Kuro clutched a bowl brimming with rice. More juicy morsels waited on his lacquered dinner tray. His stomach whined and gurgled and punched him from the inside.

He couldn’t eat a single grain. Not with her watching.

He hunched over his bowl and glanced down the line of trays. The dowager empress met his eyes. Kuro ducked his head.

Kuro must have really ticked off Ren to be thrust into this starving ghost’s hell. And it was about to get so much worse.

After Yumi delivered her utterance, Kuro paced around the pond. Ren emerged from his room, but ignored Kuro. He practised his swordsmanship on the far side of the pond. Kuro curled up on a sun-warmed rock to watch, enthralled.

Yumi had lied. Ren delivered strike after strike, the muscles in his arms flexed. Even as a human, he was too strong to be killed by Kuro’s presence. He’d faced down the Shogun.

Besides, if Yumi really had believed that, she wouldn’t have snuck into the Imperial Palace to berate him.

Yet a worm of doubt wriggled in his gut.

His head swirling in chaos, he hadn’t noticed Ren’s approach. “We’re eating with my family tonight.”

“You might be,” Kuro snapped back.

“I’m going to tell them.”

Kuro jerked to his feet, blood draining from his face. “What? But—” But if Ren revealed what Kuro was, they’d demand to have him executed too. He searched for an escape route.

“You’re right,” Ren said. “If I can’t even tell them about me, I can’t hunt a demon.”

Kuro had sagged in relief. When Ren asked him to come with him, Kuro’d agreed before he thought about it. Just like a fool. If he had bothered to think, he would have said no. Should have told Ren no right then and there, damn whatever he’d said before. But Ren had relaxed as well, as if Kuro’s presence comforted him, and Kuro found his mouth glued shut.

In the same room they’d dined in before, Ren knelt in the place of honour nearest the alcove, his mother next to him. She ate rice with graceful movements, her sleeves rustling in only the most appealing way, her body an art form. His sisters knelt on Ren’s other side.

Ren had placed Kuro at the foot, the least venerated position. If they had been foxes, Kuro would have taken issue. He was not submissive. But they were the Imperial family, and the dowager empress’ presence pricked him like knives, so Kuro bowed his head and thanked every god he knew of that in the ten minutes they’d been eating, no one had uttered a single word to him.

Even more fortunate, Ren hadn’t been able to get a word in.

The youngest sister, although four years older than Ren, abandoned her rice bowl to lean toward her mother. Princess Ruri spilt words like a bamboo flute spilt spring water over a garden waterfall. “But — but Mother, just think about it.”

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“I have,” the dowager empress said.

“He walks by us everyday to see how I am. He—” Ruri tried to mouth her next word, but beyond a shape, her voice did not come. Like the bamboo flute filling with water, the stream stopped.

Reiha would have spat at her to either speak or shut up, but the dowager empress waited.

Finally, the weight of the water flipped the flute over, spilling the water over the waterfall. “He c-cares for me.”

“Men are fickle.” The dowager empress pressed rice into her mouth, manipulating the chopsticks as artfully as a flower arrangement.

“It’s t-t-true love,” Ruri insisted. “I-I l-l-love him, and he loves me.”

“You’ve hardly spoken to him.”

Again, Ruri grasped for words. “I know his soul. I looked into his eyes and I know him.”

Kuro ducked his head so none of the family noticed him roll his eyes. Ren wasn’t the only naive one in the family. Apparently being cloistered away had prevented Ruri from learning that human men only wanted one thing, and that wasn’t a soul mate.

But the dowager empress said, voice as even as before, “That’s not enough.”

“Mother!” Ruri sagged, and then pressed her hands together in prayer. “Please, please, please. I want to marry him.”

“You only have two choices,” the dowager empress said. “Remain with us, or risk the demon-infested forests to join a nunnery like your other sisters.”

“But — but I want to be a wife, not—not-not— die an old maid.”

“Life is only a temporary state.” Ren’s other sister, Reiko, smiled serenely. She still wore both layers of kimono wrapped the same way, as they dressed human corpses for a funeral. Worse, she’d set her rice bowl down half-full. She hadn’t even touched her fish.

Ruri sent her a nasty look. “Then you go to the nunnery.”

“I’d be happy to,” Reiko said, “if happiness weren’t a temporary state I’m ridding myself of.”

Ruri gaped, and not entirely due to her impediment. “That is — you are impossible.”

“Ladies,” the dowager empress said. “No one is going to the nunnery.”

“I do not see why you must make such a fuss, sister,” Reiko said. “This life is a flicker of a candle, soon to be puffed out. Then we start the cycle over again.”

“I don’t want to wait until the next life to marry.”

“Oh, I don’t expect you’ll marry then either. You should devote yourself to the Way so you can take advantage of your spinster destiny.”

Ruri half-choked, half-squawked.

Kuro smiled into his bowl. He’d only ever overheard these kinds of conversations when perched on top of roofs, spying on merchant families. Well, stranger than those, but the same. The daughters are in love, or the sons were, and making the other suffer for it, the parents chiding their children over dowries and alliances and missed chores.

Peering up at Ruri, Reiko and the dowager empress, Ruri looked affronted but not angry, and Reiko and the dowager empress looked serene. An argument that didn’t result in anyone being locked into a store house.

While his sisters bickered, Ren picked at his food. If they’d been alone, Kuro would have stolen most of it by then.

“The only way you’ll escape is by breaking through the cycle of rebirth,” Reiko said.

“I—” Ruri struggled, then turned back to her mother. “Mother!”

“The Shogun won’t hear of it,” the dowager empress said. Her tone almost sounded apologetic.

“But…” She dropped her head.

The dowager empress patted her hand, providing her daughter more comfort in one gesture than Reiha had given Kuro in a century.

Ren exhaled and pulled his shoulders back. “Mother, Sisters. I…”

Kuro ducked his head again, clutching his rice bowl so hard his knuckles turned grey. This was it.

“Yes, darling?” the dowager empress asked.

“I…” Ren seemed to have picked up the same speech habit as his sister. “I don’t want to get married.”

“Bully for you.” Ruri rolled his eyes. “R-rub it in, why don’t you?”

Ren waved his hands in front of him. “I didn’t mean—”

“But mark my words, little brother,” Ruri said. “You will one day, when you have a chance to meet a girl who’s not related to you. Then you shall know my pain.”

“But I like—”

But Ruri had already forgotten him. She leaned over her tray towards Kuro. “You’re—You’re the Shogun’s man. C-c-convince him to grant me permission.”