Chapter 7: Under the blossoming cherry trees – Part 1

Katsuyori was sleeping soundly when he felt something light feathering across his nose.

He opened his eyes to find Shika's face inches from his own, wearing her usual cheeky grin and holding a single fern frond she'd clearly been using as the instrument of his torment.

"Mornin', unc."

"Shika-san," he said, blinking the sleep away, "that is not how one wakes a person."

"It is now."

"What do you require of me?"

"You stink."

He sat up properly at that, mildly affronted. He had gone to the river daily for practice, and for the cold-water discipline his father's retainers had drilled into him as a boy. The river was the closest thing to a proper samurai's bath available to a man living in a hut made of lashed branches. But he looked down at himself and found the complaint difficult to argue with. He had one robe. The one he'd retreated in, weeks ago now, through rain and mud and the long collapse of everything he had been.

"I cannot exactly procure new clothing out here," he said, with as much dignity as the sentence allowed. "Though if you happen to know a competent textile merchant, I am willing to learn the craft myself rather than continue offending your nose."

"Yuki-chan's basically a fashionista," Shika said, already hauling him up by the wrist with more enthusiasm than the hour warranted. "He'll fix you right up. C'mon, get up."

They walked rather than flew this time, Nobu trailing behind them at her own pace. Katsuyori found himself turning a question over that had been sitting in him since their first visit.

"If Yuki-san is a yokai," he asked, "does he not require human flesh to sustain himself?"

"Yuki-chan only eats bad people," Shika said, as though this were an obviously reasonable dietary distinction. "Properly bad. Murderers. Rapists." She shrugged. "He's pickier than most of his kind. Most yokai just eat whoever's unlucky. Yuki-chan decided a long time ago he'd rather have standards."

"That is, I confess, a more comforting answer than I expected."

They found Yuki kneeling over Minokichi in the clearing outside the hut, dabbing at a long, ugly gash across his forearm with a cloth gone dark with blood. His usual composure was frayed at the edges and he wasn't bothering to hide it.

"What happened," Shika said, all the morning's lightness gone instantly out of her voice.

Minokichi managed a pained, sheepish grin. "New bandits. Came through three days ago, working the village under the new chief's blessing, calling it tax, mostly because nobody's left who'll call it what it actually is." He winced as Yuki tightened the binding. "Came up here when I was late paying. Didn't take well to being told the mountain doesn't really belong to anyone."

"They'll come back," Yuki said quietly, not looking up from his work. "And next time they won't stop at the door."

Nobody said the rest of it. If the bandits forced their way inside and saw what Minokichi's wife was beneath the kimono, the marriage that had survived through countless reinventions would end here in the worst possible way.

"I'm going to eat them."

The words emerged as a low growl.

Yuki's eyes lost their warmth. His pupils narrowed, his features sharpened, and for a fleeting moment something ancient stirred beneath the borrowed shape of a man.

"No."

Katsuyori's voice was calm but absolute. Something settled in his chest, cold and certain.

The collapse of the Takeda clan had left the province lawless enough for opportunists to fill the gap with exactly this kind of cruelty. Small men with swords they hadn't earned, preying on people too far from any real authority to be protected by it. He had spent his whole life commanding armies meant to prevent this, and he had lost. Commoners like Minokichi were paying for that loss now, in blood drawn across a woodcutter's arm.

"Lend me something to wear," he said. "Common clothes. Nothing that marks me as anything."

Minokichi raised an eyebrow despite his pain. "Going somewhere?"

"To have a conversation with your tax collectors."

The clothes Minokichi lent him were too short in the sleeve and smelled faintly of pine sap, and Katsuyori had never worn anything more comfortable in his life.

No crest. No topknot. That had been gone for weeks now, the hair grown back uneven and unremarkable, the mark of status that used to open castle gates reduced to nothing more than an ordinary man's haircut.

He slid the tachi through the borrowed belt and told himself it would stay there. He had been raised to the sword the way the heir of Kai is raised to it—for fields and formations, for armoured men and the backs of the routed. It was precise, lethal, and it did only one thing: it ended a man on the first stroke, cleanly. A blade like that had no small settings. You did not draw it to warn or to wound. You drew it when the man in front of you had to die and there was no way left around it, and until then it stayed in the scabbard.

None of the six waiting downhill was that man. He meant to keep the edge out of the morning entirely.

He walked into the village centre looking exactly like what he now was. Nobody. A woodcutter, maybe. A farmer who'd wandered too far from his fields.

The bandits, six of them, lounging across the steps of what used to be a modest shrine office, now repurposed as their collection post, didn't even bother standing when he approached.

"You got coin or not," the nearest one said, barely glancing up, picking at his teeth with a fishbone. "Chief's tax is due first of the week. No coin, we collect in kind. Pigs. Rice. Pretty wives, if your village happens to have any."

"I'm here about the man you cut on the mountain," Katsuyori said.

That got their attention, though not the kind he wanted yet. One of them laughed.

"That woodcutter? Owes back taxes. Should be grateful we only took an arm's worth of warning." The leader, a barrel-chested man with a notched blade and the loud confidence of someone who'd never once lost a fight against anyone who mattered, finally rose to his feet, sizing Katsuyori up and finding, evidently, nothing worth respecting.

No topknot. Cheap borrowed clothes. A farmer's hands, as far as he could tell from this distance.

"You looking to pay his debt for him? Or looking for the same lesson?"

"Neither," Katsuyori said. "I'm looking for you to leave this village. Permanently."

The laughter that answered him was loud, genuine, and entirely unearned.

It would not last.

The first one came at him sloppy and overconfident, swinging a blade that had clearly seen more use threatening farmers than facing anyone who could fight back.

Katsuyori let the strike come close enough to feel the wind of it, then stepped off the line. It was not work for the sword. His borrowed sleeve caught the man's wrist on the way past and put the blade into the dirt, and a single open-palm strike to the back of the skull put him face-first down before his friends had registered that the fight had started.

The second and third came together, which was the only intelligent decision any of them made all morning.

It didn't matter. Reading them was the oldest thing he knew. Katsuyori had spent two decades learning to read the precise half-second before a cavalry charge, the moment a horse commits its full weight to a line it can no longer leave, and a man with a sword gives away the same thing, only slower, written across a lousy shoulder and an overreaching arm. He took the first sword off its owner with a twist that left the bandit staring at his own empty hand in confusion while putting the second one down with the flat of that same stolen blade across the back of his knees, dropping him hard enough that he wouldn't be standing again without help.

The fourth tried to run. Katsuyori let him get exactly three steps before throwing a stone, the same one he'd palmed off the ground without anyone noticing. It caught him precisely behind the ear and folded him sideways into the dirt, unconscious before he finished falling.

The fifth was competent.

He landed one real strike along Katsuyori's forearm, a thin line of blood, and something old woke in Katsuyori's chest for the first time since Nagashino. The flat, patient thing the Takeda had carried onto every field they lost, the art the guns were supposed to have retired. For one breath he let it wake. He settled, and the tachi came a hand's width out of the scabbard.

The bandit felt it the way you feel a room go cold. He stopped. Some part of him below thinking understood that the next thing would not be a bruise.

Katsuyori put the sword back. He finished it with the flat of his palm to the chest, and the man left his feet and landed on his back with the air driven out of him in one long gasp. It was mercy. It would not feel like mercy in the morning.

The leader watched all five of his men go down in less time than it had taken him to laugh. His confidence finally, visibly, began to crack.

"Who the hell are you?" The laughter had gone out of his voice. His blade remained raised, but the swagger behind it was gone.

Katsuyori tugged the borrowed sleeve back over his forearm.

"Nobody," he replied.

What followed was not a duel so much as a correction.

The bandit lunged, desperate to take back the confidence he had already lost. Katsuyori stepped aside and let the strike pass, then answered with the hilt of his sword beneath the man's jaw. The leader staggered, swung wildly, and found only empty air. Each attack grew sloppier than the last, driven more by panic than intent.

When Katsuyori finally ended it, he did so without haste.

One precise cut opened the flesh above the man's brow, leaving a cross-shaped scar that would remain long after the bruises faded. A second strike, delivered with surgical precision to the back of his ankle, severed the tendon without taking the foot itself.

The bandit collapsed with a cry, clutching at a leg that would never again answer him properly.

"You can still live," Katsuyori said, lowering the tip of his blade until it rested beneath the man's throat. "But you'll never outrun your cowardice, and no one will follow a leader who limps behind his own men."

The leader swallowed hard.

"I... I swear it. We'll leave this village."

"You'll leave tonight."

The man nodded so vigorously that the edge of the blade nearly drew blood.

Only then did Katsuyori withdraw.

He stripped the belts from the unconscious bandits and used them to bind all six at the wrists before propping them against the steps of the shrine office in a neat row. They looked less like fearsome outlaws than discarded scarecrows waiting for someone to decide what to do with them.

Without another word, Katsuyori turned and disappeared into the trees before the villagers could gather. The fewer people who remembered his face, the better.

He almost went unnoticed.

Almost.

A small child standing at the edge of the shrine grounds caught sight of the solitary swordsman disappearing into the cedar forest. Their eyes met for only a heartbeat before Katsuyori vanished among the mist.

By the time the villagers noticed the bandits, the sun had begun to sink behind the mountains.

That night, battered and humiliated, the six men stood before the one person they feared more than the mysterious swordsman.

Their chief did not speak immediately.

He simply stared at the cross carved into his underling's forehead. It was too clean to be rage and too shallow to be an accident. Someone had stood over this man with the means to take his head and had measured out a scar instead, the way you measure something you have done ten thousand times.

Then he smiled.