Tanuki. They spent their days carousing, swiping sake and shaking their giant balls in people’s faces. To foxes, they were the dissolute younger siblings that the humans moaned about in their own families. Irritating but harmless.

And Kuro had just eaten one.

Swallowing repeatedly as acid stung the back of his throat, Kuro stared at the Shogun. Any moment, the Shogun would burst out laughing at the joke. A tanuki would probably have even joined in, preferring joviality to reality.

But the Shogun didn’t laugh. He dismissed Kuro.

Kuro stumbled down the path, every muscle twitching and jerking his limbs about. But he had no attention to spare to them when the contents of his stomach threatened to violate the Shogun’s garden. If he failed, he knew who’d next be on the dinner menu.

Tanuki. Tanuki. He kept seeing the tanuki pup running from the two human brats. The pup rising up on his hind legs, pounding on his belly like a drum, as he claimed he was strong enough to join the Night Parade. No other phrase would have proved he was a child as much as that. And Kuro had eaten him.

He shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut, but since the pup was in his head and not on the path in front of him, it didn’t help. He reached for his logic. Logic told him he probably hadn’t eaten the pup, since the city was full of tanuki, but that the pup was probably being run down and ripped apart by dogs, if he hadn’t already.

“Bah!” Logic wasn’t helping.

He’d thought the Shogun a human bully, power-hungry and greedy as only humans could be. But he wasn’t a human enemy, or the hero Ren thought him to be. He was a demon in human skin. Kuro needed to get out of the Capital before he was forced back into the Shogun’s company.

He ran the rest of the way to the teahouse. If the Shogun refused to give him the money for his shrine, fine. But Kuro had earned that money. He’d earned the shrine. He’d take it by cunning. And he’d save Ren. All Kuro needed was his fine fox mind. And money. And for money, Kuro needed to sneak into the Shogun’s treasury. And for that, he needed Yumi.

He slammed open the front panel so hard it jammed in its groove. “Ren, Yumi, we—”

But there was no them. The teahouse was empty, the scent of human faded. Kuro trembled, but like the door, he’d jammed.

They’d left. Kuro left the panel as it was to keep the barrier down and checked the garden. They weren’t there either. He checked the closet, but while the nest remained, Ren did not. The Kusanagi was also missing.

Kuro collapsed against the closet door. Gone, gone, gone. The only thing that could make this worse was the onmyouji sneaking up on him and shutting the entrance panel. Kuro jerked up, but he was alone. The entrance was just as empty as the rest of the house. Of course the onmyouji wasn’t there. He was too busy rounding up tanuki for the Shogun’s dinner.

Kuro rubbed the skin between his eyes. He had to get a hold of himself. He had to think. Think of something besides how he’d entrusted one task to Yumi and Ren — keep the other from leaving — and they couldn’t even manage that. He wanted the comfort of his fox form. He needed it. But he needed to stay human more. He needed to get unfrazzled and stop thinking about the bits of tanuki dissolving in his stomach.

He focused first on his breath. At the start, his chest rose and dropped faster than rabbits pounding mochi. He’d pass out soon, so he elongated each breath. Breathe in, one, two, three, four. Breathe out, one, two, three, four.

Calm smoothing out the frantic lines of his mind, he thought perhaps Ren disappearing was a good thing. Perhaps it was even — Kuro inhaled, not able to believe he might actually think this about Ren — clever.

The Shogun knew Ren was alive. Or thought he did. Human-headed calves always foretold the truth. In the few minutes between their first breath and their last, they saw all of time. Their prophecies were never wrong.

Nor could the Shogun be sure of Kuro’s loyalty. They hadn’t contrived this together. The Shogun had bribed him, and then kept him imprisoned. If the Shogun trusted him — and no demon in human skin would trust anyone — he wouldn’t have bothered with convincing Kuro of rank or righteousness.

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Kuro scanned the hedges marking the path to the teahouse, but he was alone. No one spied on him or watched for a revenge-blinded Ren. The Shogun thought he had Kuro completely tamed. But at least if Ren wasn’t there, the Shogun couldn’t use Kuro as bait.

So long as Ren didn’t get himself into a bigger scrape. Kuro dropped his head, his neck muscles straining. He wouldn’t bet on it.

Yumi’s disappearance, on the other paw, was mochi after dinner. She’d only trap him in the teahouse, where Kuro could only watch the ceiling darken while Yumi and Ren mucked about until they were executed.

But if the Shogun had only sent someone to watch Kuro, then Kuro could take the opportunity to take a stroll around the court. He jumped off the platform and hurried down the path. Pausing only to smack himself in the head. Sandals. He actually needed to wear the sandals. He went back to fetch them.

No one stopped Kuro returning to the main compound. When he stepped up on the veranda, a maid disappeared with his sandals. He squinted his eyes, trying to come up with a mental image of Ren. The most immediate image was of him sprawled out over the futons. Amusing, but not helpful.

When Ren had guided him through his palace, how had he walked? Gracefully, like he glided instead of took steps. Like his feet had wings, yet never left the ground. His head stayed level, and he brought his hands together. Just like the old man in the peeling mural.

Kuro slid one foot forward, then the other. If he could imitate a housewife to make suspicious samurai blush, he could imitate Ren’s walk. He paused, and evaluated, then readjusted his gait. He slid forward. Dare he say he even glided? Perfect.

He focused on his feet as he moved through the corridors, with the additional bonus that such concentration made his eyes glaze over. But his serenity wasn’t much of a disguise. The government officials stomped by him, or raced down the halls, the whites of their eyes showing. They muttered to each other, half the words a curse of some kind.

But the difference wasn’t a problem. They didn’t even notice him. No, the problem was that the main compound was a maze of corridors and he had no idea where a Shogun kept a treasury. He’d have to search room by room.

Which he could have done, if not for passing officials and servants every five seconds. He turned another corner with open screen panels. A senior official screamed at two juniors, punctuating each remark by throwing papers at them. The two juniors, tufts coming loose from their topknots, dropped to their knees to gather the papers.

Kuro hurried past them. Definitely couldn’t risk checking the rooms on either side. He needed somewhere vacant.

He barrelled around a corner, and then froze. Swearing mentally, he backtracked and pressed himself against the corner. He glanced back into the corridor.

Yumi knelt on the veranda, facing the courtyard garden’s moss-covered rocks and stunted pine trees. The servant girl next to her wasn’t so circumspect. She angled her knees toward Yumi, leaning forward.

He should glide around, find another way through, before Yumi slammed her fist into his nose.

Except… “That little braggart,” he whispered to himself.

“She kept sobbing and sobbing in the middle of the wardrobe room,” the servant girl said. “We kept telling her it was going to be all right, that the Shogun would save us. Even the Elder knelt next to her, patting her back. She started to calm, but then Lady Marito glided in, demanding to know what the racket was, and set her off again. Lady M kicked her.”

Gossip continued to tumble out of the servant girl’s mouth, faster than the waterfall in the Shogun’s pleasure garden. Yumi bobbed her head, occasionally adding, “Er, you don’t say,” and “Um, yes.” By her words alone, Kuro would have thought her in need of rescue. But Yumi smiled, as content as could be, adding encouraging nods of her head to urge her friend on.

“Then finally she just yelled, ‘I cannot find your hair pin, my lady.’ A hair pin. She’d been bawling about a hairpin. And Lady Marito glared down at her, and said, ‘Why, you stupid girl, it’s clutched in your hand.’”

Kuro leaned his head back on the pillar. Yumi had berated him to no end about getting worthy evidence out of the Shogun. She’d declared, without a single waiver of hesitation, that the Shogun must be stopped at all costs.

Yet here she was, drinking in gossip as the day passed on. She wasn’t even spying on Ren.

“You useless girl,” Kuro whispered.

“What was that?” the gossip raised her voice.

He pressed himself to the wall. She couldn’t see him, could she? One overly talkative maid he could deal with. But if she pointed him out to Yumi…

“Come on,” a third voice, also female, said. “Master needs us to dress him immediately.”

“But what of his headache?” the gossip asked. “He hasn’t stirred since—”

All three fell silent for a long moment.

“He received word that the abbot is refusing to prepare for the funeral rites.”

“You’re kidding!”

“The abbot claims that as they’re missing His precious body, the Sun Prince must not be dead.”

“You think?”

“Don’t!” the other servant snapped. “If anyone hears you, you’ll be sent to the execution grounds. Just come with me.”

“Sorry, Miss Yumi,” the gossip said. “I must go.”

Yumi made an accepting noise, probably bobbing her head like a crow. It was as if she was shy or something. She never had any problems reprimanding Kuro or beating his head in, though.

He waited until the two girls darted away before he slid around the corner, leaning back against the wall. “Well, well, well. What do we have here.”