Chapter 9: A Very Responsible Use of Fox PowersBy the end of her second week, Yuki had developed strong opinions about which shrine tasks she hated and which ones she merely disliked.

  Sweeping: disliked. Repetitive, but meditative once you stopped fighting it.

  Incense arrangement: disliked. Too many rules about direction and height.

  Folding prayer papers: hated. The folds had to be exact, and her fingers were still adjusting to being the size they were.

  Purification rituals: actually liked, which she absolutely refused to admit out loud.

  And illusion work? Illusion work was, quietly, the most fun she'd had since dying.

  She'd figured this out accidentally. Three days ago, she'd been practicing making a stone appear to be a flower when a group of vilge children came up the shrine path with Daichi for a visit. One of them—a boy of maybe seven—spotted the flickering illusion and froze.

  Yuki had made it bloom.

  The kid had completely lost his mind with delight.

  So had the other two children. She'd spent twenty minutes making illusory butterflies, vanishing rabbits, and one very wonky fox (she still couldn't get animal shapes right) while Daichi watched with the expression of a man witnessing something he hadn't expected and wasn't quite sure how to categorize.

  Today, there were no children, but the principle stood.

  She was crouched at the edge of the courtyard working on a flower that actually looked like a flower—petals properly shaped, color stable, not fading at the edges. The shimmer was new, accidental. She'd been trying for the st hour to figure out if she could make it intentional.

  She couldn't, yet. But she was getting closer.

  Sometime around midafternoon, she heard footsteps cross the courtyard behind her and pause. She didn't look up—too deep in the illusion, trying to keep the shimmer stable. The footsteps didn't come closer. Then they moved away again, back toward the main building.

  She only gnced up afterward.

  Kuroki's cup was on the step beside her. Tea, still warm, pced at some point without Yuki even noticing.

  Yuki looked at it for a moment. Kuroki was watching. Or passing through. Or both. Impossible to say.

  She set that thought aside—firmly, deliberately, into the mental box beled Do Not Open—and made the flower pulse once, bright, before letting it dissolve.

  "I could do something useful with this," Yuki called out, knowing the samurai's hearing was just as good as hers. "Not just flowers."

  Kuroki stepped back out onto the veranda. "Barriers?"

  "Tsukuyomi was talking about overying illusions on the shrine's perimeter. Make it look abandoned to anyone who means harm. Like a deep forest, no buildings. So hostile youkai don't realize there's a shrine worth attacking."

  Kuroki straightened slightly, her professional interest piqued. "That would work?"

  "Apparently it's a technique. Old kitsune used to do it for small settlements." Yuki picked up the practice she'd been doing—building an image of yered pine trees from nothing. "It takes a lot of concentration to hold something that rge. I can't do it yet. But eventually."

  Kuroki was quiet for a moment.

  "Tell me when you can," she said. "We should pn how to use it."

  We.

  Yuki kept her face pointed stubbornly at the illusion. "Sure," she said.

  She held the pine trees for forty seconds—a personal record—before they flickered out.

  "Longer than before?" Kuroki asked.

  "Twelve seconds longer."

  "Good."

  Kuroki pushed off the wooden pilr and went back to whatever she'd been doing before she stopped to watch. Yuki tracked her across the courtyard without meaning to—the way she moved, the slight shift of her ponytail in the breeze, the habitual way her hand rested near her sword even when there was nothing to be cautious about.

  Stop it, Yuki thought.

  She redirected her attention to the stones at her feet and tried to make one of them look like a flower again.

  The stone became a perfect pink blossom on the second try.

  She stared at it.

  When Kuroki had been standing there watching, she'd gotten the flower to stabilize on the twelfth try. Now, alone? Second try.

  She thought back to yesterday's practice. When Kuroki was nearby, her focus shattered. When Kuroki left, her magic flowed perfectly. Tsukuyomi had warned her on day one: kitsune magic was tied to emotion.

  Which meant her massive, unwieldy crush on her bodyguard was actively nerfing her magical abilities.

  She was absolutely, firmly, not going to think about what that meant.

  One of her white ears rotated slowly toward the main building, acting like a compass needle tracking the faint sound of Kuroki putting away supplies.

  Stop that, she told the ear.

  It did not stop.

  Yuki let the stone-flower dissolve with a sigh, picked up her cold tea, and went inside.

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