Chapter 24: Breakfast in the Sun

The door stayed open all morning, and nobody could explain it.

Tsukumo poked it, and Natsuki examined the hinges, and the nurikabe leaned against it as an experiment.

It stood in the alley wall in full daylight, with the lantern gone pale.

The fox on the lintel looked, for the first time, rather smug.

"It's the trade," Kuzunoha said at last."

""The shop gave me an hour of light for a night of dark."

"It's decided to keep the door open, so I can come and go."

"And the nights?"

"We'll keep the dark. Six nights, and one off. We have a pharmacist who sleeps."

"Nine hours a day," said Haruna.

"Ten, if you ask Natsuki."

They went to the market because Kuzunoha said she would die if she didn't.

Nishiki was loud and narrow and smelled of pickles and grilled eel and hot oil.

Kuzunoha walked down the middle of it with her silver hair loose and her wooden sandals clacking, stopping at every stall.

She stared at a barrel of pickled radish for a full minute.

She tried a sample of tofu, and a sample of sweet potato.

A sample of eel on a stick, and declared each one the best thing she had ever eaten.

At the fruit stand, she found the persimmons.

"They're beautiful," she said.

"They're four hundred yen each," said Haruna.

"Four hundred?"

"It's the market. You haggle."

Kuzunoha straightened to her full height.

She turned to the old man selling them and gave him a long, amber, honest look.

"These are very fine persimmons," she said. "And the price is too high by exactly one hundred yen."

The old man blinked.

"You can't lie, can you?" he said, to Haruna's astonishment."

""My grandmother used to speak of a fox in the alley."

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