The dowager empress was both more clever and cruel than the Shogun and the onmyouji put together. She didn’t settle for assassins or demons to take care of her enemies.

She’d starve Kuro to death.

Kuro collapsed to the tatami mats as the dowager empress ushered her daughters out of the compound, carrying Kuro’s poor abandoned dinner with them. Their bickering over Ruri’s lack of love life trailed behind them, but words couldn’t fill his empty belly.

“Bath?” Ren bounced on his heels as if his cheeks weren’t as pink as fish guts.

Kuro clutched his stomach. “Go ahead. I’m going to find the kitchens.”

“We just ate.”

No, Ren had picked a few grains of rice, and Kuro wrangled a few pieces of fish with the chopsticks. That did not count as eating.

“I’ll, uh, I’ll show you where they are.” But Ren remained where he stood.

Kuro narrowed his eyes. “You don’t know where they are.”

“Of course—” He shrugged. “No, not really.”

“I’ll find it.” Kuro pointed at his nose. “Just swear to me you won’t slip a single toe outside of the compound.”

Ren exhaled.

“Swear to me.”

He raised both hands. “All right, upon my honour, I swear.”

After Kuro climbed the compound wall and slipped into the main palace, the knots in his spine loosened. The floorboards creaked with every shift of weight, so he barely had to pay attention for approaching humans. At last, he was alone. Unobserved. Free.

He didn’t even have to walk like a human, and after switching his gait, one foot landing directly in front of the other, his feet fell so lightly the planks only groaned.

If he wanted, he could change forms and jump over the palace bulwarks. He could say goodbye to the convoluted mess his life had become. Leave behind the ill omens his black fur presented. Leave behind the Shogun’s plots, and… and not hurt Ren.

But then what?

He trotted down the corridor, but halfway down, a floorboard creaked ahead. Kuro froze, wishing human ears weren’t plastered to the side of his head so he could hone in. A mouse, or a human? But why would a human stand around a corner, without moving? A human should be walking somewhere.

Unless they’d set a trap. Kuro slid his feet backward, the floorboards groaning under his feet despite his best efforts to stay quiet. At least he’d hear if a human approached, since their steps were a hundredfold more noisy than a fox’s ever could be—

He bumped into a a torso. A human torso.

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He tried to leap forward, but a hand grabbed his neck and used his momentum to throw him against the wall. The hand lifted. Kuro tried to turn. A blade replaced the hand, over Kuro’s throat. He froze, every one of his fox senses directed at the steel.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” the dowager empress asked him.

The dowager empress? She pressed her torso against Kuro’s back, and once he noticed more than the blade, that torso was very obviously a human female’s. She hadn’t had one of the palace guards attack him. Could she use the dagger? Could she press it so hard his blood spurted out?

“I suppose not,” she said. “It’s rather hard to enjoy one’s self when one is in the middle of a distasteful task. I imagine that working for the Shogun must be troublesome.”

“Working for—” Kuro started to swallow, then froze as his throat Buddha pressed dangerously close against the blade. “I — this humble servant doesn’t — doesn’t know what Her Highness means.”

She knew about the plot. No, she couldn’t know, or she would have had Kuro executed by then.

“What exactly has the Shogun tasked you with?” she asked.

“I’m His Highness’ companion.” Ren had told them that at dinner.

“Officially. But what else does the Shogun have planned?” She shifted behind him. “My son is a good man. He sees the best in others, no matter how little they deserve it. He believes in the Shogun. But I am not so foolish. Do not lie to me again.”

Kuro opened his mouth. Cold sweat trickled down his spine.

Slicing his throat wouldn’t kill him. It would hurt more than seeing his mother again, and his blood would drain out of his body. He’d drop, too weak to move until his body knit itself together again.

The dowager empress would have plenty of time to saw through his neck. Then he’d really be dead.

“Why are you here?” the dowager empress demanded.

“To protect Ren!” Shit, she’d said not to lie again, but he’d spoken before he’d even thought of one.

The blade shifted away from his neck, but the dowager empress pressed it again. “Really?”

“The Shogun is trying to kill him.”

“Yet he sent you to protect him?”

“I don’t want Ren to die. I — I like him.” Why couldn’t he stop himself from babbling?

“So…” the dowager empress trailed off.

Kuro squeezed his eyes shut. All she had to do was press down on the blade. Even if this was the first time she held a knife, she’d be able to manage that much.

“If you’re refusing to obey him, what is the Shogun’s plan?”

“I don’t know.”

She pressed the blade harder against his throat. “He has the Dark Kitsune.”

“Y-Yes.” Not the whole truth, but the dowager empress believed him, judging by the loosening blade. Kuro swallowed several times, his throat throbbing.

“He’ll use the Dark Kitsune against Ren,” she said.

Kuro wanted to nod, rather than voice the answer, but the dagger was still there. “Yes.”

“He’ll send it here.”

If she suspected… “Yes.”

“Then why send you?”

What could he answer? If he tried a human lie, she’d know. If he tiptoed around the answer, she’d spot him in an instant.

But then, as beautiful as the ringing of the bell in a miko’s shrine dance, Ren called out in a low voice, “Kuro? Kuro, are you there?”

The dowager empress withdrew the blade from his neck and threw herself to the other side of the corridor. The planks creaked as Ren approached.

Kuro’s knees trembled like a block of red bean jelly yokan. He shook his head, hands fluttering at his side. He couldn’t pretend he was just a fox or the Shogun’s underling. He couldn’t stay.

Ren turned around the corner, his eyes brightening and a smile widening until he spotted his mother. “Er, Mother, what’s—”

Kuro couldn’t wait for him to finish the question. He bolted down the corridor as fast as he could on his wobbling human legs.

“Kuro!” Ren yelled after him. The floorboards shrieked as his feet pounded on them.

Too slow. Kuro ran too slow and Ren would catch him. He reached into his kimono sleeve and withdrew a maple leaf. He snapped it onto his head, smoke swirling around him.

In his real form, his real self, he ran. Ren couldn’t keep up. Kuro crashed through a screen door and raced across the gravel yard to the bulwark.

He landed on top of the wall. Balancing on four paws, he glanced back.

Ren braced himself on the pillar, his chest heaving. He opened his mouth.

Kuro didn’t give him the chance. He dropped onto the street.