Chapter 3: Third-Night Rice Cakes
"No," you say.
It comes out steady, which surprises you. Your body is naked under the furs and his hand is on your hip, a hand that cut a cedar grove in half yesterday without trying, and your voice comes out as steady as it does when you're telling a kitchen hand his knife is dull.
"I didn't know," you say. "I swear it on my sister's life."
Sukuna doesn't move. Neither does Uraume.
"There was a man in the village this summer," you go on, because if you're going to die, you'd rather do it having said everything. "From the capital. He wore an onmyōji's hat and stayed three nights at the headman's house and nobody would say why. And on the morning they sent me up, the headman's wife dressed me. She painted my lip and she knelt at my feet for a long time, fussing with the hem, and her hands were shaking. I thought she was ashamed." You breathe out. "I suppose she was."
The silence goes on.
Then, slowly, Sukuna begins to laugh.
It isn't the big laugh from the first night, the one that rolled through the hall like thunder. It's low and quiet, and there's something in it that makes Uraume, kneeling in the corridor, lower their eyes.
"I know you didn't," he says.
You stare at him.
"You'd have been a terrible poisoner. You'd have tried to put it in my food on the first day and then refused to serve it because it ruined the taste." His thumb moves on your hip, once. "And you don't lie. It's your most irritating quality."
"Then why did you ask?"
"To watch you answer." He sits up, unhurried, the furs sliding off his chest. All the amusement drains from his face, and what's left underneath is very still and very cold. "Do you understand what they did? They didn't send you up the mountain to die. They sent you up to die twice. Once in my teeth, and once more when the seal took me and every sorcerer in Hida came to pick over what was left. You were never a tribute. You were a hook in a piece of bait." His lip curls. "Cheap, too. Sewn into the hem like a peddler's coin."
Your throat is tight. You don't know if it's grief or fury. You think of your sister, wailing in the yard. You think of the headman, who drew the lots himself.
"Give it to me," you say.
Uraume looks at Sukuna. Sukuna looks at you, and something in his face changes, a slow, sharp interest, the way it did on the first night when you told him his fish was overcooked.
"Give it to her," he says.
The seal is light as a moth wing in your hand and it makes your teeth ache. You carry it to the kitchen wrapped in nothing but an outer robe of his that drags along the floor behind you like a bridal train. The hearth is cold. You build it up yourself, kindling and split oak, the way you've done every morning for thirty-two days, and you blow on the coals until they catch.
"It won't burn," Uraume says from the doorway. "I tried. Cursed fire, ordinary fire. It doesn't take."
"It was sewn for me," you say. "Maybe it needs to be the one it was sewn for."
You lay it on the coals.
For a moment nothing happens. Then the edges of the paper curl, and a thin blue flame runs along the red characters like a finger reading them, and the whole strip goes up at once with a sound like a sigh. The ache behind your eyes goes with it. You stand there with your hands spread toward the warmth and watch the ash rise up the smoke hole into the gray morning, and you feel lighter than you've felt since the lot was drawn.
When you turn around, Sukuna is leaning in the doorway beside Uraume, arms folded, all four of them, watching you.
"Well," he says. "That was good."
He doesn't make you wait long.
"Uraume will take you wherever you want," he says that afternoon. He's on the dais, and you're kneeling at the edge of his furs, and for once there's no food between you. "The capital. The coast. Some other province where nobody knows your face. You'll go with gold, enough to open a kitchen of your own and hire a dozen fools to burn your rice. No one will follow you. I'll see to it."
You look at him for a long time.
"And if I don't want to go?"
"Then you stay." His four eyes hold yours. "Not as tribute. Not as a cook who has to earn tomorrow. I've never kept anything. I take what I want, I use it up, and I break it when it bores me. That's all I am. I won't pretend to be anything gentler for you." His voice drops. "But I'm not bored. I don't think I'm going to be. So stay as mine. My bride, in fact, since your village was so eager to dress you for it."
"Yours," you repeat.
"Mine." A slow smile, sharp at the edges. "Answer plainly, cook. You're good at it."
So you do.
"I'll stay," you say. "On two conditions."
Behind you, Uraume makes a faint sound that might, in anyone else, have been a laugh.
Sukuna's eyebrows climb. "Conditions. To me."
"My sister's house. No one touches it. No one in it is harmed, not ever, not by you or anything that serves you."
"Done. And?"
"And the headman is mine to deal with. Not yours."
Sukuna looks at you for a long moment. Then he leans forward, cups your face in one huge hand, and kisses you, hard and brief, like setting a seal.
"Merciful," he says against your mouth. "Or cruel. I can't tell which, and I like it."
Uraume brings the headman up the mountain the next morning. He walks the last stretch on his own feet, because Uraume refuses to carry him, and by the time he reaches the temple steps his hair is soaked with sweat and his face has gone the color of old rice paste.
You meet him in the hall. You've cooked for him. Grilled ayu, salted properly. Rice. A small dish of hoba miso, blistering on its leaf.
He looks at the tray, and then at you, and then at Sukuna lounging on the dais behind you with his chin propped on one hand, watching like a man at a play.
"Eat," you say.
"It's poisoned," the headman whispers.
"It isn't. I'm not you." You kneel across from him. "That's the last meal you'll get from my hands. Eat it, then go home, pack what you can carry, and leave Hida. If you're still in the valley at sundown, I'll stop asking him to be patient."
He eats. His hands shake so badly he drops half the rice. When he's finished, he crawls backward out of the hall without once getting off his knees, and Uraume follows him down the steps like a frost settling.
At dusk, from the veranda, you watch a single thread of fire arc down out of the sky over the valley, beautiful as a falling star, and the headman's empty house goes up in one bright bloom.
Sukuna lowers his hand.
"He was on the road," he says. "Nobody was inside. I made certain he'd see it." He glances at you sidelong. "You said not to touch him. You didn't mention his house."
You should mind. You find you don't, very much.
That night Uraume dresses you in red.
Not borrowed shrine silk this time. Layer upon layer of it, crimson and deep plum and the pale pink of plum blossom at the collar, robes fine enough for an empress that Sukuna has had brought from somewhere you decide not to ask about. Uraume combs your hair with careful, cool hands and says nothing at all until they're finished. Then, very quietly, as they set the comb down: "Salt the fish first. Always. He's noticed the difference."
"I know," you say. "Thank you."
In the capital, a marriage is made on the third night, when the couple eats the third-night rice cakes together and the bride's family acknowledges the groom. You have no family on this mountain and you are thirty nights past the third. You make the rice cakes anyway, small and white and perfectly round, and carry them to his chamber on a lacquered dish.
He's waiting in the low light, robe open, sprawled across the furs. When he sees you in the doorway, red silk pooling around your feet, he goes very still.
"Third-night cakes," you say. "It's a capital custom. You eat one, and I eat one, and then we're married."
"That's all?"
"That's all."
He holds out one hand. You set a rice cake in his palm. He eats it in one bite, watching you, and you eat yours, and he swallows and says, "Come here, wife," and his voice on the word makes your knees go weak.
He undresses you slowly. It takes a long time; there are a great many layers, and he refuses to tear a single one. Four hands, and every one of them patient, untying and unwrapping and sliding silk from your shoulders like he's peeling a fruit he means to savor. When the last layer falls away, he just looks at you, all four eyes dark and heavy, until your skin burns under it.
"Lie back," he says.
You lie back in the furs. He kneels between your thighs and kisses his way down you, unhurried. Your throat. The hollow between your breasts. The soft skin below your navel. One hand pins your wrists gently above your head, another holds your hip, the other two spread your thighs wide, and when his mouth finds you, you cry out loud enough to wake the whole mountain.
He doesn't stop. He takes his time with you the way he takes his time with a meal, devouring and deliberate, tongue slow and then relentless, fingers sliding into you until you're arching off the furs and pulling against the hand at your wrists. He lets you go only to pull you back to the edge again. When you finally come, sobbing his name, he groans against you like you're the best thing he's ever tasted.
"Please," you manage. "Please, I want you inside me. Now."
"Since you ask so plainly."
He moves up over you, huge and warm, his weight braced on two arms while the others gather you close, and pushes into you in one long, slow stroke. You wrap your legs around his waist and pull him deeper. He drops his forehead to yours and holds there a moment, buried to the hilt, breathing hard, and his voice when it comes is rough and low.
"Mine," he says.
"Yours," you whisper. "And you're mine. That's how a marriage works, my lord. Both ways."
He laughs, breathless, disbelieving, and begins to move.
It's slower than the spring. Deeper. He rolls his hips in long, grinding strokes that drag against every nerve you have, and he watches your face the whole time, learning what makes you gasp and doing it again. You claw at his back. You kiss him, and the bone face on the right side of his skull presses against your cheek, and you kiss that too, the way you did in the steam, and he shudders hard and drives into you faster. One of his hands slides between you and circles your clit until the pleasure winds tight and bright and unbearable, and you break apart beneath him with his name in your mouth, and he follows you down with a long, rough groan, holding you so tightly against him that you can't tell where his heartbeat stops and yours begins.
After, he doesn't let go. He lies on his back with you sprawled across his chest, one hand stroking your hair, one tracing lazy patterns on your spine, the other two folded behind his head like a man who owns the world and has finally found something in it worth the trouble.
"They'll send more sorcerers," you say into his skin. "When they hear the seal failed. Better ones."
"Good. The last batch was boring."
"And when they find out the King of Curses took a wife?"
He grins at the ceiling, all teeth. "Then they'll send a great many more, and I'll be very well entertained, and you'll cook for me after every one."
You lift your head and look at him. His four eyes are half closed, heavy and satisfied, and for the first time since you climbed the mountain, there's nothing in his face that wants to hurt anything.
"Cook for you tomorrow," you say. "And if it bores you?"
He rolls you under him in one smooth movement, all four arms caging you into the furs, and lowers his mouth to your throat.
"Then I'll eat you," murmurs your husband, and starts at the collarbone.