The Daimyo took his wine on the roof of the governor's house, where the day's heat was finally lifting off the clay.
Kaname stood a pace behind his right shoulder. Below them the square had gone dark but for the lanterns the town hadn't the heart to take down, and at the eastern edge the dead scorpion was a black hill against the dunes, ringed with torches. The townspeople were already at it with knives and hooks, breaking it down to share among themselves. The Daimyo had spent the evening listening to the governor's accounts, his water rights, what was left of his grain stores, the names of the dead. He had promised nothing and refused nothing, and the governor had bowed him out, grateful all the same.
Kaname had been carrying the question since the gate. He set his wine down untouched and asked it.
"My lord. May I?"
"You may ask." Reizen did not turn from the rail. "I may not answer."
"The girl."
"What about her?"
"You could have had anyone." Kaname kept his voice level. It was not his place to question the choice but he was curious. "You could have asked Sunagakure for Chiyo. For Ebizo. Shinobi who have proven themselves time and time again. And you took a child instead."
"I did."
"May I know why?"
Reizen turned the cup in his fingers and watched the lanterns.
"Lady Chiyo would be a fine choice for a bodyguard. She's protected this house since before my son was born. Her brother as well. But they answer to Suna first and me second. Despite how it should be." He drank. "However, I've heard quite a few interesting things about this girl."
"Everyone has. The Land of Dust. The Land of Glass." Kaname paused. "Stories. I couldn't tell you a single true thing about her."
"They call her a hero. A savior. That's what interests me. A mere child…" He set the cup on the rail. "From what I've seen, she's a simple girl. Someone in my position loves simple people, Kaname. They're the easiest to read. Chiyo, I'd have to watch. Ebizo, I'd have to watch. The girl I only have to pay."
Kaname thought about the square that afternoon. "Is it because she refused the young lord's demand?"
"That's one part. A very important part." Something close to satisfaction moved under the old man's voice and was gone. "A bodyguard who follows every order is pointless. She follows the wrong one, my son is kidnapped or killed. I didn't pay for a guard who can only say yes. There are hundreds of shinobi willing to do that. If she'd broken that man's arm today, I would have gotten rid of her."
"That isn't the only reason, I presume?" Kaname turned to him.
For the first time, Reizen looked at him.
"No," the Daimyo said. "It isn't."
He turned back to the town.
"My son is nineteen and everyone is watching him. He has my blood and nothing else. There are rumors of a war coming, the treasury bleeds, and it would take forty years, if he's lucky, to teach a man who won't be taught by his father what it costs to be respected instead of merely obeyed." He said it simply. "I don't have the years. So I bought him a year of duty beside the one person the whole country won't stop talking about. Children learn from children."
He picked the cup back up and looked into it.
"Their Kazekage offered her to me with a straight face and a very long letter about her virtues. He wants my son to come home thinking well of the Sand." The corner of his mouth moved. "He thinks I can't see it. I took her anyway. Let the boy come home fond of Suna. I'd settle for him coming home fond of anything besides his prayers and his pleasures."
Kaname was silent for a moment. "And the girl?" he said.
"Is to be left alone to do her job." The Daimyo drank. "For now."
Kaname looked at him. The Daimyo did not explain, and Kaname had served him long enough not to ask twice.
"Now stop guarding my choices and go back to guarding my life."
Kaname stepped back to his place behind the Daimyo's shoulder, and the two of them watched the lanterns burn down.
Karura had been turning it over since the funeral.
She had stood her post that afternoon, outside the room where the prince sulked, and watched through her Byakugan as the town carried its dead. She had thought about the children at the gate with their thin wrists, and the herder's daughter who had gone for water and not come back, and the whole feverish welcome the town had put on, the carpets and the lanterns, all of it now hanging slack in a town with a monster's corpse at its edge. A town that had emptied itself out to be glad and gotten a funeral.
She couldn't fix that. She couldn't give the herder back his daughter or unmake the deaths. But she had sat against the wall outside Yuuga's door that night with a lamp, a knife, a block of soft white pinewood and an idea, and by the gray hour before dawn she had a fistful of little people.
They were small, each one no longer than her hand. A lord in a fat painted robe. A girl in a yellow dress. A fennec with ears she'd hinged so they could flick. A merchant, a mother, a well with a real bucket on a real string. And a monster, because the town needed a monster, jointed and many-legged. She painted them by lamplight with the little pots from her repair kit and let them dry on the sill of the corridor window.
[Tenfold has activated!]
[You have gained tenfold crafting experience!]
The trouble was the post. She could not leave it. The prince was hers, and the prince was three steps away behind a door, and a guard who wandered off to put on a show in the square wasn't really doing their job, were they?
So she made someone who could.
Her hands came together. A breath of chakra, a single seal, and the smoke bloomed and thinned and there were two of her in the corridor. The clone looked at the figures on the sill, then at her.
"Hey." Karura smiled.
"Hello." The clone smiled back.
The clone gathered the little people into a satchel. Then it laced its fingers, and a second technique took it, and the air folded around it, and where a small sand-haired girl had crouched there was an old man. Thin as a cane. A long face, kind eyes, and strange everywhere else, a long nose and white hair that went where it pleased. He looked nothing like her. He looked like nobody.
"Have fun." Karura told him.
"This is what puppetry was originally for! Doing the legendary Monzaemon Chikamatsu proud!" the old man cackled excitedly, and let himself out the corridor window.
Karura settled back against the wall outside the prince's door and closed her eyes. She would have every minute of it when the clone poofed tonight. For now she had a prince to watch.
Behind the door, Yuuga was complaining to an attendant about everything he could think of. The heat, the bed, the lack of entertainment, the food...
The old man set his cart down in the corner of the square, in the long morning shade of the granary that the scorpion's tail had opened, and began to set up his little stage.
Nobody looked at him. That was fine. People had carrying to do and walls to mend, and an old stranger unfolding a painted box on three legs was the least of what the morning held. He took his time. He stood the well up, and the lord, and laid a strip of blue cloth for water, and weighted the corners against the wind, and from the basket under the cart he set out a row of cactus fruit, fat and green and split to show the wet red inside, with a hand-lettered card that asked ten ryo each.
A girl stopped first. Six, maybe seven, with a scab on her knee and a curious look on her face. She watched him stand the fennec up on its hind legs.
"Is that a dog?" She asked.
"It's a fennec. Which is a fox." The old man said kindly.
The girl sat down in the dust.
It was easy after that to bring in people. A second child drifted over because the first girl had. A mother came to collect the second and stayed to watch. The old man flicked the fennec's hinged ears and made it tremble and made the children laugh, and gave the first girl a cactus fruit for nothing because she'd clapped, and she bit into it and her eyes went round, and her mother watched her daughter eat a whole fruit and stand up straighter, color coming back into a face that had been gray since spring, and the mother looked at the red flesh of it and then inquisitively at the old man.
He started the show.
He showed the fennec first, because they needed to laugh before anything else. The fennec who thought he was a dog, who tried to herd the merchant's goats and herded them into the well instead, who outsmarted a sandstorm by talking it to sleep. Small and silly. By the time the fennec talked the storm to sleep, half the carpet-sellers had drifted from their stalls and there were thirty people standing where there'd been one girl.
Then, he gave them the monster.
He brought it up slow from behind the stage, the gold jointed thing, many-legged, its tail rising over the little painted town, and a silence went through the crowd. They knew this shape. They had buried what it killed the day before. A boy near the front snatched a pebble from the ground and drew his arm back in anger, and his mother caught his wrist. A smaller girl turned her face into her mother's skirt and watched with one eye.
The old man let it loom. Then he stood the girl in the yellow dress up in front of it, no bigger than one of its legs, and gave her a tiny fan for a weapon.
"She's going to get eaten…" the boy with the pebble said, very quietly.
She won, of course. Not easily, the old man saw to that. He made the monster knock her down once, and the crowd gasped. He made it knock her down twice, and the first girl, the one with the scab, was on her feet shouting "Get up! Get UP!" before the old man had moved the little figure at all, and then half the children were shouting it with her. And the girl in the yellow dress got up, and swung the fan home, and the gold monster went tumbling off the edge of the stage and into the old man's basket, never to be seen again.
The square came apart in noise. Children shrieking. A carpet-seller pounding his own counter with the flat of his hand. The boy's mother let go of his wrist, and he threw the pebble straight up into the air and didn't care where it came down. Someone cursed when it came down on their head.
They had watched the thing that ate their people die at the hands of a girl with a fan. It was just a story where the monster lost.
He fed them too. Cactus fruit went out into the crowd, ten ryo here and there that stacked on his little cart, and people ate, and the ones who'd gone hungry since the herds scattered thought the day wasn't so bad. A clever few asked where the seeds went after, and the old man told them, in the ground, anywhere, they're not fussy, and watched which ones tucked the pits into their sleeves instead of spitting them in the dust. Renge would have cactus seedlings by the turn of the season.
They asked for an encore. He gave them more. The girl and the well-spirit, where the last cup of water shared with a beggar came back as a gourd that never ran dry, and the children mouthed the ending before he got to it. The merchant who learned to weigh fair. And last, the fat painted lord, who opened his storehouse in a dry year for a town that hadn't dared to ask him, and rode back through it ten years later to find every child in the street knew his name and called it after him. The old man ended that one with the little lord bowing to the crowd, and the real crowd laughed and bowed back.
By midday the square had filled in past the broken granary, and the laughter coming off it carried up the clay walls of the lodging and over the courtyard, where it reached two windows.
One was shuttered. Behind it the prince had taken to his bed against the heat and the noise and the indignity of being made to stay in a town like this, and he did not open it.
The other stood open, high on the governor's house, and the Daimyo of the Land of Wind stood in it with a cup in his hand and looked down at a square full of fed people laughing a day after they'd buried their dead, and at the old stranger working little puppets, and at the basket of green fruit going out among the thin children. He looked for a long time.
Then a child tugged the old man's sleeve and asked for the fox again, and he gave them the fox again, and went back to work.
Outside the prince's door, Karura stood her post and listened to a town laugh through a wall, and let herself enjoy it.