POV: painter
Summary
Painter hears *ritual bath* and is briefly relieved — he has been sweating for an hour and a bath sounds good. Yumi explains it is taken in the town's cool spring, on the high ground above the town, reserved exclusively for the visiting yoki-hijo while she is bathing. Before they leave he asks, awkwardly, whether her spirits actually need a warrior — is he going to have to fight something? She thinks not; the spirits will need to be formed and then asked. *Through painting?* he tries. *Through art,* she says. Hope catches in him so hard it surprises him. He drops the loner pose and tells her — heartfelt — that whatever it is she needs of him, he will do it.
He steps barefoot out of the wagon and immediately leaps back onto the steps yelping. The ground is stove-hot. He notices, for the first time, that everyone else is in clogs. Liyun and the attendants watch him with the look one gives a man who has sat down to dinner and begun eating the plate. He puts on the clogs by the door and follows the procession, feeling proud he can walk in the awkward things. The attendants hold large fans up to hide him from the gathered townspeople, in a half-measure that feels less like privacy and more like pretending not to want to be noticed.
The pool itself is a basin about fifteen feet across, waist-deep, no steam rising — encouraging, since by now he is dripping. The attendants stop at the rocks; Yumi has to follow him past them because the tether between them will not let her stay outside. She begins to disrobe; he tries to suggest bathing in clothing instead; she explains, blushing, that ritual cleansing does not work that way and the attendants would think it very strange. The attendants approach with the soaps wearing nothing themselves and proceed to undress him. Yumi points out, helpfully, that at least they see him as her. He almost manages to look stoic. At her quiet request he closes his eyes and is bathed in silence, and the illusion holds even through touch — the attendants notice nothing wrong with the body they are washing.
In the water his hand drifts and brushes Yumi's, and the hion-line warmth surges back — but this time it carries emotion: her fear, her embarrassment, her deeper terror that something is very wrong and she cannot fix it. She catches the inverse from him: his own embarrassment and a shame buried so deep beneath the practised confidence that it might as well be magma. They break the touch. Both feel better. The mortifying situation is somehow easier knowing the other person knows it is mortifying too. The attendants dunk him for the ritual count and step away to prepare the fresh tobok. Alone in the pool he relaxes — and notices that Yumi's long black hair is wet. The water has touched her, where nothing else on Torio can. They meet one another's eyes, then realise simultaneously where they are and what neither of them is wearing, and shut their eyes again.
Dressed in the stiff bell-shaped tobok and bow afterwards, Painter once more feels the strange draining tiredness — heat from sky and stone and starchy silk all at once — and faints as the women tie his bow. He wakes to pounding on a door. He is on his own futon in his own apartment in Kilahito, teal-and-magenta hion painting his strewn clothes and the half-eaten box of cereal. It was a dream, then? Then Yumi sits up from the floor beside the futon, wearing his oversized pajamas, sleeves swallowing her hands and her hair a frizzy mess. He reaches for her — and his arm passes through the edge of his dining table. He waves his hand through the table again. Through the sock on it. The pillow. Yumi stumbles to her feet, knocks against the table, jolts an old noodle bowl and clatters a maipon stick off it onto the wood. She stares at her hands, then at him, with the panicked eyes of someone who has just realised the rules of the trade have flipped while they slept.