Shadows on the Moon (26 page)

There was no music. She moved around the room to a rhythm that was all her own, with such liquid grace that it was hard to believe there could be actual legs and arms beneath her
yukata.
The dance was delicate and joyful, and her face radiated peace. She threw, caught, fluttered, and swirled her fans, making each one seem alive but at the same time a part of her. I never, for a single moment, believed she would drop one. They flew back to her as if they were birds that she had trained to eat from her fingers.

“This dance is to symbolize a young girl finding joy in the warm winds of summer, and the fans represent both the wind and the girl’s emotions,” she said when she had finished. “It was a little stiff. My side still pains me, and I am out of practice. Now you will shadow my movements and begin to learn.”

When we had finished I was panting for breath, and despairing. I was a rank amateur, and it showed. I had barely managed to keep up with her, and I had dropped my plain wood-and-paper fans too many times to count.

“Well, that was a good first try,” she said, apparently unfazed. “Now for the Chu No Mai. This is a little trickier. I have thought about it and decided that this will be a sad dance. You have an air of . . . of not belonging about you. Cultivating it will add to your mystery and your allure. So you will be the ghost of a woman who longs for love.”

And once again Akira demonstrated. The dance showed the ghost searching, with increasing sorrow and loneliness, for someone to see her, and love her. It began with broad, beseeching movements that moved Akira around the room, but gradually the gestures became smaller and tighter as the ghost lost hope, lost the ability to reach out, until she curled in upon herself and sank to the floor. Such was Akira’s air of misery and longing that I almost expected to see her crying. I wanted to go forward and comfort her, but held myself still, because of course the point of the dance was to make the watcher long to offer comfort. She held herself in the position of mourning for a moment, and then sat back and crossed her legs. “Well?”

“Perhaps it would be easier if you merely killed me now. Then I really could be a ghost and would save myself the sorrow of trying to look as much like one as you did.”

Akira laughed as if she had not been making my eyes prickle with unshed tears a moment before. “No, no, we of the Kano family do not take the easy way out. You will learn.”

After Akira had finished torturing me, we bathed and ate another meal together — I noted that the cooks had prepared an unusually filling meal of beef
motsunabe,
and sent them silent thanks. Then we began shadow-weaving lessons.

We moved to Akira’s sitting room for this, as the evening was drawing in. The servants came to light the lamps, and we made ourselves comfortable on cushions, facing each other.

At first Akira tested me by asking me to create simple illusions, much as Youta had done. Holding out my arms in front of me, I made my hands disappear into shadow, made them appear to be covered in coarse fur and then in white and pink cherry blossoms. I looked at my efforts afresh, realizing that to a critical eye, they were crude indeed. They relied too much on people seeing what they wished to see — but as I had already learned with Terayama-san, sometimes people wish to see exactly what you wish to conceal. And the only full body illusion I could do was my clumsy, though versatile, cloak of shadows.

As the petals melted back to plain skin, Akira ran her hands gently down my forearms. I realized she was tracing my scars and forced myself not to pull away.

“You must learn to hide these,” she said finally. “A Shadow Bride’s skin is flawless.”

In answer, I pulled that most basic illusion, the one of normal pale skin, over my arms. She nodded in approval and said no more, but I caught a considering look in her eyes and knew that she had not dismissed the marks from her mind.

“I do not think you will need much instruction from me,” she said finally. “Your gift is strong, and so you have learned to create illusions in broad strokes. You need only learn how to be more attentive to detail, and you will be able to create illusions that will fit a little better, that will be undetectable in the sunlight as well as in the darkness. And in making your illusions finer, you will be able to create larger ones, and maintain them longer.”

I practiced this by creating a single cherry blossom, this time concentrating intensely on each individual tiny detail, on the red veins in the velvety petal, on the golden fur of the stamens: its faint translucency and the way it trembled under your breath, almost as if it wished to fly away.

As I worked, I felt a strange sensation of heat begin to flutter under my skin. I tried to ignore it, but it grew more and more intense, until I was sweating. Then there was a tiny spark — a flash of fire — and a cherry blossom was sitting in the palm of my hand.

My skin was chilled now. I could feel the slight weight of the blossom as it rested on my hand, although I knew it was impossible.

Wasn’t it impossible?

Akira’s hand was shaking as she reached out. Slowly, she laid her palm over mine, on top of the illusion flower. I could feel the petals spread out and press flat, soft, and faintly warm against my palm. I heard Akira’s sharp intake of breath, and I reminded myself again that it was impossible.

“Yue, when I was ill, I had a dream. . . .” she said, her voice low and hesitant. “I dreamed that I could barely breathe and that I knew I was dying. Then something hot touched me. It felt like a brand, and the heat of it should have set fire to my flesh, but it did not. Instead it swept through me, burning away the illness, and left me weak but healed. When I opened my eyes, I saw that the brand was your hand and that the heat came from you.”

I stared at her, very aware of the silence and the shadows in the corners of the room. “I — I had a dream like that, too.”

Her eyes searched my face, her pupils huge despite the lamp burning nearby. “Hundreds of years ago, when the Old Empire still governed Tsuki no Hikari no Kuni, there were men who had a power like ours, a gift . . . But these men could do more than weave illusions. They could change their shape, see the future, heal. They called these men Akachi. It means ‘Hand of the Gods.’”

That word ran through me like a rumble of thunder.
Akachi.
That was the word they had used to describe Otieno.

I shook my head. “I am only a shadow weaver.”

“How would you know that?” Akira asked. “If shadow-weaving is all you are trained to do, how would you know you could do more? Unless you reached out to a friend in need and somehow healed them? Unless you did things that you did not even know you were capable of until they were already done?”

“No,” I said. “It was just a dream. A fever dream.”

Even as I said it, there was another flash of brilliance in my mind — like a firework cascading against the night sky — and I remembered that day, in my family’s orchard, when I had run from the soldiers. It had not felt like shadow-weaving. I had thought myself a white hare, had felt myself shrink and become light and small.
They could change their shape. . . .

Another flash. The day on the ship, when Terayama-san had escorted me across the deck, and, without knowing why, I had felt so uneasy and frightened, even though I had longed to walk there before. It was almost as if I knew that he was going to hurt me.
They could see the future. . . .

“If you have such a gift, you must have training. Proper training. Who knows what good you could do? Or what harm, if your talent is left uncontrolled?” Akira looked away, frowning, already planning. “I knew someone once who traveled across the sea to a place called Athazie, and he said that there were still Akachi among the people there —”

The name of Otieno’s country snuffed the flaring lights in my mind as quickly as a damp blanket snuffs out a flame.

Otieno had spoken of Athazie, that land of golden plains and hills, of sweet-voiced birds and warm, drifting rain. It was a beautiful place. A place where men like Otieno and A Suda-san laughed and smiled. Where no one slaughtered an animal unless it had a fair chance to escape.

What would such a land — such men — make of me? I would be anathema to them.

“Stop!” I shouted without meaning to, trying to cut Akira’s voice off. My fingers curled around hers until she winced. I loosened my grip and repeated, more softly, “Stop. I do not have such an ability. I do not want it.”

“But —”

“If you are my friend, then please, do not speak of this again. I want vengeance; that is all. Nothing more.”

It was the first time I had ever seen Akira speechless. She opened her mouth once, twice, as if searching for the words to change my mind. But as she stared into my eyes, something in her expression altered. After a long moment, she let out a sigh and bowed her head, the proud line of her back slumping.

“Oh, Yue,” she whispered. “I thought . . . I thought that helping you take your revenge would set you free. I was wrong, wasn’t I? It is just another prison for you.”

She did not look at me. She expected no answer, and I had none to give. I leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead — it was where Youta had kissed me the last time I saw him. Then I released her hand. The brown, dried-up remains of a cherry blossom fell from between our palms, dissolving into dust before they hit the mat.

“Ow!” I flinched as the flexible willow wand snapped down on my toes.

“That is the third time you have placed your foot incorrectly,” Akira said calmly from her place kneeling at the edge of the tatami mat. “You know the rule.”

I grimaced. After I had learned the basics of the two dances, Akira had started using the willow wand to drive the finer — and more easily forgettable — movements home. At first I had protested mightily. I had lost the argument, and the willow had stayed, and been used. Though Akira’s blows were light and never broke, or even bruised, my skin, the swish and snap of the stick made me jump every time. But perhaps it did help me to remember; I did not usually make three mistakes in a row nowadays.

I thought, wryly, that once I had inflicted much worse pain on myself without even blinking. I had not cut, scratched, or burned myself for over four months, not since Akira and I had begun planning for the Shadow Ball. I did not know why. I had never really known why I needed to do it, or why sometimes I did not. It wasn’t about being happy. I was not happy, though I had learned to hide it from Akira as much as I could.

I loved Akira. Not as I had loved my father and Aimi, for I had owned a full and untroubled heart then, but as much as a person like me could love. As much as a liar can love the person she deceives. As much as a stray dog can love the woman who offers it scraps and kind words, though in its wildness it might still turn on her and bite her hand.

I comforted myself that I would not impose on her forever. Once I was the Shadow Princess, I would leave her to take a place in the court of the prince. I never allowed myself to doubt that it would happen. I never allowed myself to think any further into the future than that.

And I did not cut myself anymore.

“Begin again.” Akira broke into my thoughts. “Complete the dance flawlessly, and we will stop for the day. If not, you will complete both dances again, and you will use the ceremonial fans, not the practice ones.”

I groaned. I was tired and hungry, and I knew I would not manage to get through the fan dance again — not using the heavy ceremonial fans, which had steel spikes in them — without landing on my face.

I began the slow, deliberate motion of arms, fully extending my fingers into the soft fluttering movements that would tell the audience I was a ghost. The proud line of my back and raised head showed that I was a noblewoman. It was up to my feet, my face, my spirit, to show them that I was alone, desperately sad, and searching.

The dance grew gradually faster, a sense of desperation and despair drawing my movements back toward my body as I gradually realized there was no hope. . . .

I sank onto my knees, head bowed, bringing my arms together so that my hands were cupping my face by the time I was still. I held the position. My breath came in tiny pants, which I kept as silent as possible. Snorting like a horse would get me another flick of the willow.

“Good.”

I would never have Akira’s glowing expressiveness. That was her own particular genius, honed through years of professional practice. Yet in the past few months, I had heard “good” little enough to know it was worth a great deal.

“You are ready.”

“What?” I yelped, then bit my lip. “I’m sorry, I meant ready in what way?”

“Ready to take a place in the Moon Court. The news came yesterday, but I wanted to see you dance again before I told you. The Kage no Iwai has been announced. It will be in eight weeks, and the invitations will be issued a week before that.”

So it would begin. We had discussed this at length, and I knew that the next step would be to begin attending parties and functions — the first of which was to be a simple tea ceremony at Lord Takakura’s house. If I did well there, more invitations would follow. I must do my utmost to impress, cultivating an air of mystery, charming everyone with my playing, and becoming fashionable, sought after, infamous. Then the prince’s advisers would be forced to invite me to the ball; the only criterion for invitation was supposed to be beauty, after all, even if everyone knew it was really political.