The Ronin's Mistress Read Online Free PDF Page A

personality, and emotions. Although there were far too many auras to memorize, Hirata recognized those of people he knew. He projected his senses outward, searching the city.
    Midori came to stand beside him. “Is he there?”
    “No.” Hirata didn’t feel the aura he was looking for, that he’d encountered for the first time eighteen months ago.
    He’d been at Ueno Temple when he’d felt an aura more powerful than any he’d ever met. It emanated from a man with powers far beyond what Hirata had thought possible for a mere mortal. Struck with awe and terror, Hirata had waited for the man to reveal himself—but he hadn’t. Instead, the man had begun loitering invisibly near him, taunting him. Once only, he’d let Hirata catch a glimpse of him, then slipped away.
    Since then, Hirata had been searching for the man he called his stalker, whose name and face he didn’t know, whose fighting skills he probably couldn’t match, who could follow him anywhere. He lived in fear of an attack that might hurt his family and friends as well as himself. He spent days riding through the city, trying to lure his stalker into the open; but so far his stalker remained hidden and anonymous.
    “Maybe he’s not coming back,” Midori said. She was one of the few people that Hirata had told about his stalker. Sano was another. He’d sworn them all to secrecy. He didn’t want anyone else to know he was afraid of a ghost that nobody but himself could detect.
    “Yes, he is,” Hirata said. “He’s hovering in the distance, biding his time.”
    “For what?” Midori tried, not very hard, to hide her skepticism.
    “To fight me,” Hirata said.
    Many men would like to beat him in combat and replace him as Edo’s top martial artist. Many had tried. All had failed. But Hirata realized that even his mystical powers couldn’t keep him in his prime forever. Eventually someone would come along who could defeat him. He feared it was the stalker. He sensed that the time for a showdown was near.
    “What are your teacher’s sayings that you’re always quoting?” Midori said. “‘What we fear, we create.’ ‘His own mind is a warrior’s most formidable adversary.’ I wonder if your mind is driving you crazy. Maybe this stalker doesn’t really exist. Maybe you made him up.”
    “I did not.” Annoyance prickled Hirata.
    His wife didn’t entirely believe in his mystical powers, even though she’d seen him perform astonishing feats. A practical woman, she thought everything had a rational explanation. But of course Hirata hadn’t believed in the supernatural until he’d experienced it himself. He couldn’t expect Midori to understand. And he had to admit that there could be truth to what she’d said. Perhaps his mind and his fear had built the stalker into a bigger, stronger person than the man really was. But Hirata didn’t think so.
    “I have to go,” he said.
    Concern for him crept into Midori’s eyes in spite of her doubts that he was in any real danger. “Be careful.”

 
     
    3
     
     
    GUARDS IN THE towers and enclosed corridors atop the walls of Edo Castle looked down at the main gate, which opened to let out a procession of mounted samurai. Sano rode in the lead, Hirata by his side. Marume and Fukida followed with fifty soldiers from his army. His heart lightened as it always did when he escaped the castle’s confines. As he and his men crossed the bridge over the moat, he breathed the eye-watering, cheek-stinging cold and the fresh atmosphere of hope.
    They turned on the avenue that separated Edo Castle from the daimyo district, where the feudal lords lived in vast, walled compounds. The wooden framework structures of fire-watch towers were sketched against a blue sky pillowed with white clouds. Snow lay shin-deep on the wide avenue. There wasn’t much traffic except a squadron of samurai on horseback approaching from the opposite direction. Poles on their backs flew banners that bore the crest of a daimyo clan