Chapter 11: The Seam

Nobutaka’s illness was announced within the week.

It was handled with the quiet efficiency of a thing the court understood without needing to be told — a nobleman’s sudden fragility, the family’s concern, the provincial estate with its cleaner air and slower pace, the regrettable necessity of relinquishing his position. The Ministry of Ceremonial processed the retirement in three days. There was no scandal. There was no scrutiny. There was the ordinary machinery of court life absorbing a small disruption and closing over it the way water closes over a stone.

Akiko watched it happen from her position two steps behind the Empress’s right shoulder and understood for the first time the full weight of what it meant to have power deployed on your behalf by someone who would never acknowledge having deployed it.

She had gone to Fumiko the morning after the conversation in the writing room.

She had arrived at the gate before the steward was at his post and waited in the early light with the poem folded inside her robe and the pine visible over the top of the wall and her heart doing the thing it had been doing for months with less and less attempt to ignore it.

The steward arrived and recognized her and bowed and led her through the outer garden without being asked.

Fumiko was at her writing table. She looked like a woman who had not slept, which was the same way she had looked the night before the competition, which was beginning to seem like her natural condition under pressure. She looked up when Akiko came through the screen and the expression on her face was the one Akiko had memorized from the lamplit room — the expression of a person who had been waiting and was not certain they were ready.