After Tsubaki saw the Seventh Prince off the mountain, a single question struck her all at once: what now? Her old sect had dissolved so completely that there was no place left for her to cling to. She ought to find somewhere else to go. She glanced at Hiroki. The drugged incense had not yet worn off, and he was still fast asleep. If only he could sleep forever, she thought. Then he would never wake and bring danger down on Senior Brother Yoru. She knew she ought to leave at once, for Yoru's sake and for her own. But she hesitated one moment too long, and that fatal pause delivered her straight into a ring of officials and soldiers. Not that they were exactly hostile. Their tone was almost respectful. "Priestess, this way." But by now Tsubaki knew too well how little the words of worldly men could be trusted, least of all those who lived in palace shadows. She could read trigrams, judge the five elements, set mechanisms and arrays, but faced with bright, cold weapons and expressionless men, all her learning seemed suddenly useless. In the end there was no point resisting. She could not bring trouble down on Yoru as well, so she boarded the carriage. The green brightness of Mount Jiazi receded into the distance, and the cracked, withered earth of the outer world closed over her again. For one mad instant Tsubaki almost thought that everything on the mountain had only been a dream. If it had been, so much the better. At least then Yoru would still be somewhere no one could hurt him. The soldiers never tried to go up the mountain. It was as though their whole purpose had simply been to bring her down from it. That only made it stranger. By then Tsubaki had already exhausted herself taking the prince down the slope. Yoru's farewell still echoed in her ears, as if it had pulled away the last thing that had been holding her together. The road stretched on without end. The faces of the soldiers gave away nothing. She had no idea what waited ahead. She was too tired to do anything else, and so she simply let herself sink into sleep.
When she woke, she discovered that where she had been taken was neither paradise nor hell. At first she thought it was a prison, because she had been shut into a room alone and heavily guarded at the door. Meals were brought in by hand. Yet the room itself was exquisitely furnished, everything in it elegant and costly. The meals were vegetarian, but prepared with such care that they made her remember she had not eaten a grain of rice or had a drop of water since drinking tea at the foot of the mountain. She stared suspiciously at the dishes. The maid who brought them bowed and said, "Priestess, please eat." So she was in the palace after all. In Mount Jiazi she had put the Seventh Prince through enough hardship; now he must mean to return the favor. Perhaps this food was meant to send her on her way. But the maid kept looking at the door, then finally turned back with shining eyes full of urgent curiosity. "Could it be true?" she asked. "Are you really a priestess? Can you live on wind alone?" Tsubaki had no patience for nonsense. "I know what your master wants," she said coldly. "Tell him to make it quick." Instead the maid fell to her knees with tears in her voice. "Priestess, have mercy. Please save our Seventh Highness." Tsubaki was genuinely startled. She had guessed right. The girl truly belonged to the Seventh Prince's household. But why plead with her? She clutched the maid's sleeve. "Where is His Highness?" The maid only shook her head and cried harder. "We cannot see him. Only you can save him." Tsubaki gave a bitter smile. "I can hardly save myself." By then she had more or less guessed how she had come to wear the title of priestess. If the prince himself had not spread the lie, then the shopkeeper who had run off before surely had. "You can do it," the maid said, lifting her face full of desperate hope. "All you have to do is follow our arrangements." Arrangements? Tsubaki's mind instantly filled with stories of punishment and torture she had heard as a child. Yet when the maid set the meal before her with such cheerful eagerness, Tsubaki suddenly realized that poison was still kinder than all the things she had imagined. So she stopped resisting and ate everything, one bite after another. The bowls were delicate, the food beautifully made, and it even tasted good. If she had to die, then let her at least die full. There was soup as well, and she drank that too, all in one go. The court did not neglect appearances, she thought grimly. At least they liked to see things properly finished. After she had eaten, the maid, who said her name was Yotsuba, cleared everything away happily and told her to rest well. Tsubaki knew she would have all the time in the world to rest if she were dead. Still, she waited. Nothing happened that night. She saw no underworld. Her soul remained exactly where it was. The room was still beautiful, the guards still blank-faced. Then Yotsuba returned and said, "Priestess, please come and burn incense and bathe."
The words alone were enough to make Tsubaki suspicious. Incense. Bathing. Purification. Had the Seventh Prince truly turned vindictive enough to remind her of the drugged incense she had once used on him? After the incense came attendants, then more attendants, and after that a long ceremonial bath and dressing. Tsubaki gave up guessing and let them handle her like a puppet. Floating in the warm water, she felt only shame. Outside, common people had no water to drink and fields were splitting open from drought, while she was soaking in a whole bath of clean water. Afterward, as she sat before the bronze mirror in a white robe, she saw a girl with black hair loose over her shoulders, a pale face, and eyes full of fear. Where was the majesty of a priestess in that? "Fasting, incense, bathing..." she muttered. "Are they preparing to offer me up?" Yotsuba's hand shook so badly that the ebony comb dropped and broke in two. Before Tsubaki could press further, a voice came from outside. "The auspicious hour has arrived. Please move." Then several strong eunuchs wrapped her in yellow brocade, lifted her bodily, and carried her away. She struggled, but the brocade blocked her sight and the men were too strong. She felt only turns and stairs and darkness. At last she was set down, and when she pushed free of the cloth she found herself in a square, dark chamber lit only by a few palace lamps. At its center stood a huge bed draped in white gauze. Was this a sacrificial hall? Then footsteps approached. A hand lifted the curtain, and a familiar voice laughed coldly. "What, so impatient?" It took her eyes a moment to adjust. Then she saw him clearly: the Seventh Prince himself, still wearing that faintly mocking mouth and those sharp handsome features she had known from the start she ought never to have provoked. He too had let his hair hang loose and wore only white. Something struck her all at once, and her heart dropped. This could not possibly mean what she thought it meant. "What are you blushing for?" he asked lazily, climbing onto the bed and opening his arms to her. Tsubaki shrank back. He laughed and began loosening his sash as if enjoying her horror. "Relax. Even if I don't measure up to your Senior Brother Yoru, I'm still of imperial blood. You won't be too badly wronged." She could only stare. She knew she ought to be angry, to call this insult by its proper name, but she had never learned how to cope with a man like him. Since childhood her master had rarely spoken harshly to her, her seniors had always treated her gently, and she had never in her life had to deal with a shameless libertine. "You're not truly dumb enough to play cat-and-mouse again, are you?" he said at last, his expression sharpening. "You had better really be a priestess, if you expect to leave here alive." He paused, then added almost casually, "You and I are both sacrificial offerings tonight. If the rain ritual fails, you'll be a scapegoat along with me." Little by little the shape of things became clear. This was no old custom presided over by an emperor and his consorts. It was punishment. A real gaoxi sacrifice, and they had been shut inside like tools meant to be used. The prince, seeing her begin to understand, sat on the floor across from her and explained with a bitterness that only half hid his fear. The emperor might soon flee the palace and leave one of his sons to inherit the wreckage outside. The princes were already circling one another. Yoru, who had once been involved in rebellion, would become an easy target the moment the wrong man rose to power. "And if it were you?" Tsubaki asked in a low voice. "If you took the Eastern Palace, would Yoru be safe?" The prince looked at her for a long moment. In that instant he seemed to believe, fully and helplessly, that she was exactly what people claimed. Not because of miracles, but because she was transparent in everything she felt. At last he said, "I can promise it." She did not trust him. He answered with more seriousness than before. "If I harmed him, do you think the woman I love would forgive me?" That was enough. For Yoru's sake, she decided she would have to keep the Seventh Prince alive. She lifted her chin and said, "All right. Then I will help you."
The room remained dim, the lamps casting just enough blurred light to make everything feel indecent, the incense threading desire into the air. The prince looked at Tsubaki's clear black eyes and, just for a heartbeat, lost his own composure. If she spoke firmly enough, one really could believe she was some mysterious priestess. Then the illusion vanished and he laughed at himself. "So after all that, you've decided you don't need to stay chaste for Yoru anymore?" Tsubaki flushed. "You should be the one worrying about betraying the woman you love." That made him laugh properly. "You really do get more interesting by the minute." Yet before he could say anything more, she had already risen and gone to the ritual table. She took a turtle shell used in offerings and set one of the palace lamps in the center of the floor. "I want to try turtle-shell divination," she said. "To see when the rain will come. For the next hour, Your Highness, please keep everything around me from being disturbed. I cannot divide my attention." Only then did he understand how completely he had misunderstood her. Her offer to help him had had nothing whatever to do with lying down beside him. "I will guard the place," he said. "Do what you have to do." Tsubaki laid out a circle, removed the glass cover from the lamp, and heated the shell over the fire. Outwardly she looked calm, but in truth she was only trying the dead on the living. She knew perfectly well she was no legendary priestess who could stand in for the earth-mother. But if the rite itself was ancient, then perhaps meeting it with something equally ancient would work better than anything else. She had always studied practical arts, mechanisms, arrays, hidden passages. Divination by shell was one of the things she knew least well. She had to summon every grain of concentration she had just to drag half-remembered teachings to the surface: what each crack meant, what the direction of each split signified, how the sounds of heating corresponded to meaning. Across from her, the prince watched in silence. He did not really believe that roasting a single piece of shell could do anything. Yet under the firelight, Tsubaki's closed eyes and still face had a gravity to them that was almost genuinely priestly, and that unsettled him. Time went on like that until the bells outside began to sound and a shrill eunuch voice cried out the auspicious hour. Then came the chant from beyond the door, an ugly invocation that made clear what everyone outside expected to be happening within. Rage rose in him all at once. Was the emperor really so willing to use him as a joke, all for the sake of the son he valued more? Was this merely about rain, or about those waiting for him to fail and be replaced? He nearly went to hammer on the door. Instead he looked at Tsubaki and swallowed the anger. Then, half in malice and half in protection, he kicked the bed, tore at the curtains, and made just enough rhythmic noise to convince the listeners outside that the ritual was proceeding as they wished. No matter what came after, no matter whether they got out alive or not, for now he had only one thought: not to let Tsubaki be disturbed.
But a new problem followed almost immediately. Heat began to rise in his body for no reason at all. It was a strange, crawling heat, restlessly searching for a way out. His eyes landed on the bed. The coverlet was woven from a cool marine silk, smooth and cold to the touch. Perhaps that would quiet the fire in him. Then he looked back at Tsubaki and saw that color had risen in her face as well. Of course. They had been drugged. Whether the drug had come through the food or through the incense hardly mattered. Someone outside had no intention of leaving this ritual unfinished. Tsubaki's forehead was beaded with fine sweat now, her body wavering. When she half-opened her eyes, the clarity that had been in them before was gone, replaced by something hazy and dazed. The prince discovered with real alarm how difficult it was to retreat to a safe distance. Tsubaki's grip loosened. The turtle shell nearly slipped from her hands. Clenching his teeth against the fever in his own blood, he seized a jade flute from the offerings and forced himself back to where he had been sitting. Then he played. The sound that filled the chamber was cold and pure, lonely enough to cut through the heat. Tsubaki, trapped in the same burning confusion, had been on the verge of letting everything go. In her blurred vision someone had seemed to come toward her, tall and beautiful and impossibly dear. She had wanted to abandon the ritual, to throw herself into that illusion and let it take what it wanted. Then the flute swept through the haze like clear water. Little by little the restless fire in her body subsided. Her mind steadied. And then, at last, she heard it: the strongest crack of all from the turtle shell. Tsubaki opened her eyes. She was fully lucid again. She studied the lines in the shell, then covered the lamp. "It's done." The prince set down the flute and came to support her. "You need rest." She looked drained to the bone, her lips pale. "It will rain within three days," she whispered. "We don't need to..." Before she could finish, her whole body went limp and collapsed against him.
He lifted her up at once and pounded on the door. The ritual officials hesitated but finally opened it under the force of his anger. Carrying Tsubaki in his arms, the Seventh Prince strode straight toward the imperial infirmary. The officials could only trail helplessly behind. "Your Highness, but..." one of them began. He did not even look back. "If it doesn't rain within three days, then punish me however you please." No one dared stop him. If he was truly a discarded prince, then everything was lost already and it cost them nothing to humor him. If the ritual had really succeeded, then the future still contained too many variables to risk offending him. So they let him go. Some of the younger attendants even snickered afterward, talking about the bed, the ripped curtains, the noises they had heard, and placing wagers on what exactly their exhausted prince and priestess had been doing inside. Tsubaki, however, heard none of it. She had already drifted elsewhere, back into a dream from years before, when she stood hidden in the rear garden watching Yoru practice his sword. She had always thought him not merely handsome but almost ethereal, as if everything about him belonged to some world above her own. She had hated her own weak body then, hated that she could not spar with him the way some of the others could. Yet he had always treated her kindly. He had praised the salves she made him, teased her about how capable she was, told her he had even argued with their master that she should not be taught too much because theirs was no place for someone like her. "You ought to go to some great house," he had once said. "You could spend your days embroidering or chasing butterflies with the maids, and in time marry some highborn gentleman. That would be easy for you." Tsubaki had gone still and said quietly, "I don't want that. I think this life is fine." He had stared at her, startled, and then smiled. "Good. I was only teasing. I wouldn't want you to leave either." At the time she had treasured that warmth without question. It stayed inside her for years. Even later, when another woman was sent in her place to Mount Jiazi, even later, after the palace rebellion and all the ruin that came after, she had still carried it with her. And then, only days ago, she had seen Yoru again with her own eyes and realized there was a weariness in him that she had not been there to share, a distance she could never cross, and that everything had in truth been decided long ago. There would be no turning back. All longing had already become ash. Just then she heard the clear sound of dripping water, so real that it pulled her out of the dream. "Priestess, wake up!" Yotsuba was shaking her, half laughing and half crying. "It's raining. The ritual worked!" Tsubaki opened her eyes fully and heard it herself: the unmistakable sound of rain falling outside, a rain the court had waited far too long to hear.