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After Sayaka Igarashi’s third husband turned up dead, the villagers started to become suspicious.
Despite the collective wariness of the townspeople, there was nothing about the bodies that suggested any foul play. When the lifeless men were found and their bodies recovered, there was no frothing about their mouths or puddles of vomit to suggest poisoning, no bulging blue veins or sickly pallor. There were no fatal wounds inflicted by club or blade or heavy stone, no blood painted the snow. The skin of their necks were not stained with the blue-purple shadows of hands that clasped hard enough to crush a windpipe. There was no evidence whatsoever that could suggest another person had stolen their lives.
The bodies, found many months apart and in different circumstances, did, however, share some distinct commonalities. For starters, all three had perished outside during winter, frozen so thoroughly solid that it wasn’t uncommon, when the bodies were being recovered, for a finger — sometimes several — to snap off of the deceased’s hand like an icicle detaching from a tree branch.
But death by overexposure to the frigid, unforgiving winters of Nara’s slopes was not unusual, no. Every winter brought a slew of new dead that were claimed by the snowy mountain towering over the village nestled at its base: lost travelers wandering dazed and confused until they ultimately perished, overeager woodcutters succumbing to fatigue before they could return to camp, ice fishermen who fell through imperfectly frozen lakes and ponds. Such were the hazards of living in a mountain hamlet in the northernmost region of Japan.
But the bodies of Lady Igarashi’s husbands had a few notable differences from the usual frost-bitten corpses recovered from the mountain that gave the villagers much pause.
For one, the state of the skin on the husband’s bodies was odd, appearing to be completely devoid of any fullness and shrinking to cling tightly to the bones inside in much the same way a grape shrivels and hardens under the harsh rays of the sun.
Second, another feature that made the bodies entirely unique, the distinctive signature of whatever thing had happened to them: the last expression they wore on their faces. Each husband was found with their jaw wrenched wide open and crooked, their desiccated skin clinging in stark relief against the bones of their skull, and the tongue, gums, and skin inside their mouths so frostbitten that it had turned a deep, dark purple color that bordered on being black. If their mouths twisted in a silent, neverending scream wasn’t enough evidence that their final moments were obscenely frightening, one would only need to look to their eyes for confirmation. Much like their mouths, each husband’s eyelids were peeled back to be opened as wide as possible, though their eyeballs had glazed over in a sheet of ice that turned their irises and pupils alike a misty grey.
And finally, the husband’s bodies were not found buried in the density of the mountain’s forests like the other bodies usually were. Lady Igarashi’s husbands were found shockingly close to the treeline at the edge of the Igarashi estate if not on the property itself.
The first husband, Aoi Miboumi, was found dead on a snow-covered veranda at the estate. He was discovered on his back, eyes nearly rolled back into his skull, with half his body hanging heavy and limp off the side of the walkway. Well…the right eye was nearly rolled back, at least; his left eye had been ran through by an icicle and out the back of his head, pinning him to the cypress planks underneath him like a specimen on display. Injury and death by falling icicles was not uncommon, especially not with the impressively large ones that formed on every accommodating surface of the mountain during winter. As far as anyone could tell, Lord Miboumi had simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time; a tragic accident that cut the young man’s life far too short.
The second husband, Kaede Manyuda, was found kneeling with his head tilted all the way back, the skin of his knees frozen to the stone path leading to the temple he had said he was paying a visit to the night before his death. Frozen rivulets of tears clung to Lord Manyuda’s eyes and cheeks, and it was discovered that the reason his knees had been frozen to the ground was because he had wet himself in his final moments. No one ever did figure out exactly what had happened to the young lord.
After two good men of refined upbringing and status had been taken by whatever curse was looming on the mountain or possibly within Lady Igarashi herself, the daimyo was put in a difficult decision. Lady Igarashi needed a husband, few eligible bachelors were available, and even fewer upstanding families wanted to send any of their sons to what was expected to be a certain death. But one noble family had a son on the brink of exile for his foul behavior, and, in a last ditch effort to set him on the right path, a marriage was arranged in the weeks of late autumn.
Not even a month into the marriage, the third husband, Jun Kiwatari, was found with the top half of his body embedded in a frozen lotus pond that sat within the estate, his wide eyes and gaping maw staring downward into the water’s depths.
Despite the unsettling oddities, no one could fathom, given the evidence, how anything other than the harshness of winter itself — and perhaps some personal folly — had thrice made Lady Igarashi a widow. All the eligible bachelors in the village knew was that they didn’t want to find themselves paired with her by the daimyo, and that three dead husbands was three too many.
And so after Sayaka Igarashi’s third husband turned up dead, the villagers started to become suspicious. They started to gossip. They started to make up stories to explain the unexplainable, picking and choosing details that fit their various beliefs and motives, each one more far-fetched and fantastical than the last. They blamed it all on a woman, though it wasn’t Lady Igarashi, no, not at all. The villagers thought Lady Sayaka had been cursed by an evil, hungry entity that did not like to share the mountains and woods with newcomers, devouring Lady Igarashi’s husbands only to leave her at her late father’s home all alone, stranded at the estate nestled into the mountain’s slopes, frightened, cold, and miserable.
The tall tales about the strange, violent deaths condensed into a single point until all the gossip homogenized into a lone culprit, and the villagers constructed their preferred explanation: the husbands of Lady Igarashi had been taken by the yuki-onna – the snow woman.
Some say the yuki-onna only feasted on unruly children who wandered outside too late during winter, others say she would happily snatch the soul away from any lone traveler that wandered into her territory. Shrewd wives would say the yuki-onna would feast exclusively on unfaithful men, and that Lady Igarashi’s husbands must have been philandering scoundrels. Many men asserted that a particularly handsome man could escape the yuki-onna’s frigid clutches so long as they could charm her enough with his good looks, and that the late husbands of Lady Igarashi were simply not attractive enough to be spared.
Regardless of if the yuki-onna even existed, let alone how she chose her victims, Lady Igarashi required another husband in order to keep her father’s estate. When the daimyo went searching for another suitable partner, so many men conjured excuses to the contrary that he thought he would have to use the threat of punishment to force the arrangement. But, as luck would have it, a hapless newcomer soon arrived in the village from a town far enough away that the rumors of Lady Igarashi and the alleged yuki-onna that stalked the mountainside hadn’t reached him.
And that was how Ryota Suzui became Lady Igarashi’s fourth husband.
When Suzui — who was far from being a lord like the husbands before him — entered the Igarashi estate for the first time, the look that was cast toward him by every staff member was as unmistakable and just as sickeningly pungent as soured milk: it was pity. The staff felt sorry for him, and while Suzui couldn’t fathom why, he began to feel as though he had made a great error in accepting the daimyos marriage arrangement.
Suzui was not of noble blood, but he was a fisherman. Even though he wasn’t the son of a daimyo or samurai, his trade produced food, and so the nobility looked upon him and his ilk with respect. When the marriage had been proposed to him not long after he arrived in the small hamlet village in Nara, he had been too stunned to turn it down, let alone the fact that he didn’t want to anger the daimyo with his refusal. And so that’s how he found himself here: a fisherman turned lord overnight by his marriage to a respected samurai’s daughter.
Lady Igarashi and the staff that helped her tend to the estate were perfectly polite to Suzui, but the lingering air of their pity hung heavy over every interaction. At least it did when he spoke with the staff, anyway. Lady Igarashi held no pity towards Suzui; she didn’t seem to hold anything at all for him. She was well-mannered and clearly highly intelligent, yet harbored only cool disinterest towards Suzui despite them being man and wife. Despite this, Suzui wasn’t terribly bothered by it.
Perhaps it was the patience and solitude instilled in him by his line of work, but Suzui rather enjoyed being left alone to his tasks. Lady Igarashi seemed to see no reason to force herself to socialize with him, and in return, he didn’t either. They shared meals together and the occasional conversation, and, some nights, Suzui would play the shamisen, just like his grandfather had taught him to, and Lady Igarashi would listen and compliment him on his skills, but not much else transpired between them. Certainly, no consummations of their union, let alone kisses or other forms of affection, had been exchanged. Lady Igarashi hadn’t even hugged Suzui since he arrived. And, frankly, that suited him just fine.
And so Lord Suzui — for their marriage made him so — and Lady Igarashi got along quite well like this. She tended to her obligations and helped Suzui find buyers for the fish he extracted from the mountain’s bodies of water and Suzui did what he did best: he fished. As luck would have it, Lady Igarashi’s father managed a few ice houses before his death, and the ice and snow that they held year round helped Suzui keep his catches exceptionally fresh for markets. Their routines and knowledge complimented each other. Days turned into weeks that stretched into months, and the couple — though they behaved more like business partners — coexisted peacefully.
That is, until one summer night, when Suzui found himself unable to sleep, he discovered an altogether different routine that his wife kept that he hadn’t known about before then. Restless, he sat on the veranda outside his quarters and gently plucked at his shamisen, when, after some time, he noticed movement in the corner of his eye. A long way down the veranda, where his wife’s quarters were, Lady Igarashi quietly left her room and disappeared into the night for hours. She was gone so long, in fact, that Suzui had gently dozed off while listening for her return, and only awoke when the clack of the shōji screen to her quarters hit the door frame. He jolted awake at the sound and strained to listen for any other movement. Her room was briefly lit with the soft glow of an oil lamp as she prepared for bed before plunging again into darkness. Unease settled in the pit of his stomach.
After that night, Suzui made a habit of staying up later than he normally would, quietly creeping through the rooms separating their sleeping quarters until he was close enough to hear movement within his wife’s room. Many nights — though not every night — hours after the staff had already left to return to their own homes for the evening, and when Suzui himself was usually asleep, Lady Igarashi would repeat the same thing that had happened that one strange night: she would awake, leave her room, wander off into the dark, and not come back for many hours. When she returned, she would go straight into a peaceful sleep.
On the nights Lady Igarashi stayed in, Suzui listened, stunned into immobile silence, as his wife would seemingly be overtaken by sobs and gentle cries. She’d make pitiful sounds for a short while, the noises building into long moans and strained groans until they would abruptly stop, and she would gulp in deep breaths of air.
Suzui assumed that Lady Igarashi simply had trouble sleeping, and just went on walks to exhaust herself and clear her head, and that when she didn’t, she was plagued by terrible nightmares that made her cry out in her sleep until she awoke. When he asked a maid on staff if she knew anything about her lady’s nighttime habits, the maid’s mouth formed a thin line and her eyes widened.
“Forgive my bluntness, my lord, but I would very much suggest you don’t pry into the lady’s private affairs. You may find yourself like the others.”
“The others…?”
The maid’s eyebrows quirked up in the middle, and that terrible, sour expression of pity washed over her features and spilled onto Suzui.
“Oh, goodness… You don’t know, do you?”
And that’s how Suzui came to find out why the staff pitied him so, how he came to learn that he was Lady Igarashi’s fourth husband.
He slept excruciatingly lightly after that, and always with his fish gutting knife under his pillow.
With his mind plagued by the mystery of his wife’s strange behavior and the line of husbands that had apparently been left in her wake, Suzui cautiously observed Lady Igarashi’s unnerving evening ritual all through the summer. When autumn came and the habit persisted even as the leaves changed color and fell to the ground, curiosity got the better of him, and, one evening, Suzui decided to follow his wife after she left, determined to know what compelled her to leave the warmth and comfort of her futon more nights than not.
Something Suzui observed right away was that Lady Igarashi didn’t carry a lantern with her on her evening excursions. Whatever path she took and wherever her destination, she knew it so well that she could confidently navigate the pitch blackness of night without any aid. Another thing he noticed as he crept quietly behind her, slipping behind shrubs and tree trunks to avoid detection, was that she wore only her sleeping kimono and a pair of sandals despite late autumn’s chill in the air. Suzui wore the many warm layers of his kimono for this pursuit, intent on lingering outside all night if he had to; his gutting knife was stowed in his sash, just in case.
After a long, albeit brisk, walk along a dirt path, Lady Igarashi arrived at the cluster of ice houses maintained by her estate and staff. Suzui had been shown the houses shortly after his arrival in spring, but hadn’t dealt with them aside from occasionally taking ice to pack his fish for transport to the market. He waited behind a tree, straining against the darkness to see his wife as she made her way to the furthest ice house and let herself inside, shutting the cellar doors that led down into the partially sunken structure firmly behind her.
Suzui quietly moved closer until he could press an ear to the doors. He held his breath as he heard the muffled sounds of his wife’s voice and…was that another voice? Suzui pushed himself closer against the door and the cartilage of this ear pressed painfully into his skull. It was another voice, silky and smooth and, if Suzui’s ears didn’t deceive him, distinctly feminine.
And then the noises started. The same, fitful, strained noises of anguish he would hear Lady Igarashi make on the nights she stayed in her bed. The gasps, sighs, and groans grew as they normally would, his wife’s voice cracking as her vocalizations crescendoed into the same ragged breaths. This time, afterward, the other voice, low and soft, spoke and Lady Igarashi responded, breathless. Suzui shuddered against the wood of the doors and backed away, slowly circling around to the back of the ice house on quivering legs.
Who on earth is in there with her, and what are they doing!?
Suzui doesn’t know how long he sat there, staring out into the impenetrable density of the dark woods, his bottom pressed against the cold ground and his back to the wall of the ice house. His mind raced and reached for explanations but each attempt to understand Lady Igarashi’s behavior came back empty. Eventually, though, his wife exited the ice house with a few whispered words, and he listened until he could no longer hear the bottom of her sandals crunch against the dirt and rocks of the path back to the estate.
Suzui had heard another voice in that ice house, he was sure of it, and he hadn’t heard them leave yet.
“I would very much suggest you don’t pry into the lady’s private affairs. You may find yourself like the others.”
Suzui pushed the maid’s warning from his mind as he carefully and quietly opened the doors to the ice house. One hand gripped the handle of his knife and the other pressed against the wall for support as he lowered himself down inside the cold belly of the structure. Once inside, he listened for movement, breathing, anything that would betray the fact that another person was currently lurking inside, a person who had to be there for his wife to talk to. Instead, he was met with cold silence. Suzui pulled his hand from the wall and slowly turned the knob on the small oil lamp he had tied to his sash until the flame grew large enough to bath the ice house and its contents in a golden glow.
And there, in the yellow light of the lamp Suzui discovered…nothing. The only sight that met him were the last few bricks of ice from last winter and a large drift of snow in one corner.
Even so, when Suzui finally turned to leave after looking around the barren room in anxious bewilderment, he felt the distinct feeling of eyes boring into the back of his skull. When he turned to confront whatever was looking at him, he was met by the same thing: just ice and snow.
Suzui trudged back to the estate, dazed from lack of sleep, his limbs heavy with uncertainty and the chill of the evening’s air. He collapsed into the warmth of his futon, but sleep eluded him all the way until dawn.
Suzui did his best to keep to himself and not let his wife know that he knew that she had strange, midnight rendezvous at the ice houses. That was fairly easy, seeing as they didn’t spend much time together outside of polite conversation during meals. But Lady Igarashi made it difficult when she commented on the dark circles that had started to appear under his eyes. Whatever was going on with his wife, it was slowly costing him his health.
“Do let me know if there’s something that could be done to help you sleep better. More quilts, perhaps? I remember you saying you’re not from this region; it gets quite cold this time of year. In fact, it should start snowing any day now.”
Perhaps he had imagined it, but a strange sparkle seemed to blink into existence in Lady Igarashi’s eyes at the mention of snow. Suzui turned his attention back to his dinner and swallowed his bite of rice.
“Ah, thank you, but…I don’t think it’s the cold affecting my sleep.”
“No?”
Lady Igarashi paused her sip of tea. Suzui squirmed in his spot on the tatami mat floor.
“...I’m, uh, not sure what it is. I’ve been having odd dreams, waking up in the middle of the night. Th-that sort of thing.”
A lie to try and bait her. Lady Igarashi’s expression was unreadable.
“Do…Do you ever get nightmares?” He probed. “Sometimes taking a walk late at night helps exhaust me after I’ve had one.”
His wife studied him for a long moment before she spoke. Then she closed her eyes and sighed with a small shrug.
“No, I haven’t had nightmares since I was a little girl. I nearly always sleep through the night undisturbed.”
You’re lying!
“Oh. Well…I’m glad. You deserve good rest, my lady.”
The rest of the meal passed in silence.
That evening, Suzui awoke in the middle of the night to frigid darkness, his teeth chattering from the cold. When he went to adjust his quilts and blankets, he noticed the sliding door to his room had opened the tiniest sliver, a faint dusting of the season’s first snow having made its way through the crack and collected on the floor.
He slid from the warmth of his futon and crawled the few paces to the door and nudged it shut. Just as the side of the door pressed firmly against the doorframe, he felt it again: eyes on the back of his head, roaming over his hunched over body. He cautiously turned to glance over his shoulder, scanning the walls and corners of the room despite the fact that all the details of the room had been swallowed by the impenetrable void of night’s darkness.
He sighed, attributing grogginess to his paranoia, and turned on his hands and knees to crawl back to the warmth of his bed and peaceful sleep.
And then he saw it: the barest flash, but it was there, he was sure. High up the wall in the corner farthest from him, nestled close to the rafters, were two small, dim gold glints of light.
The eyeshine of an animal, of something not human.
Sleep fled Suzui’s mind in an instant and he wracked his brain for what his father had taught him when he was learning to fend for himself in the woods.
Red for foxes… Orange for cats… Blue for dogs and wolves too… White for deer…
Suzui slowly craned his neck around, watching in awe as the light in the dim gold dots settled in the corner of the room where the walls met the ceiling shifted along with Suzui’s movements.
Definitely eyeshine. But gold…?
He had never encountered an animal with gold eyeshine before. He would’ve thought that one of the cats that chased rats and mice on the property had nestled up in the rafters to catch spiders or simply to perch, but the weight of the eyes — and their color too — made cold dread settle over his limbs. Or at least he had thought it was his anxiety causing the cold weight in his arms and legs until he blew out a shaky exhale and saw his own breath unfurl into the room in the form of a white cloud of mist.
The gold glints disappeared for a split second and reappeared.
It blinked!
Suzui swallowed the saliva pooling in his mouth and shakily fumbled for the knob on the small oil lantern he kept near his bed. His fingertips met the cold metal and he turned it ever so slightly until a gentle flame bathed a sphere around the lamp in a faint golden glow. Suzui went rigid when he saw what the lamp’s light revealed.
In the corner with the gold dots, the hem of a pure white kimono came into view. The bottom of it was adorned with silver-white embroidery of peach blossoms along with several koi and a large arowana swimming through the flowers and tree branches. Suzui slid his eyes upward from the hem of the kimono, up, up, up, to where a torso should be, but the kimono only extended further upward into a shadow that the lamp’s flame hadn’t penetrated. The two gold dots were still near the ceiling, watching, waiting.
Suzui’s teeth started chattering again and even the air exhaled from his nostrils was appearing in puffs of white. He turned the knob a bit further and light spread. The sash of the kimono came into view along with the hem of the sleeves. Whatever was wearing that kimono and standing in the corner was at least twice as tall as the tallest person Suzui had ever seen. He once again turned the knob a bit further.
Suzui stopped turning the knob when the light became strong enough to reveal enough of the thing standing in the corner to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was in danger. Part of him had already known the moment he spotted the eyeshine. If he were really honest with himself, more parts than he would like to admit were resigned to the idea that he wasn’t going to live to see another sunrise. That notion all but cemented itself in his mind when the lamp’s glow glinted off of a slowly widening grin of unnaturally perfect teeth.
Crouched on all fours, trembling so hard his breath was coming in fits of gasps and broken sighs, Suzui let himself fully absorb the features of the strange figure before him. As far as he could tell, the entity was a woman, and a shockingly alluring one at that. She’d be the very picture of beauty if not for the fact that, whatever she actually was, it was doing an imitation of a human female that was just ever so slightly wrong. Her lips were a velvety, pale blue, and the corners of her mouth spread just the tiniest bit too far with her smile of perfect, pearlescent teeth. Her skin was unnervingly perfect — poreless and without any blemishes or wrinkles — and ghastly pale. Her eyelashes and eyebrows shimmered like ice in the sun, and — now that there was enough light to make her eyeshine recede — the electric blue irises of her eyes seemed to thrum with the very energy of the moon and all the night’s stars. Along with her flowing white kimono, her long, silver-white hair was swept back into an elaborately crafted hairstyle that was adorned with silver hair ornaments that fanned out from the crown of her head like the wings of a metal butterfly. Whatever this thing in front of Suzui was, she was hauntingly beautiful, and yet all he felt when he looked at her was deep and heavy dread.
The sound of crunching snow and the squeal of fracturing ice filled the room as the woman in front of him — for if Suzui recognized that the thing in front of him was anything else but a woman for a moment longer, he feared he might lose his sanity — lowered herself from the rafters, the length of her kimono, and presumably the legs underneath, condensing down into a much more acceptable human height. Even if she was no longer towering over Suzui, she was still foreboding and now all of Suzui was convinced he was about to die.
And then the woman in front of Suzui started to move towards him. Similar to the other imprecise details of her form, the way she moved was perhaps the wrongest thing about her.
She moved like she was running underwater, flowing and weightless, the fabric of her kimono unfurling as if the cloth itself was possessed. The air in the room became so cold that a thick, rolling fog spread out from underneath the woman’s kimono and blanketed the tatami mats. Suzui willed his hand forward to pat under his pillow for his gutting knife. His fingers closed around the handle of the blade.
The woman moved quickly, her serpentine movements coming to an abrupt stop with her neck craning down to be nose-to-nose with Suzui; he felt tears began to leak out of the corners of his eyes and freeze painfully on the skin of his cheek. The woman’s grin twisted wider in what Suzui could only fathom as pure malice. And then she spoke, and her voice alone made every hair on his body stand on end.
“You…”
Is that…the same voice from the ice house!?
The woman lifted a finger, the nail bed of which was the same pale blue as her lips and the skin rimming her eyes. If her fingers hadn’t been so long and elegant, Suzui would’ve thought they made her look like a corpse.
“You’re an interesting one, aren’t you?”
Something snapped inside Suzui’s mind and body. All the pent up fear that had frozen him to the spot shattered, and his body moved on its own with frightening aggression. Suzui couldn’t control his own tongue enough to make words, but his throat was able to produce a shrieking wail that could rival a sick and hungry newborn’s.
Before the woman could do anything else, Suzui’s arm moved on pure, animalistic instinct, extracting the knife from under his pillow, and driving it directly through the eye of the woman in front of him, clenching his eyes shut before the tip of the blade found it’s mark.
The woman made a soft noise of surprise, but Suzui didn’t see and didn’t care; he scrambled backwards out of his room on his heels and elbows, still wailing, pitiful and broken.
As soon as he clambered onto the veranda, he wrenched his eyes open and ran.
Suzui had only made it a few paces before he felt those eyes, those goddamn eyes, pressing into his back, followed shortly by a roar of wind and snow and ice that left him breathless and disoriented. He pressed forward on stilted legs, the muscles in his legs seeming to stiffen and freeze.
The woman behind him laughed, bright and crisp and somehow sharp in a way he had never experienced before. Lady Igarashi’s quarters were just ahead, and he knew he needed to make it there if he had any hope of survival.
Just…
Suzui's legs stalled, frozen stiff, and he folded down onto the snow-covered wood.
A little…
He clawed at the wood with his hands and elbows, frantically dragging himself forward. The woman’s laughter was growing closer.
Further…
The icy wind whipped at his face and burned as his hands, growing stiffer and colder by the second, found purchase on the edge of the sliding door to his wife’s bed chambers.
As soon as he wrenched the door open with far more force than he intended, sending the shōji screen slamming into it’s frame, Suzui’s body was thrown through the doorway and he tumbled, limbs flailing like a ragdoll until his back slammed hard onto the floor inside Lady Igarashi’s room, forcing the air from his lungs. When he willed his eyes to open, the woman from the corner of his room was standing over him, knife still protruding from her eye, the blade covered in a layer of thick frost. To Suzui’s horror, the punctured eyeball did not leak or bleed; instead, it appeared fractured like a sphere of ice that had been struck by a hammer. A choked sob gurgled in the back of Suzui’s throat.
“What on earth is going on in here!? Kirari!?”
Sayaka’s voice rang out as the room filled with the bright glow of an oil lamp burning at its highest intensity.
“Kirari! What are you doing with hi— YOUR EYE! What happened to your eye!? ”
Kirari…? Her name must be Kirari…
Suzui’s mind swam, barely grasping onto anything that was happening at that moment.
Kirari’s eyes shifted to look up and over at Sayaka, the knife still embedded in her left eye twitching with the movement. Suzui’s stomach lurched at the sight.
The woman pinning him to the floor hummed.
“I’ll give you three guesses as to how a fisherman’s gutting knife found itself embedded in my eye socket.”
Lady Igarashi sighed and Suzui felt her footsteps move closer to his and Kirari’s position on the floor.
“Oh, my love…” her voice cooed. “Here, let me help you.”
Suzui expected his wife to help him up, maybe offer him a warm blanket or a cup of tea. He was knocked breathless again when, instead, his wife caressed the cheek of the woman on top of him.
Are they…?
Suzui watched, dumbstruck as Lady Igarashi gently tilted Kirari’s chin up before wrapping her hand around the knife’s handle.
“Shall I do it quickly or slowly?”
The pale woman chuckled softly.
“Well, you’ve always seemed to like it a bit on the fast side, haven’t you, Sa-ya-ka?”
Oh my god, have they–!?
“K-Kirari!” Lady Igarashi, or rather, Sayaka, flushed bright red. “Th-this isn’t the time for that!”
Kirari laughed again, but instead of the terrible frost it produced the last time she did, it was gentler, softer; melodic, even. It reminded Suzui of windchimes.
“Just…hold still while I–” and Sayaka jerked the blade free with a sickening crackling noise.
Suzui was slack-jawed as he watched the sharp fissures in Kirari’s eye fuse into each other and undo the damage he had caused until her eye was just as he had first seen it.
“Better?” Sayaka tucked the knife in the sash of her sleeping kimono.
“Much. Thank you, darling.” Kirari smiled softly up at Sayaka. Suzui couldn’t believe that such a menacing creature could hold such gentleness. “Now–”
Her eyes, both now fully intact, flicked back down to Suzui and his stomach twisted itself into an anxious knot. The vibrant, pale blue glow of Kirari’s eyes bore into Suzui’s like the tips of razor-sharp daggers.
Or my gutting knife…
“What should we do with this one? I fear he knows too much…”
Suzui licked his lips, feeling for the first time how dry and cracked they had become from the chill Kirari harnessed.
“I-I w-won’t tell a s-s-soul,” he croaked between soft sobs. “P-please…I…I don’t-t…”
Kirari sighed and frowned, the corners of her blue lips pulling downward.
“Your fourth is rather pathetic, isn’t he? And here I had thought he might be somewhat interesting…Alas.”
Sayaka folded her arms across her chest and shook her head lightly.
“Perhaps a bit, yes. But… Oh, he’s nothing like the others, Kirari. I don’t think he’d ever hurt me like they tried to.”
Suzui was weeping openly now. “I p-p-promise, I w-would never h-h-h-hur–” He squeezed his eyes shut and hot tears spilled over the side of his face onto the floor below him. The warmth of his tears stung his wind-chilled skin.
“Goodness,” Kirari murmured. “He clearly doesn’t have it in him to try and violate you like Aoi and Jun did. He also doesn’t have Kaede’s overbearing persistence either.”
She sighed, aggrieved.
“That being said, I do still think he knows too much to carry on as usual, my love.”
A long pause stretched to fill the room. Suzui looked up at the two women standing over him through tear-blurred eyes.
“Sayaka? What would you have me do with this one, darling?” Kirari pressed, albeit gently.
As Suzui blinked his tears away and his vision became clearer, he could see Sayaka, Lady Igarashi, his wife , worrying her bottom lip with her teeth looking down on him with the expression only she hadn’t given him before this moment: pity.
Suzui opened his mouth to try and say something, but nothing came out aside from gentle sobs.
“He hurt you,” Sayaka said so quietly Suzui nearly missed it. “I’m sure you have ideas as to what you’d like to do to hi–”
“–No,” Kirari interjected with a quick shake of her head. “He’s your husband. Anything that happens to him weighs on you and your reputation. Tell me what you’d like to be done, and I’ll do it.”
She’s going to kill me like the others, isn’t she?
“P-please,” Suzui whispered, “Please…”
Sayaka closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose between two fingers. After a long moment, she dropped her hand away and returned to the stoic, decisive woman Suzui had always known her as.
“He plays the shamisen,” Sayaka swallowed. “Quite well, might I add.”
What? What does that have to do with anything?
Whatever Sayaka was hinting at, Kirari seemed to understand, her strange, crystalline eyes suddenly sparkling with understanding.
“I could leave him on the edge of the village where someone would find him so he doesn’t die from exposure,” Kirari nodded.
“And no one would believe him if he’s–” Sayaka quickly waved a hand in front of her eyes, unblinking. “– You know . And with the shamisen, he could still support himself, I think...”
Suzui felt himself deflate against the tatami mats of his wife’s — no, of the woman-that-was-once-his-wife’s — room.
Kirari hummed. She fixed her haunting gaze back down on Suzui.
“I bet you thought you wouldn’t live to see another sunrise, did you?” Her smile was gentle, and yet all Suzui could feel was uneasiness. “Would you perhaps like to see just one more?”
When dawn broke a short while later, Kirari and Sayaka stood behind Suzui on the veranda as he watched the sun slowly creep up over the horizon, its golden light breaking through the tree branches and spilling rays of light in all directions. It was magnificent. It was calm. He felt at peace.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispered.
And as soon as he felt a soft smile spread across his face at the sight, one of the women behind him shifted. The coldest air Suzui had ever felt cascaded down over his face like a sheet of water, and the sight in front of him was eaten by a grey shadow that started at the edges of his vision and crawled inward, until finally, all he could see was neverending grey mist.
A warm weight settled on his shoulder, and he knew it was Sayaka’s hand.
“Live out the rest of your days with your shamisen, Ryota Suzui. Travel to the finest courts. Play them songs, tell them stories, and they’ll provide you shelter and good food. You’ll live a comfortable life of relative ease.”
And so Suzui did. He told stories of victory and defeat, love and sorrow, wars and peace. But by far the most requested song he was asked to play was the one with which he was most familiar: it was a tale about a woman — some say her name was Igarashi — and how when her third husband was found dead, the villagers started to become suspicious.