Even after hearing her best friend insulted, Reirin was never one to ignore the rules of decorum. She smiled politely and opted for a change of topic. “See that, Your Majesty? There’s a hoe lying on the ground over there.”
“What of it?”
“Just something I noticed.”
Or not. Her animosity was leaking out despite her best efforts.
Bad Reirin! This man is the highest authority in the land. It’s not right to think, “You have some nerve to insult Lady Keigetsu when you couldn’t hope to carry out this plan without her!” That said, His Majesty certainly has some nerve…
Reirin did her best to rein herself in, only to fail miserably the next moment. Now that she thought about it, Genyou had relentlessly hounded her best friend and nearly killed Reirin herself by Akim’s hand. Emperor or not, it was difficult to muster any genuine fondness for him.
While Reirin’s eyes lingered on the hoe, Genyou’s mouth twisted into the slightest of grimaces. “Looks can be deceiving, I see. I was misled by your fragile exterior. I took you for a dutiful niece, but it turns out you’re so wicked, brash, and impulsive as to pick a fight with the emperor.”
“Life is full of surprises,” Reirin replied without batting an eye. Though her tone was ladylike, her words were anything but. “I used to think of Your Majesty as my gentle uncle, so I was equally shocked when recent events revealed a very different side to you.”
Until the persecution of Keigetsu entered the equation, Genyou had seen Reirin as a humble Maiden, and Reirin had seen Genyou as a kindhearted uncle with a serene smile. At this point, however, they had both stopped bothering with appearances. The pair had traded their superficial smiles for similar deadpan expressions—one staring at the moon, the other at a hoe.
I wonder if Aunt Kenshuu is aware of her husband’s temperament, Reirin thought, impolite though it was.
It seemed unlikely that her esteemed, all-seeing aunt, the wise Kou Kenshuu, would be oblivious to Genyou’s true nature. Assuming she knew the truth, that raised questions of what sort of bond the pair had built. It was hard to picture the conversations between a couple as mismatched as the dynamic, open-minded, cheerful, mischievous Kenshuu and the vindictive, insidious Genyou.
Stop that, Reirin! It’s terribly improper to fantasize about the private life of a married couple, and you must never disparage others, not even in the privacy of your mind. As the saying goes, there’s no accounting for taste. She made an honest attempt to admonish herself, but she wasn’t doing a particularly great job of it.
Ultimately, she opted to cut the conversation short. Standing around talking with someone she found objectionable would do nothing but cut into her precious sleep. “Er, Your Majesty, why don’t you head to bed soon? Tomorrow is the long-awaited Day of Ultimate Yin. A good night’s rest will go a long way toward achieving your goal.”
After staring at the moon in silence for some time, Genyou murmured, “It has been a good many years since I last felt impatient for the dawn.” It sounded almost like a soliloquy. “Every time the sun rose over this kingdom, I could feel my brother blaming me. Mornings always filled me with a sense of dread.”
Reirin almost stole a glance at Genyou, but she had enough sense to stop herself.
Emperor Genyou always kept to the main palace, and he never stuck around the inner court until morning. No matter how early it was, he would always be found in full formal dress, denying even his own son a glimpse of weakness—and perhaps it was all because that glorious time of day conjured memories of his loathsome past. Prince Gomei was supposed to have lost his life in the middle of the day, not the morning, but the man had always loved the dawn, and Genyou had robbed him of that light twice over. Once when he took his eyesight and again when he took his life.
Come to think of it, even reaching back into my childhood memories, I have never seen nor heard of the emperor sleeping soundly.
He would sit in the dark and make it to morning without a wink of sleep. Reirin could relate to that agony, and she knew it couldn’t be eased with superficial sympathies.
“O traveler slumbering at journey’s end, what visions dance in shuttered sight? Do they blossom in the domain of life?”
Instead, she chanted the lyrics of the song she had been humming all day long.
“What echoes weave through frosty ears? Do they carry the mirth of those once dear?”
Genyou slowly turned around, but he didn’t command her to stop. Picking up on the fact that he was likewise appreciating the lyrics, she crooned the last few verses.
“Sleep, sleep, find peace where a warm breeze blows. From the north comes a heavenly sun to bathe you in its glow…”
This was the song the Maidens had taught the locals, one that had started out as a poem carved into a pillar of the inner court’s mausoleum. Its meaning was thus:
O traveler slumbering at journey’s end,
What do you see behind closed eyes?
Is it flowers blooming in the land of the living?
What do you hear with ears nipped by cold?
Is it the laughter of those you left behind?
I wish you a peaceful rest where a warm breeze blows.
The sun over Paradise shall soon rise in the north and envelop you in its light.
It was probably a requiem. Its metaphors were straightforward, and it wasn’t particularly sophisticated. The choice of the word “north” also came across as odd, seeing as the sun rose in the east. Still, the poem was filled with compassion for the dead, and its melody was so pleasing to the ear that simply humming it could put the mind at ease. As a matter of fact, Keigetsu herself had praised its power to pacify the soul.
Yes, this was indeed the same poem Gomei had carved to keep himself busy after losing his eyesight. He had added a melody by writing musical notes next to the verses—though given Leelee’s lack of musical background, it had looked to her like nothing but a string of random characters—and turned it into a song. This was the piece Genyou had played back at Cloud Ladder Gardens, and it had sounded so familiar to Reirin because she’d implicitly remembered reading its notes.
“When I first read the poem in the mausoleum, I was too young not to question why it would mention the north,” Reirin told Genyou as he clenched a hand around his flute. “But now that I know it was written by the blind Prince Gomei, and that he spent his days in the innermost depths of the Palace of the Golden Qilin, I finally understand its true meaning.”
Genyou offered only a dubious frown, so Reirin elaborated further. Making her point required exposing a glimpse of her own weakness.