Chapter 27
Haru
That night, after the funerals, I couldn’t be alone.
The priests insisted solitude was the foundation of tranquility—or some such nonsense—and had locked me in my chamber with a pot of tea and a single cup.
The least they could’ve done was leave a bottle of sake.
A post-funeral, pre-coronation night deserved that much, didn’t it?
I tried to surrender to seclusion. I really tried.
I’d dismissed my servants, waved away the guards, and retreated to my chambers with every intention of spending my final hours of being human in quiet contemplation, but the silence was unbearable.
In the quiet, all I could hear was Mother’s broken keen.
All I could see was smoke rising from the pyres.
All I could taste was ash.
A knock came just after midnight.
“Haru?” Esumi’s voice, soft through the door.
Relief flooded through me. “Get in here.”
He slipped through the door and closed it behind him. His eyes found mine in the lamplight, and I saw my own exhaustion reflected back.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said, but there was no force behind it.
“Probably not.” He crossed the room slowly. “But I thought . . . you might not want to be alone tonight. It’s your last night before everything changes.”
My throat tightened. “How did you know?”
He grunted what sounded like a strangled laugh.
“Because I know you.” He stopped close enough that I could feel his warmth.
“And because your grandmother told me you’d need someone.
She said, and I quote, ‘My little fish shouldn’t spend his last human night alone with his thoughts.
They’ll eat him alive. Besides, that boy thinking scares me more than all the wakō ships in the harbor. ’”
Despite everything, I barked out a laugh. “She said that?”
“She also said if I hurt you, she’d have me thrown from the palace walls. I’m taking a calculated risk here.”
Before I could respond, another knock echoed through the chamber.
We both froze.
“Heika?” A woman’s voice. Not a servant. “It is Mother. May I . . . may I enter?”
Esumi’s eyes went wide, and I saw panic flash across his face. Being caught here, alone with me in the middle of the night would be catastrophic, especially if it was my mother who caught us; but there was nowhere for him to hide, and Mother was already opening the door.
She stopped short when she saw us both.
For a long moment, no one moved.
Mother stood in the doorway in her white mourning robes, her face still filled with grief but her eyes sharp. Those eyes moved from me to Esumi and back again. I watched her expression shift from surprise to understanding to something cold and hard.
“I see,” she said, her voice like ice. “I am interrupting.”
“Mother, I—”
“Don’t.” She held up a hand. Her gaze fixed on Esumi, and the temperature in the room dropped. “You. Out. Now.”
Esumi bowed immediately, deeply. “Yes, Your Majesty. My apologies for—”
“I said leave.”
He glanced at me, uncertain.
I wanted to tell him to stay, wanted to defend his presence, but the words stuck in my throat. Tomorrow, I would be Emperor. Tonight, she was still my mother, and she was still in mourning. I couldn’t find it in myself to defy her.
I nodded to him slightly. “Go. I’ll . . . see you in the morning.”
He bowed again and slipped toward the door. As he passed Mother, she didn’t budge, forcing him to edge around her. The door closed behind him with a soft click.
Silence stretched between us as Mother stood there, still as stone, her hands clasped in front of her. In the lamplight, she looked older than I’d ever seen her. Smaller, too. Her Imperial robes seemed to swallow her whole.
“Mother, if you came to lecture me about—”
“One does not lecture Divinity.” Her voice cracked on the last word. She closed her eyes, took a breath. When she opened them again, something in her expression had softened. Just slightly. “I came because . . . because you are all I have left.”
Her words struck like a gauntleted fist.
“Tomorrow you become Emperor,” she continued, her voice steadier now but still strained.
“Tomorrow you stop being my son and become . . . someone else. Something I can’t hold, can’t protect, and I .
. .” She paused, struggling. “I realized I had not told you anything, had not prepared you, had not—”
“Mother, it’s all right. You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do.” She moved further into the room, her steps stiff and formal, as though she was walking across a field of shattered glass.
“I have been a terrible mother to you, Haru. I know that. I have been cold and distant, more focused on Kioshi because he was Crown Prince. I told myself you did not need me because you were not . . .” She stopped.
Started again. “That was wrong. I was wrong.”
I stood there frozen, having no idea what to say. This wasn’t my mother. My mother was distant, controlled, and untouchable. This woman looked like she might shatter at any moment.
“I do not know how to give you advice about being Emperor,” she said, and now her hands were shaking where she held them clasped.
“Your father tried to teach me court politics, but I never cared for it the way he did, the way Kioshi did, but I know this.” She looked at me directly.
“They will try to control you—the ministers, the generals, the nobles—they will use your youth and inexperience against you. They will push and prod and test you every day.”
“I know.”
“Do not let them.” Her voice turned fierce.
“Do not let them make you doubt yourself. You are Takashi’s son.
You are my son. You are stronger than they think, cleverer than they expect, and tomorrow—” Her voice broke.
“Tomorrow you will have power they cannot imagine. Use it. Do not let them trap you the way they tried to trap your father.”
“Mother—”
“And that boy.” Her eyes hardened again, just for a moment.
“Esumi. I do not . . . you know I do not approve. He is not of rank, and if the court confirms—” She shook her head.
“But I also know what it is like to be lonely in a palace filled with people. You will need those near you, those you can trust and love, those who will love you regardless of what the world might say. So I will say this only once, and I beg you to heed my words: Be careful, my son. Whatever you feel for him, whatever he is to you, be careful. The throne has no room for weakness, and love—” Her voice cracked again. “Love is the greatest weakness of all.”
The day seemed to crash into her all at once.
Grief she’d been holding back, the control she’d maintained throughout the funeral, all of it crumbled.
Her face twisted, her shoulders shook, and suddenly she wasn’t the Empress Dowager anymore.
She was a mother who’d lost her husband and her eldest son in the same week.
“They’re both gone,” she whispered. Tears began streaming down her porcelain face. “Takashi and Kioshi are both gone and I didn’t—I never told them—”
She stumbled forward.
I lurched to catch her.
She fell into my arms like a puppet with cut strings, sobbing into my chest with a violence that shook us both.
I held her, this woman who’d never really embraced me, who’d barely touched me, who’d spent my whole life glaring from a distance.
Now, she clung to me as though I was the only solid thing left in a world that had turned to mist.
“I never told them I loved them,” she wept. “I was so busy being Empress, being proper, guarding my heart . . . and now they are gone and . . . they will never know—”
“They knew,” I said, though I wasn’t sure it was true. “Gods, Mother, they knew.”
“And now you.” She pulled back enough to look at me, her face paint marred by tears.
“Tomorrow I will lose you, too—not to death, but to something worse. You will become Emperor, and I will lose my last son to duty and the gods and I cannot—” She shook her head helplessly.
“I cannot lose you, too, Haru. Gods, I . . .”
“You’re not losing me,” I said, holding her tighter. “I’m right here.”
“No.” She pressed her forehead against my chest. “You are already gone. I saw it today at the funeral. I saw it in the way you stood and the way you spoke. You are already becoming something I cannot reach.”
I glanced up at a sound outside the door and realized Esumi must still be out there. He must have heard Mother’s breakdown, must have stayed to make sure she was all right, to make sure I was all right. The thought of him standing in the corridor, listening to this, made me ache.
Mother buried her head in my chest and wept for what felt like hours.
I held her through all of it while she anointed my mourning robes with tears and grief.
Eventually, her sobs quieted into shudders.
Then shudders quieted into trembling. She pulled back, her face red and swollen, and looked at me with eyes that were clear for the first time since Father’s death.
“I am sorry, Haru,” she whispered. “I should not have—”
“Don’t apologize. Mother, please—”
She reached up and touched my face, a gesture so tender and unexpected that my own eyes burned. “Be a better ruler than your father. Be a better man,” she said quietly. “Be stronger. Be kinder. Do not let the throne make you cold the way . . . in the way it made me cold.”
I gulped back something I might never understand. “I’ll try.”
“And Haru?” She dropped her hand. “Whatever happens tomorrow, whatever you become—you were a good son, better than I deserved. Remember that.”
I couldn’t speak.
She stepped back, composing herself with visible effort. The Empress Dowager’s mask settled back into place, piece by piece, until the woman who’d wept in my arms was hidden again.
“I should go, Heika,” she said, her voice steady once more. “You need rest. Tomorrow will be . . .” She couldn’t finish.
“Tomorrow will be tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll face it, whatever comes.”
She nodded, then turned toward the door. She paused with her hand on the handle. “The boy is waiting in the corridor. He never left. That is . . . that says something about him, I suppose.”
“Mother—”
“Be careful, Haru. Be careful with your heart. The Empire needs an emperor, not a lovesick boy.” She bowed deeply, then turned and left before I could respond.
I stood alone in the silence, my robes still damp from her tears, my mind reeling. My mother had broken down in my arms, had called me a good son, had given me her blessing, in her way. Of all the things I’d witnessed and heard over the past few weeks, that might’ve been the greatest shock.
I tried to count the words she’d spoken, more words than she’d said to me in a dozen years.
She’d been honest about our relationship, about how her eyes only sought my brother, only cared for the one who would wear the crown.
I never thought of it as such, as a queen protecting her power and station.
All I knew was that my mother chose another for her affection, that she held so little love in her heart she couldn’t afford to divide it between her children.
She couldn’t afford to give it to me.
And so I lived without the love or warmth of my mother’s palm against my cheek. I lived with the knowledge that my family, those who should’ve been my greatest supporters, were precisely the people who believed in me the least.
Kioshi was the only one. Kioshi and Grandmother. They loved me without reservation, without worry or fear or that gnawing dread I saw each time I looked into Mother’s eyes.
Father tried. In his own way, I knew he loved me.
Was he proud of the man I’d become? I was less sure.
He hadn’t seen me grow these past months.
He hadn’t seen me face my own trials or struggle with my place or battle the demons who sought to drag us all down.
He’d only known the hapless youth who’d found his only solace in the bottom of a bottle.
No, he’d not known pride.
Not in me.
I sank to my knees and felt fresh tears fall. How was I supposed to rise, to lead, to stand before my people and inspire them to become something greater if . . . if I couldn’t see that greatness in myself?
Tomorrow, I became Mugen. I wouldn’t simply be her son or the son of the gods or whatever the gods demanded of me. No, the moment the crown touched my brow, I became the Empire—and the Empire became me.
A wave of panic joined the tears, causing my skin to pimple and my heart to quake.
I was so unprepared, so woefully lacking in every possible way.
And yet, Mother had held me just now. She had gazed into my eyes and told me she loved me.
When had she last said those words? When I was a child?
Yet there was no deception in her gaze, nothing but the frightened, troubled heart of a mother, as she watched her only remaining son go where she could never follow.
Sweet Amaterasu, why was this life so vexing? Why was my path so fraught with—
The door creaked open.
My heart seized as I watched and waited to see what fresh hell the gods laid before me next.
Esumi’s head poked around the thick wood.
“I’m sorry.” He crossed to stand before me. “I heard . . . is she . . .”
“She’ll be all right,” I said, wiping the tears. “You didn’t have to stay.”
“Yes, I did.” He cupped my cheek, his thumb finishing what my own fingers had started. “Are you all right?”
I wasn’t.
I was exhausted and grieving and terrified and overwhelmed.
Tomorrow I would become Emperor. Tomorrow I would stop being human.
“No,” I said honestly. “But I will be.”
He pulled me close, and I let myself lean into him, let myself be held the way Mother had let me hold her. Most of all, I let myself be weak, if only for a moment, because tomorrow I could never be weak ever again.