The wind was gone when Himari opened her eyes.
The white walls were gone too. The sand beyond them, the scouring sound that had followed her from morning to night, was gone.
When the world reformed around her, it was soft and green. A garden with a low stone wall, a basin of still water, and a sky that held no heat in it. She stood on grass that did not exist in the Land of Wind.
She did not question the unordinary things around her. Dreams accepted themselves.
He sat on the edge of the low wall at the garden's centre, watching her with the calm, measuring patience she had seen once before. It was the boy from the Capital. The Apostle of the Goddess, whose hands she had taken.
Himari stopped a step away. Something in her recognised him, not by face but by weight. The dream from the Capital had been like this. The garden had been like this, though the water had been different.
"You," she said.
"Me," Akane said, and he smiled a little. "You remembered the garden."
"I remembered that there was one." She looked around, at the grass and the basin and the tree that had no season. "It is easier this time. I knew I was dreaming before I knew where I was."
"That is because you are sleeping better," Akane said.
Himari looked at him, and then, after a moment, she sat on the wall opposite him. She kept a careful distance, the way she kept distance from everyone in her father's house.
"The letter," she said. "My father read it. He has not spoken of it."
"Tell me what he did instead," Akane said.
Himari folded her hands in her lap. In the waking world her hands were often cold, even in the desert heat, but here they were warm.
"For three days after it came, he ate in his study. He walked the corridors after the lamps were lit and he did not call for his sons. The ministers who came for the morning reports left quicker than usual." She paused, and the way she paused was precise, the way she had learned to speak in the Capital. "On the fourth day he called the steward and asked for the accounts of Roran's traders, not the traditional court's traders but the ones who carry salt to Roran."
Akane listened with his arms resting on his knees. The garden was quiet except for the sound of wind through leaves that did not exist.
"Has he said her name?" he asked.
"No. Not where I could hear it. The servants say it in the kitchen, though. They say Roran, and then they stop."
"And your brothers?"
"They have not come to the house since the day the letter came." She looked at the water in the basin, and the stillness of it held her face. "Their man who used to wait near the stables is gone too."
"That is good," Akane said.
"Is it?"
"It means they are being careful, which means they are uncertain, and this uncertainty buys time."
Himari nodded at what Akane said. She had spent the time learning. She had watched the servants who watched her, learned the faces of the men who came to her father's study, learned the difference between the ones who feared him and the ones who wanted his position, exactly as he had told her to do in the Capital.
She had not yet found a use for the knowledge, but she was eagerly waiting for one.
"You have been careful," Akane said, as if he had heard the thought.
"I have been what you told me to be. I kept the name. I learned the court." She looked at him, and something harder came into her voice. "When do I use the third option?"
"You don't. Not yet." Akane shifted on the wall, and the stone was warm under his hands. "The third option is not a knife you draw because you have one. It is a door you keep open while everyone else decides the other two are the only doors in the room."
Himari frowned a little at that, but then she let it go. She had learned that his sentences meant more than the words in them.
"I have something to tell you," he said. "It is small, and it will sound strange. You must not tell your father or your brothers or the women who dress your hair."
She waited for his words.
"Tonight a traveller will come to your residence. It will not use the gate. It will come through the earth near the garden wall, and meet you in your room."
Himari waited.
"You will prick your finger and give a few drops of your blood to the traveller. No one will see. No one will miss it. The traveller will then go on into the desert."
She frowned a little.
"What traveller?"
"The same kind that protected you in the capital when Akemi was going to poison you, and the same that would protect you when you might have nothing around you," Akane said and let his words settle in her mind.
"It is pale, quiet, and it moves through the earth. It will carry with it a slug no bigger than my palm." He held his hand out to show her the size, even though the garden was not the waking world and size was a suggestion. "She is called Katsuyu. She will not hurt you, and you will not need to keep her. She goes with the traveller to Roran."
Himari stared at his hand.
"Why does a slug need to go to Roran?"
"Because she is a road," Akane said. "One end will sit in the desert near Roran. The other end sits in Konoha. When I need to come there, I will come through her, and no watchpost between here and there will see me pass."
Himari was quiet for a moment. In the waking world she would have been told that such things were not possible, and she would have been told to stop asking. Here, in the garden that had no business existing, she believed him.
He said it plainly, the way he had taught himself to speak in rooms where the truth was a weapon, and Himari heard the plainness and understood that it was the truth.
"Is Roran far from here?" she asked after a moment.
"Far enough that the desert eats letters," Akane said. "Near enough that the same wind touches both places."
He looked at her across the basin, at the girl who had survived twice, once when her brothers meant for her to die and once when her father meant for her to be a problem he could solve quietly. She had kept her teeth through both.
'She is thinner than she was in the Capital, but her eyes are not,' he thought. 'She is learning how to watch without being watched.'
"Seramu," she said quietly. "My aunt."
"Yes."
"Will I meet her?"
"Not yet," Akane said. "She will write, and you will answer. The letters will be official, but you both will have to learn how you two need to talk."
"You will learn her hand, and she will learn yours. When you open the political door around you, it will open through this thread, not through your father and not through me."
Himari nodded. She had been writing letters anyway, short notes to the steward's daughter and to the woman who had taught her to sew, because Akane had told her that a girl who wrote letters was a girl who was preparing to be somewhere else.
"Why my blood?" she asked.
Akane remained silent for a while, to show that she was asking more than she ought to. When she understood his silence, he laughed and continued.
"Because Roran rests on something old, a current of power that runs beneath the desert, deeper than any well."
"Your aunt's mother could draw on it. Your mother carried it, and you carry it too." He let the words sit.
"I need to know your blood will hold the current for a moment, even when you are not there."
Himari was very still in the green garden, and the water in the basin was perfectly still.
"And if it does?"
"Then I will know that the power remembers the blood, even across a distance," Akane spoke. "And I will know to help you remember it too."
She held his gaze for a long breath, then another. He did not look away. He had told her the truth once in the Capital, and the only currency that had ever bound her to him was that coin.
"Yes," she said at last. "I will do it."
He nodded, and the garden around them began to soften at the edges, the low light gathering toward the corners of his vision.
"Sleep without waiting for footsteps," he said, his voice following her as the green faded. "You are no longer alone in that house. Your father has to ask himself a question he has never asked before, and that question is your roof every night."
The garden dissolved into light, and the ordinary darkness of a bed in a quiet room. Himari opened her eyes on the desert night with her heart beating hard against her ribs. The wind moved beyond the white walls, and the sand ticked against the lattice.
On the low table beside her bed, the basin of water was still, and the cloth she had used to dry her hands lay folded, untouched.
She lay still for a moment, weighing the vastness of the thing she now carried. Then she turned on her side, closed her eyes, and slept without waiting for the sound of footsteps outside her door.
In Konoha, in a room in the Senju home, Akane opened his eyes. The house was quiet. The moon had climbed higher through the window, and the river beyond the compound wall was a low, even sound.
He lay on the bed for a moment, letting the last of the dream current drain out of him, and he went over the conversation the way he always did, turning each exchange over to see where the seams were.
'She said yes too quickly,' he thought. 'She wants the road to be real. If the Vein answers the blood even for a second, I will know.'
He sat up, reached for the earth at the foot of his bed, and felt for the answering pressure far away, the traveller moving through sand and the small slug carried with it, on its way to the desert where a road would need to be laid.
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You guys can support me at my ptreon.com/kaoski (˵◝ ⩊ ◜˵マ Chapter 120 out there, plus various original one-shot stories. Exams over btw! Hehehehehehehe!