Beneath the Ink
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 2: The Second Errand
The Empress sent her again three days later.
This time the poem was written on paper the color of new moss, wound around a branch of young maple, the leaves still small and curled at the edges like hands not yet decided whether to open. Akiko carried it the same way she had carried the first one, inside her outer robe, close to her body, which she told herself was simply practical. The paper was delicate. The morning was damp.
Nobutaka’s steward recognized her now. He received the poem with a small bow that contained, she noted, something closer to deference than he had shown the first time. She was no longer an unexpected arrival. She was an anticipated one. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
She waited in the cedar room again. The same gap in the screen. The same pine bowing over its gravel bed.
This time she watched the garden more carefully and let herself think about what she was actually doing here. The Empress had poets at court, men of considerable reputation who composed on her behalf for precisely these kinds of exchanges. She had not used them. She had used Akiko, who was not a poet, whose value to the Empress was discretion and competence and the ability to move through the court without drawing attention. This errand was not about poetry. Or it was not only about poetry.
She heard, through the screen, a sound she couldn’t immediately place. Then she placed it. Someone in the inner room was writing. Not the slow deliberate calligraphy of a man composing — that had a particular rhythm, the long pauses, the single decisive stroke — but something faster and more continuous, a brush moving the way water moves, following its own logic.
The sound stopped.
A long silence.
Then the steward appeared with the reply.
She waited longer this time before opening it. All the way to the far end of the outer corridor, past the guardhouse, to where a small persimmon tree grew through a crack in the stone border and dropped its shadow across the path in the late morning light. She stopped there.
The paper was pale gold. The stem it was wrapped around she had to look at twice before she recognized it — a single shoot of bamboo grass, so young it was almost translucent, the kind of thing you had to go looking for deliberately in early spring. Not something a steward gathered. Not something a man who delegated his correspondence entirely to his household would have thought of.
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