The Tale of Edi-Lo and the Archer
Child, come closer. You want a story, do you? I will tell you one, an old one, the story of Edi-Lo and the archer.
In the very great long time ago, there was a kitsune who called herself Edi-Lo. What is a kitsune, you ask? A kitsune is one of the many kami that inhabit the world, a powerful one, a spirit-fox. Kitsune always have more than one tail, and the more tails, the more powerful the kitsune. A three-tailed kitsune is of little account, but a nine-tailed kistune--nine being the Number of Heaven--a nine-tailed kistune is a fearsome thing indeed.
Kitsune always have two forms. They appear as a fox with many tails, a clever fox red as blood, white as snow, or black as night, sometimes silver as moonlight. And they appear as a human woman of great and dangerous beauty, a beauty that clouds the minds of men and woman alike. A kitsune in human form can only be told from human by their reflection in water--and only running water at that!--where you can see their tails and the fox ears peeking out from beneath their hair. Some say that the only way to tell a kitsune is to cut her head off and see if she reverts to her fox shape, but that is an ugly rumor spread by jealous men. They accuse an innocent woman of being kistune, kill them, and then oh so sorry we were mistaken. Pah!
Kistune are, like their mortal brethren, tricksters. They delight in seducing mortal men and woman, making them fall in love with the woman they appear as, and then tricking them into making great fools of themselves. Some kitsune are kind, and allow their lovers chances to discover their ruses, reasoning that if their mortal is so foolish as to not notice their clues, they deserve their fate. But others are neither kind nor gentle, but have hearts as cold and black as a winter night. These kitsune never take a chance of being discovered, but instead draw their victims into their trap so very gently, maddening them with desire. And when the trap closes, their mortal lovers usually die.
One such kistune was Edi-Lo. A momentous beauty she was, raven hair and amber eyes, mouth a perfect half-bow, her ankles trim and her manner as graceful as a goddess. But her beauty hid a great desire for the lives of men, and hundreds of them over her lifetime had fallen to the wiles of this five-tailed seductress.
One day, running in her fox form, Edi-Lo happened upon a man who was washing himself at a stream. His helmet, armor, and bow declared that he was an archer in the service of the local warlord. He was a young man with black eyes like a falcon's, and Edi-Lo conceived a sudden passion for him. She sat under a bush and contemplated her newest prey.
All that day and the next, she followed him, back to the stronghold of the warlord. She found that it was his habit to go to a certain sacred place by a river each day to pay homage to the kami who lived there. So she arranged to be there when he arrived one morning, seemingly deep in prayer.
That day, she said nothing. Nor did she speak to him the next day, or the next.
On the fourth day, she dropped her fan on the way out, seeming to accidentally leave it behind. The next day, the young man did indeed give her the fan back, excusing himself for being so bold as to touch anything of hers, but expressing a desire for this beautiful thing to be kept safe. With her amber eyes, Edi-Lo could see that the archer was not only speaking of her fan but of her person as well, and her black heart was cheered by the fact that her plan was in order.
On the fifth day, the archer invited her to come walk with him. They spoke together of inconsequentials, but Edi-Lo could see that he was much enamored of her. She confessed to him, all blushes and flutters, that she was quite taken by him, and then widened those amber eyes as if startled by her own boldness.
The archer only nodded.
Edi-Lo was confused. He was supposed to take her in his arms, confessing that he felt the same for her! Yet he did not. They continued to walk together still. Day after day, they would meet at the temple and go together along the forest paths, speaking of the weather and the crops. Surely, she thought, surely one day soon he would give in! But the archer was a man of firm honor, it seemed.
And did she but know it, the archer's steadfast refusal of her was awakening a passion in Edi-Lo's black heart, something she had never felt before and had no experience in dealing with. She was fascinated by a man who could resist her beauty, resist all of the wiles she could throw at him, resist them as if he noticed them not at all.
So one day on their walk, Edi-Lo asked the archer, quite bluntly, why he was resisting. "I have bared my heart to you, my archer! You cause me such suffering by your silence. Do you then find me undesirable? For if you do, then I must return to my home and weep, for you have become my only hope of heaven."
The archer shook his head. "My lady, I find you above all women desirable. But there are impediments."
She asked, sharply, "Impediments? What impediments could there possibly be?"
"There are three impediments. The first is that I am betrothed to a childhood friend, who I have not seen since I entered my lord's service. I would not betray her. The second impediment is that I have sworn not to lie with a woman until I can shoot so accurately that I can hit a dragon's eye at five hundred paces. And the third impediment is that I may not wed until I am released from the service of my lord, which will not happen for eight years. So you see, even if you were to desire to become my wife, it could not happen."
Internally, Edi-Lo seethed. But she said sweetly, "Of course. Well, I will enjoy our walks, then, and ask nothing more."
But, o, what could Edi-Lo do? Here was a man of honor, and those impediments were indeed difficult. But if a kitsune has nothing else in her life, she has the unshakable belief that through her wiles she can overcome any difficulty. The first impediment she tackled was the betrothal. It was the work of but a moment to cause the archer's betrothed, a sweet young woman with a quiet beauty, to conceive of an ill-fated passion for one of her father's guards. All played out there as Edi-Lo desired. The girl fell pregnant and was married off quickly, and not to the archer since he could not wed until he was out of his service. The betrothal broken, Edi-Lo returned to her archer, one impediment erased.
But there were two more. Both of them more difficult than the first.
"To hit a dragon's eye at five hundred paces. Difficult, but not impossible. How could I arrange it?" She muttered to herself as she moved around her lair, sifting through piles of shining things she'd gathered over the years. And there, o! there was something she had collected and promptly forgotten all about. It was an arrow, a bright black thing with red fletching and a heavy head. She remembered this arrow. A witch had blessed it, saying that it could only be shot once, but it would hit whatever it was shot at.
Simple, so simple. It was the work of a moment to find a dragon, a fearsome green dragon who lived in the swamps at the edge of the kingdom. The work of a moment to needle the dragon into a rage and send it screaming towards the warlord's stronghold. The work of a moment to slip the black arrow into her archer's quiver.
When the battle came, Edi-Lo, invisible beside her archer, guided his hand to the black arrow, and whispered in his ear, "His eye. You must hit his eye." They were six hundred paces away from the dragon.
And the archer drew back his bow and let fly, and--o!--the black arrow struck true, putting out the dragon's fearsome green eye. Edi-Lo yipped with joy. The second impediment was dealt with.
But the third impediment remained. And of the three, it was the most difficult. For her archer now would not dishonor her by merely taking her as a lover; he said that she was too precious to him to take into his bed as anything but his wife. No arguments of Edi-Lo's could sway him, no hot and bitter tears she shed could change his mind.
And somewhere in her black heart, she wished to become his wife. She had never, as far as she remembered, been denied anything she wanted, and as is the way with kitsune and many men, what they cannot have is the most desirable thing they can think of.
What to do? How to overcome this last impediment, the terms of her archer's service?
First, Edi-Lo disguised herself as a clerk and attempted to change the papers of her archer's service. But they were enchanted in a way she did not understand, and would not change for her spells.
Edi-Lo arranged for the warlord's nine wives to all become suddenly enamored of him for weeks on end. But the warlord's heart was strong and he stubbornly refused to die as she'd expected. She then attempted to arrange for him to be killed in battle, but he was a great and wise warrior, and refused to fall.
Edi-Lo, for the first time in her very long life, knew despair.
And despair she knew for the next eight long years, as she outwaited her archer's service. She knew worry and fear every time her archer went off to battle, she knew joy when he returned to her safe. She knew hope every time he looked at her and sorrow every time he looked away.
And the kitsune's black heart broke, and something new took hold of her, in those eight long years that she waited. For the first time, the fox of five tails knew love.
When the day came that the archer's service was done and she could wed--ah, that was a joyful day! They were married the afternoon that he received his freedom from service, and were blissfully happy for two years after that.
But all things, when it comes to kitsune, must end, even for kitsune who have begun to understand love.
Edi-Lo had been very careful to not reveal her true nature to her husband, the archer. One day, though, she felt another heartbeat underneath her own, and knew that new life stirred inside of her. And for the first time in a long time, she was fearful. Would the child take after her, or would it take after the archer? Would it be more human, or more kitsune? Would the child reveal all that she had hidden for so many years?
Her worry made her careless. Her husband had gone to a neighbors to barter for some things, and when she heard the sound of his wagon on the road, she ran out to meet him, to share her news. A little distance from the cottage they lived in, there was a placid river, bridged with stone.
She met him on the bridge, looking up at him with the amber eyes he loved so dearly, and began to tell him that she was with child. The archer's sharp eyes, though, had not faded one bit in the years since he had met the kitsune, and he noticed from his vantage point on the wagon her reflection in the water.
Out from under her dress peeked five bushy fox tails. And her lovely face was framed by two fox ears, black as midnight.
And the archer knew her secret, and knew that she had been lying to him for all these years. Without thinking, without even a word, he lashed out with the staff he had at his side, knocking her into the water, and drove on. By the time the kitsune pulled herself out of the water and walked back to the cottage, he was gone.
Edi-Lo mourned, the love that had grown in her heart tearing at her, suddenly turning all to thorns and glass. But kitsune cannot change shape while they are pregnant, and so she stayed in the cottage, eating only as much as she needed to survive, spending much of her time gazing out the window, looking down the road, hoping against hope that her archer might return.
He never did, and seven months later the kitsune labored to birth her child alone.
Her daughter was beautiful, the blending of the best of the kitsune's and the archer's features, and her cheerful personality was so clearly not inherited from either of them that Edi-Lo occasionally wondered if she were a changeling.
A year passed, and the child grew from an infant to a toddler. And the kitsune's heart turned against her daughter as mothers sometimes will, blaming her for the loss of her archer.
And so it passed that Edi-Lo began to run in the night as a fox, returning for longer and longer amounts of time to the spirit world.
We do not know what became of her daughter; she might live still, though she would be very old now. but Edi-Lo stll lives. You can hear her yipping by the river sometimes, near the shrine where she and her archer first met.
She is still waiting for him to return. And she is immortal, granddaughter. She will wait until the sun perishes for him to come back to her once more.