Chapter 1: Tribute
They dress you as a bride, which is the village headman's idea of a joke.
White silk, borrowed from a shrine, too long in the sleeves and smelling of camphor. Your hair oiled and combed until your scalp aches. A dab of safflower red on your lower lip, applied by the headman's wife with trembling fingers, as if paint might make you taste better. Nobody says the word tribute. They say honor. They say the mountain has chosen. They say it while carefully not looking at you, the way you don't look at an ox on the morning it goes to the butcher.
You are twenty-four years old. You spent eight of those years in the kitchens of a Fujiwara household in the capital, learning to fillet sweetfish so cleanly the bones lifted out like the teeth of a comb, before a jealous senior cook accused you of stealing a jar of Tang honey and you were turned out with nothing but your knives. You came north to your sister in the Hida mountains because she was the only family you had left. You've been here two winters. You're the outsider, the one with the capital accent and no husband, and so when the headman drew lots this autumn, nobody was surprised the lot was yours.
Your sister wept until she was sick. You held her hair back and told her it was fine.
It isn't fine. But you made the choice to walk up the mountain on your own feet instead of being carried up it in a cage, and that, at least, is yours.
The palanquin bearers set you down at the edge of a cedar forest so old the trunks are wider than houses, and then they run. You hear them crashing back down the path for a long time.
The house at the end of the path was a temple once. You can tell from the curve of the roofs and the stone lanterns flanking the steps, though the lanterns are cracked now, and moss has eaten the old sutra carvings off the gate. The great doors stand open. There's firelight inside, and the smell drifting out is not what you expected. Not rot. Not blood.
It smells like someone is grilling fish.
A figure waits at the top of the steps. White hair cut blunt at the jaw, a pale, sharp face, robes the colors of frost on a pond. You can't tell if they're a man or a woman, and you get the clear impression they would find the question beneath them. They look you over, top to bottom, slowly, like a cook at market judging a daikon.
"Too thin," they say. "The marrow will be poor."
You have been afraid for three days straight, and you are so tired of it that something in you snaps clean in half.
"Then feed me first," you say. "Fatten me up. I'd take a week of rice, if you're offering."
The white-haired one regards you. Their eyes are a pale, unsettling red.
"I am Uraume," they say, as if you should have known. "I prepare what the master eats. You will not speak to me with that mouth again."
"You'll be cooking it, though."
Uraume's expression doesn't change. The air around you does. Frost spiders across the stone step under your sandals, cracking as it spreads, and your breath goes white. You don't step back. Your knees have decided, independently of you, that they've come all this way and they're not about to be impolite now.
"Uraume." The voice comes from inside, deep and lazy and enormously amused. "Bring it in. I want to see the thing that talks back to you."
The main hall is long and dark, lit by braziers, its floor scattered with pelts. At the far end, where an altar would once have stood, there's a raised platform, and on it, sprawled across a heap of furs and silk cushions like a cat in a patch of sun, is Ryomen Sukuna.
You've heard the stories since you came north. Everyone in Hida has. The demon with two faces and four arms. The King of Curses, who has eaten sorcerers from three provinces and the warriors sent after them and the priests sent after the warriors. You thought the stories exaggerated. They don't. They lack imagination.
He is huge. Taller than any man, even lounging, his bare chest and arms traced with black markings that curl like ink in water. He has four arms, and he is using all of them: one propping his head, one holding a cup of sake, one picking idly at a lacquered tray of grilled fish, one resting on his knee with the fingers drumming. His hair is the color of embers gone pink with ash. His face is handsome, cruelly so, on the left, and on the right, a second face is fused over the first like a carved mask of bone, its own eye open and watching. He has four eyes in all. Every one of them is looking at you.
"Kneel," Uraume says behind you.
You kneel, because your legs give out, and you'd rather it look deliberate.
"So." Sukuna's voice is a slow, rich thing, like dark syrup. "The village sent me a bride this year. How sweet. Did they think I'd be flattered?"
"I think they thought you'd be hungry," you say.
All four eyes narrow with interest. Behind you, Uraume makes a very small sound.
"And you?" he asks. "What did you think?"
You have rehearsed this. All the way up the mountain, swaying in the palanquin, you've rehearsed this, and you don't let yourself wonder whether you're about to die badly for it.
"I think that fish is overcooked," you say.
The silence is very long. A log shifts in the nearest brazier, spitting sparks.
Then Sukuna laughs. It's a big laugh, and an ugly one, full of teeth, and it rolls through the empty hall like thunder in the cedars.
"Uraume," he says, "she's insulting your cooking."
"I heard, master."
"Are you going to kill her?"
"If you permit it."
"I don't." He sets down the sake cup, swings his legs off the cushions, and leans forward with all four elbows on his knees. Even sitting he looms. "Explain yourself, bride. Quickly. I get bored very easily, and when I get bored I get peckish."
You make yourself look at him. Not at the floor. At him. Into the eyes on the left side, the human-seeming ones, because the eye in the bone mask is too much.
"I was a cook in the capital," you say. "Eight years in the house of a Fujiwara counselor. I've made dishes for princes and abbots, and once for an imperial envoy who wept into his soup. That fish was grilled over oak too green for it, too close to the coals, and nobody salted it until after. It's dry at the tail and raw at the spine." You swallow. "Someone who thinks of food as only meat has been feeding you for a long time. Let me cook for you. One meal. If I bore you, eat me. I won't argue."
"And if you don't bore me?"
"Then I live until tomorrow, and I cook again."
Sukuna tilts his head. The motion is slow and predatory and horribly graceful.
"You're bargaining with me," he says.
"Yes."
"With your own flesh as the stakes."
"It's the only thing I brought."
Something moves behind his eyes, and it isn't anger. It looks a great deal like delight.
"Uraume. Show her the kitchen."
Uraume's kitchen is the best you've ever stood in, and you hate them a little for it.
Stone hearths, three of them. Iron pots. A larder cut into the cold side of the mountain, with a stream running through it to keep it chilled, and in it, things the Fujiwara cooks would have killed for: wild boar, mountain yam, dried kombu traded up from the coast, rare mushrooms, a crock of dark, aged miso that smells like a forest floor after rain. There are other things in the larder too. You don't look at them. You keep your eyes on the vegetables and your mind on your hands.
Uraume watches you the whole time, arms folded, saying nothing.
You make hoba miso.
It's a peasant dish, a Hida dish, the thing your sister's neighbors make in the cold months. You take a broad, dry magnolia leaf and set it on a grill over charcoal, and on the leaf you spread miso mixed with sweet mountain sake and chopped leek and slivers of shiitake, and you let it all bubble and smoke and blister on the leaf until the whole kitchen smells like autumn. Then you add the boar, sliced paper thin against the grain, and you let it curl in the miso until the edges catch. You grill ayu on skewers alongside it, salted first this time, the way it's meant to be done, over dry oak, and you make the rice so carefully that every grain stands up on its own.
Uraume watches you salt the fish. Their mouth thins. They say nothing.
When you carry the tray into the hall, your hands don't shake. You're very proud of that.
Sukuna eats in silence. He eats the way he does everything, with an unhurried, total attention, two hands busy with chopsticks and bowl, the other two resting. He eats the ayu down to its spine and holds the skeleton up to the firelight, turning it, as if he's never seen a fish's bones come out whole before. He scrapes the last of the scorched miso off the magnolia leaf with the edge of his chopsticks. He drinks a long pull of sake.
He doesn't say anything at all. You kneel on the cold floor and wait to find out whether you're going to die.
"Come here," he says finally.
You stand. You walk up the steps of the dais, because there's nothing else to do, and kneel again at the edge of the furs, close enough now to feel the heat coming off him like a banked fire.
One of his hands lifts. The lower right. It closes around your jaw, not hard, and tips your face up. His palm is huge and very warm, rough as tree bark. He turns your head one way, then the other, studying you the way he studied the fishbone.
Then he leans in, slowly, and breathes in at the curve of your neck.
Your pulse is going so fast he must hear it. You feel his breath move over your skin, hot, and the brush of his lips, almost, below your ear. Something low in your belly tightens and you don't know if it's terror. It doesn't entirely feel like terror.
"You smell of smoke," he murmurs against your throat. "And miso. And you're afraid." A pause. "No. Not only afraid."
You don't answer. You couldn't if you tried.
He draws back far enough to look at you. All four eyes. His thumb moves once along your lower lip, smearing what's left of the safflower red.
"Again tomorrow," he says. "Something different. If it bores me, I'll eat you raw, and I won't let Uraume salt you first."
"And if it never bores you?" you ask, before you can stop yourself.
His mouth curves, slow and wicked. The thumb on your lip presses, just slightly, until your lips part for it.
"Then I'll have to find out," says the King of Curses, "what else that mouth is good for."