She flew over gently rolling greenery, forest and cropland in alternation. Han really was beautiful, as had been Sai, but she couldn't tell if it was more or less beautiful than Koukai. It was simply different. Koukai was harsh, unforgiving, but yet there was a severe sort of beauty to it. Here was more pacified, more gentle, pleasing to the eye in its own way. She supposed it didn't really matter. It was what it was, and it was beautiful, so what was the difference?

There was one major difference: Nansou was the only youma she'd seen in a while.

She discussed with Nansou where should be their destination. Nansou described for her the layout of the area, and where the various towns and cities were. They brainstormed on what to expect at each one, based on the physical and cultural terrain. In the end, they came up with a flight path that would take them by most of the more inhabited areas. She would stop in each population center for a couple days, searching each for her king. It was a good plan, or at least one that would do for now. She might get lucky. Nansou changed the angle of their flight a few degrees to accommodate their decision.

They had left very early, and Nansou had gained some speed, so it was about only halfway through the day when they approached the first town, still a good ways from the border. Even from the air, and at quite a distance, Aku could pick out a collection of shapes that had to be the tents of refugees. Once again, Nansou landed some distance from the town and the road leading to it, and vanished into Aku's shadow the moment she hit the ground. Aku followed her shirei's directions back to the road and onward to the town.

This town, she could tell from a distance, was a little larger than the ones she had been to before. She got a good look at it; she was coming down at it from the top of a hill. It was as colorful as the other one in Han, but it was colorful in a different enough of a way that she could tell the difference. This one had more blues in it. Both inside and outside the gate there were bunches of cloth tents. For a moment she was worried for the people outside. She knew the walls partially existed to ward off youma, and there would be little protection out here. But then she remembered that Han was doing well, so there wouldn't be that many youma around. A kingdom at this sort of height was more like Houzan than like Koukai.

As she neared, she could hear the town. This one seemed to be more active than the other one, filled with discussion, laughter, and music. As the walls got closer and closer, she wondered where she should go first. She could explore the town. She could say hello to the refugees, search through them for her king. She could secure lodgings and then do either or both. In the end, she decided to go figure out where she was staying for the night first. She hoped it would be cheap; she didn't have a whole lot of money.

It turned out it wasn't very cheap. It was over twice as much as she had paid at the last inn, but the place looked of about the same or slightly lesser quality. She was about to ask after it when she suddenly understood. Supply and demand. They had a limited supply of rooms, and with refugees around seeking lodgings, it was bound to be more expensive. Grumbling internally, she decided to take the room anyway; she had been told it was the only inn in town. Of course, she could probably get the room for free if she just revealed she was a Kirin, but that felt cheap somehow.

Leaving most of her things in the room, she wandered back out. After a moment of thought, she decided to visit the refugee camp, and headed in that direction. She decided to head toward the half outside of the walls first; if she should take a while talking to them, it would be better to arrange it in a way she was less likely to be interrupted by the gate closing.

The refugee camp wasn't as depressing as she had expected it to be. They were destitute, and they were dirty. But somehow, their spirit seemed, while not perfectly clear of damage, intact. When she approached, she actually got shouted greetings from some of the people. It was almost like being back in the meadow. The set up was pretty similar. The tents and people were shabbier, but it was pretty familiar. Except these people, of course, didn't know she was their Taiho. She casually walked through the camp, taking in the faces colored with dirt. No one stuck out to her. She spent a while there before deciding the king wasn't there. This camp was pretty small, so it didn't take so long.

So she decided to move to the camp inside the walls. It didn't take long for her to reach the same conclusion. She was just about to leave, disappointed, when, to her baffled surprise, a group of people pulled out battered instruments and struck up a tune. Was that really something refugees would be doing, in the middle of their idle poverty? Strange. Some of them perked up in excitement at the sound, and many of them moved to a cleared area in the center. She quickly divined that that was exactly why it was cleared: for dancing. She distantly wondered if the people of Kyou had always been this taken with music and dancing, or if it was something she had inspired already.

For a while she stood watching. She knew the steps to this dance. She knew the steps to a lot of dances, actually, from both En and Kyou. It wouldn't be too inaccurate to call her an expert. Apparently she was standing too close to the epicenter of mirth, as a man grabbed her wrist and dragged her in. That surprised her a little. Her clothes marked her as wealthy, though not ostentatious, so it was strange of him to assume she would want to participate.

Oh well. With hardly a thought, she slipped into the folk dance. Like the dances she knew from En, Kyou dances involved a lot of circular motions, but Kyou had more direct, back and forth motions than the other. It was a contrast she rather liked. Time blurred as she spun and swayed, and everything turned into a smear of twisting color and laughter. So it came as a total surprise what happened next.

As Goushi had been walking back from business he had had in town, he later told her, he had noticed the dancing and was moving to join in. It was when he had seen the flash of familiar crimson hair that his heart had stopped. Goushi had gone on a shouzan two years ago, but it had taken him a few moments to convince himself he was really seeing who he thought he was seeing. First he had said it quietly, but then he had repeated it loud enough to cut over the music and laughter. "Taiho!"

When Aku heard the word, she immediately jolted to a stop. Well, that ruse was over quickly. She knew it was possible she would run into someone who would recognize her, but she hadn't expected it to happen so soon. She heard the confused muttering around her. Some of them involved the phrase "red hair". The rumor of her coloring had probably gotten around by now. It took a short while, but eventually people started lowering themselves to the ground. Soon the entire group had their heads to the dirt.

Aku restrained a sigh. "It's okay," she said, trying not to grumble. "You can stand."

Most of them didn't, though they did sit up. One of them did, and he came right to her. He was a large man, wide in the shoulders and thick in the chest, with brilliant green eyes. "I didn't expect to see you here, Aku," he said as he neared. "You gave me quite a shock there."

For a moment Aku stared at him with an idle frown, trying to place the face. "Gouki?" she eventually said with a grimace. That was wrong.

The man continued smiling anyway. "Close enough. Goushi."

"Sorry," Aku muttered. "I have a lot of names and faces floating around in my head."

"We talked once years ago. I'm flattered you even half-remembered. I'm sure it wasn't the same experience for you as it was for me." Goushi glanced at the people around them. "You heard the Taiho. Stand up."

For a while she talked with the refugees. They asked her what she was doing so far away from Houzan, and she explained that she was out searching for their king. She described her plan of tracing a route along the border, hoping to find somewhere along that path the person they were all waiting for. She admitted she didn't think her chances were that great, but she didn't have a whole lot of options, and the people seemed to sympathize with that. Any chance to speed the process was worth it.

Actually, she just noticed, she had immediately gone to Han instead of Ryuu, or even Kyou. She hadn't even considered going to either. It was believed that Kirin were drawn to the aura of their king, even subconsciously. Maybe her queen really was here. But that was too optimistic for her to really get attached to. She shouldn't get her hopes up.

Aku added some more names and faces to her repository of them; she hoped she would be able to remember them. They offered her things she couldn't accept—food, money, and various small gifts. They needed these things to survive, so she couldn't just take them. They talked for a while, then went back to dancing; the rumor that she loved dancing had also gotten around. Then after that they talked for a while longer. It was an interesting gathering, though it made Kyourin a little sad, to see her people displaced and so poor. She definitely needed to find her queen as soon as she could.

When night approached, Goushi suggested they pool their money to buy out the only restaurant in town for the night, for Aku and a group of her people to have dinner together. Aku immediately rejected the plan. They couldn't be spending their limited money like that. Goushi said it wasn't a problem, but Aku insisted, absolutely refusing to go along with the plan. At one point, Goushi asked why she didn't just say she was the Taiho, and get it all for free. Aku tried to explain that it wouldn't feel right, like she were stealing. In the end, Goushi managed to convince her to go with him alone, and she reluctantly went along with it. She still didn't think he should be spending his money like that. Again, she had to talk with the cooks about her food, before they decided on something she would be able to eat.

Mostly, she and Goushi talked about the state of Kyou. Goushi seemed strangely informed on the topic; he said he had been an educator, and he had only left Kyou recently, so he had known a fair amount of what had been going on. "Things would be bad all on their own, of course," he admitted, taking a swig of his drink. "But the Chousai just made it worse. I understand tightening his grip to try to keep things in line during the disaster. But I think he's tightening too far. It made the situation even harder to deal with."

"What do you mean?" She had heard a fair deal about the Chousai from Mei the governor, but she was still curious what Goushi knew.

"Increased taxes, when with the state of affairs people aren't able to pay. Crackdowns on minor crimes. Increased presence of soldiers. He says it's to ward off youma, but a fair number of them are posted at the border. It took some work to get around them and across."

Kyourin frowned. "He's keeping people from leaving the kingdom?"

"Trying to, anyway. The border is too long for him to guard the whole thing, when his soldiers are too spread thin from protecting against youma."

"How did you get in? There's only one path, so I would think it would be easy to block."

"One official path, yes," Goushi said with a wide smile. "There are ways."

Aku decided to let that pass. "Mei, the governor of Teki Province, says he may resist the Mandate."

Now it was Goushi frowning. "You mean he's not going to bow to our king?"

"That's her suspicion."

"No," Goushi said, shaking his head. "That's impossible. He has never claimed the throne. He's just holding it in faith for when the king comes."

Kyourin decided not to push the matter. Between Goushi and Mei, she was pretty sure she should trust Mei. Mei was much closer to the Chousai, after all. And it's not like Kyourin really understood how humans thought about this kind of thing anyway; the whole thing was foreign to her. The simple idea of someone wanting power over another was weird—which was a little funny, considering how much power she would wield, mostly indirectly, in the future. There were certain things about humans she was sure she would never be able to sympathize with. And she was supposedly one of the more human Kirin.

After eating, Goushi insisted on walking Aku to her room. His treatment of her struck her as a little weird. She didn't really know why. Maybe it was because she wasn't used to a man giving her this kind of doting attention. All the nyosen were, of course, women, and it was they she most interacted with. His behavior was kind of reminding him of Sekto, for some reason.

That night falling asleep was strangely difficult. She ended up calling out Kasshi to snuggle her to sleep. Kasshi and her shirei had been trying to wean her off of that kind of comfort, but sometimes she felt she still needed it. Kasshi did give her a short speech about needing to be able to stand on her own, and that she was an adult now, more or less, and how when there would be servants around in the future who might see she wouldn't be able to have Kasshi around then either, but eventually caved. After that, unsurprisingly, Aku managed to have her best sleep since leaving Houzan.

She got another surprise the next morning. After paying for the overpriced room, Aku started on her way out of the town. As she approached the Kyou refugee camp, she saw it was noticeably smaller than it had been the previous time. Added to that, there was a group of people standing around with packs. Were they moving elsewhere? When she walked up to one of them, following a wave of people dropping to the ground, to ask what was going on, she got an answer she certainly hadn't expected.

"Taiho, we're coming with you, of course."

Immediately she went to Goushi, who was similarly packed. She had gathered yesterday that he was their leader of some sort. She got the same report from his mouth. They had a long discussion about it. They couldn't follow her, abandoning part of their number. She would be flying anyway. She barely had enough money to cover her expenses for the flight; if she had to provision the much longer trip on the ground she wouldn't be able to support herself. Goushi was very adamant, that they wanted to be where she was, and if she was going to be all on her own in a land she had never been to before they would worry. It was no use trying to explain that Koukai, where she played around just for the fun of it, was more dangerous to begin with, and that she was fully capable of protecting herself. Her safety, of course, was not what they were worried about. Whatever that meant. It wouldn't be fitting to her status to camp outside, but they would give her every comfort they could. She gritted her teeth at that; those sort of details really didn't concern her overmuch. So why not come with them, then? It would make them happy.

Now it was Aku caving. If it's what they really wanted, what would make them happy, she didn't have the will to get in the way. She would still feel bad about depending on them, but the thought of that seemed to make them happy too. That she could kind of understand. It would be handy if she had more shirei people could ride, but she didn't have enough.

Just setting her foot on the road out made her feel much better. Kyou-Ou was out here, and it didn't matter how she got to her. Only that she did.

The first short while was a sort of chaos. It seemed everyone wanted to walk next to Aku, talk to her. It took a while for them to stabilize into the shape and ordering that they kept for the rest of the walk. She ended up in the middle of a family, a middle aged woman, her husband, and two sons. They got more and more familiar with her as they walked. After a short while she asked them the when, how, and why they had left Kyou.

"Well, originally we're from a little farm not too far from Renshou. Beautiful place. Or at least it used to be."

"On the leeward side of a range of hills, near a clear river, with forest all around."

"This was before everything went to the youma, of course. Now it's a wasteland."

"We managed to get out before it got too bad, though."

"I'm not sure how much you know of what happened in Renshou..."

"To be fair, we don't really know either."

"There were whisperings, of course, that people were planning something. No one thought it would be something that big. No one I knew, at least."

"Now, the king—I forget what we're supposed to call him now—wasn't especially popular. But the people didn't really hate him, either. I have no idea where that rebellion came from."

"There must have been people that disagreed with us, I guess."

"And many of them at that."

"Anyway, so the king fell, and the Chousai took over. We knew without a king blessed by Tentei that things would get bad."

"Just look at En."

"Right. So we tried to hold on as long as we could."

"It wasn't so bad at first. For quite a while nothing changed at all."

"There was that one earthquake we had not that long after. But it didn't really do much, just knocked some things over, and we put them right back."

"I kind of remembered that. I think something fell on my head."

"Well, you were pretty young then."

"It must have been a big something."

"Who's the stupid one? I never fell in a well."

"I only almost fell in. I caught myself."

"And it was me that dragged you back out, remember."

"Kids, be good. Anyway, so things were fine for a while."

"Taxes went up, to support the youma-fighting army, but it wasn't too hard to deal with. Then a few years after the king died, the field got flooded."

"That was really weird. It was a pretty small river, I never expected the thing to do that."

"Yeah, it was weird. We managed to recover from that well enough. It was that same year that one of our neighbors got killed by some youma."

"I'm the one who found them slaughtered. It wasn't a pretty sight."

"We got a small patrol of soldiers after that to keep an eye on the area. But places that got patrols like this had to support them."

"Which meant an extra set of taxes for us to pay."

"We were starting to have trouble making ends meet then."

"We actually saw youma a few times over that next year, but they never came close enough to be that bad of a threat."

"Well, there was that one that hauled off with our pig."

"I'm still not convinced that was a youma. I think it was those nasty Kiko."

"You've had it in for those poor people since they moved in."

"Of course I have. They took our pig."

"There's no proof they took our pig."

"I'm sure they did. If the youma took it why didn't it just take us too?"

"I don't know, let's just forget about that. We were starting to get pretty nervous by then, is the point."

"That's when the locusts came. Took out our whole crop."

"Well, there was no point staying then, was there? Until you, Taiho, came along and brought us a new king, things were just going to get worse."

"So we packed up our things and the kids and left."

"Without looking back."

"Without looking back. We took the road south, stopping in towns when we could."

"Under yaboku when we couldn't."

"Those weren't too easily findable though, so we tried not to depend on them."

"We met a few other refugees on the way. Before long we had a good-sized group going with us. That's how we met up with half the people here."

"It took a couple months to get to the border. It wasn't a very fun time."

"We lost a good chunk of us to youma and soldiers."

"Yeah, we were surprised by that too. It's like they didn't want us leaving."

"Pretty quickly we learned to avoid places where soldiers would be patrolling."

"That's how we got across the border, walking through the forest around the patrolled road."

"As soon as we got into Han, we went to a prefectural seat and registered. Pretty simple process, really."

"They said if we would consider permanent residence they would even give us land."

"But we don't want to live here. Kyou is our home. It'll be better one day, with the right people at the top."

"That's why we're so happy to see you working so hard to find the new king. One day, we'll be able to go home, and it'll all be thanks to you."

"And the king, of course."

"Right, of course."

As if Aku needed more reasons to feel guilty for taking so long, or pressured to find her queen more quickly. As they walked, Aku heard many similar stories, and by the end of the first day, Aku felt like she were going to explode from the tragedies and hopes of all these people. Before going to sleep in a tent and on a mat Goushi had given up for her, she walked out into the forest to hyperventilate for a little while, just to relieve some of the tension. It took even more effort than the previous night to convince Kasshi to sleep with her, but Aku's obvious distress won the argument.

This was going to be a difficult journey.

She was very fortunate it ended so quickly.


Goushi: 強矢

Kiko: 鬼虎