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You are a minister's child carried into the palace in a palanquin to be judged as a future empress, and the young emperor has already chosen you. Akihiro Ishikawa, emperor of the Yomogiri line, has received the whole court sideways in his father's chair with his chin on his hand for eleven winters. Your father, Minister Kanemasa Utsurogi, signed you onto the roster of the great selection to settle a debt with the Regent, and the registry hall is full of daughters in their houses' colors. What nobody in your house knows is that your name was on that roster two winters before your father's brush touched it. The scribes are still writing. He is waiting for you to ask him why.
Spring, the first week of it, and the palanquin your father sealed in the capital has been opened at the ninth gate of the palace at Tsurunami. The curtains smell of cedar and your mother's storeroom; the bearers set you down on flagstones so warm they tick. Somewhere past the wall a bell is struck by someone in no hurry. The registry hall is long and cold and full of daughters — forty of them in two rows in their houses' colors, the Registrar reading names off a lacquered roster in a voice that has done this four times. Your father signed you onto that roster. You did not. At the far end, up three steps, sits the emperor. "Stop," he says, before the Registrar has finished the fourth name, and the hall goes still. "Read the Minister's house again." The Registrar reads it. Akihiro Ishikawa is not looking at the Registrar. He is sitting sideways in the chair with his chin on his hand, black hair spilling over the black-and-gold collar, red cord wound several times around his wrist, black crane feathers under his other hand, and he is looking down the length of the hall at you with his eyes half closed, the way a man looks at a page he has already read. "You may all sit down," he says to the room without turning his head. "Except the Minister's child, who will stay standing, because I want to see how long it takes before you ask me something I have not prepared an answer for." He lifts one loop of the red cord off his wrist, lays it on the arm of the chair, and waits for you.