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Sukehime had died in the heart of the inner palace, polluting it from within with her blood and hatred and death the way that her faithless beloved had poisoned her soul from within. Her very death had been one final act of defiance and rejection.
But Sukehime had also died as a human, in Hiromasa’s arms, and had been burned, mourned, and prayed for just like any other human. That room, in the heart of the palace, remained sealed under a taboo for 49 days, and once they were up, it was time for her human soul to move on, for the mourners to conclude their ritual confinement, and for the world to return to normal.
And so, on the night exactly 49 days after her death, Seimei was solemnly ushered on silent feet and in official robes into the sealed room of her death. As a rule, it was the head of the bureau of divination who had to perform any such duties, but the position had remained gapingly vacant after Douson’s demise, and by unspoken general consensus, the task of performing the purification marking the end of the taboo had fallen to Seimei.
Not that he minded at all. In fact, he was glad of the privacy from prying eyes and ears, and of the chance to speak to her for the first and last time.
The room looked just like it had on the day when he had watched Hiromasa and Sukehime together do the impossible - return a demon to her human essence. The scene had haunted Seimei for all 49 nights since her death, and would probably continue to do so for a long time yet.
Even the five altars he had used for his spell, back then, were still in the room. The water had evaporated, the oil had burned away, the magic was spent. He cleared them away and set up a new one - in front of the spot of her death. Then he knelt, and bowed, and performed the rites with the precision of the water clock. Just as he would have done for his nearest and dearest.
In the end, he lit a stick of smoky incense and simply waited.
The almost immaterial aromatic motes slowly started to flow in the shape of a woman, and as the glow of the spark started to eat away at the incense, she obtained color and a sense of presence. Seimei hadn’t known her in life - didn’t even know how she looked - but he recognized the layering of the colors of her robes that Hiromasa had described to him. She was dressed just as he had seen her, with her sleeves peeking from below the curtain of an ox-cart back before… everything.
It was a good thing, Seimei knew. Ghosts who had found peace often appeared in the shape they had known the most happiness in.
“My lady…” he started, and when she didn’t deign to so much as look at him, he added, “...of the Full Moon.”
Her eyelashes fluttered and she raised her face to meet his eyes. She looked lovely indeed, and very, very human.
“In what time we have left, I would like to speak to you, if it pleases you,” Seimei said formally. “About your son.”
“Hiro… hira…” she breathed, and the incense smoke stirred.
“Yes. Prince Hirohira. Since your death, three people have come to me, asking me to seek your counsel as to his future fate.” His nose twitched, just a little. “Well, two of them summoned me, to be precise.”
“My son… is well?”
“He is. He has been in mourning seclusion, together with his wet nurse and a maid, but that ends tomorrow. And his father, the emperor, is unsure if he can…”
“I do not wish to speak of that man.” Her breath made the smoke twist violently, distorting her features and making the motes of incense twist into the shape of horns on her forehead. Piercingly cold air blew in, reaching to Seimei’s bones and soul, almost extinguishing the flames of the altar between them.
“I understand that sentiment so well, my Lady of the Full Moon,” he said serenely.
“I forbid that man to raise my son. Send him to a monastery if you must, because the Buddhas made of bronze are warmer and more human than that cruel, fickle man.”
The incense smoke shimmered and clouded, clung to Seimei’s robes, and seemed to tinge in blood-red in the sputtering flame of the burning oil. Seimei gave a small, silent bow.
“The second person to come to me was lady Touko. She wishes to adopt your son and raise him together with prince Atsuhira as her own.”
When that didn’t cause much of a reaction, Seimei went on.
“I believe her intentions to be quite sincere. She has been the person to oversee whatever arrangements needed to be made for your son. She also told me that she would have adopted him already, had she not been unsure if that wouldn’t anger his mother’s spirit.”
“I do not bear lady Touko any grudge,” Sukehime said slowly. The smoke shimmered and settled back into its old patterns, and when the flames stopped their wild dance, the red tinge and the shapes of horns were gone. “I was her once. She may yet become me.”
Seimei pursed his lips. It was something he had considered himself, and very much hoped to avoid. Unlike Sukehime, lady Touko did not have Hiromasa, and would thus be beyond salvation.
“Please, tell her that I am sorry,” Sukehime said, and Seimei blinked in surprise. Although, he supposed, anyone whom Hiromasa had chosen had to have more goodness in their heart than met the eye. “I never meant to harm her boy. I never blamed her for anything. And yet…”
“And yet?”
“I do not wish for him to grow in this palace, in this poisonous garden, so close to that poisonous man. My Hirohira was meant to be the bejeweled peach growing in it, but now it can only become his grave. Send him to the Buddhas instead. They will be more merciful to him than this court, and may show him how to be a better man than his father.”
“Then perhaps you will look more kindly upon the heartfelt plea of the last of the three,” Seimei said and his hands tightened imperceptibly on the ceremonial rod he was still holding. “The only one who came to me actually asking for help.”
“Who is that?”
“Minamoto-no Hiromasa.”
Sukehime grew quiet. The incense stick was burning away, and she seemed so very human and small and fragile in the dissipating smoke.
“He also says…” Seimei’s throat constricted for a moment, as if he didn’t want to let go of the words he had been entrusted with. “He says that he meant every word he ever said to you.”
“I should have never doubted that,” Sukehime breathed and raised a sleeve to her face. The sleeve was unraveling, the incense motes settling over the altar and the wooden floor and into Seimei’s clothes. Time was running out, and he couldn’t let it. For Hiromasa’s sake, he couldn’t.
“He too lost his father and his beloved grandfather very young,” Seimei urged. “And he… doesn’t have other heirs, so Hirohira would be provided for, not much worse off as if he were still in the imperial family. It’s unconventional, but Hiromasa would raise him as his own, I am sure.”
“Lord Hiromasa… So that is why you know… that name…”
“Yes.”
“And he… wants to do that..?” Sukehime asked in what sounded a lot like a sob.
“Yes. Very much so. If only you’d allow it…”
Sukehime said nothing.
“Hiromasa is a good man. Your son will be loved, with him. He…” Seimei gulped and took a deep breath. The incense smoke stung his eyes and made breathing difficult. “He has… more love in his heart than anyone else I’ve ever met. Please…”
“Why are you pleading so on his behalf?”
“Because it’s what he wants. And I believe it would make him happy,” Seimei said simply, but urgently. “And your son as well.”
He didn’t know what else to say. The incense motes he had breathed in seemed to burn him from the inside. The last of the smoke was trailing, low on the floor, engulfing him as well, but there was barely a speck of incense left in the burner anymore. Sukehime’s fading shape was starting to blur.
The rite was ending.
And finally, she lowered her sleeve and looked straight at him, through him, inside him. He held her gaze until she spoke again.
“To awaken love and foster humanity in a grieving boy…” she breathed softly. “A boy with a terrifying demon for a mother, and a weak-hearted man who could not raise him for a father… a boy who ended up in the home of a stranger… and who is destined to live out his life branded as different…” she sighed. “A boy so full of grief and love with nowhere to go that he withdrew into a dark cave of his own making, like lady Amaterasu once did, until he met lord Hiromasa…”
Her form was almost lost now.
“My Lady of the Full Moon… it doesn’t have to turn out like this! I know that all that you say may still happen to your son, but it has not happened yet. I believe in Hiromasa. I believe he wants to do it, and that he will be good at it.”
“Oh, it is not a matter of belief, lord Seimei,” Sukehime’s voice sounded as if a gentle smile graced her now almost invisible lips. “I know it. Now, I have seen him accomplish all of that.”
“You have? Where?” Seimei asked the last wisps of cold incense smoke, now as fine and immaterial as a trailing cobweb string.
“Right here.”
The very last vestiges of incense smoke gathered in the outline of a white ghostly finger, and tapped Seimei’s chest.
Right over his heart.
“You have my blessing. Take care of the only two men in my life who ever loved me, lord Seimei,” whispered the impossibly fine midnight breeze that scattered the last fragrant motes in the air and made it pristine and empty once more.
“Love them like I wish I had been able to…”
And then there was only Seimei sitting alone in the empty room in the heart of the midnight palace. The ritual was concluded. Sukehime had departed. This was no longer the taboo space defiled by the death of a woman who had been driven to turn herself into a demon by those who called themselves human. But it would also be yet another few hours until the sunlight and the work of servants and the stream of the mundane life of the palace would wash over it and transform it back into just another room of the palace.
In this small beat between worlds, between past and future, between this world and the next, there was only Seimei, and Sukehime’s final words filling the world.
Seimei closed his eyes, pressed a hand over the cold silk where the ghostly hand had touched him, and longed for Hiromasa’s warmth.