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I gave him my fiercest scowl, but I couldn’t fight the twitch nagging at my lips. “How can you make light of this?”
Takkan set my jacket on the bridge railing. “I make light because I don’t care what others think of you or of us. Even if they never learn the truth, it matters not to me.
“There will be many trials and misunderstandings in our future, Shiori. We’re bound to quarrel, and sometimes I may be too angry to run after you. Let alone with you.” He chuckled. “But I have faith that we’ll always laugh together in the end. I have a feeling we’ll laugh about today years from now.”
Years from now. The way he said it made my eyes misty.
Locking my hands with his, I drew him deeper into the gardens, far from the temple, until we found refuge under a forgotten wisteria tree. There, I reached for his comb in my hair and brushed it down to loosen one of the beaded threads dangling against my cheeks.
“What are you doing?” Takkan asked.
“Picking off the beads,” I said, my fingers working deftly. “They’ll have cleared the temple, so we can’t go back. But that doesn’t mean we can’t finish the ceremony.” I combed off the last bead and displayed the bare red thread on my palm. Then, realizing what I’d said, I blushed. “I’d…I’d prefer here, anyway, over that suffocating temple with every gossip in court watching.”
Takkan smiled at my blasphemous language. “Are you sure you want to link your fate to mine?” he questioned. “A lord of the third rank from a wasteland so far north that the sun is but a pebble in the sky?”
My cheeks heated with shame. Those were my words. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Amusement edged his voice. “I know.”
“Takkan…”
“Your brothers warned me that a lifetime with you would mean plenty of jabs to my pride. But my love for you is far greater than pride, Shiori. Far greater than anything.” He tilted his head and held me in a tender gaze. “Now, what did you say about finishing the ceremony?”
It was the profoundest magic how Takkan could cast away all the darkness that plagued my mind. How he turned the shame heating my cheeks into joy, and how that joy radiated across my body, seeping from pore and hair until I could have rivaled the sun with my brightness. Even my insides were beaming.
I unwound the red thread in my hand and met his eyes. “Surround yourself with those who’ll love you always,” I began, “through your mistakes and your faults. Make a family that will find you more beautiful every day, even when your hair is white with age. Be the light that makes someone’s lantern shine.”
Those had been Raikama’s words to me—a last wish for my happiness.
With great care, I started wrapping the thread around his wrist. “This is how Imurinya bound herself to the hunter so they could journey to the moon together—did you know?”
A foolish question. Of course he knew—Takkan was a scholar of tales.
I wound the thread around him once, twice, thrice. “I bind you to me, Bushi’an Takkan. Not because my father or my stepmother or my country asks me to do so, but because I wish to do so. I would always choose you. You are the light that makes my lantern shine.”
I tied a knot. Then Takkan took up the thread, knotting the other end around my wrist.
“I bind you to me, Shiori’anma,” he said. “Let our strands be ever knotted as we weather joy and sorrow, fortune and misfortune, and pass our years from youth to old age. We are of one heart, honor-bound, and one spirit, whether on earth or in heaven. From now until ten thousand years forth.”
I tipped his chin toward me. “And now, don’t you have a promise to keep?”
With one step, he obliterated the gap between us, and then his lips fell on mine in a kiss. Not a quick, shy peck on the cheek or forehead, like he’d given in the past. Not even the tender kiss he’d placed on my nose just last night. A real kiss, of lips to lips and breath to breath, that made my knees knock together and the world sway—just as I knew it would.
I rose to my toes unconsciously as Takkan pulled me close, our arms entangled and fingers intertwined—still tied together from the ceremony. We kissed again and again, until we were drunk on each other and our toes had left deep imprints in the earth and purple wisteria petals crowned every inch of our heads.
“Your fate is bound to mine now,” I whispered, my lips against his. “Your heart is my own, and where you are is my home. Whatever we face, we face it together.”
“Together,” he echoed firmly. “Always.”
Takkan was the end of my string. No matter how far my kite wandered, it would always find its way back to him. And though the impossible still awaited us, my heart rested a little easier knowing he would never let go.
Regardless of how I wished it, Takkan and I couldn’t hide in the gardens forever. Sooner or later we had to face the palace. For once, I chose to go first—and Takkan went to look for Gen, who still hadn’t sent word from the mountains.
There you are! Kiki said, flittering over my head as I emerged onto the garden pathways. Your brothers are waiting for you in the Dragonfly Court. They’ve prepared an explanation that— Shiori! That’s the wrong way! Where are you going?
“To see my father.”
Isn’t he angry with you?
