A week passed with Ikusa residing at Yuki's house. He aided her in salvaging what small portion of her plants survived the storm, and made himself helpful around the house in other small ways. Yuki decided that she was better with him than without.
But two people are easier found than one.
Yuki sat on the now-finished weaving of Dolan, while behind her Ikuza spun cloudy wool into thread.
"You're a fine weaver." Ikuza said.
"Huh." Yuki flicked one of the strings of the loom with a claw. Outside, stars sparkled in the eternal night of the Beast Kingdom, making it impossible to tell time.
"You dye your own thread?"
"Yes." Yuki tapped her claws on the floor. "I grow the dyes."
"Is it hard?" Startled at the question, Yuki glanced at Ikuza.
"Is what hard?"
"Growing the dye, when it's always night."
"No. Some plants grow very well here."
"I see." Ikuza finished the bit of wool he had been spinning and laid it to one side. He stood, quietly, and walked over to the window, leaning out into the night. "Why do you hide here?"
"Do you really want to know?"
Ikuza nodded.
"I am the daughter of the Beast King, the king before both Kevin and Lugar. I am his second-born, and to a beastwoman, not a human woman. I was born after Kevin left and before he returned." Yuki paused, and stretched. "I always got along well with Kevin. He told me stories of what he had done, the adventures he had. Time passed, and my father died."
"I'm sorry." Ikuza said.
"There's no reason for you to be. He died of old age. It had been approaching for years." Yuki said, but she still carried old sorrow in her voice. "Kevin was named king after him, as the first-born. Some time after that, Queen Angela, one of the other Warriors of Mana, attacked the Beast Kingdom. I don't know why. I suppose I never will. They were good friends, before that."
"What happened?" Ikuza's usually quiet voice dipped even lower, almost inaudible even to Yuki's wolfish hearing.
"That was, hnn, a year or two ago." Yuki stared at the floor, incredible sadness welling up in her voice. "Kevin didn't understand, and went out to meet her." Yuki took a deep breath, and spoke the next words as if it hurt to talk. "She killed him. I watched him die. He never did understand why. Lugar named himself heir and crowned himself. He and I never got along, and one day he decided that I was a threat to his already unstable reign."
Ikuza started to ask a question, but Yuki cut him off.
"By law, the heir to the throne must be of royal blood. Direct royal descent. That is me. But I never wanted the throne, and told Lugar so many times. He never really believed me, perhaps because he wanted the throne so badly. He spread rumors that I was unfit to rule, as a woman and an albino. I think he meant those as insurance, so that his appointed heir would take the throne when he died, and not me.
"After that, he tried to murder me.
I killed the assassin he had sent and fled. Altena still besieged
us. They burnt Mintos to the ground, and killed many of inhabitants.
The survivors fled to the castle. I left in the confusion.
"When Queen Angela heard of my disappearance,
she sent patrols out, searching for me. Perhaps she wants me as a
puppet queen, after the Beast Kingdom falls. Which it will.
How much longer can it stand against both Forcena and Altena?" Yuki
trailed off, and Ikuza waited patiently for Yuki to begin again.
She did. "Or maybe she wants me dead, to erase the royal line. I retreated here, and found the house and built the garden. I don't know who lived here before." Yuki stood and stretched. Told like that, it sounded like naught more than a fairy tale, which depressed her. Living all her life in darkness... "That's all."
Ikuza looked sad, and he toyed with the chain of his necklace in silence.
"So." Yuki moved up beside him, leaning out of the window as well. "Why are you here?"
When Ikuza finally spoke, he was very quiet. "I was a prince, of sorts. I aquired the flute, and fled from the Underworld, when the rift was opened by the Dark Prince. Later, I found that I couldn't return. Then someone decided that the flute was the key that opens the gate, and I have been hunted ever since."
"Is it?"
"I don't know. I'm not sure I want to try."
"If you unsealed the Underworld, wouldn't you be a hero to other demons?"
"It might kill me." Ikuza was silent for a while, and then he sighed. "And this world is so beautiful. I don't want to see it burn."
Yuki waited by his side, but he didn't say anything more. She turned to lay out her pattern for another weaving, and she heard a sharp crack.
It could have been nothing.
Yuki's head snapped up. "What was that?!"
Ikuza blinked, startled, and turned away from the window. "Was what?"
"Something, outside." Yuki hissed. Ikuza blanched, even paler than he normally was.
"I've stayed here too long. They've found me again."
"Demons..." Yuki phrased it as a question. Ikuza nodded mutely. Yuki strode over to her fireplace and plucked the halberd from the wall above the cheerfully sparking fire. "Hu. Demons bleed and die, or so Kevin informed me." She hefted the halberd, testing its weight, and then stalked towards the door.
"Wait!" Ikuza said, sounding desperate. "I don't want you to get hurt."
"Then come fight with me." Yuki said, softly.
Ikuza followed her out the door.
Yuki stopped some paces from her house, facing the dark screen of trees beyond her small clearing. Tiny white blossoms carpeted the thick green-blue grass.
She thre her head back and roared.
Ikuza started. He was used to her being so calm and soft-spoken.
"What demonspawn lurks the night,
I call you here to fight!"
The shadows themselves answered her call, churning out of the forest, a mess of smoky shadow and claws and dead, bright yellow eyes. They paused, facing Yuki, and slowly their twisting forms solidified until Yuki could see that there were three or four of them. More than that was impossible to tell, because they always moving, twisting around each other unnervingly.
Yuki howled, a weird ululating battle cry, and charged the demons, swinging the halberd over her head like a short spear. The demons met her in mid-charge, weaving her into their insane design. Ikuza could see glimpses of her, shining white fur and flashing halberd, among the demon's flowing claws and shadows.
She sliced through one of the demons, and it shrieked and vanished, blown apart by winds that noone else felt. The pattern shattered for a moment, and Yuki broke free and backed up to Ikuza's side. She was breathing hard, her fur matted with many shallow cuts and black ichor– demon's blood– running down her halberd and over her hands.
The demons regrouped.
"I can't... Ikuza..." Yuki said, through clenched teeth. The halberd slid out of her grasp and she collapsed, leaving Ikuza alone with the demons.
The demons advanced, hissing and speaking in voices like wind through wheat. What they were saying was unintelligible, but the malice that pervaded their words was impossible to mistake.
Ikuza stepped backwards.
He took out the flute, and began to play it.
The demons stopped, confused. The music was chilling, warping the night into something deeper, darker, calling something out of the shadows that even the demons he fought feared to tread. A haunting song of summoning.
Behind Ikuza, a huge figure, shining so brightly white it could not be looked at, wavered into being. It had no legs, and instead tapered into a tail, or nothingness. Ikuza continued to play, either expecting it or oblivious to it.
The figure grinned, all fangs, and glared at the demons with piercing, unearthly orange eyes that glowed like dying embers. It carried a flute in one of its clawed hands, an exact, if larger, copy of the flute that Ikuza still played.
"I demand a price for my summoning." Gorva said, his voice a snarl. Restless winds blew about him, winds that filled a dead ship's sails and disheveled Yuki's white mane and Ikuza's black hair. Ikuza let the flute fall from his hands, and silently pointed back at the house. Gorva laughed, a horrible, grating, screeching cacophony. The house burst into flames.
So did the demons. Screaming and shrieking, they roiled, breaking the pattern they wove with their bodies into fragments, snatches of their shadowy weaving. The night was lit into hellish day, everything tinted red and orange.
Gorva laughed as the demons died.
Eventually, they ceased shrieking and dissolved into ashes, grey ashes that sparkled among the grass like stained snow. Gorva vanished, and with him went the winds.
Ikuza slipped the flute back under his shirt and knelt by Yuki and wept.
Behind him, the house burned.
