I wait until the door has closed behind her to slump back in my seat and let out a breath.
“She didn’t ask how to get in touch with High Earth,” Nariel notes.
I shake my head. “She’ll figure that out herself. If Evram suspects I had anything to do with it, he’ll know I’m playing him.”
“She could be playing you.”
I take a bracing gulp of tea. “Do you think she is?”
Slowly, he shakes his head. “I do not.”
I look at him. He doesn’t look happy, but he’s also not telling me that.
I firmly tell myself it is not my job to manage his feelings if he’s not willing to tell me what they are, and I finish my ice cream.
The truth is I don’t want to know. If he does know what I’m doing and disapproves, there’s nothing I can do about it anyway.
Back at the ryokan, I announce that I’m going to take advantage of the hot springs.
Then Nariel says, “I have another idea.”
I brace myself for the conversation I desperately don’t want to have.
But he opens the closet in our shared room to reveal his shopping bag from earlier.
And then he pulls out a yukata, a traditional summer kimono worn at festivals. It’s a brilliant red with delicate cherry blossoms.
I stare at him.
“You aren’t expecting any fights today,” Nariel reminded me.
“I know that. You want to join the Tanabata festival?”
“Don’t you?”
Yes. The answer rises in me so strongly I don’t let it out, and say instead, “I was asking you.”
Nariel looks at me intently. “I haven’t been in many years. I hoped you could show me.”
Oh lord. Tanabata is the festival celebrating the one day a year that a pair of godly lovers separated by the cosmos can meet.
I may have hysterics.
Somehow I manage, “I don’t know how to tie the obi.”
“I do,” Nariel says, because of course he does, he’s hundreds of years old, why wouldn’t he know how to tie a dang obi?
(This thought followed closely by, ohmygod, is he also going to wear a kimono, and will I be able to cope?)
Nariel crosses the room and puts the yukata in my hand.
“Red for boldness,” he murmurs. “Cherry blossoms for—“
“I know what cherry blossoms are for.”
The beauty in transience. Appreciating that moment while you have it.
I really am going to cry.
