In Kuroinu

I heard the bowstring before I opened my eyes. Thwack. A pause. Thwack. Another. Thwack. Coming from behind the inn, through the window, across the courtyard and through the stone walls and I could hear the arrows hitting the target with a precision that I shouldn't have been able to pick up from a bed on the second floor with the shutters closed. Llusse's boost. The world was louder this morning.

The bed was empty. The pillow next to mine had an indent in it and the sheets smelled like pine sap and cold air and she'd folded the blanket before she left, which was the most aggressively tsundere act of domestic tidiness I'd ever witnessed.

I got dressed and went downstairs. Natalia was behind the bar and she slid a plate of bread and cheese across the counter at me without being asked and winked. Mila was sitting at a table near the window with her ears perked forward, watching the courtyard. Tianne was beside her, drinking tea, looking settled. She'd been like that since the temple visit. Filia was already outside.

I took the bread and went out the back.

The inn had a small yard that backed onto a stone wall and someone had set up a practice target against it, a straw circle with painted rings. Llusse was standing at the far end of the yard with her bow drawn and she released as I came through the door. The arrow hit dead center. She nocked another one and drew and released and it hit dead center. She did it again. Dead center.

The cluster in the bullseye was so tight there was barely room for another shaft. She nocked. Drew. Released.

The arrow hit the shaft of the one before it, split it down the center, and buried itself in the target exactly where its predecessor had been. A perfect split.

She stared at the target. Her bow arm came down slowly and she looked at the ruined arrow and the new one sitting in its place and her ears were flat.

"Lucky shot."

Filia was leaning against the doorpost beside me with her arms crossed and a whetstone in one hand and she'd been watching long enough to have seen the whole sequence. "Every single time?"

"The wind."

"There's no wind."

"There's ALWAYS wind. It's an outdoor range."

Tianne had come out behind us with her teacup. She'd been healing a palace trainee's sprained wrist earlier that morning and the golden shimmer was still fading from her fingertips and she looked at the target and her eyebrows rose. "That's wonderful, Llusse. Your accuracy has-"

"I SAID IT'S LUCK."

Llusse pulled her arrows from the target with more force than was necessary, the shafts coming out in sharp jerks, and she stuffed them into her quiver without looking at any of us and her ears were red and her jaw was set and she walked past Filia without meeting her eyes. A feather from one of the split arrows drifted to the ground behind her.

Filia watched her go. Then she looked at me. One eyebrow up.

"Don't," I said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to."

"I was going to say the barracks has a hot spring." She pushed off the doorpost. "The training commander offered it to us. Group bath after lunch."

The hot spring was at the back of the barracks compound, a stone-walled enclosure with steam rising from a pool fed by a pipe that came from somewhere underground. The palace guards used it after training. The training commander had cleared it for our party as a courtesy to the hero team, which was apparently what they were calling us now.

The girls went in. I did not go in.

"Men's hour is after sundown," Filia told me at the door. "You wait."

"Seriously?"

"Palace rules."

"I'm the hero."

"Palace rules apply to heroes." She closed the door. The lock clicked.

I stood in the corridor. The stone walls were warm from the pipes running through them and the air was thick with steam that leaked from under the door and from the vents near the ceiling. I could hear water. Splashing. Voices muffled by wood and stone. A bucket being filled. Filia saying something I couldn't make out and Llusse's response, sharp and loud enough that I caught "I am NOT" through the door.

The new hearing was a blessing and a curse. Before last night I'd have heard muffled noise. Now I could pick up fragments. The register of voices, the direction of movement in the water, the difference between Tianne moving carefully and Llusse moving like she was trying to wash with maximum hostility.

Mila came around the corner carrying a stack of towels, her tail wagging, her ears swiveling at the steam. She stopped when she saw me standing outside the door.

"Are you peeking?"

"No."

She tilted her head. Her ears angled forward. Her tail slowed.

"...Do you want to?"

"Mila!"

She laughed. She covered her mouth with one hand and the towels wobbled in her other arm and her eyes were bright and her tail was going and she turned pink from her ears to her collar and she ducked past me through the door and I heard her call out "I brought towels!" to the others as it swung shut.

I stood in the corridor. The steam was warm on my face. Through the door, the sounds of the bath played out in fragments I caught with ears that were sharper than they'd been yesterday.

Water.

"Llusse, you seem relaxed today." Filia's voice, casual and precise.

"I'm ALWAYS relaxed."

"You're usually wound like a bowstring. Today you're practically glowing."

A splash. Heavy. Aggressive. Llusse had thrown water. Or a bucket.

"Don't you DARE-"

"I'm just observing-"

"Your OBSERVATIONS can-"

Another splash. Then Tianne's voice, quiet beneath the others, and I couldn't catch the words. A pause. Then Llusse sputtered. Then Filia made a sound that might have been a laugh cut short.

Then Tianne laughed.

The sound came through the wall and the door and the steam and it was clear and warm and surprised and I'd never heard it before. In all the weeks since the summoning, all the battles and the healing sessions and the quiet conversations and the night she'd come to my room with tea and the night she'd come to my room without it, I had never heard Tianne Ruthheim laugh like that. Open. Unstrained. A woman in warm water with two other women she trusted, and one of them had just said the thing that cracked her open and she was laughing.

Mila joined in. Her laugh was different, higher, a series of bright sounds that tumbled over each other, and her tail was hitting the water.

Even Llusse. A short sound, bitten off, like she'd caught herself and then couldn't stop. "That's not- STOP it, that is NOT what happened-"

More laughter. Overlapping. The four of them in the steam, in the water, laughing at a joke I'd never hear the punchline to.

I sat down in the corridor. My back against the door, my legs stretched out on the warm stone, and I listened.

A servant walked past with a basket of linens. He looked at me sitting on the floor outside the women's bath and his mouth opened and then he looked at the hero's insignia Filia had pinned to my coat and he closed his mouth and kept walking.

Through the door, the laughter had settled into conversation. Quiet voices in warm water. I could catch words but I stopped trying. Some conversations weren't mine.

I leaned my head back against the wood and closed my eyes and the steam was warm and the stone was warm and the sounds of four women talking in a bath came through the door and I didn't want to be anywhere else.

Three down. Thirty-three to go.

The thought came automatically. Filia. Tianne. Llusse. Three partners. Three power boosts. Three women whose combat abilities were measurably stronger because they'd slept with me. Across the continent, thirty-three more women were living lives that were going to be destroyed by forces they couldn't see coming. I knew their names. I knew their faces from the source material. I knew which villain was going to target each one and when and how and I knew that every day I spent in this capital was a day closer to the deadlines I was racing.

I caught myself.

They're not numbers.

I thought about Filia's hand on my jaw the first time she'd kissed me and how her fingers had been shaking even though her voice was steady. About Tianne's golden light filling a dark room and her face when she'd looked at her own hands in wonder. About Llusse crying against a tree in a forest and saying she didn't want to be number three on a list and then telling me she hated me while her arm tightened around my chest.

They weren't numbers. They were people. Specific ones, with voices and scars and the way they held their tea and the sounds they made when they didn't know anyone was listening. And I was sitting outside a bath listening to them laugh and I was smiling and I hadn't decided to.

They're people.

I kept thinking it. I'd known it before, intellectually, the way you know a character in a show is fictional until you meet them in a hallway and they hand you a cup of tea and their fingers are warm on yours. But knowing it and feeling it were different things and right now, sitting on a warm stone floor with steam in my hair and laughter through the door, I felt it.

The door opened and Mila stuck her head out, her hair wet and plastered to her cheeks and her ears drooping with the water weight. "We're done! Do you want-" She saw me on the floor. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah." I stood up. "I'm good."

She looked at me with her head tilted and her wet ears and her wide eyes. Her tail wagged once, scattering droplets, and she went back inside.

Llusse came out next. Her hair was damp and she was wearing clean clothes and she walked past me without looking. Her ears were pink. Filia followed, her wet hair over one shoulder, and she nodded at me and said "Your turn" and there was a hint of a smile that she didn't try to hide.

Tianne came out last. Her blonde hair was down and wet and she smelled like lavender and steam and she paused in the doorway and looked at me and there were still traces of a smile on her mouth.

"Were you waiting long?" she asked.

"Not long."

She touched my arm as she passed. Her fingers were warm from the water and the touch lasted a second longer than it needed to and then she was walking down the corridor and the golden shimmer at her fingertips caught the lamplight for a moment before it faded.

I went in. The bath was still warm. I sat in the water and listened to the silence and the steam rose around me and I thought about thirty-six women who were real and alive and laughing and I thought about the ones I hadn't met yet and whether they'd laugh like that too.

The water was good. The silence was better.

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