text: Rosamund had been separated from her companions by her ignorance of woodcraft. She wrung her hands nervously. She hated fighting. The emotions it roused were ones she felt uncomfortable with. She cowered by a tree, licking her lips and wondering what had happened. A sound intruded on her thoughts. She raised her head and could not forbear a scream. An unshaven face under a pillbox hat was leering at her around the bole. Seeing she was alarmed and alone, the yamabushi stepped around the tree and reached for her. She reacted instinctively. Pulling back, she lashed at him with her hand. The yamabushi grinned and grabbed at her robe. The weighted end of the chain she kept in her sleeve hit his forehead above his eyebrow. The front of his skull caved in, and his eyes turned in his head. Rosamund's breath whistled beneath her teeth as she turned to seek more enemies.
  
  Osatsuki knelt in a clearing, admiring the hint of white seen between the trees. The sound of the waterfall was muted by the tree boles. Beneath her the velvety moss cushioned her knees and stained the hem of her robe a bright green. There was a poem on the subject, she remembered, but the lines would not come to her.
  
  Tsuneyoshi stepped out of the forest and stopped beside her. His handsome, aristocratic face was sad. "You should not have betrayed us," he said.
  
  She bowed slightly, looking sideways at him, her head tilted to one side.
  
  "The Master has indicated you are no longer acceptable. I am sorry, but my duty is to him. I could have loved you, but instead..."
  
  "What would you do now?" she asked softly.
  
  "I'll go into the mountains. I can no longer serve him."
  
  His sword was resting lightly over his shoulder. He raised it higher, and she noted that it was a heavily curved sword of ancient style, no doubt a relic of his family. There were many such men, scions of great families brought down by the politics and wars that had ended at Osaka with the fall of the Taiko's heir. She leaned forward and shrugged out of her embroidered outer robe, tucking the ends of her sleeves beneath her knees so as to fall properly. He looked at the back of her neck, and the memory of her beauty on their travels rose in him.
  
  "I shall pray for your repose in the afterlife," he said, and raised the blade two-handed.
  
  "And I for yours," she said softly, and drove the sharp steel hairpin she had drawn from her hair through his ribs and into his heart. Far below them, conches and drums announced the start of the parade.