Chapter Seven: The Hero In The Square

Three weeks later he was still at the forge, and he still had not got used to his own face.

Naruto sat on the edge of the narrow bed in the back room with his elbows on his knees, staring into the cracked mirror propped against the wall opposite. The henge was off. There was no point holding it with the door barred and the shutters pulled across the window and Torvan and Mira asleep on the other side of the building, and besides, he had started making himself look at least once a day. It felt like the kind of thing a person ought to be able to do.

It had not got easier.

Half his hair was his mother's, that bright arterial red, exactly the colour he remembered it being in a white room outside the world. The other half was his father's, the pale gold he had been wearing since birth. The line between them ran straight down the centre of his head as though somebody had drawn it with a rule.

His eyes did not match. The right was a deep stormy blue, dark as the sea an hour before weather. The left was pale and bright and almost cold, the colour of a winter sky at noon. Both of them had been his father's colour once, and now only one of them was, and he had no idea which.

And then there were the horns. Pale grey, close to the colour of old bone, ridged along their length, rising from just behind his hairline and curving back over his skull like something carved out of stone by a person in a hurry.

Naruto tilted his head to the side and squinted at them in the light of the single candle.

"Can I even use these things?"

He leaned closer to the glass and tapped one, carefully. It rang faintly. Solid all the way through.

"What am I supposed to do, headbutt people?" He pulled a face at his reflection. "Like, watch out, here comes Horns Nō Jutsu. Real scary. Terrifying. Grown men would weep."

He snorted at his own joke, one short puff of air, and the laugh went out of him immediately and left nothing where it had been.

The truth was simpler and less funny. The horns made him impossible to miss, in a world that had already made its feelings clear about things it could not miss. And the worst part, the part that kept working at him like a splinter under the nail, was that he did not know what they were for.

Were they decoration? Some sort of natural signal, the way a stag's antlers were, meant to be looked at and measured against another stag's? Or did they do something? Did the demons in this world carry their abilities in their bodies, in their bones, in these? He had no way to find out. There was nobody he could ask. He could hardly lean over the counter at the forge and enquire casually about the average horn length of a healthy adult male.

He leaned back, still watching the stranger in the cracked glass.

"Guess I'm a mashup of Mom and Dad now."

His fingers went up and slowly traced along the seam in his hair, where the gold gave way to the red.

"Didn't even know that was possible. Mixing you two up like this."

It should have been unsettling and it was, but it was not only that, and he sat with the not-only for a while without examining it too hard. He had spent seventeen years looking in mirrors and seeing a face that belonged entirely to himself, because there had been nobody to compare it to. Now there was. Now half of what looked back at him had been sitting cross-legged in a white nowhere telling him about the day she kicked Jiraiya into a river.

It was a terrible face. He did not want it. And he could not make himself hate it the way he wanted to.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

He lay back on the bed with his arms folded behind his head.

He was not tired. He was never tired. By now he had made a peace of sorts with that, and with the not eating, and with the fact that in twenty-nine days he had not once needed to visit the outhouse behind the forge, which was a piece of good fortune he had decided not to think about at all. His body had simply stopped requiring the things bodies require. If he lay still and breathed slowly and stopped chasing his own thoughts, he could reach something close enough to rest that it counted.

The problem with lying still was that it left room for thinking, and his thinking had been going to unpleasant places all month.

He had finally admitted the largest one about ten days ago, at three in the morning, staring at the same beams he was staring at now.

He was not going back.

He had died. That part was not in question. He remembered the rain and the rods and the exact sound Hinata's body had made when it hit the mud beside him, and he remembered Pein's voice saying something calm and reasonable about peace, and he remembered going down into a dark that had no floor. Whatever had happened after that, whatever the In Between had been and whatever his parents had done to him on their way out of it, he had not been sent back to the place he came from.

This was it. This was the world now, whether he liked it or not, and he did not like it.

He could live here quietly. He had proved he could. Twenty-nine days of holding a transformation and hauling iron and eating bread thrown at his head by a woman who thought he was a nice polite boy from somewhere south. Nobody had looked twice. Nobody had reached for a weapon. It was, objectively, the most peaceful month of his entire life.

But was that him? Fading into the background of somebody else's city, wearing a borrowed face, keeping his mouth shut for the next sixty years?

That did not sound like Naruto Uzumaki. That sounded like a man wearing the name.

"I'm human," he told the ceiling, and he said it flatly and with force, the way you say a thing you have decided rather than a thing you have discovered. "Always have been. Always will be. So there's no way I'm siding with demons. Not ever."

The ceiling did not argue.

And then, because his mind had never in its life let him finish a decision cleanly, it dragged the soldiers' voices back up from three weeks ago.

Heartless killers. Every last one of them.

He turned it over again, the way he had been turning it over every night since. If they were right, what was the purpose? Nobody made war on nothing. Even the ugliest conflicts he had ever been part of had a spine of some kind, some grievance or ambition or fear you could take hold of and follow back to a beginning. Land, water, iron, pride, revenge. Something.

Here, four men in armour had told him that an entire people existed for no reason except to kill, and had said it the way they would have described the tide.

Somebody had to be wrong. Either the soldiers were wrong, and there was a reason nobody in this city had ever bothered to look for. Or they were right, and there was something in the nature of demons in this world that was genuinely different from anything he had ever met.

And if it was the second one, then what was he? Because a month ago he had walked into a village wearing a stolen bedsheet and every single person in it had reached for a weapon before he had finished a sentence.

Naruto closed his eyes and breathed out slowly.

He was not going to take anybody's word for it. Not the soldiers, with their campfire certainties. Not the rumours going round the market. Not this Hero's, however famous, however powerful, however many songs got written about him afterward.

If there was a reason this war existed, he was going to find it himself and look at it with his own two mismatched eyes.

Because that was the one thing about him that had come through everything intact. He chased the truth. Even when the truth was ugly. Especially when it was ugly, since the ugly ones were the only kind anybody bothered to hide.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

The news went through Bakur Canyons the way fire goes through dry grass.

One moment the market was doing what the market did, a hundred conversations and the clatter of trestle tables and the ring of Torvan's hammer coming steady through the open door. The next there was a shout from somewhere up near the square, and then another one further off, and then twenty at once.

"The Hero is here!"

"Himmel. Hero Himmel and his companions, they just came through the gate."

"They're in the city square right now, go, go!"

Naruto was sitting on the low wobbly wall outside the shop with a piece of bread in his hand, still warm, which Mira had fired at him from the doorway forty seconds earlier with her usual accuracy. He stopped chewing.

The street came apart around him. Stallholders abandoned goods mid-sale and left them lying out in the open, which told him more about the size of this event than any of the shouting did. Children tore past his knees at full speed, screaming with the pure undifferentiated joy of children who do not know what is happening but have correctly identified that it is enormous. Two of the gate guards came down the street at a fast walk that was trying very hard to look like an official patrol and fooling nobody.

Naruto pushed the last of the bread into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and brushed the crumbs off his hands.

"Hero, huh." He hopped down off the wall. "Guess it can't hurt to go look."

He let the current of people carry him. It got thicker the closer he came to the square, shoulder against shoulder, and the noise built until it was a solid thing pressing on his ears, a rolling wall of cheering that broke and rebuilt itself every few seconds. By the time he reached the outer edge of the crowd he did not need to see anything to know the party had already arrived.

He craned his neck. He shifted sideways, slid between two large backs with an ease that would have impressed anybody who understood what they were watching, and got himself a sightline.

The man at the front had to be Himmel.

He stood in the centre of the square with the kind of posture that comes either from a lifetime of training or a lifetime of being looked at, and in his case Naruto suspected both. His hair was blue, a clear bright blue like deep water under sun, and it caught the light in a way that could not possibly be accidental. His eyes were the same colour. He wore a deep blue uniform with gold at the throat and the cuffs, a white cape hanging clean behind him and moving properly in the breeze, and at his hip a sword in a polished scabbard that looked as though it had been given a name by somebody, and used.

He was smiling. It was a particular smile, and Naruto recognised it immediately and with some annoyance, because it was the smile of a man who genuinely believed everything was going to be fine and who made other people believe it too, purely by standing there and being convinced.

The crowd adored him. Children at the front waved carved wooden swords and copied his stance badly. Women had flowers ready and were waiting for a gap in the cheering to throw them. Grown men with grey in their beards had straightened their backs and pulled their stomachs in without noticing they had done it.

Behind him and slightly to his right stood a man in pale priest's robes.

His hair was green, a deep soft green like moss in shadow, and his eyes behind a pair of thin round spectacles were a bright clear emerald that caught the sun whenever he turned his head. He was waving to the crowd with a mild, faintly tired smile, the expression of a man who has been to a great many ceremonies and has long since worked out which parts of them require him to be present. And even at forty paces, through a crowd, Naruto felt something coming off him. Not power, exactly. A kind of calm, wide and steady, like standing near still water.

Next to the priest was a dwarf, built along the general lines of a retaining wall.

His armour was worn, scratched and dinted all down the left side, and it had been maintained with a care that the scratches somehow made more obvious. His beard was long and a dark yellow, the colour of old straw, and it had been braided into two thick plaits that were tucked into his belt so they would not get in the way of anything important. A helmet sat under one arm. The other hand rested on the haft of a double-headed axe that was leaning against his shoulder and that Naruto estimated at roughly the weight of a person.

He did not wave. He did not smile. He did not need to, and Naruto understood that instantly, because he had known exactly one other person who could stand in a crowd and be the quietest and the heaviest thing in it.

And then there was the elf.

Her hair was long and silver-white, tied up into two tails that came down over her shoulders like poured moonlight. She had a staff planted in the cobblestones beside her and one hand resting on it, and her dark dress moved slightly in the same breeze that was doing such good work on Himmel's cape.

There was something almost lazy in the way she stood. Her weight was on one hip. Her shoulders were down. She had the air of a person who would very much rather be indoors, or asleep, or anywhere with fewer people in it. Her face was calm past the point of calm, all the way to detached, as though the thousands of cheering voices around her were weather that had been going on for a while and would presumably stop eventually.

Her eyes were green. A clear, pale, flat green, and they moved slowly across the crowd without settling on anything, the way a person's eyes move over a page in a language they do not read.

Naruto watched them drift along the front rows. Past the flower-throwers. Past the children. Past a fat man on a barrel.

And then they stopped.

On him.

Naruto blinked, caught completely flat-footed. Then, because it was what his body did before his brain got involved, he grinned. A wide friendly reflexive grin, and he lifted one hand in a small casual wave that meant nothing at all beyond hey, over here, nice day.

She did not wave back.

Her expression did not soften, and it did not harden either, and that was somehow worse. It sharpened. Her eyes narrowed by a fraction that would have been invisible at ten paces and was perfectly legible at forty, and the flatness in them stopped being disinterest and became something with a decision in it.

She was not looking at a stranger in a crowd. She was looking at a thing that had come up out of a drain into a room where people were eating.

The grin locked on Naruto's face and stayed there, useless.

The air around him seemed to thicken. That was not a metaphor and he knew it was not, because he had felt this exact sensation before, on bridges and in forests and once in a corridor under a stadium, and it had always meant the same thing. Somebody had just placed him in a category and it was not a category he was going to be able to talk his way out of.

His raised hand came down slowly to his side.

"The hell," he muttered.

His stomach had turned over and was staying turned over. He took a step back, and then another, and let the pressure of the crowd close in front of him and swallow him whole. He had no intention of standing there while that gaze finished whatever it was doing.

He worked his way backward out of the square without looking round once, which took some doing, and did not properly breathe until he was two streets away with a wall at his back.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

The afternoon sun came down long and gold over the market as Naruto went back to work, and he spent the rest of it trying not to think about a pair of green eyes and failing at roughly two-minute intervals.

He hauled billets. He worked the bellows. He carried a finished set of spearheads out to the yard and stacked them. And every time his hands were busy and his mind was not, the elf's face came back and sat in the middle of it like a stone in a shoe.

She had known. Somehow, across a packed square, through a transformation that had not failed him once in thirty days, through a jutsu that had fooled every guard at the gate and every customer in the front room and a woman who fed him bread daily, she had looked at him and known that something was wrong.

Naruto had been in the business of deception since he was nine years old. He was good at it. It was, whatever anybody in Konoha had believed about him, the single thing he was best at.

He had never in his life been read that fast.

He put down the last of the spearheads and stood in the yard with the light going orange over the rooftops and admitted to himself, quietly and without any pleasure at all, that the quiet option had just closed.

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Chapter Eight: Die,