But the humidity seemed to ease a little, even if the heat didn't. There was a breeze, finally, coming off the low green mountains. Raidou paused to consult his maps, while Kurenai splashed the rest of her water over her face and Genma tiredly ordered everyone to eat another rat bar, I don't care if you're not hungry, Tousaki, your body needs it. Kakashi stood on a rock and brooded.

"That's Hiraizumi," he announced suddenly. "They're holding their festival tonight."

Ryouma squinted at him. "Do you just have all the festival calendars in the north-east memorized?"

Kakashi grabbed Ryouma's biceps, yanked him up to his feet, and pointed at a gap between trees. "Festival lanterns."

They were standing on the crest of a steep slope, between cedar trees and hinoki cypress, with flowering rhododendron thick around them and the thatched roofs of the village barely visible far below. Ryouma followed Kakashi's hand and eventually saw it: the moss-stained steps of a winding path, working up the slope at an angle away from them, between trees strung with thick straw ropes and hung with paper lanterns. A couple of teenagers, girl and boy, had been hanging the lanterns. Now they were kissing.

"I thought you said this was a fire festival," Ryouma said. "Not fertility."

It wasn't much of a joke, even less of a peace-offering, but Kakashi seemed to recognize the attempt. He glanced sidelong at Ryouma, then snorted. "And give you ideas?"

"Hey, like cicadas mating on my bedroll didn't? Actually, yeah, that just grossed me out."

Raidou made a quelling sound, easily translated: We have discussed the bug sex and we are not discussing it again. He rolled up his map. "If that's Hiraizumi, then we're making good time. We'll stop in the village tonight."

Genma drew a deep, reviving breath. His rat bar wrapper flared briefly into flames and ash.

Kurenai said, "Choose an inn with good baths, Namiashi, or there may be bloodshed." She raked out her loose hair, damp curls tangling between her fingers, and bound it up again swiftly. "Henge going in?"

Raidou glanced over the bedraggled crew — armored, sweaty, mud-splashed and bug-bitten — and then down at the steep-roofed village in the valley below. "We'll be lucky to find an unbooked room. Luckier to get it as a group." His gaze touched Genma, then Kurenai. "Happy family? We could get away with parents and kids, if Tousaki and Hatake can find it in themselves to be sullen teenagers."

Genma turned to Kurenai. "If you're the mom, who am I?"

She'd given up on most makeup several days ago, but Kurenai's mouth was still red as a wound. She smiled, dangerously. "What made you assume?"

Ryouma didn't even sense the chakra. One moment she was there, sweaty and muddy in jounin blues. The next, an elderly woman with crimson petals printed on her black kimono was straightening the carved wooden pins in her steel-shot hair.

Genma sighed, and lifted his hands. His henge was almost as smooth, though this time Ryouma caught the inverting edges of chakra. Genma lowered his hands again as a handsome middle-aged man, crows-feet at the corners of his eyes and laugh-lines beginning around his mouth. He looked a little like his own father, with more hair and a trimmer middle, and he wore a festival yukata, blue cotton printed with leaping white koi. "We could be a two-dad family?"

Raidou's mouth twisted. "Progressive," he told Genma, "but not inconspicuous."

He shaped the same seals with a more obvious chakra swell, a pop of ozone and unsuppressed smoke. A woman took his place, red-haired and comfortably rounded, with twinkling brown eyes and soft civilian hands. Her kimono was a muted blue figured with white lilies and waves, bound with a vivid obi in yellow and red.

Kurenai tapped one smooth nail against her mouth, her brown eyes alight. "A fine pair," she commented. "You do this old woman's heart proud. Though not my daughter, I think, not with that hair— You'd better pass it on to Kakashi."