The Bamboo Princess

It was raining again. Rain, here, was expected to be the third most popular topic among complete strangers, right after coffee and the Seahawks. It fell so often upon the city of Seattle that the wettest days seemed to run together in an unblinking blur of grey dampness. It did little to improve Shino Kantoshu’s mood.

She stared out her office window, her right palm flat against the cold glass. A ring of faint condensation outlined her fingers, framing a gentle cloud of her breath opposite the chilled drops that made their way down the outside of the glass. The downtown traffic was congested as usual; the red letters of Pike’s market mirrored the flurry of brake lights on the streets below.

Shino tried to distract herself by thinking back on the last sunny day, but stopped counting when she got back to February. Quit torturing yourself, she thought, catching sight of the reflection of her face. The office lights behind and above her were lit to project a sense of warmth and comfort, but they formed shadows beneath her eyes that made her seem even more introspective than she felt.

I’m not depressed, she insisted. I just can’t think of anything better to do with my day.

Realizing that looking out the window at the perennially grey sky wasn’t going to improve her mood, she spun slowly back around in the black leather chair and thumbed through the files in the inbox tray on her desk. Old case, closed case, cold case, she observed. Everything done to death, nothing new to go on. She frowned, bringing her line of thought to an abrupt end. Am I actually hoping for new cases to come across my desk? I definitely seem to be hoping for…something.

She grabbed her oversized purse and her coat on her way out the door before her chair had even stopped spinning. Almost as an afterthought, she grabbed her personal umbrella from the stand by her door. I don’t care if I look like a tourist; it’s too cold for wet hair.

“I’m going out,” she said unnecessarily to her assistant, an elegant and appropriately quiet young man named Hisoka. He inclined his head as she passed; she responded in kind, mostly out of habit. She stabbed the “L” button with the metal tip of her umbrella. All things being equal, she preferred to clear her head by taking a drive, but she found herself yearning for the familiar sights, smells and sounds of the Market, and the only thing she hated more than traffic was trying to find parking. Coffee and a crepe, she decided, as the elevator doors opened once again. Or maybe a doughnut, she added with a smile.

Shino breathed in a lungful of the brisk morning air. The rain appeared to have kept the usual crush of pedestrians off the sidewalks, and she felt for a moment like she had the city all to herself as she popped her umbrella, stepped out from under the overhang and onto Pike street. She fancied that she could almost smell the fish from the market from here, but if the odor could travel the distance up the street towards her, it would certainly have brought a few thousand of its aromatic friends along the way. It didn’t matter; it was part of what she loved about the modern city – everything right there at your fingertips. The mortals already live in a world full of magic and yet fail to perceive the grander spells which are cast right before their eyes.

She was nearly halfway to the market when she heard the low hollow clack of a shishi-odoshi, a sōzu, echoing off to her left, accompanied by the scent of cherry blossoms. A common device in Japanese gardens, the deer scares were made from hollowed bamboo, set on a hinge above a stone and beneath a slow trickle of water – when full, the bamboo would tilt to allow the water to escape, the motion creating a loud and random echoing sound.  It was an eerie sound on its own, a splinter through silence. But here, in the midst of the city, the sound had a distinct meaning for Shino’s trained ears. It was not simply a random noise – it was a warning.

A faint shiver ran up her forearms, and her eyes darted to the nearby parking ramp. Speaking of magic, she thought. Her lips came together in a pout which she assumed would probably have been considered adorable under normal circumstances.

Not missing a beat, she turned and walked up the pedestrian access to the garage, following the telltale scent of blossoms to their source. It was a passive trick she maintained as part of her daily ensemble; it responded to the use of magical manipulations, with the aromatic component allowing her to track it to its source and the deer scare marking an indication of violent intent. The tone continued to brighten as she walked, the smell becoming stronger as well. She put a tentative foot on the landing for the first level and nearly gagged as an additional wave of cherry blossoms washed over her. A second – no, a third – deer scare rang out. Three mages, then, she thought, already adjusting her tactics to the increasing numbers. And they know I’m here. But they’re unlikely alone.

She closed the umbrella, holding it in her right hand by the tips of the fabric. Shino blinked her eyes slowly, until she could see the structure as if it were made of glass. The two attendants were sitting in their booths, sleeping soundly – but no other people appeared within her view. She rolled her eyes. I hope your plan looked good when you planned it, she thought, because this is where your train leaves the rail.

She snapped her fingers sharply. Instantly, the parking structure was filled with a thousand wailing, screeching sirens as all the car alarms went off at once. The suddenness of the cacophony sent a powerful fog of sound waves through the building, highlighting seven individuals who were, in addition to covering their ears, all moving in her direction. The mages barked out orders to the other four, who drew weapons and broke into a run. I see you, she thought, snapping again to drop the spell.

The first one to round the corner did so with a drawn pistol. Pathetic, Shino thought with a frown. You’re just a thug.

She spun the umbrella over in her hand and jabbed forward, spearing the barrel cleanly with the umbrella’s metal tip and sliding her hand back to trigger the release.

And Takeshi says I don’t watch enough Television.

When the man fired the pistol, the gun blew apart in a spectacular flash of heat and his accompanying scream of pain and surprise. Well, Talk, a cartoon rabbit taught me that trick, and I don’t care if those lovely boys on Mythbusters say it’s busted.

Dismissing the remnants of the pistol off the umbrella with a flick of her wrist, she lunged forward with her left index finger and poked the man in the center of his forehead. His eyes rolled back in his head and he dropped to the ground, unconscious.

The second brute was right after the first, fast-cocking a shotgun as Shino hopped over the inert body of her first attacker. But the umbrella was already closed again and she brought it around in a sweeping diagonal strike which tore the firearm from his unsuspecting hands. She followed the momentum of her swing into a vertical cartwheel until her feet collided heavily with the side of his head, throwing him to the cement beside his companion. She landed nimbly on the ground a few feet away.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I just beat two of you with an umbrella. You should see the things I can do with something actually dangerous, like a parasol.”

The remaining two hired hands stopped about thirty feet away, looking nervously at this deceptively young-looking Japanese woman that had just taken out their two teammates in as many seconds. These must be the smarter crop, she realized. Nice to see the quality in hirelings has gone up over the years.

Number three gestured at number four and then at Shino. Number four grunted back and number three finally conceded. He pulled a long knife from a holster on his back hip and brandished it towards Shino. He was a large man, rough shaven and with a healthy amount of his college savings clearly having been wasted on the tattoos that adorned most of his exposed skin.

She sighed, placing the umbrella this time in her left hand, resting her thumb on the tip cap above the grip. Her eyes remained fixed on the tattooed man with the large knife, but she kept both men in her sights. Hireling number four was the smart one – he stayed back to observe how his comrade would be defeated, so he could adjust his own attack accordingly.

Shino kept the umbrella back, letting it play out as more of an afterthought, something not worth their paying attention to. It would have time to sing in a moment, she knew, but its melody was best played as an unexpected counterpoint. When Tattoo Lad charged in, blade flashing only inches from Shino’s face, she leaned back onto her left foot to support the dodge. He recovered well enough, as if expecting the swing to miss, but Shino stepped across his backswing, letting it pass wide from its target as well.

His attacks were simple enough; he was clearly thinking two moves ahead at a time – strike, recovery, and followed after a reassessing pause by another strike and recovery. She kept her movements economical, only moving just enough to dodge each attack. The key was making him think that his next swing was going to connect for sure, and let that confidence grow until it crowded out the logic of how she was capable of avoiding every swing he made.

A vein rose up on his temple at the end of his fourth pass, and Shino waited for the next swing to miss her, moving into his exposed flank, and swept her left foot around behind his knee and kicked hard. His recovery swing met no resistance as his right leg buckled and his right arm went wild in an effort to manage his balance. Shino’s right arm came up and over, the umbrella striking him at the wrist and knocking the knife free to bounce over and disappear behind one of the nearby cars. Her momentum pushed further still, catching him below the chin and knocking him fully back onto the ground. Shino spun around his falling body and drove her elbow sharply into his neck, crushing his windpipe, and rolling back up and onto her feet before the final thug had a chance to close the gap between them.

He glanced briefly down at his choking associate, and gave a single nod of respect to Shino before drawing a long blade from over his back. The scattered interior lights of the car park glittered along the edge of the katana, a barely audible ring still echoing from the draw.

Another clack echoed near her, even before the scent of blossoms reached her nose. Her left hand swung up instinctively, catching the periphery of the spell just as it was cast, stopping it cold.

Her sword-bearing opponent was moving into range as her fingers slid across the tapestry of the spell that the nearest mage had cast. Well, he’s no slouch, she admitted to herself. But he should have been more careful to hide his signature. She wrapped her fingers around the core of his spell’s design and tore it free, leaving it a cloud of directionless magical energy to be absorbed into the fabric of her jacket. Its fabric had been specially prepared to manage, store and redirect the energies of the universe – well suited for the sort of magical battery her job frequently made use of.

“Gerard DuPuis,” she called out to him, identifying the mage by his handiwork, “I bind you.”

A voice screamed out from a shadow twenty feet to her side as the mage snapped into view and collapsed onto the ground in a brief but brutal seizure. Her right arm swung back, catching the katana deftly against the shaft of the closed umbrella.

“Wait your turn,” she teased, continuing the parry in a full circle and forcing him back two paces. A soft squeal of metal on metal bounced across the concrete surfaces, and the man looked closely at the umbrella which seemed to be affixed to the midpoint of his blade. But when he looked to what Shino was holding, he realized his error – it was no simple umbrella she held, but a sheath for her own blade, masquerading as an umbrella. The umbrella casing fell from his blade and he looked from his own katana to hers.

She winked. “Don’t you read Japanese comic books? Never expect weakness from a girl with an umbrella,” she said, reaching out to sense the other mages. To their credit, they’d two that remained had managed to keep themselves concealed even after their hired muscle had been exposed by the blast of sound Shino had triggered. But to her credit, she didn’t need to see them to attack them.

She pointed at the nearest car, a souped-up Honda Accord with gold-painted rims. Extending her fingers at once, the four hubcaps popped from the tires. Shino curled her fingers into a fist and the rims rose to just above the roof of the car. Then, one by one, she flicked each finger outwards, sending each of the hubcaps shooting off in a different direction as if fired from cannons. Each one flew until it collided with a wall, ricocheting until it struck the next and so on. The noise was even more disorienting than she’d hoped, and she felt the intensity of aggressive magics subside sharply. One of the hub caps stopped short of the concrete walls, smashing into one of the mages as they had been moving for cover. The concussed man dropped to the ground, likely unconscious; perhaps worse.

Shino had no time to celebrate the success of her spell, however, as another spell erupted from the opposite side of the room, crashing across the world’s natural flow of order. I’ve frightened them, she realized, frowning briefly. They’re invoking chaos magic now. She held up her left hand, palm out, and slapped it against the incoming bolt of lightning. The arc struck an unseen wall parallel to her hand, scattering out in dancing splinters of raw electricity.

The remaining combatant took advantage of her apparent distraction to move in again; she caught his blade with hers and reversed her grip on the hilt as she rejected the angle of his swing, forcing him to adjust his own grip to match. In that fraction of a moment when his hand was least in control of the sword, she reached out with her left hand and struck the flat of his blade. A remnant of the lightning she’d intercepted coursed along his blade down to the cap of the hilt, lancing off into his arm with a loud crack of energy. His sword clattered to the ground, his arm too numb to hold it.

“One warrior to another,” she whispered, “I give you this one chance to flee.”

“One warrior to another,” he answered, “you know I will not.” With a quick flash of his left hand, he drew a shorter blade from a sheath at the small of his back.

She shrugged slightly. “Respected. Die well.”

He made the most of his final volley, his left arm flicking out in a series of jabs and slashes that very nearly made their mark in half his attempts. Her own blade was longer, giving her the benefit of reach and breadth of defense, but with his smaller tanto, his speed pressed her hard to keep him from striking flesh. I did tell him to die well, she thought. Next time, I’ll need to be more specific as to when…wait. Something’s wrong.

Shino was so focused on him that she did not notice the next magical effect until after it was cast. She gasped for a moment before she realized the nature of the spell, cursing their ingenuity. Wonderful, now they’ve taken away the air. This might make things… difficult.

She held on to the breath in her lungs, changing her stance to allow her to move less and take more conservative strikes. It would only require one strike to incapacitate him; the right attack, in the best possible moment. But he was an experienced fighter, and had already seen through many of her attempts to trick him into a quick death. At this rate, she was more likely to suffocate before she could take care of this one. Her mind did the math on her attackers, tracking backwards for a quick solution.

The simplest of all magics – and thus the easiest to master – were the core elemental magics: fire, air, and so forth. Whoever had been directly attacking her had focused on these. Elemental magic was powerful and could be easily adapted into a variety of uses, but it had one particular and peculiar weakness in that it required a direct visual contract between the caster and his construct. Line of sight.

 Her opponent had been careful to stay mostly to her right side – unusual when confronting a sword with a short tanto; the wiser positioning would have been on her left, to ensure a partial protection from her swings. His mage must have told him to keep me on this side of him so I couldn’t break his angle; I’ll need to move. But his movements were too quick, and she could feel herself slowing down. One option came to mind, though it wasn’t her favorite spell. It left her momentarily disoriented, and moments were becoming increasingly precious right about now. Drawing some of stored energy out of her jacket, she conjured up an old spell, the matatakumani.

Translated as “Twinkling of an Eye”, the matatakumani was a disorienting spell, which effectively created a partial copy of herself, another Shino Kantoshu which existed only a fraction of a moment apart. She thought of it like the old shadow magicians, the traveling showmen who cast the earliest moving pictures up on the walls. It was all illusion, candles and cutaways which to the natural eye looked alive and breathing, but when employed well could be used to dramatic effect.

Small risk, big gain, she reminded herself, even though she recognized she was breaking that particular rule.

Fine, if this doesn’t work then you can say you told me so.

If this doesn’t work, she pointed out, I’ll be dead.

So will I, she thought in response. Am I always that condescending, she wondered?

Good point. And yes, probably.

So let’s do this.

Age before beauty.

She pressed forward aggressively, driving the full weight of the blade to her right side and around as if to bring her katana up behind the tanto’s reach. It was a risky move; if it had not been blocked, it would have fatally wounded her opponent, but it left her dangerously open for a counterattack. The man saw the attack coming, and brought up his own blade to stop the katana’s momentum. But even as their blades locked in a sharp clang of metal, Shino’s other-her dove sharply to the left, rolling low to come up behind him. She struck the man in the center of his back, stunning him long enough for the small blade to fall from his lifeless fingers. The original Shino continued her swing, driving a diagonal line through the man’s torso.

The other-Shino crouched down, smiling as she felt the suffocation-inducing air magic fall away. She reached a hand out behind her and pulled the other-her back inside her. Once again joined, she sheathed her katana and moved quickly into the relative shelter of a minivan until the disorientation passed.

Her spell had only been active for five seconds, and that was just how long it took for her two timelines to re-merge.  Time magic wasn’t her natural inclination, though for that very reason she tried to keep herself trained on a broad range of magical foci. Let your enemy know only those strengths and weaknesses you want them to perceive.

There was only one mage left; she could feel the weaving of his protective shields. He’s going to run, she observed, but he’s just an elemental. He’ll have to get outside before he can try to get away.

She placed her hands on the minivan beside her, and its engine flared to life. “Go get him, boy,” she whispered. The vehicle’s tires squealed twice in quick succession as it backed quickly out of its parking space and then halted, turning, and racing down and around the turn so it could charge up the far side.

Unfortunately for the last mage, he turned and ran just as the car reached him. His own motion forced his hiding illusion to vanish, and the car, now seeing its prey, instantly attacked him.

The animated car tore through four layers of defensive barriers, which cut through its frame and engine as if they were formed of tissue paper and shaving cream. The momentum of the minivan came to a sudden halt, but the mage now found himself trapped within half a minivan and having no remaining passive magic.

Shino hopped the barricade between sides of the parking lot and quickly approached the man. She looked at the mangled wreck of a car appraisingly, glancing in through the shattered windows to peer in at the ensnared mage.

“Don’t try and be tough,” she told him. “You can’t possibly get a spell off before I crush you, so behave yourself and you might yet live to cast another day.”

“I – I can’t tell you anything!” he said.

With a soft laugh, Shino shook her head. “I don’t need you to talk, silly boy,” she told him as she raised her hands to his eye level. “I just need you to sit still for a moment.”

After she had gotten all she needed from him, she repaired the minivan and returned it to its parking space. The mage rapidly folded up his comrades and packed them away for travel, but not before Shino went to each of them and cut off a single square inch of the fabric of their clothing, slipping them in between two pages of a journal she kept snugly tucked away in her coat.

“You’re all going on report,” she explained, “Even your dead one here. Your records will be turned over to the local magister’s office, and they’ll deal with your punishments accordingly.”

“But, we didn’t know,” he protested. “We had no idea you were…who you are.”

She nodded. “I’m aware of that. But accepting a contract to take another’s life – whether part of the Inari embassy or otherwise – is against your tolerances as practitioners.”

“We just needed the money,” he began, but she waved him off.

“If you’re planning on using the ‘Any Port in a Storm’ defense, don’t bother. The desired acquisition of wealth is not grounds for a declaration of innocence. Officers of the court will seek you out shortly for a full declaration, at which time you may seek counsel and make your objections known.”

Not knowing what else to say, he simply nodded, defeated.

“Now, take your friends and go while I clean this mess up.”

He nodded again, quickly, and hurried from the building, closing the flap on his journeyman’s pack after one final check to ensure that they were all appropriate tucked away inside.

Her good mood was by then completely eroded. She felt she was probably being careless with the cleanup, but to be honest, she didn’t truly care. Once all the blood and damaged vehicles were cleaned up, she turned back to a seemingly empty patch of wall some thirty meters away.

“Prince Kyōfu, is it? After all these centuries, you finally came over to the West to try and settle with me once and for all?”

A patch of darkness far across the parking structure to her left swirled and shifted, eventually revealing a man in a charcoal business suit, slicked back hair and a thin dark beard that did its level best to hide his weak jaw.

“You… you knew it was I?”

“Not at first,” she admitted. “Not until I drew it out of your little mage, there.” Her lips curled in apparent disgust. “Really? Mages? Against me? You haven’t already had enough humiliation in your life?”

He inhaled sharply, his pride struck by the memories her words evoked. “It has been a long life.”

“Too long,” she said under her breath. Affecting a more pleasant smile, she began walking towards him. “So now what?”

He looked around nervously. “What do you mean, Kaguya-hime?”

Sighing in exasperation, she decided that she just wasn’t in the mood to play the congenial hostess, and instead hit him with the nearest car. It was only a glancing blow – not enough to injure him, merely to get his attention and display in no uncertain terms that she was fully past the point of bullshit tolerance. Kyōfu screamed out in what Shino thought was an appropriate amount of pain and embarrassment.

He staggered back to his feet, quickly checking himself for injuries. Finding none, he stepped out from between the cars and stood beneath one of the fluorescent light sconces which hung from the ceiling.

“See what you made me do?” she asked, pointing at the car until it had repaired itself. “You’re coming ridiculously close to putting me in a terrible mood.”

“This is your good mood?” he asked, the tinge of sarcasm in his voice forcing her to shatter the windscreen of the car she was trying to fix. He quickly raised his hands in surrender. “I’m sorry, please, please!”

She came to a stop ten yards away from him, and summoned her umbrella back to her hands. She sheathed the blade inside the slightly-bent case, easing it back into shape as she did so. “Why are you in town, Kyōfu? You know all of you are supposed to stay in Japan.”

“I know, but…” he looked far too uncomfortable to be capable of lying. She slapped the umbrella into her open palm to drive home the gentle reminder of what she was willing to do to him if he tried to safeguard the truth from her. It worked. “It’s Yoku and Puraido; they made the rest of us go along with this.”

Her eyes widened. “All five of you? You’re all here, in Seattle?”

He nodded quickly.

She gestured around them at the parking edifice. “So I’m going to have to fight four more little bands of thugs, is that it?”

His hands rose, palms facing her. “I don’t know what the others have planned, I’ve only been talking with Puraido, but I know the others are here as well.”

“And what of your Father, the Emperor? Does he know you are here, in defiance of the oath you swore?”

His bowed head was enough of an answer.

“Fine, then,” she said coldly, closing the final distance between them. “Prince Kyōfu, I hereby remand you into custody, pending a final hearing and extradition. You have the right to seek counsel and representation; all other rights granted by association to the Inari are temporarily waived by my authority as Ambassador to the Northwestern America Inari consulate.” She held out a hand, palm up, glancing into his eyes as she held her lips close and blew across her palm towards him.

Once again, the scent of cherry blossoms filled the room, but this time as a natural side-effect of her incantation. He blew apart with the slow impact of the spell, drifting into countless fragments of glittering crystals which faded and dissipated into the air and left behind nothing but a lingering sigh of regret and a firmly resolved Inari ambassador.

She inhaled, releasing the breath with the remnants of her anger. A fallen Prince, she thought, come to the northwest to exact his revenge upon me for the wrongs committed upon him out of innocent love. Shino shook her head slowly. There was no sense in dwelling upon recriminations and remorseful recollections of the actions of her youth. Even with her knowledge of the centuries that had passed between then and now, she knew full well she would have made the same decisions; would have sent he and his brethren on the same fruitless quests, would have, in the end, rejected every last one of them.

Shino pulled out her phone, auto-dialed the office and waited for Hisoka to answer. “It’s me,” she said after his initial greeting. “I’m going to be out of the office the rest of the day, but please let Souta down in holding know to expect a few more arrivals, as well. See that they’re booked in and prepared for evaluation.”

“More arrivals, ma’am?”

With a faint wave of her hand, she rearranged the parking garage, smoothing over the damage and replacing the cars, repaired, to their original condition. The bodies would be found, tagged and prepared, inexplicable additions to the SPD morgue. “Prince Kyōfu just personally arranged a hit; I’ve transported him to one of the available cells for processing.”

“Ah, I see. And you expect the others to be involved as well?”

“Kyōfu is mostly a lot of talk,” she said, making a flicking gesture with her left hand to cast off the sleeping spell that had taken out the parking lot security; the cameras would stay off another five minutes, long enough for her to make her way casually back onto the street. “He wouldn’t do this alone, he’s too much the coward. I shouldn’t be long, but just in case, please shift the rest of my meetings until tomorrow.”

“Very well, ma’am. And where will you be, if I am asked?”

“I don’t yet know,” she said honestly. “But there are four more of them out there, and I don’t think any of them are coming along without a struggle.”

“Will you be requiring assistance? I can have guardians sent to your position immediately; they are sworn to aid you with anything, including matters of a personal nature.”

She declined politely. “This is more personal than I think the embassy should have to involve itself with, Hisoka, but thank you. This is something I need to address on my own.”

“As you wish, ma’am.”

She ended the call and slid the phone back into its pocket. The threads of their anger were faint, even though they were all still a good distance away. She could feel them, knew they had been watching. They knew she was no longer unaware; they’d be more prepared for the next attack.

Shino smiled at the guards as she walked past them, and opened her umbrella as she got to the street. A large gash was still present against one side of it, where the man’s katana had cut into it. She smoothed this out with her fingers, requesting that their molecules reattach and thanking them once they had done so.

Standing once more out on the sidewalk, she looked up and down Pike Street, sighing softly. Another fine day ruined by unfinished business, she thought. But this at least gives me an excuse to drive out to the island. The walk back up to the office was a brisk one, in spite of the slight incline leading up and away from the waterfront. She took the parking lot entrance on 5th avenue, her bad mood all but dissolved in the anticipation of a short road trip out to Bainbridge Island and the artist’s colony affectionately called Delphi West by its friends and patrons.

As she approached her glossy black BMW, she reached for her keys only to discover with a sigh that she didn’t have them. So it’s actually going to be one of those days. She held her right hand out, palm up, and cast a simple sight cantrip to give her a visual reference for her keys so she could summon them back to her, but nothing happened. She tried again, with the same result. What the - - ?

She turned around and began walking back towards her office, and had taken only a few steps when the image of her car keys snapped powerfully into view before her. Shino once again held out her palm and passed her left hand above it in a quick half-circle. The keys appeared in the air between her hands, dropping into her right hand. She turned back to her car.

At some point, less than half a step closer to her car, her spell had not been functioning, and now it did. And yet it wasn’t so strong an incantation to trigger her defenses – there was no scent of cherry blossoms to draw her attention, no sounds of the bamboo deer scares to alert her. In point of fact, there was…nothing. She summoned a thimbleful of kami into the space between her thumb and forefinger, igniting it into a glimmering sphere of radiance. Shino held it, letting the flickering sparks of energy coalesce and settle until it appeared as a partially transparent, glowing ball of light the diameter of a silver dollar. It was little more than a wisp of magic, this little ball of luminosity, the least of her repertoire. And as she stepped slowly forward, she felt its existence become swallowed up by the imperceptible field surrounding her vehicle.

Curious, she thought. Someone’s gone and placed a very clever negation spell around my car – so subtle that I wouldn’t have even noticed it had I not been looking for my keys. She considered shattering the spell until a second thought occurred to her: the only reason to cast a spell like that is to keep me from noticing something else. Something worse.

Assuming for the moment that the “something else” in question might actually be tied to the negation spell, she instead relied upon her physical senses to offer up clues. The instinctive response from most onmyōji – practitioners of the magical skills of onmyōdō – would have been to cast a more powerful spell to override or dissipate the spell, but her instincts warned her from this. They would have expected me to find it, she reasoned.

It took only a few minutes of searching before she located the bomb assembly attached directly beneath the driver’s side seat. As she reached up to remove the device, however, the sphere of light reappeared in her hand, causing her to draw back abruptly. Clever bastards, she grimaced. You created a pocket of magic within a sphere of magic negation – which means there’s some other magical effect wrapped inside the larger bubble. Like, a trigger which will detonate the bomb if it recognizes that the physical trigger has been disengaged or if it’s removed from its target. Or, she thought, causing her heart to skip a beat, if it registers that I’m this close but haven’t triggered it yet.

Well, strike that. If it was going to go off, it would have. So let’s focus on a solution. It took her only a moment, nearly causing her to laugh out loud. Whoever had set the bomb, their own caution had given Shino a simple solution. She stood and walked until she was once more outside of the negating effects of the larger sphere, and conjured up a sphere of her own – but this one was designed to protect and contain. Then, holding her hands carefully apart, she stepped back inside the sphere but maintained her concentration on the bubble she had created. She knelt and leaned close until the sphere reappeared inside the interior bubble, and she quickly pushed it up until it had surrounded the bomb. Then, she kept her left hand between the margin of the negation and her defensive bubble and used a gentle flick of energy to disengage the bomb from her car while she shrunk the bubble until it was wrapped tightly around the bomb’s casing. A bubble inside a bubble inside a bubble? I might just need another coffee today.

Now the tricky part, she thought, seeing a series of lights engage on the exterior of the bomb. She felt the negation sphere drop a fraction of a second before the bomb engaged – likely designed to allow a magically-enhanced explosion achieve its full effect. It hit her mind with the power of a freight train, but she managed to contain the force of the blast, though only just.

She could feel the skin of her hands prickling and reddening with the intensity of the fire as it raged, desperate for an exit, hungry for air. It was too hot to release it – the backdraft could still ignite everything in the garage. As she struggled to her feet, however, she once again smelled the faint aroma of blossoms, silently drifting past her senses.

Got you.

She lashed out with her mind, grasping the edge of the spell as it wandered into her range. It was a straightforward perception spell, designed to let a person extend their senses into another location; in this case, it was someone spying on the room in an effort to ascertain the extent of the damage caused by their bomb. Shino could feel the fear and anxiety-curdled desperation on the spell; she could even tell, even with the majority of her focus being on the maintenance of the compressed detonation, that it was the same sorcerer who’d cast the spells on her car. And that makes this so much easier, she thought with a smirk.

Her left hand shot from the hot, glowing sphere long enough to grip the trailing edge of the sorcerer’s remote viewing spell and plugged it directly into the ball of heat, and vented the force of the explosion back through their spell. The effort left her momentarily drained, but feeling deeply satisfied.

She pulled her phone out and slid her finger across the screen to wake it up. One speed dial later, and Hisoka was on the line. “Ma’am?” he answered.

“I need a quick scan on my car,” she said, “and then I need you to contact someone over in regional security and ask them if they have any reports of an intense explosion within twenty five miles of us here.”

“An…explosion?”

She nodded, even though she was on the phone. “Would have been about ten seconds ago. And get me that car scan ASAP, please.”

“Yes, of course,” he complied. “One moment. Are you all right, ma’am?”

She took a deep breath to calm her shaking knees. Just how close that had been was finally beginning to sink in. “Yes, I’m fine. I just need to know if it’s safe to get into my car.”

“Scans are running now. What makes you think it isn’t safe?”

“It really wasn’t safe a minute ago,” she said vaguely.

“It looks fine now, but I do see that there was… my god…” his voice trailed off.

“Yes, exactly,” she said, unlocking the door and sliding in. She put her purse on the passenger seat and plugged in her iPad, scrolling through until she found a playlist that fit her mood, one she’d labeled “Bring It.”

“If they pick up an address on that explosion, route it to my GPS, I need to get something to eat before asshole number three shows up.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Hisoka replied. “Will you be requiring anything else?”

“I’ll let you know,” she said, ending the call.

* * * * *

I only wanted a crepe, she thought, letting her thoughts unfold on the drive.

She had started her day early in the office, managing to catch up on all outstanding paperwork in the first half hour of her day. There hadn’t been any other projects or cases pending, leaving her facing what might have otherwise been an entire day of staring at the elaborately overwrought interior décor of her office.

 Some days, it was easy for her to forget the primary rule of her position as liaison for the Inari: keep the peace, secretly. Though there was a team of investigators who worked at the street level, her particular set of skills made her uniquely qualified to observe ripples in the cloud that kept the mortal public from becoming too aware of the Inari’s presence among them.

Beside the very deliberately-placed items intended to adhere to specific feng shui tenets, a triple-paned relief hung upon the wall directly across from her desk, depicting the yin-yang clash between the tiger and the dragon. The muzak floating down from the hidden speakers played a gentle but annoying repetitive riff with a zither and chimes. She loved her office and hated it as well. It was a consistent battle in her mind between opulence and overindulgence, all wrapped in an eyeful of stereotypical cultural aesthetics. It was a mark of the trust and validation the Inari had placed in her for all her work on their behalf, but it also served to remind her that she was still, for all her effort, just one of the entities that the Inari had been designed to sustain.

Employment with the Inari was a complex enough affair – she was on her seventeenth tour in total, fourth right here in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. She was by no means a tenured partner – and yet her appointment to this remote embassy had not gone without whispers of surprise and implied scandal.

Which was not to say that her appointment was seen as an elevated rank – she was still little more than upper middle management – but she was little more than upper middle management in one of the most highly contested fronts of the Inari western expanse. She had a team of field agents and data entry drones to handle the less interesting facets of her responsibilities, and she reported up to a regional manager who also had area managers in the different districts of the continent. Shino only had to keep the Pacific Northwest stable and free from ungoverned conflict. It was a role best described as being positioned on the edge of a razor between success and failure; two of her predecessors were kept in glass jars as display pieces in the executive lobbies of the Tokyo and Beijing embassies.

Failure was an option, certainly; it just wasn’t a good one.

For more than two centuries, the Inari had struggled to achieve a toehold in the West. There were other outposts across the American continent, but the Seattle embassy was one of two linchpins in its slow migration east.

The signature line of her supervisor’s emails flashed across her mind: “The eyes of our ancestors rest upon you.” Shino was fairly certain it was intended as a sort of blessing, meant to have a calming and reassuring effect on the reader. But to her, it sounded more like an implied warning of certain, inevitable doom. Those emails made her imagine she could smell medical-grade alcohol and embalming fluids.

But the alternative could have been worse. She hadn’t been back to her native soil of Japan in over a hundred years, now, and if she had to choose between the constant risk to her immortal soul on the streets of Tokyo or trying to restrain the urge to shove a finely-balanced pen through her temporal lobe, there were days that she honestly needed to weigh her options.

Today was definitely feeling like that sort of day.

* * * * *

By the time she pulled up to the location, she wondered why she would have even needed the seers to track the magic back to its source after all. A tremendous column of smoke still rose impressively into the overcast sky, and three trucks from the nearest fire department stations had already arrived on site to battle the mysterious blaze. The rain was letting up at last; too little too late to help the firemen with the remnants of the explosion, however.

Shino parked a block away, setting the physical car alarm and an additional mystical one as well. She flashed her credentials to one of the fire department captains as he approached to ask her to keep back, and he instead nodded and asked her to please be careful. She told him that she would, and remained mostly in place while she looked around for a familiar face. After a moment, she spied him, seated on the running board of one of the trucks and breathing heavily into an oxygen mask, his face blackened by the smoke of the fire.

A paramedic was tending to his right arm, which had apparently taken the brunt of his injuries. Shino stood a few feet back, sipping on her coffee until he noticed her. When he did, he merely gave her a slight nod of his head and looked back down at the ground. Once the paramedic had finished her work, she mentioned something about taking him shortly to the Swedish medical center’s emergency room and walked away. Shino took that moment to approach, and sat down beside him. He kept the oxygen mask over the lower half of his face; his eyes looked fearfully at her, making her feel like the tiger that had caught the fox.

“Hello, Taidana,” she said casually. “Shame about your house.”

He coughed into the mask, pulled it away to spit onto the asphalt. Wiping his lips with the back of his wrist, he shook his head. “Not mine,” he said softly. “Friend’s home.”

“Not for much longer, I’d think,” she answered. “But if he’s still your friend after this, then you know he’s a good friend.”

She gave him another few moments to breathe deeply through the oxygen mask before continuing.

“So, you tried to torch my car, Taidana? Really? My car?”

His expression was a bold combination of deep shame and terror. Shino briefly wished there were a way she could capture the moment on film without breaking the mood. She patted his knee and watched him squirm.

“So I have a couple of questions,” she said, her tone professionally amiable. “As you might imagine, I’ll require your complete cooperation. Can I expect that?”

He paused, closing his eyes while he nodded his head as if it hurt him to do so.

“Good,” she said, sliding her tablet from its holster in her purse. “I’ve already learned the other four are here in town, so I’m guessing this is to be a coordinated attack on me?”

Another pause. Another nod.

Her voice was soft but unavoidable. “Where are the others? Well, don’t worry about Kyōfu, he’s been taken care of. But, Haji, Yoku and Puraido? I’d love to hear all about them. And I think you’d love to tell me.”

For several more moments, the only sounds that passed between them were the despondent breaths taken from the oxygen tank, trembling hisses into badly-damaged lungs. Taidana’s eyes tried to leave Shino’s face, but they could not. A single tear beaded up in the corner of one eye, cutting a pale streak through the soot that stained his face.

The paramedics returned minutes later to find their patient sitting alone beside the fire truck, his blackened face hidden in his hands, sobbing disconsolately. It was only after much effort that they were able to get him to the back of the ambulance and rush him to the hospital.

Shino watched the vehicle drive off while she sat in her car and plugged a few new addresses into her car’s GPS.

The five princes, together again, she mused. More coordinated than in the past, more aggressive. This goes beyond a simple response to romantic rejection; this smells of…something deeper.

She glanced across the small map that shone out within her dashboard. They’re still fairly spread out, she observed. Also, if I keep going at this rate, they’re going to figure out that I’m on to them. I suppose that only really leaves one move left.

Shino instead switched the GPS back to map mode, and dialed her office.

“Hisoka,” she said after her admin answered the phone. “I need you to send a message out to three people. Take this down…”

After having him repeat it back to her to ensure it was exactly how she wanted it, she instructed him to send the message across more secured channels, and thanked him before ending the call. She sat back in her chair, picked up and shook the now-empty coffee cup. “Okay, first, a refill. Then I wrap this all up.”

* * * * *

The Seattle Asian Art Museum sat upon one of the higher points of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, with a serene and contemplative view of the city. Through a circular stone art display in front of the structure, the Space Needle stood as a glowing sentinel above the bright lights of the city beneath it.

Shino paused to look downtown through the massive ring, smiling slightly at the gleaming tower that housed the Inari embassy and her office in the heart of the city’s dancing lights. Behind her, the murmuring voices of her ancestor’s more public reliquary called to her, beckoned her. Speak with us, they whispered. Hear our words.

Not just now, she answered. Working.

The museum itself was closed now to the public, but she promised herself that she’d let herself in later, should all her other pending affairs be resolved to her satisfaction. The parking lot was all but empty, only her black sedan filling up any of the available spaces. She glanced at the clock on her phone, which read 7:59pm.

She hadn’t even time to remark on their lack of punctuality when three cars turned the corner, their headlights cutting through the dense foliage that surrounded the park.

They came to a rest in the center of the parking lane, their drivers exiting the vehicles to open their doors in near unison. Shino hid her smile, remaining in place with the city behind her.

The three men, dressed impeccably in dark business suits, stood together and eventually made their way to her. She noted their expressions, as varied as they were in their hearts. Haji, who kept his eyes towards the ground, contemplation cutting deep lines across his forehead; Yoku, with his gold rings reflecting none of their light and warmth into the dark eyes that hid behind darkened glasses; and, lastly, Puraido, whose rage could have been no more obvious had it been painted into his skin.

She greeted them each in turn. “Haji, Yoku, Puraido,” she said, bowing to them.  All but the last returned the bow.

“Prince Puraido,” he corrected her. “Even now, you disrespect us.” He stood to her right side, his gloved hands kept at his sides.

She glanced between the three of them. “Need we stand on such formalities, my old friend? Such titles no longer apply to us.”

His face darkened, and she feared for a moment he might attack her on the spot. “You were never friend to me or my brothers.”

Haji turned to his angry brother and opened his mouth to speak, but Puraido raised a hand to cut him off.

“Do not!” he commanded. “I will be heard!”

She nodded in agreement, and Haji’s eyes fell again to the ground. “Please,” she urged.

Clearly, Puraido had not been counting on her being so agreeable, and it took him another second to gather himself. “Our father came to you in earnest, and his proposal was generous and sincere. You repaid his humility with ridicule and deceit!”

“Is that how you saw it? As if I were a mere prankster, playing a game with your father’s will?”

His face was nearly purple by now. “You deny it?”

Shino weighed her response carefully. “Yes…but also no.”

In a flash, his sword was in his hand, its scabbard cast aside to clatter across the sidewalk. Yoku stepped closer to him, but Puraido shoved him away. “No more games! Speak no more riddles, or by the gods above and below I will rend you in two!”

She could feel the mystical energies bound to the ensorcelled blade; there was truth to his bravado – if any blade existed that could destroy her, this might be the one. Though he’d have to hit me with it first, she silently amended.

“No riddles,” she agreed. “I fear my answers will not be as clear as the vengeance you feel within you demands them to be, but I will be honest.”

“My nodachi will be the judge of your words, if I cannot,” he growled.

“Agreed.” She looked at their faces. “Time has been our uninvited guest all these centuries; it often makes small adjustments to the history we once lived. Perhaps you could tell me the events as you recall them, so that I may answer to them in kind.”

Puraido’s mouth opened wide, but whatever vile curses he might have spat forth were silenced by Haji’s soft voice.

“You are correct, of course,” he said. “May I begin? I have spoken recently with our two other brothers, Taidana and Kyōfu, and would gladly impart their own sad memories of the events in question.”

With obvious reluctance, Puraido at last agreed.

Haji bowed slightly at the waist. “I shall start, as they say, at the beginning. Though in those times we knew nothing of your true nature, Kaguya Hime, word reached the Emperor’s palace, the home of our father, of your incomparable beauty. Each of us – my four brothers and I – were sent in turn to see if these rumors could in fact be true. Each of us returned home to confirm that they were. But we being…of a competitive nature, we could not decide amongst ourselves who would win your hand. So we came to you with but a single request – to decide for us who would be your betrothed.”

Shino nodded, feeling unexpectedly awkward at hearing his version of the events she had herself experienced.

“And thus you gave us a quest – five quests, rather, one for each of us, and promised that he who returned first with our assigned prize would win your heart and your hand.”

Yoku interrupted him with a sharp exhalation. “You give her tricks undue flattery by naming them quests. Impossible charges are not quests, they are…aspersions and mockeries.”

“My brothers, please,” Haji said calmly. “She will have a chance to respond after the facts are established.”

The other two men frowned but remained silent.

Continuing, Haji waved a hand in the air, causing five images to appear between them. As he gestured to each of them, they glowed more brightly than the other four and he described them. “Taidana was charged with seeking a great stone bowl of profound meditation. Kyōfu was asked to seek the Dragon Jewel, and I was sent to collect the robe of fire. Yoku was sent for a golden branch of the jewel tree, and Puraido was challenged with the recovery of a beautiful shell found in the nest of a swallow.”

Haji ignored the teeming rage that clenched his eldest brother’s gloved fists, and continued.

“We each failed in our tasks, and were thus found unworthy of your hand.”

Moonlight flashed across the horizontal slash of Puraido’s blade; the other three all leaped back from the slice, which caught Yoku’s left shoulder in a glancing blow. He screamed – more in surprise than pain – and recovered quickly enough to snap his fingers and cause the air around Puraido to harden, freezing him in place.

“I told you we shouldn’t have let him bring the sword,” he grimaced.

“And I did not disagree, brother. I merely wished to avoid a fight before arriving here.” Noticing Shino’s curious expression, he added, “Much as I wish to avoid one now, of course.”

“I share his rage, but not his impatience,” Yoku said, examining the wound. “This is your fault,” he said, pointing a bloody finger in Shino’s direction. “Give the five of us impossible requirements is one thing, but to refuse the command of our father, the Emperor? To do so is to embrace death.”

Silence hung in the air for several minutes, accompanied only by the sounds of the wind through the leaves and the distant noises of traffic, and the occasional frustrated grunt of the immobilized Puraido.

“That is how you saw my actions, then?” she whispered. “As a disrespectful and arrogant girl, pitching spittle into the faces of my honorable liege-lords?”

Haji’s quietly raised hand urged Yoku from answering. “It is as we knew it then, my lady. We were mortals, all, and had no reckoning of the ways of the Inari, beyond the whisperings of legend.”

She paused until she had their full attention, then said simply, “If it was as you believed it to be, we would not be here now, discussing it.”

“As you say.”

“Had I been nothing more than a bamboo-cutter’s daughter, then it would have been my deepest honor to be wedded to any many above my station; to marry into the Emperor’s home would have been far outside the scope of my dreams.”

Shino let those words hang in the air for another moment before continuing. “But I was not merely the child of an impoverished old man and his wife. You know this now.”

Yoku and Haji both nodded this time.

“And yet you still feel the need to seek compensation for these perceived slights?”

Their silence was enough of an answer.

“Then let me answer for them,” she said, raising her head high and taking a deep breath.

Both men seemed confused, so she held her hands out, palms toward the sky. The air shimmered and an ornate stone bowl appeared in her left hand, a fiercely burning reddish stone in her right.

She held these towards Haji. “Please see that these are delivered to your younger brothers, so that they may be assured that their quests are resolved. Please remind them that inaction is never an excuse for failure, whether it be due to laziness or fear.”

He took them, bowing deeply as he did so. “I will so be required, my lady.”

The air trembled again, this time taking the form of a brilliantly gleaming branch of wood. Under the cold blue light of the moon, it looked as if it were forged of pure platinum, but both men knew that it was in fact gold. On each twig and along the length of the branch were inlaid a variety of jewels of impossible quality. This she gave to Yoku, whose eyes filled instantly with tears at the sight of the valuable item.

“Your quest has been completed as well, Prince Yoku,” Shino said softly. “May it be a reminder to you to always be a man of truth and never rely upon subterfuge as a means to an end.”

“Furthermore,” she added, “You must learn to let go of your love of money, else it shall be the end of you.”

Her eyes returned to Haji, whose eyes were filled with trepidation and unfulfilled regret.

“I am sorry, my young Prince,” she said, her voice now barely audible. “The robe of fire which I sent you to find… it is no more.”

His brow furrowed, clearly confused. “But…how?”

She sighed. “You sought the robe in distant lands, faced many trials, and were led to an old and tattered garment, do you recall?”

He indicated that he did.

“However, blinded by your fear and concern as to your own perceived failure, you cast it into the flames, judging that no mighty artifact could ever be allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair. And so you returned home, your mouth filled with the bitter taste of your own defeat. You abandoned the quest and allowed your own life to mirror your perception of worthlessness.”

A single nod confirmed her statements, and she continued, sadness creeping into her own voice as she spoke.

“But what you never realized was that the robe you had cast into the fire was in fact the very subject of your quest. You did not fail. You merely surrendered.”

The softness in her voice was broken by a powerful burst of anger from Puraido, who shattered Yoku’s spell and charged forward with his sword. Shino’s katana appeared in her hands, and she was only barely able to angle his attacks away as she stepped back, trying quickly to move back from his greater reach.

“Brother, stop!” Haji called, reaching for Puraido’s arm. But his more powerful brother cuffed him across the face with his right hand, sending him sprawling.

“Cowards!” he spat. “You let yourselves be enchanted by her condemning words, and accept your castigations as if you were sheep. Sheep! Not proud sons in the Imperial line, but sheep!”

He returned his attention to Shino and his blade followed, but it was met by her own in a ringing impact of metal on metal. Puraido disengaged, bringing his sword across in a pair of powerful slashes, but Shino’s katana met them both, deflecting the keen-edged nodachi too far to harm her.

Puraido took a half step backwards, drawing the blade high overhead, and stepped ahead with a powerful downward thrust. She parried his attack high, but failed to see the follow up strike of his knee until it had collided with her stomach, nearly folding her in half.

The air burst from her lungs and she felt her sword fly from her stunned hands and clatter to the cement well beyond her reach.

The sidewalk reached up and struck her across the knees and she was only barely able to move her arms in front of her to take the rest of the brunt of her fall’s impact. She braced herself for the deathblow; she was defenseless, and she recognized several of the spells cast into the blade which would tear the soul from her body, nigh-immortal though it was.

But the strike did not land. Instead, he reached down and took her by the chin, lifting her face to look at him. He drove the blade into the cement beside him and she could at last see the warring emotions inside his eyes.

“You will see the price I paid for your childish quest, Bamboo Princess!”

He pulled his gloves off, holding his hands up before her eyes. She had heard of his injuries, but had never actually seen them until now. The warped, wrinkled ruins of his hands were potently visible, even in the moonlight.

In her mind she could almost hear the screams of pain that accompanied the hissing sizzle as his hands had fallen against the heated metal of the stove below him as he had reached out. He had overstepped his own balance blindly stretching his hands into a sparrow’s nest, searching for the shell he would never find.  The ladder upon which he had precariously stood had fallen away, tumbling the Prince down, landing upon the hot iron. Blinding pain had met the proud young man, and he tore his hands free of the metal, leaving much of the skin behind, and leaving horrible scars upon his remaining flesh.

Tears filled her vision, blurring the sight of his wounds. “I am…sorry,” she said softly.

She understood his rage – from their perspective, of course they would feel justified in seeking recompense. And not just from the injuries sustained in the course of their quests, but in the very notion of the quests themselves. The arrogance and presumption of giving quests to the sons of the Emperor himself!

“Did your father tell you of coming to speak on your behalf?” she asked.  She gathered from their silence that he had not done so. “It was a full year after you had all gone away, leaving me alone again with the only family I had known for more than seventeen years of my life.”

“He brought his army with him,” she explained, nearly laughing at the memory. “A whole army, surrounding one tiny hut in the middle of the bamboo forest – my father nearly fainted from the sight! And the Emperor himself came to our doorstep to speak to us. He was very proper and polite, insisting that I rescind my quests and allow one of you to marry me.”

“And still you refused him,” Yoku said evenly. “Our father - the Emperor – gave you a command and you refused him.”

“I did,” Shino said. “But it is not your father’s pride which has brought you here, sword in hand. Your father came to see that I could not be the bride to any of his sons, and he withdrew his request.”

Puraido pulled his gloves back over his scarred hands. “An easy claim to make, since you destroyed him and all his armies.”

“I did not raise my hand against him, Prince,” she answered. “Have you not read the legends of what happened next?”

He spat on the ground in disgust. “Legends – pah! Stories told by the Inari to maintain a tranquility among the Eastern peoples.”

Haji stepped forward, raising his hands in an effort to encourage his brother to remain calm enough to listen. “Brother, she will tell us the truth; it profits her nothing to lie to us now.”

The two brothers stood by Puraido until at last he nodded his head a single time. “Speak, then.”

She nodded her head in response, her voice starting in a soft whisper as the memories rushed once more to her lips.

“Your father was angry when I said I would marry none of you; he swore that if I would not promise to marry one of you, that he would command his armies to burn down the bamboo forest and destroy my family’s home with us inside. My mother pleaded with me in tears to go with the Emperor, and even my father told me he would rather I live in unhappiness with the Emperor’s family than die among parents who loved me. But it was one week before my eighteenth birthday, and at last I told your father that he would have his answer then, when the moon would once again be at its fullest.”

“He agreed,” she continued, “thinking that I only wished to have a final week with my adopted parents, and he and his army remained surrounding my home for the next seven days. On the evening of the seventh day, the moon rose full and swollen in the sky, and, as my true parents had long before promised, they opened the sky and came for me. From the moon they came, my true Father and an army of his own, to float above the bamboo forest in which they had left me as an infant and gather me up now as a grown woman to return home.”

“Your father’s army was frightened at the sight of thousands of the Inari in the night sky above them, and moved to attack the home of the old bamboo cutter who had raised me as his own daughter. He and my mother stepped from our front door and raised their arms to beg peace…” Her voice trailed off. Even after so many years, the memory was too potent for her to describe it.

Haji spoke the words for her. “And they were killed by the Imperial armies, thinking the old couple was attacking them.”

A tear crept down her face, glistening in the moonlight. The single nod of her head was barely perceptible.

“Our father’s lieutenant was the only survivor of what happened next. He told me the story – he told us all the story, but my brothers would not listen – of how Tsukuyomi, the moon Lord, descended with the hosts of all the night sky and cleaved through our father’s army. He told us how the moon Lord gave him leave to return and pass on the tale of the Bamboo Princess, she who was given leave to tarry among the world for a daughter’s lifetime.”

The four of them were silent for a long while, the crisp ambience of the city around them their only companions.

It was Puraido who at last broke the stillness. Gone from his voice were the brashness and the rancor, tinged instead by the weight of realization. “So it was…true,” he said softly.

Shino took in a long breath through her nose, letting the sensation of it steady herself. “Yes.” She held out a closed hand towards Puraido, and extended her fingers, revealing an iridescent shell. It still smelled like the sea.

He made no move towards it until she looked up at him. “Please,” she said. “I was wrong to withhold the truth from all of you – I should have told you I could not marry, instead of giving you missions I believed you could not accomplish.”

Puraido responded with a low chuckle. “Then you do not know us well, Kaguya-Hime. In spite of the height of the tasks, they showed us – some of us later than others – the true weaknesses in our hearts.” He held out a hand, and, removing the glove, accepted the shell. “We may wish it were not so, but clearly it took the command of a woman such as yourself to push ourselves far enough to discover our own limitations. For us all, honor was the greatest price. We face the choice of paying it or being indebted to it.”

Yoku nodded. “It is said that only in the hottest forge can the truest blades be formed.”

Puraido cuffed him on the shoulder with a laugh. “Bah, brother, the lesson is taught, keep your wisdoms in your counting-houses.”

They said their goodbyes then, the three men making their way back to their cars and slowly driving from the parking lot. Puraido remained a moment longer, his eyes remaining on Shino.

Her eyes followed his, ending up back at the sword which Prince Puraido had left tip-down, wedged into the sidewalk. She reached out and pulled it gently from the concrete and examined the blade in the moonlight. It was a fine blade, she conceded, and clearly intended as a peace offering from Puraido to Shino. She closed her eyes and bowed towards him; he bowed in turn, and gestured for his driver to depart. She collected the scabbard and sheathed it once more, and picked up her own Katana, sending it mystically back to its sheath in her office.

Shino shook her head in contemplative amazement.

“Well, that went better than I’d expected. Surprisingly little bloodshed.”

She placed another call to the Embassy holding quarters and instructed the guards to release Kyōfu on the condition that he gather with his four brothers and return to Japan immediately. There would be paperwork, but it could wait until tomorrow.

The moon seemed much larger this evening, she thought, ruminating that perhaps her own family was more attentive tonight than on other nights. Perhaps…perhaps the sense of aloneness with which she so often kept wrapped around her was only a perception, nothing more.

She made her way back to her car, and looked back at her phone. It’s not too late, she thought. Perhaps Takeshi wouldn’t mind some company.

I know I wouldn’t.