“The truth is simple,” she said. “I loved my father. He was trying to stop a great evil in our country, but… he mademistakes. It’s clear the lord chancellor was trying to do the same thing, and their rivalry got in the way. It ruined my father… He should have been at your side, as in the old days when you were young. His folly was his selfishness. And that is not something I am likely to repeat.”
Seikiyo considered his tea. “I wonder. Tell me, you think it is only a sign of weakness for people to obey the law? To sit on their heels and bow low to touch the ground when the emperor walks past.”
She shook her head. “No, lord.”
“And yet that is what your clan believes,” he said. “Why? Because you remember where you come from. You cling to it… You remember the days when the only way for minor nobles to make their name was to run off to the provinces, hire hunters on the local tracks. You define yourself by what you fight; just as this empire defines itself as what it is not: barbarian. You fight them and you bring us back their heads. Thus the kijin-tai gain stature. This is what your line has always done. And you seek to do it now. But you must remember, Lady Kai, in the capital, theTen’inreigns.”
“Or their regents,” she said. “You are kijin too, lord. Is that not also the story of how the Keishi came to be?”
“Not now,” Yora began, but she wouldn’t let it go.
“What? Are we not allowed to talk of it? Are we not allowed to speak?”
A murmur of unease swept the hall. “We need not listen to this woman,” said the Minister of the Right.
“‘This woman’? What of our founders, lord? Was Empress Sora’in not a woman? Did the god Ohirume not take a woman’s form?”
“Kai,” warned Yora.
“Why is it a sin to seek some independence?” She addressed the powdered nobles. “Answer me.”
“Child,” one of them hissed.
“Why am I so ill-marked in this city?” She wheeled around; everyone was watching her, and she knew she should find a better way, but it was too late. “You are punishing me because of what my father did.”
“Your father rebelled against the throne,” the papery Left Minister said.
“No, my father protected the throne. He put our former Ten’in in power to stop the demon-emperor, just like you did. We are no different. You were friends.”
“Then why make war against his ‘friend’? Why help restore order, then two years later, begin another uprising, another war? Has your family not had enough bloodshed?”
Kai laughed. “It’s a joke. You are, you’reblind. You’re so consumed by your own petty intrigues and your poetry and your fucking games behind your screens. You don’t even know it.”
“And what,” the Minister of the Right said icily, “is this joke that we don’t know?”
“I’ll ask you a question, lord.” She turned to him. “What if he’d won?”
The plump man bared his teeth. “What did you say?”
“What would you have done, if my fatherwon? You would have supported him. The regents would still have sway in this court, and not—”
“Not what?” Seikiyo looked down at her with his shaved head, eyes flared in anger. “You come close to treason here, Gekko’in. You should listen to your uncle. You should listen to those who know more than you – especially about what happened then.”
“You mean when you had my father killed?”
A gasp spread out across the ministers. “Take your seat,” Seikiyo said.
Instead, Kai turned on her heel and left, burning with embarrassment and unbridled fury.
“Kai.” Yora rose sharply, but it was too late. Kai turned her back to the hall. Seikiyo muttered something to her uncle as she went, but whatever it was, the words were lost under the pounding of her own angry footsteps, and the creaking of the cicada floors.
Outside the chamber, the world seemed calm and quiet, but Kai could not keep still. She swept past the startled guards and found herself in the main hall, looking at the picture scroll, color on silk, of her uncle Yora slaying the devil nightbird.
Bureaucrats, she thought.They can go to hell.I’d do better than the lot of them combined.
She didn’t know what to do. That banking Minister of the Left, Hara-no-Ichiei Hoin, was supposed to be Goshira’s friend, but he’d done nothing to help her. Everything the former-emperor had said was right; the Keishi were not even regents, not officially, but as grandfather to the newborn prince, Seikiyo would do what he wanted. The baby’s father, Emperor Ashihara, suffered under his thumb.
All Ashihara does is perform ceremony, she thought, scowling.This system is so broken. I have to do something better. I could do something better.
