The first time I saw Oda Nobunaga, he was eating.

  Not in the way lords were supposed to eat, attended by servants and surrounded by lacquered trays and the careful performance of dignity. He was squatting at the edge of a training ground in the grey light of early morning, tearing apart a rice ball with his fingers, watching his men spar with the focused disinterest of a man who already knew the outcome of everything he observed. He was twenty-two years old. He looked like he had been born already tired of the world and had decided to conquer it out of sheer irritation.

  I was seventeen. I had walked four days from my father's farm to offer my spear arm to his service, and I had nothing to recommend me except that I was tall for my age and had not yet learned to be afraid of the right things.

  "You're staring," said the soldier beside me, a squat veteran named Daisuke who smelled permanently of horse and had taken it upon himself to shepherd the newest recruits through their first week without embarrassing themselves. "Don't stare at him."

  "I wasn't—"

  "You were. Everyone does. He notices. He doesn't like it."

  I looked away, fixing my gaze on the sparring men instead. Two ashigaru were running a spear drill, their movements ragged and unpractised. On any other lord's training ground they would have been acceptable. Here, watching Nobunaga watch them, I understood instinctively that acceptable was a kind of failure.

  My name is Kuroda Ren. Third son of Kuroda Masahide, a minor samurai of Owari province whose land holdings amounted to three rice paddies, a leaking storehouse, and a reputation that had been quietly declining for two generations. My oldest brother would inherit those three paddies and that leaking storehouse. My second brother had gone into the service of a temple outside Nagoya. There was nothing left for me except a spear and whatever use I could make of it.

  This was the logic that had brought me to Nobunaga's gate. It was not courage. I want to be clear about that from the beginning. It was the particular desperation of a young man with no options who has convinced himself that desperation feels like resolve.

  The training ground sat within the outer compound of Kiyosu Castle, a sprawling collection of buildings that smelled of cedar and wet earth and the ever-present smoke of cook fires. Owari province in the spring of 1552 was a place balanced on the edge of something, you could feel it in the way the soldiers moved, purposeful and slightly too fast, the way conversations stopped when certain names were mentioned. Nobunaga had been lord of Nagoya Castle for two years, inheriting it after his father Nobuhide's death, and half the province was still deciding whether he was a fool or a threat.

  The other half had already decided he was both.

  "Owari no Outsuke," Daisuke muttered beside me, using the nickname like he was reciting something unpleasant but necessary. The Great Fool of Owari. "That's what they call him. Walks around half-dressed, eats in the street, ignores ceremony like it personally offended him. His own retainers think he's an embarrassment."

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  "And yet here we are," I said.

  Daisuke gave me a look that suggested I had said something either very clever or very stupid. "And yet here we are," he agreed.

  Across the training ground, Nobunaga stood, brushing rice from his fingers with the same economy of motion he seemed to apply to everything. He said something to the two sparring soldiers without raising his voice. I was too far away to hear the words. Both men stopped immediately and adjusted their grip on their spears. They ran the drill again. It was markedly better.

  He hadn't demonstrated. He hadn't raised his voice or drawn attention to the correction. He had simply spoken and the world had rearranged itself to his preference.

  I felt something shift in my chest that I didn't have a word for yet.

  That night I slept in the barracks with forty other ashigaru, packed onto thin sleeping mats in a long room that smelled of sweat and lamp oil. The man to my left snored with the commitment of someone who had made it his life's purpose. The man to my right was young enough that he was still hiding the fact that he was frightened, which I recognised because I was doing the same thing.

  I don't know what time it was when I woke.

  There was no sound to wake me, no movement, no obvious reason for my eyes to open and find themselves fixed on the ceiling. The barracks were dark except for the faint orange thread of a dying lamp near the door. Everyone around me was asleep.

  And yet.

  There was a smell. Not smoke, not the barracks smell of bodies and oil, something older and stranger, like river water after rain, like the inside of a shrine that had not been opened in years. It pressed against the back of my throat and made me want to swallow.

  I sat up slowly.

  The corner of the room near the far wall was darker than it should have been. Not merely unlit. Dark in a way that had texture to it, a depth that didn't fit the dimensions of the room. I stared at it the way you stare at something you are trying to convince yourself is nothing, and it did not convince me.

  Something in that darkness was looking back.

  I had experienced this before. Twice, that I could clearly remember. Once at the shrine near my father's farm when I was nine, a shape at the edge of the tree line that watched me with too much stillness for any animal. Once three years ago by the river, a voice in the current that said my name in a tone that suggested it had been waiting a long time to do so. Both times I had decided I had been tired, or feverish, or simply weak-minded in the way my father occasionally suggested I was.

  Both times I had been lying to myself, and some quiet part of me had always known it.

  The darkness in the corner did not move. It did not speak. It simply existed with an intensity that made the rest of the room feel thin and provisional by comparison, like a painted backdrop behind a real object.

  Then Daisuke rolled over on his mat, muttered something about barley, and the spell, if it was a spell, broke. The corner was just a corner. Dark because the lamp was dying, shaped like a corner because that was what corners were.

  I lay back down. My heart was hitting the inside of my chest with more urgency than the situation seemed to warrant.

  I did not sleep again until dawn.

  In the morning, Nobunaga rode out through the castle gate on a grey horse with no ceremony and no escort beyond four mounted samurai who looked like they were used to keeping up. He did not look at the rows of ashigaru assembled for morning inspection. He looked at the road ahead of him the way a man looks at something he has already decided to own.

  I watched him go and thought about the darkness in the corner of the barracks, and how the air had smelled of old shrines, and how the feeling of being watched had intensified, I was almost certain of this now, at the exact moment my eyes had first found Oda Nobunaga on that training ground.

  I thought about these things and I said nothing to anyone.

  This was, looking back, the last sensible decision I made for quite some time.

  End of Chapter 1

  Author's Note: Welcome to The Demon King's Covenant. This story follows the rise of Oda Nobunaga through the eyes of a young ashigaru soldier, set against the backdrop of the Sengoku period and the hidden world of the Japanese gods. Updates weekly. If you're enjoying the story, follow and leave a rating. It helps more than you know.