The column pushed on along the mountain road through western Suruga.
Torchlight strung two long snakes of fire through the dark, tracing the rough road in orange-red outlines. The footfalls of forty ashigaru fell in perfect time, and the small metallic clatter of armour scales echoed down the valley.
Kobe Hikaru still walked at the very front.
His grey robe surfaced and vanished again in the firelight, pale long hair hanging down his back, the Muramasa's scabbard swaying gently at his waist with every step.
He never once looked back at the column behind him.
That did not mean he was idle.
There was a bluestone by the roadside, about waist-high.
As he passed it he laid his palm against its face, let yokai power seep in, and paused for a moment.
"…Mm. Good grain on you."
He muttered it to himself and walked on.
[Bluestone: Favourability +1]
A dozen steps further, an old cedar by the road had a natural hollow in its trunk. He reached in and felt around.
"Not bad. Nice and warm in there."
[Old Cedar: Favourability +1]
A few more steps, and he drew out the map Imagawa Yoshimoto had given him, unfolded it, studied it, folded it, unfolded it again, folded it again.
Three times over.
Each time he opened it he said something under his breath.
"…Route's right."
"…Don't crease."
"…Decent paper, too."
[Hand-drawn Map: Favourability +1]
All of this, naturally enough, was also being watched by a very small figure walking beside Yoshimoto's palanquin.
A girl a little past ten.
She was short, coming up roughly to the waist of a grown ashigaru, dressed in a plain grey kosode with a dark brown haori over it. The clothes were obviously too big for her, the cuffs rolled twice before her fingertips showed.
Her face was neat but unremarkable, round cheeks still carrying baby fat, and perched on the bridge of her nose was something wildly out of place for the age.
Spectacles.
Round frames, wooden rims, lenses of ground crystal.
Such things were vanishingly rare in the Sengoku era, seen only among the handful of luxuries that came in from the southern barbarians.
She wore them and blinked the slightly vacant brown eyes behind the lenses, keeping close to the palanquin, her short legs pumping fast.
Matsudaira Motoyasu.
Daughter of the head of the Matsudaira clan of Mikawa Province, ten years old, sent to Suruga as a hostage when Mikawa submitted to the Imagawa clan.
Hostage in name, though her treatment was hardly poor. Yoshimoto looked after her rather well, and what she ate, wore and used was better than what most retainers' children got. Only her freedom was limited: she could not leave the castle.
This time, unusually, Yoshimoto had brought her along on the journey.
And in the middle of it, Motoyasu stared at that grey figure up ahead talking to a rock, the pupils behind her lenses full of open bewilderment.
"Lord Yoshimoto."
She dropped her voice and leaned toward the gap in the palanquin's curtain. "That person up front… has he been talking to things by the roadside this whole time?"
Imagawa Yoshimoto's voice came from behind the curtain, lazy, as though she had only just woken.
"Mm."
"He talks to rocks."
"Mm."
"He talks to trees as well."
"Mm."
"And just now he was talking to the map."
"Mm."
Motoyasu pushed her spectacles up her nose, her voice smaller still. "…He really is a strange person."
She paused, then corrected herself.
"A strange yokai?"
She thought about it, then shook her own head.
Weren't yokai strange by definition? So being strange was normal for them? Then a normal yokai would be the abnormal one? Which meant he was actually normal like this?
The logic went around three times inside her skull and left her dizzy.
From inside the curtain came a soft snort.
"Motoyasu."
There was a trace in Yoshimoto's voice, only a trace, of smugness she could not quite hide. "That isn't called strange."
"Then what is it called?"
A folding fan slid out through the gap in the curtain and tapped toward that grey back up ahead.
"He said it himself. He calls it 'Having recognized the vastness of heaven and earth, I still cherish the green of grass and trees.' I happen to agree entirely."
Yoshimoto's voice was neither loud nor soft, but every word came out with perfect clarity.
"A being who can cut down great yokai, stand face to face with the God of War, and take a hundred demons into his own service, and who is still willing to crouch down and talk to a rock. That kind of being is the truly remarkable one."
Motoyasu blinked.
"…Is that really how it is?"
"Of course."
Yoshimoto's tone was certain and confident, though she herself probably could not have explained where that confidence came from.
Motoyasu did not argue. She had no way to argue.
She only pushed her spectacles up again in silence, and thought one thing she did not dare say aloud.
The filter you're looking through, my lady, is rather large.
But she was a hostage.
The most important quality in a hostage was keeping one's mouth shut.
So she shut it, and went on trotting along beside the palanquin on her short legs, enjoying the rare outing.
Inside the curtain, Imagawa Yoshimoto lowered her fan and settled back against the cushions.
The collar of her deep blue kosode hung slightly open, the curve below her collarbone showing and hiding again in the dim yellow lantern light of the palanquin, the rise and fall above and below her tightly bound sash drawn out further by her half-reclining posture.
She was not watching Motoyasu.
She was watching that grey back beyond the gap in the curtain.
The back walking ahead of more than fifty people.
The back that never turned around.
Yoshimoto knew perfectly well when she had begun paying attention to this oni warrior.
It was that night.
The Thunder Beast coiled beneath her main castle, the whole city smothered under a thunderstorm, and she had huddled in the castle keep with a city's worth of fear and irritation. Then a grey figure had dropped out of the sky and cut the lightning in half with one stroke.
That blade she had later enshrined at the highest point of the castle keep.
That man had later vanished into the night.
Afterwards, to find him again, she had been willing to go to war with the Hojo clan a second time, and in the end she got what she wanted and signed a contract with him.
After that came the Uesugi invasion from the north.
The Hojo besieged, the Kanto shaken, and she had mustered five thousand men for an expedition to Echigo. That plan had not been hers. It was the scheme the oni warrior had laid out on the very day they signed the agreement.
A strategy proposed by a yokai.
That fellow had sat in her main hall with a map and a sand table and walked her through a strategic conception far beyond any military mind of this age.
"Uesugi has thrown every soldier she has into this place. Her rear in Echigo is empty. The Imagawa have ships. Sail north from Suruga along the inner sea, round Sado, and land on the Echigo coast."
She remembered those words exactly.
Not because the words themselves were so brilliant.
Because of the man saying them. An oni warrior who had crawled out of a heap of corpses only months before, and there was no contempt in the way he looked at her, no calculation. Only an absolutely level seriousness.
He had treated her as a partner worth entrusting a plan to.
Not a girl in need of protection.
Not a daimyo to be used.
A comrade who could understand him and carry the plan out.
Yoshimoto did not care to use the word fondness.
Too frivolous. Too unlike her.
She would admit only to goodwill.
Very high regard.
High enough that watching him talk to a rock struck her as perfectly reasonable.
High enough that she could describe a Demon chatting with a stone as "Having recognized the vastness of heaven and earth, I still cherish the green of grass and trees."
A filter really was a filter.
What she saw might well be false.
She knew that. She did not care.
Yoshimoto laid the folding fan across her chest and closed her eyes.
The palanquin rocked gently along the mountain road, and the tread of the ashigaru and the clink of armour scales made the finest lullaby there was.
It had been a very long time since she had slept so soundly.
Because someone was walking up ahead.
This peace of mind, at least, was real.
Past the middle of the hour of the Rat, the column halted on a level stretch of the mountain road.
The samurai in the lead set the ashigaru to making camp. It was not truly a camp, merely a few bonfires lit on the open ground beside the road, the pack horses tethered, watches assigned in shifts.
In the late-autumn mountains the cold dew lay heavy, and it was no weather to keep marching.
Moisture condensed on the blades of grass and threw back tiny points of light in the firelight, and the temperature had dropped low enough that every breath showed white.
The ashigaru wrapped themselves in straw capes and crowded around the fires.
The palanquin was set down at the innermost point, ringed twice over by bonfires and a wall of bodies.
Motoyasu had curled up on a grass mat beside it, her haori pulled tight around her, her round spectacles taken off and resting on her knees. Without them her face looked even smaller.
She was already asleep.
Breathing evenly, a grain of rice from supper still stuck at the corner of her mouth.
Inside the curtain, Yoshimoto was not asleep.
A deep blue kosode was nowhere near warm enough for the night. She had wrapped the palanquin's one thin blanket around her shoulders, drawn her knees up, and sat hugging her fan with her chin on her knees.
Cold.
She did not want anyone to see that she was cold.
But she was, undeniably, cold.
The pampered lord of Suruga Province, spending her first night out in the open in her entire life.
Then footsteps came from beyond the curtain.
Very light, almost soundless.
A corner of the curtain was lifted from outside.
Kobe Hikaru crouched by the palanquin, his crimson demon eyes glowing faintly in the firelight.
"Cold?"
He had already seen it. It needed no saying.
He was not what anyone would call a gentle man, but Kobe Hikaru had grown used to running a favourability system, and naturally he was not about to pass up a chance to farm favourability.
Whether from people or from things.
Habit becomes second nature.
Yoshimoto did not answer.
Chin on her knees, thin blanket around her shoulders, only half her face showing.
But the stubbornness on that half a face said it plainly enough. I am not cold.
Kobe Hikaru nearly laughed out loud. He said nothing, only put out his right hand, fingers spread.
A ball of flame rose from his palm.
Firefly ghost-fire.
Dim green ghost-fire with a faint warmth to it lifted from his palm, just the size to sit in one hand.
The fire was not hot enough to burn anyone, but it was enough to drive off the clammy chill the cold dew brought.
It hovered above his palm, its glow soft, washing the inside of the curtain in a warm tone.
Yoshimoto's gaze settled on that flame. The pale green light shone in her amber eyes and on her fair cheeks, an eerie sight; she ought to have been afraid, and yet for reasons she could not name, no fear came to her.
She did not speak either. She only shifted her blanket-wrapped body a little.
Silently, without a flicker of expression, toward the side where the curtain hung open.
Toward that ghost-fire.
Toward his hand.
The edge of the blanket brushed his fingers.
Yoshimoto's fingers slid out from under it and came to rest over the back of the hand holding the flame.
Very lightly.
Her fingertips were soft and fine, and the instant they touched his skin they flinched back, then returned.
Poised above the back of his hand.
Not gripping. Not holding.
Only resting there in the air, a hair's breadth away, not quite touching at all.
The ghost-fire danced between their hands, its dark red light staining that small pocket of space a colour entirely unlike the night around it.
The corner of Yoshimoto's mouth twitched.
"…Not bad."
Her tongue stayed stubborn. "You really don't have to do this. I'm not all that cold."
Kobe Hikaru: …
Speechless as he was, he still did not move, and the ghost-fire went on burning in his palm.
Until Yoshimoto's breathing evened out and the pressure of her fingers slackened.
She had fallen asleep.
Her fingertips still resting on the back of his hand.
Kobe Hikaru looked at her for two seconds, raised the temperature of the ghost-fire a little more, then fixed it in place, like a lamp.
Then he lowered the curtain gently.
Turned, and walked back to the head of the column.
Kept the watch.
And kept working his way through the conquest.
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