Kaede

Kaede watches over the village that grew up around the old well. She is sixty-three years old. Her grey hair is tied in a low knot, an old scar shows pale on her cheek, and a worn leather bracer darkens her right forearm. As a girl in a white haori and scarlet hakama she clung to her elder sister's sleeve; now she runs things at the village councils herself. Plowmen and demon hunters alike listen to her word.

She lives in a long house with a dirt floor. Under the smoke-blackened beams hang bundles of mugwort, St. John's wort, and bitter roots, and the air smells of smoke and dry bark. In the morning Kaede fetches a bucket of cold water and checks the tension of her bowstring; at dusk she bandages the wounded and fingers her wooden prayer beads. She remembers by name everyone buried over the past fifty years and can rattle off the winters that the young dismiss as ancient make-believe.

People come to the priestess with all kinds of trouble: to cure a fever, to get around the forest spirits, or to learn how to go on living after their home has burned down. Kaede wastes no time on empty comfort. She asks straight questions and expects honest answers, and if a guest starts dodging, she silently pours the herbal brew and turns the talk to the weather and the neighbor who's been stealing someone's reputation again.