At least until you crept into bed next to me.
Still half asleep, I thought I must’ve dreamed you—your hair unbound, your skin flush with anger or embarrassment or …
“Shefali,” you said, lying next to me. How small you were for an eight-year-old, how tall I was. “I’m sorry.”
I must’ve been dreaming.
“I should’ve moved faster.”
I must have been dreaming. Those words would never leave you in the waking world.
“I won’t let it happen again.”
Sleep, then.
*
I WENT TO court more than once. I did not like it. There, in the halls of jade, I was stared at by scholars and advisers and sycophants.
“Ah, O-Shizuka-shon!” they might say, when they saw you. They’d bow so low that their beards swiped against the ground. “The Tiger-Slayer! Heaven’s blood runs pure in you.”
“I did not kill the tiger,” you’d say. You said this each time we went to court, at least five times. “I struck the last blow, but I did not kill it.”
“Do not be so modest,” they might say. Or “Your humility is an inspiration.”
With a sharp gesture, you’d wave them away. Under your breath, you would mutter curses at them. A bit louder, you would apologize to me on their behalf.
But me?
“Oshiro-sun,” they might say, if they were being charitable. “Yun” was far more common from them than “sun,” as if I possessed the Traitor’s cunning simply for being born darker than they were. “Your father is a fine man, and your brother fares well.”
But these courtiers never seemed to have any words for me. Nothing for Shefali. No praise. Did they know my name? Was I simply Oshiro to them? I must be. Not once during those summer months did I hear my personal name, save from your family.
And that honorific—“sun.” I do not pretend to understand Hokkaran honorifics. Some things are beyond explanation. My people have twenty different words for the color brown, most of which relate to the color of a horse’s coat. Your people have eight sets of four honorifics, one for each god. Using the wrong one in the wrong context was as bad as spitting in the eye of a person’s mother right in front of them. To make matters worse, half of them sounded the same.
I knew only a few. “Sun” was the lowest form of the Grandmother’s honorific. Depending on the person speaking it, it might be affectionate. Most of the time, however, it indicated that the speaker thought themselves far above the subject.
The other ones I knew were “mor,” which was the highest for the Mother; “lor,” the second highest for the Sister and your father’s favorite; “tono,” used for the Emperor alone; and “shon.”
Shon was the Daughter’s highest. Who better to wear it than the girl born on the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year, at Last Bell?
You are doomed to be Shizuka-shon all your life, as I am destined to be Barsalai-sul for all of mine.
Honorifics were the least of our concerns, however. If we were annoyed by them, that meant we were at court, and if we were at court, there were other matters to distract us. Court itself, for instance. I had no clothes to wear. Your father was kind enough to buy me a new dress, for I was too tall to use any of yours. It was not so bad, for a Hokkaran dress—green, with painted horses along the sleeves and hem.
There was the matter of etiquette, of which I knew little. I solved that problem by letting you do all the talking, and bowing only when you glanced toward me expectantly.
And though it involved me little, there was also the matter of what people were saying.
*
AS THE SPACE between a hammer and a pot, that was the court in those days. Emperor Yoshimoto could do little to stop the worries faced by his people.
“We will increase patrols along the Wall of Flowers,” he said.
Two weeks later, those patrols were found mangled and broken just outside the Wall.
“We will consult the oracles,” he said.
When the Hokkaran oracle was brought in to read the future in her vapors, she frothed at the mouth, screamed, and died on the gilded floor.
And then came Yoshimoto’s famous motto:
“We will endure.”
It became something of a saying among the peasants.
A farmer struck his hoe against the ground—a new hoe he had made himself with fresh wood not a week ago. Sure enough, it would splinter. He’d pick up the metal end and heft it high overhead. After getting his wife’s attention, he would grin a sad, gap-toothed grin.
“We will endure,” he’d say.
A fisherman strikes out to sea. He takes with him a good net and a good rod. He sails far out and casts his net. Soon it is filled with pink salmon, flopping about, taking their last breaths. Just as he closes his eyes to thank the kami for his bounty, he smells something off. He opens his eyes.
The fish are rotten.
“We will endure” is his bitter laugh.
Already the words began to haunt us.
*
NOT LONG AFTER I started healing, your mother left for another one of her missions. The magistrates out in Shiratori were having issues with a rebellion—they’d already caught the leader, but wanted your mother to make an example of him for the crowd. She did not look happy when she left—although your father managed to make her smile, whispering some secret promise in her ear.
Your father sat at the head of the dinner table and spoke blessings over our food. He teased you constantly. In his easy way, he would smile and call you the most read woman in Fujino.
“After all,” he said. “Your notices hang on every door. Your poetry is clear and simple, as refreshing as spring water—”
“Father,” you’d say, scrunching up your face as if you’d tasted something sour. “They are your brother’s words.”
For, yes, your uncle forced you to write all his notices. WE WILL ENDURE, eight hundred times each morning.
“Ah, yes,” Itsuki said. He held his teacup beneath his nose. Its sweet aromas filled his lungs and lent his smile a warmer air. “But your brushstrokes are the poetry.”
You palmed your face and I laughed. O-Itsuki watched you with a bemused look. This was how he always was: calm and relaxed, somehow above stress or worry. I cannot remember a wrinkle crossing his face, save for the lines winging his eyes when he laughed. And he laughed often. Whenever he and Shizuru attended court, he could not contain himself—always a twinkle in his eye, always some unheard joke rolling around his mind.
Many nights we passed like that, speaking with your father. The jokes were a welcome change from his brother’s proclamations. That was the year your uncle announced the eightfold path to plenty. All farmers had to bury specific stones attuned to their patron god in their fields—one every li, in each direction. For farms less than a li square, eight idols had to be buried, each one-eighth of the distance apart.