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Garurumon did not adjust its speed for crowds.
This was a principle, not an oversight. The city streets of the Flower Capital had learned, over the years, to make room when the silver-blue fur appeared at the end of a lane, because the alternative was to not make room, and the consequences of that decision were not ambiguous. Merchants hauled their carts aside. Pedestrians pressed against walls. A man selling grilled fish executed a genuinely impressive defensive maneuver involving himself, his stall, and a side alley that was no wider than his shoulders.
Tama rode on Garurumon's back with the practiced ease of long familiarity, one hand braced in the fur at the scruff, the other adjusting the yellow combs in her hair against the rush of wind. She was moving quickly enough through the streets that anyone catching a glimpse of her would see only the flash of green silk and silver fur before both were gone.
She had a tea appointment. She was late. Garurumon understood this to mean run faster.
Several minutes of this brought them to a teahouse on a quieter street in a district where the buildings were older and better maintained—the kind of establishment that did not need to advertise because its reputation had been conducting advertising for it for a generation. The carved wooden sign above the door had been touched up recently. The hinoki cypress of the facade had aged to a silver-grey that suited it.
Garurumon slowed, lowered itself without being asked, and Tama stepped off its back with the neatness of someone descending a staircase.
A waitress had already appeared in the doorway.
She was tall—taller than most women in the Flower Capital—with hair the deep blue of deep water falling straight down her back, and the kind of proportions that the Ukiyo-e painters had been attempting to capture for centuries. Her kimono was light yellow, embroidered with chrysanthemum patterns in thread that caught the afternoon light. She moved with the contained grace of someone who had learned, through practice, to take up exactly as much space as she wanted and no more.
"Tama," she said, with the particular warmth of someone who had been waiting and had not been angry about it, but had noticed. "You're here. The proprietress has been keeping your tea warm."
"Feed Garurumon for me, Okiku." Tama smoothed her kimono from the ride. "Twenty kilograms of raw meat. Take it from the account."
Garurumon, hearing this, produced a sound that was technically a whine from something that had earlier been swallowing fire whole. It pressed its enormous snout toward Okiku's shoulder with the hopeful energy of a creature presenting its case through physical proximity.
"Come along," Okiku said, with the composure of someone who had grown accustomed to this. She led the wolf—ten meters of silver-blue fur navigating a Wano Country street with improbable delicacy—toward the market quarter, and Tama pushed through the wooden door into the teahouse.
The noise inside was substantial.
The Teahouse did good business, and had done better business since the Beasts Pirates had extended their informal protection to it. The protection was not announced, exactly. It was simply known, the way useful things in Wano Country were known—by observation, by inference, by the particular absence of the problems that occurred everywhere else. The small thieves had stopped visiting. The aggressive customers had stopped lingering. The Orochi Oniwabanshu still passed by on their rounds, but the fines they issued at other establishments did not appear here with the same frequency.
When Tama walked through the door, the noise did not stop—not entirely—but it changed quality. A table near the window that had been laughing suddenly found something else to do with its faces. A group of Beasts Pirates sailors who had recognized their superior stood immediately. Two of them collided with each other in their eagerness to be the one who offered to pay for whatever she might order.
Tama waved them back without looking at them.
She climbed to the second-floor attic by herself, down a hallway with paper screens on either side showing garden scenes, to a rest room at the end where the light came from a paper lantern and the sounds of the floor below were muffled to a comfortable murmur.
She sat. She adjusted her kimono. She breathed.
The proprietress appeared not long after.
The woman who operated the Teahouse was not Wano Country in the way most women here were Wano Country—there was something in how she held herself, something at a slight angle to the conventions of the place, as though she had arrived from somewhere with different rules and had spent years learning these ones without ever quite losing the memory of the other set. She was beautiful in a way that the Ukiyo-e tradition could have painted, but would have found difficult to categorize. She carried the tea and the food herself, which she always did when Tama came.
"Tama," the proprietress said, the warmth in her voice of a different quality than the waitress's—less professional, more complicated. She set the tray down. "You haven't eaten. I can tell. Sit properly and eat before anything else."
This was the one place in Wano Country where Tama did not maintain her posture.
She ate.
She ate the way she always ate here—with complete, shameless efficiency, ignoring the portions that were supposed to be portions and treating the serving dishes as approximately the correct unit of measurement. Ten adult men's worth of food, maybe more, disappearing at a pace that required one to recalibrate one's sense of what "underage girl" implied as a physical category. The proprietress watched, and did not comment, and refilled dishes with the practiced motion of someone who had done this many times.
Somewhere in this—in the particular safety of the room, in the quality of the food, in the absence of any requirement to perform anything for anyone—Tama's face settled into an expression that didn't appear anywhere else. The flat remove of the street was gone. There was something younger in its place, and considerably less armored.
"Eat slowly," the proprietress said. "I made extra. I packed portions for you to take."
Tama did not slow down, but she met the proprietress's eyes and there was something in the look that passed between them—acknowledgment, warmth, the specific gratitude of someone being cared for in a way they can't quite accept directly.
When the rice was finished and the grilled fish was finished and the pickled vegetables were finished and the soup was finished, Tama picked up the tea. She held it in both hands, the way her grandmother had taught her, and drank it slowly and without speaking.
This was the correct time to talk. The proprietress knew this rhythm.
"Tama." Her voice was light. Careful. "Have you heard from my husband? He hasn't sent letters in a while, and I..." She paused. "I'm a little worried."
Tama looked at her over the rim of the tea bowl.
Foxfire Kin'emon—Kitsune no Kin'emon, samurai of the Nine Red Scabbards, loyalist of the Kozuki restoration effort, user of the Fuku Fuku no Mi (Clothe-Clothe Fruit)—had a wife in the Flower Capital who ran a teahouse and cooked better than Kurozumi Orochi's personal chef and worried when her husband's letters stopped coming. These were facts that existed in perfect parallel with each other, and the proprietress navigated all of them with the patience of someone who had made her peace with a complicated situation a long time ago.
Tama set down the tea.
"He's been seen in the Wanoku region." She said it the way she said most things of operational relevance—clearly, without excess. "He's preoccupied. There's been news from Cake Island. Momonosuke is getting married."
The proprietress's expression changed.
"Kozuki Momonosuke," Tama continued, "is to marry Charlotte Smoothie. Sweet Commander of the Big Mom Pirates. The ceremonies will be held on Cake Island." She paused, letting the geometry settle. "Another one of Big Mom daughter and Vinsmoke Sanji of the Vinsmoke Family are being married at the same time. Two ceremonies simultaneously. The event will be—significant."
The significance she meant was the kind that moved territory and altered the mathematics of the New World. Charlotte Smoothie as Momonosuke's wife gave the Kozuki restoration effort access to the Big Mom Pirates' neutrality, at minimum. At maximum, it gave them a claim on the largest baking fleet and the most extensive homie network in the sea as allies of convenience. And Sanji's marriage to Charlotte family wove the Vinsmoke bloodline into the same fabric, which was either a stroke of strategic genius or a trap depending on which side of the table you sat on.
Kin'emon would not be coming home soon. The preparation for his lord's most consequential political maneuver would occupy whatever time he had.
The proprietress was quiet for a moment, processing this.
"The Kozuki boy," she said finally, carefully. "He really came back from his defeat and started planning all this."
"He's persistent," Tama said. "I'll give him that."
There was a quality to her silence after that which the proprietress recognized. She did not push on it.
Tama turned the tea bowl in her hands—a slow rotation, measuring something. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped to a register that was at odds with her age and the quality of her earlier expression.
"Kozuki Momonosuke is the grandson of Kozuki Sukiyaki." She was not looking at anything in particular. "My master's grandson." A beat. "Madam Toki made a prophecy before she died. Do you think it will come true?"
There was a specific quality to how she said it—calm, precise, gentle—that made the words feel colder than they were. The same way that still water looks safe until you notice it has no bottom.
The proprietress felt the weight of Tama's attention settle on her, and chose her words accordingly.
"Madam Toki has been dead for many years," she said. "Her prophecy is... history, now."
"Perhaps." Tama looked at the paper lantern. Its light was warm and steady, casting no shadows that weren't meant to be there. "Kozuki Momonosuke challenged Captain Kaido once. Lost easily. Left Wano Country and hasn't returned. The restoration forces here lost hope." She picked up the tea again. "Now he's on the sea, building alliances, arranging marriages. Trying to gather enough strength that the fight he can't win yet becomes a fight he might win eventually."
She said this without judgment. It was a description, not a verdict.
"If he marries into the Big Mom Pirates," she continued, "the Beasts Pirates will need to recalculate how many enemies they're prepared to face simultaneously. If the marriage actually produces an alliance—not just a truce, but something binding—that changes what Captain Kaido needs to do before he returns."
The proprietress poured more tea that neither of them was currently drinking.
"You think there's going to be a war," she said, quietly.
"I think there is always going to be a war." Tama's voice was the voice of someone describing weather. "The question is only the shape of it and who's standing where when it begins."