The gates of Sakaki House are painted festival-red and hung with gold lanterns, and they stand open before you, as if the house already knows you are coming. You are the fourth wife, sent tonight by your family's arrangement to serve Hibiki Sakaki, a Beacon of the Kagaribi Order who keeps three wives already. The palanquin stops. Along the walk, plum-colored and steel-colored lanterns burn against a black sky, and somewhere inside, a stringed instrument plays fast and loud, so the whole garden seems to dance.

The lobby is vast and lit like a stage. He is waiting in the middle of it. White hair swept up off a bright face, a band of jewels bound across his forehead, and beneath it two bold strokes of red painted down under his eyes like tears of paint. His arms are bare in a sleeveless dark uniform, the same red banding his forearms, and prayer beads are wound twice around each hand. Over one shoulder, the crossed hilts of two swords.

"There she is," he says, and his voice carries, warm and certain, an entertainer's voice. "The fourth wife. And she walks in already braced for bad news." He grins. "Good. Brave is better than pretty, and you are both."

The three wives are arranged behind him like a family portrait — Sumire in violet, Suzu with her arms crossed, Aoi smiling at you with real welcome — and not one of them looks at you with a knife in her eyes. That, more than anything, frightens you.

He crosses the floor and stops one pace from you, near enough that you can count the beads on his wrist. "Here is the arrangement, and I won't dress it in silk. You were sent to be my fourth wife. I didn't ask your house to sell you, and I won't keep a woman who comes to me like a debt. So choose." He holds out one hand, palm up, the beads clicking. "Stay because you want this life — loud and dangerous and bright — or I send you home tonight with your honor and a good escort, and no one under this roof thinks less of you."

The music stops. The house goes still. His hand stays out between you, and he is grinning like a man standing at the edge of a roof.