a quick bow before hurrying after the others. Okame gave me a strange look as I caught up, but didn’t say anything.
We walked through a bamboo gate and into a small garden, in which a mossy lantern sat beside a tiny pond under the boughs of a pine tree. Remembering the pond in the Silent Winds temple, I peered into the water, expecting to see a few carp or fat goldfish swim up to me, mouths gaping. Sadly, the pond was empty, the water holding only a few rotting leaves, making me frown in disappointment. But my reflection stared back, a girl with furry ears and eyes glowing yellow in the fading light, and my stomach dropped.
“Kitsune,” the headman said, and my heart gave a violent lurch. Stomach roiling, I turned to face the human, who gave a nervous smile. “We’ve had terrible trouble with foxes lately,” the headman explained, gesturing at the pond. “Always getting into everything. My poor fish had no chance.”
“Oh,” I breathed. I quickly stepped away from the edge, hoping no one else had seen the brief flash of a kitsune in the pond. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Stupid mistake, Yumeko. Be more careful. This is no time to be playing with fish.
The headman slid open the front door, which was heavy and wooden, I noticed, not made of rice paper on a frame. “Asami!” he called, as we left our sandals below the lip of the wooden floor before following him into the house. “We have guests! Set three more places for dinner.”
“You really don’t have to do this,” I told the headman, as a middle-aged woman in a dark blue kimono appeared in the door and, with a gasp, hurried off again. “We have our own supplies.” I remembered the tiny farming community at the base of the mountains near the Silent Winds temple. Sometimes a farmer would show up at the gates of the temple to ask that someone pray over his fields or drive the spirits of evil fortune from his house or family member. The monks had obliged, and accepted only meager forms of payment in return; a sack of barley, or a few skinny carrots. The people there barely scraped by, Master Isao told me. Farming was a difficult life; many villages often went hungry, as over half their rice crop went to the Earth Clan daimyo for taxes each year. I didn’t want to take food away from these people if I could help it.
But the headman wouldn’t hear of it, stating yet again that we were honored guests in Yamatori, and it would be unforgivable to treat us as less. So we sat cross-legged on thick tatami mats with lacquered trays in front of us, as the headman’s wife and daughters brought us dish after dish of food. Much of it was simple, hearty fare: pickled cabbage, cooked river eels in miso, dried plums and seemingly unlimited bowls of pure rice, without a kernel of millet to bolster it. According to the headman, some of the farmers made their own sake, which Okame took great pleasure in sampling; Tatsumi and I stuck to tea. But no matter how often I emptied my rice bowl, another would appear, almost by magic. I couldn’t keep up with the amount of food, even as Okame gorged himself on everything. Tatsumi ate very little, saying nothing except to politely turn down the offer of more. If it wasn’t for the fact that the headman was eating the same dishes as us, I doubted he would have touched any of his food.
Finally, when I couldn’t eat another kernel, the headman rose from his table, smiling and clasping his hands together. “You must be tired after such a long journey,” he said, glancing out one of the windows, where a bloated yellow moon was beginning to peek over the treetops. “If you will follow me, I will show you where you can sleep tonight.”
I dragged myself upright, feeling my stomach press against my ribs, and stifled a yawn. “You are very generous,” I said, earning another strange look from the headman, as if he were again puzzled that I was the one speaking for the group, and not the quiet, black-clad samurai behind me. “But we wouldn’t want to intrude upon your lovely home.”
“It is no trouble, my...lady,” the headman said. “We have a guesthouse out back that we keep for this very purpose. It is quiet and isolated from the rest of the