The summons came on a Tuesday, which felt like the wrong day for my life to change.

  Not that I knew it was a summons at first. Daisuke found me in the weapons storehouse cataloguing spear hafts, which was the kind of task assigned to people who had not yet proven they were worth assigning anything better to, and told me that Hayashi Toranosuke wanted me in the inner courtyard immediately.

  "Did he say why?" I asked.

  Daisuke's expression suggested the question was slightly embarrassing. "Ashigaru don't ask why," he said. "Ashigaru go."

  I went.

  Toranosuke was waiting in the inner courtyard with two other samurai I didn't recognise, both of them carrying themselves with the particular tension of men on an errand they hadn't chosen. The morning was overcast, the sky the colour of old iron, and the courtyard felt unusually empty for that hour.

  "Kuroda Ren," Toranosuke said, looking at me with an expression I couldn't read. "You were observed during the action at Asobe. Your conduct was noted."

  I waited.

  "Lord Nobunaga has requested that you be assigned to the inner compound."

  The silence that followed this statement was inhabited by several things I did not know how to say out loud.

  "As what?" I finally managed.

  Toranosuke looked mildly pained. "As an attendant. You will carry messages, run errands within the castle, assist the senior staff with whatever they require. It is not a promotion in the formal sense." He paused in a way that suggested the next part mattered. "But it puts you inside."

  One of the other samurai was watching me carefully. Not with hostility. With the particular attention of someone assessing whether a new variable in an equation was going to cause problems.

  I thought about the fox figurine against my ribs. I thought about amber eyes and the smell of old shrines. Get closer to him.

  "I am honoured," I said, which was both true and a significant understatement.

  The inner compound of Kiyosu Castle was a different country from the outer barracks where I had spent my first three weeks. The air felt different here, denser somehow, carrying the weight of decisions being made and unmade in rooms I was not yet permitted to enter. Servants moved through the corridors with the practiced invisibility of people who had learned that being noticed was usually bad news.

  I learned quickly that my primary function was to be present and unobtrusive, available to carry a message or fetch an object at a moment's notice, and to otherwise behave as though I were part of the furniture. I was good at this. Third sons of minor samurai families develop a talent for occupying space without drawing attention to it.

  What I was not prepared for was how often Nobunaga moved through the same spaces I was inhabiting.

  He did not keep to the formal rooms and reception halls the way I had expected a lord to. He walked the corridors of his own castle the way he crossed a training ground, purposefully and slightly too fast, appearing in unexpected places at unexpected hours, trailing the two or three senior retainers who could keep pace with him and leaving everyone else slightly breathless in his wake.

  The first time he passed within arm's reach of me I was standing against the wall of a corridor holding a folded document I had been told to deliver to a room at the far end. He came around the corner without slowing, saw me, and stopped.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The retainers behind him stopped too, with the practised precision of men who had learned to anticipate sudden halts.

  Nobunaga looked at me for a moment. His eyes were dark and direct and gave nothing away.

  "Asobe," he said.

  It took me a second to understand that it was not a question. He was placing me. The same way he had looked at me across the courtyard three days ago, trying to locate where he had filed me in whatever system he used to catalogue the world.

  "Yes, my lord," I said.

  He studied me for another three seconds, which doesn't sound like long until you are the subject of it, and then said "good" in exactly the same tone Daisuke had used after I killed my first man, and walked on.

  I stood against the wall and breathed carefully until I was certain my legs were going to continue functioning.

  I should describe what it was like to be near him, because the stories told about Oda Nobunaga after his death tend to flatten him into either a monster or a visionary, and he was neither of those things and somehow both.

  He was of middling height, lean in the way of men who never quite stop moving, with a stillness in his face that sat in strange contrast to the constant motion of his body. He was not handsome in the conventional sense but had the kind of presence that made handsomeness seem beside the point. When he spoke, which was less often than you might expect from a man remaking a province, the words landed with a precision that suggested everything unnecessary had been removed before they left his mouth.

  Being near him felt like standing close to a fire that was slightly larger than you had initially judged. Not dangerous if you were careful. But you were always aware of the heat.

  And there was something else.

  Something I noticed on my third day in the inner compound and could not unfeel afterwards. When Nobunaga was in a room, the shadows in that room behaved differently.

  Not dramatically. Not in any way that would make a rational person point and shout. But I had grown up near shrines. I had seen things at the edges of the world my whole life. I knew the difference between a shadow cast by light and a shadow that was present for another reason entirely.

  The shadows near Nobunaga were attentive.

  They pooled slightly where they should have spread. They oriented toward him the way iron filings orient toward a lodestone, subtly, consistently, with a patience that suggested they had been doing it for a very long time.

  I did not tell anyone. I gripped the fox figurine in my sleeve and I watched and I said nothing.

  On my fifth night in the inner compound I woke at the second hour of the dog to the smell of something burning.

  Not cook fires. Not lamp oil. Something older and more purposeful, the smell of an offering being made, of something being consumed at the intersection of the mortal world and whatever lay beyond it.

  I was out of my sleeping mat before I was fully awake, moving on instinct down the corridor toward the smell with my hand on my short blade and the fox figurine burning hot against my ribs, hotter than it had ever been before, hot enough that I could feel it through the fabric of my sleeve.

  The corridor led to a small interior courtyard, a garden space used for private contemplation, with a stone lantern at its centre and a gnarled pine in the corner that cast complicated shadows in the moonlight.

  Nobunaga was standing in the middle of the courtyard.

  He was alone. No retainers, no attendants, no sword at his hip. He was standing perfectly still with his face tilted slightly upward toward the sky, and the shadows around him were doing something that made my stomach drop.

  They were moving.

  Not with the wind. Not with any light source I could identify. They were moving the way water moves in a current, flowing toward him and around him in slow deliberate patterns, and where they touched the ground at his feet they were darker than darkness had any right to be, darker than absence of light, dark with the particular quality of something that existed as its own presence rather than simply the absence of something else.

  And from within that darkness, just barely at the threshold of hearing, there was a sound.

  Not words. Not quite. More like the memory of words, or the shape of them before they acquire meaning, pressing against the inside of my ears with an intimacy that felt like violation.

  Nobunaga was not reacting to any of this. He stood in the centre of it with an expression on his face that I had not seen there before. Not fear. Not reverence. Something I could only describe as recognition. As though this was not new to him. As though this was a conversation that had been going on for so long that both parties had stopped needing to acknowledge it.

  The darkness at his feet shifted and for one terrible second it turned its attention toward the corridor where I was standing.

  The cold that hit me was not temperature. It was older than temperature. It was the cold of spaces between stars, of depths in the earth that have never known warmth, and it moved through me like a hand reaching into a jar and it felt, I am certain of this, it felt curious.

  I did not move. I could not move. The fox figurine in my sleeve was blazing now, genuinely hot, and I gripped it because it was the only warm thing in the world.

  The darkness considered me for what felt like a very long time.

  Then Nobunaga lowered his gaze from the sky and the shadows snapped back to where shadows were supposed to be and the cold released me so suddenly I nearly fell forward into the courtyard.

  He looked directly at the corridor where I was standing. The courtyard was dark enough that I should have been invisible. I was not invisible to him.

  "Go back to sleep," he said quietly. Not angry. Not alarmed. As though he had known I was there the entire time. As though my presence was a minor variable he had already accounted for.

  I went back to sleep.

  Or rather I lay on my mat with my eyes open and the fox figurine cooling slowly in my hand and thought about the sound that was almost words and the cold that was not temperature and the expression on Nobunaga's face that I now had a word for.

  The word was communion.

  Whatever lived in those shadows, whatever had been circling him for longer than he had been alive, he knew it. Not as an intrusion. Not as a haunting.

  As a relationship.

  I lay there until dawn came grey and indifferent through the shutters and burned away the night the way it always does, as though nothing in the darkness had been real or worth remembering.

  But I remembered.

  And the fox figurine, when I looked at it in the morning light, had a new hairline crack running from its chipped ear down to its base, as though something had pressed against it very hard from the outside and been held back by the narrowest possible margin.

  I wrapped it carefully in a strip of cloth and put it back in my sleeve and went to find out what tasks the morning required of me.

  My hands, I noticed, were completely steady.

  I was more frightened by that than anything else.

  End of Chapter 3