I’d spent the first half of the night defending myself (and Furi) from my mother’s helpful advice and the second half poisoning rats in the apothecary. At dawn, I tied up loose ends within doors, then let myself out to the garden. The season was getting on and the trees had filled out and now provided good shade from a blistering sun. I stretched out under the broad boughs of a fig tree to take my first sleep in almost two days.

Mine was not a restful sleep. Dreams aggravated. Light penetrated my lids, always illuminating Furi, hiding deep within some secret grotto—forcing a confrontation neither of us was ready for. She shrank away from me and the sense of her fear filled the air like a cold vapor that distilled a film of sweat over my brow and the back of my neck. At last, I realized I had transformed into my Earth Kumo self, but was perversely disproportioned. I towered over Furi’s cowering form, eight eyes glaring and breath menacing.

And then time—breath, movement stopped. Matter reorganized—not my size and form—but Furi’s posture. She crept toward me…one step, then another, defying fear, indifferent to my hideous shape and enormous scale. At last she reached up with one soft, warm hand. Brushing my swollen and bristled face with her fingers, she planted a breathy kiss on under one eye. My lids flickered, and at once I was there, in human, beneath the plum tree and Furi above me. Unafraid. Willing. My hand found the soft flesh of her navel and for an instant I held her, and whispered, “I thought you were a dream.”

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Then at once her flesh turned cold and she jerked back.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

I dropped my hands at once, and she stepped back. But I closed the distance again. Pulling her close, I spoke through a throat rigid with tension, “Furi. I’ve been waiting for you since we were children.”

I sent her the images from my memory. Myself, a raw-boned boy, standing at the edge of the Ishiyama farm. Furi sitting beneath the eaves, eating that bitter-skinned apple I had given her. The sting of pine salve upon her damaged neck. My voice in her ear pleading for her to wait.

The torment of indecision played out across her eyes and mouth. And I wanted to take everything back, but couldn’t.

Resisting, she whispered back, “I cannot be the cause of your death, Ansei.”

“Should I cling to my own life and not give way for a child?”

“How will I stand it when you are gone, and at my own hands?”

“You will destroy me all the same, and waste my life rather than spend it.”

It was several minutes of impasse before I released her, and I went away from the garden over a pathway toward a neighboring wood.