When the young man stopped breathing, the girl rose, and went to her sister again.
“Come,” the woman said.
The girl followed her into the house. Again it was quiet. Again she waited as the demon went to work. A desk, an inkwell. Paper in a stack. The demon found a brush, began preparing the ink. It spread, it glistened, wet in the moonlight over snow.
The girl watched again. In her sister’s hands, she saw small strips of paper no larger than her palm. With brush and ink, the demon wrote upon them, graceful letters like those that marked her skin. When she was done, she laid them on the table, each small strip the width of three fingers on a hand. They rose into the air, floating – and then they scattered to the corners of the room, forming shadows of vaguely human shape, each one marked with inky squares of paper that hung where a face should have been. They waited, these shadows, silent, spectral; like her, the girl; like they were ghosts.Shikigami, she thought.The summoned.
They were waiting for her to tell them what to do.
“Sister,” she said. “What sign were we waiting for? All this time?”
The woman gazed into the night. “A sign of plagues. ‘When the low overthrow the high, and the mountains burn. And the fields lie fallow.’”
“Is that now?” asked the girl.
“Yes, child. It is now.”
She lowered her brush with care. One last dip into the well, a final paper stroke: and she wrote a lonely word, one character to bind the rest, on the single square of paper that remained.
When it was done, the girl asked: “What are you doing?”
“We need to find someone,” the demon said. She had finished with her strokes.
“One of the three?” the girl asked.
The demon lifted her last paper to the air. It wavered, hovering, in the changing dark. “Yes,” she said. “One of the three.”
She released the paper then, setting it free: it rose and drifted near the others. On it, the girl saw small letters, painted stark black on the white. It was a single word. It was a name.
It read:
Starlight.
CHAPTERTHIRTY-ONE
Yaeko
Yaeko bent her way through the sleet.Could have picked a better day for this.The roar of it, an angry tide like waves crashing down from a tempest sky. Unrest sluiced through the edges of the town. The city heard, and whispered. A broadsheet fluttered in the breeze, brushing against her leg as she entered the palace.
She batted at it with a scowl. They were everywhere. Satirical illustrations by anonymous authors, they were crude, humorous, and mocking of the court. She’d seen one depicting a naked monk atop a donkey riding through a burning temple; another of impotent councilmen, fainting as they watched a wall of fanning flames. A third showed great ministers too busy bedding courtesans to bother, with their bare feet pointing to the sky, thin smiles cracking in pleasure as one of them said, “Oh! It’s hot in here!”
People had spread these pamphlets and other caricatures for a full moon-cycle already, and she was weary. This particular one showed a holy monkey in a priest’s robe, prostrating himself before a frog with rolled-back eyes who was meditating on a stupa. Behind them, all manner of animals read the scrolls of enlightenment with great discernment while a cat and fox with human bodies cavorted, half-nude as they lay among the reeds, their comically oversized breasts and genitals meant to draw the eye.
In other times she would have found the mockery quite funny – eachbroadsheet seemed intent on laughing about one particular element of the courtly life; some she found crass, while others were objectively good – but not today. Today she had too much to do.
Today she had to tell her lord what his sons had done.
The death of their brother hit them hard. Murdered in his own home; Shigeo had never gotten along with his brothers, and lately stood up against his father in the court, but he was still Keishi. He was family. And he was dead.
She found Seikiyo praying at the fox-shrine outside the Hall of the Morning. His indigo robe, normally immaculate, its white patterns braided with yellow, lay in wrinkles on his shoulders. She was struck with a sudden urge to protect him. He had, after all, protected her.
He asked her what happened, as though he already knew. His face, drawn, and lined, and tired; like something carved of wood. Seventy years on this shattered earth. Five children, two of them now dead.
“Your son, Lord Muzo,” she began. “Seichi, he’s gone on a rampage.”
Seikiyo sighed. “He’s always been a firebrand. Often it is, with the youngest.”
Seichi had demanded Yora’s head, blaming the older Gensei for his brother’s death, and damn the gods, he’d called for the retired-emperor Goshira’s head, too. The Chiten had conspired with rich Lord Matsubara Taiho, Minister of the Right, to confiscate Shigeo’s provincial holdings in the days following his death; Seichi, hearing of this, upended a cart of lotus roots in the marketplace, drank himself into a rage, and proceeded to blockade the minister’s home, threatening to burn it to the ground.
