YUMI WAS DAUNTED by the number of towns she’d visited but couldn’t name. She was a servant of the people of Torio; shouldn’t she be able to name the places she’d helped?
Yet she saw so little of them. Only their cold springs—or bathhouses, for those that didn’t have a spring—and their shrines and places of ritual. The different towns blurred together, interchangeable in her memory. At times she almost thought they could be the same town over and over—that she went to sleep and her wagon was pulled around in circles to give the illusion of motion before stopping right back where she’d begun.
She was ashamed of that thought, because the places were important and unique to the people who lived in them. Take this shrine, where Painter knelt today per her instructions. Most shrines were in gardens, with cold stone so the flowers could spin low to the ground.
This one was instead in the middle of an orchard. Nearby, trees drifted and bumped against one another, chained in place to keep them from floating off but given enough slack to always be in motion.
The air was cooler than she liked, and the dim light of the sun behind so many branches reminded her of Painter’s world. However, this was a different kind of dimness: broken up instead of absolute, like sunlight made festive. The trees in turn were spangled with fruit. The celebration here was a quiet one.
Though the workers had been cleared out to give the yoki-hijo silence for her meditations, this was plainly a cultivated spot. Any fallen fruit had been collected before it could bake into sticky tar.
People worked in here frequently.
Which meant the people of this town didn’t strictly obey tradition by setting the shrine off from commonly trafficked areas. She’d seen it before, and…well, a rebellious part of her approved. These people wanted their shrine near as they worked. There were spirit statues on the roof, created by a yoki-hijo to have no purpose beyond watching over the workers to give them comfort.
Why shouldn’t people adapt tradition to their needs? It was a dangerous line of thinking—so when Liyun noted the cultivated trees and the statues on the roof of the shrine, she frowned. Then, fortunately, she bowed and withdrew—leaving the yoki-hijo to her ritual prayers.
As Liyun retreated, Painter let out a long sigh. “Something’s wrong with that woman.”
“Liyun-nimi,” Yumi said, “is an immaculate warden. You will expunge such terrible ideas from your mind.”
“Why?” he said. “It’s not like I’m saying it to her face.”
“Thinking it is as bad,” Yumi said. “You are a yoki-hijo. You are better than such thoughts. You must be pure, not just in action, but in
mind and soul.”
“But—”
“Complaining is for those lesser. Back straight. Head bowed.”
“I’m not a yoki-hijo.”
“Today you are,” she said, walking around him as he knelt in the open-sided shrine. “If you want to end this, you must do what I cannot. Beyond that, there are consequences—rarely implemented— for a yoki-hijo who cannot serve. We are in danger of provoking Liyun to extreme measures, which will make it impossible for us to
accomplish our goals. So unless you want to be stuck like this forever, you need to follow the protocol and do what I tell you.”
He let out a long, annoyed breath. “Fine,” he said (lowly).
Yumi nodded. During her bathing she had come to a realization. A reason why the spirits might have sent this seemingly useless person to take her place. Shortly they would test her theory. But first, meditation.
“Now,” she said, “you will say the proper prayers. Because you are new to this, we will say only the six that are strictly necessary.”
“Six?” he said. “How long will this take?”
“Half an hour,” she said. “Roughly.”
“A half hour of praying? But—”
“Do you want out or not?”
He grumbled, but as she began to recite the prayers, he repeated them. She wondered if perhaps she should be kneeling too. So she knelt beside him, hands laced in the pattern of reverence before her, head bowed. It would give him a good model at the least.
Was it the words or the heart that mattered in a prayer? Perhaps the spirits would accept his words and her heart.
The half hour was over in no time—saying only six of the prayers was novel, and barely felt like it was enough. But at the end Painter groaned as if she’d made him do something terrible, like carry his own luggage. He flopped to the side, and she decided to let him rest before making him— “Hey!” she snapped. “Don’t close your eyes.”
“Just for a moment,” he said, his eyelids flickering.
“If you fall asleep, we might swap again!”
“You don’t know that’s true…” he mumbled.
So she did the only thing she could think of to wake him. She stuck her finger through the middle of his forehead.
The immediate effect was that overwhelming warmth, spreading through her body with a ripple—a tingling shiver riding before it, like a flower on a thermal. Then the blurring of self, that connection to him.
She felt his fatigue, his concern, his frustration. His emotions washed against hers, mixing like overlapping prayers—blurring together, but still distinct.
It wasn’t terrible. But it was unnerving, as it mashed them both together in a way that was utterly unnatural.
He sat bolt upright, pulling away from her. “Hey! What are you (lowly) doing?”
“Keeping you awake,” she said. “We must meet the spirits. You can’t afford to nap.”
He huffed, but stood and shook his arms, the moment of drowsiness apparently past. “Fine. Let’s get on with it.”
“We have to meditate,” she said, “until the ritual time.”
“Ritual time,” he said. “Ritual bathing, ritual clothing, ritual place.
When do I get my ritual tote bag? My ritual underpants? Ritual fingernail clipper?”
“Levity,” she said, “is not becoming of a yoki-hijo. Your duty is to our people. To make light of your position is to make light of their lives.”
“It’s a shame then,” he said gravely, “that their lives are all so (lowly) ridiculous that mockery is inevitable.”
“Enough!” she shouted, pointing at him. “You will take this seriously.”
“What happened to you?” he muttered, backing away before she could poke him again. “I liked the demure version of you better.”
“Nothing happened to me,” she said. “This is who I am. The person I have to be. If I grow lax, then people die, Painter. Do you understand that? Farming among my people ends without the yoki- hijo. If I am not my best self, then people will starve. Forgive me if it’s a little stressful, therefore, that I can’t do my duty without the cooperation of a liar who finds all this funny!”
He glanced away, looking ashamed. As he should have been. This was the way she’d been trained—with relentless conditioning toward solemnity. With unyielding strictness. Until the desire for levity and individuality had been drained from her like pus from a boil.
It had worked for her. She’d turned out fine. Rather, she’d turned out to be what she had to be.
It would work for him. She merely had to remain stern. For his good
and the good of the spirits as well.
“We wait, then,” he finally said.
“We meditate,” she said, kneeling.
He knelt beside her. “Meditate, eh? So…we just kneel here and think?”
“No thinking,” she said, spreading her hands to the sides and tipping her head toward the sky. “Meditation is the opposite of thinking.”
“Uh…I can force myself to be calm. Will that work?”
She glanced at him, and he seemed genuinely confused. Did…she really have to explain something so simple?
“It is more than calmness,” she clarified. “It is an utter rejection of all emotion, sensation, and individuality. You often start by fixating on something rhythmic, like your breathing or the deliberate stretching and relaxing of a muscle. Some find it helpful to vocalize a tone or a mantra. The goal is to empty your mind of all thought—abandoning even the initial focus that started the meditation.”
“What’s the point of that?”
She cocked her head, baffled. “To center yourself in the cosmere,” she said. “To wash your mind as you wash your body. To expel emotional refuse, as your body does with physical excrement. To be clean, down to your soul, and to renew. You’ve never done it before?”
He shook his head.
No wonder he was so…well, him. How backward must his society be to know nothing about a need so fundamental?
She started him out—as you might with a child—with a focus on breathing. She centered herself, let herself simply exist. The familiar sense of drifting enveloped her, followed by the sensation of… nothing.
Complete emptiness. Being. Nothing else. She was as the rocks,
the trees in the air. The… He was there next to her.
She could feel him. Now that she was centered, she sensed him pulling on her. She cracked an eye; his own eyes were closed, but he was smiling, his mouth twitching.
“You’re thinking about something,” she said to him.
“I can’t help thinking,” he complained. “I don’t want to stop, regardless. I like thinking about things.”
“You will control even those enjoyable thoughts better,” she said, “when you are experienced at meditation.”
“There’s more to life than control.”
“Try it,” she said, centering herself again. “Practice. You’ll see. The best artists can focus far better on their art after training to meditate.
Control leads to focus and focus to accomplishment.”
“Depends on what you want to accomplish.”
The two continued to kneel, and now Yumi found it difficult to stop thinking. About him. Not that there was anything specifically appealing about Painter. It was just that she’d never imagined kneeling in a shrine beside someone. It was…a thing that married couples did.
Not an experience for her. To marry would be to defy the spirits and the gift they’d granted. To have a love, to have a family, would be to turn her back on her duty. She was a precious resource, and absolute dedication was required.
Yet strangely, many of her world’s favorite stories involved a yoki- hijo falling in love. Liyun had rightly tried to keep them from her, but Yumi had heard the tales from Samjae—a yoki-hijo she’d been friends with when they were young—who had relayed them with a gleeful air of transgression.
Samjae said transgressive stories were the best. Because forbidden love somehow tasted the sweetest.
“Nice,” Painter said, shaking the shrine as he stood up. Yumi started, thinking he’d somehow sensed her thoughts. But he was referencing Liyun approaching up the path. “This means we’re done, right?”
“Right,” Yumi said, standing. “Let’s go summon the spirits.”
He nodded and took a step forward. Then he paused. “Wait. I can’t believe I’ve never asked this, but how do we summon them? You said something about art the other day?”
“Yes, it’s easy,” she said. “All you have to do is stack some rocks.”
IT WAS TIME to test Yumi’s theory.
She considered it as Painter entered the place of ritual, the fenced- off section of ground where stones had been placed for him.
Townspeople gathered along the fence, musicians at the ready, and
Yumi remained behind with them—until Painter was distant enough that she was pulled, against her will, a few steps inside.
He looked back at her, noticing the pull. She nodded to him encouragingly. Earlier she’d said that his task would be easy. That was sort of an untruth. Learning to properly stack rocks was difficult, and had been a large part of her training.
But she had a suspicion that it would be easy for him. That was the realization she’d come to while bathing, and it would explain so much.
The spirits had come to her begging for help—yet Yumi had not been enough. She wasn’t skilled enough; wasn’t good enough. She was inadequate.
So they had sent someone who could do what she couldn’t. Painter might not be a hero…but he might be a prodigy. That would explain why they’d picked him. She was now confident that he’d prove to be a natural at stacking, blessed with talent beyond her own even though he’d never known it on his world. The answer was so obvious it made her smile.
She was able to maintain this happy delusion right up to the moment he “stacked” his first rock. It fell.
The very first rock he placed fell. Somehow he managed to fail at balancing a large flat piece of stone on the ground. It toppled to the side and rolled away.
The townspeople behind Yumi gasped. Painter didn’t notice—just gave a goofy smile and piled up some other rocks like he was… pushing blocks into a heap. He didn’t even manage this without squishing his finger, which made him yelp and shake it.
Yumi glanced to Liyun, who watched with a slack jaw, horrified.
Painter put a rock on top of his pile, which collapsed. Then he looked to Yumi and gestured. “Like this?” he asked. “How’s it look?”
Oh no, Yumi thought. Oh, spirits. No.
They were in serious, serious trouble.
