Shadows on the Moon (33 page)

“There is something we must speak about before we attend Lord Yorimoto’s entertainment tonight,” Akira said.

I turned away from my comparison of a silver and mother-of-pearl
kanzashi
pin with a tortoiseshell and coral one, and looked at her. She was pale and very serious.

“What is it? Are you well?”

“Do not worry about me,” she said. “I have told you that Lord Yorimoto is the key to gaining your invitation, but I also said that all you need to do is be your usual charming self and the invitation would be yours. That may no longer be true.”

“Why?” I asked, although I was not sure I wanted the answer. It was no minor problem that put such a look on her face.

“I have just received word that Lady Yorimoto is ill. She will not be presiding over the party tonight. She will not even be in the house, in fact. She is staying with her daughter.”

I frowned. “Does that make such a difference?”

“I am afraid so.” She drew in a deep breath, as if bracing herself. “Lord Yorimoto is a handsome, charming, and intelligent man. That is why he is a valued adviser to the prince and why you need his help if you want to attend the Shadow Ball. He is also a notorious seducer of young women — though
seducer
is not precisely the right word, as I have it on good authority that many of his victims are less than willing. His wife is a formidable woman and a friend of the old princess; having her there tonight might have made your role a little more difficult, since she does not like me and would not have approved of you. However, her presence would have kept Yorimoto in check. With her safely out of the way, he may feel free to act in ways that you will not like.”

I swallowed and looked down at my hands, clasped neatly and calmly in my lap. “We will be in public, though, and you will be with me.”

“You cannot rely on either of those things to keep you safe. He could arrange to have us separated in any of a dozen ways, and getting you alone would be child’s play for him. The higher people rise in court, the more they excel at such games. Besides . . .” She hesitated.

“What? Tell me. I need to know.”

She made a gesture of frustration. “If Yorimoto is pleased, he can arrange to have that invitation in your hand by this time tomorrow. With his wife at the party, it would have been easy to please him: a little flirting, a smile, a touch of a hand. But without any restraint placed on him, he will expect more. If you offend him, he may withhold the invitation out of spite, and with both him and his wife as your enemies it will be much, much harder to gain an invitation through someone else. Not impossible. You are Kano Yue. Someone will probably help you.”

“Probably,” I said, my voice hollow. “The ball is in a week and three days. Have we any invitations from other advisers to the prince before then?”

“No.”

I let out a long, slow breath. “So the question becomes: just how much is the invitation worth to me?”

I had steeled myself to the duties of the Shadow Bride. I could and would go through with it in order to get the promise. Now I had to decide if, in order to get to the ball in the first place, I could allow another stranger to lay his hands on me, simply because he was despicable enough to be my enemy if I refused.

Akira looked away. “You are not the daughter of a nobleman. You are the sister of a notorious courtesan, of murky past. He will not expect you to be a virgin. He may feel that, even if you are to attend the Shadow Ball, there is no harm in sampling the goods. Or he may not go that far, but he could still expect you to show him ‘favor,’ shall we say. Yue, I know that you and Otieno have grown close these past few weeks. Have you —?”

“No,”
I said.

Akira rubbed her forefinger in a gentle circle on her smooth forehead, a sure sign that a headache was building. “I am not sure if that makes it better or worse.”

In the midst of my own dismay, I felt a flash of compassion for Akira. This was hard for her. Perhaps it brought back memories of her own past, of being sold to the theater. They had expected her to take on the role of a grown woman not just on the stage but in the pleasure rooms behind it, when physically and mentally she was still a child. At least I had a choice. She had never had one.

Without thinking, I shuffled forward and laid my hand on her knee. It rested there a moment before it began to heat and tingle, bringing to me the awareness of the uncomfortable pressure behind her left eye and the thudding in her skull. This much of her distress I could alleviate, at least. I let the heat spread from my skin to hers, soothing the pain away.

Her tense shoulders relaxed, and her hand fell away from her head. I pulled back, closing my eyes against the wave of dizziness that came when I moved. It passed almost straightaway. I was getting better. Stronger.

And less and less able to resist the temptation to use this new gift.

I pushed that thought away and opened my eyes to see that the delicate color had returned to Akira’s cheeks.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling. “I do not know what I ever did without you.”

“If it were not for me, you would not have had the headache in the first place,” I pointed out.

“Nonsense. Now listen to me, Pipit. We do not have to attend tonight. I can send a note to Yorimoto claiming a sudden indisposition, and then we will just have to work harder and try to get an invitation some other way. You need not do anything you do not wish to do.”

I shook my head decisively. “There is no time. I will just have to do my best to stay with you, and charm him while keeping him at a distance.”

“And if that does not work?” she asked, eyes huge. I wondered again at the memories that caused her face to fill with such emotion, and took her hand.

“Then I will have to make another choice. I cannot know yet what I will do. I will survive it, Akira, no matter what. I have chosen my own way, and I will see it through. Do not worry about me.”

Brave words. Even I did not believe them, really.

Akira fussed over me more than normal as we readied ourselves for the party. She sent her maid away and dressed my hair herself. She brought some of her own pins for my hair, long ones with dangling beads of abalone and freshwater pearl.

“These pins are very sharp,” she commented casually. “If you were to stab someone with them, it would hurt a great deal.”

I nodded, making the beads clank together. I wanted to tell her that I would not need the pins, that I could look after myself, but I was afraid of what might come out instead. I had used up my store of bracing speeches. Instead I took a sip of the tea that Akira had brought for me and gagged.

“What is this?”

“Just tea. Why?” Akira said, still busy with the pins.

I peered into the cup. The tea looked normal, but it was intensely bitter and had a faint spicy smell that was familiar. Then I realized where I had smelled it before and gagged again, pushing the cup away so hard that part of its contents slopped onto the lacquered tray.

“That is sangre tea!”

“Yue —”

“Why are you trying to make me drink this?”

“Calm down.” Her hands left my hair and came to rest on my shoulders. “You said yourself that you cannot know what you will do. This is just a precaution.”

I shook my head, wanting to refuse, to reject the tea utterly. “It is dangerous, this stuff!” I knew it was. None knew better than I.

“Not taken like this. It is heavily diluted, and you are not pregnant. I know it tastes bad, but it will not harm you. The worst that can happen is your monthly bleeding will be a little heavier. Yoshi-san and her girls use it often. You know I would not put you in danger.”

I took a deep breath. I knew Yuki had taken sangre without any real ill effects; it was the amount I had given my mother that had been fatal to her. And Akira was right. It would be stupid to take risks.

I picked up the now lukewarm tea and drank it down in one gulp, coughing and sputtering as the bitterness hit my throat.

“Good girl,” Akira said, and went back to arranging my hair.

Eventually we were both ready, and we left home, not speaking much in the carriage. This was the event we had both been working toward almost since I had first come to live with Akira, but it brought about no feeling of excitement. I just wanted to get it — whatever it was — over with.

From the moment we arrived at Lord Yorimoto’s home, I could see the truth of what Akira had said. Ostensibly it was to be an evening celebrating music, dance, and the other traditional arts, but the boisterous voices and brittle laughter nearly drowned out the sweet tune that a pair of
gijo
were playing on
biwa
— four-stringed lutes — near the entrance. Many men and women were gathered around them, but no one seemed to be making an effort to listen.

In another area of the large room — which had been created by pushing back or partially pushing back all the dividing walls on the lower floor of the house — more
gijo
performed. Two of them danced with fans, while a third provided music on a
shamisen
. I could not hear enough of her playing to know if she was good. The girls were beautiful dancers, but their movements were much more openly sexual than the dances I had seen at Yoshi-san’s teahouse. The girls wore heavy white makeup and had red lips, something I had never seen before either, and instead of keeping their eyes fixed on the distance, they cast laughing, flirtatious looks at those watching them, many of whom made lewd gestures in return.

Akira hissed quietly. “This will degenerate into an orgy before the night is through. Yue, I do not think —”

“Ohime-sama!” A hearty voice broke into Akira’s words. A tall, solidly built man approached us, smiling. Akira moved, and I found myself half hidden behind her as the man continued, “Your beauty graces my humble home. I am glad that your long period of mourning is, at last, at an end.”

“I am Kano-san now, Yorimoto-san,” Akira said, smiling. It did not touch her eyes. “It is no longer necessary to address me as princess.”

“You will be a princess in my eyes as long as you live,” he said. Though the words were flattering on the surface, to my ears they seemed like a threat. It had been a while since I had thought about the danger of the old princess’s hatred for Akira, but he made me remember it now. He went on, “However, I will be obedient to your wishes, of course, Kano-san.”

There was a high-pitched trill of female laughter behind me, and when I glanced back, I saw that one of the dancing
gijo
now sat in the lap of a man who had been watching her dance. She struggled a little, playfully threatening to bat him over the head with one of her fans, before he released her and she stood up again. I suddenly realized that the man was Lord Takashi, and I whipped back around before he saw me staring.

My movement caught Yorimoto-san’s attention. “Ah, who is this? Can it be your famed sister? I am told that she might outshine even your legendary beauty.”

Akira beckoned me forward, and I thought that no one but me could have detected the reluctance in the lines of her shoulders and back.

“This is Kano Yue. She is making her first appearance in society. Since you have the prince’s ear, I have told her that she must meet you.”

I bowed to Yorimoto-san, and he to me. He was handsome, as Akira had said, and his smile held a great deal of confidence and humor. Then I looked into his eyes and saw not the frank appraisal that I had become used to, but a kind of calculating coldness that reminded me abruptly and unhappily of Terayama-san. As we both straightened, he moved a little closer to me, and his breath — not bad smelling, but warm and unpleasantly intimate — washed over my face.

“The stories do not do you justice,” he murmured, more for effect, I thought, than because he was really impressed by me. “Kano-san, you have presented me with a jewel.”

“Actually,” Akira said, moving to separate us, “I hope to present Tsuki no Ouji-sama with a jewel.”

“Oh?” He quirked an eyebrow, not looking away from me. “The Shadow Ball? No one ever faulted you for lack of ambition, Kano-san. It was a pleasure to meet you, Yue-san. If we have the opportunity to speak later — in private, perhaps — then we must speak of the Shadow Ball.”

We bowed to each other again, and he moved away, smiling and talking to his other guests.

Akira swore viciously under her breath.

“It was no good, was it?” I said.

“No. He was telling us — not very subtly — that he will not even talk about invitations unless I let you go off alone with him. Most likely he will give you some time to think about it and approach you again later.”

“What if I go with him but make sure to stay in this room? Within your sight? Do you think that would be enough for his pride?”

“Possibly, if you flatter him,” she said unwillingly. “You must not let him take you outside, though, Yue. He will not want to be seen doing anything too outrageous here in public, because the gossip would get back to his wife. If he can get you really alone — that would be bad.”

Akira moved deeper into the room to an alcove behind an ivory and mother-of-pearl screen. Another heavily made-up
gijo
was serving tea there, and a small group had gathered around her. We took a place among them. I was grateful to be allowed to kneel in silence while Akira chatted to everyone pleasantly.

“How do you feel?” she asked, turning back to me.

“Nervous,” I whispered, and then, wanting to change the subject, “Curious, too. Why do the
gijo
wear such strange cosmetics?”

“It is a new fashion among them,” Akira explained. “The city guard demanded that when inhabitants of the Perfumed District leave it to attend parties such as these, they wear clothes or makeup that make them easily distinguishable from the inhabitants of the other districts. The
gijo
decided that instead of wearing a small badge or some other discreet thing, they would take their example from the
oiran
and flaunt their profession. Hence the makeup. It has become popular. Some patrons even ask for it when they visit the
gijo
in their teahouses. It makes them look different, and the customers find it exciting.”