“Oh, we’ll make it,” Choryu said. “We all ride well. My magic is powerful enough to protect us from bandits or wild animals, and you two have your arrows. If we go quickly and quietly, without fanfare, we can be there and back before Michiko is missed.”

  “And once we arrive?”

  “Once we arrive, we rely on Michiko to get us into the libraries. The Academy has been working quite closely with the Daimyo’s stewards. If we present ourselves properly, there’s no way they’ll refuse a polite request from Daimyo Konda’s daughter.

  “Besides, it’s not like we’re researching powerful spells. We just want to know what’s going on around us. Maybe this has happened before. Any one of a dozen history books could tell us how it ended.”

  Riko sighed. “I do not think it will be that simple. If the answers were so easy to acquire, why haven’t they been?”

  Sharp-Ear nodded silently in agreement.

  The female archer continued. “What do you think, Michiko? Before we decide if this is wise, tell me: is it even possible? Would you risk so much for the real possibility of nothing in return?”

  Michiko’s voice was soft and hesitant. “Choryu is right. I could be gone for days before my father noticed.”

  Choryu pounced. “And Lady Pearl-Ear won’t be back before then, either.”

  Riko’s robe rustled as she sank into one of the couches. “And Sharp-Ear?”

  Michiko responded immediately, “Sharp-Ear would notice.”

  The fox-man grinned in the darkness. Pearl-Ear may have doubted his reliability, but he had at least impressed Michiko as an attentive instructor.

  Choryu scoffed. “He currently has no standing at court. Who would he tell? Who would listen?” Sharp-Ear’s smile faded.

  Riko stood up quickly. “Any fool can say, ‘Where is the princess?’ If no one knows the answer, someone will go and look.”

  “Tell Sharp-Ear you’re sick,” the water wizard said. “Tell him you’re injured. Tell him anything that will make him look the other way for a few days. If he doesn’t raise the alarm, no one else will, either.”

  Sharp-Ear would not have believed that Michiko would be childish enough, selfish enough, or dimwitted enough to agree to a secret jaunt into war-torn countryside simply because she was bored. But he heard her assent in her voice, sensed it on the air even as Michiko uttered the words. It was not restlessness but duty that drove her.

  “I have decided. We will go to the Minamo Academy.”

  Riko and Choryu both reacted, the former with concern and the latter with relief, but Sharp-Ear did not stay to listen. The fox-man immediately began inching silently back across the rafter.

  “When do we leave?” Riko asked.

  “Before first light tomorrow.”

  “Excellent,” Choryu said. “This is for the best, Princess, you’ll see.”

  Sharp-Ear crept along the beam, sadly shaking his head. Perhaps he had misjudged Michiko’s maturity. Perhaps he was misjudging her now, and she really did intend to make the journey as some sort of token effort to be helpful in these violent times. In either case, the princess had decided to quit the tower and slip away from his kind tutelage and expert supervision. Pearl-Ear had bid him “be responsible.” Here, now, it was clearly his responsibility to do something.

  * * * * *

  Gaining entry to Choryu’s chambers was more difficult than Sharp-Ear had expected, but it was well within his abilities. There were very few locks or charms that could keep a determined kitsune out.

  So when Choryu returned to his quarters and lit the lantern, he found Sharp-Ear stretched out comfortably on his bed.

  “We must talk, wizard.” Sharp-Ear stretched and rolled to the foot of the bed, where he stood eye to eye with Choryu. “About this trip you have planned.”

  The boy’s strange blue eyes betrayed nothing. Choryu stared at Sharp-Ear quizzically, his spiky white hair seeming to vibrate in the firelight.

  “I’m surprised to find you here, sensei,” he said. “And disappointed.”

  “I cannot let Princess Michiko leave the tower.”

  Choryu stepped back and rebarred the door to his room. “No one is asking you to, sensei. We’re just need you to trust Michiko-hime’s judgment and step aside.”

  “It is your judgment I question.” Sharp-Ear flexed his ankles and bounded lightly to the floor. “What makes you think you and Riko alone can protect her all the way to your academy gates?”

  Choryu smiled. “Are you offering to come along?”

  “No, wizard. I am canceling the whole trip.”

  Choryu shook his head. “We leave in the morning, sensei. You saw that thing at the assembly. It’s no safer here than anywhere else. At least at the academy, we can study the situation, research the causes, isolate a solution.”

  Sharp-Ear scowled, and when he spoke, his voice growled from the back of his throat. “She thinks of you as her friend,” the kitsune said. “And you’re going to bring her before your masters so they can study her.”

  “I am her friend,” Choryu flared. “And my masters are as concerned for her well-being as I am.”

  The young wizard bowed, his tone imploring, “Please, sensei. This is what the princess wants. We all seek answers to the same questions. At the academy, we can seek them together.”

  “No, my young friend. This is not the way. Wait for my sister’s return. Send an organized delegation, an official caravan to the school with Michiko-hime at its head. And if Konda will not let her go, I will lead another procession to the school and ask them on behalf of the kitsune-bito. But you are about to make a terrible mistake and endanger the very person you seek to assist. I will not let you do it.”

  “I am sorry, sensei. But you cannot stop me.”

  Choryu splayed his fingers wide, palms facing backward. Sharp-Ear rushed forward, confident that he could bowl the wizard over before he could summon a stream of water.

  But Choryu raised not a stream, but a sheet of water that materialized like a wall between the wizard and the fox-man. Sharp-Ear splashed into the vertical curtain of blue liquid. It was thicker, denser than real water.

  The kitsune dug his toes into the wooden floor and tried to surge forward. The thick blue water held him in place, however. It still flowed and burbled around him, even waving the fur on his arms back and forth like a lazy field of undersea grass. But Sharp-Ear himself was frozen in place, unrestrained but unable to make his limbs function.

  “You won’t drown,” Choryu said. “Nor will you hunger. You are caught in a field that represents the precise moment when ice transforms to water. You are fixed, like the crystal, but flowing, like the droplet.”

  Sharp-Ear had not taken a deep breath before entering the trap, but his lungs did not ache. Tentatively, he tried to let his air out, but nothing happened and nothing within him changed.

  “It will preserve and protect you for weeks, months if need be. But the princess will be back in a matter of days. I will release you then, and make amends. Forgive me, sensei.”

  Sharp-Ear watched in silent misery as Choryu painted several powerful charms on his door. The white-haired wizard blew out the lantern, bowed to Sharp-Ear, and pulled the heavy door shut behind him.

  A whitish blue light crawled around the edge of the door in the doorjamb, making a complete circuit before sputtering out like a wet candle. Sharp-Ear was left alone, helpless, and quite possibly forgotten in the darkness.

  His sister would certainly kill him if this went on much longer. He had best escape and salvage what he could of his reputation for responsibility.

  * * * * *

  Sharp-Ear waited for several hours, until the square of sunlight from Choryu’s window had crawled to the edge of his liquid prison. The sun would set in a short while, but by then he would have gotten what he needed.

  Choryu had obligingly explained the nature of the trap in which Sharp-Ear now languished, but the kitsune would have escaped the same way no matter what stasis/paralysis/immobility spell he had dredged out of the academy archives.

  Sharp-Ear reminded himself not to underestimate the young wizard again. He had been much faster and much more powerful than the kitsune expected. But he was still young and foolish enough to trap a defeated foe rather than finish him off, and almost every trap involved keeping the target still.

  The kitsune occupied a unique position among Kamigawa’s tribal society. They straddled the social world of commerce and civilization on one side and the solitary realm of harmonious nature on the other. Kitsune clerics healed using human medicines and mystic ritual alike; kitsune warriors came as disciplined samurai bushi on the battlefield and as free-roaming independent rangers in the deep woods. They were gregarious among their own kind but elusive and sometimes off-putting to outsiders.

  One thing they excelled at was motion. Their minds and bodies were fast, lithe, and graceful. They lived long lives, matured slowly, and existed in near-constant motion most of the time. In a word, Sharp-Ear, thought, we are excitable.

  Sharp-Ear repeated the words to a powerful mantra in his mind as he watched the sunlight slide into the edge of his prison. Sunlight had warmth, but light itself had motion, energy, vitality. He was trapped in a transitive moment when one thing becomes another … with a little light, energy, and motion, he could complete the transformation.

  “Dance,” Sharp-Ear thought to the countless drops of blue liquid that flowed through the edge of the sunlit square. His vision fogged as the water seemed to boil around him. In his mind he repeated his mantra, focusing his mind, body, and spirit on channeling the power of the Great Sun Spirit.

  Sharp-Ear heard a hiss and a watery pop, and then he fell forward in a great splash of cold blue water. Coughing, sodden, his eyes alight with triumph, Sharp-Ear stretched out his hand and reached into the vertical shaft of sunlight nearby.

  “Thank you, old friend.” The fox-man sprang to his feet, shook himself, and went to examine the charms on the door while he planned his next move.

  The water wizard was correct in that Sharp-Ear’s voice did not hold much sway with the rulers of Towabara. If he tried to report the princess before she left, she could simply deny it. If he tried after she left, she would likely be returned and punished severely … assuming she wasn’t waylaid on the road and ransomed by bandits. And then not only would Sharp-Ear himself be in the soup for letting her go, but Choryu would have succeeded in the first part of his misguided effort to help Michiko. Sharp-Ear was far too wet and far too annoyed to allow that.

  His mind fairly whirred as he read the symbols on the door and traced his finger around the doorjamb. He doubted he could talk Michiko out of the trip as easily as the wizard had talked her into it. If confronted, she would most likely agree with whatever Sharp-Ear said then find some other way to get out undetected.

  He could allow her to go, catch up with her himself, and chaperone the remainder of the trip. At least that way she would have a proper guardian. Pearl-Ear would tear his tail off, but Michiko would be somewhat better protected.

  The lithe kitsune-bito bounced up onto Choryu’s table, pushed a square of ceiling aside, and darted up into the rafters. The wise thing to do would be to quietly sabotage the outing, make the travelers think that the spirits frowned on such a journey.

  Sharp-Ear scowled, wrinkling his muzzle. Short of hobbling every horse in the Daimyo’s stable, he didn’t see how he could prevent them from traveling. Hobbling Michiko herself did cross his mind, but he rejected the idea and decided not to tell anyone he’d had it. He could put a sleeping draught in the wizard’s morning tea, but that merely delayed the problem. They would try again as soon as they were all up to it.

  He tried to follow Pearl-Ear’s example, to think like her. What would a proper guardian, a responsible one, do? Sadly, a huge cause of the distance between himself and his sister was the fact that they thought nothing alike. It was like asking a fish to think like a bird, and he gave up that line of thought almost as soon as he opened it.

  Then the fox-man’s eyes sparkled. An idea, born from pieces of all his other ideas cobbled together, was taking shape in his mind. He knew where they were going. Perhaps he couldn’t stop them, but he could steer them toward the safest possible course.

  Sharp-Ear nodded happily. This was an energetic solution, one worthy of a kitsune trickster. His erstwhile students might think of it as a journey, but in reality it was just another training session in Sensei Sharp-Ear’s dojo.

  In the cool, dark, predawn mist, Princess Michiko rode into Eigan Town proper for the first time since she was a child. Concealed beneath one of Riko’s student robes and flanked by Riko and Choryu, Michiko kept her head bowed as they rode past the sentries. Traffic was light, but there were enough merchants and pilgrims moving to and from the tower to keep anyone from taking a closer look at the three student wizards headed back to Minamo.

  Her heart hammered in her chest until they cleared the north ridge and the torches on the tower walls and guard houses went out of sight. She could still see the white tower stretching high into the clouds, but to anyone looking back down, she was just another traveler.

  She and Riko had planned their route very carefully. They would skirt the northwest edge of the Jukai Forest, following one of the less-traveled paths that would also keep them far from the criminals to the west and the bandits to the south. They would remain on the border between Towabara and kitsune-bito territory, where dangers were few and every citizen was a loyal supporter of Konda. If they ran into trouble and had to reveal themselves, they would find no shortage of volunteers eager to assist the Daimyo’s daughter.

  By sunrise they were looking at the western boundary of the Jukai, with an almost unbroken curtain of cedar trunks and boughs that stretched into the horizon. The road was wide enough for them to ride side by side, and as they had hoped, there were no other travelers to be seen.

  Riko seemed nervous and Choryu excited, which did not surprise Michiko. Of the three, Riko had been the least interested in traveling incognito. She and Michiko were closer than sisters, and the student archer was clearly concerned about the dangers they would face. Choryu, on the other hand, seemed to live for exploration and adventure. He approached this trip as a challenge to be met, a chance to experience something new. He was especially animated this morning, almost jittery as they stole away and glancing back long after they were clear of Eiganjo.

  Michiko stole a glance at Choryu from beneath her hood. He was handsome, with strong features and those dazzlingly clear blue eyes. His close-cropped white hair made him look even more manic, however, as if there was too much thought energy in his skull and it had bleached the hair above it and fused it into points.

  Choryu was a year ahead of Riko and close to graduating. He would soon be a full-fledged water mage and an assistant instructor at the Academy. Riko said that he had focused on his spellcraft almost exclusively, advancing higher and faster than normal at the expense of every other subject. Riko herself adopted a wider focus, unsure of where her true interests lay.

  Privately, Michiko thought Riko’s archery was every bit as advanced as Choryu’s magic, and she had told her friend so. She had not mentioned this to Choryu for fear of offending the proud young man. She liked both of her friends from the Academy, and at times she could see herself as a combination of the two. Perhaps she should consider enrolling at Minamo. It would help her to choose a discipline to focus on and to show her father that she was competent on her own.

  They rode on, stopping only for a midday meal and to water the horses. Michiko relaxed more with each passing mile. The smell of cedar and the feel of fresh air on her face nourished her—she had not realized how stale and stifling it was in the tower. She hoped they would see some wildlife on the way. Besides horses and her father’s dog, the tower had very little in the way of animal life.

  Michiko’s brow furrowed as she rode. There was very little life of any kind in the tower these days. Her father was always locked away in the upper reaches of the tower. The survivors of kami attacks were all dour, silent, and traumatized. Even the tower staff and the armies of Towabara looked wan and drained, almost overwhelmed by the fighting and the influx of refugees.

  She straightened in her saddle. She was doing the right thing. When she was little, her nurse referred to her as “Towabara’s hope for the future.” If that were truly her destiny, then perhaps this journey was the first step toward it. Even if she didn’t find the answers she sought, merely making the attempt would change her, teach her, maybe even redefine her. Michiko the sheltered princess was of no use during a Kami War. She was resolved to becoming someone who mattered, someone who could help.

  “You see?” Choryu said, when the sun started to set. “We’re halfway there and we’ve barely seen another soul.”

  “Halfway is the most dangerous point,” Riko replied. “Our starting point and our destination are equally far away. We’re completely removed from assistance at either end.”

  Choryu smiled, his eyes twinkling in the dusk. “Well, don’t say that. You’ll jinx us.”

  “Worse than you did by gloating at the halfway mark?”

  “My friends,” Michiko interrupted. “I am pleased with our progress, but I won’t be comfortable until we get where we’re going. How much longer can we ride before we have to rest for the night?”

  “There’s plenty of daylight left,” Choryu said. “If we press on and pick up the pace, we can probably make it to the edge of falls.”

  “And the Academy is at the top of the falls.”

  “Close enough,” Riko said. “But reaching the edge of the falls doesn’t mean we’re there. It’s the largest river in Kamigawa, and by far the tallest and widest waterfall. On horseback, it will take at least another day to climb the path.”

  “It would only take half a day by boat.”

  “We can’t rely on a boat being available. Nor can we expect a ferryman to keep our presence a secret.”