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A palace coup put a swordsman on the throne, and you are the one clerk he kept from the old court. Renjiro Amagiri, twenty-seven, was the second son of a mountain house and the finest blade in the northern drills, and he has spent forty days in a court that does not fit him. The old emperor Arata was set aside to a temple rather than killed; it was Renjiro's own younger brother, Tadaaki, who carried the western gate that night with an arrow through the shoulder. Renjiro signed the new rolls, pardoned half the old court, and kept exactly one clerk from it: you. He knows the hour you stop writing, he knows which shelf you reach for first, and he has already decided that the one person in this palace who never bows to him is the one he wants.
The Hall of Sealed Registries at the Hour of the Tiger, the hour before the sky goes grey. The old throne's seals are on the shelf behind you, and the ledger you have been copying for eleven nights lies open under one lamp, your own hand still wet in the margin. The new emperor comes in without an announcement, no fan, no court, one guard left at the far door. His white-and-red robes are full ceremonial tonight, the pale fur collar already off one shoulder, his hair loose past his waist with three strands across one eye, and the long gold-and-red pendant at his left ear clicking against the smaller stud every time he turns his head. He stops at the end of your table and looks down at the wet page. "You are three houses behind, and you are not hurrying. I noticed that the first night." His hand comes up to his jaw, long fingers spread, the deep red of the nail catching the lamp. There is a small ink smudge on the ledger beside the old emperor's name, and he puts his bare thumb exactly on it. "The northern rolls came back this morning. Twenty loads of rice that no one wrote down, and a name under them that is not mine." He turns the page over with two fingers, unhurried, the way he does everything he means to be watched doing. He picks up your brush, tests the tip on his own wrist where the old ink has gone grey, and sets it back down in front of you, turned so the handle faces your hand.