My Heart was Swimming in Words Gathered by the Wind (1/8)
Title: My Heart was Swimming in Words Gathered by the Wind
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Nino/Becky with side Sho/Kitagawa Keiko and hints of Jun/Ohno because sure why not. Aiba’s here too BTW.
Summary: Even though Kazu is only 10, he’s not stupid. When a Sin Eater faces Tsumi, he dies. That’s the whole point of the pilgrimage. They cross the Nihonbashi and to defeat him, you must give your life. But then he comes back, so what is the point? It’s throwing your life away, plain and simple.
Notes/Warnings: For this year's ninoexchange, 65,000 words. Death of minor characters, some killing and some wounded folks (but not graphically violent), angsty content. Inspired by Final Fantasy X (video game) with considerable tweaks to characters/plot. It's more of an alternate history/fantasy version of Japan. Many place names are inspired by the 53 Stations of the Tokaido, a travel route between Kyoto and Tokyo in the Edo period.
The powers of the 'Sin Eaters' in the story are somewhat inspired by Shinto shrine maidens (miko) and the itako (blind female shamans) who are said to have the power to remove evil spirits and communicate with the dead. Any other Shinto-esque influences in this story are intentional and probably not as well researched as they ought to be ;)
The title of the story comes from an English translation of Suteki da Ne, the theme song to Final Fantasy X.
Splashes of color pierced through the black night, accompanied by echoing rumbles. Fireworks, Nino realized with a roll of his eyes, locking up the cart shed for the evening. Always such a noisy sendoff and with such a limited return on the investment. Gunpowder was costly, and wasting it on a pilgrimage always left a bad taste in his mouth.
All of the Sin Eaters coming east passed through Heiankyo, the second largest of Wakoku’s cities. While most of the southern villages had feasts or bonfires to send their Sin Eaters off, Heiankyo always had to go bigger. Fireworks, multi-day celebrations after the rituals were out of the way. Nino, as a businessman, knew there was money in it, but he figured all the best spots to set up shop had been claimed for generations.
It really was the only celebrating that happened these days, especially now that the Calm was over. The guards on Heiankyo’s walls were on high alert, higher than usual, but at least within the walls there was fun to be had. Carnival games for the children, goldfish catching, spun sugar in fluffy mounds bigger than your head. The temples opened their gates, and well-wishers crammed inside for the chance to have a glimpse of the Sin Eater and their procession. It was the only chance the common folks usually got.
In a city like Heiankyo, most Sin Eaters spent their time being wined and dined by the city’s wealthy. They got to gorge themselves on luxuries and were given gifts and supplies for their pilgrimage. And in exchange, if they brought the Calm, Heiankyo’s wealthy could brag that it was their cloak the Sin Eater had worn on their journey. It was their mule she rode, their medicines and potions he had taken to stay strong. And if the pilgrimage ended without the Calm, no harm done. Maybe the next would be the one to succeed.
Nino’s shop was in the foothills due east of Heiankyo, high enough that on a clear day he could look down and see the squat brown roofs of houses within the city walls, punctuated here and there with the green of their inner gardens and yards. He could see the slums, where the buildings were built closer together. Those were closer to the wall, closer to the river, destroyed and rebuilt dozens of times over the years. He could see the guard towers dotting the walls at regular intervals. It had been several generations now that they’d built the guard towers out of wood. Rebuilding them in stone was wasteful. It was best to keep the stone for the walls themselves.
There were a handful of roads that led northeast from Heiankyo, more like dirt paths snaking through the rice paddies in most cases. But all of them came to the river at the same crossing, Sanjo Ohashi, and from there the Tokaido started. From Sanjo Ohashi the Tokaido entered the foothills, hard-packed dirt that had been worn down for centuries by the feet of travelers and pilgrimages alike. Nino’s shop was five miles from Sanjo Ohashi, not so far, but far enough to still make money. In a Calm, travel was common. People emigrated, many going northeast along the sea road despite the dangers, to seek safety and maybe wealth (if they were lucky) in Odawara.
But now the Calm was over, and this one had only lasted for two years. At one time the Calm had apparently lasted for decades, but the priests were always blabbing on that with more people, there was more sin. The more civilization spread, the more greedy man became, and the faster Tsumi returned. Nino didn’t really care what the reasoning was. All he knew was that business right now was awful.
It had been almost a year since the Calm had faded, since Tsumi had returned to thin the human herd. He, she, nobody knew and nobody cared. Tsumi was a monster, a dark shadow, and there was simply no hiding from it. Or at least that was what the priests believed. Nino, however, considered himself a practical sort of man. In his thirty-one years of life, many of them spent in observation of the world around him, he knew that Tsumi almost always came from the sea, surging up over the walls (if a city was lucky enough to even have them, like Odawara or Heiankyo) to wreak havoc. And yet almost all the cities and villages in Wakoku were within a mile or so of the sea or a river that led to it. The hills, the mountains, this was where everyone ought to be. It was why Nino had settled there and why Nino wouldn’t leave.
Of course the hills and mountains came with their own assorted risks. Live animals, unabsolved animals, profiteering types, and obviously the unabsolved profiteering types, unwilling to accept their deaths because there was still some loot that needed pilfering somewhere. And these were ever-present worries in the hills, in the long stretches of land between the walled towns. Risk death in the countryside every day or enjoy the Calm from the comfort of your walled city? After all, Tsumi would only be back for a little while and eventually a Sin Eater would send him on his merry way once more.
It was something that made sense a few generations back but made little sense now. The Calm times were growing shorter, Tsumi returned stronger than ever, thousands perished, the cycle repeated. Nobody knew how long it had been happening, and nobody knew when it was going to end, if maybe this time the Sin Eater would be able to banish Tsumi from their world for good. From the day you were born to the day you died, there was no doubt that Tsumi was bound to affect your life at some point. If it didn’t kill you, it killed a family member, your neighbor, your entire town.
And so now the fireworks in Heiankyo were brighter, the feasts and carnivals were costlier. Only the Sin Eaters could save them, and it was the only way for the common folk to say “thank you, at least, for trying.” Over the past several months, Nino had seen at least seventeen Sin Eaters cross at Sanjo Ohashi. They didn’t always stop at his shop, so he didn’t know how many were Heiankyo natives or how many had only stopped at Heiankyo on the way from one of the backwater towns further south. The “Tsumi Bait” villages, the more arrogant residents of Heiankyo called them, because they were targeted heavily. They were poorer people, could barely get their homes rebuilt with the shorter and shorter Calm times so the concept of city walls was unthinkable and impossible. Tsumi Bait.
Seventeen from Heiankyo, who knew how many else from Mikawa or Odawara or any of the eastern Tsumi Bait towns. A full year and still Tsumi was spotted up and down the coast. Still Tsumi’s wrath was visited upon the people of Wakoku. The pilgrimage was long, it was tiring, and nobody came back. When Nino was a kid, his grandmother told him stories about Sin Eater guardians who had managed to return from the pilgrimage. Tall tales, most likely, about men and women who’d left in their prime only to return with their wits gone, their bodies wasting away, unable to speak of the things they’d seen. Bedtime stories, Nino’s mother had always said with a sigh, chiding her mother-in-law. Unless they left early or the entire party gave up, a pilgrimage was a one-way trip.
Nino stopped to stare out across the valley, watching the fireworks light up the skies over Heiankyo. Around his shop and the cart shed, the ever-present hum of his intruder detectors buzzed low and gentle. It would be eighteen now, eighteen people and who knew how many guardians, that had headed east up the Tokaido. As Nino entered his shop, locking up and climbing the stepladder up to his living quarters on the second floor, he wondered how many it would take to bring the Calm this time. And if the Calm continued the way it had, shorter and shorter every time, what would happen if they ran out of Sin Eaters?
-
“Hiroshi, put him down,” his mother says. “You’ll block the people behind us. He’s too old for that.”
“So what,” his father snaps back, hoisting him up so he can sit on his shoulders. “This won’t be the last time, there will be more of these in the weeks to come.”
“Kazu, are you okay up there?” his mother asks.
He nods, mostly oblivious to what his parents are arguing about. They argue a lot. About money and the shop and about Grandma, but Kazu is much more interested in the temple. There’s no more room inside. Odawara Jingu always seems to fill up fast when a Sin Eater is preparing to leave. Instead they are just outside the torii at the shrine entrance, two rows of people back from the wooden gates the city watch have put up.
He can still smell the paint since they’ve touched up the gate just in time for the first pilgrimage to depart. It’s hard to see now since it’s dark and there’s only lantern light all along the procession route, but the torii in the daytime is a brilliant red color. It’s Kazu’s favorite color, the torii red.
There’s a roar from inside the temple grounds that frightens Kazu at first, and he shuts his eyes. But then his father’s hands, strong and firm where they’re holding his legs, squeeze tighter. Reassured, Kazu opens his eyes again, tries desperately to see around the torii to what’s happening inside.
“She’s coming,” his mother is saying, shouting a bit to be heard over the crowd. The streets outside Odawara Jingu where they’re standing are even more packed than the temple grounds. She’s finished her prayers and is ready to leave the city to go out the Great Eastern Gate. The Sin Eater, his mother told him earlier at home, is from here in Odawara. Lady Haruka of House Igawa in the upper city.
When he sees her, he finds it hard to believe she’s a lady at all. Lady Haruka is only seven years older than Kazu, fourteen and the youngest Sin Eater in decades. She’s accompanied by four men, cousins apparently because House Igawa is unwilling to send its son and heir as guardian. His mother calls this sad, his father calls it common sense.
Sin Eaters wear white when they depart, pure as mountain snow. From the decorative clips in her dark black hair to every layer of her kimono and down to the cloth shoes on her feet, Lady Haruka is a radiant white, off to battle with Tsumi, with sin and evil itself. Like everyone around him, Kazu waves with all his might as Lady Haruka passes. She doesn’t wave back but bows her head a few times as people toss flowers at her feet. White lilies for purity, white roses for innocence. The only flowers that aren’t white are blood red spider lilies.
Kazu watches Lady Haruka’s white-shoed feet step over the red flowers, marring the cloth with scarlet stains from the blooms. “Morbid,” his father complains, but it’s not until later that Kazu learns why he said so.
It’s his Grandma who tells him, tucking him into bed the following night.
“Those flowers, the Higanbana,” she says, kissing his forehead. “They’re for someone you will never meet again.”
-
He woke to the intruder alarm, his legs snagging in his blanket as he struggled to get out of his futon. The blare would continue until he went outside and manually reset the detectors. He hurry-stumbled to the window, looking down in irritation to see what had tripped it. It was daytime already, maybe almost midday, but Nino had been sleeping in now that the Calm was over and customers were sparse on the Tokaido.
When he spied the intruder, he was tempted to open the window and find a knife to fling at him. But it would waste a perfectly good knife. The team of oxen had already been unshackled from the wagon and had tripped the detector. The two animals, oblivious, dined happily on the grass in Nino’s front yard. The oxen’s owner was already unloading goods from the wagon nearby.
Nino grumbled to himself, pulling on a halfway clean shirt and trousers (only the best for a guest like this) and climbed down his ladder. The whole shop was vibrating with the alarm and he unlocked the front door, slipping on some sandals and hurrying across the lawn to recalibrate his detectors.
When he straightened back up, turning around ready to unleash a litany of curses, the intruder only set down a sack of rice and waved. “Hey Nino!”
“I was sleeping, you dimwit!”
This didn’t rattle the intruder one bit. Nino’s insults always slid right off of him as though they’d never been said. Even in the cool air of the foothills, Aiba Masaki was covered in sweat, his face and arms darkened from many days’ travel in the sunshine of the open road. The two thugs he employed to guard his wagon, Nishikido and Maruyama (or as Nino thought of them, Dumb and Dumber), were helping to unload the wagon, their swords nowhere in sight. Some protection detail.
“You will not believe what they are charging for bamboo shoots in Mikawa these days!” Aiba was complaining in his husky voice, mopping his brow before reaching for a crate of healing potions. “When I was a kid, I used to dig ‘em up with my Grandpa and we sold them by the side of the road for 5 mon a piece!”
“What a lovely story,” Nino replied. “I don’t care.”
Aiba ignored him once again, gesturing to the stuff he’d unloaded. “That’s everything for you. The rest is going on to Heiankyo.”
Nino held out his palm. “Your animals are eating my front yard.”
Aiba rolled his eyes, fumbling in his pocket for the coin pouch he kept there. “It’s just grass.”
“And when it’s all been eaten, it’s no longer grass. It’s ex-grass. Former grass. Patches of dirt, you could say,” Nino continued, still holding out his palm until Aiba marched across to him and set a handful of mon in his hand. “A pleasure as always, Aiba-san.”
“You’re going to end up giving me all of that back and then some!” Aiba complained, heading back for the boxes. He gestured to his employees to start hauling things into Nino’s shop.
“We’ll handle that transaction when we get to it. For now, we’re even again.”
As of that summer, Nino had spent eight years in his shop, eight years in what the Heiankyo townsfolk called “the frontier,” even if he was only five miles from Sanjo Ohashi and six from the walls. And for six of those years, Aiba Masaki had been his friend. Sometimes Nino used the word “friend” kind of loosely when it came to Aiba. He was noisy, he told bad jokes, and was often lacking in common sense.
However, he was a loyal person (the dumb often were) and his prices were reasonable. Aiba’s caravan (if you could call one wagon, two oxen, and three idiots a caravan) ran the western Tokaido route, back and forth between Heiankyo and Mikawa. Rain or shine, Calm or no, he was on the road trading and delivering orders to the various shops and hamlets along the way. He could make the trip in two weeks, one way, so Nino saw him twice a month, going to and coming from Heiankyo. Though his caravan guards occasionally changed, Aiba himself never did.
He was really the only friend that Nino had. Nino preferred solitude and the feeling had only grown stronger as the years went by. He could chat with emigrants and travelers during the Calm, could sell his wares to people unwilling to pay Heiankyo prices, could offer specialty items to Sin Eaters and their guardians. So it wasn’t as though he was completely alone. But there were few regulars. Nino could see new faces, learn new stories, and simply let them move on. Aiba was the only one who kept coming back.
Aiba was half a year older, the two of them both having been born during Lord Kondo’s Calm. Nino knew that parts of Aiba’s past were a sore spot, so he never asked about them, and Aiba knew the case was the same for Nino. So there were some blanks that stayed blank, but Aiba was the type of person who always had something to chat about even if it wasn’t about his past. He’d grown up somewhere south, on an island. Nino assumed that Tsumi was a big fan of the place since the southern islands were easy pickings, although Aiba was oddly cheerful for a southerner. Maybe it was an entire island of people as happy-go-lucky as him, despite the way the world worked, the way the world continuously screwed them over.
Aiba talked Nino’s ear off with stories of the people he met on the road. During the Calm, he often volunteered the use of his wagon to people traveling. And when Tsumi was back, he sometimes ferried Sin Eaters and their guardians in the same way. He was a decent person, a truly decent person. He was the kind of person who usually ended up becoming a guardian, willing to go east and probably never come home. Nino had asked him once if he knew any Sin Eaters or if he knew any guardians. But Aiba had clammed up, shaken his head, changed the topic. So maybe Aiba was a good person, but he wasn’t keen on self-sacrifice.
Dumb and Dumber finished bringing things into the store, and before Nino could stop them they went up the ladder and started helping themselves to the snacks they knew were in Nino’s cupboards. Aiba tethered his oxen and followed Nino inside. While Nino set to work unpacking the supplies Aiba had brought for him from Mikawa, Aiba himself perched on Nino’s shop counter with his trusty kendama.
Clack, clack, clack, Aiba swung the wooden kendama, getting the bright green ball to land in the cups every time. Nino had stolen the kendama before, held it ransom as testament to Aiba’s occasional absent-mindedness. It had gotten Nino a crate full of potions for half the price.
“Another one left last night,” Nino said, arranging the small glass potion vials on his shelves with care. Blessed by temple priests and priestesses, some of the potions cured poisons while others increased your attention span. Others could even heal wounds, fight infection. All helpful things for travelers on the Tokaido and the dark world beyond it.
“Hmm,” Aiba replied, swinging the kendama once more and this time catching the ball on the central spike. “We must have been camped out when they passed by. Did you see who it was?”
“Nope,” Nino said. “Has anyone even gotten close yet? What’s taking so long this time?”
Pilgrimages were tough, certainly, but nobody had defeated Tsumi yet. Only Sin Eaters and their guardians crossed the Nihonbashi, leaving the Tokaido behind. Nino didn’t actually know how long the journey took from there. For some successful Sin Eaters it was months, for others days. Nobody else was curious enough to wander up there and find out what the geography was like. Enough people were dying in their own towns, in their own familiar haunts, to bother going east to find out. Even during the Calm nobody dared to undertake such a dangerous, unpredictable journey.
“Maybe there’s bad weather up there. A blizzard.”
Nino shrugged. “Well, if one of them could hurry up and get it over with, that would be great. I’m going to go broke at this rate.”
Aiba allowed himself a small grin. “Speaking of your finances, you got any spare roofing tiles laying around here?”
“The hell do you need roofing tiles for?”
Aiba shook his head. “Ah, just someone was looking to trade. They’re, uh, remodeling or something? I don’t know, Mikawa people.”
Nino rolled his eyes, moving a curative potion vial over half an inch. It would catch the sunlight from the window perfectly, and any Sin Eater worth a damn would be drawn to it. “You have to stop doing favors for people. What’s the plan here, load your wagon down with tiles for this Mikawa weirdo and have no room for your own merchandise?”
“Sometimes, Nino, it’s nice to be nice to other people.”
“Overrated,” he shot back. Aiba with that dopey smile of his was always on a quest to make Nino into a “decent human being.” His suggestions included offering discounts to Sin Eaters (“after all, they’re saving the world!”), smiling at shop customers, and getting a dog for companionship.
Nino was more interested in his financial bottom line, staying open so he could stay alive and live comfortably. His current savings, hidden in a locked box under the floorboards in his room, had finally topped 100 gold ryō coins. At the rate he was going, he could probably retire by age 40 or 45. Unless, of course, the Calm times kept getting shorter.
He could hear a laugh from upstairs, and he moved from behind his counter to shout up the ladder. “This is a place of business, shut your traps!”
Aiba grinned, knowing full well that nobody else would visit said place of business but them that day. “Maru-chan’s dad is getting married again. The young one.”
Nino sighed, ignoring the chuckles and merriment from upstairs as Aiba’s companions ate his food stores, and he tried to further ignore Aiba’s attempts at sharing bits and pieces of said companions’ lives. The last time they had come back from Mikawa, they’d spoken of nothing but Maruyama’s strange family and the young woman the father had been courting. Younger than the son, Maru would soon have a stepmother. The conversation usually turned to the idea of son seducing stepmom, and it was then that Nino went outside to tend to his carts.
Aiba shoved his kendama in the back pocket of his trousers and took a look around the shop. “We won’t stay and bother you today, I can tell when I’m not wanted. I’m meeting a seller in Heiankyo anyhow this evening. Hair combs. Need any hair combs? Jade ones, even.”
Nino hauled another crate of potions onto the counter. “Do I look like I need a hair comb, Masaki?”
“For a special lady maybe?”
“You are the closest thing I have to a special lady, and I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”
Aiba smiled again, unfazed. “I could bring you that too! A special lady, I mean. Maybe that’s what you need here, a woman to cheer the place up. Who wants to buy potions and rice from a skinny little sourpuss? A wife, that’s what I should bring you.”
Nino offered a rude hand gesture in reply, heading for his ladder and his money upstairs to pay Aiba and his companions for the delivery. Yeah, a woman. That was the last thing Nino needed, another mouth to feed when he could barely take care of himself. It had been a while since he’d even been with someone. An eager group of courtesans heading to Odawara just before the Calm ended had patronized his business, and he’d been lonely enough to patronize theirs. But a wife? A permanent female fixture? There was no way he was suited for something like that. He wasn’t husband material, plain and simple.
He booted Dumb and Dumber from his table, where they’d already managed to gobble up all the thin, mealy carrots Nino had grown in his back garden. They headed down the ladder, out of sight as Nino shifted his small bookcase aside and pried up the floorboard to retrieve his money box. He counted out what he owed Aiba and put the box back, heading down again to see that they were already packing up. A mercifully short visit this time. Aiba was always more inclined to stay longer after coming from Heiankyo. He usually had more stories from the gambling dens, the red light district on his return trip.
“Please do not kidnap any women on my behalf,” Nino warned his friend, counting the money out into his sweaty palm.
“I was joking.”
“No woman needs to be stuck with me forever,” he grumbled.
Aiba patted him on the shoulder. “There’s someone out there who would be happy to love the stingy, unfriendly card cheat you are. Mark my words. The Calm will come soon, and maybe you’ll change your tune.”
“Get off my property.”
With that Aiba ruffled his hair, ducking away before Nino could retaliate, and getting his oxen team hooked back up. He waved cheerfully from his wagon as Nishikido walked in front and Maruyama behind, kicking up dirt on the road and heading down to the city. Nino watched him go, waiting until he knew Aiba couldn’t see him before waving back.
-
He doesn’t want to go. They’re in the middle of a Calm right now, what does it even matter? But he’s just turned 10, and it’s Odawara law. “It’s something everyone does,” his mother had explained several times as his birthday had drawn closer, including that morning. “And the odds are against it. They say only one in ten have the potential.”
“And what if there are nine people in line ahead of me?”
“That’s not how probability works,” his father had chimed in from the other room, fingers flying across the abacus as he tallied up their shop’s earnings.
His parents had sent him from the house alone, as is common practice. The wealthy families from the upper city tend to have priests visit them privately, but Kazu isn’t from a wealthy family. Gift Day is held every midsummer, and for people in the lower city, that means the Odawara Jingu. All boys and girls who have reached the age of 10 in the past year are required to visit and be assessed.
But even if he has the so-called “Gift,” he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to be a Sin Eater. For some families it’s a point of pride to have someone with the Gift, even if the person doesn’t go on pilgrimage. After all, there is always a need for a Sin Eater back home and not on the road. Some families, his father has explained, intermarry with particularly Gifted families in order to increase the likelihood of producing more. Somehow it doesn’t matter to them what happens to Sin Eaters on pilgrimage. It seems that family pride, being able to boast about that person, is more important than losing them.
Because even though Kazu is only 10, he’s not stupid. When a Sin Eater faces Tsumi, he dies. That’s the whole point of the pilgrimage. They cross the Nihonbashi, enter Yomi, and face Tsumi. To defeat him, you must give your life. With all the sin they’ve consumed, they’re somehow able to kill him. But then he comes back, so what is the point? It’s throwing your life away, plain and simple. Tsumi always returns, and it doesn’t matter how much sin they eat first.
Odawara is the largest city in Wakoku, so there’s plenty of other children in line at the temple when Kazu arrives. His birth was registered here at Odawara Jingu, so the temple knows how old he is and who his parents are. If he hadn’t come willingly, they would have come and dragged him here. He’d stubbornly refused to come out of his futon that morning until his mother had almost cried at the thought of such shame. For most people, Gift Day is exciting, especially if you found out you were a Sin Eater. You were special. But Kazu knows he isn’t special and has no desire to be. Kazu doesn’t want to be special if it means he could die because of it.
He recognizes Shunsuke-kun from the kimono shop a few blocks over. He was born the same day, and their mothers talk about it every time they meet. Kazu stays behind him, hoping that if someone born on that day has to be a Sin Eater that it’s Shunsuke. They say you have to be pure of heart to be a Sin Eater anyhow, so maybe wishing such a thing on Shunsuke means Kazu isn’t pure of heart to begin with.
The temple grounds are kept empty on Gift Day so nobody can wander the grounds and try to interfere with the assessment. Kazu follows Shunsuke up the steps and into one of the buildings that houses the temple priests. They remove their shoes and pad across a squeaky wooden floor, a narrow passageway that reeks of incense so much Kazu worries he may vomit from both the stench and from his own fear.
The gathered 10 year olds of Odawara are then corralled in a tatami-mat chamber where they are expected to sit quietly and meditate, praying that they’ve been blessed with the Gift and thus the potential to change the world. Kazu sits toward the back of the room, close to the exit, behind Shunsuke and his happy smile. Shunsuke seems to not have a care in the world. He’d be a better Sin Eater anyway, Kazu thinks.
Soon the first child is called, and Kazu focuses on breathing. He’s never experienced something this scary before, not even when his father is drunk and says mean things. As time passes, Shunsuke is called and disappears down another corridor. It’s the head priest of Odawara Jingu who performs the assessment, and for most people, it’s the only time they will meet him. But Sin Eaters train with the head priest, learning to harness their abilities. And of those, many end up going east on pilgrimage when the Calm fades.
He can still smell the incense, and it makes his eyes water so much that when his name is called and he is led down the corridor, the priestess guiding him lets him use her handkerchief to dry his eyes. “Most save their tears until after the assessment,” she teases him gently.
Then he’s brought to the room. It’s maybe half the size of the waiting room, stifling hot. He remembers his father’s words from the night before. “When we were assessed, they were still using birds, sometimes mice. You should be happy they’ve changed their ways for this generation.”
The room is void of furniture. Only the bald priest in his dark, heavy robes kneels in the center of the room. To the left of him is a wooden bucket and before him is a metal plate. In his hand, there’s a small knife.
“Come forward,” the priest says, and Kazu swallows down his fear as best he can. He can’t shame his parents in front of this man. The temples of Odawara have the power to affect almost anything in the city, and if he behaves poorly it will certainly reflect on his parents’ business.
Kazu kneels opposite the priest, bowing his head.
“Your House and name.”
“House Ninomiya,” he says as confidently as he can manage, hoping not to stumble over his words. His mother practiced this with him dozens of times. “I am called Kazunari, and I have reached 10 years of age.”
The priest puts his hand in the bucket and pulls out a wriggling earthworm a little longer than Kazu’s middle finger, but skinnier. He lays it down flat on the metal plate and holds the knife aloft. Suddenly Kazu is happy it’s not a bird or a mouse. He knows he couldn’t bear it. He wonders if they use earthworms now in every city or if only Odawara assesses in this fashion.
As the worm crawls around the plate, trapped by the edges and oblivious to its sad fate that day, the priest begins to pray, chanting to himself. Kazu can only stare at the plate, at the earthworm pulled that very morning from the dirt of the temple grounds. What sin could this earthworm possibly have anyhow? It burrows underground, seeks food and shelter. Humans, he understands, but animals? Worms?
When the priest’s prayer is completed, he asks the worm to forgive him. In any other circumstance, apologizing to an earthworm might be funny, but it’s definitely not here. Kazu watches as the priest’s knife cuts in a swift stroke. Blood spurts out as the creature’s life is taken away.
Kazu knows that upon death, the spirit leaves the body in shimmering strands of light. He’d seen it once in the neighborhood when a dead raccoon was found in an alleyway by one of the other boys. The raccoon’s spirit was there, still tethered to it like a kite string until a Sin Eater was dispatched from the local temple to take care of it. All spirits have sin, the priest explains to Kazu as small glimmers of light appear around the earthworm’s body.
“Spirits experience rage, envy, hatred. We covet what does not belong to us, we hurt those we ought to protect. It is the Sin Eater’s task to consume the sin so that the spirit may be cleansed and pass on to the next world. We call this absolution.”
Kazu watches the light surrounding the earthworm burn brighter as its spirit pours out, floating around it in strands thinner than a cat’s whisker. For a human, this happens on a much larger scale. More strands, much more sin.
The priest continues. “If the sin is not taken away, the person or creature remains unabsolved. In time, the spirit’s light darkens, takes control. The sin takes hold, and the creature becomes a monster.”
Kazu has never left Odawara, but he knows the stories. Of animals that die in the wild, of people that also die away from the cities. Instead of rotting away peacefully, they become vicious, angry, the embodiment of sin. The cities of Wakoku were built to not only protect them from Tsumi but from the way sin can affect everyone without absolution.
“So how do you consume it?” Kazu asks.
“If you have the Gift,” the priest says, holding out his hand, “we will learn now. Those who have it will naturally enter a trance, and their body absorbs the sin. You need only touch the spirit.”
Kazu lifts his hand, hesitating. He’s never seen a Sin Eater in trance. Most rites of absolution are performed away from people’s seeing. Touching the spirit of the dead, even an animal’s, is a pollution of the body. The Sin Eaters willingly accept the sin, willingly touch the dead and allow themselves to be polluted. If Kazu touches the spirit now and nothing happens, he needs only to bathe to clear his body of the pollution. But Sin Eaters will never be free of it again.
“Do not be afraid,” the priest says gently.
He pulls his hand back so Kazu can put his own forward. The earthworm is dead, and it cannot truly rest until it is absolved. The head priest is a Sin Eater, so if Kazu fails, absolution is still possible. He wonders if any of the children before him succeeded.
He takes a deep breath, silently praying that he won’t be able to do it. He lowers his fingers, seeing that his hand is shaking wildly. It’s the last thing he knows until he wakes on the floor of the room, and there are several priests gathered around him. Oh no, he thinks. He must have gone into trance. He must have consumed the earthworm’s sin. He must be a Sin Eater…
“Kazunari,” the priest is saying now while a priestess dabs at Kazu’s forehead with a damp cloth. There’s a shift in his voice, though. None of the kindness Kazu had heard during the assessment, none of the gentleness. There’s an edge to the man’s voice that he’s only used to hearing when his father is angry, when he overhears an argument coming from another house.
“Am I a Sin Eater?” he asks weakly, wondering why he’s hurting so much. He didn’t know going into trance hurt this badly.
“No,” the priest replies sharply. “You are not.”
-
He only managed to pull his trousers on when the intruder detectors went off, waking him from a deep sleep.
The front door downstairs opened with a bang. He’d locked it, he knew he’d locked it, so it had been forced open. “Nino!” Aiba screamed. “Nino, get down here!”
He’d never heard Aiba’s voice sound that way before, so the remnants of sleep faded in an instant. He nearly tumbled down the ladder in his haste to get down. The detectors got turned off outside, and Nino would have to yell at Aiba later if he’d taught his companions how to do it. They’d come and go whenever they felt like now.
He fumbled in the dark for a lantern and his matches, holding it aloft to discover that Aiba was back outside helping another man drag a body toward the shop.
Shoving down his disgust at the intrusion, he lit a few more lanterns and grabbed an armful of the coarse saddle blankets he sold. He had just gotten them down on the floor when Aiba and the other man came barging through the doorway.
“Nino, potions!” Aiba said, giving orders like it was his shop and not Nino’s.
It wasn’t the best light, but it gave him a look at what he was now dealing with. Aiba and the other man laid a third man down on the blankets. The man helping Aiba was closer to Nino’s size, short with a round face and panic in his eyes. The man on the blanket was unconscious, and in light gray robes stained almost black around the middle. He was a little larger, closer to Aiba in size with a shock of dark, shaggy hair and a face that might be handsome if he hadn’t fallen unconscious with his features twisted in agony. The short fellow crouched down and untied the unconscious man’s sash, gently pulling the robe open. The thinner robe underneath was soaked through with blood, and Nino was almost sick at the sight of him.
Aiba swatted at him. “Potions! Salves! Anything you’ve got, hurry!”
Nino nearly bit down on his tongue in his anger, setting the lantern down by the injured man’s head and racing around his counter.
“Sho-kun,” the short man was crying, patting the man’s face. “Sho-kun!”
Well, it seemed that this Sho-kun had gotten himself killed if the wound under his robe was as bad as the blood he’d lost implied. Nino tallied up the prices for each vial he pulled off the shelves, heading back for the victim. “How does it work?” Aiba asked. “How do they work, do you know?”
“I’m not a healer,” Nino protested.
“Give them to me,” the short man insisted, holding out his hands. They were strong-looking hands, rough and callused and covered in Sho’s blood. He was unashamed to cry in front of strangers, his face streaked with tears. This person meant something to him, clearly.
Maruyama and Nishikido thankfully stayed outside with Aiba’s wagon while Nino uncorked the vials one by one, handing them over. Aiba used a pocket knife to slice open Sho’s robe, leaving him in blood-soaked trunks and nothing else. Nino shut his eyes at the sight of the wound, but knew it was going to stick with him long after. He’d been gutted, sliced open across his abdomen. Hopefully the pain of it had knocked him out quickly. Such a wound would have been unbearable to manage while awake. He wasn’t dead yet, Nino realized. His spirit wasn’t visible. But he was probably close to it.
Sho’s friend took the vials from Nino’s hands. Curative potions, one after the other were upended over the man’s wounded body. Nine, fourteen, twenty of them splashed onto him before Nino saw them start to work. “It’s closing,” Aiba announced, wonderment in his voice. “The wound is closing!”
Aiba raced outside to fill a bucket at the well behind the shop, returning and nearly spilling half the water onto the floor in his clumsy haste. He set it down beside Sho, and Nino found some clean cloths. While Aiba cleaned the blood from the man’s middle, Sho’s friend poured potions with singular purpose until Nino finally had to take hold of the man by his wrist and shake him.
“It worked already, you’re just wasting them now.”
“His insides, maybe I should make him drink them,” the man mumbled, shaking like a leaf now that he wasn’t able to concentrate on pouring out the vials. “A wound like that, his insides…”
“If it’s stitching up the outside, it means it fixed the inside first. It’s powerful medicine,” Nino explained as gently as he could. “He’s going to be okay. He’s going to live.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, anger taking hold. “You said you weren’t a healer, so what do you know?”
“Ah ah ah, don’t fight,” Aiba interrupted, trying to make peace. He took a clean cloth and dabbed at Sho’s abdomen. “Look, see? He’s going to be fine.”
Where the wound had been the skin was now whole again, save for a scary looking scar traveling from Sho’s ribs across his body and down almost to the waistband of his trunks. It was ugly, a heavy red line that would probably be with the man the rest of his life. Potions fixed you, Nino knew, but they weren’t perfect. And with a wound like that, sliced open like a fish, he was lucky to only have a scar left behind.
“But he’s not waking up,” the man complained, still crying. “Why isn’t he waking up?”
“The potion fixes the injury, but he lost a lot of blood. You should be glad he’s still knocked out,” Nino said.
“We need to get him out of these,” Aiba carried on, poking at the ruined robes.
Together the three of them got the wounded man out of his clothes, covering him with another blanket. They didn’t dare move him, so they left him on the mound of blankets on the shop floor. Aiba tidied up, scrubbing the blood from the floorboards while Nino picked up the empty vials that had piled up beside Sho’s friend. The friend could only sit on the floor beside Sho, staring at him as though he could make the man wake from sheer force of will.
Eventually Nino grabbed Aiba by the arm, yanking him out of the shop and towards the cart shed, out of earshot of both his hired help snoozing by the wagon and the men in the shop.
“Alright, we saved the guy so now it’s time for the important questions,” Nino said, shoving Aiba hard until he nearly stumbled back. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, bringing them here?”
Aiba’s hands became fists, but he didn’t shove back. “We found them along the road. They needed help!”
“So bring them to a doctor! It’s six miles to the wall and more doctors than you can even imagine!”
Aiba was furious. “They needed help! You have potions, and maybe he wouldn’t have lasted another six miles! You saw what happened to him!”
“I saw the wound, Masaki, but I don’t know what happened to him. Who are they? Where did you find them? Bringing strangers here in the dead of night, you nearly scared me to death. Who are these people?”
“A Sin Eater,” Aiba said, hands on his hips. “A Sin Eater and his guardian. They were attacked by an unabsolved. Ohno-san managed to kill it with Nishikido’s help, but…”
“Which one’s which?”
“Sho-san is the Sin Eater, Ohno-san is the guardian.”
Nino nodded his head, laughing in irritation. That small guy, a guardian? “Let me get this straight, Aiba-san. Just so I am hearing you correctly. A Sin Eater with only one guardian?”
“That’s not so strange…”
“It’s very strange! And what were they doing? We’re not that far from Heiankyo, so they were either out there looking for unabsolved trouble or they’re the two unluckiest people in Wakoku.”
“I didn’t exactly interrogate them,” Aiba complained. “We just found them a few miles from here and turned around to bring them to you. You were the closest, and I know just how many potions you have.”
“How many potions I had, you mean,” Nino complained. “This guy almost wiped me out.”
“We’ll pay.”
Nino and Aiba both turned to find Sho’s friend, the guardian. Ohno-san. His face was more solemn than hysterical now, and he was holding a money pouch.
“We’ll pay for it. The potions, the blankets, new clothes…”
“No way,” Aiba said. “He needed help.”
“That’ll be eight ryō and fourteen hundred mon for the potions and curatives…”
“Nino!” Aiba interrupted.
“…seven blankets, so twenty-one thousand mon…”
Ohno-san’s expression remained steady while Aiba gave Nino a shake. “What do you think you’re doing?”
But Nino continued, unfazed. “The new clothes were mine, and I definitely don’t want them back now, so that will be a free service. But since that guy isn’t going to be up and on his feet for a while, I’ll want 8000 mon a night until you leave. I’ll drop it to 4000 if you sleep in the shed.”
“He’s kidding,” Aiba tried to assure Ohno-san, turning to Nino with a shocked expression. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?”
“They needed help!” Aiba complained.
“And help costs money,” Nino shot back.
“He’s a Sin Eater! He could be the one to defeat Tsumi, and you’d rather bankrupt him!”
“Aiba-san,” Ohno interrupted, placing a hand on Aiba’s shoulder. “It’s okay, I said we’d pay for it. We wouldn’t have needed it anyway if I’d done my job and protected him better…”
Aiba was still angry, walking away towards his wagon before he said something he’d probably regret later. The three of them would probably camp out overnight just off of Nino’s property so they wouldn’t owe him a single mon. Aiba would do something like that. Nino ignored Aiba’s crusade to be kind and generous, steering Ohno-san back to the shop. Now that his friend was in the clear, his anger and emotion had seemingly subsided, leaving a quiet, solemn person in his place. His aura was different now. He was on the small side, certainly, but from his walk and the sword belted around him that Nino had finally noticed, there was no doubt the man was a guardian, a Sin Eater’s sworn protector.
While Sho slept, Ohno-san came clean. “We don’t have the money to pay you for everything right now. We don’t have very much at all, I’m afraid.” And this coming from the guy who had dumped maybe a gallon of potions onto his friend’s injured body. “But I can work. Here in the shop or if you want to make a different arrangement. I could find work in Heiankyo and give it all to you…”
Nino gritted his teeth at how calmly Ohno admitted that they were broke. “That would take a long time, guardian, paying back eight ryō with your labor. What about when he wakes up? Aren’t you on a pilgrimage?”
Ohno scratched at his head, and Nino could almost sense the guilt radiating off of the man in waves. It was a guardian’s duty to protect his Sin Eater at all costs to ensure they made it safely to Nihonbashi. The fact that such a catastrophe had befallen them so close to a big city like Heiankyo was weighing heavily on him. “Our pilgrimage so far has not exactly been traditional. What’s one more delay?”
Before Ohno-san could explain exactly what he meant, Nino held up a hand to quiet him. “Whatever, you’ll be stuck here a while, so tell me some other time. Tomorrow you go with Aiba-san to Heiankyo. Manual labor pays well, and they’re always looking for people to help reinforce the city walls. It’s hard work.”
“I’m not afraid of hard work,” Ohno insisted, meeting Nino’s eyes.
He held out his hand, wondering if he should have just borne the cost of saving Sho’s life. Now he was stuck with them until their debts were paid. Ohno’s grip was remarkably strong, making Nino bite the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out in pain. They shook on it, and now he had two unwanted houseguests.
part two
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Nino/Becky with side Sho/Kitagawa Keiko and hints of Jun/Ohno because sure why not. Aiba’s here too BTW.
Summary: Even though Kazu is only 10, he’s not stupid. When a Sin Eater faces Tsumi, he dies. That’s the whole point of the pilgrimage. They cross the Nihonbashi and to defeat him, you must give your life. But then he comes back, so what is the point? It’s throwing your life away, plain and simple.
Notes/Warnings: For this year's ninoexchange, 65,000 words. Death of minor characters, some killing and some wounded folks (but not graphically violent), angsty content. Inspired by Final Fantasy X (video game) with considerable tweaks to characters/plot. It's more of an alternate history/fantasy version of Japan. Many place names are inspired by the 53 Stations of the Tokaido, a travel route between Kyoto and Tokyo in the Edo period.
The powers of the 'Sin Eaters' in the story are somewhat inspired by Shinto shrine maidens (miko) and the itako (blind female shamans) who are said to have the power to remove evil spirits and communicate with the dead. Any other Shinto-esque influences in this story are intentional and probably not as well researched as they ought to be ;)
The title of the story comes from an English translation of Suteki da Ne, the theme song to Final Fantasy X.
Splashes of color pierced through the black night, accompanied by echoing rumbles. Fireworks, Nino realized with a roll of his eyes, locking up the cart shed for the evening. Always such a noisy sendoff and with such a limited return on the investment. Gunpowder was costly, and wasting it on a pilgrimage always left a bad taste in his mouth.
All of the Sin Eaters coming east passed through Heiankyo, the second largest of Wakoku’s cities. While most of the southern villages had feasts or bonfires to send their Sin Eaters off, Heiankyo always had to go bigger. Fireworks, multi-day celebrations after the rituals were out of the way. Nino, as a businessman, knew there was money in it, but he figured all the best spots to set up shop had been claimed for generations.
It really was the only celebrating that happened these days, especially now that the Calm was over. The guards on Heiankyo’s walls were on high alert, higher than usual, but at least within the walls there was fun to be had. Carnival games for the children, goldfish catching, spun sugar in fluffy mounds bigger than your head. The temples opened their gates, and well-wishers crammed inside for the chance to have a glimpse of the Sin Eater and their procession. It was the only chance the common folks usually got.
In a city like Heiankyo, most Sin Eaters spent their time being wined and dined by the city’s wealthy. They got to gorge themselves on luxuries and were given gifts and supplies for their pilgrimage. And in exchange, if they brought the Calm, Heiankyo’s wealthy could brag that it was their cloak the Sin Eater had worn on their journey. It was their mule she rode, their medicines and potions he had taken to stay strong. And if the pilgrimage ended without the Calm, no harm done. Maybe the next would be the one to succeed.
Nino’s shop was in the foothills due east of Heiankyo, high enough that on a clear day he could look down and see the squat brown roofs of houses within the city walls, punctuated here and there with the green of their inner gardens and yards. He could see the slums, where the buildings were built closer together. Those were closer to the wall, closer to the river, destroyed and rebuilt dozens of times over the years. He could see the guard towers dotting the walls at regular intervals. It had been several generations now that they’d built the guard towers out of wood. Rebuilding them in stone was wasteful. It was best to keep the stone for the walls themselves.
There were a handful of roads that led northeast from Heiankyo, more like dirt paths snaking through the rice paddies in most cases. But all of them came to the river at the same crossing, Sanjo Ohashi, and from there the Tokaido started. From Sanjo Ohashi the Tokaido entered the foothills, hard-packed dirt that had been worn down for centuries by the feet of travelers and pilgrimages alike. Nino’s shop was five miles from Sanjo Ohashi, not so far, but far enough to still make money. In a Calm, travel was common. People emigrated, many going northeast along the sea road despite the dangers, to seek safety and maybe wealth (if they were lucky) in Odawara.
But now the Calm was over, and this one had only lasted for two years. At one time the Calm had apparently lasted for decades, but the priests were always blabbing on that with more people, there was more sin. The more civilization spread, the more greedy man became, and the faster Tsumi returned. Nino didn’t really care what the reasoning was. All he knew was that business right now was awful.
It had been almost a year since the Calm had faded, since Tsumi had returned to thin the human herd. He, she, nobody knew and nobody cared. Tsumi was a monster, a dark shadow, and there was simply no hiding from it. Or at least that was what the priests believed. Nino, however, considered himself a practical sort of man. In his thirty-one years of life, many of them spent in observation of the world around him, he knew that Tsumi almost always came from the sea, surging up over the walls (if a city was lucky enough to even have them, like Odawara or Heiankyo) to wreak havoc. And yet almost all the cities and villages in Wakoku were within a mile or so of the sea or a river that led to it. The hills, the mountains, this was where everyone ought to be. It was why Nino had settled there and why Nino wouldn’t leave.
Of course the hills and mountains came with their own assorted risks. Live animals, unabsolved animals, profiteering types, and obviously the unabsolved profiteering types, unwilling to accept their deaths because there was still some loot that needed pilfering somewhere. And these were ever-present worries in the hills, in the long stretches of land between the walled towns. Risk death in the countryside every day or enjoy the Calm from the comfort of your walled city? After all, Tsumi would only be back for a little while and eventually a Sin Eater would send him on his merry way once more.
It was something that made sense a few generations back but made little sense now. The Calm times were growing shorter, Tsumi returned stronger than ever, thousands perished, the cycle repeated. Nobody knew how long it had been happening, and nobody knew when it was going to end, if maybe this time the Sin Eater would be able to banish Tsumi from their world for good. From the day you were born to the day you died, there was no doubt that Tsumi was bound to affect your life at some point. If it didn’t kill you, it killed a family member, your neighbor, your entire town.
And so now the fireworks in Heiankyo were brighter, the feasts and carnivals were costlier. Only the Sin Eaters could save them, and it was the only way for the common folk to say “thank you, at least, for trying.” Over the past several months, Nino had seen at least seventeen Sin Eaters cross at Sanjo Ohashi. They didn’t always stop at his shop, so he didn’t know how many were Heiankyo natives or how many had only stopped at Heiankyo on the way from one of the backwater towns further south. The “Tsumi Bait” villages, the more arrogant residents of Heiankyo called them, because they were targeted heavily. They were poorer people, could barely get their homes rebuilt with the shorter and shorter Calm times so the concept of city walls was unthinkable and impossible. Tsumi Bait.
Seventeen from Heiankyo, who knew how many else from Mikawa or Odawara or any of the eastern Tsumi Bait towns. A full year and still Tsumi was spotted up and down the coast. Still Tsumi’s wrath was visited upon the people of Wakoku. The pilgrimage was long, it was tiring, and nobody came back. When Nino was a kid, his grandmother told him stories about Sin Eater guardians who had managed to return from the pilgrimage. Tall tales, most likely, about men and women who’d left in their prime only to return with their wits gone, their bodies wasting away, unable to speak of the things they’d seen. Bedtime stories, Nino’s mother had always said with a sigh, chiding her mother-in-law. Unless they left early or the entire party gave up, a pilgrimage was a one-way trip.
Nino stopped to stare out across the valley, watching the fireworks light up the skies over Heiankyo. Around his shop and the cart shed, the ever-present hum of his intruder detectors buzzed low and gentle. It would be eighteen now, eighteen people and who knew how many guardians, that had headed east up the Tokaido. As Nino entered his shop, locking up and climbing the stepladder up to his living quarters on the second floor, he wondered how many it would take to bring the Calm this time. And if the Calm continued the way it had, shorter and shorter every time, what would happen if they ran out of Sin Eaters?
-
“Hiroshi, put him down,” his mother says. “You’ll block the people behind us. He’s too old for that.”
“So what,” his father snaps back, hoisting him up so he can sit on his shoulders. “This won’t be the last time, there will be more of these in the weeks to come.”
“Kazu, are you okay up there?” his mother asks.
He nods, mostly oblivious to what his parents are arguing about. They argue a lot. About money and the shop and about Grandma, but Kazu is much more interested in the temple. There’s no more room inside. Odawara Jingu always seems to fill up fast when a Sin Eater is preparing to leave. Instead they are just outside the torii at the shrine entrance, two rows of people back from the wooden gates the city watch have put up.
He can still smell the paint since they’ve touched up the gate just in time for the first pilgrimage to depart. It’s hard to see now since it’s dark and there’s only lantern light all along the procession route, but the torii in the daytime is a brilliant red color. It’s Kazu’s favorite color, the torii red.
There’s a roar from inside the temple grounds that frightens Kazu at first, and he shuts his eyes. But then his father’s hands, strong and firm where they’re holding his legs, squeeze tighter. Reassured, Kazu opens his eyes again, tries desperately to see around the torii to what’s happening inside.
“She’s coming,” his mother is saying, shouting a bit to be heard over the crowd. The streets outside Odawara Jingu where they’re standing are even more packed than the temple grounds. She’s finished her prayers and is ready to leave the city to go out the Great Eastern Gate. The Sin Eater, his mother told him earlier at home, is from here in Odawara. Lady Haruka of House Igawa in the upper city.
When he sees her, he finds it hard to believe she’s a lady at all. Lady Haruka is only seven years older than Kazu, fourteen and the youngest Sin Eater in decades. She’s accompanied by four men, cousins apparently because House Igawa is unwilling to send its son and heir as guardian. His mother calls this sad, his father calls it common sense.
Sin Eaters wear white when they depart, pure as mountain snow. From the decorative clips in her dark black hair to every layer of her kimono and down to the cloth shoes on her feet, Lady Haruka is a radiant white, off to battle with Tsumi, with sin and evil itself. Like everyone around him, Kazu waves with all his might as Lady Haruka passes. She doesn’t wave back but bows her head a few times as people toss flowers at her feet. White lilies for purity, white roses for innocence. The only flowers that aren’t white are blood red spider lilies.
Kazu watches Lady Haruka’s white-shoed feet step over the red flowers, marring the cloth with scarlet stains from the blooms. “Morbid,” his father complains, but it’s not until later that Kazu learns why he said so.
It’s his Grandma who tells him, tucking him into bed the following night.
“Those flowers, the Higanbana,” she says, kissing his forehead. “They’re for someone you will never meet again.”
-
He woke to the intruder alarm, his legs snagging in his blanket as he struggled to get out of his futon. The blare would continue until he went outside and manually reset the detectors. He hurry-stumbled to the window, looking down in irritation to see what had tripped it. It was daytime already, maybe almost midday, but Nino had been sleeping in now that the Calm was over and customers were sparse on the Tokaido.
When he spied the intruder, he was tempted to open the window and find a knife to fling at him. But it would waste a perfectly good knife. The team of oxen had already been unshackled from the wagon and had tripped the detector. The two animals, oblivious, dined happily on the grass in Nino’s front yard. The oxen’s owner was already unloading goods from the wagon nearby.
Nino grumbled to himself, pulling on a halfway clean shirt and trousers (only the best for a guest like this) and climbed down his ladder. The whole shop was vibrating with the alarm and he unlocked the front door, slipping on some sandals and hurrying across the lawn to recalibrate his detectors.
When he straightened back up, turning around ready to unleash a litany of curses, the intruder only set down a sack of rice and waved. “Hey Nino!”
“I was sleeping, you dimwit!”
This didn’t rattle the intruder one bit. Nino’s insults always slid right off of him as though they’d never been said. Even in the cool air of the foothills, Aiba Masaki was covered in sweat, his face and arms darkened from many days’ travel in the sunshine of the open road. The two thugs he employed to guard his wagon, Nishikido and Maruyama (or as Nino thought of them, Dumb and Dumber), were helping to unload the wagon, their swords nowhere in sight. Some protection detail.
“You will not believe what they are charging for bamboo shoots in Mikawa these days!” Aiba was complaining in his husky voice, mopping his brow before reaching for a crate of healing potions. “When I was a kid, I used to dig ‘em up with my Grandpa and we sold them by the side of the road for 5 mon a piece!”
“What a lovely story,” Nino replied. “I don’t care.”
Aiba ignored him once again, gesturing to the stuff he’d unloaded. “That’s everything for you. The rest is going on to Heiankyo.”
Nino held out his palm. “Your animals are eating my front yard.”
Aiba rolled his eyes, fumbling in his pocket for the coin pouch he kept there. “It’s just grass.”
“And when it’s all been eaten, it’s no longer grass. It’s ex-grass. Former grass. Patches of dirt, you could say,” Nino continued, still holding out his palm until Aiba marched across to him and set a handful of mon in his hand. “A pleasure as always, Aiba-san.”
“You’re going to end up giving me all of that back and then some!” Aiba complained, heading back for the boxes. He gestured to his employees to start hauling things into Nino’s shop.
“We’ll handle that transaction when we get to it. For now, we’re even again.”
As of that summer, Nino had spent eight years in his shop, eight years in what the Heiankyo townsfolk called “the frontier,” even if he was only five miles from Sanjo Ohashi and six from the walls. And for six of those years, Aiba Masaki had been his friend. Sometimes Nino used the word “friend” kind of loosely when it came to Aiba. He was noisy, he told bad jokes, and was often lacking in common sense.
However, he was a loyal person (the dumb often were) and his prices were reasonable. Aiba’s caravan (if you could call one wagon, two oxen, and three idiots a caravan) ran the western Tokaido route, back and forth between Heiankyo and Mikawa. Rain or shine, Calm or no, he was on the road trading and delivering orders to the various shops and hamlets along the way. He could make the trip in two weeks, one way, so Nino saw him twice a month, going to and coming from Heiankyo. Though his caravan guards occasionally changed, Aiba himself never did.
He was really the only friend that Nino had. Nino preferred solitude and the feeling had only grown stronger as the years went by. He could chat with emigrants and travelers during the Calm, could sell his wares to people unwilling to pay Heiankyo prices, could offer specialty items to Sin Eaters and their guardians. So it wasn’t as though he was completely alone. But there were few regulars. Nino could see new faces, learn new stories, and simply let them move on. Aiba was the only one who kept coming back.
Aiba was half a year older, the two of them both having been born during Lord Kondo’s Calm. Nino knew that parts of Aiba’s past were a sore spot, so he never asked about them, and Aiba knew the case was the same for Nino. So there were some blanks that stayed blank, but Aiba was the type of person who always had something to chat about even if it wasn’t about his past. He’d grown up somewhere south, on an island. Nino assumed that Tsumi was a big fan of the place since the southern islands were easy pickings, although Aiba was oddly cheerful for a southerner. Maybe it was an entire island of people as happy-go-lucky as him, despite the way the world worked, the way the world continuously screwed them over.
Aiba talked Nino’s ear off with stories of the people he met on the road. During the Calm, he often volunteered the use of his wagon to people traveling. And when Tsumi was back, he sometimes ferried Sin Eaters and their guardians in the same way. He was a decent person, a truly decent person. He was the kind of person who usually ended up becoming a guardian, willing to go east and probably never come home. Nino had asked him once if he knew any Sin Eaters or if he knew any guardians. But Aiba had clammed up, shaken his head, changed the topic. So maybe Aiba was a good person, but he wasn’t keen on self-sacrifice.
Dumb and Dumber finished bringing things into the store, and before Nino could stop them they went up the ladder and started helping themselves to the snacks they knew were in Nino’s cupboards. Aiba tethered his oxen and followed Nino inside. While Nino set to work unpacking the supplies Aiba had brought for him from Mikawa, Aiba himself perched on Nino’s shop counter with his trusty kendama.
Clack, clack, clack, Aiba swung the wooden kendama, getting the bright green ball to land in the cups every time. Nino had stolen the kendama before, held it ransom as testament to Aiba’s occasional absent-mindedness. It had gotten Nino a crate full of potions for half the price.
“Another one left last night,” Nino said, arranging the small glass potion vials on his shelves with care. Blessed by temple priests and priestesses, some of the potions cured poisons while others increased your attention span. Others could even heal wounds, fight infection. All helpful things for travelers on the Tokaido and the dark world beyond it.
“Hmm,” Aiba replied, swinging the kendama once more and this time catching the ball on the central spike. “We must have been camped out when they passed by. Did you see who it was?”
“Nope,” Nino said. “Has anyone even gotten close yet? What’s taking so long this time?”
Pilgrimages were tough, certainly, but nobody had defeated Tsumi yet. Only Sin Eaters and their guardians crossed the Nihonbashi, leaving the Tokaido behind. Nino didn’t actually know how long the journey took from there. For some successful Sin Eaters it was months, for others days. Nobody else was curious enough to wander up there and find out what the geography was like. Enough people were dying in their own towns, in their own familiar haunts, to bother going east to find out. Even during the Calm nobody dared to undertake such a dangerous, unpredictable journey.
“Maybe there’s bad weather up there. A blizzard.”
Nino shrugged. “Well, if one of them could hurry up and get it over with, that would be great. I’m going to go broke at this rate.”
Aiba allowed himself a small grin. “Speaking of your finances, you got any spare roofing tiles laying around here?”
“The hell do you need roofing tiles for?”
Aiba shook his head. “Ah, just someone was looking to trade. They’re, uh, remodeling or something? I don’t know, Mikawa people.”
Nino rolled his eyes, moving a curative potion vial over half an inch. It would catch the sunlight from the window perfectly, and any Sin Eater worth a damn would be drawn to it. “You have to stop doing favors for people. What’s the plan here, load your wagon down with tiles for this Mikawa weirdo and have no room for your own merchandise?”
“Sometimes, Nino, it’s nice to be nice to other people.”
“Overrated,” he shot back. Aiba with that dopey smile of his was always on a quest to make Nino into a “decent human being.” His suggestions included offering discounts to Sin Eaters (“after all, they’re saving the world!”), smiling at shop customers, and getting a dog for companionship.
Nino was more interested in his financial bottom line, staying open so he could stay alive and live comfortably. His current savings, hidden in a locked box under the floorboards in his room, had finally topped 100 gold ryō coins. At the rate he was going, he could probably retire by age 40 or 45. Unless, of course, the Calm times kept getting shorter.
He could hear a laugh from upstairs, and he moved from behind his counter to shout up the ladder. “This is a place of business, shut your traps!”
Aiba grinned, knowing full well that nobody else would visit said place of business but them that day. “Maru-chan’s dad is getting married again. The young one.”
Nino sighed, ignoring the chuckles and merriment from upstairs as Aiba’s companions ate his food stores, and he tried to further ignore Aiba’s attempts at sharing bits and pieces of said companions’ lives. The last time they had come back from Mikawa, they’d spoken of nothing but Maruyama’s strange family and the young woman the father had been courting. Younger than the son, Maru would soon have a stepmother. The conversation usually turned to the idea of son seducing stepmom, and it was then that Nino went outside to tend to his carts.
Aiba shoved his kendama in the back pocket of his trousers and took a look around the shop. “We won’t stay and bother you today, I can tell when I’m not wanted. I’m meeting a seller in Heiankyo anyhow this evening. Hair combs. Need any hair combs? Jade ones, even.”
Nino hauled another crate of potions onto the counter. “Do I look like I need a hair comb, Masaki?”
“For a special lady maybe?”
“You are the closest thing I have to a special lady, and I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”
Aiba smiled again, unfazed. “I could bring you that too! A special lady, I mean. Maybe that’s what you need here, a woman to cheer the place up. Who wants to buy potions and rice from a skinny little sourpuss? A wife, that’s what I should bring you.”
Nino offered a rude hand gesture in reply, heading for his ladder and his money upstairs to pay Aiba and his companions for the delivery. Yeah, a woman. That was the last thing Nino needed, another mouth to feed when he could barely take care of himself. It had been a while since he’d even been with someone. An eager group of courtesans heading to Odawara just before the Calm ended had patronized his business, and he’d been lonely enough to patronize theirs. But a wife? A permanent female fixture? There was no way he was suited for something like that. He wasn’t husband material, plain and simple.
He booted Dumb and Dumber from his table, where they’d already managed to gobble up all the thin, mealy carrots Nino had grown in his back garden. They headed down the ladder, out of sight as Nino shifted his small bookcase aside and pried up the floorboard to retrieve his money box. He counted out what he owed Aiba and put the box back, heading down again to see that they were already packing up. A mercifully short visit this time. Aiba was always more inclined to stay longer after coming from Heiankyo. He usually had more stories from the gambling dens, the red light district on his return trip.
“Please do not kidnap any women on my behalf,” Nino warned his friend, counting the money out into his sweaty palm.
“I was joking.”
“No woman needs to be stuck with me forever,” he grumbled.
Aiba patted him on the shoulder. “There’s someone out there who would be happy to love the stingy, unfriendly card cheat you are. Mark my words. The Calm will come soon, and maybe you’ll change your tune.”
“Get off my property.”
With that Aiba ruffled his hair, ducking away before Nino could retaliate, and getting his oxen team hooked back up. He waved cheerfully from his wagon as Nishikido walked in front and Maruyama behind, kicking up dirt on the road and heading down to the city. Nino watched him go, waiting until he knew Aiba couldn’t see him before waving back.
-
He doesn’t want to go. They’re in the middle of a Calm right now, what does it even matter? But he’s just turned 10, and it’s Odawara law. “It’s something everyone does,” his mother had explained several times as his birthday had drawn closer, including that morning. “And the odds are against it. They say only one in ten have the potential.”
“And what if there are nine people in line ahead of me?”
“That’s not how probability works,” his father had chimed in from the other room, fingers flying across the abacus as he tallied up their shop’s earnings.
His parents had sent him from the house alone, as is common practice. The wealthy families from the upper city tend to have priests visit them privately, but Kazu isn’t from a wealthy family. Gift Day is held every midsummer, and for people in the lower city, that means the Odawara Jingu. All boys and girls who have reached the age of 10 in the past year are required to visit and be assessed.
But even if he has the so-called “Gift,” he doesn’t want it. He doesn’t want to be a Sin Eater. For some families it’s a point of pride to have someone with the Gift, even if the person doesn’t go on pilgrimage. After all, there is always a need for a Sin Eater back home and not on the road. Some families, his father has explained, intermarry with particularly Gifted families in order to increase the likelihood of producing more. Somehow it doesn’t matter to them what happens to Sin Eaters on pilgrimage. It seems that family pride, being able to boast about that person, is more important than losing them.
Because even though Kazu is only 10, he’s not stupid. When a Sin Eater faces Tsumi, he dies. That’s the whole point of the pilgrimage. They cross the Nihonbashi, enter Yomi, and face Tsumi. To defeat him, you must give your life. With all the sin they’ve consumed, they’re somehow able to kill him. But then he comes back, so what is the point? It’s throwing your life away, plain and simple. Tsumi always returns, and it doesn’t matter how much sin they eat first.
Odawara is the largest city in Wakoku, so there’s plenty of other children in line at the temple when Kazu arrives. His birth was registered here at Odawara Jingu, so the temple knows how old he is and who his parents are. If he hadn’t come willingly, they would have come and dragged him here. He’d stubbornly refused to come out of his futon that morning until his mother had almost cried at the thought of such shame. For most people, Gift Day is exciting, especially if you found out you were a Sin Eater. You were special. But Kazu knows he isn’t special and has no desire to be. Kazu doesn’t want to be special if it means he could die because of it.
He recognizes Shunsuke-kun from the kimono shop a few blocks over. He was born the same day, and their mothers talk about it every time they meet. Kazu stays behind him, hoping that if someone born on that day has to be a Sin Eater that it’s Shunsuke. They say you have to be pure of heart to be a Sin Eater anyhow, so maybe wishing such a thing on Shunsuke means Kazu isn’t pure of heart to begin with.
The temple grounds are kept empty on Gift Day so nobody can wander the grounds and try to interfere with the assessment. Kazu follows Shunsuke up the steps and into one of the buildings that houses the temple priests. They remove their shoes and pad across a squeaky wooden floor, a narrow passageway that reeks of incense so much Kazu worries he may vomit from both the stench and from his own fear.
The gathered 10 year olds of Odawara are then corralled in a tatami-mat chamber where they are expected to sit quietly and meditate, praying that they’ve been blessed with the Gift and thus the potential to change the world. Kazu sits toward the back of the room, close to the exit, behind Shunsuke and his happy smile. Shunsuke seems to not have a care in the world. He’d be a better Sin Eater anyway, Kazu thinks.
Soon the first child is called, and Kazu focuses on breathing. He’s never experienced something this scary before, not even when his father is drunk and says mean things. As time passes, Shunsuke is called and disappears down another corridor. It’s the head priest of Odawara Jingu who performs the assessment, and for most people, it’s the only time they will meet him. But Sin Eaters train with the head priest, learning to harness their abilities. And of those, many end up going east on pilgrimage when the Calm fades.
He can still smell the incense, and it makes his eyes water so much that when his name is called and he is led down the corridor, the priestess guiding him lets him use her handkerchief to dry his eyes. “Most save their tears until after the assessment,” she teases him gently.
Then he’s brought to the room. It’s maybe half the size of the waiting room, stifling hot. He remembers his father’s words from the night before. “When we were assessed, they were still using birds, sometimes mice. You should be happy they’ve changed their ways for this generation.”
The room is void of furniture. Only the bald priest in his dark, heavy robes kneels in the center of the room. To the left of him is a wooden bucket and before him is a metal plate. In his hand, there’s a small knife.
“Come forward,” the priest says, and Kazu swallows down his fear as best he can. He can’t shame his parents in front of this man. The temples of Odawara have the power to affect almost anything in the city, and if he behaves poorly it will certainly reflect on his parents’ business.
Kazu kneels opposite the priest, bowing his head.
“Your House and name.”
“House Ninomiya,” he says as confidently as he can manage, hoping not to stumble over his words. His mother practiced this with him dozens of times. “I am called Kazunari, and I have reached 10 years of age.”
The priest puts his hand in the bucket and pulls out a wriggling earthworm a little longer than Kazu’s middle finger, but skinnier. He lays it down flat on the metal plate and holds the knife aloft. Suddenly Kazu is happy it’s not a bird or a mouse. He knows he couldn’t bear it. He wonders if they use earthworms now in every city or if only Odawara assesses in this fashion.
As the worm crawls around the plate, trapped by the edges and oblivious to its sad fate that day, the priest begins to pray, chanting to himself. Kazu can only stare at the plate, at the earthworm pulled that very morning from the dirt of the temple grounds. What sin could this earthworm possibly have anyhow? It burrows underground, seeks food and shelter. Humans, he understands, but animals? Worms?
When the priest’s prayer is completed, he asks the worm to forgive him. In any other circumstance, apologizing to an earthworm might be funny, but it’s definitely not here. Kazu watches as the priest’s knife cuts in a swift stroke. Blood spurts out as the creature’s life is taken away.
Kazu knows that upon death, the spirit leaves the body in shimmering strands of light. He’d seen it once in the neighborhood when a dead raccoon was found in an alleyway by one of the other boys. The raccoon’s spirit was there, still tethered to it like a kite string until a Sin Eater was dispatched from the local temple to take care of it. All spirits have sin, the priest explains to Kazu as small glimmers of light appear around the earthworm’s body.
“Spirits experience rage, envy, hatred. We covet what does not belong to us, we hurt those we ought to protect. It is the Sin Eater’s task to consume the sin so that the spirit may be cleansed and pass on to the next world. We call this absolution.”
Kazu watches the light surrounding the earthworm burn brighter as its spirit pours out, floating around it in strands thinner than a cat’s whisker. For a human, this happens on a much larger scale. More strands, much more sin.
The priest continues. “If the sin is not taken away, the person or creature remains unabsolved. In time, the spirit’s light darkens, takes control. The sin takes hold, and the creature becomes a monster.”
Kazu has never left Odawara, but he knows the stories. Of animals that die in the wild, of people that also die away from the cities. Instead of rotting away peacefully, they become vicious, angry, the embodiment of sin. The cities of Wakoku were built to not only protect them from Tsumi but from the way sin can affect everyone without absolution.
“So how do you consume it?” Kazu asks.
“If you have the Gift,” the priest says, holding out his hand, “we will learn now. Those who have it will naturally enter a trance, and their body absorbs the sin. You need only touch the spirit.”
Kazu lifts his hand, hesitating. He’s never seen a Sin Eater in trance. Most rites of absolution are performed away from people’s seeing. Touching the spirit of the dead, even an animal’s, is a pollution of the body. The Sin Eaters willingly accept the sin, willingly touch the dead and allow themselves to be polluted. If Kazu touches the spirit now and nothing happens, he needs only to bathe to clear his body of the pollution. But Sin Eaters will never be free of it again.
“Do not be afraid,” the priest says gently.
He pulls his hand back so Kazu can put his own forward. The earthworm is dead, and it cannot truly rest until it is absolved. The head priest is a Sin Eater, so if Kazu fails, absolution is still possible. He wonders if any of the children before him succeeded.
He takes a deep breath, silently praying that he won’t be able to do it. He lowers his fingers, seeing that his hand is shaking wildly. It’s the last thing he knows until he wakes on the floor of the room, and there are several priests gathered around him. Oh no, he thinks. He must have gone into trance. He must have consumed the earthworm’s sin. He must be a Sin Eater…
“Kazunari,” the priest is saying now while a priestess dabs at Kazu’s forehead with a damp cloth. There’s a shift in his voice, though. None of the kindness Kazu had heard during the assessment, none of the gentleness. There’s an edge to the man’s voice that he’s only used to hearing when his father is angry, when he overhears an argument coming from another house.
“Am I a Sin Eater?” he asks weakly, wondering why he’s hurting so much. He didn’t know going into trance hurt this badly.
“No,” the priest replies sharply. “You are not.”
-
He only managed to pull his trousers on when the intruder detectors went off, waking him from a deep sleep.
The front door downstairs opened with a bang. He’d locked it, he knew he’d locked it, so it had been forced open. “Nino!” Aiba screamed. “Nino, get down here!”
He’d never heard Aiba’s voice sound that way before, so the remnants of sleep faded in an instant. He nearly tumbled down the ladder in his haste to get down. The detectors got turned off outside, and Nino would have to yell at Aiba later if he’d taught his companions how to do it. They’d come and go whenever they felt like now.
He fumbled in the dark for a lantern and his matches, holding it aloft to discover that Aiba was back outside helping another man drag a body toward the shop.
Shoving down his disgust at the intrusion, he lit a few more lanterns and grabbed an armful of the coarse saddle blankets he sold. He had just gotten them down on the floor when Aiba and the other man came barging through the doorway.
“Nino, potions!” Aiba said, giving orders like it was his shop and not Nino’s.
It wasn’t the best light, but it gave him a look at what he was now dealing with. Aiba and the other man laid a third man down on the blankets. The man helping Aiba was closer to Nino’s size, short with a round face and panic in his eyes. The man on the blanket was unconscious, and in light gray robes stained almost black around the middle. He was a little larger, closer to Aiba in size with a shock of dark, shaggy hair and a face that might be handsome if he hadn’t fallen unconscious with his features twisted in agony. The short fellow crouched down and untied the unconscious man’s sash, gently pulling the robe open. The thinner robe underneath was soaked through with blood, and Nino was almost sick at the sight of him.
Aiba swatted at him. “Potions! Salves! Anything you’ve got, hurry!”
Nino nearly bit down on his tongue in his anger, setting the lantern down by the injured man’s head and racing around his counter.
“Sho-kun,” the short man was crying, patting the man’s face. “Sho-kun!”
Well, it seemed that this Sho-kun had gotten himself killed if the wound under his robe was as bad as the blood he’d lost implied. Nino tallied up the prices for each vial he pulled off the shelves, heading back for the victim. “How does it work?” Aiba asked. “How do they work, do you know?”
“I’m not a healer,” Nino protested.
“Give them to me,” the short man insisted, holding out his hands. They were strong-looking hands, rough and callused and covered in Sho’s blood. He was unashamed to cry in front of strangers, his face streaked with tears. This person meant something to him, clearly.
Maruyama and Nishikido thankfully stayed outside with Aiba’s wagon while Nino uncorked the vials one by one, handing them over. Aiba used a pocket knife to slice open Sho’s robe, leaving him in blood-soaked trunks and nothing else. Nino shut his eyes at the sight of the wound, but knew it was going to stick with him long after. He’d been gutted, sliced open across his abdomen. Hopefully the pain of it had knocked him out quickly. Such a wound would have been unbearable to manage while awake. He wasn’t dead yet, Nino realized. His spirit wasn’t visible. But he was probably close to it.
Sho’s friend took the vials from Nino’s hands. Curative potions, one after the other were upended over the man’s wounded body. Nine, fourteen, twenty of them splashed onto him before Nino saw them start to work. “It’s closing,” Aiba announced, wonderment in his voice. “The wound is closing!”
Aiba raced outside to fill a bucket at the well behind the shop, returning and nearly spilling half the water onto the floor in his clumsy haste. He set it down beside Sho, and Nino found some clean cloths. While Aiba cleaned the blood from the man’s middle, Sho’s friend poured potions with singular purpose until Nino finally had to take hold of the man by his wrist and shake him.
“It worked already, you’re just wasting them now.”
“His insides, maybe I should make him drink them,” the man mumbled, shaking like a leaf now that he wasn’t able to concentrate on pouring out the vials. “A wound like that, his insides…”
“If it’s stitching up the outside, it means it fixed the inside first. It’s powerful medicine,” Nino explained as gently as he could. “He’s going to be okay. He’s going to live.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, anger taking hold. “You said you weren’t a healer, so what do you know?”
“Ah ah ah, don’t fight,” Aiba interrupted, trying to make peace. He took a clean cloth and dabbed at Sho’s abdomen. “Look, see? He’s going to be fine.”
Where the wound had been the skin was now whole again, save for a scary looking scar traveling from Sho’s ribs across his body and down almost to the waistband of his trunks. It was ugly, a heavy red line that would probably be with the man the rest of his life. Potions fixed you, Nino knew, but they weren’t perfect. And with a wound like that, sliced open like a fish, he was lucky to only have a scar left behind.
“But he’s not waking up,” the man complained, still crying. “Why isn’t he waking up?”
“The potion fixes the injury, but he lost a lot of blood. You should be glad he’s still knocked out,” Nino said.
“We need to get him out of these,” Aiba carried on, poking at the ruined robes.
Together the three of them got the wounded man out of his clothes, covering him with another blanket. They didn’t dare move him, so they left him on the mound of blankets on the shop floor. Aiba tidied up, scrubbing the blood from the floorboards while Nino picked up the empty vials that had piled up beside Sho’s friend. The friend could only sit on the floor beside Sho, staring at him as though he could make the man wake from sheer force of will.
Eventually Nino grabbed Aiba by the arm, yanking him out of the shop and towards the cart shed, out of earshot of both his hired help snoozing by the wagon and the men in the shop.
“Alright, we saved the guy so now it’s time for the important questions,” Nino said, shoving Aiba hard until he nearly stumbled back. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, bringing them here?”
Aiba’s hands became fists, but he didn’t shove back. “We found them along the road. They needed help!”
“So bring them to a doctor! It’s six miles to the wall and more doctors than you can even imagine!”
Aiba was furious. “They needed help! You have potions, and maybe he wouldn’t have lasted another six miles! You saw what happened to him!”
“I saw the wound, Masaki, but I don’t know what happened to him. Who are they? Where did you find them? Bringing strangers here in the dead of night, you nearly scared me to death. Who are these people?”
“A Sin Eater,” Aiba said, hands on his hips. “A Sin Eater and his guardian. They were attacked by an unabsolved. Ohno-san managed to kill it with Nishikido’s help, but…”
“Which one’s which?”
“Sho-san is the Sin Eater, Ohno-san is the guardian.”
Nino nodded his head, laughing in irritation. That small guy, a guardian? “Let me get this straight, Aiba-san. Just so I am hearing you correctly. A Sin Eater with only one guardian?”
“That’s not so strange…”
“It’s very strange! And what were they doing? We’re not that far from Heiankyo, so they were either out there looking for unabsolved trouble or they’re the two unluckiest people in Wakoku.”
“I didn’t exactly interrogate them,” Aiba complained. “We just found them a few miles from here and turned around to bring them to you. You were the closest, and I know just how many potions you have.”
“How many potions I had, you mean,” Nino complained. “This guy almost wiped me out.”
“We’ll pay.”
Nino and Aiba both turned to find Sho’s friend, the guardian. Ohno-san. His face was more solemn than hysterical now, and he was holding a money pouch.
“We’ll pay for it. The potions, the blankets, new clothes…”
“No way,” Aiba said. “He needed help.”
“That’ll be eight ryō and fourteen hundred mon for the potions and curatives…”
“Nino!” Aiba interrupted.
“…seven blankets, so twenty-one thousand mon…”
Ohno-san’s expression remained steady while Aiba gave Nino a shake. “What do you think you’re doing?”
But Nino continued, unfazed. “The new clothes were mine, and I definitely don’t want them back now, so that will be a free service. But since that guy isn’t going to be up and on his feet for a while, I’ll want 8000 mon a night until you leave. I’ll drop it to 4000 if you sleep in the shed.”
“He’s kidding,” Aiba tried to assure Ohno-san, turning to Nino with a shocked expression. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?”
“They needed help!” Aiba complained.
“And help costs money,” Nino shot back.
“He’s a Sin Eater! He could be the one to defeat Tsumi, and you’d rather bankrupt him!”
“Aiba-san,” Ohno interrupted, placing a hand on Aiba’s shoulder. “It’s okay, I said we’d pay for it. We wouldn’t have needed it anyway if I’d done my job and protected him better…”
Aiba was still angry, walking away towards his wagon before he said something he’d probably regret later. The three of them would probably camp out overnight just off of Nino’s property so they wouldn’t owe him a single mon. Aiba would do something like that. Nino ignored Aiba’s crusade to be kind and generous, steering Ohno-san back to the shop. Now that his friend was in the clear, his anger and emotion had seemingly subsided, leaving a quiet, solemn person in his place. His aura was different now. He was on the small side, certainly, but from his walk and the sword belted around him that Nino had finally noticed, there was no doubt the man was a guardian, a Sin Eater’s sworn protector.
While Sho slept, Ohno-san came clean. “We don’t have the money to pay you for everything right now. We don’t have very much at all, I’m afraid.” And this coming from the guy who had dumped maybe a gallon of potions onto his friend’s injured body. “But I can work. Here in the shop or if you want to make a different arrangement. I could find work in Heiankyo and give it all to you…”
Nino gritted his teeth at how calmly Ohno admitted that they were broke. “That would take a long time, guardian, paying back eight ryō with your labor. What about when he wakes up? Aren’t you on a pilgrimage?”
Ohno scratched at his head, and Nino could almost sense the guilt radiating off of the man in waves. It was a guardian’s duty to protect his Sin Eater at all costs to ensure they made it safely to Nihonbashi. The fact that such a catastrophe had befallen them so close to a big city like Heiankyo was weighing heavily on him. “Our pilgrimage so far has not exactly been traditional. What’s one more delay?”
Before Ohno-san could explain exactly what he meant, Nino held up a hand to quiet him. “Whatever, you’ll be stuck here a while, so tell me some other time. Tomorrow you go with Aiba-san to Heiankyo. Manual labor pays well, and they’re always looking for people to help reinforce the city walls. It’s hard work.”
“I’m not afraid of hard work,” Ohno insisted, meeting Nino’s eyes.
He held out his hand, wondering if he should have just borne the cost of saving Sho’s life. Now he was stuck with them until their debts were paid. Ohno’s grip was remarkably strong, making Nino bite the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out in pain. They shook on it, and now he had two unwanted houseguests.
part two