Kaneko (Land of Jade & Fire #2)

Chapter 1

Kaneko

The cabin was small but clean. That was the first thing that struck me when they shoved me inside and slammed the door. It wasn’t filthy, didn’t reek of piss and rot and death. It was just . . . clean.

A narrow bunk with actual blankets.

A small table bolted to the floor.

A porthole that let in a sliver of gray light.

I stood there, swaying with the motion of the ship, trying to understand. The chains on my wrists and ankles had been removed, leaving angry lines where iron had bit into flesh.

I glanced about.

Strewn across the bed were clean clothes. The dull-colored fabric of the kimono reminded me of workers outside Tooi’s fields. It was simple but honest.

Clean cabin? Clean clothes?

This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how wakō treated slaves. It wasn’t how they treated anyone who didn’t bear their brand. Hells, from what I’d seen, they barely treated their own this well.

Why?

In one stride, I stood before the bunk, shoved the kimono aside, and carefully sat, half expecting everything to vanish in a puff of smoke. The blankets were coarse but real, the mattress thin but present. I ran my fingers over the fabric, my mind spinning with confusion.

Below me, somewhere deep in the belly of the ship, I could hear them.

The others.

The ones who weren’t given cabins.

I heard muffled sobbing, the rattle of chains, the creak of bodies pressed too close together in the stinking dark of the hold.

That’s where I should’ve been. That’s where slaves belonged.

So why was I here?

The door rattled, and I jerked upright, my heart hammering as it swung open.

A pirate stepped inside, gold bangles jangling around his wrists, the sun glinting off a loop in his left ear.

He was young, maybe a few years older than me, with a pockmarked face and eyes that wouldn’t meet mine—I doubted would ever meet anyone’s gaze.

I caught hatred in the eye that tracked me, flickering in the brief glance he threw my way before looking down.

In his hands, he held a tray, which he set on the table without so much as a word.

I stared, mystified, as though Amaterasu herself had descended from the heavens and now stood before me.

Rice?

And not the hard, half-cooked gruel I’d expected, but actual steamed rice, white and fluffy, still radiating heat.

And grilled fish, glistening with oil and seasoning, perched on a bed of pickled vegetables, bright and fresh.

Beside the plate was a bowl of soup with savory steam curling into the air.

Hot food? Fresh food?

It was the kind of meal one served guests, not prisoners.

“What—” I started, but the sailor was already turning to leave.

“Eat,” he muttered, his tone something dark. Resentment, maybe. Or disgust.

“Wait—”

He paused at the door, still not looking at me.

“Why?” The question burst out before I could stop it. “Why are you feeding me like this? Why am I here instead of down there?” I gestured toward the floor, toward the hold below.

The sailor’s jaw clenched. For a moment, I thought he might not answer, then he said, his voice tight, “Taichou’s orders.”

“But why—”

He shrugged. “Not my job to ask why.” Then he finally looked at me, and the hatred in his eyes was unmistakable. “I follow orders. You should, too.” He spat the words like they tasted foul. “Rest of us eat hardtack and salted meat, but you get this. Fucking whore.”

He vanished before I could respond, slamming the door behind him.

I sat there, staring at the tray, my stomach churning despite the gnawing hunger. The food smelled incredible. My mouth watered, my body betraying me. I hadn’t eaten a proper meal since—gods, I couldn’t even remember.

But this felt wrong. All of it felt wrong. I was a prisoner, a slave. I should be starving in the dark with the others, not sitting in a clean cabin with hot food and blankets.

Why?

My hands shook as I picked up the chopsticks.

They gave me chopsticks? Even that simple act felt foreign. They weren’t sharp; still, the wooden sticks formed a point. They’d just handed a prisoner a weapon.

Nothing made sense.

I told myself I needed to eat, needed to keep my strength up, but the truth was simpler: I was too hungry to resist. The first bite of fish melted on my tongue, seasoned with ginger and soy, perfectly steamed.

The rice was soft and warm, better than anything I’d eaten in months.

Even the soup was rich and complex, nothing like the thin broth I’d had aboard The Worm during my first encounter with the wakō.

I ate, barely tasting anything despite the quality, my mind racing.

This wasn’t how you treated cargo.

If I’m not cargo, what am I? Where are they taking me, and what will they do—

My heart lurched.

The mainland slave markets.

What kind of buyer paid enough that a slave needed to be pampered like this? I was strong, not unattractive, still young. A noble house or . . . gods, no—

My head swam. The food turned to ash in my mouth.

A prayer flew from my lips, “Holy Ebisu, you guided me home more times than I deserved, protected me from your brother’s anger on the sea. Save me from this fate, I beg you.”

My prayer turned to mist on the wind.

Over the next few days, the pattern continued.

Three meals a day, always hot, always substantial.

Rice and fish, sometimes pork. Where in all the hells had pirates found pork?

Fresh vegetables that shouldn’t have lasted this long at sea.

Fruit, on occasion—expensive, precious fruit that spoke of careful planning and deep pockets.

And always, the same sailor who delivered it would give me that same look of barely contained hatred before leaving without a word.

He’d spoken to me once. He would never do so again. Slowly, I began to understand.

The crew resented me. To them, I was nothing—less than nothing, a piece of cargo who ate better than they did and who slept in comfort while they worked themselves to exhaustion. Only Kichi Taichou’s orders kept them in check.

Still, I saw the looks. I saw when they escorted me to the head to relieve myself—always with guards. I caught them glaring. Their eyes followed me with cold calculation, weighing whether the taichou’s wrath was worth whatever satisfaction they might get from ignoring his orders.

Most days, I tried not to think, tried not to wonder what would happen if Kichi changed his mind or if we hit rough seas and discipline broke down. I tried not to imagine hands in the dark, and screams no one would answer.

On the fourth day—or was it the fifth?—they led me up on deck for exercise. “No getting weak,” the guard muttered, clearly unhappy about the assignment.

I squinted against the brightness, my eyes watering. The sun nearly blinded me after so long below. And that’s when I saw them.

Three others.

Two women and a man, all wearing kimonos like mine, all being led in circles around the deck by bored-looking guards. They appeared clean and well fed, each holding beauty, a certain light that captivated the eye. Each remained lean, smooth and unmarred by life or lash.

Special cargo. All of us.

One of the women caught my eye. She was older, maybe thirty, with elegant features and carefully maintained hair despite her circumstances. When our gazes met, her eyebrows rose in a silent question.

I gave a tiny shake of my head.

She shrugged, a baffled gesture I felt in my soul.

“No talking!” A guard’s bark cut through the moment. He stepped between us, breaking our line of sight, but dared not raise a hand or whip. “Walk. No talking, no touching.”

We obeyed, circling the deck like horses being trained, each lost in our own confusion.

But I’d seen it in their eyes. They didn’t understand either. They were as baffled as I was by our treatment, by the contradiction of being prisoners who ate like lords while slaves suffered in the hold below.

That night, lying on my bunk, I heard a woman for the first time. She was in the cabin next to mine. She was crying. Her sobs were soft and muffled, tears not meant to be heard. But the walls were thin, and the ship was quiet save for its endless creaking and the distant shouts of sailors above.

I pressed my hand against the wall, wishing I could offer her comfort but not daring to speak. The guards had been clear: No talking, no contact.

The woman cried well into the night, long enough that my own eyes began to burn in sympathy. Eventually, she quieted, and I pulled away from the wall, curling onto my side and struggling to sleep.

The next morning, I heard her again, only this time, she wasn’t crying.

She was singing.

Her melody drifted through the wall, soft and ethereal, like nothing I’d ever heard. I couldn’t make out all the words at first. They were in a dialect I didn’t fully recognize, but the emotion layered within them was unmistakable.

Love. Loss. Longing.

And something else.

Hope.

I sat up slowly, transfixed.

Her voice was beautiful, but not in a practiced, polished way—in the way of something raw and real and utterly unbroken. She sang like someone who still believed there was something worth singing about, even here, even now. The words gradually became clearer as I listened:

Beyond the mountains, beyond the sea,

There waits a love who remembers me.

Though chains may bind and darkness fall,

My heart flies free beyond these walls.

My throat tightened.

She sang of home, of someone waiting for her, of hope that transcended iron and wood and the endless rocking of the ship.

I pressed my hand against the wall again, as if I could reach through it and touch that hope, hold it close.

She sang every day after that, sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night, always the same songs, or variations of them. Songs about love that endured. About light in darkness. About holding on when everything screamed to let go.

I clung to those songs like a drowning man clutches driftwood.

In the dark hours, when my mind turned to terrible places—to Tooi burning, to my family lying dead in the streets, to Yoshi likely broken and forgotten—the woman’s voice pulled me back.

The dawn will come, the night will fade,

And love will find the path we made.

Though oceans part and years go by,

True hearts remain, they never die.

Yoshi.

His name was a constant ache in my chest.

I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, didn’t know if he’d made it to safety or if the wakō had slaughtered him on the road, didn’t know if . . . if he thought of me the way I thought of him—obsessively, desperately, with every breath.

But the woman’s songs gave me something to hold on to.

If she could hope, maybe I could, too.

If she could believe someone was waiting for her, maybe I could believe that Yoshi had survived, that he was rebuilding Tooi . . . that he remembered me.

That someday, somehow, I might see him again.

The thought was ridiculous—insane, even—but I let myself imagine it anyway.

In the quiet moments, when the invisible chains felt too heavy and the walls too close, I pictured his face, his smile, the way his hair fell across his forehead and his eyes lit up when he solved some problem no one else could see.

“He’s alive,” I whispered to the darkness. “He has to be. He’s somewhere safe, learning to be the Daimyo his people need, the man I need.”

Some nights, the woman’s songs shifted, her melody turning bittersweet:

And if the sea should claim my breath,

And darkness be my final rest,

Still will my love reach out to you,

A light that guides you safely through.

My eyes burned as I pressed my forehead against the wall and whispered, “Thank you.”

I doubted she could hear me, doubted she even knew I was there, but I needed to say it anyway. Her songs were the only thing keeping me sane, the only reminder that beauty still existed somewhere in the world, even here, even now, even as we sailed toward an unknown fate in bewildering captivity.

Some nights she would cry again, and I would press my hand to the wall, wishing I could tell her that her songs had saved me.

But I couldn’t.

All I could do was listen. And wonder. And hope.