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Chapter Text

Once upon a time there lived a boy more beautiful than the sun. 
 
On thundery nights when he couldn't sleep, his mother told him how, heavy with child, she'd prayed to the gods and received an orange slice of the sun, red-hot and glowing.  When her son fell from the womb, mouth open in a scream, she fed it to him. 

It was just a story. Akira almost always thought that, since he was seven or eight and started realizing how religion worked. The people of New Yogo venerated thunder and not sunlight, but his mother's people were different. She was half Yakoo, and the Yakoo valued nature more than anything. 

He also thought that his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. 

He was not alone in this opinion: his mother had risen from the degradation of slavery to the position of one of the highest noble ladies in the land. Akira had no understanding of or context for slavery. When his parents told him the story of their courtship and marriage, that part always went over his head. Still, he loved the romance in it, the adventure. His parents were both beautiful; he idolized them.

His sisters were another story. 

***

Akira Ayutan was sun-blessed from birth; his name meant "radiance," and he did his best to live up to it. He had two older sisters, Reina and Kaori, who looked much like their mother but, strangely, not as much as he did. His eldest sister, Reina, had always resented him, though he was almost a teenager before he realized why.

Akira first became aware of the force of Reina's resentment when he was two years old. She was filling a bath for him in his mother's absence; he couldn't remember why or where his mother had gone, but he knew that Reina had been put in charge of taking care of him even though she was only four years older. She'd poured steaming water into a low wooden tub and put him in.

The water was too hot. She must have known that; she certainly knew it after Akira started screaming, but by the time she pulled him out the damage was done: the skin of his toes had melted and webbed together. It was a severe burn, one whose hurt had lingered; Akira remembered his vision going white from pain. His feet might have been deformed forever if his mother hadn't brought in a physician to separate his toes again by snipping the skin between them and sewing up the wounds with delicate stitches. Looking at his feet later in life, it was impossible to tell what had happened--but Akira knew. There was a raised scar between his left big toe and second toe that he could always feel, even if it was more or less invisible.

Scarring him had been an accident, but hurting him had not. He learned from that experience that Reina wanted to hurt him, but he still didn't understand why.

Kaori resented him, too, but her resentment took more passive forms. She came into his room in the middle of the night and made noise so that he would be scolded and yelled at. She found his favorite toys and books and hid them from him in high places so that he had to wail for his parents to find them. Kaori never said anything mean to him, but she never said anything nice, either. He remembered learning his basic alphabet flawlessly at three years old and holding it up to Kaori with an expression of deep pride. She'd just shrugged and told him to tell mom. "She'll be as proud of you as she always is." If that was a compliment, it was a backhanded one.

It was only after his mother had another child that Akira started to understand the motives behind his older sisters' grudges.

***

Akira stood in the doorway, head barely reaching the brass knob, wilted flowers clenched in his fist.  "Mother..." 

But the sucking infant had stolen her attention, and she watched, rapt, as the small pink mouth fed from her nipple. Nothing changed even when Akira grew older. His baby sister Aizu shone as if she had swallowed the sun, and Akira turned quiet, withdrawn and a little sad.  On a warm spring morning, while his mother and baby sister walked in the garden, Akira left home, wondering how many years would pass before they noticed. 

Unsure where to go, he wandered into a green-black forest.  Night crept over the trees, and he fell asleep between the moss-covered roots of an oak. His father came and carried him home.

That was the night his father told him about the Hunters, and serving the Mikado, and assassination. He was only six and he didn't understand, not anything: not service to a distant figure he'd only ever heard of and never seen, and not murder on command. He didn't even like crushing ants in the garden, though Reina seemed to enjoy doing that with Kaori. Anything moving was alive; he saw no reason to disturb others' lives while trying to live his own. 

"This is my first lesson to you, Akira," his father said, bending down to his level to look him in the eyes. "Some things are inevitable and it's best to accept them.  It'll only hurt more if you resist." 

Akira still didn't understand. This was like Reina's grudge, only worse because he had no framework for understanding. "Did you--resist?" he asked.

"I did," his father admitted."I do. But my life hasn't been easy. I always wanted yours to be better. So here's what we're going to do." His father always talked to him like this; like they were a team and part of something together. He appreciated this, even if he'd never really asked to be on anyone's team in the first place. "I'm going to teach you how to fight, and kill, and you're going to learn and be loyal and obey the Mikado in all things. No matter what."

Akira frowned. "And if I don't?"

"He'll kill you," his father said. "He'll kill me and your mother. Is that what you want?"

Akira shook his head and mouthed, "No."

"Good. Your arms need strengthening if you're going to shoot a bow. Let's start with planks and push-ups."

***

The night he began Hunters' training, Akira had a dream about his parents. 

His mother was a slave in possession of an organization called the Blue Hand. He saw her, younger, sitting in a cage all alone with her face in her knees, crying. His father had found her there--her and all the other slaves the Blue Hand had taken--but he couldn't simply rescue them all.

"I wanted to save them," he remembered his father saying. "But I couldn't sneak them all out; we'd be caught. And I couldn't just take her and leave the others, either." His father was wearing his guard uniform when he approached his mother in the cage. She whispered something. His father nodded. He went outside and stripped off his guard uniform, leaving him in slightly formal civilian clothes. He found the slavers and set down his weapons.

Then he bought every slave in their underground warehouse for a sum of money so staggeringly large that Akira couldn't even hold the amount in his head. In his dream, his father paid the bad men a pile of gold and carried his mother to safety. 

That wasn't what had really happened. He wouldn't find out the real story until later--much later.

***

Training to fight wasn't romantic or adventurous at all. It was sweaty and exhausting and disgusting; he hated it. Most nights, his father had him aim for the heads and vital points of dummies with his practice sword and bamboo bow. He had good aim and concentration, but he lost his focus whenever he turned his thoughts toward aiming his weapons at actual people.

He couldn't even kill ants. How could he be expected to kill another person? One with hopes and dreams and thoughts just like his own? He wasn't sure he'd ever be capable of it.

But his father kept trying to drill it into his head that he would have to kill someday--someday soon. It was impossible. "I hate this," he said.  "I hate you, for trying to turn me into this." His eyes flashed with defiance that his father recognized easily; he got it from his mother. "Maybe I'll kill you someday. See how you like it." 

"You won't kill me," his father said with a snort. "Right now, you can't kill anyone." 

Training went on for hours, and by the end, Akira's heart was frozen over like the surface of a lake in winter. 

"You need to learn obedience," his father said before dismissing him. "Train with your mother until you do."  He vanished, and Akira wondered how the father he loved and idolized so much could be a cold-blooded murderer. Couldn't understand why his father wanted him to be the same way.

He trained with his father at night, when the sun wasn't out. He missed it terribly. I don't want to kill. He appealed to a sun god that might or might not have ever existed. Please.

***

Training with his mother was more difficult than training with his father, but he hated her lessons far less.

The night after his father had given his command to train with her, he came to his mother's rooms, alone. The baby was asleep in the far corner, completely silent for once; his mother was still in her day clothes. "Come here," she said with a sweet smile.

He approached and bowed.

"Come now," she said. "Surely things haven't become quite so formal between us. I know we haven't seen one another as often as we used to because of Aizu, but you're still my precious one." She radiated warmth and joy. "You're so bright, Akira. I always see the sun in you, even when it's dark."

Akira felt himself reddening from the praise. 

His mother clapped her hands. Two servants who usually attended his parents during the day carried in a portable wooden table, then brought in dishes full of Akira's favorite foods: fried rice and kamemeshi, tenmusu and katsudon, all steaming and salty and smelling of special spices from the kitchen. Akira had eaten dinner, so he wasn't really hungry, but he was always willing to eat more of his favorite foods. He reached for a plate and chopsticks--

"I did not say that you could eat, Akira," his mother said. She grabbed a plate and started loading up kamemeshi next to a tender, steaming cutlet of fried pork. Akira's mouth watered.

"But you're eating," he said.

"Not yet," she said, still loading her plate. After it was full, she set it aside. "Besides, you ate dinner, right? You shouldn't be hungry."

He nodded.

"But you want to eat."

He nodded.

"This is why your father asked me to teach you obedience." She sighed. "Obedience is rarely fun, Akira. You'll almost always want to do something else instead of obeying." She frowned a little. "If I commanded you, right now, not to eat any of this food, what would you do?"

He thought for a long moment. "I still want to eat it, but if I really can't," he said, "then I wouldn't want to waste it. Could I give it to the servants? Or the poor? Could we carry it somewhere so that other people could eat it?"

His mother ruffled the hair on his forehead. "There's my sweet boy." She ate a mouthful of rice with her chopsticks, then kept eating. "It's easy to obey when your belly is full and your mother is asking nicely, isn't it?"

He nodded.

"These tests are going to get harder. I am sorry about that." She frowned. "But this is a foundational lesson. If you don't obey your fellow Hunters or the Mikado, any one of them could kill you." She leaned forward slightly. "We are high-ranking members of the nobility, but we're at the very bottom of that tier. Our family's position is precarious, Akira. One wrong move could see us exiled--banished or executed or whatever else the Mikado deems appropriate."

Akira's face went white.

"I see that you understand." She opened her arms; he scurried over to her for a hug. "I would give anything to keep you alive--anything, including my own life. But I want you to listen to me and your father when we teach you. I don't want our family to suffer any more than it already has."

Akira frowned. "How have we suffered?" 

His mother smiled sadly and ran fingers through his soft hair. "I have caused your father to suffer," she said softly. "He never complains. I doubt he ever will. But it's still true." She sighed. "But you are bright and beautiful and strong. You can succeed while playing by the rules. That was never something I learned how to do."

His mother looked down at him and smiled. "Would you like something to eat?"

He nodded.

"You can't have any, I'm afraid," she said. She picked up her plate and ate from it again, clearly relishing the savory dishes. "Do you still want to feed others with this food?"

He nodded.

His mother ruffled his hair again. "You're too much like me," she said softly, as if she were speaking to herself. "I certainly hope it doesn't get you into trouble someday."

Chapter Text

Akira sat in his mother's room with his hands over his stomach as it growled at him. He hadn't eaten all day. He felt so weak that he could barely keep his balance when he bowed. His mother sat in front of him, eating dinner at a leisurely pace. His mouth watered.

"Do you want to eat, Akira?" His mother's voice sounded like it was coming from across a vast chasm.

"Yes," he gritted out.

"You can't," she said. Her voice held no emotion. "How does that make you feel?"

"Hungry," he said without hesitation. He'd been building to this day for weeks, eating less and less during the day to prepare for the torture of the night. He was glad he wasn't doing combat training at the moment; he felt too weak to lift his bow, never mind a sword. "Angry."

"Yet you're not eating."

"You told me not to."

"Good boy." She approached him, plate in hand, and ran her fingers over his forehead. His stomach lurched and growled like a wild, living thing. She finished the food on her plate, eating slowly and savoring every bite. "You know why we do these tests?"

"To teach me to obey," he answered.

"Yes," she said, "but do you know why?"

He looked up at her. She didn't usually talk this much during dinner, and while she'd explained her reasoning in broad strokes, she'd never gone into detail. "Why?"

"Your father disobeyed." Her frown was dark and forbidding; he'd never seen her look so terrifying. One of her body servants flinched. "He set aside the wife that had been chosen for him to marry me, a poor girl with no family and no prospects. Because of that, I had to earn a place--and he was whipped for disobedience. His father--" She hesitated.

She looked Akira in the eyes and said, "You will probably never meet your grandfather. He left us. He stays in the imperial palace at the Mikado's side and speaks poison about me into his ears." She took a deep breath. "I know what it is to be hungry, Akira. I know how it feels to starve, and to want nothing more than to eat, even at the immediate cost of my own life. You must endure this pain so that you understand the consequences of disobedience." She paused. "Do you understand?"

"I think so," he said. His stomach hurt and he felt flushed and weak all over, but there was a reason for it. "I'll always do what you say, mom."

"Good, Akira," she said with a firm nod. "You've mastered hunger and learned obedience. You go back to training with your father tomorrow."

He nodded sadly. "Does that mean I can't come back?" The pain of hunger was terrible, but he endured it. He had an excuse to see his mother every night. Before this weeks-long ordeal, he'd spent so little time with her that he'd run away in an attempt to escape his loneliness.

"Of course not." She cupped his cheek with her hand; it was so soft, so soothing, even though he felt weak and lightheaded and his vision had spots. "I'll still be giving you lessons, love. But first, you need to sleep."

He glanced at the food. "I guess I can't eat before going to bed."

She shook her head with a little frown, then pulled him into a hug. "You're doing so well," she whispered in his ear. "You don't want to repeat this test, do you?"

He shook his head. 

"Sleep, love," she said in a voice like a lullaby. "My sunshine." She kissed his forehead.

Akira fell asleep in her arms. She carried him to her futon and tucked him in, then lay down next to him. When he woke up the next morning, she had a large bowl of rice and a cup of water waiting for him.

"Eat slowly, now," she said. "I don't want you to get sick."

***

The end of obedience training meant that he went back to working with his father in the evenings, but his mother also made time for him during the day now during his lessons: calligraphy, history, painting and music. He had a separate tutor for all of them except music, which was taught by his mother. She sang and played for her theater productions; Akira knew that she'd taught his two older sisters to sing and play different instruments. He wondered what his instrument would be.

He followed his two older sisters to their first class, calligraphy. Their instructor, Moraresu Fumi, was a scribe that often went out to the villages to transcribe Yakoo language and culture at his mother's behest. She was a severe-looking woman with a high forehead, sharp, clear eyes, and perfect penmanship.

Akira was still hungry after breakfast, so his first calligraphy lesson didn't go terribly well. Reina could write beautifully--not just print, but cursive, too. He saw her doodling in High Script, which was Old Yogoese; Akira couldn't even read that yet. Kaori, though, seemed to be struggling about as much as him to write in neat lines across the thin rice-paper sheets.

"No, no, no," instructor Fumi said with an expression like thunderclouds. "You must hold your pen lightly and at the proper angle." She corrected Akira's grip, then Kaori's. Reina looked bored and was folding scrap paper into flowers.

"Lady Reina," instructor Fumi said in a tone of mild disapproval. "What are you doing?"

"I've completed my lines, instructor," she said innocently. "May I make flowers?" She held out a peony rose to instructor Fumi. When Fumi pulled the petals back, there was a haiku written in Reina's elegant script.

Fumi hesitated, but then said, "Oh, very well. You may fold five flowers, but then I wish you to assist your sister. She has been struggling to connect the letters for cursive." 

"As you wish."

No one suggested helping Akira. Perhaps he was simply too young. It was his first day learning to write properly. It was a lot harder to make the letters with the right strokes than it was to read them. He knew how to print because he'd started making notes about things he liked the moment he'd learned to read, but calligraphy was more like art.

He made it to the end of class with a full sheet of letters written correctly inside the lines. They weren't pretty, but they were legible.

"Acceptable," Fumi said. "No homework tonight, young master. Lady Kaori, I wish a sheet just like this one tomorrow morning."

Kaori gave Akira a death glare. He wilted.

"Must take after mom," Reina said airily, gathering up her paper flowers. "You know you're like dad, Kaori. You'll trounce him at history. Probably music, too."

Kaori grinned at the reassurance. Akira wanted to disappear into his seat. He decided right then that he didn't like lessons very much.

***

History was taught by a washed-out old man whose face seemed to be devoid of all color. His name was Seigo Maedan. Unlike instructor Fumi, he was from a high noble house of similar status to the Ayutans. He had retired from his work as a field historian to become a teacher after his children had grown up and married. He had no hair at all; his bald pate shone in the light of the study room's windows. Three small tables were lined up in the room, along with cushions for Akira, Kaori, and Reina to sit on. The setup of the calligraphy room was similar, but all calligraphy was performed while standing, so the tables were much higher.

Instructor Maedan acknowledged Akira's presence with a simple nod. "Sit," he said in a neutral tone.

Akira waited for his sisters to sit so that he wouldn't risk taking their accustomed seats, then took the free space in the front, closest to instructor Maedan. Instructor Maedan unfurled a map and tacked it to the wall using some sticky substance. He sat seiza and removed a wooden baton from his belt. 

"So," he intoned, "we have a new victim." 

Akira swallowed.

"Tell me, young man," he said, "what do you know about the founding of this nation?"

"Um...I know about Mikado Torugal, and us fleeing from the southern continent because the Master Star Reader recommended it. Our family accompanied them and protected Master Star Reader N-nanai and the Mikado." He hoped he'd gotten the names right. His parents had told him the story of the nation's founding since he was very small, but he hadn't heard it in quite some time.

"Not bad," instructor Maedan acknowledged. "How old are you, young master? Seven?"

"Six."

"It appears that I shall not have to assign you remedial work," he said. "You are free to follow along with lessons with your sisters." He pointed to the map with his baton. Kaori looked miserable again. 

"The history of the southern continent was one of war and endless killing," instructor Maedan said. "Our ancestors came north to escape that kind of life. We have had peace in New Yogo for almost two hundred years because of the wisdom of our ruler, the Mikado, son of Ten no Kami, the God of Heaven." He paused.

Akira was keenly interested in what instructor Maedan had to say. He wanted peace: peace more than anything. he didn't understand why a world at peace would require him or his father to kill.

"You will hear ill spoken of the Mikado from time to time," instructor Maedan said. "Do not believe it. Your loyalty must never be questioned. The houses of the Warriors Eight have always shielded both the Mikado's person and his reputation."

Reina yawned.

Instructor Maedan rapped his baton sharply on the small table she sat behind. "Miss Reina, please pay attention. Your family's future depends on your conduct."

Reina sat up a little straighter and said, "I am, sir. But no one is here to watch our current conduct except you. And I have heard this lecture many times."

"Your brother has not."

Reina shrugged and didn't so much as glance in Akira's direction.

Instructor Maedan opened his mouth to speak again when he was interrupted by the high-pitched wail of Akira's baby sister, Aizu. He pinched the skin above the bridge of his nose. "Not this again..."

Akira smiled at him in sincere sympathy. He was prepared to like him as a teacher, at least before he gave him an entire book in an older form of Yogoese to read before the end of the week, written by the first Rakusurans to settle in New Yogo. "They are the court historians and have the most valuable and accurate information," he said primly. "Take notes and ask questions. Don't worry too much about the antiquated language. This is designed to give you a beginner's familiarity with old script."

Akira looked down at the leather-bound book in despair. How was he supposed to read something this long and this complicated in a week? 

Kaori smirked.

***

Painting was taught by Souchiro Arima, a member of a slightly more distant branch of a noble family that was close in status to the Warriors Eight. He had been courting Moraresu Fumi for the better part of a decade, but his feelings were clearly not reciprocated. Akira had seen her toss aside flowers that he left on her desk and avoid stepping into rooms that he was in. He was an overbearing person, both in his teaching style and in his ordinary life.

"You have an excellent eye for composition," he said as he looked over Akira's oil painting of a vase of flowers. "The colors you have chosen are a bit more vibrant than they would be when representing the true object, but that makes the piece more eye-catching."

Akira didn't think his vase looked very good at all--not compared to either of his sisters'. There was a blotchiness to his flowers and lines that he didn't like. "It's all wrong," he said.

"It is not," instructor Arima said. "It is clearly a first attempt, but not a poor one by any means. As I have said, you have a natural gift for composition, like your mother and lady sisters. You could become a very great painter, if you desired it."

Akira glanced at his sisters' canvases with an expression of envy. Kaori had wreathed her flowers in a corona of sunlight that wasn't true in real life. Reina's was so pristinely perfect that it was like looking at the image of their model vase in a mirror.

Instructor Arima gave Akira the assignment to remake the same painting from memory the next day. He gulped when he thought about how much he suddenly had to do. Regular meals were great and all, but he almost missed his long, lazy, hungry nights spent with his mother. At least the expectations had been relatively reasonable: all he'd had to do then was not eat.

He was only six and learning to kill people. Now he had to read thick books and learn to paint as well. How was he even supposed to get any sleep?

***

Music lessons were held two hours after lunch by Akira's mother. She sat in her own chambers with a shamisen in front of her; Kaori played shamisen like her mother while Reina played a bone flute. His mother gave Kaori and Reina individually selected sheet music to practice, then sat down next to Akira and taught him how to tune her five-string shamisen. That done, she showed him how to grip the strumming bachi, not too hard and not too loosely. His hands started sweating.

"Wipe the bachi if it gets wet," she said. "We don't want to ruin it or rust the strings, right?"

He nodded. "Will I be playing shamisen, mom?"

"You will be playing every instrument I know," she said gravely. "Your future depends on that, Akira."

He glanced at Karei and Reina. "They're only practicing one instrument."

"They can also play others," she said, "but they are permitted to specialize. You are not." She smiled. "But you have always been very bright. I have complete faith that you'll master the shamisen, the flute, the drums, and the suzu bells."

He frowned. "Aren't suzu bells for temple maidens?"

"They are." She smiled. "But I know them, so I shall be teaching them to you. A new singing master will be coming today to sing for us and judge your voice."

Akira frowned. He felt like he'd been judged enough for one day. His mother pressed his lips with a finger and said, "No frowning, now. Music is a joyful and wonderful thing, Akira."

"When you're not cutting your fingers," Reina muttered.

"Or straying from the time signature," Kaori added.

"Or losing your voice," they said together.

"Hush, you'll scare him," his mother said. The two girls exchanged a look, then moved to opposite sides of the room to play scales and etudes until the singing master arrived. 

The singing master was a young man with dark hair and intense clear eyes. He didn't appear to be Yogoese; both his hair and skin were slightly darker than his father's, but Akira didn't think he looked much like his mother, either. 

The man performed a florid bow when he entered after being announced. "I am called Shinji Susuki," he said formally. There was a slight accent to his speech. "I was told that you summoned me, lady Ayutan."

"Shinji," she said, bowing a little. "It's been a long time, I know, but surely we don't have to stand on ceremony any longer." She beckoned him forward, then turned toward Akira. "Shinji and I are old friends. He's been working for some years as the leading entertainer of Tafmur, King of Sangal. I asked him to come during his slow time to help teach you singing."

"No fair," Kaori muttered as she fiddled with the pegs on her flute.

"All of you, naturally, shall be learning," his mother said, looking pointedly at Shinji and nowhere else. "I imagine you are exhausted from your long journey. Would you care to rest? We can begin formal instruction tomorrow."

Shinji smiled a little. "I would prefer to sing for you, my la--Karei."

"Please do."

"Would you like a specific song?"

Karei frowned and thought for a moment. She turned to retrieve her own shamisen, then nodded a little to herself. "I shall accompany you."

"'The Lost Princesses,' then?"

"As you say."

Akira blinked. His mother gestured for him to sit; he sat. His mother began strumming a melody with a simple rhythm; Shinji the court singer took a breath and began to sing in a voice that was light and high, like soft clouds in a summer sky.

Fires spread and winds blow
     Through city and palace and heart so cold:
The wide world's winds untimely blow,
     And soldiers climb the cliff with zeal,
 
Their footsteps echo. The drums boom.
     In days before Yogo was sold
And time began its walk to doom,
     Our God never denied appeal,
 
But all appeals now end in death.
     Torn harshly from their parents' hold
Princesses took their last free breath,
     And from these crimes there is no weal.
 
Better the fire had left them dead.
     I know the hate of hands grown bold.
View Ten no Kami's wrath with dread:
  His hate knows neither rest nor weal.

A chill went down Akira's spine as he listened. Some of the words were old and he didn't understand them very well, but he did understand the general contents of the song. The melody was measured and regular, like the footsteps of marching soldiers; the words he knew were all about bloodshed and war. He stood behind his mother and crouched down, hiding.

"Akira? What's wrong?"

Shinji smiled apologetically. "I admit that I am not the best singer for that song. It suits a deeper voice, one with more understanding and knowledge of warfare." He paused. "Is it still your favorite song, la--Karei?"

His mother nodded. "'The Lost Princesses' is part of a long ballad about the fall of Yogo--some ten or fifteen years ago now. It's hard to believe it's really been that long."

"Not this again," Reina muttered.

"Yogo's gone, mom," Kaori said.

Karei nodded sadly. "I know. But I still remember." She smiled a little sadly and put her shamisen aside. "You won't be able to play songs like that for quite a while," she said. "I admit to being curious about what kind of singer you are. So work with Shinji a little, all right?"

"He's a tenor, mom," Reina said.

"It's obvious," Kaori added.

"Well, then we can at least figure out your range." She smiled at him, then turned a sterner face on his sisters. "It's his first day of full formal lessons," she said. "You're being awfully rude."

"Me, rude?" Reina looked up with an artlessly innocent expression that wasn't fooling anyone.

"She's always like that," Kaori said with a shrug.

Karei sighed. "Don't mind them. They're just jealous."

Akira frowned. "Why?"

"Because you're my sunshine." She ruffled his hair. "And you've seen me a lot more this month than they have. I'm sure you can understand that."

He nodded.

"Let's have a picnic tomorrow," she said, "just us girls."

Kaori's face lit up. Reina looked skeptical. "You're not going to blow us off again, are you?"

"Of course not," Karei said primly. "Why would I suggest it if I were going to blow it off? You shouldn't be so suspicious of your mother."

Reina frowned a little, then sighed. "All right. Do you want us to bring anything?"

"Just yourselves," she said. "And I'll have your father take you out into the woods to look at nature. Doesn't that sound nice?"

Akira shrugged. He'd been hiking before and enjoyed it, but he had that big book to read and he had to redo his painting...how was he supposed to have time?

"You'll be off from lessons, of course."

Akira hugged his mother tightly and didn't let go.

Chapter Text

Akira's picnic with his father turned into a training session. He really should have expected that.

He did have a picnic basket packed by his mother that included many of his favorites, including umeboshi and salted rice. She'd packed egg sushi for his dad and enough onigiri to last for what seemed like days. He swung the basket happily as he walked with a short sword in his belt and his bow strung over his shoulder.

They walked, just the two of them, in companionable silence for a while. His dad found a shady tree with a hollowed-out space that seemed perfect for sitting in.

"This is one of our rendezvous points in this forest," he said to Akira. "Look up."

Akira did. There was a long black line along the bottom of one branch. It would be difficult to see from any great distance and impossible to see except from this angle. "This is an initial point, which is why there's one line. Other places have two or three. The paint is refreshed by Invisibles and those who know our secret."

Akira frowned. "But what are these points for?"

"Many things," his father said. "Missions. Training. Hiding. You'll learn them all as you get older. The lines are only the most obvious signs. Imperial guards use these locations for training as well."

Akira nodded in understanding. "Is this where we're going to picnic?"

His father almost cracked a smile. Akira grinned happily; his father almost never smiled when he was with him.

"I was going to press on, but I suppose we can picnic here," he said. He frowned a little, then took the basket from Akira's hands. "I'm going to scout ahead to the second rendezvous point, which is north. Wait here until I get back. That's an order, understand?"

Akira nodded. His father walked off, carrying the precious, mom-made food. Akira sighed and leaned his back against the tree. The sun was high; it was a warm day with a breeze. The branches of the tree above him swayed lightly in the wind. He sat down for a while, then became bored and decided to climb and take a look at his surroundings.

Climbing the tree was very easy; it had a lot of branches close to the ground. He could see the river from here, and mountains in the far distance across a grassy plain. This was the southern border of the city facing east, only a few hours' walk from their estate. He kept climbing higher, hoping to reach a high enough vantage point to see his house. The air was perfectly clear today; he could at least try.

Try as he might, he wasn't quite able to make out his estate from the top of the tree, though he could see the city walls. The branches were thinner here; he had to be very careful not to snap them so he wouldn't fall. He remembered what his father had told him about climbing: at least two points of contact, and preferably three.

He twisted around carefully, hoping to see some sign of his father coming back. He was hungry.

Strangely--though his father couldn't have gone far--he saw no sign of him at all.

That was when Akira started to think that this was all some sort of test. He frowned and climbed carefully down the tree. "He made it all the way back to the trunk when his feet slipped, leaving him hanging by his hands on to two thin, narrow branches.

"Ah!" He wished his dad were here. Or his mom. Or even Reina; she was a good climber and she'd probably help him if it looked like he was going to get hurt. He adjusted his grip and felt one of the branches in his hands snap. He held on, one-armed, taking panting, frantic breaths. He extended both legs to the tree and relaxed a little as the soles of his feet connected to the trunk. He wrapped his legs around it, then his free arm, clinging to the tree for dear life.

Akira shimmied down, sweating buckets with his heart in his throat. He touched the hilt of his short sword for reassurance, then thunked the tree with his sword hilt. "Bad tree." It wasn't really the tree's fault--he knew better than to climb so high without a spotter--but it felt good to blame it, anyway.

He was urgently thirsty, but had no water or food; his father had taken it all. He frowned as he remembered which direction the river was from here.

His father had told him to stay here, but the river was only ten minutes away at most. And he hadn't seen his father coming back yet; he probably had enough time to make it to the river for a drink, and then come back.

Akira wiped sweat from his forehead and nodded. The river was to the east. He faced it and started walking.

He'd taken scarcely ten steps from the tree when something sharp grazed his cheekbone. "Ow!" He saw a projectile fly past him into the tree: a dart.

Someone was out there. They'd attacked him! Akira retreated to the tree to use it as cover. No other darts flew at him. He sat down in the hollow at the base of the tree and tried to get his breathing under control.

He was still thirsty. And hungry. His heart beat fast and he was terrified. His father had ordered him to stay here, despite all that. Or maybe--because of all that? Was this really some kind of test?

Akira hunkered down with the tree at his back and stayed completely still.

A few minutes later, a man dressed as an imperial guard approached the tree. Akira stood up straight to face him, then bowed.

"Hello there," the guard said in a friendly sort of way. "You seem awfully young to be out here by yourself. Are you lost?"

Akira shook his head. "My father went to look for a picnic place. He'll be back any minute."

"Oh! Let's go find him, then, if you're sure he's not far. I don't like the idea of leaving you here alone. What's your name, son?"

"Akira," he said. "Akira Ayutan."

The guard bowed low. "I know your father. Come with me and we'll find him."

Akira took two steps away from the tree and froze. His father had ordered him to stay here. When he'd strayed from the tree before, his face had been cut. He shook his head. "I can't. I promised I'd wait for him here." He lowered his eyes, then mumbled, "Do you have any food and water?"

The guard appeared perplexed, but handed him a half-full waterskin. "I wish I had more, but I just ate lunch not too long ago. I see that you're hurt. Do you want me to stay with you?"

Akira shook his head. "My dad's coming. And you're a guard; you must have duties." He frowned. "Who are you, sir?"

"Takuto," he said. "Takuto Amusuran."

***

After he realized that Akira couldn't be budged, the guard left. Akira sat with his back against the tree, looking up through the branches. He was used to hunger by now; he was glad that the guard had given him some water. The cut the dart had made across his cheekbone throbbed. He rubbed at it, then his stomach, as the sun began its descent. He climbed the tree again, searching for his father, but he saw no sign of him.

His father returned at nightfall, without the picnic basket. He looked at Akira with a little frown. "I see that you were tempted to get a drink," he said. "But you didn't follow the guard." He tossed him an onigiri. 

Akira devoured the rice cake in three bites; he was starving. "Weren't we going to have a picnic?"

"We did," his father said. "You fell from the tree and cut your face on a branch. Remember?"

He used the same tone of voice that he always did when talking about Hunters' training. Akira nodded in understanding.

"Good. The next test will be harder. You won't get off with just a scratch if you disobey next time."

He touched his cheek and frowned. "If I hadn't gone away from the tree, could we have had a picnic?"

"Yeah." His father grinned bitterly. "Takuto took the picnic basket. He didn't lie to you; he does know me. But if you had followed him, you would have failed this test completely."

Akira froze to the spot. "And what would happen then?"

"Takuto would have taken you to the woods and left you there for three days."

Akira's eyes went wide. "But I--"

His father sighed. "I didn't think you'd fail." He rested a hand on his shoulder. "And if you had, I'd be watching you the whole time. I need you to learn this, Akira. It's foundational to everything you'll be and do in the future. Do you understand?"

No, not really. But he did understand that he needed to obey. "I'll do better," he said.

"I know you will." His father gave him another crooked smile. "Come on. Let's get home before your mother worries."

 
***

Akira and his father came home late. His mother was still awake, waiting in the estate's entrance hall; she pulled Akira to her chest for a long hug, then flicked her dark eyes up to her husband. "Tell Takuto not to scar our child's face."

"I'm sure it won't scar," his father said.

"Let me take care of that." She touched his face, making the wound smart. "Come with me, love. I'll put something on that cut to make it all better."

"I have to report back," his father said.

His mother nodded wearily. "I know. Ask for some time off next week, though, if you can."

"What's next week?"

She looked significantly toward Akira. He tilted his head, then hmmed. "Already, huh?"

"I set up the meeting today. It's all decided."

His father nodded. "I understand. Sleep well, you two. Tell the girls I'm sorry I didn't say good night."

"I always do." His mother smiled fondly. "Now go, before Mon scolds you for being late." A pause. "And I hope Takuto enjoyed the picnic basket."

"He did. He shared it with Mon, Hyoku, and Zen. And set some aside for the others." He sighed. "I didn't get to eat much of it, but it was delicious."

Akira nodded. "It was the best thing I ever ate."

His mom kissed his forehead. His father waved to them, then went back out the door of the estate.

"Let's get this cut looked at," his mother said with a frown. "And then I have to tell you about someone you'll be meeting. Meeting soon."

"How soon?"

"Four days from now." She smoothed his hair back, then took his hand and started guiding him to her rooms. "I hope you'll be good friends with her for a long time."

He frowned. He didn't have any friends, really. His sisters really didn't count. "Who?" he asked.

"Her name is Hana."

"Does she like flowers?" 'Hana' meant 'flower' in Old Yogoese.

"I'm not sure," his mother said. "Why don't you ask her when you meet her?"

"I will!"

She sat him down near her futon while she retrieved her medicine box. She opened a jar of salve that he'd noticed Reina using on her chapped hands after shamisen practice. His mother dipped her thumb in the jar and smeared the salve over his cheek.

"There. Don't muss that, and it'll heal up good as new." She smiled. "Get some sleep. You have a big day coming up, and you need your rest."

***

The next morning, Akira read through his ponderous history book, then worked on his painting. The perspective still seemed off even after he redid it. He asked his body servant, Yoshimi, to tell him what was wrong with it, exactly.

Yoshimi was semi-retired, having worked in his mother's theater for years as a set designer and painter. He gave the canvas a critical eye, then said, "It's slanted left. I can see it, but have not the skill to repair it. Your lady sister might be of assistance." 

Before Akira could object, Yoshimi sent a summons for lady Kaori. She had just finished her morning remedial calligraphy lessons; she entered with a scowl on her face. When she saw how scared Akira looked of her, she softened slightly. "What is it? Umi said you needed something."

Yoshimi bowed deeply, then flicked a glance toward Akira. 

"My painting is all wrong," he said. "I redid it, but it's still wrong."

Kaori smiled a little. "So Mr. Perfect needs my help, huh?"

"I'm not perfect," he muttered. He'd failed his dad's test and had a cut on his face. He hadn't gotten to eat his mother's picnic food.

"Yes you are," Kaori said. "The world treats you as perfect, so that's what you are." She lifted his paintbrush and stared at his canvas with a puckered forehead. "But your painting definitely isn't perfect. Here." She adjusted a few lines; the picture looked more balanced. Akira looked at her with clear admiration. 

"How--"

"You're seeing everything a little bit from the side." She bit her lip as the adjustments she made became more delicate. "It's a habit dad has, too. But he can't paint at all." She surveyed her repair with a smirk of satisfaction. "Stand directly in front of your models for a while so the perspective doesn't mess you up."

Akira nodded. "Thank you."

"For what?" she asked airily.

"For helping," he said. "I know it's early."

Kaori looked down. "Um, actually..."

"What?" he asked.

"I was hoping I could copy your calligraphy grid," she said, all in a breath. "I need the stroke diagrams. I don't know why I forget so easily. I can make the letter shapes fine--"

But the strokes weren't in the right order. He understood. His sister saw everything in front of her clearly, but she didn't always know the right way to do things. Getting sword strikes in a combination wrong could be fatal, so he'd never had trouble keeping his stroke order straight with letters.

But Kaori didn't train with a sword. She was better at using a brush to draw actual pictures.

Akira dug around in the papers on his desk and handed her the chart he'd made in class. "You can keep this one," he said. "I wanted to make a nicer one for instructor Fumi, anyway."

"Really? Thanks." She set aside his brush and lifted the chart. Then she frowned at him. "Are you hurt?"

"I fell at the picnic with dad yesterday," he said. He didn't look at her.

Kaori ruffled his hair. "Well, Mr. Perfect's on a losing streak, it seems. I don't mind. Makes you seem more human and less like mom's doll." She took a step back from him. "Don't be sad, Akira. Everyone hates lessons and has things they're good and bad at. Not everyone's good at everything like you," she said, with just the slightest trace of resentment, "but we all have our strong points."

"I think you're better at almost everything than me," he muttered.

"Of course I am." She put her nose in the air. "I'm older. Work hard and catch up, okay?" She left, clutching the chart in her hand.

Akira didn't like his sister's nicknames. He didn't think they suited him at all. 

"It's almost time for your history lesson, lord Ayutan," Yoshimi said.

"Right." He left his painting to dry and gathered up his history book. He hoped instructor Maedan didn't expect him to have understood it all.

***

As it turned out, instructor Maedan spent most of his energy that day trying to get Reina to engage with the book instead of Akira.

"But it's so boring," she complained.

Akira didn't nod, but he wanted to. There was one chapter that was all limericks about the Mikado that was kind of funny, but the style there was entirely different from the rest of the book, which was a dry record of facts that spanned from the nation's founding to about ten years ago, some years before he was born.

"Your family history is in this book, young lady," instructor Maedan chided. "An essay. Ten pages, on the historical Ayutans and their role in defeating the water demon. Due tomorrow."

Reina pouted and muttered something that didn't sound particularly ladylike.

"Um," Kaori said softly. "There--isn't a lot about the Ayutans in that book, sir. I've read it."

Instructor Maedan nodded thoughtfully. "And why do you think that is?"

Her eyes went wide in sudden understanding. "Because of our mother?"

Instructor Maedan nodded. "Now, you know I don't hold to family grudges and prejudices, but some do. Most records of your parents' marriage have been destroyed. There is a danger that all of you will be deemed illegitimate."

"What does that mean?" Akira asked.

"It means we could be thrown out of the house to live like poor people," Reina said flatly.

Kaori and Akira glanced at one another in alarm. 

"But, sir," Akira said, "there are some things about the historical Ayutans in the book. We know that the first Ayutan lit his arrows on fire, which hurt the monster enough for the other Warriors Eight to kill it."

"Just so," instructor Maedan said. "And what did you learn from that, Akira?"

"Uh...it's important to work together as a team?"

"No," instructor Maedan said. "The Ayutans live to serve in support roles. They didn't kill the monster; lords Orutoran and Amusuran did. Make sure you don't forget that."

Akira frowned. Why were all his lessons about denying what he wanted to do and listening to someone else?

"I'll assign you an essay, too, young man. Five pages, on the battle with the water demon, analyzing the basic tactics used by all the Warriors Eight. You will need to read this book for a fuller picture of the situation." He dropped another thick, musty-smelling book on the table in front of Akira.

He groaned internally. "When do you want it finished, sir?"

He stood up stiffly. "As soon as possible."

The glance Kaori gave him almost appeared sympathetic.

Chapter Text

Akira's studies preoccupied him for the next few days; he completely forgot about his meeting with Hana Kotosuku until the day before.

Chapter Text

After that, Akira's life fell into a long pattern of routine. He awoke every morning early to train in the yard with his father before breakfast, then attended lessons during the day with his sisters. Hana Kotosuku visited once every few weeks; they often read books together and exchanged little notes in them so their parents wouldn't see. 

Lessons continued to be dull and drab and soul-killing, but his calligraphy improved by degrees until it was almost as good as Reina's. He also learned to play the shamisen and bone flute passingly well, though he often messed up the rhythm with drums and bells. His father blamed his footwork discipline and had him switch his feet and bob and weave for hours on end to correct the fault. His painting improved as well, largely with Kaori's help. He gave her his calligraphy charts in exchange for her tips on drawing perspective.

He grew to detest history, much like Reina did. He didn't learn very much of interest to him there until after the Mikado fell ill with a lethal plague called Corruption.

The whole city fell ill, of course--not just the Mikado--but when he fell ill, the Ayutan estate felt it, like the shadow of a pall being cast over it. Akira and his sisters had never met the Mikado, though Reina was due to be presented to him during her adulthood ceremony in the winter, which everyone seemed to be dreading. 

But then the Mikado fell ill.

Akira found all news of the disease detestable and disgusting. Bruising and purple pus, augh. He was glad to be a noble and that he didn't have to go outside. None of the house servants got sick, either; his mother started to have everything delivered by merchants rather than risk having anyone venture out except for dire emergencies.

When Akira looked back on the plague in later years, he would be ashamed at how selfish he'd been--and at how little he'd felt the death of the man whose passing would change his entire world.

He had just turned twelve when it happened.  His coming-of-age ceremony passed without much by way of incident; his father passed him the traditional weapon of their house, a long sword, and said a few words about obedience and loyalty that went in one ear and out the other. He was accustomed to such lectures from instructor Maedan; he didn't need another. 

“What did I just say?” his father asked.

“Uh, obey the Mikado in all things and in all ways,” he said, injecting a note of confidence into his voice. He swore that he father actually smirked at him. He smiled back. They didn't always understand each other, but on some things, they were in perfect agreement. He would receive a different sword at his adulthood ceremony at fifteen, but he expected that his father's speech would be much the same. Akira would be expected to give a speech then, too. Akira was set to meet the Mikado and the Holy Sage in person a few weeks after his coming-of-age ceremony, provided the plague lifted; but the plague only worsened with time. Scant days after the ceremony, the criers and messengers came to the house to announce the news that Mikado Ishikawa was ill with Corruption, the plague sweeping Kosenkyo like fire. Every man, woman and child sank to their knees in prayer, including Akira; he might have been selfish, but he didn't want anyone to die a gruesome death, even the Mikado who put so many restrictions on how his family was supposed to think.

No one can force people to think a certain way. He was convinced of that. Instructor Maedan's lessons had sunk in; he could repeat back as many pious phrases as required to satisfy the man. But he didn't believe them. Reina didn't, either. He wasn't sure about Kaori, but he was fairly sure she didn't buy into the lie, either: why would she? Everyone always said that their family was at the bottom of the noble hierarchy--that the Mikado and even his own grandfather were working to slander them or bring them down. He was sure his family was smart enough not to believe in lies.

But he still prayed. 

And when the Mikado drew his last breath two days later, Akira permitted himself an entirely internal sigh of relief. He knew that this Mikado had hated them; it was possible the new one would, too. But it was also possible that the new one liked his family, or was indifferent: either option would be better. 

This simple, childish optimism was borne out when his father told him he'd be allowed to come to the Imperial Palace for the very first time--without having to meet the Mikado in person. The new one needed to officially ascend to the imperial throne with all the ceremonies due to his rank. For the immediate and very brief future, there was no Mikado to boss them around.

***

Before Akira was set to make his first visit to the Hunters' Tower, there was a bit of family drama that lived enshrined in Ayutan history for many generations to come. His father usually called it the Great Clothing Migration. Akira typically remembered it as The Day Mom Went Crazy.

Mikado Ishikawa had only recently fallen ill.  Akira's mother was pacing back and forth, muttering to herself; the theaters had been closed for weeks so she couldn't work, and she had no place to put her typical nervous energy. She had already reorganized all of her closets and made sure her sheet music was arranged as she liked. Akira's father still had to work, so she started sitting in on lessons with Akira, Reina and Kaori. It was awkward.

From this experience, Akira learned that his mother had learned to read late and wasn't terribly good at it. Instructor Maedan chastised her several times for reading the wrong word in recitation. Her handwriting was flawless, as was her painting and music--but reading the dense books that all three children had worked up to was too great a challenge for her. It frustrated her, too; he could see that in the tiny lines around her eyes that only ever appeared when she was angry.

The same tiny lines of frustration were around her eyes now, as she paced back and forth and looked around hopelessly for something to do.

Akira tuned his shamisen as she paced and fretted, thinking to sing her favorite song to her in an attempt to soothe her. Reina had the same idea, so they compromised and decided to harmonize the song. Reina insisted on taking the melodic line, leaving him with the much less interesting harmonic line.

“Fine,” he muttered. Reina was almost of an age to marry. He was legally allowed to work, though he wasn't officially an adult until he turned fifteen. Petty squabbling was for children.

At that moment, his father arrived from Hunters' Quarters, carrying a message requesting--of all things--clothes. "Clothes?" His mother's eyebrows went up.

There was, apparently, a boy at the Hunters' Tower who was about his same age, and this boy had no clothes. 

Akira's father put an arm around his wife's shoulders as she read the message and kissed her cheek. She ignored him in favor of the message.

"How does he not have clothes?" Akira asked. The idea stunned him to the core. Even when he'd dreamed about disobedience and persecution, he'd never considered the idea that he would be without clothes. Full closets were the norm in the Ayutan household.

"Takuto, your handwriting is awful," she complained in a strident tone that Akira had almost never heard from her. She clapped her hands, summoning her body servant. "Call Yoshimi," she said to Akira. "I need him to empty your closets. Please offer up whatever you can spare."

Akira's eyes widened. Reina smirked.

"I see you have something to do," his father said. "I'll leave you to it. I'm on gate duty tomorrow morning, so I'll let Takuto know that you're sending the clothes over."

His mother nodded. When his father pulled away from her, she pulled him back and whispered something in his ear. He blushed.

Akira didn't laugh. He was happy that his parents obviously loved one another. It made the endless lectures on obedience a bit less onerous to bear.

He summoned Yoshimi, then went to his main closet with his mother. She had her body servant and two house servants bring in two enormous chests. Akira's eyes widened again. "Do you really think that he has no clothes at all?"

She nodded. "That's what the message said. So he'll need undergarments," she said, selecting these from near the bottom of his closet; most of those shitagi and fundoshi had never been worn, or worn rarely. "Itasuran's colors are...oh no, I've forgotten."

She paused to look up this information, then returned, selecting clothes for every season with a practiced eye, mostly taking black and yellow things, since it turned out those were Itasuran colors. "What are our colors, mom?"

"Blue and green," she said, "like the sea. Your ancestor was a sailor. The Mikado elevated him when they reached New Yogo safely."

Akira didn't have much of a fondness for black or yellow, so he let his mother take the lot, and a few of the outfits he hadn't worn in months as well. 

But if she'd stopped collecting clothes there, Akira wouldn't have remembered this day as The Day Mom Went Crazy. She raided his father's closet, then each of his sisters', looking for additional socks and accessories. Neither of his sisters complained during this event, but the loss of a favorite pair of tabi weighed on Kaori's mind for months to come.

"One boy can't possibly need this many clothes," Akira muttered, forgetting that he was a boy with this many clothes.

His mother didn't pause for dinner; she kept packing clothes into the trunks she'd selected until the house's supply of trunks was exhausted. Akira retreated to the music room with his sisters to avoid the chaos of scurrying servants and his mother's bold and confident strides from room to room.

"I think I preferred the pacing," Kaori said as she scanned new sheet music for her flute.

"She's really bored," Reina said, blowing sweaty hair out of her eyes. The day had been warm even for summer, and her mother had just finished packing activities in her room.

Maybe dad shouldn't have tried to give her something to do...

Akira went to bed before his mother finished packing up clothes. He heard her give instructions to deliver the clothes to Hunters' Tower first thing tomorrow morning.

"But my lady," her body servant said, "what about the plague?"

That made her hesitate. "There have been no new cases in days," she said. "We'll be in and out. It will take only an hour, then we'll return home and monitor everyone for infection."

The servant nodded, then frowned. "We, my lady?"

"Of course," she said. "I'm coming with you."

The house went into an even further uproar. No one had left the house in weeks except to pick up supplies from outside the gate; now, guards had to be prepared to accompany the dozen or so chests of clothes his mother had selected--and his mother herself, apparently.

"Can I go?" Akira asked.

His mother shook her head. "You're not allowed at Hunters' Quarters yet, love. Too dangerous."

He gulped. "Isn't it too dangerous for you, too?"

"I've been there before." She bent and kissed him on the forehead. "You were very generous today. I'm sure the little boy you're helping will be grateful."

"What's his name?"

Her shoulders slumped. "I don't know. His family name is Itasuran. I couldn't read Takuto's handwriting for his first name, and your father forgot it." She smiled. "But I'll ask when I give them to him."

He nodded, then bowed and excused himself. He didn't sleep well that night; the house was too loud. And when he did finally wake up, his mother was gone.

Reina and Kaori were at the dining table before him when he came downstairs from his room to eat. "Did mom eat anything?" he asked.

Reina shook her head. "I've seen this before, when she really wanted dad to free another slave. She gave her all her money and all her clothes."

Akira blinked. "When was that?"

Reina snapped her mouth shut. "I'm not supposed to talk about it."

It probably had something to do with Hikari, then, or his parents' past. He really did need to ask his mother about that.

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

Akira met the new Mikado on a day of rain.

The older Hunters all bowed their heads and swore oaths of loyalty to him in the courtyard outside the Mikado's Palace, including Hasham, who wasn't old enough to be Yun--but apparently his father was dead or something. This was the imperial guard swearing-in ceremony; the actual Hunter swearing-in ceremony would take place behind closed doors much later, but Akira wasn't allowed to come to that. Akira glanced apprehensively at his own father and prayed without looking up. He had read in his books that the Mikado usually hid behind a bamboo blind so that he wouldn't accidentally look anyone in the eyes and kill them.

But this Mikado didn't hide. He stood out in the rain, face uncovered, with his attendants standing around him. They held a large black silk screen over his head to keep the rain off. He looked stern and forbidding, but he also seemed astonishingly young--much, much younger than Akira's own father. One of his wives stood next to him, holding his arm as he accepted the Hunters' oaths. She was pale and exhausted-looking. Akira understood why; there had just been a death. He'd never experienced one in his own household, but he knew many people had died of the plague.

After the Hunters swore their oaths, they were dismissed. Akira's father was asked to stay behind. His father shooed him off; Takuto Amusuran gripped his arm and steered him away from the courtyard of the Mikado's Palace.

"Will my dad be all right?" he whispered.

"I think so," Jin said. Hasham nodded firmly.

By the time they returned to Hunters' Quarters, the steady, drizzling rain was becoming a downpour. Takuto remained stationed at the gate while everyone else went inside. Hasham seemed reluctant to leave him. Akira was starting to understand why he'd seen Hasham using Jin's bath.

Is he like his dad or something? Since his actual dead is dead?

Hasham had shown him around Hunters' Quarters over the past few days--he seemed to have a detailed understanding of where absolutely everything was--but he'd shared very little about himself. The other Hunters dispersed at the gate; Jin followed Akira and Hasham to the mess hall, where they gathered in front of the fire. Akira was soaked to the skin and freezing.

Hasham vanished down the hallway before he could turn into the mess, then came back with one of Akira's own blankets for him, plus one for Jin; he'd forgotten one for himself. "Thanks." Akira dried his hair.

Jin took the blanket offered and wrapped it around Hasham's shoulders. Hasham frowned a little at him.

"I need to go collect Sun," he said. "You two stay here. No going outside alone today. I know it's quiet, but this is a vulnerable time, for us and the new Mikado. I expect you to stay safe." His eyes flicked between Akira and Hasham. 

Hasham nodded sulkily. "We'll stay here."

"Good." He left, trailing wet footprints behind him. Hasham's hands twitched; he sat down at the low mess hall table and started to draw. He had several charcoal sticks, so Akira asked for one.

Hasham hesitated, but he did push a blank sheet and a new charcoal stick to him over the table. 

"Thanks." Hasham was quiet and withdrawn, but he hadn't been mean since their first meeting. "What are you drawing?"

"My house," he said darkly.

"Itasuran estate? What does it look like?"

"Why do you want to know?" he asked, leaning forward so that his long, damp hair partially concealed what he was drawing.

"I've never been there." Akira thought for a moment, then said, "I'll draw you my house if you draw me yours."

Hasham's hand paused on his paper. He nodded.

Akira started drawing the garden where he trained with his father. He'd fallen on his face so much in that place that he was familiar with every inch of it: the soft sand of the Zen garden, the dark earth where his mother's favorite flowers from the southern continent grew. It was summer now; the wakura were in bloom, along with the tiger lilies and other common wildflowers that she'd cultivated in a noble's garden, simply because she found them beautiful.

The yard at Hunters' Quarters was wonderful in its way, but it was designed for utility, not beauty. "I wish I had colors," he muttered as he looked down at his picture.

"What colors do you need?" Hasham asked.

"Blue," for the wakura, "red, orange, and black," for the tiger lilies, "oh, and green. A few different shades, if you have them."

"We don't have that many colors in pencils," Hasham said with a little frown. "I can get you paint. Wait here."

Akira nodded. He wasn't sure he liked Hasham telling him what to do, but at least he wasn't mean about his orders like Reina was. In some ways, Hasham reminded Akira of his dad: inscrutable and strange, but ultimately well-meaning. He didn't think Hasham wanted to be mean for the sake of it.

He came back with a full color spread of paints and brushes, then laid down extra paper so that Akira wouldn't spill any paint on the table. "Jin gets mad if there's a mess."

"You seem to care an awful lot what Jin thinks."

Hasham didn't say anything. He worked on his drawing in silence. The paints were there, but he made no move to add any colors.

They worked quietly for a long while. When Hasham finished his picture, he started on another.

"You're done?" Akira asked.

"Yes," Hasham said.

"Can I see?"

"Only if you show me yours first," he mumbled.

Akira surveyed his painting with satisfaction. He hadn't yet mastered the trick of making sunlight where there wasn't any, like what Kaori could do, but he thought his picture did the garden justice. "The paint's still a little wet," he said, pushing along the edge of the thin rice paper. 

Hasham leaned forward and looked. "I haven't seen some of these flowers before." He pointed, but didn't touch the painting's surface. "What are they?"

Sun explained each flower's origin as best he could. Hasham nodded down at the painting. "It's pretty," he said, but he was frowning. "But you don't live right there, do you? You'd live outside if you did."

Akira nodded. "This is the garden behind the house. What about you? What did you draw?"

Hasham showed him. It was all done in black and white, but the river in the foreground was so perfectly shaded that it appeared to be flowing. Scattered wisps of cloud partially concealed the naturalistic-looking sunlight illuminating the scene. The river was surrounded by rushes and wild rice; on the other side was a sloping hill, on top of which was a wide paddock with four horses running around in it. One of the horses was pure white; the others were black or gray. Their eyes were tiny, but even they reflected a bright gleam of sunshine. Akira suspected that Hasham might be better at drawing than Kaori, but he'd never tell her so. He was certainly better at drawing than Akira was.

A boy leaned over the paddock fence to feed the white horse an apple. He had short, dark hair, but his face wasn't visible. Akira wondered if the figure was supposed to be Hasham.

There was a stable behind the horses. In the distance, way off in the upper right-hand corner, Akira saw the outlines of a house. It seemed less real than the rest of the picture; its sketch lines were still visible. It almost looked like Hasham had included it as an afterthought.

"Is this you?" he asked, pointing to the boy feeding the white horse an apple.

He shook his head. "It's my brother."

"You have a brother?" Akira asked.

"Had," Hasham corrected. "He's dead."

"Oh." Akira frowned. "I lost my brother, too."

Hasham looked at him very seriously for a long moment. "Is he dead?"

"I don't know," Akira mumbled. "We're not allowed to talk about him anymore."

Hasham's frown was bitter. "I never had anyone to talk to at home, except for him." He closed his eyes, then opened them slowly. "Do you remember anything about him?"

"No," Akira said. "He got taken away when I was little. Do you remember anything about yours? Aside from what he looks like, I mean?"

Hasham nodded sagely. "I remember everything."

***

Hirekazu bowed before the new Mikado in the rain. The Mikado's Harusuan wife clutched his arm protectively. If it weren't sacrilege to think so, Hirekazu would guess that the Mikado was actually frightened.

"Rise," the Mikado said in a trembling sort of voice. 

Hirekazu rose to his feet, but kept his eyes cast down.

"My father punished you for the crime of impurity," he said, "but my grandfather was formed in a more merciful mold. I always admired my grandfather's conduct and sought to emulate it." This was as close a thing that the Mikado could say as an insult to his father. "I believe a decade's worth of loyal service has more than paid for your fault. I shall release the elder lord Ayutan into your care."

Hirekazu nodded dumbly. He'd been under the impression that his father had defected to Mikado Ishikawa voluntarily, but it didn't sound like this was the case. "Forgive me, Your Imperial Majesty, but...may I request news of my son?"

The Mikado frowned slightly. The Harusuan Queen removed something from her sleeve and passed it to him. A shadow passed over the Mikado's face. His glossy black hair blew back behind his shoulders in the strong wind.

"I--I must inform you that your son is dead." He passed what he was holding in his hand to a personal attendant, who passed it to Hirekazu. "I am sorry. I thought my father had told you." A pause.

What Hirekazu held was a book with no cover, bound with silk thread. He placed it inside his own sleeve to protect it from the rain. "I thank you for the news, Your Imperial Majesty," he said. His voice didn't shake, but he was crying. The rain gave him an excuse not to wipe the water from his eyes.

He had hoped that Hikari would still be alive--but at least his father could come home. That was unexpected. "I have already dedicated my life and loyalty in service to you," he said to the Mikado. "But I will never forget this kindness." This was only half a lie. Mikado Ishikawa hadn't even told him that his son was dead, and he never thought he'd be able to speak to his father again. He bowed low.

The Harusuan Queen appeared genuinely touched. The Mikado's expression didn't shift. He commanded an attendant to free lord Hoshi Ayutan from his bondage and bring him here. 

While they were waiting for the attendant's return, Jin came back, leading Rai and Taga. "Your Imperial Majesty," Jin said, saluting before bowing. "It is my advice that you get out of the rain in the open. You need not heed it, of course, Your Imperial Majesty, but our most important role is to keep you safe."

The Harusuan Queen pushed a tendril of dark, wet hair behind the Mikado's ear, then leaned in and whispered something to him. He nodded. "I shall take your advice. Lord Ayutan, please tell my attendant that I have retired to the Second Palace when he returns with your father."

"Your Imperial Majesty," Hirekazu said. The Mikado left, along with the Harusuan Queen and his retinue. Taga and Rai accompanied them as extra security. Hirekazu and Jin were left alone.

"So, what did he want?" Jin asked. "Not to punish you again, I hope?"

"No," Hirekazu said. "Sanctions on my house are lifted. Karei will be able to perform in public now, I think--and he's releasing my father."

Jin smiled at him. "And your son?"

Hirekazu shook his head. "Dead."

Takuto put his hand on his shoulder. "My sympathy. Ishikawa was a monster. I'm glad he's ascended, and good riddance."

Hirekazu's eyes widened. "You shouldn't say that where people can hear you."

Jin sighed. "Do you know anything about how your son died?"

"The Mikado gave me this when he told me of his death." Hirekazu passed Jin the book concealed in his sleeve. As the current leader of the Hunters, he should get this information first, especially since he'd asked. It felt awkward handing it over. He would have felt better about giving it to Mon. Jin accepted the book, then hid it inside his own clothing as well. "I'll take a look when I'm off-duty, then return it to you. Aren't you assigned to the First Palace today?"

Hirekazu nodded. He saluted, then sprinted off to the First Palace in the worsening rain. 

Takuto returned to Hunters' Quarters to take care of the administrative forms that were always required whenever there was a major transfer of power within Hunters' Tower--a new Mikado, a new Queen, a new heir. There were also some loose ends to tie up with Mikado Ishikawa's wives. All his sons aside from Rin had died in childhood; his only surviving daughter was part of Harusuan house and lived on that estate. Ishikawa's Third Queen had proved barren and died young of a wasting disease, but the current Mikado's mother and Ishikawa's Second Queen were still alive. He had to see to it that they retired comfortably and easily to their families' estates. It was possible that some of the Hunters would need to escort them home, for safety's sake.

Zen was at the gate when he returned. He nodded at him brusquely; both of them were soaking wet and he wanted to get inside. "Any messages?"

"None," Zen said. 

"I'll relieve you in a little while," Takuto said. "There's something I need to take care of, first."

"Sir." Zen seemed a bit more shell-shocked than the others that the Mikado was dead. He'd only recently been married; the sudden change in power was likely a bit of a jolt. 

"Are you all right?" Takuto asked before going inside.

"Fine, sir," he said. "It's just...a grim day."

Takuto nodded. Zen hadn't suffered nearly as much as the other Hunters under Ishikawa's rule. His father had been a prudent man, and had relocated his family to a villa outside the city as soon as Ishikawa ascended to the throne. He'd stayed behind in Kosenkyo alone. It was a brilliant idea, in hindsight; one that the previous Rai had emulated--and the previous Taga, too late.

Takuto sometimes wondered if sending his family to safety would have been the wisest course, but he knew that, even if he could go back in time, he wouldn't have been able to send Sayuri away--and she'd never let the children be taken from her. He and lords Rakusuran and Orutoran had opted to make their stand here, if it came to it. The Ayutans had not been given a choice.

And then there was Isamu Itasuran, who had indulged Ishikawa's every whim--even whims the Mikado wasn't previously aware of having. Everyone agreed that Ishikawa had only become worse and more tyrannical with time. Ishikawa was dead, but the man who'd tended and watered the seeds of his malice was still living. Takuto seethed as he stalked down the hallway to the mess area. He'd planned to look at the book when he was done with his administrative work and went off-duty, but the idea that it contained information about a dead Hunter-in-Training compelled him to investigate. He liked to think it was what Ryuu would do, if he were here.

Come on, Ryuu, wake up.

There was no longer any chance of Ryuu dying, but his long illness had made him weak, confused, and prone to losing his balance. He likely wouldn't return to Hunters' Quarters and regular work for at least a few weeks.

Until then, all of Ryuu's work was Takuto's. That meant protecting the Hunters and their families, no matter what. A chill went up his spine; he went to check on Hasham and Akira to make sure that they were still safe.

Hasham sprang to his feet when he walked in the door of the mess hall. "At ease, Hasham," he said with a slight chuckle. "It's only me." He and Akira had been seated across the table from one another, apparently drawing pictures. It was a nice, settled activity that kept them both indoors, so Takuto approved. He glanced at Sun's painting of a garden and was impressed; Hasham never used more than one color in his drawings, perhaps because that was the style he was accustomed to.

Hasham crossed the room and handed Takuto a blanket with his head bowed. He accepted it this time, settled it over his shoulders, then brought the book that Sun had given him over to the mess hall's roaring fire.

He opened it to the first page with writing and frowned. It was written in a strange cipher that he hadn't seen before. He paged through it, hoping to discover some kind of pattern to it that would help him crack the code. He could tell that it was Sangalese in style; he suspected the book was in Sangalese as well, at least in part.

"Pirates," he muttered. Maybe slave traders. He got to the end of the book and blinked in disbelief at a diagram of a withered, severed arm.

Another.

A severed leg.

Another.

A cut-out tongue, complete with cross-section.

An anatomically correct sketch of a boy without any limbs.

Takuto closed his eyes. The book didn't end there--there was more after that--but he didn't need to know much more. He understood exactly what had been done to Hikari.

He suddenly regretted that he wasn't able to kill Ishikawa twice.

"Jin?" Hasham asked quietly. "What's wrong?"

"Cipher," he muttered. "The language is Sangalese, I think, but the code to unlock these is usually a name." Hikari's? He tried it, but that didn't work.

"Can I see?" Hasham asked.

Takuto shrugged. "Look over my shoulder. There are things in here that I'd rather you not see."

"All right."

"What about me? Can I see?" Akira asked.

Jin hesitated. "How good are you at codebreaking?"

Akira looked down. "I, uh, haven't had much experience."

"We'll try first," Takuto said in a reassuring tone. "Don't worry."

Akira nodded.

Takuto was relieved; Hikari's brother shouldn't see this. Hasham leaned over his shoulder and took in the cipher. He froze.

"Hasham?"

"The word to unlock it is 'butcher,'" Hasham said. "It's a standard slave journal. Only the ones he really liked got journals coded to their names."

Takuto looked at him with an expression of pain. "Slave journal?"

"I saw him writing in them, sometimes." He frowned. "They're how I learned to read."

"What are you talking about? What is that book?" Akira asked.

Hasham and Takuto exchanged a look.

"You're brother's dead," Hasham said quietly. "Just like mine. The same person killed them."

"What?" This was a surprise, but not a shock. He'd never known his brother, so him being dead didn't have too much of an effect. Hasham and Takuto appeared much more upset. "What happened to him? How did he die?"

Hasham and Takuto exchanged another look. 

"Let's draw something else," Hasham said in a tone of finality. "I'll draw you and you draw me?"

Akira's forehead puckered in confusion. Takuto nodded at him in encouragement. "Uh, fine...I guess."

They sat back down at the mess hall table. Takuto considered throwing the book into the fire, but he didn't. Hirekazu deserved to know. Karei deserved to know. He left the mess hall and went to his own quarters, which were full of Hasham's things now: his clothes, his borrowed weapons, his pens and paper and bottles of ink. It had never been so cluttered in this room before; even his bed wasn't his own anymore. Hasham slept there, and he let him because having him sleep in Yun's room was unthinkable.

He didn't really mind the mess; it reminded him a little of when Touji was a toddler, leaving trails of destruction everywhere. He picked up a pen and a piece of paper and began transcribing the book into Yogoese. He took his time to make his handwriting clear, though it was never going to be beautiful: this was another area where Ryuu outmatched him. But perhaps beautiful clear script wasn't appropriate for a text like this.

Hikari's limbs had been amputated one by one, with space between so that the boy could recover. He had fought, which was why his right arm had been cut first; his tongue had come next, then each limb in succession. It had taken fully six months to complete all the amputations.

During that time, the boy was also exposed to other tortures. Rapes. Beatings. Whippings. Starvation. Isolation. All of this was recorded neatly, measuring reactions and recovery times from physical damage. He was a few pages in before he realized he was looking at Isamu's handwriting.

He closed his eyes. Isamu again. All the Hunters had known that he was close with Ishikawa. Ryuu's father had even discovered something of Hasham's situation, but had been threatened into keeping silent. We should have noticed before. He would never forgive himself for not noticing before all of this had happened.

Hasham had implied that there were more of these slave journals. It was possible that Hasham had one, himself.

Takuto turned off his thinking, rational mind and focused on putting words on the page. The Ayutans had to know this had happened. Ryuu had to know. He knew that it was too late to fix any of this now, but they could consider how to prevent anything like this from happening in the future.

He remembered when Hikari had been taken, but he hadn't remembered the boy's face until he'd seen it in the journal's diagrams. The boy had gone to the stone dungeons underneath the palace, at first. The guards had treated him well; he and Ryuu had seen to that.

But then the boy had vanished without a trace. Ryuu had commanded all the Hunters to search for him in secret, but he'd never been found. Takuto scoured the journal for clues about where all this torture had taken place, but there were no location details given.

Shockingly, amputation and beatings hadn't killed the boy. Poison had. Isamu had been testing a new blend of poisons, designed to be undetectable. Apparently, he'd messed up the dosage. The tone of the journal conveyed disappointment.

Maybe Hikari was supposed to be alive, but he doubted it. And the Ayutans getting him back like that--it might be worse than death.

He had to ask Hasham about the other slave journals. He might know where Isamu had conducted these sick experiments. Even if he knew of one other slave, that might allow the Hunters to save someone else's life--and blow Isamu's long history of illegal slavery, torture and abuse wide open.

You won't hurt anyone else, Takuto insisted to Isamu in his mind. I won't let you.

***

Nozumi did not relax until a full month had passed since her escape. Isamu Itasuran was not dead--of course he wasn't; he was a force of nature: impossible to kill. But he was hampered in his movements by physical disability. One of his co-workers, fellow assassins all, had finally discovered some of his activities and put him down like a mad dog.

Nozumi considered this fitting. She briefly considered returning to Itasuran estate to finish her former master off herself, but her hands shook at the mere idea of it. He'd conditioned her not to harm him; she would have to be content with the idea that he could no longer harm her.

Or so she'd thought.

She'd been staying at Akemi's for the better part of a month, singing and dancing to earn her keep; she was too physically scarred to be worth much as a sex worker. One of the enforcers he commonly used to bring in runaways, Itachi, tracked her down to Akemi's, but she spotted him before he saw her and remained outside the teahouse in her geisha garb, watching him.

She was probably unrecognizable like this. Most of her master's enforcers knew her as his dog, and she was typically dressed and coifed accordingly. It was pleasant to feel like an ordinary woman again; freedom itself was pleasant, even without Karei, though she still spent hours every day searching for her.

The only Karei anyone knew of was a woman named Karei Ayutan, a high noble lady. That didn't sound like her Karei at all. Her Karei was a half-Yakoo girl with a china face, brittle like glass and hard like steel at the same time. Karei had promised to save her, and she'd failed. It made sense that Karei was dead now, too.

Nozumi wasn't sure she'd mind being dead, but she certainly didn't want to give up on being free. She strode confidently into Akemi's teahouse with a coquettish grin, hiding her face behind her fan. Itachi passed her without giving her a second glance.

But another man came later, when she was sleeping. She felt him at the foot of her bed before she saw him and kicked both legs out to trip him. He fell. She climbed on top of him and clawed his eyes out with her long fingernails, clamping one hand over his mouth to muffle his screams. The teahouse was stirring now; Nozumi grabbed the man by the neck like a rag doll and yanked with all her strength.

She heard a sickening crack as the man's neck broke.

Nozumi's door slid open. A young girl, new to the teahouse, stood there. She took in the bleeding man and the red on Akemi's hands and clothes with panic in her eyes. Her lips trembled finely; she opened them and almost cried out--

"Hush," Nozumi said. "The danger is past. I will clean this up and be away from here by morning, so please don't be scared and tell on me."

The girl hesitated. "Did he hurt you?" she whispered.

"He wanted to kill me." Nozumi shrugged, then lifted him up, placing his arm over her shoulder. "What's your name, girl?"

"Peony," she said.

"Peony," Nozumi said. She smiled, and it wasn't entirely unkind. "Don't be a teahouse girl, or a geisha. Get out of this. Do something else instead."

Peony frowned. "Aren't you a geisha, miss Nozumi?"

"I was," she said, settling the man's weight more easily over her own shoulders. "And look what happened to me." 

Peony nodded slowly in understanding. 

"I'll be back to clean up," Nozumi said. "Don't follow me."

"Yes, miss."

She left the teahouse, carrying the man. "Oof, you're heavy. Master feeds you too much." She carried him all the way down the street to the alleyway that led into the first rice fields outside the city walls. There were tar pits there, perfect for throwing a body into and making it disappear. All she had to do was avoid guards or anyone curious.

By good luck, it was late, and the moons were both on the wane: it was very dark. She could only tell where she was by following the very edge of the stone road. She passed a few men, all drunk with their eyes spinning; she gave them a wide berth and pretended that the man she was supporting was also drunk.

Nozumi made it to a tar pit without incident and threw the man in. In the dim light of the stars, she identified this particular enforcer as Valnan, the main Sangalese trafficker in Kosenkyo.

"Huh. Not a dog after all."

Valnan was not as powerful as her master--who could be?--but he didn't work directly for him, either; they both served the same master in a land far to the south. Perhaps Valnan had found her because he was looking for Isamu.

His head sank into the tar. Nozumi spun on her heel and returned to the teahouse. She had to get her room thoroughly cleaned and be gone by morning.

She wasn't ready to stop being free yet. If Karei was dead, she wanted to verify that first. And if, by some miracle, she wasn't--

--well. Then, Karei had broken her promise and left Nozumi for dead. She wasn't entirely sure she could forgive that.

Chapter Text

The children were asleep. Hirekazu was back at work. Karei's newly returned father-in-law had taken over a guest suite; he'd said scarcely two words to her before retiring to bed. Rain pattered on the roof of the silent study room where Karei had taken refuge to be alone.

She flipped through the book her husband had given her with trembling fingers. The script was lord Amusuran's, halting and clumsy, but unusually legible. She almost wished he'd blurred the words more for her sake. The diagrams shown in the original version of the book, written in code, had been so horrific that they were burned into her mind after a single glimpse.

How--why--

The day had been full of terrible and heart-wrenching surprises, but this was the worst of all: her son dead, and in one of the worst possible ways. She had always known that the previous Mikado was evil. He had opposed her marriage with all the pressure and power at his disposal; she suspected that this vindictive death had been selected especially for Hikari out of the Mikado's malice. She threw the book across the room and hugged her knees to her chest.

A shadow passed over the open doorway of the study room. She looked up and saw Seigo Maedan, her children's history instructor. His bald pate shone in the flash of lightning through the windows.

"Lady Ayutan?" he whispered. "Are you all right?"

She nodded. "I'm fine, lord Maedan. Please don't trouble yourself. Go back to sleep."

"I find myself disinclined," he said. "I love thunderstorms."

He took a seat across the room from her and looked out the window at the two moons and a sky full of lightning. Dark clouds passed under the high moons at blinding speed. The Yogoese believed that lightning was god's wrath, but that was not what the Yakoo believed. Lightning was like sunlight. In the temperate north, the sun was a wonderful gift of life and warmth. In the tropics, the heat of the sun could kill people--cause their skin to blister and turn purple and slough off. 

And so, the Yakoo believed in the ambivalence of nature. Lightning would strike the occasional person or house or tree, but the fire it caused in the forest was likely what taught people how to harness fire's power in the first place. Nothing did harm without good--except maybe Mikado Ishikawa.

Karei frowned at Seigo. "My husband didn't ask you to watch me, did he?"

He smiled. "If he had to tell me, I wouldn't be much of a guard." He got up and picked up the book she'd thrown. She made no move to stop him; the entire house would know soon enough what had happened to her oldest son. Her firstborn--precious and irreplaceable.

Names had meaning among the Yakoo, too, more so than among the Yogoese, whose names rarely held intrinsic meaning. She had named her sons with Yogoese words for "light" in the hope that they might successfully fend off the darkness that had dogged her footsteps since she was a little girl. But she was no magic weaver; she had no way of weaving spells to shield her children; that was obvious. That was why Hikari was lost to her.

Hikari was only six when he was taken. He'd been in Hunters' training for about four months then. Imperial guards had come to the house in the middle of the night and snatched him, bold as brass. Reina had been asleep next to him. When the guards came, she'd refused to let go of his hand. The guards taking him had broken her arm.

Karei closed her eyes and took deep breaths so she wouldn't cry.

"I'm sorry," Seigo said after a long pause.

"I know," Karei said. Seigo was a precautionary figure: a retired guard and historian with important contacts throughout the city. His facade protected her surviving children; all of them could recite oaths of obedience to the Mikado by rote because of him, and their court etiquette was beyond reproach. Karei imagined that it was boring, and perhaps a little disheartening, to hear the same lessons and the same message over and over again: a message of servitude and worthlessness. She might not be a slave anymore, but she and all her children were still forced to toe the line or face the consequences.

Nothing could be worse than losing her son in this way--except losing all her other children, too. "You can stay," she said softly.

"Thanks, my lady." He smiled up at the dark sky. "I'd rather sit than pretend to hide in the corner standing upright."

Seigo was overprotective. Karei found that strangely comforting. She fell asleep in that room alone as the storm passed over, with Seigo Maedan standing--or rather, sitting--guard over her.

***

The next morning, Akira was summoned to his mother's rooms early, before Hunter's Training with his father, even. She appeared withdrawn and very pale, but she smiled when he entered the room. "There's my sunshine."

Akira scratched the back of his neck and looked down. He was getting too old for the nickname, probably, but he still liked it. 

"Your father told you about your brother," she said softly. "Right?"

"That he died?"

His mother nodded. "That's why I summoned you here early today. We have no time to waste." She summoned her body servant and said, "Set up the screen. We'll be changing."

"Yes, my lady."

The body servant unfolded her silk screen and opened the closet closest to her folded-up futon. "Come here," his mother said. "Let's get you dressed."

"But--those are your clothes," he said with a little frown.

"I have some that will fit you. No need to be shy."

"But--they're girls' clothes." Women's, actually, but his mind didn't make that much of a distinction there yet. 

"Yes, they are." His mother smiled. "You're going to be a girl today, Akira. I'm sure you'll find it an enlightening experience."

Dressing behind the screens was a bit fussy, but his mother helped him and Yoshimi always helped him dress anyway, so he was used to it. The makeup was very strange--why did they need to paint their faces white and their lips red to go outside? But it all smelled nice and felt cool on his skin. It was high summer, muggy and hot; anything cooling was welcome.

"This is good makeup," his mother said as she dusted something red over his eyelids. "We wear this for ornamentation, to make ourselves into beautiful objects to draw the eye."

Akira remembered the description of the princess in "Sousuke and the Mountain." "But women aren't objects," he said.

"Very good, Akira. Many men never learn that." She just barely restrained herself from ruffling his hair. It would take time to do it up all over again. "It is useful, today, for us to be beautiful. Trust your mother on this."

He frowned a little. "You don't need makeup to be beautiful."

She laughed. "Neither do you, love. Let's get your obi tied. I'll fetch some umbrellas, and we'll go to a teahouse for breakfast."

"What's a teahouse?"

Her lips quirked upward. "You'll find out."

They left the estate in the pouring rain with thunder echoing around them and shaking the ground beneath their feet. "Is it safe to be out here?" he asked. The plague was over, but this looked like a pretty bad storm.

"We'll be all right," his mother said with a bright smile. "It's not far." They walked close together with their oil-treated cloth umbrellas open so that the rain wouldn't wreck all the careful preparations they'd made with their hair and clothes. When his mother lifted the skirt of her kimono to prevent it from dragging on the ground, he did the same.

The Ayutan estate was the closest of all the Hunter estates to Kosenyo's Lower Fan, where the poor and common class lived. The Lower Fan was the largest part of the city, expanding out into rice and wheat fields past the main gate leading to Mountain Shadow Bridge over the Blue Bow River. Akira could see the river if he squinted through the rain.

"We're going to the Lower Fan?" he asked. "Why?"

"That's where all the good teahouses are. You'll see." She directed him toward the right-hand side of the street. A series of squat buildings with flat roofs done in Yakoo style lined the road. 

"You look like a girl, Akira," his mother said, "but you do not walk like one. Watch me for a moment."

He did, then started making the effort to stand up straighter and take tinier steps. Kaori and Reina did this all the time, and it didn't seem that hard--maybe he should try to copy them? Copying Reina felt wrong somehow, like she was too unique and individualized (also: she'd kill him if she ever found out), so he decided to try emulating Kaori instead. I'm Kaori, he told himself--even if it was only temporary.

The stone street slanted up sharply all of a sudden, revealing more Yogoese-style buildings. One was so large that it could be an outbuilding on their estate. Its walls were white: its roof, black, shiny tile glittering like bits of mica in the low light streaking through the clouds overhead. The doors were ornamented and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and painted red and white. There were two windows in front, near the doors, but the rest of the building appeared windowless.

"Here we are," Karei said with a smile. "What will you have to eat?"

"What are you having?"

She considered for a moment. "Whatever the house specialty is. First, though, we need to be seated and wait for a room." She escorted him through the teahouse's double doors into a spacious, brightly lit waiting area with cushions scattered in each of the corners. His mother led him to a corner with beige cushions. He watched her sit down, then tried his best to emulate her movements. They were so fluid and graceful and easy; he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to match that. That's okay. Kaori's not as graceful as mom, either. At least not yet.

A few moments after they sat down, an interior door slid open. A girl perhaps Akira's own age, or younger, came to greet them. Her hair was done up in a simple bun with the ends of pink silk ribbon trailing over her shoulders. Her kimono and obi, too, were a soft pink and simple in style. Akira thought she looked a little like a rose, or some kind of flower.

The girl got down on her knees and brought her head all the way to the floor. "Welcome, esteemed guests," she said. "I am Peony. The mistress is opening the teahouse for the day, but she will be with you shortly. If there is anything you wish, I will fetch it for you."

Peony. Akira thought the name suited her. He glanced at his mother. 

"We will wait for your mistress, Peony," his mother said. "Please, go about your work. I promise we will not interrupt you."

"Thank you, my lady," Peony said, raising her head. She wore full makeup, like his mother--and himself. It was a little hard to tell what her face would look like underneath. Perhaps that was why his own disguise seemed so successful; it must be a bit difficult to see his true face. He wasn't sure people were supposed to be painted like vases.

But his mother had described the meaning behind the makeup, so he didn't complain.

The teahouse's exterior doors slid open, revealing a man in a dark brown kimono and stained hakama. He stumbled into the teahouse and frowned. "Sake."

Peony rose to her feet and approached the man cautiously. She was about to get to her knees to perform her customary greeting when the man grabbed her arm and pulled her upright. "I said sake."

"Of course, sir," she said, lowering her head. She tried to twist a little to remove her arm from his grasp, but he didn't let go.

Akira got up. His mother shook her head at him. Her eyes seemed to say: Watch.

Peony tried to extricate herself again. The man stumbled forward and caught himself on the girl for balance; she lost her footing, tumbling backward and down to the ground--face-first.

Akira winced.

When Peony didn't move, the man seemed to realize what he'd done. He fled through the still-open exterior doors and didn't bother to close them behind him.

The door to the interior of the teahouse opened with a loud snap. "Karei!" A woman in a green kimono with jade combs in her gray-black hair rushed over to his mother and seized her hands in both of hers. "Are you all right?" Her eyes flicked down to Akira. "Your daughter? Are either of you hurt?"

Karei shook her head. "We're fine, Akemi," she murmured, "but the little one seems a little worse for the wear." Karei extricated herself from the woman, stood up and approached the still form of Peony. Akira sprang into motion and extended his hand to the girl.

Peony raised her head a little, then looked at his hand in confusion.

"Up you go," Karei said, hauling her bodily to her feet when she didn't take the proffered hand. "Are you all right, dear? That must have been frightening for you."

The girl nodded.

"Peony," Akemi snapped. "This is a high noble lady. Greet her properly as you've been taught."

"Yes, mistress." Peony got down on her knees and brought her forehead all the way to the floor.

"Go easy on her, Akemi," Karei said. "She's just had quite a fright, after all."

Akemi folded her arms. "Come back with me, Peony. If you've eaten, it's time you start work."

"Yes, mistress." She raised her head. There was a slight bruise developing over her eye from where she'd fallen on her face.

Akira glanced at his mother in alarm. She smiled. "If you don't mind," Karei said, "I would like to hire this one on for the morning. My s--, ah, daughter is learning how to be a proper lady, and that can't be done without knowing the fine arts of drawing, painting, dance and musicianship."

"Quite so," Akemi said with an indulgent nod. "Though I dare say your daughter won't have any trouble attracting suitors regardless." 

Akira blushed and looked down.

Akemi shifted her gaze to Peony. "This one has a gift for dancing." She paused, then said, "Accompany the ladies Ayutan to the noble suite."

"Yes, mistress." Peony bowed low again.

"Have you eaten?" Akemi asked. "We have that salmon roe you used to like so well on the menu today."

Karei smiled. "You remembered. I would love some. Aki--Aki? Would you like some roe as well?"

Akira nodded. Aki was a girl's name; his mother had almost forgotten about his disguise. Frankly, so had he. Everyone seemed to think he was a girl, and he didn't really mind that they thought that--though the idea that men might want to marry him when he looked like this was a bit alarming.

He and his mother rose to their feet, prompting Peony to get up, bow to them, and lead them out of the main entrance hall down a hallway. They went all the way to the back of the building and turned; Peony slid open a rice paper door.

"The noble suite, my ladies Ayutan," Peony said stiffly. "Your breakfast shall arrive shortly. Is there any entertainment I can provide to while away the time?"

"Akemi said you were skilled at dancing," Karei said as she entered the room. "I should like to see that, but first, dear girl, let me take a look at your eye."

Peony winced. "It's fine, my lady. Really--"

"--I am a noble and have made a request." Karei's smile didn't reach her eyes. Peony paled.

"I can play," Akira said when he saw a shamisen on its stand in a corner. "Mom can give you medicine, and then she can dance. When you feel better, you can dance with her."

Peony blinked at him. He realized a fraction of a second too late that he'd been speaking like a boy and not a girl.

"Aki!" his mother snapped at him. "How many times have I told you to use proper language!" She shook her head a little; there was a faint pink flush on her cheeks. "Please pardon my daughter. You understand now why she needs proper socialization."

Akira blushed as well. Peony nodded at him uncertainly.

Karei settled herself down on a red cushion and removed a vial from her sleeve. "Sit down here, Peony," she commanded. "I'll put this on your eye. It should prevent swelling and it will cover the dark mark of the bruise."

"Thank you, my lady." Peony sat where she was told and submitted to Karei's ministrations to her eye. Akira picked up the shamisen and played an easy-going dance from Old Yogo that Kaori had always liked; the rhythm was catchy, but the pace was slow. Peony started tapping her foot in time to the music.

"I have not heard this song," she said a little breathlessly. "What is it? May I ask?"

"You may." Karei smiled faintly. "It is a waltz from Old Yogo, played at parties in their imperial palace. The song is uncommon, but my daughter favors things from the old kingdom."

That wasn't really true...but he had an exhaustive historical and cultural education of both Yogos, so really, he could take his pick. He was pretending to be Kaori, so he'd chosen her favorite song. 

Their breakfast arrived. Peony served it, then sat seiza in the corner of the room with her head bowed. Akira asked her to share some of the food. She glanced at Karei, who nodded.

"Have you eaten yet today, Peony?" Karei asked. "Please, come enjoy our meal with us."

Peony kept her eyes cast down as she joined them at the table. "You are too kind to me," she said as she began serving herself. The portion she gave herself was so small that Akira added another slice of roe with his own chopsticks.

She looked up at him. Their eyes met.

Karei clicked her tongue. "Let the girl serve herself, Aki. Only she knows how hungry she is."

Akira nodded in assent. His mother told him that it was impolite to play the teahouse's instruments when Akemi had sent them in with an entertainer, which made Peony blush and apologize. She performed a shrine maiden dance with suzu bells, Akira's worst instrument, and looked like a rose blooming in summer. The rain ceased and sun streamed through the windows as she danced, feet making almost no sound as she whirled and swept her feet over the polished floor. The bells had a soft and silvery chime.

So that's what a girl is.

His sisters were girls; he understood what girls looked like and acted like, but he felt that there was a distinction, somehow, between how they looked and acted and how they were on the inside. His mother told him the story of how he'd swallowed a piece of the sun at birth. Looking at Peony, he almost thought that such a thing was possible.

She called the sun back. Like magic.

She bowed low again when she finished. His mother brought her hands to her chest in a pose of sincere admiration and smiled. "You do, indeed, have a gift. How old are you, Peony? I may ask the lady of the teahouse to let you perform at my theater.

"Th-thirteen, my lady," she said, bowing deeper. "But I would prefer not to leave until my adulthood ceremony. My mother is here. I know the indulgence may be too much to ask--"

"--think nothing of it," Karei said. "Forget I said it. I will make the same offer when you are an adult."

Peony raised her head a little. "Really?"

Karei nodded.

Peony blushed and looked more like a rose.

***

Akira and his mother returned home from the teahouse that evening after a day spent in dancing and speaking lessons. The weather remained clear after the rainy morning, but puddles dotted the stone street back to Ayutan estate. 

Akira wanted to change when they got home, but his mother insisted that he remain in his costume until it was time for bed. When his father came home from duty and saw him, he called Akira 'Reina.'

Fortunately, Reina was doing makeup work for Seigo at the time, and his mother didn't laugh--much. She had him come to her rooms to get changed back into his yukata from the morning.

"What did you learn today, Akira?" she asked.

He frowned. "Being a girl has a lot of rules."

"Being a boy does, too," she said.

He nodded. "I know, but--different ones. You really have to watch what you say and how you say it. And that guy hurt Peony and she couldn't defend herself." His frown grew deeper. "Why aren't Reina, Kaori and Aizu learning how to fight?"

His mother's expression was very still. "Women do not fight," she said. "This is New Yogo, a land of peace, so men generally do not fight, either. What you witnessed today was not a fight. It was an expression of dominance and power. That man was not fully in control of himself due to drink, but he desired to assert his authority over her and make her fear him so that she would give him what he wanted."

Akira tilted his head. "That's--awful. What--what would have happened if we hadn't been there?"

"The lady of the teahouse would have handled it." She grinned. "Akemi may not look it, but she can fight." Her eyebrows pinched together slightly. "Maybe not like you. Women have other weapons."

"Like what?" he asked.

"Tomorrow," Karei said. "You've learned enough for today, I think."

***

Nozumi wandered for a while after fleeing the teahouse. The streets were quiet the morning that she fled; it looked like rain. She ducked into a public onsen and sat in the corner of the entrance chamber to catch her breath.

She should never have assumed that she was safe. And she'd killed an important person, not a dog. That would be noticed. Her master, or someone of his same level, would send more people after her. She wracked her brain thinking of where she might safely hide. Not Itasuran estate or the lower city. She had no way home to Hashiro. Her sister, if she was still alive, was her only family--and she had no idea where she was.

Nozumi brought her knees to her chest and cried. Some of the entering onsen patrons appeared a bit startled as they passed her, but no one called out to her. 

Even if her sister was out there somewhere, she couldn't go to her: not as she was now. But--and this idea made her stop crying--Isamu had other dogs.

Not like her; she was unique among his dogs, though she didn't believe she was the favorite: that was the kid, the baby he'd warped from infancy to succeed his dark empire. But other dogs existed; she'd met them on jobs, though she'd usually gone in and performed the kill herself.

Killing people was alarmingly easy. There were so many soft and sensitive places; Nozumi knew them all. She could kill quick and clean or brutal and messy, but she usually preferred to do it with her bare hands. She had never truly been comfortable with a weapon. Her fighting style had earned her the nickname of the Mad Dog. She owned the name when her master picked it up for her because it was a gift, and hers. She had so few things that were truly hers anymore.

Her master was still not fully capable of hunting her. He hadn't sent any of his own dogs after her. That meant the other dogs were like her: scattered, in the wind. She didn't know if she could trust any of them, but she needed a place to stay and wasn't very particular about where. She decided to look up Bandit at Choron harbor. From what little Nozumi remembered of her, she was more or less enslaved by Talsh--but a decent sort, for all that. There were relatively few female dogs; Isamu had always preferred men. Maybe she'd be willing to take Nozumi in. Failing that, Nozumi could kill her and take over her position. Either way, it was win-win.

Getting to Choron would take time--or money. She had some saved from her work at the teahouse. She would take a carriage if she didn't fear attracting unwanted attention. In the end, she waited for the rain to stop, then hired a rickshaw to carry her halfway for a silver lugal, which would leave most of her funds intact. She headed for the main warehouse and gave the signal with a special knock on the doorway. She waited.

No one came to the door, but someone else came to the warehouse before long. She was a young woman with thin reddish hair and a deeply inked red tattoo streaking across her face. Nozumi didn't know her, but her mark identified her as an enforcer. Not a killer, necessarily, but a slave chaser.

What rotten luck.

The woman drew her knife. "Who are you?" she asked.

"The Mad Dog," Nozumi said evenly, giving her professional nickname. "I was looking for Bandit."

"Oh, her? Sold a long, long time ago now. Talsh finally got her after all her squirming." She spat. "She never was cut out for this business."

Nozumi's heart sank in her chest. Bandit had been her best chance at getting a safe place to sleep for a while--a few nights, at least. "Have you heard anything from the top lately?"

The woman shook her head. "Just news. One of his business rivals tried to take him out, but he's still kickin'. You here on orders?"

"Something like that." She thought a moment. "Which slave market did Bandit get to, anyway?"

"Kosenkyo's, the big one. Can't miss it. Next slaving day's on the full of the second moon."

She nodded. "Thanks." She turned to leave.

"If you see the boss," the woman said, "tell him to get well soon. We're seeing profits dip around here."

Nozumi grinned. "I will," she said sweetly. She wouldn't. She hoped Isamu never walked again. If he could possibly chase her, he would: she knew that.

She'd have to backtrack all the way to Kosenkyo now. She was glad she'd decided to conserve most of her money; it looked like she'd need all of it to track down Bandit now.

Why are my friends always so hard to find? she grumbled internally. 

Chapter Text

The next day dawned bright and clear. A messenger came in the early morning with an invitation to the Mikado's official Ascension Ceremony at the beginning of spring. It would be held in one month's time, giving all the rulers from the northern continent time to travel for the event. The Ayutans accepted, of course, and preparations began for the ceremony. His mother decided that Akira would be attending as a lady.

"What? Why?" he asked.

"It will be a test," she said. "You cannot say you've passed as a woman unless you fool the Imperial Court."

He gulped. "And what if they see right through me?"

"They won't," she reassured him. "I would bet my life on it."

Akira wouldn't bet his.

***

Over the next week or so, Akira went to the Hunters' Tower every morning dressed as a woman. Hasham's reaction wasn't quite what he'd been expecting. 

Walking behind his father the first day after his mother's proclamation, Akira kept his face down and his shoulders slumped, even when he got reprimanded for it by Mon. Hasham entered the dining hall before training started and gave him a once-over. "You look a lot more like your mom than usual."

"Gee, thanks."

"You're crabby." Hasham handed him his bowl of porridge. "What's wrong?" And that was it. Male or female guises mattered less than Akira's interior state to Hasham. Akira hadn't really appreciated that at the time.

Akira told him about the coming Ascension Ceremony and what was expected of him. It didn't help that the morning had been gray and rainy and threatened to ruin his outfit. He complained in Hasham's general direction for awhile until he ran out of words.

"Oh," Hasham said. And that was all.

Akira raised an eyebrow.

"Well, you look like a girl dressed like that," Hasham said. "It took me a second to recognize you. Passing as a girl shouldn't be that hard, right? You can do it," he said, nodding in support.

Akira glared. He should have guessed that Hasham wouldn't understand his angst at all. Messing up could be fatal to him, or his family. Lesser screw-ups would result in punishment. His head spun with all the terrible possibilities.

Mon came over and set drawing supplies on the table in front of Hasham, wearing an indulgent smile. "You can take it easy today," he said. "The Hunters are getting ready for the Ascension Ceremony, so there's not much to do in the tower. Find me or Jin if you need anything."

Hasham waited for Ryuu to say or do something else... but he didn't. He walked away.

"What was all that about?" Akira asked, helping himself to drawing paper and a pencil because he often drew with Hasham in the mornings now.

"Nothing," Hasham said, too fast. "I wasn't feeling well this morning."

"Why?"

"It's not important."

"It sounds important." Akira considered what he knew about Hasham--which wasn't much, admittedly. He'd read the public files on all the Hunters, though, when he'd first come to the tower. What was special about today? He decided to go check Hasham's public record again.

Akira excused himself briefly and focused on walking like a woman all the way to the public records room. It didn't take him long to discover what was special about today.

Today was Hasham's twelfth birthday. He came of age today. He and Akira would be the same age for a few months. Why didn't he say something? I could have gotten him a present...

He and Hasham hadn't been friends for too long, but Akira had few agemates and felt the need to celebrate this huge event. He puttered around his father's room in the tower and on the upper floors where the supplies were and cobbled together what he thought of as an okay gift: a nice leather satchel that his father never used, stuffed with good charcoal pens and the good-quality Rotan vellum that was usually used for financial reports that went directly to the Mikado. He calculated the cost of the vellum so that he could pay Mon back later. 

Akira sat surreptitiously down and finished his painting--a portrait of Hasham; they'd been trading those back and forth lately. Akira found portraits of himself in woman's garb a bit odd. Not bad, exactly. But those portraits didn't match his self-image. At least not yet.

"Got you a present," Akira said, passing over his completed portrait at the same time.

Hasham raised an eyebrow. "I didn't ask for a present. And I don't have one to give you."

"Oh, you don't have to," Akira said. "I know what today is." He passed the satchel over the table. "Best I could do on short notice. Sorry about that. But, uh, you didn't tell me."

Hasham's face froze like a rictus into an expression that Akira didn't recognize at the time. Later, he would understand that Hasham was afraid--not of Akira, but of birthdays. Of the presents that Hasham's father had given him on birthdays.

"Go on," Akira said. "Open it."

Hasham opened the bag mechanically without looking at it.

"Vellum," Akira said. "Mom gets it from Rota. They use it to make picture books."

Hasham lifted out a piece of the vellum and held it up. "Why..."

Akira shrugged. "I couldn't think of what else you might want for your birthday."

Hasham put the piece of vellum down, then emptied the bag, spilling the vellum sloppily over the table. He shoved the bag back at Akira with a violent gesture, his face bright red.

"I can't have birthday presents," he said, a little too fast. "They're cursed."

Akira shook his head. "Just try it out. You won't know if it's cursed if you don't--"

"I said I can't have birthday presents and don't try to give me any," Hasham said all in one breath. 

With slow care, Hasham tore each sheet of expensive vellum into quarters.

"What are you doing?" Akira hissed.

Hasham didn't answer. He just kept embarking on his near-silent destruction, mouth half-open in a silent scream.

"A gift is yours to do with as you like," Akira said tonelessly. He was looking at the table, not at Hasham. "If you want to destroy it, that's your business."

Hasham left the mess hall, leaving his drawing supplies and the tatters of Akira's gift behind.

After that, Hasham didn't speak to him for a week.

***

Hasham woke up on a cold spring morning a week after his twelfth birthday in Hunters' Tower, alone. He'd slept in Jin's room the previous night, since Jin wasn't on duty. It wasn't quite dawn, so no one in the tower was stirring yet. All was peaceful and still. Hasham couldn't even hear crickets chirping.

He rarely woke up this early if he could help it. He wondered what had awakened him. He didn't feel any sense of danger--where could he be safe, if not in Jin's room?--but there did seem to be something wrong. An almost indefinable something that made him kick Jin's blanket off him and run to his own room.

Yun's room in Hunters' Tower was Hasham's own dedicated space, but he'd only started spending time there recently, after his birthday. Mon and Jin had removed all traces of his father before encouraging him to use the room, which he appreciated. Still, there were nights when he woke up at Mon's and wandered back to the tower in the darkness, guided by the light of the two moons, drifting like a sleepwalker into to Jin's room.

Mon worried about him when he did that. He'd learned to be very, very quiet when leaving Orutoran Estate.

Rabbit, Hasham's pet, used to live in Jin's room, too, before Hasham underwent the painstaking process of moving all of his possessions to Yun's room. He was Yun, for all intents and purposes, and Jin's room wasn't his, even though Jin still let him borrow it. He decided to let Rabbit out for exercise outside, and get both himself and Rabbit some breakfast in the mess hall.

Only... when he checked the cage in his room, Rabbit wasn't there.

The door to the cage was open, and Rabbit was gone.

***

One Week Ago

***

Hasham's twelfth birthday dawned gray, rainy, and chilly enough to make his breath steam in front of his face. He'd slept in Jin's room the previous night, and Jin was on duty, too, so they were on separate futons, listening to the wind howl and the rain lash against the windows of the tower.

"Damn, I wish this storm would break," Jin muttered. It had rained for the past three days.

"It should, soon," Hasham said, huddling under the blankets. He closed his eyes. The sound of the rain was vaguely soothing. He was cold, so he'd gotten Rabbit out of his cage earlier. Rabbit was in his arms, asleep, having dreams about running free that made his legs twitch.

The corner of Jin's mouth quirked upward. "How is your little furball?"

Jin never called him 'Rabbit.' "He's sleeping." Hasham yawned.

"You should sleep, too." Jin stretched extravagantly on his futon. "You've got a big day ahead of you tomorrow."

Hasham's eyes snapped open. "You didn't...tell anyone...that it's my birthday, right?"

Jin cracked his knuckles. "Ryuu knows everything that I do about you. Akira will probably know, too. But, no. I haven't gone out of my way to tell anyone."

Hasham frowned sourly. "I don't want anyone to know. Can I just be eleven for the rest of my life?"

Jin chuckled. "If only it worked like that..."

Jin fell asleep first. Hasham let the sound of the rain, the warmth of Rabbit's fur, and the steady rhythm of Jin's breathing lull him into a fitful doze.

***

The next morning, Ryuu Orutoran--Mon--showed up at the tower with Hasham's drawing supplies. "You can take it easy today," he said. "The Hunters are getting ready for the Spring Festival, so there's not much to do in the tower. Find me or Jin if you need anything."

Hasham fed Rabbit, then found a sunny spot in the mess hall and started to draw.

Akira came to the tower and sat opposite Hasham, drawing with him for a while before he had to start training with his father and Mon. He'd been dressing like a girl lately, part of some kind of advanced infiltration training that Hasham wasn't a part of. He thought Akira looked good as a girl, though he didn't say so. 

Jin was guarding the gate. Zen sat in the mess hall with Akira and Hasham, filling out supply requisitions for the Spring Festival. Hasham noticed that some of the forms weren't filled out on behalf of the Warriors Eight, and asked why not.

Zen grinned. "Mon's idea. We're making supply requisitions anyway, so we make a few extra on behalf of the common people who live near the nobles' gate. Hyoku tried giving away the stores we requisitioned a long time ago so that the kids in he city wouldn't starve, but that backfired." Mikado Ishikawa had taken Hyoku's eye in retribution. "So we do it this way, instead."

"That's nice," Akira said. He was drawing a picture of Hasham--of all things--in full color. Hasham hadn't expected that.

"Why are you drawing me?" Hasham mumbled.

"Can't I?" Akira asked. "Are you shy?"

Hasham blushed slightly. "N-no. There are just...way more interesting things to draw than...that."

Akira quirked an eyebrow. "I happen to like drawing you. Indulge me." He set his drawing aside, then brought the tips of his fingers together, looking mischievous and a bit self-satisfied. "Got you a present," Akira said.

Hasham raised an eyebrow. "I didn't ask for a present. And I don't have one to give you."

"Oh, you don't have to," Akira said. "I know what today is." He passed the satchel over the table. "Best I could do on short notice. Sorry about that. But, uh, you didn't tell me."

Akira passed him a supple leather bag. Hasham looked at it as if it were a poisonous snake that would bite him if he touched it.

"Go on," Akira said. "Open it."

Hasham's hands felt numb. He opened the bag, revealing a thick sheaf of the highest-quality paper Hasham had ever seen. It was so thin, but it had the slight shine and tear resistance of parchment.

"Vellum," Akira said. "Mom gets it from Rota. They use it to make picture books."

Hasham lifted out a piece of the vellum and held it up. It was almost translucent and soft to touch. "Why..."

Akira shrugged. "I couldn't think of what else you might want for your birthday."

Hasham put the piece of vellum down, then emptied the bag, spilling the vellum sloppily over the table. He shoved the bag back at Akira with a violent gesture, his face bright red.

"I can't have birthday presents," he said, a little too fast. "They're cursed."

Akira shook his head. "Just try it out. You won't know if it's cursed if you don't--"

"I said I can't have birthday presents and don't try to give me any," Hasham said all in one breath. The rabbits his father had made him kill on previous birthdays flashed before his eyes: Yuki, Rabbit 1, Rabbit 2, Rabbit 3, Rabbit 4...

Rabbit 5, now known simply as 'Rabbit,' was Hasham's only surviving pet, and the only other birthday present he'd ever received. Rabbit was a gift from his father--if he could call Rabbit a gift, since his father's intent was to make Hasham kill him.

Hasham lifted a sheet of the vellum, then tore it in half.

Another. Another. Three at once.

Akira's eyes went wide with horror, but he didn't try to stop Hasham.

"A gift is yours to do with as you like," Akira said. He was looking at the table, not at Hasham. "If you want to destroy it, that's your business."

Just like he'd destroyed his other pets--taken their lives as coldly and efficiently as possible, after Yuki.

Hasham bit his lip. He was almost crying, but he couldn't show it. He left the mess hall, leaving his drawing supplies and the tatters of Akira's gift behind.

***

"It was a good thought," Zen said after Hasham left.

Akira clenched his fists under the table. "He never lets me do anything nice... it always blows up in my face. Does he hate me? What did I do?"

Zen thought for a moment. "You and Hasham have different pasts, and that affects how you treat each other," he said. "In the short term, I wouldn't get Hasham any more presents--he likely feels indebted to you for his clothing already." True; most of Hasham's clothes were secondhand from Akira, with the exception of those that were hand-me-downs from Jin. "And maybe, when you both calm down a little, you can ask him about it. But not today. Leave him be for today."

Zen rested his chin in his hands. "Would you like to go tea shopping with me? There's a tea ceremony as part of the Spring Festival."

Akira still felt hurt and upset, but shopping struck him as a decent way to take his mind off things. "All right," he said. It would be good practice, pretending to be a woman at the tea shop. 

***

Present Day

***

Had Akira let Rabbit go? No--Akira knew how important Rabbit was to him. He'd never interfere with Hasham's pet like that.

Would he?

Hasham didn't know. He understood that Akira would be upset after having his gift rejected, but surely he wasn't upset enough to take out his frustration on an innocent creature. Rabbit was just two years old, after all.

By good luck--though it made Hasham suspicious--Akira was already training in the practice yard with his father this morning. Hasham picked up a bow and stood next to Akira, shooting without warming up; he was too impatient.

"Where's Rabbit?" he whispered.

A pause--hesitation, fear. Hasham remembered that he hadn't spoken to Akira in days. Almost a full week had passed since he'd said anything at all to Akira. Akira still greeted him and trained with him as normal, because he was better at pretending than Hasham was. The lift of his eyebrow and the slight puckering of his forehead revealed that he was genuinely surprised that Hasham was talking to him again.

"Rabbit?" Akira asked. "Isn't it about time for him to eat? He's probably in his cage." His tone was carefully neutral and friendly. If he was guilty of freeing Rabbit, he was hiding it well. 

"He's not," Hasham said, not bothering to keep his voice down. His arrow went wide of the mark and skittered off the side of a shala tree.

"He's not?" Akira frowned. "Did you check the cage? Did it break?"

Hasham hadn't. He'd been so concerned about Rabbit's current whereabouts that he'd failed to perform a real investigation.

"Permission to be dismissed, sir?" Akira asked his father.

Akira and his son didn't look much alike, but they shared an even-tempered disposition. Hasham called the expression on their faces now the ice mask--not a shred of emotion was contained there. They were professionals staring each other down. Hasham understood that Sun wanted to keep training his son, and that Akira wanted to help Hasham find Rabbit. It was an immovable object colliding with an impenetrable wall.

Jin had that mask, too. Had it down to an art. Hasham could always see the cracks in Mon's version of it. Sometimes he thought Mon was too human for his own good.

Hasham... didn't feel human. He felt closer to Rabbit than anyone, with the possible exception of Jin, sometimes--and it was hard to think of Jin as human, either. Jin was like a hawk: a bird of prey who hunted enemies and cast a cold eye even on his friends. He could be reached, but appealing to Mon or Zen was easier. And more likely to succeed.

"We just started," Sun said. "Dismissal denied."

"I'd like to practice reconnaissance," Akira said smoothly. "We're missing a man."

Sun folded his arms. "Who?"

"Rabbit," Akira said. "He's missing. We need to find him. Never leave a man behind." Akira stood up straighter.

"Rabbit's not a Hunter," Sun said after a long moment. "But he is one of ours. You have an hour. Find him by then. After that, you'll have to let Hasham find him alone."

Akira gave his father a brilliant smile and an impeccable salute. "Thank you, sir!"

Hasham bowed a little.

Akira took Hasham's hand and pulled him back into Hunters' Tower. Sun watched them go, shaking his head a little. He kept working with the bow, arrows cutting through the early morning air in a steady rhythm.

***

Rabbit's cage sat empty in Yun's room. The sun shone through the loosely woven sides, casting shadows on the room's smooth white walls.

"The latch is broken," Akira said, pointing. "It's only wood. Kind of surprising it lasted this long."

"Look here," Hasham said, kneeling down. The sun helped him see things he hadn't noticed before. There was a slightly muddy pawprint on the ground that had left a clear impression of the direction of Rabbit's foot. They followed Rabbit's trajectory down the hallway.

"You didn't... break the latch, did you?" Hasham asked.

Akira hmphed. "If you think that, why ask for my help?"

"I didn't ask; you offered," Hasham said darkly.

"I did," Akira said. "And that should tell you something."

"What?"

"That I'm not responsible for Rabbit's disappearance," Akira said. He didn't quite meet Hasham's eyes. "I... don't understand you. At all."

"What is there to understand?" He pointed to another pawprint. It seemed like Rabbit had gone out into the practice yard by way of the mess hall. That made a certain kind of sense; Rabbit knew there was food in the mess hall. But why had he gone outside?

"You think people being kind to you always has some kind of ulterior motive, or something," Akira said. "You thought the vellum was cursed. You think I'm helping you find Rabbit because I'm responsible for him being lost. Have you ever accepted help at face value?"

Yes... No. Hasham blinked. He'd accepted Jin's help when there was no other choice. Even Hiroshi's help was conditional, dependent on their father's whims. Hiroshi had always wanted to help him, but sometimes, his father had forced Hiroshi to hurt him instead. No sources of help could be wholly trusted.

Not even Jin? Hiroshi's voice asked inside his mind.

Hasham stopped moving. "No," he said. "I haven't. I can't."

"That's... sad." Akira pouted, biting his bottom lip. "But I have seen you accept help. From Mon and Jin. So you can trust people, yeah?"

"Kind of," Hasham said.

"But you don't trust me," Akira said. He crouched down in the grass, then lifted a tiny tuft of black fur that looked like it had come off of one of Rabbit's ears. "Why not?"

Hasham didn't know, beyond the fact that Akira was his same age and not a Hunter yet. They'd been a little awkward around each other since their first meeting. Hasham didn't really get along with people: not Mon's family, not Akira, not the other Hunters beyond Mon and Jin. He felt like he was surrounded by a shell: a hard, strong, warm shell, and that to venture outside it would be to freeze to death--or shatter into a million pieces.

Akira wasn't inside his shell. He got along with Akira better than many people--both of their brothers had been killed by his father, and Hasham did feel for Akira there--but he wasn't about to trust Akira just because Akira asked him to.

"Why should I?" he asked.

Silence. Akira pointed to the garden wall, then put a finger to his lips. "I think Rabbit might have found a way into the Imperial Palace garden," he said.

"Or he went toward the ornamental pond at the foot of the temple," Hasham said. The trail wasn't very clear here.

"Hm, you may be right. Should we split up?"

"No," Hasham said. If Akira turned up with Rabbit on his own, that would contribute to the idea that that Akira was responsible for Rabbit's disappearance. Hasham had no proof that Akira was behind it, but he also had no one else to blame but himself.

I... lost Rabbit.

That was unforgivable. He'd promised to take care of Rabbit forever, and keep him safe. Rabbit wasn't safe right now. Hasham had failed to protect him.

"We'll search the temple first; it's smaller. Then we can look in the gardens."

Akira nodded decisively. "We'll find him, Hasham," he said. "I promise."

Hasham hadn't told him, but Akira's smile always made his heart skip a beat or two. His smile was confident, and that was reassuring, but it was also... something else. Something that made Hasham want to come out of his shell for a few seconds so that he could look more closely at it. He hadn't done that; not yet. Maybe one day, when he had more reasons to trust Akira, he would.

"Let's go," Hasham said, crossing through a narrow stone gate and starting the long climb up to the Imperial Palace's temple.

The Mikado came to the garden behind the temple once a month to perform a purification ceremony. Water bubbled up from a clear spring at the top of a steep hill. The temple was built on the hill. Unlike the rest of the Imperial Palace's architecture, the temple was built to look more like a natural part of the landscape. It was hard to tell there was a building on the hill from any distance away.

Hasham hadn't been here very often, and Akira had never been here before. The dewdrops on the grass soaked their tabi as they climbed further.

"I don't see any rabbit trails," Akira said. "Do animals avoid this place?"

"Not particularly," Hasham said. "Though it's true that I rarely see animals around here. Maybe only pure animals are allowed, or something."

Akira pulled a face. "You believe in all that purity stuff?"

Hasham raised an eyebrow. "Well..." Truth be told, it was difficult to think of his father as being some kind of pure-blooded saint. He knew the Mikado thought of himself that way, but Hasham believed himself human, and his father demonic. On bad days he considered himself part demon, too, but that wasn't the question Akira had asked.

"I know I'm not pure or anything," he said. "But maybe Rabbit is. Who knows?"

They came to the sacred spring near the top of the hill. Akira stooped down and took a drink. The sun was still rising above the early morning haze that marked the horizon; it was finally getting warmer.

"We should be able to see more tracks soon," Hasham said. "Let's search the First Palace's garden." His hands trembled slightly. He tried to ignore that.

Rabbit, where are you?

He's okay, Hiroshi's voice tried to reassure him. No one here will try to hurt him.

"Right," Akira said. "I'm sure he's okay. Every animal Shinji ever kept got loose from its cage at least once."

Hearing Hiroshi's words echoed by Akira was a little unnerving. "Who's Shinji?"

"He's a musician who does a traveling show. Sometimes with animals. They don't like being cooped up."

"I let Rabbit out every day," Hasham said.

"Yeah, but maybe you weren't there to let him out when he wanted it. Animals are allowed to get bored." He grinned.

Hasham looked away. Rabbit being bored was better than Rabbit being gone--dead--

No, not dead, he's not dead, don't jump to conclusions...

They picked up the trail starting at Hunters' Tower and headed for the First Palace's garden. Rabbit had tracked through mud at one point, which helped them a lot. They came out into a grassy area under a stand of black cherry trees and discovered a woman and her attendants lounging on cushions near a shallow pond.

Rabbit was sitting in a woman's lap, looking extremely pleased with himself.

Hasham was about to march forward and demand Rabbit back when Akira seized his arm. "That's First Queen Liano," he whispered. "The Mikado's wife! We have to get out of here."

Hasham froze. He'd found Rabbit, and he wasn't about to leave him here.

Never leave a man behind.

"Children in the garden?" a different woman asked. "That's rare, isn't it? You, there! Come closer."

Queen Liano shifted a little on her cushion. Rabbit looked up at her with adoring eyes. Hasham had the brief but worrying impulse to stab a woman he'd only just met.

Akira tugged at his hand. They approached the women and their attendants with their eyes cast down. Hasham recognized the woman who'd called them over as the Second Queen, Isora Harusuan. He'd seen her standing next to the Mikado when the Hunters swore their Imperial Guard oaths to the new Mikado.

"Don't be frightened," the Second Queen said. "Raise your heads."

Hasham tried to look up, but Akira stomped on his foot. He stared at his feet.

"They don't have the look of servant children," the First Queen said speculatively. "Guardsmen's children, maybe? What are your names, boys?"

Akira waited a beat, then said, "This is Hasham Itasuran, and I'm Akira Ayutan, Your Majesty." He knelt down, bringing Hasham with him.

"Children of the Warriors Eight," the Second Queen said with a little smile. "I wasn't aware we would have such distinguished guests so early in the morning. What brings you here?"

Hasham's eyes flicked to Rabbit.

"The bunny there is a pet who escaped from the tower," Akira said. He still didn't look directly at the Queens, but he was smiling. "We came to find him. I hope he didn't cause you any trouble, Your Majesties."

"No, none at all." Queen Liano scratched Rabbit behind the ears. Rabbit jumped down from her lap, then dashed in front of Hasham. Hasham didn't acknowledge Rabbit. He wasn't about to reward bad behavior. Rabbit had to know that it was a bad thing to run off.

But then Rabbit licked his face, and Hasham's arms wrapped reflexively around him, gathering Rabbit up into a soft hug. Akira told him later that he was crying, though he didn't remember things that way.

"Feel free to let the rabbit visit the garden at any time," the Second Queen said. "That's a wise animal."

"Really? Why?" Hasham was pleased that Rabbit had been praised--and by an Imperial Queen, no less!--but he didn't understand the reason for it. He was relieved to have Rabbit safe in his arms again, but he was still mad at Rabbit for running off.

Queen Liano settled her hands on her belly. "He did come straight for me, didn't he?" She looked toward the Second Queen, then returned her attention to Akira and Hasham. "I'm pregnant. Perhaps you're right, Isora, and the rabbit knows a thing or two."

"You'll have a healthy boy," the Second Queen said. "I'm sure of it. The songbirds come to your window every morning, too--even in winter. I bet he'll have a gentle soul. Animals are good judges of character."

Queen Liano's smile grew wider. "I hope you're right." She shifted her gaze to Akira and Hasham. "You're free to go and play, if you like," she said. "Don't be strangers."

Hasham stood up, still holding Rabbit. Rabbit was starting to squirm a little. Akira waited until they were leaving the garden to say, "Looks like Rabbit had an adventure. He even made new friends."

Hasham locked eyes with Rabbit. "What's wrong with the old ones, huh?"

Akira flinched a little, but said nothing. They walked back to Hunters' Tower together. Hasham was particularly clingy about Rabbit in the days that followed, but things gradually returned to normal. Hasham almost repaired the latch on the cage, but then he considered. He didn't want Rabbit to feel trapped--trapped like he'd felt in the shed at home. Even though it worried him terribly, he wanted Rabbit to be able to roam free, if he wanted.

He even made new friends

Rabbit was like Hasham. He deserved a chance to make his own choices.

***

With the Mikado's Ascension Ceremony fast approaching, Akira was made to split his time between combat training and pretending to be a girl. It was exhausting, not least because he needed multiple baths a day and hours to change. His irked mood took a worse turn when Hasham refused to talk to him. Only Rabbit's disappearance brought them back together as they were, and then only temporarily.

I lost a friend, Akira thought to himself. He didn't understand how or why it had happened, either. Zen told him it wasn't his fault. It looked like he and Hasham might be able to get along on missions, at least, which was all that was strictly necessary. Akira shouldn't care so much. He had too much to do.

So when Hasham showed up to Hunters' Tower the morning after they'd found Rabbit with the gifted satchel slung over his back and a peace offering of rice porridge and tea, Akira was surprised.

"I'm sorry," Hasham said. "I fixed this. I'll use it. Thank you."

Akira accepted the food and tea. "Okay. You're welcome." He ate a few bites, then asked, "Why did you do... all that?"

Hasham shook his head. "I can't explain. But I won't do it again, I promise. You weren't wrong. I was." He looked at his hands.

Akira nodded. "Apology accepted. Why didn't you talk to me, after?"

Hasham muttered something unintelligible, then tried speaking again, louder this time. "I thought... you should have been angry. Why weren't you angry?"

"I was hurt," Akira said. "I am hurt. Hurt that you didn't tell me about your coming-of-age day, and that you destroyed most of the present I got for you. I thought you didn't want to be my friend anymore and that was just your way of saying it."

Hasham's eyes went wide. "You're... my friend?"

"What else would we be?"

Hasham shook his head. "We train together. It's expected. I thought... I mean, your mom made you give me a bunch of clothes and stuff. I never expected you to be nice to me. Why are you nice to me when I'm not nice to you?"

Akira hmphed, took a bite of his porridge and kicked Hasham's foot.

Hasham frowned at him.

"So," Akira said, using his feminine manners to wipe his mouth and set down his chopsticks. "Friends?"

Hasham tilted his head like a confused bird. "Are you sure? I don't think I'm that good of a friend."

"Well then, I'll just have to teach you to be one, right?" Akira smirked. Then, in a confidential whisper, he said, "I'm not sure I'm that great of a friend, either."

"What? Why?"

Akira spread his hands on the table. "Lack of practice, for one. I thought about it, and I probably should have asked you what you wanted, if anything, before giving you a gift. I'm friends with my fiancée, but otherwise I've got nothing but casual acquaintances except for you."

Hasham blinked. "Why?"

"Because I'm eighth-ranked." Akira glared at his porridge. "That's why."

"That's dumb," Hasham said.

"No argument," Akira said.

"I'll be your friend," Hasham said. "If you're sure. And if the higher ranks try to bully you, well. Let me know. I'll tell Jin."

Akira raised an eyebrow. "Why not Mon?"

"Because Jin will do something about it. He'll probably drag Mon along, too."

Akira smiled. "Okay. Yeah, okay."

"Will you tell me who's tried to bully you? I'll beat them up," Hasham said.

"How sweet." Akira shook his head. "I can beat people up, too."

"Not without getting in trouble. I don't care if I get in trouble, though. No one will punish me that badly." Hasham nodded to himself, then said, "Tell you what: next time someone gives you trouble--anyone; I don't even care if it's the Mikado or someone from the Big Four houses--let me know, and I'll take care of it."

"Why?" Akira asked.

Hasham shrugged. "Maybe I'm trying to be a better friend."

***

The Mikado's Ascension Ceremony was fast approaching. For Nozumi, that meant only one thing: no open slave markets. The Mikado publicly opposed slavery, though the last Mikado had done plenty of dealing under the table. When she searched for Bandit in the underground slave pits of Kosenkyo, she didn't find her. Most of those pits had been emptied, at least temporarily. She was back to square one of her search.

One positive development was that Isamu was still out of commission. Word from Itasuran Estate was scant and sparse, but she knew enough to be hopeful. Isamu couldn't chase her anymore, at least not on his own two feet. Any effort to retrieve her would take awhile.

That meant plenty of time to look for Karei.

The Mikado's Ascension Ceremony would be a great place to look: where there were musicians and artists, Karei would almost certainly be among them. Nozumi wasn't quite qualified on her own merits to perform for the Mikado, so she would have to impersonate someone, sneak in, or do her searching at a distance.

Impersonation might be possible. Rina Kiraran, the dancer, was her same height and had the same body type as her. She was also staying in Akemi's teahouse, just down the hall. 

Nozumi was back in the teahouse again. That was why she knew that Rina had an invitation to the Ascension Ceremony as a performer. All Nozumi had to do was take it--and make sure the real Rina never showed up. Nothing simpler in the world than that.

The ceremony was a little less than two weeks away. Nozumi sighed over a sumi-e painting of a bamboo forest. She'd been scraping a few silver lugals together each day by selling art, but this wasn't her life, not really. She needed to find Karei to feel truly free. 

Soon, she told herself, blurring ink into shadows with her brush. Soon.

Chapter Text

The morning before the Ascension Ceremony, Akira went to visit his betrothed, Hana, at her home. He was dressed as a high noble girl and accompanied by both his parents. This was a test run for tomorrow--one last check so that everything would be perfect.

Hana herself greeted them in her family's welcoming hall, all smiles, and Akira bowed to her with a fluorish of sleeves and skirt. Hana clapped in delight. "My lord--or should I say my lady?--you look stunning!" There was a book in her lap, same as usual. "Will you take tea with me, Lords and Lady Ayutan?" she asked in a formal register.

Akira's mother graciously accepted, and his father gave a stiff bow. Hana ushered them all into a formal tearoom with the help of two attendants, and then it was like any other betrothal meeting, really, only supervised--which felt odd at first. Hana proffered her book to Akira--it was a boldly illustrated text from the southern continent--and said, "I can't make heads or tails of this one! My mother says it's in Ormese, though I'm not sure that's right."

"It's in Talsh, I think, Lady Hana," Akira said, remembering at the last moment to add a sentence softener as a noblewoman would. "I cannot read it, but have a friend who can." Hasham was a savant with written languages. Akira could usually speak them better, but Hasham's vocabulary would always be superior because he could read. "Shall I commission a translation?"

"Would you? That would be truly splendid. I should like to learn Talsh, and a translation will serve me well as a primer, no?" She grinned and took a dainty sip of tea. Then she leaned closer--right on the edge of decorous behavior--and said softly, "I like you as a boy, but as a girl you're gorgeous. I think you're prettier than me and I can't even hate you for it." She pouted lightly, then smiled and straightened her posture. 

"Lady Hana..." Akira let himself blush and found it didn't take much acting. "I am pleased that we shall always be great friends, regardless of my guise." He unbent enough to wiggle one eyebrow at her and received a stern look of rebuke from his father.

Eh, worth it.

"Shall your family be attending the ceremony tomorrow?" Akira asked.

"Us? Oh, no," Hana said, stammering a little. "That is to say, we were invited, but there are no places to sit in the hall. My mother is too ill to stand for the whole event." She sighed. "I would so love to see it. Might I request one of your beautiful paintings as an illustration of the event?"

"Of course. I would especially like it if I received one in return."

She scoffed a little. "My art is in no way superior, but I shall strive in all ways to honor your request." The corner of her mouth twitched upward. "Having heard about the purpose of today's meeting in advance, I prepared a few novels and chapbooks that many girls of our age read. Would you care to look at some with me?"

Akira looked to his parents, who didn't object, and nodded. "Of course, Lady Hana."

***

Akira returned home with a chapbook under his arm and a polite smile on his face. He had a lot to think about. 

The primers Hana had given him contained information his mother hadn't told him about being a woman--unique insecurities and fears. The pamphlet on pregnancy was going to give him nightmares all on its own. The rhetoric in many of the chapbooks and short stories struck him as wrongheaded at best and harmful at worst. Girls--or perhaps only noble girls?--were encouraged to see themselves as useless outside a narrow band of acceptable activities: cooking, cleaning, maintaining a household, raising children, and perhaps some feminine art like music or painting if the family had the income for it. 

Those stories had cemented in an essential why of Akira's education. He was being educated as a girl and a boy simultaneously and thought both sets of skills were useful. Until today, it had never occurred to him to think of tasks coded masculine or feminine as restricted to either gender. So a man couldn't help raise his own child? A woman couldn't pick up a weapon to defend her family? Who had decided that?

When Akira had asked Hana similar questions in polite terms, she had laughed. "Oh, you ask the same things I asked! Shall I give you the same answer I was given?" 

Akira had nodded.

"Men," she'd said. "Men decided it. Not open-minded educated young men like you, Akira. Rich, old, boorish men who fear competition--not just from other men, which might perhaps be understandable, but from women as well. Those men had power, and enacted laws and customs to keep people in the places they decided they should be." She'd stacked two books together, then said, "I like how your parents are teaching you. You might be the only young man in the whole of Kosenkyo who understands what being a young woman is actually like." 

"Do you ever wonder what it's like to be a boy--man--whatever?" Akira had asked, forgetting to be polite for a moment. He'd mumbled an apology.

"That's one of the reasons I like to read," Hana had said. "I read adventure stories of boys and men on adventures. I feel the dangers and perils they face and imagine how I would feel in their place. Though my mother might scold me for saying so, I think men and women are more alike than they are different. They want the same things."

"What's that?"

"Security. Stability. Love and support. Good food and a comfortable home and a family. Who wouldn't want that?"

"So men brave danger to achieve security?" Akira had asked.

Hana had nodded. "Consider your ancestor. He was elevated to nobility because he was brave. Your family keeps that status because you are brave, Akira--you and your father, and his father before that." She sighed. "The one trouble I have with how my life is arranged is that I have so few opportunities for bravery. When we marry, will you find some way to take me on an adventure?"

"You won't be scared?"

She'd shaken her head. "I would trust you to protect me. Would you trust me, too?"

He would have to teach her a few things... but most people on the street didn't know much by way of self-defense. He'd nodded. 

Now, walking home with his parents, he wasn't sure about anything he'd read. He respected Hana's opinions as a reader and a person, but from his perspective, what he'd discovered in those pamphlets and chapbooks was another set of chains. He'd gotten used to being kicked down like a disobedient dog. Learning that every woman he'd ever met had suffered similarly made him sad--then angry. Then very angry, on his mother's behalf. He even spared a thought for his two sisters that hated him more often than not. 

"Mother," he said, still in his formal register. "I do believe that being a woman is more difficult than I ever knew."

His father chuckled. "If you learned that much, you know more than most men ever will."

His mother nodded. "The truth is that being human is difficult, for men and women both, in different ways. Men almost always have more options, however." She turned to look at him. "You will have a man's options and a woman's options. Do not waste them, or your potential. It is one thing to understand women. It is quite another to be one."

"Yes, mother."

They walked home the rest of the way in silence. 

***

The morning of the Ascension Ceremony dawned bright and clear. Akira dressed with painstaking care, then visited Hasham Itasuran at Orutoran Estate, where he was living. He and Hasham were of a height and were attending together. Mon said it was Hunter training and Jin said Hasham needed to be socialized.

Akira was admitted by house servants and led to a sunroom to wait. Shirai Arima, Hasham's betrothed, was sitting in the Orutoran garden with Hasham, her long black-red hair streaming loose in the early morning sunshine. When she saw Akira through the window, she waved. She bent to squeeze Hasham's hand, then excused herself. 

Akira came out into the garden and sat down across from Hasham on a low stone seat. “Good visit?” he asked. "Was she going to go with you today?"

"The Arimas didn't get an invitation. She stayed over last night because I hadn't seen her in awhile. I have no idea why she keeps coming over," Hasham said.

“Well, you’re gonna get married in, what… three years? And she likes you.”

Hasham made a face at the word ‘married.’ 

“Is something wrong?”

Hasham wasn’t looking at Akira. Instead, he had an odd unfocused look--staring at the air in front of Akira instead of Akira himself, as if there was some kind of wall there. 

“Who decided that marriage was a good idea, anyway?” Hasham asked.

“What?” Akira laughed. “I mean, everyone does it. It’s been that way for a long time, so there must be a good reason.” He remembered the pamphlets he'd read about marriage the previous day and shuddered internally. Women didn't seem to get much out of marriage, save for an early death in childbirth. And men married against their will all the time--no one seemed to ask permission for anything on either side. 

And yet, Akira believed what he'd said, because it had been indoctrinated into him. He'd been told at the age of five that he would marry; at six, he'd met his betrothed. His life path was set, and so was Hasham's.  

“What is it? The reason, I mean?” Hasham asked. 

Akira shrugged. “I… don’t know. I think that socially the Mikado likes to control how people connect, so that his allies and friends are close to him. My mom picked someone nice for me, within those restrictions. And Shirai is nice. Do you not want to marry her?” He noticed that his answer was similar to Hana's. Men decided this. Old, rich, boorish men. That summed up the Mikados of the past fairly well. 

“I don’t want to marry anyone.” Hasham still wasn’t looking at Akira. “I don’t understand it, for one. And I don’t like what I do understand.”

“What don’t you like?”

“Being forced to spend your life with someone. Not getting to leave, and not getting a choice. I don’t like that. Not for me, not for Shirai.” He took a deep breath. “She likes another boy; she told me. She didn’t want to. She was afraid she’d get in trouble, but I told her I wouldn’t tell her parents or anything.” Finally, his eyes focused on Akira, attention bright and intense and unwavering. “Why can’t she marry who she likes, and then, I don’t know… marry someone else if she doesn’t like the person anymore? That makes more sense to me. Choices. And it accounts for change. What if I don’t like her when I grow up, or vice versa? I don’t want… I don’t…” 

Hasham lost the thread of what he wanted to say, or maybe he just didn’t have the right words. Tears glistened at the corners of his eyes. He was flushed all over, with anger or distress; it was hard to tell.

“You don’t have to,” Akira said brightly, trying to pull Hasham back and out of whatever terrible thoughts had their hold over him. “Not for a long time. We’ll figure it out.” He remembered Peony with a lump in his throat. Hana was kind and lovely, but he hadn't chosen her. He couldn't choose Peony, even if he wanted to. 

Hasham shook his head. “I was… chained, in that shed. For a long time. It felt like forever. The idea of doing that to someone else is… I can’t. I won’t.”

Akira blinked. “You wouldn’t literally chain someone up and hurt them, though.”

Hasham shook his head again, adamant. “It’s not… of course I wouldn’t do that. No way. But it’s the same thing. Just because the chains are invisible doesn’t mean they’re not there. I see them. I won’t chain someone else up. And I refuse to be chained again. If I’m going to spend forever with someone, it should be because we both want to. And if either of us wants to leave… it should be a choice.” He nodded to himself.

“But it’s not,” Akira said sadly. Anger and distress were what Hasham was feeling. Akira understood why.

“Yeah.”

“Did you ask Shirai? If this is what she wants, I mean.”

Hasham shook his head. “I’m afraid to.”

“Why? I think she’ll understand. I do.”

Hasham tilted his head. His concentrated attention became a little less sharp, though no less focused. “You do?”

Words weren’t going to convince Hasham of anything. Akira slid off his stone seat and scrabbled over Hasham so that they could sit side-by-side at the little white stone table in front of the bench. Then he reached for Hasham’s hand. Hasham let him take it, but he didn’t react otherwise.

“You know…” Akira thought hard about what he should say. He wouldn’t lie, but he needed to be careful. “I didn’t want to meet you. It was just after the plague and everything, and I was figuring out my Hunter oath and stuff. You were the last thing on my mind. My mother insisted; it wasn’t my choice.” He squeezed Hasham’s hand. “But it was my choice to stay.”

Hasham didn’t say anything.

“I think the whole world is caught up in these chains. Invisible ones. We’re Hunters; that chain is obvious. Our parents and families are linked to some others, but not everyone. The opportunities we have to even make our own choices are determined by those chains, those connections. But not everything is.

“I think...” It was Akira’s turn to fumble for words. “I think some connections can be good.  Some chains might even be good. I like that I was allowed to be your friend, because we’re the same social class and have a lot of the same connections. Connection isn’t bad. Coercion is bad.” 

It was easier, somehow, to say all this without Hasham looking at him. Hasham’s grip on his hand was no longer loose; he was listening. 

“So here’s what I think,” Akira said. “You have to get married to Shirai. That’s a chain, a--a compulsion. Coercion. But you don’t have to keep her away from the other boy she likes. You can let her do that. You can help her hide it from other people, so that she’s happy. And if you wind up liking someone else, she can do the same for you.

“It’s not the same as being free,” Akira said. “I understand that. It’s not the same as free choices. But it’s better than being chained to someone with no way out.”

Hasham leaned his head against Akira’s shoulder and breathed, deep and slow with his eyes closed. “You chose to stay,” he said. “Why?”

Akira rested his chin on top of Hasham’s head and squeezed his hand briefly. “You’re… a little awkward. It’s endearing.” He poked Hasham in the nose; Hasham scowled up at him. “I could tell you all the ways that you’re just crazy exceptional--you’re an amazing artist, you’re smart, you fight way above all of Jin's benchmarks which is impossible…” He grinned. “But you hate compliments, and that’s not why I stayed.” He felt Hasham relax a little against him. “You never wanted anything from me. I’ve never really experienced that before. My parents expect a lot. My sisters all want me to do things for them or not to overshadow them or something--I’m always tripping over hidden wires with them. I never understand why they’re mad at me.

“You don’t have that. You expect nothing. You want nothing. Only… choices.” Hasham had never shared so much of what he was thinking before. Akira was glad that he understood it: the thought process that led to Hasham rejecting marriage because he saw it as a form of compulsion. 

“You’re wrong.” Hasham shuddered all over, then sat up and dropped Akira’s hand. His fingers twisted in his clothes: a nervous habit. “I mean, it’s nice of you to say. But I don’t put things on people because I don’t want them to put anything on me. It’s selfish.”

Akira sighed. “It’s not selfish to want people to like you for yourself, is it? Not for what you can do, or what you can offer. Just… you.” He shifted on his seat, then pushed some of Hasham’s long hair out of his face. He was always hiding behind it.

Hasham looked up at him, into his eyes, and he was still close to crying but he seemed steadier. Akira stared back, though it was a little uncomfortable. He remembered the first time Hasham had stared at him. Akira was used to performing, used to being noticed, but being noticed was not the same thing as being seen. 

“Isn’t it?” Hasham asked. Quiet. 

Akira shook his head, then pulled Hasham into a hug.

Ayako Orutoran, Mon's wife, found them like that a few minutes later, whispering to one another behind the curtain of Hasham’s hair. She clicked her tongue. "The Ascension Ceremony is starting in less than two hours," she called into the garden.

"Coming!" Hasham called back. He stood up, then helped Akira to his feet as if he were the girl he was dressed as. "So. Shall we?"

***

Hasham introduced them when they reached the First Palace, since he was from the fourth-ranked Warriors Eight house and Akira was ranked eighth. Dignitaries from Kanbal and Sangal were present, as well as a few Rotans in lush fur garments. Sangalese women wore dresses in many layers, each layer a different, bright color. Kanbalese men roamed the greeting hall in full leather armor, carrying blunted ceremonial spears. Imperial Guards ringed the Mikado's throne at the center of the hall, which was currently empty. 

The Yogoese noblewomen and girls that Akira saw were all dressed similarly to him, in long robes with trailing sleeves. He was in peacock colors today: one of his mother's favorite outfits, and the elaborate makeup and colorful feathers in his hair turned some heads.

"They're staring at me," Akira whispered to Hasham in Talsh.

"Nope," Hasham whispered back. "They're staring at me. 'Cuz I'm so hideous."

Akira would have stomped his foot if they weren't in public. 

"Ignore them," Hasham said, plucking glasses of sweet Sangalese wine from a server. "Drink. Eat. Be seen. This is your test, right?"

Akira nodded. "And you?"

"I'm with you, remember? I'm not supposed to let you out of my sight. You're gonna get sick of me, Lady Ayutan."

"Never, Lord Itasuran." 

Hasham offered his arm, and they drifted around the hall, sipping their wine and accepting finger foods from other trays. They drifted into a side-room off the main hall and found the dancers and musicians warming up; Akira was so entranced by one dancer that he stopped still.

The musician, he noticed, wasn't practiced with the song. The dancer compensated for the less-than-stellar playing by shifting her body with the erratic beat, arms moving like a bird's wings, only boneless, fluid; she glided over the floor without a sound.

"Who is she?" Akira asked aloud.

"Forgive me, noble lady," a young girl with a short haircut said, bowing neatly but not quite perfectly. "You witness my mother, Rina Kiraran, who shall perform in the ceremony today." The girl grinned. "I, too, am privileged to witness her dance."

"And who are you?" Hasham asked.

"A teahouse servant, lord," she said, bowing again and doing a slightly better job of it. 

"Seeing your mother makes me desire to dance myself," Akira said, "though I could never match her."

Hasham shrugged, then half-bowed, offering one hand.

Akira's eyes widened. "Wait. You dance?"

Another shrug. "I'm a nobleman, aren't I?"

"With hidden depths, apparently." Akira accepted his hand, and they moved to an empty corner of the room so that they wouldn't disturb the other performers. They went through the simple warm-up steps of a traditional dance that they both knew without needing to say anything to each other. It was fast-paced and fun, with a lot of spins and twirls for Akira and some high jumps for Hasham, ending with Hasham lifting Akira over his head.

"Oof, you are heavier than you look," Hasham said, letting Akira down at the end of the dance with a little smile.

Akira smacked him in the sleeve with his fan. "You will never, ever say that to your betrothed. Ever."

The teahouse girl giggled behind them. "You can dance!" she said. "That is one of the first dances we learn." She bowed to them again. "Are you not betrothed, lord and lady?"

Akira and Hasham exchanged glances. They tried to restrain laughter, unsuccessfully, though Akira at least hid his face behind his fan. 

The teahouse girl's forehead puckered in confusion. 

"Oh, hello!" Peony flounced over, swathed in a pink silk dress. "It's wonderful to see you, Lady Aki, Lord--" She bit her lip, then looked at Akira, practically begging for an introduction.

"This is Lord Hasham Itasuran," Akira said. 

Peony bowed low. "A pleasure to meet you, lord."

Hasham muttered something noncommittal and looked uncomfortable.

Peony frowned a little and opened her mouth to apologize when Akira cut in. "Don't mind him," he said. "He doesn't like new places."

Hasham glared.

"Will you be dancing tonight?" Akira asked Peony.

The girl blushed. "Me? Of course not. I'm just here to assist the court dancers. And learn," she said. She saw the other teahouse girl standing nearby and waved her over. "Teru! How is your mother?"

"Ready," Teru said. "I wish I could see you dance tonight, too!" The look she gave Peony was full of a fierce devotion that Akira recognized. He hoped he wasn't looking at Peony the same way. He was glad that Peony had a friend, however pint-sized. 

A flurry of activity distracted Hasham and Akira: all the dancers were moving into changing rooms. It was almost time for the Ascension Ceremony to start. 

Peony gave Akira an apologetic look and excused herself. Teru bowed hastily and followed after her mother. In moments, the side-room was empty save for Hasham and Akira.

"That was interesting," Hasham said. "Lady Aki?"

"My mother takes me to Peony's teahouse sometimes."

"Uh huh. And you haven't told Peony your real name or..."

Akira stepped on his foot.

"Got it. Touchy." Hasham stood up straighter. "I've never seen you like that."

"Like what?"

"Dunno. You look like Peony like she's the sunrise or something. Something bright and shiny. I think I stared at Shirai the same way the first time I saw her."

Akira glanced sidelong at him. "Oh?"

"I was six. I grew out of it."

"How unromantic." Akira pouted. 

Hasham shrugged. "We should probably go out to the main hall."

"Yeah."

Neither of them moved.

"I don't like crowds." Hasham scuffed one shoe into the floor. "Maybe it would be okay to stay here?"

"My mother will scold us."

"You're afraid of your mother?"

"I think so, yes."

Hasham shrugged again, then offered his arm again with a disappointed sigh. "All right. Shall we?"

Akira accepted his arm and nodded graciously. "You have decent manners. For being raised in a barn."

Hasham stiffened. "A shed."

"I see no difference."

"You wouldn't." 

They were facing the doors to the main hall when they heard a blood-curdling shriek behind them.

Akira froze. Hasham didn't. Silent, wordless, he grabbed Akira's hand and yanked him in the direction of the scream. Inside of five seconds they were in a changing room facing a woman covered in blood.

When Akira remembered that day, after, it was always in flashes.

Little Teru crouched by the sliding door, clean of blood somehow, mouth open in shock. Too stunned to cry or scream.

Peony with her hands over her head, trying to protect herself from the bloody woman coming at her with a long knife. Not even to kill her, but because she was standing in the way of the costumes for the performance.

The woman. The terrible, terrifying woman. Akira had never seen anyone so appalling in his entire life. Her straight black hair was matted with gore that spattered her face and torn clothes. She was barefoot, free of adornment: her only garment was a stained, ripped gray shift. Her face was a rictus of insane rage, eyebrows skewing in different directions, eyes unfocused, a wide mouth smiling far too wide.

"Nozumi!" Hasham said, standing in front of Akira with both arms spread wide. "Stop."

That got the woman's attention. She tilted her head, turned, and it was then that Akira really saw it: Rina the dancer, dead and leaking blood at her attacker's feet. Her expression in death was surprise, not fear. When Hasham and Akira put the pieces of Nozumi's plot together after, they realized that Rina wasn't supposed to have time to scream. 

"Pup." Nozumi's unfocused eyes drifted toward Hasham. "Go home. This doesn't concern you."

Hasham bent quickly and pulled a knife from his boot. "Back up." He lifted the knife level with Nozumi's. "Leave. Leave these people alone."

A shudder went through Nozumi. Her unnatural smile went wider. 

Then her distant eyes found Akira and held. 

"Karei..." Nozumi took a few steps forward and reached for Akira.

Hasham sliced the back of her hand with his knife. 

Nozumi hissed at him. "You won't keep me from Karei."

"Watch me."

Another hiss, and Nozumi lifted Peony up by the hair, bringing her blade to the girl's neck. "Give her to me," Nozumi said, "or this one gets it."

"Fine," Hasham said.

"No!" Akira cried out at the same time."

Nozumi chuckled.

"Hasham, get out of my way," Akira said, trying to side-step his friend and meeting nothing but fast-footed resistance. Hasham stood in front of him, implacable, knife held high. 

"No way," Hasham said. "She's insane. She'll kill you."

Another chuckle from Nozumi. "And why not? Can you honestly say she doesn't deserve it? She was my friend, y'know. She betrayed me. Left me to die. I owe her a debt." The knife skittered across Peony's collarbone, drawing blood.

"Stop," Hasham said. "Settle it with me."

"You?"

"My father can't resolve this. That means you answer to me."

Nozumi scoffed and raised her blade at him again. 

The screen door behind them opened, revealing Jin and Zen out of breath. They took in the situation with a look and fanned out to either side of Hasham.

Nozumi looked at the newcomers with contempt. She lifted Peony up again and brought the tip of her blade to the girl's throat. "One wrong move," she said, "and there'll be a room full of dead dancers tonight."

Jin readied a shuriken. Hasham gestured for him to put it down. Jin frowned, but complied. Akira remembered being confused by that at the time.

"No," Hasham said, sounding older than he was, standing taller than usual. "You can kill them, sure. Fine. But you have to kill me first."

Nozumi's eyes narrowed. "Your word is not law, pup."

"I can free you," Hasham said. "My father can't move or speak. Only I have that authority. If you let that girl go, I'll let you go. Fair?"

Nozumi actually seemed to consider this. "What does 'freedom' mean to you?"

"What you think it means." Hasham tossed her a leather pouch that was full of gold and silver lugals. "Your master is dead. You don't have anything. I'll give you all that, and more, if you just walk away. Leave the girl alone. Leave my friend alone. I won't come after you. If you don't show your face to me again, you can live however you like."

Nozumi's face twisted and spasmed. "But Karei..." She rummaged through Hasham's pouch for a few seconds, and that was when Jin released his shuriken. Two hit her: one along the scalp and another lower, near her ribs. Unfortunately her spasming and twitching made it so that the others missed, and she was still able to move.

Hissing and clutching Hasham's money in one hand and her blade in the other, Nozumi sprinted out a side-door toward the exit.

Jin followed, leaving Zen to investigate what had happened here.