Heaven's Net Is Wide by Hearn Lian & Rubinstein Aka Gillian

Author:Hearn, Lian & Rubinstein, Aka Gillian [Hearn, Lian & Rubinstein, Aka Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Historical, Adventure, prose_contemporary, Romance, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781594489532
Amazon: 159448953X
Goodreads: 186668
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2007-08-16T07:00:00+00:00

THROUGHOUT THE WINTER she delivered snippets to Masahiro that she thought might keep him interested. Some she made up; some were loosely based on what she gleaned from Shigeru. None, she thought, was of any great importance.

28

Muto Shizuka spent the winter in the southern town of Kumamoto with Arai Daiichi, the eldest son of the clan lord. She could have seen herself openly acknowledged as Arai’s mistress, for it was said he was so infatuated with her that he would deny her nothing, but beneath her lively, charming exterior, she was secretive by nature as well as by upbringing and training, and she preferred to keep the relationship hidden.

Her father had died when she was twelve years old, and her mother lived with relatives in Kumamoto, a merchant family by the name of Kikuta whom the Arai knew mostly as moneylenders. Her father had been the eldest son of a Yamagata family called Muto, and Shizuka was very close to his relatives, writing to them almost every week and often sending gifts. She told Arai stories about this family, embroidering them with warmth and humor, entertaining him with their petty feuds and follies, until he felt he almost lived among them. What he did not know was that the Kikuta and the Muto were the two most important families of the Tribe.

Like most of the warrior class, Arai knew very little about the other castes that made up the society of the Three Countries. Farmers and peasants worked the land and provided warrior families with rice and other basic supplies; they were usually easy enough to handle, having no fighting skills and very little courage. Occasionally starvation made them desperate enough to riot, but it also weakened them, and unrest was usually quelled without difficulty. Merchants were even more despicable than peasants, since they lived and grew fat on other people’s labor, but they seemed to become more essential every season, producing foodstuffs, wine, oil, and soybean paste as well as many luxuries that added to the delights of life-fine clothing, lacquered boxes and dishes, fans and bowls-and importing expensive and exotic items from the mainland or from distant islands to the south: spices for cooking, herbs for medicine, gold leaf and golden thread, dyes, perfumes, and incense.

Arai was a sensual man with a prodigious appetite for all life had to offer, and enough good taste to demand the best. He knew of the Tribe-had heard them spoken of-but thought they were some sort of guild, no more. Shizuka never told him that she had been born into the Tribe, was related to the Masters of both the Muto and the Kikuta families, had inherited many skills, and had been sent to Kumamoto as a spy.

Both families at that time were employed by Iida Sadamu as spies and assassins; and through them, Iida-determined to deal with his traditional enemies the Otori, and in particular with the man he had come to hate more than anyone else in the Three Countries, Otori Shigeru-kept a close watch on the movements and intentions of the Seishuu in the West.

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