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standing in one of the garden
pools. Its beak jabbed into the water and came up holding some little wriggling
creature. The heron lifted itself elegantly upwards and flew away over the
wall.
    Lord Otori came into the room, followed
by two of the girls carrying trays of food. He looked at me and nodded. I bowed
to the floor. It occurred to me that he, Otori Shigeru, was the heron and I was
the little wriggling thing he had scooped up, plunging down the mountain into
my world and swooping away again.
    The rain fell more heavily, and the
house and garden began to sing with water. It overflowed from the gutters and
ran down the chains and into the stream that leaped from pool to pool, every
waterfall making a different sound. The house sang to me, and I fell in love
with it. I wanted to belong to it. I would do anything for it, and anything its
owner wanted me to do.
    When we had finished the meal and
the trays had been removed, we sat by the open window as night drew in. In the
last of the light, Lord Otori pointed towards the end of the garden. The stream
that cascaded through it swept under a low opening in the tiled roof wall into
the river beyond. The river gave a deep, constant roar and its gray-green
waters filled the opening like a painted screen.
    “It's good to come home,” he said
quietly. “But just as the river is always at the door, so is the world always
outside. And it is in the world that we have to live.”
     

Chapter 2
    The same year Otori Shigeru rescued
the boy who was to become Otori Takeo at Mino, certain events took place in a
castle a long way to the south. The castle had been given to Noguchi Masayoshi
by Iida Sadamu for his part in the battle of Yaegahara. Iida, having defeated
his traditional enemies, the Otori, and forced their surrender on favorable
terms to himself, now turned his attention to the third great clan of the Three
Countries, the Seishuu, whose domains covered most of the south and west. The
Seishuu preferred to make peace through alliances rather than war, and these
were sealed with hostages, both from great domains, like the Maruyama, and
smaller ones, like their close relatives, the Shirakawa.
    Lord Shirakawa's eldest daughter,
Kaede, went to Noguchi Castle as a hostage when she had just changed her sash
of childhood for a girl's, and she had now lived there for half her life—long
enough to think of a thousand things she detested about it. At night, when she
was too tired to sleep and did not dare even toss and turn in case one of the
older girls reached over and slapped her, she made lists of them inside her
head. She had learned early to keep her thoughts to herself. At least no one
could reach inside and slap her mind, although she knew more than one of them
longed to. Which was why they slapped her so often on her body or face.
    She clung with a child's
single-mindedness to the faint memories she had of the home she had left when
she was seven. She had not seen her mother or her younger sisters since the day
her father had escorted her to the castle.
    Her father had returned three times
since then, only to find she was housed with the servants, not with the Noguchi
children, as would have been suitable for the daughter of a warrior family. His
humiliation was complete: He was unable even to protest, although she,
unnaturally observant even at that age, had seen the shock and fury in his
eyes. The first two times they had been allowed to speak in private for a few
moments. Her clearest memory was of him holding her by the shoulders and saying
in an intense voice, “If only you had been born a boy!” The third time he was
permitted only to look at her. After that he had not come again, and she had
had no word from her home.
    She understood his reasons
perfectly. By the time she was twelve, through a mixture of keeping her eyes
and ears open and engaging the few people sympathetic to her in seemingly
innocent conversation, she knew her own position: She was a hostage, a pawn