The Wings of Dreams

something, the grownups around her would smile and said exactly that.
    “Adults always think of themselves first. Say you want to catch a lot of kijuu and become a stable master and they laugh and say you’re being childish. They claim that wanting something doesn’t make it so. But say you want to try for a government position that simply requires graduating from a university and they’ll tell you that becoming a government official isn’t something you should worry your little head about at your age. It really starts to gets on your nerves.”
    “That’s not what I was going to say and not why I laughed,” Kinhaku said with a smile and a wave of his hand. “It’s just that weighing your options like that, empress on one hand and shushi on the other, caught me off guard. You like kijuu, Shushou?”
    “I do. That’s why a shushi or a wrangler would be a good profession. Truth is, training kijuu is something I’d like to try. But adults won’t tell you how to become a wrangler. How do you?”
    “First of all, your parents have to be itinerants.”
    “You mean it comes down to your parents?” Shushou glanced at the annoyed-looking Gankyuu, who nodded.
    Kinhaku only chuckled. “Yeah, that’s what it comes down to. Your parents become itinerants or refugees. In order to put food in their mouths, they sell their kid to the master of a goushi or shushi guild house. You apprentice as a kid and become a koushu as a adult.”
    “Buying and selling people is against the law.”
    “It’s less a matter of buying and selling than struggling to get by and lacking the resources to raise a child. If you’re a refugee, the orphanages won’t take you in. So you find a person who will. What else can you do? The parents might even collect some consolation money, if they’re lucky. That’s pretty much how the story goes.”
    “Is that how Gankyuu and Kinhaku became koushu?”
    “Well.”
    “I see. So that’s what gave you two such contrary personalities. Considering the lengths you went to become koushu, you should take pride in it.”
    Kinhaku again responded with a loud laugh. “Regardless of the lengths anybody goes to, I don’t think anybody ever became a koushu because they wanted to.”
    “People do all sorts of things for all sorts of different reasons. What happens to the goushi when there’s no longer a kirin on Mt. Hou? If I become empress, you’ll be out of a job.”
    “When people stop going on the Shouzan, goushi don’t waste time becoming shushi overnight. When the work dries up, they go into the Yellow Sea and hunt kijuu. Though they don’t all do the job the same way.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Before I went into business for myself, my guild master had three of us about the same age working for him. We didn’t work as guardians during our apprenticeship. We went kijuu hunting with the journeymen. Except we skirted the trail used on the Shouzan. In that we differed from regular shushi.”
    “Huh.”
    “Following the road there and back while hunting kijuu drilled the details of the journey into our heads. Even when there’s no longer a kirin on Mt. Hou, they’ll keep doing the same thing. You see, even if it’s just the goushi, they’ll stick to the routine or the road would soon disappear.”
    “The road would disappear?”
    “It’s there in the first place because people clear out the saplings and dead wood, cut the weeds. If nobody walked here, the Yellow Sea would soon swallow up any evidence it was ever there. That’d leave the goushi in a real fix. When the time came, they’d have to start all over from square one carving out a safe route.”
    Shushou nodded and glanced back over her shoulder, at the long column of people going on the Shouzan climbing the rising slope through the sea of trees.
    “So this road was surveyed by the goushi.”
    “What do you think, Shushou? Maybe you’ll grow up to be a guardian.”
    “If becoming empress doesn’t work out, that wouldn’t be a bad idea either. I think a life on the road would agree with me. Which isn’t to say I find everything about the job appealing.”
    “Like what?”
    “The way goushi do things may be the way they’ve always done them, but I don’t always agree. Maybe they got abandoned by their families and that’s why they became koushu, but it wouldn’t hurt goushi and shushi to adjust their thinking about some things.”
    “What a strange girl,” Kinhaku laughed.
    Gankyuu sighed. “Quit spouting