The Wings of Dreams

cannot is understandable. Their job is to protect their employers. But it is true that travelers unaccustomed to the Yellow Sea require the assistance of those who know it well, like the goushi. If the goushi can’t provide that knowledge, then I will. Alas, I do not know what they know. So I must learn through repeated trial and error.”
    “Would asking them be faster than trial and error?”
    “When you were in school, did your professors only give you the answers to every question on the test?”
    “Ah, um, no.” Shushou sighed. With a wave of her hand she said, “Sorry for being a bee in your bonnet,” and spun on her heels.
    She hadn’t gotten far before running into Rikou. “It’s getting dark, Miss. Gankyuu is fit to be tied.”
    “Well, then we can apologize to him together,” Shushou quipped. But as she fell in beside Rikou she let out a long breath.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “It’s just so very complicated, everything about all this.”

Chapter 21
    [3-5]  G iven that the Yellow Sea was not a place made for human habitation, traveling there entailed certain hardships. This made perfect sense to Shushou. No proper roads, no inns, no shops. Youma roamed at will. Spending a single night in the Yellow Sea put the strongest man’s life at risk.
    “That’s what I heard,” Shushou said, leaning forward as she climbed the seemingly endless slope.
    The fact was, there were roads in the Yellow Sea, like the one she was walking on right then.
    “What’s that?” Rikou said.
    Shushou shrugged. “I heard there weren’t any roads in the Yellow Sea. So I thought it’d been like entering uncharted wilderness. I once went to the mountains to gather chestnuts. We had to push through the undergrowth, clear branches out the way, grab onto the trunks of trees on the way up and cling to clumps of grass on the way down. I thought it’d be something like that. The biggest problem was losing your sense of direction. You had to find somebody who knew the mountains like the back of his hand and wheedle out of him the best way to figure out where you were and where you should be going.”
    “Oh, really?”
    Rikou grinned at her. Shushou flashed him a wry smile in turn and sighed.
    “But the Yellow Sea has roads. At least up to this point, it’s not like I’ve been thinking about how much better things would be if there were a real highway. Much worse is walking and walking and never arriving anywhere like a city or town.”
    “How’s that?”
    “If you’re walking on a real highway and get tired, you can look for the nearest town. Necessities can be picked up along the way. If you’re hungry, you can buy something to eat. If you’re thirsty, you can stop at a village and borrow of bucket of water from a well. But that’s not what I’m talking about. On my way to Ken, I often slept in the crawl spaces of mausoleums. I thought that camping out in the Yellow Sea would be something like that. But the two have nothing in common. When you camp out along a highway, there’s always a town nearby where you can stock up on supplies.”
    Shushou leaned over to pick up a promising piece of firewood.
    Kinhaku said, half in surprise, half in jest, “A road isn’t a flat strip of land that goes on and on. A road is the road and what surrounds it, where travelers harbor no fear of starving to death or dying of thirst, where they can rest when they get tired. By that definition, there definitely are no roads in the Yellow Sea.”
    For the past two days, Kinhaku and his companions had been here, there, and everywhere, and always in shouting distance. More than that, the groups with koushu guides had clearly begun to close ranks.
    “You’ve got a lot of pluck. So that’s the kind of thing you ponder while walking through the Yellow Sea?”
    “Of course. How does one become a goushi or shushi?”
    Kinhaku gave Shushou a startled look. “A strange thing to express an interest in. Thinking of becoming one when you grow up?”
    Shushou said, giving Gankyuu a sharp, sidelong glance in the process, “Well, becoming empress takes precedence. But, sure. If being empress isn’t in the cards then being a shushi doesn’t sound half bad.”
    Kinhaku burst out laughing. Walking alongside Shushou, Rikou chortled as well.
    “Go ahead and laugh. And then you can tell me that shushi are unique among the koushu and that just wanting to be one doesn’t make it so.”
    Whenever Shushou said she wanted to become