Ghost: A Dream of Murder

Mochizuki Chiyome wants someone dead

And someone wants to serve her

At a banquet to celebrate a new alliance, Chiyome contemplates murder, and discovers a new servant.

This is the third of six Kunoichi Companion Tales, prequel stories to David Kudler’s historical novel Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale.

White Robes — Mired in her own grief, Lady Mochizuki Chiyome encounters two young women who give her a whole new, much more interesting opportunity

Silk & Service — A young Takeda warrior meets a servant who is much more than she seems (coming soon!)

Ghost — At a banquet to celebrate a new alliance, Chiyome contemplates murder, and discovers a new servant

Shining Boy — Plucked off of the streets of the capital, an orphan girl tries to figure out what story she's wandered into

Blade — Toumi doesn't want anyone messing with her business

Little Brother — Returning to the monastery turns out to be as hard as leaving it was

Extract:

The Way of the Warrior, Chiyome knew, teaches that one must fight without anger and kill without hatred. That a warrior must act always out of duty and never out of personal need. She knew this because her mother had taught her so. She knew it because her father and her husband had died acting so. She knew it because because her annoying servants Mieko and Kuniko always seemed to act so.

And yet, staring across the shōgun’s banquet hall, all that Mochizuki Chiyome could think was that she hated Uesugi Kenshin; that she wanted to cut off the far-too-pretty lord’s nose, wanted to strangle him, wanted to rip out his heart.

She considered it a great act of restraint to have remained sitting through the long feast commemorating the new alliance.

Lord Uesugi leered at her, and her restraint shattered.

“Mieko?”

“My lady?”

Chiyome leaned closer to the young woman who looked like nothing so much as a perfectly sweet companion for a perfectly harmless old lady. “If I were to ask you to kill that insufferable fop Uesugi, could you do it?”

(Teen assassin, historical fiction, love in a time of war, Japan)