The spirit looked so infuriatingly smug. Sen relished the way the light left his eyes when she pressed her blade to his throat. He scrambled away, but she used her blade to force him onto his back like a beetle. She stepped halfway into his side of the house, her shadow falling over him.
“What have you done?” she said.
The spirit swallowed, the motion shifting the blade at his throat. “You saw the fire, didn’t you?” he said.
“The fire thatyoucaused,” Sen said. She wasn’t naive to the ways of evil spirits. Of course they could foretell tragedy that they caused themselves. Sen shouldn’t have spoken to him, tempting him to act. The blood was on her hands now.
Her father hadn’t allowed her into town to see the carnage, but the sky was still dark with smoke, and the smell of burnt human flesh still coated her throat. She couldn’t go outside to train because the scent made her sick.
“I didn’t cause the fire,” the spirit said, frowning. “I only read that it happened.”
“Liar.”
Sen pressed the blade down harder, and a thin line of blood bloomed across the spirit’s throat, a scarlet bead rolling onto the floor. His breaths quickened and his pupils yawned wider, darkness devouring his bright green irises. He should have looked scared—any normal person would with a blade at their throat—but instead, his eyes glinted and a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. He didn’t even try to fight her off.
“Do you really think I’m a liar?” he said. “Or are you angry that I might be right?”
Sen imagined pressing her blade down just a little more, the way his skin would split and the wound would scream open. He wouldn’t have a chance to make a sound before Sen pressed through his throat, his vocal cords, his spine.
“I’ll destroy you,” she said, “and no more tragedy will come to Chiran.”
“No, you won’t,” he said, his words infuriatingly calm, “because I have something you want.”
Do you want to know how you die?
The memory of his question echoed as if shouted into the dark cave of her mind.I’m not dead, she thought, but the words wilted before she could voice them.
“If I were powerful enough to cause a forest fire over a hundred years in the past,” the spirit said, his words light and unbothered, “then I wouldn’t be here, with a blade above my throat, begging for help from a girl who would sooner kill me than listen to me. If I were that powerful, I wouldn’t ask for your help. I woulddemandit. In my own time, I have no power at all. The only thing I’m good at is unearthing truths that no one else wants to hear. But I am very, very good at it. And maybe that makes me evil, but I’m no spirit. Spirits are what I want to find.”
The rage left Sen like a cold wave pulled back out to sea. This man’s words felt too raw to be untrue. Besides, he was notasking her for loyalty, or love, or vengeance, or anything that an evil spirit might want. If he were truly a spirit, he wouldn’t need her help to find others.
Still, Sen had to be sure.
She sheathed her blade, then stepped over the man and into his side of the house. The man rose to his feet, a sound of protest on his lips, but it was hard to argue with someone holding a sword.
His room was darker, as he’d said—the tatami mats had faded to a dirty yellow. But other than that, the space looked hardly lived in. There was a futon on the floor and a few scattered cushions, a bag with many pockets by the bed and what looked like a trunk in the corner. It did not look like somewhere a ghost had moved in, but somewhere he’d stolen.
“I’ve only been here a few days,” the man said, and Sen hated how he seemed to sense her doubts before she could voice them.
She turned to the wall above the bed, and froze at what she saw.
Holes.
Small, round holes the size of nails, evenly spaced in long rows.
In Sen’s room, this wall had hooks where she placed her katanas. But here, it looked as if the hooks had been removed. The wall was lighter where the katanas had blocked direct sunlight. She reached forward and touched the holes, as if to assure herself they were real.
The man stood in the corner and watched as Sen turned and knelt by the door, running her fingers across the doorframe in the dark until she found it.
There—a notch in the wood, thin as a splinter. Seijiro had come into her room on the first day they’d moved here, and she’d thrown one of her indoor shoes at his head, denting the wood.
There was only one more thing to check.
She knelt beside the futon, feeling around for the loose floorboard. The wood was warped with age and stuck in its frame, but she managed to pop it up and cast it to the side, then reached into the darkness below.
Her hand closed around something small and cold.
She pulled out her sword guard, now tarnished to a deep green and dark brown, as if it had spent many years in wet earth. There was the same crack along the left side, just below the carved turtles. And there, on the back, was the engraving.
