Three weeks into my service under Oda Nobunaga, I killed a man for the first time.

  I want to tell you it was dramatic. That there was a moment of clarity, or horror, or some transformation in my understanding of myself and the world. Soldiers in stories always seem to cross that threshold with weight and significance, as though the gods themselves pause to mark the occasion.

  The truth is I barely had time to think. One moment I was running with forty other ashigaru across a muddy field on the outskirts of a village called Asobe, and the next moment a man in mismatched armour was swinging a rusted nagamaki at my head, and I put my spear through his throat because that was what the situation required.

  He fell. I kept running because everyone around me was still running.

  Afterwards, when the skirmish was over and the surviving bandits had fled into the treeline and we were standing in the mud counting our own dead, Daisuke clapped me on the shoulder and said "good" in the tone of a man grading produce at a market. That was the ceremony of it.

  I looked at my hands for a long time that evening. They looked the same as they always had.

  The action at Asobe was not a battle by any meaningful standard. A band of ronin, maybe sixty men who had stopped being soldiers and started being something worse, had been extracting tribute from three villages along the eastern edge of Nobunaga's territory. Two previous attempts to dislodge them had failed under the command of a retainer whose name I was not senior enough to know but whose reputation for caution had apparently become a liability.

  Nobunaga had sent us instead. One hundred and twenty ashigaru, no cavalry, a single mid-ranking samurai named Hayashi Toranosuke in nominal command, and a set of orders that Toranosuke had read to us the evening before with the expression of a man who had not expected to find himself in this position.

  "Lord Nobunaga's instructions," Toranosuke had said, holding the scroll slightly away from his body as though it might bite him, "are to engage before dawn, move faster than they expect, and stop when they break. He says—" a pause, a careful clearing of the throat, "—that frightened men are already half defeated and we should not give them time to stop being frightened."

  Someone in the back of the assembled men had laughed. Toranosuke had not.

  It had worked, which I suspected was the point Nobunaga was making to everyone involved. Not just about the ronin.

  We camped that night in the village we had relieved, sleeping in the open because the villagers were generous with their gratitude but not quite generous enough to open their homes to a hundred and twenty armed men they had met that morning. The spring night was cold and clear, the kind of cold that makes the stars look sharp enough to cut.

  I sat apart from the others near the edge of the village, my back against a storage shed, eating the last of my rice ration and trying not to think about the man I had killed. Not because I felt guilt exactly. Something quieter than guilt. Something more like the awareness of a door that had opened and would not close again.

  The smell came before anything else.

  River water. Old shrines. The particular cold of stone that has never seen sunlight.

  I set down my rice bowl very carefully.

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  "You are not as afraid as you should be," said a voice beside me.

  I turned my head slowly. Sitting on the ground to my left, close enough to touch, was a woman I had not heard approach across ground that I was certain would have made noise. She was dressed in robes the colour of autumn foxes, deep orange shading into white at the edges, and she was watching me with amber eyes that caught the starlight in a way that human eyes did not.

  Beside her, curled against her hip, was a fox. It regarded me with an expression of mild professional assessment.

  "You were in the corner," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Three weeks ago in the barracks. That was you."

  She tilted her head slightly. "I was curious about you. You can see more than you should. Most humans learn to stop seeing by the time they are your age. The world teaches them not to." She paused. "You never learned that lesson."

  "My father said I had a weak mind."

  "Your father was wrong about many things." She said this without cruelty, simply as a statement of fact. "Though he was correct that your perception is unusual. It is not weakness. It is closer to the opposite."

  I looked at the fox. The fox looked at me. I had the distinct impression it found me only marginally interesting.

  "What are you?" I asked, though some part of me already knew. I had grown up near enough to shrines to understand the old stories, the ones told in lowered voices when the priests weren't listening, about the messengers who moved between the mortal world and the realm of the gods, who wore faces that were almost human and eyes that were not quite.

  "A messenger," she said simply. "Among other things."

  "Whose messenger?"

  She smiled and it was a complicated expression, the smile of someone who finds a question both predictable and genuinely amusing. "That depends on the day. Tonight I am here on my own curiosity, which is perhaps the most dangerous kind of errand." She looked out toward the dark treeline at the edge of the village. "You have entered the service of a remarkable man, Kuroda Ren."

  "He's effective," I said carefully.

  "He is more than effective. He is a focal point." She turned those amber eyes back to me and the weight of them was considerable. "Do you know what it means when the heavens pay close attention to a single mortal life? When multiple powers find themselves drawn to watch the same man?"

  I thought about Nobunaga on the training ground. The way the air had felt different near him. The way he had looked at that road as though he already owned it.

  "It means something is going to happen," I said.

  "It means something is already happening," she corrected gently. "Has been happening for longer than your lord has been alive. You entered his service three weeks ago. The forces that have been circling him have been doing so for decades." She stood in a single fluid motion that seemed to involve slightly less effort than gravity should have allowed. The fox rose with her. "I am telling you this not because you can stop it, but because you have the ability to see it clearly, and someone should."

  "Why does it matter if someone sees it clearly?"

  She looked at me for a long moment. "Because what cannot be witnessed cannot be understood. And what cannot be understood cannot be survived." She reached into her sleeve and produced something small, placing it on the ground between us before I could react. "Keep that close. It will not protect you. But it will help you see."

  Then she walked toward the treeline and the darkness accepted her the way water accepts rain, completely and without resistance, and she was gone.

  I sat very still for a long time.

  Then I picked up what she had left behind.

  It was a small ceramic fox figurine, the kind sold at Inari shrines across the province. Worn smooth with age, one ear slightly chipped, painted in the same deep orange as her robes. Warm to the touch despite the cold night.

  Ordinary in every way that an object could appear ordinary.

  I closed my fingers around it and felt, at the very edge of perception, something vast and old and watching turn its attention briefly toward me and then away, the way a river acknowledges a stone by flowing around it and continuing on.

  I put the figurine in my sleeve. I picked up my rice bowl. I finished my dinner.

  What else was there to do.

  I did not tell anyone what I had seen. This was partly because I had no language for it that wouldn't make me sound feverish. It was partly because Daisuke was the kind of man who responded to unusual information by becoming loudly sceptical, and I did not have the energy for it.

  But it was mostly because of what she had said. Someone should see it clearly.

  If that was going to be me, I needed to stay in Nobunaga's service. I needed to get closer to him, not further away. And people who started talking about fox women in the middle of camp did not tend to find themselves trusted with proximity to lords.

  So I said nothing. I sharpened my spear. I slept when I could.

  Three days later we returned to Kiyosu Castle and I saw Nobunaga again for the first time since we had left. He was crossing the inner courtyard with that characteristic speed that was not quite running but covered ground like it was. He stopped when Toranosuke intercepted him to make his report.

  I was thirty feet away, carrying equipment back to the storehouse with two other ashigaru.

  Nobunaga listened to the report without expression. Then he said something brief, nodded once, and walked on.

  But in the half second before he turned away, his gaze crossed the courtyard and landed on me with the randomness of a man's eye catching movement, and then held for just a fraction longer than random chance would explain.

  He looked at me the way you look at something you have seen before but cannot immediately place.

  Then he was gone, moving through a doorway, and the courtyard was just a courtyard again.

  The ceramic fox in my sleeve was warm against my ribs.

  I stared at the doorway he had passed through and understood, with the particular clarity of someone who has just seen the door close behind them, that I was no longer making choices about my own life.

  I was inside something now.

  End of Chapter 2