Her mother is a red silhouette in the night, lost to the water. There are pale hands and wavy hair in her dreams, and the sound of breakers. She remembers one phrase, "I never wished for this," and a sorrowful look in a star-eclipsed face.
That face disappeared the next morning.
The waves swallowed her.
Her mother was never theirs, never hers to begin with. The red-stained lady belonged to no one except the emperor, whom she fled from, and the sea, who took her in.
Kougyoku is a girl who knows the ocean's cruelty.
She favors the guzheng because it does not lie. It shrills and it trills and it twangs and it clangs, and it never hides. Clumsy princess fingers bleed over it in the hope that one day the noise will become music.
Tucked deep inside the palace is a beautiful guqin, plucked with deceitful hands. Lovely, lying, empress hands. From her chambers waft the moontears and the sunsongs; starflowers bounce on the seven slender tightropes of the instrument of sages.
"What sound is that?" she had asked, the very first time the shafts of qin song reached her ear.
"That is-" it was Kouen who told her, secretly (the first and only secret he ever shared with her), "—the most frightening music you will ever hear." Kougyoku peeks into his eyes and sees illegible frost script emblazoned on his irises. He does not wait until the qin stops playing before turning away.
When she looks back on that moment, she remembers someone whispering, "Run!" and an instinctive fear for what lay behind those impervious paper screens.
She plays well now, music now, to the beat of abandoned leaves fluttering down opaque glass.
She chooses the guzheng because she is not the empress.
There's a bouquet of pai sho tiles and peaches and pigeon feed in her arms, entrusted to her care by none other than the third prince of the empire, Ren Kouha, who would much rather carry a smelly crocodile pelt with a baby crocodile concealed inside than the assortment of miscellaneous tokens to be delivered to their recipients. The youngest princess trudges along as her almost-twin visits his two older brothers and the magi, careful not to let any of the offerings slip from her tiny hands. It occurs to her that she is the only one among the emperor's daughters granted the privilege of witnessing a squirming reptile execute five consecutive moves of pai sho.
"You'll make a fine queen someday," Ka Koubun says.
Kouha overhears, grins, and lets loose a jar of grasshoppers in her room.
"Stop laughing!" Ka Koubun can't resist a glare at the not-so-little girl whose cheeks are red from watching the maids try to scoop up all the jumping, flying things with absolute disrespect for royalty.
She giggles even harder, any thought of queens and court ladies and duties to the empire banished from her mind, for Kougyoku is, after all, simply a child who watches the world with two, wide, fire-besotted eyes.