The Fox's God (15 page)

Akakiba and Yuki had stopped to loiter near the kitchens, one stealing food to feed the other. Either Yuki was willing to tolerate the hovering or he was too hungry to protest.

“Your people’s standards are slipping,” Jien informed Akakiba. “Now the big guy knows about shifting. He means well, but I’m not convinced he knows how to keep a secret.”

“You’re jealous all the women are interested in him,” Akakiba said.

“I wasn’t alone in my room either, if you want to know.” He’d meant the lie to sound smug, but it came out harsh and reproachful.

Akakiba averted his eyes rather than meet his. They were silent, probably both remembering events long past.

Yuki studied them both with narrowed eyes. “What?”

“Nothing,” Akakiba said.

Peeved by Akakiba’s unwillingness to admit they had history—being involved with him wasn’t anything to be ashamed of—Jien laid it out for Yuki. “We were almost lovers, once. That’s all.” As they gaped, he hurriedly added, “Oh, and Aki has something important to tell you!”

He made his escape at high speed, to discourage pursuit. Having long legs was always useful.

Once he was certain he wasn’t followed, he went to the healer’s working quarters. He might at least help pour soup down Aito’s throat.

“Hey, do you need help with—”

There was nobody in the large room except Aito. Who was sitting up, eyes open.

“Aito,” he yelped. “You’re awake! How do you feel?”

Aito looked at him, but didn’t answer. He raised a hand to his head, gaze wandering away to stare at empty air.

“Maybe you’re not quite back yet, huh? Are you hungry? I’ll get—”

The healer’s daughter stepped in with a tray of food. She smiled at him politely. “Oh, hello. I was going to find you and tell you he’d woken, but I thought he needed to be fed first.”

“I understand. Give it here.”

He started with the soup, placing the bowl in Aito’s hands. “Here, do you remember how to drink? Just lift it—” He had to help, pushing Aito’s hands up and settling the bowl against his lips. “Here, see, now—” Something, whether the taste or smell or memory catching up, prompted Aito to open his mouth and drink noisily and eagerly.

“Great! And here’s the rice. Do you remember chopsticks?” It turned out Aito didn’t—they kept falling out of his grasp—but he chewed and swallowed whatever Jien put in his mouth.

“Not too much at once,” the healer’s daughter said. “His stomach hasn’t been full in days, despite our efforts.”

“Understood. I’ll stop here.” He patted Aito’s arm. “I’ll be back later with more food.” To the young woman, he said, “Thank you for your work, ah…”

“Kasumi,” she supplied. “It was nothing. You did a great thing for our clan.”

She didn’t look happy, though. She looked close to coming of age so she might have been anxious about going through the ceremony. He thanked her again and sauntered off to tell the others. Aito was awake!

He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he’d started to think it might never happen. But it had, and that meant Aito would be well given time.

Yuki and Akakiba weren’t loitering around the kitchen anymore. Jien peered inside, finding only a pair of older human women cleaning up.

“Excuse me, where’s everybody gone?”

“The foxes are all aflutter about Inari,” the first woman said. “They’re by the Mirror Pond.”

“It’s nice to see everybody excited,” the second woman said. “We’ll have a nice evening.”

“Another busy one,” the first said. They giggled in unison, and Jien pretended they weren’t talking about what he thought they were.

The gardens were usually a place of peace, and quiet, and beauty. None of those words presently applied; it was crowded, adults trampling the vegetation and children perching in trees like strange, oversized squirrels.

To see what was going on, Jien climbed on the nearest rock. Inari had her muzzle in the Mirror Pond, and the water glowed. When Inari lifted her head, the pond spirit rose in the likeness of a woman with long flowing hair. It was impressive, but he’d seen the Mirror Pond spirit before. Nearly everybody had.

Then, Inari shifted human.

Jien almost fell off his rock.

How could she
do
that? She was occupying a natural fox body, wasn’t she? How much human did she have in her?

The shape Inari took was identical to the mirror spirit’s, in shape if not in details. The clothes were real and colorful and so was the hair brushing the ground. Hair that wasn’t black, but bright red.

“Now we know where Sanae got it from,” he muttered to no one.

Inari lifted a hand and so did the water spirit; they put their palms together, true mirror images of each other.

“Thank you for watching over my children for me,” Inari said. “I’m grateful.”

The mirror spirit broke apart, every drop splashing back into the pond.

A few foxes went down on their knees, bowing their heads to the ground. The motion rippled outward through the crowd. It was the deepest bow one might offer, the strongest sign of deference and respect.

Inari laughed, the sound kind and merry. “You’ll ruin your clothes, you foolish children! Get up! Give me your names, and your lines. Are there records? I would know which of you came from Haru’s line, which of you came from Susumu’s, from Maseo’s, from—”

Jien sneaked away, feeling uncomfortably voyeuristic. This family reunion wasn’t for humans.

Chapter
E
ighteen

Akakiba

I
t was difficult these days to find a moment, however brief, when the family graves site was deserted. He could have gone to his parents’ quarters to pray to their household altar and the Sanae portrait on it, but that would have been unbearably awkward.

In hope of finding privacy, he rose while it was still dark. At this pre-dawn hour, there was only a young girl before the graves. Maru’s daughter, wasn’t it? Her name was, ah, Kasumi? Who was she here for?

The polite thing to do would have been to ignore each other’s presence, but she raised her head and glared at him venomously from beneath her bangs. “Did she ever talk about me?”

“Who—Sanae? No.”

“I thought I was her best friend. She never came to see me, after. She didn’t let me know she was still alive.”

He stood there like a fool, gaping at her. He should have realized Sanae had never been a loner. She would have had many friends. But she’d never mentioned them to him, not even Kasumi. Why?

“Why?” Kasumi asked, echoing his thoughts. “Why would she show herself to you and not to me? You
left
, while I was always there for her. Why were you more important to her than I was?”

“I don’t know.” Nobody truly knew Sanae’s mind except Sanae, and she was no longer there to explain anything.

“If I’d been allowed to go and fight, I wouldn’t have let her die!” With an angry huff, Kasumi stalked away.

Ah—Kasumi was younger than Sanae. She must have been fourteen, or freshly fifteen. She hadn’t fought in the so-called Last Battle, hadn’t been able to protect those she loved. Anyone in that position would have carried anger in their heart.

Sanae had once had a best friend. What else had he never known about his baby sister?

The moon was nearly full, bathing the graves in silver light. There was one for each of the five children the First Lady was said to have borne. Takeo, Haru, Susumu, Masao and Saki, founders of the clan. The lines had grown muddled with time, as distant cousins married and merged different lines, and nobody made any fuss about whose ashes went in which grave.

Sanae’s ashes would have properly belonged in the last grave, the one with Saki’s name. They were direct descendants of hers through their father’s bloodline. This information had never meant anything to him before, but knowing the First Lady was real—and alive—suddenly made it relevant. If they asked, Inari could tell them who red-haired Saki had been, not as a historical figure but as a real person. Whether she’d been as fierce as Sanae, whether she’d had similar likes and dislikes. Inari could tell them about the sixth child, too, the one lost to time and memory.

Strange that they’d never considered the First Lady might also have had red hair, might have been the source of it. By a quirk of magic, the coloring had passed down the lines, all the way down to Sanae. She would have been so very proud to know she had the First Lady’s hair, Inari’s hair. But she would never pass it onward.

“I wish you could have seen her with the Mirror Spirit,” he said, speaking to the grave like the worst fool. She couldn’t hear him. “Nobody doubted her identity after that display.”

Footsteps approached. More unwelcome company.

Akakiba shot his best homicidal glare over his shoulder—right at Yuki, who stopped and averted his gaze. “She missed eating these,” Yuki said, extending a plate piled with red bean buns. “I put a few aside at the feast.”

That hadn’t even occurred to him. Shame and gratitude mingled in his brisk, “Thank you.” The buns went to rest on the stone monument bearing Saki’s name, near the numerous other offerings of food, drink, and incense.

When Yuki made as if to leave, shuffling backwards, Akakiba reached out to seize his sleeve. The glare hadn’t been for him; he should have known that.

“Sorry,” Yuki said. “I didn’t mean to intrude on…” He gestured vaguely towards Akakiba’s face.

Akakiba lifted a hand to his face and found wetness there. Strange. He hadn’t noticed.

“I miss her too,” Yuki said. “I’m sorry.”

He wanted to say, “Stop apologizing, we’ve been over this.” But he couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, because his throat had squeezed shut. His vision grew hazy and blinking rapidly was no help at all.

“Hey.” Yuki’s hands pressed to either side of Akakiba’s head, pulling him down. Yuki’s arms wrapped about him as if to shield his grief from view.

Akakiba barely had to bend to rest his forehead against Yuki’s shoulder, his tears sinking into soft, clean fabric.

“Fresh grief is like a sharp rock,” Yuki said after a while, “that cuts your skin every time you pick it up. And time is like running water, smoothing your grief down until it no longer causes injury. It’ll still be there, later, but it won’t cut.”

Akakiba huffed almost-laughter, stepping back and straightening. “You sound like a priest.”

“I know. It’s something I heard my father say. It stayed with me.”

“I—”

“No apologizing,” Yuki said swiftly. His lips shaped a smile. “Sanae would be exasperated with us, wouldn’t she? She’d say, ‘Honestly, Brother! I help save the world and this is all I get? You should be proud of me!’”

The words didn’t come out in a man’s voice. Entirely the opposite. And, for the briefest moment, Yuki’s aura flushed red. The color vanished as soon as he stopped talking. An echo, perhaps, a shred of memory.

“I am,” he whispered in answer.

Yuki eyed him oddly. “Hm? I didn’t catch that.”

“Nothing.” He turned away. “That’s enough time spent in the company of the dead. I’d like breakfast. If we’re lucky Jien and his loud mouth will still be in bed.”

“I approve of food,” Yuki said. “I’m low on energy, since
somebody
decided to sneak out in the middle of the night.”

“You didn’t have to abandon your futon
to follow me.”

Yuki’s answering look was of the “I’m going to ignore the stupid thing you just said” variety.

As they came around the building, something soft landed on his head and Yuki made a choking sound. “There’s a squirrel in my hair, isn’t there,” Akakiba said, resigned. “I thought he might have decided to live in the garden.”

Momo chattered as if trying to answer the question.

“My hair is not a nest; find somewhere else to sleep.” With prodding, Momo was convinced to get off his head and go be squirrelly elsewhere.

Yuki watched the critter go, eyebrows knitted together. “I don’t know how to ask… Nobody here would eat him, would they?”

“Nobody should be that hungry.” Akakiba paused, reconsidering. The clan had its idiots. “I’ll ask my mother to let it be known he was Sanae’s pet.”

They weren’t the first to seek breakfast from whoever was on feed-the-clan duty.

The scribe beckoned to them the moment they walked in the room. “I have a favor to ask,” he said, indicating a scroll. “I would like this message delivered to the emperor.”

Akakiba considered the scroll speculatively. What was in there? Was it in their best interest to deliver this message? Perhaps it should mysteriously go missing.

The scribe picked up on his misgivings, volunteering, “It contains a general report on recent events, nothing you might object to sharing. More importantly, it contains my resignation.”

“You’re leaving the emperor’s service? Why? What could possibly be more important to a human?” He slipped the scroll in his belt, to pass on to his father.

“More important than money and power, you mean? Love.” Before Akakiba could do more than stare in open disbelief—how, when,
who
—the scribe added, “Love of knowledge, I should say. The breadth and depth of Lady Inari’s knowledge is truly godly; someone has to record it.”

“I can believe that,” Yuki said. Whether he meant Inari’s “godly knowledge” or the scribe’s infatuation with it didn’t matter; both were equally believable.

“We can do that without you,” Akakiba pointed out. “It may surprise you to learn that we dim samurai possess the power of literacy.”

The scribe spread his arms wide. “But would you share this knowledge or keep it to yourself? We normal humans deserve to understand the world, too.”

Yuki’s face was screwed up in what might have been an expression of unbearable pain or a desperate attempt not to burst into laughter and hurt the delusional man’s feelings.

“Did you ask Inari if she’s willing to share her knowledge with you?” Akakiba asked curiously. Surely she’d grow tired of his pestering. When it inevitably happened they could firmly and politely push the scribe out the gates. Problem solved.

Inari slunk in the room as if trying to go unnoticed.
Kyosuke,
she complained.
I can hardly go anywhere without getting mobbed.

The scribe lifted a single, perfect eyebrow at her. “What did you expect, coming here?”

Such lack of sympathy. I’m hungry. Is there meat?

The scribe rose. “I’ll find out.”

Kyosuke, eh? Why did Inari know the man’s name? “You’ve been spending a great deal of time with him,” he observed, trying not to sound like he resented it. What was it about that outsider that interested her, when she had an entire clan at her fee—paws?

Of course I spend time with him,
Inari said.
I’m wooing him.

What? “I think I misunderstood what you just said.”

Her amused tone seemed to mock him.
I said wooing. This body will not last long, by your reckoning. I would like a human body again. We would do well, he and I.

“Ah, you’re looking to merge with him,” Yuki said.

If he should be willing,
Inari said.
Yes.

“Good luck with the wooing.”

They both seemed to be ignoring a crucial fact, so Akakiba pointed out, “He’s a man.”

There will be no conflict. I can be content in a male form.

“But—”

It would be a mistake to say gender means anything to a born spirit. I was a human woman, once. To be a man this time will restore balance.

“What about him? Won’t he be unhappy losing his…identity?”

That is for us to find out,
Inari said, watching him in a way unsettling in its intensity.
Our choices and preferences do not invalidate yours.

He twitched. “Who told you?”

Your mother sought my advice. I didn’t tell her about your problem, but I did reiterate your father and others like him might benefit from spending time in an energy sink, to absorb more energy.

The scribe returned, precariously balancing four different trays. “I thought I’d save time by bringing enough for everybody. Don’t expect this to be a reoccurring event.”

They had human food on their trays, mostly fish, rice, soup, and fermented soybeans. Inari had a fox-oriented selection: fish, cooked turtle flesh, and preserved wild eggs. Normally, foxes who wanted fancier food than rabbit meat and fish had to go hunt for it themselves. Reptiles, amphibians, and eggs were all easy-to-find supplements, even for kits. But somebody had gone to some effort to provide Inari with variety.

Others drifted in; single or widowed men and women, hunters who had a room but no cooking pit, human guests. Two foxes came in together; the one with the unusually bushy, white-tipped tail was Akakiba’s father and the one with the limbs as black as if they’d been dipped in ink—that was his mother. He’d almost failed to recognize her.

“Mother, Father,” he greeted them, a little warily. What did they want, coming here? Outside of special occasions, they’d always eaten meals as a family in their own quarters.

The kitchen is short on meat again. Your mother and I thought we would help by going hunting this morning.

It was an obvious invitation. “I can’t.”

Can’t what? Find a few moments for your neglected parents?
his mother complained.

“I can’t shift,” he clarified. They would have found out eventually.

Oh!
Akahana sat on her haunches, exposing the white fur of her underside.
When—?

“The battle. I knew it would happen, but there was no choice.”

Your sacrifice honors you,
Kiba said. It was the kind of meaningless phrase people said to those who were trapped. It was slightly more meaningful from someone who had experienced the same loss.

Lady Inari believes it can be fixed,
Akahana said.
If we go to the sinks she mentions…

“It will not be quick, even if it works.” He regretted opening his mouth the moment his mother’s ears fell.

Yuki coughed, completely unsubtle about his interruption. “I’m sure the nice sisters we met in the mountains would be more than happy to reopen the family business to welcome visitors from the Fox clan. For now, your parents are going to need someone to carry their kills, won’t they? I’ll say hi to Aito for you.”

Unsure whether he was grateful or irritated, Akakiba nonetheless gave in, abandoning his meal half-finished.

Akahana pranced ahead like an excited kit. On four legs, the injury to her ankle was much less noticeable.
Oh, we haven’t hunted as a family in so long. What shall we catch? What would Lady Inari like, do you know?

“No squirrels. Absolutely no squirrels.”