Musuko (Book Two of the Kakureta Hana series)

III: San

From my old room in the Igarashi house, I can hear Ryuu and Sakura whispering in their room.  I do not believe that they realize that I overheard many a conversation this way when I was younger.

"Who would be left for Taro to wed his daughter to if she refuses Kazuhiko?" Sakura asks, genuine curiosity coloring her voice.

Ryuu sighs.  "If he is looking for a clan leader that is somewhat nearby and has a degree of influence, I fear that he will try to coerce someone like Neji Raiden or Aikawa Shigeru into marrying Amaya.  I fear that Emi would have a better idea of what Taro is planning for his daughter, and I also fear that she would likely not tell us at this time."

"Are you still bitter about the fact that she did not tell us about the traitor sooner?"

"No, not bitter," he answers.  "Just struggling to understand why she kept such information to herself especially when she probably knew that it would cost Jun and Rika their lives as well as risk our own.  Even now we do not know who was working with him and whether he actually had a hand in killing them or if someone else carried out the deed."

"Something tells me that the shinobi and Amaya's future are not the most prominent things on your mind," Sakura whispers.  "What else is troubling you, Ryuu?"

Another sigh escapes him.  "You have not been eating, Sakura, and you have been ill these last few days.  Is something wrong?"

A long silence stretches before Sakura's voice rises to answer his question.  "I have not decided if there is something wrong yet.  I am suspended on the edge between terror and elation, yet nothing has managed to sway me definitively to one side or the other.  The future has begun to take a new shape, Ryuu, and I have not sure that I am ready for it."

Whatever Ryuu says to her is too low for me to make out, and I roll onto my side, sleep tugging at the edges of my vision.  And what little I heard concerning Amaya's future if she did not marry me makes me all the more determined to make her my wife.

Amaya looks startled to see me sitting out in the garden when she arrives with her mother.  I wait for her to whisper to her mother before she makes her way towards me.  A slightly uncomfortable silence falls over the two of us after she sits down.

"Why did you make such a deal with my father, Kazuhiko?  By agreeing, you have given him more power over you as he knows how much that I mean to you now.  You should have just left the matter as it was and not said anything," she says at last, her eyes fixed upon where Sakura and Yori are bent over a worn book.

I cross my arms, taking a deep breath as I shove the hurt that her words conjure down until my chest no longer aches.  "I told you that I was going to marry you, Amaya.  I would have thought that at some point your father would have considered me as a suitable match, yet six years have passed and it seems as if he has not even given a thought to me.

"Yes, it was impulsive and stupid of me to agree to your father's terms, but I refuse to wait any longer.  I do not want to see if he manages to dig up someone who is only interested in a woman to give him an heir and therefore does not care what flaws she may possess."

Amaya looks at me, and her brown eyes simmer with barely restrained anger.  "Who says that I want to marry you, Kazuhiko?  You made the assumption that I was going to hold you to a vow six years old and made at a time when we were two children."

"I made that vow as a man."

"I do not need you to rescue me!" She says, and I see the women's attention shift to us from across the garden.  "I do not need you to drive away suitors.  I do not need you to sweep in to marry me.  I do not need you to act so noble and self-sacrificing."