The Emperor died in the ninth month, on a morning when the sky above the palace burned red as a forge, and by noon the whole court had decided that his daughter would be easy to manage.
Sayo was nineteen. She had spent most of her life in the women’s quarters of the Palace of the Western Pagoda, learning poetry and calligraphy and the proper way to pour tea. She spoke softly. She kept her eyes lowered. When the ministers came to her chambers to tell her that her father was gone, she listened to them in perfect silence, and when they finished, she bowed her head and said only, “Thank you for telling me.”
They left her rooms nodding to one another. A gentle girl, they murmured in the corridors. A quiet girl. She will need guidance.
The guidance arrived that very evening, in the person of Lord Oshiro.
He had been her father’s chief minister for twenty years. He was a tall man with a narrow, handsome face and a voice like warm oil, and he wore robes of deep plum silk that cost more than a village earned in a year. He knelt before her in the audience hall, touched his forehead to the floor with great ceremony, and rose with an expression of tender sorrow.
“Your Majesty,” he said. “The whole empire weeps with you. You must not trouble yourself with matters of state during your grief. Allow me to carry that burden for you. I will act as your regent until you are ready.”
He did not say if you are ready. He did not need to.
“You are very kind, Lord Oshiro,” said Sayo.
“And perhaps, in time,” he added smoothly, “when the mourning period is over, Your Majesty might consider a husband. My son Takehiro is a fine young man. A steady hand beside the throne would comfort the people.”
Sayo lowered her eyes. “I will think about it.”
Lord Oshiro bowed again, very deeply, and went out of the hall with the quiet, satisfied air of a man who has just been handed the keys to a house.
The coronation was set for the first day of the tenth month. Until then, Lord Oshiro would govern in her name.
That night Sayo did not sleep.
She went instead to the garden behind the pagoda, the one her mother had planted when Sayo was a little girl. It was a wild, untidy place by palace standards, nothing but cosmos flowers, thousands of them, orange and pink and gold, swaying on their thin green stems as high as a woman’s shoulder. The court gardeners had always hated it. They said cosmos were weeds, peasant flowers, unsuitable for an imperial garden. But her mother had loved them.
“Do you know what their name means?” her mother had asked her once, when Sayo was six. “Order. Harmony. The whole universe, arranged just as it should be.” She had smiled. “They look fragile. They bend in every wind. But you cannot kill them. Cut them down, and they come back thicker the next year.”
Her mother had died when Sayo was ten. Her father had kept the cosmos garden exactly as it was for nine more years. And every morning of those nine years, he had come out here at dawn, alone, with a small bowl of rice from his own breakfast, to feed the crows.
It was the one strange habit of a very proper emperor. The ministers had found it embarrassing. But her father had only laughed.
“Crows are the cleverest creatures in the empire,” he had told her. “Cleverer than half my court. They remember every face. They know who is kind and who is cruel. And they can tell, better than any taster, when something is wrong with their food.”
Sayo stood among the flowers in the dark and remembered those words. She remembered them very carefully.
Because three days before her father died, she had seen something she had not understood at the time.
She had been walking past the garden at dawn, and she had seen her father standing with his little bowl of rice, scattering it on the stones. The crows had come down as they always did, dozens of them, black wings flashing. They had hopped toward the rice.
And then, one by one, they had stopped.
They had looked at the rice. They had looked at her father. And then they had lifted into the air, crying harshly, and flown away without eating a single grain.
Her father had stood there, puzzled, holding the empty bowl. He had laughed a little, shaken his head, and gone back inside to finish his breakfast.
The same breakfast. From the same kitchen.
He had fallen ill that evening. He had never recovered.
Sayo stood very still among the cosmos while the night wind moved through them, and the lanterns along the garden path flickered, and the dark shape of the pagoda rose against the stars. She did not cry. She had done her crying already, alone, where no one could see.
Now she was thinking.
She was so lost in thought that she did not hear the footsteps on the path until they were nearly beside her. She turned sharply.
A girl stood in the lantern light, holding a pair of pruning shears. She looked about Sayo’s age. She wore the plain brown clothes of a palace servant, and her hair was tied back with a scrap of red cord, and there was dirt on her knees. When she saw who it was, she dropped at once to the ground and pressed her forehead to the path.
“Forgive me, Majesty. I didn’t know anyone was here.”
“Get up,” said Sayo. “Who are you?”
The girl rose, though she kept her eyes down. “Kaede, Majesty. The gardener’s daughter. I look after this garden. My father says it is too wild for anyone else to bother with.” She hesitated. Then, very quietly, she added, “I saw something the day your father took ill. I saw the crows he would feed. That morning. When I was weeding by the wall.”
Sayo went perfectly still.
“And I saw something else,” Kaede said. She lifted her eyes, at last, and looked straight at the empress. They were fierce, steady eyes, nothing like a servant’s. “But I didn’t know who I could tell.”
“Tell me,” said Sayo.
So Kaede told her. That morning, before dawn, while she was weeding by the kitchen wall, she had seen a man slip out of the imperial kitchen with his sleeve held tight against his side. He had looked both ways before he left. In the gray light she had seen his face, and the crest stitched on his collar: a plum blossom inside a circle.
“It was Gonza,” Kaede said. “Lord Oshiro’s steward. He had no reason to be in that kitchen. Ever.”
The cosmos whispered around them in the dark.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Sayo asked.
Kaede gave a short, bitter laugh. “Tell who, Majesty? Every guard in this palace answers to Lord Oshiro. The gardener’s daughter accuses the chief minister’s steward? They would have found me in the river by morning.” She paused. “And then I heard you were coming out here at night, alone, to the garden your mother planted. And I thought, maybe she already knows. Maybe she’s not what they say she is.”
“What do they say I am?”
Kaede hesitated. Then, with a bluntness no servant had ever used with her, she said, “Quiet. Easy. A doll they can dress up and set on a throne.”
Sayo was silent for a long moment. Then, for the first time since her father died, she smiled.
“Good,” she said. “Let them keep thinking it.”
For the next eleven days, the empress was everything the court expected. She sat in her chambers and wrote mourning poems. She approved every decree Lord Oshiro placed in front of her without reading it. When he mentioned his son again, she blushed and looked at the floor, and Lord Oshiro went away very pleased.
And every night, in the cosmos garden, she met with Kaede.
The gardener’s daughter could go anywhere in the palace without being noticed. Nobody looks twice at a girl with dirt on her knees. She learned which guards Gonza drank with. She learned where his quarters were. And on the eighth night, while the steward was at a gambling house in the city, she slipped into his room and found, wrapped in an oilcloth at the bottom of his clothes chest, a small black lacquered jar with a few gray grains still stuck to its sides.
She brought it to the garden, and Sayo held it in her hand for a long time without speaking.
The night before the coronation, there was a banquet in the great hall. Every lord in the empire was there, glittering in silk, and lanterns hung from every beam. Lord Oshiro sat at the empress’s right hand, in the place of highest honor, and smiled at everyone as if he already wore the crown himself.
When the last course was cleared away, the empress rose.
The hall went quiet. Sayo had never once spoken at a banquet.
“My lords,” she said. Her voice was soft as always, but it carried to every corner of the room. “My father had a custom that many of you thought foolish. Every morning, he fed the crows in my mother’s garden from his own bowl. He said they were wiser than any food taster in the empire.”
A few of the lords chuckled politely. Lord Oshiro smiled indulgently.
“Three days before he died,” the empress went on, “the crows would not eat his rice.”
The chuckling stopped.
Sayo turned toward the servants’ door. Kaede stepped through it, in her plain brown clothes, carrying a small lacquered tray. On it sat a single cup of tea and, beside it, a little black jar.
She set the tray down in front of Lord Oshiro’s steward, Gonza, who stood behind his master’s chair.
“This was found in your room,” said the empress pleasantly. “I’ve had a little of it stirred into your tea. As a gift. Since you were so generous with my father.”
She had done no such thing. The tea was perfectly ordinary. But Gonza did not know that.
He looked at the jar. He looked at the cup. The blood drained out of his face. And then, in front of every lord in the empire, he fell to his knees and began to babble, “It was him, Majesty, it was Lord Oshiro, he told me to do it, he swore I would be rewarded, please, please, I don’t want to die—”
Lord Oshiro rose to his feet, white with fury, and shouted for the guards.
The guards came. But they did not come for the empress.
The captain had been at Kaede’s father’s table the night before, and had seen the jar, and had heard the whole story. Now he walked straight past the empress, laid his hand on Lord Oshiro’s shoulder, and said quietly, “My lord. Come with me, please.”
The hall was silent as they led him out. Not one lord spoke. Not one moved.
The empress sat down again, very calmly, and folded her hands in her lap.
“A quiet girl,” someone murmured, somewhere at the back of the hall. But it did not sound like an insult anymore.
At dawn the next morning, before her coronation, Sayo went out to the cosmos garden carrying a small bowl of rice from her own breakfast. Kaede was already there, kneeling among the flowers, pulling weeds.
The empress scattered the rice on the stones. The crows came down in a great black rush of wings. They looked at the rice. They looked at her.
And they ate.
Sayo let out a long breath she felt she had been holding for weeks.
“Kaede,” she said. “You have calluses on your hands that don’t come from shears.”
The gardener’s daughter went still. Then, slowly, she stood up and brushed the dirt from her knees.
“My father was a swordmaster of the Imperial Guard,” she said. “Before Lord Oshiro had him dismissed for refusing a bribe. He has trained me every night since I was eight years old. In secret. He says the palace has forgotten what loyalty looks like.”
The empress nodded, as if this was exactly what she had expected.
“Lord Oshiro has a son,” she said. “Takehiro left the capital last night, before the guards could find him. He has friends, and money, and now he has every reason in the world to hate me.” She turned and looked at Kaede with her calm, steady eyes. “I am going to need someone beside me who notices things. Someone who does not answer to anyone else in this palace. Someone I can trust with my life.”
Kaede dropped to one knee among the cosmos and bowed her head.
“You already have her, Majesty.”
That afternoon, Sayo was crowned Empress beneath the great red pagoda, in a robe of black silk lined with crimson, with a single gold pin in her hair. The court bowed low as she passed. And a step behind her left shoulder walked a young woman in a white kimono embroidered with red maple leaves, a gift from the empress herself, with an old sword at her hip that had once belonged to her father.
The lords whispered about her as she passed. "Who is she? Where did she come from? What is she?"
The empress heard them, and smiled, and did not answer.
They would find out soon enough.
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