Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (Seasons of the Sword #1)(37)

When I asked Kee Sun about that, he just smirked. “Lady’s orders,” he said. “She says to feed yeh like my lord used to feed his troops before battle, and that’s the way yeh’re gonna be fed. Right, Smiley?” He threw the knucklebone of the pig we were cutting up at Emi, who looked up, blinking, and caught it on the fly. “It certainly agrees with the lot of yeh!”

It was true. I was much less skinny than I had been when I met the others. Though the constant work kept the new muscle that was beginning to cling to my bones from ever growing soft, my ribs no longer stuck out of my chest like maple boughs in winter. Even Toumi had fleshed out a bit, so that it no longer looked as if you would cut your hand if you were to touch her. Not that I was ever tempted to touch her.

Though at first it seemed as if Emi had changed the least—her face still in a perpetual frown, her hands and feet still bigger than her arms and legs could seem to carry—I realized that the hand that had caught that bone was now well clear of the sleeve of the jacket that she wore. Looking down at her feet, I realized that the cuffs of the pants didn’t reach anywhere near her ankles.

Carefully placing the knuckle in the offal bucket, Emi looked at me—looked down at me—and scowled. She didn’t seem to know how to react to her growth. I certainly didn’t know either.

—

After every meal, we brought the unusable bits out to the rubbish pit out the back entrance of the Full Moon. As much as the pit itself stank, giving off steam even on the coldest days, I loved being out near the woods. Outside of the little world of the compound.

One day, as Emi and I were coming back from dumping fish bones and scales in the pit, Emi stopped, her nose twitching. “Do you smell smoke?”

Frowning I nodded. “Could be from the kitchen.”

Emi shook her head. “Wind’s blowing the other way.” She pointed up at the the Full Moon’s wall, where the smoke from the kitchen fire was clearly blowing away from us. “Farmer?”

“Don’t think so. They’re all too far away. Someone must be in the woods.” We both peered at the groves that choked either side of the ridge. The smoke certainly wasn’t coming down the cliff behind us.

We looked at each other.

“I don’t suppose,” Emi said, “that you could...?” She pointed at the thick woods that hemmed the Full Moon in on either side of the ridge.

Nodding, I said, “Tell Kee Sun I’m, um, ‘visiting the King’ or whatever—I’ll be right back.”

The trees were tangled oak and bay that weren’t easy to climb through, yet didn’t provide a much cover in the winter. I clambered carefully toward the faint smell of smoke—but stopped when I heard the faint whicker of a horse and a voice: a man’s voice. And then another, fainter in the wind, but higher. A woman. Who?

Before I could get any closer, however, I heard Kee Sun’s voice calling my name. Quietly cursing, I made my way back to the back entrance.

“Bring me any acorns, did yeh, Bright-eyes?” The cook’s arms were crossed and a scarred eyebrow raised.

Chastened, I followed him back to the kitchen.

—

After days spent up to our elbows in fins and feathers and intestines, we entered the kitchen the next morning to find the entire space between the cooking fire and the pantry taken up with the carcass of a cow. Groaning at the size of the beast, we looked to Kee Sun for instruction.

The cook, who was sitting atop the barrel that held the brewing rice wine, simply laughed his peculiar laugh and gestured to the worktable. Knives were laid out as usual, gleaming.

Toumi started to complain, but Emi shook her head. “No point,” she said, her voice matching her glum face for once. Squaring her shoulders, she walked to the cutting table and picked up the largest knife I had ever seen.

Nervously, I looked over at Toumi. She seemed as overwhelmed as I felt, but when she saw me peering at her, she narrowed her eyes, grabbed a sword-sized cleaver and a thin blade for skinning, and strode over to where Emi was already starting the process of reducing the animal to food.

I looked at Kee Sun and he looked back, unflinching. His face was blank and his eyes empty of their usual humor. Gulping quickly through my mouth so that I wouldn’t have to smell the animal, I picked up my knives and went to help out.

And so that is how we spent the entire day, for Kee Sun told us with great glee that we would be spared from our usual lessons—as if that were a favor. He made breakfast and lunch, whistling and singing.

Whatever lesson Mieko was teaching to the women in the great hall that day had them all howling with laughter, which didn’t brighten our moods in the kitchen. We worked away, butchering that enormous creature, carefully skinning it and laying aside the hide for tanning, cleaning the carcass, dividing it into workable portions, removing all of the edible bits—there are edible parts of a cow that you wouldn’t even want to begin to think about—and delivering them to Kee Sun in neat, evenly cut cubes and leaf-wrapped packages, all by the time that Kee Sun had begun to chop the vegetables and clean the rice for that evening’s meal. We were covered in blood, and the stench there in the kitchen was awful, but I think we all felt a certain amount of pride at having completed the gruesome chore.

“Well done!” he called, and once again we received a portion of rice wine with our meal after everyone else had eaten.