“Your pardon, elder.” Michiko had watched Riko go, but now she turned to face the kitsune women. “What were you saying about the ritual?”

  “I said nothing about the ritual yet, child. I was talking about your headstrong friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “You see?” The elder patted Pearl-Ear’s shoulder. “The princess is a capable young woman of remarkable faculties. It is not necessary to keep secrets from her.”

  Pearl-Ear’s ears flattened and she stared at the back of Michiko’s head. If the princess heard, she was not yet interested in responding.

  “With respect, elder,” Pearl-Ear hissed. “It sounds like you’ve been talking to my brother. Who should not have been talking.”

  Lady Silk-Eyes laughed. “I have not been in contact with your Sharp-Ear, my dear. Your student came here to find something. You came here to avoid something. I think that they are perhaps the same thing and that you should share your respective burdens rather than concealing them.”

  Pearl-Ear continued to stare at Michiko. “Perhaps, elder.”

  “And you should do so soon. After the ritual, it may be too late.”

  Before Pearl-Ear could reply, the elder patted her on the shoulder and glided back to the center of the square.

  Lady Pearl-Ear stepped forward and stood next to Michiko.

  “Have you been keeping secrets, sensei?”

  “A kitsune always keeps secrets. It’s our nature.”

  “True.” Michiko continued to stare straight ahead, and Pearl-Ear did the same.

  “It’s odd that we have not seen your brother. He was the one who guided me here, after all.”

  “Not so odd, Princess. He knows that when I find him, I will cut off his tail and nail it to his forehead.”

  “He was an excellent yabusame instructor. I put his teachings to good use in the forest.”

  “I never said he was a bad teacher. Merely a careless guardian.”

  “I learned a great deal. But he said one thing that stuck out. He said that the art of yabusame had grown more important since I was born.”

  Pearl-Ear’s heart grew cold. “That sounds like standard archery instructor talk to me. Comparing the good old days gone by to the more dangerous ones at hand.”

  “So he was merely referring to the Kami War.”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “But I have noticed it before, sensei. No one has ever said so, but the my birth coincides directly with the start of the war.”

  Pearl-Ear sighed. “A less self-interested student would dismiss that as mere coincidence.”

  “I have found, sensei, that there is very little coincidence when kami and kitsune are involved.”

  Lady Pearl-Ear felt tears forming in her throat. “I loved your mother very much. For her sake, let me defer my answer until a more appropriate time.”

  Michiko’s eyes were dry and bright. “It is in her name that I ask, Lady Pearl-Ear.”

  Pearl-Ear faced the princess. “Your arrival changed many things in Eiganjo Castle. It provided the Daimyo with a potential helpmate and heir. It provided me a vocation. And it filled your mother with pride she could barely contain.

  “You deserve to know the truth, Michiko. And I swear that I will see that you find it. But until I know the truth, I can and will say nothing. Now,” she said as she took her student’s hand, “let us take our places for the ritual.”

  They sat at the front of the growing throng. Lady Pearl-Ear began chanting along with the other kitsune, but the princess was silent for a few moments until she picked up the cadence of the chant. Then she, too joined in.

  Pearl-Ear felt someone sit next to her, and she cracked an eye. Riko mouthed, “Choryu” and shrugged. Then the student archer closed her eyes and joined the chant.

  They were speaking an old kitsune dialect, but Riko and Michiko both were familiar enough with the modern foxfolk tongue that they could contribute. As the throng repeated the same phrase, Pearl-Ear let time and space and all the worries she had been carrying slip away. It could have been moments or it could have been days, but Pearl-Ear had no idea and less interest in telling one from the other.

  When Pearl-Ear heard was nothing but the chant in her ears and felt nothing but the vibration in her own throat, Lady Silk-Eyes spoke.

  “Hear us, spirits of the plains. Spirits of the trees. Spirits of our ancestors. Your children here in the utsushiyo need your guidance. We face enemies from your realm as well as from ours. If there is a kami among you who still cares for the kitsune, answer us now.”

  In response, the chant grew louder and higher in pitch. On either side of her, Pearl-Ear heard Riko and Michiko matching the changes, following the elder like an orchestra follows a conductor. Pearl-Ear could feel the power coalescing above the crowd as her own voice also swelled and the group chant grew louder and more powerful. It was working.

  The noise reached a crescendo. The elder’s stick tapped crisply three times against a wooden bucket, and the makeshift drumbeats brought the chant to a sudden stop.

  Pearl-Ear opened her eyes. She looked at Michiko, at Riko, and then up at Lady Silk-Eyes.

  The kitsune elder stood in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by a hundred or more silent kitsune. She held her walking stick aloft with both hands and her face was pitched back, muzzle to the sky and her throat exposed. Lady Silk-Eyes coughed, then let out a soft, mournful howl.

  Pearl-Ear and the rest echoed the howl, combining their voices with the elder’s. Lady Silk-Eyes began to sway, rolling her shoulders and hips with her feet planted. Then she stepped off her mark, winding her way around the center of the square in a sinuous, hypnotic dance, softly howling all the while.

  The air above them was dominated by a bank of luminescent green mist. It glowed softly, like a lantern through gauze. The cloud was as wide and as long as the square itself, and though she could not see through it, Pearl-Ear knew that it rose higher into the evening sky than the tallest cedar.

  Lady Silk-Eyes twirled her staff and herself around five times, then brought the gnarled stick’s end down on the wooden bucket. The dull wooden boom sounded again and the howling stopped.

  A spark flashed deep within the dull green cloud. A rolling wave of light surged across the surface of the fog bank, crackling as it went. Below, the throng waited silently, eagerly, their eyes wide open in awe and anticipation.

  Slowly, an image began to take shape in the fog. Currents of mist thicker than the main body, flowed together and intertwined, climbing high into the sky. The image clarified, becoming a kitsune watchtower.

  This tower continued to expand, swelling outward and upward. Pearl-Ear recognized the Daimyo’s tower even before it was complete. Above the tower, brighter fog pooled, giving the impression of a full moon over the capitol of Towabara.

  A white spark leaped out of the fog-tower’s highest point and sailed away from the enormous structure. It moved more slowly the farther it got from its starting point, though it strained and heaved like a fish on a line. Eventually, the tower moved toward the light, towed along by the spark’s progress.

  “Behold,” Lady Silk-Eyes intoned. “The light of Towabara draws the Daimyo himself behind it. More, spirits. Show us where the light must go.”

  The misty tower dispersed, but the white light floated on. It meandered across the cloud, and as it approached the far end, a new shape began to form there. It was far smaller than the tower had been, but still gigantic compared to the spark.

  The new form quickly sprouted arms, and legs, pointed ears, and a short vertical muzzle. It coalesced into the form of Lady Silk-Eyes herself, and the cloud-elder mimicked the real elder’s motion as perfectly as a mirror.

  “Behold,” Lady Silk-Eyes said. “Towabara’s treasure seeks out the oldest and most oddly shaped among us.”

  Light laughter ran through the crowd and then just as quickly subsided.

  “Now we see what has happened,” the elder said. “Not what should happen. More, spirits. Show us where the light must go next.”

  Like the tower before it, the fox silhouette dissipated. The white spark continued to the edge of the cloud and then doubled back.

  Two new forms took shape at the center of the fog bank. One was a smaller, brighter version of the Daimyo’s tower. The other was less distinct. A dozen or more streams of thick mist flowed into one another, but maintained their own boundaries. The streams flowed over and around each other, twisting themselves into complicated free-form knot. More streams were drawn into the center of the tangle, and the knot grew wider and heavier until it actually began to sink toward the bottom of the cloud.

  The white spark hesitated between the rising tower and the sinking knot. The images in the cloud shuddered, as if someone had tossed a pebble into a pond and the ripples were affecting the vision.

  Then, the tower faded and the knot rose to meet the spark. The white speck of light pressed against the outermost layer of smoky streams and then sank in. When it reached the center of the still-expanding mass, the spark flared, and the vision ended.

  Pearl-Ear blinked at the suddenly empty sky over the courtyard. She turned to her right and saw Michiko staring upward with tears in her eyes.

  “Behold,” Lady Silk-Eyes said. “There will be many distractions before the light of Towabara reaches her destination. She will be sorely tempted to return home before the journey is complete. But she must not. Thank you, spirits. You have shown us the way.”

  The entire crowd replied as one. “We honor you, spirits of plain and cedar.”

  The elder kitsune rested her stick on the ground and leaned on it. “Michiko of Towabara,” she called. “Have you seen the spirits’ display?”

  The princess sputtered. “I have, elder. But I do not understand it.”

  Lady Silk-Eyes smiled. “You left your father’s house to find answers. You will find them among the snakes of the forest. Seek you the orochi-bito, Princess, the snakefolk of Jukai. Among the knot of serpentine bodies is where your questions will be answered.”

  An impressed murmur rode through the crowd. With the ritual’s sudden end, the spell was broken and the kitsune-bito began to talk once more. The chatter was evenly divided into two camps: those who were amazed by the idea of the princess visiting the orochi-bito, and those who were anxious and fearful, having come for news about goblins.

  Michiko turned to Lady Pearl-Ear. “What does this mean?” she asked. “What are the orochi-bito?”

  Pearl-Ear hesitated. She wasn’t sure how to answer Michiko’s question. The orochi-bito of the deep woods were as mysterious and solitary as the moonfolk in the Daimyo’s tower. They dwelled in the thickest parts of the Jukai and shunned the other tribes of Kamigawa. They had no single ruler, no ambassador to Towabara, and no documented interaction with any human civilization. Even the kitsune, with their mastery of the forest and its ways, had never encountered more than a handful of orochi—and those encounters were always fleeting.

  “Look,” said Riko. “There’s Choryu at last.”

  Grateful for the distraction, Pearl-Ear turned to where Riko was pointing.

  The white-haired wizard stood on the very edge of the village square, half-concealed by the stiles of a fence that encircled someone’s garden. Pearl-Ear looked from Michiko to Riko to Choryu, struck by the difference in their expressions.

  Michiko was still in shock, troubled by what she had seen and preoccupied with puzzling it out. Riko was caught up in the rush of energy created by the group vision, and she was waving energetically to catch Choryu’s attention. Choryu himself looked pained, as if someone had stabbed him in the stomach while telling him the worst news of his young life.

  Pearl-Ear felt a flutter of pity for the headstrong wizard. He had been a student longer than the girls had, with better access to the extensive libraries at Minamo. She wondered if his studies included tales of the orochi-bito, if he had read second-hand accounts of how ruthless and territorial they were and heard the campfire stories about how no one had ever returned alive and in their right mind from a trip through the snakefolk’s forest.

  From the look on Choryu’s face, Pearl-Ear guessed that he had.

  The following morning, twenty of Daimyo Konda’s finest troops rode into the kitsune village. Lady Pearl-Ear recognized their leader as her old acquaintance Captain Nagao. Behind Nagao, the mounted archers and swordsmen were a study in discipline, their oiled leather armor gleaming in the sun, their weapons sharp and ready, their horses immaculate. A single kitsune scout rode before them on a pony.

  The scout raised a hand and the entire column came to a halt. He turned and saluted Captain Nagao, then trotted off to the side of the road.

  Silver-Foot, Pearl-Ear, and Lady Silk-Eyes came out to meet the Towabara retainers.

  “Greetings, Captain,” Pearl-Ear said. “It’s good that you have come. There—”

  The leathery officer tilted his leather helm back, exposing his face to the morning sun. He did not look happy. “Where is Princess Michiko?”

  “Safe in the village. But there is—”

  “Lady Pearl-Ear of the kitsune. I am to take you and Princess Michiko back to the tower. Immediately.” He craned his head and shouted, and a soldier rode up with two riderless horses. “And if your brother is present, I would like a word with him as well on behalf of the Daimyo.”

  Pearl-Ear cleared her throat. “We will come with you, Captain. But there is an even more pressing danger nearby.”

  Nagao shook his head. “The Daimyo was very clear. Nothing is to delay Michiko’s return.”

  Silver-Foot stepped forward. “Not even an akki raiding party? There are at least two hundred goblins in the woods nearby. We have seen their tracks and found the casualties they left behind. According to the compact between the Daimyo and the kitsune, we officially request his aid.”

  Nagao frowned. He turned and muttered something to his lieutenant and then swung his legs around and slid down from his horse. As Nagao approached the kitsune delegation, his lieutenant issued orders to the Towabara riders. Soon the road was clear and the Daimyo’s retainers were standing at attention alongside their mounts.

  After they had all introduced themselves, Nagao’s face was tense and haggard, but his concern was genuine. “Are you certain?”

  Silver-Foot nodded. “Quite certain. I notice you don’t seem very surprised.”

  “Strange things are happening all over,” Nagao said. “I’ll just add this to the list.” He called to his lieutenant.

  “Send two riders back to the tower,” Nagao told him. “On my authority, we need a full division of infantry and another company of yabusame archers. Get them here as fast as possible. Go, and be quick about it.”

  The lieutenant saluted and scurried off. Nagao inhaled deeply and blew the long breath out between pursed lips.

  “I can’t send the princess back if there are goblins about,” he said. “And I can’t return without her. Nor can I ignore your official request for aid.”

  Silver-Foot nodded. “I have one hundred kitsune warriors under my command. Together, your troops and mine can defend this village until reinforcements arrive.”

  Nagao smiled without humor. “Mine is not a defensive unit. We are trained to travel light and fast, to hit the enemy hard and then withdraw.”

  “That will not be effective here, against the akki.”

  “I have battled akki before. You don’t need to tell me what will work against them.” Nagao composed himself. “Excuse me, noble Silver-Foot. I am at my wit’s end. We didn’t come for akki, we came for a runaway girl. The plan was to overtake her and bring her back swiftly, fighting only if we had to and even then, only enough to disengage without casualties.” He paused, considering. “Do you know where they are based?”

  “I believe they are on an extended march. No base camp. They seem to be perpetually on the move, always heading north.”

  “And what is to the north?”

  “More trees. More kitsune. Eventually, they will reach the shores of Kamitaki Falls.”

  “If they make it that far, may they all drown there. Why do you think they are here? They’ve never come this far north before, and there are easier routes to take if they wanted to raid Eiganjo.”

  Silver-Foot sneered. “They are a mindless rabble. Who knows what drives them? Though, as you say, strange things are happening. Perhaps something has stirred them, called them out of their normal territory.”

  “Not something,” a male kitsune said from within the village. “Someone.”

  Pearl-Ear recognized the voice and once more cursed her brother for his ability to mask his presence. She would have to learn that trick from him before he was made to pay for letting Michiko out of the tower.

  “Sharp-Ear,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

  The small grey fox stepped out of the crowd of kitsune observers.

  “Who is that?” Nagao said.

  “I,” Sharp-Ear said, “am Lady Pearl-Ear’s brother. I am Michiko’s tutor and her spirit guide. I am a kitsune scout and an expert archer. I am the reason most of you are here.”

  Nagao turned to Pearl-Ear. “Is this babbler your missing brother, Lady Pearl-Ear?”

  “Yes,” Pearl-Ear said.

  “Then the Daimyo will want his head.”

  “That may be true,” Sharp-Ear said. “But I think you all want what’s in my head more. I came from the woods. I have seen the akki horde.”

  Nagao glared at Sharp-Ear, hand on his sword, but he did not draw. Pearl-Ear also fixed her most withering gaze on her brother, and Silver-Foot’s eyes leaped back and forth between all three.

  “Perhaps,” Lady Silk-Eyes said,” we should all adjourn to my hut for a parley and a pot of tea.”

  * * * * *

  In the cramped confines of the elder’s home, Nagao, Pearl-Ear, Silver-Foot, and Sharp-Ear all sat around a small wooden table. Princess Michiko and Lady Silk-Eyes served tea, which only Sharp-Ear drank. She kept staring intently at the kitsune trickster and he kept winking, raising a girlish giggle every time.