Chapter 13

News of the engagement spread through the household before Meimi had even finished pinning the comb properly into her hair the following morning, servants offering quiet bows of congratulation as she passed through corridors that had once felt, in her earliest weeks here, like the halls of a prison rather than a home. She found the warmth of their reception surprising, and said as much to Hikari over the morning meal, still faintly disbelieving that people who had watched her arrive as a purchased stranger now seemed genuinely pleased to see her stay.

She thought, walking those same corridors that morning, of how differently she had moved through them on her first day in this house — eyes lowered, spine rigid with a wariness she had mistaken, at the time, for dignity, certain that every servant’s glance carried some silent judgment of the geiko who had been bought like any other household acquisition. She did not remember exactly when that wariness had finally loosened its grip on her, only that it had, somewhere in the long accumulation of ordinary mornings that had followed, each one asking a little less of her guard than the last.

“They have watched you longer than you realize,” Hikari said, refilling both their cups with the unhurried ease of a woman who had clearly slept better than usual, buoyed by her own part in the previous evening’s secret. “Servants notice everything in a house like this one, far more than either of us tends to credit them for. I do not think there is a single person under this roof who has not seen, across these past months, exactly how much you have changed my brother, and how much this house has changed you in turn. They are not congratulating a stranger. They are congratulating someone they have already, in their own quiet way, decided to consider family.”

Fuyuki joined them shortly after, dressed for a morning of correspondence he had clearly been putting off in favor of the previous evening’s events, and settled beside Meimi with none of his usual careful formality, reaching for her hand beneath the table in a gesture so unguarded that Hikari raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“I sent word to my father’s former colleagues this morning, informing them of our intentions,” he said, once the servants had finished laying out the meal and withdrawn. “I expect we will need to discuss the shape of the ceremony itself before too much longer. My family’s standing calls for certain formalities I do not think either of us can avoid entirely, however much I might wish otherwise on your behalf.”

“What formalities?” Meimi asked, aware of how little she actually understood of what a hatamoto’s wedding required, her own experience of ceremony limited entirely to the far smaller rituals of her old life.

“A formal exchange of betrothal gifts between our households, though in our case that exchange will look somewhat unusual, given that there is no family of yours to receive them in any traditional sense.” Something crossed Fuyuki’s face at this, a flicker of concern he did not immediately voice. “I have been turning over how best to handle that awkward difficulty. I do not wish the absence of your own family to become an embarrassment paraded in front of guests who will already be inclined to gossip about the unusual nature of our match.”

Meimi felt an old, familiar ache rise at the reminder, the quiet loneliness of having no mother’s house to represent her in the formal exchanges a proper wedding required, no father to negotiate on her behalf the way custom expected. “I do not have an answer for you. I have not had a family to speak of since I was sold to the okiya as a child. I do not know how a wedding accounts for a bride who arrives with no one behind her.”