Chapter 12: Under the blossoming cherry trees – Part 6

Shigemaru and his entourage made camp three days' walk from the village, in the ruins of an old waystation that had served travellers before the road fell into disuse. Mifune found water and built a fire without being asked. Mifune did what was practical regardless of what was happening around him, which was why he was still alive and most men who had worked for Shigemaru were not.

Shigemaru looked at the fire. What Mifune saw in his face was not fear. He had seen Shigemaru afraid before and it looked different—it looked outward, looking for something to damage. This looked inward.

"He came in armour," Shigemaru said.

"Yes."

"Takeda armour. The full crest." He turned a stick over in the fire. "A dead man's armour."

"He's not dead," Mifune said. Being accurate with Shigemaru was more useful than being comfortable. Shigemaru's plans tended towards catastrophe when they were built on comfortable inaccuracies.

Shigemaru's mouth twitched. He rose, brushing ash from his robes, and turned towards the seven women. The firelight moved on their faces. For a while he looked at them the way a man looks at figures in a ledger.

Then something in him shifted.

It happened in his face first. The muscles resettled into an arrangement Mifune had not seen on him before. He tilted his head, the way a child does when it has just thought of a game.

Then he began to sing in the cadence of a child skipping stones across a summer pond.

Pretty petals, one by one,

Falling, falling, 'neath the sun~

Sakura whispers, soft and sweet,

Come and dance on dancing feet!

Mifune had heard him give orders, threaten, lie, and laugh. He had never heard this voice come out of him. It was light and it was pleased with itself. And it belonged to somebody or something else.

He drew the short blade from his belt with a flourish, the steel catching the firelight like a sudden bloom. The oldest wife, the one who had lasted six years, stiffened but did not run. She knew better. Shigemaru stepped to her first, still singing in that bright, playful tone.

First wife, faithful, tried and true,

Petals red, a lovely hue~

One quick snip, and off you go,

To the garden down below!

The blade flashed. A wet gurgle. Her head tumbled onto the mossy stones of the ruined waystation. Blood sprayed in a bright arc that shimmered like cherry petals in the fireglow. Shigemaru giggled—an actual, childlike giggle—and twirled once before moving to the next.

Second wife, so round and fair,

Blooming plump without a care~

Twirl and spin and down you fall,

Petals dancing, one and all!

The third tried to scramble backwards. He caught her by the hair and pulled her into the song.

Third wife, quick with clever tongue,

Now your pretty song is sung~

Snip-snap, red rain all around,

Sakura smiles upon the ground!

Mifune stood motionless by the fire, feeding it another stick as if nothing unusual were occurring. Practicality above all. The screams that began were quickly cut short, each one folded neatly into the rhyme.

Fourth wife, eyes like autumn night,

Close them now, no need for fright~

Bounce and play and lose your head,

Cherry blossoms, soft and red!

Five and six, my merry pair,

Twins in beauty, light as air~

One, two, three, off they fly,

To the branches in the sky!

The blade moved with grotesque cheer. Six bodies slumped in a widening pool of blood, their heads arranged in a rough half-circle around the fire like offerings beneath blossoming boughs. Shigemaru's voice never wavered. The ground between them had gone black and would not soak any more of it.

He stopped before the seventh, the youngest, the winter wife. She was the most beautiful, with skin like fresh snow and eyes that still held some fragment of the mountain village she had been taken from. He had found her half-frozen by a stream last winter and claimed her as the prize of the season. Now he crouched before her, blade dripping, his face splattered crimson yet strangely gentle.

Outside, beneath the cold gaze of the moon, the cherry blossoms had turned red beneath the weight of the night. They swayed gently, almost playfully, in the breeze, dripping slow, viscous beads of crimson onto the moss like tears of perverse delight.

The winter wife stared out through the broken lattice, transfixed, as the tree bloomed brighter still, redder still, drinking deep from the slaughter within.

--

Mifune watched her without appearing to. He had learned to do that over years of surviving men who disliked being observed.

She sat at the cold ash through the rest of the night and did not move. She did not make the small adjustments a sleeping body makes. Six of the heads were within arm's reach of her and she did not look at them.

By the time the first grey of dawn began separating the treeline from the sky, he had arrived at a conclusion he didn't particularly welcome.

She wasn't cold.

The temperature had dropped sharply in the pre-dawn hours, the kind of damp mountain cold that found the gaps in clothing and settled in the joints, and every other living thing in the camp had responded to it in some way, drawing in, curling, seeking warmth. The winter girl sat exactly as she had sat at midnight, her thin borrowed robe apparently insufficient, yet her breath did not make clouds the way his own did.

He looked at his own breath in the air in front of him. Then at hers.

He was still processing this when she opened her eyes and looked directly at him.

"You've been watching me," she said.

"Yes."

She considered him for a moment. What moved across her face was not the blankness she had worn for Shigemaru. It was something older and considerably less human. It was the look a mask has when the person behind it has stopped holding it flush.

"Clever," she said. Her voice had changed. Not into anything monstrous. Into something that no longer needed to perform being a frightened young woman. "Most of them don't notice until much later."

Her eyes changed last. The pupils elongated, split, and resolved into something that reflected the pre-dawn light in a way human eyes had no business reflecting it.

Then the rest of her followed.

The borrowed robe tore as nine tails unfurled behind her like banners of living flame. They were white-gold, shot through with crimson, each one tipped with flickering foxfire. Her limbs lengthened and sharpened, bones shifting with wet, deliberate cracks. Fur rippled across her skin in a shimmering wave. What had been the winter wife rose, no longer the shape of a woman but a nine-tailed kitsune, her muzzle elegant, her fangs gleaming.

Mifune’s stomach twisted. All of it made sudden, hideous sense.

She stretched luxuriously, tails swaying.

Poor little Shigemaru, never stood a chance~
I crawled inside his skull so deep, a worm into a rotten peach~
Every brutal cut and scream and crime, every drop of blood was mine, all mine~
He thought he ruled with an iron hand, a big strong terror of the land~
But he was just my pretty toy, a broken puppet dripping joy!

Her tongue flicked across her fangs. She gave a soft, girlish giggle.

"The wives were getting old, like dried fish left out too long. You would get rid of old food too, wouldn’t you? "

From the far side of the camp came a sudden, choking gasp. Shigemaru woke, too late.

The kitsune moved faster than Mifune could follow and put him on his back with her claws through his shoulders. His eyes bulged with belated awareness as the mind control shattered.

"What—what are you—"

"Shhh."

She opened his belly with two fingers, the way you'd open a letter you already knew the contents of. Then she reached in and began taking things out.

She took the intestines first, and there was a great deal of it, more than seemed reasonable. She worked without hurrying and every so often she stopped to push the hair back from her face with the back of her wrist. His body emptied from the inside out, organs arranged around him in a grotesque parody of the wives’ severed heads.

Shigemaru was still screaming.

When only a twitching, hollowed shell remained, she licked blood from her paws.

The kitsune turned back to Mifune, who had not moved.

"Well, little survivor?" she asked, voice singsong again, "Would you prefer to be eaten alive, or have your soul sucked out? I’m feeling generous."

Mifune ran.

He almost made it to the trees. One tail came out after him like a whip and caught him across the face. It tore from his hairline to his jaw and took his eye on the way through. Pain exploded through his skull. He kept running. He could feel it working down into his cheek, and he could smell himself burning, and he kept running.

She did not follow. She laughed, a bright, delighted sound that chased him through the dawn woods like mocking bells.

Mifune ran until his legs gave out, the left side of his face forever ruined, twisted into a permanent snarl of burned and torn flesh.

Above the ruined waystation, the nine-tailed kitsune sat atop a blood-red cherry tree, tails swaying contentedly. She licked the last traces of Shigemaru from her lips and gazed towards the distant forest where a black horse had once galloped between cedar trees.

"Katsuyori," she murmured, eyes gleaming with fresh hunger.