Behold the night of your birth. I regret that I cannot show you your mother one last time. Our opportunity is limited and there is something you must see.

  Michiko agreed, and though she did not speak or think the assent, her phantom form was drawn to the top of the tower all the same.

  She passed through the heavy white stone and a dozen or more retainers without resistance. The men and women of the tower did not register her presence in the slightest. Ghost-like, she drifted down the halls, up the stairs and into the locked chamber where twenty years hence, Daimyo Konda would spend all his time.

  Her father was there, looking as he always had. His face was slick with sweat and he was grinning victoriously. A bearded man in Minamo robes was kneeling beside a brazier of blue fire. Takeno kneeled beside the brazier, chanting and hurling gold dust into the fire. A soratami stood opposite the wizard, striding back and forth as he chanted. His ears were loose and trailed behind him, the strange markings on his flesh migrating from his skull to the tips of his lobes.

  Why is there a moonfolk here? Michiko wondered.

  As I said, Mochi’s voice answered. We’ve been trying to undo this since it was done. Your father would not be dissuaded, so we decided to participate in order to keep the situation manageable, and in case something went wrong.

  “Come,” Konda intoned. “Come to me now, my child.”

  The air above the brazier split and a thin seam of energy seeped through. The dazzling blue-white line intensified. The ends of the line withdrew into the center and formed a blazing spot of blinding energy.

  “Come!”

  The light crackled, contracted, and then burst, flooding the room with a sheet of luminous white. Michiko blinked reflexively, but she maintained a clear and interrupted view.

  Her father and his cohorts were frozen, statues on a field of white. The center of the white void was open and swirling like a rapidly draining basin. Through the hole, Michiko could see something vast, glimpses of an alien world.

  This is a window into the spirit realm, Mochi’s voice said. No mortal, not even the ones in this room on this night, has ever seen what you now see.

  Michiko floated forward, hypnotized, intoxicated by the swirling vortex. She reached out a phantom hand and broke the plane between the kami’s realm and her father’s.

  Watch closely, Princess. And don’t forget to come back.

  Spirits swam and soared across the colorful emptiness, not in shapes but in vectors. There was a clear sense of motion, but no sign of bodies in motion. Michiko sensed action, but she could not distinguish any actors. It was like a thousand gusts of wind across a shapeless expanse of clouds and wavering light.

  Then, the entire churning mass trembled. She had the oddest sensation of being a fish in a bowl while someone was tapping the glass. The fabric of the world around her seemed to stretch and collide with itself, trembling from to some tremendous external impact.

  “Come!” her father’s roar rippled across the surface of the spirit world. A million strands of force flowed back toward the rift behind Michiko, gathering from every direction into a funnel shape.

  The funnel continued to swirl and collect strands of motion to itself. Michiko was reminded of the dregs in the bottom of a teapot—the bits of leaf and stem were a part of the brew, but if you stirred fast enough, you could easily separate them into a column at the center.

  The swirling funnel grew thicker, more dense. It had accreted so much spirit energy that it was becoming physically solid. Michiko saw parts of the spinning mass harden, break off, and be churned back into to vortex. Soon the entire thing would congeal like cooling wax, set forever in the shape of a disk.

  “Come!”

  The disk turned on its axis. It oriented on the portal and drifted toward it.

  Everything but the disk stopped, as if the kami had together abandoned their own pursuits and had paused to watch. There was resistance between the disk and the portal, a current of force that flowed to keep the disk in place. Her father’s call was too powerful, however, and the disk surged on like a fish against the current.

  A terrifying, outraged growl rumbled across the entire realm. Michiko had never imagined any sound could be so primal, so threatening. Terrified, she tried vainly to turn away, to flee before whatever made that sound appeared before her.

  The substance of the spirit realm changed. The disk was now almost at the gleaming portal, but the air, the light, the very space around it had changed. It expanded and contracted like a lung, squeezing the world and Michiko too.

  On the horizon, a new sun flared to life. It was joined by a second fiery orb, then a third and fourth. Stars began bursting to life in pairs, and when they had formed a line that reached all the way across the realm, they began to blink.

  Eyes, Michiko realized. The paired stars were eyes in some vast and unknowable field of faces.

  In the terrible light from those eyes, she saw the edges and outlines of nostrils, lips, and huge, savage teeth. Her heart froze. Whatever her father was doing had roused something unimaginably old and incomprehensibly vast. As multiple pairs of eyes surged forward to the portal, Michiko saw that their fire would fill the entire spirit realm long before the heads came close enough to touch the disk. A single one of those stars was enough to char an entire world, and there were more than a dozen coming for her now.

  A pair of hands plunged through the portal and sank into the substance of the whirling disk. Michiko recognized the thin, powerful hands of her father as they dug in and hauled the disk halfway through the portal.

  Michiko turned back and saw that all the visible horizon was now filled with star fire. It was drawing closer all the time.

  Go, now, little Princess. You’ve seen what you came to see. To stay longer is to invite real danger.

  Michiko’s paralysis broke and though she had no sense of control over her motion, she willed herself to the portal as hard and as fast as she could. Behind her, the wave of fire was picking up speed, and she heard a louder version of the outraged growl, now a chorus of six or more snarling together.

  She hit the portal just as the last edge of the disk vanished through it. Michiko was blinded once more by the trip from spirit realm to her world, and the star-eyed horror’s furious sounds lingered in her ears.

  How had her father summoned this much power? Even with the moonfolk and the Minamo master, it seemed impossible that the Daimyo could change the rhythm of the spirit world and distill part of it down to a form he could manipulate.

  Then she was back in the chamber, listening to her father exult. He clapped Takeno on the back, he clasped the wizard’s hand, he bowed to moonfolk on the other side of the brazier.

  The blue flame had gone out. In the air above the smoking metal bowl hung a circular mass of roughly carved stone. The form of a small, scaled creature was etched onto the stone disk’s face, curled and stunted in the fetal position.

  “Gentlemen,” her father said. “We have just changed the future.”

  “Long live the Daimyo!” Takeno erupted. “Long live Konda!”

  The wizard took up the chant, and after a few rounds the moonfolk joined in as well. Konda himself stood below the smoking statue, staring up at it intently through wide eyes. As Michiko watched, her father’s pupils grew fuzzy and diffuse. They began to migrate back and forth across his eye sockets like a pair of searchlights searching for a ship in distress.

  Michiko felt like she ought to scream. Instead, she said a small prayer to Justice, pleading with Towabara’s patron spirit to spare her people from the consequences of Konda’s crime.

  On the wall of the chamber, the mural depicting Justice began to weep. Unable to close her eyes, unable to shed tears herself, Michiko could only stare as the Daimyo’s men celebrated, Konda himself gaped in awe, and a princess’s love for her father faltered under the weight of his actions.

  * * * * *

  Toshi started, almost losing his balance. He steadied himself against the cave wall. Mochi had trapped him in Michiko’s point of view, so he felt everything she felt and learned what she learned. Disoriented, he focused on sorting his thoughts out from hers.

  Michiko stood, eyes downcast, her arms clenched around herself. Her eyes were dry, but her expression was beyond sadness.

  Mochi was next to her. He placed a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I am sorry, Princess. But that is the answer you seek. Your father dared to do what could not be done: he invaded the spirit world and captured a kami. And not just an everyday kami, but a major one. No simple well spirit or household benefactor here. He has imprisoned an essential being and is harnessing its power for his own ends.”

  Michiko dully raised her head. “And this is the secret of the tower.” There was no inquiry to the princess’s voice, only resignation. “The thing that he values most of all.”

  “He values you, too Princess, even if it’s only because you are tied to that thing. It was created on the same night you were, born into this world only because you were. You are not the cause of the Kami War, Michiko. You are not the crime. Your birth was merely the opportunity.”

  Toshi’s ears perked up. “What do you mean she’s ‘tied to’ it?”

  “Through the ritual. Her birth helped create sympathetic magic that brought the kami into this world. She’s like the counterweight on a pan scale. The other side is only balanced, only stable, because Michiko exists as its opposite.”

  “And what happens to the kami statue if something happens to Michiko?”

  Mochi shrugged. “I don’t rightly know. Opinion is divided on the subject.”

  “The snakes said their kami want her dead.”

  Mochi wrinkled his nose. “Yes. That fits with their patron spirit’s attitude. It sees the crime as a terrible imbalance in the natural order. To restore that order, it would gladly sacrifice an innocent life.”

  Toshi crouched down and pulled a handful of straw from his sleeping mat. “What about you, Mochi? Where do you stand?” As he spoke, the ochimusha folded pieces of straw into the same kanji character and dropped them one by one to the floor.

  “I am here to help, as I said. I do not support action against the Princess.”

  “And what do you get out of it?”

  “I am a lighthearted spirit, by nature.” Mochi smiled his dazzling smile. “The strife of the war is painfully ugly to me. I prefer to be invoked by lovers and drunkards on a fine night out, not by soldiers cursing me for more light to kill by.”

  Toshi glanced at Michiko, who still wore the same shocked expression.

  “What a pant-load,” Toshi said. “Are you buying any of this, Princess? Because I don’t believe the kami do anything for purely altruistic reasons. Nobody does. Right now, all we’ve got is a convincing illusion and this swollen little bladder’s word. I say we make him give us some straight answers before we trust him.”

  “We?” Mochi raised an eyebrow. “But if it’s straight answers you want, I stand ready. Ask away.”

  “Why’d you send me those portents? They led me to danger, not out of it.”

  “I was trying to get you to go into hiding. How was I to know the ogre would send you right out again, straight to the place I wanted you to avoid?”

  Toshi paused, unmollified. “Why are the moonfolk after me?”

  “They hate for anyone to know what they’re doing. It pierces the veil of mystery they’ve spent so long building up. When you stumbled onto them, and then escaped, it became more than an insult. They’re looking to get even on behalf of the whole species.”

  The ochimusha casually inspected his fingernails. “How did Kobo die?”

  “You already know. And if that’s not the truth, I’ll eat your sword with a spoon.”

  “Who can I trust?” Michiko stepped forward, drawing both Mochi and Toshi’s attention. The small blue kami smiled.

  “Him,” he pointed at Toshi. “So long as you choose your words carefully and get a solemn promise out of him.”

  “Who can’t she trust?”

  Mochi turned back to Toshi. “Anyone who tries to take her to the Minamo Academy. There is far more going on this world than I could ever explain or you could ever grasp. There are plots within plots, conspiracies within conspiracies. Many of the wizards are close to panic now that the Kami War has spilled out of the Araba. They know what happened on the night of her birth. They will do anything to study her in the hopes of determining a way to nullify that act.”

  Michiko became angry. “How do you know this?”

  “Because some of them work for me. I admit that.”

  Toshi crossed his arms. “And your boys had nothing to do with focusing the other kami on me and the princess.”

  “Not a thing. Recently, there were conflicting opinions among soratami and the academy about what to do with you. The majority opinion was to get you to the school and learn what they could. I feared that they would then come to agree with the forest kami—that Michiko must die to restore what was lost. I reject that option. So I acted.” He sighed. “Things rarely go according to plan, even for kami.”

  “What of Riko-ome? Does she work for you?”

  “Riko-ome is your friend, Princess, and always has been.”

  Toshi folded another straw kanji. “And the boy?”

  “Choryu is a better student than he is a friend. If he had listened to my party’s counsel and left Michiko at home, perhaps none of this would have happened.”

  “And what about that thing in the kakuriyo?” Toshi asked. “What owns those eyes that burned up half the spirit world?”

  “Don’t take everything you saw literally,” Mochi said. “The spirit world doesn’t actually burn.”

  “Answer my question. What was that thing?”

  Mochi’s face grew dark and somber. “Something,” he said, “that must never be allowed into your world.” The little blue kami locked eyes with Toshi. “Such an event would put both our realms in danger.”

  Toshi held Mochi’s gaze and nodded. “Including you.”

  “Including me.” The feckless grin returned, but briefly. “That’s the other reason I’m helping her and trying to undo what Konda has done.”

  Toshi turned. “Hey, Princess.”

  Michiko continued to stare for a moment, but then her eyes glanced up. “Yes?”

  “If half of what this guy says is true, we’re both in for a rough night. And I do think only half of what he says really applies to us.”

  Mochi raised an eyebrow. “I’m hurt.”

  “What makes you think I trust you any more than I trust him?” Michiko said to Toshi. “You have caused me and my friends nothing but hardship and grief since I met you.”

  Toshi pulled back his sleeve and showed Michiko the triangle tattoo. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I’m an ochimusha lowlife. I do dirty jobs for hire. Right now, holding you prisoner is my job. But I’m a freelancer, and I’ll drop this in a heartbeat if something better comes along.” He held out his hand. “Take me into your service,” he said. “Make it worth my while and I’ll not only let you go, I’ll protect you from everyone that’s coming for you. What do you say?”

  “Of course not. Half the people coming here are doing so to rescue me. And I would be a fool to bargain for my safety with you. I am no fool, Toshi.”

  “Hear, hear.”

  “Quiet, chubby.” Toshi looked Michiko up and down, shaking his head. “You’re wrong, Princess. Time isn’t on anyone’s side. The first group to get here will claim you, but there’s no guarantee they’ll keep you. And when the fighting starts, how will you protect yourself? The snakes had you at their mercy despite your fox friends and your water wizard.”

  “You were there,” Michiko said. “And you fell just as quickly.” She drew herself up to her full height. “The only service you could offer that would sway me would be the one to join the Towabara infantry. Serve my people for two years as a soldier if you want to earn my trust. Unless you’re read to take that oath, I will wait here with Mochi.”

  Toshi nodded. “Not exactly what I had in mind, but not too far afield. I wasn’t thinking of an oath to your nation, Michiko, but to you. Personally.”

  “Toshi,” Mochi said quietly. “This is a bad idea.”

  “And when I care what you think, I’ll ask. Michiko,” he stepped across the cave to the princess. “He’s shown us things that you believe. Maybe I believe them, too.”

  Toshi watched her face. Those big eyes, those stern, set lips. She was so earnest, so innocent. Her entire world kept getting pulled out from under her. Surely all she wanted now was a rock to lean on. Toshi knew she was close to agreeing with him.

  He drew his short blade, placed it blade-up between her wrists, and sliced through the vines binding her. He turned, stepped away from the mouth of the cave, sheathed his sword.

  “You can go now,” he said. “Take your chances on your own. Or, you can stay here with me and listen to what I have planned to keep us both alive.”

  Toshi drew his good jitte and twirled it around his finger before catching it in his hand. “So,” he said. “Are you with me?”

  Three full companies of the Daimyo’s finest mounted archers thundered south on the main route to the mountains. They moved as a single, massive entity rather than a thousand different individuals, and the merchants and farmers and villagers along the way all stared in awe as the great force of men and beasts rode by.

  They were half a day’s ride out of the tower, which was still visible behind them as they powered their way through the countryside. None of the men looked back, but many thought of their lord and master Daimyo Konda watching them from the highest levels of his mighty castle. He would watch them until they disappeared from view, and he would wait until they came triumphantly back with Princess Michiko leading them home.

  The trees along the road began to shudder and shake. Some of the riders laughed and pointed. Look, they cried, even the soil trembles to see us pass!

  The rumbling continued, growing longer and stronger until it had become a full-fledged tremor. The leader of the yabusame column reined in his horse, gradually slowing. Behind him, the rest of the great mounted entity kept pace, easing their horses from a full gallop to a moderate trot. They were still under orders to travel with all due speed, but it was foolish to risk men and horses when the ground kicked back.