by Anna Frost
Yuki hurried on. His destination was in sight. There were no holding cells in the clan house so the demon-possessed woman had been wrist-tied to a post in the garden. There was but one guard standing by, presumably the man called Tate.
Tate watched him approach with narrowed eyes. “Who are you?”
“I was told to come help. I’m Akakiba’s friend.” The dragon in his hair reared up with a warning hiss.
Upon seeing the dragon, Tate relaxed. “Oh, it’s you. You witnessed Sanae’s ceremony, didn’t you? I remember now.”
“Is everything alright here?” He cast a cautious look around as he spoke, aware trouble could creep up on them at any moment.
Thick bushes, huge rocks, and tall trees ensured the area was secluded, out of sight from any building and far enough from the defense wall to avoid falling shinobi. Small rocks had been used to delimit a pond too shallow for fish—the so-called Mirror Pond—and the possessed woman sat beside it.
“She hasn’t made any trouble.” Tate slumped down on a conveniently sized rock. “Ahh, everybody is out there fighting, and I’m sitting here uselessly.”
“Every job is important.” He gazed round for a suitable seat. His muscles needed a moment’s rest. He finally settled near the pond with the woman. She glanced his way, then quickly averted her eyes. Her back was rigid, her hands knotted together.
“Don’t be afraid,” Yuki said, feeling uncomfortable. “I won’t hurt you.”
“The foxes will.” She huddled on herself, wrapping her arms around her knees like a child. “I wish the shinobi would kill them all.”
A low hiss came from his hair. He reached up to remove the dragon, which, as Akakiba had predicted, had already grown heavy enough to give him neck pain. “Yes, I know,” he told the creature. “You don’t like demons. Go for a swim.” The little one eagerly slid into the pond’s cool water.
“I hate dragons,” the woman said. “They hate us, but why? We don’t go out of our way to attack them.”
Yuki started to reply, then thought better of mentioning that the first demon he had slain on his own had definitely gone out of its way to harass a dragon. Instead he offered, “Foxes aren’t without their own natural enemies. Dogs hate them with a passion. Instincts are powerful. Humans are still slaves to them at times. They make it hard for us to overcome fear of the unusual. I remember once…”
He searched his memory for the shreds of information he needed and marveled that they seemed to come from so long ago. Back when he had heard this story, his father had been alive. “There was a strange child born in a nearby village. Her hair and skin were white as snow, and her eyes had a red tint to them. The villagers didn’t know whether they should worship or fear her so they avoided her. She lived such a lonely life that one day she went into the river and didn’t come out again. The villagers should have been able to see she was a normal person inside, but their instinctive fear of her strangeness interfered.”
The possessed woman turned sideways and observed him without meeting his eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”
“If we tried harder, maybe humans could see there’s a person inside a demon too.”
No emotion registered on the woman’s face. It was a while before she answered, “We’re dying. The way we’ve found to save ourselves is one that humans won’t forgive. A few will hide successfully. The others will die.”
“You said this woman you’re inside was willing. Why can’t you take those like her?”
“She was willing, because she was desperate. There are far more desperate demons than desperate humans. We have no choice but to be enemies.”
Yuki looked up at the darkening sky, wondering how long the battle would last. The walls were quieter now. Was that a good sign? “It wasn’t a question of survival before. Why was there never peace?”
“Why?” She seemed surprised by the question, insofar as he could interpret such a stiff face. “There was never a need. Only fools attacked humans and attracted the hunters’ attention upon them. The rest of us were unconcerned. Also…we changed. Those of us who settled into human bodies, we changed.” She met his gaze and held it. “I can have this conversation with you now, because I understand how humans communicate. We had to learn how to thrive in these bodies, how to keep them safe. Before, I couldn’t have understood you.”
“I see. So we’re a first, you and I. In that case…” He gave her a quick bow. “I’m Yuki. Pleased to meet you.”
The woman returned her gaze to the pond. The formerly placid surface was now disturbed by one tiny dragon’s antics. Her bound hands twitched in her lap. “Don’t. We’re not friends.”
Yuki tried, but she would say no more.
“What did you expect from a demon, anyway?” Tate said. “Step away from her. It makes me nervous that you sit so close.”
A cry went up. A shinobi was descending into the garden with the help of a grappling hook. A female archer was trying to take him down from afar, but his swinging trajectory made it impossible, and the arrows bounced harmlessly off the stone. The shinobi disappeared from view behind the garden’s greenery.
Tate’s eyes shone. “That one is mine! You watch the woman!” He took off, charging through the bushes with an arm raised to protect his face.
“Ah, wait!” Yuki took a few steps forward, his hand raised toward Tate’s disappearing back, then stopped. The bushes were so high and thick that he couldn’t see what passed on the other side. What if Tate were killed and the shinobi came after him next? He couldn’t hear any fighting, which made him fidget in worry. Shinobi were known for killing unheard and unseen.
He called out tentatively. “Tate? Hey, Tate? Are you okay?”
He heard a rustle and whirled around, but there was no darkness-clad shinobi trying to kill him. There was, however, a pale kosode disappearing behind a large rock. The pole and rope stood alone, their prisoner gone.
“Hey, wait!” he ran after the demon-possessed woman. She zigzagged like a panicked rabbit, trying to lose him in the gardens or by entering buildings. He was younger and healthier, and she couldn’t outpace him unless he let her. He couldn’t do that for fear a fox would catch her if he didn’t.
Cornering her in an empty room, he held out a hand. “I won’t hurt you. Come with me. Please.”
She sounded calm, even if her breathing was ragged. “Perhaps you mean it. But your friends will kill me, sooner or later. We want to live, both of us.” She punched through the thin rice-paper wall and escaped into the next room. He chased her back into the gardens, irritated by the large spaces as he ducked around rocks, ponds, and trees.
They had gotten turned around somehow, and they were back where they had started, near the empty pond. By then the archers had noticed the commotion, and the nearest one was taking aim at the fleeing woman.
“Don’t!”
The arrow took the possessed woman in the shoulder. She collapsed in the pond with a strangled sound, her body arching in agony and her hands grasping for the shaft. A red flower bloomed in the water.
He splashed in. “Don’t yank on it! It’ll be worse.” He knelt and took her hands away from the arrow. “Here, here. Let me see.”
“It hurts. It hurts.” She breathed in gasps, her eyes wild. Her voice suddenly changed, filling with emotion as she pleaded, “I don’t want to die. Don’t go, don’t go. No!”
He didn’t know to whom she spoke until he saw blackness ooze out of her mouth and into the water, where the young dragon set upon it with much hissing and acid-spitting. The demon was fleeing its dying host, but why? Hadn’t it said it would die if it left? It hadn’t been lying; within seconds it had disappeared, as if diluted.
The entire pond lit up, shining a pure white that hurt the eyes. He raised an arm in protection, squinting against the light. A shape stepped out of the pond, a female wearing clothes with sleeves that nearly reached the ground. She held a long sword in her right hand. The light dimmed in the pond as the figure left it. She was m
ade of water, her features recognizable as human but much too smooth to be real. She had the look of a statue, perfect and beautiful, and her hair was so long that it brushed the ground.
Tate, who had somehow returned without Yuki noticing, fell to his knees before the apparition and prostrated himself. “My lady!”
The water lady turned her head toward the front gates. From here, the sound of battle was faint, distant. The spirit gazed away for a moment, perhaps thoughtful, perhaps seeing farther than physical bodies could. Then, she exploded. Thousands of water droplets flew outwards, and she was gone.
Tate rose from the ground with a wide, foolish-looking grin plastered across his face. “I can’t believe it! She woke!”
Yuki stared at where the apparition had stood. “Are you saying that’s the spirit who likes to take the likeness of the founding lady?” Did it mean that the stories Sanae had told him were real? There had truly been a special half-fox woman who had spawned an entire clan?
“Yes! We weren’t certain she was still alive. I can’t miss this!” Tate took off as fast as his feet could carry him, which was much faster than a mere human could possibly go.
A soft moan returned Yuki’s attention to the woman he held. The shoulder wound shouldn’t have been fatal, as the Fox clan didn’t poison their arrows, yet she was beginning to shake. There was no sign of consciousness in her open, unseeing eyes. When she stopped breathing, he pulled her limp body out and laid her on the ground, trying to arrange her waterlogged clothes in a dignified manner.
“I’m sorry.”
He looked toward the front gate, as the water lady had done, and hurried away. If the Mirror Pond spirit felt it necessary to appear after decades of quiet, the situation was bad. Akakiba would surely be in the thick of the battle.
An unhappy dragon hissed, causing him to backtrack hastily. “Sorry, sorry!” Dragon in hand, he ran.
Chapter Eighteen
Akakiba
AKAKIBA HEARD THE CROWD’S COLLECTIVE GASP. He had to turn cautiously to avoid giving a shinobi the chance to stab him in the back. Thankfully they seemed to have run out of throwing stars and daggers.
There was a water spirit on the battlefield, its nature obvious as it was of a gleaming, translucent blue and lacked the detailed features of a physical creature. Its likeness was that of a woman in long flowing clothes with a katana in her hand, tip pointed toward the ground. As she advanced, the crowd parted for her.
“What’s that?” Jien asked. True to his clingy nature, he hadn’t taken long to locate Akakiba, who, in turn, had located his sister.
“The lady’s look-alike spirit,” Sanae said, repeating the awed whisper that spread through the crowd.
“She’s a bit late,” Jien noted. “We’re crushing them.”
That much was true. The shinobi were on the edge of breaking, seemingly holding for no other reason than to give their wounded time to get out of the way. Poison wasn’t enough to give the shinobi the edge they needed to fight on equal footing with angry fox samurai.
The spirit stopped at the gate, standing over the crumpled form of a fox who had taken such deep and terrible wounds that Maru hadn’t wasted the time to attend to him. Akakiba had thought the fox dead and had previously been careful not to look too closely at the bloody form for fear of recognizing his father. Now the fox stirred, perhaps sensing the spirit’s eyes upon him.
As if reaching a decision, the spirit raised its sword until the tip pointed at the sky. It stood motionless as it began to glow, brighter and brighter, until everybody had to shield their eyes and avert their faces. Squinting against the pain, Akakiba attempted to watch.
At the height of its brightness, the water spirit…exploded. Water droplets flew in all directions, splattering on every surface, person, and fox. Shinobi began to scream or whimper as the droplets burned their exposed skin, leaving ugly red marks. An especially unlucky human, who must have been too stunned to think of widening the distance between himself and the spirit, clawed at his eyes and howled.
Akakiba touched the droplet that had reached his cheek: it was warm and harmless. No, harmless was the wrong word. Hadn’t there been a cut on his face? His fingers quested for the wound without finding one.
Sanae gripped his forearm. “Brother, look!”
The fox who had seconds earlier been at death’s door, with entrails peeking out of a gash in its belly, was rising on shaky legs. Its fur was matted and bloody, but there was no other sign of its former injuries.
Other members of the Fox clan who had collapsed to the ground or were struggling against the effects of poison straightened, calling out with un-fox-like enthusiasm that they were healed.
“The lady’s grace!”
“The lady blessed us!”
It was too much for the enemy: the shinobi broke and ran, fading into the forest.
An order came like a whiplash in his head, the mental voice recognizable as Kiba’s. “After them! Let none escape! Bring prisoners!”
Permission was implicit. Springing into pursuit, many changed their shape when they reached the cover of trees to go onward as fast-footed foxes. They were, after all, predators. The hunt was on.
Shinobi were notoriously difficult to capture alive. They kept poison capsules in their mouth and would bite down if they thought themselves trapped. The wounded ones left on the ground were dead already from their wounds, their own poison capsule, or a comrade’s questionable mercy.
Sanae bounded off. Akakiba made as if to follow, but he had no energy left for a chase. “Cursed red-haired child,” he muttered as her stunningly bright fox-form disappeared in the forest.
“Let her have fun while she can,” Jien said. “Nobody’s going to be happy once the fallen are counted.”
He shuddered. He didn’t want to know who was dead, as if he could deny reality with ignorance. What if…“I should find Yuki,” he said abruptly.
“Yuki’s fine.”
“How would you know?”
Jien pointed. Across the courtyard, on what had earlier been the edge of the battle, a mixed group of women and children was organizing itself. Yuki appeared to have been drafted to help; he was holding a bucket and nodding along to some instructions. He looked slightly damp but otherwise in mint condition.
Those who mattered to him were all alive and accounted for. The fear in his heart, when it left, took the rest of his energy with it. He hurt, and he ached. He was tired and hungry, but there could be no rest yet.
“Help me,” Jien said. He was prodding unmoving bodies with the butt of his spear, seeking to identify any who may still be breathing. Akakiba joined in, and they slowly made their way back across the courtyard, poking and probing.
“This one’s alive!”
There was a young shinobi on the ground, unconscious and bleeding but alive.
Akakiba thrust his fingers into the boy’s mouth and removed the poison capsule. “Get Maru. We need this boy to survive long enough to speak.”
Jien rubbed his face, smearing blood that came from a minor scalp wound. The spirit’s water hadn’t affected him in the least, neither harming nor healing him. “Going, going.”
Maru arrived as a human, covered in blood not his own and hauling a bag of medical supplies. After sedating the shinobi, he went to work examining and bandaging his injuries.
“Stable,” Maru said at last. “We can move him without killing him.”
He gestured to a pair of foxes to carry the youth and disappeared inside after them.
Akakiba and Jien went on seeking survivors. Once all of the living had been found and given medical attention, for many had been too far away from the lady to fully benefit from her intervention, they turned to the dead. Shinobi bodies were put in a pile outside the main gate to be handled later.
Gradually, order was restored. Wounds were seen to, and the bodies of their own were laid in neat rows. There were twenty corpses, few compared to the perhaps sixty shinobi bodies outside, but that didn’t allevi
ate the pain.
“Father, she’s stopped breathing!” That was Maru’s daughter, still at work.
Akakiba went by quickly, unwilling to look inside and see which distant family member was fighting for her life. She would make it, or not, without his interference.
Elsewhere, a woman wept endlessly. Two foxes, an adult and a young one, sat at her feet. Akakiba recognized her: Hatsu, who had always lived in sorrow for giving birth to the first fox child who could not turn human.
“Hatsu can’t shift fox anymore,” Sanae whispered, popping at his side to cling to his arm. “Once you’re trapped, it’s forever.”
In the past, foxes had retained their ability to shift until death. These days, losing the ability was frighteningly common.
Akakiba eyed his sister, checking for unreported injuries. “Your ankle is swelling again.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I was too eager to catch a shinobi, and I tripped again,” she said, sounding strangely subdued. She must have seen the bodies too.
“You should go and eat something. I can smell rice cooking.” He slipped his arm free and nudged her in the right direction before wandering back outside to find something to do. Gather wood, perhaps. They would need a pyre, a big one.
Somehow not one of his close ones had been lost. His father had attended the clan head the entire time, his mother had been resting half the fight, and his sister had suffered nothing worse than that twisted ankle. Yuki was untouched, and while it was true that Jien had gotten somewhat battered, a salve sprinkled with dragon eggshell would do wonders.
Still, he stared at the dead and couldn’t understand how such a thing had come to pass. Each dead body was a reproach, proof he hadn’t fought hard enough and well enough.
Now that there was no more work to keep people from dwelling on their losses, anger began to seep into the comments whispered around the courtyard.