As soon as Owen had left, Midori left the blade on her bed, wary about it. She decided to bathe to wash the blood from her hair and head. She put a large bucket over the fire, which she poked back to life, and gathered hair lotions and towels and a hairbrush she left on a table where a small mirror leaned against a wall.
She could hear the water slowly bubbling in the bucket but left it for longer. She opened a window, finding the room to be stuffy and glanced out the window at the soft twilight that blanketed over the sky. Propping her chin on her elbow, she gazed at the golden sunset streaked with many colors as if a painter had accidentally spilled his paint over a tranquil scene.
"Taken by the sunsets glow, the seas so calm," Midori sang, her voice barely as whisper, "I wait for you lover, I'll wait for you…taken by your charm, hung from your kindness…Love has slain me on fields of red roses, oh love has spilled the blood of a fair maiden whose heart was aflutter. Love has slain me in the glow of sunset, but if my heart shall fail me now, oh let the gods be wrong, I know I'll wait for you lover, I'll keep on waiting until the suns stop setting and darkness banishes all…"
Turning back to the bucket of water, she quickly took it inside the privy and poured it inside the round tub. With the faint smell of flowers coming from the garden, she stripped from her tunic, breeches and underclothes and slid into the steaming water with a heavy sigh, feeling her cares drift off. She dove under the water and wet her hair, feeling the warmth seep into her marrow, Midori surfaced and poured a sweet-smelling lotion into her open palm and spread it into her hair into a soapy lather. After she had washed it out of her hair, she took a bar of soap and rid her skin of the dirt.
She just sat in the tub enjoying the warmth, she was done with her bath and now just wished to think and have a little time to herself. "So if I saw the sword in a dream, is it supposed to help me fight the demon that has possessed the Scanran warlord?" "I've got more worrisome things to think about: the Ordeal…" the woman shivered despite the steam and the temperature.
Finally, she climbed from the tub, the water having slowly chilled and toweled herself dry, and dressed in a nightgown and bathrobe suddenly unable to sleep.
Taking the hairbrush, she absently combed through her hair, wincing as she came to a knot and tried to coax it out. Once she had combed her hair it fell in a waterfall of night-black and she began to braid it into one long braid, humming as she braided. She sat on the bed near the sheathed sword and touched the tough roan red leather, feeling power pulse through.
It pulsed as if it had a heart. Pumping adrenaline through her veins and making her feel as if some immortal thing, that willingly bound itself to her will, would protect her in times of peril.
She gazed at her palm and drew the blade, cutting her palm from the index finger diagonally to her wrist, letting the blood slide down the blade. She had given the blade her blood as an unknown sacrifice to the unseen 'ghost' inside the blade.
Midori wiped the blade clean and put it close by her bedside, but during the night she couldn't sleep, thoughts of the coming Ordeal haunting her.
She whispered a line from the song she had sung at the window:
"Love has slain me on fields of red roses, oh love has spilled the blood of a fair maiden whose heart was aflutter."
She was that maiden. Her blood would be spilled on the battlefields, if not now, then later, and her heart was aflutter with what people described as the duo tormentors of the heart.
An emotion.
Not one but two…Not two separate but two that easily went hand-in-hand.
…Love.
And…
…Fear.