The Winds of Tepr

From the street, the safehouse is just another sagging shell in Bo'anem's slump district: windows bricked in, door warped, roofline listing toward the harbor like a drunk at closing time. Inside, the air smells of old fish, printer's ink and the stubborn ghost of dye that never quite left the beams. Once it was a workshop where someone tried to make honest coin tinting cloth. Now it is where the revolution hides what it cannot afford to lose.

Tonight, that is Hanae and a half-dead prince.

Yotaka lies on a narrow pallet, swaddled in scratchy blankets that used to be banners. His face is a patchwork of bruises and grey dust; his lips are split and white at the edges. Hanae has washed most of the blood from his hair, but the effort stops at "no longer horrifying." His wrists are wrapped in rags where the shackles gnawed his skin. Every few breaths his body shudders, as if the cell walls are still coming down on him.

Hanae crouches beside him with a chipped cup in her hands. The cup trembles, but not from the water.

"Slow," she says, as he tries to gulp. Her voice is brisk, almost scolding. "You drink like that, you'll choke and I'll have to tell Aram I killed you."

He wheezes on a cough anyway, water spilling down his chin. A rebel hovering near the door—skinny, soot-streaked, still half in his scaffolding harness—snorts.

"Could put it as a footnote on your wanted poster," he mutters. " 'Also responsible for regicide.' "

"Out," Hanae says without even looking up.

The rebel vanishes. People learn quickly when she uses that tone.

She wipes Yotaka's mouth with the least filthy corner of a bandage. Her fingers are deft, practical. They are also shaking hard enough that the linen sticks to his chin before she remembers to let go.

He blinks at her, pupils still enormous in the lamplight. "You're… Mitsue Hanae... The singer..."

"Mm," she says. "And you're currently a liability lying on my blanket. Try not to die. It's unsanitary."

A ghost of a smile twitches at the corner of his mouth. It looks like it hurts him. "I'll… do my best."

She pretends her chest doesn't squeeze at that.

Days fold into each other in the slump, measured not by sun or bells—martial law has made both unreliable—but by small, stubborn rituals. In the mornings, someone grinds tea. At noon, a runner comes with rumors and rice. At night, Hanae counts heads and weapons and makes sure she has the right number of each.

Somewhere in that mess of hours, Yotaka starts to live.

He sleeps for nearly a full day at first, surfacing only long enough to choke down water and broth. When he wakes for real, the room is empty except for Hanae, bent over a low table, scribbling notes by lamplight. The lamp burns tallow that smells like it lost a fight with a goat.

He shifts. The pallet creaks. She does not look up.

"I need you to be one of three things," she says, pen scratching. "Quiet, useful, or gone. I'm fond of 'useful.' It's rare."

"I can be quiet," he offers.

She looks up then. His hair is clean now, roughly hacked to remove burned ends, sticking up in all directions like a hedge after a storm. She has found him clothes that almost fit—plain worker's tunic, patched at the knee. He clutches the blanket around his shoulders with one hand, but his back is straight.

"You're royalty," Hanae says. "Your natural state is the opposite of quiet."

"I'm very good at hiding," he replies, with a seriousness that doesn't belong on a face that young. "I've had practice."

Something in her expression flickers. She goes back to her notes.

"Congratulations," she says. "The republic made you a valuable skill set."

He watches her write for a moment. Her script is quick and angular, letters like blades. On the table beside her lies the splintered bridge of a shamisen, polished by the worry of her thumb. His eyes linger there.

"I heard you," he says, softly. "In the square. Before they… before everything. My nurse said you sounded like the tide."

"That's very poetic," Hanae says. "Remind me to hire your nurse for slogans."

He smiles again, a little steadier. "She's dead."

Hanae's pen stills. A beat of silence stretches out, taut as a wire. Then she nods once and goes back to scratching.

"Then you'll have to write your own lines," she says.

...

He tries. He can't lift heavy crates yet, but he can fold leaflets, grind ink, listen. The safehouse begins to rearrange itself around the fact of him.

He thanks people when they bring food. He learns their names: Jorin with the missing teeth and the laugh that always sounds surprised; Mapo, who used to be a dockhand and now dreams explosives in his sleep; little Rui, who should be in school, not learning the difference between good hiding places and bad ones. Yotaka listens when they talk about food shortages, patrol routes, disappearing neighbors. He never says "But in the palace—" He never says "We had—"

He says, instead, "That sounds hard," in a way that actually means it.

Hanae notices. She tries not to.

At night, when the safehouse settles into uneasy rest, grief seeps through the cracks in her discipline. She lies awake on her own pallet, staring at the water-stained ceiling, fingers wrapped around the useless shamisen fragment until the wood cuts her palm. In the next room, Yotaka shifts and mutters. Sometimes he cries out in his sleep, words garbled, but the tone unmistakeable: the particular helpless terror of someone who has watched a parent die in public.

On the fourth night, she hears him gasping and finds him sitting upright, eyes wild, clawing at his throat.

"Hey," she says sharply, hand to his shoulder. "You're here. Not there. Breathe."

He blinks at her, chest heaving. "They— the sword— my mother—"

"I know," Hanae says.

He stares at her. The lamp behind her throws her face into lines: tired, hard, younger than she feels. The grief in her eyes is a different shape from his, but they recognize each other across the distance.

"You lost someone too," he whispers.

"Sleep," she says, ignoring the land mine of that. "We can both fail to process our trauma later. I'll put it on the schedule."

"Is there… actually a schedule?" he asks, dazed.

"Of course there's a schedule," Hanae says. "What kind of anarchist do you think I am?"

He huffs a small, incredulous laugh. It's not much, but it's the first sound he makes that isn't soaked in fear.

...

The city tightens around them like a noose.

Patrols double, then triple. Curfews creep earlier each day, spilling backward from midnight toward dusk. Loud proclamations rattle through the streets: about martial law, about terrorists, about the tragic assassination of Comrade Shin Aram. Hanae hears her lover's name wrapped in mourning silk and weaponized in the same breath, and has to leave the room before she puts a knife through the nearest wall.

In the safehouse, they light fewer lamps. Voices drop without anyone deciding they should.

On a night when the fog rolls in from the sea in thick, clammy strands, Hanae finally sits down opposite Yotaka and says, "Tell me."

They are at the low table again. The lamp between them paints their faces in unreliable gold. Outside, a patrol's boots clatter past, accompanied by the sharp bark of a sergeant's orders and the softer murmur of someone complaining about the damp.

"Tell you… what?" Yotaka asks.

"What happened after they killed your parents," Hanae says. "From the square to that cell."

He looks at the lamp's flame for a long moment. The light wavers, struggling against the fog-slick draft sneaking under the door.

"You don't have to—" she begins, but he shakes his head.

"No. You risked… everything. For me. I think—I think I owe you the story, at least."

She snorts. "You owe me a city, a navy, and a logistics miracle, but a story is a start."

He takes a breath.

"I remember," he begins slowly, "the square being too bright. The banners, the ropes— I remember thinking they had built a stage for a play and then realizing the play was real."

His voice does not break. It thins, but it holds.

He tells her about his father standing straight at the scaffold, about Miju's voice reading charges like a shopping list, about his mother's hands as they were tied.

"I thought they would banish us," he says. "Or send us to a monastery. That's what happened in the stories. Princes go study with monks. They don't…"

He gestures, a small, helpless movement.

"They put me behind the curtain," he says. "With the servants. So I heard it, instead. The crowd. The… the sound. When the swords fell. It was like…" He searches for the word and fails. "It was loud," he finishes, uselessly.

Hanae's fingers press harder into the shamisen fragment, knuckles whitening. She says nothing.

"After," Yotaka continues, "they told me to be very, very quiet. My nurse and an old guard. They hid me in a laundry cart. They rolled me out through the side gate. We went to a house I didn't know. Not ours. A warehouse, near the docks. I stayed in a cupboard for two days."

He slips into present tense without noticing. The memory is that close.

"Nurse whispers that I mustn't make a sound because the republic is listening. She kisses my head and smells like starch and lemons. The guard says he knows a way. The monarchy is over, but I… I might still be useful to someone, later. Or I might live quietly in some other country. He doesn't seem to know which is more impossible."

Hanae exhales softly through her nose. "Sounds about right."

"They put me on a boat at night," Yotaka says. "Just me. A little skiff with a half-broken sail and a box of biscuits. They pushed it off and told me to keep my head low. If the Moukopl navy found me, they said… they would give me shelter…" He shrugs. "I think they were guessing."

"They sent a child out as a message in a bottle," Hanae says. "That is some advanced royal strategic thinking."

He huffs a tiny laugh that is almost a sob. "The bottle leaked. There was a storm. I ran out of food and water. I spent all days and nights sleeping... Then I woke up in a cabin."

"Pirates," Hanae says.

"Pirates," Yotaka echoes. "Blood Lotus."

He says the name with a peculiar mixture of dread and awe. Hanae's head snaps up.

"Shan Xi?" Her voice comes out sharper than she intends. "You were with Shan Xi's crew?"

He nods. "They were pretty nice."

Hanae can't help it. A short bark of laughter escapes her. "That sounds like her."

Yotaka's face brightens, just a fraction. "You know them?"

"I know of them," Hanae says, which is technically true and dramatically understated. "What were they like?"

He thinks. "Loud," he says finally. "And… chaotic. Shan Xi laughs like she's starting a fire. She swears a lot. They argued about everything. Rope, rum, which god hates them most. But no one ever pushed me. Or shouted at me."

Hanae bites the inside of her cheek to stop herself smiling. She fails. "Good."

"There was one who… took care of me more," Yotaka says. "Lizi."

The name lands between them like a dropped coin.

Hanae stares. "Lizi," she repeats carefully. "Describe her."

"Short," he says at once. "Short hair. Laughs with one side of her mouth. Smells like tar and oranges. She's Shan Xi's second. Shan Xi says she keeps the ship from falling into the sky out of spite alone. She… she was kind. She gave me extra biscuits. Taught me which ropes not to touch unless I wanted to die horribly. She said if I ever became king of anything again, I had to outlaw nobles who didn't know how to tie a bowline."

A quiet, strangled sound escapes Hanae. It might be a laugh, or something close to a sob.

"She sounds terrible," she says.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"She is," Yotaka says fiercely. "I owe her. If she hadn't held on to me when the mast swung, I'd have gone into the sea. She called me 'deadweight' for three days, but… she was shaking."

Hanae's eyes go distant for a heartbeat, as if watching a memory in some other room. When she speaks again, her voice is back to practical.

"Where are they now?" she asks. "The Blood Lotus. They didn't drop you in Bo'anem out of pure civic-mindedness."

Yotaka shifts, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders. "They're near," he says. "In the slump, by the old warehouses, south pier. There wasn't time for subtle. Shan Xi said the city was about to drown in soldiers and idiots, so she might as well be one of the idiots before they arrive."

"Specific," Hanae murmurs. "What are they doing there?"

"Waiting," he says. "For a fleet. Moukopl. There's going to be an invasion. She's struck a deal with Yol—" He fumbles the foreign syllables. "Yohazatz cavalry. Steppe riders on boats. They argue with the sailors all the time about whose horse smells worse. Shan Xi says when the Moukopl ships come, they'll hit Bo'anem from the harbor like a hammer in a bowl."

The safehouse seems to tilt, just slightly, as if the building itself is listening now.

"Yohazatz," Hanae says, tasting the word. Steppe cavalry. Stories of proud warriors and golden coups flicker across her mind. "And Blood Lotus. And a Moukopl invasion."

"Is that… good?" Yotaka asks, cautious.

"It's exciting," Hanae says. "And exciting is very rarely good."

She rises and begins to pace, bare feet silent on the warped boards. Her mind runs ahead, spinning webs: pirates in the slump, riders in the alleys, Miju's tightening grip, Yorin's numbers, Tomoe's ships. Aram's voice, turned into state propaganda. The shamisen fragment digs into her palm, grounding her.

"Did Lizi say anything else?" she asks without looking at him. "Any place. Any person. Any phrasing that sounded like a joke but wasn't."

Yotaka watches her move: a small, controlled storm in a room too low for thunder.

"She said…" He frowns, searching his memory. "She said if the 'Ink Rat' was still alive, she'd sniff her out by the old dye warehouse, the one that smells like rotten seaweed and hope. She told Shan Xi that was where the best trouble started, last time they were here."

Hanae stops dead.

"Ink Rat," she says.

"I didn't understand it," Yotaka says quickly. "I thought maybe it was a ship name. Or a… disease."

Hanae huffs air through her teeth. "It's a very rude name for a person who did absolutely nothing wrong except run twenty illegal presses and blow up a few polite buildings."

She turns. The lamp light catches the edge of her grin. It is sharp and dangerous and, for the first time since the prison, genuinely alive.

"Lizi's talking about you," Yotaka says slowly, realization dawning.

"Mm," Hanae replies. "And about a warehouse I know very well."

She looks toward the wall, toward the harbor and the slump beyond it, as if she can see through plaster and fog to the tangle of alleys where her old life used to run like dye in water.

She knows Lizi will go looking. Lizi will prowl that district like a cat around a familiar door, sniffing for old ink and older friendships. Hanae understands pirates: if you drop a promise and a joke in the same place, they will come back to see if either has exploded yet.

She also understands opportunities that smell like ambushes and salvation at once.

Hanae knows Lizi will try to find her near their old warehouse, so she will try to meet with her there.

...

"Nice. You redecorated."

Yotaka is the first to move.

He is still raw-boned and shaky from the prison, but when Lizi's knees go out and she crumples, he is already crossing the room. The rebels around them freeze for a heartbeat—their brains still catching up with the fact that the pirate who arrived in a trail of blood is now a heap on the floor—before Hanae's voice cuts through.

"Clear the table. Now."

Her tone is the same one she used in the dye-yard when a boiler exploded: sharp enough to skin hesitation. Two people scramble to sweep maps, bowls, and a half-finished leaflet onto the floor. Yotaka and another rebel haul Lizi's limp weight onto the rough planks. Blood spills from under her coat, dark and thick, turning the table into an altar.

Yotaka presses his palm against the wound. Heat and wet explode between his fingers.

"She's shot," he says, stupidly.

"Thank you, Your Observancy." Hanae rips Lizi's coat open with a knife. "Bo'anem produces only the finest bullet wounds."

The hole is ugly: a ragged puncture low on the ribs where the musket ball punched its way in. It bubbles when Lizi breathes. Not deep enough to be certain death, not shallow enough to be ignored.

"We need to get that thing out," Hanae says. "Or push it through. Or something clever involving magic, which we tragically don't have."

Yotaka swallows hard. The smell of fresh blood and old dust presses against his memories: his father's execution, Aram's cell, a hundred whispered stories of torture. His hands want to shake. He refuses to let them.

"In the palace," he says, voice thin but steadying as he speaks, "the surgeons… they use boiled knives. And wine. They say you either die or come out stronger."

Hanae glances at him. For a moment there is something like respect in it, or at least acceptance.

She barks orders: water, fire, cloth, liquor that is technically for morale. The safehouse snaps into motion. A brazier is dragged into the center. Someone pours cheap spirits into a chipped bowl; the fumes are almost strong enough to dislodge the damp from the rafters.

Yotaka holds Lizi's shoulders while Hanae saws cloth into bandages. Lizi groans, lashes flickering, pupils blown wide.

"Don't you dare," Hanae murmurs to her, low enough that only Yotaka hears. "You drag yourself into my city, you don't get to die on my table. That's rude."

Yotaka touches Lizi's cheek with his free hand. Her skin burns under the grime.

"Lizi," he says. "It's Yotaka. Remember?"

Her mouth twitches.

"Too… heavy… to throw overboard," she slurs.

"Good," Hanae says. "She's still herself. Hold her."

The knife comes out of the coals glowing faintly, steam hissing where water clings. Hanae douses it with liquor, and for a heartbeat the blade is a clean, bright thing.

"Last chance to confess anything," Hanae tells Lizi. "I'm about to go diving for souvenirs in your side."

Lizi manages to bare her teeth. "If you kill me I will haunt your bathhouse."

"You assume I still have a bathhouse," Hanae says. "On three. One—"

She does not count to three.

The knife goes in.

Lizi's scream is a raw, animal thing that rips through the room and out into the alley, where it curls on itself like smoke. Yotaka pins her shoulders as she bucks, his own eyes squeezed shut, jaw clenched so hard it hurts.

Hanae works quickly, face carved from stone. The blade probes, seeking metal. Blood wells, slicking her fingers. She has been this close to death before, has rolled bandages for others, but cutting into Lizi is different. Something heavy sits behind her ribs, pressing outward with every heartbeat.

"Come on," she mutters, as if talking to a stubborn knot. "You didn't come all this way to lodge in my friend's organs."

She feels it then, a small, horrible scrape against steel. She hooks carefully, draws back. A flattened bit of lead slides out, glistening with red.

Lizi's body slackens, sweat pouring off her like rain.

"Got you," Hanae breathes.

Yotaka reaches for the liquor. Hanae douses the wound. Lizi screams again, hoarse and breaking, then falls into a shuddering quiet, breath sawing in and out.

"Bandage," Hanae snaps. Yotaka passes cloth. Their hands move in tandem now: she packs and wraps, he lifts and holds. The two of them work as if they have done this together for years.

When they are done, Lizi lies bound in a cocoon of stained linen, side swaddled tight. Her skin is ashy, lips pale, but her pulse under Hanae's fingers is beating like an angry drum.

"She needs rest," Yotaka says softly.

"Lucky her," Hanae replies. She straightens, smearing blood across her own tunic, and looks around at the circle of watching faces. "Back to work," she says. "The revolution does not pause because one idiot pirate tried to solo a battalion."

The room exhales. People move. Maps are lifted from the floor, the brazier pushed back. Someone brings a thin blanket to cover Lizi's legs. Yotaka stays by the table until Hanae nudges him toward a pallet.

"Sleep," she orders.

"I can watch her," he protests.

"You can fall over and add to my collection of idiots on the floor," Hanae says.

He almost smiles at that.

Then he lies down on the pallet opposite Lizi and, despite the pounding of his heart and the metallic taste of fear, sleep takes him like a wave.

...

Morning in the safehouse is a soft, grey sort of light, filtering through gaps in boarded windows. The fog outside presses its nose against the cracks, curious but held back. Inside, the world shrinks to the smell of porridge, the scrape of spoons, the low murmur of tired voices.

Lizi wakes up to the sensation of not moving, which is wrong. Her usual mornings involve swinging hammocks, creaking masts, the slap of waves or at least the rhythm of a ship's pulse. Here, everything is too still. Her ribs send up a protest when she tries to sit; pain spears through her side, sharp enough to make her hiss.

"Careful," a young voice says. "You've already bled on that shirt once. I don't think we have a spare."

She turns her head.

At the low table, Hanae and Yotaka sit opposite each other, bowls in hand. Hanae's hair is tied back messily, dark smudges under her eyes; Yotaka's is sticking up in improbable directions. Between them sits a dented pot of porridge and a plate with exactly three pickled radishes arranged like a solemn offering.

Lizi blinks. For a heartbeat, the image is so domestic it hurts. It looks like a scene in a story: exhausted parents, sullen child, breakfast before another day of the world ending.

Yotaka notices her staring and straightens, almost spilling his porridge.

"She's awake," he says, as if announcing festival fireworks.

"Very observant," Hanae replies. "The way her eyes are open was a subtle clue."

Lizi clears her throat. "If this is the afterlife, it's disappointing. I expected more fruit."

Hanae snorts. "You get gruel and radish. You're welcome. Dead people don't complain about menu options."

She stands, grabs the pot, and limps over. Lizi sees the bandage on Hanae's forearm now, the stiffness in her shoulder. It does something unpleasant in her chest.

"How do you feel?" Hanae asks, ladling porridge into a cracked bowl.

"Like I lost a bar fight with a cannon," Lizi says. "Did anyone catch the name of the musket that hit me? I'd like to send it a fruit basket."

"You can send it the piece of lead we dug out of your side," Hanae says. "As a memento."

She hands her the bowl. The porridge is thin, more water than grain, but it is warm, and the steam smells faintly of roasted barley. Lizi's stomach growls loudly.

Yotaka appears at her other side with a spoon. "Here," he says. "I washed it."

"Treason," Lizi mutters. "Royalty doing dishes."

"I was never good at being royal," Yotaka says. "I keep doing things myself."

Lizi glances between them, between the careful way Hanae supports her back with one hand and the earnest way Yotaka hovers, spoon at the ready. Something tender and dangerous curls under her ribs, close to the wound.

"It's almost sweet," she says, forcing her voice light. "You two. I feel like I've stumbled into some strange domestic play. Mother, father, and their adopted, morally compromised aunt."

Yotaka flushes. "I am not the child."

"You're the only one here who apologizes when he swears," Lizi points out. "That makes you the child."

Hanae raises an eyebrow. "In that case, you're the embarrassing relative who drinks too much and tells everyone how she used to be pretty."

"I am still pretty," Lizi protests. "You should see me when I'm not ventilated."

Hanae's mouth flickers. Yotaka can't help it; he laughs, a short, surprised sound.

For a few breaths, the room softens. They eat. Yotaka tells a story about trying to convince a palace cook to use less salt; Hanae counters with the time she accidentally used gunpowder instead of flour. Lizi interjects with tales of Shan Xi's culinary crimes, concluding that pirates should never be left alone with soup.

The jokes pile up like sandbags against the outside world.

Lizi feels it: the shape of something that could almost be a future, ridiculous and impossible. Hanae's quick, dry wit. Yotaka's careful kindness. Her own irreverence slotting into the gaps like a bad patch on a torn sail. A crooked little trio held together with bandages and sarcasm.

It feels, dangerously, like a real family.

Which is, of course, when her brain chooses to remind her that she once walked away from Hanae without looking back, and that Hanae loved—and loves—someone who is not in this room.

The awareness cuts through the warmth like a cold wind through paper walls.

"So," Lizi says too brightly, setting down her spoon. "This is all very charming. Truly. We should rent a cottage and raise chickens. It would be even funnier with Aram here, though."

The name drops into the air like a stone into still water. The ripples are immediate.

Hanae's hand stiffens around her bowl. Yotaka's smile fades, uncertainty clouding his features. The safehouse noise beyond their corner of the room—murmured plans, the scrape of boots—seems to recede.

Lizi realizes, too late, that there has been a Hanae-shaped silence around that name since she woke. No songs hummed under breath, no casual reference to "when Aram sees this." The absence of Aram has been a shout. Lizi simply refused to hear it.

She tries to laugh it off, fails.

"Where is she, anyway?" Lizi asks, softer now. "Busy rallying the crowds, I imagine. Or making your speeches sound less like laundry lists. She always—"

"She's dead," Hanae says.

The words are flat, unornamented. They carve the air.

Lizi stares. "That's… not a funny joke."

"It's not a joke." Hanae sets her bowl down with care, as if it might explode. Her fingers are very steady. Her eyes are not. "The Baekjon-kai took her. The new Triumvirate decided the revolution needed a martyr on a leash, so they made one."

Baek Miju. Kagawa Tomoe. Seo Yorin. The names are knives; Hanae says them like incantations of spite.

"They arrested her," Hanae continues. "Locked her in a hole. Used her face to sell their version of order. We blew a hole in the prison to pull her out, but it was the wrong cell. It was his cell." She points at Yotaka.

The room seems smaller, as if the walls are leaning in to hear.

Lizi's mind goes white and then red.

For a heartbeat she is back on the ship, watching a mast snap in a storm: the same helpless, gut-deep lurch as something you thought was permanent breaks.

She swings her legs off the pallet, ignoring the scream from her side. The pain feels almost necessary, like tribute.

"I should have been here," she says. Her voice is low and dangerous. "If I'd stayed, if I hadn't run off to play second to a pirate queen and get drunk in prettier ports—"

"You would be dead too," Hanae cuts in.

"Good," Lizi snaps. "At least then I wouldn't have missed my chance to gut those ledger-loving bastards."

Her hand finds the hilt of a knife that isn't there. Her fingers curl around air instead, shaking.

"I swear," she says, and every syllable is a nail. "On whatever is left of my soul. Miju, Tomoe, Yorin—Baekjon-kai, Triumvirate, whatever they call themselves—I will put them in the ground. I will hang them from their own laws. I will—"

"Save it," Hanae says, but there's no derision in it, only exhaustion and something raw. "You're not going anywhere until your insides stay inside."

"That never stopped me before," Lizi growls.

Yotaka speaks then, quietly.

"They killed my parents," he says. "Miju read the charges. Yorin counted the cost. Tomoe stood with the navy that blockaded the harbor while the king's head rolled." He looks down at his hands, at the faint scars from shackles. "They killed Aram, the Voice of the Tide. They tried to kill me in a cell."

He lifts his head. His eyes are not a child's now. They are old in a way that has nothing to do with age.

"If I ever sit on a throne again," he says, voice soft but carrying, "it will not be so I can decorate myself with a crown. It will be so I can drag every one of them, and every butcher, and every quiet accomplice, into a court that does not care what name they write on their doors. Criminals will be judged. All of them. Equally. No ledgers. No exceptions."

Lizi wants to scoff. She wants to say something about gullible princes and their pretty promises. The words line up in her mouth.

They refuse to come out.

Because Yotaka looks like he means it—deep in the marrow, past the fear, in that place where Aram's songs used to land in people and take root. He looks ridiculous and young and utterly sincere, and the worst thing is that sincerity feels dangerous, because people might believe him.

Hanae studies him, eyes narrowed, mouth a hard line. She has every reason to hate crowns, to spit on the idea of kings. The last king's blood soaked the square; the republic that replaced him turned her lover into a state-approved ghost.

And yet.

"You think you can be a just king," she says slowly.

"I will try," he replies.

"A kind king."

"I will try," he repeats, more firmly.

Lizi snorts, but it's softer now. "I believe you," she admits grudgingly. "Which is extremely irritating."

Hanae exhales through her nose. "I believe you too," she says. "Which is worse."

Yotaka blinks. "That sounds like a good thing."

"It isn't," Lizi says. "Because you might be just. You might be kind. You might be the best thing to happen to a crown since someone realized they could melt it down and make coins."

She leans forward, ignoring the pulse of pain. Her eyes are flint.

"But your children?" she says. "Or their children? Nothing guarantees they won't be petty tyrants with your jawline. Monarchy is a game where the stakes are entire nations, and the dice are genes. It depends on the moods of a very small, very privileged group of humans. That's not a system. That's a long, shared delusion with fancy hats."

Yotaka does not flinch. "And your republic?" he asks quietly. "The one that promised justice and gave you Miju's sword in Aram's heart? How is that different? Different hats, same delusion."

Lizi opens her mouth, finds only air. The old slogans crowd at the back of her throat—Power to the People, No King But the Tide—but they taste sour. The people did not vote for a Triumvirate of monsters, but monsters rose wrapped in their flag all the same.

She looks at Hanae, silently tossing her the question like a burning coal.

Hanae turns the bowl in her hands, thumb tracing the crack down its side.

"Every system is flawed," she says at last. "Monarchy. Republic. Council of wise fish. Give anything long enough and someone learns how to twist it."

She looks at Yotaka, then at Lizi, then at the ruined walls of the safehouse that have listened to more plans than prayers.

"But we can't judge a system solely because it failed once," she continues. "If we did, we'd never walk again after the first time we fell. The monarchy rotted and we burned it. We built a republic and the wrong people grabbed the wheel. That doesn't mean the idea of many hands on the wheel is wrong. It means we let go too soon."

Lizi sighs, a long exhale that seems to take some of the fight with it.

"Fine," she says. "Try again, you mean. Fix the blueprint instead of burning the whole house."

"Something like that," Hanae replies.

Yotaka frowns thoughtfully. "And if that doesn't work?"

"Then we try something else," Hanae says. "And something else after that. Systems are tools. None of them are holy."

Lizi leans her head back against the wall, staring at the ceiling beams with a sour smile.

"Wonderful," she says. "We agree that everything is broken, and also we have no idea what would actually work."

She lifts her spoon like a toast.

"To the future," she says dryly. "May we eventually invent a way of living together that doesn't eat us alive. Because right now, I can't name a single system that wouldn't crack under its own weight."

She glances sideways at Hanae.

"Not even anarchy."