Mai lay flat on her belly behind a lip of red rock and watched four men walk into the Scorpion's Throat.
The pass was a crack in the borderlands two days west of anything worth naming, a long dry gully with walls of crumbling stone on both sides and a floor of packed grit that held footprints for weeks. Nobody came through it who didn't have a reason to avoid the main roads. That was the reason these four had picked it, and the reason Ebizo had picked it for them.
Through the violet lenses of her glasses the world was a sphere, and the men in it were glowing maps of chakra walking toward her. Three of them with jonin vests on. The fourth man was older. Robes instead of a flak jacket, a walking staff tipped with a brass scorpion.
Kuchinawa. Elder of the Village Hidden in Poison. The man who'd looked at the Kazekage's delegate across a table three months ago, listened to the terms, smiled, and paid nothing.
He was talking. He'd been talking since they came into range, and the closer they got the clearer it carried off the stone.
"...a man with a list and a pleasant face," Kuchinawa was saying. "Sat at my table, drank my tea, and told me that Sunagakure knows. Knows! As if knowing meant anything." He laughed, a dry little cough of a laugh. "Pay the Glass Lord his tribute, he says, and dress it up as a gift, and say thank you for the privilege of not being punished. Thank you! To Suna, of all villages. A village that's been begging its own Daimyo for coin for a generation, and it wants to lecture me about paying."
"Elder," one of the jonin murmured. "The pass."
"The pass is empty. I chose it." Kuchinawa waved the staff. "That's the thing about Suna that none of you young men understand. They're a great village. Fine. They have a tailed beast, which I hear got loose last month and nearly destroyed them, and they have a Kazekage who sits on his rear all day, and they have a few thousand shinobi who think the world is a stage. What they don't have is eyes in every rock in this desert. They want you to believe they do. That's all a threat is. A man pretending to see more than he can." He tapped the staff on the ground in time with his steps. "And I'll tell you what I told Lord Doku. A Kazekage who has to send a man with a list is a Kazekage who can't afford to send anything else."
His sandal came down on the wire.
It was thinner than a hair, smeared with grit, strung across the gully at ankle height between two stones that Mai had picked out the night before. It went taut. Up in the rocks to the left, a spring released.
A kunai whipped out of the stone and across the gully a meter in front of their faces, and wrapped around its handle was a flash bomb.
It went off.
The pass turned white. The light was so absolute and so sudden that it had no source, it was simply everywhere, filling the gully wall to wall, and the four men inside it screamed and threw their arms over their eyes far, far too late. Kuchinawa's staff clattered to the ground. One of the jonin stumbled into the wall.
Mai was already standing.
She'd closed her eyes for the flash and opened them on the afterglow, and through the glasses the four men were still four bright shapes, staggering, blind. She drew back her arm and threw.
The kunai crossed forty meters of gully in a flat line and took the stumbling jonin in the back of the head where the skull met the neck. It went in to the ring. He dropped straight down like someone had cut every thread holding him up, face first into the grit, and his legs kicked twice and were still.
Kuchinawa heard the body land. He didn't see it. He couldn't see anything. He just heard the wet thump and the clatter of a dropped blade, and he screamed again, higher, his hands clawing at the empty air.
The other two jonin were good. Mai gave them that. Blind, they found each other by voice in the space of a breath and closed in around the old man, back to back, blinking hard and fast, each one with a short blade already in his hand. The edges were dark and wet. Mai could see the poison on them from here.
"Elder, stay down! Stay between us!"
At the far end of the gully, where the pass bent around a shoulder of rock, Pakura stepped out into the open. She'd been waiting for this half of the plan, and she wanted to do it right. Her hands came together and flashed through the seals. Orbs bloomed around her shoulders, white at the core and orange at the edges, one, three, six, and then she drew her hands apart and the orbs ran together like drops of oil on a pan, stretching, fusing into one long rope of white heat that coiled once around her body and lifted its head.
It looked like a dragon.
"Scorch Style: Scorch Dragon Jutsu." She sent it down the gully.
The jonin couldn't see it, but they could hear it. The air screamed around it. The grit under it cracked and blackened as it passed. One of them shouted something and both of them wove through hand signs and slammed their palms against the ground, and the floor of the pass answered them.
The sand came up in a dome. It rose around the three men in one great heaving rush, packing tight as it climbed, grains grinding together into a hard shell the color of the gully walls, and closed over their heads a half second before Pakura's dragon hit it.
The heat broke against the dome like water against a rock.
It didn't go through. For a moment Mai thought it had failed, and then she saw what it was doing. The orange light spread across the shell and soaked into it, and the sand began to change. The outside of the dome went dark, then bright, then slick. It ran and then it set, hardening into a cloudy, warped, glittering skin of glass.
The jonin had saved themselves from being burned alive. They had shut themselves inside an oven to do it.
Through the glasses Mai could see them in there, three bright shapes in a shrinking space, and she could see the moment they understood it. The heat was still soaking through. The air inside was cooking. The glass had sealed the dome so completely that there was no gap to breathe through, and the floor under their knees was too hot to touch. One of them pressed his palm against the inside of the wall and jerked it back with the skin left behind.
Their eyes had cleared by now. Through the warped glass they could finally see something of the people who'd done this to them. Two small shapes. Distorted, stretched, bent by the bubbled glass into something like children in a dream. One at the far end of the pass, wreathed in heat.
And one running at them.
Mai opened the first gate on her first step. The second on her third. On her fifth step she opened the Gate of Life, and her skin went red from scalp to heel, every vessel under it swelling, the blood roaring through her so loud she couldn't hear her own feet.
To the men inside the glass, she disappeared.
She came back in front of the dome in the air, already turning, her right leg whipping around in a leaping kick with several times the power behind it. Her heel hit the glass at chest height.
The dome exploded.
It burst outward and inward at the same time, a thousand jagged pieces of fused sand driven by a kick that could have folded an iron door. The shards went into the three men like a swarm. Mai saw it in a single frozen instant through the glasses. A shard as long as her forearm went through the nearer jonin's throat and out the back of his neck. Another took the second jonin under the jaw and pinned his tongue to the roof of his mouth. A spray of smaller ones stitched across his chest and belly so that when he fell, he fell open. And Kuchinawa, the elder of the Village Hidden in Poison, who had told his escort that Suna had no eyes in the rocks, took a curved sheet of glass straight through both eyes and the bridge of his nose and sat down hard in the grit, his mouth working, before he toppled over sideways onto his own staff.
Mai landed in the wreckage on the balls of her feet. Glass crunched under her sandals. She let the third gate close and the red began to fade out of her skin, and her whole body shook with the drop.
Three men lay twitching in the glittering ruin of the dome. Then they stopped.
"Good." Pakura called down the gully, walking toward her. She was already pulling a sealing scroll from her pouch. "Get the elder's body. We need it for the Kazekage..."
Mai's glasses showed her something wrong.
The jonin with the open chest. His chakra should have been going out like the others, fading the way a body's chakra faded after death. It wasn't. It was collapsing inward instead, all of it, the whole map of his network rushing toward a single point under his ribs where a small dark knot sat that hadn't been there a second ago. Something in there was swelling. Filling.
"PAKURA, GET BACK!"
They both leapt.
Behind them the dead man's body bloated. It happened in a heartbeat, the torso swelling against the flak jacket until the straps snapped, the skin stretching, darkening, going purple and tight and shiny like a fruit left too long in the sun, and then he burst into a rolling cloud of thick purple smoke that poured out of the ruined body in a wave and swallowed the dome, the bodies, the glass, everything inside ten meters, and kept spreading.
Pakura clicked her tongue. She landed on a ledge of rock and her hands were moving before her feet had settled, already shaping a wind jutsu. Mai was faster. She opened the gates. One through five in a single breath, the fifth slamming open in her chest like a fist through a door. She dropped into the edge of the cloud with her breath held and her eyes slitted, and drove a rising uppercut into the heart of it.
The air itself moved. The column of smoke above her fist ripped upward in a shrieking spiral, punched clean out of the gully and into the empty sky, a purple funnel climbing a hundred meters and spreading thin against the blue.
Mai let the fifth gate drop before it injured her body further and threw herself clear, gasping, and landed on her back on the gully floor. Her bandages were smoking. Every place the purple had touched them, the cloth had gone brown and brittle and was flaking away. She looked at her knuckles. The skin under the bandages was pink and stinging but whole.
Down in the cloud, the bodies were melting.
She could see it through the glasses even with the smoke between them. The flesh went first, softening, sliding off the bones like wax off a candle, pooling in the hollows of the broken dome. Then the bones themselves began to pit and crumble. The elder's robes went black and thin. The brass scorpion on the end of his staff tarnished green and then dissolved into nothing at all.
By the time the cloud thinned enough to see without the glasses, there was nothing left in the gully but broken glass, a dark wet stain soaking into the grit.
"Heh..." Mai sat up and wiped her nose with the back of her ruined bandages. "Who would've thunk that ninjas from a poison village would use poison... to-"
"Shut up." Pakura stamped her foot on the ledge. Her face was pale under the heat flush. "I should have planned for this. I heard they use poison to kill themselves so they can't be captured. But this is different. They weren't captured. They were already dead." She glared at the stain like it had insulted her personally. "He had performed a jutsu. If he died, it would destroy everything around him. Bodies, evidence, all of it. So nobody can study them. So nobody can prove who they were."
A shadow moved on the rim of the gully.
Ebizo came down the rock in easy steps, his hands in his sleeves, his long brows lifted as he looked over the ruin of the dome. He'd watched the whole thing from the ridge. He didn't say anything for a moment. He walked to the edge of the stain, crouched, studied it, and stood.
"No body," Pakura said stiffly. "I'm sorry, sensei. We have nothing to bring back."
"We've learned something new. They have more than one way of escaping capture through poison. And the Kazekage will take my word that he's dead." He then looked at Mai's smoking bandages, then at her face, and his eyes softened just a little. "Burn those before we leave. And let me see your hands at camp."
"They're fine!"
"Then it'll be a very short look." He turned and started back up the gully, toward the bend where their packs were hidden, and over his shoulder he said, "Good work, both of you. Truly."
He walked ahead.
Mai rolled to her feet and kicked a chunk of glass across the gully. "Shut up? You wanna go, Cactus Head!? It's been a while since we sparred, you know. Don't tell me you're chicken!" She tucked her hands into her armpits and started flapping her elbows. "Bawk. Bawk bawk."
Pakura felt something in her temple start to pound. She glared at Mai.
"I don't have time to waste on someone like you." She dropped off the ledge and started walking. "Karura's already become a special jonin, and we're still genin. Grow up already. We don't have time to waste when she's leaving us in the dust like this."
The two were curious about Karura but could never bring it up directly themselves. They knew Ebizo didn't approve of how they've treated Karura after the Chunin Exams. So, they worked together to nudge and knock information out of him regarding Karura without being the first to speak about her. Pakura might ask about Chiyo. Mai would ask about the Puppet Master Corps. None of it escaped Ebizo's notice.
Mai jogged to catch up. "Heh. Our mission was to take the guy out. We did it. I don't know why you're so upset. And I don't know how that involves Karura."
"I'm falling behind. That's unacceptable."
"Sure, it sucks. But I mean, that's Karura, you know?"
Pakura's mouth curled. "Ms. I Hate You is telling me to just deal with falling behind?"
Mai's face went red, and for once it had nothing to do with the gates. "Stop bringing that up... I didn't really mean it. Well. I meant it at the time. But not anymore..."
"Mhm. I know." Pakura didn't look at her. "But you still haven't apologized for it. You even dragged me into your stupid crap, begging me not to say anything to her."
"I'll get around to it, okay! As soon as we get back. I'll do it, okay? Will that make you happy?"
"It's not about me. I'm not the one being eaten up inside with guilt."
"AUUUGGHHH!!!" Mai grabbed her head in both smoking hands and sprinted ahead up the gully, past Ebizo, past the bend, out of sight.
Pakura followed at a walk. She was smirking.
Finally. Finally this whole stupid nonsense would be over.
There were two ANBU at the bottom of the stairs, and both of them turned toward the small girl in the yellow scarf before she reached the last step.
"Good evening." Karura said, and bowed.
The holding level sat three floors below the administrative building, cut straight into the bedrock of the canyon, cool and dry and silent. One corridor. Oil lamps every ten meters. At the far end, an iron door with a narrow barred grate set into it at head height, and on the stone floor in front of the door, a seal painted in black ink, wide as a cart, faintly glowing.
"Special Jonin Karura," said the ANBU on the left. His mask was a hawk. "You're not on the access list."
"I know. I'm sorry." She straightened. "I wanted to know if I could talk to Toma-kun. Just talk. Through the cell is fine. You could both be right there the whole time." She hesitated. "I'm leaving on a long mission soon, and I'd really like to see him before I go."
The two masks looked at each other.
They knew who she was. Every ANBU in the village knew who she was. The Kazekage brought her up in briefings semi-regularly. Lady Chiyo bragged about her to anyone who stood still long enough. Lord Ebizo smiled when her name came up. The whole village had spent the last week talking about the puppet girl, the cactus girl, the one with the scarf and the hundred hands. And here she was, at the bottom of the coldest stairs in Suna, with dust on her sandals, politely asking permission to visit the thing the village kept hidden away.
"We don't have orders for visitors." said the second ANBU. His mask was a jackal.
"Our orders say nobody goes through the door." Hawk said slowly.
Jackal turned his mask toward him.
"She's not asking to go through the door," Hawk said. His voice had gone a little rough. He cleared his throat. "My cousin's building came down on her in the north. She says a hundred wooden hands came through the rubble and dug her out." He was quiet for a second. "She has two kids."
Karura didn't know what to say to that, so she bowed again, lower.
Jackal looked at the girl. Looked at the door. Turned his mask away toward the wall for a moment, and when he turned it back, he stepped aside.
"Through the grate," he said. "We stay right here."
"Thank you so much."
She stepped carefully around the edge of the painted seal and stopped in front of the iron door. The grate was just above her eye line. She had to go up on her toes.
"Toma-kun?"
Inside, something moved in the dark.
"...Karura?"
He came to the grate slowly, like he didn't believe it. His face appeared behind the bars, thinner than she remembered, the dark circles under his eyes so deep now they looked like bruises. He was holding onto the bars with both hands. He was looking at her the way you'd look at water in the desert, if you'd seen too many mirages to trust it.
"How... why are you..."
"I wanted to see you before I leave. I have a mission. A long one."
He was quiet. She watched him put it together. She watched him understand that she'd come here, to this place, which meant she knew exactly what this place was for, and what he was.
"You know," he said. It wasn't a question. His voice had gone very small. "About... what's..."
"I know."
His hands tightened on the bars until his knuckles went white. "And you came anyway."
"I told you we'd spar sometime, didn't I?" Karura smiled up at him through the grate. "I don't think they'll let me open the door. So I'm going to cheat a little. Okay? Look at me."
He looked at her.
Her fingers formed several seals. Lately she practiced her genjutsu skills on Sasori and Yashamaru, neither of whom was a fan of genjutsu afterward. Karura told them a shinobi needed to have a healthy balance of Taijutsu, Ninjutsu, and Genjutsu. At the very least solid knowledge in each of the three.
Toma's eyes went unfocused.
So did hers.
…
The desert was endless and golden and empty, and the sun hung in it at the perfect height for the light to be warm without hurting.
Toma stood on a dune in his sand-colored tunic, barefoot. He looked down at his hands. He looked up at the sky, so big and open and blue. There were no walls anywhere. There was no door.
And forty meters away, on the next dune, Karura stood with the wind moving her scarf.
He looked at her. Really looked at her, for the first time in his life with nothing between them, no gallery, no arena, no iron.
Her eyes were different.
They were pale here. Almost white. No pupils at all, just a soft lavender gleam like the light at the very edge of the moon.
Karura saw him staring. Her own eyes widened. She spun around so her back was to him, and her hands flew through three signs, and when she turned back her eyes were indigo again, warm and dark and familiar, and her cheeks had gone pink.
Toma smiled. It was the first real smile he'd felt on his face in a week.
"So you have secrets too..."
"Please don't tell anyone about that." She said it with every ounce of sincerity she had, both hands clasped in front of her.
"I won't. I promise."
I don't have anyone to tell in the first place, he thought.
Karura reached for the scroll at her hip. She grinned at him across the sand. "Ready when you are!"
The sand around Toma's feet stirred and rose, and for the first time in his life, it rose because he wanted it to and for no other reason.
"Here I come, Karura."
He couldn't have been happier than he was in that moment.
…
An hour later, Hawk and Jackal were still standing in the corridor, staring.
The girl was sitting cross-legged on the stone floor outside the door with her back very straight and her eyes closed. She'd slid down into that position about five minutes into whatever this was. Through the grate, they could see the boy doing the same on the other side, sitting with his face turned toward hers, eyes shut.
Both of them were smiling.
Every so often one of them twitched, a hand jerking, a shoulder dipping, like a dog dreaming of running. Once the girl laughed out loud, a short bright sound in the cold corridor, and both ANBU nearly jumped out of their masks.
"That's a genjutsu," Jackal said. "I can sense her chakra extending into him."
"Since when does she know genjutsu?"
"Nobody told me she knew genjutsu either."
They watched a little longer. The boy's fingers flexed against his knee.
"Should we be worried?" Hawk asked.
"I'm not sure..." Jackal tilted his mask. "What kind of genjutsu would she put the jinchuriki under in the first place?"
"I don't think it's a bad one. They're both smiling."
"Should we inform the Kazekage?"
"Obviously." Jackal crossed his arms. "But after. Let the girl play with the monster. I'm not having Lady Chiyo come after my head for refusing her student's whims."
Hawk considered this. "That's a good point. After, for sure. The Kazekage's better equipped to handle Lady Chiyo."
"Nobody's equipped to handle Lady Chiyo."
"The Kazekage's more equipped than us."
…
The genjutsu eventually ended.
Toma opened his eyes. He was sitting on the cold floor of his cell. The iron door was in front of him, and through the grate, on the other side, Karura was opening her eyes at the same moment, and they found each other through the bars.
They both smiled.
His body ached from a fight that had never happened. He could still feel the hot sand under his feet. He could still hear her laughing when his sand wall swallowed Million up to the waist, and her shout when Reaper came over the dune behind him, and his own laugh, something he couldn't remember ever doing before, when she knocked him flat into a dune and then reached down to pull him up.
"Thank you, Karura..." he said.
Something ran down his cheek. He didn't notice it until he saw her face change.
Karura reached through the bars and wiped the tear away with the side of one finger.
"It's nothing," she said. "We're friends."
Toma inwardly shook his head. It might have been nothing to her. It was everything to him. And she'd called them friends. His first friend. The first person in his whole life who had ever called him that and meant it.
He knew how unlikely it was that they'd ever really get to be friends, out there. Walking through a market together. Eating at the same table. Who would want to be seen with the village's monster? With the thing that had killed so many people, people with cousins and children and building walls that came down on them?
But she'd said it anyway. She'd said it knowing.
"Toma-kun." Karura was still up on her toes, holding the bars. Her voice dropped, a little more serious. "Can I tell you something? I don't really know how to explain it. But I've just started learning fuinjutsu." She glanced at his belly. "When I'm better at them... a lot better... I want to look at yours. I want to see if I can make it hold better, so you can get some proper sleep."
Toma stared at her.
"You'd do that?"
"I'd like to try." She smiled. "Don't get your hopes up too much, though. I'm still really bad at it. Master Chiyo is giving me a hard time about it." The act of being bad at something was strangely soothing to Karura.
Toma didn't say anything. He couldn't. He just nodded, both hands still wrapped around the bars.
"I have to go now," she said. "I'm going to be gone for a while. I'm not sure when I'll be back. But I'll bring something back for you. For sure."
"Thank you for thinking of me, Karura..."
She let go of the bars and dropped back down onto her heels. She turned around, stepped carefully around the edge of the painted seal, and bowed deeply to the two masks at the end of the corridor.
"Thank you, Mr. ANBU!"
Jackal coughed. "Good luck on your mission."
"Be safe, Karura-chan," said Hawk.
She ran up the stairs two at a time. Her footsteps faded. The corridor went quiet again, just the lamps and the seal and the boy behind the iron door, still holding the bars, still looking at the empty place where she'd been.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold training results!]
Halfway up the third flight, Karura stopped and read the words, and blinked. An hour of holding a genjutsu, keeping both their minds tied together while they fought, feeding it the whole time. She hadn't even thought of it as practice.
She smiled and kept climbing.
The Third Kazekage's fist caught Rasa straight in the nose.
Cartilage popped, hot and sharp behind his eyes. Rasa stumbled two steps back, shook his head, and brought his hands back up, warm blood spilling over his upper lip. At the edge of the field, his gold dust gourd sat where the Third had made him leave it before sunrise, sealed shut, close enough to see, and close enough to see and no use at all.
"Keep your guard up." the Third said.
He didn't wait for Rasa to set his feet. The Third stepped inside Rasa's reach, knife-hand flashing toward his windpipe. Rasa jerked his chin back and threw a hasty counter, punching only empty air as his sensei slipped to his blind side. Two fingers pierced toward his eyes and Rasa ducked low on instinct before a shin whipped into his legs.
Rasa's legs went out from under him, but before he could even fall, the Third's fist sank deep into his gut.
The desert air left Rasa's lungs in a single, wet cough. The sand came up to meet his back. For three seconds, the sky spun. Rasa rolled onto his side, spat a mouthful of grit and copper into the dirt, and pushed himself up on raw, skinned knuckles. His lip was split open again from the morning before, and his left ribs throbbed where the Third had spent twenty minutes yesterday morning hooking him in the body every time he planted his heels.
Stop reaching for it, Rasa told himself, forcing his trembling right hand into a fist. Twice during that last exchange, his fingers had twitched open. Trying to call up a wall of gold that wasn't coming. He had spent his whole life standing still behind a shifting, impenetrable curtain. Very few had ever been able to cross the distance.
Then Mai had walked through his gold like it was nothing, pinned his shoulders to the dirt with her knees on his chest, and hammered his face until he choked out a surrender.
The Third hadn't said a word about it afterward. The next morning he'd simply pointed to the edge of the training ground, told Rasa to unstrap the gourd, and spent every dawn since beating the bad habits out of his bones by hand.
Rasa dragged in a shallow breath, stayed on the balls of his feet, and lunged. He snapped a high left jab toward the Third's jaw to draw his eyes up, then whipped a low kick straight at his sensei's lead knee.
The Third didn't even shift his weight. He lifted his knee a hand's breadth, let Rasa's shin whistle harmlessly underneath, and stamped his heel straight down onto the bridge of Rasa's ankle, driving it deep into the sand.
Rasa had half a second to tug against his own trapped leg before the Third's other foot came up beneath his chin, snapping his teeth together and sending him skidding backward across the dirt.
"Dead three times," the Third said, looking down at him. "Better than yesterday. Yesterday it was five."
An ANBU dropped onto the edge of the field, knelt, handed over a folded note, and was gone.
The Third read it. Rasa, getting back to his feet while rubbing his aching jaw, saw his eyebrows move. That almost never happened.
"Something wrong, sensei?"
"No." The Third refolded the note. Then, after a moment, he unfolded it and read it again. "Karura went down to the holding level last night. She asked the guards if she could speak to Toma. They let her talk through the grate." He paused. "She put him under a genjutsu, and the two of them sat inside it for an hour."
Rasa straightened. "She... what?"
"Apparently she knows genjutsu now." The Third's voice was very dry. "Nobody thought to inform me of that, either… I suppose Sayo is closer to Karura than I thought."
Rasa was confused. Toma? Visited Toma? Spent time with that waste? For what reason? He knew he hadn't thought about Toma at all, except as the reason the village was nearly destroyed.
Karura had gone to see him.
"Are you going to punish her?" he asked.
"For what? Spending time with the jinchuriki through a cell?" The Third tucked the note into his sleeve. "I'm not pleased about it, but perhaps there can be a benefit to this I haven't seen yet. One of my most valuable shinobi and our village's greatest weapon…" He rubbed his chin. "I'll have to think about it."
Rasa nodded slowly.
"Sensei. Can I ask you something?"
"You may."
"The Daimyo's heir. The escort." Rasa had heard about it. He kept his voice level. "Why her? I'm not... I'm not saying she can't do it. Obviously she can. But Lady Chiyo's done missions like that. Lord Ebizo's done missions like that. They know the court. They know how those people think. Why send her instead?"
The Third didn't answer right away. He looked at the boy for a long moment, and Rasa had the uncomfortable feeling of being sized up for something.
"What does the Wind court see," the Third said, "when Lady Chiyo walks into a room?"
Rasa thought about it. "The puppet master. The poison master. The woman who's killed more shinobi for Sunagakure than anyone alive."
"And Lord Ebizo?"
"Chiyo's brother. An elite strategist. Someone who's been negotiating with them for decades."
"Yes. They are Suna's most valuable shinobi, and the court knows exactly where they keep them. When either of them walks into a room, every noble in it puts a hand on his purse and smiles very carefully." The Third turned back toward the field. "The heir does not need a knife. The Guardians are knives. He has five of them. What the heir needs, though he doesn't know it, is to spend half a year beside someone from this village and come home thinking well of it."
Rasa frowned. "Why wouldn't they like us?" Then he saw the look of disapproval on his sensei's face and started thinking elsewhere. "You think she'll make him like Suna?"
"I think she'll keep him alive. That's the mission on the scroll." The Third's mouth moved, just slightly. "And somewhere around the fourth month, a spoiled nineteen-year-old who has been insulting her since the first town is going to notice that she has saved his life three or four times and never once asked him for anything in return. A man remembers the people who asked nothing of him. Especially a man who has never met one."
"Does she know? That that's what you want?"
"No. And you're not going to tell her." The Third looked at him. "If she knew, she'd try. If she tried, he'd smell it. She'll do it far better by accident."
Rasa looked at the sand between his feet for a long time.
He'd have done it wrong. He knew that, standing there. He'd have kept the heir alive, probably. But getting on some uppity noble's good side? Acting subservient and meek and passive? Rasa definitely wasn't the shinobi for a task like that. Especially one that may involve their future as a village.
A year ago he would have argued with that. Today he didn't have the breath for it.
"I understand, sensei."
"Good." The Third stepped back into the center of the field and settled into an easy stance, hands loose at his sides. "Let's keep going while I don't have to attend any meetings or do any paperwork."
Rasa raised his hands.
The Third came in, and this time, when the punch came, Rasa's guard was there to meet it.