Chapter 3: The shape of grief

They ate the fish by the riverbank, speared crudely on green branches and held too close to the fire, the skin charring black in places before either of them thought to pull them back. Katsuyori ate like a man who had forgotten food could taste like anything. Shika ate like someone who had never once worried that there wouldn't be more.

She studied him while he chewed, head tilted, and reached out without warning to flick the short, uneven ends of hair at the back of his neck where the topknot used to sit.

"What happened here," she said, delighted. "Did a dog get to you?"

"I cut it myself."

"On purpose?"

"On purpose."

She made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff.

"So you quit. Lord no more. Just a bum in the woods now."

"That would be an accurate description," he admitted.

She was quiet for a moment, picking a bone out of her fish with great concentration. Then, without looking up: "Why are you here, anyway? In my forest. Bleeding all over my moss."

He told her plainly. His wife. His sons. Seppuku, already chosen and already carried out before he reached the trees, in a place he had not been present for. Oda Nobunaga's banners over what remained of his provinces. The clan, in any form that meant anything, no longer existing.

Shika listened with her chin propped on her knees. When he finished, she nodded slowly.

"Okay," she said. "So start a new clan. Call it the Katsu clan."

She paused, just long enough for him to feel the joke coming and be powerless to stop it.

"Sell katsudon. Pork cutlet bowls. Katsuyori's Katsu. It writes itself."

"That is not—" he started.

"It's right there in your name. I didn't even have to try."

"I would ask that you try a little less."

She grinned, entirely unrepentant, and he found himself fighting something that was almost a smile despite the subject they had just been discussing.

It was Nobu who spoke next. The voice arrived low and even from somewhere behind him, and for several seconds his mind simply refused it.

She's always like this.

Katsuyori turned slowly. Nobu stood at the edge of the firelight, ears forward, watching him with an expression that had not existed on her face in all the years he had ridden her.

"You can speak," he said, which seemed an insufficient response but was the only sentence available to him.

A kami's touch changes what it heals.

She lowered her head slightly, an oddly formal gesture from an animal.

I am told this makes me something like a messenger now. I did not ask for the position.

"A kami's touch," Katsuyori repeated, and looked at Shika, who was picking at her fish and not looking back.

She is the protector of this forest, Nobu said. And of the deer in it. Five hundred years, by my understanding, though I am new enough to this not to know if that number impresses anyone.

Katsuyori looked at the girl sitting cross-legged by his fire. Antlers catching the low light. Fish grease on her fingers. She was sucking a bone clean with no apparent awareness that she had just been described as ancient.

"Older than my own grandmother," he said.

Shika pointed the bone at him like a small accusing sword. "Watch it, unc."

The fire burned lower. Somewhere beyond the treeline a bird called twice and went quiet. Katsuyori found himself, in the unguarded stillness that follows a meal and precedes sleep, thinking of his wife. Not the fact of her death, which he had already absorbed, but her face across a low table much like this fire, the way she used to sit.

Shika watched him think it. She seemed, he was beginning to understand, unusually good at watching people think things.

"You miss someone," she said. Not a question.

He didn't answer immediately.

"Can you bring her back?" he asked finally. The words came out rougher than he intended.

"No dice, unc." She didn't soften it. "Dead people are a different shrine's business entirely. I try that, I'm in the doghouse for a thousand years, easy."

He nodded, the disappointment landing exactly where he expected it to.

Shika tilted her head, turning the problem over the way she'd turned over the fish.

"If you tell me what she looked like," she said, "I can hold a shape. Just not for long. A candle's length, maybe less." She held up a finger, to make the limit very clear before he got any ideas about it.

He sat with that for a long moment, the fire cracking softly between them. He found that wanting it and fearing it arrived in him at exactly the same weight.

"Keirin'in," he said eventually. Her name felt strange in his mouth after weeks of not saying it. "She was a swordswoman before she was anyone's wife. My father insisted on the marriage for the alliance, but she would have made a name for herself regardless of who she married." The words came easier than he expected. "Small. Quick. Stronger than her size suggested to people who hadn't trained against her. Skin pale as snow—she burned in the sun like she'd never once stood in it, no matter how many summers passed." He paused. "There was a scar. Just below her ribs, on the left side. A training cut from when she was young, before I knew her. A blade caught her during practice, before she'd learned to read an opponent's wrist. She used to say it was the only mistake she ever let stand uncorrected, because it reminded her never to make it twice."

Shika closed her eyes.

The light of the fire bent strangely against her outline. The antlers receded. The small frame lengthened and settled into someone else's proportions.

When she opened her eyes again, they were the wrong shape for a heartbeat, then they weren't.

"Katsuyori," she said, in a voice that was not Shika's.

He did not move for a long moment. Either this was not enough like her to bear, or it was enough like her and that was worse.

Then he crossed the small distance between them and held her. The warmth of her was real. Present. Breathing against his collarbone. It undid something that had stayed shut since the morning her death reached him as a report rather than a grief.

He reached for her without thinking. His hands found her waist, then slid upward. The silk of the borrowed kimono whispered under his fingers as he tugged at the obi. The knot came loose with a soft pull. He parted the fabric, sliding the top half of the kimono down her shoulders until it pooled at her elbows.

He did not let go for a long time. Long enough to feel, beneath his palm, the faint raised line of an old scar just below her ribs. Exactly where it should have been. Healed exactly as crooked as memory insisted.

It was the proof he hadn't asked for and couldn't refuse.

He did not know how long he held her. He was not a man who had lost a province and a clan name. He was a husband, holding the only thing in the world he had ever wanted back.

"I'm here," he said.

It wasn't true. Neither of them said so.

Then the shape under his hands began to change.

The scar he had been tracing faded away.

It was not sudden. It was slower than sudden, like ink dissolving back into water. The proportions shrank. The voice became, mid-syllable, a smaller and rougher voice, and antlers pushed through hair that was no longer his wife's.

He was holding Shika.

He let go so quickly that she nearly toppled backward into the dirt.

"Whoa—hey—you knew it was me the whole time, unc!" She caught herself, blinking up at him, her yukata twisted half off one shoulder from the shape she'd just been wearing. For once she did not seem to know what to say.

He stepped back. Put actual distance between them.

"That's it," she said, straightening her yukata with quick, businesslike tugs, not meeting his eyes. "Told you it wouldn't last."

He said nothing. He was still catching his breath, and it had nothing to do with exertion.

The silence stretched long enough that even she seemed to find it uncomfortable, which he hadn't yet seen from her in the short time he'd known her.

"You okay, unc?" she asked, quieter, without the usual mockery.

"No," he responded. "I don't think I am."

She nodded and settled back down by the fire with her knees drawn up, sitting a little further away than she had been.

For a while neither of them spoke. The fire popped and settled. Somewhere out in the dark, Nobu shifted her weight and exhaled the long, unbothered sigh of an animal entirely unaware of what had just happened a few feet away from her.

"Was it good?" Shika asked eventually. Not teasing. She genuinely wanted to know.

He considered lying. He didn't have it in him.

"It was the closest I have felt to her since the report reached me," he said. "And it was also the cruellest thing anyone has done for me in a very long time."

She turned a stick over in her hands, peeling a long curl of bark from it without looking up.

"I didn't mean it cruel," she said finally.

"I know." He looked at the fire rather than at her. "That does not change what it was."

She didn't argue the point.

They sat like that for a long while, the fire dropping lower, neither of them moving to feed it. She had stopped making jokes about katsudon and his hair. He was grateful for her silence.

"You're not what I expected," he said eventually, mostly to break the silence himself.

"Nobody expects me," she said. "That's usually the point."

"A protector of deer who speaks like a dockworker and revives dying horses out of boredom."

"Out of principle," she corrected, some of her usual sharpness returning, though gentler than before. "There's a difference."

"Forgive me. I am still adjusting to the local customs of this forest."

She almost smiled at that. Then she stood, brushing dirt from her yukata, the antlers catching the firelight as she moved.

"Get some sleep, unc," she said. "Grief makes lousy company for the night watch."

She disappeared into the dark between the cedars, not walking so much as simply ceasing to be where she had just been.

He sat a while longer, his hand still remembering a scar that had never been real, and found that for the first time since Nagashino, his exhaustion outweighed his grief.

He slept without meaning to and did not dream of anyone at all.