Chapter Three—The Way A Jinni Does It

The day had been long and Shiro’s feet were hurting. He had never walked so far in all his life. He could have paid for passage, but he was trying to save money.

“Do you mean cheap?” Jessamine had asked.

Shiro hadn’t responded to her provocation.

Now the sun was down and Shiro was pitching his tent for the night. Once he was finished, he searched the river bank for dried wood so he could make a fire and cook something to eat.

There was a dark orange hue on the horizon and the wheat fields were a black silhouette of waving grasses in the subtle breeze. The weather was warm but the night was beginning to really cool things off.

Shiro felt a subtle chill nip at him as he bent to put another piece of dried wood atop the pile in his arms. Amidst the trickle of the river he heard a splash and looked up, saw that Jessamine was playing in the water with her feet.

“You’re going to ruin your dress,” he said.

She turned, her face a black silhouette in the night. “What, this old thing?”

She giggled.

“Not funny.”

“And why is it not funny, Shiro?”

He picked up another stick. “I spent a fortune on that dress.”

“A princess only accepts the finest garments or none at all.”

“Hmph.”

“Would you prefer that I pranced about in nothing but a shawl like before?”

She was taunting him again. Or was she teasing him? He couldn’t say. The only way he could deal with her constant immaturity was to ignore most of it, otherwise Shiro might find himself getting angry.

We wouldn’t want that, Jessamine conveyed.

“Out of my head, Jinni.”

She giggled again.

With enough wood collected, Shiro returned to where he had pitched his tent. In the wheat field on the edge of the river there was a clearing. He thought it made the perfect spot to make camp. It would keep him out of sight of most travellers, and any who saw the glow of his fire would probably think the farmers were camping out.

He set the sticks into a little pavilion atop some bark shavings that he pulled out of his bag.

“Are you angry with me?”

“No.”

“Hmm,” she noised playfully.

With his dagger and flint, he set to work making sparks. Jessamine said nothing for a time, and yet he could see her feet unmoving. He looked up. He couldn’t see her face, but he knew she was smiling that mischievous smile of hers.

“What is it?” he asked.

Suddenly her face lit up as she blew upon her finger, an ember with a trail of fire alighting above her nail.

Shiro jerked back and her smile deepened as she flicked a little fireball onto the unlit kindling. It flared to life with a poof!

“Kuso!” he cursed, more in surprise than in anger.

She laughed.

“I did not know you could do magic!”

“Well I am a jinni, Shiro!”

He stared at her.

“Close your mouth, my young adventurer.”

He did as he was told, not because she told him to, but because it was undignified to gape like a fool, even at something as surprising as a sudden magically conjured fireball!

“What other things do I not know about you?”

“Oh…” she said breezily, “I don’t know. What might be something you would expect me to tell you would seem like something completely inconsequential to me. It might never come to me, and if something does, I’ll probably just forget.”

“Fine,” he said. “Keep your secrets.”

“I’m not a whore,” she said. “I’m a jinni. What would I be without my secrets?”

Thinking about that for a moment, he supposed she had a point. But it still irked him that he had only just found out about her ability to make fire after she had spent months watching him start fires—and at times toiling with the chore of it.

Kami-sama, he thought. This jinni will be the death of me.

Looking up, he found that Jessamine was no longer standing there. He glanced about and couldn’t find her. She must have evaporated into blue smoke like she did from time to time.

“How goes it?” a raspy voice said from behind.

Shiro whirled. It was none other than Tarshiks the cat eye. “How did you find me?!”

Tarshiks smiled. “I’m a cat eye. I can track a man through ten rivers across a snow-covered plane.”

It wasn’t lost on Shiro that Tarshiks’ sword was out of its scabbar. Shiro’s eyes flicked to his katana near the tent.

He was defenseless.

Beside his katana was his bag where he kept the lamp.

“What do you want?”

“Ahh,” he noised with a rasp and laughed. “Just everything you have. That… or your life, human.”

“Kuso! I knew you were trouble.”

Tarshiks chuckled.

I say give him your gold, Shiro, Jessamine said, an unmistakable air of bored amusement in her conveyance. When he turns to leave you can strike him down.

Iie.

Just as he stood up, Jessamine reappeared in the field behind Tarshiks and began making her way toward him.

“What are you waiting for?” the cat eye thief asked. “Are you going to make me cut you down?”

“Would you?” Shiro asked, stalling for time. Jessamine was clearly up to something.

“Indeed I will,” Tarshiks said with a toothy grin. “You don’t know me, human.” Jessamine took up Shiro’s katana and began to circle around the lit camp back toward Shiro. He tried not to glance at her so Tarshiks wouldn’t be alerted to what she was doing.

Even so, Shiro couldn’t mistake the grin on her face. Was she enjoying this?

“I just didn’t suspect you for a killer,” Shiro said.

“But a killer I am!” Tarshiks rasped, a notable air of impatience in his tone. “Now leave this camp and don’t look back otherwise I will—“

He was interrupted, his eyes going wide as Jessamine strolled toward Shiro. She siged and lazily handed him his katana. “Here you are.”

“Arigatou,” he said, thanking her without taking his eyes off of Tarshiks. Unsheathing his blade, the cat eye took a step back. “Be gone, cat eye—or I will kill you.”

Tarshiks growled. “You can’t take me, foreigner.”

He jumped over the fire, a cry so bestial and loud, Shiro would have been stunned into wooden immobility had he not had previous experience with members of the cat eye race.

As Tarshiks swung his blade in an attack that would have surely killed Shiro, he lunged forward and struck in an upward slash that caught Tarshiks’ sword under the cross guard sending the blade spiraling.

Still in mid slash, Shiro used the momentum to turn around and elbow Tarshiks in the face. The cat eye’s head whipped back and he went stumbling.

Tarshiks growled deeply, but by the time he recovered, Shiro was standing still, his blade poised for a quick kill as Tarshiks’ sword splashed into the river.

“Ho—how?”

Jessamine sauntered behind Tarshiks with a smile. “Oh, why even ask? Be gone or be destroyed, fur ball.” Then her eyes lit up in an iridescent blue and Tarshiks jumped, rolled and splashed into the river.

Jessamine laughed then watched him swim across and disappear into the wheat field on the other side.

A moment passed and Shiro let his guard down, picked up his scabbard and sheathed his sword.

“Aren’t you confident,” she said.

Shiro glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

“A little slower and you would have missed his cross guard,” she said. “That is what you were trying to do—disarm him, am I not wrong?”

“Hmm,” he noised. “You are not wrong.”

“Very impressive, Shiro.”

“It was nothing,” he said, going back to the fire so he could search through his bags for something to cook.