Himitsu (Book One of the Kakureta Hana series)

III: San

It is our last day with the shinobi when I feel someone watching me as I sit in the garden.  The early days of summer have arrived, and in my misery, I have taken to wandering the land around the village.

"Your father was miserable when he came to me with a wailing three-week-old babe strapped to his back and a limp pouch of coins," my observer says suddenly before taking a seat next to me.  "He wouldn't let me say anything until he had told me the whole story, and then he stood there all hunched up like he expected me to turn him away."

Emi gently touches a low-hanging branch of the cherry tree above us.  "Your mother had broken him into so many pieces that it took all of his discipline to pull himself together long enough to take care of you.  I was his last hope of finding her at that point.  He had searched everywhere he could think of for your mother."

"He should have just let her go the first time she ran from him," I mutter, staring at the stream running past the borders of the garden.  "It would have been better for both of them."

"Nobuo knew that she would not return to him; he merely wanted to make sure that she was all right wherever she was.  He begged me desperately, apologizing over and over for his dwindled funds.  I didn't care about the money; it was the nature of the request that made me pause.

"However, he finally took you off his back and held you out to me. 'Please,' he whispered, 'I just want to know that my son's mother is alive.  I do not expect you to do anything but find her for me.'  I took you in my arms and told him that I would do it, that I didn't need payment."

The shinobi looks towards me, but I refuse to meet her eyes.  "I traveled as a healer to the one place your father vowed he would never go: the Aikawa clan.  That's where I found your mother, sick and wan.  Many a person who had seen your father's misery, the way you wailed for a mother that wasn't there, would have said she was being dealt the hand she had played.

"However, I saw a woman, who had been broken apart and put back together wrong.  I spent a month tending to her before she finally told me about her father's cruelty, about how by the time she was twelve, she had been passed among all the clan's men.  She spoke of running away at thirteen and starving on the streets of a village before she turned to the only skill she knew: selling herself."

She carefully picks a blossom from the tree.  "One day, the general, who had destroyed her clan months after she had left, came to this village and met her.  Falling in love, he stole her away, only to gamble her away two months later when he fell in debt.

"Your father won her, and he, too, fell in love with the fifteen-year-old.  Rather than take her to the house he shared with his wife, he set her up with a small home of her own and vowed she would be cared for the rest of her life and that he would not touch her while he was married."

"Then his first wife died, he tried to get my mother to marry him, she refused him, and four years later, they had me," I interrupt.  "I know that part of the story.  My mother never loved my father like he did, and he paid for that love for the rest of his life."

The garden falls silent except for the sound of birds and the running of the stream.  Finally Emi says, "Igarashi Ryuu, that was never true.  Your mother loved him as much as he loved her.  However, the life she had lived taught her to be wary of love.  It had taught her a warped, blurred version of real love.

"She ran that day because she was afraid of accepting the truth.  She loved your father, and she loves you.  Even now, she regrets that she was too much of a coward to return to your father, to tell him that she loved him too, before he died," the shinobi tells me before pressing the blossom into my hand.  "It is not too late for you, Ryuu.  Continue to fight for Jun, continue to fall deeper in love with her, but do not push her too far too fast.  Her father had ingrained deep within her that she was worthless because of the fact that she was female.  Love can change that, but it must be the soft flame of a candle, not the hot raging flame of a wildfire."