I noticed Haruto was missing before the sun had fully reached the western slope.
That alone should not have unsettled me as much as it did.
Haruto was quiet by nature. He had always known how to fold himself into spaces people overlooked. If he wished not to be found for an hour or two, then most of Hoshimine Village would consider that a blessing and never think of him again. But I had known him too long to confuse silence with absence. There were places he drifted toward when the village pressed too hard against him. The dead tree beyond the southern field. The back of Old Genji's barn. The outer fence line where the grass grew high enough to half-hide someone sitting down. The little rise overlooking the lower path where he liked to pretend he was only resting and not escaping.
By midday I had checked all of them. He was nowhere.
I stood for a moment beside the dead tree with one hand resting against the old lightning-split wood and looked out over the grass moving softly in the wind. The field below shimmered pale green beneath the afternoon light. A few crows crossed the sky. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once and was quiet again.
And still no Haruto.
I exhaled through my nose and turned back toward the village.
The service yesterday still lingered in me, though I could not have said why. The chapel had felt smaller than usual. The air thicker. The prayers heavier in the mouth. Father had spoken with the visiting deacon afterward for longer than he normally did, and when I asked what they had discussed, he only said that village matters were village matters and that I ought to spend less time listening for things not meant for me.
That usually meant something was wrong. It also usually meant no one intended to explain it.
So, I spent today doing what I was expected to do.
I carried water from the cistern behind our house. Helped sort dried roots for storage. Checked the winter cloths where they had been hung to air and fold. Old Mrs. Johnson stopped by with a basket of bitter greens and a complaint about the northern fence, though she softened as soon as Father came within earshot and started speaking as though her whole life had been a hymn of gratitude. I smiled when I had to. Nodded when I was meant to. Answered politely. Moved through each task with the right amount of grace and attention.
All the while I kept looking for him.
At first, I did it indirectly.
A glance toward the lane when voices passed outside. A pause at the kitchen window when someone crossed the lower field. A little too much interest when one of the stable boys mentioned the eastern barns.
Then I stopped pretending.
When I was sent to bring fresh cloth to the miller's wife, I took the longer route so I could pass near Old Genji's storage sheds. Haruto was not there. When I carried a basket of lentils to the widow near the south path, I looked toward the lower well and found only two boys sitting on its stone rim with their sleeves rolled to the elbow and their faces full of the stupid, careless ease boys often wore when they had already spent their cruelty for the day.
They saw me and straightened at once.
"Lady Shiro," one of them said, too quickly.
I looked from one to the other.
"Have either of you seen Haruto?"
The smile disappeared from the older one's face as if I had laid a dead thing at his feet.
"Why would I be watching him?"
"Because boys who enjoy tormenting someone tend to notice when he isn't there to torment."
That made the younger one look down as the older one seemed flushed.
"We haven't seen him since yesterday at the morning service."
His tone suggested I had lowered myself by asking. I decided not to care.
"If you do see him," I said, "tell him I'm looking for him."
Neither answered as I turned and left before they could decide whether my concern for Haruto was more offensive than my speaking to them that way.
By late afternoon the unease had settled properly into me.
Haruto did not vanish without reason. Even when he hid, he hid predictably. There was a difference between wanting to be left alone and disappearing so completely that not even accident could uncover you. I thought of the cut near his ear. The way he had looked at his own hand after borrowing my Grace. The way he had smiled and then almost seemed surprised by it.
A strange thought came to me then, uninvited and cold.
What if someone had hurt him again?
Not the ordinary kind of village cruelty. But something worse. A fall. A beating. A body lying somewhere beyond the fields while the village went on chewing and praying and gossiping as if nothing had shifted.
I hated that my mind went there so easily. That was what Hoshimine Village had made of us.
I took supper with Father just before dusk.
He sat across from me at the low table, straight-backed even in his own home, with the weight of the village somehow following him into every room he entered. He was not an unkind man. I knew that in the way children know such things by instinct long before they can prove them in words. But he had spent too many years believing that duty and hardness were cousins. The result was that most tenderness had to pass through him disguised as practicality or it never emerged at all.
He broke his bread in silence before finally glancing up.
"You're distracted."
I set down my cup.
"Haruto hasn't been seen all day."
A shadow crossed his face so briefly that another person might have missed it.
"He's a wanderer."
"He does not simply vanish!"
Father tore another piece of bread and dipped it into the stew without looking at me.
"If the boy wishes to be alone, that is his concern."
"But it becomes mine when he's hurt!"
His mouth tightened very slightly.
"Shiro..."
It was only my name, but it carried warning. I held his gaze anyway as he continued.
"Then perhaps he should have the sense to keep out of trouble."
A little burst of anger flared in me.
"As if trouble ever needs his help to find him!"
Father's spoon touched the rim of his bowl with a soft sound.
"Enough."
The word was calm. Final. The sort of word he used when he had decided a discussion must become obedience. I lowered my eyes, but only because I knew pushing further there would gain me nothing.
The rest of the meal passed in silence.
Afterward I stepped outside alone and stood in the yard behind our house while the last light faded from the sky. The evening was cool. The prayer strips tied near the storehouse moved softly in the darkening air. From farther down the village came the familiar sounds of doors closing, animals being settled, quiet voices preparing for night. One by one, lamps kindled behind paper windows until Hoshimine Village seemed made of little squares of amber set into wood and earth.
It was peaceful. That was how it always looked from a distance.
I wrapped my arms loosely around myself and stared toward the black edge of the forest beyond the fields.
"Where are you?" I whispered.
Only, there was no answer for me. When I finally went inside, I brought that unease with me.
Sleep did not come easily. I drifted at the edge of it for what felt like hours, never fully sinking. Every small sound in the house seemed sharper than usual: the settling of old beams, the faint click of cooling stone near the hearth, the restless brush of branches against the shutter outside my window.
Then at some point, without realizing it, I must have fallen asleep. Because when I woke, the world was already wrong. At first I thought I had dreamed the screaming. A single cry, distant and broken, had torn through the dark and vanished so quickly that for one dazed second I lay still in bed wondering whether it had only reached me from sleep. Then came another. Then another.
I sat up so fast the blanket tangled around my legs. The room was black except for the orange light pulsing faintly through the gaps in the shutter. Orange. And I smelled smoke.
My body moved before thought did. I threw off the blanket and crossed the room barefoot with my hands shaking as I pushed the shutter open.
There were flames everywhere.
For a moment I could not understand what I was seeing. Fire leapt above the lower roofs in hungry sheets of orange and gold. Sparks spun up into the night like swarming stars. Shadows rushed through the lanes below. I heard men shouting—deep, rough voices, wrong voices—and over them the higher sound of villagers screaming. Something crashed. A horse shrieked. Then came the unmistakable sound of steel striking steel.
My breath caught in my throat.
The door behind me slammed open.
"Shiro!"
Father's voice.
I turned. He stood in the doorway already dressed, a cloak thrown over one shoulder, a short sword at his side that I had not seen him wear in years. His face looked older in the firelight coming through the window. Harder too. Not frightened exactly.
Resolved.
"Get your shoes on," he said. "Now."
"What's happening?"
"Barbarians have invaded the village!"
For a heartbeat I only stared at him.
The word itself felt impossible. Like something from old cautionary tales told to make children stay close after dusk. Then another scream cut across the night from somewhere near the square, and impossibility lost its argument.
Father crossed the room in two steps and thrust a cloak into my hands.
"They came from the southern edge and broke through faster than anyone expected. Some of the men are trying to hold them at the center lane, but it won't last." He fastened the blade at his side with quick practiced fingers. "You are leaving through the eastern path. Follow the ridge road. Do not stop. Do not look back."
My fingers fumbled with the clasp of my cloak.
"What about you? And what about the Holy Knights? Shouldn't they have come by now if they knew? They always did!"
Another crash shook the night. This one was closer. Beneath it came a sound I would remember for the rest of my life: the wet awful noise of a man screaming until something cut him off halfway through.
My stomach turned as Father caught my shoulders once I had my shoes half on and forced me to look directly at him.
"Listen to me! Whatever you hear outside, you keep moving. And... The Holy Knights... They aren't coming..."
Father's expression changed immediately.
No fear. No confusion. Only anger sharpened by disbelief that I could say that name now, here, with the village burning.
It wasn't right. This didn't feel right. The Church would always send someone a day prior if something like this were to happen. Did they know this would happen? Or... Did they... No. I cant think about that. What mattered more was...
"What about Haruto?" I asked.
I pulled free of his hands.
"He was gone all day. I couldn't find him. What if he's still out there? What if he's hurt?"
Father stared at me as if I had suddenly begun speaking some profane language in my own house.
"Shiro..."
"He could be alone—"
"He is not your concern tonight."
"He is my friend!"
"That boy—" He stopped himself, jaw tightening. Firelight moved over his face in harsh gold bands. "That boy has been the village's misfortune since the hour he was born."
My own anger rose to meet his.
"No... The village has been his misfortune!"
For the first time in years, Father looked at me not as his daughter but as something difficult standing in the way of necessity.
"Enough," he said. "You will not throw your life away for him!"
Outside, a woman screamed for her child. Somewhere near the square a man bellowed in drunken triumph, and then flames roared higher. Father grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the door.
"You will care about your own life," he said. "Do you understand me?"
I did not answer as he dragged me down the hall, through the main room, past the household shrine where the little oil lamp had guttered out in the draft. Smoke was already slipping through the seams around the front shutters. When he opened the back door, the yard beyond lay in ugly shifting light, half fire, half moonless dark.
He pointed toward the eastern fence.
"Go."
"Father—"
"Go!"
I had never heard that note in his voice before. It cut through me more cleanly than any slap would have. For one moment I could only stand there. Then instinct overrode pride, and I ran.
The grass was cold beneath my feet even through my shoes. I vaulted the low fence at the edge of the yard and stumbled into the narrow dark path between the chief's field and the neighbor's grain shed. Smoke dragged across the lane in gray sheets. Behind me, somewhere inside our house, Father was shouting orders to people I could not see.
I ran east just as he had told me. Past the prayer pole bent near the path. Past the little stone marker where children left flowers in spring. Past the last house at the village edge, its roof already spitting sparks into the night.
By the time I reached the rise beyond the eastern lane, I stopped.
The whole of Hoshimine Village spread below me in broken fire and screams of the innocent.
Flames climbed from three roofs now. Maybe four. Men moved in the lanes like black shapes cutting through orange light. I could hear the clash of weapons, the terrified panicked cries of people waking too late, the coarse laughter of invaders who had found soft ground and were pleased by it.
The ridge road continued east into darkness.
Safety lay that way, perhaps. Distance. Survival. Obedience.
Behind me was the village.
Behind me was Father.
Behind me was Haruto...
I stood there breathing hard. My heart hammered so violently it made the whole world seem to pulse with it.
Father was wrong.
Or maybe he was right in every practical way that mattered. Maybe going back was madness. Maybe Haruto was already dead. Maybe I would die before I reached the square. Maybe kindness had finally reached the point where it could no longer pretend to be harmless.
I thought of Haruto by the stump, pretending his bruises were nothing. Haruto smiling like it had surprised him. Haruto as a child in the rain, muddy and starving and already convinced no one would care if he disappeared.
If I kept running now, then he would have been right. I turned back toward the village. Then I ran.