"Anko is talking to the foreign boy, the one in charge of the group that's tramping around the mountains taking measurements and digging," Satsuki, Anko's mother, informed her husband. She knelt on the hearth in his office, making tea, while he reviewed papers at his desk.

"What?" Eitaro, the successor Sheriff, nearly dropped his seal into the inkwell. "That foreign stripling? Our Anko? Why would she do something stupid like that?"

Satsuki looked in the pot. The tea had steeped ...