I smiled, beset from all sides. “I cannot see as how we can refuse now.”
“Aiko!” The driver, seemingly finished with his inspection of the wheels, was waving us over, covering his head with his arms as he did so. The rain was falling harder now.
“Just a minute!” Aiko shouted back. She turned again to us, an enigmatic smile on her face. “Are you two coming?”
I was still waiting for that sense of unease to come. It hadn’t; at least, not yet. Moreover, this was our chance—perhaps our only chance—at crossing the border without detection.
I dismounted, not waiting for my lord to hold out his hands before taking him by the waist and helping him down. Now that we’d made our decision, I didn’t want to incur any annoyance by dawdling.
Mamoru grasped my sleeve, as if to ask whether I was certain that was the best course of action. I smiled, true as I knew how to, and sent him into the caravan ahead of me while I hitched the horse up to the back of the wagon.
“Is this all right?”
My lord leaned close to whisper the question as I moved in next to him, Aiko pulling the doors shut behind us. I nodded, reaching out to clasp his forearm warmly, just to reassure him that I’d taken his words to heart. It was as my lord had spoken. There were things the both of us had needed to get off our chests before they crushed us completely. In their absence, the air between us seemed much clearer, and the distance much smaller than before.
We’d made the decision together, as brothers on the road.
Inside, the caravan was dark and crowded, the men and women sitting close together with their knees drawn up to their chests in an effort to make more space. Nearer to the front there was a man telling jokes, and the crowd around him laughed uproariously at the latest punch line.
Closer to us was a musician tuning his instrument, murmuring a few bars of a song to himself before frowning and turning the keys at the neck a minute fraction over. The instrument howled sadly, but also out of tune, the rain no doubt affecting it.
“So she says, that’s not a melon, my lord…”
“… and hair of river-silk…”
“… it’s two for the price of one!”
The next line of the musician’s song, about eyes that shone like lamplights in the gloom, was lost in the tide of laughter at the jester’s latest joke.
My lord smiled shyly, taking in the scene with wide eyes, as though he’d never seen the like. Neither had I, if it came to that. The actors brought to the palace were classically trained, and even then came only to perform. There was no interaction between them and those who worked at the palace. This was an experience entirely foreign to the pair of us, and I could only hope that my bewilderment didn’t show on my face as obviously as I felt it.
“So, where’re the two of you from?” Aiko asked after we had given our aliases, straightening the edge of her jacket as though it was the hem of a skirt.
My lord glanced at me, and I smiled, bowing my head. “We lived near the capital, before. But my sister’s taken ill, and she lives in the Honganje prefecture.” It was a lie that came far too easily to my lips. What was worse, I was glad of it.
Aiko whistled. “That’s a fair distance. You’re traveling the whole way by yourselves?”
“We didn’t hear about the trouble with the prince until it was too late to turn back,” I explained, willing my voice to betray nothing, as my hands did. “Now it seems we’ll have more trouble crossing the wall points than we thought. My…” I hesitated only the slightest moment. “… wife and I have had enough trouble with disreputable men along the way,” I explained, swallowing thickly. “With the trouble at the border—”
“He’s more impulsive than I knew when I married him,” Mamoru said wryly.
“Well,” Aiko pondered, stretching her arms out in front of her, not seeming to mind when she almost slapped the musician in the back of his head, “that all depends. Your wife is pretty enough that she might get through, or you might get someone with an eye that decides she looks a little too much like royalty. She does, you know,” Aiko added.
In comparison to what passed for women in nearby towns, I supposed that he did.