“Not if I can help it.” Looking around the shed, Reiko saw tools hung on a wall-hammers, knives, awls, hatchets. She snatched down a sturdy knife with a wooden handle and a long, sharp steel blade.

“In case I don’t see you again, I’ll thank you now for helping me find my son,” Reiko said. “If there’s anything I can do for you in return, I will.”

“No,” Wente pleaded. Her mouth worked inside its blue tattoo as she fumbled for words. “You don’t know how go. You get lost.”

Finding her way to the keep didn’t appear difficult to Reiko, who’d navigated around huge, labyrinthine Edo all her life. “Good-bye.”

The dogs jumped in front of her. They barked and snapped. Rather than attacking her, they seemed anxious to protect her. She cried “Get away from me!” and waved her knife.

Wente uttered a command in Ezo language. The dogs retreated. She hesitated, frowned, and bit her lip. “I go with you. I show you.”

“All right,” Reiko said.

As Wente led her by the hand through the castle grounds, Reiko felt thankful to have a guide. Wente knew how to walk as if invisible. Maybe it was an Ezo talent developed while hunting game in the forests. Maybe she’d just had practice hiding from the Japanese in Fukuyama Castle. She and Reiko flitted from behind one building, tree, boulder, or snow pile to another. They avoided servants and officials who passed near them along the paths and covered corridors. Wente seemed to anticipate where the patrol guards would be. Reiko saw many across courtyards and gardens, but never near her and Wente. She felt invisible, as if Ezogashima had many different dimensions and they moved through one hidden from other humans.

Skirting the palace, they slipped through a gate and emerged into a compound. On a low hill at the center stood the keep. Seen at close range, the square tower wasn’t white but dingy gray, the plaster on its surface cracked and weather stained. Gulls swept down from the brilliant turquoise sky and perched on the tiled roofs, whose upturned eaves protruded above each story. Bars covered the small windows. Reiko squinted against the sun at them, and although she couldn’t see inside, her whole being tingled with the sense that Masahiro was there. She wanted to hurl herself at the keep.

A flight of steps led up the hill to it. The snow had been shoveled off them. At the top, the ironclad door of the keep opened. The sound of coughing drifted down to Reiko. Two young soldiers stepped out the door. They carried buckets whose liquid contents they dumped onto the snow. As they went back inside and shut the door, Reiko’s hope of rescuing Masahiro stalled like a bird shot in flight. “No can get in,” Wente whispered.

“There must be a way,” Reiko whispered back, even as she saw another soldier walk around the corner of the keep and go inside. That Masahiro was so close, yet out of reach! She could barely stand the agony.

Wente tugged at her arm. “Must go. Before men see us.”

“Wait! No!”

Reiko couldn’t leave. She felt as if an invisible chain connected her to her son inside the keep and anchored her to the ground. But storming the keep was out of the question. Even though she’d been trained in combat and won fights before, she was one woman with a knife against heaven knew how many armed guards. Getting caught would do Masahiro no good.

She let Wente tear her away. Her every heartbeat was a throb of pain as they moved from hiding place to hiding place through the castle. Reiko could hardly breathe past the sob caught deep in her lungs. The invisible chain dragged harder at her with every step.

They’d reached the garden outside the guest quarters when five soldiers appeared. Wente yanked Reiko to the ground behind a snowdrift. They lay on their stomachs, holding their breath and listening to the soldiers’ voices.

“She can’t have gotten out of the castle.”

“And she can’t hide forever. We’ll find her eventually.”

“You three stay here and watch the chamberlain’s men. The last thing we need is more prisoners on the loose. We’ll keep looking for her.”

Footsteps crunched through the snow near Reiko and Wente. Reiko was horrified to realize that the guards had discovered she’d escaped. She lost all hope of sneaking back into the guest quarters undetected. With her chin pressed into the icy snow crystals, she thought fast and hard.

“What you do?” Wente whispered.

Giving herself up wasn’t an option. The guards would lock her in and watch her more closely than before. Reiko would sit in her room, helpless. This was her one chance to reach Masahiro. She couldn’t waste it.

“I’m going back to the keep,” she told Wente.

Although her expression said what a rash plan she thought this was, Wente gamely accompanied Reiko. But search parties swarmed the castle. Reiko and Wente dived behind bushes, darted around buildings, narrowly evading one patrol after another. They circled the keep from a distance, like a moon orbiting a planet, never getting any closer. Out of breath, gasping with fatigue, they paused in the shadow of a storehouse to rest.

Its door burst open. A soldier came out and spotted Reiko. “There she is!” he shouted.

Reiko fled. Too late she noticed that Wente had run in a different direction. Separated from her guide, on her own now, Reiko ran for her life.

Granted permission to interrogate the gold merchant, Hi-rata headed into town with the soldiers assigned to guard him. They were two samurai about eighteen years old. Filled with youthful masculine gusto yet insecure about their abilities, they were anxious to prove themselves superior to other men, including Hirata, their closest target.

“Try to get away from us,” one said, as they escorted him along the road down the hill from the castle. He had a round, pimpled, mischievous face. “Come on, try.”

“We’ll give you a head start.” The other was tall and lanky with an overbite, hopping in his eagerness for a fight. “But you won’t get very far.”

Hirata kept silent and kept walking.

“Of course he won’t,” said the first guard. “Look at him. He limps.

“What happened? Did you fall and break your leg?” the second guard asked.

Even though they must know that Hirata had killed several of their fellows yesterday, they felt safe teasing him because his comrades back at the castle were hostage to his good behavior. When he didn’t answer, the first man jeered “Cripple!” and shoved him.

Hirata, trained to stay in equilibrium under any conditions, let the energy from the shove pass through and out of his muscles. His step didn’t even falter. The guard gave him another, harder shove. This time Hirata flashed its energy back at his tormenter. The guard went reeling as if struck. He landed on his buttocks on a patch of ice and slid.

“Hey!” he cried.

He and his companion lunged at Hirata. Hirata dodged so fast that he seemed to vanish from the place he’d been standing. They collided and fell facedown. Scrambling up, they stared at Hirata with expressions now sober and frightened. Snow clung to their cheeks like sugar on cakes.

“If you try any more nonsense, I’ll have to hurt you,” Hirata said. “Understood?”

They proceeded into town without further incident.

Fukuyama City was a poor excuse for a capital. Along the main street, people fought a losing battle with winter, shoveling the snow from two days ago off their roofs. The stores were identified only by names carved on plaques, and when the few customers passed through the doors, Hirata could see nothing inside except dim lantern light. Wolfish dogs prowled, leaving yellow marks in the snow. Down the side streets nearest the castle, walls surrounded mansions that must belong to Matsumae officials. Farther away, fences enclosed houses where the rich merchants probably lived. The whole place had a shut-in, unwelcoming aspect. Men with what Hirata now recognized as the typical weathered, prematurely aged Ezogashima complexion loitered outside a teahouse, smoking pipes. They regarded Hirata with suspicious curiosity.