Kensei Jon's Arc

Chapter 32 of 49

The magic book still sat on the shelf beside the others Kensei had carried from the old library. Ha-ni slept in her own room now. That gave him mornings again. He pulled the whole crate down and began to sort what he owned. He wanted to know what else he had missed. The books were not what he expected. One taught how to read the stars for sailing. One mapped how water moved through soil and stone. One named the signs that led to gold in a riverbed. One, its cover worn soft, taught seduction, with drawings he shut fast when he heard Jeon-min's step. "What is all that," Jeon-min said. He set Ha-ni down on her blanket. She reached for a striped cat that had wandered in through the door, its fur banded orange and black like a koi. The cat let her grab a fistful and did not run. "Books," Kensei said. "Not law. Not history. Skills. Someone hid these the way they hid the magic." Jeon-min knelt and lifted one. He read the first page. "Star sailing." He set it down. "We don't sail." "Look at this one." Kensei held out a thin volume near the bottom of the crate. Its pages were stitched, not bound. "It's about a tribe. The kamayaki." Jeon-min took it. He read slowly, moving his finger down the lines. Kensei watched his face. "They were Christian," Jeon-min said. "Long ago. In the north." He turned a page. "And they let two men marry. Two women. It says here. Their priest blessed it." Kensei went still. "Blessed it." "Blessed it," Jeon-min said. He did not soften the word. He read the rest and closed the book. "They were real. A whole people. They lived like we live and no one struck them down for it." Kensei took the book back. His hands were not steady. All his life he had thought his love was the first of its kind, a thing with no name and no place. He had fought the palace alone because he believed no one had stood where he stood. "I thought we were the only ones," he said. "You thought wrong." Jeon-min touched the worn cover. "Someone buried this. Someone wanted us to think we were the only ones." The cat climbed into the crate and settled on the star charts. Ha-ni laughed. Kensei set the kamayaki book apart from the rest, alone on the clean part of the table. "This one we keep out," he said. "Where she can find it when she's old enough to read." Jeon-min nodded. He picked up Ha-ni and held her against the book so she could pat its cover. "So she knows," he said. "So she never thinks she's the only one." Kensei looked at the crate of hidden skills. The buried knowledge was not only magic. It was proof. Someone had worked to erase every trace that his kind of love had ever lived free. Now he held the trace in his hand.