POV: yumi
Summary
Yumi wakes in her travelling wagon to the sight of the daystar hanging unusually bright over the western horizon — for her, a clear omen that the primal hijo will be receptive today. She has reason to take signs seriously: a falling star marked the sky over her birth, identifying her as one of the yoki-hijo and prising her from her parents to be raised to the calling. It is also nineteen days past her nineteenth birthday, which her private heart keeps insisting is a day for asking for what she wants. The next Festival of Reveals is a hundred days away in Torio City, and her caravan happens to be in the region.
Her morning is a sequence of rituals carried out for her rather than by her. The attendants Chaeyung and Hwanji enter to feed her — a yoki-hijo never crassly puts food in her own mouth — and to walk her, shielded by enormous fans, through the village to the cold spring. They undress her, rub her through a strict sequence of seven increasingly perfumed soaps (the later ones more cream than soap), and rinse her by dunking her under for a count of one hundred and forty-four. She looks up through the water as is her private habit, and breaks ritual decorum by coughing a little when she surfaces. The attendants then dress her again, in undergarments and the two-layered tobok with its broad bell skirt — bright magenta for the day — and slide her clog-getuk back onto her feet.
She walks through the village to a small wooden shrine that floats on a single lifting spirit split into two grotesque statues — one crouching, one clinging — under its floor. Blue cuplike flowers ride the thermals at knee height around her. She removes her clogs, kneels on the cool wood, and recites the thirteen ritual prayers of the morning. She thinks the right thoughts: she is blessed, she is one of the chosen, the warm sun and floating gardens of Torio are wonderful, and surely this should be more than enough. And yet — perhaps, this once, she could ask?
Liyun appears: tall, severe, in a black tobok with a white bow, her hair cut bladelike at the sides, her clogs sleek-heeled. As Yumi's warden — the nearest word, the narrator explains, to a Torish kihomaban that splits guardian and sponsor — she has come to fetch Yumi for the place of ritual, but the local steamwell is due to erupt soon and they should wait. The small pause is Yumi's opening. She raises the Festival of Reveals: it is a hundred days off, it falls in a thirteenth year when the hijo are unusually active, and they will be near Torio City in any case. Liyun consults her little pocket calendar, then completes the sentence for her: she presumes Yumi would like to spend the festival day in prayer of thanks for her elevated station.
Yumi hesitates on the edge of saying no. Liyun snaps the book shut and fills the silence: surely Yumi would not actively desire to embarrass her station, would she — or imply she regrets her place? She was honoured, of all the children born that year, to be one of only fourteen yoki-hijo alive. She is special. The unspoken pressure does its work. Yumi would rather be less special and feels guilty for thinking it. She steadies herself, abandons the request, and asks instead to be led straight to the place of ritual without waiting for the steamwell — she is eager, she says, to begin her duties and call the spirits.