The first cut of the morning was slower than yesterday's.
Ryo did not see it the way Rinka saw it. Rinka had been watching students cut for nineteen years. She knew what a slowing blade looked like before the body wielding it knew. She did not say anything. She watched.
The second cut was slower than the first.
He reset. He held the form. He breathed.
The third cut was slower than the second.
He stopped.
He stood with the practice blade pointed at the packed earth, his shoulders rising and falling in the kind of rhythm that wasn't breathing anymore. It was the body's last argument with itself before the body lost. Sweat tracked down his temple. The November sky was grey and high. The yard smelled like cold dust.
"Kenzaki."
"… I know."
"Do you?"
"… Yeah."
"What do you know?"
"I'm slower than yesterday."
"And yesterday?"
"Slower than the day before."
Rinka was quiet a moment.
"How long?"
"… Six days."
"Six days you've been getting worse."
"… Yeah."
She didn't say anything else. She set her own blade aside. She walked over to him and looked at his hand on the hilt, the hand he was trying not to let her see, and she didn't touch it. She just looked.
His right hand was trembling.
It wasn't large. It wasn't constant. It came in small irregular pulses, the way a string vibrates when something heavier than it is somewhere down the line. He had noticed it the night the spirit left. He had told himself it was from sitting too long.
"Take a break."
"… No."
"Kenzaki."
"I said no."
His voice cracked at the edge of the word. Not loudly. The way a cup cracks before it breaks. Small, audible, irreversible.
Rinka watched him.
"Take a break, Ryo."
She did not use his name often. She used it now.
He did not answer her. He turned and walked toward the western gate and he did not look back. The blade in his hand was practice steel. Light. Light should have felt light. It didn't.
-----
He sat on the bench at the far edge of the courtyard. His back to the gate. The bench was where the rogues sat when they came to watch him train, which was most days now, which had stopped being strange to him.
Today only Banri was there.
Banri Enzō was a square-shouldered man in his late twenties with a coat that had seen three winters too many and the kind of face that smiled before it spoke. He was peeling an apple with a knife that was too good for the job. The apple was cheap. The knife was a Hunter's knife. Ryo had never seen him use it for anything else.
"You done with the cutting?"
"… Yeah."
"For today?"
"… For today."
Banri offered him a slice. Ryo took it. The apple was cold and sweet. The cold went through his teeth in a way that had nothing to do with the apple. He swallowed. The cold stayed.
"Bad day?"
"… I'm slowing down."
"Mm."
"Six days. Every day worse."
"Mm."
"Aren't you going to say something useful?"
"I am saying something useful. I'm saying 'mm.' That means 'I heard you.' If I said something else, it would mean 'I have a fix,' and I don't have a fix. So I'm saying 'mm.'"
Ryo almost laughed.
The almost was the closest he had come to laughing in two weeks. Banri did not point this out. Banri was the kind of man who let almosts stay almosts.
"… You ever feel like you were given something that didn't fit?"
Banri stopped peeling the apple. He thought about it.
"Every day of my life, kid."
"… What did you do about it?"
"I quit the people who handed it to me."
"…"
"Which is its own thing. Don't recommend it for everybody. Some people, the thing they were given did fit, and they were just told it didn't by people who wanted them smaller. Those people should keep what they were given. Other people, the thing didn't fit, and they wore it anyway because they thought the not-fitting was a personal failure, and those people end up bleeding from places they shouldn't be bleeding from."
He looked at Ryo's right hand.
The trembling had stopped while Ryo was holding the apple slice. It started again the moment the slice was gone.
"Which one do you think you are?"
Ryo did not answer.
-----
He sat on the bench with the practice blade across his knees for a long time after Banri left. The yard emptied. The sun moved.
Mei came and sat next to him.
She didn't say anything for a while. She had Satoshi's history book open on her lap and she was pretending to read it. He could tell she was pretending because she had been on the same page for ten minutes and Satoshi's history book had pictures in it that nobody could pretend to read for ten minutes without flipping.
"Mei."
"Mm."
"Thanks."
"For what?"
"For sitting here."
"I'm reading."
"… Mei."
"Fine. You're welcome."
She closed the book. She set it on the bench between them. She looked at the yard. She looked at his hand. She looked at his face. She did not look at his hand twice.
"You're shaking."
"… A little."
"Hiroshi said you've been training too hard."
"Hiroshi worries."
"Hiroshi is right."
"…"
"He doesn't say it because he thinks you'll feel worse if a kid your age tells you you're hurting yourself. So he tells me, and I'm telling you. You're hurting yourself."
"… I don't have a choice."
"Yes you do."
"… No, Mei. I don't."
She looked at him a long moment. She was sixteen. She was very small and very stubborn and she did not know what she was, and somehow she still managed to look at him the way an older sister looks at a brother who is making a mistake she cannot fix for him.
"Then at least let us sit with you while you make it."
He looked at the yard.
"… Okay."
She picked the history book back up. She opened it to a different page this time.
-----
Hiroshi and Satoshi came as the sun was starting to lower.
Satoshi sat down on Ryo's other side. Hiroshi stood in front of all three of them with his hands on his hips and his hair stuck to his forehead from running. He had clearly run from somewhere. He had not said why.
"Kenzaki."
"… Hiroshi."
"You look like garbage."
"… Thanks."
"I mean it. You look like the bottom of a trash chute. You look like something a raccoon would refuse on principle."
"… Hiroshi."
"I'm bringing you food. I'm bringing you food whether you want it or not. I told my mom you were sad and she made enough rice to feed the western district. You're going to eat it. Satoshi's going to make sure you eat it. Mei's going to make sure Satoshi makes sure you eat it. This is a chain of command. I'm at the top because I'm the only one of us who isn't afraid of you."
"… Why would anyone be afraid of me?"
Hiroshi did not answer for a beat.
Satoshi did.
"Because you're getting cold, Ryo."
It was a quiet thing to say. Satoshi was quiet about most things. Satoshi was the one who noticed temperatures changing in rooms before anyone else did.
"… What?"
"You're getting cold. Physically. The bench is colder where you've been sitting. The air around you. I've been watching it for three days. Hiroshi noticed too. We didn't say anything because we didn't want you to feel weirder about it than you already do."
"…"
"But it's getting worse. So now we're saying it."
Ryo looked at his hand. The trembling had not stopped. The bench beneath his palm was beaded with frost where there had been no frost a moment ago.
He pulled the hand away.
The frost stayed.
The yard had emptied of color. Not visibly. He just felt it. The light was the same. The sky was the same. The cold was the only thing that had changed.
His three friends sat with him while it changed.
They did not move away.
That was the thing that almost broke him.
-----
He left them at sundown. He told them he would eat Hiroshi's mother's rice tomorrow. Hiroshi accepted this only because Mei nodded at him in a way that meant let him go. Satoshi watched him walk out of the yard.
He did not go home.
He went to the eastern outskirts.
It was cold there. It was always cold there, but tonight it was the kind of cold that didn't belong to weather. He sat on a flat stone in the November dusk and he set the practice blade across his knees and he put his head in his hands.
He did not cry.
Not because he wouldn't have. Because his eyes were too cold for tears.
-----
"… You are angry."
He did not lift his head.
"I am not."
"You are. At yourself. Not at the world. Which is somehow worse."
The air had cooled. His breath misted. He knew without looking that she was sitting across from him on the dead grass, the silver-white hair drifting in a breeze the world did not have, the kimono in winter blue, the silver comb in the shape of a crescent moon.
He lifted his head.
She was not seated this time. She was standing. The drop of crystallized ice at her throat caught the dusk and threw it back violet.
"… I'm not getting stronger."
"No."
"I'm getting weaker."
"You are."
"Six days."
"Yes."
"Why?"
She was quiet a long moment.
"Because the blade you carry is not feeding you. And you have not asked it to."
"…"
"It has been listening to you. It has been waiting. It has been giving you the bare minimum a Kizugami gives a wielder it has not promised itself to. You have had access to enough of its presence to fool yourself into thinking you were progressing. You were not progressing. You were idling. The idling has now become decline, because the body cannot stay in one place. The body either moves up or down. Yours is moving down."
"… Why hasn't it promised itself?"
She tilted her head. The same small motion.
"Because I haven't asked it to."
"…"
"And I haven't asked it to because you have not asked me to."
She knelt in front of him on the dead grass. Her eyes were level with his now. The pale gold was very close.
"Ryo Kenzaki. You are seventeen. You are running out of time before your friend arrives. He has trained for three weeks under a man who has been alive for a hundred and thirty-seven years. You have trained alone, with a blade that is not feeding you, for six days, and you are going backwards. You will not survive what is coming."
"…"
"Unless I help you."
"… Then help me."
"It is not free."
"…"
"And before I name the cost, I will say it the way it must be said, because what I am about to offer you is not a transaction between strangers. It is a pact. Pacts are spoken aloud. They are heard by what witnesses they have. They are kept until the conditions of the pact are unmet, at which point they end. I will name the terms. You will accept or refuse. If you accept, the words will hold."
She raised her hand. She did not touch him.
"I will lend you my power. Not all of it. The part of it that the body of a wielder who has not earned a Kizugami can carry. Ice. Cold. The slowing of motion. Enough that you can stand against your friend long enough for what needs to happen to happen. I will not give you a shortcut. I will give you a window."
"… The cost?"
"The blade is not yours. It was not made for you. Your body will not be made for it. The cold will obey your call, and it will obey calls you do not make. It will appear in places you did not intend. It will take parts of you that were not offered. Your right hand has already begun. It will continue. It will spread."
"…"
"It will not kill you. I will not allow that. But you will pay for every inch of strength I give you with an inch of yourself you do not get back."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"And the pact ends the day you can carry me without borrowing. Not before."
He looked at his right hand. The trembling. The frost on the stone where his palm had rested. The cold of his own breath.
He thought about Kyou Ren. He thought about Yua. He thought about Mei sitting next to him pretending to read a book. He thought about Hiroshi running across half the western district with his hair stuck to his forehead. He thought about Banri saying some people end up bleeding from places they shouldn't be bleeding from.
He looked back at the spirit.
"… I accept."
She closed her eyes.
When she opened them, the pale gold was deeper. A lower note.
"Then say it."
"… Say what?"
"The form of the pact. You speak it. I bind it."
"… I don't know the form."
"You will. Repeat after me. I, Ryo Kenzaki, accept what is lent. I will not ask for more than I can lose. When the cost runs higher than the loan, I will set it down. I will carry what I borrow until I am the one carrying it."
He repeated her, line by line. His voice was hoarse. He did not cry.
When the last sentence left his mouth, the air between them froze for a single half-second and then thawed, and the half-second contained a small impossible sound that he heard somewhere behind his ribs, like a key turning in a lock that had been waiting for the key for forty-three years.
The Kizugami at his hip hummed once.
Affirmation. Not bonding. Something quieter. Permission.
She rose.
"Stand."
He stood. He raised the practice blade. The cold collected at the tip of it for the first time. Frost crawled along the steel in fractal lines that looked like maple leaves.
"Cut."
He cut the November air.
A line of ice formed where the blade had passed. It hung. It held. The breath in his lungs went out as visible vapor and did not come back.
It was beautiful.
It was also wrong, in a way he did not yet have language for. The blade did not feel heavier. It felt closer. As if it had stepped a half-inch nearer to him while he wasn't looking. As if the agreement he had just made had not bound him to a power but had been heard by the power and accepted.
He turned the blade. Ice followed. He did not tell it to.
He lowered the blade.
The ice followed for another full second after the lowering, then stopped.
His right hand trembled hard enough that he had to grip his wrist with the other hand to make it stop. The cold did not leave him. He could feel it in the space behind his sternum, where it had not been before, settled and patient and not in any hurry to go anywhere.
The spirit watched.
"… It will get worse."
"… I know."
"You will be very tired tonight."
"… Okay."
"Eat the rice the boy's mother made. Sleep with another person in the room if you can. Cold is easier when there is breath beside you."
"… Okay."
She faded the way she had faded before. Not dissolved. Released.
He stood in the November dusk with a blade that now belonged to him in a way it had not five minutes ago, and a hand that did not belong to him in a way it had five minutes ago, and the cold in his chest, and the frost on the dead grass where she had knelt, which did not melt for a long time after she was gone.
-----
He walked home.
The streetlamps were on. His breath misted in the November air the way everyone's breath misted, and also a little more than that, and only he could tell the difference.
When he opened the door to the apartment, Hiroshi was already there. Sitting at the table with a covered bowl in front of him. Rumi was at the stove. Kujuro was reading. Mei was on the couch with Satoshi. The lamp was on.
Hiroshi looked up.
"You came."
"… Yeah."
"My mother said if you didn't come tonight she was going to cross the river herself and bring it to you, and she's seventy-two."
"… Tell her thank you."
"You can tell her tomorrow. Sit down. Eat."
He sat. The rice was warm. The bowl was warm. The room was warm.
His right hand trembled. He kept it under the table.
Mei did not say anything. Satoshi did not say anything. Hiroshi did not say anything past eat.
That was the thing that almost broke him for the second time that day.
He ate.
The cold in his chest sat where it had settled and listened.
🌀 END OF CHAPTER 75