As the snows began to thaw and the days began to lengthen, Sumire felt a lightness of spirit she’d forgotten she could feel. Life was not easy, but it was better than before. Though no longer living hand to mouth, money remained thin. With the constant need to re-invest in the family business, the amount of funds that came in went back out just as quickly, like an hourglass turned continually upon its head.

But there were moments of reprieve. At their lord’s behest, the guardsmen who’d looted from Shurei and her family had been swift to restore as much of the stolen valuables as could be found. For the items that couldn’t be tracked down, they arranged a repayment in coin which was drafted by Tatsumi Yahiko’s own scribe and sealed by the lord himself.

Much as the Inoki clan lamented the loss of their precious heirlooms, the coin was undeniably more useful. Tanaka had practically become a land baron, buying up vast swathes of the trade district—particularly those avenues where the Inoki clan sought to expand. As such, he remained their landlord and chief lender.

In this way he kept Sumire firmly under his thumb.

She rebuffed him as best she could without provoking him, using every bit of whorish guile she possessed. A tedious balance of scorn and simper. She hoped he would tire of her, as most men eventually did of whores and their petty games. Once he had a bad taste in his mouth for her, he would keep his distance.

But he was slow in tiring of her, no matter how aloof and contemptuous nor sullenly demanding she treated him by turns. It became clear to Sumire that in Tanaka she’d had the misfortune of seducing a man who’d been neglected by his mother as a child. Because of her age and capriciousness, he’d latched to Sumire with unnatural vehemence.

She had seen this sort of thing happen before. She knew she needed outside aid to stave him off. Typically a jealous wife could do the trick. However, Tanaka’s was lazy and self-absorbed, content to let her husband do as he liked so long as she was kept in idle luxury. His father was dead. His mother was gone, of course. 

As far as Sumire could see, there was no one around to help her deter him.

In the market square one day he pulled her aside into an alleyway. “Why haven’t you come to see me? It’s been more than a week.”

Tugging her arm free of him, she stepped away. “I’ve been too busy lately.” She curved him a fetching smile. “Soon, my lord, I promise.”

This sort of pandering was usually enough to appease him. But as she started off back toward the square, Tanaka pursued her.

“That’s always what you say,” he remarked irritably. “You work too much, I think.”

“I like to work.”

“No woman likes to work. What you like is to torment me.” When she didn’t deign to reply, he turned her around by the shoulder to face him. His small black eyes bored into hers. “I give you gifts, and what becomes of them? I send you workers, and you are still not at leisure. What am I to think except that you enjoy playing me for a fool, while the Inoki clan reaps the rewards of my charity?”

“Sincerely, Tanaka-dono,” Sumire said coolly, “I do not enjoy playing with you at all.”

Tanaka bore his sharp white teeth at her, his voice rough with lust and anger both. “You fickle whore,” he said as he backed her into the side of a building, “you’d do well to be kinder to me. If you think I cannot bankrupt the Inoki clan, you are sorely mistaken.” Catching a lock of her dark hair that had pulled free of its tie, he fingered the silver glints among its strands. “Come to me tonight, or tomorrow morning you and your folk will be back out on the streets.”

Sumire stiffened, turned her face away from the hot sour breath fanning over it. When he took her by the jaw to steer her back to him, the sound of heavy bootsteps made him pause. Sumire glanced down the alley in surprise at the group of advancing guardsmen.

“This man troubling you, Sumire-dono?” one boomed out, as Tanaka drew back from her.

Before she could answer, the landlord replied briskly, “I was discussing a matter of rent with my tenant.”

“Is that right?” another guard sneered, looming over Tanaka as the others circled around to hem him in completely. “Judging by these fancy clothes of yours, you don’t seem in want of coin.”

He’d given Tanaka’s fine collar a flick as he said this. The much slighter man stumbled back a step, and the group of guards chuckled in dark derision.

“Aye,” the first guard said, with a touch of menace, “must’ve been telling the lady he’d be lowering what she owes him.”

“By half,” another added, staring Tanaka down. 

The landlord blanched, then bristled. “I pay good money to your captains to let me manage my affairs as I see fit.”

The guards glared back, unmoved.

“Inoki Shurei and her kin have special privilege. Hassle them again, and you’ll be paying out more than coin. Now begone with ye.”

With that, Tanaka’s tyranny over Sumire and her family came to an end. Having a surplus of gold at last in hand, the Inoki clan was able to purchase their own properties, control supply and increase their margins. They no longer went to bed hungry or cold. The lurking specter of ruin that had plagued them for years vanished like an exorcized ghost.

“I finally feel like I can breathe again,” Shurei said to her mother, as the sound of pleasant talk and laughter filled the dining hall amid the click of chopsticks and the crackle of the coals.

It was the first time Sumire had seen her daughter smile since Kouta’s passing.

True to his word, Tatsumi Yahiko took Kenichi under his wing, sending him off to train alongside the sons of samurai and other high-ranking officials. Shurei despaired at first of her son becoming a swordsman, but there was no question Kenichi was thriving on this new path, growing stronger and sharper with each passing day. Even after his lessons were over, he would often stay on at the palace to train with whoever would have him. At times, the warlord himself.

Yet it seemed Yahiko’s wardship of Kenichi was not driven by benevolence alone.

In the shops and in the streets, Sumire noticed him crossing paths with Shurei too often to be mere coincidence. It was almost comical at times, to see the cantankerous, unsociable lord attempting casually to mingle, glowering outright when he’d enter one of the Inoki shops and Shurei’s kin would happen to greet him in her stead. There was always some pretext to speak with her, not that any was necessary. Always something purchased in patronage, not that anything was needed, nor even wanted it seemed.

It was among the flimsiest of ruses Sumire had ever seen. One evening, as she went to fetch Kenichi home before he missed dinner yet again, Yahiko decided to end it. 

Drawing Sumire aside, he gestured for her to sit opposite him, as though in council. She had scarcely touched her knees to the tatami when he began.

“I’m taken with your daughter,” he said without preamble. “I was from the moment I saw her, but my interest in her has only grown since then. I can barely sleep now for thinking of her.” At the lack of reaction on Sumire’s face, his glaring eyes narrowed further. “But I see this is no news to you.”

Sumire smiled. “May I speak frankly, my lord?”

“Frank speech is the only sort I allow.”

“Then I will tell you that your interest in her has been plain to me from the start.” With an edge to her smile, she said, “What I have been less certain of are your intentions.”

Yahiko scowled. “If they were anything less than honorable, I would not be speaking with you now.”

“That is true,” Sumire said deferentially. “Yet you will forgive a mother’s concern for her only daughter, whose wounded heart has not long been healed.”

Yahiko’s scowl softened a fraction. “I know what it is to be widowed. I was married once, when I was young. She died while I was away at war. In childbirth,” he added tersely. “Under siege. I came back maimed to learn that both were gone, and I was left with nothing.”

Sumire looked at him in compassion. Yahiko gave a curt wave of dismissal.

“If there is anything I regret, it is that I was a poor husband to her. This scar on my face has been a help to me in some ways, and a hindrance in others. You may or may not wonder that I haven’t taken another wife since. I’ve had prospects over the years, but I suppose you can imagine how these pampered princesses recoil from me. Most women do. Most men, too, for that matter,” he said with a snarl. “But you and your daughter do not flinch from me.”

“For different reasons,” Sumire replied, with emphasis. “My daughter is beyond reproach, but you must know what I am.”

“What you were,” Yahiko said.

Sumire inclined her head, accepting this for argument’s sake. “She is illegitimate, nevertheless.”

Yahiko’s fixed snarl furled deeper. “So I have learned. But I’d be a hypocrite if I held that against her. I’m a lord’s bastard myself.” As Sumire blinked in surprise, he said, “I was claimed by him later, at the urging of his second wife.”

Sumire’s brows furrowed. “That is…unusual.”

“She was unusual,” Yahiko said. “Even to this day I don’t quite know what to make of her.”

His voice was dark and low, almost a murmur. Sumire couldn’t tell if it was reverence or rancor which underscored his remark. Perhaps it was something of both.

The moment of recollection passed, as some phantom thought banished from mind. Yahiko looked to Sumire. His gaze was piercing.

“Your daughter is as gracious a lady as any I have seen. But a woman’s pity is intolerable to me as her disgust.”

As he let this statement hang between them, Sumire felt the challenge in it. He wanted the truth from her, and was watching her like a hawk for any sign of equivocation. She might have felt chagrined at this interrogation tactic, if she didn’t sense the wariness of rejection behind it.

“Only Shurei knows her heart,” Sumire replied. “But she speaks highly of you, and not only to me. She esteems you, and she is grateful to you for all you’ve done for her family.”

“Grateful,” Yahiko said sourly, as though weighing the word on his tongue and finding it lacking the sentiment he craved.

As chidingly as she dared, Sumire said to him, “Yours is not a face to make a lady’s heart swoon, my lord, but Shurei isn’t one to be moved by appearances, either. A man who is honest, strong and kind—this is the sort of man she could love. And she could not marry a man whom she didn’t.”

The good half of Yahiko’s face frowned aside. “I am not a kind man,” he said.

“Before you knew Shurei was widowed,” Sumire replied, “you took the trouble to give her son a fair hearing. You saw the danger ahead of him and set him on a better course. Would you cast him back out now to fend for himself, even if she doesn’t wish to marry you?”

“No,” Yahiko said heavily, still frowning aside. “He reminds me too much of myself at that age, though I was twice as troublesome. I would spare him learning the hard way those lessons which were branded into me. Or at the very least,” he said, glancing back at her, “I’ll have one less urchin running rampant in my streets. So even in this, you see, my efforts are self-serving.”

Sumire smiled at him mildly. “You’ll excuse me, my lord, if I disagree with you.”

A few days later, it was Shurei who drew Sumire aside, after her eldest son had brokered yet another profitable trade deal, with a finesse and cool composure that belied his sixteen years. 

“Kouta-kun would be so proud of him,” Shurei said to her mother, tears glittering in her eyes. “I see now that I was holding him back, smothering him too much out of fear. He only needed a chance to stand on his own, and see how well he has done!”

“A wise decision,” Sumire said.

Shurei glanced away, a touch of red rising to her cheeks. “It was Yahiko-sama who advised me to ‘loosen the reins’. Those were his exact words—they made me angry at the time, but he was right.” Looking sidelong at Sumire, she asked, “What do you think of him, Mother?”

“Yahiko-sama?”

Shurei nodded.

“He has a good heart,” Sumire replied with a note of caution, “but he is a difficult man.” Wryly, she said, “What matters most, I think, is what you think of him.”

Shurei was quiet for a time. There was a faraway look in her eyes as she nodded again.

“A difficult man,” she agreed, looking to Sumire with a fond, knowing smile. “Like my father.”

Sumire smiled back.

All seemed to be going well. Better even than well. Instead of dwelling incessantly on the problems of the present, Sumire began for the first time in years to contemplate the future. Dreams which had seemed so dim and hazy on their distant horizons now drew into sharper focus in her mind.

Her home city had begun to feel like home again. Only the image had been recast. Difficult as it was to let go of the old, she found it easier with each passing day to embrace the new.

And so it was particularly blindsiding when she returned home one afternoon to find Shurei abed and sobbing.

Rushing to her daughter’s side, Sumire tried to calm her. But Shurei was inconsolable. Between gasping sobs, she endeavored to speak.

“Y-Yahiko-sama…”

Sumire’s heart clenched. “Shurei,” she began gently, “if his feelings have changed, it is no reflection on you—”

Shurei sat up grimacing, her face wet with tears. “N-no—it isn’t that! He…” Her features crumpled. Swallowing thickly, she said, “He had word…he told me that—oh, Mother…” Sumire held her as she dissolved into choking sobs again. “T-there was a surprise attack…on Edo…the whole c-castle…razed to the ground…”

Sumire’s blood froze in her veins. Icy claws closed around her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t feel. Around her daughter her hands were numb. She stared down at them, so white and trembling. They looked alien to her. Ghostly and detached.

She’d heard rumors of war in the east. But there were always such rumors. Always there were skirmishes, even here in the west. By the time word of them traveled more than a few miles, they’d become full-fledged battles. She had never believed that Edo could fall. She had never believed that Kohaku could be defeated. He was only a man, but she had not quite believed it. In her heart she had denied this fact.

Now the cruel truth of it was tearing through her.

The hollow voice that left her seemed not her own. It seemed to come from beyond her. Or maybe she was the one outside of it.

“Kohaku…no, he cannot be…” When Shurei wouldn’t lift her head, Sumire seized her by the shoulders and shook her. “Shurei!”

Her daughter’s bloodshot eyes rose to her, bleak with terrible remorse. “I was w-waiting to write to her…with good news.” Her expression wretchedly twisted. “R-Reiko, my sister…her children…n-now all of them, all of them are—” 

She bit herself off, unable to say what the raw anguish in her gaze was screaming. She whimpered her father’s name instead, her brothers’—the youngest of whom had been more of a son to her than a sibling. 

“…I-Ieyasu…my Ieyasu…oh gods…”

She kept moaning for him until her voice gave out.

The hours of that night were a dark void in Sumire’s mind. The sheer exhaustion of grief that overwhelmed Shurei and her children could not reach her. Sumire’s eyes remained open, vacant. Dry and desolate as the scorched earth of Edo castle.

Her spirit seemed untethered from the world around her, from her very flesh and bones. Long after all the others had been overtaken by sleep, she wandered out alone into the dark. Her body dragged like an anchor behind the will that drove it on. When sight returned to her empty eyes, she found herself standing in the derelict ruins of the old brothel house, once her home and prison both.

Now there was nothing left.

There was nothing…

She sank to her knees in the dust and the rubble. She curled her hands into the brittle ground and wept until her arms gave out. Collapsed, she lay there, weeping into the ashes of what had been.

She had not thought a man could ever steal her heart. Now she realized she had given it away to him herself, long ago. Perhaps from that first night together. Perhaps from the moment she’d first glimpsed him in the sky.

Now she was fifty-seven years old, and the only man she’d ever loved was dead.

Sumire closed her eyes, grit her teeth. Through the hole in her chest where her heart had been, all the pain she’d ever felt was bleeding out of her, welling up unceasing from depths of agony previously unknown. She was drowning in it even before she dragged herself up onto the crumbled stone wall at the edge of the overhang and cast herself from it—

Drowning even before the black frigid waters closed over her head.

She didn’t fight the current that rushed her along, the rapids that tossed her about like a fallen leaf. She was nothing but chaff in the end. Another tired old whore, swept out to sea. But she didn’t care. She was done fighting against the tides of fate. All she wanted was to sleep, and to forget…

Her head smacked something hard, and she fell into dark oblivion.

.

.

.

.

.

The land of the dead was not what Sumire had expected.

The shadowy gloom she found herself in upon waking was drafty, rocky and dank. Algae slimed under her hands as she hefted herself up from the flinty shore. Her damp clothes clung to her, making her shiver. Below their skewed, heavy hems fiery cuts and purpling bruises mottled her skin. Her left side ached with every stilted breath. The right side of her face was crusted over with half-dried blood.

Sore all over, she wrung out her gritty hair and stripped off her robes. Laying them out over the stones, she looked grimly about her, accepting by degrees that she was still in fact alive.

By some strange bend in the current, she had washed up inside a hidden cove. Tree roots twisted through the ceiling of water-carved earth and stone. Ducking her head, she padded to the entrance of the cavern and peered out through the gaps in the vines. 

She hadn’t drifted far from where she’d first plunged in. Perhaps a mile or so. For all Madam Noh’s threats to send her across the river, here she was, standing naked on its shore.

Sumire shook her head, a short raspy laugh escaping her. “…Gods, what a fool I am.”

She plunked herself down on the rocks, let her head fall back against the worm-tunneled wall of the cave. Her right temple throbbed hotly, as though in rebuke. She could only feel that she deserved it. By all rights she ought to be dead.

In the watery light of day, she felt ashamed for throwing herself away like she had. Her heart hurt terribly, worse even than her battered body did. But seeking such an end to its pain had been a stupid and selfish thing to do.

How could she have thought to abandon Shurei and her children? Kohaku may be gone, but they alone were the living legacy of him. This was the truth, but in the surge of her grief she had not been thinking. Now the return of her better senses assaulted her with a vengeance.

The only mercy to her was that the day was warm. She curled onto her side in the sandy mud, slept fitfully for perhaps an hour or so. Her stiff clothes were still damp when she pulled them on, but it would have to do. Dipping her hand into the chill dark pool, she splashed a few handfuls of water onto her bloody face, and decided that would also have to do.

What she needed was a blanket, a bath and a fire, which were waiting for her back at home, along with a series of scoldings.

Sighing, Sumire drew herself up on stiff legs and started off—before a curious glint in the water made her stop and turn back.

She knelt down, reached out into the shallow pool. Her fingers closed around that glinting shape. As she opened her hand and let the silt sift away, she saw in the first bright rays of morning a heavy coin of pure gold in her palm. 

She looked out across the pool again. As more light filtered in through the hanging roots, she saw another glint, and then another. Like a multitude of winking eyes, pieces of gold lay scattered all over the pool’s muddy floor. 

Walking back along the edge of the cove, she saw the split and sunken chest from which the coin had spilled. Beyond it, in the shadowy recesses of the cave were many more stacked and moldering chests. Prising open the rusted latch on one, she gasped aloud at the glitter and gleam of jewels and gold that filled it to the brim.

What she had stumbled upon was a bandit’s hoard—a dead bandit’s hoard, judging from the sorry state of it.

Staring in amazement at the fortune she’d found, Sumire saw then with surreal clarity why the gods had seen fit to spare her. Like a map unfurled, her destined path lay plain before her—

The great work of her life lay yet ahead.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

One part left to go in this mini-series <3

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