Chapter 2: Only One God To Worship
Ashes rode the tide like a slow surrender. The sea swallowed Gokumei's remains like a thing finishing an argument. Salt stung Hikuru's lips. The spear he'd pulled free from the sand was slick with blood and something darker that smelled of iron. He planted his naked feet into the wet earth and watched the sun give up its last light as if it, too, wanted nothing more than to sink.
Footsteps came—short, urgent—before he could name them. An old man barreled into him and wrapped his arms around Hikuru so hard the boy could not draw a full breath. The old man smelled of smoke and yesterday's tea. For a beat Hikuru thought the world had narrowed to bark and fabric and the steady, shocking weight of another's hands.
"I can't—" Hikuru managed, half-laugh strangled into panic. "—breathe, old man."
"Who calls his father 'old man'?" the man countered, voice ragged with a grief that would not be kept small. He released him then. Nobu Uoya's face was a map of thin lines. His hands shook, but his eyes were all method. He checked for wounds like a man checking his tools. He found a new map beneath the skin at Hikuru's ribs: teeth marks darkened with salt. He tore his own outer robe and wrapped cloth around the wound with clumsy, fierce fingers until blood slowed to more intention than flood.
"Doctor," Nobu said once, and it sounded less a suggestion than a prayer. Hikuru fought the word with the stubborn silence of someone who could not yet admit how hollow his chest felt.
They had not finished untangling when a woman from the scrub of villagers pushed forward. Her voice was a rasp that carried years of gossip and simple certainties.
"That shark's bite is not for men," she said. "It marks you. It curses you. Only purification at Kannon's Shrine will save you."
Others took up the syllables like pebbles tossed into a shared well. Names were offered—Kyoto, the shrine, Priest Hoshi who knew how to read such things and who, the villagers swore, still kept old rites. A low panic gathered in the crowd like dark weather.
Nobu's hands trembled when he smoothed the bandage. "Kyoto," he repeated. "We go now."
Hikuru wanted to refuse. He wanted to say he was fine. The spear had felt like an answer; the sea had felt like absolution. He opened his mouth to say as much and found he could not make the words hold down the taste of blood.
Then a shadow stepped from the back of the crowd. Taller than most. Broader in the shoulders. When he spoke there was no pleading in it.
"I will take Hikuru," the man said. "No arguments."
The name was Shinji Uoya. Hikuru's chest folded into something older than fear: obedience and the memory of a fist landing for a childish misstep. Shinji had been the one to pinch and scold, to teach him how to keep from falling. He had been kindness that could bruise.
Hikuru's protest caught in his throat. Shinji's jaw tightened. The single look the elder brother gave was a cold measure and a promise. Hikuru shut his mouth and let himself be lifted from argument into duty.
Night was a small boat and a long way to Kyoto. The oars cut the river with patient, tired rhythm. Wood creaked and flies circled the lantern like tiny, determined stars. Hikuru sat with his side wrapped in sloppily wound cloth. Every small motion sent needles beneath the bandage. Shinji scolded in half-sentences that made sense only as the sound of steadiness: "Keep still. Don't talk. Look straight. Hold the wrap." Nobu flinched at each shock of motion and then folded himself into a silence like a shield.
Shinji said he wanted a respectable trade in Kyoto. He spoke of shops and apprentices and the way a man should present himself to a town that measured worth by how clean his sleeves remained. Hikuru listened the way one listens to rain on a distant roof. The words washed over him and left no warmth.
They climbed the shrine steps by lantern light. Each stone had the soft gloss of rain or salt. The shrine gate was a silhouette against a night that smelled of incense more imagined than real. Shinji still scolded, voice boiled down to shorthand. Hikuru kept his eyes on the steps ahead. He thought of nothing and everything: the spear, the ocean, the taste of metal.
Shinji's face was turned to him when they crested the last stair. He did not see what the others could not have imagined until they were close enough to name it.
Bodies lay like torn prayer papers. Lantern light varnished blood into oil. A priest's robe lay wet in blood where a man had stood. The air tasted of copper and the wrongness of violence done in a place supposing sanctuary.
The mist rolled around that man like a cloak. Silk fell from his shoulders. His hair was black and long and clean. His face was pale as bone. Sharp eye's, terrible point—burned red.
Then the man put his hand on the priest's chest.
It was not a touch. It was pressure like a stone settling into the heart of a house.
The priest's body erupted. Flesh and blood and robe and prayer scattered in a sound like a bell shoved backwards. The shock of it hit the courtyard so cleanly that for one stunned second that hikuru and Shinji seemed to hang in place above their own terror. The man—Muzan Kibutsuji—stood with blood bright on his sleeve and the priest was nothing but a red bloom on stone.
"There is only one god to worship!" he said, and he smiled like a man making a new proclamation. "—and it's Muzan Kibutsuji." Muzan's voice slid across the courtyard. Smooth. Cold.
Hikuru heard nothing but the boom in his own chest. Instinct rose before reasoning. He straightened. Shinji froze half a step back, eyes blown wide. But Hikuru stepped forward.
It was not a plan. It was a muscle memory that had nothing to do with good sense. He felt the bandage at his ribs and the raw, stupid clarity of someone who must act.
Muzan tilted his head and watched the boy take a stand to protect his brother. His robe whispered. Up close his face was cut clean and wrong. Blood clung to the cuff of his sleeve like a dark promise. The red in his eye gleamed like a coin in a gutter.
Then muzan moved like a thought. One step, then another, and it was suddenly closer than any man should have been. It struck with the casual violence of something that had been awake a very long time.
A single kick folded through his ribs. Wind left his lungs like a betrayed bird. The world tipped. His knees kissed stone. His hand found the spear at his back. For a second his fingers were only spear and salt and the remembered pressure of his brother's hand.
Hikuru's vision folded at the edges. He heard nothing of the crowd. He heard only the intaking of a breath that was too large for the hush of the night.
"Shin-," he managed, the name a rope thrown into a dark well.
Stone hit bone. Darkness poured in.
The courtyard swallowed the sound of Hikuru's name.