Chapter Thirty-Five Kasu
The moment Kasu and her sister drew their first wailing breaths, they destroyed their mother’s happiness.
Kasu was the elder, born just moments before her sister. Twins. An ill omen. In some parts of the country it was customary to drown one of the babies so as not to invite misfortune. Unfortunately for their mother, drowning one or both would not save her. The damage had already been done.
Kasu would later find out that her mother was the daughter of a minor official.
Her family had arranged for her to marry a soldier of good rank.
A promising match, though her mother was in love with the cattle herder who sometimes brought his cows to graze near the edge of the village.
Their mother had been wilful. Stubborn. Fine clothes and fluffy rice meant little to her in the face of true love.
By the time Kasu and her sister were born, neither the soldier nor the cattle herder wanted anything to do with them.
The shack was cold. No matter how many times Kasu patched the straw roof or adjusted the wonky door, the wind somehow managed to blow right through. Like clockwork, when the trees turned colour, her sister began coughing. One day, she started coughing and never stopped.
Her stomach was empty, so empty. The hollow ache seemed to echo through her bones. She could not bear it. Her hunger was a vast madness.She doubted anything less than the world would satisfy it.
Their mother made money doing laundry. Kasu and her sister did odd jobs around the nearby village – delivering messages, mopping floors, collecting water from the local well.
When they were little, old women would pinch their red cheeks and toss them scraps. Then they grew up. No longer small and cute and easy to pity, the handouts stopped.
Mother had a gentle smile. She sang them lullabies on nights when the howling wind did not drown her out.
Mother had fists like iron. Sometimes, she hit Kasu. Sometimes, she tried to hit Kasu’s sister and ended up hitting Kasu instead.
“Kasu? Kasu, can you hear me? Hang on!”
One day, her mother returned from the village with an old lady Kasu had never seen before.
“They’re really dead?” Her mother’s shoulders trembled.
It was then Kasu learned that her grandparents were gone. She couldn’t say she mourned them much. Her grandparents had disowned her mother just because she had two babies in her belly. It was their fault that Kasu’s family were poor and starving.
“They’re dead.” Her mother buried her hands in her hair. She had started pulling at it recently. Sometimes, Kasu would find clumps in the corner of the house. “What about their estate?”
“It will go to your uncle.” There was something odd about the old woman her mother had brought home. Her shadow sometimes flickered like a flame.
“But it belongs to me!” Mother ripped her hands from her hair. Several greying strands came away in her palm.
The old lady nodded. “When you were driven from your home, they took your identification token – your pendant – didn’t they? It has the sigil of your family carved into it. If you had it again, if you could prove that you were their daughter, their inheritance would be yours.”
Something had possessed Kasu’s mother. She looked more alive than she had in years. Her eyes shone with a fervour Kasu had never seen before.
“This woman will help us.” Her mother gestured to the stranger she had brought into their home.
“She says she knows ancient magicks, but she’ll need your help.
The pendant is proof of our inheritance!
Proof that we don’t belong here! That we deserve better than this!
If you help the lady get it for me, you and your sister will never go hungry again! ”
Her mother’s fingers dug into Kasu’s shoulders so deep they hurt.
“Please. Do this for me. Do this for your sister. It’s the only way.”
Except the woman was not a woman but a demon wearing a mask that could conceal her true self. Lady Camellia was very thorough when going over the contract.
“And when you die, you will work for me,” Lady Camellia crooned in a voice like the rustle of dead leaves.
“Kasu, listen to me! You can control it! Open your eyes!”
Someone was calling her, their voice distant and watery, as if they were somewhere far, far below the sea. Kasu could barely make sense of the words. She was hungry, so very hungry. And she was empty, so very empty.
“Where’s mother?”
Her sister looked up from the straw bed she had been confined to. Her eyes were as dull as her sallow skin. When she spoke, exhaustion coloured her voice.
“She left.”
Kasu’s gaze darted to the wicker baskets they used to store what few things they had. Their mother’s clothes were missing. The pendant was gone too.
Fear reared up inside Kasu like a snorting bull. Maybe their mother had gone to sell the clothes. After all, when they all returned to their rightful home, they would have no need for those rags.
“She can’t be gone! Wait here, I’ll go find her!”
Kasu turned and ran. Her sister’s shout devolved into a fit of wet coughs, but Kasu did not hurry back to her. She had to find mother first.
“Kasu! Kasu!”
It took five days to find her. Kasu’s mother was in the next town over, pleading with an officer to lend her a carriage back to her old home.
“I’m their daughter, see?” Her mother was on her knees, clinging to the officer’s shoe and holding up the jade pendant.
“I don’t know where you got that from, but their only daughter died sixteen years ago, everyone knows that!” The man growled and kicked her away.
Kasu’s mother gathered herself up. Their eyes met.
Then her mother turned away.
There was a corpse inside her home.
It lay on the straw bed with its eyes open, glassy and unseeing. At some point, dogs had come in through the unsecured door – the door that let the wind in no matter how many times Kasu tried to straighten its wonky hinges. The dogs had gnawed at the corpse’s legs.
Kasu lay down next to it and closed her eyes.
She tried to fill the grief and the hunger with rage, but all it did was live alongside them, consuming her from the inside out.
Kasu didn’t remember dying. All she recalled was a hunger that hollowed out her bones. An emptiness that echoed within her. A rage that churned deep inside her gut.
She thought of her mother and cried. After a while, the cries turned to screams. Kasu pounded her fists against the floor until they bled.
She broke her teeth from grinding them so hard.
She was empty and hungry and angry. Hatred burned with every painful breath.
She cursed her mother, she cursed the men who had abandoned them, the family that had disowned them.
A cat with two tails stood above her. Their fur was of the darkest black, dotted with silver and purple and blue as if the cosmos swirled inside their belly.
A curse.
Kasu had smiled.
Then she had died.