Chapter 6: Touch of a kami

"Get on Nobu."

She reached for his hand and led him towards where Nobu stood pretending, not very convincingly, to be absorbed in the morning grass.

He didn't understand what she meant until the obi around her waist began to glow.

It started the way it always shifted colour—subtly, then entirely—the fading maple pattern dissolving into something that looked less like fabric and more like captured light, the green-gold of it unwinding from her waist in a long ribbon that wrapped first around Nobu's body, then, before he could properly object, around his own.

"Shika-san…"

"Hold on, unc," she said, already climbing up behind him, "this part's easier if you don't think about it too hard."

The ground left them without warning.

His stomach dropped the way it had during his first cavalry charge as a boy, except there was no gravity beneath him to translate the motion into anything his body understood. Only the obi's light holding him, and the absence of ground.

He did not shout. He came close.

The cedar canopy fell away beneath them. The forest revealed itself from above as a single unbroken green expanse, the river a thin silver thread through it, the mountains beyond rising into cloud he had only ever seen from below. Nobu floated beneath them, calm, dark mane streaming, unbothered by physics that no longer seemed to apply to any of them.

"This is…" he started and had no end to the sentence.

"Insane?" Shika offered, grinning against the wind. "Impossible? Scary?"

"I was going to say enormous," he said. "The world. I forgot how enormous it was."

He had spent his life understanding the world through maps. Provinces bordered and contested, roads measured by how quickly cavalry could move along them, mountains valued only for whether they could be crossed or had to be gone around. From up here none of that existed. There were no borders visible from this height. No Takeda lands, no Oda lands, no lines drawn by men who'd spent their lives certain those lines mattered more than anything.

Just forest, and river, and sky, continuing in every direction without asking permission from any of the names men had given pieces of it.

Something in his chest, which had been clenched tight since Shitaragahara, loosened slightly. Not healed, but loosened, the way a fist relaxes once it understands it no longer needs to be a fist every single moment.

"This used to be the Takeda clan," he said, more to himself than to her. "But now…"

"Yeah." Her voice was unusually soft. "So make new ones. Or don't make any at all. You get to decide that now, unc. Most people don't get that kind of do-over."

He turned his head, just enough to see her face close to his shoulder. The mockery was gone, and something open and unguarded in its place. An expression he hadn't yet learned the name of on her.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked.

She considered the question with more seriousness than she gave most things.

"Because you chose to live," she said finally. "Most people who come to my forest choose to splish-splash themselves open. You were one of the few smart ones. Refreshing."

Below them the cedar canopy rolled on towards the horizon, endless and indifferent to provinces. And for the first time since the smoke cleared at Nagashino, Katsuyori was looking forward rather than back.

That feeling lasted exactly as long as it took the wind to change.

Shika's head turned sharply towards a break in the canopy ahead, the warmth draining out of her posture. Whatever she sensed first, Katsuyori caught a half-second behind her.

"Down there," she said.

The obi dimmed and they dropped low into a clearing where the moss grew strangely flat, as though something had been pacing the same small circle for a long time. A woman stood at its centre, frozen, a basket of mountain daikon spilled at her feet.

Facing her stood something that had once, perhaps, been shaped like a child.

It did not move the way a child moves. Its shoulders sat too high, hunched forward at an angle that put unnatural strain on a spine that shouldn't have bent that way, and when it shifted its weight, the motion arrived in stages. A ripple travelled up through it like something underneath the skin was relocating itself, finding a new arrangement before settling. Its tattered jinbei (9), dark and rotted at the hem, hung from a frame with too many joints, the wrists bending at points wrists had no business bending.

And above all of it, where a head should have sat, was something small.

Katsuyori's mind tried, for one merciful second, to make it into anything else. A mask, he told himself. A doll's face, lashed on for some forgotten ritual.

But the eyes were too clouded with age to be carved, the small ears too soft at the edges, and the head was fused to the wrong neck by something dark and glistening that had stopped being blood and become part of the architecture holding it in place.

He did not look any longer than that.

The thing was speaking. Its voice came out high and sweet, pitched to a register that did not belong anywhere near the rest of it, calling towards the frozen woman.

Mama, I'm cold, I'm cold.

Its long fingers spooled out towards her like the legs of something that lived beneath rocks.

The woman could not move. Katsuyori had seen that stillness on battlefields. The body's last bargain with a death it has already accepted.

Shika stepped off Nobu's back mid-air, the obi already unspooling into a long blade of blinding light before her feet found the ground between the thing and the woman.

The yokai's head turned towards her with a sound like wet rope twisting, vertebrae grinding through a range of motion no living spine permits, swivelling nearly full around on the column of its neck before its body caught up and followed.

It had time to open its mouth.

Shika didn't give it time to use it.

She came in low and fast, the obi-blade catching the yokai across the midsection in a single stroke that should have passed through.

Except it didn't pass through cleanly.

The blade caught and dragged, the creature's wrongness fighting the cut even as it failed, its substance splitting open in a way that wasn't quite flesh and wasn't quite shadow, releasing something thick and black that hissed where it struck the moss and burned small circles into the ground.

It didn't die quietly.

The torso buckled but the arms kept moving, disconnected from whatever passed for its will, fingers grasping at nothing, at air, at the memory of the woman it had been calling to. Shika spun the blade in a tight arc and took the arms next, one and then the other, each strike landing wet and final, the black ichor spraying across the moss and across her own yukata, steaming where it touched her skin without seeming to burn her.

The body went down in pieces that did not stay still even on the ground, twitching, reassembling fractionally, trying to put itself back together long enough to finish what it started.

Shika did not let it finish that either.

She drove the blade down through the centre of it, into the moss beneath, and held it there as the light spread outward from the point of contact, eating through the wrongness of it from the inside—the rotted robes, the too-many joints, the black ichor—until there was only the small head left at the centre of the dissolving wreckage, still turning, still searching for the woman with eyes that had long since stopped belonging to anything alive.

It found her face.

Mama. Hungry.

For one moment something passed through its expression that was not threat. Something closer to relief.

Then the light folded inward all at once, collapsing the shape down into a single point, and where the creature had been there was only a small, tattered piece of cloth lying in the scorched moss. A child's jinbei, sun-faded, still faintly carrying the tenderness of morning miso broth and leftover fish.

The woman's stillness broke.

She sank to her knees before Shika could reach her, crawling the short distance on hands that didn't seem to feel the burnt ground beneath them, and gathered the small cloth against her chest with the particular desperate gentleness of someone reaching for something she could not yet name but already knew, somewhere beneath thought, that she had been missing.

Her eyes, when she looked up, held nothing. Only the confusion of a mother standing at the edge of a memory that had been taken from her before she got to keep it whole.

Shika stood there a moment longer than she needed to, breathing hard, ichor steaming off her sleeve, before the obi reformed around her waist as if nothing had happened.

She turned to the woman, and her expression had gone unlike anything Katsuyori had seen on her. Older, quieter, the playfulness stripped away.

"You're going to forget this," she told her, not unkindly. "All of it. You'll remember picking your daikon, and then you'll remember being home, and the hours between simply won't exist for you anymore."

The woman didn't answer. She couldn't. She was already half-gone into whatever Shika was beginning to do to her.

Two fingers, light as breath, against the woman's forehead. Her eyes fluttered, unfocused, then cleared into something calm and untroubled. She blinked down at her spilled basket with mild irritation, as though she'd tripped, and began gathering the daikon back into it.

She walked off down the mountain path a moment later, humming faintly to herself.

Katsuyori found his voice once Nobu had carried him back to the ground beside her.

"Kamikakushi (10),” he said quietly. "The old stories. Children who vanish into the mountains, taken by spirits, never seen again." He looked at the blackened circles scattered across the moss where the ichor had burned through. "I always thought it was a story parents told to keep children from wandering."

"It started that way." Shika's voice had gone quiet. "Then things like that"—she didn't look at the clearing again—"started actually doing it."

"And the ones it takes?"

She was a long time answering.

"Some of them, I get to," she said. "Most of them, I don't. I'm not everywhere, Katsuyori-san (11). I'm just here." She gestured at the cedar canopy, the green hush of her forest.

He looked at her—drenched faintly in something that wasn't blood and wasn't quite shadow either—and understood that he had only ever seen the gentlest fraction of what she actually was.

"Still want to keep flying with me, unc?" she asked, no joke behind her eyes for once. "Or was that enough yokai for one morning?"

"No," he said. "I want to understand what you actually are. All of it."

Something shifted in her face. Surprise, and beneath it something like relief.

"That's a longer flight than this one," she said.

"Then we'd better start," he said, and reached for Nobu's reins, then turned and offered her his hand instead.

She took it slowly, with the earnest, unguarded smile of someone just beginning to let herself be known.

Author’s note:

9. Jinbei are a staple of children's wardrobes. While traditionally designed as menswear, the lightweight, two-piece outfit is now widely popular for boys, girls, toddlers, and even babies.

10. Kamikakushi (神隠し), literally “hidden by the gods” and commonly translated as “spirited away,” refers to a Japanese folklore belief in people disappearing without explanation. During the Sengoku period, Kamikakushi was often invoked to account for the deaths of civilians—especially children—who succumbed to starvation or the ravages of war. Faced with overwhelming heartbreak, people turned to folklore as a way to explain, soften, and conceal some of their grief.

11. A small nuance, though: おじちゃん (oji-chan) doesn't literally mean "unc" in the internet slang sense. It means "uncle," but in Japanese it can also be used playfully for an older man, someone you're teasing for being middle-aged, or even an affectionate way of calling a familiar older gentleman. Since Shika is 500 years old, it's ironic that she calls a man in his twenties or thirties "Ojichan." When she suddenly switches to Katsuyori-san, single shift in address can say far more than having her explicitly explain her feelings.