Her fingers were trembling, like leaves at the end of autumn that stile futile clung to their parent branches. How very odd, Hanako thought, and tried to figure out what was causing them to shake so.
“Don’t mistake me, he’s alive.” Akashi Keiji said, and Hanako was suddenly filled with such joy that it felt as if the sun was rising within her, and she could feel the brightness within her own smile.
“However,” The Clever One continued, and Hanako was still spinning gloriously on the high of her joy and relief that she barely paid attention to him, for what ‘however’ could do anything to mar the delight of this moment?
“However,” he repeated again, “Your husband may be alive, and by my mother’s account has suffered no injury that will impair his continuance, but he is not well by any means.”
That made her heart’s glorious dance slow, and she clasped her hands nervously, biting her lip. “What happened?”
Akashi Keiji flicked his fingers in that odd motion of his, and in the flicker of movement she could almost see a flash of a white-tipped tail, and he said, “The ronin succeeded in his mission, and eliminated the samurai that were to be sent after our tail. However, when he tried to take care of the manipulative thief that calls herself a princess of the Fujioka, he… underestimated her capabilities, and paid the price.”
“O-oh… what happened?”
The Guardian’s golden gaze lifted and bored into her own, flat and serious and slightly pained—“He lost his sight in both his eyes.”
Hanako sat there. She sat and stared and stared into his eyes, until the gold of his eyes watered and ran and the entire world blurred. Dimly, in some part of her that was frozen like a flowering bud stricken by a sudden frost, she realized she was crying, and mechanically she lifted the sleeve of her yukata to wipe the dampness away from her cheeks. She was almost entirely unsuccessful, though, as the tears continued to pour down her cheeks relentlessly.
“Hanako-hime?” Akashi Keiji said gently.
“He must be in so much pain.” Hanako whispered. “And all alone. H-he has no one and—”
“If that’s what you’re worried about, my mother drove off Katsumi and her greatly diminished number of remaining lackeys, and then tended to his hurts. However, his eyes could not be salvaged.”
“Oh, Shichiro,” Hanako murmured, and her heart broke.
After a moment, she ventured to ask, “Is—is your mother going to bring him here? To—to us?”
Akashi Keiji shook his head. “Your husband is of the opinion that his presence would only be a burden and he apparently cares too much for you to continue bothering you with his presence.”
It took several moments for the celestial spirit’s words to actually make sense in Hanako’s mind. “B-but, I’d never think that! I, I don’t, I wouldn’t ever think he’s a burden! He’s my honored husband! He’s, he’s, he’s my friend!”
“I know.” Akashi Keiji soothed. “However, you are not the one thinking, he is. And your husband’s sense of his own worth has been broken ever since he was a child.”
Hanako didn’t think it was possible for a heart to break so many times, and she covered her face with her sleeves to hide the humiliation of her tears from the world.
“Child.” The Clever One said. “What will you do?”
Hanako didn’t know. She had never had to decide something like that, for herself. She was still very young, and she had never left her pagoda before yesterday. How could she possibly make the right decision?
But her heart stirred within her and told her what the right decision was, and she listened and thought and decided with a tentative nod. The Clever One noticed it (as he noticed everything), and cocked an eyebrow.
“I—I wish to continue my journey, as my husband requested of me. And… and when we reach Ginshi and the palace of his honorable brother, I…” She cut off, self doubt rising like an ugly shadow to catch her and pull her resolve back into darkness, but Akashi Keiji flicked his fingers curiously, and somehow she managed to gather the strength to go on. “And when we come face to face with my brother-in-law, we will request his help, and then together we shall find his lost brother and… and bring him home.”
And when she said those words, a sudden, soft warmth spread its careful fingers through out her body, like the very edge of dawn slipping slowly over the rim of the world, and somehow Hanako knew that everything will be all right.
CHAPTER NINE --- THE JOURNEY AND THE DISCOVERY
Despite the faint cloud that Shichiro’s current situation cast of Hanako, she found that she enjoyed traveling very much—except, of course, when Akashi Keiji decided it was a great time for her to get down and walk for a spell.
“No one will want to serve an empress that can’t walk more than a mile before fainting from acute exhaustion,” he reasoned. “How will you ever manage to navigate your Imperial Palace otherwise?”
Hanako pouted unhappily, munching on a leftover rice ball from her breakfast as she walked in the wake of the little prancing fox. “I have never fainted from exhaustion, Akashi Keiji-sama. You are exaggerating.”
Akashi Keiji shrugged his shoulders (or at least, she assumed he did. It was rather hard to tell considering her traveling companion was currently a fox). “Well, you never know. It certainly could happen if we don’t work on building up your stamina. Look on the bright side, though, your stamina has definitely improved in the past several days.”
So Hanako was forced to slowly walk fifteen minutes at a time if Akashi Keiji deemed the terrain easy or safe enough for her passage.
She took another bite of her rice ball and chewed unhappily, wondering how much time had passed, and how soon she would be released from her misery. With that, The Clever One stopped and suddenly morphed into his larger self. “All right, fifteen minutes are up,” he said.
Hanako happily climbed onto his back, and he set off again, running over the mountains.
Normally Hanako enjoyed the experience. Today, however, the faint rocking caused by the fox’s loping stride seemed to make the princess’ stomach rebel, stirring uneasily within her gut.
The few times she had felt similarly back at the pagoda, the handmaidens had advised her to eat something to settle her rioting stomach. And conveniently, Hanako had the rest of a rice ball in her hands at that very moment. She popped it in her mouth and immediately made a face. Somehow, she didn’t recall her rice ball tasting quite so… not bad necessarily, but unwelcome?... when she was eating it only a minute before. Nevertheless, Hanako powered through, chewing and swallowing, and waited for the inevitable easing of her gut.
Except, however, that the easing wasn’t as inevitable as she hoped. Instead, she felt a bubbling wave beginning to claw its way up her throat, accompanied by a sudden twisting, hollow feeling in her stomach, and she yanked suddenly at the Fox’s scruff.
The Fox stopped immediately, immensely shocked at the vaguest of ideas of the gentle little Empress committing such violent actions, and Hanako tumbled down off his back and scrambled for the nearest bush, where she proceed to collapse on her knees and vomit the entirety of her breakfast, including that last ill-fated rice ball.
It was some time before she was done, but at last she sat back and washed her mouth out carefully with water from the canteen that the Clever One had shoved daintily towards her. She took one more long drink then sat back, her face puzzled. “How odd. I’ve never been ill before, and I always thought it was because of the Emperor’s Pearl. Why do you think I am sick now?”
Akashi Keiji opened one eye from where he lay curled up on a pile of moss. “My guess it has something to do with you being with child.”
Hanako blinked at him in confusion. “What does that mean?”
The Fox opened both eyes and blinked at her for one long moment. Hanako tilted her head to the side, intrigued. She had never seen the smooth and sauve Celestial ever at a loss for words before. Whatever ‘being with child’ meant, it must be something quite extraordinar
y.
“It means… you’re pregnant?” the Fox hedged.
Hanako blinked again. “I’m very sorry, but I do not know that word. What is ‘pregnant’?”
The Fox stared at her. “It means you’re going to have a baby.”
Hanako’s eyes widened. “Oh!” She clasped her hands over her heart and revelled in this wonderful news. She had never seen a baby before, besides the baby birds in the nests on her pagoda. I wonder what a baby human shall be like… After a moment, she asked, “How exactly am I going to have a baby? What do I have to do?”
Akashi Keiji shifted slightly. “You have to grow it, mortal child.”
Hanako bit her lip, considering. “I… I suppose that makes sense. Very well. Where do I get the seed, then? And should I wait to plant it until we reach my honored husband’s relatives?”
The Clever One twitched. “Ahhh, that won’t be necessary, fairest lady. I assure you, the seed had already been planted.”
Hanako thought about this. She did not remember ever planting a seed that grew a baby, but if the Immortal Akashi Keiji said she had, she must assume he was right. “Well, where is it then, noble fox?”
Akashi Keiji briefly switched to the form of a man, with his dark red hair and keen golden eyes. He gestured with his long fingers at Hanako’s midsection, casually glancing off to the side in a rather pointed manner. “In your tummy, mortal princess, as I believe I have heard the mortals say.”
The princess gasped, her hands flying to her stomach, looking down at it in wonder. “Oh, truly? How marvelous! Is it in there now?”
The Fox smirked, accompanied by him tapping his sharp nose with a finger. “I can smell it, little empress. It’s there, true enough. It’ll be some months before you see it, though, and you’ll get rather round before then. However, I shall get you to Ginshi before the worst of it, and you will be able to deliver your child in comfort.”
Hanako nodded absently, gently stroking her fingers up and down her stomach. After a moment she asked, curiously, “How do you think a baby got there, though? It seems rather strange to me. And where do they come from, in the first place?”
There was a long, long silence. Curiously, Hanako glanced up and saw something she would never forget.
The Celestial Akashi Keiji, the Clever One, the Sly Fox, was absolutely mortified. He had completely lost whatever grip he had on his composure, flicking in between his human and vulpine forms like leaves whipping back and forth in a tempest. Finally he managed to settle on his fox form, but Hanako had never seen a fox look so uncomfortable before.
“Children come from when a husband and wife love each other very much, and the Heavenly Emperor sees fit to send them a child. And before you ask if there is more to it, I won’t tell you. Ask my mother, or, better yet, your sister-in-law. They will explain it to you, for there is no way in all the seven realms that I will.”
Hanako stared at him. She had never seen the perpetually calm spirit so discombobulated. Whatever the answers to her question, they must be truly frightening indeed.
*****
The days passed slowly, with Hanako being filled with more and more wonder every day at the sights she came across. Everything was so… so beautiful and strange, unlike anything she had seen before.
The pure wonder of it entranced her, as she watched the river pass by, or the deer rushing through the forest, or seeing the autumn flowers blooming beneath the gold of the autumn stained ginko leaves.
However, she could pass with the sickness that wracked her during the morning… and sometimes during the afternoon, and sometimes during the evening. Akashi Keiji had informed her he believed it was referred to by mortals as ‘morning sickness’, but Hanako was extremely dubious. It didn’t make sense that anyone would name the rather unpleasant phenomenon with such an inaccurate name. It wouldn’t be fair to women at large, as far as she could figure.
After the seventh night where Hanako had completely lost her entire supper and was unhappily ruminating on why the blessing of the Emperor’s Pearl didn’t help at all with her current situation, Akashi Keiji asked his mother for help.
Hanako woke late one morning to the unpleasant stirrings of her stomach, and was greeted by the sight of a fox and a goose, seated side by side in front of a campfire. But then she blinked, and it Akashi Keiji in his mortal form, accompanied by a tall, graceful lady with a artfully arranged hair the color of a moonless night.
“Ah, are you awake, little empress?” The Fox said casually, and Hanako stood up and did her best to gracefully glide over to the campfire, despite the protests her stomach was currently raising.
“Who is our guest, Akashi Keiji-sama?” She murmured politely as she arranged herself comfortably on the ground.
“This,” Akashi Keiji said, “Is my celestial mother, Momoe Chiyo of Karigane.”
Hanako blinked, then gathered herself and bowed formally. “It is my honor, Momoe Chiyo-sama. I am Princess Nishimura Hanako of the Dragons. I…” she faltered, before gathering her courage and continuing, “Is it true, as your esteemable son as said, that you tended the wounds of my husband after his battle?”
“It is,” Momoe Chiyo said, her voice low and melodic.
Hanako bowed again, far more deeply this time, pressing her forehead against the ground. “Thank you.” Her throat felt thick, and she swallowed hard before she was able to continue. “I… could not bear it, if he was left alone with no one to help him. His is my husband, and he is… precious to me.”
She stayed there, bowing, awaiting the response of the celestial lady before her. It came in the form of a gentle touch on the back of her head. “It is my delight and honor to be of help, for that is the very reason my kin and I now dwell in the mortal realms. Rise up, little empress, and bow to me no more.”
Hanako did as she was bid, and she looked up at matched the gaze of Momoe Chiyo, and the lady smiled at her.
Hanako knew the tales of Momoe Chiyo of Karigane, the Heavenly Goose—her mother had left Hanako many scrolls to read, to occupy her mind as she grew, and many of them had been about the histories and legends of the Seven Realms and their Celestial Guardians.
Momoe Chiyo was the First and Eldest, who had been sent long ago unto the Mortal Realms and guided a young man named Miyamoto Akiyoshi, who had brought about the end of the warring clans to the south and established the first of the seven realms, Karigane. For long, long years she had remained the only guardian, even after the six other realms were founded. But then the Imperial throne was created, and the Immortal Dragon Tamotsu Eiji had entered the world. The Great Dragon had taken Momoe Chiyo as his wife, and together they had born the Six Guardians, including the Clever Akashi Keiji of Akiyama himself.
The fact that this great lady, this celestial spirit from the Court of the Heavenly Emperor, was deigning to speak to her, Hanako… it made her mind spin, like a stick being tossed in the waters of the river below. She knew they said she was destined to be Empress, but Hanako couldn’t really bring herself to believe that. Hanako knew that she wasn’t talented or charismatic or knowledgeable enough to be a good leader, especially now that she knew her entire education had been skewed into making her Mother’s puppet.
But… she ran her fingers across her obi, thinking of the child nestled within her. Perhaps, the child she carried may be the Emperor or Empress needed to unite the Seven Realms and bring peace at last. It was a nice thought, and she cupped it to her heart, a little ball of warmth and hope. It might even be a true thought, and it made a bright smile come to her face.
“Now,” Momoe Chiyo said, her voice gentle and kind, “My son tells me that you are with child?”
Hanako felt the beginnings of a flush spread across her cheeks and she said, “I really wouldn’t know, my lady. But Akashi Keiji-sama tells me that he can smell it.”
Momoe Chiyo nodded, and reached one hand out, the tips of her long pale fingers just barely peeping from the wide expanse of the silver-grey sleeve of her kimono. “If it be
your will, Hanako-hime, I would be honored to check on its development.”
Hanako nodded, a little confused, but the Lady continued calmly, laying her hand flat against Hanako’s obi. The princess wasn’t quite sure what she was expecting, but nothing visible showed… until the grand lady smiled gently and tenderly and looked up with unexpected joy in her eyes… and a strange happy sparkle that told Hanako the Celestial had a secret, but a good one. It made Hanako curious, but she supposed she’d find out in time.
“You are indeed with child, my princess.” The lady said, and Hanako felt a swirl of happiness stir to life iniside her, and she felt both her hands slide over her stomach almost unconsciously, as if there was where they were always meant to be.
“Oh! Oh, when will the child come?” She asked, barely able to keep ahold of her decorum in her sudden excitement.
“In late autumn.” Momoe Chiyo said, “The Empress will bear her imperial heir amidst the season of the chrysanthemums, fitting indeed.”
“Amongst the royal chrysanthemums…” Hanako murmured, and smiled down at her child’s cradle. “I can’t wait until then.”
The two celestial spirits smiled at her, waiting until Hanako pulled herself out of her daydream feelilng… oddly peaceful. She had been nervous and on edge ever since she had heard of Shichiro’s fate, but the discovery of her child had calmed her anxiety. She had something important to do, a task her husband had unknowingly entrusted her with. It might delay her search for Shichiro, but she didn’t mind, not anymore.
Momoe Chiyo explained several other things about her pregnancy, some of which made sense, and some of which completely bewildered Hanako… and she still hadn’t gotten a satisfactory answer over the name ‘morning sickness’. But despite that little detail, she was incredibly grateful that the Celestial Spirit had condescended to help her, even if the child she bore in her womb would be the Imperial Heir.
It was only when the sun was setting that Momoe Chiyo took her leave. She and Akashi Keiji spent some time on the edge of the campsite, talking in hushed voices, before the grand lady finally turned to Hanako.
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