Morning in Hoshimine Village had a way of stretching itself thin. One chore became two, and two became five. By the time the village had fully awakened, I had already hauled water, repaired the north fence, mucked the stalls, fed the hens, carried root sacks, swept the barn entrance twice, and fixed a broken hinge on one of Old Genji's storage sheds because apparently being cursed did not disqualify me from carpentry.
It was near midday when I finally slipped away just beyond the fence line, where the Village Chief's southern field gave way to a narrow patch of open grass and a dead tree that had been struck by lightning years ago. I heard it was struck the moment I was born. Truly, I am a curse, am I not? But it was one of the only things that I for some reason felt a connection to. Maybe it was because it would always accept me leaning and resting against it?
That was why I liked it.
I set the empty bucket beside the stump and lowered myself down against it, letting the rough wood support my back. The wind moved softly through the grass. Somewhere below the hill, water ran over stone in a steady murmur. In the distance, I could hear the dull rhythm of an axe biting wood, then silence, then another strike.
I tilted my head back and closed my eyes. It was quiet. Though, Hoshimine Villages never truly was. But it was quiet enough that I could almost imagine I had slipped out of the world for a few minutes and explore and take in the unknown. It was my way of attaining a semblance of freedom.
My shoulder still ached faintly from the yoke. The cut near my ear had dried stiff. My sleeves smelled like damp hay and cold water. I should have gone back sooner. There was always more work waiting. There always would be.
But for that moment, I stayed where I was, doing nothing.
"Thought I'd find you here!"
I opened my eyes and there she was.
Shiro stood a few paces away with her hands folded behind her back as the breeze moved through the long white strands of her hair. Sunlight caught against it and turned the edges pale silver. She wore a simple village dress beneath a light outer mantle, though even simple things seemed to look different on her. It was as if the world had decided early on to be gentler with her than with most of us.
Maybe it had. But she was smiling. It was small, familiar, and dangerous in the way only kindness can be.
"What have you been up to?" she asked.
I stared at her for a second longer than I meant to. Then I looked away first.
"Nothing."
"That's a lie."
"It's not."
"It is. You only come up here when you're hiding from work or from people..."
I frowned faintly.
"That makes it sound like I'm clever."
She stepped closer, the grass whispering around her ankles.
"You are clever. You're just dedicated to hiding it."
I snorted before I could stop myself. That, more than anything, seemed to please her as she lowered herself beside the stump without asking, close enough that our shoulders nearly touched. She always at near me like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like there was nothing strange about the chief's daughter resting in the grass next to the village curse.
At first, years ago, I used to glance around in panic whenever she did it. Now I mostly just braced for the part of me that still didn't know what to do with being treated like a normal person.
She turned her face slightly toward me. There was dirt on my sleeve. A smear of dried mud near my wrist. I became aware of all at once.
"You're hurt again," she said.
"It's barely anything."
"I know that's a lie."
"It isn't."
Shiro leaned closer before I could move away and studied the small cut above my ear. Her expression changed in that quiet way hers sometimes did. Not anger exactly but not pity either. It was something sharper. More private.
"Was it the boys near the well again?" she asked.
I kept my eyes on the field.
"Maybe."
"Haruto."
I sighed.
"...Yes..."
Her silence after that was worse than if she had shouted. The wind moved through the grass between us.
At last she said, very evenly, "I don't like when you answer like that."
"I know."
"You say 'maybe' as if uncertainty makes it go away."
I picked at a splinter on the edge of the stump.
"It makes it bearable at least..."
She did not answer right away. That was another thing about Shiro. She knew when to leave silence alone and when to push against it until it broke. Today, apparently, she chose silence.
After a moment she exhaled and looked out over the hill instead.
"Then tell me something else."
"Like what?"
She tucked one leg beneath herself and tilted her head, pretending to think hard about it.
"What were you doing before I found you?"
"Resting."
"Before that."
"Working."
"That doesn't count."
"It counted for me."
A soft laugh escaped her.
"Then let me be more specific. What were you thinking about?"
I should have said nothing or lied. That would have been easier. But Shiro had a way of asking simple questions that made lying feel more difficult than truth. So I answered the way I usually did with her.
"I was thinking," I said, "that this stump is probably the most patient thing in the village."
She blinked. "The stump?"
"It never throws anything at me and it always accepts me with open bark."
For one brief moment, her eyes widened in surprise. Then she laughed. Not the careful laugh of someone trying not to offend. Not the performative one girls sometimes used near the square. It was bright and sudden enough that I felt it before I understood it.
I looked at her despite myself. Shiro noticed, caught my gaze, and smiled again. Though smaller this time.
"There," she said. "That one."
"What one?"
"The face you make right before you realize you said something funny."
"I did not say something funny."
"You did."
"I was being serious."
"That was the funny part."
I shook my head, but there was no force in it.
Shiro rested her chin lightly on her knee and studied me with the calm boldness only she ever managed.
"You know," she said, "you were less stubborn when we were children."
"That's not true."
"It is. Ten years ago, you barely spoke to me at all."
I looked away again.
Ten years ago, I was just a seven-year-old boy who was scared shitless, wondering if I'd make it the next day without starving. But, I did not need help remembering. The memory rose so quickly it was almost physical.
Rain. That was the first thing. Rain on packed dirt. Rain on roof wood. Rain dripping from the brim of the old grain shed at the edge of the village.
I had been sitting behind it with my knees pulled to my chest, hiding from the others because I was too young then to pretend I wasn't. My shirt had been damp. My hands were muddy. Someone had shoved me into a puddle earlier that afternoon. I remember staring at the brown water on my legs and thinking, in the simple brutal way children think, that maybe if I simply disappeared, the village wouldn't care and be glad the cursed child was dead.
Then a younger Shiro had appeared. She was small and dry beneath a paper oil-cloth held badly over her head.
She must have been eight or nine at the time. I had thought, with the certainty of the miserable, that she had come to mock me too. Instead, she crouched down and held out a cloth wrapped around half a sweet bun.
I remembered staring at it like it was a trick.
"Did you poison it?" I asked before I could stop myself.
She had frowned at me then, offended in a way only children can be.
"Why would I do that?"
"Because everyone else hates me."
She had considered that for all of three seconds.
Then she answered with absolute conviction, "Well, I don't."
I had not known what to do with those words. Even now, part of me still didn't. Then, Shiro's voice pulled me back.
"You're remembering all those years ago, aren't you?" she asked quietly.
"Yes."
A small smile touched her lips.
"You thought I was going to throw mud at you or add even more salt to your wounds."
"You were the chief's daughter. Of course I thought you were going to do that."
"That explains nothing."
"But it explained plenty."
She gave me a look. "I brought you a dry towel and some food."
"You looked suspicious."
"I was eight."
"You looked very suspicious for an eight-year-old at the time."
She made a face at me, and I felt something loosen in my chest. It always startled me, how easily she could do that. Shift the air. Pull me out of myself without making it look like work.
"I remember your answer," she said.
"My answer?"
"When I asked your name."
I hesitated. Of course she would remember that. Shiro remembered everything I wanted forgotten and held it so gently I could never resent her for it. I rubbed my thumb along the edge of the stump.
"I said it didn't matter. Not that I had one at the time."
"You did."
I could still hear the way my younger voice had sounded. Flat. Wary. Trying very hard to pretend it would not hurt to be hurt again.
"And then," she continued, turning toward me fully now, "I said, 'It matters if I want to call you something.'"
I almost smiled.
"Then you asked again," I said.
"I did."
"And I told you I didn't have a name."
Her eyes softened.
"And now you do."
For a second, neither of us spoke.
The breeze lifted a few strands of her hair and carried them across her cheek. I had the sudden absurd urge to reach out and tuck them back. I did not. Some impulses still felt too sacred to survive contact.
Instead I said, "You shouldn't remember things like that."
"Why not?"
"Because it was nothing."
Shiro's expression changed immediately.
"It wasn't nothing," she said.
I should have looked away then. I usually did when she said things like that. It was easier to survive people when their words slid off you. But it was harder when they reached somewhere raw and stayed lodged in your flesh.
But I met her gaze anyway, and that was probably my mistake. Because when Shiro looked at me like that, it became briefly possible to believe I had not imagined my own humanity. She broke the moment first as a mischievous glint entered her eyes with such little warning that I had only enough time to think that look never means anything good.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing."
"That look you're giving me definitely means something."
"It means," she said lightly, rising to her feet, "that you look too serious."
I watched her step back into the open patch of grass with the hem of her dress brushing over the ground. She lifted one hand with her palm up and let out a slow breath.
The air changed. It always did when someone's Grace was being used. The breeze thinned and the temperature dipped just enough for my skin to notice.
Then pale lines of light traced briefly across her fingers like frost forming on glass, delicate and white-blue, too bright to be mistaken for anything ordinary. Tiny motes gathered above her palm as moisture condensed from the air, spinning inward in a soft glittering spiral.
A snowball then formed in her hand. It was perfectly round as cold mist curled from its surface.
I stared despite myself. I had seen Shiro use her Grace before. It was on small things, mostly. A shimmer of white at her fingertips on winter mornings. A cup of water turning cool for an old woman in summer. Frost patterns coaxed across a windowpane just to make children laugh.
But there was still something unfairly beautiful about it. Her Grace looked natural on her. It was as if the world had expected it.
Shiro weighed the snowball in her palm and smiled with infuriating innocence.
"What have I told you about frowning all the time?"
"That you complain about it too much?"
"No." She drew her arm back. "That it makes you an easy target."
She then threw it.
I barely had time to lift my hand. The snowball should have burst against my face. Instead, the moment it touched my palm, my Grace woke. It happened the way it always did—too fast for thought, too strange for habit.
It was a faint pressure that moved through my chest, then down my arm in a sharp cool rush. White threads of Grace peeled away from it and sank into my skin like cold light passing through water. For an instant I felt what she had shaped into it: the compression of winter air, the delicate tension holding scattered frost together, the quiet structure beneath the ice.
I didn't steal it. In a sense, I borrowed it. Translated it. Assimilated it.
My hand closed around emptiness, then around possibility.
A pulse of cold bloomed beneath my skin and my fingertips tingled. The air around them silvered faintly. I knew, with the strange instinct that always came with it, that I could hold that aspect of her Grace for only a moment before it thinned and faded.
So I did the only sensible thing and shaped a snowball of my own. It formed on my palm clumsily compared to hers. It was a rough sphere of frost and packed white gathered in my palm, trailing pale vapor.
Shiro's eyes widened. Then I threw it straight at her shoulder. It burst against her with a muffled paf of powder and ice. For half a second she just stood there offended, beautiful, and absolutely disbelieving.
And then she gasped, "Haruto!"
I was already grinning. I knew because I felt it happen before I meant to. The expression came like something forgotten returning home. Shiro stared at me with snow dusting her hair and sleeve.
Then she laughed. I laughed too.
Shiro scooped loose frost from the ground where the fragments had fallen and tried to gather Grace around it again. I stepped backward, still laughing, and barely managed to absorb the second throw before she rushed forward and hit my arm with her hand instead.
"That one shouldn't count," she said.
"It counts."
"You cheated."
"You started it."
"I was correcting your mood."
"With violence."
"With charity."
"That's not what charity means."
"It does if I say it does."
She tried to push me again, lightly this time, and I caught her wrist on reflex. The contact only lasted only a second. Maybe less. But, her skin was cool from the Grace. Mine still hummed faintly with that borrowed winter feeling. A strange, small silence opened between us. Then Shiro looked down at my hand around her wrist, and I let go at once.
"Sorry," I muttered.
She tucked a loose strand of hair behind one ear.
"You always apologize when you don't need to."
I wanted to argue. Instead, I looked down at my palm, where the last traces of her Grace were already fading. The cold brightness beneath my skin thinned to nothing. The air around my fingers warmed. The borrowed structure was gone.
Temporary, as always. That was how my Grace worked. It touched. It understood. It carried something over for a little while. Then it left me with empty hands.
Shiro noticed where I was looking. Her expression softened again, though this time there was something heavier under it.
"It still amazes me," she said quietly. "Every time."
"It shouldn't."
"It should." She stepped closer, close enough that I could see the tiny flecks of white still caught in her hair. "You took my Grace apart with one touch and made it yours!"
"Only for a moment..."
"But imagine if you could permanently keep it? You'd be just like those heroes in the books I use to read to you!"
I looked away first from flattery. We stood side by side for a few seconds after that, facing the village below. From here, Hoshimine Village looked the way it always did from a distance with quiet roofs, narrow lanes, and the Church tower watching over all of it like a finger pointed upward.
The bell was silent now. Smoke climbed lazily from the chimneys. Somewhere out in the lower field, someone shouted for a child to come back inside. It all seemed so ordinary. Which was probably why what Shiro said next landed the way it did.
"It's a shame," she murmured, "that you can't do that openly."
I turned toward her. Shiro was still looking out over the village, but the lightness had gone from her voice. Her fingers tightened slightly around the edge of her sleeve.
"They'd call it heresy," she said. "The Church would. Maybe the village before them."
I said nothing. She went on anyway, quieter now.
"And for what? No one ever explains it properly. They just say it's wrong. Forbidden. Unclean. As if that answers anything."
The cold that lingered from her Grace felt different now. It felt sharper. Less like winter play and more like the edge beneath a blade.
I lowered my eyes to my hand. The same hand that had caught her snowball. The same hand that, for a few breaths, had carried a piece of her miracle as though it had always known how.
"When I was younger," Shiro said, "I asked Father why your Grace was forbidden if it didn't hurt anyone."
I looked up at that.
She gave a humorless little smile.
"He told me some questions are dangerous when spoken too clearly."
Something tightened quietly in my chest. That sounded like the sort of answer adults gave when truth had become inconvenient.
"You know its more than just that..." I said.
Shiro glanced at me.
"Yea...."
She knew of my whole story. The boy who killed his own mother through childbirth. The Church had declared such a thing a heresy. A sin. A curse. A taboo. I had lived my whole life under the weight of other people's judgment. But Shiro had lived hers close enough to power to notice when judgment was being guarded.
That difference mattered more than either of us said aloud.
Shiro's voice softened when she spoke next.
"I wish you could walk around without being feared or scrutinized against."
I let out a breath that almost became a laugh and failed halfway.
"That would require this village to become reasonable overnight."
"I didn't say the wish was modest."
That pulled the corner of my mouth upward despite myself. Shiro noticed. For a moment, neither of us spoke. Then she nudged my arm lightly with hers.
"Come on," she said. "If you stay here too long, they'll accuse me of helping you laze around."
"They already accused you of worse."
"I know."
There was no bitterness in the way she said it. Only the quiet steadiness that had always been there. Seven years ago, she had asked my name like it mattered to her in the world even though I never had one to begin with.
But she still did.
That was the problem.
But it was a miracle too.