Beneath the Ink
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 6: The Announcement
The notice came from the Ministry of Ceremonial on a morning in late spring when the wisteria was at its peak and the court had the particular restless quality it always acquired when the season was too beautiful to ignore and protocol required everyone to ignore it anyway.
An imperial poetry competition. Thirty days hence. All court nobles of the third rank and above were required to attend and compose in person before the Empress and her assembled household. The theme would be announced on the day. The format was classical — one poem composed in the room, in the time it took a stick of incense to burn, judged by a panel of three senior court scholars.
Akiko read the notice twice and felt the ground move.
She was standing in the outer corridor when she read it, having received it from a Ministry clerk along with eleven other pieces of household correspondence she was delivering to the Empress’s secretary. She shuffled it back into the middle of the stack and continued walking and delivered everything without any change in her expression or her pace.
Then she went to the small room adjacent to the Empress’s writing chamber where she processed correspondence and sat down and took the notice back out and read it a third time.
Nobutaka was third rank. His name would be on the Ministry’s list. There was no mechanism by which a noble of third rank could absent himself from an imperial command performance without consequences that would draw exactly the kind of attention the household could least afford.
He would have to appear. He would have to sit in the east hall before the Empress and her scholars and a room full of the court’s finest poets and compose a poem in the time it took incense to burn.
Nobutaka, who had never composed a poem in his life.
Akiko sat with this for a long time.
She thought about Fumiko — she had given her this name privately, only in her own mind, a small unauthorized intimacy she had allowed herself — sitting in her room with the pine garden and the single window and the correspondence she conducted through a gate stone and a borrowed name. She thought about what it would mean for Fumiko to read this notice. The Ministry would have sent copies to all affected households. Fumiko would know already. She had known, possibly, before Akiko.
The most recent poem had arrived yesterday. Akiko had not yet replied. The correspondence since her honest poem — the hand against the screen — had changed in a way that was difficult to describe precisely but impossible to miss. Something had been acknowledged that could not be unacknowledged. The hidden layer of their exchange had moved closer to the surface, the way water moves up through dry ground after a long rain, and what they were to each other, which had no name in any social register Akiko knew, had become the whole of what they discussed without either of them ever saying it plainly.
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