Chapter Text
The kitchen light hummed, and nobody had gotten up to fix it in months.
Natsuki Kenichi sat at the table with a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago. He was a tall man, still broad through the shoulders from the morning runs he refused to give up, but the glasses on his nose sat crooked, and the easy grin he had worn all his life had been missing for a very long time. People in the neighborhood still said hello to him on the street. They said it carefully now, the way you speak to someone carrying a full cup of water.
Across the table, Naoko was setting out cups. Three of them, as she did every evening.
He had stopped asking her about that after the first year.
She moved around the kitchen with her usual unhurried drift, humming under her breath, a tune with no beginning or end. She set the third cup in front of the empty chair, nudged it a quarter-turn so the handle faced the right way, and stood back to admire it as though it were a flower arrangement.
"Kenichi," she said, tilting her head at the cupboard. "Do you think they have mayonnaise, wherever he is?"
It was such a Naoko question, so far off to the side of everything, that a laugh escaped him before he could stop it. It came out cracked, like a plate with a hairline fault.
"I'd say it's the first thing he'd check for."
"Mm. I bought the big bottle again." She smiled at the empty chair. "He'll be annoyed if we finish it without him."
The laugh died in Kenichi's throat.
Six years. Six years since the boy had pulled on his tracksuit jacket in the hallway, mumbled that he was heading to the convenience store, and never come back. Naoko had called after him from the kitchen, buy mayo if they have it, we're out, and he had said yeah, yeah in that bored, put-upon voice sons use on their mothers. That was all. Those were the last words in the house that belonged to him.
The police had searched. The neighbors had searched. Kenichi, who was good at everything, whom people liked, who had spent his life making difficult things look easy, had searched until his legs gave out and then searched some more. He had walked every street between the house and the store until he knew the cracks in the pavement by heart. He had talked to the cashier, the cashier's manager, the man who sold newspapers outside, a stray cat that sat on the wall. He had found nothing. No footprints, no camera footage, no phone signal, no witness. A boy had walked out of a front door and stopped existing.
Subaru's room was exactly as he'd left it. Naoko dusted it on Sundays. The game console was still plugged in. Once, three winters ago, Kenichi had caught himself standing in the doorway at two in the morning, whispering a boss-fight strategy to an empty bed, and had gone back to the living room and sat in the dark for an hour.
"Naoko." His voice wobbled, and he hated it. "I'm sorry. I'm supposed to be the one who—"
"Silly." She reached across the table and pinched his cheek, the way she did when he was being dramatic. But her eyes were wet. "You always say he gets his sulking from me. It isn't true. Look at you."
"Ah. Caught." He took her hand and pressed it against his forehead, and the kitchen blurred. "I just want him home. I'd even let him skip school for a week."
"Two weeks," she whispered.
"Two weeks."
They stayed like that while the evening light slid slowly down the wall, two people holding on to each other because it was easier than looking at the third chair.
"He was a good boy, wasn't he," Naoko said, very quietly.
"He is a good boy."
"Mm." She nodded, accepting the correction as if it were a small, important gift. "He is."
Outside, a bicycle bell rang, children laughed, a door slammed somewhere down the street. Ordinary sounds. The whole world was carrying on, and had been for six years, and Kenichi had never forgiven it.
Then the light stopped being the sun's.
It rose from the floorboards, pale and warm, and Kenichi had just enough time to think this is not a gas leak before Naoko gasped, her fingers locked around his, and the kitchen folded away like a sheet of paper.
There was no pain. No sense of falling. Only a long, silent moment in which the whole world seemed to hold its breath, and the sound of his own heartbeat was the loudest thing in the universe.
Then came the noise.
Voices first, hundreds of them, layered over each other. Wheels grinding on stone. Hooves, or something like hooves, clopping in lazy rhythm. Vendors shouting prices. Somewhere a bell, somewhere a child shrieking with laughter, somewhere a dog barking itself hoarse. After six years of a quiet kitchen, it hit him like a wave.
Then the smell: grilled meat and woodsmoke, dust, something sweet and spiced, warm bread, animals, a lot of animals.
Kenichi opened his eyes.
He was standing in the middle of a street. Stone paving, worn smooth in the middle by centuries of traffic. Timber-framed buildings leaned together overhead, painted in faded blues and ochres, and banners in white and silver were strung between the rooftops. A cart rumbled past at an easy pace, and the thing pulling it was a lizard the size of a small car, green-gold and heavy-shouldered, its claws clicking on the stone and its tail trailing lazily behind.
Beside him, Naoko was still clutching his arm with both hands. Neither of them said anything for a long moment.
"Kenichi," she said at last, very softly. "That man has ears on his head."
He looked. A man was haggling at a stall a few steps away, a lean fellow in a patched coat, and yes, there were fox ears poking up through his russet hair, flicking in irritation as he argued over the price of a turnip.
"Yes," Kenichi said. "I see them too."
"They're real, aren't they?"
"...It looks that way."
"Ohh." Her face lit up with something horrifyingly close to delight. "Kenichi. They're very fluffy."
"Naoko, sweetheart, I need you to hold on to the part of you that's scared for about thirty seconds, okay? And then we can be amazed."
"Oh. Yes. Right." She straightened her cardigan with great seriousness. "I'm scared."
He might have laughed, if it weren't for the way her hand trembled against his sleeve. She was holding herself together the way she always did, by making her mind go somewhere small and cheerful, and it hurt to see how thin it was wearing. He drew her in against his side and made himself take stock, the way he had on the worst days of his life.
Pockets first. Wallet, keys, a half-empty packet of mints. His phone, which showed a blank screen and no signal and a clock stuck at the minute they'd left. Nothing here would help. He looked at the signs hanging above the shopfronts and found they were written in letters he'd never seen, flowing and looped, and yet the voices around him were perfectly clear, every word of it Japanese in his ears, as if someone had arranged for him to understand.
Somebody arranged this, he thought. Somebody planned it.
He didn't like how steady that thought felt.
The street itself was odd, too. Not strange like the fox-eared man, but strange in a quieter way, a wrongness at the edge of the eye. Half the buildings were bright and new, the stone pale and unweathered, the timber still raw gold. But here and there between them stood older structures that had been scorched black, their upper stories rebuilt with fresh planks like mended clothing. A whole row of shopfronts to his left had been rebuilt in a single uniform style, as if a hundred hands had put them up in a single season. Banners hung from the new roofs. Under one of the banners, someone had left a bundle of dried flowers, tied with string.
"Kenichi," Naoko said again. "Why does everyone look so tired?"
He looked at the faces moving past, the merchants and carters and mothers with children on their hips, and she was right. They were busy, they were even laughing, but there was a heaviness under the noise, the same watchfulness he'd seen in his own neighbors' faces for six years. These were people who had lost something and were being brave about it.
"I don't know," he said, and kissed the top of her head. "But I'd like to find out where we are before I find out why. First thing, we find someone who looks decent and we ask. People are people. Somebody will talk to us."
"You always say that."
"And I've always been right."
"Not about the curry place."
"Naoko, the curry place was one time."
She giggled, a small wet sound, and some of the fear went out of her shoulders. It was enough. He squared his own, took a breath of strange air, and steered them toward the closest stall.
The stall sold apples. Heaps of them, red and gold, stacked in crooked pyramids on a table draped with a faded cloth, and behind the table, on an overturned crate, sat an old man with a shock of green hair and a face creased by weather and good humor. He was in the middle of polishing a fruit against his sleeve, whistling through his teeth, when he looked up and saw them coming.
The humor left his face at once.
"Mister," he said, low and quick. "Your hair."
Kenichi touched it. "Ah. Is something wrong with it?"
"It's black." The old man glanced up and down the street before he went on, lowering his voice until it barely carried over the stall. "Cover it. Please. Wrap something around it, anything. If the wrong person sees you..."
"I'm not sure I understand."
"You don't know?" The apple seller stared at him, then at Naoko, then back again, as though trying to decide which of them was the joke. "Where are you two from? You haven't heard of the Black-Haired Archbishop?"
Naoko tilted her head. "Is that a pastry?"
"A... no, ma'am." The old man swallowed. "The Sin Archbishop of Pride. The Witch Cult's devil. He's the one who set the capital burning, and half the kingdom with it." His jaw tightened, and for a moment he looked much older than his years. "Even the Sword Saint couldn't stop him. And if he couldn't..."
He didn't finish. He didn't need to.
"Black hair, black eyes," he said instead. "People hate that look, mister. Even years after. The dye merchants made fortunes that first winter. You'd see whole families in the streets with their hair gone brown or gray, little ones too, just so nobody would look at them twice." He rubbed his face. "It's quieter now. But it's not gone. It won't ever be gone, not for those who lost someone."
A cold thread slid down Kenichi's spine.
Black hair. Black eyes.
He told himself it was nothing. A country with lizards and fox-eared men, a country where the sky might as well have been a different color. There were probably a hundred black-haired men in this city.
But a few steps behind him, a mother had pulled her small son close and turned his face into her skirt, watching Kenichi with narrowed eyes, and a boy no more than six was drawing something in the dust with a stick, a stick-figure with a wide mouth and long, spiky black hair, and a circle of flames around its feet.
"Thank you," Kenichi said, and he bowed his head, because it was the only response that felt honest. "For telling us. That was kind of you."
The old man rummaged under his counter and came up with a faded length of blue cloth. "Here. It's not much."
"I can't pay you."
"I didn't ask." The old man pressed it into his hands. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he picked the best apple off the top of his pyramid and dropped it into Naoko's palm as well. "You two look like you've had a rough day. Keep your head down, and stay out of the back alleys. They're not friendly to strangers."
"Thank you very much," said Naoko warmly, polishing the apple against her cardigan. "You have lovely green hair."
The old man blinked, flustered. "...Thank you, ma'am."
"Is it natural?"
"Naoko," Kenichi murmured.
"I'm only asking!"
But something unwound in the old man's face at that, a flicker of the humor that had been there before, and he waved them off with the back of his hand. "Go on. Go. Mind the cloth. And mister," he added, as Kenichi turned, "whatever's been done to you folks, I'm sorry for it."
Kenichi looked back. The old man had already gone back to his polishing, whistling through his teeth again. But his hands were not quite steady on the apple.
Kenichi wound the cloth around his hair and tucked the ends under, feeling very foolish, very frightened, and strangely grateful, all at once. Somewhere inside the grief he had carried for six years, a small, stubborn warmth stirred.
There are decent people here too, he thought. Good.
He would hold on to that thought for as long as he could.
They did their best to stay out of the back alleys. They failed within the quarter hour.
It wasn't carelessness. The main road bent, then forked, then forked again, and the crowd thinned in ways he hadn't expected. Kenichi, with one arm around his wife and his attention on the sky for a landmark, took a turn that looked promising and turned out to be a long, narrow gap between two buildings with a single window high up and no one in it at all.
He knew it was wrong before he saw them. His shoulders knew it. There was a quality of silence in the passage, an attentive silence, and the noise of the market had dropped away behind them as if someone had closed a door.
Three men stood at the far end.
They had the look of people who made their living from other folks' bad turns. One was heavy-set, with a split lip. One was thin and wiry, picking his teeth with a splinter. The third, standing a little in front, held a knife loosely in one hand, the way you hold a toothpick.
"Evening," the knife man said. "Funny clothes you've got."
Kenichi stepped half in front of Naoko without thinking about it. In his youth he'd been good at fights, then better at ending them before anyone got hurt, and he read the shape of this one at a glance. Three of them. One visible blade, probably more. A narrow alley, blocked at one end, with the way back about twenty paces behind him. And Naoko at his back, with no idea what the rules were here.
"Gentlemen," he said, and held out his hands, palms open, easy. "We're lost, that's all. We don't want any trouble. If you'd point us toward the main road, we'll be on our way."
"Sure, sure. Happy to. Just leave the bag and the pretty lady's jewelry, and we'll point you anywhere you like."
"We don't have a bag."
"Then the jewelry."
"Oh, I didn't bring any," Naoko said, peering around his shoulder with sincere regret. "I only have the apple. Are you hungry? You all look very tired."
All three thugs stared at her.
"...What?"
"You look like you haven't slept." She held out the apple with both hands, completely earnest, as one would offer a treat to a stray. "My son gets cranky when he hasn't eaten, too. I always keep a snack in my bag, but I left my bag at home."
Kenichi closed his eyes for half a second. Naoko. Love of my life.
The wiry one was the first to recover. "Lady, are you stupid, or—"
"Oi!"
Kenichi's voice cracked down the alley like a plank dropped on stone, and all three flinched. He was a big man, and he had spent a lifetime keeping that voice folded up and put away where it could not hurt anyone. It came out now with an edge he hadn't used in thirty years.
"Take one step toward my wife," he said, in a quiet, even tone that was somehow worse, "and I will personally make sure you regret it."
It wasn't a bluff. The knife man seemed to understand that. His grip tightened. His friends shifted their weight. Kenichi's mind raced through angles and distances, the wall at his left, the loose brick at his feet, the way the heavy one was favoring his right leg, and he settled his weight to move.
If it goes bad, I take the knife. Naoko runs. She runs the second I move, and she doesn't look back.
He didn't know if she'd listen. She never did, not about this.
"Guards!" he bellowed, as loud as his lungs would carry. "Someone! There are men with blades in the alley!"
"Shut him up—"
"That's enough."
The voice was quiet, unhurried, and somehow it was the only sound in the alley.
A man stood at the mouth of the passage with the street behind him, lit from behind by the afternoon sun. Tall, young, with hair the red of banked embers and a plain, courteous face. At his hip hung a sword in an unadorned white scabbard, and the entire alley seemed to lean away from it. He hadn't drawn it. He didn't need to.
The wiry thug went pale. "That's—"
"Don't," hissed the knife man.
"That's the Sword Saint. The one who couldn't—"
They ran, all three, so fast the dust lifted. The knife man's blade rang off the stones as he dropped it without breaking stride, and for a moment the only sound in the alley was three sets of boots scattering into the distance.
If Reinhard had heard the half-finished sentence, nothing in his face admitted it. Only his hand shifted, once, against his side, like a man pressing an old bruise to learn whether it still hurt.
Kenichi let out a long breath he hadn't known he was holding, and a trembling laugh with it. "Well. That's one way to settle a negotiation."
The red-haired young man stepped into the passage and bowed, a precise and graceful movement. "Are you hurt, sir? Madam?"
"No, we're fine, thank you. Truly." Kenichi bowed back, deeper, while his legs worked out that they weren't going to be needed after all. Up close, the young man looked thinner than he should have, with shadows under his eyes that no amount of sleep could fix. He carried himself like someone who had once sworn to protect something and had never been able to forget the day he failed. When his gaze fell on his own gloved hands it slid off them at once, the way a man looks away from a mirror he has learned to avoid. "I don't know how to repay you. We're new here, and not doing very well at it."
"There's no need. My name is Reinhard."
"Natsuki Kenichi. And this is my wife, Naoko."
Reinhard's hand stopped halfway to Kenichi's.
His face didn't change, which was somehow worse. It simply went still, the way a pond goes still when something has dropped into it. The air in the alley thickened. Kenichi felt it in his chest before he understood it, a weight, as though the whole street had stopped to listen.
Reinhard's other hand had closed on the hilt of his sword. He seemed not to notice. The leather of the grip creaked under his fingers.
"Natsuki," he repeated, very quietly.
For one instant the courteous blue of his eyes went flat and cold, and Kenichi, who had been looked at with real contempt only twice in his life, knew it for what it was. It was not meant for him. It passed through him like light through glass and fixed on someone standing just behind his face. Then it was gone, and what replaced it was worse: a naked, private shame, as though the young man had caught himself in something unforgivable.
The cloth had slipped partway off Kenichi's hair during the shouting. He felt it now, and felt the young man's gaze settle on the line of his jaw, the shape of his brow. On his eyes.
Naoko's eyes. Kenichi's face.
"...Forgive me," Reinhard said. His voice was perfectly level, and Kenichi had a sudden, absurd certainty that the levelness was costing him everything he had. "May I ask what relation you have to a man named Natsuki Subaru?"
He said the name the way a man lifts something filthy with two fingers: carefully, and only because it had to be done.
The world narrowed to a pinpoint.
"Subaru." Naoko said it first, and it sounded as though her entire body had said it. She stepped forward, the apple slipping from her fingers and rolling away, forgotten. "You know Subaru? Is he all right? Do you know where he is?"
"Please," said Kenichi, and found his voice barely working. "He's our son. He's been missing for six years. If he's here, if he was summoned here somehow, like us, then please, anything you can tell us..."
A sound came out of Reinhard, short and strangled, almost a breath drawn through clenched teeth, and it was gone before it could become a word. Is he all right. The woman who asked it had no idea what she was asking. Kenichi watched the question land in the young man like a stone dropped down a well, and watched him go down after it.
Reinhard did not answer right away.
The Sword Saint, who by every account could not be moved, stood in a dim alley with his knuckles white around his sword and looked at two frightened parents. Kenichi watched something cross his face that he couldn't name. Grief, certainly, and a stunned kind of pity. And beneath them something colder, aimed not at the two people in front of him but at the name they had set between them, so raw on that gentle face that it looked like a stone in a bowl of milk.
He looked at Naoko's hands, pressed so tightly together beneath her chin, and then very carefully away from them, as though they were something he had no right to witness.
His fingers opened, one at a time, and came away from the hilt.
"I'm sorry," Reinhard said. "I can't speak of him here."
Kenichi's heart stumbled. "What do you mean, you can't—"
"There is a great deal that must be explained, and it is not mine to explain. And not in a street where anyone might hear that name." For the first time, something cracked in the courtesy. His voice dropped, rough and low. "Please believe me, sir, madam, I mean you no harm. But you can't stay here. If the wrong person sees your face, I won't be able to..."
He stopped. He drew a slow breath through his nose, and the wall went back up.
"Her Majesty has been searching for you for some time," he said. "I must ask you to come with me."
"Her Majesty," Naoko echoed, bewildered.
"For your safety," said Reinhard. "And for others'. I'm afraid I must insist."
It was an invitation shaped like a sentence. Kenichi knew that grammar. He had been polite to enough authority in his life to recognize it.
He looked at his wife. Her face held hope, terror, and a helpless trust that cut him to the quick. She had never been good at reading rooms, but she had always, always been good at reading him.
"Kenichi," she whispered. "He's sad."
"I know."
"I think he's very sad. I think we should go with him."
Reinhard had heard. His eyes closed for the length of a single breath. Sad was a kindness he did not think he deserved, and it showed in the way he turned his face toward the light, as if it might burn something out of him.
He almost laughed. It was possible that she was the wisest person in the alley.
Whatever this is, he thought, it's the only door we've found.
He bent, picked the apple up out of the dust, and wiped it clean on his sleeve. He pulled the cloth back over his hair and took his wife's hand.
"Lead the way," he said.
Reinhard did not take them through the main streets.
He led them by lanes so narrow that Kenichi's shoulders brushed the walls, past kitchen doors, drying laundry, a cat asleep on a barrel. He walked half a step ahead and slightly to the right, on the side where the lane opened to the world, so that his body stood between his charges and anyone who might look in. Kenichi noticed it. Naoko, who noticed most things in her own sideways way, noticed it too, and slipped her hand into the crook of Reinhard's elbow as though he were an old family friend escorting her to a wedding.
The young man went rigid. Then, very slowly, he did not pull away.
"You're very tall," Naoko told him conversationally.
"...So I've been told, madam."
"Do you eat enough? You're thin."
"I eat," said Reinhard, with the faintest, most baffled note in his voice. "Thank you for your concern."
"My Subaru's the same, you know," Naoko went on, quite happily. "He'd live on snacks if I let him. I think you'd like him. He's always liked people who are polite."
Reinhard's step did not falter. Nothing about him changed at all, except his eyes. For the space of a single breath they dropped to the cobblestones ahead, and there was such a flat, controlled loathing in them that Kenichi felt it like a draft from an open grave. Then something behind the loathing gave way, and what remained was only a bottomless tiredness, the look of a man who has hated one person for years and himself for a great deal longer.
"I'm sure he is very dear to you, madam," Reinhard said, and he chose each word as if he were stepping across thin ice.
Kenichi watched his wife prattle on, undeterred, and felt a strange, tender ache. She was frightened out of her mind and she was doing the only thing she'd ever known how to do with fear, which was to be kind to whoever was nearest. Kenichi had spent six years believing that she was fading. It had never occurred to him that this was the thing keeping her standing.
The lanes ended, as lanes do. They came out onto a broader street, and Reinhard slowed.
"We must cross the old quarter," he said, so quietly that Kenichi had to lean in to catch it. "There is no other way to the castle. Please keep the cloth where it is, and please do not stop. If anyone speaks to you, say nothing. I will answer."
"What's in the old quarter?" Kenichi asked.
Reinhard didn't answer. He only walked on, and Kenichi, after a moment, understood that he had already been answered.
They came upon it gradually. First a blackened lintel above a shop door, then a wall streaked with soot a story high, then a whole row of houses whose upper floors were new but whose foundations were charred to the color of old iron. The paving here was cracked in a way that Kenichi didn't like to look at too closely. Weeds grew in the seams. The air smelled faintly of wet ash, five years later, as if the ground itself hadn't forgotten.
People moved through it with their heads down. Nobody lingered. A woman hurried a child across the square with one hand over the girl's eyes, though there was nothing to see. A vendor selling roasted nuts fell silent as they passed and did not start up again until they were gone.
Some of them looked up as the red-haired man passed. Kenichi had expected awe. What he saw was stranger and sadder: a tired, wordless reproach, and in a few faces a pity that was worse. A woman sweeping a doorstep lowered her broom and would not meet his eye, and Reinhard bowed his head to her, not as one greets a neighbor, but the way a man bows to a verdict.
And then there was the wall.
It ran along the whole eastern side of the square, a long, low barrier of pale stone, and it was covered, from the base to the height of a man's head, in names. Carved, painted, scratched in with nails. Names in neat official lettering and names scrawled by shaking hands. Little bundles of dried flowers had been pressed into every crack. Cups of tea had been set out along the base, some fresh, some years old. Children's drawings were pinned under stones. A scrap of embroidered cloth. A wooden toy horse.
Kenichi stopped.
He hadn't meant to. His feet simply stopped, and Reinhard, a step ahead, stopped with him and did not urge him on.
Reinhard, Kenichi noticed, had kept his eyes on the cobbles all the way across the square, and kept them there now, the way a man walks past a house he cannot bear to enter.
"Are those names?" Naoko asked softly.
"Yes."
"All of them?"
"All of them are people who died in the fire." Reinhard's voice was very even. "Not all the dead are here. There wasn't room."
Kenichi stared at the wall, at the rows and rows of carved letters, at the little cups of tea going cold in the shade. He thought of the cup he'd left cooling on his own kitchen table, and the third cup beside it. For six years, he and Naoko had set out a place for one missing person. Here was a whole city doing the same, on a stone wall, for everyone.
A fire, he thought. The man at the stall said a fire.
Black hair. Black eyes.
His stomach turned over, slowly, like a sleeper in a bad dream.
"Mister."
The voice was thick and unsteady. A man had stepped out of a doorway at the edge of the square, a heavy, unshaven fellow in a stained apron, swaying a little. Drink, or grief, or both. His gaze had snagged on the line of Kenichi's jaw, where the cloth had slipped again.
"Mister, you there, take off that—"
"Good afternoon."
Reinhard had not raised his voice. He hadn't moved. He had only turned his head, and something in the air of the square changed, a pressure like the moment before a thunderstorm. The man in the apron stopped as though he'd walked into a wall.
"S-Sir Reinhard."
"These two are under my protection." It was very polite. It was the politest thing Kenichi had ever heard anyone say, and it carried the unmistakable weight of a closed door. "By order of the Crown. I would be grateful if you would remember that."
The man's mouth worked. His eyes flicked once to Kenichi's face, then to Reinhard's, and whatever he saw in the latter made him take a step back, then another.
For half a heartbeat, Kenichi thought he saw something like agreement pass over the young man's face as he looked at the stranger in the apron, the same grief, the same wish. Then it was gone, and a politeness so exact it was almost a punishment closed over it.
"Of course. Of course, sir. Forgive me."
He retreated into the doorway and vanished. Reinhard watched the empty doorframe for a moment longer than was necessary. Then his shoulders came down, a barely perceptible loosening, and Kenichi realized he had been braced for something worse.
"Thank you," Kenichi said.
"Don't." It came out sharper than Reinhard had apparently intended, and he closed his eyes briefly. "I'm sorry. Please don't thank me. I have done nothing that deserves it."
He started walking again, and they followed, leaving the wall behind. But Kenichi looked back once, and saw the young man's gaze fix for a moment, in passing, on a single patch of stone near the lower corner, a short name, carved small and neat. Reinhard's lips shaped it silently. Then he looked forward again, and his face gave away nothing. But his hand had found the hilt of his sword once more, and he gripped it the way a man grips a wound, as though the pain were owed.
The castle rose at the end of the avenue, pale and enormous against a sky going pink at the edges. Scaffolding still clung to its eastern wing. A flag hung over the gatehouse, a white banner with a silver crest, and below it two guards in gray-blue livery stood to attention at the sight of the red-haired man.
"Sir Reinhard."
"Open the gate."
The younger guard's gaze flicked to the cloth over Kenichi's hair, and then, with a question in it, to Reinhard.
"Guests of Her Majesty," said Reinhard.
The word sat in his mouth like something he had been ordered to swallow. Every instinct in the man, Kenichi could see, was screaming to say something else, and he was holding the line by discipline alone.
The iron groaned. Kenichi stood at the threshold of a place he did not understand, in a world that was not his, with his wife's hand in his and a cloth around his hair like a shield.
"Kenichi," Naoko whispered.
"Yeah."
"He's going to tell us something bad, isn't he?"
He didn't lie to her. He never had, not once in thirty years. "Yes," he said. "I think so."
She was quiet for a moment, watching the gate slowly open. Then she squeezed his fingers, once, very hard.
"Then hold my hand," she said, "the whole time."
"The whole time."
They stepped through together. Behind them, the gates closed with a long iron sound, like a breath finally let go.
End of Chapter 1