The Twelve Kingdoms: The Shore in Twilight

speed, and hugging the shadows as much as possible, the knowledge of what happened here will be kept from him."
    "I understand."
    Risai bowed. Gyousou nodded and got to his feet. Risai watched him leave and then went back to Kaei. For completely different reasons than before, Kaei broke down and wept. She finally seemed to let down her guard. After crying for a while, Kaei smiled like a summer sky clearing after a thunderstorm.
    "Risai, I understand now what you mean when you say that His Highness is a different kind of person than ourselves. I sense that even I can find a way to agree."
    "I feel my faith confirmed as well," Risai agreed with a self-effacing smile.
    Kaei seemed to take things a bit easier after that. The differences in temperament between Kaei and Gyousou's retainers seemed to balance out, and she came to be viewed as part of Gyousou's retinue.
    Since about that time, Risai thought she caught sight here and there of similar changes. She began hearing questioning voices in public about the same time that Kaei had voiced her concerns: those who, like Kaei, were not accustomed to Gyousou's methods; in whom the rapid changes produce great anxiety. There seemed to be far more of them than Risai had previously imagined.
    However, the volume of those voices diminished. Little by little, the Imperial Court became one in purpose. Or that's how it looked to her.
    And Risai found this frightening. She couldn't put her concerns into words. If forced to speak her feelings aloud, she might say she was worried that something succeeding so well could just as well succeed to bad ends. The end product of either would be the same, the only difference being the direction in which they traveled. The same way a ferocious king opened himself up to calamities, was not Gyousou opening the gate to disaster?
    In any case, the Imperial Court found its footing and showed a unified front. Misgivings about Gyousou's military rule, anxieties about the speed of his reforms, and fears about the resoluteness of his actions seemed to fade away. The problematic bureaucrats and ministers were dealt with before Taiki returned.
    With the scouring away of this great evil, they all believed things would now start to move forward. They kept their eyes peeled, making preparation and looking for signs of forward movement. Differences in temperament, and the discord among those who called themselves retainers and those who did not, resolved themselves as well.
    There should be no problems after this. Nevertheless, Risai felt that she hadn't caught something--hadn't seen something--she should have. Some other seed of destruction was hidden in the shadowy depths at the bottom of the well.
    She couldn't shake the feeling. And, in fact, they were about to spring forth from beneath the placid waves.

Interlude
    I t took a while for Taiki to grasp exactly what had happened to him. Put in plain terms, he'd been "spirited away." Scolded by his grandmother and sent out to the yard, he suddenly disappeared from the spot where he'd been standing.
    He couldn't remember the moment he disappeared himself. As if dozing off to sleep, after a vague interval in vacant space, he'd returned to his home. More than a year had passed in the interval, but he did not sense the passing of time. And so he found it impossible to explain the substance of that which did not exist.
    The police and a doctor were called. He was subsequently bounced back and forth among a number of child psychologists. The adults seemed determined to unearth that lost time, but he could not remember a thing.
    As far as he was concerned, no break had occurred. Between the snowy courtyard and the front walk of his house on the day of his grandmother's funeral, a nebulous sense of passage had taken place, but the two events seemed to him like two beads on the same string.
    The changes had happened to the world, not to him. His grandmother had died. His brother was suddenly bigger and was his classmate, instead of a being year behind. The kids who had been his classmates were all a year ahead.
    But nobody else noticed this shift in the universe. He was the one out of step. Thus a very definite gap was born between himself and everybody else, something very basic that had given rise to discrepancies keeping them out of sync with each other.
    Of course they would have no idea, but--quite unbeknownst to himself as well--he began losing himself. He did not realize that for every day he spent here,