TWO YEARS LATER
.
When the monks first found her, she had known nothing - nothing. They told her it was as though she had only just been born.
She could not read or write. She spoke, but she did not know the uses of ordinary things. She did not know her family, her village, her clan, or her name.
A beautiful young girl, wandering around the mountain on her own, carrying nothing, wearing nothing but a single set of clothes, neither coarse nor fine.
A beautiful, trusting young girl.
Even a princess would not have been so naive.
The monks took pity on her and brought her into their sanctuary.
The monks tried to find her family. The master worried, rightly, about the search taking too long.
The boy who found her called her Kaoru, after his sister, who had died.
.
After a few weeks, one of the novices tried to seduce her.
"I don't think he is ready to become a monk," she told the master, seeming unperturbed. The master frowned and shook his head.
And so the monks found a place for her with the old couple who supplied their cloth - poor people but kind. Safe. Kaoru was their servant, but they called her granddaughter.
Good to settle into a new family, a new home. Kaoru had felt so unbalanced, moving from one life to another. Bowing her head meekly while her sprit felt like a bowl full of water, tumbling over, ready to spill.
She wouldn't have expressed what she was feeling even if she could have. She didn't know the words for it - she had a horror of being abandoned, being alone. She had a horror of what she didn't know.
Everything she couldn't remember - it wasn't just a blank, like sleeping. It was the nightmare. It was a consuming emptiness. It was fear.
So she smiled all the brighter and doubled the energy she put into her chores. Sitting in between grandfather and grandmother, following the movements of their gnarled fingers with her fine young hands, learning to weave.
The old man and the old woman were so kind to her, so kind to the lost girl, the idiot girl.
The monks had been kind. The master had been kind.
The novice had been kind, but then he was holding her arm and he didn't let go, gripping her so tightly...
What happened after that? She wasn't sure, but he stopped. He stopped, frozen, and then, silently, he turned around, looking like she felt.
Pale. Stunned. Cold.
Kaoru didn't like to feel afraid.
.