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short while. And this being winter, all the more so.
    At the end of the day, buried in this potter’s field were the lonely dead who had no living to watch over them. It sounded better to called them wayfarers who had died on their journeys. But anyone who died and whose family did not come to get them was treated the same. Family or no, they lacked the resources or the respect and affection.
    And then there were entire families that died at the same time. There were vagabonds on the one hand, and those with families that cared but had no place to bury them on the other, and left them in a potter’s field out of necessity.
    After seven years, the grave keeper disinterred the unclaimed dead, crushed the coffin together with the bones inside, and reinterred them in the city mausoleum. And that was the end of it.
    In any case, the land a person owned was technically on loan from the kingdom, so when the old owner died, a new owner would take possession of it. Normally, people kept their hands off the catalpa trees at the borders of the hamlets. But if somebody inadvertently cut one down and discovered a coffin beneath, they’d dig it up and hand it over to the grave keeper, who would disposed of it in the customary manner.
    And so the end inevitably came, for people and every other living thing.

    “There are a few things I need to get done first,” Shushou muttered to herself, stroking Hakuto’s throat. She smiled into those golden brown eyes and took off her satin padded kimono. Beneath it was Keika’s thinner padded jacket.
    “It’s freezing—”
    Once the sun began to set, the chill in the air grew fierce. She’d traveled a considerable distance southeast from Renshou, but the weather hadn’t improved at all. She’d heard that winter didn’t visit kingdoms far to the south like Sou, and had been hoping that things would warm up a bit.
    With a sigh of regret, Shushou folded the satin kimono and stuffed it into the traveling pack on Hakuto’s back. Now to find an inn to spend the night.
    She’d donned Keika’s padded kimono—and before that had devised a way to take it off Keika’s hands—because she’d imagined that strutting around in her best outfit would make her a prime target for highway robbers.
    However, there was still the moukyoku. She needed an inn that had stables equipped to care for him. Except that Shushou certainly did not look like a seasoned traveler who knew her way around inns, or was wealthy enough to own her own kijuu, and so was likely to arouse suspicions. She’d had the constable called on her once already and had to make a quick getaway.
    “I’m pretty much running out of options.”
    She’d made it this far by pretending to be a servant whose master had ordered her to deliver a kijuu. Except that putting a twelve-year-old in charge of a kijuu and sending her alone on such a journey wasn’t any more believable.
    To make matters worse, the further south she went, the greater the civil unrest, and the harsher the eyes of the guests. In the last city, she’d skipped the inn and crawled beneath the floorboards of the cemetery shrine. She wasn’t looking forward to another night in a graveyard, and wanted to give Hakuto a good night’s rest too.
    Along with the rack and ruin, public order was worse in the south too. It wasn’t that disasters were choosey about the geography, but that the youma were working their way north. Perhaps sensing the youma presence, Hakuto grew especially agitated when the sun set. The night before, he’d growled from sundown to sunup. That was probably the reason for his pace being off today.
    Shushou could do worse than search for a yaboku to bed down under. She was guaranteed to be safe from harm beneath a yaboku. But she simply didn’t have the constitution to sleep out under cold winter skies like these.
    She could try her usual routine, put on a teary expression and beseech the nicest-looking innkeeper for a room. Or sidle up to a traveler and