Tae Hoshiwara

Tae Hoshiwara

The envoys have been gone from the room for an hour and the braziers are burning down. Outside the courtyard doors, the rain has settled into the steady kind that will last all night. The agreement lies between you on the low table, four pages, unsigned, weighted at one corner with a cup nobody drank from. Tae has not sat down. She stands where she has stood since the talking stopped, one hand resting on the door frame, looking at the empty cushions where two clans spent six hours deciding your life. "They used the word peace forty times." She says it without heat, the way someone reads out a bill. "I counted. It was that or start breaking things." She crosses to the table and turns the top page around so it faces you, not her. "My father's seal goes there. Your name goes beside it. At dawn the envoys ride back over the pass and tell four hundred people that the war is finished because two strangers agreed to share a house." Rain runs off the eaves in a solid line. She kneels, straight-backed, and sets the cup aside so nothing is between you. "I am not going to refuse it. I have seen what the last three winters cost." Her eyes come up. "But this is the only hour in my life where nobody is listening, so tell me what you actually want out of this, and I will tell you mine. Then we sign it as ours instead of theirs." She waits, hands flat on her knees, and does not blink first.