Chapter 15: The Dawn Door

By dusk the fever was thirty-seven point eight, and Kuzunoha was sitting up in the kitchen eating her fourth bowl of rice.

Natsuki had gone home to sleep for three hours before her shift, with strict orders and a long hug.

Tsukumo had spread the old ledger across the low table and was pointing at a line of faded brushwork on the inside cover.

"I found it," she said. "It's the oath. The whole oath, not just the fox on the plaque."

Haruna leaned over her shoulder.

The writing was old and slanting, and Kuzunoha read it aloud in a quiet voice, because she had known it by heart for forty years.

"The shop is a fox that does not lie. The shop opens at the dark and closes at the light. The keeper tends the dark, and the dark tends the keeper."

"That's the part that stops you at the door," Haruna said.

"Yes."

"So the shop is bound to the night."

"The keeper is bound to the shop."

Haruna turned the page.

There were smaller lines below, written in a different hand.

"One hour of light may be borrowed, if the keeper tells the truth about what she wants. The light is paid for in dark."

"Paid for how?" Haruna asked.

"I don't know," Kuzunoha said. "I never got far enough to need it."

Tsukumo's umbrella-spirit ears had gone pink.

"I think it means nights," she said. "Like, if you take an hour of day, you give back a night. We'd have to close the shop."

"Close the shop?"

"Not all of them. One, maybe. For an hour."

Nobody said anything.

Haruna looked at the fox plaque through the kitchen door, at the cracked tail with its thread of gold.

"We should try it," she said. "A small one. See what it costs."

"Haruna."

"You said what you want. The shop answered. It's offering a trade, and I'd like to know the price before anyone pays it."

Kuzunoha set down her chopsticks.

"Yes," she said, very quietly. "I would like to know that too."

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