The Twelve Kingdoms: Dreaming of Paradise

it was his wife was adorning herself with. Otherwise, I would have expected him to criticize her just as he did the rest of us. But because her accoutrements did not look gaudy and extravagant, he assumed she must be as frugal as he."
    Gekkei nodded. "His Highness was always willing to see the best in people like that."
    Shouyou gave Gekkei a curious look. He could almost swear Gekkei was getting wistful.
    As if taking note of Shouyou's expression, Gekkei raised his eyes and smiled. "You still loath His Highness, Shouyou?"
    The memory of Chuutatsu's coronation suddenly rose to his thought, as vivid as a blow to the chest. "I can't say I loath the man he was. Though I have no regrets about raising an army and fighting against him, I regret that it ever became necessary."
    "I wouldn't disagree with that. To tell the truth, I still find the whole thing an awful waste."
    "You too?"
    "I try my best to put it behind me, but when the countenance of His Highness rises into my thoughts, I find it difficult to tolerate."
    That longing for what Chuutatsu had once been, Shouyou stated bluntly, was why he couldn't discard his own inkstone, however often his anger had prompted him to do so.
    Gekkei answered with a chagrined smile. "It is strange. I never hated the Queen as I did the King. She lied, slandered, and bore false witness. Yet I didn't think her irredeemable. When it came to sheer malicious intent, she was many times his superior. But all her scheming never aroused in me the anger that His Highness's ruthlessness did."
    "Really? I did consider her irredeemable. It was she who spurred him on. That made my blood boil. In all honesty, I thought you soft for merely exiling the Princess Royal to Kei Province. I would agree that, isolated as she was within the Imperial living quarters, none of her father's sins could be laid directly at her feet. But her crimes of omission struck me as just as grievous. Though that was likely more my temper getting the better of me, wondering why she had done nothing to make him see the light."
    "Your temper—"
    "That's the way it seems to me now. Yes, I wanted to make His Highness see the light. I wanted him to be a good King. But he kept sinking deeper into the mire. I wanted to stop him and couldn't. Say that the penalties are too severe, the witch hunts too excessive, and he'd take it to mean you wanted nobody punished for anything. He'd dismiss you as a nuisance."
    "He said as much to me."
    Shouyou nodded. All the nostalgia from a few minutes ago evaporated, leaving a hole behind in his heart. "And if a man of valor, a favored retainer, would say such things, then how much more degenerate his subjects must be—that's what he said as he turned the screws all the tighter. Every admonition was taken as indicative of a worsening state of affairs. Beyond a point, I couldn't bring myself to remonstrate with him. All I could do was hope for someone else to do what I could not."
    "And hence your anger. The Queen and Princess Royal refused to rise to the moment."
    "That would be it," Shouyou said with a nod. "I fear the bitter truth of the matter was that even if they had remonstrated with him, he wouldn't have budged an inch. It was possible that those closest to him would have aroused an even worse outcome. That's certainly the way things turned out with the Taiho. The more the Taiho contended with His Highness, the harsher the laws became. Not even the shitsudou dissuaded him from the course he'd charted for himself."
    "Unfortunately not."
    "I understood what was at the root of those feelings. But I still despised the Queen and Princess Royal. It wasn't hard to do. There was already no greater pain than hating His Highness, that sense of loathing that came from asking myself why he had driven me into this corner. If he could just show the people a little mercy, I believed all those feelings would evaporate. More loathing only invited more pain, and that pain turned into more hatred. Yes, compared to that, what I felt for the Queen and Princess Royal was a mere trifling."
    "Absolutely."
    There were echoes of pain in Gekkei's voice, a tone of voice that told Shouyou why he so adamantly refused to take up the reins of royal authority. "This has all got to have been pretty tough for you."
    The necessity of killing Chuutatsu. And the necessity of living with it afterward. He couldn't simply pile on one disloyalty after another on top of that.
    "I am beginning to understand where you've been coming