"Maomao, what are you doing?!"
"What do you mean, 'what am I doing?'"
Maomao set down the small knife that had wounded her left hand.
She had been testing a new medicine in her room. For Maomao, this was an everyday scene, but
for Yao,
it must have been quite the extraordinary sight.
"There's no problem. I have medicine right here."
Whether it would actually work was another matter. Creating new medicine meant repeating trial and error over and over.
(It would be nice if there were someone else to experiment on.)
The old man would give her a disapproving look about it. She occasionally tested medicine on sturdy-looking guards, but those ideal subjects always seemed to vanish after a single treatment.
Using mice would anger people too, and there was the time she had
considered shaving Momo's fur
to test a hair growth medicine, but the outcry from everyone at Rokushoukan had been so great she couldn't go through with it. The properly shaved fur could have been used to make brushes, too.
So, Maomao had no choice but to use her own body.
"You fool!"
She was scolded.
"What is it?"
When she heard Yao's voice,
En'en
came over.
Yao had grabbed Maomao's left hand and was fuming, while En'en looked on.
"En'en, say something to her, won't you?"
"About what?"
En'en seemed to have been in the middle of preparing dinner, as she held a napa cabbage in her hands. Today would be hot pot, perhaps. En'en's...
Plain Water
It was infused with seafood and pork bone broth and quite delicious. She would enjoy it later.
"What do you mean, what—this! Look at my battered left hand!"
"Yes. You're testing the effects of medicine again, aren't you?"
"That's right!"
"Indeed."
En'en was sharp, so she had noticed without even looking.
"Then if you knew, why didn't you stop her? I thought it didn't look like it was healing at all, but she was making new wounds on top of that!"
No one had ever called her out on the scraping. It wasn't that she hadn't noticed—apparently, she had been considerately avoiding the subject.
"That is, my lady. This is something Maomao does to herself. If it serves the purpose of perfecting a medicine rather than being mere self-harm, then I determined there was no need to stop her."
"Yes. It serves a purpose. Medicine and poison are separated by a fine line, so the only way to determine the right formulation is through testing."
Anyone in the medical field should understand how crucial drug experimentation was. To test the efficacy of medicines, the medical office kept several types of animals for trials. Yao wore a complicated expression but didn't complain—because she knew it was necessary.
So Maomao felt she had no right to interfere, yet Yao showed no sign of backing down despite her furrowed brow.
"That still doesn't mean you can just leave it as is!"
Yao didn't let go of Maomao's hand.
"A friend doing something like this!"
"..."
Maomao and En'en's eyes went wide.
"Friends—well, close enough to call each other friends, I suppose. Yes, well..."
En'en looked at Maomao with a hint of jealousy.
"So you two were friends, huh."
Come to think of it, lately they had been eating together and chatting beyond just work matters. Perhaps this could be classified as a friendship.
When En'en and Maomao each pressed her for confirmation, Yao's face gradually turned red.
"N-no! Not friends—w-we're colleagues! Colleagues! You'd stop a colleague from experimenting with strange medicines, wouldn't you? En'en, you'd do the same, right?"
En'en, who had been asked to agree, thought for a moment.
"Honestly, even if you tried to stop Maomao it'd be pointless. If anything, letting her do it because there's merit to it is the right call."
Maomao nodded as well.
"Then I'll do the same thing!"
"Absolutely not!"
En'en answered without hesitation. The cabbage she'd been holding tumbled to the floor.
"Not a single scratch is permitted on Lady Yao's beautiful, flawless skin. It's unthinkable, it must never happen. If you were to attempt such a thing, I would inflict ten times — no, a hundred times — that many wounds upon my own body. Even so... even so, would that be acceptable to you?"
She rattled this off at breakneck speed with a dead-serious expression, gripping Yao by both shoulders and shaking her.
It seemed Maomao was being treated rather carelessly, but when the subject was Yao, there was no helping it.
The more attached you were to someone, the more you wanted to restrict what they did. That was especially true when it led to self-harm.
(...)
Maomao tilted her head and let out a low "Hmm..."
She seemed to half-remember something, or maybe she didn't.
(No, let's just pretend I don't remember.)
Still humming to herself, Maomao applied medicine to Yao's uninjured left hand and wrapped it in gauze. Then she picked up the cabbage En'en had dropped.
"Hey, something smells burnt."
Maomao wrinkled her nose.
"...The pot. I left it on the stove."
"..."
The three of them rushed to the kitchen.
The pan-fried buns she'd been making alongside the stew had been reduced to charcoal. The count was a multiple of three — she wanted to believe Maomao's share had been included — but she was in no mood to eat something charred black.
"I'll wash it later."
En'en's shoulders slumped. More than the wasted ingredients, it was probably the burnt-on residue caked to the surface that defeated her.
(That's going to be a nightmare to clean.)
They had congee and stew — a slightly more modest meal than usual. Maomao scooped up the broth with a lotus-shaped ladle, and the clear soup En'en made was delicious. She'd asked for the recipe once, but En'en wouldn't share it. However, En'en had glanced at Yao and smiled a little too knowingly, so perhaps it was best not to ask too many questions.
(What did she put in it?)
Unlike Yao, Maomao didn't mind rough fare, so she'd just let it go.
A bit
few side dishes
Yao looked disappointed, but seeing how dejected En'en was, she couldn't very well say anything. The reason this master-servant pairing worked so well was that, from En'en's perspective, Yao was always there to accept the love that was almost too one-sided.
Maomao picked up a dried scallop with her chopsticks and put it in her mouth. The flavor still lingered faintly.
"Now that I think of it, Yao — was there something you needed?"
The root cause of the burnt pot was that Yao had come to Maomao's room in the first place. Yao was the shy sort — she would never come to see Maomao without a reason, or without some excuse.
"I forgot."
Yao set down her chopsticks, which still held a piece of pork, and pulled a piece of paper from inside her robe.
"This is the schedule."
"The schedule?"
In the medical office, officials were often assigned to each festival and ceremony. So they were given a month's schedule to check whether any events would require the presence of a medical officer.
When she opened it, she saw familiar characters.
"The garden party."
Right. At this time of year, on the cusp of winter, there was the garden party that the consorts of the rear palace all dreaded.
"The main ones are the garden party and the year-end ceremonies, more or less."
En'en also poked her head in.
"Isn't the garden party a bit late this year?"
She felt the garden party had been held about a month earlier than this last time. There couldn't have been many flowers left in the garden to admire.
"It is late. But I think the garden party is just a front this time."
En'en, always the well-informed one, traced the characters for "garden party" with her fingertip.
"They're probably going to use it to introduce the new 'named one' — the one that's been left in limbo."
"The 'Jade'?"
The "Jade" — that is, Gyokuyou's father, Gyokuen.
Lychee.
The western region, the Western Capital — it has been half a year since he, who rules it, was summoned to the capital.
Normally, he would have been formally introduced by now. If not for
Saou
and the ruckus over the poisoning of the priestess.
Yao and Yanyan's expressions darken slightly.
Neither of these two knows that the priestess is alive. Yao may have some suspicion, but Yanyan should be unaware. If she knew, she—being under Yao's orders—would surely have done something about it.
"I hear that conscription has begun anew in the west. Well, not just the west, but other regions as well."
(Where on earth do they source that information from?)
"Conscription?"
"Yes. It would be fine if it were merely a military expansion, but..."
They must have something in mind that they're considering.
Either way, this is not something Maomao, an assistant to the imperial physician, should stick her nose into.
"Yanyan, may I ask you something?"
"What is it?"
"Can the people of the Western Capital be trusted?"
At Yao's overly blunt words, Maomao looks around. There is no one in the dining hall. The doors and windows are shut tight because of the cold. No one could be eavesdropping.
"My lady."
"I know. That's why we're talking here."
Yao is no fool. She only spoke so freely because there were three people present and no more.
"I've certainly heard rumors about Consort Gyokuyou. They say she's beautiful but doesn't put on airs, and that in the rear palace she's kind even to the lowliest servants. Maomao would know more about that, I imagine."
"Consort Gyokuyou is not the type to bring ruin to a nation, and His Majesty does not strike me as the sort of man to be consumed by women."
Maomao realizes she has said a bit too much.
"That is what the rear palace physician told me, so to speak."
She slips in the excuse of a quack doctor.
They already know Maomao worked in the rear palace, but she never said it was the Jade Palace. Yanyan might know, but it is safer to keep quiet about it. If asked, she will explain then.
"Even though they say she isn't a kingdom-toppling beauty,"
Yao scoops her congee with a spoon.
"I wonder how many of those past beauties who supposedly toppled kingdoms were truly wicked women."
Plop, plop—she lets the congee fall back into the bowl again.
Maomao understood what Yao was getting at.
"Even if Lady Gyokuyou is such an accomplished person, we can't say the same for her relatives."
Maomao knew almost nothing about the man named Yu'en.
Usually, Yao was rather impulsive, but at times, she could be surprisingly sharp.
"Yes. I want to believe Lady Gyokuyou isn't just another tool for her family."
"Miss Yao."
Yanyan looked at Yao with concern.
What must the young woman, who had nearly been turned into a tool by her own uncle, think of Gyokuyou—heading toward the pinnacle of the nation's women as the ultimate tool of advancement?
Yao scooped up the congee with her spoon once more and brought it to her mouth.