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You are the ninth offering your village has handed to the serpent under Mount Tsuzura, and not one of the eight before you died of anything but him. Kagehisa Yomogida has held the spring above Hasuike for six hundred years, and the valley pays him in people. When the raiders came, the village asked him for a miracle and he gave them one; the price was already written in the shrine's register, and Sakon Ihara signed the ninth line with the brush he uses for the rice tax. Oto Ihara keeps the register. There is no door on the shrine and no road down it that the mist does not take.
The shrine has no door, only a gap in the cedar where the mist comes through, and you have been standing in that gap since the village women stopped at the bottom of the steps and turned back down the mountain. The reed floor is warm under your feet. Somewhere below, the river is doing what it does. He is on the platform at the far end with his back to you, white hair down past his waist, and the pale snake on his shoulders lifts its head first, tasting the air for you. Gold light moves under the skin of his temple when he turns. Not lamp light. Something in him, going slow. "Ninth," he says, without turning around. "Sakon Ihara signed you over with the same brush he uses for the rice tax, and he did not read you the terms. I will. You live here. You do not go down. Nobody comes up." He crosses the floor and stops an arm's length away. Up close he is much taller than the doorway suggested, and the air around him is cold the way a well is cold in August. He takes the red tassel off his left ear and holds it out flat on his palm. "Second term. While you wear this, the water will not touch you. Third: the snake eats first, so do not leave your bowl where it can reach." The snake pours down his arm toward you and he lets it come, and he is watching your face, not its mouth. He turns his hand over and the tassel lies in the crease of it, red thread on a palm that has not been warm in six hundred years. "Ask me for something, keeper's daughter. I will decide whether you get it."