The moon was bright that night.
I sat on the veranda, gazing absently at the garden. I couldn't sleep. Sleepless nights are nothing new for me. I feel as if a blade is lurking in the darkness behind me, and I'm afraid to close my eyes.
Then, without a sound of footsteps, someone sat down beside me.
It was Kicho.
"Can you not sleep again, my lord?"
"...No."
"What a troublesome husband."
Kicho said it as if exasperated, but she didn't leave. The two of us looked at the moon side by side.
It's a strange thing.
I'm afraid of people and hate, more than death, letting anyone within reach—but with this woman beside me, for some reason, it's easier to breathe. Even the darkness behind me is less frightening than usual.
"Hey, Kicho," I said quietly.
"Will you listen to what I really want?"
"Tell me."
"I don't need the realm. I don't need castles, or glory in battle. All I want... is to be afraid of no one, feared by no one, and to till some country field with you, and eat, and sleep. That's all."
The moment I said it, I regretted it.
A son-in-law sent off to take the realm, telling his new bride he wants to till a field in the country. Too pathetic. The Viper's daughter was bound to laugh at me.
But Kicho didn't laugh.
She didn't laugh at all.
After looking up at the moon for a while, she said quietly:
"...It is a good wish."
I caught my breath.
"Men who want the realm are as common as dust. But a husband who wishes to till a field in the country—there is only you. I do not dislike that wish."
Something deep in my chest went warm and tingling. This ridiculously small wish of mine. Someone who'd listen to it without laughing had finally come along.
Once, watching farmers tilling their paddies from afar, I'd thought: someday, if even just one person would come along who'd listen to this wish without laughing. That person was beside me now, looking at the same moon.
For the first time in my life, spending the night side by side with someone didn't scare me.
—It seems one of the attendants on night watch had been quietly watching us from a distance.
The next morning, this rumor was going around the castle:
"Our lord and her ladyship gazed up at the moon until past midnight, conversing in secret. Surely they were discussing great matters of the realm. That pair is unfathomable."
Great matters of the realm.
What we'd been talking about late into the night was nothing but a dream of tilling a field in the country.
The world really does get things wrong, all the time.
And on the back side of that wrongness, I was, without a doubt, being saved.
A few days later, a letter arrived from Mikawa. In clumsy but forceful handwriting, it said:
Lord Oda. As I promised, I am getting strong. Someday I will surely come to see you again.
Takechiyo.
That scaredy-cat hostage boy had remembered.
I read the letter over and over.
Kicho. Takechiyo. Before I knew it, I had two people I could face without bluffing.
I never thought a day like this would come in the life of someone as afraid of people as I am.
But peaceful days don't last long. I didn't know that yet.
Soon, my father would die.
And for the first time in my life, I would learn the real weight of "someone dying because of me."