Kuro was not pathetic. All right, he was, curled up in his makeshift den pretending that he was loved by his family. But on the sliding scale of pity, he was positively flourishing compared to Ren.

Samurai blushed in embarrassment to think of him as their Sun Prince, when they thought of him at all.

Ren hadn’t learned that yet. He hovered outside Kuro’s den, creeping forward and shuffling back.

Kuro popped his head out of the blankets. “What? I’m napping.”

Ren blinked rapidly. “Er, dinner’s ready.”

Kuro narrowed his eyes.

“My family’s eating in their banquet hall.” Ren shrugged. “So it’ll only be the two of us.”

Better, but still, the last thing Kuro wanted to do was kneel with his stomach grumbling as Ren ate his precious feast. Maybe Kuro could swipe something from Ren’s tray. He crawled out of the den and followed Ren through room after room to the opposite end of the building.

This room surpassed Ren’s own, if only because it wasn’t littered with silks and the screen landscapes were unadorned by Ren’s calligraphy brushes.

Two lacquered trays with cushions had been placed in the centre.

Kuro shoved his shoulder into Ren, forcing him out of the way, so Kuro entered first. Standing next to the trays, he turned back to Ren, waiting for his reprisal.

Ren just tilted his head.

“You lied,” Kuro said.

His brow knit together. “I lied?”

“Who else is coming?” He gestured at the second tray.

“No one. That’s yours.”

“So I have to watch you eat?”

Ren walked around him, kneeling at the far cushion. “You can eat too. If you want.”

He could? Ren uncovered the serving bowls, releasing a big cloud of steam and aroma into the air. Warm rice, miso broth, and mackerel. Kuro knelt on his cushion before he even noticed he’d moved.

He grimaced. One of those bowls would be gruel, just like in the onmyouji’s quarters, and he’d have to watch Ren nibble at the expensive cuts of fish.

Ren uncovered the last plate. More fish. Drool pooled in the hollows of Kuro’s mouth. He brushed his lips before he humiliated himself by drooling over the food.

“I’m sorry it’s not very much,” Ren said. “And not inari-zushi.”

He didn’t really care. It smelled delicious. He dove to pick up fish chunks with his fingers.

Ren coughed.

Kuro ignored him and shovelled the fish into his mouth. He wasn’t letting anyone, not even the Sun Prince, steal food from him.

Ren only laughed, then clapped his hands. “Thank you for this meal.”

Oh, right. Kuro followed suit, murmuring around a mouthful of fish.

Ren selected several slices of mackerel onto a saucer and slid the screen door open. The sky had darkened to indigo, and shadows hid most of the garden, but the soft light from the lamps placed next to the alcove illuminated the edge of rocks and stone.

Kuro swallowed and readied his glare for when Ren pointed out he was supposed to arrange the room to Ren’s liking.

Instead, Ren placed the saucer of fish on the veranda and returned to his cushion.

“Are you really that stupid?” Kuro asked. “You have to bury your food, or the cats and crows will get at it.”

Ren jerked. He’d punish Kuro for sure, and then Ren would prove he was just like any other human.

Ren laughed. “I’m leaving them for the cats. You don’t have to bury your food.”

“What?” Kuro slammed his hands onto the tray.

“Our meals might be a bit sparse, but you won’t go hungry.”

“Why would you give your food to cats? Willingly?”

“They’re hungry.”

“They’re jerks!” Especially the Cat Girl, yowling for the samurai because Kuro wouldn’t give up his hard-won mochi. A traitor to supernatural kind.

“Also, you might want to try these.” Ren held up his pair of jade chopsticks. They were works of art.

Kuro glanced at the pair on his tray. “Too slow.”

“But less messy.” Ren picked up a piece of fish between his chopsticks.

Only less messy if the eater used chopsticks on a regular basis. Kuro could never count on regular meals, relying on stolen offerings and skewers of meat, neither of which required chopsticks.

Kuro snatched the fish from between Ren’s two chopsticks and popped it into his mouth. “Eh, how come your cuts are so much better than mine?”

Stealing the food from his plate must goad Ren into ending the charade. Even the most diabolical human had to have a breaking point. He’d order Kuro to be beaten, or toss him to the Night Parade. Perhaps he’d try to order Kuro to flagellate himself. That would be amusing to watch.

“Help yourself.” Ren pushed the tray of fish forward and attended to his bowl of rice.

A trick. Kuro narrowed his eyes, examining the options. He snagged the plate and downed the slices of fish as fast as he had his own, and dropped the plate back onto Ren’s tray. He waited for a reaction.

After taking his time with his rice, Ren set the bowl down. “You know, the palace wasn’t always this empty. Before I was born, it was full of people. Servants and nobles and—”

“Humans of every description, I’m sure,” Kuro interrupted.

“Yes,” he agreed. “There wasn’t any place to avoid the multitudes. Even here, in the emperor’s quarters, there were people. Nobles who could look upon the emperor.”

“You mean arrogant nobles who had to kowtow to the emperor, delivering meals and cleaning up after the emperor like they were common servants. I bet they really appreciated that.”

“It wasn’t all work,” Ren said.

“So?” Kuro shrugged. “Bemoaning the loss of your lordly servants?”

“Just…” He dropped his shoulders as he toyed with his miso bowl. “It wasn’t always like this. I just wanted you to know.”

Why, Ren didn’t share, just as he hadn’t shared what his expectations for Kuro were. No matter how rude Kuro acted, Ren took it in stride. He didn’t ask Kuro to do a single task, but seemed content to open his own doors and remove the trays to the corridor for the servants.

It was annoying, Kuro reminded himself, as Ren invited him to his private bathhouse as if Kuro shared his rank. He had to walk on tenterhooks, wondering what to do, and how far he could push Ren. He knew how to bathe from sneaking into the bathhouses, but who knew what kind of extra tricky etiquette the court had invented. As if he cared. Ren would probably ignore him like every other display of dominance Kuro had tried on him.

Kuro quickly threw off his robe in the dressing room and stepped onto the threshold of the main bath. He froze.

The Imperial bathhouse was ten levels — no twenty levels above the public bathhouse he’d visited. The public bathhouse had been all mould and old men scrubbing their wrinkles out before crowding into the central tub.

But the Imperial bath house was bigger than that, and Ren had it all to himself. Covered by the roof, a dozen washing stations were armed with stools, buckets, mirrors and real soap instead of bags of rice bran. The other end opened up into a hot spring pool, part of it covered with a thatch roof and the rest screened by a garden. Red and orange leaves bobbed on the waves.

Kuro fetched a bucket of hot water from the bath and plopped onto a stool. A bronze mirror hung on the wall, reflecting his human face back to him.

Kuro had only tried fox displays of dominance. Any fox or spirit with half their wits would know what he was doing, but humans were blind to the hundreds of subtle signals that passed between their own kind, never mind between foxes.

Ren finally emerged from the changing room, hiding his groin behind a towel as he slunk to the stool next to Kuro. Kuro dumped the bucket over himself, making sure to splash Ren. The human barely glanced his way, eyes firmly on the mirror on front of him and his knees clenched together.

Kuro grabbed as many of Ren’s expensive soaps as he could fit in his arm and gave himself copious dollops, rather than look to see if he had any for servants.

“Scrub your back?” Ren offered, voice rough.

Kuro looked over. Stingy with the soaps? No, Ren still stared at the mirror. Kuro grinned. He knew this human habit. In the bath houses, the junior men scrubbed the backs of their superiors. “Sure.”

Ren sat there, as if paralysed by Kuro’s indifference. Good. To hide his grin, he turned on his stool, facing away, and pulled his hair out of the way. After another moment, he heard the stool set onto the tile behind him and then felt soft wash cloth and even softer hands on his back.

No one could have called what Ren did as scrubbing. His touch was too light, the complete opposite of that harridan Yumi, who’d stripped off a layer of his skin. But the lingering soreness from then melted away as Kuro leaned back into the touch. Only Kuro and Ren remained, along with the fluttering in his stomach and the tingling up his spine.

Ren rubbed the washcloth from the nape of his neck, over his shoulders and down his spine. Kuro should have shivered, sitting wet with only the steam wafting off the pool to warm him, and even if his foxness protected him, Ren’s hands should have trembled and felt cold, but they didn’t.

“A-all finished.” Ren yanked the cloth back and before Kuro could even sputter, he’d retreated back to his station, completely ignoring Kuro.

Kuro rinsed himself off with another bucket. He waited for Ren to bare his teeth, for the hand rubbing his limbs to tighten in fury when Kuro didn’t offer to return the gesture. Ren just jerked the washcloth over his arms and legs in a mechanical motion. Perhaps Ren wasn’t good at recognising human displays of dominance either.

So Kuro marched over to the pool, hesitating at the edge.

That was a lot of water. In the public bathhouse, so many old humans had crammed into the pool that they’d held Kuro above the water. There hadn’t been enough room to drown him even if they’d been paid to assassinate him.

But Ren’s bath was huge and deep. A breeze rippled the water into waves. Waves like when…

Kuro shook his head and shot Ren a glare, just in case he’d looked. But Ren remained in his own little pocket of the world, as if Kuro didn’t even exist. But in a few minutes he’d rinse off and turn to find Kuro trembling at the edge, and wonder why Kuro didn’t enter the pool. If he was lucky, Ren would assume Kuro waited for his permission — and that was just as terrible, because that would be all the dominance Ren needed to lord it over Kuro.

Kuro couldn’t afford to wait. He could turn around and march out, but then Ren would raise awkward questions, because who turned down a giant, private hot spring?

There was just one thing to do. He forced himself to jump in, splashing the tiled side. He stood up quickly. The water only rose mid-thigh. The tightness in his chest eased, and he checked Ren, but that breach had received no remark either, so he tried paddling around. The pool was big enough to do that.

“Having fun?” Ren stepped up to the bath, one hand holding the towel over his lower regions but everything else on full display.

Looking little more than skin and silk before, Kuro hadn’t thought the rice stalk of a human had anything to display. He was wrong. Muscle corded his biceps and thighs, and the dim lantern light played on his abdominals.

Ren seemed to notice where Kuro was looking, and red dappled his cheeks. He must never have bathed in front of anyone but his family before. He’d definitely never been forced into a public bathhouse where old men swung free, forgetting to cover their modesty.

This was the man Kuro had agreed to kill. Kuro tucked his legs under him, feeling more like a boulder dropped into the ocean to plunge downward and downward forever.

For his shrine, he reminded himself. If he trusted the Shogun to deliver, which he didn’t. He wasn’t stupid. Humans lied, and they lied to Kuro all the time. Ren lied too. He pretended that Kuro’s disobedience amused him, but sooner or later, he’d finally push the prince too far. Then Kuro would be glad for his mission.

Ren’s change of heart should have seemed inevitable, yet Kuro couldn’t imagine those soft features turning hard with the same hate that darkened Yumi’s eyes.

“Bored.” Kuro stood up.

Ren coloured red from crown to chest. An interesting reaction. Kuro cocked his head at the spoiled prince, who quickly looked up at the sky. The night sky seemed to help him regain his composure, and Ren gingerly stepped into the pool, still angled away from Kuro.

“Hmm,” Kuro murmured to himself, then grinned as Ren sat down at the edge, only removing the towel from his lap once he was hidden beneath the water. Kuro waded over to join him. Ren tensed.

Kuro said, “The water feels so nice, doesn’t it?”

Ren jerked his head in agreement.

“Hey, Ren.” Kuro slid closer to him.

“Mm?” He seemed incapable of actual words.

“I know why you brought me here.”