Chapter 3: Ghost Walk
The dawn came too early, a pale gray light leaching into the room through the paper screens. Hana had slept in fits, the silence too dense, the walls feeling like they were breathing. She woke to find new clothes laid neatly on the trestle where the miserable kimono had been. Not a kimono.
She sat up, rubbing her eyes. The fabric was a deep, practical indigo, rough-spun but sturdy. The trousers were wide-legged, tied with a thick cord. The matching jacket was simple, cross-fastened. Beside them lay a pair of tabi socks and worn but serviceable straw sandals. Ōsuimono. He’d listened.
A tight, reluctant knot in her chest loosened just a fraction. She dressed quickly, the simplicity of the garments an immediate relief. She could run in these. Fight, maybe. She tied her damp hair back with a spare cord from the trousers’ waistband and slid the door open.
The hallway was empty, the estate still hushed in the predawn gloom. A single guard sat slumped against the wall further down, head nodding in sleep. Her father’s door was shut. The urge to stay put, to wait for instructions, tasted like bile in her throat. This was exactly what they’d expect—the confused girl, the passive echo.
She moved silently, a skill born of a thousand late nights slipping back into her suburban home. The sleeping guard didn’t stir. She found a side door that led out into the gardens, the wood groaning softly under her hand.
Outside, the world was submerged in a thick, silver mist. It coiled around the bases of perfectly shaped pines, swallowing paths and blurring the lines between earth and sky. Stone lanterns stood like solitary sentinels, their light diffused into fuzzy halos. The air was cold and heavy with the smell of damp moss and wet earth. From somewhere impossibly distant, a flute played a sparse, wandering melody that seemed to weave through the mist itself.
Hana walked, the gravel of the path a faint crunch under her sandals. The mist dampened her face, beaded on her jacket. She felt unseen, a ghost in a ghost-world. It was a perverse comfort.
The well-tended paths gave way to a narrower, rougher trail, heading toward the estate’s western edge where the cultivated garden bled into wilder forest. The mist was thinner here, shredded by the trees. And then she saw it: a small, weathered wooden structure nestled against a towering cryptomeria. A shrine. It was humble, almost hidden, the thatched roof furred with green moss.
As she approached, she saw two young maidservants kneeling before it. They were placing offerings—a few grains of rice, a small cup of what looked like sake, a wildflower. Their voices were hushed, terrified.
“...please, Lady Bell,” one whispered, her forehead pressed to the ground. “Do not be angry with us. We mean no disrespect to your memory.”
“We keep it clean, we make the offerings,” the other pleaded, her voice trembling. “Please, let your spirit rest. Do not haunt the halls. Do not… do not take your anger out on the lord.”
Hana froze, her stomach dropping. They were talking about her. They thought she was her mother’s vengeful ghost.
The first maid sat back on her heels, casting a fearful glance toward the main house. “To appear like that, in dirty foreign clothes, demanding trousers… speaking so bluntly to Lord Kage… it is not the behavior of a noble lady. It is the behavior of a mind unsettled by death.”
“My grandmother said a spirit confused in passage can become a goryō, a wrathful ghost,” the second maid murmured, placing the flower with shaking fingers. “Especially one who died with regrets in a distant land. If she is displeased with how the lord has mourned her… or with the girl who wears her face…”
They finished their rites and scurried away, vanishing into the mist like frightened mice.
Hana stood motionless long after they’d gone. The cold from the damp ground seeped through her sandals. A disgrace to her family. A vengeful ghost. The sour, metallic taste of anger rose in her throat, but it was dulled by a deeper, colder hurt. She wasn’t even a person here. She was a forgotten stain on the past, an echo so off-key it frightened people.
She turned and walked back, the flute’s melody now sounding like a laugh.
The breakfast room was brighter, the mist outside burning away under a weak sun. Kenji was already there, kneeling formally at the low table. Kage was absent. A simple meal of rice, grilled fish, and pickled vegetables was laid out. Hana sat, not kneeling, just folding her legs.
“You’re up early,” Kenji said, his voice carefully neutral.
“Needed air.” She picked up her chopsticks, the motion clumsy. She’d used them her whole life, but these were longer, finer. The rice kept slipping.
Kenji watched her struggling for a moment. “You hold them too close to the ends. You’re pinching, not resting. Here.” He demonstrated, his movements economical and precise.
“I know how to use chopsticks, Dad.”
“Not like this.” He corrected her grip gently, almost invisibly. It would be fine later, but his anxiety was showing. With Kage’s moods swirling around them, an ignorantly casual Daisy using chopsticks like a toddling local probably felt to him like nails screeching on a chalkboard, an invitation more danger. A subtle flag of disregard for their hands being cut, however well-intentioned hers gestured.
Then he spoke. “And your pronunciation earlier, with Lord Kage. ‘Doko desu ka’ is… too modern. The inflection is in the wrong place. Here, it would be more like ‘Doko de gozaimasu ka’ in a formal setting, or simply ‘Doko?’ with a different tone if you are being intentionally… blunt.” He cleared his throat. “It matters here. Tone is everything. Honor and insult are trade but exact from the very emphasis novel social gas suffers left unsaid but implied.”
Hana stared at a pickled plum on her plate. The anger from the garden, a slow, cold seep, finally met the spark of this. “So what? I sound like an idiot? Is that the problem? Not that we’re stuck here, not that mom died of some… time-cancer, not that that guy in there has a whole shrine of creepy claw-marked paintings, but that my Japanese isn’t up to snuff?”
Her Japanese, ironically, slanted into the perfect, archaic form when she was livid.
Kenji flinched. A servant placing a teapot on the table went utterly still, then backed away. The news of the unheard-of insults thrown paternal wish ill likely shape.
“It’s not about sounding like an idiot,” Kenji said, his voice low and tense. “It’s about survival. Every word out of your mouth here labels you. ‘Outsider’ is bad enough. ‘Rude outsider’ is a threat. ‘Ignorant outsider’ is a target. I am trying to make you less of a target.” Despair shadowed his ordinary telling distribution indicate uniquely pledged nursing relationship.
Hana poked at her fish. She knew he was right. It didn’t make it easier to swallow. “They think I’m her ghost,” she said flatly, not looking up. “The servants. They have a little shrine in the woods. They’re making offerings so Lady Bell’s angry spirit doesn’t haunt the place or… ‘take her anger out on the lord.’ So anyway, my bad Japanese is probably the least of our problems.”
Her dad stopped moving. A shadow crossed the threshold of the door to the main dining room.
A shadow crossed the threshold of the door to the main dining room.
Lord Kage entered. His gaze swept over the table, lingering on Hana’s indigo trousers and cross-fastened jacket. A subtle, cold flicker passed through his amber eyes before fixing on Kenji. “Are you giving her permission to walk around like that for all of the male guards here?” His voice was deceptively quiet, the question a blade aimed at her father’s throat.
Kenji slowly lowered his chopsticks. He sighed, a weary sound that seemed to carry the weight of all one hundred missing years. Hana’s fingers tightened around her rice bowl, the ceramic threatening to crack.
“In the time period Hana is from, women have more freedom to choose what they wear,” Kenji said, his words measured. He chose each one like a man defusing a bomb. “So, to answer your question, my opinions do not matter to Hana because she is an adult.”
Hana took a deliberate sip of tea, the hot liquid scalding her tongue. She held Kage’s stare over the rim of the cup, satisfaction a sharp, brief warmth in her chest.
Kage’s mouth thinned. He looked her up and down again, his expression unreadable. “It is a curious freedom,” he remarked, the words dripping with a disdain that had centuries to ferment. “It makes her look even more like a courtesan than her mother did.”
The archaic word, yūjo, took a moment to land in Hana’s mind, to translate from a vocabulary list to an insult. When it did, the connection was a physical shock.
Her cup slammed onto the table. Tea sloshed over the side, a dark stain spreading on the polished wood. Kenji shifted, a hand half-raised. “Daisy, don’t—”
But she was already moving. She launched herself across the low table, ignoring the scattering dishes. She grabbed the front of Kage’s immaculate yukata, her fists twisting the fine silk at his collar, yanking him down toward her. Her English exploded into the tense air. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
Kage didn’t struggle. He allowed himself to be pulled into her space, looking down at her furious, upturned face with paralyzing calm. His expression was a blank page, but his eyes were hurricanes.
Breathing hard, she released his collar with one hand and snapped it toward the table, aiming for the plate of grilled fish to hurl into his perfect, impassive face.
His hand moved faster than she could process. It wasn’t a block; it was a capture. His fingers clamped around her wrist, tight enough to grind the small bones together. The pain was brilliant and instantaneous. He used her own momentum to pull her even closer, their bodies colliding.
Her waist pressed against the hard line of his hip. His grip on her wrist was a vice, his other hand coming up to restrain her free arm, pinning her against him. To Kenji, who half-rose with a choked noise, it was a violent containment.
To Hana, the world narrowed to points of contact.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drum. She breathed in, and his scent filled her lungs—not the perfume of incense, but the clean, sharp smell of sun on cedar and something darker, like ozone after a storm. The pain in her wrist faded, replaced by a wave of pure, unwanted heat. It flooded her lower stomach, a lazy, pooling warmth that tightened and spread, a feeling so foreign and inappropriate it short-circuited her rage.
Kage’s fierce expression held hers. His gaze bored into her, a promised threat of utter, final violence if she pushed him further. She should have been terrified. She waited for the fear.
It didn’t come.
Instead, she saw his own focus fracture. His eyes dropped to her mouth, just for a half-second. A confusion, deep and disorienting, clouded the threat in his gaze. He blinked, as if shaking off a daze.
Then he shoved her away from him, the motion rough. She stumbled back, catching herself on the edge of the low table. Her wrist throbbed where he’d held it.
“Do not do that again,” he said, his voice a low ripple of thunder. He turned and strode from the room, the silence he left behind louder than any slam of a door.
“Have you lost your mind?” Kenji’s voice was raw with fear. “You cannot grab a lord like a common brawler! You cannot—do you understand what he could do?”
Hana wasn’t listening. She stared at the empty doorway, her breath still coming in short bursts. The ghost of his hold was a brand on her skin. The heat between her legs was a traitorous, confusing echo.
She lifted her trembling fingers to her own lips, confused by the absence of fear, and more confused by what had taken its place