Chapter 1: The Blade That Came Back
The sword arrived wrapped in a bloodstained haori, and you knew whose it was before the Kakushi finished untying the cord.
There were only so many blades in the Corps that came back to the village smelling of smoke even after a week on the road. You had sharpened this one four times in two years. You knew the slight forward weight you had given it after its owner complained, in a letter delivered by a very tired crow, that the previous one "felt shy." You knew the flame temper line you had clayed by hand, rolling up from the edge like fire climbing a wall. You had never met the man who carried it, but you knew his sword better than you knew most people.
It was cracked from the tip to a finger's width above the habaki. Not chipped. Not bent. Cracked, the way ice cracks on a pond when someone heavy steps where they shouldn't.
"Is he dead?" you asked. Your voice came out flat behind the mask. The hyottoko's puckered mouth made everything sound like a joke, which was one of the reasons you liked wearing it.
The Kakushi, a young woman with soot on her sleeves, shook her head so hard her hood slipped. "No! No, he's alive. The Flame Hashira is recovering at the Butterfly Estate. Upper Moon Three got away at sunrise. They're saying it was very close."
"Close how?"
She hesitated. "He lost an eye."
You set the blade on the felt and did not touch it for a while.
There was a shelf at the back of your forge that nobody else was allowed to dust. On it were seven tsuba, seven sets of habaki, and a box of fittings you had taken off swords that came home without their owners. The Corps returned Nichirin blades to the village when a slayer died, if anyone found the body. The steel was too precious to bury. You melted the blades down and folded them into new ones, because that was the job, and you kept the fittings because nobody had told you not to.
Your master had called it morbid. You called it inventory.
The Flame Hashira's sword was not going on that shelf. You decided that around midnight, when you finally took the handle off and saw how deep the crack ran into the tang. A sensible smith would have melted it down and started fresh. You were sensible about most things. You were not sensible about this sword.
"You're going to try to save that?" Haganezuka said from the doorway at dawn. His wind chimes rattled. He had been awake for three days working on something for the Kamado boy, and it showed in the way he leaned on the frame like it had personally insulted him. "It's dead. Let it be dead."
"It's not dead. It's hurt."
"It's steel."
"So are you," you said, "and I'd still patch you up if you cracked."
He made a noise like a kettle and left. You took that as approval.
It took nine days. You cut away the worst of it, forge-welded a new edge steel from the ore you had been hoarding from the eastern face of Mount Yoko, the stuff that drank sunlight so greedily it was warm to the touch in winter. You rebuilt the geometry by eye and memory and the faint ghost of the old temper line. You quenched it at the hour of the rooster with the whole forge dark so you could read the color, and when it came out of the water and did not crack again, you sat down on the floor and laughed into your mask until your apprentice brought you tea and asked if you were dying.
On the tenth day you began polishing, which was where you were when the village went strange.
It started with the errand runners between the forges going quiet all at once. Then the old women by the hot spring path stopped arguing. Then you heard it, coming up the stone steps from the lower village, a voice so large it seemed to arrive slightly before its owner.
"Good morning! What a magnificent village! Excuse me, is this the forge of the smith who repaired my sword? No? Thank you! Excuse me, is THIS the forge of the smith who repaired my sword?"
Your polishing stone stopped.
"He's asking every door," your apprentice whispered, peering through the slats. "He's very loud."
"I can hear that he's very loud."
"He has a bandage. And a white haori with flames on it. And his hair is..." Your apprentice searched for a word and gave up. "Is that the Flame Hashira? Is he coming here? Should I hide the sake?"
"We don't have sake."
"We have the sake you hid under the charcoal."
You set down the stone, stood, and checked that your mask was straight. You smelled like iron and sweat and the camellia oil you used on blades. Your sleeves were tied back with a rag and you had a burn on your forearm in the shape of a crescent. None of this was relevant. He was a client. Clients came by sometimes, though usually they sent crows, because the village was hidden for a reason and the Corps did not like Hashira wandering around it on holiday.
The door slid open without a knock.
He filled the frame. That was the first thing. You had built his sword for a man of a certain height and arm length based on measurements in a letter, and it had not prepared you for how much of him there was, how bright. His hair stood out from his head in gold that went to red at the ends, as if someone had lit him at the tips. The right eye was gold with a ring of flame around the pupil, wide and unblinking. The left was hidden under clean white linen. He held himself very straight, but there was a stiffness at his middle that told you his ribs were strapped under the uniform.
He looked at your mask. He looked at the sword on the polishing bench. Something in his face went very still and very soft at once.
"Ah," he said, much more quietly. "There it is."
Then, at full volume again, he bowed so deeply that you heard his ribs object. "I am Kyojuro Rengoku, Flame Hashira! I owe you my life and my thanks!"
"You owe the Kakushi who carried you your life," you said. "You owe me a letter of complaint about the weight, probably."
He straightened. His eye found your mask again and stayed there with an interest that felt like standing too near a fire. "You are the smith who made my last four blades?"
"Three blades. I sharpened the fourth. The fourth was my master's work."
"The fourth was shy!"
"I know," you said. "I read your letter."
He laughed. It was not a polite laugh. It went straight up to the rafters and rang there, and your apprentice, still crouched by the window, let out a startled little snort.
"May I?" he asked, and nodded at the sword.
You were not in the habit of letting clients touch a blade before the final polish. You stepped aside anyway.
He did not pick it up. He knelt by the bench, slowly because of the ribs, and looked at it the way a man looks at a letter from home. He followed the new temper line from the tip to the old steel without touching it. You had worked hard to make the join invisible. He found it anyway, his eye pausing exactly where your new steel met the old.
"Here," he said.
"Yes."
"I felt it break." His voice was not loud at all now. "He caught the blade in his hand and I felt the steel give, and I thought, I am sorry. Not to myself. To the sword. To whoever made it. I thought I had wasted your work."
You did not have anything ready for that. You stood with your burned arm and your camellia oil and found that the hyottoko mask, for once, was not funny enough to hide behind.
"You didn't waste it," you said finally. "You used it. That's what it's for."
He looked up at you. Then he smiled, and it was not the big public smile from the doorway. It was smaller and crooked and a little startled, as if you had handed him something he hadn't expected to be given.
"I have decided something," he announced, getting to his feet.
"Please don't."
"I have decided that I will court you!"
The village outside your forge went entirely silent. You were fairly sure even the river stopped.
Your apprentice fell over.
"You can't," you said.
"Why not?"
"You don't know my name."
"Then tell me it!"
"You don't know what I look like."
"I know what your work looks like." He gestured at the sword with an open hand, as if that settled it. "You made a blade that held against an Upper Moon until it didn't, and then you mended it so that I can hardly find the scar. You argue with Hashira by letter. You are rude to me in a very kind voice. I don't need to see your face to know I want to see more of you."
"That's not how courting works."
"Then you'll have to teach me how it works," he said brightly, "because I've never done it before!"
You opened your mouth. Nothing came out. Behind you the forge fire popped, and a coal rolled out onto the stone, and you stepped on it without looking.
"I am on medical leave for six weeks," Rengoku went on, as if he were reading orders aloud. "Kocho has forbidden me missions, training, and lifting anything heavier than a teacup. She did not forbid me from travelling, because I did not ask. So I will stay in the village until my sword is finished, and every day I will try to win you, and at the end, if you still say no, I will thank you for your patience and go home. That seems fair!"
"It seems insane."
"Fair and insane are not opposites!"
From somewhere down the lane, a high, cracked old voice called out, "Let him stay! It's been years since anything interesting happened to that one!"
You closed your eyes behind your mask. That was the village chief. Of course it was. Tecchin Tecchikawahara could hear gossip through three walls and a waterfall.
When you opened them, Rengoku was still standing there, gold and absurd and patient, one hand resting lightly on his strapped ribs, waiting.
"The sword will take a week," you said. "Maybe less."
"Then I have a week."
"I'll finish it in four days just to get rid of you."
His smile went wider, delighted, as if you had issued a challenge instead of a threat.
"Then I had better start immediately," said Kyojuro Rengoku, and turned to your apprentice, who was still on the floor. "Tell me! What does your master like to eat?"