Chapter Text
The castle in the forest was haunted, and all the children knew it.
Adults were more pragmatic about the whole castle business. There is no castle, mothers would claim as they shepherded children indoors, ready for washing up and dinner and all the other little formalities of life. Who would ever build a castle out here?
None of the children had ever had a very good answer for that, but they still knew the castle was there. It was waiting, they assured each other, for something. And maybe there were even people in it, waiting too. Or monsters, lurking just outside the village walls. The forest was thick, dark and deep: people went missing in its depths sometimes, lost to bears or cliffs or the elements.
(Or monsters, the children would always insist when they overhear the adults talking about the latest missing, tight-lipped and frowning. Having a monster roaming the woods was exciting. Having bears roaming the woods was terrifying.)
Those were the stories that looped through Ren’s head while she made her way into the woods. She’d been one of those children before, laughing and playing at beast-of-the-woods in the village streets. Now she was an adult, and understood the true danger of the forest. No one who lived in the village traveled through it unless they had to, and then, they only kept to the path. Bears and boars lived deep within the trees, near the mountain’s base; the terrain itself was treacherous, marked with soft hills that gave way to sharp cliffs and roots that poked through the earth, ready to trip the unwary.
Only a fool would go into the forest alone and deliberately step off the path.
She’d left the path about two hours ago, and she’d been thinking about the damn castle ever since.
Logically, realistically, she knew that there was no castle. It was far more likely that some child had come across an abandoned farm long ago, and spun the house into a beautiful castle full of curious beasts in each retelling of their story. If there were a castle, though, perhaps Nori could’ve --
She cut that line of thought at its stem, and wrapped her arms around her stomach. Logically. Realistically. Logically, realistically --
Nori was likely dead. She’d only come into the forest to search for him, and she’d come alone. She’d pleaded with some of the men in town to come with her, to find her friend, but they’d all claimed that there was too much work to do and not enough sunlight to accomplish everything. Only Amagiri had been honest with her, in that soft-spoken way of his that did nothing to blunt the sting of his words.
“Ehara Nori has been missing for three days,” he’d said, not quite gently after he’d pulled her aside. She wasn’t sure she blamed him: he was speaking something he knew to be the truth, and there was no need to wrap a hard truth in a pretty ribbon. “You know how cold it gets in the forest after dark. You know how many animals roam through those trees. If he hasn’t returned to the village yet, he won’t return at all. Let go of this, Sakuraba.”
She’d sworn at him, then, and stormed back to the house she shared with her sister. Distantly, she knew that had been rude and the kind of unladylike that would’ve led her sister to slap her. Now that she was in the woods as well, she wondered if he would be saying the same things about her in three days’ time.
Fuck logically and realistically.
As she walked, calling Nori’s name every few moments, she kept track of little landmarks. A tree with a lightning scar on its trunk, a rock that was shaped like a fist, a clump of flowers that stood out blood-red against the grass. If she could keep all of it together, those things would lead her -- and Nori, she reminded herself firmly -- back to the village in one piece.
She received no answer though, no matter how loudly she called or how far she walked. It was when she glanced up through the trees and saw a darkening sky, when she paused and listened for birds yet heard none, that she realized that she might’ve made a mistake.
(Well, no. She’d known that earlier, when she’d first turned around and seen that the path was no longer in sight, but -- it felt very real now.)
Still, she’d come this far, and she hadn’t yet found Nori. He’d come into the woods to paint, which meant that he would’ve wanted to find the prettiest view. With a touch of desperation, she wheeled in a circle, scanning the area for some kind of clue that might lead her in his direction.
Oh, she was an idiot. She was an idiot, and --
In the distance, a dying ray of sunlight glinted off something white. It couldn’t be a tree; it couldn’t be a stone. Whatever it was, it had caught her attention: it would’ve caught Nori’s attention, too, drawn by his painter’s eye. Maybe it was an old, abandoned statue, or some other remnant of long-gone human life. No one lived in the woods now, but it really wasn’t impossible that some decades-past family had tried it.
Without quite considering her options (again), she ran, hair streaming out behind her. She dodged low hanging branches and scrambled over gnarled tree roots, trying to reach that flash of white light before -- before what? Before night fell? Before a monster found her?
She’d been alone in the woods too long, if she was starting to think like that.
When she reached the source of the light, however, she stopped dead in her tracks. It was a wall, pale-white and well-made like some of the richer families’ homes in the city she’d been born in. Cautiously, she stepped up to it, reaching out to brush her fingertips along the stone as she walked alongside it. The stone was warm and impossibly smooth; if this place had lain abandoned for years, it had certainly weathered its loneliness well.
This was the castle in the woods, she supposed. A real place, then, although certainly not full of monsters. In the middle of the silent forest, though, with the sun slipping beneath the horizon, it wasn’t difficult to believe that it might be full of ghosts instead.
“Nori?” she called again, flattening her palm against the stone. There was no answer, but she had called more softly this time. She decided to think it was because she’d already shouted so much: her voice was simply disappearing from overuse. It had nothing to do with the instinctive need to not draw attention to herself. Of course. She wasn’t afraid of an old wall in a forest.
After a few more moments of walking, still trailing her hand along the stone of the wall, she spotted the dark wood of a gate ahead of her. Stepping away from the wall, she squinted to take a better look: it was slightly ajar, but it also looked as though it had weathered the years very, very well. Maybe the family who had lived here had left in a hurry, and left the gate open years and years ago without ever returning to close it. Maybe some traveling merchant or doctor had left the gate open after sheltering in the abandoned house for a night. Maybe it had just been children -- after all, kids were so rarely conscientious enough to close a door behind them.
There was no reason for a half-open gate to make her feel so damn uneasy.
“I’m being stupid,” she whispered to herself, as though speaking the words aloud would make them true. Her sister had once claimed that could happen, that there was some kind of power in words. “I went into the forest alone. I went off the path alone. I can walk through a gate alone.”
If Nori had spotted the wall, he would’ve come toward it. If he’d seen the gate, he would’ve gone through it, and he wouldn’t have been such a coward about the whole business. He could’ve twisted his ankle or gotten sick, and for all she knew, he was still waiting inside, hoping that someone would find him to help him make his way home. She’d come this far for him, and she’d go farther. He was the best -- the only, really -- friend she had, and he deserved a search.
She took a breath, and shoved the gate open. As she passed through, she didn’t bother to close it behind her.
The courtyard she stepped into was massive, but only one thing about it stood out. There were no ghosts fluttering between the buildings; there were no monsters lounging on the stairs. More disappointingly, Nori was not there, waiting to be saved.
No, the peculiar thing about the courtyard was the cherry blossom tree, standing tall and proud, blooming out of season.
She was drawn toward it, this gnarled thing with half the petals fallen to the ground beneath it. All of them should have been gone at this time of year, but somehow, it had clung stubbornly to hundreds of them. It wasn’t pretty -- not in the least, actually, half-bald and scrubby -- but there was something inherently alluring about a tree that had managed to cling to its beauty weeks after all of its petals ought to have fallen. Stubbornness was an ideal she could approve of.
Without quite thinking, she reached out and snapped one of the lowermost branches, twirling it curiously in her fingertips. It would make a good-luck charm, something strong and strange to ward off her own bad ideas. She certainly needed it.
As soon as she pulled it from the tree, though, the petals withered in her hand. They didn’t just fall off: it was like they died before her eyes, turning brown and shriveling at her touch. Before they’d even hit the ground, someone shouted behind her, a high-pitched voice that was nearly a scream.
She whirled, clutching the now-bare branch to her chest, Nori’s name rising to her lips, and was overtaken by a young woman in boy’s clothes.
“What did you do?” the girl was asking, wringing her hands together. She reached out as though she would take the branch from Ren, then whipped her hand back as though it had been a thornbranch instead. “Oh, you shouldn’t be here -- you need to leave, before you’re spotted --"
“Huh?” Ren managed, with all of the eloquence and grace she’d so often been praised for. Someone lived here? Some teenage girl, by the looks of it, who was halfway to a panic already and clearly needed supervision -- who got this worried about an errant traveler? She was trespassing, yes, but she obviously meant no harm. Did this mean Nori hadn’t come here? If he had, had this girl chased him off?
“You need to leave, ” the girl said again, more urgently. This time, she reached out to take Ren by the shoulder, steering her back toward the gate, careful not to brush her arm against the branch. Ren tried to shrug her off, but found that the girl was deceptively strong: her grip was like a vise. “Take the branch with you if you must, but you have to --”
A man’s voice sliced across the courtyard from behind them, interrupting her before she could continue on her thoroughly bizarre chain of commands. “She has to what, Chizuru?”
Ren twisted -- the girl’s grip had loosened at the man’s first word, mercifully enough -- and spun on her heel to face the man who’d spoken. He stood in the doorway of the nearest house, arms crossed, and sharp-eyed: he almost looked like any boy she could’ve found in the village crowds, but he wore two swords at his hip and there was a strange glint of gold in his eyes. He was certainly no one she’d seen before; no one in the village could afford a single sword, let alone two.
The girl -- Chizuru -- glanced at the ground, and then back up at him. “She needs to leave, Okita. She shouldn’t… She’s from the village, isn’t she? The one outside the forest? We don’t want her to get mixed up with us.”
“There is no us,” Okita said sharply. It seemed by his tone that this was a discussion he’d had with Chizuru before; the tired slump of Chizuru’s shoulders when he said it only served to drive that idea home. “Ah, that’s not quite true. There is an us, but you’re not part of it, are you? You made that clear. And it looks to me like she’s got one of the branches in her thieving little hands, doesn’t she?”
“You can’t steal a flower!” Ren sputtered, throwing up her hands. Neither of them paid her any mind.
“She didn’t know,” Chizuru said, chewing her lip. “It’s -- just let her go, Okita. It doesn’t have to… You don’t want her to be here after dark, Okita. She’s from the village.”
Okita rolled his eyes and jerked his head toward the door, although Ren wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to say with the gesture. “She took a branch, Chizuru -- how many days do you think that is? It makes her a thief and a killer. Do you really just want to let her leave, after what she’s done to us?” He paused, then smiled. “Well, not to you, of course. But to us.”
“I don’t know,” Chizuru said. Her voice had fallen to a whisper; this time, when she glanced at Ren, it wasn’t entirely the look of an ally. Perhaps that wasn’t fair, though. She hadn’t been an ally when she’d started shouting about how Ren needed to get out, either.
What was going on? Out of spite, Ren gripped the bare branch harder, ignoring the way it scraped against her skin. A thief? A killer? She’d taken a cherry blossom branch, out of curiosity, and it hadn’t even lived through being picked. Was that what he’d meant? If he was going to take his plants that seriously, then there was no helping him.
“I’m just looking for someone,” she cut in desperately, shouldering past Chizuru and choosing not to think too much harder about the nonsense Chizuru and Okita were passing between them. If she could distract them from all of that, circle them back around to what mattered, then maybe they’d know something about the reason she’d come out here in the first place. “A young man, around my age. His name is Nori, and he came out here to paint. He’s taller than I am, with grey eyes and light hair.”
Chizuru made a little noise of upset behind her; Ren made a mental note to apologize to her, if she got the chance before she left this stupid house. It hadn’t been necessary to do that: she was just a kid, anyway, and she hadn’t really been in the way. She had grabbed Ren a little too roughly, but maybe she was just used to the way this Okita man carried out business -- which seemed to be unpleasantly, if every word he’d said so far was any indication. Poor girl.
“I think I’ve seen your friend,” Okita said slowly, finally looking directly at her. She didn’t like the feeling, but at least they weren’t talking about -- whatever it was they’d been talking about. A killer? “I’ll be generous, then, and make a deal with you, mm? Come inside and apologize for what you’ve done, and I’ll tell you where -- what’s his name? Where the boy is.”
Ren glanced at Chizuru, and then back at Okita. Neither of them offered any hints as to what the correct answer was. Was he lying? Had he really seen Nori?
She couldn’t risk it. Nori deserved this. If Okita knew where Nori was, or where he might have gone, she would have to play by his rules.
“Fine,” she said, slipping the branch into her obi. Whatever his obsession with the cherry blossom tree was, he likely wouldn’t take kindly to her throwing the stupid thing on the ground instead. That was fine. Everything was fine. Maybe if she spoke the word fine a few more times, it would come true as well. “Fine, I’ll come inside.”
Okita made a sweeping gesture that she chose not to interpret as mockery, and she walked slowly up the stairs, passing by him without looking directly into his face. With any luck, Nori would be inside the house, and he’d help her sort this business out. He had a way with people that she’d never had: he would know what to say and what to do.
The cherry blossom branch didn’t feel much like a good-luck charm anymore, but she still touched it once more as she crossed the threshold with both of them at her heels.