Dragon Sword and Wind Child by Noriko Ogiwara

me. Not now, not ever. He doesn’t see me.
    At first she had thought he was seeing Princess Sayura rather than herself. But she had been wrong. Perhaps Princess Sayura had grown weary of life because she realized that his heart was not hers. While drawn to the Water Maiden, in reality he was gazing far into the distance, and even the Prince himself did not really understand. But Saya did, and most likely Princess Sayura had, too: the object of his gaze was Teruhi’s reflection glimpsed in the water’s surface.
    Intuition, like the sixth sense of a small animal, gave her this insight. That the immortal twins quarreled every time they met was not simply because they did not get along. It was because they revolved around each other like orbiting stars. Just let an outsider try to intrude upon such an unfathomable love-hate relationship, to break the intense bond in which the violence of their feelings caused them to repel each other!
    No mortal can possibly ease the Prince’s pain, the rift created by the gods, when heaven and earth were sundered. No one can but the two immortals themselves, the sun and the moon who each represent one half of the other.
    Saya knew that she had at last discovered the truth, but it did not help her. She could only meditate on the emptiness of her two open hands.
    â€œ PERHAPS we should call for a physician. For Lady Blue,” the senior handmaiden said to her assistant after Saya had left. The assistant, who was putting away the writing desk, turned and smoothed her hair.
    â€œBut she has become much more pliable. With the ceremony soon to take place, a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders.”
    â€œAh, but it makes me nervous when she is so well behaved day after day. There was a time when she ate a shameful amount, yet recently she hardly touches her food. I wonder if she is ill.”
    â€œI see what you mean. Perhaps you’re right.” The assistant pondered the problem.
    â€œIt would be bad for our reputation if people thought that she had become ill because we harassed her. We’ll have to do something,” the senior handmaiden said.
    It did not take long for her quick-witted assistant to come up with a plan. “A physician might be overdoing it. But what if we gave her a child servant? Having no servant of her own, she has had to do everything for herself. Perhaps this would ease her burden.”
    The other woman nodded in agreement. “An excellent idea. And perhaps if she had her own servant, the other girls would be less inclined to treat her as a serving girl.”
    â€œWell, as to that, who knows,” said the assistant with a faint sneer.
    EVERYTHING SEEMED like too much trouble. It was partly the change in climate: the rainy season had been followed by intense summer heat and relentless sunshine. But more than anything else, Saya, who had never before lost her appetite from heartbreak, was defeated by herself. Her confidence in every area had evaporated, and she no longer even hoped to continue as a handmaiden.
    Maybe if I fall ill and die, Princess Teruhi won’t revile me , she thought. But it would be too galling to be confined to her bed and treated as a nuisance by the coldhearted people of the palace. She longed for her home in the east. There, when the heat became intense, they had swum freely in the river and brought out benches at night to sleep under the stars. But neither the cool breeze nor the fresh morning dew reached the deep recesses of the palace. There was only the sun glaring down on the hard dry earth. Summer in the palace hung heavy and stagnant.
    One sleepless night, Saya thought she really would die. Although she did not really understand what it meant to die, it seemed as if her soul was flailing wildly trying to escape her physical frame and all its troubles. It no longer mattered to her whether it would be she who discarded her body or she who would be left behind. She only knew that if she