She lives her life in ritual, he thought. Who is there to tell her? Who is there to even （lowly） talk to her?
His heart broke for her as she fell to her knees. “But…” she said. “But the spirits… They don’t listen to these women, do they?”
As he repeated it, Hwanji spoke quickly. “No, no. Not like they listen to you. Don’t worry, Honored One. You’re the strongest yoki-hijo. Everyone knows it. Why, my old yoki-hijo, before she retired, she only averaged around ten spirits summoned per session.”
Yumi wilted. “Ten. I…averaged around twelve…and most yoki-hijo draw no more than five or six, Liyun told me. So…”
So the spirits did not ignore a woman simply because she decided to eat on her own. Painter should have felt vindicated. Instead he felt miserable.
“The others…retire?” Yumi asked. “I was told…this wasn’t possible. That they have to work even when infirm.”
“They insist on being finished at age seventy,” Hwanji said as Painter repeated Yumi’s words. “And, well, I don’t think the years until that retirement are quite as hard on them as they are for you. Since…” She winced. “They take days off. Whenever they feel they need them. Dwookim worked around half the days of the week during most of the time I served her.”
“Days off,” Yumi said, Painter repeating. “To do what?”
“Whatever they want,” Hwanji said, with a shrug. “I’m sorry, Honored One.”
“Thank her, please,” Yumi said, bowing to Hwanji. “Thank her, Painter. For being the only person, apparently, to care if I knew the truth.”
“Thank you,” Painter whispered. “Deeply, Hwanji. I will pretend I didn’t learn this from you.”
She nodded and turned away, glancing all around her anxiously, as if frightened Liyun would pop out at any moment.
“It seems,” Yumi whispered, looking up at him with tears in her eyes, “that you were right. Good job.”
“Yumi…” he said, reaching toward her shoulder—then froze. He didn’t want to inflict those feelings upon her. It felt like the wrong time.
“If you please,” Yumi said to him, “would you go in and go to sleep? I have the distinct and urgent need to be someone else for a while.”
Two days later, when they awoke again in Yumi’s world, she was feeling somewhat better. She’d spent her day in Painter’s world meditating while he roamed the city, testing out the new freedom granted by Design’s change to their bond.
How quickly and naturally he had returned to freedom. Did he feel constricted now that they were back in her world, where their tether was barely ten feet long? What did it say that she’d stayed in his room thinking the entire day?
She walked to the window, gazing outward while listening to Painter fetch his breakfast from the attendants. She watched the rising crops creeping ever higher in the sky as hotspots on the ground went from warm to scalding. The plants spun like children playing in a rare spring rainfall. She watched them soar, and she envied their liberty. Even cultivated crops were granted more independence than she.
As soon as she thought that, she quashed it. Crushing her longing, her wanderlust, her dreams until they were flat as paper, more easily filed away deep within her soul.
Despite it all, that’s still my instinct, she thought, listening to Painter eat. I know I’ve been lied to. Yet my training holds. It’s a depressing fact. Abuse is a more effective form of captivity than a cell will ever be.
A quiet banging came at the door, and Yumi turned, cocking her head. Why was someone doing that? In all her life, when people wanted her, they simply entered.
Painter called for the person to enter. Liyun opened the door, dressed immaculately in white and dark blue, the long sleeves of her ceremonial tobok swallowing her hands.
She bowed. “Upon your pleasure, Chosen.”
Painter waved with his maipon sticks for her to enter. She left her clogs behind and knelt before him in a posture that might have looked demure for someone else. Liyun, however, appeared unable to make herself fully bow her back, her elbows were too stiff on her knees, and she lowered her head barely a few degrees. A technically apologetic pose, by the strictest definition of the word.
She seemed sorry in the same way a tank commander might be apologetic after destroying your house. He might be in the wrong. But he was still in a tank.
“How,” Liyun finally said to Painter, “did you find out?”
He continued eating, but glanced at Yumi, letting her take the lead. She nodded to him in thanks.
“Find out,” Yumi said, “about what, Liyun?”
Painter repeated the words with an appropriate air of indifference. How did he manage that? She would have wilted beneath Liyun’s glare.
“The reform movement,” Liyun admitted at last.
Something had been straining inside of Yumi. It cracked fully when Liyun said the words. Until that moment, a part of Yumi had believed that Hwanji had been lying or confused.
“I…” Yumi said.
“Someone contacted me,” Painter said, fabricating the lie with such ease it concerned her. “Someone who thought I was being treated unfairly. They left me a note a few weeks ago. There was no name. Just a random activist, I suppose.”
Liyun swallowed this lie easily.
“You shouldn’t have taught me to read,” Yumi said, with him repeating the words. “I’d be a much better captive that way.”
“You aren’t a captive,” Liyun said. “You are—”
“A servant, yes,” Yumi said, with him repeating. “I know.”
Liyun took a deep breath. “Is this the reason, then, for all the…strangeness these last weeks?”
Painter looked to Yumi.
“Yes,” she said for him to repeat. “To an extent.” The deception came easily to her as well. Frighteningly easy.
Liyun stood up and nodded. “Very well then.” She turned to leave. “I shall meet you at the place of ritual, where I shall wait upon your needs for the day, Chosen.”
“Wait,” Yumi said through Painter. “That’s it? That’s the end? All you’re going to say?”
“It is not uncommon,” Liyun said as she slipped on her clogs, “for a younger person to seek to stride past their boundaries. I had hoped such a common attitude would not seize you, but we are all weak before the eyes of the spirits.” She looked at Painter. “We are still the servants of the people. Even the most reformed yoki-hijo does her duty in that regard. So we continue. Besides, I know for a fact you were trained well. You will overcome this bout of petulance.”
Yumi gasped softly. Liyun hadn’t spoken to her in such a forward way since the first years of her training.
The woman turned to leave. Yumi found a word bubbling out, too hot to keep in. “Liyun!”
The woman glanced over her shoulder as Painter relayed the word.
“Do the others live with their families?” Yumi asked. “Do they go back to them? At least visit their homes?”
“It is not unheard of,” Liyun said, “for a yoki-hijo among the more…liberal persuasions to spend a few weeks each year with her birth family.” She paused briefly. “You’d hate it, Yumi. Nothing to do? Sitting each day with people you don’t know? Strangers trying to pretend they’re your parents? You would be miserable.”