Chapter 156: Aunt Keiko

Aldenmarch’s cathedral had never held anything quite like her.

She stood in the middle of the old summoning circle wearing one slipper, a faded green cardigan, and an expression of total, furious calm. In her left hand she held a wooden spoon. In her right she held a pot lid, raised like a shield. Six priests stood pressed against the far wall, and Doran, the oldest, looked like he was reconsidering his entire vocation.

"She has not stopped talking since she arrived," Doran whispered as Ryuji came through the chamber door. "We have understood perhaps one word in six."

Ryuji stopped walking.

He understood every word.

[System Log: Day 162]

[A THIRD SUMMONED HUMAN HAS ARRIVED. SHE IS ARMED WITH CUTLERY]

[THE ENTITY’S EXPRESSION HAS CHANGED. I HAVE NO CATEGORY FOR IT. THE CLOSEST ENTRY IS "A BOY WHO HAS BEEN CAUGHT"]

"Ryuji Hayato Volkris," Keiko said, in the language of a world none of the priests had ever seen. "Fourteen months. Not one phone call."

"Hello, Auntie," Ryuji said.

She crossed the circle faster than a woman her age should have managed and smacked him on the upper arm with the spoon. Hard. Then she dropped both utensils and pulled him into a hug so fierce his ribs complained.

"You stupid, stupid boy," she said into his shirt. "I kept your plants alive."

"I heard."

"Tetsu stopped watering them. I never stopped."

"I know. Thank you."

Behind him, Tetsu made a sound that was half laugh and half sob, and Keiko released Ryuji just long enough to spot him. "You. Skinny. You stopped checking the apartment."

"Six months in, Auntie," Tetsu said, wiping his face. "I’m sorry."

"I forgive you. Get over here."

Selene stood a careful step behind them, hands folded, and Ryuji felt the empathic warmth shift as her unease arrived. She could not understand a single word of what was being said. Ryuji turned and saw her face, the particular stillness of a princess watching her husband speak a language she had never heard, with a woman who clearly knew every embarrassing detail of his life.

"Selene," he said in the common tongue. "This is my aunt. Keiko."

Keiko turned. She took in the silver hair, the violet eyes, the dark clothes with their elegant lines, and her whole posture changed into something Ryuji recognized with a sinking feeling. She was assessing.

"So this is the princess," she said, in her own language, and walked a full slow circle around Selene.

Selene did not flinch. Her eyes tracked the woman without moving her head.

"She is very thin," Keiko announced. "Does he feed her?"

"Auntie," Ryuji said.

"A girl needs breakfast. What is she, a warrior? She needs more than tea. I made rice for you for years and look at you, all bones."

Ryuji translated, as gently as he could manage.

Selene considered this. "Tell her," she said, very evenly, "that I eat four pancakes every morning. And that I prefer the crispy edges."

He translated. Keiko’s eyebrows rose.

"Pancakes," she said. "Hm. His mother’s recipe. Did he tell you she learned it from me?"

Ryuji had not known that. He translated it anyway, and watched Selene’s chin lift a quarter inch. It was the small, dangerous gesture she made when something had been taken from her without her permission, and in this case the something was a recipe she thought of as theirs.

Mireille had been standing near the door, perfectly still, since the moment Ryuji walked in.

Keiko had not looked at her yet.

When she did, the entire room seemed to stop. The pot lid slipped from Keiko’s fingers and hit the stone with a clang that echoed off the vaulted ceiling. Her mouth opened and no sound came out. She took one step. Then another.

"Mimi," she said.

"Hello, Keiko," Mireille said, in the same language, her voice cracking down the middle.

Keiko stared. Her hands rose halfway to her face and stayed there.

"You are older," she said finally. "You died young and now you are older than when you died. That is extremely rude."

Mireille laughed through tears. "I know."

"I went to the funeral. I wore the black dress. Your son stood there like a statue and would not cry, and I held his hand for four hours."

"I know," Mireille said again, softer. "I am so sorry."

Keiko crossed the last of the distance and grabbed her sister’s face in both hands. Ryuji watched two women in their sixties, one older than she looked and one older than anyone should be, press their foreheads together and weep like girls.

"Sisters," Ryuji said quietly to Selene. "Not by blood. My mother turned up on her doorstep with no papers and no past, and Keiko just decided she was family. She never asked a single question."

Selene’s expression softened, though something careful remained underneath it.

The household found the next hour considerably easier to survive than Ryuji had feared. Keiko inspected Kaelith ("Too many years in the eyes, that one"), shook Alexei’s hand until he looked genuinely alarmed, and wept again when she met Yui, whom she held at arm’s length and declared "far too thin as well." Tetsu translated the best jokes. Yui translated the rest, having apparently absorbed a surprising amount of Japanese from twenty years of overhearing her mother’s dreams.

By evening they had settled into a guest hall at the palace, and Marro, who had traveled from the estate with Bram specifically for the occasion, was already attempting to explain Avarthos to Keiko across a table loaded with food.

Selene found Ryuji in the corridor outside, arms crossed over her chest.

"She is wonderful," Selene said.

"But."

"There is no but."

"Selene."

She exhaled through her nose. "She calls you by a name I have never heard. She knows how you take your tea in a world I will never see. She speaks to you in a language that sounds like home, and I stand beside you like a stranger at your own table." She stopped, jaw tight. "And she does not like me."

"She doesn’t know you."

"She walked around me like I was a horse for sale."

"That’s how she shows she cares," Ryuji said. "She did that to Tetsu for a week when he first came to the house."

Selene was quiet for a moment. "I am afraid," she said finally, "that if the way home were ever opened, the way back to all of this, you would look at me and see a decision. Not a choice."

The words landed with more weight than Ryuji expected.

"I’m not going anywhere," he said.

"You say that now."

"I said it in a kitchen with a spatula in my hand and a woman trying to kill me. I’ve been saying it ever since." He took her hands. "Selene. My home is wherever you’re standing. Keiko can come to dinner as often as she wants. That doesn’t change it."

Her grip tightened. "Teach me to say something to her," she said, very quietly. "In her language. Something that will make her stop looking at me like I am an experiment."

Ryuji grinned despite himself. "Okay. Give me a minute."

When they returned to the hall, Selene walked straight up to Keiko, who sat at the head of the table with Marro’s tea in one hand and Yui’s hand in the other. She bowed, not deeply, but precisely.

"Keiko-san," she said, in careful, halting, wildly accented Japanese. "Thank you for taking care of my husband when I could not."

The hall went silent.

Keiko put her tea down. She looked at Selene for a long moment. Then her face crumpled into the widest smile Ryuji had seen on her in years.

"She speaks!" Keiko announced to the room. "The princess speaks! Oh, she is terrible at it. Listen to that accent. Come here, child. Sit. Eat."

Selene sat. Keiko immediately began loading her plate. Ryuji felt something settle in his chest that he hadn’t known was still wound tight, and across the table Tetsu caught his eye and silently mouthed, She’s in.

Late that night, after the hall had emptied, Keiko cornered Ryuji alone near the window, her cardigan wrapped tight around her shoulders, her humor gone as if someone had flipped a switch.

"I need to give you something," she said. "I should have given it to Tetsu, but there was no time. The light was already coming up from the floor."

She dug into the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out a small cloth bundle. Ryuji unwrapped it with fingers that suddenly felt clumsy.

The pendant lay in his palm, silver chain tangled, the dark stone burning softly from the inside like a banked coal. It was warmer than he remembered. It pulsed, slow and steady, like a second heartbeat.

"It started glowing the morning you disappeared," Keiko said. "Never stopped. I kept it in the drawer like you did. Tonight in the circle it started singing."

"Singing," Ryuji repeated.

"Humming. In my bones." She looked at him with old, sharp eyes. "Show it to your mother. Please. I think she should see it."

He found Mireille in the corridor still wearing the shawl Keiko had draped over her, and held out his hand without a word.

Mireille looked down at the pendant. All the color left her face.

"Where did you get this," she said.

"It was in your things. After the accident. I took it."

"Ryuji." Her voice was barely a thread. "I have never seen this in my life."

The stone flared, blinding white, and for one second the whole palace seemed to hold its breath.

"Attendants were forbidden to carry anchors," Mireille whispered. "I never owned one. Someone else put this in my belongings."