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Volume One
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The young man's name was Sougen. Calling upon the wisdom of the sages, he built the foundation of an empire and became the first emperor of Saiunkoku. After Sougen's death, the eight sages vanished. However, the mansion constructed in their honor, called Sentouguu, still stands in the Imperial Palace.
The empire was divided into eight districts, each named after one of the sages, with the capital located in Shi District. The emperor put one noble family in charge of ruling each of the other seven districts, changing their family names to match the districts they ruled. The family name "Shi" was reserved for the Imperial Family. Next in importance after Shi come the two noble families Ran and Kou, on the principle that mixing indigo and red makes purple.
At first, the positions of power were all hereditary, filled by the nobility. However, eventually the law was changed so that government officials were chosen on the basis of their results on difficult examinations. This did not significantly alter the balance of power, since the nobility could afford to hire the best tutors and continued to monopolize the top positions.
Eight years ago, the emperor's health began to fail. His second son was exiled because the prince's mother's family had tried to make a bid for power. Of the remaining five sons, the oldest four killed each other in their attempts to gain the throne. This left only the youngest prince to inherit the crown.
The prince, Ryuuki, was coronated six months ago at the age of nineteen. He shows no interest in governing, spending all his time wandering the palace at random. On top of that, he has gained a reputation for sharing the bed of a different servant every night--and only male servants. His ministers and advisors are desperate to whip him into shape and make a proper emperor of him, but nothing they do has any effect. Finally the three top advisors--Shou Taishi, the Prime Minister, Sou Taifu, a war hero, and Sa Taiho--devise a plan to marry him off to a strong young woman and have her do the job for them.
The one they choose for the position is Kou Shuurei, daughter of Kou Shouka, the oldest male in the direct line of descent of the powerful Kou noble family. Shouka should have been living in luxury in Kou District as the head of the family, but he turned down the position and went to live in the capital instead. He was given a job at the palace with a respectable (though considered by most to be useless) title--Imperial Archivist--and a salary fitting for his rank. However, he did nothing but spend all day reading in the archives, oblivious to pretty much everything. The Registry Minister in charge of payroll began gradually reducing his salary, yet Shouka never uttered a word of complaint. Eventually he and his daughter plunged into such poverty that Shuurei had to go into town and search for odd jobs to supplement the family income so they wouldn't starve.
Ever since she was little, Shuurei had dreamed of passing the test to become a government official. She was crushed when she learned that women weren't allowed to take it. Instead of giving up, she continued to study and turned her efforts to tutoring children in the area so that the boys could grow up to become officials in her place. Shuurei's mother had passed away years ago, but Shouka had taken in a young man he named Seiran who helped out around the estate and got a job as a palace guard to contribute his meager earnings to supporting the family.
When the Prime Minister approaches Shuurei with the offer to pretend to be the emperor's wife for a few months, she jumps at the chance. The five hundred gold coins she will be paid play a large part in her decision, as does the assurance that the emperor never sleeps with women so he won't try to touch her. Seiran is given a temporary promotion to the Imperial Guard to help protect her and keep her company during her stay at the palace.
At the palace, she makes the acquaintance of Li Kouyuu, who works for and is the adopted son of the History Minister and holds the record for being the youngest person ever to have made the top score on the qualifying exam, and Ran Shuuei, a high-ranking noble of the Ran family and a skilled swordsman in the Imperial Guard. Both young men highly respect Shouka and are impressed by Shuurei, in particular being won over by her cooking. They sincerely hope she will knock some sense into the emperor. Shuurei is assigned two servants, a girl named Kourin and a young woman named Shusui. Both servants are secretly in love with men who don't feel the same about them. The one person Shuurei doesn't meet is the emperor.
One day in the garden, Shuurei is approached by a young man who claims to be Ran Shuuei. Of course, Shuurei knows the real Shuuei, so she isn't fooled for a moment and immediately realizes that he's the emperor, but she pretends to fall for the charade and pointedly neglects to introduce herself as his wife. The emperor takes a liking to her and they start to have tea together in the archives. Finally "Shuuei" reveals that he knows she's the emperor's bride and that she came to get the emperor to act like a proper ruler.
Shuurei explains that when the princes were in dispute over the succession eight years before, the capital city was plunged into chaos. Corrupt officials hoarded money and no one from the palace could spare the attention to do anything about it. Most of the noble families closed their gates and did their best to ignore the citizens dying of starvation left and right. Shouka for once left the archives and began distributing fruit from the trees in his orchard. When the fruit was gone, he researched botany and stripped the bark and roots and anything else edible from his trees and passed it out to people. Due to his generosity, his trees all died and no flowers bloom any longer at his estate. Shuurei, though only a small child at the time, worked as much as possible to help care for people.
Eventually the government stabilized and the bad times ended. Shuurei concluded from the experience that, no matter how hard one worked, there was a limit to what a regular citizen could accomplish. In order to prevent such a disaster from recurring, it would take people in the government with the power to make important decisions and laws working to protect the people. That was why she wanted to become an official. Above all, the people needed the emperor to keep the government stable.
After hearing her story, Ryuuki comes to see her as the emperor and agrees to start ruling. He takes an interest in her on a romantic level...though when Shuurei challenges him about his sexual preferences, concerned by his exuberance, he assures her that he likes men. The emperor, for his part, has conflicted feelings about Seiran. On the one hand, as Shuurei's husband he's jealous of how close she is to the young man. On the other, he can't deny that Seiran is very attractive. When he wakes from a nightmare to find Seiran comfortingly holding his hand, he invites the young man to sleep with him. The flustered Seiran declines as politely as possible.
Ryuuki sets out to deepen his bond with his wife...in other words, to get her to call him by name. He pays a visit to her room, where he winds up falling asleep in her bed. In the morning, she gets all embarrassed at what her father and Seiran will think, but it turns out they know perfectly well Ryuuki wouldn't try anything without her consent. Ryuuki returns to visit her that night. She sneaks off to sleep in a corner of the room so as not to repeat the previous morning's shock, but again she awakens to find herself in bed with the emperor.
Meanwhile, Kouyuu gets worked up when he discovers that the emperor had only been pretending to be uneducated and incompetent. In fact, as the youngest prince with no one powerful to back him, Ryuuki had been mercilessly bullied by most of his older brothers. He took refuge in the archives, where Shouka tutored him personally. He also received private sword instruction from Sou Taifu, a famous general. Thus he is both highly educated and a skilled swordsman. In addition, he survived the struggle for the throne when his older brothers didn't as a result of his adeptness at avoiding assassination. He uses this latter ability to remove poison and other dangers from Shuurei's room while she remains completely unaware that someone is trying to kill her.
The emperor offers flowers to both Kouyuu and Shuuei. This is a sign from Ryuuki that he puts his trust in them and asks for their undivided loyalty. They both accept the flowers, a sign that they willingly pledge themselves to him. They have finally accepted that, thanks to Shuurei's influence, he has become a worthy ruler.
When Ryuuki comes to sleep with Shuurei again, she tries sneaking off to sleep in the next room. She is awakened in the middle of the night to hear him screaming. She goes to see what's the matter, and he clings to her painfully tightly. He explains that he hates being alone in the dark at night because his mother and older brothers used to lock him up alone in the dark when he was little. That was why he always spent the night in a servant's bed. Shuurei feels very sorry for him.
Only one of his brothers, the second-oldest prince, was ever kind to him. That brother, Seien, was the one light in his life. However, when Ryuuki was six years old, Seien was exiled. Even when Ryuuki was named emperor, he believed that Seien deserved the throne. He clung to the hope that Seien would one day return, and when that day came, he wanted to be able to hand over the crown with as little fuss as possible. That was why he stubbornly refused to involve himself in the government. It was also why he never slept with women; he didn't want to have any children because that would complicate the issue of succession.
When Shuurei finds out that the emperor had been playing dumb all along, she feels he's been making fun of her. Furious, she declares that her job is done and she's going home. Ryuuki, who hadn't known that she was only his wife temporarily, doesn't have a clue how to handle her and has her confined to her room...from which she is promptly kidnapped. Ryuuki, aware of the attempts on her life, has had Shuuei and Kouyuu working on tracking down the one responsible. After Kouyuu discovers that Shuurei has vanished from her room, it turns out that Seiran is also missing.
Ryuuki confers with Shuuei and Kouyuu. They know Kourin was behind the clumsy assassination attempts, but they also suspect she was doing it on behalf of the man she loved. Kouyuu accuses Seiran of being responsible, yet Ryuuki's faith in the young man remains unshaken. Impressed by the emperor's perceptiveness, Shuuei shares a letter he had been told to keep secret revealing that Seiran is actually the exiled prince Seien.
The one behind everything was Sa Taiho. His plan was to kill off Ryuuki and put Seien on the throne as his puppet. Seien chases him down and confronts him in the hope of rescuing Shuurei, but he winds up surrounded by over ten men. As good a swordsman as he is, they overwhelm him. Before he loses consciousness, he manages to hit Sa Taiho with a thrown dagger.
Before the old man can gloat over his success, however, all of his thugs are killed in an instant. In front of him stands the leader of the previous emperor's secret band of expert assassins called the Wind Wolves, a man called the Black Wolf...otherwise known as Kou Shouka. Shusui, the assassin Sa Taiho had believed to be loyal to him, is really one of Shouka's Wind Wolves. She was working as a double agent on Shou Taishi's orders in an elaborate trap. Kourin, who loved Sa Taiho for having adopted her when she had nowhere else to go, had sensed his desire and tried to kill Shuurei on his behalf without his knowledge--little realizing that her amateurish efforts would lead investigators right to him.
Sa Taiho stumbles off and meets up with Shou Taishi. Sa Taiho had worked hard for many years with the ambition of becoming the most powerful man in the empire, yet no matter how hard he struggled or how high he climbed, Shou Taishi was always above him. Thus he resorted to this rebellion as a desperate gamble. Shou Taishi takes on the appearance of a young man and slowly thrusts his arm inside the other man's chest. Sa Taiho admits to having known Shou Taishi was more than human, though that didn't change his desire to be superior. Shou Taishi is saddened at having to kill his long-time friend.
Shusui sends Ryuuki a message informing him of Shuurei's whereabouts, and he rushes off alone to rescue her. He manages to free her, but she has been poisoned. Desperate to save her, Ryuuki goes to see Shou Taishi and bargains for the antidote, promising that he will do one thing Shou Taishi really wants in exchange. Afterward, Shouka expresses his anger with Shou Taishi for using his daughter and Seiran as part of his plan without any regard for their safety. The Prime Minister explains that he made a promise to an emperor long ago not to work for the good of the empire or the people, but when he found an emperor he could respect, he would do everything he could for the sake of that emperor. Shouka later apologizes to Shusui for having adopted her and turned her into an assassin. He disbanded the Wind Wolves twenty years before, yet Shusui insisted upon remaining at the palace because she is in love with him.
Seiran goes to speak with Ryuuki before he leaves to return to living at Shouka's estate. Ryuuki still holds his brother in the highest esteem and feels Seien deserves to be the emperor. Seiran refuses, declaring that he's satisfied with his current identity and that it's too late to switch rulers anyway. Now that Shuuei and Kouyuu, seen as the two most important up-and-coming men in the palace, have pledged their unswerving loyalty to Ryuuki, no one else can take his place.
Finally the time comes for Shuurei to say goodbye to all her friends at the palace. Ryuuki tries to pay her to stay, but Shuuei stops him. Shuurei invites Shuuei and Kouyuu to come over anytime for one of her home-cooked meals...on the condition that they supply the ingredients. She also invites Shusui and gives her regards to Kourin, completely unaware that the young servant had tried to kill her. When she turns to Ryuuki at last to bid him farewell, he shocks her by kissing her in front of everyone. He predicts that Shuurei will eventually return to the palace.
He concludes by whispering in her ear that, as for his sexual preference, he is--as Shuuei would put it--a double-edged blade.