Chapter 3: Tsuba
Smiths were not supposed to leave the village. It was hidden for good reason. Demons would give a great deal to know where Nichirin blades were born, and every smith learned, before they learned to fold steel, that the road out was walked blindfolded on a Kakushi's back or not at all.
You walked it with your eyes open, carrying a sword that was not yours and a small cloth bundle that you had finished at dawn, and nobody stopped you. Haganezuka saw you pass his forge. He looked at the long shape wrapped on your back, then at your face, or rather your mask, and then he went inside and came back out with a lantern and pushed it into your hands without a word.
"Bring it back," he said. You weren't sure if he meant the lantern or the sword or you. Then he slammed his door so hard his wind chimes fell off.
The pass was four hours on foot. You did it in less than three, mostly by running and partly by sliding down slopes on your heels in a way that would have horrified your master. The sun was a red smear over the western ridge by the time you saw the inn, a low timber building with its lanterns all unlit and its door hanging open like a mouth.
You heard him before you saw him. Of course you did.
"There you are! Come out and fight me properly! Hiding under the floorboards is very undignified for a demon of your age!"
You found him in the yard behind the inn, standing in the middle of a ring of churned mud with a training sword in his hands. It was a plain steel blade from the rack outside the village dojo, dull-edged and badly balanced, a thing the Corps gave to recruits so they would learn to respect the real ones. It could not kill a demon. It could only hurt one, and only if he hit hard enough, and you could see from across the yard that he had been hitting hard enough for some time. There was blood on his haori. Some of it was his. His ribs, you thought, his stitches, and felt your stomach turn over.
The ground on his left heaved. Something came up out of the earth there, long and pale and many-jointed, and you understood at once what the demon had worked out. It was attacking from his blind side. Every time.
He turned too late. Not much too late; half a heartbeat. He got the training sword up and the blow skidded off it, and he went down on one knee, and the thing sank back into the mud with a wet laugh.
"Rengoku!" you shouted.
His head snapped around. For one terrible moment, he looked at you instead of the ground, and you saw the shock on his face, and the ground behind him began to bulge.
You did the only thing you could think of. You pulled his sword off your back, tore the wrapping away and threw it, sheath and all, the way you would throw a bar of hot steel to an apprentice across the forge, flat and spinning and handle first.
He dropped the training blade. He caught his sword out of the air with his right hand, and the scabbard flew away into the dark, and the blade came alight in the dusk. Not with fire, not really. It was only the steel turning to its true color in his grip, red rising up the edge like heat. But it looked like fire to you.
He did not turn to look at the thing coming out of the ground. He did not need to.
"Flame Breathing," said Kyojuro Rengoku, very quietly. "Fifth Form."
You had heard slayers describe the forms. You had never seen one. You had forged swords for two years for the breath of a man you had never watched fight, guessing from letters and measurements and the wear on his old blades what he needed. You had not understood. You understood now. The air around him went hot. The mud steamed. When he moved, he moved in a great roaring arc, like a beast made of flame leaping down from a mountain, and the demon came up out of the earth just in time to meet it.
The head rolled almost to your feet. It looked surprised. Then it began to crumble into ash, and the long pale body behind it crumbled with it, and the yard was very quiet.
Rengoku stood in the steam with his sword lowered. His breathing was ragged. He looked at the blade in his hand as if it had just told him something.
"The balance," he said.
You were shaking. You put your hands together to stop them. "It's a fraction heavier toward the tip now."
"Yes."
"You can't see to your left. You'll need to swing wider on that side. I adjusted the weight so the blade would carry through on its own if you were late." You heard your voice wobble behind the mask and hated it. "I measured the old crack. I worked out where he caught it. If you're late again, the sword won't be."
He turned and looked at you, and kept looking.
"You knew," he said. "Before I came. You built it for a man with one eye."
"I built it for you," you said. "That's the same thing now."
You did not let him walk back to the village that night. He tried. He said the ribs were fine, that the stitches had held, that it was barely a scratch, at which point you pressed two fingers to his side and he went white and sat down on the inn step very fast. You found clean cloth in the abandoned kitchen. You found the stitches had torn in two places. You rebound them while he sat with his jaw tight and his eye fixed on the stars, and you did not let your hands shake again, because you had held hot steel steady for years and this was only a man.
"I'm sorry," he said, at some point.
"For what?"
"Leaving without telling you. I thought you'd stop me."
"I would have."
"I know." He breathed out carefully through his nose. "I couldn't let it keep killing people because my ribs hurt. I'm a Hashira. There was nobody else."
"You're an idiot," you said, tying off the bandage. "A loud, half-blind, sweet-potato-eating idiot, and I've just spent ten days making sure your sword would forgive you for it."
He laughed, then stopped laughing because it hurt, then laughed again anyway.
When dawn came you walked him slowly up the ridge path toward the village. The maples there had turned while you weren't paying attention. The whole slope was red and gold, and the morning sun came through the leaves so that the light on the path was the same color as his hair, and halfway up he stopped, and you stopped with him.
"Before we go back," he said. "I have to tell you something."
"If it's a poem, I'll push you down the hill."
"It's not a poem." He looked at you, at the mask, steadily. "I told you that at the end of the week I would ask for your answer and go home if it was no. The week is over. I'd like to keep my word."
You had known this was coming. You had known since the second day, at the bellows, when he went quiet and the silence was good. You had known in the doorway of your forge, watching him put the pine-needle tsuba back on the shelf exactly where it belonged.
You reached into your sleeve and took out the cloth bundle you had carried all night.
"Hold out your hand," you said.
He did.
You put it in his palm and unfolded the cloth. Inside was a tsuba. It was round, iron, blackened in the old way and then polished back so that the high points caught the light, and it was pierced through in the shape of flames curling up from the bottom edge. It was not the same as the one he had given away to the Kamado boy, the one that had been his father's. You had not tried to copy it. You had looked at it in your memory, the way you had once seen it on his sword in the sketch he had sent, and you had made something that rhymed with it.
He looked at it for a long time.
"I made it on the fourth night," you said. "After you found the shelf. I thought about what you said, about knowing someone before it was too late, and I realized I'd been doing the opposite. I'd been keeping everyone at arm's length so that when their swords came back alone, I'd only lose the steel. That's not the same as being safe. It's just being lonely early."
You reached up and untied the cord of your hyottoko mask.
It was harder than you expected. Your fingers fumbled on the knot. When it finally came loose you took the mask off and held it at your side, and the cool morning air touched your face, and you looked at him without anything in the way.
He had gone completely still. He did not say anything. He did not shout. Kyojuro Rengoku, who could not enter a room without announcing himself, stood on the path under the red maples and looked at your face as though he were trying to memorize the temper line of it.
Then you told him your name.
He said it back to you. Just once, quietly, the way he had said there it is when he first saw his sword on your bench. As if he had found something he had lost.
"Yes," you said. "That's your answer. Yes."
He stepped forward, carefully, mindful of the ribs, and put the hand that wasn't holding the tsuba against the side of your face. His palm was rough with sword calluses and warm as a forge stone. You put your hand over his and held it there. Then you rose up on your toes, because he was very tall and you were done waiting, and kissed him.
He made a startled sound against your mouth. Then he kissed you back, slow and sure, as if he had been practicing patience all week for this and nothing else, and it tasted like cold air and smoke and, faintly, of the sweet potatoes he must have eaten for breakfast before he left. When you finally pulled apart, his face was flushed to the tips of his ears and his eye was wet and shining.
"Umai," he whispered, completely seriously.
You laughed so hard you had to lean on him. He held you up, wincing, beaming.
"Come back for repairs," you said into his haori when you could speak again. "Every time. I don't care what's broken. You bring it to me."
"Every time," he promised. "And in between. With sweet potatoes."
A shadow crossed the path above you. Wings beat. A Kasugai crow settled on a maple branch, cocked its head at the two of you, and opened its beak.
"CAW! FLAME HASHIRA! REPORT TO HEADQUARTERS AT ONCE! THE MASTER WISHES TO SEE YOU! CAW! AND BRING THE SMITH!"
You looked at Rengoku. Rengoku looked at you.
"Ah," he said, with enormous cheer. "I may have mentioned you in my report."