Chapter 22

The weeks following the executions settled into a strange, unfamiliar quiet, the household slowly rebuilding around an absence of danger that felt, after so many months of heightened vigilance, almost disorienting in its own right. Meimi found herself, more than once during those first quiet mornings, reaching instinctively for the kaiken at her hip before remembering that the immediate threat which had made carrying it a daily necessity no longer existed, the habit itself taking longer to unlearn than she had expected of something adopted so recently.

The household itself seemed to breathe differently in those weeks, servants moving through corridors with a lightness that had been absent since long before the attack itself, the low, unspoken tension that had gripped the estate throughout Fuyuki’s absence and its violent aftermath finally dissolving into something closer to the ordinary rhythms Meimi remembered from her earliest, happier months as a married woman. Even the practice yard felt different in the mornings now, the training continuing with the same discipline as always but shedding the grim, unspoken urgency that had colored every session since Hikari’s first suggestion to carry their weapons at all times.

The new household staff arrived in a steady trickle across those weeks, seven in total by the season’s end — two cooks, three grooms, a seamstress, and an elderly gardener who had tended the Kurosawa grounds for thirty years before their sudden dissolution left him without position or purpose at an age when few households would think to take on someone so advanced in years. Fuyuki interviewed each of them personally, a courtesy Meimi understood few lords of his rank would have troubled themselves to extend to staff so far beneath their own station, though she had come to expect nothing less from a man who had never once, across all their months together, treated any person’s dignity as beneath his notice.

“You do not need to interview the gardener yourself,” she told him, one evening after he had spent the better part of an hour in quiet conversation with the elderly man, learning the particulars of thirty years spent coaxing life from soil that would soon belong to strangers. “Hikari could easily have handled the arrangement without troubling you at all.”

“I know she could have. I wanted to do it myself.” Fuyuki considered his own answer for a moment, as though only now fully articulating a reasoning he had not previously stopped to examine. “I think I wanted each of them to understand, from the very first conversation, that they were not being taken in as an afterthought, some obligation discharged to ease my own conscience. I wanted them to know they were actually wanted here, for whatever skill and history they carried with them, rather than merely tolerated out of guilt.”

The gardener, a soft-spoken man named Tanaka, proved himself within his first month worth every hour Fuyuki had spent in that initial conversation, transforming a corner of the estate’s grounds that had long sat neglected into something approaching the quiet beauty Meimi remembered from her earliest weeks in this house, when she had first wandered its gardens in search of some place to be alone with her own resentment. She found him there often in the following weeks, working with a patient, unhurried devotion that reminded her, watching him, of Otsuru’s own careful attention to a form not yet perfected.

“You have made something beautiful of a corner I had entirely forgotten existed,” she told him, one afternoon, watching him tend a bed of chrysanthemums that had, under his care, begun to flourish in a way she would not have thought possible only weeks before.

“A garden simply wants attention, my lady. Most things do, if you are patient enough to give it to them.” Tanaka’s smile carried a quiet contentment that Meimi found herself envying, in some small way, a man who had lost everything he once knew and had nonetheless found, within weeks, a new corner of the world worth tending with his whole heart. “I did not expect, when my former household fell, that I would find myself in a garden this fine, working for a lord who troubled himself to ask my name before he ever asked what I could do for him.”