Chapter 2: Salt the Fish First
You don't bore him the next day, or the day after.
You make him sweetfish again, this time stuffed with sansho leaves and grilled over cedar. You make a hot pot of wild boar and burdock, thick with grated mountain yam, that steams so heavily it fogs the hall. You make chestnut rice. You make pickles from turnips Uraume brings you from the gods know where, sharp with yuzu peel, and Sukuna eats an entire crock in one sitting and then glares at the empty bottom as though it has wronged him.
On the eleventh day you make something so simple it's almost an insult: rice balls, salted and toasted over the coals until the outside crackles, wrapped in a perilla leaf. He eats six. He asks for a seventh, and when you say there aren't any more, he looks at you so long and so steadily that you go back to the kitchen and make another batch.
"You're feeding him like a farmhand," Uraume says, watching you shape the rice.
"I'm feeding him like a person."
"He is not a person."
"Everyone who eats is a person at the moment they're hungry." You press the rice firm between your palms, turn it, press again. "That's the first thing they teach you in a great kitchen. A man may be a prince or a priest or a monster, but when he lifts his chopsticks, he's just a mouth."
Uraume says nothing for a long time.
"Your salt is better than mine," they say finally, as though the words are being pulled out of them with tongs. "I don't know why."
"Mountain salt. From the spring below the cedar grove. It's sweeter than sea salt. I'll show you."
They look at you with those pale red eyes, and for once there's no frost on the floor.
You stop counting the days after the twentieth. Somewhere around then, you also stop waiting to die.
It happens slowly, the way a river wears a stone. He starts calling for you outside of meals. At first it's to complain about the next one. Then it's to ask about the capital, and you tell him about the Fujiwara counselor who kept a pet crane he loved more than his wives, about the imperial envoy who wept into his soup, about the night the kitchens caught fire during the Festival of the Weaver Star and the head cook kept stirring the broth while the roof burned.
Sukuna listens to all of it sprawled on his furs, one hand supporting his head, his other three keeping busy with sake and a sharpening stone and the end of your sleeve, which he has developed a habit of pulling through his fingers as you talk.
"The capital sounds tedious," he says.
"It is. Everyone's so busy being elegant that no one ever says what they mean."
"And you do."
"I'm a cook. If you mean something in my kitchen, you say it. Otherwise someone loses a finger."
He laughs, low. The hand holding your sleeve slides up your wrist, the rough pad of his thumb finding the place where your pulse beats.
"Say what you mean, then," he says. "Are you still afraid of me?"
You think about it. You owe him that much.
"Yes," you say. "But not the way I was."
"How, then?"
You don't answer. You can't. He watches you not answer with all four eyes, and his thumb keeps moving, slow circles against the inside of your wrist, until you have to look at the brazier instead of at him.
The sorcerers come on the thirty-first day.
There are nine of them, from three different clans, in hunting robes stitched with protective sutras. You see them from the veranda where you've been shelling chestnuts: figures moving through the cedars in a disciplined line, talismans fluttering, their cursed energy so thick it makes the air waver like heat over a road.
Uraume appears at your elbow. "Go inside."
"Will he..."
"Go inside," they repeat, and their voice isn't cold. It's almost gentle. "You don't need to see this."
You don't go inside. You stay on the veranda with chestnut shells in your lap, and you watch Ryomen Sukuna walk down the temple steps to meet them, barefoot, unhurried, all four arms loose at his sides.
You don't see much. That's the strange part. You see one of the sorcerers raise a hand and shout something, and you see Sukuna lift two fingers, lazily, like a man brushing off a fly. You hear a sound like silk tearing, and the line of cedars behind the sorcerers falls over all at once, cut clean through, every trunk sliding apart at the same height. Then there's a second sound, sharper, and it's over. It takes less time than it takes you to shell a chestnut.
He stands there for a moment among what's left, looking down at it with his head tilted, the way he looked at the fishbone on the first night. Then he turns and looks straight up at the veranda, straight at you, as if he's known you were there the whole time.
You don't look away.
You should be screaming. You know that. You should be running down the far side of the mountain. Instead you sit on the veranda with your heart going like a drum and something hot and heavy curling low in your belly, and when he walks past you up the steps, close enough that the hem of his robe brushes your knee, he pauses.
"Not afraid?" he asks.
"Not of that," you say.
The corner of his mouth lifts.
"The spring," he says. "Bring sake."
The hot spring is behind the temple, in a cleft of black rock, half roofed by an old cedar whose roots grip the stones like fingers. Steam rolls off the water in the cold dusk. Sukuna is already in it when you come, sitting with his back against the rocks and his arms spread wide along the edge, all four of them, eyes half closed. The water is clean. Whatever was on him when he climbed the steps, he's washed it off.
You kneel at the edge with the sake and a cup. Your hands aren't steady. You pour anyway and hold the cup out.
He doesn't take it. He opens his eyes and looks at you.
"If you get in this water," he says, very quietly, "I'm not going to be gentle about wanting you. I've been patient for thirty-one days, and I'm not a patient creature." A pause. "So leave now, if you mean to leave. I'll let you. This once."
You set the cup down on the stone.
"I stopped leaving a long time ago," you say. "I just didn't tell you."
"Say it plainly, cook."
You stand. You untie your sash. Your fingers fumble the knot and you don't care. The robe slides off your shoulders and the mountain air hits your bare skin, sharp with cold, and his eyes, all four of them, go dark.
"I want you," you say. "I've wanted you since the first night, when you touched my mouth. I'm saying it plainly. I want you."
You step down into the water.
It's scalding after the cold, so hot it steals your breath, and then his hands are on you. All of them. One spread wide across your lower back, pulling you in. One at your hip. One tangled in your hair, tilting your head back. The fourth traces up the line of your throat, slow, with a kind of reverence you never expected from him, and stops under your jaw, exactly where it rested on the first night.
"Look at me," he says.
You look. He kisses you.
It isn't gentle, just as he promised. It's deep and hungry and devouring, his mouth hot and tasting of sake, his teeth catching your lower lip, and you make a sound into it you've never made in your life. You grab at his shoulders. The black markings on his skin are faintly raised under your fingertips, like the grain in a fine knife, and you trace them without thinking, and he growls into your mouth, a sound you feel all the way through your chest.
He lifts you as if you weigh nothing and settles you astride his lap in the water. You feel him beneath you, thick and hard against the inside of your thigh, and the size of him makes you gasp. Two of his hands hold your hips steady. The other two move over you, unhurried, maddening, mapping you. A thumb circles your nipple until it's tight and aching. A palm slides down your belly, under the water, between your legs, and when his fingers find you, slick and swollen and so much more than ready, he goes very still.
"Thirty-one days," he says roughly, against your mouth. "And you were like this?"
"Yes," you breathe. "Please."
He laughs, dark and delighted, and does it again. Slow strokes, then faster, two thick fingers sliding inside you while his thumb works circles above them, and his other hands keep you pinned against him so you can only take it, so you can only arch and shudder and cling to his shoulders while the steam curls around you. He watches your face the whole time. When you come, it's sudden and blinding, your thighs clamping around his wrist, your cry echoing off the black rock, and he murmurs something low and filthy and pleased against your temple and doesn't stop until you're twitching and begging.
"Now," you gasp. "Now, I want..."
"I know what you want." He lifts you by the hips. "Show me."
You reach down between you and take him in your hand, and guide him, and sink down.
It's a stretch that borders on too much. You go slowly, your forehead pressed to his, breathing through it, and he lets you set the pace, every muscle in his huge body rigid with restraint. His hands shake against your hips. You hadn't known he could shake. When you finally take all of him, you both go still, and he lets out a breath that sounds almost like pain.
"Move," he says, through his teeth. "Or I will."
You move.
The water sloshes over the stones. His hands grip you, guide you, lift you and pull you back down onto him, harder each time, until you're riding him in long, deep strokes that make stars burst behind your eyes. One hand stays tangled in your hair. One finds your clit again, relentless. He kisses your throat, your jaw, the corner of your mouth, and the bone face on the right side of his skull presses cool against your cheek, and you don't care, you turn into it, you kiss that too, and he makes a sound like something breaking open.
"Again," he orders, low. "Come on me again. I want to feel it."
You do, helplessly, clenching around him, and he follows you over with a roar that sends birds bursting out of the cedar overhead, his arms crushing you to his chest, all four of them, holding on like you might be taken from him.
For a long time, there's only the steam, and the water, and his heartbeat slamming under your ear.
You wake in his chamber at dawn, buried in furs, one of his arms heavy across your waist. He's asleep. You didn't know he slept. You lie still and watch the gray light on his face, and you think, quite calmly, that you have lost your mind and that you don't want it back.
There's a soft sound at the screen door.
Uraume is kneeling in the corridor outside. In their hands is your white tribute robe, the borrowed shrine silk you arrived in, folded over their arm. The hem has been slit open.
Between their fingers is a narrow strip of paper, covered in brushed characters in red ink. Even from here, even without knowing how to read them, you can feel the wrongness of it, a sour, crawling pressure behind your eyes.
Uraume's face is pale and set.
"I went to burn this. It wouldn't burn," they say quietly. "This was sewn into the hem. An onmyōji's seal, very old and very skilled, made to hide itself from cursed energy. If the one who wears it is eaten, it binds the eater from the inside."
The arm across your waist goes still.
You turn your head. Sukuna's eyes are open. All four of them. And he's looking at you.
"Your village," he says softly, "sent me poison in a wedding dress."
His voice is perfectly calm. His hand, the one still resting on your bare hip, doesn't move.
"Tell me, bride," says the King of Curses. "Did you know?"