I slid the door open for Mamoru out of habit, managing not to bow only as a cursory remembrance. My lord was doing so well at playing his part. It dealt a great blow to my humility to think that I was not.
Our room was plain, with two narrow mats stretched out in the center of the room and a lamp set on the back table. It flickered uncertainly from time to time, as though unsure as to whether or not its presence was welcome. Outside the window, the moon waxed like a ripening fruit, pale and elusive.
Mamoru slipped his new shoes off and began to undo the tie that held his hair. Out of habit, I paced over the length of the room, searching into all the corners and listening to the sound of the floor as I walked it.
“Kouje,” Mamoru murmured, his voice as soft as a moth’s fluttering, “I do not think you’ll find any assassins here.”
“Mamoru,” I said, fighting the urge to bow. “I did not mean to disturb you. It is merely a habit. If you find it offensive…”
My lord smiled warm in the lamplight. “No. You needn’t stop. I find it almost reassuring, truth be told, and… I am in need of some reassurance tonight.”
He drew back the thin, summer-season coverlet. It was imprinted with a design of trees, ones that held the most elegant of songbirds. My lord had always enjoyed listening to the songbirds in the menagerie. On some occasions, if the night air was right, he said that you could hear them singing all the way from the palace.
I knelt on the mat next to my lord’s. “Everything will be well tomorrow,” I told him, “now that we’re traveling in a larger group. No one will take any notice of you.”
“My face,” he said, touching one smooth cheek thoughtfully. “That man said that they were stopping everyone with a regal air about them.”
“I shall counsel you to amend your posture,” I said firmly. “And leave your hair uncombed in the morning. And perhaps we might cover your face in dirt,” I added, as an afterthought.
“Kouje!” Mamoru looked at me for a moment, stunned and amused in equal measures. “Surely our companions would notice something peculiar about such a thing?”
I shook my head. “It was unwise to bathe when we did. I see that now.”
My lord sighed fondly, in a way that did not betray his exasperation in the slightest. “Next time, I’m sure we will both think twice, and learn to live peacefully enough in each other’s stench.”
“Indeed,” I said, allowing myself the smile I’d been holding back. I couldn’t help looking around the room once more, since there were other habits a man accumulated during his lifetime, ones less easy to break than the familiarity on the tongue of a certain title. “Is there anything I might fetch you, before the day is out?”
Mamoru cast his eyes toward the window, and the moon that had risen high over the trees.
“I believe the day is already out,” he said, then, “I’ve everything I need, Kouje. Thank you.”
I rose to extinguish the lamp, trying and failing to make my feet sound noiselessly against the floors, the way I could at the palace. That I couldn’t was some reassurance, but some loss also. I heard a quiet sigh, and the shifting of fabric as Mamoru tucked in underneath the coverlet. I tiptoed back as softly as I could to my own bed and pushed the covers back in the dark.
“Thank you,” my lord said again. Already his voice was coming slower, half-ragged with the pull of sleep.
“You have nothing to thank me for,” I assured him in a whisper that would not break the tenuous threads of sleep forming around him like a spider’s web. “I merely felt the need for a proper bed. You have forgiven me for my indulgence, and I’m very grateful. There’s no more to say on the matter than that.”
“No more to say on the matter,” Mamoru murmured, the words nearly swallowed up in a yawn worthy of the menagerie lions.
“Good night, my lord,” I said.
A quiet snore was his only response. I lay awake after that for some time, listening to the creak of men and women walking the halls, finding their rooms for the night or leaving them. Gradually the noise subsided as the rest stop closed down for the night, and then there was no sound at all but for Mamoru, sleeping peacefully in