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foxinthestarsToday was a good day, even if I did suffer the usual mood swings and indulge in a long talky scene; I didn't quite make up my shortfall, but I took a big chunk out of it. On a whim, I took the laptop down to my former church (right next door to the house; we still know the people there and have keys to it) and worked there for awhile, then I was able to get more done this evening, got to a point of productively gaming myself with the stats the NaNo site shows (I'm so close to 1800 for today, just a little more... Now can I do 1900... That kind of thing.), and ended up with good progress; I had wanted to make it to 33k today, so doing that made me happy.
And now, in lieu of pithy comments, allow me to share a song that I have associated with FY and particularly Mirrorverse Yui ever since back in the day:
“That’s Gyoushi; oh, I’d go crazy without her,” Kin’umi said as they picked themselves up. Her childhood voice had matured into a smooth contralto, but her light, babbling cadence still made it sound girlish. “But what are you doing here? For you to be out of the palace and come all this way, it must be...”
Hotohori nodded. “She finally came.”
Kin’umi squealed with delight. “The Suzaku no Miko! They don’t tell me much in here, but I did know that. So then, that must be the girl who was with you --- but why would the Miko have a Zashiyo dialect...?”
“No, no, that’s Chichiri, one of the other Seishi. She and Nuriko are still locked in your dungeon,” he reminded her.
She clapped her hands to her mouth. “Oh! Gyoushi, send someone to tell them he’s safe and let them go.”
“Yes, Milady.”
Kin’umi scrambled under the curtain again, and the two of them sat silently while Gyoushi went out into the empty antechamber and delivered the message to the soldiers and monks waiting outside, not speaking until she had shut the doors behind her again.
“I’ve given everyone a terrible scare,” he admitted. “I couldn’t know that it was you.”
“Isn’t it awful?” she said, pushing the heavy veil aside again. “That’s the law here; anyone who looks at the Emperor or any of his family, they just cut off their heads like that; they’re not even allowed to say anything.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t really know it was you, either,” she said. “I thought I must be imagining it, that you couldn’t possibly be here, but it looked so much like you, and even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t let them do that to anyone, could I? Maybe they won’t like it, but they just humor me because I’m the silly foreigner... I’m not even supposed to talk! Look at this; I want to show you this.” She gestured him in behind the curtain, which Gyoushi finally lifted out of the way and propped up with her axe. Beside the cushion where Kin’umi sat was a small chest with numerous drawers and a tray laying on top. She pulled a drawer to reveal files of thin ceramics slips, and she took a few out and turned them over to show a character on each face. “I’m supposed to talk with this. Can you imagine sorting through thousands of tiles every time you want to say anything?? They say it’s because of the Mandate of Heaven, but it’s crazy! Am I such a living goddess that looking at my handwriting will burn people’s eyes out?”
“I’ve been seeing how formal everything is here,” he said. “It must have been terrible for you...”
“It wasn’t this bad before I came of age and we had the real wedding,” she said. “And I have Gyoushi and everyone humors me --- there are some things I just won’t do... And at least I got away from Mother.”
Hotohori smiled ruefully. “Were you told when she died?”
She nodded. “I didn’t know what to do...”
“I don’t think there was anything you could have done,” he said.
“But it made me so happy, all the dresses and silks you sent when I got married,” she said. “I know it was horrible to make you wait at a time like that, but I just had to change clothes before I brought you in here. I feel like a widow the way they dress me for things like that, not that anyone sees me anyway...”
He chuckled, not having it in him to be angry at her for her vanity.
“You really rescued me, you know,” she said.
“Did I?”
“Yes. My husband had finally just ordered me to go to the big temple and monastery, after I told him again and
“But---!” Hotohori stopped and looked back at Gyoushi.
“I told you, I know how to keep my mouth shut,” she said.
“But the Monks of Genbu are helping us,” he told Kin’umi. “They were planning to meet us at the monastery at sunset; could that be why...?”
“I don’t trust him that much,” she said. “As soon as we were married, he started in --- he wants me to be a nun, can you believe that? To be a nun for Genbu and wear one of those black veils all the time! I told him if I was going to do that, I would have stayed home and done it for Suzaku, but he never gives up, that stupid man...”
“So you’re unhappy with your husband?” he asked sadly. After all, she hadn’t been given any choice in marrying him.
“Well, he does do things like that, and I have to tell you he’s not handsome...”
Hotohori hugged her. “My dear little sister, I’ve made you unhappy!” he lamented theatrically. “How could your husband charm you with his looks when you have a brother like me to compare him to?”
She burst out in giggles. “Oh, it’s not a matter of comparing!” she laughed. “He has these little black eyes with thick eyebrows, and a big flat nose and a double chin, but...” she trailed off.
“But...?” he asked.
She let her face fall and for a long moment savored a frown, but one more wistful than bitter. “Whoever said ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ was an idiot,” she said at last. “I say those things, but what I hate the most about him is that he’s so busy. For weeks at a time I never see him. Then I think about things he did or said or wanted me to do that offended me, and I think about how plain-looking he is. After a week of that, I hate him, and I think when he comes I’ll say something nasty to him, but as soon as I see him, I forget it all. Even when he asks me over and over to go to the temple or something like that, he never tried to force me, at least not until today. He tells me I’m beautiful even behind a curtain, because I think about things differently from everyone else here, and maybe he’s patronizing me, but I never start thinking so until after he leaves. When we’re together, for a while I forget that Mother shipped me away to this crazy country and you or I didn’t have anything to say about it. For a little while, it’s like that...” She sighed. “And then he always leaves again.”
Her brother held her around the shoulders; it was a sad story, but it also gave him a sense of relief and hope. She had given him a glimpse beyond the surface grievances, and he could see that it wasn’t a completely lonely and joyless life she had been delivered into.
“And what about you?” she asked. “Did Mother pick out someone from the Inner Palace for you?”
“Don’t speak to me about that place,” he said bluntly, with a twitch.
“It sounds like she must have tried.”
“’There are some things I just won’t do,’” he echoed.
“But you can’t just go on alone forever,” she said.
He smiled knowingly. “I didn’t say I was alone.”
“Oh? Who is it?”
“She finally came... The Suzaku no Miko.”
Kin’umi squealed with delight again. “I wanted to ask you before, what she was like, and now I have to!”
“Well...” He was struggling with how to put Yui into words when the bell sounded in the antechamber and his sister ducked behind the curtain again.
Gyoushi snatched her axe and let the drapery fall back into place before she went out and brought back a letter on a tray, which she slid under the curtain before returning to close the doors again.
“My husband says I can’t keep you,” Kin’umi summarized.
“I’m afraid you can’t,” Hotohori told her. “I have to meet the others at sunset, and after that, speed is too important to our mission to spend more time here...”
She shouldered the curtain aside again to show her pouting face. “It’s not fair, just to come in and go out like the wind when we might never see each other again...”
“It isn’t, is it?”
“At least you got this far,” she said. “Without you, I’ll just be sitting behind a curtain again, for the rest of my life...”
Hotohori knew that she wouldn’t really want to keep him away from Yui and the others, but bitterness at the situation was only natural, and he of all people could understand how she felt. It had been only days ago that it had been himself in the palace of Konan, thinking that the lively breeze that had swept into his life was passing out again, leaving him in the gilded cage where he would remain forever. The barriers around his sister might be more real, but he couldn’t help thinking, If only she had someone like Chichiri...
“The Suzaku no Miko...” she said wistfully. “I wish I could have met her just once...”
*******
As evening approached, Yui pulled together several of the floor cushions in the meditation room where she still waited and lay on them with her eyes closed in an effort to take a nap, now with everyone but Hotohori there watching over her and conversing in hushed tones. The earlier terror and confusion had run the worst of its course within a couple of hours, but it had still exhausted her, and just when she would have wanted to be energetic and alert to face the mysterious guardians of Genbu’s Shinzahou. Despite Tama curling up against her chest, she couldn’t fall asleep, but just laying still --- and, as cold as it might seem, exempting herself from interacting with anyone --- had some value as rest, and allowed her to process what had happened and calm herself down.
She had still been crying when Master Tan had arrived, leaving it to Chiriko and to Tasuki --- who had turned highly protective in the crisis --- to explain the rumor they had heard, and when Tan had revealed that the princess in question was Kin’umi, the little sister Hotohori mentioned in the cave, telling Yui and Nuriko of his guilt for not standing up for her when they were children, it had only introduced a new dread, at what cruel fate it would be for Hotohori to be inadvertently killed by his own sister, but Yui didn’t dare breathe a word of it. To let slip that Hotohori was the princess’s brother would be to reveal that he was the Emperor of Konan and invite unpredictable repercussions.
Tan had arranged to send the princess a message with all possible haste, saying he could even get one on such short notice from Kin’umi’s husband, the crown prince, proving Chiriko’s suspicion right about what a highly-placed official he must be. Her reply had arrived shortly. It also avoided the personal aspects of the situation, but it said that all of “the prisoner’s” companions had already been freed, that he would be delivered by the end of the day, and that she was so fearful that her husband would follow his native customs and avenge the transgression against her that she demanded to have them all, together with Hotohori, brought before her again as quickly as possible, writing even that she would refuse to sleep until she had seen them safe.
It was some time after that that Nuriko, Chichiri, and Tamahome had come to the monastery looking for Yui so they could tell her as much of the situation as they knew, leaving her with the letter in hand to reassure them rather than vice versa. Chichiri acted as if she had never been the least bit frightened, Nuriko as if she would stay alarmed until she had Hotohori back before her eyes, and this time, Yui felt much more in accord with Nuriko, at least enough to keep her stubbornly suspended above the threshold of sleep.
Being awake, she opened her eyes immediately at the sound of the door and recognized Tan’s sash. “He’s here. I’m having him brought directly to the rear courtyard, so if you’ll follow me, I’ll take you there now.”
And now, in lieu of pithy comments, allow me to share a song that I have associated with FY and particularly Mirrorverse Yui ever since back in the day:
33012 ★ 50000 (66.02%)
“That’s Gyoushi; oh, I’d go crazy without her,” Kin’umi said as they picked themselves up. Her childhood voice had matured into a smooth contralto, but her light, babbling cadence still made it sound girlish. “But what are you doing here? For you to be out of the palace and come all this way, it must be...”
Hotohori nodded. “She finally came.”
Kin’umi squealed with delight. “The Suzaku no Miko! They don’t tell me much in here, but I did know that. So then, that must be the girl who was with you --- but why would the Miko have a Zashiyo dialect...?”
“No, no, that’s Chichiri, one of the other Seishi. She and Nuriko are still locked in your dungeon,” he reminded her.
She clapped her hands to her mouth. “Oh! Gyoushi, send someone to tell them he’s safe and let them go.”
“Yes, Milady.”
Kin’umi scrambled under the curtain again, and the two of them sat silently while Gyoushi went out into the empty antechamber and delivered the message to the soldiers and monks waiting outside, not speaking until she had shut the doors behind her again.
“I’ve given everyone a terrible scare,” he admitted. “I couldn’t know that it was you.”
“Isn’t it awful?” she said, pushing the heavy veil aside again. “That’s the law here; anyone who looks at the Emperor or any of his family, they just cut off their heads like that; they’re not even allowed to say anything.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t really know it was you, either,” she said. “I thought I must be imagining it, that you couldn’t possibly be here, but it looked so much like you, and even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t let them do that to anyone, could I? Maybe they won’t like it, but they just humor me because I’m the silly foreigner... I’m not even supposed to talk! Look at this; I want to show you this.” She gestured him in behind the curtain, which Gyoushi finally lifted out of the way and propped up with her axe. Beside the cushion where Kin’umi sat was a small chest with numerous drawers and a tray laying on top. She pulled a drawer to reveal files of thin ceramics slips, and she took a few out and turned them over to show a character on each face. “I’m supposed to talk with this. Can you imagine sorting through thousands of tiles every time you want to say anything?? They say it’s because of the Mandate of Heaven, but it’s crazy! Am I such a living goddess that looking at my handwriting will burn people’s eyes out?”
“I’ve been seeing how formal everything is here,” he said. “It must have been terrible for you...”
“It wasn’t this bad before I came of age and we had the real wedding,” she said. “And I have Gyoushi and everyone humors me --- there are some things I just won’t do... And at least I got away from Mother.”
Hotohori smiled ruefully. “Were you told when she died?”
She nodded. “I didn’t know what to do...”
“I don’t think there was anything you could have done,” he said.
“But it made me so happy, all the dresses and silks you sent when I got married,” she said. “I know it was horrible to make you wait at a time like that, but I just had to change clothes before I brought you in here. I feel like a widow the way they dress me for things like that, not that anyone sees me anyway...”
He chuckled, not having it in him to be angry at her for her vanity.
“You really rescued me, you know,” she said.
“Did I?”
“Yes. My husband had finally just ordered me to go to the big temple and monastery, after I told him again and
“But---!” Hotohori stopped and looked back at Gyoushi.
“I told you, I know how to keep my mouth shut,” she said.
“But the Monks of Genbu are helping us,” he told Kin’umi. “They were planning to meet us at the monastery at sunset; could that be why...?”
“I don’t trust him that much,” she said. “As soon as we were married, he started in --- he wants me to be a nun, can you believe that? To be a nun for Genbu and wear one of those black veils all the time! I told him if I was going to do that, I would have stayed home and done it for Suzaku, but he never gives up, that stupid man...”
“So you’re unhappy with your husband?” he asked sadly. After all, she hadn’t been given any choice in marrying him.
“Well, he does do things like that, and I have to tell you he’s not handsome...”
Hotohori hugged her. “My dear little sister, I’ve made you unhappy!” he lamented theatrically. “How could your husband charm you with his looks when you have a brother like me to compare him to?”
She burst out in giggles. “Oh, it’s not a matter of comparing!” she laughed. “He has these little black eyes with thick eyebrows, and a big flat nose and a double chin, but...” she trailed off.
“But...?” he asked.
She let her face fall and for a long moment savored a frown, but one more wistful than bitter. “Whoever said ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ was an idiot,” she said at last. “I say those things, but what I hate the most about him is that he’s so busy. For weeks at a time I never see him. Then I think about things he did or said or wanted me to do that offended me, and I think about how plain-looking he is. After a week of that, I hate him, and I think when he comes I’ll say something nasty to him, but as soon as I see him, I forget it all. Even when he asks me over and over to go to the temple or something like that, he never tried to force me, at least not until today. He tells me I’m beautiful even behind a curtain, because I think about things differently from everyone else here, and maybe he’s patronizing me, but I never start thinking so until after he leaves. When we’re together, for a while I forget that Mother shipped me away to this crazy country and you or I didn’t have anything to say about it. For a little while, it’s like that...” She sighed. “And then he always leaves again.”
Her brother held her around the shoulders; it was a sad story, but it also gave him a sense of relief and hope. She had given him a glimpse beyond the surface grievances, and he could see that it wasn’t a completely lonely and joyless life she had been delivered into.
“And what about you?” she asked. “Did Mother pick out someone from the Inner Palace for you?”
“Don’t speak to me about that place,” he said bluntly, with a twitch.
“It sounds like she must have tried.”
“’There are some things I just won’t do,’” he echoed.
“But you can’t just go on alone forever,” she said.
He smiled knowingly. “I didn’t say I was alone.”
“Oh? Who is it?”
“She finally came... The Suzaku no Miko.”
Kin’umi squealed with delight again. “I wanted to ask you before, what she was like, and now I have to!”
“Well...” He was struggling with how to put Yui into words when the bell sounded in the antechamber and his sister ducked behind the curtain again.
Gyoushi snatched her axe and let the drapery fall back into place before she went out and brought back a letter on a tray, which she slid under the curtain before returning to close the doors again.
“My husband says I can’t keep you,” Kin’umi summarized.
“I’m afraid you can’t,” Hotohori told her. “I have to meet the others at sunset, and after that, speed is too important to our mission to spend more time here...”
She shouldered the curtain aside again to show her pouting face. “It’s not fair, just to come in and go out like the wind when we might never see each other again...”
“It isn’t, is it?”
“At least you got this far,” she said. “Without you, I’ll just be sitting behind a curtain again, for the rest of my life...”
Hotohori knew that she wouldn’t really want to keep him away from Yui and the others, but bitterness at the situation was only natural, and he of all people could understand how she felt. It had been only days ago that it had been himself in the palace of Konan, thinking that the lively breeze that had swept into his life was passing out again, leaving him in the gilded cage where he would remain forever. The barriers around his sister might be more real, but he couldn’t help thinking, If only she had someone like Chichiri...
“The Suzaku no Miko...” she said wistfully. “I wish I could have met her just once...”
*******
As evening approached, Yui pulled together several of the floor cushions in the meditation room where she still waited and lay on them with her eyes closed in an effort to take a nap, now with everyone but Hotohori there watching over her and conversing in hushed tones. The earlier terror and confusion had run the worst of its course within a couple of hours, but it had still exhausted her, and just when she would have wanted to be energetic and alert to face the mysterious guardians of Genbu’s Shinzahou. Despite Tama curling up against her chest, she couldn’t fall asleep, but just laying still --- and, as cold as it might seem, exempting herself from interacting with anyone --- had some value as rest, and allowed her to process what had happened and calm herself down.
She had still been crying when Master Tan had arrived, leaving it to Chiriko and to Tasuki --- who had turned highly protective in the crisis --- to explain the rumor they had heard, and when Tan had revealed that the princess in question was Kin’umi, the little sister Hotohori mentioned in the cave, telling Yui and Nuriko of his guilt for not standing up for her when they were children, it had only introduced a new dread, at what cruel fate it would be for Hotohori to be inadvertently killed by his own sister, but Yui didn’t dare breathe a word of it. To let slip that Hotohori was the princess’s brother would be to reveal that he was the Emperor of Konan and invite unpredictable repercussions.
Tan had arranged to send the princess a message with all possible haste, saying he could even get one on such short notice from Kin’umi’s husband, the crown prince, proving Chiriko’s suspicion right about what a highly-placed official he must be. Her reply had arrived shortly. It also avoided the personal aspects of the situation, but it said that all of “the prisoner’s” companions had already been freed, that he would be delivered by the end of the day, and that she was so fearful that her husband would follow his native customs and avenge the transgression against her that she demanded to have them all, together with Hotohori, brought before her again as quickly as possible, writing even that she would refuse to sleep until she had seen them safe.
It was some time after that that Nuriko, Chichiri, and Tamahome had come to the monastery looking for Yui so they could tell her as much of the situation as they knew, leaving her with the letter in hand to reassure them rather than vice versa. Chichiri acted as if she had never been the least bit frightened, Nuriko as if she would stay alarmed until she had Hotohori back before her eyes, and this time, Yui felt much more in accord with Nuriko, at least enough to keep her stubbornly suspended above the threshold of sleep.
Being awake, she opened her eyes immediately at the sound of the door and recognized Tan’s sash. “He’s here. I’m having him brought directly to the rear courtyard, so if you’ll follow me, I’ll take you there now.”
