ALL SHADES OF BLUE, Chapter 4. You can find all other IkeSen works of mine here or become a Patron of mine! NOTES: Thank you so, so, so much to @nyktoon-ikemenlove and @daeva-agas for sharing SO MUCH USEFUL INFORMATION ON KENNYO AND HIS HISTORICAL CONTEXT.
The samurai bowed low before Kennyo, hands and forehead pressed to the dirt. At last he murmured for the man to stand. Despite the formality, the samurai was a stranger to him. He was one of the Ikko-ikki, his followers that he knew would both live and die at his command. That power never sat well with him. He’d left it alone for years.
But now things were different.
“Holy Kennyo,” the samurai began. “I come on behalf of my Lord with an offer of aid.”
“Oh?” Quietly he ladled out rice and offered their visitor a bowl. The fire crackled warm near his toes, the full moon overhead all the other light they needed. The world had a way of making everything seem spectral and eerie in the nighttime--
At least, it did without her.
“My Lord wishes to let you know that, at your command, he and I, among other loyal followers of yours, are willing to rise up in Oshu.” The flame in the man’s eyes was chilling. Kennyo half-wondered if that was what he looked like when thinking of Nobunaga. “We could upset Date Masamune’s lordship and force him to retreat back home. There are far too many of us for him to quell the insurrection effectively. Nobunaga would be left without a powerful ally.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d considered the plan. It would work, and that was the frightening thing. Without the Date forces at his back, Azuchi was far less defended. Even the Takeda-Uesugi alliance (which even now chomped at the bit, ready and willing at a moment’s notice to tear from Kasugayama and descend on the Devil King) posed a danger with Date Masamune. Without him? That was another thing entirely.
Still.
They’d tried simply poisoning Nobunaga in the past. All their tricks had failed. Poisoned needles, arsenic slipped in sake, tainted water--nothing ever seemed to penetrate the unholy man’s barriers. The lines of defense were too strong. But if it had, if it had worked, then oh. Kennyo knew that was the day all his dreams were realized.
But they hadn’t worked. And the Takeda-Uesugi alliance hadn’t yet moved in to allow him advantage and opportunity to manipulate the situation (and Shingen was proving frustratingly difficult to outmaneuver, as always). His options grew few.
But the faces of those farmers blossomed unbidden in his mind. He knew the cost of war. No civilians were left out of that equation. When the fields burned, people starved. When the lords demanded soldiers, husbands and uncles and sons were ripped away to die. When the balance of a region upset, like the spinning of a top in the last rattle of its rotation, bandits and thieves always swarmed to fill the void.
And then there was another factor, one he’d not even considered before, and all at once he cursed the name of Date Masamune. There was her. The Dragon of Oshu was not so blind as to ignore Kennyo’s attachment to their precious chatelaine. As much as he’d ever tried to hide it, no doubt her very survival hung on his actions. Who was to say what the Devil King might order? Date Masamune seemed reasonable enough toward her, but Oda Nobunaga deserved no such grace. If the Ikko-ikki rioted in Oshu, there was the very real possibility she might die for it.
He struggled to tell himself that it was worth it. What was one woman to destroying a devil? What was a single life balanced against the scale Nobunaga himself weighted so heavy with the lives of fallen monks and villagers? She didn’t outnumber that tragedy.
And yet--and yet--his heart kept attributing to her the weight of another thing entirely, something more than human, something more than a calculus in a game, and he couldn’t yet give it up.
“I’ll consider it.” Kennyo realized he’d sat silent far too long. “If the time comes, then I’ll write you and your lord--if you would forgive me enough to do this thing. For now I cannot yet justify risking the innocents of Oshu.”
“Holy Kennyo.” The samurai bowed low once more. “It is only ever an honor to do as you ask.”
For a fleeting moment, the question the Princess asked him rang in his ears: Do you really believe you are Amida Buddha?
He knew the answer and was too afraid to admit it. That night, well after their guest went to sleep and nothing but the night patrols disturbed the silence, he took out a bit of paper and an ink brush and wrote a letter.
---
Masamune tried not to hover. That kind of thing was Hideyoshi’s domain. Even so he kept a watchful eye on their chatelaine--not because he thought she might betray them, but because he cared.
That was strange for him. He cared about plenty of people--Ieyasu, his soldiers, his scouts on the outskirts of Azuchi, Oshu, his late father, the monks who’d educated him in his youth--but no one worried him as much as her. She was as loud and vivacious as he was sometimes, then soft and quiet and solemn in turns. Deep in her was a loneliness he couldn’t quite get a handle on.
That, too, was familiar.
Despite her friendliness with Kennyo, she didn’t display as much attachment in Azuchi. She hovered on the fringes, never a part of any particular room, always a fixture and never a person. Oh, she had her moments. Nobunaga’s nickname for her was appropriate: Fireball. But even at her most sincere, she was contained.
That really, really bothered him.
“Hey. Kitten.” He rapped on her screen one morning. At last she opened it, a row of pins in her mouth and a questioning stare in her eyes. “Wanna come and help me out with something?”
Her sly grin betrayed the joke before she made it. “No.”
“Well, hell.”
“Fine. What is it?”
“Got some shopping to do, and I kind of wanted to commission a new haori from you. I was thinking I’d just escort you down to the market and we’d make an afternoon of it. You’re cooped up in here too much.”
It was so hard to pin down her expression, but eventually her face softened and she nodded. “Alright. Give me a minute.”
Together they descended into the town proper. Most of the women tied their hair up to go out, but she let hers down. He assumed it was to hide the odd shaved part of her head and those thousand sparkling bits of metal in her ears. It didn’t do to stand out in some regards, especially when you were an attractive woman these days. Besides--those things had to be valuable. There was always the chance a bandit might get the wrong idea. Either way he didn’t ask.
They stopped by the vegetable stand first, and he argued with the shopkeeper (an old friend of his) over the price of ginger until he saw she was laughing at him. It warmed him through and through. Afterward they headed to the fabric stall, the merchant smiling and nodding at her as if they’d known each other a thousand years.
“You sure do come here a lot, don’t you, Kitten?”
“Someone has a nasty habit of tearing his kimono,” she snickered, chiding him in a single sentence. “I have to keep stocked on every bolt of blue fabric the surrounding area can find me.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“Are you certain? How many have you dropped off this week?”
He opened his mouth and realized the number exceeded five, and she giggled at the moment of realization in his eyes.
“Alright,” he allowed with a grin. “I keep your hands busy. At least I pay well.”
“Well, there is that.”
He didn’t know all that much about fabric, so he just rested in the cool awning of the stall and watched her. It was as if everything in her softened. Those bright eyes turned to a haze, her hands dancing over the options, her lips pursed as she considered each of them in turn. She didn’t conduct herself like most women. That wasn’t to say that other women were somehow lacking. But her--there was something he couldn’t quite trace about the way she moved, the way she talked, the way her face flashed with every screaming emotion that so many others kept locked away.
Buddha help him. He liked all of that. He liked the little details that made her different. He liked the click of her too-long, too-square black nails and the mystery behind the metal in her ears. He liked how she always had a smart remark. Her glow was contagious even though she tried to hold it back.
“Ready?” She asked, tucking a bolt under her arm. He slid it away and set it on his shoulder.
“Yep. Wanna go to a tea shop? I know one with pretty good dumplings.”
The waiter knew him well enough that they served his usual immediately: two shares of dumplings, some rice balls, and a steaming pot of tea. She took a tentative bite and he’d barely blinked before her half was gone.
“Hell, Kitten. Hungry? Shogetsu doesn’t eat that fast.”
She glowered at him under her eyebrows and he laughed. “It was good. Don’t compare me to your pet.”
“You’re not a pet. That sounds like something Mitsuhide would say.”
“He did say that. He threatened to take me ‘on a walk’.”
“Then I was right.” He spun a rice ball between his chopsticks. “Lemme ask you something.”
“Alright.”
“You’re pretty damn reserved around us. You don’t have to be best friends with us if you don’t want to, but I kind of wanted to check in and see what was going on.”
She didn’t answer him. Instead she refilled his cup, and just by the way she wrestled with the teapot, he knew she’d never used one before--at least not in recent years.
“It’s complicated,” she answered, softer than he’d ever heard her.
“I’m all ears.”
“It’s really complicated,” she clarified. “I don’t know, Masamune. I just don’t feel like I can… open up or something. Not right now. I don’t know.”
What could he even do with this little mystery? He laced his fingers together and just watched her sip her tea. Unbidden, the thought that eventually she might just leave, up and disappear from Azuchi and the region and his life charged into his consciousness, and he wondered if that was why she resisted growing closer. What would that day be like? What would the last thing he’d ever said to her be?
“You know, Kitten,” he started. “Life is there for you to enjoy it.”
“Mmm?”
Their gaze connected and he wondered how many times he’d looked at her without looking at her. Now there was no barrier there. He continued. “Things happen. Stuff is complicated. Tragedy and death and war and famine are almost inevitable. Amida Buddha’s infinite karma might help us in the afterlife, but now? Now is hard. I get it. But the sun shines differently if you’ve resolved that you’re going to let yourself enjoy it. Damn the consequences of later.”
That reached her. He watched her long lashes flutter in surprise, then drop as she inhaled.
“I’ll think about it,” she murmured.
Together they walked back to Azuchi. They’d barely reached the gates before someone hailed them.
“A missive, my lord!”
“Thank you.” Masamune reached out for it. “Who is it for?”
“The lady chatelaine.”
Her? That was strange. Masamune quirked a brow and stepped aside, letting her collect the correspondence herself. “You expecting someone to write you, Kitten?”
“No.” She sounded just as confused as he. “I guess I’ll read it and find out who it’s from later.”
“Right.”
She tucked it into her obi, clearly not giving it a second thought. For his part he had ideas about who it was from and said nothing, telling himself that the pang of irritation was just concern, not jealousy.
