As with all spirits from the kakuriyo, this one was surrounded by a cluster of floating facets, minor aspects that attended her like servants. In this case, the Taken One was surrounded by a cloud of miniature stars that glittered as bright and distant as the sky on a clear winter’s night. Even in the soft light of the forest at midday, the new arrival’s stars sparkled and shone.

  The woman fixed her vivid yellow eyes on Toshi as he came around the tree. For a moment Toshi looked the Taken One full in the face, taking in the details and waiting for her to act. As they stared curiously at each other, Toshi realized why the disk-woman seemed so familiar. The eyes and the hair and the skin had distracted him from the elegant cheekbones, the small, perfect nose, and the long, graceful curve of the neck. She was wilder, more imposing, and more alien, but the Taken One looked remarkably similar to Michiko-hime.

  “Greetings,” Toshi said softly. “Do you remember me?”

  The Taken One blinked. She craned her head away from Toshi and then fixed him once more with her hypnotic eyes.

  “I am free,” she said. Her voice sounded like three voices, a shout, a song, and a whisper all at once.

  “You are. We released you according to your wishes. My name is Toshi.”

  The Taken One did not look interested at all in the concept of names. “Where is this?”

  “You are in the utsushiyo, the physical world. Does that mean anything to you?”

  The Taken One shook her head. Then she stopped and looked perplexed. “How do I now speak? Why do I now move?”

  “Well, you’re a powerful spirit,” Toshi said. “You would know better than I. But I think it has something to do with her.” He pointed to the princess.

  Michiko had partially recovered from the Taken One’s release. She had risen to her knees and was staring open-mouthed at the fierce reflection of herself.

  “Sister,” the princess said.

  The Taken One spun to face Michiko. She approached the princess like a stalking tiger and stared down into her eyes.

  “Sister,” she said. The Taken One reached down and took Michiko’s hands. Tears welled up in Michiko’s eyes as she folded the Taken One in her arms. The two sisters embraced awkwardly at first but then clung to each other as the princess’s tears rolled down the Taken One’s back.

  “Forgive me,” Michiko said. “I will never be able to restore what my father took from you.”

  The Taken One hissed and sprang out of Michiko’s arms. “Father,” she said. “Where?”

  The princess tried to soothe the Taken One with her voice. “He is not here. I do not know where he is.”

  “She means O-Kagachi,” Toshi said. Mentioning the old serpent only made the Taken One more agitated, so Toshi added, “He’s not here, either, and we’d like to keep it that way.”

  The Taken One shook her head angrily. “Father,” she said, pointing at herself. “Father,” she pointed at Michiko. Then she opened her green lips and hissed.

  “I don’t like them either.” Toshi stepped forward to the two women. “Michiko,” he said, “it’s important that you find out what the Taken One wants. That way—”

  The Taken One hissed again, and Toshi stepped back. “What is it?”

  The serpentine woman bared her fangs. “Father called me ‘Taken One.’”

  “She objects,” Michiko said. She reached out to stroke her sister’s face, but the newcomer pulled away like an angry cat. “She does not wish to be known by the name my father gave her.”

  “That’s easy to fix. Does she have another?”

  Michiko stared at the naked double of herself for a moment. “No,” she said. “She never needed one before she was brought here.”

  “Well, let’s keep it simple then. How about ‘Kyodai?’ It means ‘sibling.’”

  “Kyodai,” Michiko echoed. She stepped in front of her twin and touched herself on the collarbone. “Michiko,” she said. Then the princess reached out and touched the other. “Kyodai. Sister.”

  The serpentine woman stared at Michiko for a moment. Then she nodded and touched her own chest. “Kyodai.” The entity smiled for the first time, clearly pleased with her new name.

  “Please.” Michiko took her outermost layer of kitsune linen from her own shoulders and draped it around Kyodai. “A gift for you, my sister.” Kyodai eyed the fabric suspiciously, but with Michiko’s help she was able to put the garment on. She was not ready for a formal dinner, but the simple kimono did make her less distracting … at least to Toshi.

  “So, back to business.” Toshi bowed. “Welcome, Kyodai. Michiko and I would like to help you, and we will. But first you have to understand our situation.” Here Toshi faltered, for he had no idea how to sum up everything relevant in a way Kyodai would understand.

  “Michiko,” he said at last, “can you tell her what we’re up against?”

  “I don’t think I have to,” the princess said. “She isn’t comfortable speaking yet, but I’m sure she knows far more than she can say.”

  Toshi glanced around the training area. “Does she know why we’re the only ones awake?” he said. “I don’t mind, but your friends have been asleep for quite a while now.”

  “You,” Kyodai pointed at Toshi. “Me. Michiko. We speak now. Alone. They.” She gestured at the sprawled, sleeping bodies of the kitsune villagers. “Later.”

  Toshi smiled as his stomach went cold. “You’re keeping them out?”

  Kyodai considered his meaning for a moment and then nodded.

  “Very wise,” Toshi said. “I commend your judgement. But what I’m getting at is this: Both your fathers are coming here. Konda wants you back as his trophy, and O-Kagachi … well, I don’t know what he wants. But it definitely involves finding you and wrecking the landscape. What do you want to do? Should we run? Fight? Bargain?”

  “Slow down, Toshi. You’re just confusing her.”

  “This is the price of freedom, princess. The burden of making decisions. She has to understand that all of us … you, me, her, everyone here is in danger. I don’t know if she can die, but I can. You can. We all can, and some of us would like to take steps to avoid it.”

  “What would you have us do?” Michiko said. “You’ve been running for weeks and it’s changed nothing. Fighting seems equally pointless. We can do very little against the great serpent or my father’s army.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Toshi said. “I saw Kyodai slap a major spirit aside with no effort, and that was when she was an inanimate piece of rock. I’m hoping she can do a lot more now that she’s got a body.” Toshi allowed himself another glimpse of that body, still tantalizing him with flashes of colorful flesh from beneath the sheer kimono. He had always appreciated Michiko’s beauty, but it was somehow even more intoxicating on Kyodai.

  Michiko crossed her arms firmly. “I would rather the first thing we asked of her wasn’t combat.”

  Thunder boomed high overhead, freezing Toshi where he stood. Tentatively, he lifted his head up and saw the terrible dark bank of clouds that had formed.

  “So would I,” Toshi said, “but I think we no longer have a choice.”

  In seconds the sky went from bright and clear to black and ominous. Great flaming eyes winked open across the horizon by the pair, six becoming twelve becoming sixteen. Inflamed by his daughter’s sudden release, O-Kagachi at last manifested fully, the great and terrible eight-headed serpent in all his awesome splendor. The tangled mass of heads and serpentine necks filled the entire sky in all directions, blotting out the sun, the clouds, and everything else. The only break in the field of crushing coils was directly at the center, straight up from where Michiko and Kyodai now stood.

  The rest of the world literally stopped. On the distant horizon, clouds hardened into sky-bound stones that hung heavy in the air. Falling leaves froze in midflight, birds’ wings stopped between beats. The great spirit beast’s manifestation seemed to draw all other life and motion from the world, from the sky above to the treetops directly over Toshi’s head.

  Toshi’s knees buckled as all eight of O-Kagachi’s heads roared down in brute fury. He experienced overwhelming dread and a sadness so profound it made him feel like a single drop in an ocean of tears. The world wasn’t ending, it had ended, and its final destruction was little more than a formality. Toshi steeled himself and swallowed his panic. He couldn’t run and he couldn’t fight, but he would at least meet his end with his eyes open. Toshi planted his hands on his hips and stared angrily, defiantly up at O-Kagachi.

  Come on, he thought. Nothing in either world has ever been able to resist you before. He glanced over at Kyodai. But she is something new.

  Then, like some malevolent fog, the great old serpent descended.

  Kyodai bared her fangs and hissed angrily at the titanic figure. Michiko stared up in abject awe. All her previous encounters with O-Kagachi had been through visions and dreams, and in those only a few of his heads had appeared. Toshi shared the princess’s shock but not her paralysis. He ran to Kyodai and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “Call him off,” he said. “You called him to you before, so now you have to send him away. Do it now, or your sister dies.”

  Kyodai tore her yellow eyes from O-Kagachi and locked them onto Toshi. She opened her mouth and her forked tongue shot out, stopping a hair’s breadth away from his face.

  “Let go,” she whispered.

  Michiko found her voice. “Do as she says, Toshi. She will never allow herself to be restrained again.”

  Toshi held on for an extra second, unblinking as the sharp tips of Kyodai’s tongue flickered in front of his face. Then he relaxed his grip and stepped back.

  “Forgive me.” He bowed. “But what I say is true.”

  The princess stepped between Toshi and Kyodai. “It is as Toshi says, sister. You would be justified in letting your father destroy me. It would balance what my father did to you. But I do not wish to die. Especially not now.”

  Kyodai’s fierce eyes softened. She extended her hand and took hold of Michiko’s.

  “Come,” Kyodai said. “We will prepare.”

  The air blurred around the sisters. Toshi blinked rapidly to clear his vision, and when he looked again Michiko and Kyodai were gone.

  Overhead, O-Kagachi continued to bear down on him. Scattered around the training area, the kitsune elders, mentors, and soldiers continued to sleep. There was nowhere to run. He couldn’t fade away and he couldn’t escape into shadows. The Myojin of Night’s Reach had completely ignored all of his prayers since he’d arrived in the kitsune settlement, and she certainly wasn’t answering them now.

  Toshi walked among the fallen foxes, prodding them with his toe. Some, like Pearl-Ear and her brother, stirred and groaned as if they were about to wake up. None of them did, however, and soon Toshi was back where he started, no closer to a solution but much closer to O-Kagachi. The only good thing he took from his survey was his jitte, which he found tucked in Sharp-Ear’s belt.

  Furious and frustrated, he slumped heavily to the ground. He sat cross-legged and idly began gouging out small furrows in the dirt with his jitte. Here, at the end, he couldn’t even think of a useful symbol to draw. Hidetsugu had once told him it would end like this: Toshi alone, forsaken, and fresh out of tricks as retribution closed in on him. Toshi hadn’t given the prediction much credence, and when he did he was certain he’d be much, much older when it came true.

  I tried, Toshi thought. The final irony was that he truly had been trying to do the right thing. To release the Taken One, to honor the wishes of Night’s Reach … he truly had been trying to help others in addition to himself.

  O-Kagachi roared again. Toshi tossed his jitte into the air so that the tip stuck in the ground. This, Toshi thought. This is what I get for moral and spiritual diligence.

  Michiko felt herself disappear into the world, becoming a part of everything while remaining separate and distinct from it. It was intoxicating but also smothering and constraining. She felt like a fish in a bowl that was exactly as big as she was: the entire world was hers to explore, but her world started and ended with her own body.

  See, sister, how I have lived. Kyodai’s voice rang in Michiko’s head though the princess could not see her. Before I was taken to your world, I was woven throughout the fabric of both realms like the threads in your clothing. The old serpent embodies everything in the kakuriyo and the utsushiyo. Many of the kami you know seceded from O-Kagachi after they’d been given an identity by the denizens of your world. Your prayers can give the spirits purpose, and that purpose gave them power, identity.

  Michiko’s vision darkened. When it cleared, she found herself suspended in a huge, cloudlike void of darkness and unstable shapes. She saw a vast expanse of flickering energy and drifting dust … by now a very familiar scene to her. Twice before, powerful spirits had shown her the spirit world, its unfathomable ebb and flow churning in a complex rhythm she would never apprehend.

  But the kakuriyo seemed somehow different with Kyodai as her guide. Her sister’s presence comforted Michiko, making the strange space more real, more alive, and less overwhelming.

  Here, Kyodai said, there was no “I.” There was no Kyodai to separate from the fabric of O-Kagachi. All things in both worlds are part of the old serpent, but none more so than me. For I was forcibly removed from his essence not by the prayers of many but by the arrogance of one. I was never meant to be distinct, never intended to be an individual. Then, I had no motion of my own and no will. I had not even the thoughts required to recognize these essential aspects of existence. I was subordinate, wholly contained.

  “I am so sorry, my sister. That sounds like a hellish existence.”

  It was not hellish or divine. It simply was. I did not know anything other than what was, so I could not love or hate it. How could I long for the touch of your hand when I did not know you existed? When I did not know I had a hand to touch?

  The void shuddered and began to spin. Michiko had seen this vortex form before—the visual effect of Konda’s crime.

  And then he came. Kyodai’s voice grew low and malevolent.

  The scene before Michiko shifted, taking her from the mysteries of the kakuriyo to a small stone chamber in her father’s tower. Konda was there with General Takeno and the daimyo’s advisors from Oboro and Minamo. They stood around a flaming brazier that cast eerie blue light across the room. Above the brazier hung a stone disk with a fetal serpent etched across its face.

  He stole me from my home, ripped me away from everything I knew and was. He gave me individuality without freedom, that I might recognize my sorry state but remain unable to change it. Here is where the hellishness begins, my sister. Had your father let me be, I would never have known regret, anger, or loneliness. Had he brought me here as a true kami, one to be worshiped with respect and admiration, I would have been another willing participant in the great dramas of the physical plane. I would have showered him with as many blessings as he could conceive, as many as I could bestow. For I would have been alive.

  But he did neither of these things. He cast me in stone and left me aware. He made me powerful but denied me choice and action. He created me as an individual entity but used me as a means to his ends.

  Michiko found herself constrained again, frozen and immobile. She was looking through a distorting window at her father’s face. Awash in blue light, Konda’s mad grin and wild eyes were the most frightening things she had ever seen.

  This is the face of my enemy. The face of your father. This is what I saw for the twenty long years of my physical existence. I will never allow myself to be imprisoned like this again. Do you understand me, sister?

  “I do, Kyodai. He is a great man, but great men do not always make good fathers.”

  The view from inside the stone disk shimmered. When it cleared, Michiko was once more looking out into the void of the spirit world. Slowly, Kyodai faded into view alongside the princess.

  “What of your father?” Michiko asked. “We are agreed Daimyo Konda wishes to imprison you again, to use you for the glory of his nation. We will not let that happen.

  “But what of O-Kagachi? What will the old serpent do when he finds you?”

  Kyodai looked away, her jaw working nervously in an unconscious imitation of Michiko’s own nervous habit. I fear the worst.

  “Then, like me, you fear he will do more than imprison you,” Michiko said. “He will devour you. He will consume and digest your personality until it is once more a mere extension of his. He will take you back into himself to restore the injury done to this realm regardless of your wishes. Regardless of the multitude of injuries he will inflict in the process.”

  Kyodai’s voice was soft, almost melancholy. I called out for him when I was afraid. But I am also afraid of him. There is none of this, she motioned back and forth between Michiko’s mouth and her own. No language, none of the sharing of ideas or ourselves. He is everything and therefore needs nothing. His guardianship is all that matters, the imposition of boundaries between the realms of physical and spiritual. Only that drives him. I see now how terrible he is.

  Michiko looked past Kyodai and took in the whole of the kakuriyo. From her vantage point she could see the very edges of the spirit realm, the limits of it scope, the very shape of it. Though its depths were still immeasurable she felt she could reach out and take it in her hands like some rare and exotic treasure. Was this how her father felt? Did he also see the true shape of the spirit world and dream of holding it, protecting it, shaping it to his design?

  Kyodai was truly her sister, she thought. Their lives shared so many parallels. Yet they were also strangers, unknown and perhaps unknowable to each other. Kyodai had taken a body of flesh and Michiko had seen the cosmos as an ephemeral spirit, but this was not true understanding. They were only visitors in each other’s worlds, observers of each other’s lives. Michiko could never grasp the perfect nightmare of gaining an identity only to spend twenty years discovering it was that of a helpless, motionless prisoner. Kyodai would never see how Konda’s indifference to Michiko was as cruel and painful as his devotion to the stone disk, and how his actions had forever altered the course of her own life. They were two sides of the same mirror, linked, identical, but forever distinct and separate.