The elderly villagers of Hiraizumi had more than their fair share of medical complaints, and Kaede had listened to all of them.

But she'd gotten snippets of the information she was hoping for, too: a long digression about arthritic knees led easily into the topic of the villages further into the mountains, and how strange it was that no one from Tanigawa had come down for the festival this year. It was a small disaster for the sake sellers at the neighboring stall, who'd made do with inferior sake from the southern river valleys. Kaede sampled, grumbled in agreement, and ordered another bottle for her new friends.

The women asked about her family. Kaede expanded on her son's good heart, his clever wife, the grandchildren who charmed and bedeviled her daily; she'd been worried about this trip, she'd heard young folk had gone missing—

No, thank the gods, there was no danger of that sort here, not since the ninja war ended. Of course sometimes you heard strange sounds in the mountains, or saw the flash of lightning on a clear day, but mostly shinobi kept their quarrels out of the villages, and kept to themselves when they passed through. There'd been a little group from Lightning Country recently— no, two months back, it was, when old Hatori died, though everyone knew the Kumo nin had nothing to do with that—

Kaede listened, and paid for the drinks, and asked more questions.

By the time her son and his family wended their way back, clutching roasted corn-on-sticks and paper boats of takoyaki, two of Kaede's informants had already nodded off. The swift twilight of the mountains was drawing down, and strings of electric lights came on above the stalls. Near the stone tanuki statue, young men in open coats and rope headbands began to light torches.

Kaede creaked off her bench and waved off Ryuu's offered corncob. "Too messy for me, dear, but— Oh, takowasa!" She looked, startled, into Gendou's dark eyes. "You remembered."

Gendou passed her the bowl, and a smile. "Of course I remembered."

That— wasn't, entirely, the dutiful son. She'd half-thought they'd all forgotten those charged moments in the club and the izakaya, but now she wondered.

Ka-chan tugged on her sleeve. "Obaa-san, look! I won us all prizes."

"Of course you did, dear. Oh, how clever—" She let herself be drawn into admiration and praise, Ryuu's dramatic retelling of his sister's victory and the vendor's surprise, a collaborative attempt to solve the puzzle box. Ryuu, sticky-fingered, wasn't allowed to touch.

They ate sitting on the stone steps of the village pharmacy, its doors shuttered now and its proprietor presumably mingling in the crowd. Ryuu licked his fingers clean and went for the puzzle box again; Ka-chan unbent enough to let him try, but reclaimed it smugly after five fumbling minutes. Ryuu pulled a fuzzy tanuki plush out of his sleeve and started trying to nest it in Ka-chan's hair instead.

Since they weren't throttling each other yet, the adults ignored them. Kaede told Gendou and Rie, idly, a little of the gossip she'd learned. "No visitors from Tanigawa in the last three weeks, and no Tanigawa sake for the festival at all. And Kumo shinobi stayed here two months ago; they might have passed through Tanigawa, first."

Gendou's pleasant face sharpened. Genma said, "But the sake went missing more recently than that. And why would Kumo steal the sake?" He took a thoughtful bite of takoyaki, then put his chopsticks down. "Wait, did you say there's no Tanigawa sake at all? The thieves stole all of it, not just the Daimyou's private batch?"

Their voices were low, washed over by crowd noise, but Kurenai spun up a little sound-muffling jutsu anyway. "It seems likely. Otherwise the village could have passed off a batch of the lower grade for the Daimyou, and blamed any drop in quality on the middlemen. But there must be three or four breweries in the village. Who could steal it all? And why would the villagers stay away from the Hiraizumi festival, even if they've no sake to sell?"

"Shame, maybe," Genma guessed. "But it's probably something worse. It could still be Kumo. Although why hold a whole village hostage?"