Wounded

Arata had seen his father injured before. One of his earliest memories was seeing him slumped over in a street framed by the skeletons of buildings. Four fractured ribs, bruises over every part of his body not covered by burns, the family katana dirty with ash. Later paintings of the end of the Great Fire showed his father standing victorious, the witch’s scalp in hand. But a lifetime of poeticisation couldn't remove that image from his head. Nor the view of the hand of his mother, the only aspect of her that escaped the rubble, as if she was offering hers in exchange for the arm Arata lost that night. Here they were again.

On the garden steps outside Hinoe’s practice, Arata sat next to his father, the state of both of his legs hidden by his greaves. From the wince he made every time he moved, Arata suspected he wouldn’t be walking unassisted for a few months. Both were stained with an ash that must have come from a mixture of wood and skin but neither had the motivation to wipe it from their faces. Towards Marshtown, the fire was losing its fight and the blue turned from sharp azure to a cool indigo.

Another cry of pain came from the room behind them and Arata clawed the stone steps underneath his nails. Back at the burning house, Aose had begged Arata to take a stretcher along with Sawatari and his father. He knew he should have, he knew better than anyone that the heroes in this profession weren't glorious. When they weren't dead, they were broken— definitely not able to walk away with victory in each step. And still, he was Shibagaki Reiji’s successor, trained from childhood in the art of the witch hunt. If he didn't walk now, why should he ever again? If victory was in each step, it felt like white hot pain.

Instead, he carried Sawatari's stretcher on his shoulder so that each of her movements sent a bristle of wood grain cutting into his neck. Without her, the witch’s blade would have separated his head from his shoulders in an instant. The only thing stopping it had been Sawatari using herself as a shield. What a hero he was.

“You saw the fire and went off alone?” Reiji asked Arata with a coldness to his voice of someone who thought he wasn’t trusted. If Arata wanted to lie, that would be the easier explanation, it might have even closed some routes of questioning, but he couldn’t do it in this situation.

“No.” Saying anything felt wrong, like what the witch had done to Sawatari demanded their silence and reflection. What kind of thought was that, they had to respect the harm a barbarian inflicted on one of their own? “We wanted to follow up on checking fire codes. We thought it would just be routine.”

Arata paused just long enough to catch his father glance over to him as if he should ask something to follow up. “The witch already killed the man that lived there,” Arata continued, “We tried to alert others outside but… this one was different to any I’d faced before.” He looked to his father for guidance, the older man just coughed out a laugh.

“I’ve gone up against my share of big ones and a few carried steel as well, not that many.” Reiji scratched the well kept moustache above his lip. “To have them both, that’s a bad day. Add on what I saw of its control of fire, that’s an oni walking.”

It wasn’t reassuring but if they could force it to retreat now, they could do it again. The only cost was now it knew how they fought.

“It was saying something about where another witch was, you’re still telling me there was only one when you got there?” His father’s question sent images of the witch he still had bound at home racing through his mind. Shinutcha, that was her name according to the witch.

There, not Chiyo. Shinutcha. He thought to himself with a self-loathing ache.

“Only one when we got there.” Arata tried to keep his voice as flat as possible—it wasn’t a lie, he knew his father would be able to see through one of those. “And the man… he was already dead.” Arata was surprised how easily he could use that fact to cover himself.

Before Reiji could reply, Hinoe’s willowy face appeared in the doorway and beckoned them in. “She’s through the worst of it, I can see to both of you now.”

Sawatari lay on the only spare bed next to Koseki. According to Hinoe, the only survivor of the manor house fire—apart from the witch—should make a recovery in a couple of weeks. He didn’t say full, just a recovery. Arata didn’t pry any further, instead focusing on the condition of Sawatari.

“Oh she’ll be fine. She just needs rest for a couple of days.” Hinoe undid Reiji’s greaves, prompting an overdramatic hiss from the old witch hunter. “One of your rank who brought you in told me a portion of what happened, but I couldn’t get a clear picture.” He traced a finger over Reiji’s skin and caught it on the fracture. “Was there no one alive inside?”

Arata repeated the events as he did to his father. “We interrupted the witch before it could scalp the victim but were too late to save him. My father came in at the last minute and couldn't escape in time once the house collapsed.”

“I just wanted to stretch my limbs.” Reiji added, hissing as Hinoe examined his other leg. He got a sharp-eyed glance from the doctor before he turned away.

“Both are broken, you’ll need splints, crutches, and no movement for a while. I hope you enjoyed stretching your limbs. Now, what about your son?”

Arata explained the wound on his shoulder and the burns that were treated with salves across his legs and wrist. Apparently Aose had applied it well as Hinoe barely needed to reapply the bandages before he turned his attention to the gash.

“Now we know we’ve seen the witch who does the scalpings.” Arata tried to talk through the discomfort of getting his wound redressed.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, young man,” Hinoe began after stripping back the last bandage to reveal a ragged hole in Arata’s flesh, “The weapon that did this couldn’t come close to the sharpness needed to scalp skin from bone.”

Arata hadn’t found a knife carried by Shinutcha and unless this other witch kept a spare, that meant they had only met two out of three, or maybe even more. The thought drove an iron wedge into Arata’s chest. Giseizawa could be crawling with witches and they had struggled to catch only one.

Somewhere in the house, a teapot began its tortured hiss and Hinoe left to collect it. Laid out on the table, Sawatari rolled her head to look at her subordinate and her supervisor together. Most of her face was bandaged but her left eye burned with a fight that hadn’t left her. “The witch escaped, didn't it?”

The question sent a flash of self-hatred through Arata’s jaw and neck. He should have been able to stop it—Sawatari should expect that he stopped it—instead he just let her down again.

So Arata did the only thing that was right. He dropped to his knees, forehead slamming into the tatami floor, elbow flared outwards. “I let it get away.” His voice came out hard edged and he hoped this position stopped anyone seeing the tears in his eyes.

***

The following morning was a spill of grey and red. Arata limped through the carcass of the house on the hill, surrounded by the ruins of its neighbours, brought down to act as a firewall. A small thought went out to the old rice farmer but he knew they would build something in the house’s place soon enough.

“You couldn’t have fought the witch in a house with less steps leading to it?” Reiji asked behind him, crutch in one hand and a yakitori he had picked up on the way there in the other. The incongruity made Arata click his tongue against his teeth.

“If I had a choice, we wouldn’t fight witches at all.” Arata called back, weaving between workmen already trying to remove any evidence of the house’s existence. And with it, removing their evidence. They walked over to the remains of the hunter although were disappointed by exactly how much remained. The house’s collapse had flattened the body to only a shadow. Nothing there.

For the next hour, they combed the house for clues. Thankfully, the witch fire made the shattered remains of charred flowers outside unremarkable and Arata wouldn’t have to explain how they missed that the first time around.

A workman called him over, clad in thick fireproof hide. Arata saw what he was pointing to immediately and the handle of his sword came free from the ash with only a slight pull. Along with it, the smell of deep earth.

“Peat…” Arata murmured to himself, trying to invent a reason for what this type of fuel would be doing so far from a fireplace. Nothing came to mind.

“I didn’t realise the witch had a second victim.” His father somehow snuck up on him and Arata turned the blade over in response. It was a vicious crack—the only one in the town who could mend it was Kurogane herself. That wasn’t a house call he wanted to make in these circumstances: he reminded himself to buy daifuku on the way back.