Crowsbane

He had to move fast. If a witch crow had spotted them, its master must have been nearby. Arata took the lantern from Kurogane. He was confident that if anyone could get a chunk of metal out of the ground, it would be her, and ran in the opposite direction. Glancing up, it hadn't changed its course and was on track to round the cluster of trees masking Kurogane from its sight.

Without breaking stride, Arata stooped low and snatched a rock from the mud. He turned back towards the crow, took careful aim, and whipped the stone through the air. It was dark, so he could forgive himself for only clipping the crow’s tail instead of impacting the wings or body—it did the job either way. The crow turned to him, as obvious as a sole star in the blackness, and dropped low. Arata realised he should have given himself more distance for the throw as now he barely had enough time to clear his katana from the scabbard.

It was a rushed draw but he didn't need much finesse to cut the bird in two and its wings separated from its legs on the ground.

A squawking filled the air, rattling like autumn branches, as the two halves of the crow tried to claw themselves back together. The front flapped with horrid fervor whilst the back hopped across the grass to meet it. Arata took a step back, sword flat, as the bird reattached itself, any indication of a cut cauterising in blue flame. It was the right move, as only a second later it leapt for his eyes again.

He caught the bird on the flat of the blade and flicked it to the ground. “How much longer will it take?” Arata shouted not out of desperation, he could defend against one bird, but every second they stayed out there meant another second something actually dangerous could show up.

“Almost got it!” Kurogane called back, although the end of the shout was cut off by an uproar of crows nearby. If she needed a reason apart from mosquito bites to hurry up, she had one.

He knew his role: distraction until Kurogane freed the deitetsu from the earth. But as he watched the murder rise above the trees, he realised almost wasn't fast enough. The crow beside him crowed one last time and he'd had enough, impaling the bird with the practice katana before kicking the lantern onto it. It lit up like tinder but no matter how hard it flapped, it couldn't free itself. That should have kept the flock occupied.

"What do I need to do?" Arata almost fell into the pit Kurogane had dug when he ran to her, a mass the size of his arm exposed at the bottom. She couldn’t see him as well as he could see her so he didn’t wait for a response to describe something right in front of him. Instead, he dropped down beside her and squatting down, tried to find a handhold on the deitetsu.

The surface was more like rock than metal which surprised him but the cold was what he expected: deep, placid. Kurogane saw what he was doing and shoved him aside to the heaviest part.

“Stop trying to take charge and just lift.” She shouted and with a gasp, the ore began to shift. There was an unbalance to its weight and Arata could just raise it to his chest when they heard the squawking close in on them.

Kurogane knelt down to give Arata a leg up, confident he would be able to see what she was doing. Once he was out of the pit, she scrambled after, shovel and knife stuffed into her bag, before running in his shadow.

You should know better, he thought through gritted teeth and burning bicep as he balanced running with retracing their steps through the marsh. Even for a witch hunter, the grass was scarcely differentiable, one way would be steady ground, another would swallow them without a trace.

They rounded a patch of trees when they saw the first of the rice paddies and the lights of Giseizawa beyond. But that was where Arata stumbled. He took the turn too hard, the earth slid like a whetstone against a blade from underneath him and he splashed into a ditch. Kurogane reacted fast, rushing to him as he slipped, and wrapping his body in a bear hug. They hit the ground together and all the breath burst out Kurogane’s lungs as she landed beneath his bulk. But thanks to her, he found his footing again. Still clinging on, she steadied herself, gulping in breath that couldn’t fill her lungs.

She wouldn’t make it in time. He had no choice. Crouching to one knee as she did before, she got the message and wrapped her arms around his neck. He ran, she held on, and they made it to the first house just as a crow swooped down.

It corrected its dive at the last second to miss them, wheeling back to join the rest of the murder. Witches never used their animals near the city, they were safe. Kurogane finally regained her breath enough to begin laughing.

***

He never liked how the furnace flames turned blue as soon as they began to smelt deitetsu. It was a unique quality of the metal, how similarly it resembled the things it was meant to kill. Kurogane shouted instructions fast and clear which he couldn’t be more happy to follow. They acted like a single three-armed entity, a god of metal and swords—lit by the flames, a glimmer in her eyes caught his attention. It was like watching tigers hunting their prey, acting exactly as nature intended. He hadn’t seen it since they were children, when they would sit around the forge on cold evenings, listening to the stories her father told of emperors, battles, and armies. All things so distant to Giseizawa, even in his deep and rational voice, they could have been fantasy.

Arata helped with the last fold before Kurogane shooed him away. Now was the time to sharpen it and she wanted to be alone. To make use of his time, he paced the courtyard impatiently, kicking over a loose stone he almost tripped over, before he relinquished and took a practice sword from Kurogane’s wall.

As he pulled the katana from its sheath, he was in the burning building again. The witch stood before him, blue flames pouring like rapids from the walls, with a smile on its exposed skull jaw. He lunged, baited it low with a feint, and saw himself caught by the same scorching hand that wrapped around Sawatari’s face. A second try ended the same way. So did a third.

Even in his head, it was an impenetrable wall, an opponent who was everywhere except where his sword was. He wouldn’t retreat, not again. By the twelfth attempt, he had dodged the first grab. By the nineteenth, he had landed a hit across its left arm. The twenty-seventh ended with a clash of steel against steel, dodging fire and collapsing timber, until he tried the low feint again. The witch reacted just in time, just as fast as it did back there. They both turned and Arata’s concentration broke when Kurogane shouted for him to come back to the forge.

All deitetsu blades had the same finish. It was inevitable, to use that low grade ore—iron from the bog—the end result would never come out pleasantly. The inner curve was rocky with jagged protrusions and notches just like the stone it came from. The cutting edge couldn’t be sharper.

With her tiger-gleaming eyes, Kurogane handed him the sword. “I know you won’t name it, so I did it myself.” She didn’t let go even as Arata took hold, like it had become an extension of her. “Bane of circling crows. I thought it fit.”

“Crowsbane,” Arata abbreviated, “I’ll take it.” She finally released it.

Kurogane said her goodbyes with a hug that covered Arata in furnace ash and he turned away into the night. Back home he had his own crow roosting and now he had the thing that reminded him what she was.