The Stone in the Shoe

Someone can slap you in the face and you could be drinking with them that night — but it is the stone in your shoe you can never forgive.

Doji Setsuna woke without a fever for the first time in a week, was made whole by Shiba Midori, and spent the rest of the day walking the Lion camp undoing the damage done while she slept — and finished it standing in the Lion Champion's war tent putting Toshi Ranbo on the table.

Kitsuko Ayoko said she looked much better. She was right. What was left of the fever's damage Doji Setsuna cleared herself, and what she could not, Shiba Midori took off her. She is completely well for the first time in months.

The three magistrates still standing conferred. As the nearest thing to an Imperial envoy left alive, they set the terms and name the names, though each clan picks its own delegation — and if the clans are left to set the pace they will talk until winter. So: not a peace, a truce. Something that holds until Winter Court, which satisfies what the Emperor demanded, and then the real settlement done at Winter Court, at what will very likely be a Crane house, where Doji Setsuna says she has cards. Meanwhile use these talks to find out what each side is actually aggrieved about rather than what it says in the documents.

The advocacy plan had to be rebuilt around the duel. Kakita Kazumi cannot face the Lion now. Shiba Midori can — she is Akodo Akihito's physician and friend, and conspicuously not the person who took his eye — with Doji Setsuna fronting as arbiter. And Shiba Midori put a finger on the hole in all of it: nobody has ever established why Shinjo Altansarnai actually refused the marriage. That is the thing that started the war and no one has asked.

Then Doji Setsuna and Shiba Midori called on Akodo Akihito, who was doing paperwork under an embroidered eyepatch, attended by his man Shun, with Shinjo Miharu sitting quietly by the tent flap — a Unicorn hostage, and an old acquaintance.

He expects not to be chosen as the Lion's delegate. Last time I was deliberately sent to fail. Doji Setsuna turned that over and handed it back sharper: both times he has tried to win against Kakita Kazumi he has lost, and the one time he was sent to fail — at Otosan Uchi — he succeeded. So let the Lion send him to fail again. He was uncomfortable with it. I have built my reputation on fulfilling expectations, not upsetting them.

He then began feeling for how much she knew about the last Crane treaty — the business none of them may discuss — with Shinjo Miharu in the room. Shiba Midori does not know Cadence. She improvised: fan, posture, and a performance loud enough to say she is not cleared for this without saying anything. Shinjo Miharu gave her an odd look and Shun put his face in his hand, but Akodo Akihito took the point and turned smoothly to vagueness about having had a favourable mediator.

And he gave her a name she did not have. Ikoma Anakazu — the man Shinjo Altansarnai was to have married. The issue of Ikoma Anakazu's broken betrothal would be better resolved through negotiation than violence.

So she went and remembered what she could about him, and it opened the floor out. He is the Ikoma daimyō. He was already married. He was made to divorce his wife to clear the way for the match, and then the bride refused him — humiliated twice over, once by his own clan and once by hers. And the wife who was put aside for nothing has a name: Asako Ikari of the Phoenix, called Ikoma Akari while she was married. A divorce in Rokugan is social death. Nobody has offered her, or the Phoenix, anything at all.

Doji Setsuna put the name to Akodo Akihito and got a raised eyebrow for it. The Lion know who their daimyō was married to. They do not know the rest.

Then she gave him the shape of the settlement. The Unicorn have insulted the Lion. The Lion have insulted the Phoenix. The Unicorn will pay recompense through the Lion to the Phoenix.

He conceded it, and conceded the harder half with it — that Ikoma Anakazu, the man who should have defended his bride's honour, was the one who did her the injury, and that the woman who was set aside is owed a debt of honour too.

He offered to present them to his lord, and went to be armoured — arranging, on the way out, for the women to walk Shinjo Miharu out of the tent and have her to themselves.

Shinjo Miharu half-recognised her: her family were at Doji Setsuna's wedding, and she is Shinjo Harunobu's cousin. She wants this war finished so she can go home. She is blunt, and knows it. She surrendered to Akodo Akihito because she believed he would do right by her, and so far he has — and there is something between them she did not deny when it was raised. If I were to go and he were to pursue me, it would not be objected to. Shiba Midori nearly let slip that a match had once been floated between her and Kakita Kazumi, and that Shinjo Miharu had beaten him bloody in the rain with broken practice weapons instead. Doji Setsuna's advice, woman to woman, was that if she did not want to marry Akodo Akihito she should make sure he never heard that story.

She is also certain Kakita Kazumi cheated somehow. She fought him herself once, after he killed a dozen of her people and nearly broke her unit, and she knows he never fully healed from it.

And she gave them Akodo Toturi. Reasonable. Comes at things from angles nobody expects, which is probably why he and Akodo Akihito get on. He was a monk before his elder brother died and he was recalled to lead the family. One of the youngest ever admitted to the Akodo War College and undefeated in every battle he commanded in his first year. He has taken Akodo Akihito into his confidence. And both of them care very much what Akodo Kage thinks.

They were left waiting outside the war tent long enough to be seen waiting and not long enough to insult the Emperor's arbiters, and then admitted. Three men over a map: Akodo Toturi, Akodo Kage, and the Champion's right hand. All three rose and bowed.

Akodo Toturi is startlingly young — barely older than they are — measured, precise, courtly in his diction, and softer-voiced than a man in that armour has any business being.

She gave him her gift: Shinjo Harunobu's court clothes, carried all the way from the capital, offered with the double edge that he might either complete her husband's captivity with them or send them on, as he saw fit.

He said he would send them on. Because two weeks ago he had Shinjo Harunobu conveyed under safe conduct to the Castle of the Swift Sword — on a plea from the Lady Kitsu that he could not ignore, made on behalf of a worried wife. He had fought well, had not fallen, was recovered, and his wounds were tended.

This is unexpected and wonderful news. And then, in front of Akodo Kage and the hatamoto: it seems I am in your debt.

She laid out the negotiation. The Lion and the Unicorn, and — she added deliberately — the Phoenix, who are not unaffected. She wants a holistic answer, at least to the immediate causes. He was measured about it: if she acts consistently in that direction and makes a peace that satisfies everyone's honour, that will be sufficient — for me at least. And, candidly, given the ill will generated in his camp this week: you have quite a challenge before you. One that may make your reputation.

So she told him what she actually believes. Someone can slap you in the face and you could be drinking with them that night — but it is the stone in your shoe you can never forgive. People overestimate the insurmountable thing and underestimate the small cut that never healed. She wants every side to name what is truly troubling it and have it met, so that the small things do not wreck the large one. And the Emperor asked for peace, not permanence — it need only hold until Winter Court, where a far more interesting set of possibilities can be discussed.

And then, as the close of her own pitch, she said that Toshi Ranbo itself could be on the table at Winter Court if this peace is brokered.

Every mask in that tent came off at once — an unguarded what? from the Lion command — before they were put back on.

Setsuna

The compensation chain is the best thing she has built in this campaign. The Unicorn pay the Phoenix through the Lion. The Unicorn get to pay somebody who is not the Lion, which they can swallow. The Lion get to be the honourable conduit instead of the supplicant, which restores face without anyone kneeling. And the Phoenix — invisible in this until this morning — become a party whose satisfaction both belligerents can take credit for. She sold it twice in one day, to the likely Lion delegate and then to the Lion Champion, and neither of them objected, before the Unicorn have even arrived.

The debt to Akodo Toturi is owed by the wife and not by the magistrate, and she must keep it there. He freed Shinjo Harunobu two weeks ago, unasked, on somebody else's plea, and she said I am in your debt out loud in front of his sensei. In Rokugan the office is not the person. A wife's giri toward the man who spared her husband is a private matter and touches nothing on the bench — and if the Scorpion or the Unicorn later say the arbiter is in the Lion's debt, the answer is already built. The only thing that could unseal it is her repaying it with something official. Repay it personally or not at all.

And what actually moved her husband was, again, obligation. Kitsu Takeko asked Akodo Toturi and he did it. Not the writ, not the badge, not thirty-odd sessions of Imperial authority — a Lady of the Kitsu making a heartfelt plea to a young man who used to be a monk. She wrote that lesson down twenty sessions ago and it has just proved itself again.

Asako Ikari is the stone in this shoe and nobody has even looked at it. A woman was divorced for a marriage that never happened and no one has offered her a thing. That is precisely the injury her own doctrine says wrecks settlements — small, unglamorous, unaddressed, and carried by somebody with no army. Shiba Midori is the only Phoenix on this field, which makes her the natural channel and also makes her partial. That needs naming before somebody else names it.

And she still does not know why Shinjo Altansarnai refused. Shiba Midori is right that it is the detonator and right that nobody has been near it. The Champion herself arrives in a day or two. Shinjo Miharu is blunt, friendly, wants the war over, and is a Shinjo. The asking should happen before the delegations sit down, not after.

Then Toshi Ranbo. She said it herself, unprompted, as the last line of her own pitch, in the Lion Champion's war tent, and watched every mask in the room come off. She conceded nothing — she made the Lion aware that the Crane's most contested claim is a live variable and that she is the one who raised it, and planted that months before Winter Court so it works on their arithmetic all season. The broken masks were the point.

Two things about it are true at once and she should hold both. She has no authority from the Doji to bargain that city, which makes the lever partly a bluff — and its whole value is the Lion not knowing whether she can deliver. So: do not clarify, do not repeat it, and deflect rather than confirm if they press. The other truth is that Akodo Toturi and Akodo Kage both now remember exactly who raised it, and can quote her at Winter Court. She has handed them a sentence.

And the man who called Kakita Kazumi a liar was standing in that tent the whole time, saying nothing, being deferred to by a Champion and a hero. Akodo Kage is the unfinished business in this camp, and she has not spoken a word to him yet.