Chapter 83 THE FINAL PLAY

Chapter 83 THE FINAL PLAY
Mei POV

The festival grounds on the last night are something I was not prepared for.

I have seen them building all week, day by day, the stalls going up and the stage taking shape and the lanterns being strung between buildings until the whole square was threaded with light. I have seen the crowds growing and the energy compounding and the town of Hollow Crest becoming more fully itself with each passing evening.

But this.

Every lantern in the square is lit. Not just the strings between the buildings but the ones on poles and the ones in windows and the ones carried by people moving through the crowd, dozens of individual warm lights bobbing and swaying through the dark like a field of low stars. The lily garlands overhead are the densest they have been all week, the white blooms so thickly strung that looking up through them is like looking up through a flowering ceiling, and the smell of them is everywhere, sweet and warm and completely inescapable.

The crowd is enormous.

Not just Hollow Crest. All eight towns are here tonight, the way Jasper described them that first morning at the breakfast table, and they have brought their children and their grandparents and their festival clothes and everything they feel about Takuya Miyuki and what he built and what he left behind, and the result is a square that is barely a square anymore, just a mass of people and light and sound.

I hold onto Declan's arm and he holds onto mine and we move through it together.

The team stays roughly together for the first few minutes, the specific gravity of people who know each other in an unfamiliar crowd, and then the crowd does what crowds do and distributes everyone into different pockets and different eddies and I find myself with Declan on my left and Emeka on my right and everyone else somewhere in the warm press of bodies around us.

"There's the stage," Emeka says, pointing.

I look.

The stage is fully dressed tonight. Not the simple platform of previous evenings but something that has been worked on all day while we were in the theater, draped fabric and flowering arrangements and the warm wash of actual stage lighting, real electrical lighting tonight rather than the oil lamps and firelight of the previous performances.

Someone went to considerable effort for the last night.

The space in front of it is packed, people three deep and still growing, all facing forward with the particular contained excitement of a crowd waiting for something it has been building toward all week.

"We should find a position," Declan says, craning his neck to see above the heads around us.

"Over there," I say, pointing to a gap along the right side that still has some open ground.

We move toward it, Emeka following, and find ourselves standing with a decent sightline to the stage just as the lights dim.

The crowd goes quiet.

It is the specific quiet of several thousand people making a collective decision at the same moment, the particular suspension of a crowd that has just realized the thing it has been waiting for is starting, and it lands across the square like a held breath.

And then Naomi walks out onto the stage.

The applause that greets her is immediate and full, the kind that comes from an audience that has decided before a single word is spoken that the person in front of them has already earned it. She stops in the center of the stage and waits for it to settle, and in the waiting she is already doing something I have watched her do every night and still find remarkable, she is making the whole square feel smaller, more intimate, the particular gift of a stage presence that does not require words to establish itself.

She is wearing white.

A simple costume, long and clear-lined, nothing elaborate, and the stage light catches it and the whole effect is of someone who has decided that the night's significance does not require decoration.

She looks out at the crowd for a moment.

Then she begins.

I will not try to summarize what happens in the next hour because I am not sure I could and I am not sure it would serve the purpose. What I can say is that the final play of the Festival of Lilies is not the romantic production of previous nights, the idealized story of the Miyuki courtship and the flowering of a love that Hollow Crest has been performing for years. Tonight's play is something older and more specific, the full arc of Takuya and Yoshi Miyuki's life together, from the meeting to the building of the theaters to the years of work and the specific kind of love that grows between two people who spend their lives building something together.

And the end of it.

His death. Naomi standing alone on stage with a single lily in her hand and the stage light narrowing to a single point and the crowd around me so quiet that I can hear the person next to me breathing.

She sets the lily down on the stage floor.

She looks out at the crowd.

"He built something that lasts," she says, and her voice carries across the whole square without effort, the actress's gift. "And lasting things do not close easily."

The silence holds for one more moment.

Then the stage goes dark and the applause breaks over the square like a wave and I find that I am clapping hard with both hands and that my eyes are wet and I do not particularly care about either of these things.

Declan's hand lands on my shoulder briefly.

I look up at him.

He is smiling, the kind that has nothing to do with humor, and he nods once at me. I nod back. Beside me Emeka is applauding steadily with the particular quiet dignity he brings to everything, his eyes bright.

The lights come back up on stage and the cast takes their bow and the applause goes on for longer than I would have expected and then finally settles and the energy of the crowd shifts from held attention to released joy, the specific transition of an audience that has been moved and is now remembering how to be social again.

I breathe out.

That is when Wise Obasan appears.

I see her before most of the people around me do, the small ancient figure moving through the crowd with a purpose that parts people instinctively, as though they can sense without looking that something with strong opinions is approaching. She is wearing the same clothes as this morning and the same expression of someone who made a determination and has come to announce it publicly.

She climbs the stage steps.

I grab Declan's arm.

He looks down at me and then toward the stage and his expression moves rapidly through several stages of concern.

"Oh no," he says quietly.

Wise Obasan takes the center of the stage with the comfort of someone who has been doing this for longer than the stage has existed, possibly longer than Hollow Crest has existed, and looks out at the crowd with her yellow-toothed smile.

"Good evening, Hollow Crest."

The crowd responds with more warmth than I would have predicted, several voices calling back greetings, the particular affection of a community for its own traditions even the unusual ones.

"You all know why I am here," she announces, her ancient voice carrying with surprising strength. "The moon lily pairings of this year's festival are ready to be declared."

The crowd makes its sounds. Excitement from the younger contingent. Resignation from several people nearby who clearly know what is coming. A few actual groans from people who apparently had opinions about this morning's assessments.

"First I will declare the unapproved pairs," she announces, and several people in the crowd go slightly tense. "These are matches of good will but misaligned energy, no shame to them, just not the best that could have been found."

She begins listing couples with the systematic certainty of someone reading from a document only she can see.

I stop listening to the individual names because I am watching Sachi.

He is in the crowd, visible between two taller people ahead of me and to the left, and he is watching the stage with an expression I have been cataloguing all week. Not the theatrical warmth. Not the performance. The underneath thing, the tired real version of Joji Sachi that only shows itself in unguarded moments.

He looks at Naomi on the stage.

She is looking at him.

Something passes between them across the crowd and the light and the evening air, something that has no words attached to it and does not need them, and then they both look away at the same moment with the specific coordinated timing of two people who have been looking away at the same moment for a very long time.

That Sachi.

"And now," Wise Obasan says, and her voice drops into the register she used this morning when she said the truest thing, "the approved pairs."

I brace.

She says Emeka's name.

She says Xiao Shen's name.

There is a murmur through the crowd and somewhere to my right I hear Sachi make a small sound that he swallows quickly.

Wise Obasan's eyes find me in the crowd.

I do not know how. There are several thousand people here and the light from the stage is mostly pointed away from us and I am not especially tall and not especially noticeable in a crowd of this size, but her eyes find me with the specific accuracy of someone who has been tracking exactly where I am since she climbed those stairs.

She says Declan's name and then mine.

There is a sound from the crowd around us, the collective sound of people who have been watching this festival all week and have opinions about it, and beside me Declan sighs in the patient way of someone accepting a consequence.

Then she says the last pair.

Cal's name first.

Mine second.

The sound from the crowd is louder this time and I feel the heat starting in my chest and working rapidly outward in every direction and I look firmly at the stage and nowhere else.

Wise Obasan holds the silence for exactly as long as she wants to, which is long, and then she smiles her yellow smile at the crowd.

"These are my declarations," she says. "The moon lilies do not lie."

She descends the stage steps.

The crowd breaks into conversation and laughter and the various sounds of people who have just been given something to discuss, and I look at Declan and he looks at me and neither of us says anything for a moment.

Then from somewhere in the crowd, at carrying volume, Mrs. Koku's voice.

"I KNEW IT! DIDN'T I SAY? DIDN'T I SAY FROM THE VERY BEGINNING? NOW JASPER, I HOPE YOU'RE PAYING ATTENTION BECAUSE THIS IS HOW THESE THINGS—"

I look at the sky.

The sky is very clear tonight.

"Declan," I say.

"I know," he says.

"I need to find Cal," I say.

"I know," he says again, and he takes my arm and begins moving us through the crowd.