Prologue

The Children of the Grain

The wheat smelled of warm earth, of sun, and of a summer drawing to its close. Since morning the heat had hung over the fields, setting the air above the ears shimmering. Jiro swung the sickle in the same unchanging rhythm: a hiss, the sigh of falling stalks, one more step forward. Dust clung to his face, his hair, the spaces between his teeth. Sweat ran in thin trails down his back, and his shoulders burned with every cut. Still he could not stop bringing in the harvest. His friends from the village could not come to help for another few days, and by then as much as possible had to lie in the barn. Besides, Hana's time could come any day now, and when it did, he meant to be at her side and not standing somewhere out among the stalks.

The farm lay far enough from the royal city that its noise reached them only as a distant hum, and near enough that the grain trade was worth the journey. It was a lonely life: the two of them, a few animals, and the fields that stretched to the edge of the forest. But it was their own life, and a free one. Every acre they had wrested from the ground with their bare hands.

For weeks something menacing had lain over the woods. The traders spoke of it in lowered voices, between haggling over prices and grumbling about the weather, as though other talk could cover it up: out there, away from the paths, strange things were happening. Herds had vanished without leaving any blood, without a trace of where they had gone. Shepherds claimed to have glimpsed shadows that moved faster than any known animal, and at night lights had wandered among the trees. More than one teller glanced over his shoulder as he spoke, as if the word alone might summon something or bring disaster down on them. No one would give it a name.

Jiro set little store by such talk. But he knew his homeland, and he had noticed that the birds at the forest's edge had not sung for three days. It was no peaceful silence. It was the kind that foretells disaster.

As the light tipped into the red of evening, he laid the sickle on his little handcart and walked back to the house. On the way he noticed that at the edge of the forest the first maple leaves were already turning red.

Inside, the smell of fresh bread and thin vegetable soup filled the room. His wife Hana sat on a stool at the table, one hand resting on her rounded belly. She had set out a jug of cold water for him before he had even closed the door behind him. In the candlelight her features looked soft, but deep shadows lay beneath her eyes.

“You look as if you've had to carry the whole world,” she teased softly.

Jiro took the jug and drank in long draughts. The cold water felt so good that he closed his eyes. “The harvest will be a good one. But it's not as loud out there as it used to be.” He set the jug down. “It's as if the land were holding its breath and the birds had stopped singing to the sun. You look tired. Is our little one keeping you awake again?”

“It kicks the moment I lie down.” Hana smiled faintly. “It probably wants to come out to the fields already. We should both get some proper rest for once.”

Jiro laid his rough hand on her belly and felt a kick so strong and so indignant that he had to laugh. Hana laughed with him, and for a moment the world outside was far away again.

But that night, everything would change.

A storm rose late in the evening. First the wind pressed against the shutters, then it tore at the shingles, and the sky above the fields turned pitch black. Jiro was just adding a log to the fire when something sank heavily to the floor behind him. Hana had dropped to her knees, one hand pressed to her back, the other braced against the floorboards.

“Jiro,” she gasped, her face twisted with pain. But she could manage no more than a whisper.

He hurried to her at once. The nearest midwife lived in the royal city, a day's ride away, and in this weather he could not have fetched her anyway. He had never brought a child into the world, only lambs and foals. But he had strong hands and no other choice.

He pushed the kitchen table against the wall, spread blankets on the floor, fetched water and cloths. Outside the rain drummed against the house, and the wind whistled through every crack. The candlelight twitched, the shadows danced. Hours passed in which there was nothing but Hana's breath, the smell of sweat and blood, and her fingers digging into his arm.

“Soon,” he murmured, again and again. “Soon, Hana. You can do this.” Then, as she cried out: “Now. Push!”

After midnight, when the storm had reached its height, Jiro heard something else beneath the thunder: a thin, furious wail.

He held the slippery little creature in his hands and for a moment forgot to breathe. A boy. His eyes were already wide open, and he was complaining loudly about the coldness of the world. Jiro wrapped him in a clean blanket and laid him in the arms of Hana, who sank back exhausted into the pillows.

“A boy,” she whispered, and her eyes filled with tears. “A healthy boy.”

Jiro's knees went weak. Exhaustion hit him like a wall, and yet he felt lighter than ever before. “Yes,” he said hoarsely. “Keiichi. Our son.”

On the third evening after the birth, the land lay once more beneath a clear, cool sky. Hana sat near the hearth with Keiichi asleep on her shoulder, and Jiro was mending a harness at the table by candlelight. There was nothing to hear but the crackle of the fire and the pull of thread through leather.

Then a soft, unfamiliar sound broke the silence.

It was not the wind. Out on the porch something was scraping over the wood, a long, quiet dragging, followed by a dull jolt, as if something heavy were being hauled across the threshold. Jiro stopped his needle in mid-stitch.

“Do you hear that?” he whispered.

Hana raised her head. She did not answer. The scraping again, and then a fine, bright clink, like metal brushing over wood.

Jiro stood up. The weariness of the past days had blown away. The rumours from the royal city had long since stopped being fairy tales to him. He took up the axe that leaned beside the door; its handle was worn smooth by years of work, its edge cold and well sharpened. It flashed in the candlelight.

“Stay here,” he ordered, in a tone he hardly knew as his own.

Outside, mist hung among the stalks, and the rising moon laid cold light on the tips of the ears. It was so quiet that he could hear his own blood rushing. He expected a thief, a predator or, worse, one of those shadows that people only spoke of in hushed tales. Axe half raised, he stepped to the edge of the porch.

What he saw there froze him where he stood.

On the threshold stood a basket.

It was made of dark wicker, worked with an artistry no basket maker in the village or the city could match. Inside lay a blanket of silk, woven so finely that it seemed to catch the moonlight and cast it back, shimmering like the surface of a still pond. And beneath the blanket lay a child.

It was tiny, scarcely a few days old, probably no older than his own son, and it slept deeply and peacefully, as if there were no such thing as cold or any kind of danger. Around its neck lay a necklace. In the moonlight Jiro could make out two colours: a deep blue and a glowing red. Both seemed to pulse, as though a heart of its own were beating in the strange metal.

The axe in his hand suddenly seemed ridiculous to him, a crude lump of iron beside so much fragile beauty.

Was this a trap?

One of the creatures from the rumours?

Or a miracle?

He did not know which frightened him more.

“Jiro! Jiro, answer me!”

Hana's voice, hoarse with fear. Something clattered on the floorboards behind him, then he heard her laboured breathing, and a moment later she was leaning heavily on the door frame beside him. In her haste she had bedded Keiichi in a blanket by the hearth. She was still weak from the birth. “What's out there?”

Then her gaze fell on the threshold.

The moon struck the silk, and it shone like liquid silver. The contrast almost hurt: on one side the rough wooden walls, the threadbare clothes, the work in the fields; on the other this basket, like a piece of some richer, unreachable world.

“A child,” Hana whispered. “It's just lying there.”

Jiro lowered the axe a little without loosening his grip. “It's too perfect. Just look at that blanket. You won't find cloth like that here or in the neighbouring kingdom. And this jewel …” He pointed a trembling finger at the necklace. “Blue and red. It looks almost alive.”

Hana stepped closer. Every movement cost her strength, but her gaze did not leave the basket. She saw the tiny face of a girl, the little lips, the fine lashes.

“She's so small,” she said quietly. “It's going to be cold tonight. If we leave her lying here, she'll die, and it will be our fault.”

Jiro looked at her and saw the decision already made in her eyes. She was no longer just the woman who wanted to keep the farm safe. She was a mother with a child in need before her.

“If we take her in, people will ask questions. Where does she come from? Who is she? Why is she with us?” he said, but his voice was losing its firmness. “How are we supposed to explain that?”

Hana drew the basket a little closer to her, careful not to wake the child. “Keiichi is only a few days old. No one saw him born. The midwife is a day's ride away and knows nothing of it yet, our friends won't come for a few days at the earliest, and the trader not until next week.” The words came tumbling out of her. “If we pass her off as his sister, as twins, no one will check.”

“It's still a lie. As soon as anyone sees the necklace or the blanket, they'll ask questions.”

“Then no one will see them. We'll hide them both. All that matters is that the two of us agree.”

Jiro looked once more towards the edge of the forest. For the space of a heartbeat he thought he saw a slender figure there, motionless, its face hidden beneath a hood. Then the mist drifted past, and there was only the wind in the stalks. Slowly he lowered the axe and laid it on the boards beside him. Then he took Hana in his arms, with his big hands swollen from work.

“All right,” he said. “For now we'll bring her into the warm. We can decide the rest tomorrow.”

Together they lifted the basket. It was heavier than it looked, as though it held more than a child and a blanket. As they stepped over the threshold, the necklace flared bright blue for a heartbeat. They both flinched. And yet it was not fear they felt, but a warmth that felt like belonging. Neither of them had ever known anything like it.

That night the silence of the farm was broken only by the soft, even breathing of two young lives.

In the early morning, mist still lay over the fields, dissolving only slowly in the sun. Jiro and Hana were already sitting at the kitchen table, their faces pale from too little sleep. Before them stood two cradles, knocked together from old crates and lined with blankets. In one slept the boy. In the other the girl, the strange necklace around her neck, hidden beneath a little shirt made from Hana's old linen. The basket and the silk blanket had long since been hidden beneath the boards of the storage cellar.

“We have to agree on this,” said Jiro. His voice was rough. “If we show her in the village, questions will come. Where did she get that? Where does she come from? People aren't cruel, but they are curious. And curiosity is dangerous.”

Hana brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “We say she's our daughter. Twins. It's the simplest way, and we have to tell the story from the very start so that we'd believe it ourselves.”

“And if one of us lets something slip someday?”

“Then we simply won't let anything slip!” She looked down at the two cradles, and for a moment something soft passed over her tired face. “At least she doesn't scream as loudly as he does.”

Jiro snorted, half laugh, half sigh. He looked at the sleeping girl, then at his wife, and he saw that she had decided long ago. In truth he had suspected as much in the night.

“Then we'll try,” he said at last, firm and worried at once. “I'll help you as best I can. But what shall we call her?”

Hana looked out of the window for a long time. At the forest's edge the maples glowed in the early light, with more red-gold leaves than three days before.

“Momiji …” she said suddenly. “Momiji.”

“Like the maple leaves that glow red in autumn?”

“Yes.”

“A beautiful name,” said Jiro. “Then from today she is called Momiji.”

For a moment the girl seemed to smile in her sleep.

The Unlike Siblings

The years went by, a cycle of green, gold and white. The house changed with them. Soot from the hearth darkened the walls, and on the porch the notches multiplied with which Hana marked the children's height every spring. The secret turned from what had once been a lie into everyday life.

To the village they were Hana's children, two faces running across the fields together. “Twins, and yet so different,” a neighbour once remarked with a smile. The lie was woven so tightly that no one ever doubted a single thread.

Inside the house, though, it was different.

Keiichi had wanted to protect his sister for as long as he could walk. He was like her shadow. When she played in the garden, he stood watch beside her as if he had to hold the whole world at bay. He was loud, headstrong, always on the move; he came home with scraped knees and a new story, and he dreamed of going far beyond the edge of the forest to see everything there was to find. But wherever he went, Momiji was to go with him.

Momiji was not like her brother. While Keiichi fought against the wind, she would often simply stand still and watch how the leaves moved as they fell, as though she understood how the wind steered them long before anyone had explained why. Once she watched Jiro mend the bolt on the plough, and the next morning, without anyone asking her to, she had tightened it again, exactly where it had still been loose. She learned faster than any child for miles around. And sometimes strangers who came to the farm, traders and wanderers, would stop and look at her as if they had recognised something familiar in her face that had then slipped their minds again. Each time, it gave Jiro a small sting in his heart.

One spring afternoon, when the children were seven, the siblings stood at the edge of the little brook that ran between the fields. In the mud a bird with a broken wing was flapping.

Keiichi saw it first. His face darkened, and his fists began to tremble as if they gripped an invisible weapon. In his eyes burned a fire that did not belong to a child of barely more than seven winters. “That was the miller's cat, I bet! I'll show him!”

“Keiichi.” Momiji laid her hand on his shoulder. “He needs help now, not revenge. The cat can't help it. It's just her nature.”

Then she bent down to the bird, and Jiro, who was watching the two of them from the field, slowly lowered his scythe in disbelief. Momiji did not simply walk through the mud. She seemed almost to glide over it, so lightly that her feet barely left a mark. Her movements were so effortless and flowing, as if she were following a current only she could feel. Gently she lifted the bird out of the muck and closed both hands softly around it.

Through the collar of her dress shimmered a soft, pulsing blue, as if the light were breathing. She closed her eyes, and something inside her – a feeling she had never known before – began to grow stronger. It felt like a river of warmth flowing outward from her chest. It was not pain, but it felt heavy, as though a door had to be pushed open against her own resistance. For the space of a heartbeat she felt weak, as if part of her strength were flowing into the bird's small body. Then it was over. The warmth faded, and the bird drew a deep breath. She felt a sudden exhaustion, a faint trembling in her fingers she had never known before.

Momiji opened her hands. The bird shook itself free of the clinging mud, fluffed its feathers, spread both wings and rose into the air as if nothing had ever happened. Momiji blinked after it. “It just stopped shaking,” she said in wonder. As if she herself had no idea what had just happened.

“It's flying! Do you see? It's flying!” Keiichi hopped about, his anger forgotten as quickly as it had come.

A shiver ran down Jiro's back. He told himself it had only been the sun shining through the cloth. Hana came to stand beside him, wiped her hands on her apron and watched the children. “She has a good heart,” she said. “Our Momiji.”

Jiro nodded. He did not say what he had seen. He did not know himself what it had been.

As the years passed, the rumours from the city grew louder, and Jiro began to bolt the door and windows every evening, something he had never thought necessary before. On one of those evenings Hana knelt in front of nine-year-old Momiji and straightened her collar until the necklace beneath it had disappeared.

“Do you remember what we agreed?”

“The necklace stays under my dress.” Momiji recited it in a sing-song, the way you say something you have heard a hundred times. “Always! Even when washing.”

“Even when washing.” Hana smiled, but the smile did not last long.

“Why, though?”

Hana tugged at the collar once more, longer than she needed to, and tapped Momiji fondly on the nose. “Because it belongs to you,” she said at last, “and because otherwise someone would take it from you.”

Momiji nodded. She understood that this had not been a whole answer, and understood too that she should not ask any further.

On a cold winter evening, when frost covered the windowpanes for the first time that year, the siblings sat by the hearth. Keiichi had once again fallen asleep with his head in Momiji's lap, worn out from a day in the fields, his mouth half open, one fist still clenched in his sleep. Momiji stroked his hair and gazed into the fire.

Beneath her dress the necklace lay warm against her skin. She had never told anyone how it felt. When she comforted Keiichi, it grew soft and bright. When she had slammed the door in anger after a quarrel, it glowed dull and hot. After a while both would settle again, if only she breathed calmly long enough and her mind came to rest. It felt as if she were carrying a bowl filled to the brim through life, and not a single drop could be allowed to spill. She did not know why. She only knew that it mattered.

Outside, the first snow fell on the fields, which slowly turned white, and the wind brushed softly, mournfully around the farmhouse. At the edge of the forest, where the maples now stood bare, something moved in the dark. An animal, perhaps. A gust of wind in the branches. Or something that was only lying in wait. When Momiji looked up, there was nothing but the snow, still and untouched, and for one short breath the necklace on her chest turned quite cold.

The Brother's First Sword

The following autumn, when the children turned ten, they were allowed for the first time to come along to the market near the royal city of Seikai.

Keiichi had hardly slept the night before and had been sitting on the box of the ox cart since dawn, legs dangling, asking every few yards whether they were nearly there.

“Not yet,” said Jiro.

“And now?”

“Not yet.”

“And now?”

“Keiichi,” said Hana from the back, where she sat among the grain sacks, “one more question and you walk beside the cart!”

Momiji asked no questions. She sat beside him, hands in her lap, and counted the passers-by, the turns of the wheels and the steps of the old ox. For the first time in her life she saw more of the world than the farm, the village and the edge of the forest, and she saw it the way she saw everything: watching, understanding, and without saying a word about it.

The market lay where the road to the city crossed the road to the villages by the river, half a day from the farmstead. It smelled of roasted chestnuts, smoked fish and wet wool, of hot honey and horse dung, all at once and so thick that Keiichi opened his mouth wide as if he could taste it. Everywhere there was calling, haggling, laughing. Chickens in baskets protested at their treatment. Somewhere a girl played an unfamiliar tune on a flute, a few of its notes off key, but no one seemed to mind.

While Jiro bargained with the miller, in a long and dignified game in which both pretended the deal mattered to them least of all, the children were allowed to look at the stalls under Hana's eye. After three steps Keiichi found the wooden swords. He stopped in front of them and stared like a dog at a piece of meat.

“Well, young sir?” the trader joked. “A sword for the hero?”

“I need it for my sister,” said Keiichi gravely.

“And what does the young lady need protecting from?”

“Everything!”

“Everything?” Hana repeated dryly. “Of course …”

Momiji, meanwhile, had made her way to a stall selling honey cakes.

The man behind the counter, tall, with an apron and a broad smile, handed her a little piece. “For the prettiest girl at the market, the one with the serious eyes,” he joked. Then he stopped in the middle of the movement. The smile stayed on his face as if he had forgotten to take it off, and he looked at her like someone searching a face for something on the tip of his tongue.

Suddenly Keiichi was beside his sister, the wooden sword still in his hand, his fists clenched so tightly that his knuckles turned white. “Stop staring at her!”

The man blinked and laughed awkwardly, but not for long, for now Jiro stood behind the children, calm, the dust of the sold sacks on his broad shoulders. He paid for the honey cake and, after a look from Hana that said “Just this once”, for the wooden sword as well. He thanked the man politely. His hand lay heavy on Momiji's shoulder as he did, and he did not take it away until they had left the stall far behind.

Three men stood by the well, talking with their heads bowed. “Three cattle,” Momiji heard. “From Satō's pasture. From one day to the next.” “And no trace?” “None. Not even blood.” Jiro acted as if he heard nothing, but his stride grew quicker.

At the edge of the square stood someone in a grey cloak, the hood drawn low over the face. He or she bought nothing, did not haggle, did not even look at the wares. Momiji felt the gaze before she saw it, the way you feel sunlight on your skin. Beneath her collar the necklace turned cold for the space of a breath. Then an ox team pushed between them, and when it had passed, only a market woman stood there, plucking a chicken that hung upside down.

On the way home Keiichi fell contentedly asleep among the sacks, mouth open, the wooden sword in his arms. The sun was already sinking below the horizon, and the ox plodded on slowly and steadily at its own pace.

“Mama?” Momiji said quietly. “Why do people always look at me for so long?”

Hana did not answer at once. “Because you're a pretty girl.”

“Keiichi is pretty too.”

“They look at Keiichi too.” Hana smiled a little. “But he stares back.”

Momiji had to laugh. Hana did not laugh with her. She only straightened her collar, as she so often did, wistfully and longer than she needed to. “Always stay close to me at the market, all right?”

“All right,” Momiji promised.

The Thief in the Wheat Field

It began with a single nibbled grain of wheat that Momiji found one morning in late autumn on the barn floor, far from any sack. The next morning there were three more beside it. The morning after that, a whole strip, trailing like crumbs across the straw and vanishing under the board on the north wall.

“A mouse,” said Jiro, without looking up. “There's one in every barn.”

“A mouse that steals ears of wheat,” snorted Keiichi, “is a thief.”

On the fourth day they saw her. She sat right in the middle of the biggest sack, fat as the miller's cat, with a torn left ear and the impudence to stare at the two children while she calmly chewed on a whole ear of wheat. Then she stuck the ear crosswise in her mouth like a dog with a bone and dashed off.

“Stop!” bellowed Keiichi, and so began a small and very uneven war.

Keiichi built his trap in an hour: a bucket propped at a slant on a stick, a string tied to it, a little heap of wheat as bait. He lay down behind it in the straw, the string in his fist, and waited with all the earnestness of a hunter. The mouse came, studied the bucket, studied Keiichi, took one grain from the very edge and left. When Keiichi yanked the string in fury, the bucket toppled and rolled clattering against his head.

Momiji took two days, and in that time she built nothing. She simply sat still in the straw until the mouse stopped noticing her. The mouse never ran across the middle of the floor, always along the wall, and every time it stopped by the overturned barrel, as if it had a regular seat there. Then Momiji set a small crate with a board for a flap right in front of the barrel, propped the board up with a few stalks and put nothing inside but three grains of wheat. The next morning the mouse sat in it, looking very offended.

“We'll take her to the brook,” said Momiji.

“She stole our grain!”

“She was hungry.”

“We're hungry too!”

“You're always hungry, especially when Mama has baked a cake!”

Keiichi opened his mouth, wanted to say something more, then closed it again and picked up the crate.

He held it at too much of a slant. In one leap the mouse sprang out, over his arm, into his collar and down his back. Keiichi yelled, danced, slapped at himself and then ran, with no plan anyone could see, up the ladder to the hayloft. Momiji ran after him. Up there the mouse was balancing along a roof beam, and Momiji, who could not decide whether to laugh or to worry, climbed after it. Keiichi, who saw the mouse scurry out through the back door below, promptly jumped through the hatch and landed knee-deep in the dung heap. Momiji was so startled on the beam that she slipped and ended up hanging from it by her knees.

That was how Hana found them: the laundry basket on her hip, standing in the barn door. Her son stood in the dung, picking a piece of straw out of his hair. Her daughter hung by her knees from the roof beam, upside down, with cobwebs in her hair. Hana slowly sat down on a sack and began to laugh. It was a laugh so warm that no one could resist joining in.

“Last week the well cover,” she said, once she could speak again. “Before that the beehives. Two weeks ago you wanted to prove you could fly off the roof with leaves tied to your arms. What comes next? Hunting hares in the forest?”

The children looked at each other and said nothing.

That night Jiro and Hana sat at the table for a long time. “They're too clever and too brave,” said Hana, “and I'm only a woman who minds the house and the children.”

“A cat,” said Jiro.

“A cat?”

“It hunts the mice. And it needs someone to feed it, bring it milk and make sure it doesn't fall into the well. That will keep two children busy for quite a while.”

“That's your plan?”

“That's my plan.” He gave a tired grin. “Have you got a better one?”

Hana had not. They laughed again, quietly, into the darkness.

The kitten came from the village, from a litter of the miller's cat. It was the colour of wheat, with a single white paw, and it sat in a basket. Keiichi stared into it for a long time without a word.

“That's her daughter,” he said at last. “The one that back then got Momiji's bird …”

“That was never proven,” Momiji cut in abruptly.

Keiichi looked at the kitten, which returned his gaze with a yawn, and his face slowly twisted into a mischievous grin. “I'll call her Mugi,” he said. “Because she looks like wheat.”

The mouse with the torn ear never showed itself again. But Hana swore that in the evenings the mouse sometimes sat on the barrel in the barn, that Mugi stared at it, and that the two of them had somehow come to an agreement.