Lishi saw the joyous evening and her triumph beginning to collapse around her. She wondered how she would be able to tell Papaqin how it had gone so badly so quickly. She could imagine his face going slack, his shoulders slumping and his will shattering inside him... and the foul anger and abuse that would follow. "Mamaqin was dying. Guji," Lishi said, looking down at her mamaqin unmoving in her carry-chair. "That would have killed Papaqin, too, after all that had happened to us. So I... I... Just the smallest help... Just enough that..." She couldn't finish, her voice choking. Her hands lifted. Fell back to her sides.
"You know the punishment for this sin? You know the Confession?"
Lishi clasped her hands behind her back. She could barely speak. "Yes, Guji." Inari has given me His own punishment to bear for what I did. If I'd let her die, then Papaqin might have married someone else, and he might have left me alone.
"Look at me. Quote the Confessions for me; you've certainly heard it often enough in your studies."
She forced herself to look down into his face: stern now, the wrinkles holding his ancient eyes drawn harshly in his skin. Her voice was little more than a whisper. " 'The sinner has abused Inari's Gift and shown that she no longer trusts in Inari's judgment; therefore—' " She stopped.
"Finish it," the Guji told her.
Silence
"Did I stutter?" the Guji asked.
" 'Therefore, strike her hands from her body and her tongue from her mouth so that she may never use the Gift again.' " Lishi took a long breath.
"You put yourself above Inari?"
"No, Guji," Lishi protested. "I truly don't. But I watched her suffering, watched my papaqin suffer with her..."
"Does your papaqin know what you did? Does anyone?"
"No, Guji. At least, I don't think so. I was always alone with her when I tried. I made certain of that."
The Guji nodded. His hand was still on her mamaqin's arm. "You didn't do all you could for her, did you?"
Lishi shook her head. "I was afraid. I knew Inari would be angry, and I was also afraid that everyone would notice—"
"Do it now," the Guji said, interrupting her. At her look of shock, his stern face relaxed. "The gift of healing is the rarest tendency, the most easily abused, and the most dangerous to the person using it, which is why it's proscribed. It's also why I made certain that the only other person here tonight was someone I could trust. Your hands and tongue are safe for now, Lishi. Show me. Show me Inari's Gift. Use it as you wanted to use it. Go on," he said as she hesitated.
Lishi took a long breath. She could feel the Guji staring at her as she closed her eyes and brought her hands together. As she been taught, she reached deep into her inner self as she prayed to Inari to show her the way, and again the path to the Misogi opened up before her, sparking purple and red in her mind. Her hands were moving, not in the patterns that Hu'Torii shu'Chang had laboriously taught the acolytes but in her own unconscious manner, the way she knew they must go to shape this particular Gift. She could feel it now, a warmth between her still-moving hands, a glow that penetrated her eyelids and sent blood-tinted, pulsing streaks chasing themselves before her.
Before, she'd stopped at this point, just as the energy began to be felt, and applied it to her mamaqin. This time she allowed it to continue to flow around her, gathering it. She chanted: words she didn't know, in a language that wasn't hers. A calmness filled Lishi as her hands stopped moving, as she cupped Inari's Gift in her hands.
She opened her eyes. Her mamaqin was staring at the brilliance she held between them. "This is for you, Mamaqin," Lishi whispered. "Inari has sent it to you." With that, she bent forward and placed her hands on her mamaqin's shoulder. The brilliance darted out, striking her mamaqin and seeming to sink into her.
As Lishi touched her mamaqin, she felt again the wild, black heat in the older woman: patches of it in her head, around her heart, in her lungs. It paled where the Misogi touched it, and this time, this time Lishi let the power flow freely, let it cover the illness. She could feel it through her hands: as if Lishi herself had the Fever, as if it could crawl out from her mamaqin into herself. She pushed it back, back into the maelstrom of the Misogi, and the heat rose so intensely that she thought her hands would be burned.
She lifted her hands away from her mamaqin, unable to hold the power any longer.
Tao jerked in her seat, a shuddering intake of breath as if she were a drowning person gasping for air. Her eyes went wide, and she gave a long, low wail that held no words at all. She sank back, her eyes closing... and when they opened again, her pupils were clear, and she looked at the Guji and Ei'Torii Baihu alongside him, then at Lishi in her purple robes.
"Lishi? I feel as if I've been away for a long time... I'm so tired, and I don't remember... Why are you dressed that way, child, like a torii? And so much older..."
Lishi's breath caught in a sob. She felt too weary to stand, and sank down alongside the carry-chair, gathering the woman in her arms. She looked at her own hands, marveling that they weren't burned to the bone. "Mamaqin..." The doors to the chapel pushed opened suddenly and her papaqin strode in, looking concerned. The servants peered around the opening. Lishi glanced at him; her mamaqin turned in her carry-chair and laughed.
"Deng!"
"Tao?" he said. He gaped, almost comically, caught in a half-stride. "Tao, is that you I heard?"
"Indeed it was," the Guji answered him, moving between Deng and Lishi as Baihu lifted Lishi to her feet, his hands supporting her as she swayed, exhausted. "Inari has moved here tonight, Mister, in honor of your daughter's anointment. We have witnessed a special blessing."
Lishi heard the Guji's last words as if they were coming from a great distance. She thought she saw her papaqin rushing to them, but the shadows in the chapel were growing darker and the candlelight could not hold them back. The darkness whirled around her, a night-storm. She pushed at it with her hands, but the blackness filled her mouth and her eyes and bore her away.