The Demon General Is My Ex's Little Sister novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Tea in Armor
Rin walks into the demon camp under a white flag and finds her ex's little sister pouring tea in armor. Kaede says the hero is coming to kill the Demon General, and the Demon General is her.
The white flag was a bedsheet tied to a broom handle, and Rin Tachibana had been carrying it for three hours.
Her arms ached.
Her feet ached worse.
The grey scribe's robe the court had given her was too long, and the hem was wet to the knee from the Shirakawa ford.
She had a ledger, a travel inkwell, two brushes, and one instruction from the Chancellor's staff.
Go into the demon camp, record the Demon General's terms, and come back alive.
The captain at the ford had added his own advice.
"Demons don't kill the Summoned, miss. Don't ask me why. Just don't look them in the eye."
"What do they look like?" Rin had asked.
"Like people," he said. "That's the trick of them. They wear human skin."
So Rin walked up the muddy road with her eyes on her boots.
She expected horns.
She expected claws, or fire, or a wall of skulls.
She got chalk numbers on doors.
The road ran between small farmhouses with thatched roofs, and every door had a number written on it in white chalk.
Smoke came from the chimneys.
A goat watched her from a fence.
The march roster she had copied in the capital said 4,212 households, class Demon.
She had thought that was a count of monsters.
A little boy in a patched coat stared at her white flag, then at her face, then ran inside and shouted for his mother.
Nobody had horns.
An old man mending a fence nodded to her.
Rin nodded back, because her mother had raised her to.
Then she looked down at her boots again, because she was a coward, and kept walking.
At the end of the road stood a big canvas tent with a black banner.
Two guards stood at the flap.
Neither wore a mask.
One was a girl of maybe seventeen with a spear taller than she was, and she looked more bored than terrible.
"The scribe?" the girl said.
"Yes."
"Good. She's been waiting. Go in."
"The demon?"
"The general," the girl said, and held the flap open.
Rin ducked under it, and the first thing she noticed was the smell.
Tea.
Real tea, green and hot, the smell of the tiny shop under her old apartment in Tokyo.
The second thing she noticed was the armor.
A tall woman stood at a low table with her back to the flap, and she was dressed head to foot in black lacquered plates with a red cord at the throat.
She was pouring tea from an iron pot into two cups.
She did not spill a drop.
"You're late," the woman said, in Japanese.
It had been three weeks since Rin heard a word of Japanese that was not her own.
The kingdom's language came out of everyone's mouth, the gift of the summoning, but this was different.
This was the real thing, the sound of a Tokyo girl's vowels.
Rin's grip tightened on the broom handle.
"I'm sorry?"
"The Chancellor's staff said noon. It's nearly dusk." The woman turned around. "Sit. The tea is going to go bitter."
She had cropped dark-brown hair, shaved short on the left side.
She had a pale scar across her chin.
She had dark brown eyes, and a face Rin had seen exactly once, three years ago, across a funeral hall full of white chrysanthemums.
A tall girl in a black dress had put a tissue in Rin's hand.
She had said, "Thanks for coming. Grandma liked you."
That was the whole conversation.
Rin dropped the broom.
It clattered on the boards and the sheet slid off.
"Kaede," Rin said.
"Hi, Rin."
"You're dead."
"I'm told I've been missing for two years." The corner of Kaede Sorano's mouth moved. "Sit down before you fall down."
Rin sat.
Her legs did it for her.
Kaede crossed the tent, bent, and set a cup into Rin's hands with a gentleness that did not match the armor.
Her fingers were warm, and callused across the palms.
Rin stared at the tea.
Rin stared at the plates on Kaede's shoulders.
Rin stared at the black banner outside, which she now saw had a red character painted on it that meant General.
"You're the Demon General," Rin said.
"That's what they call me."
"You're Sora's sister."
"Little sister. Yes."
"You're twenty-one."
Kaede smiled, a small tired smile.
"I was nineteen when the circle took me. They wanted a hero and got a sophomore with a bus pass."
Rin drank some tea because her hands needed something to do.
It was perfect.
Of course it was.
"I wrote "the Demon General" in my ledger this morning," Rin said slowly. "I didn't know it was you."
"You have ink on your knuckle."
"What?"
Kaede knelt in front of her, plates creaking, and took Rin's right hand off the cup.
She turned it over.
There was a black smudge along the side of the middle finger, where the brush always rested.
Kaede rubbed it with her thumb.
Once.
Twice.
The ink did not move, because it never did, and the thumb stayed on the knuckle anyway.
"You always had that," Kaede said quietly. "At the funeral. You were holding a program and your finger was black."
Rin forgot what she had been about to say.
All she could feel was the thumb, and her pulse beating against it.
"You remember that?" she asked.
"I remember everything about that day. It was the last good one."
Kaede let go.
She stood up and took her own cup from the table, and her face was calm again, a commander's face.
"Now. You came to take my terms."
"That's what they sent me for."
"Then write this down." Kaede sat across from her, armor creaking. "Tell the Chancellor my terms are that he leaves my people alone."
Rin opened the ledger on her knee anyway.
Her brush shook over the first line.
"Kaede, the hero is coming. His army is camped on the far side of the ford. He's going to attack at dawn, and he's been told you're a monster."
"I know."
"Sora doesn't know it's you?"
"No." Kaede's voice flattened. "Nobody told him the Demon General is a Summoned woman."
"Then I'll tell him. Tonight. I'll walk back across and say it."
"You can't."
"Why not?"
"Because Sora tells the Chancellor everything."
Kaede said it without heat.
"He's never kept a secret in his life, and the Chancellor's tent is next to his."
"If the Chancellor learns my name before I'm ready, I lose this valley by morning."
"Ready for what?"
Kaede set her cup down and looked at Rin for a long moment.
"I'll tell you after you've eaten," she said. "You're staying the night, scribe."
"As what?"
"As my hostage."
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