Chapter 12

The days following Lord Amano’s gathering passed in a strange, suspended glow Meimi had not expected to carry with her so long after the evening itself had ended. Word of her performance had traveled faster than she anticipated, carried through the loose network of households and colleagues that connected Fuyuki’s circle to half the city, and she found herself, in the weeks that followed, the subject of a curiosity she had not felt since her earliest days as a debuting geiko — though this attention, she noticed, carried none of the old hunger to possess or diminish her that patrons had once brought to every evening’s performance. It felt, instead, closer to respect, offered by people who had never once seen her dance and yet had somehow already decided, on the strength of secondhand accounts alone, that she was someone worth taking seriously.

She found herself, in quieter moments, turning the memory of that evening over the way she might once have turned over a difficult passage of music, still faintly astonished at her own certainty in the instant she had answered Lord Amano’s question. She had not planned the words. They had simply arrived, true in a way few things she had ever said aloud in front of strangers had been true, and she understood now, weeks removed from the hall’s stunned silence, that some part of her had been building toward that declaration for months without fully realizing it — every morning in the practice yard, every evening of Fuyuki’s patient tactical questions, every session with Otsuru asking her to set performance aside in favor of something honest, had all been leading, without her conscious knowledge, toward a single true sentence spoken in front of forty strangers.

Fuyuki said little about the promise he had made her on Lord Amano’s veranda, though Meimi caught him watching her more than once in the days that followed with an expression she had come to recognize as deliberation, a man turning something over carefully before committing to its final shape. She did not press him. She had learned, across these months in his household, that Fuyuki’s silences were rarely evasion — more often they were simply the sound of a decision being built with the same unhurried care he brought to everything else that mattered to him.

It was Hikari, in the end, who could not maintain her own silence quite so well. She found Meimi in the practice yard one morning nearly two weeks after the gathering, and rather than beginning their usual stretches, simply stood at the edge of the yard with an expression so poorly disguised that Meimi set down the bokken immediately.

“You know something.”

“I know a great many things,” Hikari said, entirely unconvincingly, “most of which are none of your concern this morning.”

“Hikari.”

Her sister-in-law’s composure broke almost immediately, a wide, delighted grin spreading across features that had clearly been fighting to remain neutral since the moment Meimi entered the yard. “I am saying nothing. I have been sworn to absolute silence, and I intend to honor that oath, though I confess it is proving considerably more difficult than any kata you have ever asked me to teach you.” She pressed her lips together theatrically, though the effort did nothing to dim the brightness in her eyes. “You should perhaps dress with unusual care this evening. That is all I am permitted to say, and I have already said more than I should have.”

Meimi felt her pulse quicken, understanding arriving with a certainty that made the morning’s practice suddenly feel like the least important thing occupying either of their minds. “Tonight.”

“I did not say that. I said nothing at all.” Hikari’s grin only widened. “Now come. If tonight is anything like what I suspect it might be, you will want your body remembering itself well enough that nerves cannot undo months of hard-won steadiness. We will practice as though it were any other morning, and you will thank me for the distraction later, whatever this evening turns out to hold.”