"At last,
Maomao,
spring has come for you too, hasn't it?"
The one giggling with her mouth hidden behind her sleeve was Shirei. Still drowsy from sleep, her hair was slightly disheveled and her collar askew. Then again, she was the type who often wore her kimono deliberately disheveled.
She entered the apothecary quite naturally and picked up the letters that had been set aside nearby. Those written in Jinshi's hand she placed in a separate letter box; the rest she left as they were. Of the five letters, two shared the same handwriting while each of the remaining three was different. By all normal reckoning, that meant letters from four different people.
(What an odd thing.)
They probably didn't even know Maomao's name. They didn't even know her face. Which was why
Baldy
had been the one to receive them for delivery. Surely even the eccentric strategist's daughter wouldn't be entertaining customers, they must have thought.
Stories of a girl working in a brothel turning out to be the daughter of someone important were actually not that uncommon. When a patron came calling, providing services that could result in
offspring—
that was the pleasure quarters for you. Through that, a calculating courtesan might bear a child without aborting. And what would come of presenting the born child with "This is yours"?
Some would believe the courtesan's words and raise the child. Even being treated as an illegitimate child was still better than nothing. If the child happened to be a boy, with a bit of luck, he might even be claimed and taken in.
But the rest would refuse to acknowledge the child and reject it outright.
There was no shortage of stories about girls who had stubbornly declared "I am a love child of the previous Emperor" dying on bedding as thin as
a rice cracker,
felled by venereal disease or epidemic. Still, as Maomao—who was well-versed in the affairs of the inner palace—knew perfectly well, while being a love child of the current Emperor was one thing, claiming to be the previous Emperor's bastard was far too implausible.
(If only they would just dismiss it as nonsense.)
But since the eccentric strategist himself had said so, it had led to this troublesome affair.
If one wondered why the eccentric had suddenly done something now, Maomao did have her suspicions.
She opened the letter box and took out a letter that had been scented with incense.
The handwriting was Jinshi's. However, she noticed the style was strangely stiff and different from his usual. The writing was oddly halting. Normally, his characters flowed as gracefully as his appearance, but here and there the letters were distorted or strange gaps had been left blank.
And then there was one more thing that bothered her.
(What is this?)
Normally, Jinshi's letters arrive folded into thirds and wrapped in cloth. But this one was slightly different. The paper was a square with all four sides of equal length, covered in peculiar creases.
Maomao tilted her head. Every crease was identical. It was an unnatural shape for folding a letter.
Maomao poked her head out from the apothecary's door. Spotting Zhao Yu, who had been playing with Baldy, she beckoned him over.
"What is it?"
"Haven't you ever folded paper into shapes with this?"
Folding square paper to make boxes and flowers out of it. It required quality paper to do, so it wasn't something common folk could easily manage.
At the Rokushoukan, they sometimes put up folded paper decorations in place of real flowers, but they never folded letters like this. If someone had, Maomao figured it had to be the work of that little brat.
"Freckles. You suspecting me or something?"
"Who else would've done it besides you?"
"No way! I didn't do it! I wouldn't mind messing with other letters, but if I treated the masked big brother's stuff carelessly, the old lady'd kill me!"
That does make sense, Maomao nodded.
"It was like this from the start."
Zhao Yu stormed off in a huff, nostrils flaring. His lackey Baldy trailed after him, mimicking his manner.
Then what was going on? Maomao tilted her head and folded along the creases.
"..."
Four identical shapes emerged. She stared hard at them—each one shaped like the tip of a small blade. Then she noticed something peculiar. She unfolded the paper again, then folded it back along the creases.
The characters on the parts aligned with the creases were distorted.
(Could it be?)
The reason Jinshi's writing was distorted in places—could it be because of these creases? They hadn't been made after the letter was written. They had been pressed in before the text was even written.
Maomao layered the four sheets of paper and tried sliding them between one another.
When she overlapped two sheets, the radical of a distorted character on one merged with a distorted character on the other.
(...I see.)
She folded and overlapped all four sheets together. What resulted was a shape like a pinwheel.
And there, the hidden text appeared.
The reason for the distorted characters was that the writing had first been composed on this shape, created by layering the four sheets. Then it was unfolded and disguised as an innocent letter with nothing out of the ordinary. The strange blank spaces must have served that purpose as well.
What was written there was...
Maomao left the apothecary and headed behind the Verdigris House. There stood a magnolia tree with deep pink blossoms.
Maomao looked at the base of the tree.
The ground at the base was slightly dug up. There were no weeds growing there.
She picked up a fallen branch and dug into the soil, and a cloth-wrapped box emerged from within.
"..."
She brushed off the dirt and unwrapped the cloth to reveal a wooden box. Opening the lid, she found something that resembled a mushroom inside. The name was
velvet antler,
so called—for though it looked like a mushroom, it was actually deer antler.
As a restorative tonic, it was a luxury medicinal ingredient.
(What would you have done if I hadn't noticed?)
A grin spread across Maomao's face, though her brow remained furrowed.
She could hardly contain her joy at finding such a precious medicinal herb, yet at the same time, she was somewhat irritated that it had been hidden in such a place without even knowing whether she would find it.
She was irritated, but the thought of his smug face thinking she could find something like that easily was infuriating.
(Still, velvet antler of all things)
Maomao tilted her head slightly, wondering whether he had chosen it because he knew its medicinal properties.
Maomao covered the hole where the box had been buried with soil, then headed back to the apothecary while cradling the box.
It was infuriating how he always seemed to see right through her, but the velvet antler had done nothing wrong.
◎●◎
"It appears that girl has finally returned."
As he placed additional documents on the desk,
Ma San
spoke.
Jinshi flicked through the tedious documents as he listened. It had been roughly
a month
The pharmacist from the pleasure district had been away. If Jinshi had expected some kind of personal remark from her, it turned out to be nothing more than a message.
Since the person she'd been taken to visit was none other than the girl's brother-in-law, he had some idea what to expect, but her absence lasted longer than he had anticipated.
It was enough to make him want to pull a small prank.
Maosen was staring at Jinshi intently.
His gaze bore a certain resemblance to Gaoshun's.
"What is it?"
"Nothing. You seem to be in a good mood."
"Not particularly."
Looking at the mountain of documents piled on his desk, there was no way he could be in a good mood. Moreover, more than half of them contained nothing of substance. This could only be called harassment.
As for the person perpetrating this harassment, all Jinshi could do was laugh.
"It's from the Strategist."
Nearly all of the meaningless documents had been sent by the court's greatest eccentric.
He had been on the receiving end of this kind of regular harassment for quite some time now. Occasionally strange ornaments would appear in his office, or the room would be fouled with
lard
in various places, but he had mostly turned a blind eye. He always wondered how the person managed to slip in, but since he never left anything important lying around when he stepped away, there shouldn't be any real problem. Probably.
When he glanced at Maosen, the stare was irritatingly persistent. The young man wasn't as composed as Gaoshun, but he had an oddly preachy quality about him—much like his father.
"Whatever could he mean by that?"
"By what?"
"The matter you mentioned to the Strategist the other day."
Jinshi suspected the increase in harassment was because of that remark, and Maosen surely understood as much.
"That's actually quite convenient. Better than having everyone come at me from all directions with proposals."
"But aren't you making things too easy for him?"
What Maosen was trying to say was this:
From his position, Jinshi was being pressured by those around him to take a wife before too long.
There were proposals to saddle him with the daughters of high-ranking officials, stories about princesses arriving from foreign lands, and the like. Among them was even a suggestion that he receive a consort from the Inner Palace as a gift from the emperor.
"...It was perfect for keeping them at bay."
What do I mean by keeping them at bay?
Normally, no woman but his wet nurse was allowed into Jinshi's quarters,
Shuiren,
and that was the extent of it. But now, there were ostentatious "maids" loitering in front of his palace, announcing their new appointments. As far as maids went, they were all flashy women reeking of perfume.
Even during work, the number of court ladies coming and going increased. They blinked far more than usual and brought over supplies with dewy, glistening eyes. They would ostentatiously carry heavy loads, then "accidentally" drop them so their skirts would ride up — making it impossible to get any work done.
He had been flirted with before, but back then he was still treated as a eunuch. So some people had the good sense to keep their distance.
"What's even the point of this scar?"
Jinshi instinctively brushed his fingers over the scar on his right cheek.
"Jinshi, please don't say things like that."
"My apologies."
This scar was one Jinshi had received without bothering to dodge. He had no regrets about it — in fact, he rather liked it. But the fact that Jinshi had been made to sustain the wound meant that Maosen had been beaten black and blue by Gaoshun. While Jinshi was in high spirits, Maosen was thoroughly dejected.
Recently, Jinshi had thought Maosen was finally getting over it, but now he had taken to sighing strangely more often. It seemed like he had picked up some new worry, but he wouldn't talk to Jinshi about it. If pressed, he'd probably open up, but there was no need to go that far. Maosen's tendency to fret must have been inherited from his father.
Maosen gathered the rejected documents and placed them in a basket.
"Were there really no other methods? It may have been medicine, but it was practically a lethal dose."
"That's a fair point."
The method Jinshi had used to change the persistent attitudes of those around him —
"You didn't have to bring up his daughter in front of the strategist with so many people watching."
Regardless of what others thought, Jinshi had never invited anyone. So he wondered: what would happen if he made it publicly known that the strategist had a daughter, and then made it look like he was interested?
At the very least, it had been more than enough to shut Little Fly up. In exchange, the harassment had increased, but still.
"Even if it was just an act, it's going to cause trouble."
"..."
Jinshi hesitated whether to correct Maosen's words but decided to stay silent.
Instead, he asked him something else.
"Tell me — what would you think if the person you kissed showed absolutely no reaction?"
"K-kissing!!"
Maren's eyes went wide and his face turned scarlet. The documents he'd been holding dropped from his hands and scattered across the floor.
"Wh-what do you intend to do to take responsibility if you do something like that!?"
Watching his milk-sibling slam the desk in outrage, Jinshi felt a certain smug superiority. At the very least, he hadn't gotten this worked up over it — that was reassuring.
"First, those sorts of things begin with an exchange of letters…"
"You start with letters?"
"Yes! That's what proper courtship is!"
No, it isn't. Not even close.
Jinshi mused that before he started heaping all manner of criticism onto Gaoshun, perhaps he ought to deal with his son first.