His own shrine. Built especially for Kuro. It didn’t matter that the onmyouji reactivated the barrier when he left. He could see perfectly well the stupefied faces of his mother and litter-sister when he as a newly-minted god paid his respects at Inari Shrine.

As a god, they’d have to bow at his feet. He’d scoff that he was sure the Celestial Kitsune could put on a proper feast on a more auspicious day.

He’d make Reiha look at him. She’d regret the day that she—

He cut himself off. It never paid to think about that day. To remember her eyes as cold as samurai steel.

The sliding door opened.

Kuro lifted up his chin in a properly regal position and flipped his gaze over to the newcomer. “You!”

The servant girl from the street — the real one this time, definitely female — smashed her lips together. She pinned her eyes on Kuro while she slid into the room, pulling a lacquered case and a tray behind her, and slid the panel closed behind them, restoring the barrier. He supposed escape couldn’t be so easy as the girl forgetting to close the door behind her.

The girl set the tray in the middle of the room, bringing with it the smell of rice and green tea. His stomach growled. It had to have been more than a day since he’d wolfed down the mochi. The Shogun hired had the best chefs in the empire, and if they were trying to please a god… Visions of inari-zushi, salted mackerel and tempura dazzled him.

He dashed for it and tore the lid off. His jaw dropped.

The tray contained a bowl of rice drowned in green tea. He shoved the bowl in the girl’s direction. “Hey you. What gives?”

She ignored him, focused on the lacquered case.

Kuro narrowed his eyes. “You,” he repeated.

“My name is not ‘hey you,’” she said. “And I’m not required to speak to you.”

He recoiled. She wanted to be on first name basis with him? “Fine. What’s your name?”

She opened the box. “Eat now or you’ll have to wait.”

“I’m not eating this slop.” Kuro crossed his arms. “Bring me inari-zushi.”

“Dogs get gruel.”

The ends of Kuro fur rose on end. “I’m not a dog.”

She flicked her eyes to him and sniffed before turning back to the box. She withdrew a red comb with white flowers painted on the handle.

He rose up onto his knees to stare into the case. Comb, scissors, round containers for cosmetics. He furrowed his brow.

The girl sidled up next to him, comb in hand. She yanked on his fur — hair, humans called it — until he had to bow over her to avoid her pulling the hair out by the roots.

“Ow!” Kuro raised a hand to her, wanting to slap her.

She held up the comb like a talisman. “Demon, be still!”

He stared at the comb. It wasn’t a charm or ensouled. But it was red, a colour that held demons at bay. “I’m not a demon.”

She sniffed.

“I’m a kitsune,” he said. “Didn’t you hear from your master? I’m to become a god.”

She exhaled. “In such calamitous times as these.”

“What’s that supposed to—Ow!” He broke off as she attacked his hair again, this time with the comb. But he didn’t cry out because it was red. She yanked the comb through his hair so hard it pulled at the roots.

“Your hair is so tangled,” she said. “What do you do with it? Swish it around in mud water?”

“No—ow! Stop that!”

“I have been giving the impossible duty of making you presentable.” She heaved her shoulders. “I should probably just shave it all off.”

He covered his head with both arms. “Don’t!”

“Then stop being a baby and be quiet.”

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Perhaps you could—ouch!—be a little more—ow!—gentle.”

“Perhaps,” she said, in a nasty tone that conveyed that she could have been, but she preferred to listen to him scream.

He gritted his teeth and bore it. The rice gruel teased him, but with the way she jerked on his hair, he’d only spill it. He should have put aside his pride and drank it down when she’d warned him to.

“Finally,” she muttered as she set the comb back into the box.

Kuro heaved a bigger sigh of relief. His skull ached worse than when the onmyouji, or the girl for that matter, had struck him. But then she picked up the pair of scissors shaped into a crane. “Wait, I thought you said you wouldn’t cut it if I stayed quiet.”

“Have you seen yourself lately?” She held up a circle of polished silver. Kuro dodged, but the mirror was just a mirror, not a magical artifact. “It’s all ragged. Really, I should be scrubbing you in a bucket like a dog—”

He whined.

“—but we really don’t have time. Thankfully, you aren’t too dirty. It looks like you at least jumped into the river in the past month.”

“I had a bath last week,” he told her proudly. He’d snuck through the back of the public bathhouse, bribing the wood furnace’s attendant with promises of taking over his job for an hour.

“What do you want? An encomium?”

“I don’t know. Is it tasty?”

She glowered at him, jerking her nose into the air as if she hated breathing the same air as him. “An encomium means I praise you for having had a bath once in your life. You probably only entered to steal the souls of other bathers.”

“I don’t steal souls.”

“Sure.” She attacked his hair with the scissors, but this, at least, wasn’t as painful as the combing. She snipped off the split ends. When she held up the mirror again, he raised his brow at his reflection. He did actually look less like a street urchin, and more like an actual god.

She took the mirror away and snapped tweezers at him. Kuro slapped his hands onto his eyebrows. This girl still had her eyebrows, but he’d seen the onmyouji.

She sighed. “It’s just a little trimming.”

He pursed his lips, but then she raised her hand to deliver him a blow, so he dropped his hands, submitting to her every command. It would be easier on him in the long run. Although, as she plucked the hairs on the sensitive skin above his eye, perhaps not much less painful.

She clipped his claws — nails, Kuro reminded himself, humans had nails. This at least didn’t seem to involve torturing him, leaving him to actually talk without having to pause for yelps.

“So why does a maid look so much like the Shogun’s onmyouji?” Kuro asked. What he wanted to ask was why she was a maid when she should be serving as a priestess in a shrine, but that seemed a bit too rude to start with.

She pinned him with a glare. So personal questions were out, just like her name. But then she answered. “He’s my elder brother. There’s just us left. Your kind murdered our family.”

“Not a demon.” Kuro raised a freshly-plucked brow. He’d heard the onmyouji came from humble origins, and he knew all humans were selfish, but he would have thought that selfishness would extend to promoting his sister, if only to not be related to a lowly servant. “And he keeps you as a maid?”

“I help him,” she said. “And I’m not a maid. I’m his attendant.”

“You’re still an embarrassment,” he said.

She snapped her eyes up to him again, just as she cut with the scissors. Kuro bit back a yelp.

“Oops,” was all she said, but she let him snatch back his hand.

The tips had bit through the pad of his finger. Blood beaded over the cut. He sucked on it to stop the bleeding.

She waved her hand, gesturing for him to return his hand. He glanced to the closed door, then obeyed.

“I meant, why aren’t you at a shrine, terrorising the local spirits?” Kuro asked. “You’re strong enough to become one hell of a priestess.”

She bent low over his hand, hiding her expression. “I need to help my brother.”

Her brother was stronger than she was. He didn’t need the help. “I would have thought your hatred of our kind ran deeper than that.”

She bent closer over her work.

“But I guess I was wrong,” he said. “Your character must be weak. You’re helping a demon kill a human, after all.”

She hissed in a breath, and that was all the warning he got before her scissors sliced through the muscle of another finger.

“Ouch,” Kuro said, voice cool. But he snatched his hand back as fast as before and sucked on the wound.

“I’m not helping you,” she said.

“Then what is this all about?” Kuro gestured with his other hand to the lacquered box. “Why the makeover? Charity? Or you just can’t stand a scruffy demon?”

“My brother needs you to be presentable in court.”

“Presentable,” he repeated. “So I can kill the Sun Prince?”

“So you can kill a traitor.” She spoke the last word with as much hate as when she spat the word ‘demon’.

“How can he be a traitor?” he asked. “He is the state. Or would be, if the Shogun ever let him ascend to the crown.”

A rap at the sliding door frame interrupted them. The girl slid back to the sliding panel, never taking her eyes off Kuro. Another girl handed her a bundle of cloth. They murmured together, the other girl giving Kuro a nervous smile, before she closed the door again.

But not before Kuro caught one specific word.

“Yumi. That’s a nice name. Can I call you Yumi-chan?” The cute honorific didn’t suit a harridan like her.

“No!”

“What about Yumi-rin?” Because an even cuter and personal honorific would infuriate her more.

She shoved the bundle of clothes at Kuro. “Don’t be ridiculous and put these on.”

“Yumi it is.” He left off any suffix, as if they were good friends.

Yumi narrowed her eyes, but said nothing.

He unwrapped them, his ears pricking forward and his tail standing on end. This was the kimono of a servant for the Imperial Court. “You really are helping me.”

“That traitor deserves a thousand deaths,” Yumi snarled. “While his empire suffers attack after attack from the Night Parade, that prince only cares about his own power. He’ll stop at nothing to destroy the Shogun, and destroy the empire.”

“The Shogun destroyed him first,” he said.

“The Shogun protected us when emperor after emperor hid in their palace,” she said. “But this prince isn’t content with hiding while his people are slaughtered. Oh no, he has to help the Night Parade destroy them.”

Kuro dropped the kimono. Yumi berated him, but her words were lost in the rush in his ears.

This was no spoiled, helpless prince they were sending him to kill. Kuro swallowed.

He might be better off taking his chances in the forest.