The Twelve Kingdoms: A Thousand Leagues of Wind Read Online Free PDF

thoughtful enough to ask."
    The girl looked nervously around at the others. None of them raised their heads.
    Gazing down at them, Riyou adjusted her ermine coat and picked up the reins. "Well, don't you work too hard, now. I am a forgiving taskmaster. I'm not going to scold anybody for letting their hair down a little. While I'm out, I leave everything in your capable hands."
    "As you wish." The servants scraped their foreheads against the ground, as did the girl, who looked about ready to cry.
    Riyou climbed onto Setsuko. With a shout of laughter, the flying tiger leapt from the entranceway and down into the wintry desolation of the world below.

    The servants raised their heads and watched Setsuko sail out of sight to the north. As one, they looked over their shoulders at the girl.
    "You had to go and open your big mouth!"
    "Don't you know when to put a cork in it?"
    "A laundry list of impossibilities! Honma sowed this mess, and now she can reap it!"
    "How about we send the little witch to the Five Mountains? By the time she returns, Lady Suibi will have been back for ages."
    There was rank among wizards as well. Riyou herself was a class-three wizard. In order to be one of her servants, you had to have barely enough talent to be listed upon the Registry of Wizards, but nothing more than that. The girl called Honma was the lowest-ranked of the lesser wizards.
    "What a fine mess. In the middle of this freezing cold, we're supposed to go to Mount Go and dig up gyokkou stones? And then to the Kyokai to catch proverb fish? And on top of that, jewel grass? At this time of year, with winter coming on, tell me, where's anybody going to lay their eyes on jewel grass?"
    "Damn it all, with her finally leaving town for a few days, I was counting on taking things easy for a change."
    "Honma can do the cleaning and painting. That's all she's good for, anyway."
    Their censorious eyes all fell upon the girl and she fled.

    She ran into the garden, to the trunk of an old pine tree in a corner of the garden nestled up against the cliff. There she wept.
    When Riyou spoke to her in that manner, how else was she supposed to respond? If it had been any of the other servants, they would have said the same thing. It wasn't her fault. In the first place. Riyou had no intent of letting her servants slack off during her absence. This was always the way she did things. Everybody in the grotto should know that by now.
    "What's this now?" came a voice behind her. It was the old man who kept guard over the garden. "Oh, don't let it get to you. They're taking it out on you because they don't have the guts to stand up to her, either. It'll be okay once they get it out of their systems, Mokurin."
    The girl shook her head. "That's not my name."
    Back in that world she so dearly longed for, she used to be called Suzu. An itinerant monk had taught her the three Chinese characters of her Japanese name, Ooki Suzu. Most people, though, mixed the second and third character together, and because in Chinese ki (or "wood") is pronounced moku, and suzu (or "bell") is pronounced rin, they called her Mokurin. At least when they weren't using some insulting term like Honma, among others. None was her real name.
    Her old home on a gently sloping hill amidst the rolling mountains, the moments of warm conversation, she'd lost it all. Already, a hundred years had passed since she'd been swept away to this world. The slave trader had taken her away, and while crossing the mountain pass she'd fallen from some kind of precipice and had ended up in the Kyokai.
    "Why does she have to be like that?"
    "Because that's the kind of person she is. Don't worry about it so. After all, her being so headstrong was what got her sent packing in the first place. Giving her this grotto was the tactful way of easing her out."
    "I know that, but . . . . "
    Suzu had been suddenly thrust into this strange world, not being able to communicate, not having the slightest idea what was going on. And