Opening Terms

These are the final terms of the Imperial Envoy, Miya Misato. Let us see if we cannot improve upon this, shall we?

They built a tent city in the grounds of a shrine and put the negotiating tent in the middle of it, and Doji Setsuna opened the proceedings by reading out a document designed to be unacceptable to everybody in the room.

She wrote it deliberately badly. The null hypothesis — what the parties get if they cannot better it — and she made it something neither of them could stomach. Shinjo Altansarnai completes and consummates the marriage. The Lion withdraw from every foot of Unicorn ground they hold and pay damages for what they did to it. And the peace stands until one of them personally petitions the Emperor for leave to fight again. Then she attached the late envoy's name to it, because it is the sort of thing she and Miya Misato would have worked on together, and because a dead woman's final terms are harder to be rude about.

The point of it is that everyone hates it, and therefore everyone would rather write something else.

Kakita Kazumi, meanwhile, put a rumour into the camps: that the Lion arranged this marriage while Ikoma Anakazu was still married. Which is true, and which is the one thing the Lion cannot afford said out loud. He also picked one up going the other way, and declined to do anything about it — that Shiba Midori is conducting a three-way affair with Akodo Akihito and his prisoner Shinjo Miharu — which is now circulating through both camps about the woman who is negotiating against him.

Doji Setsuna asked, formally and courteously, that Shinjo Miharu be released to attend. The answer came back in Akodo Akihito's own hand, immaculately polite: the disposition of any Unicorn hostages will be determined through the course of negotiations. Which is no, written beautifully.

She also did something to herself before she walked in. To every person in that tent except Shiba Midori, she made herself legible as something she is not: an opportunist using Miya Misato's death to climb — angling for the dead woman's office, needing this result for her own advancement rather than for the Empire or either clan. Anyone who tries to read what she actually wants will find that instead, and will have to work very hard indeed to get past it.

The delegations were fixed at four a side. Swords were surrendered at the door and laid out on a table; she greeted every delegate herself as they came in. Token hostages were exchanged in the old form — not from the negotiators but from the people waiting outside, each side sending one across to sit with the other. The Lion offered Matsu Yunko, Akodo Akihito's own former yojimbo. The Unicorn offered a young woman of the Ide. Nobody consequential, and the formality honoured on both sides.

Then the seating, which is the whole architecture of the thing. Shiba Midori and Akodo Akihito flanking Doji Setsuna — the two negotiators, and the lowest in standing of their own delegations. Behind and slightly above each of them, at a deliberate remove, the people who actually decide: Akodo Kage for the Lion, and for the Unicorn a young Shinjo who looks more than a little like Shinjo Altansarnai. Ikoma Ujiaki and a Matsu filled out the Lion side; Ide Subane and a Moto the Unicorn. And Kakita Kazumi sat behind Doji Setsuna as her yojimbo, because the man who holds that office is somewhere in the western desert.

Neither Champion was in the room. That is the point: if Akodo Toturi or Shinjo Altansarnai sat down in person, nobody present would outrank them and only the Emperor could arbitrate.

The gifts were the first real exchange. The Lion gave one of the earliest official copies of the history of the Battle of the Snow Plains, dedicated, copied and restored — may this help in correcting some of the errors in our mutual history. Which is a courtesy and an insult in the same object, and which Akodo Akihito had sent for from the Castle of the Swift Sword because he wanted to read the whole story. Asking whether the copy is true would be calling the Lion liars in their own gift, so nobody asked.

The Unicorn answered with a history of the diamond mine the Snow Plains was fought over — its ownership, its passing back and forth, the Imperial hand in it. Deliberately, magnificently dull. Akodo Kage knew exactly what was being done and took it with good grace.

Then Doji Setsuna read the envoy's terms out in full, put the document down, turned to Akodo Akihito, and said: let us see if we cannot improve upon this, shall we?

The Lion talked for half an hour. They want to be recompensed with a suitable number of marriages out of the Unicorn to seal the peace — they no longer require the original match. They want the territorial concessions the marriage would have brought them, and more: villages and positions across the river in Ide and Iuchi country, all of which the Lion currently occupy. They want the Unicorn to acknowledge fault and apologise formally for the insult. They want an indemnity paid for the return of the ground they are sitting on. They want horses counted toward it. And then a litany of historical grievances going back generations, each with its own unrendered apology. The hostages, they added, will be dealt with separately, and whatever is paid for them does not count against the indemnity.

The Unicorn want the status quo back, and compensation for what was done to get away from it, and the injustices corrected — including the one done to Shiba Midori's own clanswoman. She went through the families one at a time, what was taken and what was ruined, and pressed for the immediate return of every hostage without ransom and every horse. And when she came to Asako Ikari — a woman whose marriage was declared not to exist so that a more useful one could be made, and who was treated as less than baggage in the doing of it — she let her anger show, which few people in the Empire have ever seen her do.

Nobody on the Lion side was surprised by any of it. They have known all along. But as the wrong was set out item by item, Akodo Akihito twitched.

Ikoma Ujiaki objected, and objected well. The Lion took military objectives only; no lasting harm was done to roads, fields or villages; the fortresses they hold are in good repair and the only works they razed were ones they chose not to keep. And then the real move: it is improper for one delegate to represent two clans, and the Phoenix question should be severed to some other venue entirely.

Doji Setsuna split it in half.

The objection is noted. But the facts about the Phoenix wife bear directly on what justice between the Lion and the Unicorn looks like, and they will be heard. Whether Shiba Midori may also speak for the Phoenix is a separate question and is reserved; until it is settled she is here strictly as the Unicorn's representative. She got Shiba Midori to state on the record that she was claiming both before she ruled on either.

She also put a courtesy over Shiba Midori as she did it — so that anyone in that tent who moves against her by scheme loses honour for it in front of everyone.

Two things were read across the table. Shiba Midori found Akodo Akihito's giri and it is exactly what it appears to be: he serves Akodo Toturi however he is told to, but what he believes he is for is commanding men in the field. And Akodo Akihito, for his part, appealed to Doji Setsuna to have the Lion position seen as reasonable — and she read him as meaning it. He is not trying to get anything past her.

Far to the west, Bayushi Monban went back over the wall of Khanbulak the same night, having failed to get his sword back. He stopped first at Yasuki Taru's compound and stood at the gate in the dark looking like something the desert had spat out, and gave the guards back every coin she had lent him — he no longer needs it for what it was lent for, and would rather she had it. They tried to refuse on her behalf. He insisted, and asked only for water. They took the money, took the skins off their own belts, and gave them to him, and told him to mind the sand demons. He left a message: your Scorpion friend will repay your kindness, and when I make my way to the Wall I will fight in your name.

Then out over the wall, invisible, with the fox, and east across the desert on almost nothing — because his badge is at the river, and he wants it back.

He reached the river and found it wrong. It is running low in its banks, with dry ground where water should be. The trees along it are browning months early, half of them still green and half not. The air is heavy and wet where the desert behind him was clean and dry. And the fox — who was here before — says there were far more bird and beast spirits along this water then, and that the nymphs were playing in it, and that they are not here now.

There is an imbalance in this place. And the fox says it is not only this place: all over Rokugan the spirits are being disturbed by something.

The lady's court is upriver, at the spring where the water starts.

Setsuna

She opened by handing everyone something they could not accept, on purpose, in a dead woman's name. The null hypothesis is the best procedural instrument she has built: it converts whether to negotiate into how much better than this can we do, and it makes refusing to bargain the worst available outcome for both of them. Putting Miya Misato's name on it does two things at once — it gives the document an authority neither clan can insult, and it makes the envoy's death a thing that still binds people. That is either the most useful thing she could have done with it, or the most cynical, and she should not pretend to herself that it is only the first.

She has made herself legible as a careerist, and that is a weapon with a handle at both ends. Everyone in that tent except Shiba Midori now reads her as someone using this to climb into the dead envoy's office. It is excellent cover — nobody looking at a grasping opportunist thinks to look for a woman assembling a settlement three seasons out. It also means that when she rules against the Lion, they will read it as ambition rather than judgement, and the story she has planted about herself is the exact story somebody would tell to discredit her. She has pre-loaded her own smear.

The ruling on the Phoenix was the right one and she should hold the line she drew. Facts in, standing reserved. Ikoma Ujiaki tried to move the whole Asako Ikari question out of the room, and if he had succeeded the case would have gone back to being two clans arguing about a border. Instead the wrong is admissible and the advocacy is undecided, which keeps the pressure on the Lion without letting Shiba Midori be accused of wearing two clans' colours at once. Getting her to claim both on the record before ruling was the necessary half of it — now the question is defined and hers to decide when it suits.

Nobody on the Lion bench was surprised. Not one of them. They have all known what was done to Asako Ikari and have sat with it, which means the Lion's objection is not that it is untrue but that it is being said. Akodo Akihito twitched, which is the only honest reaction in the room, and he is the one they put in the chair.

And Akodo Akihito believes his own case. She read him and there is nothing under it — he thinks the Lion position is reasonable and wants her to see it that way. That makes him the wrong man to break and the right man to persuade, and it means every concession she extracts from him has to be one he can carry back to Akodo Kage and defend as sensible. He is not her opponent in that tent. Akodo Kage is, sitting above and behind him and saying nothing at all.

A word about the gift. They handed the arbiter the history of the Battle of the Snow Plains — the field she watched through Matsu Morozane's eyes, and lived. She cannot say so. She cannot check it against what she remembers without explaining how she remembers it, and she cannot question the copy without calling the Lion liars in the same breath as thanking them. It is the most uncomfortable object in the tent and it was handed to her wrapped in courtesy.

And Kakita Kazumi has put the true thing into circulation — that the groom was married when he was offered — while a false thing circulates about her own negotiator. She did not order the first and cannot stop the second. Both of them will reach this table before the week is out, and she is the one who has to decide what a rumour is worth when it happens to be true.

Somewhere west of all this, the rivers are running low and the spirits are leaving them. Matsu Tomoe told Shiba Midori that the Lion believe the Phoenix are turning the elements against them and that their shugenja are working to prove it. Something is wrong with the water, and there is a clan already looking for someone to blame for it.