That very night, the night that idea took hold of me up in the keep, I was sliding open the door to Kicho's room.
Not Hideyoshi. Not Ieyasu. I wanted to tell her, first of all.
Nine years ago. That night I burned Mount Hiei. The one to whom I'd confessed, out loud for the first time in my life, "I want to go back to being an ordinary man."
Kicho wasn't surprised that I'd come to her at such an hour. In the room with the lamp turned low, still leaning on her armrest, she just looked at me, quietly.
"...Kicho."
My voice was shaking. From the high of the idea, and from fear of saying it out loud.
"I'm going to..."
Say it. I told myself. To her, I can say it.
"I'm going to... be taken for dead."
I'd said it. Wipe the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven from the world. Have Oda Nobunaga taken for dead, and go back to being just a human being—that outrageous scheme.
For a while, Kicho said nothing.
And then.
"...At last, then."
She said that, and gave a little laugh.
I was taken aback.
"You're not... surprised?"
"I am not. I've been waiting all this time. For you to arrive at that answer."
Kicho sat up from her armrest.
"Ever since the night of Mount Hiei. Ever since that night you wept and said, 'I want to go back to being an ordinary man.' I have been thinking all this time. How I might help this timid, gentle man down from that heavy sign he carries."
I was at a loss for words.
The wish I'd sunk to the bottom of my heart, alone, for years. She'd been carrying it with me, just as long as I had—no, longer than I had.
"...Will you come with me?"
Even to my own ears, it was a pathetic voice. But Kicho narrowed her eyes, exasperated, yet gently.
"What are you saying, after all this time? I have been your accomplice since our wedding night, dear."
Something deep in my chest went warm.
But—.
Just as I opened my mouth to thank her. The look in Kicho's eyes changed, all at once. To the dignified eyes of the daughter of Dosan, the man they called the Viper.
"But, dear."
"You cannot do this alone."
My heart skipped.
"Only consider it. After you vanish. Who will keep anyone from examining your 'remains'? Who will put the broken house of Oda back together? The secret passage by which you slip out of the castle. The measures to make sure that, not even once in ten thousand, the world sees through your 'death' as a fabrication."
She folded down her fingers, one at a time.
"—Not a single one of those is ready, is it."
I didn't have a word to say.
The scheme that had looked so brilliant up in the keep. In front of her, it was still nothing but a child's daydream.
"...You."
I murmured, dazed.
"You'd already thought it through that far?"
"A woman is far more tenacious than men suppose."
Kicho smiled mischievously, and then looked straight at me.
"It will be all right. We need only count them off, one at a time. Someone to make the world believe in your 'death.' Someone to carry on the world after. Someone to hide the body. —You have some in mind, I think."
I did. In my head, several faces were slowly beginning to surface.
"Winning those people over is your task. Working out every detail of the plan is mine. And then..."
Kicho wrapped my sweaty hand in both of hers. Just the same as nine years ago.
"On the night we decide on, I will not leave your side for a moment. Even if you lose your nerve at the last and stop in your tracks. I will push you from behind. —We will leave this place, the two of us, without fail."
—Ah.
My world's-most-ridiculous fantasy. That night, in her hands, for the very first time.
Became a plan.