𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝟏. 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑮𝒊𝒓𝒍 𝑾𝒉𝒐 𝑾𝒐𝒌𝒆 𝑼𝒑
.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.
Year Ten'ō 2, Nara Period
Darkness.
Not the peaceful kind, either; a darkness stupidly oppressive that sat on one's face and in one's mouth, suggesting a mistake was made somewhere along the line and that something had gone very, very wrong.
The girl had, for reasons she could not explain, the distinct impression that she was dead. Very dead. Decapitated, specifically. Which was… oddly specific.
She lay there in the dark, not moving, and thought, "That feels excessive."
Why decapitation? Why not a more funny and less dramatic death? A fall from a cliff, perhaps; drowning in a river, dying of fever, starvation, or old age. Instead, her neck prickled as if the blade had just passed through it. She didn't remember why she knew this, only that it felt uncomfortably true. She did not know anything, in fact. Was she supposed to be headless right now? Was this what being headless felt like? That seemed unfair; if one lost one's head, one ought at least to be informed first.
Her mouth, if she even had one right now, twitched. Really, she should have been horrified, but there were only two bright thoughts in a big blank of nothingness; decapitation is a rude way to go, and it's very, very dark.
The girl tried to remember what had happened before that, but nothing came to her head. No face or house. No mother. No road to home and not even the name of a loved one. There was simply a hole, and behind the hole, another hole. That was the truly scary part, not the possible decapitation but the emptiness left by it. Memory ought to have texture, catch on something. She had the feeling that she had lived a very long life pursuing something that she could never really catch in the end. And then, before she could really know it, it was all gone. All those long years, puff.
She tried to move, but to no avail. Or perhaps... There was a result, but she could not feel it. Thinking about it, that was worse. Did she still have arms? Hands? A body at all? If she had, in fact, been decapitated, perhaps the rest of her had gotten bored and left her mind, too. Maybe this was the afterlife. No celestial maidens to celebrate her life, welcoming her in golden halls; no judges for all the crimes she was sure she had committed by someone else's moral compass; no ancestors and old friends she had not seen for over a thousand years. Just dropped and forgotten there.
If so... it was astonishingly boring.
Then, after a long moment, another thought arrived.
...Perhaps she ought to open her eyes.
Right. That usually helped with the whole "seeing" thing. With the reluctance, she forced them open—
—and instantly regretted it. Blinding light stabbed straight through her skull.
The girl groaned, threw up a hand to shield herself, and aha—! Hand confirmed; five fingers, small and pale, trembling but serviceable. It took her several furious blinks before the world stopped trying to peel her brain out through her eyes.
She was inside… somewhere. A hut, maybe? Or a room, if you could call it a room. It had a stitched-together look; the walls were clay-packed over wattle, darkened by years of smoke, and the wooden beams overhead were uneven and still showing the teeth marks of the adze. A paper window, patched twice, let in a hard white blade of morning sun, and there was a brazier in one corner, burning in low red heat. Overall, the room smelled of damp straw and dried river fish. It was not the smell of heaven, but more the smell of poverty.
The girl dropped her gaze back to her hand: too tiny, ridiculously so. She turned it over twice and flexed her fingers; the sleeve hanging over her wrist was made of coarse brown cloth, worn and philosophical about being cloth at all. The hem was frayed and stitched more than once. She touched the fabric and, yep, the pitiful ghost of a yukata had clearly seen better days.
The girl shivered and dragged the yukata-thing tighter around herself, which did nothing. The season—if she had to take a wild guess—was the tail end of winter or the beginning of spring. Whatever season this was, the yukata was definitely too light.
Also, her sense of time was as empty as her stomach, which growled so loudly she startled. She pressed both hands to it, wincing. Great. Dead and hungry.
The girl rolled upright on what turned out to be a heap of straw pretending to be a bed. She pushed herself upright, and her head instantly swam; the room lurched sideways and back again, but she managed not to fall over, which felt like triumph under the circumstances.
She brushed hair out of her face and froze; long strands fell across her hand, straight and black. Ordinary. She tugged one in front of her face and stared at it. Definitely long. Definitely familiar.
She got to her feet and promptly looked down: bare feet and scrawny legs with knobby knees and thin ankles. Her toes curled against the cold earth, and dirt clung to them immediately. The packed-earth floor was freezing, and something was very wrong with the angle of her worldview. It took her another beat to understand why.
She wasn't short; she was a child.
A child? Not younger than expected, or perhaps a bit smaller. A full, undeniable child. Her heartbeat started up in earnest. Okay. She was—what? Ten? Eleven? The girl stared at herself as if a second glance might change reality.
"I'm... a child?" she said aloud, because sometimes hearing it helped. Pity it did nothing to the rising panic, because the voice that came out was too high and soft, unmistakably female, and definitely not her old voice, if she even remembered what her old voice was.
Some part of her brain had been quietly assuming she was… older. Not this.
Yet, underneath the panic, an absurd voice that sounded too much like the one she recognized as hers, insisted that this body was in fact hers. Not stolen, for once: her natural birth-skin, as old as her. At that thought, the girl stood very still; then she pressed both hands over her face.
Nothing. Actually, she remembered nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
The only thing she could hold onto was the certainty of having been maybe decapitated, but the emptiness in her head had some shapes in it. It was not total blankness; she knew words, she knew things.
She lowered her hands and looked around again, desperate for hints. For instance, she knew the brazier was a brazier. She also knew it was made of clay. She knew the roof-thatch above her head had been patched with reeds of a different color. She knew there was a wooden bucket near the wall, and a dipper beside it, and an amulet of grass tucked above the doorframe; the sort made in poor villages that feared river spirits, mountain curses, kitsune, and tax collectors. She knew hunger and morning. She knew, useful or not, that something about this little hut was right for "rural" and "not rich." She even knew she liked the feel of smoke inside a room if it came with warmth, and that she hated the cold.
Feels like I've been here before.
Her stomach growled again. "Well," the girl muttered to it. "At least one of us is consistent."
Before she could decide whether to panic, cry, or steal food, the frail excuse of a door banged open, and an old woman stormed in. The granny was bent nearly double, her hair bound in a tight grey knot; not a noblewoman, but not starving either. Her robes, plain grey and brown, were cleaner than the yukata the girl wore herself, with tidy cuffs and a sash tied firm, and she moved with the speed and authority of a woman who had been bullying villagers into obedience for at least forty years by yelling.
"Oh, finally," the crone snapped before the girl could speak, not even pausing on the threshold. "Up, are you? About time, you lazy little plague-spirit!"
The girl straightened instinctively. Finally, someone I can ask. An unpleasant person, but still, questions; she had a full load of questions.
"Uh—"
The woman's answer was to seize her cheek between two fingers and twist
The girl flailed under the pinch. "Ow—owowow—hey! What was that for?"
The granny slapped her shoulder to shut her up. "Don't 'ow' me!" she barked. "Standing there like a stunned duck! Do you think the world waits for you to grow a brain? The other two are ready, and the Fujiwara Nankewill be here any moment!"
The words hit her and rang in the part of her head that knew things without remembering why. Fujiwara Nanke: Southern House of the Fujiwara clan. Nobles, no, big nobles, high enough that even villages knelt before the name alone. Why was that sitting in her mind when her own name wasn't?
The girl rubbed her abused cheek, glaring; okay, definitely not a sweet grandmother type. "The… other two?" she croaked. Her throat felt too unused.
The granny stared at her as if there was an error. "Yes, the other two," she clicked her tongue. "Do your ears work? Or did the fox spirits take them in the night?" With the delicacy of a butcher, she grabbed the ragged yukata and yanked it off the girl.
The girl shrieked and stumbled backward, clutching at air. "Wha—hey! Personal space—!"
"Personal space, she says. Personal space is for noble daughters with dowries," the old woman muttered, rolling her eyes. "Shame on you, standing there like a scarecrow when you should be ready. Hush your mouth before you curse us all, you stupid orphan."
Orphan. That word stung, even though she couldn't remember parents to miss. Too stunned to resist, the girl found herself wrangled into a fresh yukata. White, spotless, and softer than anything she'd ever touched in the last five minutes.
The old woman pulled it tight, then wrapped an equally white sash around her waist, knotting it with the force of a battlefield warrior. "Stop wriggling."
"I'm not wriggling, you're suffocating me!"
The sash cinched tighter, and the girl wheezed; maybe decapitation really had been preferable, but still! A far cry from the rag she'd just been wearing; she couldn't help but smile a little. "Well, this is an improvement. Thanks, Oba."
The old woman blinked, startled at the Oba. "Don't Obame."
The girl, who had never in her life met this woman and yet already knew with blinding certainty that annoying her would be one of life's purest joys, brightened a little. "Oh," she said. "So you can hear."
Oba let out a deep sigh of regret and shoved her down onto the straw bedding again. "Better you look decent than shame us all. The Miko of the Moon? Pah! What use is a miko who doesn't even know how to stand properly?"
Moon… what now?
A wet cloth appeared in the granny's hands and attacked her feet. The pressure tickled unbearably, and the girl squeaked and kicked. "Hold still! Filthy child. You think the kami want dirty feet? Do you want us all drowned, moon-child? Bad harvests? Plague? You want the moon to turn her face from this valley because you couldn't be bothered to wash between your toes?"
The girl squirmed. I'd prefer the moon mind her own business, actually. "Did you just say… Miko of the Moon?"
Oba's hand paused mid-tug, eyes narrowed. Slowly, very slowly, she looked up. "Yes! Are you deranged?" She ground harder, determined to erase dirt down to the bone. "Heaven help me, they gave me the noisy one this year's ritual—" scrub, scrub "—do not dare to say such foolish things in front of the Miko of the Sun or the Miko of the Stars, and especially not in front of the Fujiwara Nanke! Do not say foolish things anywhere if you can help it. If you cannot help it—" she flicked water at the girl's ankle "—help it."
Ritual? Sun? Stars? The Miko of the Moon, whatever that meant? What cheerful vocabulary!
The girl's head spun, but her curiosity sparked bright. "Oh! So I'm not just an orphan, I'm a special orphan!"
"Special?" The cloth rubbed harder. "Duh. Ungrateful child."
"Ehy Oba, do I at least have a name other than moon-child?" the girl asked.
"Name? Hah." Oba yanked at her hair, dragging something that could pass for a comb through it with unnecessary force. "If your parents never bothered to give you one before leaving you, why would I waste my time now? Hold still, moon-child, or I'll cut them all off!"
Tears pricked her eyes from the combing, but the girl tried to hold still. "Don't! I like my hair!" She quickly forced a cheeky grin through the sting, because she suddenly did, now that someone else wanted to cut it and make her bald.
Oba ignored her, braiding the tangled mess into a rope, leaving a long fringe to cover her forehead, down past her nose. At last, she gave a grunt of approval as a fingertip tapped the center of the girl's brow. "There. At least that ugly thing is covered."
The girl froze. "Ugly thing? What ugly thing?" Her fingers flew to her brow beneath the bang and brushed a narrow, vertical ridge of skin that felt to the touch like a sealed slit.
What is this? A scar? A closed third eye?
She dropped her hand, unsettled. Weird. Definitely weird.But Oba had moved on, tugging the braid one last time before stepping back with her arms crossed. "Done. Now stand straight and try not to shame us when the Fujiwara Nanke arrive."
The girl plopped cross-legged, wrinkling the clean white yukata on purpose. She tilted her head, studying the older woman. "Oba, what year is it?" she asked, trying to sound casual and pasted a smile over it.
"What have you taken me for? One of those high divinators that sit beside the emperor? It's The Year of the Serpent, of course," Oba said, and she added a snort, as if this should have been extremely obvious, like: The sun rises in the east.
Year of the Serpent! The words slotted somewhere in the girl's confused mind: cycles, animals, counting time. Helpful if you knew which Year of the Serpent you were in, less helpful if you had misplaced the rest of your years. "And this is… where, exactly?" she tried again, because curiosity was cheaper than panic.
"Where? Where, if not in Izumo?" Oba said, tightening the knot at the girl's back because apparently it had loosened in the act of her general existing. "Hiikawa valley, remember? Where else would we be? The Imperial Palace?"
Oh! Izumo!
... She had no idea of where Izumo was.
The girl couldn't help it; she laughed, and it came out bright, surprising both of them. Oba's mouth tried not to be infected by it, but failed at the corners; then she scowled to cover it and pointed at the packed floor. "Now, up. Feet aligned and hands like this. Breathe like a person who is not about to faint."
The girl pulled herself up, trying to be taller out of spite and gaining nothing for the trouble; the white yukata at least hung well on her, the sash held, but the braid tugged at the back of her head in a way that made her stand straighter. If she was going to be the Miko of the Moon, she might as well start by pretending she knew what that meant at all. She cleared her throat. "So, Oba. What exactly does a Miko of the Moon do?"
Oba's sigh could have blown out the brazier. "What else? You and the other two will save us from annihilation."
The girl stared. "…Oh," she whispered. "I woke up memoryless, and apparently I'm supposed to save the world."
.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.
They shoved her outside before she had properly decided she wished to be outside at all; very rude of them. Then they planted her in the middle of the human lane, arranged her white sleeves, straightened her shoulders as if she were some offering, and then expected her to blossom into sanctity.
She did not blossom into anything because the cold slapped her in the face twice.
Village cold, wet cold; it slipped into the clean white robe they had dressed her in and gnawed at her still-bare feet, jumping off from the nearby mud walls all around them. The girl tried not to hunch because a miko of the moon, if that was truly what she was, probably did not shuffle around like a chicken.
The village opened around her in a cluster of low huts crouched against the wind. There was nothing romantic about it, nor picturesque, no matter what some court poet might scribble after centuries. The huts leaned, and the thatch sagged where snow and rain had pressed too much. Straw ropes had been tied under the eaves to keep the roofs from lifting, and bundles of reeds were drying under them. Above it all, smoke slipped out through some roof vents. There were fence posts leaning, and a cart that stood near one wall with one wheel sunk in the earth; two oxen, all ribs, were waiting beside it. The road itself was packed dirt, ruined with cart-ruts, hoof-prints, and sandal marks pressed in. Beside it ran a narrow irrigation channel, chattering busily to itself, and beyond the last line of huts lay the winter fields, cut close after the harvest. Farther still, the land dipped toward the river plain of Hiikawa, and beyond that, though the girl could not see it from here, there would probably be shrines, burial mounds, old kami, older grudges, and roads that led eventually east to the sea and west toward the biggest cities. She knew, without knowing how, that this village had probably bowed to one court after another, and all of them had managed to forget it at some point. She knew that men from the capital called places like this "remote," even as they took their rice and daughters. She also knew that the great houses in Yamato usually sent other people's children to die.
Around them, people had gathered. Whenever something important was about to happen, villagers always gathered to look and judge in groups. In fact, half the village seemed to have poured into the road, by the sound of it.
Men stood in short hitoe faded from black to a gray, with their sleeves tied back. Some wore sugegasa despite the clear morning, at angles that made sense. Women stood in wrapped kosode and patched aprons, with babies strapped on their backs or children tucked behind their robes; their hair was tied back with raw cord. Little children lurked at knee height with pink noses and blue toes, sniffling, sneezing, and staring. Many feet were bare, and the ones that were not wore straw sandals gone soft with use. The whole road, overall, smelled of both humans' and ox's piss.
Oba stood in front of the gathered group like a general, eyes stayed fixed on the girl—specifically on the girl, very specifically—waiting for the exact moment she decided to do something embarrassing so she could announce it to the world that she was not suited to be the Miko of the Moon.
Do not laugh, the girl told herself, because that was her first instinct when too many eyes were on her: a tiny, nervous bubble of a sound that got loose without permission. She pressed her lips together and widened her eyes instead, which worked for approximately one second.
"Heh," she said.
A terrible sound, in hindsight.
Oba's eyes narrowed by approximately two grains of rice, and the girl straightened and blanked her face again. Cold; hungry; stared at by approximately forty people with her toes freezing off one by one, and no memories, and a mysterious forehead situation.
But not alone.
To her right, someone hiccuped on a sob and then sobbed again. The girl turned her eyes that way without moving her head much, because she had already gathered that when adults said stand still they meant every joint.
Another girl stood there in white, slightly shorter than her, with brown hair cut around the chin and a round face, flushed pink from crying. Same white robes, same bare feet turning blue. Tears made little bright tracks over cheeks, and se looked miserable and ordinary: another child dragged out too early into the cold with an empty stomach.
Curiosity leapt before caution could get a hand on its collar, and the girl bent very slightly and whispered sideways, under the murmur of the crowd and hopefully beneath the range of Oba's hearing, though Oba struck her as the sort of woman who could hear a thought from three ri away. "Hey," the girl breathed. "Are you the Miko of the Sun or the Stars?"
More sobs. Then, through fresh tears from the brown-haired girl, came a sound that sounded like "I miss papa," which was not Sun or Stars and certainly wasn't, strictly speaking, an answer.
The girl's face softened despite herself. "All right," she whispered with a sympathetic frown. "Okay, that's… that's also important. But what are we doing standing here?"
"Stand straight and hold your mouth shut!" hissed Oba from somewhere behind the first line of villagers. "Eyes forward, moon-child."
Moon-child. Well, there were probably worse things to be called.
The girl shot upright so fast her braid bounced against her back, then fixed her eyes dutifully ahead while letting the rest of her curiosity wander around. The crying one kept trembling, and this, frankly, did not fill her with confidence. Why did she look like she'd been punished by the sky? Saving the world was a grim assignment, sure, but this seemed… a lot. If one was about to perform a great holy duty and one of the appointed participants was already leaking tears, perhaps the duty itself could be postponed?
Maybe the other girl would be more informative.
The girl glanced left; if someone had told her this one had been a statue someone forgot to bring inside, she would have believed it. The other white-clad girl stood in a chosen stillness, a complete inward withdrawal. Her hair was long and white like snow, falling behind her back in a thick braid. Her skin was pale too, though not with cold, more like she had simply never reached sunlight. Her eyes were fixed on a patch of earth before her toes with the attention of a person who had decided the rest of the world was none of her business.
The girl followed that gaze; it was ground. Very competent ground, no doubt, earth of commendable character, but still ground. She looked back at the white-haired child, but nothing. No blink, no twitch. Was she even breathing? Because she had apparently awakened in this body without the instincts required to survive, the girl bent a little; then more; then leaned all the way until her own face was into the other girl's line of sight like an intrusive moon.
"Ehy…Are you breathing?" she whispered. "Blink twice if you're alive."
Several long seconds passed, and the white-haired girl remained motionless. Out of stubbornness, the girl kept her own eyes wide open too, because losing a staring contest to a child who resembled a ghost seemed a poor way to begin a new life.
Then: blink-blink.
"Aha!" the girl burst, delighted beyond reason. A grin appeared on her face. "I knew it. So you are alive!"
The white-haired girl, startled, moved her eyes up a degree at a time until they met hers. Her eyes were pale violet, not pretty exactly, but striking.
The girl smiled reflexively. "Good. No, excellent! No, screw that, wonderful! Are you the Miko of the Sun or the Stars? Because she—" she tipped her head very slightly toward the sobbing girl on the other side, "—is currently identifying as Crying Miko, which is understandable but not helpful. Why are we standing here like three rice offerings awaiting blessing?"
The white-haired child said nothing, and for a moment she wondered whether the blink had exhausted her. Then the girl's expression changed so slightly, and her gaze drifted away again.
The smile on the girl's face wobbled a little. "Not talkative? All right. I can respect that. Don't worry, I can unfortunately talk enough for both of us, and if necessary for the one crying too—"
"…Stars," the white-haired girl said at last, flatly as a pebble not thrown hard enough to make a splash.
The girl brightened at once. "Stars! Good. Very good! Then she must be the Miko of the Sun!" She realized, at the exact same moment as the words left her mouth, that she had said the last part much too loudly, and her own lips snapped shut.
From somewhere in the crowd, Oba inhaled, and it sounded like a blade sliding out of its sheath. All three girls straightened at once, tugged upright by the same invisible fear. The girl winced and shot the Miko of the Stars a sideways grin, and the white-haired girl looked back at her with a tiny, exhausted frown; she raised a single finger to her lips. Universal: shh.
Ah. Yes.
The girl nodded at once, chastened, but before she could shh herself into further trouble, the murmuring in the crowd tilted suddenly. At first, it was a ripple passing through the gathered villagers from back to front. Heads turned, and bodies straightened. Suddenly, the crying Miko of the Sun gave a higher-pitched sob and tried to swallow the next one. At the far end of the lane, people were parting. Oba stepped forward to the front.
"They're coming!" said a boy too excited to whisper correctly.
"Who?"
"Them."
"From the Fujiwara Nanke," said a woman under her breath.
At the name, several others changed posture without even seeming to notice. "So it's the Kōmyō-ei."
Another voice gasped: "The Radiant Guard? Those dangerous monsters?"
"Look at the sleeves," someone muttered, not bothering to hide the awe. "Red and black."
"Oh! That must be him—shōshō Takamitsu, the Bright Spear! Smiles like a fool, fights as Amaterasu incarnated," another voice said, too thrilled to keep it contained. "I heard he cut down a saika in Harima last spring. A real saika, not just foxes stealing ducks!"
"That wasn't Harima, idiot, that was near Kibi."
"No, no, my cousin's wife's brother heard from a courier—"
"Your cousin's wife's brother hears from drunks!"
"Even so! They say he's the youngest shōshō the Radiant Guard ever named," an older man added. "They say the other seven shōshō and even the taishō himself—"
"—cannot keep up with him!" a girl squeaked, eyes shining.
"If he's here, then the woman with him is the shōshōKaneko, the Iron Blossom! They always work together, the Fujiwara Nanke's most dangerous pair of shōshō. She's the one who last spring broke the Fujiwara Hokke envoy's sword in half by accident."
"Shh! Do you want the Radiant Guard to hear you?"
Well. That was a lot of gossip for a first introduction. Her curiosity sprang awake so hard it nearly warmed her, and the girl rose on the inside of her feet without moving at all on the outside. She squinted shamelessly, but at first she could only make out two shapes against the fading winter light: black and red moving together down the road.
Fujiwara Nanke, they had said. Radiant Guard. Apparently, warriors, formidable ones, even enough to have other people announce them with big titles and all. Maybe they would know things, or who she was, or why she had woken up with a memory of decapitation. Maybe one of them would take one look at her forehead and say, Ah, yes, of course, third-eye scar, terribly common, that happens, don't worry. Maybe they would explain everything while handing her a bowl of hot rice to fill her stomach. The girl paused in her thought; that was, even to her, perhaps a sign that she should worry.
She worried.
At the mouth of the road, Oba stepped forward, bowed, and transformed. Her whole body changed from the old village custodian to deference so forced it made the girl gag in reflex. "Behold," she said, voice rich, "Fujiwara no Takamitsu, the Bright Spear, and Kaneko, the Iron Blossom. Honored guests. Izumo remembers the grace of the Radiant Guard in another Year of the Serpent. We are humbled to receive the Fujiwara Southern House's aid, that our valley might be spared annihilation once more."
Annihilation.
A few people bowed deeper, and a few sucked in breaths. Too smooth, that speech; it sounded memorized and repeated before.
Still, the pair advanced forward, and the man came first.
He carried a spear, a hoko yari, over one shoulder as casually as if it were a stick and not a weapon longer than he was tall. He laughed lightly while Oba was still bowing, and the sound drifted through the tension, warming the air like a ray of sunlight in full summer. "Yes, yes," he said easily as if it were expected. "Guarding Yamato's borders—Izumo, Hiikawa, all the rest of it—has been our charge for decades. No thanks needed where saika are concerned."
The villagers bent lower, and the girl bowed too, because bowing seemed the sort of thing that prevented one from being struck by an authority. Still, her ears remained wide open and disobedient, and just like that, she caught the ugly truth spoken in murmurs beneath the reverence.
"…Hmph. Fujiwara Nanke. Once, they ruled the clan. Now they're just watchdogs sent to placate the worst of the saika."
"Dogs, maybe, but better them than the Fujiwara Hokke's scholars! Do you think the Northern House would send one of their poets to wrestle a saika here?"
"Look at them, Spear and Shield. Even the Fujiwara Hokke mutter their names with envy!"
"The Hokke call them thugs."
"Then why do the Hokke send for them in secret every time a saika crawls too close to one of their fancy estates?"
"Better a sacrifice than a valley in ashes."
"Better our daughters than theirs."
Gasps, whispers, a muttered prayer. Also: a hissed "watchdogs," and, from someone older, "heartless monsters".
The girl listened, head bowed, and thought: Ah. So everyone is normal about this.
The woman from the Radiant Guard.glared at the hissers, then back at the three white-clad girls with a measuring interest, and briefly met her eyes. A ripple shivered in the air around the pair, like heat above a brazier's rim, a blue-black, strange, floaty thing. It skimmed the skin of the girl's arms and raised the fine hairs there. Power, the girl thought, and then frowned at herself because how did she know what that felt like? How did she know the feeling of people dangerous enough to alter the air simply by standing in it?
By then, the two from the Fujiwara Nanke were close enough to see properly, and—well. They were very much themselves.
Fujiwara no Takamitsu was smiling already. He looked to be in his late twenties, perhaps a little older, but he didn't show it. Tall and broad across the shoulders, carrying himself with a confidence that could win most arguments. Black hair tied back in a long ponytail with a rope-tassel ornament that swung when he moved, framing his face and his golden eyes. Handsome in that I know I'm handsome way; mildly entertained by it and unlikely ever to apologize. He wore a leather armor, black beneath a sleeveless crimson over-robe. The plates bore the mon of the Fujiwara. White trousers and dark boots with travel stains at the edges. The spear at his shoulder had sutrascarved down the shaft, and the blade seemed to catch the light in an unnatural way.
Beside him walked Kaneko. Shorter but still tall for a woman, younger, and built like a wall. Her black hair was cut blunt at the jaw, her black eyes perpetually narrowed, and she probably knew how to scold the man at her side. She wore a black leather armor over a crimson kosode with white under-layers. Actually, she was heavily armored down to her legs and ankles. A darker red ribbon at the collar was trailing along one side, and strapped across her back was a iron tessen, a war-fan, tall enough to shelter half her torso, with its ribs reinforced and its surface marked with the same Fujiwara mon; the kind of fan one could also use to swat a horse.
Takamitsu stopped ahead of Kaneko as she planted her hands on her hips. That settled it, somehow, entirely. If one of them handed her a grilled rice cake with a grin, it would be him. If one of them slapped her hand away when she reached for more, it would be her.
The Miko of the Sun beside her had begun trembling so hard her sleeves shivered. "Please, please, please," she whispered.
The girl glanced at her, confused. Takamitsu looked… not kind, exactly, too dangerous for that word to fit cleanly, but easy and bright, which probably meant he was deranged in battle. Another thing she knew without knowing.
...But she also didn't understand most of anything.
The girl looked back at him as he smiled at the gathered village, at Oba, at the three girls in white. Then, his gaze settled on them and lit up in the way an older brother might look at his younger sisters. His spear slipped down from his shoulder and rested easily in the crook of his elbow.
Meanwhile, Kaneko's gaze did the opposite; it skimmed over their hems, their hands, the set of their shoulders, their bare blue feet, the knuckles, the faces, the eyes, searching for flaws. She addressed Oba, as the iron-ribbed tip of her tessen touched the earth. "You are certain of the purity of the three?" she asked. "And this"—a small flick taking in the girls "—is all the sacred ground of Izumo could produce this year?"
Oba flinched, and the girl saw it. Then again, the girl was beginning to suspect she saw rather a lot of things she was not meant to.
"Two are orphans," Oba said, voice low and cautious. "The third was sold by her parents. All unsoiled and pure. All with..." A pause. She swallowed. "...with the gift of sight. Not the finest material, perhaps, but suitable."
Material. The girl stared, then felt a hot little spike of offense. Material? Oh, why stop there? By all means, discuss us like jars of rice. Perhaps tap our foreheads and discuss whether we would keep through the season. Her mouth moved before caution or survival instinct could get to it first. "Of course I have the gift of sight," she said brightly. "From here I can count the wrinkles on your face, Oba!"
Silence happened very suddenly. The villagers inhaled together in a communal seizure of breath, and Oba went the color of overboiled octopus, while Kaneko made a sound the girl recognized as the sound she probably made before bringing her giant tessen down on someone's skull.
Takamitsu blinked, baffled, then he threw his head back and laughed unguarded as if he had genuinely, sincerely, helplessly been delighted. The sound was warm enough to make the frost reconsider its presence on the grass. "Oh!" he said, grinning. "So this year has spirit!"
Before the girl could decide whether being called spirited was praise or the first part of an execution, Takamitsu dropped into a crouch in front of them, bringing himself level with her eyes. Then, with all the confidence, he reached out and thoroughly wrecked her hair in a big, rough, and affectionate pass of the hand that turned her neat-enough fringe back into an argument.
The girl jerked. "Hey—!"
He only chuckled again, as if this were already an established relationship. "Tell me, little sparrow," he said. "Sun, Stars, or Moon?"
The girl crossed her arms at once, lifted her chin, and did her best to radiate solemn ceremonial majesty instead of hunger and the growing suspicion that this man would absolutely teach children how to do unsafe things for fun. "The Moon," she declared proudly..Then, privately: Or so they told me. She still had no idea what being the Moon meant, except white robe and cold toes.
"Mm." Takamitsu's smile widened in satisfaction. "Moon. Good." Then, as if this were natural, he asked, "Do you have a name, moon-child?"
At that, her confidence faltered. The girl frowned down at the packed dirt and searched again in the emptiness of her mind, but nothing answered. If a name had once been there, someone had taken it away. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish.
Takamitsu watched her for no more than a breath, and somehow that was enough. "So be it," he said lightly. "Kuroe."
Kuroe. The name dropped into her chest and sat there. Black blessing? Black branch? Something like that. She did not know which meaning he meant, but the sound itself felt right and fitted strangely well, as if it had been circling above her head for a long time and had only resurfaced.
"Kuroe?" she repeated. And before she could stop it, a grin spilled across her face.
Yes. That tasted right.
Takamitsu ruffled her hair again in approval, and her chest did a small climb toward warmth before she could kick it back down. There was something about him that made an ache she could not name tug at her mind; he felt like the missing shape of something she had perhaps once had.
Behind him, Kaneko exhaled and spoke the sentence of a woman at the end of her professional rope attached to an idiot. "You are not truly naming those—"
"Ahhhh, don't be so serious, Neko," Takamitsu said, not even turning around, entirely the tone of a man who had said this many times and survived every previous attempt.
Kaneko's ears turned pink so quickly that Kuroe almost admired it, even as her tessen made a small, lethal angle. "Do not call me that," she muttered to the air in front of her.
Takamitsu ignored the warning by simply not hearing it. He pivoted to the hiccuping girl on Kuroe's right. "And you must be...?"
The little brown-haired girl hiccuped violently, sucked in a breath, and managed, between sobs, "Sob—Omi—I'm the Sun—" said the girl with heroic clarity between floods.
"Hn. A fine name," Takamitsu said at once, softening his face before the smile re-armed itself and moved to the white-haired girl. "Then you—"
"Stars," The white-haired girl did not even let him finish. She gave him the label in a flat monotone with efficiency.
Takamitsu studied her, and Kuroe, interest replacing amusement in small increments. "So? Do you have a name, Miko of the Stars?"
Silence. Then, a single blink after a long count, as if she had first considered whether the question truly deserved one at all.
"So be it," Takamitsu said cheerfully, as if this too had gone exactly as he wished. "Shirae." He straightened, feeling like he had done the world a small, efficient favor by naming two orphan girls without names.
Shirae.
White branch. White blessing. Kuroe did not know; she only knew that the name suited the girl in the terrible way just like Kuroe fitted her all the same.
Shirae's eyes lifted by the smallest degree, no expression, but for an instant, they fixed on Takamitsu's face. Then lowered again with no protest, which, from her, Kuroe suspected counted as full-throated acceptance by absence of protest.
"This is ridiculous," Kaneko muttered, fishing in her sleeve.
She produced three rectangular slips of paper, inscribed with ink. Kuroe's eyes lit at once; if she had to guess, and she did love to guess, talisman felt like the correct answer!
Kaneko stepped closer. "Do not move," she snapped.
Naturally, she did not wait for anyone to obey before acting; she slapped one talisman onto each of the girls' foreheads in brisk succession, with all the manner of a butcher.
Kuroe flinched and squeezed her eyes shut as she braced for pain, or burning, or her forehead splitting open, probably, some kami reaching down through the sky to change her personality. Instead, there came only a fizz, a whisper of heat, and a tickle; then, the talisman dissolved into a blue-black flare that powdered down the bridge of her nose in ash. Kuroe sneezed immediately, not from necessity but on principle. Beside her, Omi squeaked as her charm also flared and vanished. On the other side, Shirae raised one hand and rubbed her brow once, which, judging by her previous standards, counted as a full emotional outburst.
"Oh!" Takamitsu's grin widened. "So all three truly have the sight."
Behind them, Oba gave a deep, satisfied snort that felt more like one of the oxen, and Kuroe tried not to look smug. This was made slightly more difficult by the fact that she did, in fact, feel smug; not for Oba, for herself. Which was fairer?."Sight?" Her curiosity sprang up again, and she tilted her head at Takamitsu. "Sight for what?"
"Sight," he repeated, as if that explained anything literally.
Kuroe stared at him; he stared back, apparently at peace with this being an answer. Then, perhaps realizing he was speaking to children and Kuroe in particular looked prepared to climb him like a tree until she got a better explanation out of him, he gave in with a flourish of a man who never does anything less than two-thirds dramatic. He rolled the spear in one palm, as the blade lifted toward the winter sky and the sutras along the shaft seemed—there was no better word for it!—to drink in light. A beat later, a black-blue flame-like manifestation. It jittered along the metal in hungry tongues, blue at the edges, black at the core.
The villagers stared blankly as if they saw nothing at all except a dramatic Takamitsu pointing his spear at the sky.
On the other hand, Kuroe's mouth fell open. There it was, the flutter at the edges of the pair, the pressure in the air; she could see it now, clinging to the blade!
Beside her, Shirae's shoulders tightened by one grain of rice, and Omi made a distressed sound and looked on the verge of restarting the entire crying process from the beginning.
Kuroe's eyes went enormous. "That!" she pointed. "That's the weird floaty thing!"
Takamitsu looked delighted all over again. "Cursed energy," he corrected. For the first time since he had arrived, the lightness dropped out of his voice. He turned the spear again, and the black-blue fire snuffed at once. "You can see what ordinary eyes cannot. It is no small thing."
"Cursed energy," Kuroe tested softly. The phrase made immediate, outrageous sense inside her mind, which made no sense at all. Of course, it is cursed energy, some part of her thoughts informed her, as if that had been obvious all along. It had not; not to her. Still, now that she had the words, the term slid into place, and she lifted a hand without thinking. "How do you do that? Can I learn to do that?" she asked. "The cursed-energy-blade thing?"
Takamitsu hesitated, and the brightness in his expression dimmed. "Oh, Kuroe," he said, and the oh belonged to a much older man, made when a child had asked for something beautiful and impossible in the same breath. "You three, as miko—" He stopped, turned the word in his mouth, and Kuroe saw the tiny resistance. "—are meant for something grander."
Oh. Right. The saving-the-world assignment.
Kuroe had been very carefully not thinking about it for at least several minutes. She rocked back on her heels, then forward again, like a little boat in a current.
Takamitsu crouched once more as if lowering himself before frightened children was a thing he did all the time and had feelings about every time. He put one hand on Shirae's shoulder and one on Omi's, then looked straight at Kuroe as if triangulating them into a single powerful point. He tugged, gently but inexorably, until they leaned toward one another, a group embrace in theory, a polite collision in fact. Omi stumbled inward, and her damp cheek pressed into Kuroe's right, while Shirae's cool temple pressed into her left. Kuroe, caught in the middle of this highly suspicious affection, made an offended hnn because resistance seemed futile with Takamitsu.
"For the short road we walk together," Takamitsu said with a smile that was trying so hard to be bright but had already become suspicious, "you may call me Taka-niichan!"
As if on cue, the tessen hit his skull with a resonant bonklike a temple bell. "Stop!" Kaneko snapped, the tessen still balanced against his head. "I told you not to attach yourself, and now you hand out names and invite them to call you—" she bit off the syllables "—niichan?"
Takamitsu looked up from his crouch with a pout so shameless it should not have fit on a man built like a gate pillar.
Kaneko's cheeks flushed hotter, but she said, quieter and far worse: "You cannot afford to go soft with the sacrifices."
Sacrifices.
Sacrifices.
Sacrifices.
Sacrifices.
Sacrifices.
Sacrifices.
Sacrifices.
Kuroe felt her smile stop, then crack; the villagers stopped being a murmur and became a held note; Oba looked away very deliberately as if the horizon had suddenly grown interesting.
"…Sacrifices?" Kuroe said, feeling a nervous twitch at the corner of her mouth.
She turned, very slowly, to Omi; of course Omi was crying like someone had told her the sun would not come up tomorrow. That made a terrible kind of sense now. She turned to Shirae, and Shirae met her gaze, tilted her head the tiniest fraction. Her expression did not change, but somehow the silence itself spoke: What did you think the white was for?
Kuroe looked back at Takamitsu. His bright smile had lowered into a sadder one, the kind of face adults put on when they must be kind about a terrible thing. He rose to his feet and looked at each of them in turn, steady and—curse him—gently: Omi, weeping openly; Shirae, still and pale and already half into the afterlife; Kuroe, staring at him as if the world had just shifted under her feet and she was deciding whether to bite it back.
"Miko of Moon, Sun, and Stars," he said in a formal cadence that did not fit him. "As I told you, you are meant for something greater. Through your sacrifice, this land will be once again saved from drowning and annihilation. Through your offering, the cursed calamity, the saika Yamata no Orochi, will be quieted for another twelve-year cycle."
… Well. That was not hot rice and an answer.
Kuroe swallowed, and her new name suddenly felt very small. The morning seemed to tilt as her feet remembered the cold, and her empty stomach remembered itself; the narrow scar hidden under her fringe prickled, suddenly awake as if some buried part of her had heard the cursed calamity's name and disliked it. She didn't dare touch it now. Somewhere behind her, a crow laughed the way crows do when humans do something doomed.
Right, she thought, with dry clarity. Not save the world. Get offered to it.