sovereign
kintsugi
the pity mosaic | pfp by Sun
- Joined
- May 9, 2013
- Messages
- 2,689
- Reaction score
- 2,273
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Staff
- #1
Nomi was the last kannushi to be blessed with Lord Raikou’s favor before he died. She should know better than to try for it again.
content warnings: mentions of (violent) death, references to self-inflicted torture
Emperor Akihiro’s men cut through the docks much like a gyarados passed through the shallows: they made no effort to corral or intimidate, and yet the throngs of shoppers and fishermen parted smoothly around the vibrant reds and golds of the royal retinue. Nomi tracked the procession’s movements out of the corner of her eye while counting change and mingling her shouts with the morning’s dry stench and clamor.
They stopped at Ajiro, the seaweed seller; his customers deserted him while he pointed towards Nomi’s stall, his sleeve fluttering like a pennant against the cloudless sky. They wouldn’t be here for anyone else. There was a certain arrogance that came with a thought like that, and when she tried it on she found that it suited her.
Enju
Nine copper pieces would’ve been four days worth of rice. It would also soon be the least of her worries.
She was done when the retinue arrived. Eight sets of sandals slapped out a rhythm that carried through the market’s uneven swells. Their colors marked them as imperial, which would normally garner curiosity, but Nomi could immediately see how they earned their berth—Lady Gojiro, the emperor’s only daughter, sat at their center in a lavish palanquin. Even before the sheer fabric shifted to reveal her, the silhouette of her delicate hands and upturned brow scattered the crowd.
“Lady Gojiro.” Nomi greeted the descending woman with a low bow. For a vicious moment, she wondered if Gojiro had ever known the smell of the docks, or if she only ever had fish appear to her portioned, descaled, and beautiful. “It has been too long.”
Now that the retinue had trained its focus elsewhere, Nomi could see her neighbors poking their heads out of their stalls like frightened diglett. There were rumors when she’d come back from the palace. Rumors and nothing more. Nomi held once favor with the gods, but that did not change the price of fish.
“Honorable Nomi.” The title was for a courtly woman Gojiro helped excise, not for the sun-beaten fishmonger with dried intestines beneath her fingernails. Gojiro too bowed, though not so low as to avert her eyes. “I hope time treats you well. The drought has weighed heavily on you too, I am sure.”
In another life Nomi would have the drought concerning her as it did the palace, with opulent dinners unchanged by the wilting crops and evening noh performers sweating through their clothes while a servant fanned her. But she lost that life when she lost her raikou. Lady Gojiro hadn’t spent the past month in a dried-out fish market, hawking lackluster wares; her manners had not risen and fallen like Nomi’s, with the tides. Nomi cleared her throat and tried to adopt the fainter, courtly voice, the kind that drowned in the market square and sold no fish. “Surely you have not come to ask a fishermonger’s opinion of a drought.”
Gojiro’s face darkened. “My father’s seers have confirmed a young raikou prowls the ruins of Brass Tower.” What she said next was: “Lord Raikou, the emperor is certain, has need for his favorite kannushi.”
What Nomi knew she meant was: We have tried everyone else.
Nomi did not let her eyes linger too long on the golden bridle in Gojiro’s hands, or the sharpened katana at each of her guards’ waists. The new Lord Raikou would not have a choice in leaving the ruins, Nomi decided, just as she would not have a choice but to descend. “It would be my honor,” she replied.
In an hour she was flipping the makeup case closed and carefully examining her bun in a little mirror worth more than a month’s sales of fish. She did not hesitate before wrapping the various powders and inks in their cloth and placing them by the door. It was no longer news that the trappings of the court could be freely given and taken.
She began to step into her kannushi clothes. The ceremonial kosode’s rich golden threads smelled faintly of plum, and she wondered if anyone else wore it after it was taken from her, if it fit them well.
In the palace proper it would’ve taken all morning to prepare Lord Raikou’s priestess. Here, it took just one hour. Gojiro’s retinue had commandeered a house barely four tatami mats large—not nearly large enough to properly host an emperor’s daughter, even secondborn, but it was along the path to the ruins. Most importantly, unlike the palace, it was a place Nomi had not been exiled from.
As Nomi dressed, the watchful and coiffed silhouette of Gojiro sharp against the rice paper wall between them, she imagined the palace ceremony she would’ve had if she held favor. The air would be redolent with the heady smell of incense. Two women would apply her makeup while a third brushed her hair with a boxwood comb. Nomi would be bathed and purified. She would enter the kaminada while the emperor and all of his wives and children watched solemnly through the haze of ceremonial smoke and music.
She alone would light the tapers for her raikou, raising them westward to the tower of his birth, and then letting the smoke join him on the wind. And he would answer.
As Nomi rehearsed this charade in her head, her elbow brushed against a neat line of stitches on the inside of her sleeve. She idly turned her arm over and saw, so faintly that it’d be impossible to tell from any further, three rifts in the brocade that had been expertly mended. She didn’t have to look again to recognize the spacing of a young raikou’s claws.
The raikou she knew was not prone to violence for warning’s sake. Her calloused fingertips brushed the space between the garment’s neckline and the top of her chin, measuring a gap large enough for a raikou’s jaws where there would’ve only been skin to repair, not silk. The palace had washed out the blood and repaired the rips, but someone had died in this kosode.
When she looked up, Gojiro was studying her carefully through the doorway. “The honorable Hina attempted to soothe him, but it would appear Lord Raikou’s anger was too much for her to bear. My father fears that the longer the Lord is left alone, the more comfortable he will become with his solitude, and the longer the drought will last.”
It was much like Lady Gojiro to only reveal secrets once they were already known. “Hina was kind to me. I am sure Lord Raikou was equally kind.” Once it had become clear that her raikou favored Nomi, Hina had snapped the shared kannushi necklace of purple sapphires, sending a cascade of beads across the room. When the guards entered to find Nomi gathering them from the floorboards, it was all too easy to blame an opportunistic peasant.
It was inauspicious to lay a hand on one favored by Lord Raikou. As punishment, Nomi had been directed to remove her fingernails herself, or be excised entirely.
“The honorable Hina refused her station, so my father provided a norimono and men to carry her in it. When they took her to the ruins, Lord Raikou appeared soon after and tore them apart. Only one of the guards returned to verify the story.” Lady Gojiro delicately lifted the hinges on the rosewood jewelry box and offered it to Nomi.
Nomi’s fingers snagged on the string of glittering purple beads, each a different shade of twilight. She forced herself to temper her horror with a recollection of Hina’s smirk. Showing fear would get her nowhere here. “Why didn’t she leave?”
Gojiro’s expression was a mix of pity and confusion. “The doors were nailed shut.” She fixed Nomi with a polite smile. “You are the first kannushi who agreed to return.”
The pit firmed in Nomi’s stomach. “Perhaps they should have considered their duty.” The other kannushi had far less to lose.
No, that wasn’t it. The other kannushi also knew that to meet a raikou in his rage would cost their lives. They simply had hoped the emperor would find their lives too valuable to spend.
In this regard, at least, Nomi knew her eyes saw clearly. Emperor Akihiro would gladly sacrifice a dozen priestesses to end the drought, and hundreds more before admitting he had lost a Lord’s favor.
“It fits you well,” said Gojiro, her eyes lingering on the deep purple sash as Nomi drew it across her waist.
“Does it?” The little mirror for her face was too small to use while she dressed. Nomi pretended to preen for an unseen lover in front of the bare wall. “Do you think Lord Raikou will recognize me?”
Gojiro swooped in to delicately recrease the sash where it met Nomi’s navel. “It was not the clothing he missed.”
Nomi couldn’t stop herself from flinching. Gojiro was no fool, nor stranger to the helpless infatuation she evoked. In the palace, Nomi had watched a string of princes present increasingly elaborate poems, dresses, and delicate flowers. As the rejections grew, so too did the scope and absurdity of their gifts: rare ceremonial weapons, foreign pokémon in gilt collars, a miniature warship.
They were much like the hoothoot roosting in the palace eaves. Instincts useless in this strange land, a nest could be anything familiar, like a discarded broom or four crossed twigs. Lady Gojiro was afforded exceptional freedom, the same as her brothers, and with her long rein came a challenge—in a sea of ornamental birds, this was a fearow, fully fledged and a predator, beautiful and aloof.
At times it felt like only Nomi understood: Gojiro’s other suitors offered a cage to a bird whose only place was in the sky. Nomi would’ve gladly given her the sky, if only she had it. But all Nomi had then was the voice that had sung her raikou from the slopes of Mt. Mortar to the palace, and the hand that could hold him there. As soon as it became clear that she could not give these things away, she had nothing at all.
Nomi pulled away as quickly as was polite, and turned to her pile of discarded clothes. Gojiro would see, and she would question, and there would be no avoiding it. Without ceremony she retrieved the two hand-sized, ivory-white daggers from the folds of her clothes. She wrapped the leather cords at their hafts around her neck, leaving their curved blades to frame the necklace of beads at her throat.
“Why those?” Gojiro asked, this time with genuine unveiled curiosity.
“They were mine by right.” To punish Nomi for this theft would be to acknowledge that the palace laid claim to the knives that killed a lord. Some things even the palace could not easily replace. Nomi’s skin prickled with goosebumps where the tips of the blades met her collarbone. “And they killed him before.”
Nomi’s raikou had eaten the drugged meat from her palm, and her voice had soothed him into stupor. She had been pulled away as soon as his body relaxed; they had not made her hold the knife. It had been the emperor who had ordered it done.
Her raikou had grown impetuous, despite her warnings. The emperor had decided a Lord who would only listen to a peasant was unfit for his court—may the next Lord have more deference.
So who had killed him? Far safer for her to blame the knife.
But she had seen recognition in her raikou’s clouded eyes before the draughts took him. She already knew who he would blame, if he remembered. In comparison, the might of the palace meant very little.
Gojiro’s confusion remained unsated. “You will not kill him tonight.”
A human could kill a raikou in the same way that a human could kill a storm. He had been blessed by the Sun, and no mortal hands or tools would undo that—any time he fell, at the next thunderclap, his mother would give him a new body, and he would roam free once more. And Nomi could not fell him. These would at best buy her a moment of fearful recognition. She remembered how her raikou had leapt perilously from stone to stone, sparks turning the grass beneath his paws to ash, before nuzzling into the palm of her hand. A few seconds might make all the difference.
Or perhaps Gojiro meant to forbid her from trying? Perhaps she did not know Nomi at all, after all.
“On this we agree,” Nomi said at last.
On the night that her raikou was killed, Nomi had stolen these daggers from where they rested by the body. At the time it had felt like indulging her this was the least she was owed—if these were the tools that had killed her raikou, and if the court would have Lord Raikou’s favorite kannushi join him on the pyre, Nomi would at least have the arrogance to grant herself the death of a lord rather than the death of firewood.
But holding them had enervated her somehow, as if they still held the last prickles of static. As soon as they touched her palms, her heart had raced and her mind was filled with one thought, nearly primal: I must run. Her next thought was distinctly more cold, logical, human: And then I shall live.
They had saved her once before. Perhaps they would do so again.
“They are for luck,” Nomi continued, turning to smile sweetly at Gojiro. She picked up the remaining trappings of a kannushi, the magnificent golden bridle, and wound it around her forearm. “I would ask that your men escort me to Brass Tower. I would not keep Lord Raikou waiting any longer.”
They reached the ruins just before dusk.
Long before Nomi was born, Brass Tower belonged to Enju, because it had belonged to the Sea. Now the Sea was gone and it belonged to the emperor. The path to the ruins wound through a grove of maple trees twined with ivy, surging free from their plots after centuries of pruning and guidance. Gojiro’s retinue led them to the steps, where another group of soldiers waited, spears bristling.
“By decree of Emperor Akihiro, child of the Sun,” Gojiro called, when Nomi remained silent. “His kannushi will meet with Lord Raikou.”
Nomi stepped forward, ignoring the torch offered to her. Her raikou had been a sibling of fire, and was indeed born from it, but he bore it no love. She would not insult him with its presence.
“I would ask that you remain here,” Nomi said, looking at the retinue, but directing her voice towards Gojiro. This was the most direct address she could afford.
“The palace guard is sworn as you are,” Gojiro said, moving herself into Nomi’s vision. “They would die to protect you.”
Too late, Nomi saw the pale, strained expression each man wore beneath his cap, wondered to think of what had happened to Hana’s final guard, and why only he had thought to flee. They did not deserve to suffer for her mistakes. Nomi used the only leverage she knew. “You insult Lord Raikou to say he would do me any harm. He will approach me alone, or not at all.”
Nomi caught a flash of relief spread across the nearest soldier’s face before he could quell it. She looked placidly up at Gojiro, who no doubt suspected a trick, but could find none. There was none.
“Then go with the blessing of the Sun, honorable Nomi,” she said at last, and Nomi went alone.
The ruins had been picked clean by fire, rain, and wind; in this regard, it was exactly as Nomi had last seen it. Tarnished puddles of brass gleamed faintly where the eaves had once stood. Nomi passed her hand over a rosewood sculpture that had once born the figure of the Sea, and was now little more than two ovals.
She did not need seers to know he would be in the basement. That was where he had died the first time, when the tower burned, and again, when the emperor decreed it. The ground floor had been gouged by the flames, and the basement opened like a crevasse beneath her, the fragments of remaining floorboards framing it like fangs. Nomi walked carefully over fallen timbers towards the stairs.
Shakily, Nomi descended. If she died here, it would be fair. And if she lived, there would be nothing to fear.
The basement had not been sacred until it had been blessed by the Sun, so the architecture beneath was plain and adorned only by soot and dust. Nomi looked quickly—her raikou always gleamed as if cloaked in stars and was nearly as a large as a cart. It would be impossible for him to hide. A faint glimmer of light in the half-burned rafters caught her eye, so faint she had mistaken it for moonlight.
Parched by drought, the new Lord Raikou was little more than a tangled ball of lightning, seething impotently in the gentle night breeze. Nomi clutched the daggers to her chest and tried to remember this as he circled overhead, barely more than the tangled, sparking outline of a cat leaping from stone to stone, but it was hard to miss the way the support columns that had once held up the tower shuddered beneath his feet, how the hair-fine wilted moss charred where he lingered.
Nomi closed her eyes, and began to sing softly, finding that softer part of her voice coarse with disuse. “To the other side of the mountain ...” She took one step forward. “I can see—”
He snarled at her approach. The dry air grew hot, and Nomi barely had time to lift the daggers from her neck before the ruins went white.
A thunderbolt split the air, and Nomi felt its breath skitter across her shoulders and arms before being drawn inexorably to the daggers. When it faded and her vision returned, the blades glowed a faint blue, humming with captured lightning, and she still lived. She forced herself to slow her harried breathing and knelt.
“Lord Raikou.” With her head bowed, her words were directed to the dry ground. The golden brocade of her kosode had become oppressively stifling. “I have been sent to guide you back to the palace.”
At this, the phantom lightning coalesced into a familiar, four-legged shape, smaller than she remembered, with pale mistings of clouds mantling its shoulders. Static pricked the hairs on her arms as he padded close; she dared not look up, but she felt his eyes trained on the daggers in her hand. Good. Better he focus on that than the bridle snaking down her forearm and into her lap. She heard the wet, dull sound of hackles raising, and she was quite certain that if those sparking jaws wrapped around her neck, it would break, just like Hina’s.
Nomi chose her next words carefully, and made no move towards the golden bridle splashed out magnificently across her kosode. “I seek to return what was taken from you. Will you not speak to me, as you once did?”
Evidently he would not. The raikou leapt at her, claws outstretched, and Nomi knew then he had chosen for them both.
She was already rolling out of the way, pretenses of formality abandoned. As his claws carried him forward she raised the bridle, which she had worked into a snare. His head and neck plunged through it, but then the golden thread shone and shrank around his neck, choking his momentum. He snarled and raged mere inches from her face. Once, twice, thrice he pulled, and then the bridle was fully shrunk.
Nomi waited a moment, but she knew: a raikou would never think to try trickery. He was caught.
They stared at each other, both panting, and Nomi studied the raikou who was hers no longer, or perhaps was hers again. Her raikou had been rippling mass of luxurious golden fur, muscle, and thunder; he carried himself with a grace and delicacy that did not fit his frame. Once, Nomi stroked his crest and watched an afternoon go by in the ceaseless storm reforming around his mane.
This raikou’s fur was lackluster and matted, and the purples of his mane were dimmed to pale grey. His lips flapped loosely in half a snarl. This close, Nomi could see that his fangs were nearly invisible. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to tear out her throat after all.
Perhaps he had never wanted to. If it had been this easy for the other kannushi, they surely would have prevailed.
{I waited for you. Free me,} the raikou rumbled finally, cutting through her pity. His growl was coarser than Nomi’s remembered, or perhaps his voice had become like new alongside his body.
“You must remember little of me, to ask that,” Nomi said archly in a voice she hoped brokered no argument. She wrapped her end of the bridle another time around her wrist. “Do you recognize me?”
The raikou flinched against the bridle but made no move to pull against it. Perhaps he understood he lacked the strength. All the same, Nomi was grateful he did not try. {Know you? Yes, thunderclap,} he growled. {But. I am not him. I know what he said to you. I do not know what he believed.}
Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes when he called her by name. Nomi swallowed. “Do you blame me for his death?”
{Blame?} He repeated the word slowly. {Yes.} When his eyes met her own, they were strikingly familiar, shards of amber that still glinted where the rest of him was faded. {It was the kindest thing you ever did for us.}
Like this one, her raikou’s words were often stilted, and his thoughts orthogonal to her own. Blame and guilt may not have needed description in his mind, and all he understood was the action. But this left Nomi with no place to put his gratitude.
Perhaps sensing her confusion, the raikou pressed, {You were kind then. You are kind now. Free me and be done.}
Nomi swallowed. “If you know me as well as he did, you would know I cannot free you. The emperor has called us to sing away the drought. You have no choice; nor do I. When we are done, perhaps he will grant us our freedom.”
This time sparks formed in the wilted clouds on his back, and quelled when Nomi raised a dagger. {I think,} he said evenly, {it was him who did not know you enough. He should have asked. He could not stay with you forever.}
“Tell that to the emperor and the other children of the Sun.” They would not understand him, and the court would not believe Nomi if she spoke these words on his behalf.
{Why do you think he stopped calling the rain? Not spite.} The raikou rumbled something else, and this time, it was Nomi who did not understand. Then he continued: {Your cage. Their cage. It will never be large enough. Free me.}
Nomi answered with words that Hina and the other kannushi never knew, never considered, never understood; for the first time, she wondered if perhaps her raikou had loved her more than the rest because she alone saw this truth and he alone had never before been bound by it. “Not all of us are free enough to choose our cage.”
It was Gojiro she thought of when she said it, and it was Gojiro who descended the unstable, soot-stained stairs as if summoned, footsteps as delicate as a heron. “Your insight and wit were always peculiar, Lady Nomi. I am glad your arrogance was well-placed.”
The raikou growled, this time with familiar malice, but his eyes were trained on Gojiro, and he said nothing.
“You seem unsurprised to see me alive,” Nomi called up, taking the moment to wrap the daggers back around her neck. She alone held the raikou. Once they left the shrine ruins, and the manifestation of the Sun’s power receded into the horizon, Gojiro would be all that remained. This would be Nomi’s only time to bargain, and she could not reveal all of her cards.
“The others were much louder when they died, and then much quieter.”
Gojiro had explained the court mathematics once, in loose terms. Three boats of soldiers to repel a gyarados that would have flooded a village. A dozen kannushi to end the drought that starved thousands. One peasant to guarantee a new rainlord.
Only when you saw people as things could you make your peace with owning their lives. And once you made that peace, there was nothing left to trouble you.
This raikou knew that too. One kannushi for his freedom. Then her guards. Then another.
Gojiro beckoned expectantly.
Nomi did not move. “I know your father tried to have me killed on the same night as my raikou. I would see you swear, as a child of the Sun, that we would both be under your protection this time.”
Silhouetted by the moon rising through the ruins behind her, Gojiro was like a shadow puppet, save for the creases of silver running down her face. “If you know the emperor ordered your death, then you must also know that you live because I convinced him not to find you after.”
Here the Sun had raised three lives for three lives. No lesser trade had been acceptable. Nomi held fast to this fact. “I gave this land years of bountiful harvests. In return you stayed your hand when a jealous noble suggested I was needed for the altar. I see an imbalance.”
“Be careful who you describe as a jealous noble.” Gojiro descended one stair, so that the shaft of moonlight illuminated her face entirely. “I was the one who decided that your Raikou needed to die for the rains to return.”
Her words hit Nomi like a slap in the face. “Why?”
“Because I knew he would come back.” Gojiro’s voice cut through the cold stillness. “You would bluff that you will not help cage a raikou again, because it is not worth helping my family without promises. I know one sentence can hold many lies. When the rains return, the docks will swell with fish once more; your village and your neighbors will prosper and eat well again. You already know this. If Lord Raikou returns to court, and you are the one to bring him, your position as the most valued kannushi in these lands will be beyond challenge. This you already know as well.” Her arms folded inside of her sleeves. “So which part am I to believe? That you have lost your heart and would watch your neighbors starve? That your ambitions evaporated when the clouds did?”
For the first time, Nomi wondered if Gojiro had same stories of Brass Tower, if the emperor’s children believed in the Sun’s gift and sought to hold it nonetheless, or if they thought the Sun’s mandate gave them the right to it.
Because I knew he would come back. There was a quiet certainty in Gojiro’s words, the kind that only came when the world—even miracles—always bent to your will. And buried in those words, Nomi sensed another truth: Gojiro had never doubted that Nomi would return too.
{I see now the mistake you and he made, thunderclap. What better to lure a bird into a cage—} the raikou tore his gaze from Gojiro and looked at Nomi {—than another bird?} His eyes gleamed. Then he growled that one, strange word she had not understood before.
Why had her raikou stopped calling the rain?
As if in response, her hand drifted back to her throat, where the two daggers rested, and she felt them answer for her in a language without words.
I must run. Only then shall I live.
Not daggers, Nomi realized. Fangs.
She let the bridle slip from her hand, and performed the first rite she had ever learned, long before she was a kannushi: that of offering. “They are yours by right. Take them,” she whispered.
Thunder rumbled overhead, and a bolt of lightning split the sky.
Farmers hunched beneath oiled tarps as their irrigation ditches filled. Fisherman watched dubiously as the banks of the river rose to reclaim the dried-out harbors. Languorously, Enju came back to life, with as little urgency as the dehydrated poliwag, whose breathing quickened with each passing minute. Only time would tell if the rains would stay.
The shadow of the palace did not reach across the river, but the rains did. The village chinjusha there faced west, towards Brass Tower, so the winds bore the downpour directly into it. The shrine’s doors had not been fixed before the rain, and now rivulets of water streamed across the interior walls; already, regardless, it had been stuffed with fruit, rice cakes, and flowers.
No one noticed as the last human to rein a raikou joined the stream of supplicants, ascended the steps, and knelt.
The incense she lit was too wet to burn.
content warnings: mentions of (violent) death, references to self-inflicted torture
Written for this year's Winter Roundtable, under the prompt New Year, New Me! kind of, as always.
Crit prefs: this came together in the last 30ish hours (classic), and I don't altogether dislike what it ended up being. But by my count I have about 38 words left in the wordcount, so bear in mind that I will not be able to do any lengthy edits until the Roundtable closes lol.
Crit prefs: this came together in the last 30ish hours (classic), and I don't altogether dislike what it ended up being. But by my count I have about 38 words left in the wordcount, so bear in mind that I will not be able to do any lengthy edits until the Roundtable closes lol.
※
Emperor Akihiro’s men cut through the docks much like a gyarados passed through the shallows: they made no effort to corral or intimidate, and yet the throngs of shoppers and fishermen parted smoothly around the vibrant reds and golds of the royal retinue. Nomi tracked the procession’s movements out of the corner of her eye while counting change and mingling her shouts with the morning’s dry stench and clamor.
They stopped at Ajiro, the seaweed seller; his customers deserted him while he pointed towards Nomi’s stall, his sleeve fluttering like a pennant against the cloudless sky. They wouldn’t be here for anyone else. There was a certain arrogance that came with a thought like that, and when she tried it on she found that it suited her.
Enju
Ecruteak
was not a large city, and there were only so many places to sell fish on this side of the river. In the city, Emperor Akihiro would always be able to find her if he wished. Nomi placidly unhooked her last three fish. Their scales were lackluster and their eyes sunken from the heat. The little meat on their bones was worth three copper pieces, though she’d hoped for six. She arranged them in a neat triangle for whoever dared inspect her stall after Emperor Akihiro came and left.Nine copper pieces would’ve been four days worth of rice. It would also soon be the least of her worries.
She was done when the retinue arrived. Eight sets of sandals slapped out a rhythm that carried through the market’s uneven swells. Their colors marked them as imperial, which would normally garner curiosity, but Nomi could immediately see how they earned their berth—Lady Gojiro, the emperor’s only daughter, sat at their center in a lavish palanquin. Even before the sheer fabric shifted to reveal her, the silhouette of her delicate hands and upturned brow scattered the crowd.
“Lady Gojiro.” Nomi greeted the descending woman with a low bow. For a vicious moment, she wondered if Gojiro had ever known the smell of the docks, or if she only ever had fish appear to her portioned, descaled, and beautiful. “It has been too long.”
Now that the retinue had trained its focus elsewhere, Nomi could see her neighbors poking their heads out of their stalls like frightened diglett. There were rumors when she’d come back from the palace. Rumors and nothing more. Nomi held once favor with the gods, but that did not change the price of fish.
“Honorable Nomi.” The title was for a courtly woman Gojiro helped excise, not for the sun-beaten fishmonger with dried intestines beneath her fingernails. Gojiro too bowed, though not so low as to avert her eyes. “I hope time treats you well. The drought has weighed heavily on you too, I am sure.”
In another life Nomi would have the drought concerning her as it did the palace, with opulent dinners unchanged by the wilting crops and evening noh performers sweating through their clothes while a servant fanned her. But she lost that life when she lost her raikou. Lady Gojiro hadn’t spent the past month in a dried-out fish market, hawking lackluster wares; her manners had not risen and fallen like Nomi’s, with the tides. Nomi cleared her throat and tried to adopt the fainter, courtly voice, the kind that drowned in the market square and sold no fish. “Surely you have not come to ask a fishermonger’s opinion of a drought.”
Gojiro’s face darkened. “My father’s seers have confirmed a young raikou prowls the ruins of Brass Tower.” What she said next was: “Lord Raikou, the emperor is certain, has need for his favorite kannushi.”
What Nomi knew she meant was: We have tried everyone else.
Nomi did not let her eyes linger too long on the golden bridle in Gojiro’s hands, or the sharpened katana at each of her guards’ waists. The new Lord Raikou would not have a choice in leaving the ruins, Nomi decided, just as she would not have a choice but to descend. “It would be my honor,” she replied.
In an hour she was flipping the makeup case closed and carefully examining her bun in a little mirror worth more than a month’s sales of fish. She did not hesitate before wrapping the various powders and inks in their cloth and placing them by the door. It was no longer news that the trappings of the court could be freely given and taken.
She began to step into her kannushi clothes. The ceremonial kosode’s rich golden threads smelled faintly of plum, and she wondered if anyone else wore it after it was taken from her, if it fit them well.
In the palace proper it would’ve taken all morning to prepare Lord Raikou’s priestess. Here, it took just one hour. Gojiro’s retinue had commandeered a house barely four tatami mats large—not nearly large enough to properly host an emperor’s daughter, even secondborn, but it was along the path to the ruins. Most importantly, unlike the palace, it was a place Nomi had not been exiled from.
As Nomi dressed, the watchful and coiffed silhouette of Gojiro sharp against the rice paper wall between them, she imagined the palace ceremony she would’ve had if she held favor. The air would be redolent with the heady smell of incense. Two women would apply her makeup while a third brushed her hair with a boxwood comb. Nomi would be bathed and purified. She would enter the kaminada while the emperor and all of his wives and children watched solemnly through the haze of ceremonial smoke and music.
She alone would light the tapers for her raikou, raising them westward to the tower of his birth, and then letting the smoke join him on the wind. And he would answer.
As Nomi rehearsed this charade in her head, her elbow brushed against a neat line of stitches on the inside of her sleeve. She idly turned her arm over and saw, so faintly that it’d be impossible to tell from any further, three rifts in the brocade that had been expertly mended. She didn’t have to look again to recognize the spacing of a young raikou’s claws.
The raikou she knew was not prone to violence for warning’s sake. Her calloused fingertips brushed the space between the garment’s neckline and the top of her chin, measuring a gap large enough for a raikou’s jaws where there would’ve only been skin to repair, not silk. The palace had washed out the blood and repaired the rips, but someone had died in this kosode.
When she looked up, Gojiro was studying her carefully through the doorway. “The honorable Hina attempted to soothe him, but it would appear Lord Raikou’s anger was too much for her to bear. My father fears that the longer the Lord is left alone, the more comfortable he will become with his solitude, and the longer the drought will last.”
It was much like Lady Gojiro to only reveal secrets once they were already known. “Hina was kind to me. I am sure Lord Raikou was equally kind.” Once it had become clear that her raikou favored Nomi, Hina had snapped the shared kannushi necklace of purple sapphires, sending a cascade of beads across the room. When the guards entered to find Nomi gathering them from the floorboards, it was all too easy to blame an opportunistic peasant.
It was inauspicious to lay a hand on one favored by Lord Raikou. As punishment, Nomi had been directed to remove her fingernails herself, or be excised entirely.
“The honorable Hina refused her station, so my father provided a norimono and men to carry her in it. When they took her to the ruins, Lord Raikou appeared soon after and tore them apart. Only one of the guards returned to verify the story.” Lady Gojiro delicately lifted the hinges on the rosewood jewelry box and offered it to Nomi.
Nomi’s fingers snagged on the string of glittering purple beads, each a different shade of twilight. She forced herself to temper her horror with a recollection of Hina’s smirk. Showing fear would get her nowhere here. “Why didn’t she leave?”
Gojiro’s expression was a mix of pity and confusion. “The doors were nailed shut.” She fixed Nomi with a polite smile. “You are the first kannushi who agreed to return.”
The pit firmed in Nomi’s stomach. “Perhaps they should have considered their duty.” The other kannushi had far less to lose.
No, that wasn’t it. The other kannushi also knew that to meet a raikou in his rage would cost their lives. They simply had hoped the emperor would find their lives too valuable to spend.
In this regard, at least, Nomi knew her eyes saw clearly. Emperor Akihiro would gladly sacrifice a dozen priestesses to end the drought, and hundreds more before admitting he had lost a Lord’s favor.
“It fits you well,” said Gojiro, her eyes lingering on the deep purple sash as Nomi drew it across her waist.
“Does it?” The little mirror for her face was too small to use while she dressed. Nomi pretended to preen for an unseen lover in front of the bare wall. “Do you think Lord Raikou will recognize me?”
Gojiro swooped in to delicately recrease the sash where it met Nomi’s navel. “It was not the clothing he missed.”
Nomi couldn’t stop herself from flinching. Gojiro was no fool, nor stranger to the helpless infatuation she evoked. In the palace, Nomi had watched a string of princes present increasingly elaborate poems, dresses, and delicate flowers. As the rejections grew, so too did the scope and absurdity of their gifts: rare ceremonial weapons, foreign pokémon in gilt collars, a miniature warship.
They were much like the hoothoot roosting in the palace eaves. Instincts useless in this strange land, a nest could be anything familiar, like a discarded broom or four crossed twigs. Lady Gojiro was afforded exceptional freedom, the same as her brothers, and with her long rein came a challenge—in a sea of ornamental birds, this was a fearow, fully fledged and a predator, beautiful and aloof.
At times it felt like only Nomi understood: Gojiro’s other suitors offered a cage to a bird whose only place was in the sky. Nomi would’ve gladly given her the sky, if only she had it. But all Nomi had then was the voice that had sung her raikou from the slopes of Mt. Mortar to the palace, and the hand that could hold him there. As soon as it became clear that she could not give these things away, she had nothing at all.
Nomi pulled away as quickly as was polite, and turned to her pile of discarded clothes. Gojiro would see, and she would question, and there would be no avoiding it. Without ceremony she retrieved the two hand-sized, ivory-white daggers from the folds of her clothes. She wrapped the leather cords at their hafts around her neck, leaving their curved blades to frame the necklace of beads at her throat.
“Why those?” Gojiro asked, this time with genuine unveiled curiosity.
“They were mine by right.” To punish Nomi for this theft would be to acknowledge that the palace laid claim to the knives that killed a lord. Some things even the palace could not easily replace. Nomi’s skin prickled with goosebumps where the tips of the blades met her collarbone. “And they killed him before.”
Nomi’s raikou had eaten the drugged meat from her palm, and her voice had soothed him into stupor. She had been pulled away as soon as his body relaxed; they had not made her hold the knife. It had been the emperor who had ordered it done.
Her raikou had grown impetuous, despite her warnings. The emperor had decided a Lord who would only listen to a peasant was unfit for his court—may the next Lord have more deference.
So who had killed him? Far safer for her to blame the knife.
But she had seen recognition in her raikou’s clouded eyes before the draughts took him. She already knew who he would blame, if he remembered. In comparison, the might of the palace meant very little.
Gojiro’s confusion remained unsated. “You will not kill him tonight.”
A human could kill a raikou in the same way that a human could kill a storm. He had been blessed by the Sun, and no mortal hands or tools would undo that—any time he fell, at the next thunderclap, his mother would give him a new body, and he would roam free once more. And Nomi could not fell him. These would at best buy her a moment of fearful recognition. She remembered how her raikou had leapt perilously from stone to stone, sparks turning the grass beneath his paws to ash, before nuzzling into the palm of her hand. A few seconds might make all the difference.
Or perhaps Gojiro meant to forbid her from trying? Perhaps she did not know Nomi at all, after all.
“On this we agree,” Nomi said at last.
On the night that her raikou was killed, Nomi had stolen these daggers from where they rested by the body. At the time it had felt like indulging her this was the least she was owed—if these were the tools that had killed her raikou, and if the court would have Lord Raikou’s favorite kannushi join him on the pyre, Nomi would at least have the arrogance to grant herself the death of a lord rather than the death of firewood.
But holding them had enervated her somehow, as if they still held the last prickles of static. As soon as they touched her palms, her heart had raced and her mind was filled with one thought, nearly primal: I must run. Her next thought was distinctly more cold, logical, human: And then I shall live.
They had saved her once before. Perhaps they would do so again.
“They are for luck,” Nomi continued, turning to smile sweetly at Gojiro. She picked up the remaining trappings of a kannushi, the magnificent golden bridle, and wound it around her forearm. “I would ask that your men escort me to Brass Tower. I would not keep Lord Raikou waiting any longer.”
※
They reached the ruins just before dusk.
Long before Nomi was born, Brass Tower belonged to Enju, because it had belonged to the Sea. Now the Sea was gone and it belonged to the emperor. The path to the ruins wound through a grove of maple trees twined with ivy, surging free from their plots after centuries of pruning and guidance. Gojiro’s retinue led them to the steps, where another group of soldiers waited, spears bristling.
“By decree of Emperor Akihiro, child of the Sun,” Gojiro called, when Nomi remained silent. “His kannushi will meet with Lord Raikou.”
Nomi stepped forward, ignoring the torch offered to her. Her raikou had been a sibling of fire, and was indeed born from it, but he bore it no love. She would not insult him with its presence.
“I would ask that you remain here,” Nomi said, looking at the retinue, but directing her voice towards Gojiro. This was the most direct address she could afford.
“The palace guard is sworn as you are,” Gojiro said, moving herself into Nomi’s vision. “They would die to protect you.”
Too late, Nomi saw the pale, strained expression each man wore beneath his cap, wondered to think of what had happened to Hana’s final guard, and why only he had thought to flee. They did not deserve to suffer for her mistakes. Nomi used the only leverage she knew. “You insult Lord Raikou to say he would do me any harm. He will approach me alone, or not at all.”
Nomi caught a flash of relief spread across the nearest soldier’s face before he could quell it. She looked placidly up at Gojiro, who no doubt suspected a trick, but could find none. There was none.
“Then go with the blessing of the Sun, honorable Nomi,” she said at last, and Nomi went alone.
The ruins had been picked clean by fire, rain, and wind; in this regard, it was exactly as Nomi had last seen it. Tarnished puddles of brass gleamed faintly where the eaves had once stood. Nomi passed her hand over a rosewood sculpture that had once born the figure of the Sea, and was now little more than two ovals.
She did not need seers to know he would be in the basement. That was where he had died the first time, when the tower burned, and again, when the emperor decreed it. The ground floor had been gouged by the flames, and the basement opened like a crevasse beneath her, the fragments of remaining floorboards framing it like fangs. Nomi walked carefully over fallen timbers towards the stairs.
Shakily, Nomi descended. If she died here, it would be fair. And if she lived, there would be nothing to fear.
The basement had not been sacred until it had been blessed by the Sun, so the architecture beneath was plain and adorned only by soot and dust. Nomi looked quickly—her raikou always gleamed as if cloaked in stars and was nearly as a large as a cart. It would be impossible for him to hide. A faint glimmer of light in the half-burned rafters caught her eye, so faint she had mistaken it for moonlight.
Parched by drought, the new Lord Raikou was little more than a tangled ball of lightning, seething impotently in the gentle night breeze. Nomi clutched the daggers to her chest and tried to remember this as he circled overhead, barely more than the tangled, sparking outline of a cat leaping from stone to stone, but it was hard to miss the way the support columns that had once held up the tower shuddered beneath his feet, how the hair-fine wilted moss charred where he lingered.
Nomi closed her eyes, and began to sing softly, finding that softer part of her voice coarse with disuse. “To the other side of the mountain ...” She took one step forward. “I can see—”
He snarled at her approach. The dry air grew hot, and Nomi barely had time to lift the daggers from her neck before the ruins went white.
A thunderbolt split the air, and Nomi felt its breath skitter across her shoulders and arms before being drawn inexorably to the daggers. When it faded and her vision returned, the blades glowed a faint blue, humming with captured lightning, and she still lived. She forced herself to slow her harried breathing and knelt.
“Lord Raikou.” With her head bowed, her words were directed to the dry ground. The golden brocade of her kosode had become oppressively stifling. “I have been sent to guide you back to the palace.”
At this, the phantom lightning coalesced into a familiar, four-legged shape, smaller than she remembered, with pale mistings of clouds mantling its shoulders. Static pricked the hairs on her arms as he padded close; she dared not look up, but she felt his eyes trained on the daggers in her hand. Good. Better he focus on that than the bridle snaking down her forearm and into her lap. She heard the wet, dull sound of hackles raising, and she was quite certain that if those sparking jaws wrapped around her neck, it would break, just like Hina’s.
Nomi chose her next words carefully, and made no move towards the golden bridle splashed out magnificently across her kosode. “I seek to return what was taken from you. Will you not speak to me, as you once did?”
Evidently he would not. The raikou leapt at her, claws outstretched, and Nomi knew then he had chosen for them both.
She was already rolling out of the way, pretenses of formality abandoned. As his claws carried him forward she raised the bridle, which she had worked into a snare. His head and neck plunged through it, but then the golden thread shone and shrank around his neck, choking his momentum. He snarled and raged mere inches from her face. Once, twice, thrice he pulled, and then the bridle was fully shrunk.
Nomi waited a moment, but she knew: a raikou would never think to try trickery. He was caught.
They stared at each other, both panting, and Nomi studied the raikou who was hers no longer, or perhaps was hers again. Her raikou had been rippling mass of luxurious golden fur, muscle, and thunder; he carried himself with a grace and delicacy that did not fit his frame. Once, Nomi stroked his crest and watched an afternoon go by in the ceaseless storm reforming around his mane.
This raikou’s fur was lackluster and matted, and the purples of his mane were dimmed to pale grey. His lips flapped loosely in half a snarl. This close, Nomi could see that his fangs were nearly invisible. Perhaps he wouldn’t have been able to tear out her throat after all.
Perhaps he had never wanted to. If it had been this easy for the other kannushi, they surely would have prevailed.
{I waited for you. Free me,} the raikou rumbled finally, cutting through her pity. His growl was coarser than Nomi’s remembered, or perhaps his voice had become like new alongside his body.
“You must remember little of me, to ask that,” Nomi said archly in a voice she hoped brokered no argument. She wrapped her end of the bridle another time around her wrist. “Do you recognize me?”
The raikou flinched against the bridle but made no move to pull against it. Perhaps he understood he lacked the strength. All the same, Nomi was grateful he did not try. {Know you? Yes, thunderclap,} he growled. {But. I am not him. I know what he said to you. I do not know what he believed.}
Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes when he called her by name. Nomi swallowed. “Do you blame me for his death?”
{Blame?} He repeated the word slowly. {Yes.} When his eyes met her own, they were strikingly familiar, shards of amber that still glinted where the rest of him was faded. {It was the kindest thing you ever did for us.}
Like this one, her raikou’s words were often stilted, and his thoughts orthogonal to her own. Blame and guilt may not have needed description in his mind, and all he understood was the action. But this left Nomi with no place to put his gratitude.
Perhaps sensing her confusion, the raikou pressed, {You were kind then. You are kind now. Free me and be done.}
Nomi swallowed. “If you know me as well as he did, you would know I cannot free you. The emperor has called us to sing away the drought. You have no choice; nor do I. When we are done, perhaps he will grant us our freedom.”
This time sparks formed in the wilted clouds on his back, and quelled when Nomi raised a dagger. {I think,} he said evenly, {it was him who did not know you enough. He should have asked. He could not stay with you forever.}
“Tell that to the emperor and the other children of the Sun.” They would not understand him, and the court would not believe Nomi if she spoke these words on his behalf.
{Why do you think he stopped calling the rain? Not spite.} The raikou rumbled something else, and this time, it was Nomi who did not understand. Then he continued: {Your cage. Their cage. It will never be large enough. Free me.}
Nomi answered with words that Hina and the other kannushi never knew, never considered, never understood; for the first time, she wondered if perhaps her raikou had loved her more than the rest because she alone saw this truth and he alone had never before been bound by it. “Not all of us are free enough to choose our cage.”
It was Gojiro she thought of when she said it, and it was Gojiro who descended the unstable, soot-stained stairs as if summoned, footsteps as delicate as a heron. “Your insight and wit were always peculiar, Lady Nomi. I am glad your arrogance was well-placed.”
The raikou growled, this time with familiar malice, but his eyes were trained on Gojiro, and he said nothing.
“You seem unsurprised to see me alive,” Nomi called up, taking the moment to wrap the daggers back around her neck. She alone held the raikou. Once they left the shrine ruins, and the manifestation of the Sun’s power receded into the horizon, Gojiro would be all that remained. This would be Nomi’s only time to bargain, and she could not reveal all of her cards.
“The others were much louder when they died, and then much quieter.”
Gojiro had explained the court mathematics once, in loose terms. Three boats of soldiers to repel a gyarados that would have flooded a village. A dozen kannushi to end the drought that starved thousands. One peasant to guarantee a new rainlord.
Only when you saw people as things could you make your peace with owning their lives. And once you made that peace, there was nothing left to trouble you.
This raikou knew that too. One kannushi for his freedom. Then her guards. Then another.
Gojiro beckoned expectantly.
Nomi did not move. “I know your father tried to have me killed on the same night as my raikou. I would see you swear, as a child of the Sun, that we would both be under your protection this time.”
Silhouetted by the moon rising through the ruins behind her, Gojiro was like a shadow puppet, save for the creases of silver running down her face. “If you know the emperor ordered your death, then you must also know that you live because I convinced him not to find you after.”
Here the Sun had raised three lives for three lives. No lesser trade had been acceptable. Nomi held fast to this fact. “I gave this land years of bountiful harvests. In return you stayed your hand when a jealous noble suggested I was needed for the altar. I see an imbalance.”
“Be careful who you describe as a jealous noble.” Gojiro descended one stair, so that the shaft of moonlight illuminated her face entirely. “I was the one who decided that your Raikou needed to die for the rains to return.”
Her words hit Nomi like a slap in the face. “Why?”
“Because I knew he would come back.” Gojiro’s voice cut through the cold stillness. “You would bluff that you will not help cage a raikou again, because it is not worth helping my family without promises. I know one sentence can hold many lies. When the rains return, the docks will swell with fish once more; your village and your neighbors will prosper and eat well again. You already know this. If Lord Raikou returns to court, and you are the one to bring him, your position as the most valued kannushi in these lands will be beyond challenge. This you already know as well.” Her arms folded inside of her sleeves. “So which part am I to believe? That you have lost your heart and would watch your neighbors starve? That your ambitions evaporated when the clouds did?”
For the first time, Nomi wondered if Gojiro had same stories of Brass Tower, if the emperor’s children believed in the Sun’s gift and sought to hold it nonetheless, or if they thought the Sun’s mandate gave them the right to it.
Because I knew he would come back. There was a quiet certainty in Gojiro’s words, the kind that only came when the world—even miracles—always bent to your will. And buried in those words, Nomi sensed another truth: Gojiro had never doubted that Nomi would return too.
{I see now the mistake you and he made, thunderclap. What better to lure a bird into a cage—} the raikou tore his gaze from Gojiro and looked at Nomi {—than another bird?} His eyes gleamed. Then he growled that one, strange word she had not understood before.
Why had her raikou stopped calling the rain?
As if in response, her hand drifted back to her throat, where the two daggers rested, and she felt them answer for her in a language without words.
I must run. Only then shall I live.
Not daggers, Nomi realized. Fangs.
She let the bridle slip from her hand, and performed the first rite she had ever learned, long before she was a kannushi: that of offering. “They are yours by right. Take them,” she whispered.
Thunder rumbled overhead, and a bolt of lightning split the sky.
※
Farmers hunched beneath oiled tarps as their irrigation ditches filled. Fisherman watched dubiously as the banks of the river rose to reclaim the dried-out harbors. Languorously, Enju came back to life, with as little urgency as the dehydrated poliwag, whose breathing quickened with each passing minute. Only time would tell if the rains would stay.
The shadow of the palace did not reach across the river, but the rains did. The village chinjusha there faced west, towards Brass Tower, so the winds bore the downpour directly into it. The shrine’s doors had not been fixed before the rain, and now rivulets of water streamed across the interior walls; already, regardless, it had been stuffed with fruit, rice cakes, and flowers.
No one noticed as the last human to rein a raikou joined the stream of supplicants, ascended the steps, and knelt.
The incense she lit was too wet to burn.
Last edited:
