Chapter Text
She will remember this forever; walking through forest trails that should not have betrayed her, lifting leaves into a crisp, uncluttered snap as her paws touch the ground. And her snout, a peak of fur that ends in a curve, lowering to the water below.
And then; the moment when it happens. A crunch through leaves far from her feet, a rustle in a waiting bush. She lifts her head, and ignores the gleam of her reflection to stare straight into another, steadier shine. They flicker, a quick slide of skin revealing them to be eyes as they blink. And then the human girl’s head lifts, her head tearing free of the foliage, as the twigs scatter from her hair as though she is bursting from a stream. But the branches she snaps and the bark she scraps against in her excitement let out a welcome crack, one as high and sharp as a splash.
The kitsune will remember, afterwards, bearing her teeth and snapping, marooned in the air by her panicked leap as words spill from the girl’s lips, made high and shrill with excitement. She will remember straining forward, each syllable bringing a light to life as it wraps through fur and tightens against muscles that now hang, heavy as rope beneath her skin. And she will remember snarling, snarling like a plead as she is clawed into a new creature, one that will need more than fur and the quick flicker of her shape to indentify her.
‘I name you, Miyabi,’ the girls finishes, and if there is low intensity to her voice, as she utters the name and lets it settle in the air, the youkai doesn’t notice.
Instead the light disappears and Miyabi falls headfirst into the water, with a yelp unbecoming of her age.
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Mai is the name of her new master. She tests it out in her head as they start the walk back to the shrine; Mai, Mai, Mai. She imagines it will sound rough against her tongue, as it scrapes past teeth instead of fluttering freely to roll.
Mai – her master – makes a face, her hand curling through her hair and then tightening with a squeeze. Miyabi watches as hair gleams wetly through human fingers, like oil trying to slip free of a bowl. It looks dark to her, darker than the space she sees between trees, places she has always felt safe.
There will be no more of that now.
‘I’m all wet.’ Mai turns to her with a petulant frown on her face. ‘You’re dripping on me. Stop it.’
Miyabi sighs, takes a few steps back. Her human form towers over Mai, tall, though not quite high enough to be one of her well-loved trees. It is one of the few good things she can take pleasure in. That, and the spite of making thin trails of dark material spring up and snake through the red kimono that wavers before her like a makeshift peony lantern. She straightens her spine and shakes herself abruptly, much like a dog.
Mai bites out a yell and shields her face with a sleeve. Seconds later, it lowers, revealing a tight glare on a pretty face.
‘Sorry Mai-chan,’ says Miyabi, carefully keeping her voice as blank as possible.
Mai reddens, her frown turning into a glare. It is like a thousand snakes have come to life in her brow, twisting the muscles there into hard, heavy coils.
‘You will not call me that,’ she hisses.
Miyabi smiles thinly. ‘I meant no disrespect. Master.’
The frown falls away, not completely, but now Mai’s forehead is less a nest of snakes, and more of a rumpled piece of skin.
‘No,’ says Mai, ‘no, that’s not-’ she hesitates. ‘Call me Mai,’ she says firmly. ‘That and nothing else. I have more than enough idiots crowding me at home, pretending to be my servants.’ She spins on her heel and walks off, her feet, this time, coming down a little more firmly onto the ground.
Miyabi watches her, watches the water drip from her sleeves and from the ends of her hair and thinks she would make a good ghost.
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It only later that she understands what Mai means by ‘idiots.’ The people in her village fawn over her, dragging themselves behind her heels while conversely throwing their shadows into her path. All this, while sweets come bubbling from their hands, gleaming like thick red jewels, while praises and pleas both fall through the air with equal fever. Mai treads through them all as though she expects the sound to bend and break away from her, as though the surrounding flesh, and the fake shine of the villagers eyes, cannot possibly leave their mark on her soul.
Miyabi is not sure how she tolerates it. She, herself, has spent her life walking through forests, pulling her tail through both shadows and crisp smells that change with the fluency of the wind. And yet all that seems uncluttered in comparison. For even if Mai does not have to watch out for stray branches or thorns, there is something here, in this press of people, that could snag at her heels, trip her up with little to no effort at all.
It is in these few seconds, that Miyabi suddenly feels a glimmer of respect for her new master.
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‘What have you done?’
Mai’s mother is a lean woman, her face gaunt with lines that add to her beauty rather than rendering it strange and unattainable. Her nails, when Miyabi looks, are short and riled with strange, jutting tears, as though she taken to grinding them down against something hard and unforgiving.
‘It’s alright, Mother,’ says Mai a little crossly. ‘I named her. She’s harmless now.’
Oh-ho, thinks Miyabi, is that so?
‘But...’ her mother trails off, her face now wrecked with anxiety. Her hair, while still shimmering with the tell-tell lusciousness of long-lasting youth, is caught in a half-formed twist at the back of her neck, strands spilling out of the contours in a messy wave.
This, thinks Miyabi, is a woman who has had one too many sleepless nights.
‘Mother,’ says Mai, this time with an edge to her voice. ‘I am learning to be the best priestess I can possibly be. But...as I once proved, we do not have adequate protection against any dark spirits that would nestle their way into our homes.’ She takes a breath. ‘I need any advantage I can get, before I am strong enough to tell the fakers apart from the more benevolent sort.’
Mai’s mother twists her lips. ‘If it will make you happy...’ She shoots a sharp look at Miyabi and then says vehemently: ‘she’s not sleeping in the house.’
‘Fine,’ says Mai stoutly. ‘I’m sure she’ll find some cover outside. She’s used to it after all.’ She turns. ‘Come along Miyabi.’
Her mother lets out a low groan at the name, her hands dropping to her sides as her face lowers, the fight abruptly falling out of it.
Miyabi narrows her eyes. For just a second, she sees Mai wince, her shoulders bunching up into tight, angular lines that form a more squarish shape than usual. But then they drop, as though her kimono sleeves have suddenly become heavier than before.
Miyabi wonders what other weights this household holds, and whether she will ever see the secrets they keep.
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It is not all as terrible as Miyabi fears. The earth, though it is crammed with human scents, still stirs beneath her feet in much the same way the forest floor does, and she watches as the wind urges the leaves to creep against the ground, to surge forward in the familiar dance of red, brown and gold. They unfurl like fire against her fur, and then break, with the same sweet, crisp sounds when Miyabi bats them with her paws.
‘Don’t run away,’ Mai had told her fiercely, before she had pulled the door of her house closed. ‘That’s an order. You got that?’
Miyabi does but she can’t help but shiver as the wind pulls against her fur. She is no leaf to be swayed and pulled to thinly sliced ribbons, but there are no trees here, not out in this wide open space. Just paths made out of cool stone blocks and empty, empty dirt. Nothing to stop the wind from barrelling through, to divide the full force of its scorn. It runs straight through her body and robs her of her warmth.
Dimly, she registers a prickle in her nose. Something warm, but small, barely enough to hold up in this onslaught of air, but it calls to her, and to the hunger in her belly. She lets it pull her closer to the shrine, dragging her the last few inches towards Mai’s window. And there, beneath the sill, lies a plate, filled to the brim with deep fried tofu.
Miyabi’s ears perk up. Her tongue hangs out. And then she lunges forward, swallowing down each mouthful with a watery gulp, joy rushing up to her head in the same way heat flows down to engulf her stomach. She closes her eyes and basks in the thin layer of breadcrumbs that roll crisply in her mouth before they crumble away into the softness beneath. It feels tender and slick, much like the entrails of a fish, but is better by far, than any silver thing that slips through streams.
She is thankful, when she looks up, to see that Mai is not there, watching her. For she will never be, she tells herself, grateful.
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Mai is not stupid. She is ignorant. But she learns quickly from the books she holds in her hands, her eyes flickering over the words with an eagerness that seems almost child-like. But these same eyes are wide and dark, and look half-crazed in the light that her candle throws out. She reminds Miyabi of the frenzy she’s seen some of her fellow youkai fall under and the way in which they watch the red run out from under their claws, entranced more by the colour than the marks they leave behind.
But these books, informative as they are, have been crafted by human authors and inevitably, they are missing things.
She remembers snorting, once, when Mai had recounted to her, rather excitedly, the tale of the Tamamo-no-Mae.
‘Oh-ho,’ she says, letting the snarl enter her voice, ‘an evil trickster, was she? A malevolent beast who expressed her power for the hell of it? Is that why she was stupid enough to make the emperor waste away, instead of arranging a quick, clever accident? These stories are always expressing how intelligent she was, how she amazed these great scholars...if that’s so, why couldn’t she manage that? Why risk her identity by giving these people around the emperor enough time to grow suspicious of her?’
Mai looks rather shaken by her venom. Dimly, Miyabi suspects that the human had felt a kinship with Tamamo, with this brilliant lady who wormed her way into the heart of a king and expressed no shame for doing so. She wonders if, any minute now, that shaken look will iron itself out, this time into a frown, or perhaps even a startled, searing rage.
But instead, Mai glances down at the pages, looking thoughtful.
‘She was a kitsune, wasn’t she?’ she asks and Miyabi has to choke down her rage at the way Mai says it, deliberately gentling her tone, as if she were talking to someone sickly. ‘She was kin, to you, maybe? Or maybe I’d get mad if you said humans were as bad as one you’d read about in a story.’
Miyabi sighs. ‘Tamamo was sister to us all,’ she says quietly, because at least Mai is willing to listen. ‘She was a reminder of what can happen if we overstretch ourselves. But she was different too. Adopted and raised by humans, is it any wonder that she respected human values? How can we blame her for wanting vengeance, because a bad decision by the emperor cost her human father his life? You’ll notice how that was left out in the version you read.’
Mai gasps. But her cheeks flush and in her eyes dance sparks, quick, cheap shots of light from the candle flames, made vibrant from her exhilaration. She looks back at the illustration of the Tamamo with hunger in her expression.
‘If that’s the case, then she’s greater than I thought she was,’ she whispers reverently. ‘Avenging a family member...and she didn’t care how many people she angered to do it!’
‘She failed,’ Miyabi reminds her. ‘And that failure cost her, her life.’
But she knows the words are useless. Mai has that look again, the look Youkai wear before they lose themselves to pleasure. It has caught her, the thought of a woman who used her femininity as a weapon, who dressed herself as though preparing for a courtship instead of an assassination. Miyabi wonders if Mai wants to grow up into a similar shape.
But such a path is not easy. And Miyabi is unsure whether she wishes to tread down it with her.
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So reading, hearing Mai sometimes read to her, is not always fun. But fortunetelling, perhaps, is.
Yes, Miyabi prefers it by far when Mai pulls back her sleeves and holds a wind chime up to the light. It hovers in front of her face, a distant fairy that distorts the shape of her eyes as Miyabi stares back through the glass towards her. It’s a tiny window, one that curves and offers hardly enough noise to be called a song, but it still opens up the way to the future.
Mai can make it move, can focus and cause the silver strands within it to knock together and produce a bell-like reverberation that throws words into her mind like a poem.
‘You’ve spent your life crushing down small things, just because you can,’ Mai told her, the first time she told Miyabi her fortune. ‘Now you have to learn to step back and let it grow; learn to become a part of something bigger than yourself.’
Then she made a face. ‘Useless,’ she muttered sullenly, though there was a curious haze of pink across her face, and her eyes became fixed on her knees, rather than the wind chime she still held suspended by her hand.
Miyabi is still not sure why Mai tells so many lies. Or why she forces herself to say things that deep down, she doesn’t really mean. She’s like those tiny creatures that hoist themselves up into shells when they’re frightened, making armour out of the skeleton they’re forced to wear on the outside. But Mai isn’t a snail. And her bones remain tightly wedged under her skin.
But still, Miyabi knows they could break. She could break them. She’s a little unsure when that thought started to frighten her so.
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Mai is not always a kind master. Sometimes, when her mother wavers in the corridors like a spirit unsure of what to haunt, Mai will snap, demand food from Miyabi like a servant.
'Fetch me a plum,' she will say, or, 'grab me some strawberries and be quick about it!'
Miyabi will watch her fingers pluck at the fruit, her nails tightening against the skin until they burst through the flesh and stain her hand with the juice inside. And it runs, red into purple, like blood darkening her fingertips. Mai’s hands are small, lacking the claws of a youkai, but still, when she inspects them, they seem to curve cruelly, as though in imitation of one.
Miyabi resents this, this stupid show of power, a lie that empathesis, the strength of a soul through a body that cannot help but give way to it. It does not comfort her at all, to imagine the eventual dirt and bone Mai will succumb to, even as her mother falls into the arms of another would—be suitor like a corpse and Mai scowl enlarges, alongside her temper. On those days, somehow Miyabi is not quick enough, fast enough to deliver fruit into her hands and Mai twists her name through her mouth with childish scorn, demanding her to lock herself up in the outer-shed as punishment.
In the dark, among the tight rolls of scrolls, Miyabi will pretend she is enclosed within her den, with the scent and shapes of leaves cluttering the entrance in half-moon curls. The crisp sound of paper, as her claws drift along the edges, will serve as a poor substitute in the illusion she has placed herself in, but it leaves her satisfied, in a way picturing Mai in trouble does not.
Mai will not apologise afterwards. And Miyabi will not expect one. That does not mean, however, that she does not desire one.
But on one such day, her patience falters.
‘I have punished humans for lesser sins than yours,’ she hisses, her fur dripping with the rain that barraged her after Mai had decided to let her free.
‘Sin?’ Mai looks haunty, outraged, indignant. Three forms of human rage, that Miyabi knows Mai will not keep inside. ‘What sin? The sin of using the name-bond to command you? Just because it’s difficult for you to handle, doesn’t mean it’s wrong for me to use it!’
Miyabi laughs, a harsh dry chuckle, that rolls through her mouth like the leaves she misses back home. ‘You think I don’t know what you did?’ she chides gently. ‘Oh Mai...I have seen the way some of the villagers, the ones who do not fawn on you, glare at you when others do not look. They hold murder in their hearts for you. It’s in their very postures; in that way youkai and humans are not so different. It is love, or the loss of it, that moves people into such hate.’
The anger flees from Mai’s face and abruptly, she goes very, very white.
Miyabi scuffles a little closer, just enough to let her breath lie against the line of Mai’s cheek, to stir her hair like wind.
‘Mai,’ she breathes. ‘You have let me talk to people here. That is a very foolish thing to do. It makes it easier to unearth your secrets, to learn the names of the dead.’ She pauses, and then, carefully, with all the roughness of a cub, she mutters, ‘including the name you have given to another, to me, of the one you wished to keep here.’
‘SHUT UP!’ Mai whirls away, hair slashing against Miyabi’s face like the quick-fire strike of a snake. ‘SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!’
Miyabi reaches out, grabbing Mai’s wrist as her free hand stretches for the girl’s mouth. But Mai bites down hard on her questing fingers, struggling against the sleek tails that burst out from under the lines of Miyabi’s kimono and wrap around her chest, thicker and tighter than the knot of her obi. Miyabi grunts, but human teeth are blunt, are to youkai what stones are to rocks. And she holds fast. Not a word will drop from Mai’s lips.
‘Peace,’ she says. ‘You should know better than to know I will hurt you. Think Mai. You have read tales of my kind, you know how we avenge ourselves against the humans we feel have wronged us. If I wished, I could have already crept into your body, made you shiver with sickness, see into a world that is not there. I may even have killed you.’
Her tails tighten, not enough to hurt but to threaten. Mai chokes, her tongue battling feebly against the invading fingertips and Miyabi sighs, telling her claws to shorten and resemble the fragile thinness of human nails. She has no wish for Mai’s blood to spill, to thread through her mouth as her tongue comes apart.
‘Listen,’ she says empathetically. ‘I understand throwing others aside to save someone precious. It makes perfect sense. What I can’t understand is why you thought it would work. Only a dark spirit would demand such a massive sacrifice and even then, they rarely have the power to make good on their deals. The only one who might have listened, who might have granted your request is Taizanfukun-sama. And he would never have approved of this bloodbath. Why did you not plead your case to him, back before your soul was unblemished?’
Throughout her speech Mai had been tightening in on herself, rolling forward and squeezing her chest against Miyabi’s tails as though in parody of a hug. But, upon her last word, she freezing, her muscles like dried snow against the rolls of furs that encompasses her. Hesitantly, Miyabi pulls them away , her fingers falling out of Mai’s mouth with a wet slop.
Mai swallows, before she can get her throat to work. ‘Unblemished?’
‘Well...yes.’ Something is screaming at her, warning not to finish. But Miyabi has become weak to Mai’s curiosity, to the way her mind seeks to fill in the holes no human can provide for her. ‘Taizanfukun-sama sometimes resurrects the dead in exchange for a single unblemished soul, free of any sin.’
Mai starts to shake. Her teeth chatter. And then piteously, like the snapping of a spine, a wail breaks out of her mouth.
Miyabi pulls her close, unsure if she has made a terrible mistake.