The Twelve Kingdoms: A Thousand Leagues of Wind

didn't have underground rooms, did it? But if we looked, we should be able to find one."
    "The underground rooms aren't for the lodgers, but for the innkeeper and his family. That's because Ryuu levies a tax based on how large the underground part of the building is. Add a business surcharge on top of that and it can get quite costly."
    "Hey, kid, you know a lot."
    Rakushun awkwardly scratched at his ear. The girl paid no attention to his reaction and smiled at him. "Ryuu is a good place. We don't grow a lot of wheat, but we have a lot of mines and quarries and gemstone fountains. And lumber. We really have been blessed."
    "There are mines in Hou, too. What about raising livestock?"
    "We do. But there's not good grazing. Don't you have good horses in Hou?"
    "And cattle and sheep. Lots of those."
    "We raise them in Ryuu, too, but not that many. We can't grow enough forage in the summer. Still, we do pretty well for ourselves. Our king's a good person, too. The winters are real bad, though."
    "It really is cold. I didn't expect it."
    "People say it's better than Tai. They say that if you go outside at night, your nose will freeze half off. Even during the day, if you don't cover your face, your nose will get frostbit."
    "Huh," Shoukei exclaimed. "There are so many different kingdoms. I wasn't aware."
    She had thought they were all like Hou, closed in during the winter by the snows that melted in the summer, watering the green seas of grass.
    The girl looked at Rakushun. "Is it true that in the south you can even sleep outside during the winter? That you can harvest wheat twice a year?"
    Rakushun waved his hand. "Yes, you can harvest crops twice in a year. But that doesn't mean you can sleep outside in the winter. Though in Sou, the southernmost of the kingdoms, that might be possible."
    Shoukei blurted out, "The winters in Kei are probably warm."
    "I wonder," the girl sighed. "Kei just crowned a new empress. The kingdom seems to be settling down pretty well."
    Shoukei had nothing to say in response.
    "It must be really tough when a kingdom starts to falter. The refugees from Tai are in a bad way. If your house gets burned down there, you'll surely freeze to death."
    "Yeah."
    "Tai is totally in chaos. Recently, youma have even shown up near Ryuu. I've never seen one, but that's what people say."
    Unconsciously, Shoukei found herself looking at Rakushun.
    "To make matters worse, the weather of late has been getting worse. The north has seen record amounts of snow. Smaller towns are completely cut off and there's great concern that famine will set in there. We've got a good king, so nobody knows why."
    The wagon creaked. The sound struck Shoukei as the creaking of the kingdom itself. The kingdom was rusting from above. If a county court could be corrupted, then everything above must be already rotten to the core. The kingdom was headed on a downward path.
    With no king upon the throne, a kingdom descended into chaos. Natural disasters continued and the youma rampaged. Homes were lost to fires and floods, people had no way of surviving the winter. Shoukei remembered those cold winters in the orphanage. The weather improved during the summer, but locusts devoured the sprouting wheat, leaving the people with nothing to eat. Frost or flood, in either case, starvation was not far behind.
    This is no doubt the kind of chaos Hou has plunged into, Shoukei thought, a thought that hadn't occurred to her before.

    They got out of the wagon at the gates to the city.
    "I really don't know a thing," Shoukei confessed as they walked to the inn.
    Rakushun didn't contradict her. He said, "But from now on, if there's something you don't know, you need to learn it. I've got no problem with that."
    Shoukei stopped. "Better late than never, no?"
    There was a great deal she needed to learn, and quickly. About Hou, about the national polity, about other kingdoms, about kings and empresses, about princesses.
    "What you didn't know about being the princess royal of Hou came back to haunt you. That lesson should be pretty well settled by now. True penance is still in the offing, but your life as a human being has only just begun. At this point, you're still a toddler. There's no need to hurry it."
    "You think so?"
    "There are some things in this world that you can never get back. Your life as princess royal is over. There's no reclaiming that piece of the past. Don't you think it'd be better to abandon it completely and consider instead what you