Hida was not the Neeshi Suppression Squad's destination. They were merely passing through, and their encounter with Alluka had been quite a coincidence.
Ever since Sugawara no Michizane had been exiled to Dazaifu and become one of the Four Great Vengeful Spirits after his death, the Sugawara Clan's fortunes had declined. Their political archenemy, the Northern House of Fujiwara, had pressured the clan's Jujutsu Sorcerers into exorcising curses in Tōsandō, within the Five Provinces and Seven Circuits.
A ragtag unit like theirs was cannon fodder among cannon fodder, sent ahead to scout the way for the clan's elite.
They had taken Alluka along purely because their captain, Sugawara Kazukazu, had felt sorry for her.
In an age plagued by natural disasters and curses, they could not even be sure of surviving until tomorrow. Every extra day alive was a day worth taking.
Alluka's entire family had been hacked into a bloody pulp. The soldiers did not know how the killer had managed it, but that had not stopped them from searching the residence for anything edible.
The weather was cold, so the food the family had stored had not spoiled. Compared with the poor, who could not fill their stomachs, having anything to eat at all was already a blessing.
Dressed in the white robe and scarlet hakama she had worn at the ceremony, Alluka followed at the rear of the squad.
Only after leaving the town did she discover what the world outside was really like.
Refugees in ragged clothes wound through the heavy snow in a long procession, carrying their few remaining belongings as they trudged toward an unknown distance with numb expressions.
The Sugawara Clan's squad was heading in the opposite direction from the refugees. The two straight lines passed through the snow, each moving toward a completely different destination.
That night, heavy snow poured down from the sky as though from a bottomless reservoir. Hunger and cold crept through people's collars and into their very bones.
Samurai and travelers shivered as they stumbled through the deep snow, their steps uneven. Before long, their exposed skin ached dully from the cold.
To give the squad a chance to rest and regroup, Sugawara Kazukazu led his men to an abandoned Buddhist temple nearby.
The monks had long since left because of the war. A brown wooden signboard lay in thick dust, and the arrangement of trees and artificial hills in the courtyard still faintly suggested a karesansui landscape.
Unlike the others, whose faces were tense, Alluka gazed curiously at everything along the way with her pearl-like eyes.
To her, everything was so novel.
While the samurai built a fire, she crouched beneath the latticed shutters of the temple's main hall, prodding something with a dead branch.
"What are you doing?"
The voice that spoke was rather cool.
Alluka turned toward it.
Someone stood behind her, bundled up so thoroughly that she could not make out his face.
Meeting Alluka's curious gaze, he removed his face covering.
In contrast to his somewhat fearsome rattan armor, the face revealed in the darkness looked remarkably delicate.
He was a boy not much different from her in age.
He had short, silvery-white hair close to the color of the snow outside. Unlike most people, he had a rose-red marking at the back of his head, resembling a red plum blossom standing proudly amid the snow.
"A little bird died here."
Alluka blinked her deep blue eyes and pointed at the sparrow on the ground that had frozen to death.
This winter was simply too cold. Even people could barely endure such a natural disaster, let alone the world's innocent little animals.
"Oh."
The white-haired boy glanced numbly at the sparrow's ice-encrusted body. He had seen so much of this on the way here that he was too weary to put on an expression of pity.
"What's your name?"
Alluka tossed aside the branch in her hand and shifted her attention to the boy her age, as though she had found a new toy.
"Mei."
The white-haired boy's eyes were rose-red.
His delicate face was as cold and impassive as if it had been cast from ice, but when someone asked, he still spoke the name he had treasured deep in his heart for so long.