by Zoe Marriott
I felt drained. Hollow and empty once more, but in an entirely different way. It was oddly pleasant, as if this new emptiness offered some kind of clarity or space, which I had never known before. An empty bowl will ring with a clear, bright musical note, as long as there are no cracks in it. I had turned out my bowlful of old sorrow and misplaced guilt, and found that I still rang true.
But I was tired as well. Last night we had buried poor doomed little Kimi, and this morning I had thought Itsuki a betrayer and a monster and fled from him. Now all the truth was out, and our tears had been shed, and we were friends again. And still my work was not over.
For all that events seemed to be flowing together with impossible, chaotic speed, there was more to be done before this day was through. The task I had come to the Dark Wood to accomplish still lay before me: I needed to save my father.
He was my father, and I loved him. No more than I could have let Itsuki sink beneath the surface of that pool, even when I believed him to be my enemy, could I leave my own father to die of thirst and starvation under the power of the Dark Wood.
The way seemed clear, though the thought of it sent a chill through my veins. Kaede had been wrong. Even if Itsuki could be killed, and even if I was willing to kill him – which I was most emphatically not – the power which held my father in that poisoned sleep was not his. It was the Yuki-Onna’s. Oyuki’s. To save Father, I must confront her.
To be sure, I had always known that to get out of the maze, she and I must meet. But now I understood what she had been through, what she had become, and what she was capable of – and I understood that what I planned to do was horribly dangerous. For I would not approach her simply to ask for my release. I had to get her to spare my father’s life, too. She, who had been cast out to die by her own father…
“I don’t know, for sure, if my father still lives,” I told Itsuki, my voice croaky and rough. “Or if the Yuki-Onna can be reasoned with, or persuaded … I only know that I must try. Will you take me to her?”
“Now?” he asked.
“There isn’t much time.”
He hesitated. “You will need warmer clothes.”
He climbed – almost lumbered – to his feet, and helped me to mine, and shortly we were back where our friendship had begun, in the tower-tree, in the garden of knots. I looked around me with an odd sort of homesickness, for I could not face quite yet the knowledge that one way or another my peaceful idyll here was over, and that this might be my last chance to see Itsuki’s garden for a long time to come.
Itsuki layered thick furs over my shoulders, and gave me knitted mittens and a fur cap that covered my ears. Waddling somewhat, and feeling rather like a barrel, I went across to peek in on the mother wildcat in her nest in the corner – and was shocked to see her and the two little ones gone.
Itsuki joined me, and sighed. “They’ll be all right. The creatures I try to help – when they’re better again, they always eventually leave and go back to their old lives. It’s the way of things.”
I caught the edge of his cloak as he went to turn away. “Itsuki, if I survive this—”
“You will return to your home and family.” The words were utterly neutral. There was no hint of bitterness or regret or even sorrow in his tone, and I hesitated, unsure what to make of it. Was he so eager to be alone again? That didn’t seem like Itsuki.
“Yes,” I told him. “I must go home. But that doesn’t mean I can’t come back.”
“You’re a kind person, Hana-san.” He grasped my mittened fingers, and carefully detached them from his cloak. “One task at a time. Your father is the most important thing now.”
He headed for the doorway, and I stared after him for a split second, feeling … rebuffed. I shook myself and hurried forwards before he could notice my hesitation. We were about to seek out a vengeful snow maiden, who might smite me where I stood for my impudence in even approaching her, and attempt to bargain for my father’s very life. Perhaps Itsuki was right.
One thing at a time.
Sixteen
As we left the garden of knots, Itsuki turned right, then right again, and right twice more – and although the rapid turns bewildered me and should, I thought, have only led us in a circle, it was clear almost at once that I was now in a new part of the maze. The hedges were taller, and denser, and their wicked thorns were as long as Itsuki’s fingers.
All too soon, a thick coat of frost silvered the sharp black thorns. Frost turned to ice, and the ice formed giant, bristling spikes, some of which were big enough to pierce a man right through. I was grateful that Itsuki had insisted I wrap my feet up in layers of fur and leather before we reached this icy place, for the ground was thick with snow and hard as iron.
I tucked my mouth and the tip of my nose into the ruff of grey fur around my neck and hid my hands in my armpits. Tiny specks of ice formed on my lashes and eyebrows, and though we were walking at a brisk pace, I couldn’t control the occasional shiver. Without a word, Itsuki wrapped his arm around my shoulder, sharing his own blazing warmth.
The dark maze that I had grown accustomed to – even if only partly – had become a landscape of sheer white by the time we came to the end of the thorns, to the very centre of the maze. It didn’t seem to take very long at all. In his hundred years trapped here, Itsuki had learned its ways well.
I blinked, sending a miniature flurry of snowflakes dancing in my vision.
It was a wide, kidney-shaped lake, surrounded by the white-frosted cones of dark pine trees. The water was an unbroken sheet of ice, and at one end a great waterfall, which must once have been the lake’s source, had frozen in mid-flow, ice forming into fantastic curls and bulges that seemed to glow from within with a ghostly blue light.
The frozen lake held an island. It was a long way from us, where we stood at the water’s edge, but I could see that it was white too, and glinted and gleamed in the sun.
“That is the heart of this place. I call it the Moon maze,” Itsuki told me, pointing to the island, his voice carefully devoid of emotion. “The Yuki-Onna’s home.”
“Oyuki’s home,” I murmured.
Itsuki grasped me firmly by my arm and turned me to face him. Only his chin and his mouth were visible under the hood, but they were set sternly, and his voice was almost harsh when he said, “You must never call her that. She doesn’t like it.”
Fighting a shiver that was nothing to do with the temperature this time, I nodded firmly. “Are we to walk on the ice?”
“No. We wait. She knows we’re here. She always knows. If she’s inclined to meet us, she will send us a way.”
“What if she’s not? The Moon will be dark again soon!”
“I am well aware of that,” he said, and though his voice was not reproachful, I fell silent, chastened. “You cannot force her to do anything she doesn’t wish to do, Hana-san. If she doesn’t want to see us, we will come back first thing tomorrow and hope for better fortune then. Believe me, we do not want to set foot on that lake without her permission.”
I sighed – a curling plume of white dissolved into the air – and nodded again. This was no occasion for impatience and temper. Reaching deep into myself, I tried to find a sense of stillness, my hunter’s patience. It came with surprising ease, slowing my breaths and my heartbeat, and I remembered thinking, days and days ago now, that simply being around Itsuki had taught me more patience than I had ever known before.
“Forgive me,” I said, nudging him remorsefully with my shoulder.
He put his arm around me again and drew me back to his side. “There is nothing to forgive.”
At length, there was a noise from the lake that drew both our attention – a cracking sound, as if of ice splintering. And indeed, a moment later a great split opened in that sheet of frosted white, practically at our feet. The crack widened and arrowed away from us to create a straight path in the ice. The water beneath it was dull black, like tar.
Far ahead, a tiny piece of the gleaming white is
land seemed to break away. The fragment glided slowly towards us, traversing the black path of water as smoothly and steadily as if some unseen creature in the lake’s depths towed it in our direction. When it arrived at our feet, it was seen to be a boat. A narrow little boat of ice, shaped like a rice seed, with no sail, and room enough for two to sit inside. Both the prow and stern curved upwards into graceful, flowing figureheads of ice, taller than the top of my head. The one that faced us was in the shape of a ferocious white cat, snarling. Its body was poised in mid-leap. The eyes were lumps of green ice, and its fangs were icicles. It was very clear to me whom it was meant to represent.
Itsuki looked away from it as he helped me to climb into the boat. I had little experience of such craft, but it struck me as strange that it didn’t rock or shift at all, despite the addition of my weight, and then Itsuki’s as he climbed in after me. As I sat down, I examined the other figurehead in silence. It was a peacock, the long white tail swept out behind it, like the dragging train of the heavy Uchikake robe that brides in my family had passed down for five generations.
Was this the Yuki-Onna’s personal symbol? Did it represent her power, her all-seeing eye within the maze? Or her resentment over the striking beauty that had doomed her in life?
Itsuki sat down opposite me. I caught a glimpse of his venom-green eyes, shadowed by the hood, and they seemed wide and anxious. I nodded at him with all the reassurance I was capable of. In the next moment, the boat lurched a little, and a thump echoed through the hull. Then it began to move. Away from the shore of the lake. Towards the island.
I stared down worriedly between my feet, at the bottom of the boat, hoping that the delicate-looking ice was thick enough not to dissolve. I didn’t like the look of that lake water. But under the smooth ice that seemed to be the boat’s main material I saw the fine swirling grain of some pale wood. And there was no tell-tale sloshing of water. It seemed the Yuki-Onna didn’t intend to try to drown us twice in one day.
Not yet, at any rate.
“Do you have any advice before we … arrive?” I asked softly, not sure if she could already hear us.
He only shook his head. In his lap, his hands curled and uncurled, curled and uncurled. I wanted to reach out and put mine over them, but he had brushed my touch away last time – and he seemed so far away from me, even though our toes were bumping together in the bottom of the boat.
I shouldn’t have brought him. I should have found my own way here, I thought. This was too much to ask. I’m sorry, Itsuki.
It was too late for apologies now. With a shrill scrape, the boat arrived at its destination. The island was bordered by a narrow crescent of pale fine sand – perhaps the same sand that edged the turf in the thorn maze and the garden of knots. Still attached to its invisible tether, the boat drew itself up onto that sand and clear out of the water. As it halted, it tipped gently, as if to invite us to step over its shallow side onto dry land.
Itsuki seemed frozen in place. Even his hands had stilled their restless motions. Pity and guilt stabbed at me again. Though I did not want to do it – though I doubted whether I could so much as climb out of the boat without help in all these bulky layers, let alone face the architect of this place and emerge in one piece – I leaned in until I knew I had his attention and said: “This is as far as you need come. I can do the rest alone. Please wait here for me.”
I thought at first that his silence was agreement. Then he made a little low huff of laughter. “I am not afraid of facing her, Hana-san. I may be a coward, but not such a coward as that.”
“I don’t doubt your courage. It hurts you to see her,” I said gently. “There is no need.”
Annoyed with my own hesitancy, I tugged off one of my mittens and laid my hand over the back of his, where it rested on his wide, distorted knee-joint. But as soon as my hand made contact with his skin – blazing warm still, in this cold place – the thought flashed through my mind: he used this hand to tear Kyo apart and eat him. I went still.
Itsuki shook his head and shook off my touch in the same moment, standing abruptly. And I was glad, for I was not sure if I had been about to recoil from him.
It isn’t his fault. But it is still true.
Hurriedly, I shoved my fingers back into the knitted glove.
“I am selfish,” he said lowly. “No matter how much time has passed, no matter how I have tried to be better, I am still as selfish as I ever was.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, distressed for him even in the middle of my own distress.
He had already clambered over the side of the boat and was reaching back to lift me out. The tormented, beastly shape of Itsuki’s body might pain him, but it didn’t seem to have impaired his strength one bit. “We should move on. She’ll be impatient otherwise, and we don’t want her to feel slighted.”
Unable to argue the sense of this, I found my balance and turned away from him to look at the Yuki-Onna’s home closely for the first time.
The Moon maze, Itsuki had called it. The towering construction was a cross between a forbidding fortress and the glittering diamond crown from a children’s fairy tale. It shone. It glowed. And yet, the closer we came to it, the more I felt wrongness radiating from its walls, as tangible to my senses as the waves of cold that caused the air around it to ripple and waver.
My eyes traced the shapes in the diamond-bright walls with a mixture of revulsion and fascination. They were woven of twisted fragments of every cold white thing imaginable, from bleached white branches to shining ivory, to brittle bones, to translucent horn and jagged quartz. And ice. Everywhere, coating everything, the ice. The same intricate curling patterns that had been worked into the grass in Itsuki’s garden home made up the very fabric of the Moon maze – carved into its quartz, braided into its branches, cut into its bone. These markings had never bothered me when I walked over them, had never seemed more than a pretty repeating pattern designed to please the eye. But now that I saw them writ large upon such a canvas, I felt as if every knot and tendril were looking back at me, and more, that they were moving, shifting in the corners of my vision, snaking and changing where I could not watch.
Itsuki caught me as I stumbled, and steadied me. “Better to keep your eyes on your feet if you can,” he advised. “I’ve grown used to it, over the years – I forgot.”
I stared down and found, thankfully, that my head stopped swimming almost at once when it was no longer required to make sense of such an unnatural thing. “Are we close to the way in yet?” I asked, trying not to sound too plaintive.
“The way in is wherever—” He hushed and went tense.
I wrenched my eyes up off the ground to see what was coming.
Directly before us, the white wall of the maze was changing. The twisting rigid fibres were indeed moving now, silently and inexorably, curling back on themselves as if they were alive, and not solid dead wood and ivory and stone. As the fabric of the wall dilated, a white circle of bone, many feet higher than our heads – a Moon gate – pushed forwards into the gap, and the same fibres which had shifted to make way for it now twisted around it to hold it in place.
Beyond the gate of bone, in the newly revealed blue-white shadows of the maze, something moved.
Itsuki seemed to become even stiffer, like a tree in truth – save for his hand that suddenly latched onto the back of my fur cloak. “She has sent an escort for us.”
It was a – a thing. I wanted to label it “creature”, but how could I? It was no animal, not even a monster – not a living thing at all – just a collection of rattling bones and branches held together with sinews of frost. The stiffly moving bone and branch limbs supported a torso that was nothing more than an irregular, twisted block of ice lit from within by a cold glow and wreathed in ropes of dead white matter. A dark, spreading shape, like a spill of blood, huddled at the centre of the body, misted by the ice so that its true form could not be discerned – and the sight of it filled me with visceral quaking revulsion, though I c
ould not have guessed what it was, nor why it made me feel that way. The thing’s head was a dense tangle of dry pale sticks, resting directly on the body with no neck to support it. All told, it was at least seven feet tall, towering over even Itsuki.
It stepped out of the gate and walked towards us with mechanical clumsiness, and it was not until it had come near enough for me to reach out and touch one of its spindly limbs if I wished that I saw the most dreadful part of all.
Among the dry dead branches of the head, there was a face.
A human face.
The skin was pallid blue-grey, like clay dug up from the riverbed, and the mouth gaped vacantly, and – oh no, no, dear Moon—
I twisted sideways violently, stumbling and going down on one knee in my desire to hide from those blank frost-dulled eyes.
“Hana-san?” Itsuki’s hands encompassed my shoulders, and I realized he was crouching beside me, as if to shelter me from the sight of the … the thing. I was trembling so badly, fighting so hard not to simply crumple up and cry that he was actually having to hold me upright.
“What. Is. That?” I demanded, my voice thick and slurring with unshed tears.
“It is one of the Yuki-Onna’s servants,” he said tentatively. “I know it’s … horrible to look at, but it is only one of her creations, a magic thing. It doesn’t suffer. She has many of them. Dozens. Some of them are part of the walls of the maze, to guard it, others patrol the island, others— Hana, what is wrong?” he asked urgently as my gut heaved, and I slapped a hand over my mouth.
“It is not a creation. It is a person. Or was. There is a woman inside that thing. I knew her. I knew her when she was alive. She was called Hyouta-san. She was taken from my village seven summers ago.”
She had been a friend of my mother’s, and a kind of honorary aunt to Kyo and me. Plump and cheerful, filled with matter-of-fact kindness and good sense, she had once given me a little red silk fan that had belonged to her as a girl, since she had no daughter to pass it onto. I thought the fan was still tucked into a dusty box of my childhood treasures somewhere – long forgotten. But I had not forgotten how her youngest boy had cried in his father’s arms the morning they had discovered her gone.