The Bride Who Read the Contract novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Bride Who Read the Contract
The cherry trees behind the shrine came into full flower on the last night of March.
Fumika held the spring banquet that night, in the same hall, because that was the custom and she was the head of the shrine.
Eight clans came.
Eight cushions on the dais, now.
The Grandmother in the middle, leaning on her grandsons.
The stout man at the end, who brought Fumika a jar of pickled plums and couldn't meet her eyes.
The lord of Kurai on the eighth cushion, in his black haori with the silver crescent.
Every head in the hall kept sliding toward him and away again.
Fumika wasn't pouring sake this year.
Kaede was. She had asked to.
"I want to see their faces when they realize who's pouring," she had said. "Twice in one family. It's very good for them."
She went from table to table in archivist's blue with the flask and a perfectly pleasant smile, and more than one clan wife went pink.
Suzuna sat at the end of the oni table eating everything within reach.
Fumika sat at the head of the hall in white.
The screens were open on the dark garden. Cherry petals blew in on the wind and ticked against the paper.
Outside the screens, the street at the foot of the steps was full of people who hadn't been invited.
They had come anyway, and stood in the cold, looking up.
When the last dish was taken away, the Grandmother tapped her fan on the dais.
The hall went quiet.
"The new pact," she said, "has an eighth line, still to follow. I'm told the head of Hinase has written it."
She looked down the hall at Fumika. "Shall we hear it?"
Fumika nodded to Suzuna.
Suzuna wiped her fingers on her napkin, stood up and unrolled the scroll.
It was a plain new scroll. Fumika had written every line of it out herself, in her own hand, at her mother's desk.
Suzuna looked at the first line, then up at the Grandmother.
"Seven of these were read out in this hall in the summer," she said. "Everyone here signed them. Do they want them again?"
"No," said the stout man at the end of the dais, with feeling.
People laughed.
"Then the eighth," said the Grandmother. "Half the capital is standing in the street for it. Let's not keep them."
Suzuna ran her eye down to the bottom of the scroll and stopped.
"Eight," she said. "I can't read this one. It's not my line."
She rolled the scroll up and walked it down the hall and put it in Fumika's hands.
Fumika stood up.
Her knees were shaking under the white silk. She was glad of the long skirt.
She unrolled the scroll to the last line.
She didn't need to look at it.
She had written it at four in the morning and rewritten it half a dozen times.
But she looked anyway, because her voice wanted something to hold.
"Eight," she read. "The lady of Kurai may leave any day she likes, owing nothing."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of The Bride Who Read the Contract are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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