He was anything but routine.

	Ashitaka built a small hut in Tataraba that the villagers called his home, but it seemed to her that he used it only to sleep in. He preferred to spend most of his time working, or playing with the children- there were children in Tataraba now, so many that she had almost lost count, and the air these days was filled not with the stench of sulphur and molten steel but with their laughter.

	He didn't have a steady line of work. Now that Tataraba no longer worked in steel some of the villagers had turned to cultivation of the grassy plains around them, some to crafts, some to fishing. He alternated between crafts, helping out where he would or where he thought he was most needed, and somehow it always was, that by the end of the day he wanted for nothing.

	Once every so often- she kept track, but could never see a pattern- he would slip off, leaving Tataraba for days or sometimes weeks at a time. The first time he had left, everybody had panicked but herself- she knew where he was going, not that he had told her so much in words, but in behavior. Maybe the wolf girl he had picked for his wife was the feral one, but there was something wild and untamed about him as well, something that told her his was a spirit not meant to be held by anything or anyone. 

	She didn't care about things like that, but she'd never cared enough to try to tame him, either. It was enough for her to watch, and to ponder.

	When he returned after the first time, it was dawn over the lake, and the waters were soft crimson and gold. She had been sitting in her garden, watching the waves shatter on the rocks and thinking, about revenge and second chances and a time, long ago, when the plains had been forests, and the trees had loomed over the lake like dark and forbidding gods.

	They were gone now, almost as surely as if she had cut them down with her own hands, and they had taken her right arm in return. Hardly a fair trade. It hadn't taken her long, through practice and sheer will, to learn how to rely on her left, although there were things that she still couldn't manage. She could fight well enough with knives, but she doubted that she would ever wield a gun again.