POV: painter
Summary
Painter wakes — still in Yumi's body, in Torio — to a breakfast he is not permitted to wipe his own face after (the attendants do that for him too). Yumi paces behind him invisible to everyone else, still cold with him over the night before. The attendants withdraw and Liyun takes their place, kneeling in her formal posture and informing him with delicate severity that yesterday's faint has shamed the town. She is, Painter notes with grudging admiration, a practised loomer — perfect posture, folded arms, calculated pause — artistry done in mud.
He starts to defend himself; Yumi cuts him off and tells him he will say only what she says, when she says it. He sees a different Yumi in that moment, eclipsing even Liyun's loom: the timid girl from the apartment has been entirely consumed by passion. He nods. She dictates a yoki-hijo's contrite apology — the failing hers, her flesh weakened by overextension two days before, her soul still trusting in the spirits — and he repeats it, bows on her cue, and is at last forgiven. Liyun leads them out, pretending yesterday is unworthy of attention.
The procession sets out through the town, obscured behind fans. Painter is still struggling with the unrelenting heat from the ground — even through the clogs and the bell of his tobok — when an explosion of superheated water erupts from a steamwell at the town's centre, spraying thirty or forty feet into the sky and venting a tortured whine. The procession halts politely to let him watch the holy sight. He gapes; the ground here is so inhospitable that water comes up from beneath instead of down from above. Yumi steps between him and the geyser and tells him to keep moving. A yoki-hijo does not gawk. A yoki-hijo is calm, controlled, deliberate. He hisses that he is not a yoki-hijo. *No,* she answers in the lowest form of speech reserved for unpleasant things, *you are a liar.* He turns away and walks.
They reach the cool spring. He thrusts his hands out to be undressed without even glancing at her this time, shuts his eyes, and wades into the not-particularly-cool water to suffer his ministrations stewing in resentment. The scrubs and anointings take longer than he remembers. When the attendants withdraw and he lingers in the pool he eventually, of course, peeks.
He finds Yumi standing eye to eye with him, close enough that if she were corporeal he would feel her breath, glaring. The realisation — yes, she has been waiting the entire ritual just to catch him at this — only makes her more impressive. She is unashamed in the water in a way she had not been in his pajamas; there is confidence in her eyes. He resists the urge to look her over and meets her stare instead. He is an artist; artists have a gaze trained for shadow and muscle and anatomy, and after a minute her lips tilt in faint surprised respect that he has held it. *So,* he asks, *is this what we're going to do all day?*
She tells him no. The spirits chose her and then sent him; she has to believe they were correct, because the alternative is that her whole purpose is a lie. The way forward is for him to summon them — she cannot herself, with nothing she can touch — and to ask them directly what they want. Newly drawn spirits still speak; formed ones cannot or do not. He agrees. They lean in arguing the last inch — fine, fine — and she stubbornly closes the gap and touches her nose to his. The hion-line warmth enfolds them again, carrying frustration, anger, confusion, passion. They both splash back. She sinks to her chin in the water without breaking eye contact and mutters at him not to stare.
He covers his blush with a glib line about there having to be something worth looking at first — and then, because he is not actually a heel despite saying it, feels guilty and walks out of the pool toward Chaeyung and Hwanji and their towels. Behind him Yumi calls after him: just don't faint this time, liar. They have work to do today.