“Go on…”

A low growl ensued, punctuated by a short snap of fangs.

“Just eat it, you stupid dog!”

Kagome’s blood pressure spiked as she smacked the door curtain aside and stormed out onto the porch. “Kanako-chan!”

The waif tensed. Her fingers clutched white-knuckled around the large wooden bowl she was cradling to her chest. As both she and Ikiryou looked to Kagome, a glob of bloody raw meat slid down his pale, furrowed muzzle. In the icy air, the gore faintly steamed.

Staring hard at Kanako, Kagome set her hands on her hips. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to feed him, Kagome-sama,” the waif answered, glaring sullenly at the growling dog. “But he won’t take what I give him.”

“Then stop harassing him and use your head,” the miko snapped. Crossing the yard, she plucked the bowl from Kanako’s thin fingers and cast its contents out into the woods behind them. “If he’s not hungry, it’s probably because he went hunting in the night.”

Slowly, Kanako nodded. Her wan eyes followed the flung meat’s rank, grisly course. “…Hai, Kagome-sama.”

Tossing his head, Ikiryou drew up beside his stern-faced mistress. Beneath the dark peel of his lips, his fangs remained visibly bared at Kanako. In shared and lingering enmity, the waif glowered back.

Kagome’s breath plumed out before her as she sighed.

The rest of the day passed in a similar vein. Summoned by an anxious militiaman, Kagome left the consecration of the new fortress grounds to Miroku, and made her way to the edge of Edo proper. Beside the main road a picketed fence had been erected from pikes and sharpened timbers. It was the crudest of barriers against threats from beyond, but the high stone pillars that flanked the narrow gateway hinted at the bulwark this place would become in due time—if the patrols of soldiers along the periphery didn’t already suggest it.

To Kaede, at least, the blueprints seemed easy enough to read. Ringed by a crowd of citizens, both armed and otherwise, the elderly priestess raised her gnarled wooden cane and gestured sharply toward the fledgling barricade.

“Tear ye down this fencing at once!” she gruffly proclaimed, her dark gaze leveled upon Ren and his lieutenants. “Warmongers and ruffians—ye strike upon the ground of a free and sacred place. Would ye wall in the gods themselves?—or dare ye wall them out?”

Ren bore this condemnation with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. Keen and bright, they glimmered past her. “Now, now, good priestess, you are forgetting yourself, I fear. We are merely following the commandments given to us from on high.”

As Kaede and the onlookers turned as one, Kagome strode forward into the square. “Ren’s right, Baa-chan. I’m the one who ordered the raising of this gate. Times are changing, and the ways of the past can’t protect us any longer—from the evils of men and demons both.”

For what seemed like a small eternity, Kaede held her gaze, so coolly and sternly that Kagome felt once again like a child caught in her mother’s disapproving stare. “So then,” the old woman stoutly said, “even ye have lost faith. For shame.”

Kagome’s face scalded as every troubled glance came to weigh upon her. “It seems you really have forgotten yourself, Kaede,” she said quietly, almost on a whisper, though her voice carried clearly across the crowded square, “when Kikyou died and you, second-rate miko that you are, set yourself up as high priestess to rule here in her shadow. Well, Edo isn’t just another poor backwater anymore, thanks to me, and it never will be again. This I know.”

The power of pure conviction radiated from her, not merely in the luminescence of the reiki that enfolded her, but in her shining eyes it was there—the irrefutable truth of what the next five hundred years would bring, and she, the Shikon Miko, glorious harbinger of it all.

Some gasped at the sight of her miko powers displayed. Others flinched and cowed and fell prostrate upon the ground. Even Ren averted his wolfish gaze from her, squinting.

Only Kaede continued to peer at her, though when the light faded from Kagome’s form, the old woman seemed all the wearier for the effort. Shriveled, shrunken, and frail, she stood hunched, leaning heavily upon her cane and looking so sorrowfully and gravely at Kagome still, that for a moment, the younger priestess felt regret lodge like a stone in her throat, so painful in its constriction that she wished for nothing more than to throw herself into Kaede’s arms and sob to her as she had in the past when she was a heartsick young girl, wanting what she shouldn’t and unburdening herself of every little pang of conscience that assailed her.

Even as the trembling cane slipped out from beneath Kaede’s weathered fingers, even as she crumpled to the ground, Kagome fought the urge to seek shelter from her embrace. Instead, she blinked back the tears that burned in her eyes and clenching her hands into fists turned aside.

“See to our elder now, Kanako-chan,” Kagome commanded. “She’s tired herself and needs to rest.”

The waif, who had been hanging back in wariness, started at the summons. Hastening to Kaede’s side, she met Kagome’s eye, the glint of her gaze steely in a way Kagome’s orders hadn’t been.

“Hai, Kagome-sama,” Kanako said swiftly as she half-carried the aged priestess away, and Kagome frowned after them, unbidden.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi