By the time the smoke thinned, evening had already slipped into the cedars.
Sayuri picked her way through the blackened beams at the edge of the hamlet, sandals catching ash, the air salted with the iron bite of what had burned. The raiders had come at noon—a tide of lacquered men with bored faces and hungry hands—and left by sunset, carrying the easy coin of other people's lives. She had tried to make herself a wall in front of the oldest and the smallest. A girl of eighteen was no wall.
A toppled beam groaned. Sayuri swore under her breath and levered it up with a length of pine. A man lay beneath, coughing, eyes clouded with smoke. She pressed a damp cloth to his mouth, steadied his shoulder until the fit passed. Tiny things. The only ones left.
"Forgive me," he rasped. "I… I cannot stand."
"You don't need to, Hachirō," Sayuri said, voice even, like she was certain. "Not tonight."
He went quiet. They both understood what the words meant and did not mean. After a time, when the breath left him for the last time, Sayuri folded his hands over his chest and covered his face with the corner of her own sleeve. There were three bodies gathered near the well and five missing, likely taken. She set the thought down like a blade on a shelf—there, but untouchable. If she let it cut her now, she would bleed out before the night finished.
The wind shifted. Somewhere beyond the paddies, a shrine bell clinked once, not rung by a human hand.
Sayuri lifted her head. The bell was not from their hamlet. It came thin but clear from the cedar grove that belonged to no one and everyone—the little hill where the old Inari shrine crouched with its fox statues moss-painted and blind-eyed.
"Of course," she murmured, mostly to keep herself from feeling only the emptiness. "You would choose tonight."
She gathered what she always carried: a pouch of salt and rice, a skin of water, a strip of clean cloth. Around her wrist hung a tassel of sakaki leaves, green even in winter. She had tied it there the day her mother died, and never removed it. A charm, or a promise. Some days there was no difference between the two.
The path to the shrine wound through the paddies and into the dark, where the cedars grew close and damp and quiet. Cicadas had gone silent for autumn; in their place, foxfire winked like low stars between the trunks. Sayuri slipped beneath the torii, bowed, and exhaled the taste of smoke.
The shrine was smaller than memory. A simple wooden box with a roof that leaked, two foxes guarding—one with a ball beneath its paw, one with a scroll. Offerings rotted at their feet: a handful of last year's rice, an orange collapsed into itself, a paper amulet eaten by the weather. Sayuri knelt anyway and set three things she had left: salt, uncooked rice, and the thin wet ribbon of the stream from her skin onto the dry lip of the basin.
"I don't have sake," she said softly, "and my hands are filthy. But I know your name, and I haven't forgotten your gate."
A laugh answered, light as a swallow winging near her ear.
"Some have forgotten. It makes them loud," the voice said. "You do not sound loud."
Sayuri did not startle. Fear was a luxury she couldn't afford in front of gods, men, or the things that lived between. She straightened and turned.
A woman sat atop the offering box as if it were a bench—bare feet tucked under her, white kosode with red hem clean where the world around it wasn't. Her hair fell in a rust-red spill down her back, and when she laughed a second time, canines flashed just a little too sharp. Behind her, where the shadow doubled, something swayed: not a sleeve. A tail. No—two. No—more than two, folding and unfolding like silk and smoke.
Sayuri bowed from the waist, respectful as to any elder.
"Kitsune-sama," she said. "If I have trespassed—"
"You murmured a name," the fox-woman replied, cocking her head. "You placed salt with clean intent. That is not trespass." Her eyes, lantern-bright, studied Sayuri with interest rather than hunger. "You smell of ash and stubbornness. The first burns out. The second… mm. The second can be shaped."
Sayuri let the words wash over her and pass. "The hamlet below was taken," she said. "I have nothing to bargain with but—" She stopped, not certain how to say it without sounding like an idiot at a sacred gate. "But if there is a small god of luck left in this hill, I would spend it."
"You come to buy luck," the kitsune said, amused. "And you offer nothing."
"I offered attention," Sayuri said. "And names. The names of the eight who slept there and will not again. I can speak them in order, with the right silences between."
The kitsune's mouth curved. "Attention is a better coin than most people know. Names are better still." She slid off the offering box and stood with a weightless grace that made the hairs on Sayuri's arms rise. "What is the name you carry for yourself, girl-who-bows?"
"Sayuri," she answered.
Something flickered in the kitsune's gaze. "A little lily. You do not look delicate."
"I had an older name once," Sayuri said, before she could stop herself. "It fits a grave better than a mouth."
"Mm. Pragmatic." The kitsune padded closer, the hem of her robe never touching the dirt. She circled Sayuri once, like a cat deciding how to sit. "Tell me what you think you want, Sayuri-who-chooses-her-own-name."
Sayuri looked past the fox into the grove where the bell had sounded. The trees there grew older, trunks thick as four men, roots like river braids. She could not see the hamlet from here, but she felt the emptiness inside her ribs as if it had cut its own room there.
"I do not want to be helpless again," she said. "I don't want the world to take and take while I stand with empty hands, inventing words to ease the dying. I want time. I want enough of it to matter. I want to be able to stand in a doorway and not be shouldered aside by fire."
Silence wrapped around the grove, not hostile. Listening.
The kitsune's smile sharpened and softened all at once. "Ah," she said, and there was old recognition in it. "There is a hunger under that. Not for power, not exactly. For staying."
She stepped close enough that Sayuri could see the striations in her irises, fox and flame layered together.
"I am Akihane," the kitsune said at last, giving her own name with the formality of a blade leaving its sheath. "I carry fire for Inari and walk the thresholds you are only just beginning to taste. I cannot make men kind. I cannot cure human greed. But I can give you what you ask in the shape that will not kill you: time, and the ability to move along the edges where time frays."
Sayuri kept her gaze on Akihane's face. "What cost?"
Akihane's tails lifted, glimmering with foxfire. "Clever girl."
She looked down at Sayuri's wrist and the sakaki tassel tied there. "The price is threefold. First: a flame will be set behind your ribs, my fire, and it will not go out while you keep your oaths. It will mend you when men would break you and hold you at the lip of the years. But it is a hungry thing. You must feed it attention. To the old places. To the small gods. To the names of the dead. If you starve it, it will feed on you."
Sayuri nodded. Her heartbeat—hers, for now—thudded evenly against her palm. "Second?"
"Second," Akihane said, "you must become a keeper of thresholds. Temples fallen and roadside stones, torii forgotten and gatehouses that do not know what they guard anymore. You will keep watch. It does not mean you will always arrive in time. It means you will not turn your face when you do."
"Third?"
Akihane's gaze gentled there, almost with pity. "Third, you may not be called by your first true name. It is a string that binds you to one house, one set of seasons. You will walk through seasons none of your neighbors will live to see. If you cling to the wrong string, you will tear yourself in two. Take another name and let the world forget the one you were born to. Let it belong to the dead."
Sayuri did not wince. She had already let that name go once. It would hurt no more to drop it again. "If I accept, what oath binds me? Speak it plainly."
Akihane's eyes glowed, pleased. "Plainly, then. You will not break a promise made at a gate or an altar. You will not refuse proper offerings when you have the means. If someone greets you with your chosen name and asks for true help, you will not turn away with a lie. If you betray those, the fire will eat you from the inside out. Slowly."
"And if I keep them?"
"You will live as long as a fox keeps her tails," Akihane said, and her smile showed a flash of white. "Which, Sayuri, is longer than men write in ledgers."
Sayuri looked down at her hands, knuckles dusted with ash. Hachirō's last breath still warmed her sleeve where it had caught. The thought rose: I will bury them all. And all who come after them. And after that, perhaps, I will learn how to carry it without disappearing.
When she lifted her head, Akihane had stepped back to stand between the fox statues, tails folded like the petals of a chrysanthemum.
"Choose with the mouth you have," the kitsune said softly. "Mortals often choose with the mouths of their griefs. Yours is quieter."
Sayuri breathed in the sharp green of cedar and the mineral damp of stone. She touched two fingers to the weathered fox on the left—the one with the scroll—and then to her own lips, a child's gesture, a miko's habit she had never unlearned.
"I take the flame," she said. "I will keep watch. I will not break an oath at a gate or an altar. The name I was born to will rest. I will answer to the name I wear."
Akihane watched her for the length of three heartbeats. "Say your name."
"Sayuri," she said.
The grove brightened.
It was not the hard light of day, but the pale-warm glow of foxfire, rising like mist from the ground, threading into the air with a thousand invisible hands. Akihane lifted her right palm, and inside it burned a small, perfect flame, blue at the edges, white at the center. It gave off no smoke. It smelled like nothing Sayuri had ever known and everything she had—autumn fields, old paper, the place where breath pauses before speech.
"This will hurt," Akihane said. "That is my mercy. You will remember it is real."
Sayuri swallowed. "Do it."
The kitsune did not touch her with fingers. She pressed the flame into Sayuri's chest with the heel of her hand, and the world tilted.
It was not heat the way a house fire was heat. It was a rush inward, as if someone had opened a door behind her heart and let in wind. Brightness threaded the dark places in her body—the bruises, the small cuts, the griefs that had been living there like moss. For an instant Sayuri felt impossibly light, as if she could take a step and not come down, as if she could exhale and blow out a star. Then the flame found a hollow beneath her ribs and settled, snug and certain.
She doubled over, hands on the cedar roots, breathing hard. The pain was clean and precise. It did not threaten to break her. It made her aware of where she began.
When she straightened, the night seemed clearer, edges underlined. The fox statues looked less blind. The path back down the hill was a thread, not a smear. She could feel—faintly—other threads, fine as hair, pulling from the corners of the grove to places in the hamlet below. Doors. Gates. Unmarked stones that remembered being altars.
Akihane's face had softened, the slyness banked. Kitsune or no, she looked—for a breath—as if she were watching a child stand.
"It suits you," she said.
Sayuri dipped her head to hide the sudden water in her eyes. "I will keep the oath," she said, the words steadying even as her heart raced. "I will not break it."
"Good," Akihane murmured. "You will have chances to and reasons. Remember what you said with your mouth tonight."
Sayuri wiped her palms on her sleeves and turned toward the path. Then stopped.
"The ones who were taken," she said quietly. "Can you—"
Akihane shook her head once, small and absolute. "I am not a hunter of men. I can light your way. I cannot force you to walk it. But now the way will not be closed when you arrive."
"Then I'll arrive," Sayuri said.
She bowed—low, not as to a curiosity, but as to an elder—and gathered her pouch. The flame under her ribs flickered with the motion, wanting to be fed. Attention, Akihane had said. She would learn what that meant in the days to come. She would fail and then stand up again. The thought did not break her.
At the torii, she paused and looked back. Akihane had climbed the offering box again, tails draped like a cloak, gaze bright and unreadable.
"Akihane," Sayuri said, tasting the name. "Why me?"
The kitsune smiled with only the corner of her mouth. "Because you asked for time," she said. "Not for revenge."
Sayuri nodded once and stepped through the gate.
Below, the hamlet slept in soot and dark. Beyond it, beyond the low hills, other fires burned in other provinces. The year turned. The flame inside her kept its own weather. She set her feet on the path as if it were a line she had chosen and walked until the cedars gave way to the road.
Sayuri descended the cedar hill with the flame nesting under her ribs like a small animal—alert, breathing with her. The night had thinned; stars bruised toward dawn. Below, the hamlet lay in a hushed scatter of charcoal and thatch.
At the last bend of the path a stone Jizō slumped half-buried at the verge, its red bib long since peeled to a pink rag by weather. Someone had knocked it sideways in the panic. Sayuri crouched and freed the base from mud with her fingers, setting it upright, steadying it with a wedge of cedar. She wiped a palm clean on her sleeve and laid three grains of rice on the stone's head, then straightened the bib as best she could.
"I see you," she told the little guardian, voice low. "See me back."
The flame answered with a brief, warm press. When she rose, the road's scuffs and eddies stood clearer. The raiders had not bothered to hide their trail—boot-heel and split-toe prints heading south, toward the river and the old ferry. In places the ash they had kicked up lay thick and fresh. In others it thinned where captives' smaller steps had dragged.
She began to walk. Where the road narrowed, where two stones marked a field boundary, where a footbridge crossed a ditch—thresholds she had walked past a thousand times—she slowed, touched the markers, and named them aloud. It was a strange liturgy, but the flame fed on it. The world unblurred around the edges; her feet made less noise. Once, at a fallen gatehouse, she paused, lifted the lintel's beam two finger-widths with a pry of branch to keep the passage from collapsing. Her breath went harsh in the stillness. When she set it down, something in the wood exhaled relief.
By the time she reached the river's elbow, fog was lifting off the reeds. The ferry had moored and gone, rope trailing a dark question mark across the water. On the near bank, under scrub oak, a little camp stuttered with low coals. A handful of men—half-armored, half-drunk—had made themselves comfortable, the way wolves grew soft after an easy kill. Two kept watch badly. Three more snored. The captives—five—huddled near the bole of a bent pine, wrists bound, eyes wide in the light.
Sayuri lay flat in the reeds and watched. Her body remembered fear; the flame under her ribs remembered something else. Not bravery. A refusal.
One of the bound figures was a boy of eight with a crooked ear. Kōta. He had chased chickens through Sayuri's yard the week before as if that were a future someone could count on. Beside him, a girl hardly older than six chewed silent sobs into her sleeve. There was an older woman—Shin's wife—and two others Sayuri did not know by name. She learned quickly there in the reeds, letting the breath pass in quiet, letting their faces become part of her.
A horse at the edge of the camp stamped and snorted. Sayuri's eyes went to the hobbles; the knots were lazy. Close enough to untie. But not without sound. Not without eyes catching motion.
She slid her fingers to the ground, parted the reeds, and made herself wait until the rhythm of the dozing changed, until a snore deepened then paused. She shifted then—one slow breath, another—until she could put her mouth near the bent pine's lowest branch.
"Kōta," she whispered, not louder than a reed rubbing another reed. "It's Sayuri."
The boy's head jerked. His eyes found hers and flared. He opened his mouth.
She shook her head once. His jaw closed on instinct. Tears came anyway, huge and silent.
"Can you still run?" she breathed.
He nodded. The girl with him turned and saw Sayuri, and the smallest sound left her. Not a cry. A breath with Sayuri's name wrapped around it like the beginning of a prayer.
Her oath took hold—simple as an open hand. If someone greets you with your chosen name and asks for true help, you will not turn away with a lie.
Sayuri nodded, once, to a promise made two hours and a lifetime ago.
The camp's nearest guard rose to piss, muttering. When his back turned she slid out of the reeds, two steps, three, placed the flat of her hand on the old pine's trunk. It thrummed through her skin as if it had its own pulse. The line between river and camp—the crossing from one safety to danger—felt like a drawn string.
"Let me in," she mouthed, not sure to whom. The flame flickered. The threshold woke.
She did what she had done at the shrine: gave attention. With one hand she straightened a fallen rope-ward that had once wrapped the pine; with the other she untied one of her own gohei paper streamers, pressed its white zigzag against the bark with spit, and smoothed it flat. The crisp paper took. She touched the tree's root with three fingers, head bowed.
When she lifted her chin, the space beneath the branches seemed deeper by half a breath. Not quite a tunnel. A place to step that the men would not think to see.
She moved then. Two soft cuts took the cord binding the closest two, Kōta and the girl. They startled, muscles going tense, then obeyed when she pressed their hands and pushed them toward the reed-shadow. Kōta bent and began to worry at the knots at Shin's wife's wrists with his teeth while Sayuri slipped to the hobble lines and freed the horses with quick twists. The animals' ears flicked, catching the night's request. She tugged one tail, then let go.
The horse snorted loud and lurched, shoulder knocking a pot, which clattered and rolled. The nearest guard cursed, turned, and saw only the tail of a second horse cutting like a shadow between reeds. He yelled. Two men came up from sleep like snakes.
Sayuri had the space of three heartbeats and used them to stand full into the camp's edge, catching the glare, taking it. She held no blade. Only a length of ash pole scavenged from the ferry yard, her hands set shoulder-width. The first man swung a short spear lazily, still half in the dream. She broke the shaft with a low angle and stepped into the arc before his mind finished the alarm. Her pole's butt found his knee and his tongue found his teeth when he fell.
The second man had more wakefulness and a knife. He slashed and caught her left forearm. Pain flared sharp as flint. The flame flared with it—answering, knitting—heat moving along the wound's rim. She did not flinch. On the next step she hooked his ankle and sent him into the dying cook-fire, the knife skittering.
"Run," she hissed over her shoulder, and the command flew like a bird toward the children. Kōta hauled the little girl up, Shin's wife dragging the others by loops of cord now cut. They vanished into the reeds where Sayuri had made the path a little more than a shadow.
A third man stood, going for a bow. He had a good face—the kind that didn't know it belonged to a worse man now. Sayuri's stomach lurched with that thought. She hurled her pole end-over-end. It took him hard in the shoulder and spoiled the arrow. It snapped past her ear and splashed in the river.
Noise rose. A horse screamed; another tore its tether and bolted through a tent. Sayuri moved without counting: elbow to ribs, foot to thigh, a flare of her sleeve to blind someone trying to put hands on her. Two kicks later the reed-path began to close, attention leaking, the threshold forgetting the promise it had briefly made. She had to choose then—the last captive, an old man with rope so tight it had gone bloodless, or her own skin.
She knelt and lifted the old man's bound hands in both hers. "Sayuri," he breathed. He didn't know he was greeting a name that had become an oath. He only knew a face he trusted.
"Yes," she said, and cut the rope.
By the time she got him to his feet the men had started to arm themselves properly. In the first light crawled up the edge of the river and made a bright seam no one could ignore. Someone shouted for more bows.
"Go," she said to the old man, turning him toward the reeds; then she took up the ash pole again and backed into the path she had asked the pine to keep.
The first arrow came flat and fast. It would have taken her in the throat if the pole hadn't moved on its own memory, interposing, the shaft splitting against wood. The second took her high in the shoulder, fire kissing flesh. She grunted and kept walking backward into the shadow, counting steps. Three more. Two. One.
She did not run. She did not turn her back to men whose work was stabbing backs. She let the threshold take her and shut the door behind her with a thought like a palm on a gate.
The world narrowed. Not dark. Not light. The space between. For three heartbeats they were not in the reeds or the road or the river. They were in a seam that belonged to none of those, and Sayuri felt with a startled clarity how quickly attention burned when asked to hold more than one life. The flame under her ribs bit her, hungry.
"Attention," Akihane had said. "Feed it attention."
Sayuri spoke the names as she led Kōta and the little girl and Shin's wife and the others through the seam she had begged for: Hachirō. Tomo. Aya. The twins. Mizue who had always pressed pickled plums into her hand. Loyal offerings, clean and plain. The flame eased and steadied. The seam held one moment longer. They stepped out into the ditch on the far side of the ferry road. The reeds tossed their slender heads and looked like reeds again.
They ran then.
Behind them, men tore the reed-bed open and found only ordinary mud and a broken path. Someone bellowed in panic, as if witchcraft were suddenly more frightening than their own cruelty. Someone else lit brand to smoke them out. The wind took the smoke the wrong way.
Half a league downriver Sayuri finally let herself kneel, palms on her thighs, head bowed. The arrow in her shoulder had gone quiet around the edges. Blood slicked her sleeve. Kōta hovered, stricken and ready to be useful. He had let go of the girl's hand only when she fell asleep and had wrapped her fingers into his sleeve so he wouldn't drop her again even by accident.
Shin's wife crouched in front of Sayuri, breathing hard and steady. She had spat the taste of rope out of her mouth in one clean arc, furious and offended.
"You always were stubborn," she said, trying to make it scolding and failing. The quake in it betrayed the gratitude.
"Not always," Sayuri said, breath coming easier now. She reached up and broke the arrow's shaft in two with a grunt. "Only tonight."
They moved into the edge of a bamboo grove and made themselves a hush. Sayuri bound her arm with a strip torn from her kosode, then pried the arrowhead cleanly from the meat of her shoulder with two quick breaths and a prayer she didn't bother to send to any one god in particular. Pain washed through, pure and hard. The flame rose to meet it. When it receded, she could flex her fingers again.
Kōta peered at the wound with terrible interest. "You don't die," he said, as if reporting news.
"Not tonight," Sayuri answered. "Help me keep it that way."
He nodded solemnly, as if assigned an adult task, and scuttled off to gather clean leaves and a bit of water from the ditch's sweetest corner. He returned with both, proud. Sayuri took the leaves and chewed them to paste, pack-wood-smelling and bitter, and set them under the cloth to draw heat.
"Can you walk?" she asked the old man.
He showed his wrists—angry loops of purple where cords had bit. "Can, if you say so." The edge of a smile showed under the soot. "Sayuri."
She felt the oath settle again, gentler now—a hand on a shoulder. She met his gaze and held it for a breath, letting him see more than her certainty.
"We'll go back by the field edges," she said. "By the little places. Keep your feet only where there is a stone or a lintel to greet. Bow to every one. Even if you only bow with your eyes. Do you understand?"
He didn't, not really. But he trusted the sound of the instruction. He nodded.
They began to move, quiet as the bamboo when the wind decided to be kind. Sayuri counted thresholds as they went—field-gates, the first plank of each footbridge, the split between two stones where people always stepped and never thought to greet. At each she placed a palm or whispered a name or straightened something tilt. The flame settled into a pace with her. In time the roofs of the hamlet's edge rose out of the dawn like things forgiven.
At the cedars below the old shrine the group stopped, too tired to be stoic. Kōta laughed once, sharp from relief, then hid the sound in his sleeve as if afraid to offend the morning. Sayuri sent Shin's wife ahead with the children, then sank to her knees in the turn of the path where the foxfire had guided her hours before.
The air shifted.
Akihane did not announce herself as before. She sat with her back against the torii upright like a shrine maiden stealing a rest, tails tucked, eyes watching Sayuri with that sideways fox regard that drank everything and spilled nothing.
"You did not ask for a sword," the kitsune said mildly. "You asked for time. You used it properly."
Sayuri blew out a breath that might have been a laugh if it hadn't tasted like iron. "Properly feels like a generous word."
"Do not get used to it," Akihane agreed, the corner of her mouth curving. "You will find a hundred days when the flame makes you present for endings you can do nothing to change. That is also the oath. But you did not turn away when the mouth asked your name. That part pleases me."
Sayuri glanced down the path where Kōta and the others had already vanished into the light. When she looked back, some question she hadn't known she carried had made it to her face.
"If they come again," she said, "I cannot promise to speak only to thresholds. I want—" She stopped herself before she said revenge. The flame under her ribs flared once in warning, heat and hunger and a wordless sense of lines.
Akihane's gaze sharpened. "You are permitted to make the world harder for wolves," she said. "You are not permitted to become one. Keep the difference in your mouth where you can taste it."
Sayuri nodded, swallowing the old metallic urge and letting it dissolve a little in the taste of bamboo and morning.
"You will need a staff that is not a ferry pole," Akihane added, practical as a grandmother. "And a bell that knows which ears to bother. There is a charcoal-burner on the north slope who owes the shrine three favors. He will teach you how to knot a rope that will take a fox-tail if asked. Go to him when you can stand up without hissing."
Sayuri looked at her shoulder and snorted softly. "Before noon, then."
Akihane laughed, pleased. "Stubbornness, I told you. The first burns out. The second can be shaped." She rose in one smooth coil and touched two fingers, cool as streamwater, to Sayuri's brow. "Feed the flame with what you promised. The rest will come."
"Akihane," Sayuri said, because gratitude needed a shape.
"You will not always have me where you can see me," the kitsune warned, turning away. "But there are more gates than you know, and not all of them are wood. Pay attention, Sayuri. That, too, is an offering."
When Sayuri lifted her head again, the torii held only the ordinary shadow of morning. She stood, arm aching, flame steady, and made her way down into the new day.
Dawn found the hamlet making ordinary noises: mortar-strokes, a hen's complaint, Shin's wife scolding the world into alignment. Sayuri rose with the birds, wrapped her shoulder fresh, and took Kichiemon's staff to the threshold to ask it a question. The iron ring breathed a single, clean note. Enough.
Akihane waited where the lane forgot itself and became field. Today her hair was the matte gray of river rock; her ears were there if you knew how to look. She had borrowed a farmer's posture, heel on a clod, thumbs in her belt, as if she'd grown there overnight with the millet.
"Feet," she said by way of greeting, and stepped onto the bund.
She did not mean walk. She meant listen.
They crossed the slope in a thin path of dew-darkened prints. Sayuri learned the grammar of small things: how a hinge sighs when a door is used against its grain; how a threshold, if hungry, will turn a stray straw inward instead of letting it blow clean. At the edge of the bean field a gate leaned like a drunk. Sayuri set her shoulder to the frame, lifted, and heard the pin settle with a noise so content it might have been a calf finding the teat.
"The world remembers courtesy," Akihane said. "It grows chatty when someone answers."
Midmorning brought them to the granary. It was a fine one for so poor a slope—plinths of stone, walls woven tight. Women had hung the last of the persimmons under the eaves to dry. Flies worried at a seam in the clapboard where resin had split.
Sayuri set the staff down and put her palm to the wall. The flame under her ribs turned its head.
"There," she said.
"Not a wound," Akihane murmured, close enough for the smell of fox to sit under cedar and smoke. "A seam that's forgotten which side is which."
A seam that forgot—say it right and it made sense. Straw in the yard had drifted toward the slit, not away. A dog had made a circle and refused to sleep. A girl's broom leaned handle-down—disrespect—or simply tired.
Sayuri uncoiled her rope. The fox-tail knot remembered her fingers and came home quick. She set three rice grains on the sill and said their names. Not the word rice. The names: seed taken in last spring, daughter's hand, sweat. She wet the rope in her mouth, scrubbed the stain of blood from the corner—names prefered a clean place to sit—then laid the loop along the seam and pulled until it pinched like a stitch.
The bell gave a dry little laugh. The air changed pressure the way a kiln does when it stops sulking and decides to work. Straw lifted and lay itself down in the courtyard as if someone had smoothed its hair.
Akihane watched her through narrowed eyes. "You feed it attention and it gives you back order. Keep that story in your mouth and you'll live to be bored of it."
"Will I always feel it like… this?" Sayuri flexed her hand. The heat under her sternum had spread in a careful line along her palm, as though she had leaned against a sun-warmed wall.
"Some days it will feel like a full bowl," Akihane said. "Some days like a hot stone. When you lie, it will scald."
"Good," Sayuri said. It surprised her to hear how much she meant it.
They went on. At the well, she touched the rim and named the rope. At the mill, a tooth in the great wheel had splintered inward, greedy. Sayuri turned it outward and told it its proper appetite. A child's whistle found them from behind a storehouse. Kōta, filthy to the elbows, held up an earthworm as if it were a dragon.
"It is not for the fire," Sayuri told him solemnly.
"I know," he said, offended. "It's for Shin's wife's beans."
By noon their path took them along the river, where alder roots knitted the bank and someone's sacrificial rope, long since frayed, lay half in the water. The ferry was gone for the season. A single old oak leaned out over the current, its trunk plaited with prayer papers brittle as moth wings. Akihane tipped her chin toward the waterline where the rope had rubbed the bark smooth.
"If you need me," she said.
Sayuri knelt in the damp leaf mold. She tied the fox-tail knot in the ferry rope, pulled once—not hard—and felt the thrum travel up into her hands, into the oak, into the sky. Somewhere, something turned its ear.
"Good," Akihane said, satisfied. "You won't drown easily as long as you pay respect here. The water owes debts too."
"Do you keep a tab for everything?" Sayuri asked, half-wry.
"The world does," Akihane said. "I only remind it to write legibly."
They cut across the south ridge in the afternoon, to the mushroom places and the yamabushi's summer camp, now empty but for ash and the memory of arguments. Renkō had left his mark the way monks do when they think they are subtle: a twist of cloth on a branch, a ring-staff print where the ground holds shape like memory.
"He'll find you," Akihane said. "He can smell a vow through three days' rain."
"What will he sell me?" Sayuri asked.
"Words," Akihane said, uncharitable and amused. "Some good for keeping your own mouth from biting you. Some good for nothing but making a fire behave when it shouldn't. Take the ones that agree with the thing under your ribs."
"And the bell?"
"If he offers a ring, take it," Akihane said. "Iron's poor company for foxes, but it bothers the right ears."
They followed the ridge until the light went slant. A hawk rode a pocket of air. The hamlet cupped smoke like tea. Sayuri's shoulder ached the honest ache of work that means something. The flame had stopped prowling and slept with one ear open.
At the shrine—always at the shrine, at the place where names and feet and intent made a knot—Akihane slowed. Her eyes, tonight the exact brown of Kichiemon's kiln smoke, did that sideways thing again.
"You are thinking," she said.
Sayuri considered lying for the practice and did not. "I found myself wanting to straighten every hinge between here and the sea," she said. "And knowing I cannot."
"Once you start listening you will always hear too much," Akihane said. "So you make a circle and name it yours. You walk it. You grow it if you have breath to spare. You do not take shame from the edges."
"Is there a word for that?" Sayuri asked, mostly to hear how it felt if she said it.
"Household," Akihane said. "Even when it's a hillside."
Sayuri bowed. Not deep this time, but with intent enough to write a line in the soil.
They parted before sunset. Akihane refused rice with a flick of her tail you only saw if you refused to look away. "I am fed," she said, and vanished between two breaths into the gnarled roots where shadows like to count.
Back in the lane, Shin's wife clucked at Sayuri's bandage and tried to bully her into broth. Sayuri took the bowl and the scold in equal measure. Kōta presented her with a stone "for your gate," small enough to lose, heavy enough to remember him by. Sayuri put it in her sleeve as if it were an amulet.
Inside her own door the bell on the staff said one clear syllable and slept. Sayuri sat and rewrapped her shoulder. She turned the silver of afternoon over in her mind and struck sparks off it until a simple shape remained: a path. She had stepped on it.
After dark a footfall at her lintel made the wood say who, and the who answered itself. Kichiemon stood stooped in the doorway, hat in hand, his face a map of old burns.
"I thought," he said, awkward as a boy, "you might want this." He held out a pouch that clinked soft. Nails, by the sound.
"Nails," Sayuri said, to save him the explanation.
"Good iron," he said, as if iron were not itself a prayer. "For gates. For saying no that wood respects."
She did not say no. She set the pouch by the staff and touched the throat of the bag. "I tied a seam in your granary," she said. "It will hold if you mind the eaves. Teach your girl which way to lay her broom."
Kichiemon's mouth twitched. "She minds nothing, that one."
"She'll mind when her beans rot," Sayuri said.
He laughed, brief and unpitying and grateful. He saw himself out with a nod that was almost a bow and not about her at all—about the fact that the world had not undone itself today in a way he could not fix.
Sayuri ate what Shin's wife had thrust at her and drank tea that had remembered sun once. She named the day—first walking of the circle—and put it on the shelf in her head where she kept cords, needles, debts and the little stones Kōta pressed into her palm like coins from a future.
She lay down with her feet toward the door and her shoulder to the wall, not to guard against a knife but because that is how you sleep when you mean to rise quickly if someone says your name with their mouth full of trouble. She dreamed nothing she could keep.
In the hour before dawn the bell said a syllable she did not know yet, and the flame under her ribs stretched like a cat woken by rain. Somewhere past the ferry oak a fox laughed indoors and was answered politely by a god with clay feet.
Sayuri sat up, hand already reaching for the staff.
The world was still in one piece. For now.