Author's note

I originally started posting this story here about a decade or more ago, lost interest after nineteen chapters, and didn't get back to it for close to ten years. In that time, I changed emails and lost my password for my old FanFiction account, so when I wanted to start posting again a while ago I had to re register under a different pen name. So, after the live action Kenshin movies reignited my love for the fandom, I decided to finish up the story and start a sequal. Since I can post the remaining chapters under my P.L. Nunn account, I'm reposting the entire story with the final chapters under my 'Draxal' pen name, as well as the ongoing sequel.

Shifting The Balance

Tokyo 1884

The pull of the market crowds had begun to wane with the falling of the sun. Dusk drew people back towards their homes, it urged shopkeepers to close their doors in preparation for night and the varied and myriad stalls to put up their wares and pull bamboo blinds down over their traveling showrooms. The Takanawa district never entirely fell into slumber - - there was always some portion of the shitamachi, or downtown Tokyo that remained alert and awake, catering to even the latest and most notorious patrons, but, for the most part, the decent folk returned to their families with the coming dark.

A few hopeful salesmen still called out to passerby, proclaiming "tofu for sale" or "baked yams. Stone baked Yams!" Or "fresh Fish, the finest catch from Edo bay." Himura Kenshin absently listened to the song of the salesmen, already in possession of the supplies he'd been sent after, but hesitating at a fish stall, thinking seafood might be a welcome change in menu. He shifted the sack of rice on his shoulder, surveying what was left of the day's catch, lying dead and glassy eyed in the merchant's baskets.

"Fresh fish. Just caught." The wizened old woman manning the stall eyed him with the crafty desperation of a merchant faced with too much stock at the end of her day. "A fish or two for your table?"

"Three," he agreed, almost certain that it was only himself and Kaoru and Kenji for supper tonight. One never knew when Doctor Genzai and the girls would show up, or one of Kaoru's students might stay late after practice. Supper used to be a much more expansive affair - - well, at least when they could afford it - - when Yahiko was in Tokyo, but that young man had left to see the small part of the world available to him within the confines of the empire and had taken his considerable appetite with him. Kenshin missed him. And worried a little, knowing more of the world than a young man not quite eighteen ever could, and more wary of the dangers. But Yahiko had his own path to discover and there was no holding him back.

There were other people he missed - - desperately so at times - - people that had been, for a while, closer than blood, but had chosen to fly away like leaves in the fall. Only the leaves came back - - in one form or another. Miss Megumi visited twice a year. Misao made the pilgrimage from Kyoto regularly, sometimes dragging a quiet, serene Aoshi with her. It was good to see them. Always an occasion to celebrate. But sometimes, it wasn't enough.

Sano hadn't been back. Not once. Almost four years since he'd gone, with the threat of the law nipping at his heels. Sometimes Kenshin wondered if he were dead; felt cold in the center of his being dwelling on it, but was far too familiar with death to deny the plausibility. Far too rational to pretend that the world outside was as placid as the one he had made for himself and his family within the orderly boundaries of the capital city. Not good to dwell on it too much though, because he'd worked too hard for this life he led. Built thick walls around the darkness and the violence that stained his past. He never, ever wanted Kenji to experience the things he had. Never ever, wanted him to know the things he had done.

Shame. It ate at him sometimes, when he looked into those wide, violet eyes, so much the color of his own. Innocence dwelled in those eyes, and love and worship and Kenshin was forever leery of loosing any of those three things. Kaoru knew. She'd known of that fear, the day he'd given the reverse blade to Yahiko. She accepted with relief, he thought, his dismissal of his past - - but she hated his abhorrence of it. She hated that he sometimes hated himself.

It was the fish, he thought, blinking himself back to the here and now of paying the merchant for her wares, that had made him think of old times and Sano. There was nothing that Sano had liked better than baked fish. Well, save maybe a beef pot.

Kenshin smiled wryly, nestling the wrapped fish in the wooden bucket with the rest of the odds and ends Kaoru had sent him out for. He'd gotten distracted at the Nihonbashi bridge, waylaid by the river and the people and the atmosphere. He should have been home an hour ago and would no doubt hear of his tardiness in no uncertain terms from Kaoru. Motherhood had only softened the sharpness of her tongue a small bit and marriage had done very little to curb her flash fire temper. Which was fine, for he'd never wanted to change her, only himself.

He shuffled beyond the business district, sandals kicking up little puffs of dust on the dry road. It was mid-summer and the rains hadn't come for weeks, leaving the grass dry and yellowed and the wells low. He passed a few Furi-uri at the edge of the Takanawa district coming from the residential section, poles over their shoulders, swinging their empty buckets of produce that they carried for housewives to buy for supper. He was almost past the close-set buildings and stalls and onto the more scenic road that led towards the district where the Kenda Dojo and home lay. Still, it was a twenty minute walk or more, which meant that it would be full dark by the time he reached home and Kaoru and Kenji would both be complaining of the late supper; the former no doubt, louder and more coherently than the latter; a three year-old not possessing the breadth of his mother's vocabulary.

There was a shuffle of feet in the dirt, and the soft metallic scrape of a blade sliding from a sheath. The hairs on the back of Kenshin's neck pricked, his fingers tensed on the bucket. He turned his head casually to the shadows at the edge of the road, where a last building created an alleyway between the stone wall facing the long canal. There were shifting shapes in that shadow. A gasping, breathless sound of struggling men. A cry and a curse. Thieves, no doubt, waylaying a passerby. Some innocent dragged into the darkness to be robbed of wealth and possibly life.

Passing it by was beyond him. He had no weapon of his own, but sometimes the mere presence of a witness would be enough to scatter those desperate enough to stoop to petty robbery. He stepped into the shadows of that alley, not bothering to mask the scrape of his sandals, not bothering to lower the sack of rice or the bucket of fish and supplies. There was a gathering of dark shapes. Six men, one pressed against the wall in the center. There was the glint of a short blade. A weathered wakizashi, old and misused, but deadly enough and easily concealed under clothing. The blade pressed against the throat of the man against the wall. An odd man, that. Tall and fair of hair and skin, foreign of feature even in the dark. Kenshin had seen a few westerners, mostly at port, but not generally in alleys beyond the teaming port or business districts.

"Excuse me," he called out. "Is there a problem here?"

Six sets of eyes searched him out in the shadows. A few dark shapes shifted threateningly towards him. Not scampering like poor starving street thieves in the least. Acting more like wolves who had downed prey and had no intention of giving it up. The westerner merely stared, those odd round eyes of his hard to read in the shadows.

"Get out of here, boy," the one with the wakizashi hissed.

In the darkness he might have looked like one, not overly tall and slim, possessing nothing in lines of face that might have betrayed more than three decades of life.

"I'm afraid I can't do that," he said it congenially enough. "You seem to have this man at a disadvantage."

"Mind your own business or else."

Oh, they were creative in their threats. He tilted his head, gauging the other men - - which had weapons and which did not. One had a knife, the other three clubs.

"Get rid of him," the leader growled, and two of the club-bearing ones left the circle around the westerner and advanced up the alley towards Kenshin.

A club arced past his ear and he shifted to one side, swung the shoulder weighted down by the rice into the chest of the other man, put out a foot to tangle in the staggering man's ankles, and the big body hit the ground. All very neatly done. It might have been luck or accidental grace for all the intention he gave of it. Another swing of the club and Kenshin windmilled his arms to avoid it. The bucket came up and slammed under the chin of the club wielder so hard the dull impact of the blow echoed off the stone of the canal wall. The fish went flying, as well as the small package of wasabe powder. He caught the former with the bucket and the latter in his free hand.

"Really," he said helpfully to the others. "I saw policemen just up the street. It might be wiser if you left."

"You're lying."

"No, really - -" he swung around and pointed and the bucket conveniently connected with the temple of the first man he'd tripped, who'd been trying for his feet.

They called him a foul name, or perhaps they were merely cursing the fates. The one with the wakizashi snapped at the others to flee and drew back his blade to finish their victim. The bucket left Kenshin's hand, slammed into the bony wrist of the attacker and rebounded. The blade clattered to the ground along with his supplies and the man cursed and fled into the depths of the alley. Except for the two unconscious men on the ground, and the westerner still leaning against the wall, he had been abandoned. There was the smell of blood in the air though and none of it had been drawn by him.

"Are you all right?" He moved forward, concerned.

"Yes," the westerner said in perfectly unaccented speech.

Kenshin knelt, gathering his groceries back into the bucket.

"I don't think so," he disagreed softly.

There was a bit of blood spotting the ground between the man's boots. But if a man chose to deny injury, out of pride or some sense of honor - - who was he to argue. He picked up the wakizashi gingerly, examining it for blood. It was clean. The sheath was nowhere to be seen. Probably still in the possession of the thief - - if thieves those men had been.

The man looked down at Kenshin, kneeling at his feet, short blade held lightly in his hand. He took a pained breath and reconsidered. "No. Perhaps not. I would have been very much worse, if you had not come. Thank you."

Kenshin looked up, half smiling. "Thanks are not necessary. It was the right thing to do."

"Ah - - right perhaps, but foolish, against five men."

Debating that bit of logic was useless. A change of subject was needed. He rose and had to tilt his head back to look up into the westerner's eyes. "You speak very well - - for a foreigner."

"As do you," the man agreed with an ironic laugh, and pushed himself away from the wall. He gasped, bending over, one hand clutching at his middle. Kenshin put a hand out to steady him.

"I know a doctor that lives not far away. He'll tend you."

He tossed the blade into the canal and heard it hit water with a satisfying plop. The westerner limped along beside him, grunting now and then with pain. He trailed a little blood in his wake, but it did not soak the side of his western jacket or his slim cut- cut western trousers, so it was likely not life-threatening. He would not likely bleed out before reaching Doctor Genzai.

"He didn't cut you with that blade," Kenshin remarked.

"No," the man agreed and was unwilling to explain further, though he tempered his silence on the one subject with information regarding another. "My name is Quinton Winter."

"Himura Kenshin, Mr. Quinton." He had a spattering of familiarity with western honorifics.

"Winter," the westerner corrected with a smile. "It's the other way around in English. My formal name is last."

"English?" Curiosity arose. "From Eng - Land?"

"England. The British Isles. Yes."

"You're a merchant? A trader."

"Yes," Winter agreed. "Though fallen on bad luck, it seems."

Kenshin lifted a brow politely in question. But the man looked away, distracted. He had very pale eyes, so light a gray that they seemed almost silver. Hair that was pale gold and thinning just a little along the top. Heavy, long sideburns, but a clean-shaven chin and upper lip for a westerner. He might have been close to forty-five or fifty. But a healthy, robust fifty. A man that knew physical exertion and reveled in it.

"I'm afraid, I have no money to pay your doctor," Winter said finally, softly. "They took what I had left to me."

"He'll treat you," Kenshin assured the man.

He was very late getting home. Stars twinkled brightly in a sky gone to black velvet. Kaoru was waiting on the front porch of the dojo, tapping her foot in irritation, when he stepped through the front gate.

"Where have you been? Do you know what time - -" The shrillness of her complaint dribbled away. She bit her lip in acute embarrassment as the westerner stepped through the gates on Kenshin's heel. In the light from the lantern at the gate, the man was clearly foreign.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you've brought someone home."

She crossed her hands in front of herself, contrite for her outburst in front of a stranger and a western stranger at that. Kaoru had a fascination for the west.

"No inconvenience, I prey, lady?" Winter charmed her with a sweeping bow, though it must have pained him. Kenshin had seen the wound in his side. A stab wound through the fleshy part of the hip, just above the bone. A lucky man, Winter, for it not to have punctured vital organs. Kenshin stopped at the foot of the steps looking up at Kaoru, not concerned at the blush on his young wife's cheeks or her wide-eyed examination of the Englishman.

"He was robbed and had no place else to go. I have fish." He extended the offering and she blinked and looked down at the bucket, remembering finally to act the proper wife.

"Of course." She bowed, tail of dark hair sliding over her shoulder. Reached to take the pail from Kenshin's hand and scurried back into the house.

Kenshin chewed his lip, wondering if this contrition on her part boded ill or well for him. He'd find out later in the privacy of their own room.

Kaoru prepared supper and Kenshin truly should have helped if they'd wanted Winter's first meal with them to be more palatable, but Kaoru would have nothing of it, ushering him away with a secret sharp glare that impressed upon him that she wanted to maintain propriety with a guest in the house and for him to go and do husbandly things instead of assisting her in her wifely duties.

Her cooking was a thing based solely on luck. Sometimes it was agreeable, sometimes not. She'd gotten better. Truly she had, but her dumplings tended toward chewy and her rice mushy and more often than not she burned the fish and made the soup too watery or too spicy. So he sat with Winter on the porch at the back garden, waiting on the inevitable.

"Do you mind?" Winter asked, taking out a slim brown stick of tobacco.

"No."

The Englishman offered him one and he shook his head. The man struck a match against the side of the steps. "A very fine house."

"Thank you."

"A dojo?"

"Yes. My wife teaches the Kaiya Kasshin style of swordsmanship."

Winter lifted a pale brow. "Your wife?"

"This was her father's dojo. She inherited and became master."

"A female master. Unusual." Winter blew out a cloud of smoke.

"Kaoru is an unusual woman."

"And you?"

"Me?"

"Do you make it a habit of rescuing beleaguered foreigners in dark alleys - - or was I the exception?"

Kenshin smiled, tossing a pebble into the pond, listening to the fish rise to the surface to investigate. "Only this once - - of late."

"Ah. Fortunate for me then."

The Cat bounded out in a flurry of puffed fur and a discontented hiss. She cast Kenshin an accusing yellow stare before disappearing over the fence. Of course Kenji followed on her furry heels, calling for 'kitty' to come back. But Cat disliked somewhat rough, childish hands stroking her fur the wrong way and even though Cat had been adopted early in the year - - a half-starved, half-grown tabby - - at the insistence of Kenji - - Cat had declared Kenshin her preferred human. Kenji was not overly dejected by the betrayal, being easily distracted by other things, like buzzing dragonflies and curious fish, drifting clouds and the arrangement of dirt in the garden.

With Cat disappeared into the night, Kenji gladly threw himself against his father's back, wrapping short, pudgy arms about Kenshin's neck and crying out. "Da's home. Da's home."

Kenshin swung the little boy around into his lap, grinning helplessly as the child squealed in delight. Finally, after a bout of tickling sensitive spots, he righted the child and pointed out that they had a visitor.

Large violet eyes went wide and serious. "Kenji, this is Mr. Winter. He's our guest. He's from across the sea to the west from a land called England. Mr. Winter, this is my son, Kenji."

It always made him proud to say it. Always made him swell up inside when he thought about this - - this most glorious thing that he and Kaoru had made together. The creation of a life, when he'd responsible for the taking of so many.

The child continued to stare. Then lifted one short arm and pointed. " Funny eyes."

"That's not nice," Kenshin chided, embarrassed at the directness.

Winter laughed, delighted. "My God, he looks just like you. A little darker, perhaps, but the resemblance is amazing. Strange enough to find one person here with such hair and eyes - - but two. I wonder at your genealogy."

Kenshin blinked, baffled.

"Genealogy." Kenji mimicked the odd word with nary a mispronunciation, laughed at his achievement and looked up to see if Kenshin had heard and approved.

"Merely a matter of bloodlines," Winter explained, seeing Kenshin's confusion. "Why some people's eyes are brown and some blue - - or in your case violet, I'd say."

"Oh, well, I'd hardly know that, Mr. Winter," Kenshin admitted.

Kaoru called them for supper before Winter could spew forth more incomprehensible words that Kenji could master before his father. Winter had perfect manners for a westerner, better by far than Kenji who tended to mimic Yahiko's early eating habits by grabbing food without thought, though he spilled a great deal more than Yahiko ever let escape the endless pit that his mouth had led into. Kaoru's rice balls were not quite round, but they clung together admirably. The fish was not burned and the soup was well flavored. She'd put some effort and concentration into the meal, which should have been somewhat irritating, since she never got three out of three dishes right if it where only him she were cooking for.

"You were robbed?" Kaoru had held off as long as she could, all the way through the soup and the rice and most of the fish. One could almost see the waves of intense curiosity radiating off of her.

"A horrible experience." Winter shuddered delicately. "But at least I came away from it with my life, which I might not have if not for your husband."

"Yes. Yes." She waved a hand, negating Kenshin's contribution as a given. "You're from England? Did I hear you're from England?"

"Yes, Lady Kaoru. From a place called Birmingham."

"Birmingham," she said in awe. "Is it very beautiful? I've read about England in the newspapers."

"Have you? How wonderful. Yes, it is very beautiful. This time of year, I think, it would be very misty and green."

"Are you a merchant or a diplomat?"

"A merchant, I'm afraid, that has fallen on rather bad luck. A string of bad luck actually. I find myself at somewhat of a disadvantage."

"What happened? If you don't mind my asking?"

Kenshin sipped his tea, musing that Kaoru would have asked whether Winter minded or not.

"Ah, where to start. I've been here in Japan for many years off and on. Almost twenty years, I daresay, learning the culture and the people. It's so much better now for a westerner, under the Meiji rule than it was in the Tokugawa era."

"I'm three." Kenji held up three fingers, declaring this important bit of news with solemn pride.

Kenshin smiled behind his cup and Kaoru frowned, shushing Kenji at his interruption of their guest. Kenji yawned, not overly chastised and leaned in against his mother's side.

"Ah," Winter said. "Practically grown."

"Please, go on," Kaoru urged, leaning forward to refill tea cups.

"A few years ago, I made an investment in a project that failed rather - - disastrously. Attempting to recoup from that, I put the remainder of my funds into the outfitting of a ship that most regretfully sank off the coast of Japan in the storms last spring. I've been waiting for funds from home since then and increasingly fear that my letters have gone astray."

"Well, I'm sure it takes a very long time for messages to get all the way to your England and then back again," Kenshin said.

"Rather," Winter agreed bleakly. "In the meanwhile, I find myself in dire straits. And now robbed of what funds I had left to me - - - I'm afraid that a foreigner even in the enlightened Meiji capital will be hard pressed to support himself."

"Oh, no," Kaoru said. "I'm sure there's something you can do. Why, you could teach English until your message arrives. I'm sure there are lots of people who would love to learn about the west."

"Do you think?" Winter lifted a politely dubious eyebrow.

"Of course! Why I'd love to learn. You could teach here! You could stay here! He could stay here, couldn't he, Kenshin, and teach English to students? What a wonderful idea."

She was immensely proud of the notion. Winter blinked at her. Kenshin did. Kenji snored softly away, head in her lap.

"Yes, I can see it now - -" She was rubbing her slim hands, already picturing the envy the Kenda school might get, having an Englishman in residence teaching western things. They would be the talk of the neighborhood and they hadn't been that in some time - - not since rumors of the Battousai had began to dwindle.

Kenshin would just as well they not be the talk of the town, but Kaoru had the dojo to think about - - Kaoru thought about money a great deal more than he ever did and chided him for his lack of concern. Where did one expect food to come from if not from money and where the money if not from students? Oh, he had heard that time and again as the students dwindled now and then as the young men found other interests than the discipline of the sword to attract them. After all this was the peaceful era of the Meiji. There was no revolution. There was no war. The violence hid in the shadows - - at least in Tokyo and it was easy to pretend it no longer existed. But, there were always those who wanted to learn. Always a roster of students, no matter how small, to contribute to the dojo. It was just in Kaoru's nature to worry.

"That - - would be fine." He gave his assent when Winter looked his way, even though Kaoru had made up her mind on the issue and was already plotting how to make best use of it.

Winter was polite and mannerly and well spoken - - but some tiny inkling of unease rippled through Kenshin at the thought of the man staying under their roof. Perhaps it was the avoidance of the issue of the wound and how it was gotten. It had been no dagger wound, such as the other blade wielding thief had carried. It was clean and deep and most certainly made by a finer blade than those men had possessed. He supposed Winter could have had the most terrible of luck and been set upon twice, but it seemed unlikely. The area was not teeming with cutpurses - - much less gangs of them.

Kaoru prepared a room for the Englishman while Kenshin carried a far gone Kenji to bed, then returned to clean up the supper dishes and set the room right. He collected the last few scraps of fish to put out for Cat. With Kenji safely gone the tabby padded leisurely back into the garden to claim her supper. Cat wound around his ankles, brushing against the hem of his hakama, trying her best to make him give up his pursuits and focus on her most esteemed self. He very deftly avoided her. He went about shutting the dojo down for the night, extinguishing lanterns, making sure the gates were closed tight, making sure the blinds were down over windows in case the much needed storm chose tonight to hit. Cat followed him on his rounds, a silent observer to the ritual. He paused by the garden in the moonlight and noted that a few errant weeds had sprung up between cabbage heads and cucumber plants.

He'd make a point of weeding tomorrow.

Kaoru was braiding her hair when Kenshin finally wondered in, Kenji's cat trailing at his heels. They moved much alike, the two of them, silent and supple with hidden secrets beneath a surface of lithe sinew and muscle. Kaoru was never so graceful, never so efficient in her movements. Annoying that her husband glided with more grace across the floor than she ever could. Annoying that he was more collected than she was in the face of esteemed visitors. She had so wanted to impress the Westerner. She wasn't sure she hadn't made a fool of herself.

"Do you think he'll stay?" she asked, hushed, for voices carried between thin walls and the Englishman was only a few chambers down. Kenshin shrugged, shedding hakama and gi and hanging them neatly over a clothes dowel before slipping into a thin sleeping robe. He folded to his knees next to Kaoru, tying off her braid for her, smiling across at her with that suspiciously opinionless expression he sometimes effected.

"I don't know. I'm sure he'll tell us."

"It could be so good for the school." She leaned forward, fingers touching his thigh. "So many people are fascinated by the west now days. Word will get around. If he charges for students - - then he can pay us rent - - wouldn't that be nice for a change - - a border that actually paid rent."

"That's hardly nice." He beetled his brows a little, very much aware of which border she spoke of.

"Well you don't have to pay now. Much," she clarified.

One of his drawn brows rose. She grinned at him. "Well, I have a good feeling."

"He is very mannerly and pleasant," Kenshin admitted. "He speaks like a finely educated man, even if he is a foreigner.'

"I wonder where he learned? He said he'd been in Japan for twenty years. That's a very long time."

"It is."

"Almost longer than I've been alive."

"No wonder he speaks so well. He's been doing it longer than you."

"Are you saying I don't speak well?" She gave him a look. Sometimes his blatant honesty hid unwitting insult.

"No. That's not what - - " He tried to back out of that blind alley and she waved a hand to dismiss it, more interested in the Englishman. "I think I'll spread the word at market and most certainly at the tea house - - oh and I can get Dr. Genzai to tell his patients and - -"

"Aren't you getting ahead of yourself. Weren't you just wondering if he would even stay? He might have other things to do. He is a merchant after all."

"You heard what he said. He's penniless until support from his home comes. His ship sank. So what better things does he have to do? Don't you want him to stay?" She turned to look at him, worried that he might not.

He shrugged, slid down on the tatami mat with his arms under his head. Pensive. Thoughtful.

"What?" she leaned over him, braid trailing over her shoulder, wanting more than that look for an answer. His lashes fluttered shut, dark and thick against pale skin, then open again, bringing with them a fleeting smile.

"Nothing. If you want him to stay, then I have no problem. I can see you see the possibility of many yen in the future if he is here - - so who am I to argue against such prosperity?"

She frowned, uncertain if she were being teased. Sometimes, even after all this time, he could be annoyingly hard to read. But she trusted, for the most part, that none of his obscurities were of threat to her.

"Are you implying that I'm greedy?" she knew very well he had, but being well aware of the possibility of such a condition, she was not as truly offended as she let herself sound.

"Well - - no. Maybe. A little, yes." He meandered his way towards the truth.

"Oh, so that's what you think of me?" She swung a leg over his hips, glaring down and shaking a fist in mock threat. He smiled up, no doubt enjoying the view and the feel of her rump against his groin.

"You make a fine Imperialist, Kaoru." His hands slid up under the hem of her robe, fingers grazing along her thighs.

"Darned right," she agreed, then gasped a little when he found a sensitive spot and leaned back so that he might have a better angle at it. He was very, very good with his hands, her Kenshin. She bit her lip, thoughts of the dojo's monetary gain momentarily scattering. They shifted about a bit, ending up under the light summer covers.

"We have to be quiet," she murmured, and he blinked at her from behind tousled auburn hair. "The Englishman. He's just a few chambers down."

One had to be conscious of guests. What Kenji would sleep blithely though in the next chamber, the westerner might not. One hardly wanted him lying awake, roused by the sound of their lovemaking. He might be offended, after all, and take his precious knowledge of the west to some other house.

Chapter Two

The Englishman had opted to stay. At least until his fortunes took a turn for the better. Kaoru immediately spread the word of his residence and services offered and within two days the dojo saw more interested students than it had in the last month. Of course, they were not here to learn the Kamiya kasshin style of swordsmanship, but to cluster around the Englishman and hear about the west in his perfect, aristocratic tones. Kaoru was first among them, when she wasn't teaching her own distracted students.

"Do you know what dog means in English?" she would ask Kenshin and he would dutifully ask what and she would say it and look proud of herself, even though Kenji was picking up words faster by far than she.

He weeded the vegetable garden that first day, while Kaoru was spreading word of the Englishman and the Englishman was settling himself in. Kenji and Dr. Genzai's youngest granddaughter Suzume kept him company, the eight year old girl content to watch over three year old Kenji. The boy knew he wasn't supposed to trample the plants in the garden, but sometimes distraction won out and he'd chase a fluttering butterfly, or decide to run over and attack his father.

The Englishman came out and smoked his tobacco and watched for a while; spoke a bit about the dry weather and the pitiful shape it had left the vegetable garden. Kenshin concurred, having to pull water up from the very low well to give the plants any relief at all. He initiated very little conversation and the Englishman seemed content at the silence. Other than the buzz of excitement that hovered about Kaoru, life at the dojo was little changed. Winter was a quiet, unobtrusive presence. Nothing to create unease. Nothing to encourage disharmony. Kaoru was on her best behavior, demure and sweet tempered, even when she burned the rice and seared the sweet potatoes that Kenshin had pulled up from the garden that day. He asked, softly, that first night, where his wife was and who was this proper impostor. She'd taken a moment to ponder the depth of his gentle jibe, before smiling and proclaiming that 'she certainly had no notion, but oughtn't he be ashamed of himself for sleeping with strangers?'

Of course the next day, the peace became more turbulent with the onslaught of the curious. Hisa the seamstress brought her two daughters, Hama and Otsu to see the Westerner. Junichi the retired fisherman who lived with his granddaughter down the street came hobbling up on the arm of his great grandson, Juzo. The Araki children, all friends of Ayame and Suzame came to cluster about and hear the Englishman speak. Kaoru told them all, with Winter's permission, of course, that he would consent to teach English for a very reasonable price. It was agreed upon, over supper that evening, that the Kenda school would receive half of those earnings for lodging and food.

Kaoru sent Kenshin out the next day, with a purse of newly acquired coins, for tofu and fresh fish and even a bottle of sake, for Winter had confessed a fondness for it. So with Kenji and Suzume for company - - Ayame, the elder of Dr. Genzai's two granddaughters being all of eleven now and old enough to help her grandfather with his work - - he set out for market.

Another fine day, if not dry. The leaves rustled brittley on the trees. A passing cart made little swirls of dust rise in the still air. The smell of wood smoke drifted lazily on the air, someone somewhere, smoking fish. There was a woodworker at the end of this street, who was working on a pair of very fine gates that Kenshin had admired for some weeks now in passing. He thought the gates of the Dojo in need of repair, if not replacement and that in no small part a fault of his. Trouble had followed him up to a few years past with an unerring talent. He seemed to have shaken the trail. It seemed his enemies were either dead, or unaware of his existence here. Nice to keep it that way. Nice not to have to sleep with a sword across his shoulder in fear of assassin's in the dark. Nice to have a garden plot to manage and a dojo to keep in good repair. Nice to have a wife who blamed him for no sins of the past and a child who might never know of them. Sometimes, though, on a clear day, he'd look up and see the mountains, misty and distant, north of Tokyo and his blood would sing a bit for want of something different. Something to make his pulse surge and his heart pound a little faster than it did during the daily routine life had become. But only sometimes.

Maybe if Sano were here - - it might have been different. With Sano around life was never so neatly complacent. Even if it were only trying to avoid getting in the middle of Sano and Kaoru's arguments. Yes, he missed Sano very much. Wondered if he went and asked - - if Saitou might have heard any rumors of his life or death. Saitou tended to be abreast of a great many things.

"He's very nice, don't you think, uncle-Ken?' Suzume remarked.

He blinked down at her, distracted, wondering which he in particular the girl was speaking of. She was beaming up at him, Kenji's small hand clutched firmly in hers, since the three year old tended to have a fascination with the edge of the canal. Quite convenient that one of them had been keeping an eye on the child. He felt remiss.

"Umm. Yes? Who?"

Suzume grinned at him. "Mr. Winter, of course."

"Oh. Yes." One had to agree with the observation. There were no hints to prove otherwise.

"And very tall."

"That he is, Suzume," he agreed without reservation on that count.

"He likes honey in his tea," Suzume announced and made a face. "And milk! He's also a very strange man."

"Yes." One had to agree there as well.

"Grandfather is thinking of making a match for Ayame," Suzume said, changing tactics with the alacrity of youth.

Kenshin glanced down at her curiously. "So soon. She's only - - ten? Eleven?"

"Eleven. And it's only a marriage agreement. She won't marry until she's all grown. Fourteen. Grandfather said."

Oh. Marriage at fourteen was hardly surprising. Girls were married younger - - or forced into prostitution. Suzume talked about the husband to be and how excited Ayame was at the prospect. Kenshin listened and thought that time was unmerciful in its passage.

"What's that?" Kenji was pulling at Suzume's hand, pointing excitedly at the canal where it ran under a stone bridge. Brush and debris had formed a dam of sorts under one low arch, a natural net that caught all the flotsam coming downstream.

There was something pale and bloated caught in the slime covered rubbish. He thought, at first, before he truly looked, that it might have some large fish, washed in from the bay. It smelled of death, lodged half out of water in the warm sun. But fish did not have long matted black hair, or swollen white limbs.

Kenshin grabbed Kenji up before the boy could scramble over to the edge of the canal. Before he could make out wide staring eye sockets that peered out from beneath tangled hair. The fish had eaten out one eye. The flesh around the mouth had also been ripped and torn. A few small crabs scuttled over the cold skin, jubilant in such a meal. Not a pleasant sight at all.

"Suzume. Take Kenji back home."

The girl stared, wide eyed, small mouth open. Kenshin turned her face away, one hand on her cheek.

"No reason to look. Just take Kenji home."

She nodded, taking Kenji's hand and pulling the unwilling three year old down the lane behind her. He watched them walk away. Turned back when they were of a distance and stared grimly at the corpse. It was female. There was, he thought, a second body lodged under the current, beneath the first. He walked over the bridge and into market, looking for the telltale uniform of the city police.

Of course they were never as prevalent when one wanted them as when one wished they weren't about. He found one, eventually, loitering outside a teahouse, passing time with the attractive young hostess. He'd rather have avoided doing more than alerting the authorities of the gruesome discovery, but it was never so easy. He ended up in the midst of a gathering of the uniformed city police, telling and retelling the simple bad fortune he'd had on finding the bodies. He preyed for the luck that none of these young officers would recognize his name and that he'd been released to go on his way before any older officer's arrived that might be more familiar with him. Himura the Battousai was as good as dead and he'd as well keep it that way.

There were three bodies, as it turned out. The two that had been easily visible from the surface of the canal and yet another lodged beneath the water. Quite as naked as the day they were born. It made them unidentifiable. He saw, as they pulled them out, amidst the gasps and whispers of the gathered civilians, the source of demise. They had been sliced up rather efficiently. A single stab up through the woman's ribcage that had no doubt ruptured her heart. The two men had a few more wounds - - taken, most certainly, as they'd tried to defend themselves against their killer. No amateurish wounds those. The work instead of a man or men who knew how to use a blade. It made him doubly wish to hasten from this place, even though, he thought dourly, his name would unquestionably reach ears more familiar with it than these.

When their attention turned more fully to the examination of the bodies and left him, he took the opportunity to slip into the crowd on the market side of the canal bridge. No reason not to get supplies for dinner merely because he'd been waylaid by circumstance, though his appetite was somewhat depleted. The quivering white blocks of tofu were most unappealing, floating in the water of his pale.

He took another bridge home, a longer path, and reached the dojo as the summer shadows were just beginning to lengthen.

"What is this I hear about bodies in the canal?" Kaoru took him aside and whispered, concerned.

"Victims of robbery, most likely." Kenshin put the supplies in their places.

"Suzume said Kenji found them?" Very worried then, about what her child had seen.

Kenshin turned somber eyes her way. "He did. I don't think he realized what they were - - but, such things can't be hidden from him forever. Death happens."

She bit her lip, not happy. Kaoru was pragmatic about most things, but where it concerned her child - - she did not always reason properly. "He doesn't have to know about such things yet. Don't mention anything else about it to him. He'll forget."

"His mother runs a dojo and teaches an art of swordsmanship," since she persisted on denying reality, he found the need to state a bit of it blatantly. "His father was a manslayer of notorious repute. Keep the simple fact of death from him now and we may regret it in years to come."

"I don't teach the Kamiya Kasshin style of sword for the purpose of killing. Far from it. And you're not a manslayer anymore. So they are both moot points and you know it." She was angry now, and defensive and he hadn't meant for her to be either.

"I'll start supper," Kenshin said softly. "It's my turn."

It was not an argument either of them could win. Equitably, she let him change the subject. She left him to return to the porch outside the dojo where Winter sat entertaining the children who remained with stories of the west. She'd shooed them all home by the time the meal was ready, not willing to feed the mouths of the curious. It was only the four of them, sitting by the light of a paper lantern in the dusk, sipping tea and eating miso soup and grilled vegetables.

"Your hospitality is overwhelming," Winter said, sipping his sweetened tea. "I could not have wished for better, devoid of options as I am. My thanks for this roof, and this food."

"Kenshin did the cooking tonight," Kaoru admitted with a shy, almost apologetic smile Kenshin's way. "He's better than me."

"I'm not, really," Kenshin said. "Kaoru is a wonderful cook."

He uttered the exaggeration smoothly and Kaoru blushed and seemed grateful for it. Winter looked between them, amused. Kenji hardly noticed at all, engrossed in picking apart a rice ball and tempting an uninterested Cat with grains of rice. Cat much preferred fish and since tonight's meal was meatless, Cat sat safely on a chest across the room, content to ignore the humans who inhabited her domain.

Afterwards, when Kaoru had put Kenji to sleep and the mess from supper had been cleaned, she poured Winter and Kenshin sake and sat on the edge of the porch with them, the ceramic bottle in her lap, the three of them listening to the crickets and the frogs make a serenade of the night. It was a thing he and Kaoru did alone together most frequently - - minus the sake. Winter's sharing of it - - was uncomfortable. At least to Kenshin. Kaoru seemed at peace. Kaoru was happy, the incident with Kenji and dead bodies put behind her.

And so the days progressed. The heat remained a constant and the lack of proper rain. A few light showers kept the crops from dying completely but the ground remained hard and dry and the wells ran dangerously low. The shallow well in the dojo became stingy with its bounty and trips needed to taken to the deeper, common well the neighborhood shared. The Englishman had seven students who came for a few hours each day, eager to learn his western language and his western lore. Kaoru taught her own students and Kenshin kept the dojo in good repair, took meticulous care for his garden, walking to the deep public well each day for life-giving water to feed the struggling plants. One almost wished for the torrential rains that would likely drown the crops, in favor of the drought.

Kaoru and Kenji learned bits and pieces of English. Kaoru could say passable sentences, according to Winter. He flattered her unmercifully and she basked in it, but the flattery had no taste of flirtation to it, so Kenshin ignored it, content with Kaoru's happiness.

Three weeks into the Englishman's stay and Kenshin drowsed in the heat of one tranquil afternoon, in the shade of the back garden porch while the Englishman gave his lessons. Cat draped herself, as usual, across his lap, content and vibrating softly with purrs.

"You seem to have a way with animals, as well as plants."

Kenshin blinked, heart thumping in the shock that he hadn't heard the Englishman's footsteps. He'd only been grazing the surface of true sleep and should have sensed the man's presence long before his long shadow fell over him.

"What?"

"Your neighbor's gardens wither, and yet yours thrives. Your cat is supremely fond of your company."

"Oh. Well. She's Kenji's cat, really." One had to admit the facts if not the reality.

Winter laughed and squatted, reaching out a hand to stroke Cat's soft fur. Cat slitted one eye and hissed. Winter pulled his hand back. "No. I think she is yours."

The hand moved, fingers raised to Kenshin's face. So quick and so light a movement that it took Kenshin off his guard. An unexpected grazing of callused fingers of the faint scars on his cheek. "How did you come by these?"

It was rude to ask so bluntly, Kenshin thought. Ruder still to lay a finger, no matter how lightly upon him. One could only excuse so many things because of foreign differences. The question, he could tolerate. Winter's touch - - He lifted his own arm, smoothly brushing the Englishman's hand aside.

"A very long time ago. Before Kaoru and Kenji."

"They lend you a certain - - character." Winter regarded him, his hands now carefully crossed on his knees. "Without it, I think you'd be rather - - too pretty. No offense, of course."

". . . . . . Of course." He could not force the smile.

He was not unaware of his appearance. It had worked as an advantage to him once, many years ago, the almost feminine contours of his face. There had been a time when a moment's underestimation, a moment's hesitation had lent a great deal of advantage his way. But then, his reputation grew and no one believed the facade any longer. He had not changed that much - - physically - - from that boy, who had stained himself in so much blood he sometimes still saw it on his skin. Mentally - - philosophically - - he was a completely different person. He was not - - he liked to believe - - dangerous anymore. He was a husband and a father and as such, one ought not to be feared because of the dark reputation of yesteryears. One truly did like to think such thing, even if he didn't always believe it.

So he managed a smile, an inclination of his head and an attempt to change the subject to something other than himself. "Kaoru is very grateful for your teaching. She says things to me now, that I find quite unintelligible, and is immeasurable pleased with herself for it."

"She is an intelligent woman. A quick student, though I have to admit to my newness at teaching. With a more patient teacher, I'm sure she'd be even more fluent. You have no interest in learning a phrase or two in English?"

Back to him. It made him uncomfortable. The man's unflinching stare did. He smoothed Cat's fur and shrugged. "No. I know everything about the west, that I need to know."

"Ah, you sound somewhat bitter." Winter was not offended. Kenshin hadn't thought anything resembling bitterness had crept into his voice.

"The advent of the west has caused much violence and bloodshed."

"Change often does," Winter agreed mildly. "Change is not always bad and most often beneficial."

"Yes," Kenshin had to agree with that. "You are most likely right. But it doesn't change the fact that I have little need to learn your English."

Winter smiled, a wide glimpse of white teeth. A predator's toothy smile, it occurred to Kenshin, for no particular reason. A smile to cover disagreement, or divergence of purpose. Odd that he thought so, when Winter had shown nothing but regard for them.

"I think," he said, gently displacing Cat from his lap. "That I've dallied long enough. I've a trip or two to the public well, if I want to keep my garden green."

"Do you need an extra set of hands?"

"No. Thank you all the same."

"Very well. Perhaps I'll take a walk to the docks and see if any word from home has come for me."

"I wish you luck, then."

Winter rose, that grin back on his face. "Eager to see me gone, then?"

He was being baited, and he was not entirely sure if it was in all good humor, or if there was something else behind it.

"Eager to see your good fortune return, Mr. Winter, that is all."

Kenshin, if Quinton Winter was any judge, and Quinton Winter had come to be, over the years, a very astute judge of men's intentions and motives, hidden or otherwise.

Of course, his host had confounded him for a bit. An enigma and Winter had a fascination for riddles. He offered a façade, polite and good natured and somewhat oblivious, for the most part, only now and then giving hints to the depths that lay beneath. And not so young as he seemed, Himura Kenshin, despite that creaseless face. Winter would never have guessed if he had not have asked the woman. Kaoru's tongue was not tight. She was open with her information. She was pretty and bright, and as he had told her husband, very quick student. In a little over three weeks she had picked up enough rudimentary English to speak in halting, simple sentences. She would prove immensely valuable to his needs.

His fortune had improved the very day Kenshin had intervened in the alley. He still had not decided whether it had been luck or skill that had prevailed that evening. Certainly, Kenshin had shown no singular skill afterwards, no interest at all in his wife's teachings. But he had a certain inherent grace of movement. A fluidity of movement that was economical and pleasing - - but it might have merely been a natural trait. Might merely have been a grace that went hand in hand with that face and that lean, symmetrical body.

Truth to tell, though Winter had a definite need for the young woman, his eye was attracted more often than not, to her husband. His tastes tended towards the youth of the more masculine gender, and though Kenshin might have been only a decade or so his junior, he still looked the part of a younger man and appearances, after all, were as important as reality in some cases.

It was Winter's demon, those perverse tastes, and he had learned to live hand in hand with it long ago, learned, in point of fact, to enjoy it without remorse. He enjoyed his conversations with Kenshin. Enjoyed the ubiquitous baiting that Kenshin suspected, but never quite fully realized. An honest man, Winter thought. An honorable one. Whatever his façade hid, it wasn't the sort of deception that was as close to Winter as his very blood and bone.

That honesty made him all the more appealing. What a shame to have to kill him. But such was life and the hard choices therein. His need of the girl was primary and that need could not be interrupted by her husband come seeking her out. If the Erizawa bitch hadn't been so nosy, he never would have come to this. But she'd discovered the alliances he held outside of her esteemed and most honorable father, and threatened to destroy the totality of what Winter had been working at for six years now, by the simple act of telling. He couldn't allow it.

Didn't allow it. He'd taken her through the heart in a single blow and dispatched her loyal bodyguards with little more effort. He had not spent over half his life in Japan and not picked up the more useful techniques of killing. That necessary act had lost him the connection he needed to convince his backers in England that this foray was worthwhile. It had been the word of Erizawa's daughter that would seal the pact. It had been her presence and her signature in place of her traditionalist, ex-shogun father that would convince his peers in England that the alliance was a sound one.

But really, would they know one Japanese girl from the next. All they needed was the illusion. Appearances were so very important, after all. A girl that spoke a spattering of English. A girl who looked the part of a shogun's daughter. A girl with something to hold over her head; a red-headed brat who was the image of his father.

The perfect solution to his problem. All of his alliances intact, with Erizawa none the wiser of his daughter's demise and Winter's yakuza connections still secure. The yakuza could have cared less that a wealthy, former shogun was willing to back the alliance, but Erizawa would have backed out in a second if he'd known of the yakuza involvement. Erizawa was honorable to a fault, though greedy for a return of the power that the Meiji government had torn from him and those like him. The alliance that would grant Winter and his western backers sole rights of trade in Edo bay, would make all of them wealthy and powerful beyond their dreams.

It was only a matter of time. Only the matter of arranging a few judicious killings to cover his tracks. One hardly wanted word of his stay getting back to Erizawa. The students he'd been tolerating didn't matter. They knew nothing of him, other than the fact that he was a misplaced merchant. The old doctor and his granddaughters knew more, having spent many a supper hour with them at the dojo and being subject to Kaoru's gossiping. When the time came, he'd set the yakuza after them. It would look like a robbery in the night.

It would look the same here, at the Kenda school. In the meanwhile, he smiled and laughed and ingratiated himself into the girl's good graces. It was, after all, only a matter of time.

Chapter Three

The rains came like the answer to a prayer. One day, dry, heat laden air and the next - - a body woke to coolness and the spattering of moisture that blew in from the open window. It was early enough that Kaoru could not be roused, even by a few errant drops of water, so Kenshin quietly rose, pulled on a house kimono and padded out onto the porch to watch the earth soak up the much needed rain. Stepping out into it would be foolish, no need to get a perfectly dry robe wet - - but whimsy overcame reason, and he stepped barefoot out into the yard and let the cool downpour coat his skin and plaster his loose hair about his face and neck.

He'd cut it three years ago when Kenji was born. One more testament of the life he'd turned away from. No need to wear it tied back anymore. Another whim on his part. He'd surprised Kaoru that day. Left her speechless for a few precious moments before she'd wailed over the loss. She'd understood, though.

It was a little longer now. Below his collar and his bangs were a mass that shadowed his eyes. Wearing it a little long, enough to cover tell tale scars, didn't bother him. Time perhaps to get Kaoru to trim it, though, but a little nostalgia made him cherish the length for the time being.

He sat under the overhang of the porch at the back garden, watching the rain make ripples in the koi pond with only Cat for company until Kenji woke and tottered out, tousled and unkempt from sleep. The boy immediately made to run into the rain, until his father detained him, knowing very well, that it would not only be water, but mud that stained sleeping robes that he had only yesterday washed. Kenshin got a wail and a foul glare for disturbing the fun, then another one from Cat when he suggested the child play with her instead. When Cat bounded away, the mournful cries of rebellion woke Kaoru, who appeared in short order, sleepy-eyed and yawning.

"What's wrong, Kenji?"

The child pointed one chubby finger at Kenshin and let out an inarticulate wail. Kaoru gave Kenshin a reproving look and he gestured helplessly at the rain.

"Did daddy not let you go play in the rain?" Kaoru said in baby talk, welcoming the pouting child with open arms. The tears dried up in place of a mother's arms. Kenshin blinked, wondering what magic she had, that he did not.

"You'd get all wet and cold and probably get sick, then Dr. Genzai would have to make you take some awful tasting medicine and you wouldn't like that, would you? I'd feel just terrible, if you had to swallow something so icky."

That bit of logic struck home. Kenji looked at the rain, looked back to his mother and shook his small head solemnly. She smiled over Kenji's head in victory at Kenshin and he shrugged, shaking his head in amazement at her talent.

It was a lazy day, with the rain. Only one of Kaoru's students came, and Winter sent the few that came to him home, claiming a bit of ill-health. There was no gardening to be done, no washing, no repairing of the ceramic shingles that had come loose from atop the bathhouse. Dr. Genzai kept Suzume at home today, so Kenji had no one to play with other than Cat, and nothing other to do but worry his parents with his boundless energy. Kenshin's patience, as a general rule, far outshone Kaoru's, but on this particular afternoon, after spending the whole of the day cooped inside with a testy Kenji and the Englishman's dubious humor, he was more than willing to volunteer to go, when Winter suggested a professionally prepared meal. Winter had a taste for sushi and offered to treat, if someone might be kind enough to walk the short distance to the small restaurant at the edge of their neighborhood and pick it up. Already feeling ill, the man hesitated to risk the weather and make his condition worse. A reasonable attitude, and they had not had sushi for a while. It would make for a nice change.

So Kenshin braved an evening gone prematurely dark with cloud cover and rain. Walked under the dubious protection of the umbrella Kaoru had given him, and thought the fresh smell of rain in the air a wonderful thing. He was one of few people out on such an evening. A few drenched Furi-urihurried past him, poles angled over their shoulders, a man pulling a cart laden with vegetables under a tarp. A wet, sorry looking dog that trotted up to Kenshin as he walked and sniffed the hem of his hakama, no doubt scenting Cat. They passed ways equitably.

The restaurant was empty of patronage and Kenshin stood against the open door, watching the rain as the young man behind the counter prepared his order. Half an hour later, he carried the bamboo box of sushi home under one arm, the waxed paper umbrella balanced over his shoulder in the other. His sandals were coated with mud, as was the hem of his hakama. He opened the gates at the front of the dojo against a torrential gale of rain-laced wind. Stood there for a second with his back to them, the umbrella held like a shield before his face while the wind lashed at him. Then it gave a gusty sigh and changed direction. It was no less wet, but at least rain wasn't driven into his eyes.

The lanterns on the porch had gone out, extinguished by the wind, no doubt. He thought nothing of it, more interested at the moment, in setting the box of food on the porch out of the rain and kicking off his sandals and immersing his feet in the shallow pale of water by the porch steps. It only occurred to him, after he'd taken that first step onto the flagstone leading to the steps that the lanterns inside the dojo were also dark. He hesitated, one foot on the lower step, gaze swinging around the corner of the main building to the outstretched portion of the structure where the living quarters lay. Also dark.

He fought the urge to call out - - "Kaoru, why are the lanterns out?" Because the cold, hard knot of premonition in his gut told him that there was more wrong here than the lanterns gone dark.

He stepped up onto the porch, clothes heavy with water, stood there for a second, listening past the patter of rain for telltale noises. The doors to the dojo were first and center, a mere few steps ahead of him. He put a hand on the wood and gently slid it to the side. All dark and quiet within. The pounding of his blood was louder. The beating of his heart in the fear that the peace he had found had been disturbed. He dropped his head, the water from his bangs dripping onto his face.

One step into the smooth, polished floor of the dojo and something lunged at him out of the dark. A side attack. A flash of metal as a blade stabbed towards him. He sidestepped, caught the arm holding the blade and twisted it hard. There was a popping sound as an elbow was disjointed. A strangled cry. The blade hit the floor even as other shadows moved in on him from the darkness. He made out the shapes of them, dressed in black, with their faces half covered. Well trained, for the most part. Efficient killers, most likely, but not phenomenal ones.

He caught a blade aimed for his neck between two fingers, slammed the heel of his hand against the flat of it and smashed it into the face of its wielder. Blood spurted, but only from the edge of the blade creasing the man's nose. He ducked and rolled to avoid another attack, came up under a man's reach and slammed the heel of his hand into that's man's jaw. That man staggered, not out, but momentarily stunned.

If he stopped to wonder what had become of Kaoru and Kenji, he'd be at a disadvantage. After three years of passivity, it was luck that saved him from being gutted from the one that came at him from the open dojo doors, as much as speed on his part. He slipped on rainwater and lunged sideways to avoid falling, the blade grazed his side as he did, cutting through material to scrape his skin. Kenshin hissed in surprise more than pain and slammed an elbow into the man's wrist. The sword fell and he caught it out of necessity, bringing the hilt up in an arc and smashing it into his attacker's face. The weight of it - - of good solid steel - - in his hand was staggering. How long since he'd held any weapon more dangerous than an ax? How long since he'd given the sakabatou to Yahiko in the vain effort to close the chapter of his life that belonged to the shadow of the Battousai? Long enough to lose his edge?

Maybe. But not against the likes of these. He parried with his stolen sword and the clash of steel made the hairs on the back of his arms stand up. Made his breathing slow down and his eyes narrow in concentration. If Kaoru and Kenji were dead, he'd use this sword to draw life's blood. But until he found out, he was not willing to break his oath and take a life.

With his bare hands, he'd held his own on equal footing with them. With the blade - - with the blade, he swept through them like an ill wind and stood panting afterwards, while they lay groaning or unconscious around him.

Six men. Six assassins in the night. He looked to the seventh who he knew was standing in the shadows at the other end of the dojo.

"Where are my wife and child?"

"My God," said that perfectly accented voice that he had come to know with frightening familiarity. "I'm not easy astounded - - but you, my dear boy, you - - leave me speechless."

"Winter," Kenshin said softly.

"Yes."

"What are you doing?"

"I was trying to tie up loose ends - - but you seem to have unraveled things more than severed them. And I thought you were simply good with gardens and cats. Foolish me, eh?"

"Where are Kaoru and Kenji?"

Winter waved a gloved hand. "Oh, well and truly gone by now."

Kenshin felt his vision narrow. Felt the blood lust well up like a living thing too long restrained. He slid his bare foot forward, preparing for a stance that would take him across the distance to Winter.

"Not dead." Winter stopped him with those two words. "I would never waste so valuable a commodity when I have so great a need for it."

"Where? If you value your life, where?"

Winter stared at the bodies littered about Kenshin's feet. "Those were very talented members of the yakuza. And you were very efficient in dispatching them. Words cannot express how very impressed I am with you."

"Where - -" Kenshin took a step forward. " - - are they?"

"Somewhat single minded, aren't you?" Winter waved a hand, dismissing the query. "What intrigues me, is where you learned such skill - - its certainly nothing of the style your wife teaches - - And why hide it with such vehemence?"

"This is not about me - - where are they?"

"It wasn't. It truly wasn't before these last few moments." Winter smiled at him, that smile that he'd always found uncomfortable before, and now literally set the hairs on the back of his neck at attention.

"But now, I'm intrigued. Now I want to know why a swordsman of such skill hides in this pitiful dojo in the suburbs of Tokyo."

"Take me to Kaoru. She can tell you." Kenshin slid forward, smooth, graceful, circling Winter like Cat would circle a wounded bird.

Winter sighed. "So stubborn. North. They've taken her north, along with the little one. I've a need for her, you see. I had a girl who was supposed to serve a purpose for me, but she had a change of heart and I had to let her go."

The smile came back. "Her and her bodyguards. So very messy. But sometimes messy is nice. It alleviates frustrations. I needed a new girl. One that knew a few words in English. Your wife was so quick to pick it up. The little one will assure that she plays the part I need for her to play."

"The bodies in the canal," Kenshin stated.

"Yes. I'd just finished with them when I was attacked - - of all the ill-luck - - by thieves. They might have ended my plans then and there had I not been fortunate enough to be saved. You have my gratitude there, my boy. Really. I should have guessed it was nothing of luck and everything of skill the way you drove them off. I suppose I was a bit preoccupied."

This man - - this foreigner who he had invited into his and Kaoru's home - - had killed with such ease. Brutally killed and spoke about it as if it were a joke. The depths of his malice were as of yet, still hidden. But Kenshin knew evil when he saw it. He berated himself for not seeing and realizing the snake for what it was, long before this. Perhaps he had seen and refused to acknowledge it, for fear of disrupting the peace. The thought of Kaoru and Kenji in this man's power - - made his palms sweat.

"I do not kill as easily as you - - now," he said softly. "But I shall recover the ability if they are harmed."

"Kill me and you'll never know what has become of them. My men will kill them if I do not give them word to do otherwise. Perhaps they'll have their way with the girl before they do. She's pretty enough to amuse such as them."

Kenshin's lip pulled back in a snarl, he spun and drew the sword faster than thought. It was reflex born out of anger and fear. The sharp side of the blade stopped a hair's breadth from Winter's throat. Winter blinked at him, not quite flinching.

"Bravo. I didn't even see that one coming, and I pride myself on my own alacrity. But all my skill pales in comparison to you."

"What are you?" Kenshin hissed, amazed at the man's calm in the face of death.

"Me? I thought you knew. I'm a merchant, trying to get ahead. A bit down on my luck, but fate is smiling on me now."

"Fate has turned her back on you," Kenshin disagreed.

"No," Winter said, and fearlessly lifted a hand to press the blade away from his neck. "Fate smiles even now. She's given me opportunity. She's given me - - inspiration. Do you know, that I couldn't leave here with intimate knowledge of my presence in anyone's memory? The old doctor and his precious nieces were here all too often for my comfort. My yakuza friends are headed to his dwelling this very night to take care of the problem. They'll make it quick, I'm sure."

"Damn you," Kenshin hissed and stepped back, heart pounding in the beginnings of panic now. If he killed this man, and oh, how his blood cried out for that action despite more than a decade of not taking a life - - then he might never find Kaoru. If what Winter said was true, that Dr. Genzai was in danger, if not already dead, then he had little choice but to try and prevent that tragedy.

"If you hurry," Winter said. "You might be able to stop them."

Kenshin glared, clenching his fist on the sword. There was the sound of rustling cloth and a grunt from behind him. One of the yakuza gained his feet, warily reaching for the weapon Kenshin had knocked from his fingers. A few of the others showed signs of impending consciousness. When he turned his gaze back to Winter, the man had a pistol in his hand. A new style gun with a round chamber that held more than one bullet.

"If I were you," Winter was smiling again. "I would be on my way to see about the good Doctor. I can't imagine how you'd feel if you were only a few moments too late. Those poor girls - - butchered. You can always try to track me and find your wife and son after you're finished. I imagine you've got a talent for that as well."

Kenshin hissed, and spun, decision made. He preyed he wouldn't regret it. He cut through the staggering yakuza without breaking stride, tensed for the gun being cocked. It didn't happen. He was outside in the dark and the rain and no shot came at his back. He slid the sword back into its sheath and darted for the gates, mentally calculating how long it would take to get to Dr. Genzai's house, how long to get the Doctor and the girls out and on their way to a place of safety and how long to get back to the dojo to pick up Winter's trail. Half an hour, if he was fast. A little more depending on what he found at Genzai's dwelling.

Winter put the gun back in his pocket, staring thoughtfully at the reflection in the droplets of water Kenshin had tracked onto the floor. Quite thoroughly surprising, really. It was so infrequently that Winter was taken by surprise anymore that he rather liked the sensation. He rather liked the thrill. But one had to admit, the sword at his throat - - so fast he'd not even seen it drawn - - that had gone a bit beyond thrill and well into fear of his life. In all the time he'd been here at the dojo, he'd seen nothing of the killer in Himura Kenshin's eyes. But tonight - - oh, tonight it had been there. And no casual killer, that, but a cold, deadly professional that would neither hesitate, nor blink an eye over the action. Winter knew that look. He'd seen it on a hundred faces during the various conflicts he'd lived through in the term of his life, both here in Japan and abroad. He'd seen the novices - - the men dragged into war against their will, the ones that killed but did so out of desperation and duty - - and then he'd seen the faces of the ones that were born to it.

Kenshin's eyes had been like that. Winter was lucky, he thought, to be alive. If he'd had drawn the sword under his robe, he might not have been. Wise of him not to. He was good, but he wasn't that good. He was a man well aware of his limitations and well aware of how to use them.

"Why didn't you shoot him?" the yakuza slowly climbed to their feet. They stood there by the doors, a bloody, ill-used group.

"I've changed my mind about him - - his death isn't necessarily what I desire now."

"More the fool you, then," one of them spat. "We'd heard rumors - - but never thought them true."

"What rumors?" Winter asked.

"Of the Battousai. Abandoning the sword and living in Tokyo."

"The Battousai?" that was a familiar name. Winter had been in-country during the revolution. Had helped fund the Imperialist's, helped supply them with weapons and information. He knew the names of the premier killers of that bloody time.

"Himura - - the Battousai." He laughed. "Oh, good God and I've been living under his roof. How ironic."

They stared at him as if he were mad as he stood there chortling. Oh, but it was ironic. More than any of them could know. A few years past, he'd bet his family fortune on a venture with a visionary. A man who'd also been a premier assassin for the Meiji. He'd traded all the gold he could beg, borrow and steal to invest in the construction of a ship in return for unique and sole trading rights with the Japan that Shishio Makoto would have made.

If not for the intervention of the legendary manslayer - - Himura the Battousai. He'd lost a quarter of a million pounds when that ship had sunk. Lost more when Shishio Makoto had died. He'd lost his backing, his credibility and his foothold in the structure of power back home that desperately wanted the majority of the Japanese trade. He'd never expected the nefarious Battousai to look so - - young.

"What do we do now?" the yakuza wanted to know.

"We ride north out of the city. Visibly north. I want him to follow that path. Send word to your contacts in the mountains - - let them know what to expect. Send word to the ship that I'll meet it at Sendai instead of sailing out from Edo bay."

The Yakuza nodded and two of them pelted into the rain. The rest waited for him to gather his thoughts and abandon this place. It had served its purpose and more. It had given him new purpose.

Through the rain slick streets of Tokyo with a stolen sword through his sash and he'd promised himself that he'd not take the sword to hand again. Not the killing ones, at any rate. The reverse blade he'd have happily wielded, but that he'd given to Yahiko - - yet one more way to sever those pesky ties to the past. He regretted it now. He wanted that familiar weight at his side, and that familiar balance in his hand. He wanted not to have to concentrate to remember not to use the sharp side of the blade - - though he'd come so close with Winter. He never would have taken it up, if not for the fear over Kaoru and Kenji. Would have dealt with the assassin's another way. He ought to throw it down now, save that he was afraid of what he'd find at Dr. Genzai's. Save that he was afraid he'd been dormant too long and nothing short of a sword might give him the upper hand.

Strange. Fear was not a casual concept with him. Fear was a stranger. Real fear, the kind that made him question his judgment, the kind that made his hands shake, the kind that made that tight knot of uncertainty ball up in his gut. It took a wife and a child to bring it out in him.

He pushed it back, because he couldn't afford its interference. He couldn't afford shaking hands or hesitation. Not when he was this out of practice. More the fool him.

There. Up the narrow little street, crowded with both residences and a few businesses, all of them shuttered against the rain and the cool air it brought with it. The doctor and his nieces lived in the back of his clinic. The clinic itself sat nestled between a larger dwelling and the shop of a seamstress. There was a gate to a narrow alley leading to the small garden behind the clinic. Kenshin took that path, rather than the more obvious one of the front door. Around the back and the garden was undisturbed. The back porch unlittered and the sliding doors unmolested. The house seemed quiet enough, but he felt no false hope. Competent assassins would leave no trace of their passage - - not unless they wished to.

For a moment, Kenshin stood, his back to the wood beside the sliding doors, listening for sounds other than the constant patter of rain. He heard what sounded like a child's sigh inside. The rustle of a small body turning in sleep. He let out his own breath in relief. Not too late then.

There was a sound from the roof and he froze. A shuffling heavier than rain rolling off the tiles. Kenshin backed silently into the deepest shadows at the corner of the porch. A dark clad body dropped down from above, hitting the soggy earth with a splat that could not be avoided. Another followed it. There was the muffled sound of splintering wood from inside the dwelling and Kenshin hissed softly, urged into action by the fact that there were more than these two. That others were already invading this house.

They had long knives in their hands, and probably other weapons on their persons. He flowed out of the shadow like a vengeful curse - - drawing both sword and sheath from his belt, slamming the hard, metal tipped end of the sheath square into the face of the nearest assassin. Bone shattered under the blow. The man let out a muffled, strangled moan and collapsed. The other one was professional enough not to be distracted by the surprise of his comrade's fall and came at Kenshin skillfully with the knife.

Not skillfully enough. Kenshin sidestepped and brought the hilt of the sword up under the man's jaw, spun and cracked the still sheathed weapon up against the side of the yakuza assassin's head. Which ended that conflict quickly enough. He ran for the house then, even as a startled, shrill cry sounded from within. Didn't bother with struggling with the sliding doors but hurled himself through the thin wood and came to a rolling stance with the sword out and gleaming in the near pitch darkness. Two more shapes, with similarly gleaming blades. Four assassins for one old man and two young girls. Ridiculous and shameful. Someone had too much time on their hands.

He saw a set of small shapes squirming back against the wall their sleeping mats were set against. A larger, groggy one at the other side of the room. An assassin stood over each mat, weapon raised, hesitating only because of his entrance. Perhaps they'd been expecting their comrades. In the moment it took them to realize that he was no friend of theirs, he'd swung the sheath and taken out the first one. Spun even as that blow landed, parrying with the sword, slipping through the man's guard like it was mist. He might just as easily have taken the man's head off, as slam the dull side of the blade into his neck hard enough to smash his face into the wall over the frightened girls.

He turned to the one threatening the doctor then, and that one had a touch more skill than the others. That one dodged his first attack and lunged at him with the long knife. He parried it aside with enough force to knock it from the man's hand and stepped in unexpectedly and fast to press the business edge of the blade against the man's throat. Shocked black eyes blinked down at him.

"Get the girls and get out. Through the back. Wait for me at the gate," he told Genzai and heard the old man grunt as he pushed himself up off the floor.

The girls whimpered, searching in the dark for their sandals and night robes. Kenshin waited until they'd stepped outside into the rain before he whispered up at the last standing assassin.

"You're not very good at your trade. Perhaps you should find another. Take a message to whatever men command you - - they've chosen the wrong people to attack this night. That whatever understanding they have with the Englishman, they would do well to rethink it where it concerns the Kamiya Dojo and the friends of the Kamiya Dojo. They will receive a visit - - each and everyone of them - - should they not, from someone who is very good at this trade you play at."

"Who - -?" the man gasped, his breath short against the threat of sharp steel.

Kenshin stepped back, grim-eyed and angry. "Listen to the rumors. Battousai the manslayer is not dead."

He flipped the blade and used his palm against the flat side to smash it against the forehead of the yakuza. The man went down with a whistling of breath, eyes rolled up in his sockets.

Dr. Genzai and the girls were waiting at the gate for him, shivering and soaked in their night robes. Terrified. He had no patience in him to comfort them. His mind was too far afield, wondering how much of a head start Winter had on him. Wondering where Kaoru and Kenji were. He moved through the alley and they followed him, silently. Suzume clung to her older sister.

Out into the street and Kenshin paused, looking for other yakuza. He sensed nothing of malice. Sensed no spying eyes. So he moved on.

"Do you have a place to stay tonight? Someone you're not close to? A place no one would think to look for you? A patient perhaps?"

The old man nodded. "Yes. Who were they? What did they want of us?"

"Yakuza. They wanted your silence. Tomorrow, take the girls and leave Tokyo. Go and stay with Miss Megumi. Do not go home for clothing or money. Tell no one where you go. Do not come back here until I let you know it is safe."

"But how do we - -"

"Here." He dug in his gi for what money he had on him. Some of it was Winter's. Fitting, he supposed. He didn't want it.

He wanted to leave them and chase after his own family, but their fear and his own sense of responsibility wouldn't let him abandon them until they reached the house of Dr. Genzai's patient. Kenshin faded into the shadows then, waiting only long enough to see the door open and the old man and his young nieces step inside into welcome warmth.

Then he ran back to his own dwelling. To open gates and a muddy yard where water stood in pools on ground too hard from drought to properly soak it up.

Empty. They had taken all the life out of it. The dojo doors stood open, and rain had darkened the floor two body lengths inside. He stood at that portal for a moment, then carefully slid the doors shut and moved down the porch to the sleeping chambers. There was no sign of disturbance. She had not put up a fight. Perhaps she had not been able to. Perhaps she'd been under threat of sword or gun - - or perhaps they'd held Kenji's life over her head. Winter had said he'd do that. Winter had said he wouldn't hurt them. Winter had said he'd needed them and in that one thing - - Kenshin believed him. The man would not have done this otherwise.

Winter had said north. Whether that was true or not remained to be seen.

Chapter Four

It took a bit of asking, but eventually, Kenshin found a man who'd seen a group of riders leaving the city by a northern road. Yes, one of them might very well have been a foreigner. And yes, there might have been a woman and child in the group.

The rain had let up by the time he walked out of Tokyo, but it had played its part well enough, obscuring all evidence of tracks on the road. But this particular road lead not along the northern coast, but cut through the mountains to eventually meet the coastal road again on the other side. It was a harsher path, but there were less villages and towns along the route. Less witnesses. On horseback, they had a massive advantage over him, but there would be forges and passes in the mountains that a man on foot might be better able to traverse. And horses had to be stopped and rested and fed on a more regular basis than a man might have to. And he hadn't been absent from the road so long that he'd forgotten how to walk with both the sun and the moon as guides if need be. He would find them.

He left the sword at the dojo, not comfortable with its presence. With the feeling of the blood soaked into the blade. A sword made for killing that had indeed killed many times before. He'd vowed not to take up such a blade again - - and out of desperation he had done so. He'd taken no life with it, though he'd been sorely tempted. That easy and his convictions were swayed. He was appalled at himself, now he had the time to dwell on it. Wavering on the edge of taking Winter's life and then spewing forth threats in the name of the Battousai.

They left something for him on the cross roads ten miles out of Tokyo. A ribbon caught in a twisted shrub at the side of the road. It was wet and torn and filthy, but it held Kaoru's scent. He clenched his fist about it, cursing Winter for playing with him, for certainly it had been Winter's notion to leave it. A crumb for him to follow.

A day of walking past well planted fields with yellowed crops. The rain might well have saved this year's harvest. From the look of things, all was not yet lost. The road was muddy and Kenshin's sandals thick with it as he walked. There was no grace to trudging through such muck. No silence in it, as sandals plopped in and out of wet, clinging earth. The rain kept his clothes sodden and heavy, and his hair clung to his face and neck with irritating stubbornness. It was long enough to tie back at the base of his neck - - and as good a use for Kaoru's ribbon as any, though he wound it enough times around that the dangling ends were negligible. He looked girlish enough without obvious ribbons in his hair. It felt odd, though, having it tied back again, yet without the heaviness of locks that fell to the small of his back. It would grow a handspan in a month though, unless he cut it again - - but he'd wait for Kaoru to trim it if she wished. Fates willing, it would not be so long a time that it reached halfway down his back.

He slipped into an easy, distance covering jog as afternoon fell and the rain stopped. It was easier to run without the hindrance of a dripping hakama. Wiser to do so past the extensive fields and under the cover of the road as it ran through sun dappled woods. The path was more solid on the higher ground of the forest as well and less populated by farmers or merchants and travelers who might question why an honest man needed to take this road at more than a pleasant walk. Or what he might be running from.

There was a small collection of huts at the side of the road. A traveler's waystop that boasted food and board for the night. Kenshin declined both, only stopping long enough to inquire about other travelers that might have passed this way in the day.

A few travelers, yes. No horsemen had stopped, but at least one group of them had passed silently by the waystation, a dull-eyed child reported. Kenshin thanked him solemnly and bowed to the aged grandfather who stood in the doorway.

Into the night again, under a sky devoid of stars and only minimally graced by cloud filtered moonlight. The trees made it darker. Kenshin was not afraid of the dark, nor what lay hidden within it. He hunted the worst of those things.

By dawn, he had to rest. It was the second one he'd seen without sleep and his body gave him no other choice. He found a jutting rock to provide some shelter should the rain begin again, and unfolded the blanket from the small pack he'd made for himself at the Kamiya dojo. He folded himself within it and sat with his back in the corner of the crevice, shutting his eyes and almost immediately falling into a light slumber.

He woke of his own accord no more than a few hours later. Dawn had turned into early morning and the sun was still overshadowed by clouds. The rains had come finally and looked to stay for a while. He devoured a strip of dried fish and the last of the rice balls they'd had for lunch the day Winter had revealed his deception. The road began to climb upwards, towards forest covered foothills. The mountains, an ever present feature on the misty horizon beyond Tokyo, now loomed huge and ponderous. This inland road he followed did not traverse the worst of the heights, but it was still a strenuous trail to walk. Most merchants took the coastal road, even those coming from inland Utsunomiya where this road eventually lead. He'd walked this road before, though, and others like it through these mountains and others, during his years as a rurouni. They were seasonally dangerous and usually strife with bandits who used the thick forest as cover for their activities. The latter he had little concern for. The former he would take some care for, considering the heavy rain of the last two days.

It was well into afternoon before the road began to steeply climb, leaving the foothills and zig zagging up the base of what could be considered the first true mountainous obstacle. The forest was heavy and rich with the smell of cedar and conifers. Though the occasional banyan, camphor and mulberry trees dotted the thick foliage. Small birds chattered, darted about under the canopy of limbs and leaves, hardly taking note of him at all as he silently trespassed through their playground.

He saw in the protected earth of the high trail, the deep scuff made by a horse's hoof. A most recent mark. A strand of hair from a horse's tail tangled in a profusion of creeping vines further on.

There was a Shinto shrine somewhere up this road, on a branch leading west, and perhaps a half a day beyond that, an old Buddhist monastery fallen to ruin after the Meiji restoration. A farming village in the next deep valley beyond this first upthrust series of peaks, and then beyond that more mountainous paths to travel. Japan was more mountain than anything else, the great centers of civilization finding what footholds they could in the plains and on the coasts or within the broad vales between ranges. Tokyo itself was nestled between great ranges on both the northern and the eastern sides of her.

A well-traveled man was used to climbing steep trails. Only now, Kenshin felt it a little bit in his legs, after so long living in the city doing nothing more strenuous than keeping the Kamiya dojo in good repair. He passed a man and woman walking down the road from the north and asked if they'd seen riders. No, they had come from the shrine and seen no one either there or on the road not on foot. He came to the stone marker that sat at the side of the road, indicating the smaller trail that led up to the shrine. He had no need to visit it and doubted that Winter and his Yazuka would pause to seek favor from the gods. Kenshin passed it by, continuing north up the road. Darkness came and with it more rain. He was forced to shelter by the sudden ferocity of it, and huddled under a great cedar while the worst of it played out. He dozed a little, arms on knees, forehead resting on forearms, taking advantage of his enforced rest. He came fully awake finally, as it let off, stomach complaining and throat dry. He ate the last of his dried fish and drank rainwater running off a rounded boulder.

The night was inky, the clouds so thick not even a whisper of moonlight escaped past them. It made travel an unpredictable venture at best. But, Kenshin's night vision was sharp and his footing certain and he felt sure that horsemen would not feel so confident moving along these trails on such a night. So he pushed on.

It was dawn when he heard the squeal of a woman from the forest upslope. Automatically his hand grasped for a sword hilt that was not there. He closed his fist on an indrawn breath and darted into the forest on the eastern side of the trail.

The wood was dense, not even the trace of a game trail. It was steep enough that his sandals slid here and there on slippery mulch. There was another gasping protest, almost lost to him by the minuscule sound of his own progress. It wasn't, he thought, Kaoru's voice. He'd known that instinctively at the first utterance. The second one assured him of the fact. It did not stop him from seeking her out, though.

There was a clearing in the woods, though not much of one. The overgrown ruins of what once might have been a shrine now crumbled and gone to root. There were a group of ragged men in the midst of fallen stone and broken statues. Six of them in a circle about another who's bare backside pumped over a pair of skinny brown legs. The woman had stopped her cries, but her limbs still moved in protest. The smell of blood was brittle in the air. Not only were they raping her, but they'd cut her first.

Kenshin's lip pulled back in a snarl of outrage, his fingers closing over an arm length stick jaggedly broken off at the end. He swept into the clearing with no sound of warning, slammed the wrist thick stick one way and clubbed a man in the ear, and then before the first had registered the pain of the blow, slammed it to the other direction and felled a second. The men fell almost simultaneously and the others slowly blinked in recognition of their entertainment disrupted. With his way clear he latched onto the rutting man's collar and yanked him bodily backwards, hurling him behind him to fall ungracefully in the leaf covered grown. The woman pulled her skinny limbs close to her body, shivering. No young girl this, but a woman of perhaps forty, by the lines of her face and the sagging of her body. They'd cut her across the nipple, and lower belly, and been none to kind with the use of their fists on her face and body. The men paid her nakedness little heed though, focused surely and entirely upon Kenshin.

"Do you think," he said, quiet and angry. "That the odds were well enough in your favor, seven of you against her one?"

"You little bastard," the one he'd pulled from the woman was trying to get his pants up about his hips. "I'll kill you - -"

"Please - - try." He was in no mood for gentleness. He swung the limb behind him in a sharp arc, catching the closest man square in the face with it, hearing the shattering of bone that indicated broken nose. He brought it around, ducking low as another one leapt at him, waited for that big body to reach the apex of its lunge then jammed the stick up and into a soft belly.

The woman, he noticed, from the corner of his vision had scrambled up, gathered a few shards of ripped clothing and was running with a limping gait for the cover of the woods. He took the next two out with blows to the head and sternum respectively and saved the last, most devastating blow for the rapist, by bringing the stick up with great force, between his legs. The wood splintered, the man let out a choking gasp and fell, curled fetally around his private parts.

He dropped the part remaining in his hand and stepped over a body, scanning the woods for sign of the woman.

"Hello? Are you still here? They'll hurt you no more, that I promise."

If she were still lurking about, she made no answer. She'd looked like a peasant woman, from the signs of hard labor about her and he supposed she lived in these mountains, or else had been traveling through them in the company of her family. Few women traveled alone through these roads. These men were most assuredly mountain bandits. The last two had pulled knives, which lay near their still forms. He absently kicked the blades away, not certain what to do now that the victim had fled and the culprits lay moaning at his feet. Perhaps he ought to go after her, to see if she were capable of finding her way either home or back to her group. The notion of wasting time spent chasing down Kaoru and Kenji made his gut twitch a little in panic.

He needed to be on his way. But still, he couldn't let a wounded, just raped woman wander the woods alone, with bandits that he had not properly killed still on the loose. They'd not share the mercy he'd shown them with her, if they found her again.

He moved into the woods, decision made. Smelling the faint trace of blood. There was a speck on it on a leaf a few yards to his left. He started that way, carefully tracing her path. There was a small trail some fifty yards from the ruins of the shrine. It led up the mountain to the east. It was clear enough of forest debris that it must be well used. He saw very fresh bare foot prints in the moist earth. She'd fled this way. Had known the trail was here, so therefore, must live in the mountains. A ways up and there was a small wooden shed at the side of the road and beyond that an abandoned garden plot, overgrown by the forest. The shed was empty, the home to swallows and vines now. But there were narrow ruts in the trail now that denoted the passage of a small cart, and a few small stones carved with haiku. So people lived up here and the woman was no doubt on her way to home and help. He could probably turn about and go back to the main road and his own concerns.

He chewed his lip, convincing himself of this. A man appeared on the trail ahead and stopped, blinking down at him in surprise.

"Have you seen a dog?" the man asked.

"No. I'm following a woman. She only just came up this trail. She was hurt."

The man frowned. "No woman. Who was she?"

He had no answer to that. The forest had gone deathly silent and he couldn't recall if it had been that way before he'd started up this trail or only in the last few moments. Foolish of him, he was usually more aware of the details. The man was staring at him, waiting for an answer perhaps. Or - - perhaps not.

His senses cried out in warning even as the dagger sailed through the air by his head. He smacked it aside with the back of his hand, whirling and not so much seeking out the thrower as the next source of movement in the surrounding woods. There, a man in the shadow of the trees that stood and hurled first one knife then a second in quick succession.

Kenshin simply stepped aside and let the first one fly past. He caught the second between his thumb and forefinger, flipped it in the air and sent it flying back to its owner. He didn't aim to kill. Just to incapacitate. The knife buried itself in the man's leg above the knee and with a howl, that one went down, clutching the wound.

With a cry, two more came out of the woods at him, one with a pair of sais and the other with a well used sword. He ran, weaponless at the former, who had shorter reach, and launched himself into the air just outside it; turned himself mid-air and came down lightly behind the man, then kicked him forward into the path of the swordsman. Weapons tangled inadvertently and flesh might have been pierced.

These were not of the same breed as the men in the clearing. These were not simple mountain bandits out to prey on the weak and helpless. These men had weapons of some quality and knew the use of them. The swordsman was efficient enough to avoid the embrace of his comrade and rush forward to stalk Kenshin. A quick lunge. A swipe. An unexpected arc of steel that proved this man knew technique, instead of simple butchery. Kenshin danced out of the way, wary of the blade, keeping an eye out for the other.

"You seem to have me at a disadvantage," he said, as the sai wielder joined the swordsman in stalking him. "I'm without weapon and you have three. Little fairness in that."

"Run then," the swordsman suggested with a grin and feinted towards him. Kenshin leapt back. He glanced sidelong towards the wood, wondering why they wanted him on the run. Wondering what awaited him in the woods.

"Are you his?" he asked softly. "The Englishman's?"

"Surrender and maybe we'll tell you."

Kenshin tilted his head. "Before or after I'm dead?"

They laughed, appreciating his humor.

"All right. I'll run, then." He made for the woods and they obligingly moved to follow him. A half dozen strides in and he found the launching point he needed to take him into the trees. He pulled himself up into the branches like a wraith and heard them curse behind him, oblivious to the path he had chosen.

They were not ninja, only yakuza and did not know the ways of a true hitokiri. He let them pass him by, then came down, hard and fast, his feet planted between the swordsman's shoulder blades. That one went down, face first upon the forest floor. Kenshin caught the sword before it was flung away - - held it gingerly a moment - - convincing himself to tighten his grip around the well worn hilt. It was more a trial for him now, to hold this killing blade and contemplate the use of it, than it had been days ago when the shock of Winter's evil was still fresh upon him. Even holding it - - he was that much closer to drawing blood and once he'd started - - it would be no easy thing to stop.

He straightened with a silent exhalation of breath, the sword still in his hand, searching the woods for the sai wielder. The man had melted into the forest. But the sound of his passage still reached Kenshin's ears. He set off, considerably quieter, in search of his prey, alert to whatever else was waiting for him in this wood. They had not urged him here without reason.

His prey thought it was clever. The man lay in wait for him, crouched within the shelter of a thick cedar. Kenshin let him spring out, parried the first jab easily, avoided the next with a sliding movement of his body. He got through the man's shabby guard in an instant - - had the point of the sword pressed against the pulse of the man's throat at arm's length and stood there, waiting for the idiot to realize that short of lunging forward and impaling himself, he could not reach Kenshin with the shorter sai swords.

"Where - - are - - they?" he asked with perfectly calm clarity, once the sai's had dropped helplessly at the man's sides.

"Here."

That word was actually uttered after the initial echo of the gunshot registered in Kenshin's hearing. He heard the word and recognized the voice a moment before the pain registered in his thigh. He looked down, in dull shock at the growing spot of red high up on the leg of his hakama. The man in front of him cried out, clutching at his hip and falling, blood escaping past his fingers from the bullet that had passed through Kenshin and into him.

He turned, and found Winter a dozen paces away, holding the gun casually at his side. There were a handful of men around him. The man was smiling. Quite cheerfully smiling.

"And here you are again. Bravo. The rumors do not lie, do they? But are you are everything they say you are?"

"Where are they?" Kenshin repeated the question, taking a step towards Winter. The pain in his leg was not so bad that he couldn't put weight on it. It was just a matter of focusing past it and on more important issues. Winter said nothing. He stepped back and one of his yakuza moved forward throwing a succession of knives. It was to entertain Winter, Kenshin thought, batting them aside effortlessly, moving forward step by step as he did.

Winter's smile widened and another pair of men rushed forward with swords.

Clash. Parry. Swipe. Impact. Impact.

Two men down in five strokes. He'd had to be careful with the killing blade he held. With the sakabatou he might have done it in two. One if he were particularly on his game.

Winter laughed outright. Kenshin felt his vision waver a little. Felt the warm wetness flowing down his leg.

"You find this - - amusing?" Another step and it put him almost within striking distance. Winter would never see him coming. Those behind him wouldn't be able to stop it.

"You can't imagine," Winter said. "The irony is, I'd been cursing your name long before I had a face to put with it."

"Where is she?"

Winter sighed. "Your single-mindedness is beginning to become annoying. Put the sword down and perhaps I'll tell you."

Kenshin stared, narrow eyed and fed up. He focused his anger - - his determination into that stare, and the men behind Winter quailed, backing up. Winter met it with complacent curiosity - - not effected at all.

"My dear, dear boy, I've clashed wits and wills against the lords of parliament and that, believe me is a brutal lot, don't try to intimidate me with that nasty glare. Put the sword down." Winter's smile faded. "Or shall I have the child's throat slit? I don't need him, after all. It will be harder to control her without him - - but I'm sure I shall prevail."

The Englishman raised his fingers, poised to snap off a signal. Kenshin took a breath and let the sword tip fall to the ground, his fingers still loosely around the hilt, not willing to take the chance that Winter was bluffing. "No."

"Ah," Winter's smile returned. "That's my boy. Now let it fall."

Kenshin opened his fingers and the sword hit the earth with a muffled thump. Winter gestured and one of the knife throwers darted forward and snatched it up, retreating rapidly after he'd done so.

"Oh, don't be so skittish, he won't endanger the child's life with misbehavior," Winter assured his men.

They moved in then, as Winter strolled up, two of them taking his arms and holding fast as the Englishman stopped before him. The man's hand snaked out, catching Kenshin's jaw, tilting his face up and to the side as the man's thumb grazed over the cross-shaped scar on his cheek.

"Where are they?" Kenshin hissed, face still in Winter's grip.

"Oh, on ship on its way to meet me at Sendai. This whole little land trip was for you and I must say, you made very good time."

Kenshin blinked, putting together the pieces that had made him believe in the lie. He just didn't understand why the effort had been made.

He said something soft and blasphemous under his breath and tensed - - - Winter pressed the muzzle of the gun to his shoulder and calmly pulled the trigger - - -

Thud - - -

The world danced on the edge a great swirling void of red, twisting slowly, irrevocably into deepest black. That he was aware of this - - was a change for the better. There'd been nothing but void before. The cognizance signaled something different.

Thud - - -

That something different brought with it a world filled to overflowing with pain. Perhaps better, had been too hasty a summation for the return of awareness.

Thud - - -

Kenshin heard the sound of his own scream before he fully realized he was doing it. It burned in his throat, but not nearly so hot as the pain in his hand as they drove the stake through it, pinning his arm like a butterfly wing to a board. The wash of agony and disorientation drove him to twist and writhe in the arms that held him up, but the arm with the glowing ember of pain at the end of it was the good one and the other hung limp and useless from the bullet Winter had put through his shoulder.

He had no real notion of where he was, or how many of them held onto him, only that he needed away from the hurt and that it seared deeper with each frantic movement he made. But he couldn't escape them, not with strong arms about his legs and torso, and others drawing up his numb arm and placing his hand flat against a rough surface.

A man lumbered up, face skewered and wavering in Kenshin's vision; lifted a wooden spike and a mallet and with a great grin on his face, drove the point of it through Kenshin's palm.

He screamed again, tasting blood in the back of his throat. They let him go then and he hung there, toes barely touching the ground, hair an obscuring veil about his face. It hid the blood where he'd bitten through his tongue. It hid the involuntary tears that slid down his cheeks.

It occurred to him that he was dead. That he'd probably die slow and painfully, and that in and of itself was not so great a horror as the notion that there would be no one to save Kaoru and Kenji.

No one knew. Dr. Genzai didn't know what had happened - - not really, so he couldn't tell Yahiko when he came home and found the dojo abandoned. He couldn't tell Misao if she came looking, or Aoshi if he came on her heels.

A hand tangled in his hair and pulled his head back. He hadn't the strength to fight it. Winter sneered at him face close enough that Kenshin could feel the heat of his breath.

"We've rather clipped your wings - - haven't we?" Winter's sneer turned into something else.

He pressed his mouth next to Kenshin's and ran his tongue over the blood leaking from his lips. Winter whispered with his bloody mouth pressed close to Kenshin's own. "And I so did want to fuck you before you died - - maybe I still will, eh?"

Kenshin brought his knee up. Hard. Hoped he drove the man's genitals up into his guts with enough force to make him bleed internally - - but Winter, after a few minutes of gasping cries, managed to shake off the hands that tried to help him and stab a shaking hand towards Kenshin.

"Bind his feet. Bind the bloody bastard's feet."

They came at him then. Winter's men and others dressed in the rough garb of mountain bandits. He had no defense save his legs, and soon enough they took that away from him, battering him with crude staffs until his head was swirling and his body aching with points of pain that had nothing to do with his tortured hands.

He went under soon after, the blood leaking down his arms, and from his shoulder, mingling with the other blood they'd caused to flow. It pooled at his feet, soaking the dirt. His vision dimmed on that sight and he doubted seriously that it would ever come back.

Winter got to his feet, the pain in his groin quite vividly fresh. He had to take a moment for the spots to leave his vision. Had to take a moment to gather the will to move and endure the lingering pain caused by Kenshin's well placed knee.

Kenshin hung there now, limp, in the small clearing beyond the rustic shelters the mountain bandit's called home, red hair loose and obscuring his face, the pale cloth of his hakama soaked with crimson. The fight was out of him now, but Winter didn't believe for a moment they'd broken him. There had been nothing in those narrow, black-rimmed eyes to suggest he was even close, even as they'd beaten him to insensibility. Breaking him would take some while - - longer, Winter thought regretfully, than either of them had.

He could tarry for a little while, but he had a ship waiting for him in Sendai. And Kenshin - - despite all the determination in the world - - he'd bleed out soon enough - - if the shock didn't finish him first. Or die from the tender ministrations of the mountain bandits within whose territory they all dallied.

They owed a certain, loose allegiance with the more organized yakuza, those bandits. They were none too comfortable in Winter's foreign presence, having had little or no contact with westerners despite the more civilized portions of the country embracing the west and the wonders it brought with it.

They had a score to settle with Kenshin, so they said. He'd shamed them on his way up the mountain - - hurt them bad enough without even the benefit of a sword to have them crying for his blood. Well, they had it now, it was only a matter of how long he lasted before he ran dry of it.

Which was a shame, because it meant that Winter would have little privacy to enjoy his own brand of - - - entertainment. He thought himself rather more refined than the bandits. His little games could last for days - - weeks even, if he were patient enough to draw it out. He generally had the sense not to inflict critical injury on a victim at the very first. But, one had to assume that the crude scaffold of wood that they'd nailed Kenshin to, had seen similar atrocities, what with the stains of old blood and the pits in the supporting timbers.

Someone gave Winter strong, recently brewed beer and he grimaced, having more a taste for sake. But he sipped at it, watching them torment their prey.

Kenshin had done very well, up until the moment that panic over the girl and child had driven him to rashness. If he'd practiced more patience, he might have hunted the lot of them down, one by one, until he'd deprived Winter of his allies - - Winter might have even told him what he wanted to hear on threat of his life - - with no easy out in sight. Any real hitokiri would have taken such a path - - but then again, if all of what Winter suspected was true, then Kenshin hadn't been a hitokiri for many years. Had rather stubbornly turned his back on such a life and all the ruthless mindset that came with it. A man with a wife and a child had different priorities, after all.

"Do you know," Winter said, when the bandits had tired of their play and moved away to give him the opportunity to circle Kenshin in relative privacy. "That you cost me my fortune and a good deal of my reputation? Did you know that?"

Kenshin didn't look at him. Didn't open those intriguing violet eyes of his to even acknowledge Winter's existence. Winter knew he was conscious. Could tell by the inadvertent twitching of skin, when Winter trailed his fingertips across blood streaked ribs. A lean, compact body to have caused such damage. With such an ominous reputation, one might have imagined the Battousai to be a towering, hulk of a man.

"I had a bargain with a man that would have given me and mine unique trading rights with Japan - - that would have put the damned pushy Americans in their place - - but you killed that man and sank the ship I'd invested my fortune in to gain his allegiance. I cursed your name for a solid month after that fiasco. Well, not your proper name - - but the appellation of Battousai the manslayer. For that alone - - I wished you a thousand sorts of death. I'd pictured all manner of man in those visions - - but never once imagined you to be quite so - - young-seeming. And pretty. Not dangerous looking at all, until you get that look in your eyes."

Winter pressed his thumb experimentally into the seeping bullet wound on Kenshin's right shoulder. Fresh blood oozed out, mingling with dirt and dried streaks of red. Kenshin hissed through his teeth, body jerking a little in a reflex action he couldn't stop. His eyes slit open a little, one swelling somewhat from the impact of someone's fist to the side of his head. He said nothing, though. The only thing he wanted of Winter was the girl and her child.

"If she serves her purpose, I won't hurt her." Winter wiped the blood from his hand off on Kenshin's hakama. "I receive no joy from killing women and children - - I only do it from necessity. One little girl and her brat can do me no harm once I've gotten what I need. I rather like her, to be honest. She has spunk. More so that your average Japanese wife. I admire that. I even have a few friends, who might enjoy a little Asian mistress - - might even tolerate the child, if the girl were to excel at her duties - -"

The breath hissed between Kenshin's teeth and his eyes snapped open, flashing in anger. Winter laughed softly.

"I've no interest in her myself, of course. My appetites run towards - - different things." He ran a thumb down the line of Kenshin's unscarred cheek and sighed in regret over lost opportunity. "As much as I hate to leave you, my boy - - I've a ship to meet and little time to waste. Perhaps we'll met in hell and you can extract your pound of vengeance. But until that time - - - I would tell you to die well, but with this bunch - - I've the feeling that will be a distinct impossibility."