Now she gazed into the mirror again, wishing for some lucky god to make a change in her appearance.My nose is crooked, she thought.My brows too heavy.She checked to make sure her face and neck were perfectly painted, sighed, stepped back, adjusted the elegant robes once again. Twelve layers of clothes weighed as much as armor, which, in a sense, it was.
She pictured her father – her dead father – as he was that day, seventeen years ago. The look of fear on his face, wild, untamed, in those last moments before the enemy came, and their general, green-eyed Akiyo Musha’in, had pulled her out of the little wayhouse where they’d been forced to hide. “Come with me, girl,” the Musha’in had said, her long hair glinting black in the night. “You don’t want to see this.”
I was too old, Kai thought.I remember it too well.If only she’d been young, a baby, then she never would have known him at all. Her father. It would be just a story to her, and just as easy to put away.
Instead, she felt his grip on her arm, the stench of rice-wine on his lips. His voice, as he called to her, his daughter-of-the-moonlight. The stained, wet smell of sweat on leather. And fire: torchlight, burning straw, wood paneling, rice-paper doors when they pulled his body from the house.
“That was my family,” she muttered, finishing the robes at last, “not me.”It was the past. And I will not live for ever in that shadow.
“Truly, you look wonderful,” Ayame Hayo said.
Sitting on her cushion by the window, Yora’s wife was from the Satsuki-Zusho family, sister of her stewardfather, and one of the kindest people Kai had met.
“People said that in Satsuki,” Kai grumbled. “Here, I’m just another face.”Girls are so pretty, in the center of the world.
“You’re nervous.”
“Of course I’m nervous, I’m about to meet the retired-emperor.” Kai frowned. “I have to keep face.”
So she took her time, powdering her skin until she was – if not happy, at least satisfied – with how she looked. In truth, she enjoyed perfecting the arrangement of her many-layered robes, feeling the soft cotton, the fine silks overlapping; she liked the cloth against her skin, the beauty of soft touches of makeup on her eyes, and her hair tied back in waves. She only wished she could feel more confident about it.
“Why try so hard pretending you’re a noble?” Hayo asked her later, as they were preparing for her audience in the hall. “You’re not an aristocrat.” Kijin houses were not nobles, and would never be accepted by them here.
“If I am to work with them,” Kai said, “I will need to know them very well… especially if I ever want to gain their respect.”
She turned. “Aunt, do you think the retired-emperor remembers me?”
Hayo gave a smile. “Of course he does. The retired-emperor is nothing if not…meticulouswith his knowledge of what’s happening in his city.”
“And itisstill his city?”
“What else?”
“He has taken the vows, he’s retired…”
“He’s the head of the imperial family,” Hayo said. “And will be until he dies. He is theChiten. It will always be his city.”
“I wonder what the chancellor thinks of that.”
Hayo shrugged. She was not a tall woman, by kijin standards, though she towered over the no’in and the ge’in commonfolk. Twice Kai’s age, Hayo was older than her husband, Yora, and the confidence and heft with which she moved gave lie to any who would think her past her prime. She was not as athletic as Akiyo or the other warriors. No, she was softer, rounder, more comfortable in herself, her body and her mind; she had better discipline. She was well read. She’d been trained at kijin schools. She knew how to use a blade, could ride a horse as well as any, though none could match her in the game of politics; she was proud, as were all kijin-tai, and she commanded every room that she was in. She was, in many ways, everything Kai hoped to be.
“I’ve written a poem,” Kai said, tucking the folds of her dress. “About the moon, like my name. I’ll give it to the retired-emperor today. For goodwill. He’s said to love his verse…”
“He’s famous for it,” said Hayo. “I’m sure he’ll be quite pleased.”
Kai bit her smile – her anxieties were coming back. “I worry he’ll dismiss my hand. My calligraphy, it’s not what it should be.”
“Goshira’s the biggest goblin in the country,” Hayo said. “He’ll hardly care. He knows who you are.”
Then a smile: “Don’t tell him I said that, about the goblin.”
Kai laughed. “Oh, I’ll make sure to, first thing I’ll do. ‘Ayame Hayo, she thinks you’re a monster, O lord.’ That’ll go well.”
“They call him the windswept emperor, you know,” Hayo went on. “No one knows which way he’ll go. He changes always, depending on the turning of the times. He’ll do anything to help himself.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” Kai said, and fussed with her robe again.
The retired-emperor was older than she’d expected. Bigger. Tall, like most of the nobility, Goshira had a wide, gentle face with lidded eyes like points, a round belly, thin hands. They were not hands of a man who’d drawn a bow or ridden a horse in the rain. They were not hands that had killed. No, she knew, this was the kind of man who had others do the killing. Much cleaner that way. Gentler on the skin. She caught a scent of perfume in the air; lilac, she thought, sweet orange.
