Where Gasai's receiving room had been bright and spacious, Kannagi's was dark and oppressive.

It was even larger than Gasai's and, unlike hers, was carved into the mountain itself. The cave was immense, easily thirty meters on a side and twenty high. It had obviously been the subject of generations of workers who had smoothed the walls, installed torches for light and braziers for heat, tiled the floors in a mosaic of elegant slate, each piece of which was delicately carved. The carvings blended together into a spiraling design that stretched from the walls to the center of the room, drawing the eye to the man who knelt atop the dais there. A massive woven rug, so large it must have needed multiple ninja to carry it, was spread in the middle of the room at the base of a platform on which the eldest Kannagi knelt.

A pair of Kannagi ninja, each armed with something halfway between 'axe' and 'cleaver', led the team into the room. They bowed to their clan leader, then stood aside and took up positions on either side of the door.

"Be seated," Kannagi said, gesturing towards the pillows that had been placed on the rug at the foot of the dais.

Inoue led the group to the pillows and knelt down, Noburi at her side and the others sitting behind them. Kagome was twitching slightly, his eyes darting around the room, but he didn't move.

"Your proposal to my granddaughter was unexpected," Kannagi said.

Noburi paled. "I, um—"

Inoue set a hand on his arm and he went silent. She bowed deeply to Kannagi, then straightened up and met his gaze frankly. "I must apologize, Elder," she said. "We are still learning the ways of the village, and are only slightly familiar with your rules of courtship. My student enjoyed his time with your granddaughter, but he did not intend to propose marriage. I sincerely apologize for the error. How can we resolve the issue without causing embarrassment or hurt feelings?"

Kannagi raised an eyebrow. "You, boy," he said. "You were standing next to the Betrothal Stone. You looked young Yuno in the eyes and asked if she was single. Were you merely trifling with her heart?"

"No!" Noburi said, his face pale. "I didn't meant to! I didn't want to marry her! I mean, I don't want her! I—"

Inoue squeezed his arm, hard, and his mouth clopped shut.

"Please excuse him, Elder," she said, bowing again. "He is young and inexperienced, and like most children he frequently speaks without thinking."

"Hmmm," Kannagi said, frowning in disapproval. "His proposal was very public. Proposing to my granddaughter and then casting her aside would bring shame on my family. It would spit on our honor, and especially so on me as the elder of our clan. I would have no choice but to seek satisfaction, or be branded a coward. Families have been destroyed for less insult than that."

He shook his head firmly. "No," he said. "I will not allow you to shame my family. The betrothal will proceed and the wedding will be scheduled."

~4 hours earlier, at dawn~

"Good morning, sir," Keiko said, bowing to her grim-faced teacher. Takahashi stood in the doorway, hands clasped behind him.

"And to you," Takahashi said. "Come in." He nodded politely to Inoue. "You may wait outside. I will have tea brought."

"Actually, may I speak to you for a moment?" Inoue asked. "There's been a bit of miscommunication, and I'd appreciate your help at sorting it out."

Takahashi waved them inside. "Of course," he said. "What is the problem?"

Inoue waited until all three of them were settled by the dais before laying out Noburi's mistake in crisp and unflinching detail.

"That was quite a mistake," Takahashi said. "I do not doubt that Kannagi will have people waiting at your fort by now, calling for you to meet with him."

Inoue studied him for a moment. "You knew already," she said. "Kannagi spoke to you last night, didn't he?"

"Indeed," Takahashi said. "Inasmuch as there can be said to be a good day for such a problem, this is a good day for this problem. The next thing that I need to teach young Keiko is simple, and there will be no difficulty with her leaving early. After you leave, you should go back to your fort quickly and you will be taken to meet Kannagi. Be polite; he is likely to be the one chosen for the council, and I need his vote in order to get you what you want. Your student's blunder has put him in a very awkward position, so you will need to be extremely circumspect. Now, if you'll excuse us, I wish to begin my student's training for today."

Inoue nodded and gave him a shallow but polite bow. "Of course," she said. She gave Keiko an encouraging touch on the arm, then rolled smoothly to her feet and slipped outside.

"Now," Takahashi said, "we will continue working with twelfth-dimensional...."

~Now~

Kinnagi shook his head firmly. "No," he said. "I will not allow you to shame my family. The betrothal will proceed and the wedding will be scheduled."

"Scheduled?" Inoue said, catching the key word.

Kinnagi nodded. "Scheduled," he said. "Your student will court my granddaughter properly. They will walk together, dine together, and be seen interacting in appropriate ways. I will be disapproving, while you and your team will attempt to convince me that the relationship is a good idea. My disapproval will grow stronger as time goes on until, in the end, I will cancel the wedding and forbid Yuno from seeing your student any longer. I will be seen as strong, commanding, and loyal to the old ways, which will make my election much easier. The young man will be seen as socially clumsy and over-ardent, but all of you are known for your casual rudeness and the young are forgiven from being overly direct so long as no permanent dishonor is done."

Inoue smiled and laughed. "I like it," she said. "Devious, yet simple."

Kannagi gave her an ironic bow. "Thank you," he said. "Now, the one part of the plan that is vulnerable: young Noburi here must be convincing in his role as suitor. Failure to seem ardent and faithful would ruin the charade."

Noburi was about to melt through the floor in embarrassment, but it got only worse when Inoue reached out and ruffled his hair.

"He'll be on task," Inoue said. "I'll work with him. Is there someone I can talk to about cultural issues and practices?"

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

"I will make someone available to you," Kannagi said. "Now, I believe it would be best if we played to the crowd a bit." His eyes flicked to the two guards standing by the door, too far to make out soft-voiced conversation but easily close enough to catch the tone.

Inoue flashed a wicked grin. "Thank you, sir," she said gratefully, raising her voice just a fraction. "My student is awkward and unschooled in your ways, but he is thoroughly smitten with you granddaughter, and he's a good boy. He...."

During the following several minutes of Inoue-sensei listing his various flaws (and dismissing them as 'not so bad, he's just young') and virtues (all of them phrased in the most embarrassing way possible), Noburi prayed to every god whose name he'd ever heard that the earth would just swallow him whole. Sadly, his prayers went unanswered.

o-o-o-o

Kagome waited until they were back at their fort. "Guess that stinker's working with Yoshida, then," he grunted.

Inoue looked at him in surprise. "What?" she said.

"The seals," Kagome said, as though it explained anything at all.

"I saw those," Inoue said. She grimaced. "Not until we were almost done, though."

Kagome nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Well hidden. I didn't notice them until we we were sitting down. Must be slipping."

Hazō and the other genin frowned, looking back and forth between their elders in confusion.

"Good job staying calm," Inoue said. "I was worried that there might be trouble if you saw them." She paused. "For what it's worth, I didn't notice them until we were almost finished."

Kagome grunted and suddenly became fascinated with digging something out of his backpack—or, more likely, found an excuse to turn away so as to hide the blush that he nevertheless failed to hide.

"We were already sitting on it," he said. "Wouldn't've done any good to try anything then." He grunted again and shot Hazō a glance. "Besides, I wouldn't want anyone thinking I was crazy, or tactically crippled."

Inoue frowned, looking back and forth between Kagome and Hazō. The latter made a 'tell you later' gesture.

"What are you talking about?" Noburi demanded. "What did you notice?"

"Seals," Kagome said, not turning around. "Two lines of them, worked into the design on the floor. Went from his seat, off the raised thingy, and under the rug. Probably enough explosive seals under there to put us through the mountain the long way. It's what I'd do."

Noburi went pale.

"What did you mean about Yoshida?" Inoue asked.

"You haven't noticed?" Kagome said. "There's no seals in the village except where the Yoshida go. They aren't just the seal experts, they're the only source of them."

Inoue blinked, her eyes losing focus for a moment as she skimmed back through her memory. "Good point," she said. "I missed that. I thought they were just rare, but they're not. They're restricted to only the places Yoshida interact with."

"Yeah," Kagome said. "Working together."

o-o-o-o

Yuno really was a lovely girl, Noburi reflected, as he walked to the tree under which they'd agreed to meet. A little hyper, perhaps, and far too enamored of that axe, but attractive and intelligent. In fact—

His train of thought was broken by the subject of his thoughts leaping out from behind a bush.

"Good morning!" Yuno yelled up to Noburi, whose reflexes had shot him up into the trees without conscious thought.

"H-hi," Noburi said. He took a moment to breathe until his heart rate settled down, then dropped back to the ground. He shook his head, forcing his thoughts to settle down and Inoue-sensei's lessons on proper dating protocol to come back to the fore. "The day has become pleasant," he said quietly, looking at Yuno's ear.

She blushed to the tips of her ears and she covered her mouth with one hand, her eyes going wide. "I find myself quite happy to hear that," she said, her eyes dancing like a schoolchild saying something naughty.

Noburi went to great effort to keep his face still, but inside he was panicking. That was more of a response than he'd expected. Had he said something wrong? That was what Inoue-sensei and the scary Kannagi matron had told him to lead with. Should he have looked the other direction? Was the tone too friendly? Crapcrapcrap!

"I had thought to walk a bit," Noburi said. There was something else...he wasn't supposed to explicitly ask her to come along, but he had to say something more...what was it?! "I would be grateful if you would suggest a direction." No, that was the super-inviting version! Crap! He was supposed to be keeping this low-key! Argh, why did these people have such complicated rules?!

Yuno was practically stammering. It took a moment for her to get her wits back, but then she blew out a breath and made a visible effort to calm down. "I had intended to walk to the training ground," she said. "Did you happen to be going that way as well?"

"I did," Noburi said.

An awkward silence fell as neither of them spoke or moved. He took care not to look at her eyes, instead keeping his gaze on her ear. His peripheral vision reminded him that she was very visibly a year or two older than he was. He found himself wondering if perhaps Keiko would develop similarly...the henge that she'd put on back in Iron was still engraved on his forebrain, and he often wondered if it would become reality in time. Yuno didn't match the slim, deadly elegance of Keiko's henged-older self, but she had a pleasant athleticism. Perhaps this play-dating wouldn't be as much of a chore as he expected. It might help him learn how to approach Keiko when—

Yuno cleared her throat softly, her eyes flicking in the direction of the training ground. Noburi started guiltily as his thoughts were jerked firmly back to the present moment.

"Right!" he said. "Yes. I was indeed going to the training ground. Let's go!" He turned and hurried down the trail. Yuno fell in beside him, not touching but close enough that he was hyperaware of her being in his space.

There was silence for another long moment, and then Yuno clearly couldn't stand it anymore. "I was terribly worried that I would be late," she babbled. "This morning I was practicing the Grand Dismemberment maneuver on one of the family pigs, and it took forever to get the blood out of my hair."

"Ah," said Noburi faintly.

Her eyes went wide and she stopped, turning to face him. "I did, though!" she said. "I washed twice, and did the purification rituals four times! There's no blood on me, really! I promise!"

"It's...it's fine," Noburi said, waving vaguely. Neither Inoue-sensei nor the scary Kannagi matron had briefed him on this. His smile was a bit sickly, but it was a smile. He nodded to her, then turned back for the training ground.

Okay, maybe this pseudo-dating was going to be harder than he thought.

o-o-o-o

Fortunately, their charade required only one date per day, and no more than two hours together. It was agonizingly painful, but he thought he was improving. Probably. Well, maybe. He had brought it down from inducing three paroxysms of incoherent Yuno-stammering per date to only two. That was improvement, right?

Today's date was, thankfully, over. He had left her at her front door and was hurrying with grateful speed back to the fort when he passed by a pair of village ninja circling one another in the middle of the path.

"Did you flick your shoulder at me?" the one on the left demanded of his counterpart. The speaker was sixteen, perhaps, tall and slim with dark hair and a brace of knives holstered on each leg. Noburi remembered seeing him in the Kannagi compound when he had picked up Yuno two days ago.

"Yes," the girl opposite him said. She was of an age with her questioner, with close-cropped hair and more muscle than Noburi had. "I did flick my shoulder."

Noburi stopped and looked around. Other villagers were starting to drift over, showing expressions that ranged from uncertainty to eagerness.

"Did you flick your shoulder at me, Gasai?" the boy said.

The girl smiled slowly. "Fighting is against the law, Kannagi," she said. "So no. I did not flick my shoulder at you. I did flick it, though."

"What was it you flicked away, then?" the boy asked. "Perhaps a trace of your breakfast? I know the Gasai kitchens are richly stocked. For today, at least."

The girl's smile vanished and her eyes grew hard. "They are indeed," she said. "Although I gather the Kannagi armory is a bit bare." She shrugged elaborately. "Not that it matters, I suppose."

The boy's face went pale with fury; a dagger appeared in each hand and he launched himself at her—

—only for Gasai Moriko's cane to loop around his shoulder. The ancient woman spun in a circle, her tiny weight perfectly positioned to break the boy's balance and pull him to the ground. She crouched beside him, her cane stretched across his shoulders and one knee on the cane in order to keep him pinned.

"You!" she snapped at him. "You know there is no fighting between members of the village! You have shamed your family!"

"No he hasn't, Grandmother," the girl said sweetly. "That definitely wasn't fighting."

The boy struggled but couldn't throw Grandmother Gasai off before she stood on her own. He jumped to his feet but she was between him and his target, stalking towards her granddaughter with the cane aimed at the girl's face like a spear.

"You are worse!" Grandmother snapped. "I've told you to behave! You are confined to your room until I decide what your punishment shall be! Go!"

The Kannagi boy started to say something, but Noburi hurried away. Putting his foot in it on a date was one thing, but he wasn't about to mix into this.