Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 979: Call Between Monarch and Maiden

Vespera stood on the gravel in front of the Eclipse headquarters at nine in the morning, while somewhere under the airport her son’s guild was pouring tea aboard a plane with two floors.

The wind out of the east already carried a hum off the runways that had every window on the lot faintly ringing.

The Shogunate Circle’s cars had come through the checkpoint ten minutes earlier, two of them, dark, polished, and full of Japan.

The guards unloaded in silence and formed a single rank facing the building, travel uniforms pressed, a silver crescent pinned at every shoulder.

Every one of them was awakened, and the banked mana coming off them sat heavy enough on the air that the checkpoint guard stood straighter for the rest of his shift.

Their captain crossed the gravel alone, stopped at a respectful distance, and bowed to Vespera, low and held.

”Lady Regent. The Circle asked us to keep your son’s home safe while his guild is visiting our nation and headquarters.” He straightened. ”It would honor us if you put us to work.”

Vespera looked them over once, then nodded to the captain, and that settled the matter of their employment.

Doug came down the front steps with his clipboard already flipping pages. ”I’ll take you around the perimeter, show you the fences, the cameras, and how the checkpoint rotates.” He paused at the bottom step. ”Fair warning. The big guy checks new people himself.”

”The big guy?”

Pebble had been on his feet since the first car cleared the checkpoint, tracking from the foundation line. Now he came across the lot at his own pace, and the rank of Japan’s finest held steady, though every eye in it widened by a professional minimum.

He stopped close, head level, and six amber eyes moved from guard to guard, unhurried, missing nothing.

He breathed in once, slow, from one end of the formation to the other. The captain’s coat rippled with it.

”They said he was large,” one of the younger guards whispered, in Japanese, to nobody.

The captain, to his lasting credit, inclined his head to Pebble, one guardian to another.

Whatever Pebble read in all of it satisfied him. He made one more pass, then settled onto the gravel between the guards and the way toward the dungeon, letting them all know that they were welcome to protect the property but defending the inner domain was his exclusive privilege.

Ms. Rook had quarters assigned before the captain’s rounds started, with a suggested watch rotation that Vespera approved on one page.

Vespera’s interface chimed as the hum in the east deepened into thrust.

”Lady Ashborn.” The voice was low and even, and she knew the source of it very well.

”Yunohana Tsukikage,” Vespera answered in place of a greeting.

”The plane has begun to roll. I thought you would rather hear it from a person than read it off a tracker,” Yunohana said.

”I would.”

The woman on the other end had courted Kaiden’s favor on his streams for a long time, but before all that, she had already earned something rarer: she was one of the few people Vespera actually respected and trusted.

That, and the stack of binding promises Japan’s government had put in writing for her son and his guild, was what allowed any of this to happen.

It was still a risk, and every one of them knew it. But staying here and letting the farce continue would have cost more, and her son’s people were no longer weak newbies in need of a den. They could fly out on their own.

”I’ll take care of your family. That I promise with my life.”

In Kyoto it was evening. The High Shrine Maiden knelt at a low table in the lantern light of the Moon-Thread Shrine, the phone set before her on the wood.

Five handmaidens knelt along the wall behind her, doing their level best to be furniture.

The youngest of them traded a glance with the eldest, because their lady had asked for the flight’s position twice before evening prayers, and had been smiling since the phone rang.

Vespera watched the guards take their posts along her fence, and the silence she offered back was a comfortable one. Yunohana read it correctly and let it stand.

”Start packing,” Yunohana issued. They had to be in Tokyo to welcome the incoming superstars.

...

The runway let them go.

The acceleration pressed the trio into the lounge seats, and Emily had both palms and her forehead against the window band when the ground fell away. The deck below thundered with stamping feet and somebody’s air horn, confiscated too late.

”WE’RE AIRBORNE!” Leia reported to the entire upper deck, as though the upper deck were not also airborne and present.

”Human tech is fascinating!!” Calypso boomed back, leaning her whole red weight over Emily’s seatback. ”Look at all those little ants below!”

Luna hung over the back of her chair to watch the trio’s faces instead of the view, grinning. Alice knelt on the seat next to Alexandra with the city shrinking in her window.

The rest of the family was noise and warmth in every direction, and Kaiden sat in the middle of it, watching his people be loudly, uselessly, completely happy for the first time since the sedans.

The city tilted away under the wing. For half a second the compound slid past below, small and square on its lot, and one dark shape sat at the center of it with its head raised to follow the climb.

Sarah found it in the half second it was visible and pressed two fingers to the glass, a private salute to the guardian she knew was down there, and then the clouds took the view.

On the compound, the climb was a long thinning roar overhead, and Vespera raised her eyes and followed the silver thread of it.

She had built companies and buried enemies. Now she stood regent over hundreds of strangers who had bet their futures on her son.

Her boy was in the sky, his home was in her keeping, and an ocean was about to sit between them for the first time.

”Tsukikage.”

”Yes.”

”I’ll leave them in your care.”

It was, by her standards, a speech.

In Kyoto, Yunohana Tsukikage bowed to the distant mother on the other end of the line, unseen, unhurried. When she spoke again, it was for an audience of one.

”Yes.”

Vespera paused for a long time. Then, in a tone the Japanese woman didn’t recognize, she added,

”He freeloads a lot. Don’t pamper him needlessly.”

A pause crossed the ocean.

Then the High Shrine Maiden of the Moon-Thread Lineage laughed, bright and entirely undignified, and behind her the youngest handmaiden nearly went over sideways.

”So the itineraries suggested,” Yunohana managed, composure reassembling itself. ”Japan can afford him.”

Above the city, the plane climbed through the cloud deck into sunlight and was gone.

On the gravel, Vespera stayed where she was, the wind moving her hair, the guardian at the center of the lot still watching the sky.

The corner of Vespera’s mouth curved.

”You better not start calling me Mother by the end of his trip.”

”...”

”...”

”...”

Both women remained silent for a very long time.

...