The noise hadn't stopped for three days.
Laughter, mostly. A whole square of it, rising up the clay walls and in through the slats no matter how Yuuga arranged the cloth over them, peasant laughter, camel-smelling and endless, over some puppet show a wandering old fool had set up in the shade of the broken granary. His attendants had told him about it when he asked what the racket was. A rogue puppeteer. Painted dolls on a little stage. The whole town went down to watch, morning and afternoon, even the governor's people, even the men who should have been mending it.
A puppet show. In Renge. Yuuga had lain on his bed in the heat and listened to the town laugh itself sick over dolls, and it was bothering him. There was a thing happening forty paces from his window that everyone had seen and judged and loved, and he had not.
On the fourth day he got up and went to see it, so that he could be unimpressed in person.
He was bored past the edge of his patience, shut in a town with nothing in it, and a man could only pray and enjoy his maids so many times. He would go down, he would watch the puppeteer for a few minutes, he would find the dolls as cheap and dull as the sand-breathers watching them, and then at least he would have seen the thing the whole place apparently could not shut up about, and he could stop wondering.
The girl fell in at his shoulder when he left the room without his having to call her. He had grown used to that. She went where he went and said nothing and watched everything, that ridiculous scarf and those flat indigo eyes, and he had stopped finding her presence worth a remark. She was his weapon that was always nearby. He swept past her and down the stairs and out into the white noon, and she came after.
The square was full.
That was the first thing that upset him. He had expected to arrive and have the crowd part, the murmur and the bows rippling out from him the way they did everywhere. The crowd didn't do anything at all. No one even noticed he had arrived. Two hundred people were packed shoulder to shoulder around a painted box on three legs, children on the front edge in the dust and grown men standing on cart-rails at the back to see over heads, and every face in the square was pointed away from him, at the little stage, and not one of them turned.
He had to stand at the back. The heir to the Land of Wind, behind a wall of dust-eaters, on his toes like a child at a fence.
The girl moved up beside him without being told and put herself between his back and the press of the crowd, and her eyes went over the rooftops and the alley mouths and the bodies around him, around and around, and he ignored her, because he was looking at the stage.
The old man was exactly as disgusting as he'd expected. Thin as a walking stick, a long ridiculous nose, white hair flying loose, working four little dolls on invisible strings with hands that never stopped. There was a fat doll in a painted robe, a lord, and the old man gave it a voice like a bullfrog with money, pompous and greedy, demanding its taxes, walling up its granary while a row of little cloth townsfolk were thin and bent in front of it. The crowd hissed the fat lord. A child near the front shook a small fist at it.
Mere dolls. Yuuga waited to feel the contempt.
It was taking a while.
The old man was decent. Yuuga gave him that much credit. The fat lord's voice was amusing, the timing of its greed was amusing, the way it patted its own painted belly and ignored the thin townsfolk got a laugh out of the whole square and very nearly out of Yuuga before he regained his composure. The lord schemed and feasted and the town starved and the story pulled and Yuuga found that he had stopped waiting to be unimpressed and started waiting to see what the fat lord would do next.
A boy beside him, eight or nine, filthy like the others, was watching with his whole mouth open. Yuuga had drifted forward without deciding to. He was no longer at the back. He was three rows in, among them, close enough to smell their stench, and the fat lord on its strings had just done something so grasping that the boy beside him gasped out loud, and Yuuga had leaned in to see it too.
He caught himself there.
He was standing in the middle of a crowd of peasants with his weight forward and his breath held over a doll on a string, shoulder to shoulder with a child who hadn't washed in a week, and he had been about to laugh. Heat went up the back of his neck. He straightened so fast he knocked his elbow into someone, and the someone didn't even look, because the someone was watching the show.
That was worse. That was somehow worse than anything. He had been one of them for a minute and they hadn't even noticed him join.
The contempt came back all at once, and he reached for it and held it. Dolls. Painted wood and a beggar's hands. Childish. He looked at the rapt filthy faces all around him and felt his lip curl, and he opened his mouth to say something, to put the whole cheap spectacle back in its place where it belonged.
On the stage, the fat lord's town had reached its hardest winter, and the old man was bringing the story to its turn.
Karura had watched the prince come down into the square forty minutes ago and had not changed her expression.
She had a great deal of her attention spent already. A crowd this size was the worst ground a guard could be handed, two hundred bodies and a dozen rooftops and an alley that didn't go anywhere good, and she kept the Byakugan moving over all of it, the people around Yuuga, the men on the cart-rails, the windows above.
If anything happened, she wouldn't be able to summon any of her other puppets. She'd have to rely on the Protector puppet she was inside right now. Protector was strong enough on its own despite being defensively-focused. At least, she hoped it would be enough.
As the old man, she saw the prince about to lose his temper.
So she brought the lord to his turn.
The old man slowed his hands. The fat lord stood alone in its walled granary in the hardest winter the painted town had ever seen, and out of the crowd of little cloth townsfolk the old man walked one small figure forward, a girl no bigger than the lord's painted boot, holding up in both hands a single date, the last her family had. Even a hard lord must get hungry, the old man made her say, in a small brave voice, and he held the whole square in the space where the fat lord looked down at the last date of a starving child.
The square had gone quiet. Even the prince had gone quiet.
The lord opened the granary.
The old man threw both the doll's arms wide and the painted doors banged open and the grain poured out, a fistful of real millet the old man flung glittering over the front row so the children shrieked and grabbed for it, and the little cloth townsfolk stood up straight and the fat lord came down off its dais and walked among them, and the crowd, the real crowd, the two hundred hungry people cheered.
They cheered for a painted lord learning to open his hand. They cheered like it was the greatest thing they'd ever seen, and maybe it was the thing they most needed to be true, that a hard man set over them could wake up one morning and decide to be worth loving.
She had the old man stop mid-cheer and sweep a bow toward the back of the crowd, low, both arms out, the showman's flourish.
"And what's this? A great young lord of the Land of Wind, come down to honor an old fool's little show!"
A man near the prince frowned and turned to find who the old man meant. Heads followed. Yuuga's eyes narrowed.
The old man swung the same outflung arm back to the stage, to the painted lord standing in his open granary, and back again to Yuuga, until the two of them were caught in one gesture, the lord in the tale and the lord in the square.
"Well, look at that," he said, delighted, to everyone and no one. "I tell a story about a great man learning to open his hand, and a great man walks up to watch me tell it. You couldn't write it better! Maybe he's come to take notes, eh?" He leaned toward the children in the front row like a conspirator. "Watch close, little ones. This is the part where we find out what kind he is."
The square laughed. It rolled back warm again, every face swinging easy from the puppet to the prince and back, and a few of them bowed toward Yuuga grinning.
The crowd was looking at him.
This was different from the way they'd looked at him at the gate, pressed back and frightened and dutiful. It was the way they'd looked at the painted lord when it opened its granary. They had turned, the whole crowd of them, and they were smiling at him, at Yuuga, and the old man on the stage had his hand swept toward him like he was part of the story, like he was the good part, and Yuuga found he did not want them to look away.
"You." He had the nearest attendant by the sleeve. His voice came out higher than he wanted. "Coin. Give them some. Here." He didn't know the sum these people would understand. He didn't know what a peasant did with money or how much of it made a difference. He gestured, impatient, at the purse on the man's belt. "All of that. Throw it. Now."
The attendant threw it.
A fistful of silver went up into the white noon and came down over the front of the crowd, and the square came apart with it, children diving, grown men laughing, a woman pressing a coin to her chest.
The old man swept the deepest bow of the whole show, nose nearly in the dust.
"There it is! There it is, and you all saw it!" His voice cracked with delight. "Didn't I tell you? Generous as the lord in my little story, and I say more, I say better, because my lord was painted wood and string and this one breathes! Bless the young lord of the Land of Wind! Bless the house that raised him and the father that sent him to us!"
And the crowd took it up.
"Bless the young lord!"
"Long life to him!"
"Bless his house!"
A woman near the front had her hands clasped at her chest and her eyes wet. "He fed our children, look at him, look how young he is."
"A blessing on his name," an old man said, bowing, "and on his father's."
The praise, the screams, the cheers… It was the best he had felt in weeks. It might have been the best he had felt in years.
And it had cost him a purse. A single purse of silver, the kind of thing his tailor's bill dwarfed ten times over. He had thrown away less than a good dinner and bought a square full of people chanting his name like he'd brought water to a village suffering from drought.
He turned and went, before the feeling could fade, his chin up, and this time the crowd parted for him, bowing, beaming, and he let them.
Behind him the old man was still going, pitched to carry, working the whole square.
"There he goes! Remember his face, little ones, remember this day! The day the young lord of the Land of Wind came down to a dusty little square and filled it with silver! They'll tell it in Renge long after this old fool is bones, you mark me, the year the prince came and was kind!"
A cheer went up behind him, his name in the middle of it.
Yuuga walked back to the lodging turning a single thought over and over with a kind of wonder.
That was all it took. That was all it had ever taken. A handful of coin and a few soft words, and they were his. He had spent his whole life being owed their respect and getting their fear, and it turned out respect was cheaper than fear and felt a hundred times better, and the peasants had been sitting on it the whole time waiting to give it away for the price of a dinner.
He wondered what a larger purse would buy. He found he wanted to know.
The girl came up the stairs behind him, silent, her face giving away nothing, and he forgot her before he reached the top.
They were loading the palanquins at dawn when the word reached Reizen.
He stood in the shade of the lodging wall while his people worked, and Kaname stood at his shoulder and gave him the night's small reports. Among them, set down with no more weight than the rest: the young lord had gone to the puppet show in the square yesterday, and at the end of it had thrown a purse to the crowd, and the town had cheered him for it, and the boy had gone back to his rooms in a fine mood and stayed in it.
Reizen took a date from the bowl an attendant held and ate it slowly and did not say anything for a moment.
His son had thrown money at a crowd and liked being loved for it. It meant nothing on its own. A vain boy had found a vain pleasure; it would likely amount to a habit of buying applause and nothing deeper, which was still further than the boy had managed in nineteen years, and so the Daimyo of the Land of Wind allowed himself to keep it in mind. He had watched men read whole futures into a single warm afternoon and be wrong. He did not intend to be one of them.
Once proved nothing.
He dropped the date stone back into the bowl.
"Renge sends no grain to the capital this year, or the next. Leave the steward behind with masons and coin for that granary, built larger than it was. They fill it in good years and open it in bad ones, and the governor answers to me the day I hear it was ever empty." He wiped his fingers on a cloth. "Send to the royal herds for breeding stock to replace what scattered. Let the governor announce it."
Kaname bowed.
"We move within the hour." the Daimyo said.
"Yes, my lord."
The palanquins went up onto their bearers' shoulders. The column drew out through the far gate, past the new banners gone limp in the morning still, past a square where an old man was already setting up a painted box for the few who hadn't come to see the procession off, and out onto the road, into the country, toward whatever was waiting at the far end of all that sand.