Chapter 7

The weeks that followed settled into a rhythm Meimi had not expected her new life to possess — mornings in the practice yard with Hikari, afternoons given over to the ordinary business of the household, and, twice each week, an hour set aside after the evening meal when Fuyuki himself took over her instruction, sending Hikari off with an affectionate dismissal that always made his sister laugh before she left them alone.

The mornings with Hikari had grown easier, if not yet easy. Meimi’s stance no longer collapsed the moment she tried to hold it under any real pressure, and her feet had begun to find their positions without the frantic scramble of the first weeks, though Hikari still corrected her posture at least once every session, the old apologetic curve of her shoulders never entirely banished, only quieter now, less immediate. She had grown almost fond of the ache that followed each morning’s practice, had come to think of it the way she once thought of the soreness after a long night of dancing — evidence of use, not injury, a body being asked to become something more than decorative.

But the evenings with Fuyuki were different in a way she had not anticipated. Where Hikari’s lessons lived entirely in the body, in the correction of a wrist or the repositioning of a foot, Fuyuki’s lived somewhere else, and it had taken Meimi several sessions to understand exactly where.

“She teaches you the forms better than I could,” Fuyuki told her, the first time he claimed one of these evenings for himself, unwrapping the wakizashi from its cloth in the same study where he had first shown her all three blades. “She has more patience for correcting a wrist angle forty times in a single afternoon than I have ever possessed. But there are things I want to teach you myself, and I did not think it right to leave all of it to her.”

“What sort of things?”

“How to think, rather than only how to move.” He set the wakizashi on the low table between them, still sheathed, and settled onto the cushion across from her. “Hikari will make you competent with a blade in your hand. That is not nothing — it may save your life one day, and I am grateful to her for it every time I watch you improve. But a blade in the hand of someone who has never had to think about why she might need it is only half a defense. I want you to understand the other half.”

Meimi considered this, turning the sheathed wakizashi over once where it lay. “You mean you want to teach me to be afraid.”

“No.” He said it firmly, without hesitation. “I want to teach you to be prepared, which is not the same thing, though I understand why the two might feel identical from where you are sitting. Fear makes a person freeze, or run, or make choices out of panic rather than judgment. I have seen it happen to trained soldiers, men who had every physical skill required and still failed when the moment came, because no one had ever walked them through what that moment might actually feel like before they were standing inside it.” He drew the wakizashi partway from its sheath, the steel catching the lamplight, then let it slide home again. “I would rather you spend an hour a week imagining the worst of it now, calmly, in a room where nothing can actually harm you, than have your first true encounter with fear be the same moment you are also expected to defend yourself.”

“You think something will happen to me.”

“I think something may happen to anyone, eventually, in a life spent married to a hatamoto with enemies he has made honestly and enemies he has made simply by existing in a position other men covet.” He said it without drama, the same plain honesty she had come to recognize as his most consistent quality. “I do not say this to frighten you. I say it because you deserve to know the shape of the life you have agreed to share, rather than discovering its edges only when one of them cuts you.”

Meimi sat with that for a long moment, aware of how far she had traveled from the woman who had knelt in fury on the floor of her rooms weeks ago, accusing him of putting her on display. “Tell me, then. What should I imagine?”