DISCLAIMER: All characters are property of Rumiko Takahashi. Any spark of originality is owed to Ms. Takahashi's inspirational creativity.
The king paced like a caged lion, his polished black heels clip-clopping against the wooden floorboards. He was furious. Across the room two black-clad figures huddled in the corner. Miroku's father sighed inwardly. His son, Miroku, standing with his head bowed like a criminal! It was unthinkable! Yet there he was, hunched and guilty, refusing to meet his sire's eyes. The girl is to blame for this, he thought bitterly. It had been a generous gesture, accepting the child as his own, but she was wild, untamed. Sanya, his wife, the High Queen of Edo had been nearly reduced to tears in trying to civilize the girl. Nothing appealed to the black-haired vixen. Despite himself, Miroku's father shivered as he imagined Kagome's eyes; like bits of blistering coal they were. Everything about her was unnatural. No good deed went unpunished, he thought wryly. Turning abruptly, mid-stride, he walked to the tall, gilded window, and stared out at the reddish sky. The sun was sinking like his heart as he decided on how to punish them.
"You know what you did was wrong," he said quietly. The words fell like lead weights in the silence. Miroku shifted uncomfortably. Kagome just glared.
"I heard you wanted revenge, did you not?" he asked lightly. Miroku's father was being cautious. True, as a king he could simply order for Kagome to be exiled and forgive his son, but he was an honorable ruler. He would make sure that both the girl and the boy learned their lesson.
"I will not have you whipped," he said, turning to face the children. Kagome and Miroku exchanged delighted glances, secret smiles blossoming like roses on their pink lips.
"However, you will be punished. It takes a lot of courage to break into a healer's home. It takes more than courage to try and kill a legend—that is sheer arrogance. Did you really think you'd be able to destroy it?" he asked.
The smiles faded from their faces as both children realized, with dread, that the king had something much worse in store for them.
"You," said Miroku's father, pointing a heavily ringed, accusing finger at Miroku. "You will follow the huntsmen and bring me the head of the man-eater that has been attacking the children at the northeastern end." Miroku paled visibly, thinking of the unknown beast that had been feasting on unsuspecting islanders. Hamed had said something about giant paw-prints unlike any he'd seen before. Given that Hamed was one of the most experienced hunters in the kingdom, the task didn't inspire hope. Something in Miroku's expression must have revealed his distress, because the king drew in a sharp breath through his nose and, nostrils flaring, barked, "Are you afraid, boy?"
Miroku shook his head mutely, his mind still on the daunting task awaiting him beyond these doors. Miroku's father snorted humorlessly and spun on his polished black heel to glare at Kagome.
"I believe you are the reason my son has taken to midnight vandalism?" he spat venomously. Kagome merely looked at him with polite interest, as though he were an irate swordsman brandishing an empty sheath. The king's face turned a peculiar shade of mottled purple at Kagome's response, or lack of it. The girl was infuriating! She was like a statue, immovable and stony, blazing passionately when the sun rays hit and becoming cold when the night set in. Nothing in her manner betrayed regret—on the contrary, she seemed to have been prepared for the consequences, and now stood almost eagerly braced for any punishment that would, inevitably, come her way.
Miroku's father scratched at the stubble on his chin, the corners of his mouth turned downwards and pulled his face into a calculating frown. Kagome watched him warily, disliking the look of savage satisfaction that settled in the king's expression. Heart sinking, she peeked at him through the fringe of black hair that lay over her eyes like a downy raven's wing.
"You will bring me the man-eater's mate," he stated. His voice boomed like a war-drum; Kagome shivered as an awful sense of foreboding overcame her. Unconsciously, she shook her head, silently telling herself that things could've been a lot worse. Unfortunately for her, the king misinterpreted her physical actions as defiance.
Glowering, he said, "Alive."
Kagome looked at him uncomprehendingly for a second, and then the enormity of the task hit her: an twelve-year old girl against a gigantic, unknown beast. Like slow-acting poison, fear spread wetly beneath her skin, soaking it and bleeding colorlessly into her clothes. The king smirked. However, his eyes, the same as Miroku's but tempered by years of war and kingship, greenly shone with worry. Kagome had an aura of command about her, it troubled him greatly that as king even he could not help but feel intimidated by this child with her bottomless black eyes.
He turned to face the window again, waving his hand loosely as though to slap away the image of her innocent, mischievous eyes. He listened for a while to the fading footfalls and was reflecting idly about the encounter when unwittingly floated across his mind the phrase "like bits of burning coal."
Kagome tugged at the frayed ends of the gray woolen shawl that sat on her shoulders. An icy wind bit at her cheeks, nipping her nose and numbing it. A chilling blanket of air wound itself around her, burning her skin beneath the shawl. Kagome scrunched up her eyes to squint into the blinding whiteness that surrounded her, the morning sun was lost under a veil of fog and snow. The wind was no longer invisible—powdery flakes of snow defined the wild, ever-changing loops and twirls of the winter wind. Through the haze of the blizzard, a furry beast ambled towards her, its raised hackles snatching snowflakes from the swirling streams. Kagome slowly reached behind her and grabbed her bow. She swung the heavy wooden frame in a sharp arc, her left hand simultaneously drawing an arrow from her quiver. The beast squealed as Kagome notched the arrow and took aim. She halted in surprise as the creature raised its front paws in a gesture of surrender and said, "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Kagome blinked, her frozen eyelashes scraping against her cheekbone. For a moment, no sound was heard except for the wailing of the angry wind. Then she burst out laughing, rolling about in the downy snow, crying tears of mirth which froze seconds after they fell, on her cheeks, on the ground. Miroku looked down at her from under his bear-skin coat, torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to throttle her. In the end, he snorted and plopped down beside Kagome, who was now lying spreadeagled on the frozen ground.
"I thought you were the man-eater," she said.
"I am," said Miroku, smilingly.
"Mighty small man-eater you are."
"I'm still bigger than you," he leered.
"I'm faster," she said, offended. She puffed out her cheeks and held in the air to warm her tongue.
"I'm better with a sword," he taunted. Kagome blew out a stale breath which immediately formed a silver cloud in front of her face. "That's because you've been training," she said wistfully. Miroku's father and Sanya had decided that Kagome was too rambunctious to be a level-headed warrior. While Miroku was placed under the care of the kingdom's most reputed sword-master, Kagome had been entrusted to the Queen's lady-in-waiting so that she could 'learn to be a lady'. Kagome shuddered at the thought of returning to her mundane life as an apprentice to a servant—in her mind anyone who was not a warrior was a servant. Maybe being killed by the man-eater wouldn't be so bad after all.
"Did you find any tracks?" she asked after a moment. It was nice to relieve tension by lounging in the snow,
but they had a task to accomplish, and it wasn't going to get done if they just lay there doing nothing.
"I think I saw paw-prints leading this way, that's why I was heading towards you," said Miroku casually.
"You WHAT?" Kagome jumped to her feet, livid.
"Do you have moss in your ears? I said—."
"I heard what you said!"
"Why're you yellin'?"
Kagome took a deep breath. "You're an idiot," she said flatly. The sky darkened above their heads, and a splatter of iced rain pelted them suddenly. Kagome flinched as the clouds peppered the ground with hail-stones. Extremely annoyed and jittery from Miroku's information, she grabbed his arm roughly and yanked him to his feet.
"We need to get out of here," she said urgently, pulling at Miroku's furry sleeve. He stumbled as he shot to his feet, arms covering his face and head as the hail-storm escalated.
"If we can surprise the monster, we might stand a chance," he shouted, struggling to make himself heard over the roar of the blizzard.
Kagome squinted into the screens of rain and ice. A mud-trail led into the foothills of the mountains and wound around the sloped sides—the path stood out darkly like a black snake against the whiteness. Grabbing her bow and arrows, she motioned for Miroku to follow, and the two children ran through the icy assault to the winding trail.
"You know what I think?" yelled Miroku.
"How can I know what you think?" Kagome yelled back.
"I think that the gods is out to get us, is what I think," he panted. They had reached the foothills—a few more feet and the mountain caves would shelter them from the storm.
"What's a 'gods'?" asked Kagome, curiously.
"You know, the kings up in the sky who like to throw things at us when they get angry? Them," he wheezed. The hill was starting to get steeper.
Kagome looked at him strangely. "No one ever told me about kings like that," she ground out breathlessly. A couple more feet...
"They live forever, and they watch everything we do. If we're bad, they send down death-pellets, like now," he said earnestly. He sounded like a toddler reciting a favorite bed-time story.
Kagome nodded absentmindedly. A flicker of movement behind a fuzzy boulder on the hill slope had captured her attention.
"And when they're sad, they cry, that's why water falls from the sky,"Miroku sang from memory, oblivious to Kagome's discomfort.
All around them the gale raged more fiercely, a wild, animal being. Alarmed, Kagome screwed up her eyes to peer into the icy curtain of hail-stones. Dully, she felt the impacts of shards of ice as they slammed into the exposed skin on her face. She turned to look at Miroku, whose lips were moving in his animated face (either he did not know or he did not care that his words were lost in the roar of the wind). The boy's face was a grotesque sight beneath his bear-head hood, smeared with blood from the many cuts and bristling with glittering spears of embedded ice.
"The beast'll run away, you're so ugly," sniggered Kagome, momentarily forgetting her worry.
Miroku looked offended—the glassy porcupine on his face shuddered as he scowled. "You look like a thorn bush," he snapped. "A frozen thorn bush."
Kagome opened her mouth to retort (probably to tell Miroku how much he resembled a pin-cushion), but snapped her jaw shut as the ground trembled violently. The world spun dizzyingly, white sky crashing over gray earth while trees and feet and whitened rocks tumbled over each other and hung from the bleached clouds. A dark head crept into her field of vision and eclipsed her view.
"Get up," said Miroku. Kagome stared in fascination at his upside-down face, his single pink unseeing eye blinking repeatedly as it presented words and chattering teeth.
"Did you feel that?" asked Kagome excitedly, somersaulting backwards and springing to her feet.
"Yeah, I felt it," said Miroku distractedly. Behind the barrage of hail there was distinct movement, separate from the dancing wind. It was a horizontal shuffling, too heavy to be natural. Kagome climbed up the sleeted path, cutting twin furrows into the thigh-high snow and stood behind Miroku. Holding up her hand against her forehead to shield her eyes against the snow, she craned her neck. She saw nothing but the whirlwinds of snow.
"I don't see anything Miroku," she said, alarmed. "D'you?"
Miroku didn't answer, his gaze was fixed on a spot far away in the distance. His eyes flashed like green glass and he stood stiffly, frozen like the stones around him. Kagome shook his shoulder impatiently and he turned—slowly, cautiously, as though he was at sword-point. He looked at Kagome blankly, his brow beaded with crystallized sweat.
"Don't move," he whispered. The wind no longer howled, it screeched—a high-pitched wail that rent the air.
A chill that had nothing to do with the cold air numbed Kagome's body from head to toe and she blinked away snowflakes desperately from her eyes. Behind Miroku, one of the snow-covered boulders was moving. Kagome and Miroku stood facing each other, each looking over the other's shoulder, both petrified by the sight that presented itself to them.
"It's a bear," they whispered in sync. "The man-eater is a bear."
A low, bloodcurdling snarl reached their ears, from both behind them as well as from the front, and the two children reacted. Miroku, already made wooden by cold and fear, splintered and bolted sideways into the scattered rocks of the rugged mountain slope. Kagome, fearful but alert, knew instinctively that if she showed any sign of weakness, the bears would attack. Unfortunately for her both bears ignored Miroku, who was now scampering towards a hole in the rock face. His feet flailed helplessly as the footholds gave way, showering Kagome and the bears with stones and dirt. Somehow he managed to haul himself to the opening of the cave—he heaved, pushing off of a crumbling boulder and tumbled head-first into the safety of the stony hollow.
Kagome's heart sank as she realized that she was completely alone with the two monsters. The bears circled her slowly, their claws clicking against the hard ground. Suddenly, Kagome was filled with a terrible rage, an unbearable fury at Miroku for abandoning her. She heard, as though from a great distance, the heavy pounding of flesh against earth, the mad panting of a ravenous beast. Her eyes were of little use to her, she decided coolly and closed her eyes; her fear had melted in the furnace of her wrath. Sensing that the bear in front of her was not going to move, Kagome whirled to face the charging bear, her right hand reached for the sword strapped to her left hip. Her body settled into a crouch, mimicking a rattlesnake about to strike. Tense, blind and furious, Kagome drew her blade so swiftly that the air rushed in like a cloudy breath to fill the vacuum that her actions had created. The ground beneath her feet trembled like an autumn leaf; a hot, smelly breath momentarily thawed her frozen face and Kagome struck.
Miroku peered over the Sama ledge of the entrance to the cave. Some distance below him, Kagome was standing stock still with her head bowed as though in defeat. A terrible dread filled Miroku, guilt mingled with fear—fear that had nothing to do with the bears circling Kagome.
"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," he muttered urgently under his breath as the wintry shadow behind Kagome rushed her. "Move."
His eyes widened as Kagome turned, so fast that he missed the movement, and lunged at the bear. He stared, transfixed, as she spun and twirled like a dancer, her raven locks billowing like a black cape around her. How long she fought Miroku did not know. He could only watch in morbid fascination as her blade rose and fell, again and again, its dangerous glint cutting through the blizzard haze and blinding him repeatedly. The snow around her bled, a slow spreading circle of wet crimson swallowing the ground as Kagome continued to slash. The other bear didn't seem to be able to move either—it shifted once and blended into the rocks again.
A low whine wafted upto Miroku's ears and he spun around violently, startled. He blinked furiously to adjust his eyes to the sudden gloom of the cave. Nervously, he inched into its depths, the fingers on his left hand trailing on its dusty walls, leaving shallow grooves. Another whimper sounded, this time louder and closer.
"Ungh," Miroku grunted as he tripped and fell face-first onto the hard earth. Coughing convulsively and brushing soot and gray powder from his hair and face, Miroku straightened up. A pathetic snuffling at his feet grabbed his attention and he looked down. Smiling, he bent down to pick up the source.
It had stopped snowing. Kagome rammed her sword into the earth and slumped, hands holding desperately onto the hilt and eyes squeezed tightly shut. The world seemed to be swaying around her. She sucked in a sharp breath, surprised to find herself gasping for air. Why was she so tired? In and out, she slid in and out of focus, in and out of consciousness. Vaguely she heard a heavy grunt behind her, followed by an unmistakeable snort of rage. The ground beneath her knees shuddered as the quiet grunts escalated into a full-blown rumble.
Suddenly, she snapped out of her weary trance. She was under attack, tired and almost defenseless. No options, no allies, no decoys. No friends, she thought bitterly. There were no friends in battle. Slowly, as though rising from a happy slumber, her eyelids fluttered open. She blinked reflexively as the white glare bleached her vision. Eventually, a red haze bled through the whiteness, and for the first time Kagome saw the damage she had done. She was kneeling in a pool of lightly steaming blood, a creeping red shadow which led to a mangled white boulder that lay sprawled untidily across the land. The rock was painted carefully, glistening strokes of pink and brown and red that danced when the "boulder" shifted. Before she could fully comprehend the enormity of her actions, she felt the other bear begin to move. Kagome shook, more from exhaustion than from fear as the thundering beats grew louder. Once again she turned wearily, knowing that this time she would not win. Still, she thought, better to fight and lose than lose without a fight.
Twenty feet, thought Kagome mechanically, eighteen, sixteen, fourteen...She turned her blade so that it was pointing straight at her target and waited for the bear to close in on the last few feet. A blur of silver-gray jarred her concentration—from the corner of her eye she could see the ball of movement head towards her. Another one? she thought, confused. Forcibly she turned her attention to the battle at hand, intending to shove her blade into the beast as soon as it was within range.
She didn't have to.
Standing with his back to her, his gray coat fluttering gently in the wind was Miroku. Kagome stared at his back for a moment, her blood still boiling from the heat of battle, and she struggled to understand the sudden shift in the situation. Almost touching Miroku was the bear, its black eyes glittering madly and its mouth foaming. It seemed almost...afraid? Puzzled, Kagome stood up on her toes to look over Miroku's shoulder. The boy seemed to be cradling something white and furry in his hand. The fuzzball twitched, and all of a sudden Kagome realized what Miroku was holding. A brilliant smile broke on her face, teeth shining like pearls behind a layer of gore and grime. Glancing at the bear to make sure that it wasn't going to attack, she flung her arms around Miroku's shoulders, hugging him as tightly as she could, all her anger having dissipated. The bear growled when the impact caused the cub to jolt slightly, but almost immediately subsided.
Cautiously, so as not to agitate the bear, Kagome whispered into Miroku's ear, "That's why you ran away—you knew the bear would follow without trouble if we had the cubs." Miroku shivered as Kagome's warm breath tickled his ears.
"You knew the bears had cubs, didn't you?" She breathed, almost in awe. "Next time, tell me before you take off like that, okay?"
Miroku didn't have the heart to correct her.
Author's note: Any reviews are appreciated. I can't assess how much you like my story unless you tell me. If you find it boring or too twisted or too verbose, I'd like to know about it. :-) 3
