were capable of relearning what we’d been forced to forget.
“As have I,” I agreed. “I’ve lifted enough boxes to enjoy the fruits of my labor.”
“I’ll go when you deem it best,” Mamoru said. “It seems so rude not to thank them—not to let them know we’re in their debt.”
“Hey, Goro!” Aiko called from somewhere within the makeshift playhouse—the inn we’d be staying at that evening, if we were staying at all. “If you’ve gone off with that mask again, I’m going to skin you alive and feed you to the mountain demons!”
“They’ll be busy enough with the preparations for the play that they won’t have a chance to notice we’re gone,” Mamoru said, not allowing himself to sound as wistful as we both were. “Do you remember the poem about—what was it—floating weeds? I always found it so mournful when I was little. Perhaps this is why.”
“It won’t be that way forever,” I counseled, though I knew absolutely nothing when it came to poetry.
“No,” Mamoru agreed. “Soon enough we’ll be weeds with roots. I wonder what sort of plant a weed becomes when it is watered by the sea?”
“Excellent for your constitution,” I promised. “You’ll never have a winter’s fever again.”
Mamoru rested his cheek against the side of the inn. We were lucky it was summer and there was little danger of my lord catching fever. He didn’t have his brother’s constitution; he never had. It was as though the first son had taken everything he would need to become Emperor, leaving nothing in turn for the second. Now that I understood our new Emperor a little better, it would have scarcely surprised me to discover that was his plan all along.
“I do still wonder if this might not all be an accident,” Mamoru said. “As much as I once would have welcomed the chance to run away with you, Kouje, I fear the days for such rebellion have long since passed.”
“You’re not as old as all that,” I reasoned.
When was the last time we had spoken so freely with one another? My lord had been certainly no older than a boy of five, so I at twelve would still have been too young to realize the impropriety of my informal ways.
“I did think of it often enough,” Mamoru admitted. “That we might never have to go to war, as my brother did; that you and I could live, with your sister, in some small fishing village, and that I would never have to dress myself as a girl again. At least, I’d thought those days were over.” He laughed warmly.
“I would never have allowed it,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“You would have been right to stop me,” Mamoru replied. “I may be well versed in this part, but any other and I would fall miserably short.”
I moved to shield him—from what was less certain. He seemed so small, and his cheeks were flushed with the heat of memory. It was the same look he got in his eyes when he did have a fever: those long, terrible winters when there was no one but me to visit him, and the servants were all but certain we would lose him that time. “Unless they wished for you to play the prince,” I said.
“Oh, no, Kouje,” he said. “It would be most difficult to play that role. I’d have no distance at all from it; I’d assume too much.”
“I’ll get our things once the show begins,” I promised. It was all I had to offer him; that, and a bed of grass for the night.
Think of how far you’ve come, Kouje, I cautioned myself, before the usual refrain. And think of how far you have yet to go. It was an old trick: Reward yourself before you warned yourself, and you would get far enough on your own two feet.
We passed from behind the inn to the front, where men and women were filing into the theatre, and Goro himself was shouting advertisements from a stone raised beside it. “The greatest adventure you’ve ever seen!” he yelped, in a voice that was much larger than he was. “You’ll never know such daring and excitement!”
No one was paying any attention to us; especially not Goro, who was testing his luck every time he called my lord “princess.” All that saved him was the fact that Mamoru seemed to enjoy it, and coming to blows with an aspiring playwright over an innocent nickname was too much even for me. Even where Mamoru was concerned.