Chapter Text
On the day the soldiers arrived with his father's katana, Koutarou knew that the worst had happened.
He was certain his father was dead even before the cart carrying his body rattled up to their gate. Such a man would have certainly died before he’d let such low-born filth touch a single blade of his daisho.
The soldiers stank. They carried cheap sabers and wore ill-fitting Western-style uniforms with rows of shiny buttons that gave them a dignity they didn’t deserve. Their fathers had probably been butchers or something equally vile. Or maybe they didn't have fathers at all.
Koutarou’s father had been a samurai.
Yet in the very shadow of that beloved man’s dead body, they mocked Koutarou's untamable crests of hair and his family's name.
"Your regrettable papa stood against the Emperor, straying from his own honor as a warrior. See that you don't do the same, little horned owl." They pulled the shorter wakizashi out of the cart and tossed all four blades to the ground like useless sticks.
“Be sure you don’t carry these in public,” they added. “Unless you want more of the same.”
Koutarou wanted to kill them or at least shout at them but he was too sad and scared to even move.
At six years old, his shoulders were a bit small to carry blame for that small cowardice.
But six years old was more than old enough to remember.
And so it was that Bokuto Koutarou - who had been the death of his own mother – found himself an orphan. The seventh child of a seventh child was left alone with a cold body and his father’s daisho, neither of which he had the slightest clue how to deal with. One he immediately concealed under their home for fear the swords would be taken away. The other he stared at until his grief was loud enough for the whole village to be privy to the fall of a once-respectable family.
His sister, Yukie, came home first, uncharacteristically rushing from the shrine at the speed of gossip, her red hakama swinging like bells as she ran. Her younger twin, Akinori, was soon to follow, slouching out of some dark corner where he’d been playing hooky from the advanced tutoring session intended to ready him for management of the modest lands he was set to inherit. The four remaining Bokuto brothers tumbled out of the new public school, whooping as they came. They knew nothing but that there was some kind of chaos in the village.
The boys skidded to a stunned stop when they saw the cart and its contents in front of their own home. Seven-year-old Haruki fell into an unstoppable fit of hacking coughs.
Koutarou was terrified and full of shame. He wept as his father’s body was dealt with, as his newly-arrived grandmother soothed him. He wept as his six elder siblings tried to restrain their own grief. The violence of his own sorrow racked his body, until he couldn’t stop shaking. At least the sound of his voice resounded through their valley. The mountains could hear him and echoed back their mourning.
But the death of a single representative of a bygone age and the wails of his crying children meant as little to a changing world as it did to the Emperor himself. The mountains echoed, but the seasons passed all the same.
Six years later, after the peaceful death of their grandmother, the children of the Bokuto family were left entirely to their own devices.
The two youngest – twelve-year-old Koutarou and thirteen-year-old Haruki – were particularly liberated from any kind of oversight. The boys attended the compulsory public school only when the mood struck them. Such a mood struck rarely; much of their time was spent wrecking havoc in the village and surrounding forest. Eventually, Yukie forcefully suggested they at least go fishing to help the family if they were going to squander their time.
Yukie herself had grown into a petite beauty with long, cherry-colored hair. Everyone said she was the very image of the mother that Koutarou had destroyed from the inside out. A distant cousin, who believed it necessary to “handle” the seven children that were essentially raising themselves, found no difficulty in setting up dozens of premature and unwanted marriage interviews for the oldest child in the Bokuto family. To her great chagrin, Akinori ignored the well-meaning woman’s efforts, and allowed his twin sister to permanently attach herself to the local shrine and lifelong virginity.
Perhaps more aptly put, the reluctant head of the family had neither initiative outside of his sensual paintings on screens and silks, nor any reason to deny his sister's request. He had much more reason to grant it: the shrine wasn’t large enough to house anyone so Yukie came home in the evenings. She continued to care for her six brothers - something she would not do were she to marry. She ate more than her share, but she was also a skilled cook and a competent housekeeper. Only Tatsuki could manage a household as well, and his strength would be greatly missed in the fields and rice paddies.
The cousin gave up, claiming that Akinori's permanent smirk and Yukie's singsong voice were intentionally designed to mock her. Since she had been uninterested in helping any of the other children, her familial goodwill was called into question anyway. It was likely she had simply been looking for bragging rights after making a good match.
Wataru, Yamato, and Tatsuki, who were fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen respectively, seemed to be the only members of the Bokuto family who understood that food and other necessities of life did not simply appear when you wanted them. Though tradition held that samurai did not work, samurai as both individuals and an institution had essentially been eliminated by Imperial reforms and armed conflicts. The Bokuto family was now just a family that held some land. So the three young men began to till those family holdings in the company of the peasants whom samurai had once had the questionable privilege of cutting down in the street on a whim.
Life was set to continue along on this mediocre path. If all went well, the more industrious brothers would find cheerful peasant wives at their completion of the Emperor's newly declared compulsory military service. Akinori would either know artistic fame or utter failure after his. Hardly the respectable tradition of a samurai family. Certainly nothing like the new prestige of holding office in the court of the Emperor. But definitely not a family on the verge of destitution. It was to be a life where needs were comfortably met and leisure time was frequently available. Nothing more, but certainly nothing less.
Despite this mundane eventuality for most of the Bokuto family, the entire population of Fukurodani felt confident that there was little future for Haruki and Koutarou.
The former was considerably more tragic. Haruki was small, like his mother, and sickly. Though he was an infinite source of mischief, there were many days when he struggled to breathe. The fact that he had made it to his adolescence had been shocking, but every spring his coughs grew more brutal. He’d been found unconscious in the street more than once. When he fell ill with sicknesses that spread through the village, the faces of the Bokuto siblings grew grim. It was unspoken but generally believed that the impish boy would die before he came to adulthood.
Koutarou on the other hand was very large for his age, with a particularly boisterous and impatient personality. His shock of grey and black-mottled hair spoke of something unnatural; the booming sound of his voice confirmed it. Even the manner of his birth – emerging from the womb the size of an infant two-months living – had been eerie. There were whispers that the golden-eyed boy had sucked the strength from his mother, and now he was leeching life from his brother as well. Even if that was nothing but nonsense, there was still no question that the child was simpleminded, wild, and unmanageable, worse even than his artistic eldest brother in his willful refusal to do his duty and focus single-mindedly on the care of his family.
Where was work for a young person such as this? Who would let their daughter marry the man he would become?
There were no answers. Other than, “not my daughter,” of course.
But if plants couldn’t grow from the empty soil, everyone would starve.
It was one of those crisp mornings on the teetering edge of spring where flowers and snow squalls lived side-by-side. Temperatures that seemed unbearably chilly in autumn felt balmy by comparison. The streams had thawed, the sakura were in bud, the plum trees were blossoming, and Koutarou was fishing alone in Sakanoshita Forest.
Not many people went into the forest at all, let alone the secluded spots that seemed to belong only to Koutarou and his closet brother. The villagers said it was easy to get lost, even for the most experienced woodsmen. The trees and moss and grass were just a shade too green, they claimed. It was unnatural.
But Koutarou liked it, and he never got lost. Since most everyone called him unnatural, maybe that was why: he and the forest were both peculiar, so Sakanoshita was kind to him. Whatever the reason, it meant he and Haruki had the best fishing streams, ponds, and even a lake all to themselves.
On this particular day, Haruki was ill, as he often was in early spring. In response to this poor turn of events, Koutarou was determined to catch a meal’s worth of sweetfish, since that was his brother’s favorite. Once he did so, Haruki would cheer up, Yukie and Akinori would tell Koutarou he’d done a good job, and his other brothers would all savor a big dinner after surveying the fields for the upcoming year’s planting. Everyone would be healthy and happy and no one would yell at him for skipping school, breaking some crockery they hadn’t yet realized he had broken, or being too loud in general.
Koutarou liked to make noise. He especially enjoyed the sound of his own voice on a day when his favorite brother was ill, since it could make them both laugh. Noise also brought attention; something he desperately craved since everyone was always too busy with their work to pay attention to him.
Most importantly, there had been a time where he had not spoken up. The knowledge that he had let soldiers insult his family and father still galled him, truth distorted by the pain of the experience. His youth at the time didn’t matter. He was convinced that his voice was powerful, something he should use whenever possible. And on that day he hadn’t.
Since then, he'd learned of the samurai rebellion and what he considered his father's bravery in fighting back against the loss of their family's very existence. It confirmed in his mind the cowardice of the Imperial Army. The knowledge only fueled Koutarou’s desire to prove to himself that he wasn’t a coward, but instead a worthy son. He hated the Imperial family more than he'd ever hated anything in his life, and some day he was going to do something about it.
It wasn't particularly clear what he was going to do, but he was going to do something that no one else had ever done.
As this heroic childish fantasy that involved his fathers’ katana and talking animals occupied his mind, the hours passed quickly. Before he knew it, he had five sweetfish tied to a piece of twine. He was just hauling in the sixth when everything he knew about the forest turned out to be wrong.
Sakanoshita betrayed him in a way that far surpassed any of the stories he'd heard.
It started with the sky. The best spot for fishing was a generally sunny spot by a clear-running stream, but as Koutarou brought in his catch, he was inexplicably cast into shadow. He looked up to see if rain was on the way and instead saw a rapidly descending storm cloud. It fell so quickly there was no time to react. The wet mist enveloped him, cold and clammy on his bare arms. A terrible wind blew up, chilling him to the bone and nearly knocking him over. He held tight to his fish and rod, because it felt like he was being sucked into the sky. He wasn’t about to lose the dinner he’d worked so hard for.
When the disorienting motion finally stopped, he fell to his knees somewhere that was not a sunny rock next to his favorite stream. Under his fingers (fish and pole still clenched in each hand) he could feel soft moss. The mist blew away revealing his confused brothers all around him. Haruki seemed the worst off. Wataru was holding him up in a way that suggested the younger boy had fainted. The normally imposing Tatsuki was on his hands and knees, dry heaving, while Yamato was nervously patting his back.
Akinori was the only one standing at all. He was several paces away, directly in front of a strangely attired man that none of them had ever seen before. For the first time Koutarou could remember, his brother was wearing something other than his lazy smirk. He looked, for once, like the actual head of their family, like a real eldest brother. Someone ready to fight for them now that it was truly necessary.
Tatsuki’s gags gradually subsided, and a stunned silence fell over the clearing where they’d landed.
“I’d like to thank you all for coming, first off,” the man in front of Akinori broke the tense mood. He looked like someone who had been through many battles. Everything about his face was sharp. His eyebrows were thick and heavy angled, with a chunk missing. Even his dark hair was angular, pulled back in ridges that resembled a plowed field.
Contrasting with this harshness, he was dressed in a beautiful kimono much too light for early spring. It was possible he was wearing it because he'd spent all his money on that one piece of clothing alone. The delicate pattern of flying crows that started at the hem and soared to wrap around his neck looked like the sort of thing that cost a year’s wages.
Akinori cocked his head in lazy deliberation, “You used magic to bring us here. Why? Who are you?”
“It was like a storm!” Haruki wriggled dizzily in Wataru's arms, lips blue and eyes still not quite focused.
Koutarou nodded in eager agreement. “I didn’t know people could do that! I bet I probably could figure it out if I tried, though.” The strange man gave him the same piercing, incredulous look that his teachers, grandmother, and sister had all become very good at.
“Ah..." he scratched his head the way adults did when they felt in over their heads and as a result, annoyed. "The reason you didn’t know people could do that would be because they don’t.”
He leaned to the right until his momentum spun him completely around, emerging on the other side looking very different. The crow kimono was gone, and he was dressed instead in the red pompoms and golden vestments of a yamabushi. Or sort of a yamabushi. Koutarou had only ever seen them on a few of the tamer screens that Akinori painted, so he could only trust that his brother knew what they looked like.
But he’d certainly never seen one with enormous black wings. Now the man’s bizarre ridged hair made sense, because it was actually a crest of shiny black feathers.
“You’re a-!” Koutarou gasped.
“I know what I am, little owl," the crow tengu interrupted him. "But let’s get down to business. Regrettably, I’m not here for a friendly chat. You see, much to what I think will be her everlasting regret, your sister,” he reached behind him and pulled Yukie out of thin air, “has desecrated the forest that I’m sworn to protect.”
Tatsuki and Wataru made to rush forward, and Akinori was on the verge of grabbing the stranger by the neck, but the tengu held up his hand and they stopped where they were as though they couldn't move if they'd wanted.
“I don’t want to have to do this,” he shook his head. “Really I don’t, but unfortunately there’s one thing I can’t abide, and that’s a ruckus. So if you’ll please…”
He slammed his staff down and the musical jingle of its rings drove a wind up from the ground. Where only an instant before had stood all of Koutarou’s brothers, there was nothing but the empty shells of their collapsed clothing.
“…calm down," the tengu finished.
Koutarou was, for once, struck into silence. Wriggling free from his brothers’ clothing were five owls of varying kind and size. They behaved both like birds and people, some trying to walk like a human might, others testing out their wings or pruning their feathers. The owl that had once been Haruki, the tiniest one of all, fluttered up to rest on Koutarou’s head and nestle in his thick crest of hair. He could feel the small bird trembling. Yamato, on the other hand, was digging into the unprepared sweetfish with a relish that belied their situation.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Koutarou bellowed at the tengu, too angry to be either relieved or confused as to why he was still a person.
“Koutarou,” Yukie spoke as though she was fighting for every syllable. “Don’t.”
He did not want to listen, but there seemed to be no other option, so he drew his hands into fists and made small but virulent noises of fury.
“Bokuto-san,” the tengu crossed his arms and addressed his sister, “now we can talk. I don’t give a damn who enjoys the pleasures of the flesh in this forest, as long as they don’t cause any destruction. Trysts of all sorts have been going on for hundreds of years. No one’s caused trouble quite yet. It's probably good for the place. So make love with whoever you'd like, bring a whole party if you want! I honestly don't care."
Yukie was crying. Koutarou got to his feet, took one step, then another. She shook her head violently and he stopped, feet still itching to move.
"Unfortunately," the crow tengu drawled, stretching his enormous wings out wide, "defiling a sworn shrine maiden is a different matter.”
“I-I didn’t know…” she said weakly.
“You’re telling me,” the feathers on his head crested, “you didn’t know that Sakanoshita is a holy forest?”
“It’s a holy forest?” Koutarou demanded. “I thought it was just really quiet because the trees are so old! No wonder everybody’s scared of it!”
“You humans!” the tengu threw up his arms. “You pray and pray and leave offerings and commit idiotic suicides for the sake of love and devotion so that a place ends up as sacred as Ryujin’s whiskers, and then you just forget about it?”
“I beg your forgiveness,” Yukie whispered.
“I wish I could give it! This is nothing but a hassle for me. But even if I could, you can be sure that tenacious little priest at the temple would badger me for the rest of his natural life. Look, I don’t even know what to call it when two shrine maidens defile each other, but since you insisted that you’d ‘do anything’ to keep your lover from punishment, I’ve done what you asked.”
He turned to Koutarou with a predatory grin. His teeth were pointed.
“Lucky for you, Bokuto-san you’ve got the seventh child of a seventh child as a little brother. Otherwise there’d be no way out of this. Unlucky for you, I don’t think this kid can keep his mouth shut for seven minutes, let alone the seven years required to break the curse.”
He waved his hand, and whatever had been holding Yukie back released her. She rushed to Koutarou, falling to her knees, wrapping her arms around his waist, and weeping. He knelt down to hug her back as tight as he could.
“I’m so sorry, Koutarou, I’m so, so sorry.”
He wasn’t quite sure what had even happened, but his brothers were owls, some crazy youkai was insulting him and complimenting him in the same sentence, and his unflappable sister was sobbing as though her life was over. Whatever was happening, it was bad.
The crow tengu stood up to his full height, and a rush of wind caught in his wings, ruffling the feathers on his head and streaming the ties of his vestments behind him. He slammed his staff into the ground again and the wind grew in strength until Koutarou felt Haruki’s claws digging into his hair to keep from blowing away. The rest of his brothers took to the nearby trees.
The tengu spoke, and his casual tone was gone, replaced with a voice that rang across the entire mountain and drilled through to Koutarou’s bones.
“Fallen remnants of the Bokuto family, as penalty for doubly defiling Sakanoshita Forest you are cursed to live as your namesake for the rest of your lives.”
Yukie's arms fell away as she shrank, lovely hair replaced with pure white feathers. Even as an owl she was beautiful, but he didn’t want that. He needed her. He needed all of them.
"No no no no come back!" Koutarou yelled at her, and then to the trees at the rest of his family. "C'mon you can fight this, I know you can!"
But there was no response to be had.
The wind fell to nothing, and the sounds of the forest went back to normal.
The tengu who had steadily approached while Koutarou had been shouting, picked Yukie up and scratched her head gently before settling her on his shoulder.
“Well… relatives of your namesake,” he corrected his earlier proclamation. “I don’t think this mountain could handle six great horned owls. Which is what you would have turned into if you weren’t so resistant to magic, by the way. Do you know they can kill adult foxes? And cats? I'd never hear the end of it if we suddenly had six of them. Especially since they’re not native to Japan."
He leaned down, and touched the end of his staff to the boy’s lips. He seemed almost sympathetic. "They’re all owls except for you, Bokuto Koutarou, the one who most resembles one. As I expected, the curse cannot touch you, so you alone have the power to break it.”
Koutarou was crying now, and it was embarrassing because he was no longer a child but he couldn't stop. It didn't matter. Everything was over anyway. How was he going to help them? He was worthless, he couldn’t even stop this from happening in the first place. He didn’t even know what was going on!
"How?" he sobbed, desperate for something. "I don't know any magic. Teach me! I'll learn, I promise I'll learn. I know I'm not a good student, but I’m real good at practicing till I get better! I swear I am! I’ll be the best!"
"Are you certain you really want to know? It's going to be the hardest thing you ever do."
Koutarou nodded, trying to look confident and falling just short of achieving his goal.
With another jingle of his staff, the tengu stood up and pointed towards a clearing that Koutarou hadn't noticed before.
“In that glade, past the cherry and maple tree, are stinging nettles. Thousands of them. They will grow every year, unless you rip out their roots. To see your family whole again, you must make a haori for each of your siblings out of those nettles, but only the ones you have picked with your bare hands.”
“But!" Koutarou grit his teeth as the tears returned. "I don’t know how to make clothes!”
“Learn, kid,” the tengu shrugged, irritated that Koutarou wasn't appreciating his kindness.
The boy stated the next most obvious thing. "And nettles hurt bad!”
“Deal with it!” The tengu showed his teeth. “Now are you going to listen, or should I just consume their hearts now?”
He hadn’t even mentioned that before, and Koutarou didn’t know tengu could do that, but he wasn’t about to question. He sat up into seiza and tried to look as attentive as possible, which seemed to soothe the tengu’s pride and impatience.
“For the next seven years, you cannot make a sound. No talking, no moaning, whining, groaning or anything else you seem greatly talented at.”
“What about…?” Koutarou gestured at his posterior, sheepish but earnest. “Because, you just can’t keep that from happening, you know?”
“Are you seriously asking me that? I just turned everyone you love into owls and that's your concern?"
Koutarou nodded, not understanding how it wasn't important. It was a sound that people made regularly. He should know he slept in a room with three of his brothers.
"It's fine! Fart all day and all night if you want. I’m talking about mouth noises.”
“What about sneezing? I can't keep from sneezing or I'll die, I think. I heard it once.”
“YOU CAN SNEEZE WITHOUT MAKING A SOUND IF YOU TRY HARD ENOUGH BUT NO, INADVERTENT BODILY FUNCTIONS DO NOT COUNT.”
Koutarou nodded thoughtfully. The tengu was right actually, you could.
“Bah. I hate this curse… it’s so complicated. Anyway. Once a year, your siblings will return to their human forms. On… when were you born, kid?”
“The autumnal equinox? I’m bad at remembering the day…”
“How convenient,” the tengu grinned. “On the autumnal equinox, your family will be restored to their human forms for an hour if they return to that glade with the nettles. They might not, because as time goes on, it’s going to get harder and harder for them to remember they’re not actually owls. You're probably going to be an uncle and not even know it come breeding season. But if they do return, you still can't make a sound. If that happens, for any reason or at any time, they will die immediately, with really rotten karma.”
“When does the no talking start?” Koutarou asked, wanting to mentally prepare himself by saying all the filthy words he possibly could all at once.
“Let’s just go with now.”
Koutarou flapped his mouth shut in frustrated disappointment. The tengu looked away from him, as though the sight was painful, or kind of hilarious.
"One more thing:” he said grimly, looking towards the glade. “Regardless of the state of their memories, your brothers and sister will all reassemble in the glade by sunset exactly seven years from now. If you don't finish the haori and put them on all your siblings by the time the sun disappears on that day, they will forget their humanity completely. They'll live as owls, with the same brief lifespan. You, however, will live an exceedingly long life so as to remember them."
The tengu lifted Yukie off of his shoulder and held her on the edge of his hand. "This is the worst part of the job, you know?" he told her, then tossed her high in the air. He waved his hand with a "Best of luck kid," there was a blast of wind, and he vanished.
Haruki fluttered down off of Koutarou's head, landing on the ground in front of him. He made a small yap that could have been sympathetic or scared or something in-between. Koutarou couldn't ask or even make a noise back. So he just held out his hands, and his brother hopped onto them.
With the small bundle of feathers curled to his chest, Koutarou taught himself to weep without making a single sound.
He was very good at things when he practiced, after all.