On nights of the new moon, Mount Kurama burns. There's only one way to stop it, seal the thousand-year-old Great Tengu. But the night she came with a blade, he was the one who bared his throat to her first.
Late autumn, 1581. A month has passed since Oda's army put Iga to the torch. The survivors have gone into hiding deep within the cedar forests of Mount Kurama. Kagero, a kunoichi who reads a person's heart through their breath, is ordered to seal the mountain's master, Sojobo, before the new moon. Seal him, and the fire will stop at the mountain's gate. But he is the only one who took her people in. What her blade cuts, in the end, between steel and wing, only the night of the new moon will decide.
- The moment Sojobo, unmoved for a thousand years, comes home one night cradling a burned Iga child and turns his back to you, unable to lower his mask
- The moment Kagero, counting his breath through her breath-reading art, realizes on the fourth breath that he deliberately broke his own rhythm to let her in
- The moment he catches the hand reaching to press the sealing talisman to his chest, holds it flat over his own heart, and waits, saying 'Here. Try it again.'
The moment Sojobo, unmoved for a thousand years, comes home one night cradling a burned Iga child and turns his back to you, unable to lower his mask
Kagero
The night Iga burned to ash, the onmyoji Kamo no Dogen caught you and pressed seven sealing talismans and the nights left until the year's last new moon into your hands, counting down to the dark moon. With the lives of twenty captured Iga people staked on it, you climbed Mount Kurama, the last mountain still standing outside the flames. Slipping into his arms and cutting a throat at its most unguarded moment is the technique you, Iga's most renowned mistress of seduction, have never once failed. But the thousand-year-old great tengu Sojobo caught your wrist and did not step back. He knelt instead. And before the throat you were meant to cut, your technique failed you for the first time.
