I woke to the scent of smoke.
Not the thick choke of fire, but something faint and papery, like the last breath of a burnt letter. Dawn had only just brushed the shoji with color. The room was a wash of blue-gray, the kind of light that made everything look like memory.
At first I thought I'd dreamed it—the bell, the whisper, the careful silhouette outside my door. Then I sat up and saw it on the pillow where my head had rested moments before.
A mark.
It wasn't ink. It wasn't dust. It was ash, delicate as moth-wing, etched into the linen like a seal the night had pressed onto my sleeping skull.
Two rings. One within the other. A tiny wisteria cluster stamped at the center, petals rendered in charcoal so fine I was afraid to breathe on them.
I reached out and stopped, hands hovering.
"Don't touch it."
His voice came from the doorway, quiet and level, as if he'd been there for some time.
Muichiro slid the door fully open and entered without disturbing the air. He studied the mark with the unblinking focus of a moon gazing at tide. The mist behind him pooled at the threshold and then receded, hesitant to cross.
"How long have you been standing there?" I asked.
"A while."
"And you didn't— wake me?"
His eyes flicked to my face, then back to the pillow. "You weren't in danger while you were breathing evenly."
"Is that how you measure danger?"
"It tells me enough."
He moved to the low chest, lifted its lid, and took out a small lacquered box. When he opened it, the sweet sting of wisteria oil rose like a prayer.
"Hold this." He handed me a folded cloth.
I obeyed. He dipped a thin brush in the oil and drew a circle on the tatami around the pillow—a faint ring that caught the light and then seeped into the straw. The scent thickened, a protective sweetness that made the ash pattern seem suddenly uglier, like a bruise under perfume.
"What is it?" I asked.
"An invitation," he said.
"For what?"
"For forgetting."
The brush paused. The words landed with the soft weight of falling petals and stuck like burrs.
He finished the circle and straightened. "Step out of the ring."
I slid my legs over the edge and stood, not breathing until I'd crossed the invisible threshold. Muichiro reached for the pillow with the cloth, careful, deliberate, as if moving an injured thing. The ash shimmered at the disturbance, but it didn't scatter—not the way ash ought to. It clung, as if the shape had weight.
He set the pillow into a wooden tray and covered it with a cloth. Only then did he look at me again.
"Did you hear the bell?" he asked.
"Last night? No." I swallowed. "Just rain."
"It rang once. Far off." His gaze returned to the tray. "They tested the door, then decided to write instead."
"They?"
"Remnants." He said it flatly, like naming a tool. "They know the rules. Sometimes they try different doors." His eyes lingered on me. "Different keys."
"Am I a key?"
"You are a bride," he said, as if that answered the question and another I hadn't asked yet.
He took a square of paper and copied the pattern quickly, efficient lines, no wasted stroke. The copy looked emptier somehow, as if the ash had been breathing and his ink could not.
"You said it's an invitation to forget," I pressed. "Forget what?"
He didn't answer. He lifted the tray.
"I'll show Shinobu," he said. "She studies toxins. If the ash carries any trace besides malice, she'll know."
I stared at the covered shape. "You'll take it now?"
"Yes."
"Should I—" I had no idea what I meant to offer. Go with him? Hide? Pray?
He saw the confusion flicker and softened, barely. "You will stay here. Eat. Do not open the door for anyone who does not say your full name."
"You know my full name?"
He hesitated no longer than the pause between two raindrops. "Yes."
He moved toward the door.
"Muichiro."
He stopped.
"Thank you," I said. "For… standing there a while."
His shoulders lifted on a breath I wouldn't have seen if I weren't watching. "I told you I would be nearby."
"That was a promise."
He didn't turn. "I don't use that word."
"Why?"
"Because words like that make ghosts."
The door slid shut. The mist pressed its face against the paper a moment, then withdrew, leaving me in the wisteria-scented quiet with a ring on the floor that wouldn't let anything cross without permission.
By midday the sky brightened enough to remember it could be blue. The ring of oil had nearly vanished into the tatami. I ate rice distractedly and then sat at the veranda with the silver hairpin turning slow circles in my fingers.
The inscription caught the light: For the Bride of Mist.
I had not asked whose hand wrote it. The question threaded the back of my teeth like a thorn.
A light tread approached. I tucked the pin into my sleeve.
Shinobu stepped into view, her haori trailing butterflies that never landed.
"May I come in?" she asked. Her smile was all politeness and no sugar.
"Yes."
She did not cross the ring until she had looked down, considered it, and nodded to herself—like a physician acknowledging another's bandage.
"I saw the pillow," she said, taking a seat. "Muichiro is careful. It's a quality I appreciate in a swordsman."
"Careful?" I echoed. The word felt foreign beside his quiet, sudden edge. "He stands outside doors and doesn't wake people. Is that careful or distant?"
"Both." She folded her hands. "He was younger than you when he learned that waking someone can make them run toward what's calling instead of away." The softness of her voice made the sentence hit harder. "Muichiro prefers stillness until it can be directed."
"Directed… by whom?"
Shinobu smiled again. "Ideally, by himself."
She set a small packet on the floor. "A sachet. Wisteria and a few other things. Keep it under your pillow. Don't inhale too deeply—my blends are potent."
"Did you find anything in the ash?" I asked.
"Trace elements. Charcoal of a type used for temple rubbings, lime from old walls. But it isn't from here." Her eyes sharpened. "The composition suggests it was carried. As if… a hand gathered it where wisteria doesn't grow."
"Demons," I whispered.
She tilted her head. "Or brides who stopped being brides." She stood. "You are not to let Sanemi near that pillow. His curiosity breaks more than it learns."
As she reached the door, she added, so lightly I almost missed it, "Muichiro is less distant than he looks. He remembers what hurts." Her gaze flicked to my sleeve, then back to my face. "And he notices what you hide."
When she was gone, I slid the hairpin out again. The metal had warmed to my skin—as if it remembered me back.
Dusk softened the estate into a watercolor of itself. I walked the west corridor to breathe the change, counting the boards between lanterns until I could feel the rhythm under my soles. The koi turned slow, careful circles beneath lily pads like well-kept secrets.
I reached the stone bridge and stopped. The mist there felt thicker, not unfriendly—just attentive. The off-limits pavilion rose beyond it, rooflines dark against the sky. Wind bells hung under its eaves.
They did not ring.
I knew better than to step closer. I stood at the bridge's center and watched the water. When the first star pinned itself to the horizon, I turned to go—and paused.
Someone had written on the railing, shallow grooves in the wood where fingernails or a dull blade had dragged:
DO NOT SLEEP WHERE THE BELLS RING TWICE.
I traced the words without touching them, feeling their shape in my eyes. They matched the warning from the letter I'd hidden—the one from the so-called Archivist.
I looked toward the pavilion again. No bell. Only a certainty collecting like dew: the estate knew many more names than it spoke aloud.
The air pressure shifted—subtle, like the moment before a string is plucked.
"Why are you here?"
Muichiro's voice didn't startle me anymore; it changed the temperature. I turned. He stood at the end of the bridge, hair damp, uniform crisp, expression carved from fog.
"I didn't cross the bridge," I said.
"And yet you're speaking to the wrong side."
His gaze moved to the carved warning. His jaw barely tightened. If I hadn't been watching, I would've missed it.
"Who wrote that?" I asked.
"Someone who learned slowly," he said. "And then too late."
He stepped onto the bridge. The mist around us seemed to lean in.
"Walk with me," he said.
It wasn't a request. I followed.
We took the long way back, past the training yard where chalk rings still scarred the ground from the Hashira assembly. He didn't speak. The quiet between us fell in neat lengths, like cloth cut by a skilled hand.
At my door, he stopped. He took a folded scrap from his sleeve and held it out.
"Keep this on you."
I unfolded it. A hand-drawn wisteria cluster, minimal lines, precise. Beneath it, a short phrase in tidy characters:
If you hear your name from outside, it isn't me.
I looked up. "You think they'll try again tonight."
He didn't blink. "I know they will."
"Will you—" I hated how small the question felt. "Will you still be nearby?"
"Yes."
"Will you say my name?"
"If I need to." He paused. "But not from the garden."
I nodded, clutching the paper like a charm. "Thank you."
He opened his mouth as if to say something else, then closed it. He turned to leave—and then, as if remembering a rule he'd been ignoring, he faced me again.
"Your wrist," he said.
I had wrapped it with linen earlier. I hadn't meant to show him. He looked down at the bandage and waited.
"It's fine," I lied.
"Give me your hand."
I did. He unwound the linen, careful not to pull hair or skin. The scrape Sanemi's staff had left was uglier today, rimmed with bruised color. Muichiro's jaw tensed.
"Sanemi lacks precision," he said evenly, which I understood to mean: I allowed him to go too far; it won't happen again.
He pulled a small glass vial from his sleeve, brushed the salve along the scrape with two fingers, cool and sure. The touch was nothing. The touch was everything.
"This will prevent infection," he murmured. "And pain."
"I'm not afraid of pain," I said.
"Good." He tied a clean strip of gauze with a knot so neat it looked like a stroke of ink. "Be afraid of the wrong sounds."
"The bell."
"And footsteps pretending to be mine."
He let go of my hand, his fingers lifting as if the air were heavy between our skins.
"If something knocks," he said, "speak the first half of your name and stop. If I answer with the second, it's me. If the echo repeats the first… keep the door closed."
"That's complicated," I said, managing a breath of a smile.
"It works."
He turned away. "Sleep."
"Will you?" I asked.
He didn't look back. "No."
I lay awake a long time, listening to the house: the groan of wood settling, the whisper of reeds near the pond, the distant, almost-imagined click of bamboo in the wind. The sachet under my pillow breathed wisteria and bitter herbs.
When I finally drifted, it was into the kind of sleep that has one eye open.
The first knock came as a polite suggestion. The second made the lantern shiver.
I sat up, breath held. The paper charm in my sleeve warmed against my skin.
"—" I spoke the first half of my name, voice barely air.
Silence. Then a reply, not through the door but around it, like the house had learned my syllables and wanted to practice: the second half of my name, wrong in the tiniest way—sweetness where there should have been breath.
Not him.
The sachet seemed to bloom under my head, the scent of wisteria flaring.
Another knock, a little impatient now.
I held my tongue. The quiet stretched. The thing outside exhaled, a sound perfectly shaped to hook into pity. Then footfalls: away, then closer, circling the house.
Soft, soft—then right beneath the sill.
"Bride of Mist," it whispered, voice stitched from water and charcoal. "You shouldn't be alone."
It was the same voice as before—the almost-voice that had worn a bride's shape when rain turned the night thin.
My throat closed on the instinct to answer. Wisteria flooded my mouth like a taste. I pressed the paper charm flat against my chest.
Then, clean and sharp, steel parted the night.
I did not see him cut; I only felt the shudder pass through the house, like a held breath released. A hiss—not of pain, exactly. Of something pulled like a weed.
Silence reassembled itself carefully.
The door slid open a finger's width.
"Are you awake?" His voice, this time, was unmistakable.
"Yes."
"Good."
The door closed. Cloth rustled. The scrape of his sword's spine against its sheath sounded like an exhale. He did not speak again, and neither did I. The minutes curved into hours. Dawn knitted gray to blue at the edges of the shoji.
When I opened the door, he was seated at the veranda's edge, posture straight, hair damp, eyes on the garden as if the mist had written him a letter and he was still deciding whether to reply.
"You didn't sleep," I said.
"No."
"Do you ever?"
"When I can."
"And when is that?"
His gaze stayed on the light thinning the fog. "When you don't need me to be awake."
The sentence was so simple it cut.
"I'm not fragile," I said.
"I know," he answered, and some part of me warmed, even as another part smarted under the gentle correction: I watch because I choose to, not because you break.
He stood. "Pack a small bag."
"For what?"
"We're going to the main estate." A pause. "You should speak to the master."
"About the ash?"
"About the pact," he said.
The word hung like a bell that had decided to ring without moving.
He finally looked at me fully. The morning made pale glass of his eyes. "It's time you heard what the brides were meant to be. Before the mist teaches it in its own way."
He stepped aside to let me pass the threshold. As I did, the silver hairpin slid from my sleeve and clinked softly to the floor. Muichiro's hand moved quick as breath; he caught it by the stem. His thumb brushed the engraving once.
"Keep it visible," he said, returning it. "Some doors open for it. Some stay shut."
"Whose was it?" I asked.
He paused, and for the first time since I'd known him, he looked… young. Not in the sense of age, but in the sense of someone standing at the shore of a question.
"I don't remember," he said. Then, almost to himself, "Which means I do."
He let the thought go like a petal in water. "We leave at noon."
He moved down the hall, mist parting around his ankles. When he reached the corner, he said, without turning, "You did well."
I blinked. "I thought you don't give praise."
"I don't," he said. "Consider it inventory."
And he was gone, soundless and sure, as the estate exhaled a breath I hadn't realized it was holding.
I tucked the hairpin behind my ear. The metal was cool, but it felt like a promise.
Somewhere beyond the wisteria, a bell rang once—far, far away, as if it had remembered my name and then thought better of speaking it.
I packed my bag with steady hands.