Togame knows from the start that ambition will take her far. She also knows (or rather, she guesses) that the road it will pull her down won't be straight-forward or take her to places any self-respecting nobleman's daughter would dare to tread. At first she munches on whatever food comes her way, stolen by sheer word of mouth and what a mouth she has! She starts talking to whoever will listen, advises innkeepers how to guard their valuables and cheat people out of money in exchange for a bed free from damp and woodland rot. She sits in these rooms and spends hours coming up with philosophical points to address the people in the market place with, debates hinging on the edge of guilt, lies and half-truths deviously mixed together to convince others to give her food, water, to talk of her, this amazing little girl who can help reduce your taxes, teach you how to spot a cheating merchant and oh, how many more tricks and wonders!

Togame is...Togame is nothing more than a shoddy circus performer but she is learning and she chooses her clients carefully. She makes herself indispensable to those who hold more influence than others, those with a little more money than the rest. She gives carefully guided verbal jabs at the security of their houses, points out how easy it would be to start a fire, how vulnerable their flesh and bones are to rovers, soldiers, any who might pass by.

It is in these grander buildings that Togame feels free to indulge herself, remembering the games she played with her father, simple strategies that don't allow for talking. It's easier to play, remembering that people here won't let her win like the servants and her mother did and that they lack the clever greed of her father - he would never let her win if only to teach her how to actually think- because there's just herself, the board and the person, the enemy, in front of her. So she plays, wins, and learns how to lose to prevent herself incurring the temper of those above her station - and how she grits her teeth at that! If only...-

When she grows a little larger, starts growing into her hips, it looks like her father's got the last laugh after all – his height was little better than that of a dwarf after all, and it sticks to her, this genetic inheritance, that it's one of the few things about her family that she can't throw away like her name. But she learns of coy looks and dirty talk and how the sound of her lower, softer woman's voice can get a man to listen even as he looks. A small touch as she unveils her strategies and the ones who should really know better crumble beneath her hands and follow her commands, her lines, both figuratively and literally. Togame has to stifle her laughter each and every time. Are these men, these important, rich men she travels after, really in charge of so much? And so she sends hints to the Shogunate, to anyone who will listen, anyone who has direct contact that these new battle plans, these glamorous new ideas, all come from her, the voice behind the bulky mouthpieces. She sits, coiled like a snake and waits.

When the first noble from the Shogunate's court sees her, he calls her a geisha, a ghost, a spirit and Togame almost bends her knees and feels sick before straitening up. She remembers wrenching over a stream years and minutes ago, the terror and grief still galloping through her throat as she felt the phantom touch of smoke and fire at her heels. She had peered into the water back then and screamed again and again, believing that she was dead, left wandering and alone as a ghost because her hair, her hair, dark and crow-black was stained with a white that would not rinse out. She had pulled and washed it but the white had refused to run black and time did not reverse.

She looks at the man and smiles. Three weeks later he lies dead in the muck, a Maniwa knife rammed straight into his back. No one ever manages to prove that the ink for the order of his execution ('assassination,' Princess Hitei would have purred out, if only anyone had thought to ask) came from Togame's pen.

But Togame guards the shadows in her eyes, especially when Emonzaemon is sent round to question and needle at her motives. She sits still with the same guarded facial expression, the one she's learned over those boards of shogi and presses back with her words. Emonzaemon doesn't bite or jab or get flustered; he's perfectly content to be the plaything of a woman who hides her real thoughts behind her fan.

After he's left Togame grits her teeth and shakes her head; she cannot understand.

Then later, much later and after she's grown so much colder, Shichika comes into her life and forces her to understand. He chases away all the shadows from her eyes (but not the ones lurking inside her heart, as thawed out as his presence allows it to became; Togame doesn't have the courage to set him straight) and he teaches her to laugh, to enjoy leaning all her weight against another human body. It's been so long since she could lay her head against someone's else heart-beat and not tense up, waiting for the inevitable betrayal. And Shichika...he offers up to her everything. And she's bewildered, doesn't know where to aim, where to cut so that she can unmask the tendons of his soul.

Because here's the greatest irony; for all that she teaches Shichika what's it means to be human, as much as her words, her fragile blossoming sentiment dulls his edges and forces him to learn the things his family and heritage denied him, Togame herself has tried to throw all that aside; all those years unlearning the way her father loved her so that he's just a figure to avenge, a tool in her heart to prop up her ambition; she's crafted herself into a weapon, one that even Katanagatari cannot imitate.

And in the end Shichika dulls her edges. After all, you cannot cure a sword, cannot tell it to be anything other than a tool to hurt or harm. And harm him she does, the truth like poison spilling from her lips as her blood stains her clothes and seeps into Shichika's own, his arms gently propping her up as though he can hold her together and not allow her mask to fall.

Togame embarks on her last great strategy; to get Shichika to live. It's odd as it's the first genuinely unselfish thing she can remember doing. Even as her stomach ties into knots, the bullets throbbing within her, she collects herself and plans out her points. She can try to dismiss everything they've achieved together, tell Shichika that all his hard work has been for nothing, that there was never going to a happy ending for them both, even if the final sword had never been aimed at her. Tell him that she was unable to rationalize forgiveness, that she loved her father too much to let his murder (execution, the Shogunate would have ordered, 'and rightfully so,') go unpunished. That the blood of several generations of samurai still pumps its way through her now quickly being emptied veins and that still means something to her, honour, pride, even if she's a woman. And that's the one thing Shichika has never judged her on, hasn't he, even when so many men struggled to see past her gender?

Togame has always been selfish, always been true to herself in that regard. So she doesn't hesitate when she orders Shichika to live, to forget her, even as she dredges up all that remaining cruelty within her and throws into his disbelieving gaze. (but she gentles it all the same; he manages to undo her once again, the last time, even as she struggles to die in a way that would make her father proud.)

I loved you, he tells her, screams it at her, his tears splattering on her cheek, I really loved being with you!

He's probably the only person besides her father (and maybe, perhaps Hitei in their gentler, less passive-aggressive moments, ones lost to history in the same way Shichika himself will eventually be lost) who will have ever felt that way about her. Togame knows (she feels) that she has never deserved it. Not when there were people like Meisai and Zanki Kiguchi in the world, people who needed it more than she did.

Even now the word 'love' escapes her. So she holds his cheek and reminds herself to breathe. It doesn't matter, she tells herself; that word, coming from me, would only sound like a lie anyway. So she tells him the truth in the only way that would ever make any sense.

Would you mind if I fell for you?

She's already gone by the time Shichika replies. His words are lost to the wind, the evening sun, dying as nobody else ever hears them. His words, he resolves to himself now, are only for the dead.

Togame never hears them or feels her hand back on his cheek as he carefully picks it up from the puddle of her own blood. She's not there to count the seconds he holds her, the fading light of the sunset dappling his back as it darts below the stone arch they both failed to cross together.

But this time she didn't need to grit her teeth or shake her head when Emonzaemon walks away. She would have understood completely.

Princess Younha never steps forward to claim the reward she'd spent her whole life working towards. So instead, Shichika steps forward to take it for himself. That night the castle falls and Hitei, after dragging Shichika away, grimly throws a burning braid down. She appreciates the symmetry it brings, the way she imagines it to resemble the way Togame's childhood home was brought down in a barrage of flames.

'Here's to you Youhna,' she whispers, 'and the war the two of us never got to fight.' Then she turns to tend to Shichika some more. She thinks that Younha (no, her minds whispers, Togame, that's the name she chose,) would have wanted that. In all her life Shichika was the only thing she ever managed to save. And that was as grand a legacy as anyone could hope for.