Iron Rice Fox Ch. 1 a

It is nearly spring. The rice fields are bare, the haze of smoke graying the air and the smell of burning chaff permeating even the dampest dark corners. The old women are gathered around the shabu pots, gossiping and shushing the children who run through the house. The children are all female, their hair braided and knotted and stuffed under soft wool caps, budding breasts bound. The unlucky ones beg their brothers to drop rolls of bloody rags into the outhouse. They cannot go outside. The Iron Rice Fox is on the hunt.

This one is a trickster, a sly wild thing whose motives are his own. Only one thing about the Fox is certain—when winter's rice is gone and leaves peek their green heads from dark branches, he will come and collect a bride.



Yumiko tugged at a snarl in her hair. “I don’t understand why he must come every year. He should have enough women to entertain himself by now.”

“Your city on the other side of the mountain has not seen their Fox in a generation’s time,” her cousin laughed. “Maybe he’s selling them off to lazier Foxes.”

“Well, there’s One Eye, who came back with that freak child of hers.”

Rie sniggered into her sleeve. “Maybe that’s why she likes Yuki so much. Birds of a feather and such.” The girl picked up a comb to re-plait her cousin’s hair. “Oi,” she addressed the boy crouched by the stove, “We’re cold.”

Yuki dusted his hands on his pants as he stood. “The fire is relit,” he informed the two girls.