This one was smaller than the other, its shell a muddy brown. It opened its mouth and spoke with more majesty than any human the fisherman had ever encountered.
“Urashima Taro,” it said, “the turtle you saved yesterday was the daughter of Ryujin, the Emperor of the Sea, who is forever grateful to you. He invites you to his palace at the bottom of the ocean.”
Urashima Taro looked out across the small, crumbling village where his mother lay sleeping. He had never thought himself the kind of person destined for adventure. He had not done anything great, or brave, or worth this kind of honor. He was meant to live and die on these shores.
But the call of the sea was loud, and part of him wondered what lay beyond.
“I accept,” Urashima Taro said.
The turtle turned and allowed Urashima Taro to climb onto its back. He held tight to its shell as it walked slowly into the cold waters, then plunged into the sea.
Part II
The Sword
Chapter Nine
Sen
Sen’s first mistake was looking in the ghost’s eyes.
His irises were the colors of the forest, the gold of sunrise and wheat and summer mornings and bright green sword ferns. But beyond the startling shade was something much worse.
It was the darkness of the afternoon when the shadows grew too thin. The endless winter nights when she’d waited for her father to return, wondering if the sun would ever rise again. The echoing depths of the well outside after weeks without rain.
He did not look like a monster come to devour her. He looked like someone who had already been devoured.
Maybe it was just that she had never seen a foreigner before. Maybe all their faces were this haunting, this vacant. Maybe they were all ghosts of what her country could have been, had they never come.
She tore her gaze from his eyes and instead looked to the room behind him. The ghost did not sit in a closet, as she’d expected, but in a room of his own.
It was dark behind him, but Sen had been trained to map out darkness. He sat in a room as wide as hers, the same panels on the far wall, the same window spilling moonlight across thecenter. As if the closet was a clear pond and the reflection of her own room had glinted back at her in its waters. The closer Sen looked, the more certain she became—it was not just any room, butherroom. The spirit was mocking her, showing her all he would take—her country, her home, her life.
Her gaze dropped to the spirit’s throat, and she envisioned the clean cut she would make just beneath his Adam’s apple. His lips would part in surprise and his eyes would go dark and his head would slide off the stump of his neck andthunkas it hit the floor.
Maybe a spirit could not be killed, but she would make sure he knew he was not welcome here. If she had to cut him down a thousand times, then so be it.
But as she tightened her grip on the hilt of her sword, the ghost did something far more shocking than suddenly growing claws, or horns, or fangs.
He bowed.
“Hajimemashite,” he said, and though he spoke like his mouth was full of paper, Sen understood his attempt at speaking her language. Her grip went limp on her sword and she recoiled. Why was a spirit bowing to her?
Her fingers tightened on the handle of her katana, but she couldn’t make herself draw it. She felt the same as when her father ordered her to kill rabbits or cats or mice just to prove that she could—it did not feel like an act of honor, but meaningless slaughter.
The ghost watched her, waiting patiently for her response. She wet her dry lips and wondered if she could banish him not with her blade, but with her words.
“You speak my language, spirit?” she said at last.
“Yes,” he said, his voice low and dark, a riptide that could pull her under if she wasn’t careful. “But I am no spirit.”
“Then you should know that I am a Shimazu retainer,” she said, sitting up as straight as she could, ignoring his last remark.She could tell he was taller than her, but as her shadow fell over him, the world shifted in Sen’s direction—she was on top of a great mountain, looking down on him far below. “Death is in my blood and my bones, and would be in my soul, if I had one,” she said. “Whatever hell you intend to bring here is one I have already seen. You cannot frighten me, for I fear nothing. You cannot harm me, because my body is inconsequential. If you do not leave my house, I will cut your ragged scrap of a soul to pieces and burn them until nothing remains.”
By the time the echo of her words faded from the air, the spirit’s face had gone carefully blank, betraying no emotion.
At least, nothing an untrained eye would see.
But Sen had noticed the flash of interest in his eyes, the way he leaned just slightly closer. She had been trained to see these moments clearly—the intake of breath that told you which way an opponent would move next, the way their gaze betrayed their next strike, the tension in their knuckles that spoke more than their words ever could.
