Chapter 4: Yuki and Minokichi

At the break of dawn, Shika took Nobu out before Katsuyori woke, riding deep into a part of the forest where the cedars grew close enough together that the morning light came through in thin broken strips.

Did you lie? Nobu asked, after they'd ridden for a while in silence.

Shika didn't answer.

I'm a messenger now, Nobu pressed. I'm told it comes with knowing things. What gods can and cannot do. I don't pretend to understand the rules you live by, but I know enough to know that was a choice, not a limitation.

"Then you already know the answer." Shika yanked the reins higher as a form of dominance.

I serve you now, Nobu said. I shall not question.

Shika was quiet for a long stretch after that, watching the light move across Nobu's dark neck.

"There's a poem," she said eventually. "Lady Murasaki7 wrote it, buried in the middle of a longer one, easy to miss if you're not looking for it." She recited it slowly, like something she'd carried a long time without saying aloud:

Deceit is the truest flower of the human heart—
it blooms because the soil is sorrow,
and ignorance is the only rain that lets it keep its colour.

That's not comforting, Nobu said, after a moment.

"It's not supposed to be comforting. It's supposed to be honest." Shika exhaled, watching her breath catch faintly in the cold morning air. "Deception's not always cruelty, Nobu. Sometimes it's just mercy wearing a smaller coat."

When they returned, Katsuyori was already awake, sitting outside the hut with his knees drawn up and his back against the cedar. His eyes were open and fixed on nothing. He did not look up when Nobu's hooves came near.

Shika studied him for a moment from horseback. The mockery she usually wore was nowhere on her face.

"Up," she said. "We're going somewhere."

"I would rather not."

"Didn't ask if you wanted to. Get on the horse, unc."

He looked at her with an exhaustion that went beyond sleep. His wife's death had finally arrived—not as a report, not as a fact recited in the dark, but as something settled permanently into his body. He said nothing. Eventually he stood, and eventually he climbed up behind her on Nobu's back, because refusing took more will than he currently possessed.

They rode for the better part of an hour, until the trees opened onto a small clearing with a modest house at its centre. A woodcutter's home, simply built, smoke rising thin and steady from the chimney despite the cold.

A man came out before they'd fully stopped, an axe loose in one hand, broad-shouldered and weathered, the way men who worked outdoors for a living were. Behind him, in the doorway, stood a striking figure in a woman's kimono. Pale, almost luminous skin. Dark hair piled with careful precision. Features so fine they seemed lit from some interior source.

"Shika-chan!" the woodcutter called, grinning. "You brought a guest."

"Minokichi," Shika said, sliding down from Nobu with her usual lack of ceremony. "This is Katsuyori. He's having a very bad month."

The pale figure in the doorway laughed—a low, distinctly unfeminine laugh that didn't match the kimono at all—and stepped forward. The morning light caught skin that seemed to hold a sheen of frost even near the chimney.

"You'll have to forgive my husband," the figure said, in a voice equally low. "He's terrible with introductions. I'm Yuki."

Katsuyori, still dismounting, stared, and could not stop himself. "You're—"

"A man, yes," Yuki said pleasantly, before he could finish. "I wear the kimono so the neighbours sleep easier. It's a small inconvenience compared to the alternative."

“A yokai—you're Yuki-Onna8!” Katsuyori gasped.

“Calm down, calm down, no name-calling here, unc.” Shika yanked his ear while tiptoeing.

Shika smirked. "Minokichi's a woodcutter. Yuki married a man who handles wood for a living while managing his morning wood.”

"The same joke, every single time," Minokichi said, unbothered.

"The same terrible joke," Yuki said, swatting his arm, clearly delighted regardless.

They sat together near the woodpile while Yuki brought tea, the strange domestic comfort of the place settling slowly into Katsuyori's chest despite everything. Minokichi asked, without much delicacy, what had happened to bring a man so visibly hollowed-out to their door, and Katsuyori found himself answering more plainly than he expected to. The battle. The names lost in the gunsmoke. The retreat. The wife and sons gone before he'd even reached the forest.

Minokichi listened, chewing on a piece of dried fish, unimpressed. He simply didn't seem familiar with the weight Katsuyori had been carrying it with.

"Losing a war doesn't mean anything," Minokichi said finally.

Katsuyori blinked at him. "It cost me everything I had."

"It cost you a province and a name." Minokichi shrugged. "Names are heavy if you let them be. The thing that matters is whether you've lost your will to keep going. That's the only loss that counts." He gestured with the fish. "I cut wood for a living. Nobody's ever asked me to die with honour over a bad harvest. Bushido's a fine thing if you're born into it, I suppose. It's not built for men like me."

"That is a remarkably casual way to view honour," Katsuyori said.

"That's because I don't have any," Minokichi said cheerfully. "I have a husband who occasionally has frost on his eyelashes and somehow still makes good rice. That's enough honour for one lifetime."

Yuki returned with the tea and settled beside him, leaning against his shoulder. "He means it, too. Disgustingly content. It's been years."

"What happens," Katsuyori asked, "if you're discovered? A marriage like yours?"

Yuki sipped the tea before answering. "If anyone gets too curious, I'll pretend to eat him." A small, private smile passed between them. "Terrify the whole village. Vanish into the snow with a scream and a flourish." He glanced sideways at Minokichi. "Then I'll give him a new name two villages over, and we'll start again as two men nobody's heard of." He shrugged, settling further against his husband's shoulder. "We'll do that as many times as the world makes us. Until we're both too old to care what anyone thinks, and then we'll sit on a porch somewhere and let them say whatever they like."

"That seems," Katsuyori said carefully, "exhausting."

"Less exhausting than pretending I don't love him," Yuki said simply.

Minokichi said nothing but reached over and took his hand. The easy, unhurried comfort of the gesture sat in the clearing like something Katsuyori had not realised, until this exact moment, that he had been starving for.

They left as the light began turning towards afternoon. Shika was quieter than usual on the ride back, perhaps sensing that the visit had done something to him that her own jokes hadn't managed to reach.

They were not far from the hut when Katsuyori stopped walking.

Shika turned, Nobu pausing beside her, and watched the composure he had held through every catastrophe of the last weeks finally, completely give way.

He did not sob loudly. It came the way grief comes when it has been dammed too long behind discipline and finds the smallest crack to escape through. Quiet, and total. His shoulders folded inward. His hands pressed against his own face as though he could hold the rest of himself together by force. He sank to his knees in the moss, and Shika did not move to stop him. She did not make a joke, but stood near him in silence while he wept for his wife, his sons, his name, his province, the man he had been before the matchlock fire at Shitaragahara, and the man he apparently still was now, kneeling in the dirt of a forest that wasn't his.

"I am," he managed eventually, between breaths that did not come easily, "pathetic."

"Yeah," Shika said gently, no mockery anywhere in it. "You are."

"A sad one."

"Also yeah."

"Dishonoured, even."

"Unc," she said, crouching down so she was level with him, antlers catching the late light, "you're allowed to be all three. Nobody's grading you on it."

He did not answer. He knelt there and let himself be exactly as broken as he was.

Author’s note:

7. Lady Murasaki, or Murasaki Shikibu, was a novelist, poet, and lady‑in‑waiting at the Imperial court during the Heian period. She is best known as the author of The Tale of Genji (源氏物語), a work often regarded as having a stature comparable to Shakespeare’s in Western literature.

8. Yuki Onna: In the classic Japanese folktale Yuki‑Onna (“Snow Woman”), the yokai spares a young woodcutter, Minokichi, during a blizzard on the condition that he never speaks of her. Years later, he marries a mysterious woman named O‑Yuki. When he breaks his vow and tells her about the spirit, she spares his life a second time out of love for their children and then vanishes forever. Yuki‑Onna is often depicted as a beautiful woman with long black hair, yet ruthless in killing unsuspecting mortals.