POV: yumi
Summary
The narrator opens with a brief defence: don't mistake accommodation for weakness. Yumi has spent her life accommodating; she also has limits, and they have been reached. The words come out of her unbidden: a lifetime of service, everything she has, all given over to a being she still believes is a spirit, and now this. She accuses the spirit of having taken her shape to humiliate her — a punishment for working too hard yesterday, for her mistake — and then squeezes her eyes shut and braces to be ripped to pieces, or compressed to the size of a marble, or cursed to spit lizards when she tries to speak. She waits an uncomfortably long time.
Finally the spirit speaks. He proposes, mildly, that they entertain the possibility he isn't the kind of spirit she thinks — and ask how dire that would actually turn out to be. He sits there with a grain of rice on his cheek and tries to puff himself up to mysterious again. He admits, wincing, that he thinks he is from another planet — the daystar in her sky — and that yes, he is human, born to a mother. She cocks her head and tries to fit it into the only story-shape she has for this: heroes summoned to quests by the spirits. They needed a body for him, she decides, and used hers. Is he, then, a great warrior among his kind, the people of the daystar? He thinks about it longer than she'd expect. Then he tells her yes — he is among the greatest. The story re-organises itself around that lie.
She reaches absently for his hand in supplication, and the first touch blows through her: a shiver like cold water, then a wash of overwhelming warmth and an almost electric tingling racing up her arm. She has felt nothing through any other surface since waking. He gapes at his hand. She backs away, lightheaded, blushing from her toes to her hair. *Touching you was like touching a raw hion line,* he says. She tells herself, sensibly, not to touch him again. She tries to step out of the wagon to find someone in the town who can talk to spirits and is caught short after a yard by an invisible elastic tether back to him; running at it only yanks her back into the room. She trips, he reaches to catch her, her chest brushes his — and the warmth swallows her again. She leaps free. Celibacy is a non-negotiable fact of a yoki-hijo's life, she reminds herself; she is, of course, absolutely in control of that aspect of her emotions.
She is rescued by Liyun, who sweeps up into the wagon in the day's ritual yellow on black to address what she has heard about her Chosen deciding to violate ritual today. Painter tries earnestly to deliver his *I am actually a hero summoned from another world* speech; Liyun tells him, without ever speaking in anger, that a Chosen who tries to escape her duties through fabricated nonsense only makes life harder, and the guilt of such lies will tear her apart from within. Yumi crawls to her knees and begs Painter to stop, to let her dictate the answer: *Warden-nimi, I felt remnants of a dream and was speaking according to them; forgive my indiscretions.* He repeats it. She tells him to kneel and bow his head. He obeys. Liyun orders the rituals to resume, asks that Hwanji be apologised to for the breach of address, and slips out, her clogs clopping into the morning.
Painter is bewildered that the head servant is also the warden, and Yumi explains, softly, what he is now living inside: everyone serves the yoki-hijo so that she may serve the world. The people are deeply invested in freeing her from worldly concerns so she can focus solely on summoning. Chaeyung and Hwanji return with a fresh bowl of rice and feed him bite by bite while Yumi coaches him through the ritual moves from beside him. She finds him an oddly direct-able hero, takes a breath, and lets herself believe they can manage this. They can reach the spirits and ask. All they need to do first is — *oh.* *Oh no.* The attendants rise and fetch their fans. The next thing on the ritual schedule, she tells him as he stands beside her, is the ritual bath.