The paper door of Kizuru Hall stood half open, and fine snow was falling outside. Yanagihara Sumine, wrapped in a gauze-white dancing robe, finished the last turn of her dance beneath the lamps. Sweat shone at her temples, but there was still a smile at the edge of her mouth. A maid knelt and offered her a flask of warmed wine, saying that the emperor had heard she had caught a chill and had specially sent it to warm her. Sumine looked at the cup for a long moment. Then, without asking a single question, she took it and drank it down in one swallow. The wine had scarcely reached her throat before it felt as if a tongue of flame had licked through her chest. The maid went pale and dropped to her knees, crying out for help. Sumine only steadied herself against the screen and sank slowly down, looking out at the snow growing denser by the moment. Then she laughed very softly. So this, she thought, was how her life would close.
Many years earlier she had not yet been Lady Yanagi, nor had she entered the palace at all. She had only been an unnoticed kitchen drudge in the back rooms of Hanairotei in Kyoto's eastern market, a girl named Yanagihara Sumine. Her hands lived in cold water and grease, her knuckles rough, the backs of them crisscrossed with countless knife marks. She smeared her face with a paste of herbs, ash, and rice bran, turning skin that had once been pale and fine into something yellowed and coarse, so that from a distance she looked like any ordinary low-born servant. The beauty Hanairotei put on display to the world was a cook called Fujisaki Kaori. But the person who truly ruled the stove was Sumine. Kaori smiled behind the beaded curtain and let diners think beauty itself had made the food taste better. Sumine stayed where the smoke was thickest and made every dish exactly right. She did not feel wronged by that. To her, beauty had never been a blessing. She had been sold by her gambling father at the age of six and beaten in nearly every household she passed through before she was ten. During those years, an old woman once released from the palace recognized the birthmark at the nape of her neck and secretly told her that she might not in fact be a child of the Yanagihara house at all, but an imperial princess lost among the common people on the night of the late emperor's coup. The old woman could not swear it was true. All she left Sumine were a few old objects and one warning: if you want to live, hide yourself first. So Sumine learned to cook, learned to hide her features beneath ash and herb paste, learned how to live quietly even in the filthiest, most disorderly places. She had always known one thing with certainty. Someday she would stand inside the palace and look once at Ichijo Munekata, the man now seated where he was. If the old woman's stories were true, then everything in that palace ought once to have belonged to her in some way.
The first time she truly saw Ichijo Munekata was on an afternoon just after the spring rain had stopped. Three noble guests arrived at Hanairotei, and the proprietor rushed downstairs with flattery written all over his face. There had long been a rumor that Hanairotei possessed the most beautiful cook in the world, and the emperor had supposedly come incognito to see for himself. Fujisaki Kaori went upstairs painted and adorned, and within only a few exchanges her nervousness gave her away. Sumine listened from outside the room, then entered carrying the last dish, a chilled lily broth. Floating in the bowl was something black and wormlike, enough to turn anyone's stomach. The proprietor and Kaori both dropped to their knees, white with terror lest they offend the sovereign. Sumine, however, only stepped forward beneath the gaze of the young man on the dais and gently stirred the bowl with a porcelain spoon. The worm slowly came apart. It was nothing but wood ear fungus and lily petals cut finely and arranged in a trick. The boy on the seat started, then laughed, and his smile was startlingly clean. "Were you falsely accused?" he asked. That one sentence left Sumine stunned for a very long time. No one in all her life had ever asked whether she had been wronged. No one had ever suggested stepping in on her behalf. She lowered her eyes and said only that she would prove herself. Yet in that instant she understood that the reason she wanted to draw close to Ichijo Munekata was no longer only a question of birth.
After that, Munekata came to Hanairotei often. He did not behave like an emperor. He sat by the window and ate her cherry-leaf rice, her clams steamed in sake, her almond tofu chilled to the whiteness of snow, like a young man whose soul had been snared by ordinary human warmth. Once, when the proprietor opened a branch of the inn on bamboo rafts drifting over Iris Lake, the evening wind blew the kerchief from her hair. Munekata lifted a hand, gathered back her loose strands, and murmured at her ear, "When we're alone, don't keep calling me Your Majesty. Call me by my name." She rolled the two syllables of Munekata inside her heart for a very long time, like a sweet that would not quite melt. If she had leaned into him then, if she had shown him her real face and begged him for pity, she might have left the kitchen, the proprietor, and the whole gray shell she wore with ease. But she would not. What she wanted was not a passing novelty, nor favor earned by beauty. What she wanted was Munekata's heart.
No one expected the northern domains to rise in revolt so suddenly. Munekata hurried back to the palace and within days rode to war himself. Kyoto grew cold all at once. Hanairotei went on as always, full of traffic and voices, but Sumine could no longer get any reliable word about him. It was during that time that another man stepped into her life. One night she was taking a medicinal bath in the inn's finest room. As the hot water washed the paste from her skin layer by layer, her true pale complexion emerged beneath it. She had just risen from the bath when the door slid open. A man in white stood there, his features sharp, a folding fan in his hand. He looked as if he had opened the wrong room, yet he showed not the slightest embarrassment. In the instant their eyes met, Sumine nearly bit her own tongue from shame. But he moved first, pressing a flower petal lightly to her lips and saying with a smile, "There's no need to threaten me with your life. My offense was accidental." The next day she learned his name was Hasegawa Gen, a merchant newly arrived from Ryukyu who had lately established money houses and shipping concerns in Kyoto. The first time he saw her true face, and the second time he saw her at her most wretched. Sumine could not help herself. She changed into men's clothes and slipped out of Kyoto, intending to go north and learn what she could from the war front. On the way she and her horse fell into a marsh, nearly dying there. Later she ran into stray soldiers in the woods. Both times it was Hasegawa Gen who hauled her back out. Under the moon he tossed her a robe warmed by the fire, a red handprint from her slap still bright on his cheek, and said without mercy, "Running to a place like this by yourself? Are you tired of living?" When she tried to leave again in fury and embarrassment, she almost stepped off a cliff. In the end Hasegawa Gen took her all the way to the frontier. There, for the first time, she saw a real battlefield. Blood lay everywhere among the last scraps of snow, and when the wind blew even the battle standards seemed to cry. Outside the camp she heard that Ichijo Munekata had been gravely wounded and had already been sent back to Kyoto under cover of night. Only then did Sumine truly understand that although she had imagined herself able to hold the situation in her hands and calculate people's hearts, the first person she had failed to reckon with was herself. What frightened her was not that her plans might fail, but that Munekata might truly die.
When she returned to Kyoto, Hanairotei was unchanged, but Munekata never came again. Hasegawa Gen, on the other hand, appeared often. He ate what she cooked and made little puppets dance on fine strings to amuse her. His hands were astonishingly deft. With only a few threads he could make a puppet lift its sleeves and turn as though it were alive. Watching those figures, Sumine often thought of the hand that had hauled her from the mud beneath the moon. And still she did not let herself take that feeling seriously. Then, two months later, the palace announced that the emperor would marry a daughter of the Fujiwara house as empress, the wedding set for the frost month. The red notice struck her like a slap. She tore it to pieces and sat weeping beside Iris Lake for half the night. Only then did she admit what had long since become true. It was no longer for birthright that she wanted to approach Munekata. She loved him. She loved him so much that even knowing this stirring might from first to last be nothing more than the obsession of one person alone, she still wanted to ask him plainly and hear the answer with her own ears.
So she sold everything she had and entered Kyoto's most famous dancing house to learn. She had no natural gift for dance. She fell daily until her whole body was bruised, and even when the soles of her feet broke in blood she gritted her teeth and kept going. When Hasegawa Gen came to see her, he found her sprawled on the floor after another fall. He stood there watching for a long time before saying only, "I can help you." He handed her a white dancing robe, light as mist. Once she put it on, every movement of hand and foot seemed guided by unseen threads, and even the hardest turns flowed like water. In exchange he gave her a packet of herbs and said that if she did not want the robe to consume her, she must drink the decoction prepared from them every night. Before leaving, he asked once more, "Sumine, will you really not come away with me?" She did not answer. She only held the white robe tighter.
On the day of the imperial wedding, the palace blazed with light. When the dancer in white rose into motion with the music, every eye in the hall fell upon her. Sumine had washed every trace of ash and concealment from her face. For the first time she stood before Munekata in her true appearance. Halfway through the dance he recognized her. In full view of a stunned hall, he rose from the high seat, came down, and took her hand. In that instant Sumine almost believed that all the humiliation, waiting, and obsession along the road had finally received an answer. She was kept in the palace, lodged in Kizuru Hall, and given the rank of Lady Yanagi. The following two months were the nearest thing to a dream she would ever know. Munekata tested the temperature of her nightly medicine with his own hands. He sat with her in the corridors and listened to the rain. He held her bruised feet in his palms and applied ointment to the places dance had worn raw. She had any number of truths she might have told him. She might have told him she herself could be the lost blood of the late emperor. She might have told him that when she first approached him her heart had not been pure, that she had even thought that if he proved unworthy she would pry his whole realm out of his hands. But whenever such words rose to her lips, one look at the way he looked back at her silenced them. For the first time in her life, she truly wanted to bury all the muddy schemes of the past forever.
But the dream broke quickly. Munekata began to weaken for no reason anyone could find. The physicians could not diagnose it. The kitchens could find no poison. Yet day by day he seemed to be hollowed out from within, as though the lamp of his life were nearly spent. Terrified, Sumine slipped out of the palace by night to find Hasegawa Gen, and while he was changing clothes she saw the red crest on his back, the mark of a collateral branch of Ryukyuan royalty. She understood almost everything at once. What he had given her had never been antidotal medicine at all. The decoction itself was harmless. The true poison lay in the vapor released when it was brewed. Munekata had sat by her every night, breathing that scent, and so been dosed with a slow poison without ever knowing it. From the beginning, Hasegawa Gen had approached her in order to use her, to send the poison into the palace through her hands, to pry open Kyoto's deepest gate with her birth and her obsession. She spent the night trembling with the remaining packets in her arms. At dawn she forced the last bowl between the lips of the unconscious Munekata. Before half a day had passed, his fever had broken and his pulse grown steady again. Sumine knelt beside the bed, her tears falling one by one on the quilt. She thought then that if she had saved him, perhaps she would still be granted a chance to speak the whole truth. But the first thing Munekata did on waking was order the Ryukyuan merchant house sealed and Hasegawa Gen arrested. Five days later Gen was beheaded in the western market for treason. On the day of his execution Sumine stood behind the paper window of Kizuru Hall and watched the distant sky burn red as flame. She did not cry. She only felt as though something in her chest had collapsed inward. At last she understood that though Hasegawa Gen had approached her with motives of his own, though he had chosen her for her cunning, her origins, and her obsession with Munekata and pushed her step by step across the board, the heart in his warnings and his offer to take her away had not necessarily been false.
When the snow came again, Munekata came to Kizuru Hall. The hall was very still. Only the lamp wick gave a quiet, irregular crack. Kneeling before him, Sumine told him everything at last, everything she could say and everything she could not. She admitted that when she had first drawn close to him her motives had not been clean. She admitted that she knew an old secret that could have altered the fate of the realm. She admitted that she had once thought, if Munekata proved unworthy, she would overturn his empire with her own hands. But she admitted as well that her love had been real, that her desire to save him had been real, and that at the very end she would rather have died herself than let him die. Munekata listened in silence for a long time and then finally said, very softly, "I remember the girl in the back kitchen of Hanairotei. She had knife scars on her hands and clean eyes. When she looked at people, it was like looking at spring water. Even her schemes were clumsy in how they hid. I believed her heart was clear glass, untouched by dust. But the woman standing before me now is no longer that girl." Those words were heavier than any punishment could have been. Sumine understood then that the cruelest thing in the world was not that he had never loved her, but that he had once truly been moved and yet, in the end, could no longer make himself believe in her even one last time.
The following night, the maid brought her the warmed wine. It was clear to the bottom of the cup, the lamplight on it like moonlight on Iris Lake long ago. Sumine did not ask whether it had been sent by imperial order. She did not ask whether it was a sentence of death. She knew. From the day she had entered the palace, eyes beyond counting had watched her inside and out. She was a woman who had been used by a Ryukyuan spy, a woman who had nearly killed the emperor, a woman whose former innocence no one would piece back together no matter how complete her confession. Munekata could spare her for a time, but he could not truly keep her by his side. Holding the cup, she suddenly remembered the fire of Hanairotei's kitchen, remembered spring on Iris Lake, remembered the fox fur Hasegawa Gen had thrown across her shoulders on that snowy northern night, and remembered too the moment Munekata had bent close on the bamboo raft and asked her to use his name. She realized that she had loved two men in this life. One had treated her as a piece upon the board, yet had accompanied her into the ugliest reaches of the world. The other had once seen her as the cleanest girl under heaven, and she had still managed to lose him with her own hands. She raised the cup and drank it dry. When the fire reached her throat, she bent over the writing desk and breathed shallowly. Outside the door, someone seemed to stop for a moment, but in the end did not come in. Looking at the whiteness beyond the paper window, brightened by snow, she suddenly felt like laughing. If time could turn back, she thought, she would probably still stand outside that room in Hanairotei holding the bowl of lily broth and walk inside. Because for a woman like her, it had been enough to be looked at once with such brightness for her to spend her entire life gambling on it. Only in the end, she had lost.
As her vision dimmed, she heard again the last thing Munekata had said. It was not that he had never loved. It was not that he had forgotten. It was only that the stir of his heart had remained at the beginning. It had remained with the girl in the kitchen, the one with fire-smoke on her hands who had not yet learned to use love as a bargaining chip. Outside, the snowfall thickened, sounding like countless broken butterflies striking the night. Before the lamps of Kizuru Hall went out, Lady Yanagi still sat leaning over the desk as if a dance had only just ended. She had spent her whole life scheming to return to the place she believed should have been hers, and only at the end had she learned that what she could never truly keep was not birth, not rank, not the deep palace itself, but the heart that had once been utterly clean and willing to trust one person without reserve.