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The night before the beast appears, the mark on Fumikage’s wrist turns black.
He knows what that means. So does Mother.
She yanks him into the firelight. “Can you heal him?”
The fire in the hearth cackles. So does the witch. “Who knocks on my door? It’s the High Mage looking for spells and wares,” they sing in a sweet, lilting voice, the glow of the fire veiling half their face in shadow. Fumikage can see the glitter of a human eye peering out from beneath their cowled hood, the other shut tight against a face Fumikage can’t tell is young or old, male or female, beautiful or ugly. Stray red feathers scuttling across the pocked wooden floor. Spells and wares, spells and wares, they whisper. Fumikage holds his lantern higher, a bolt of fear unraveling in his stomach.
Where witches lived, curses followed. Like him.
His lantern sputters, fighting against the dark. He can’t remember a night spent without it. It’s second nature now—like a sixth finger. Mother had given it to him the night the dark had started to move. Something shifts across the wall. Flashes, like a pair of yellow eyes. A trick of light. Or a shadow.
The lantern shakes. Fumikage’s grip wavers. He wraps the fingers of his free hand around his wrist when the mark begins to burn.
Mother’s fingers tighten around his forearm like teeth. “Six blood spot eggs. The venom of a two-headed viper, and amber blood.” She drops a basket at their feet, solid amber rolling across the floor. “That was your price. If it’s gold you want, I have that, too.” The crow resting on Mother’s shoulder croaks, ruffling his feathers.
“Be careful, Tsuru.” Her demon cocks his head, one glassy black eye pinning Fumikage in place while the other swivels. Fumikage stares back steadily, his neck prickling. Blackbeak is always keeping an eye on him when Mother can’t. Maybe one day he’ll know what that’s like. A demon of his own. A mirror to his soul. Someone who knows him better than he ever will.
If the shadowmark doesn’t tear him apart before his eighteenth birthday.
The mark on his wrist begins to sting again. Fumikage forces himself to look away from Blackback’s small, piercing eye, holding the lantern higher, but his fingers twitch, his heart jerking. Over his shoulder, the dark does, too.
The witch plucks a wishbone from their cloak pocket and picks their teeth with it. “How generous of you to offer me gold when you have so very little.” They suck the wishbone clean with a pop, flicking it into the air, a tongue of flame snapping out of the hearth to swallow it up.
“No one ever tells you no, do they? Pretty cloak. Pretty carriage. Pretty magic.” The witch cuts a sly, sidelong glance over their shoulder. “Pretty son.”
Fumikage stiffens. No one has ever called him pretty before. It doesn’t matter that he’s the son of a clan mage. They know better than to look at him at all.
Blackbeak flaps his wings, hopping in place. “We should leave.”
Mother ignores him. “I paid for a healing.”
The witch’s gold eye swivels in its socket. “I said nothing about healing.”
An ache spears through Fumikage’s stomach, Mother’s grip growing cold. He should have known. Should have known there was no leaving it behind—
Mother lets go of him, stepping into the firelight. She looks like a clan mage then: tall and regal, her dark, crowlike eyes narrowed, the sharp point of her beak parting in a hiss. “I risk scandal within my order by being here tonight. You cannot tell me you don’t know what this is, or that you can’t scrub it off his skin.”
The witch cocks their head, like a bird, and all at once, the hut seems to press in on itself. The floor beneath them shudders; the house settling on its leg again. Witch huts had souls Mahman had said once, just like they had legs. Fumikage wondered if it had a heart, too, or if the drum drum drum beating in his ears is just his own. The room feels smaller, darker. The walls heave, then go still, as if the house is holding its breath.
Fumikage wonders when he’d started holding his. Behind him, the dark sways. Ice slips down his spine. Slowly, he sets down his lantern, tendrils of shadow leaping back from its glow like startled fish.
“Mother—”
She holds up a hand. The daughter of an Avian general never surrenders. “You will give me what I’m due.”
The witch’s eyes narrow. “You paid a witch for a few lines scribbled in your grandfather’s old journal. I think,” they say softly, “you have forgotten whose house you’ve been invited into, Tokoyami Tsuru.”
The bookshelves rattle, the floor slanting. The hut groans. It’s moving, rising from the cliff face it had perched on above the Gray Sea. Fumikage reaches for his mother, the blood roaring in his ears when the door flaps open with a bang.
It’s a long, long way down.
He clutches Mother to his side, gripping onto a coat hook embedded in the wall when a pestle slides from its corner, careening across the room. The lantern rolls out of reach before Fumikage can lunge for it. Shatters against the wall. Mother shouts. The dark is spreading now—closer. Fumikage can hear it: a low, echoing growl. The coat hook digs into his palm.
The mark burns.
The house teeters, pulling away from the cliff-side with a shudder. Fumikage’s stomach dips with the hut when it kneels toward the ground. Mother gasps, the front door creaking with a rush of salty wind as the house grows still again.
The witch hasn’t moved from their little oak stool by the fire. They gesture toward the door. “It won’t wait long.”
Blackbeak caws. “Now! Let’s go now!” Fumikage whirls, gripping Mother’s wrist, daring her to pull away, or hiss, or grip him tightly in place.
She doesn’t.
“No,” she gasps, as quiet as a child when Fumikage tugs her toward the open door, hope surging through him when a sliver of lamplight wavers on the front step just beyond it.
The carriage is still waiting.
The door snaps shut with a squeal. Where do you think you’re going, fledgling? the dark whispers. Fumikage jerks back, shoving Mother behind him when she makes a frightened noise in the back of her throat.
There is no lantern to hide behind now. Only the weak pulse of the witch’s fire.
“I know what you’re running from,” the witch says as the dark writhes around them like a snake, “but I am the who invited you in. Your shadow has no say here.” They wave a hand. The hearth roars to life, the dark shrinking back. The books rearrange themselves, the pestle scuttling back to its place in the corner. The lantern wobbles upright, the glass tinkling as it mends itself, the door opening with a sigh.
“And I am the one who decides when you leave. I suppose I should have expected this from a Tokoyami. You aren’t the first ones I’ve invited inside, so before you run, tell me, boy. What do you know about the mark on your wrist?”
Fumikage’s words catch in his throat, eyeing the open door, the shadows out of the corner of his eye when they flicker. He swallows. “I know what it is not,” he says quietly. “I know the dark agitates it.” The shadows creep back into place with a hiss, his heart carving a path out of his chest when a flash of yellow flickers through the shadows.
The witch’s good eye glitters, eager and bright like gold. “Do you?” they whisper, their mouth quirking in a not-quite smile. “But do you know what it is?”
Mother is looking at him now, he can feel it, her gaze sharp and desperate. She clasps her hands in front of her, but Fumikage sees it before she can hide it: the tremor in her fingers. Remember, she’d told him that night, what happened to your aunt.
Fumikage doesn’t meet her eye, his breath whistling past his beak. The door yawns open wider, beckoning them, urging them to hurry. Remember, Fumikage thinks, but he doesn’t move. Do you know what it is? the feathers scuttling by his feet whisper. The air feels thinner. Fumikage tries to swallow it down. The candlewick in his lantern flickers. Dims. The dark hisses. Wordlessly, Mother reaches for him again, and this time, he finds his voice.
“I know my aunt is dead because of it.”
The witch hums. They hold up one of Mother’s blood spot eggs, letting the fire taste it. “Is she?”
Fumikage doesn’t answer. He shivers, fear and anger oozing through his veins like a cold sludge. He forces himself not to look over his shoulder when the shadows move again. A terrifying thought flits through his mind: he wants to look. See the thing that haunts him. Just this once. His head turns—
Mother’s voice startles him.
“I’ll do anything.” For the first time that night, her mask cracks, shock rooting Fumikage to the floor when she sinks to her knees. “Please.”
The witch’s gold eye slants, their face as cold and hard as granite. “Is the dark truly so terrible, boy? Would you trade it to be like everyone else, a pretty little familiar to go with your pretty cloak?” The witch doesn’t wait for him to answer. They snap their fingers, the mended lantern waiting by the door hopping across the floor to settle near Fumikage’s feet.
“Take it then. Do what you think you must. But it will hurt.”
Dread churns through Fumikage’s gut when Mother grabs his hand again. Tight. Pleading. Remember what happened to your aunt, her touch seems to say.
Fumikage picks up his lantern, trying to calm the hammer of his heart. He doesn’t look at the dark pooling in the hut. “I understand.”
The witch feeds another egg to the fire. It jumps. “Take him into the woods at midnight. Bring black ritual candles, salt, and steel.” The red feathers slipping from beneath their cloak swirl around their ankles, brushing against Fumikage’s cheek. His fingers clench around the iron handle of his lantern, his heart beating with a sick rush.
“Beneath the branches of a beech tree summon the shadow that haunts you.” The witch smiles, the line of their mouth grim and thin.
“And banish it.”
The hippogriffs are waiting under the slender arch of a weeping willow when Mother finally leads them out into the night, the moon high enough to gild the cliffs silver.
Blackbeak is quiet, but Fumikage can feel his hard, worrying stare like the sting of his shadowmark.
Mother grips his shoulder.
“You will say nothing of this to your mother.” Her eyes are dark, as piercing as Blackbeak’s. “Do you understand?”
“My lady!” a voice cries, pulling Mother’s attention away before Fumikage can answer. Their driver rushes through the trees, his lantern bobbing like a firefly. “I thought—I almost—“
Mother doesn’t let him finish. In the blink of an eye she’s a clan mage again, a member of the Avian Arcane Society of Musutafu, severe and imposing. “Well it’s a good thing you didn’t, Hayato.”
Hayato bobs his raven-like head, opening the carriage door with a flourish. “I’m glad to see you safe. And you, young master.”
Something dark and sharp twists through Fumikage’s chest, the black ritual candles shifting beneath their oilcloth in his grip. Beyond the trees, he can feel the night watching, lying in wait.
Where do you think you’re going, fledgling?
Fumikage steps inside. “Thank you, Hayato.”
He tries not to flinch when the door snaps shut, trapping the dark inside.
It was Mahman who saw the shadow first. Fumikage remembers the halo of candlelight framing her feathers, her dark, curling hair, the slender line of her shoulders in her nightgown. The creak of his bedroom door. A shadow playing on the wall. The gentle ring of her voice:
“Who are you talking to, little sparrow?”
Mahman is waiting by the gate, the hem of her robe and nightgown flecked with mud when the carriage slows to a halt. Mother swears.
“We should have told her,” Blackbeak starts, but Mother silences him with a glare when Mahman glides across the dirt road, her hair and feathers wild. She throws the carriage door open, the barn owl on her shoulder hooting softly.
“A witch hut was spotted over the Gray Sea,” she says, her voice knife-sharp. A knot forms in Fumikage’s chest when she reaches toward him to cup his face in her hands, tilting his head to examine him as if he were small again and in need of her healing touch.
Blackbeak huddles closer to Mother, for once utterly silent. Mother sighs. “Asuka—“
Asuka’s eyes narrow dangerously. “You don’t even know what it will do! All our life we have feared it, and I have been patient, I have listened to you, believed you, even when we have nothing but your grandfather’s word to take for it!” Mother sits straighter, looming larger in the carriage, her voice leaving her beak in a hiss.
“And my sister.”
Mahman looks away at that, releasing Fumikage from her hold. Beyond the gate, the dark shifts, the shadowmark prickling. Mahman shakes her head. “Go inside, Fumi,” she says in a hushed, choked voice. He hesitates.
“Go, Sparrow,” her owl, Snow, insists. Mother nods once, and she doesn’t have to speak for her voice ringing through his thoughts.
Don’t argue. Remember what happened to your aunt.
He leaves them whispering furiously by the gate, Mother shushing Mahman in that soft, private way of hers that makes Fumikage’s feathers bristle in embarrassment. “Listen to me—”
“No!” Mahman’s cries echo through the gate like Snow’s nighttime calls.
Hayato shadows Fumikage through the gate, the path, and the estate, bright with lanterns the servants never let go out. Musutafu yawns ahead of them, dark and sleeping. Only the Tokoyami house burns at this time of night. The servants don’t look as he passes, as if the shadwomark might leap off his wrist and onto theirs. Black magic, he’s heard them say. Devil work. Such a shame. Old Master Tokoyami’s brother, and his daughter, had been so normal. So good. So sweet.
The ritual candles feel heavier in Fumikage’s arms. He hardens himself against the thought, the sweeping entryway beckoning him inside, the polished floors sparkling with lamplight. Tomorrow night, they’ll be dark.
Fumikage reaches into his pouch, holding up the amber slab the witch had pressed into his palm before he left, magicked from the very basket Mother had dropped at their feet.
To see the truth, they’d said, and Fumikage had seen a sliver of their face through the stone without its protective glamour. Young, beautiful, golden-eyed. He rolls the stone between his fingers.
Tomorrow, the mark, and the dark thing that plays along the wall at night, will be gone. He’ll make sure of it. Fumikage turns toward a window, gazing back out into the night and tries to imagine it.
Would you trade it to be like everyone else?
“Young master?” Hayato asks through the door. Then carefully, quietly, “is there anything I can do?”
A fierce, bright ache burns through the mark. Fumikage peers through the window. Outside, Mother envelopes Mahman in her arms as she weeps. Fumikage’s heart lurches painfully.
Remember what happened to your aunt.
He grips his lantern, and the candles, closer. “You can give me the key,” he says, “to Mother’s library.”
Grandfather’s sword cut through a demon once, and no one has freed it from its scabbard since.
It hangs neatly over the mantle, as if it were nothing more than a centerpiece glittering in black dragon scale. It had seen Grandfather through two wars. Blood. Teeth. Monsters.
Mother has never touched it.
The sword had been there when the shadows first appeared, bursting from Grandfather’s youngest brother like a scourge on his eighteenth birthday. Nothing pretty or docile, nothing like a soul should be on its awakening day.
The family has never lived it down. An affliction of the soul, the Arcane Society had called it. A generational curse. Incurable. Fumikage runs a finger along the scabbard of Grandfather’s sword, the blood rushing through his head with a steady thump.
The sword slides free from the mantle so easily Fumikage feels dizzy from the hiss of steel in the air. A spark of firelight glints off its mirror-still surface.
It has been waiting for a moment like this.
Fumikage’s heart crawls up his throat when he sheathes it again, strapping it at his hip, pausing only to glance at the portrait by the fire. Aunt Suzume hangs beside his mothers’ mating portrait, hiding in the only slab of shadow that manages to cut across the library. She has always kept vigil here, the strokes of her portrait as gentle as the look the painter had captured in her eyes.
Fumikage used to pretend she could answer every question he ever had when he was younger, when the dark started talking back. But now there are no questions left. Only a feeling.
Bring black ritual candles, the witch had instructed, salt, and steel.
He falters. Sweeps a look through the empty library before catching Aunt Suzume’s dark eyes.
“I’m afraid,” he admits. The library sighs with it, the fire cracking. “That Mahman will only ever cry for me. That Mother, and no one, will ever know me outside of this mark. I am afraid of what the dark will do when I put the lantern down. And I am afraid of what I will do if I never do.”
Aunt Suzume stares back, kind and silent. He can still feel her watching when he closes the door. Hayato dips his head in greeting, and for the first time since Fumikage was small, looks away when he steps out into the night.
The lantern struggles to stay lit.
The flame shudders and dips with Fumikage’s heart, his breath sawing through his beak in sharp, uneven gasps. The cricket song is loud, a chorus that drowns out the nervous gallop of his heart.
The trees rustle in the night wind. The dark does, too.
It’s following him, creeping through the trees like an animal, shying away from the lantern light.
Fumikage swallows his heart down, stumbling to his knees in a clearing. He holds his lantern up to the trees.
Beeches.
His hands shake as he pours the salt circle.
Remember what happened to your aunt, he tells himself. Remember, remember, remember.
The hilt of Grandfather’s sword is as cold as ice in his palm when he lights the last ritual candle. The flame flares black, the lantern suddenly going dark. Fumikage stills, ice flooding his veins when the cricket song tapers. Dies. Between the beeches, the shadows move.
“Fledgling,” the dark sighs. “So you’ve come at last.”
Fumikage raises Grandfather’s sword, his wrist on fire. “Come out,” he whispers.
The ritual candle sputters, leaping higher. A shadow surges from the circle, larger than the beeches. Larger than Fumikage can ever remember it being. He falls backward as its claws sink into the soft ground beside him, its moon-like gold eyes keeping him rooted to the forest floor. Fumikage’s chest heaves as he brandishes his sword. The beast hisses through its beak.
“Tonight,” Fumikage gasps. “Tonight I’m banishing you.”
The shadow laughs, the sound shaking the trees. “Are you?”
“I know what you can do to me,” Fumikage spits. He wonders if his heart might burst. He leaps to his feet, circling the beast.
“I don’t want to be afraid. Not anymore.”
The shadow’s yellow eyes blink through the dark, winking like a fox’s, follows his movements. “You feared me when they told you to fear me,” it snarls. “Hated me when they told you to hate me. Loved me when they didn’t.”
The sword slips in Fumikage’s hands, slick with sweat. A memory pricks through his thoughts. A half-dream. Whispers at midnight. Something warm coiling around him whenever he grew scared. A childhood friend he can’t remember the name of. Soft cries whenever Mother lit the lantern. When she ordered the house to be lit at all hours, the smallest of shadows struggling to stick to the corners of the house. The horrible sinking feeling that he was alone, even when his mothers were in the room.
“You remember me,” the shadow rumbles, “don’t you, fledgling?” Fumikage shakes his head, shrinking back.
Remember what happened to your aunt, his mother’s voice screams. You know what you must to do. Fumikage’s eyes sting with tears. He squeezes them shut.
“One day you’ll kill me. Like my aunt. Like my great uncle.”
The shadow snarls. “Is that what they tell you? That I’m evil? Devil work? Something to be ashamed of?”
Fumikage falters again, his gut clenching in pain, or sorrow. “You are wild. Shapeless. Dark magic. And dark magic is—” evil, he thinks, but doesn’t say it. The shadow sways, looming over him like a lost god.
“Is a soul still a soul even when it doesn’t look like theirs?” the shadow whispers. A claw traces Fumikage’s cheek, soft like Mahman’s silks. A tear slips through Fumikage’s feathers. He doesn’t answer, the sword dropping to the ground as he reaches for the amber stone in his cloak. To see the truth, the witch had said.
Fumikage holds the hagstone to his eye, numb with shock when his shadow gazes back at him through it, small and lithe, cocking their head like a little bird.
“I am wild, and shapeless, and dark,” his shadow whispers as it edges closer. Above the trees, the sky is graying, like the sea, growing lighter with the rising sun shattering through the canopy. Fumikage watches as his shadow shrinks, Grandfather’s sword falling softly to the grass as he holds out his arms.
“But I am Dark Shadow,” his demon whispers, twirling like an otter between Fumikage’s outstretched hands, “and I am yours.”
A figure is standing in the main road when Fumikage breaks through the trees, Dark Shadow cooing in his ear. His demon falls silent, and Fumikage tenses, his eyes narrowing as he studies the stranger. Velvet cloak that had once seen richer days. Worn leather boots caked in mud. Witch charms dangling from their pack. They turn their head to study the wooden crossroads, and a beak comes into view.
An avian.
For one wild moment, Fumikage’s heart pounds, and he wonders if Mother had followed him after all, but Blackbeak is nowhere to be seen. Slowly, the figure turns to face him.
Not Mother.
“Oh.” She blinks bright, doe-dark eyes that lodge Fumikage’s heart in his throat. A small, black shadow peers out of the cowl of her hood to twine around her shoulders like a snake.
Aunt Suzume smiles. “I think,” she says, “you and I have a very similar destination.”