The woodcutter moved fast for a man carrying half a tree on his back.

  Ethan followed him down a path that switchbacked through dense undergrowth, fighting to keep pace while his hiking boots slipped on roots and loose soil. The man never turned around, never slowed, never spoke. He navigated the hillside with the unconscious certainty of someone who had walked this route a thousand times, ducking under branches at exactly the right moment, stepping over stones Ethan didn't see until he tripped on them.

  The light was changing. The sun had dropped behind the western ridge, and the valley below was filling with blue shadow. Cooking smoke rose from the village in thin threads, carrying charcoal and rice and something savory that made Ethan's stomach clench. He hadn't eaten since a convenience store onigiri at the Kyoto train station, which was either six hours ago or four hundred and fifty-three years ago, depending on how you counted.

  The woodcutter stopped.

  They had reached a flattened area where the path widened into something like a clearing. A stream crossed it, ankle-deep and clear, running over smooth stones toward the valley. The woodcutter set down his bundle of branches and turned to face Ethan for the first time since the hillside.

  He spoke. Slowly, with visible effort, as if talking to a child or a foreigner, which Ethan supposed he was both. The dialect was still thick, but the meaning came through in fragments: *Wait here. I bring someone. Do not move. Do not let anyone see you.*

  "Who are you bringing?" Ethan asked.

  The man stared at him. Either he hadn't understood the question or he'd chosen not to answer it. He pointed at the ground beside the stream, a gesture that required no translation: *Sit. Stay.*

  Then he was gone, moving down the path toward the village, and Ethan was alone in a forest that smelled like woodsmoke and wet earth and the slow approach of nightfall.

  He sat by the stream and drank. The water was cold and tasted of stone and snowmelt, and it was the cleanest thing he had ever put in his mouth. He drank until his stomach ached, then filled his cupped hands and washed his face. His reflection in the stream was distorted by the current, but he could see enough. A pale face, dark hair, green eyes that belonged to no one within a thousand miles of this place.

  He was still crouched by the water when the voices came.

  Not from the path. From the trees to his left, uphill, moving parallel to the stream. Two voices, then three, speaking in quick bursts he couldn't parse. The tone was clear enough without the words — alarm, urgency, anger.

  Ethan stood. His body wanted to run, but his legs had turned to something dense and uncooperative. This was the freeze response he'd read about in precisely the kind of academic context that was useless to him now. His nervous system had decided that the best survival strategy was to become a statue, and it had made this decision without consulting him.

  Three men came through the trees.

  They were not woodcutters. They carried tools that could serve as weapons. A sickle, a long-handled hoe, a wooden staff with a sharpened end. They wore the same rough-woven clothing as the first man, but they were younger, harder-eyed, and they were not moving with the deliberate calm of someone gathering firewood. They were hunting.

  The first one saw Ethan and stopped so abruptly the man behind him collided with his shoulder.

  For a moment, nobody moved. The stream made its quiet sound over the stones. A crow called somewhere in the canopy.

  Then all three started shouting at once.

  Ethan raised his hands. The gesture that had worked, partially, with the woodcutter. Palms out, fingers spread. *I am not a threat. I have no weapon. Please do not kill me with that sickle.*

  The man with the sickle advanced. He was young, early twenties, with a jaw set in the particular way of someone who has already decided what he's going to do and is just building the momentum to do it. He spoke a rapid string of words at Ethan, and Ethan caught perhaps one in four: *who, where, lord,* and something that might have been *spy*.

  "I am a traveler," Ethan said, reaching again for the archaic constructions. His voice came out steadier than he expected. "I have lost my way. I mean no harm to your village."

  The young man's eyes widened at the sound of Ethan's Japanese. Not with comprehension. With revulsion. Ethan's accent was wrong in a way that went beyond regional dialect. It was temporally wrong, and to these men it must have sounded like nothing human. Like a spirit trying to imitate speech.

  The man with the staff circled to Ethan's right. The one with the hoe moved left. They were positioning themselves in a triangle, cutting off his routes of escape, and they were doing it with the practiced coordination of men who had dealt with threats before. Bandits, maybe. Deserters from the wars. This was a border region, and border regions bred people who knew how to handle strangers.

  "I have no weapon," Ethan said. He pulled his jacket open with both hands, showing his henley, his empty belt. The zipper caught the fading light and the man with the sickle flinched at the flash of metal.

  The sickle came up.

  Ethan's academic mind, operating on its own schedule, noted that the tool was well-maintained. The blade had been recently sharpened. The wooden handle was worn smooth from use. These were details he would have found interesting in a museum. They were less interesting at a distance of four feet.

  "Please," he said. The word came out in English. His Japanese had abandoned him at the moment he needed it most, retreating to some locked room in his brain while the animal part took over and produced the most basic sound it knew.

  The young man grabbed a fistful of Ethan's jacket. The synthetic fabric bunched in his grip, and his expression shifted from anger to confusion. He rubbed the material between his fingers, feeling the texture of something that could not exist, and for a moment his aggression gave way to bewilderment. Then the bewilderment made him angrier, because things you couldn't understand were more dangerous than things you could, and he shoved Ethan backward.

  Ethan hit the ground. The impact drove the air from his lungs and sent a sharp pain through his right elbow where it struck a root. His notebook slid half out of his pocket. The man with the staff stepped forward and let the sharpened point rest against Ethan's chest. The wood was rough against the thin fabric of his henley, and through it Ethan could feel the man's hands trembling.

  *He's scared,* Ethan thought. *They're all scared. That's worse.*

  The young man with the sickle crouched beside him and spoke. This close, Ethan could smell him. Sweat and woodsmoke and the sour undertone of someone who worked in fields all day. The words were a demand. Ethan caught *lord's name* and *where from* and *what are you.*

  "I came from the gate," Ethan said. "The shrine on the hill. The one with the carvings."

  Silence. The staff against his chest pressed harder. Then the three men looked at each other, and something passed between them that Ethan couldn't read. Something closer to confirmation of a fear they already carried.

  The young man raised the sickle.

  *This is how it ends,* Ethan thought, and the thought was absurdly clear. *On a hillside in feudal Japan, killed by a farmer with a rice sickle, because I couldn't resist a shrine with interesting carvings. The paper will never be written. Lily will never know what happened. Claire was right: I chose the past over everything, and the past is going to kill me for it.*

  A voice cut through the clearing.

  It came from the path below, carrying the particular authority of someone accustomed to being heard. Louder than shouting needed to be, quieter than it had any right to carry. A single word that Ethan recognized as a name, directed at the young man with the sickle, spoken in a tone that contained a complete sentence: *Put that down, you idiot, before you do something I have to fix.*

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  The young man's arm stopped.

  A man walked into the clearing. He was older than the others, somewhere in his forties, with the weathered face and deliberate movements of someone who had spent decades working land that didn't want to be worked. Broad across the shoulders, thick through the chest, shorter than Ethan but built like something that would be difficult to move. His face was tanned dark, deep lines around his eyes and mouth that could have come from squinting into sun or from laughing. Both, probably.

  Ethan noticed his left hand first. The last two fingers were missing, the stumps long healed, the skin smooth and scarred over. The remaining three fingers gripped a walking stick with easy authority.

  The man surveyed the scene. Ethan on the ground. The staff at his chest. The sickle in the air. Three young men wound tight with fear and adrenaline. His expression didn't change, but something in his posture shifted, a settling, the way a person plants their weight when they intend to stay.

  He spoke to the young man with the sickle. A short sentence, quiet. The young man's jaw tightened, but he lowered the blade. The man with the staff stepped back. The one with the hoe hadn't moved, but his grip on the handle loosened.

  The older man walked to where Ethan lay and looked down at him. His eyes were brown, deep-set, and they moved across Ethan's face with the unhurried assessment of someone who made decisions about people for a living. He took in the jacket, the boots, the jeans. He noted the notebook half-spilled from the pocket. He studied Ethan's face. The coloring, the bone structure, the green eyes that were examining him with equal intensity.

  He asked a question. One word, but Ethan understood it perfectly: *What?*

  Not *who*. Not *where from*. *What.*

  "I am a man," Ethan said. The simplest true answer he could construct in the oldest Japanese he could manage. "I came from the gate on the hill."

  The older man's expression didn't change. But his eyes moved to the path behind him, where the woodcutter had reappeared, standing at the edge of the clearing with the look of someone who had fetched exactly the person he meant to fetch.

  A brief exchange. The woodcutter spoke in a low, rapid stream. Ethan caught fragments: *found him at the shrine, appeared from nowhere, speaks strangely, the gate was...* and then a word Ethan didn't know, something local, something old.

  The older man listened without interrupting. When the woodcutter finished, he was quiet for a long moment. He looked at the sky the way the woodcutter had done on the hillside, checking the light, calculating.

  Then he looked back at Ethan and spoke slowly enough to be understood.

  *Can you stand?*

  Ethan stood. His elbow throbbed where it had hit the root, and his legs were unreliable, but he stood.

  The older man turned to the three younger ones. He spoke briefly, and whatever he said carried the weight of a man whose word was not questioned in this place. The young men retreated. The one with the sickle shot a look back at Ethan that promised this wasn't finished, but he went.

  The older man gestured for Ethan to follow and started down the path toward the village. The woodcutter fell in behind, and Ethan was between them, bracketed, not quite a prisoner and not quite a guest.

  They walked in silence for perhaps five minutes. The path descended through bamboo and into the first cleared fields at the village's edge. Ethan could see the houses now, low wooden structures with heavy thatch roofs, arranged around a central clearing where a well stood. Smoke rose from cooking fires, and chickens scratched in the clearing. Somewhere a child was crying. The ordinary machinery of a life he had studied from the outside for twelve years.

  A girl appeared on the path ahead of them.

  She was young, fifteen or sixteen, with a round face smudged with dirt along one cheekbone. Her hair was tied back roughly, and she wore a working kimono with the sleeves tied up, exposing forearms that were stronger than her frame suggested. She had been running. She skidded to a stop when she saw Ethan, and her mouth fell open in an expression of such uncomplicated astonishment that it almost made him smile.

  She spoke to the older man. Fast, excited, the words tumbling over each other. *Father, is this, what is he, where did he, is he from...*

  "Tomoe," the man said. The same tone he'd used on the young man with the sickle, but softer. A warning wrapped in affection.

  The girl closed her mouth. It lasted approximately three seconds before she opened it again.

  She said something to Ethan directly. He caught *your eyes* and *green* and what he thought might be *are you a demon.*

  "No," Ethan said.

  The girl grinned. A gap between her front teeth, wide and genuine. She turned to her father and said something that Ethan translated, imperfectly, as: *He doesn't look like a demon.*

  "Tomoe," the man said again. "Go tell your aunt to prepare the back room. Extra bedding. Rice for one more. Say nothing else to anyone."

  The girl hesitated. Her curiosity was a physical force, visible in the way she leaned toward Ethan like a plant toward light. But she went, sprinting back toward the village with the energy of someone who had been given a secret and was already bursting with it.

  The older man watched her go. Something crossed his face that was too quick to read. Worry, maybe. Or the particular exhaustion of a parent whose child has no instinct for self-preservation.

  He turned to Ethan.

  "I am Jirō," he said. He spoke carefully, adjusting his dialect, finding a register between his natural speech and something Ethan's strange ears might comprehend. "I am headman of this village. You will come to my house. You will eat. You will sleep. In the morning, we will talk."

  He paused. His three-fingered hand tightened on the walking stick.

  "If you are a danger to my people, I will know. And I will act. Do you understand?"

  "I understand," Ethan said.

  Jirō studied him for one more moment. Then he turned and walked toward the village, and Ethan followed, because following was the only option he had, and because the man who had just saved his life had done so not out of kindness but out of calculation, and that, more than anything, was what made Ethan trust him.

  The village closed around them. Thatched roofs against a darkening sky. The smell of cooking rice and burning wood. Eyes at doorways, watching, pulling back. The sound of his boots on packed earth, louder than anything else in the evening quiet. A dog barked once and was silenced.

  Jirō's house was at the far end of the village, slightly larger than the others, with a swept yard and a persimmon tree just beginning to leaf. Tomoe was waiting at the door, vibrating with restrained questions. Behind her, a woman's shadow moved in the interior, arranging something.

  Ethan stepped inside. The floor was packed earth, the walls rough wood, the air warm and close and scented with rice steam and smoke from the cooking fire. It was the most welcoming place he had ever been.

  He sat where Jirō indicated and waited while someone whose face he couldn't see in the dim light placed a wooden bowl of rice and a cup of water before him. His hands were shaking again. He steadied them against his knees.

  Across the room, Tomoe watched him eat with the unblinking intensity of someone who had never seen anything like him and intended to memorize every detail.