I had meant to spend the evening writing. I had a room above a tea-house in a village in the orchard country west of Biozuri, a lamp, a column two days late, and no intention whatever of going out, and I record these facts so that the reader understands the scale of what follows.

At sunset the tea-house keeper's cousin arrived. I had not been introduced to the cousin, and the cousin did not consider this an obstacle. There was a feast, the cousin explained, at the far end of the village, for the year the village well was dug. The tea-house keeper was going, so the tea-house keeper's guest was going, because a guest under your roof is inside your circle for as long as he sleeps there, and one does not leave one's circle sitting alone with a lamp. I said I had a column to write. The cousin said the column could come too.

The kitsune keep their obligations in circles. At the centre sits the family, and the family is more than blood: a sworn sibling counts, a lifelong friend counts, a lover counts, and a call from any of them is never refused. Around the family stand the neighbourhood, the village, the region and the kingdom, and every circle keeps its own festivals. A kitsune owes her neighbourhood's feasts her presence, her village's feasts her presence in most years, and her region's feasts a journey when she can make one; she owes the kingdom's great festivals nothing at all, which is why going to them is a point of pride. The result is a calendar in which, on any night of the year, there is a feast brewing somewhere and a cousin ready to drag you to it. I had heard the saying before. I had not, until that evening, been the one dragged.

The feast for the well was the size of a village and the volume of a city. Everyone smiled at me, which a traveller from elsewhere must learn to read correctly: in Emarrea a smile is the ordinary weather of a conversation, and wants nothing from you. Everyone teased me, which is how the kitsune tell you that you have been accepted. I was teased about my feathers, my spectacles, my waistcoat and my column, in roughly ascending order of fondness. Halfway through the evening my cup of plum wine became, in my hand, a cup of foxfire that sang the first line of a drinking song and then became plum wine again. The child responsible was not punished. The table applauded, the child bowed, and after a moment, so did I. A good trick, in Emarrea, ends in laughter for everyone, the person it was played on included; anything less is merely a trick.

Two things I saw that evening I have seen nowhere else. At the head table a woman rose before the noodles, said only that her sister had called, and left. Nobody asked why, and nobody needed to: a family call is answered, and the feast closes over the empty seat. And near midnight two young kitsune stood up together and announced that their bond had run its course, and the whole table drank to it, to the season they had had and to the season after. Then they sat down side by side and finished the meal. The kitsune say a bond is freely entered, joyfully shared and lovingly released, and I had taken the third part for poetry until I watched a village raise its cups to it.

I wrote nothing that night. The column was three days late. My publisher has asked me, not for the first time, why I cannot simply decline an invitation, and I have explained, not for the first time, that I was not invited. I was collected.

Every kitsune house I have slept in keeps a shelf, and every shelf is crowded. My host in Biozuri last spring, a lantern-maker with three partners, two children and an opinion on everything, kept hers above the kitchen door, and it held, by my count, seven gods, two ancestors, a dried plum and a child's drawing of a fox that may or may not have been devotional.

The first incense of the morning goes to Hahane, the Mother-Root, who heads the kitsune's own Nine-Tailed Hall and keeps love, family, festival and the bond of many hearts. It goes to her first in every house in the kingdom, without an exception I have found, and when I asked why, my host looked at me as one looks at a man who has asked why the door is opened before one walks through it.

After Hahane the order is a matter of the household's taste and the day's business. Honokage, the Soft-Shadow, god of foxfire and kind misdirection, gets a lantern rather than incense, lanterns being what he likes. Yumegatari, the Dream-Teller, keeper of story and memory and the wish-lanterns, is thanked whenever a story is told well at the table, which in a kitsune house is most evenings. Then come the Thirteen, as many as the house finds useful or beloved. Jianna sits on the shelf of anyone in trade. Forseti comes down from the back of the shelf for a contract and goes back up afterwards. Iro, Sarrum and Vesuna each have their devout corners of the kingdom, and Bikiargi's small shrine comes out for the lunar festivals.

And there is Fisaya, who is on every shelf, generally at the front. She is the most worshipped of the Thirteen in Emarrea by a wide margin: the goddess of change, among the only people within the Thirteen's reach who change their own shape, and of the wind, among a people whose caravans and letters go everywhere. On my host's shelf she is a kitsune, multicoloured, and plainly enjoying it. On every shelf on Haizetsua she is a Tengu. I am told by those who would know that the kitsune have the likeness right, which leaves my people with some explaining to do, and I have decided not to be the one who does it.

The kitsune find it faintly puzzling that anyone keeps only one god, much as they find it faintly puzzling that anyone keeps only one partner. Both, they allow, work for some people; neither is the rule. The Heartcourt has nine pillars and none of them is Faith, which the kingdom regards as obvious and visiting clergy regard as an oversight. The temples are run by neighbourhoods and the shrines by households, and the gods appear to manage.

The Nine-Tailed Hall, despite its name, holds three. The other six seats, the kitsune say, are open: kept for ancestral spirits, or for the small gods of particular places, or simply waiting until the world's stories grow long enough to fill them. Theologians argue over whether the empty seats are real or pious poetry. I put the question to my host. She said the seats would be filled when they were filled, that it would be rude to rush them, and that breakfast was ready, in that order of importance.

I leave incense, as my readers know, at whatever temple stands nearest the road, a habit of seventy years that I cannot account for theologically. My host watched me light a stick for Hahane before my own breakfast, and said I would make a perfectly good kitsune, if not for the feathers.

The Festival of the Fox Lanterns is kept wherever in Emarrea there is water to float a lantern on, which is most of it. Every river town lights its own, Biozuri lights its own, and I have seen a village with nothing but a well float a single lantern in a bucket and call it a festival, correctly. The one everybody goes to, if they can, is Kawaakari's. Kawaakari is a village of hot springs, plum terraces and one river, the Hoshigawa, which carries enough crystal dust down from the mountain to sparkle at noon, and on that one night carries a good share of the kingdom's wishes and most of its Hearts. I have attended it more times than I have managed to describe it, and my publisher has the drafts.

The week before, as tradition and my stomach both require, I dined at the House of a Thousand Flavors in Biozuri, whose lantern-season menu is called Dreams Beneath the Lantern Sea. Between the courses Elhara, the Storyweaver of the Cook's Circle, came to each table and told a story, a different one at every table. It is understood, by a courtesy older than the House, that when the Storyweaver speaks, Yumegatari is listening, and possibly speaking too. Mine was about a lantern that would not float. I will not tell it. Readers who would like to hear it are welcome to have been there.

At Kawaakari the whole village goes down to the river at dusk, and so do the thousands who came for it, and every one of them carries a paper lantern. On it they write a wish, or a name, or a story that ought to be kept. The lanterns are lit with foxfire, which throws no heat and so burns neither the paper nor the hand that holds it, set on the water, and let go. They are Yumegatari's offering, and the kitsune say that what is written on a lantern is told to her as it passes. Within the hour the Hoshigawa is a road of light from the bathhouse steps to the bend below the terraces, the crystal dust lit gold from above, and both banks stand in a silence no kitsune can otherwise keep for more than a minute.

As at every great festival in Emarrea, any citizen may bring a matter straight to a Heart, and since the Hearts come to Kawaakari for the lanterns, the matters come to the riverbank. This year the Emerald Heart sat barefoot on a stool by the water and took petitions until the lanterns were lit. I watched an old brewer from the plum terraces explain, at length and with gestures, that the footbridge to the upper terrace had washed out in the spring and that the village council had been discussing it ever since. Shionori listened to every word. Then they asked how many planks the bridge had wanted. The brewer did not know. Shionori said that was the first thing to find out, and that they would walk up and count them in the morning; and in the morning, I am told, they did.

I wrote my wish on my lantern, as I do every year. I will not tell you what it was, which is the one rule of the festival every kitsune keeps, and I watched it go down the river with all the others until I could no longer tell it from the rest.