Shadows on the Moon by Zoe Marriott Read Free Book Online Page A

time.
    For weeks, whenever Mother or Terayama-san looked at me, I had been putting on the mask of Aimi’s gentle smile without ever realizing what that mask was. A shadow-weaving.
    Youta now supported a perfect, unblemished arm in his rough hands. It was not quite my arm. The faint patterns of hair, the tiny lines at the wrist, were subtly wrong. But the bandages were gone.
    “Do you understand what I did?” Youta asked.
    “Yes!” I said, hearing the surprise in my own voice.
    I knew I could do this. In a strange way, it felt the same as picking up my
shamisen
for the first time. When my fingers had closed on the instrument, I had just known what to do.
    I hoped I was better at this than I had been at playing, however.
    “Let me try.”
    Youta laid my right arm down carefully and helped me to hold the other one out straight.
    I stared at the lumpy bandages, then closed my eyes and imagined how my arm should look.
    I sketched in my mind the skinny wrist, white but flushing to peach near the base of the palm. Faint lines ringed it, and there was a pattern of blue veins just under the surface. As my forearm thickened, the skin did, too, hiding the veins. A gleam of soft hair on the other side, and a tiny mole, and then the sharp point of my elbow pushing against the skin. Just as I saw Aimi’s smile as a mask, I saw the arm as a close-fitting sleeve that I pulled into place on top of the bandages. I felt a ripple of power, a tingling of pleasure and excitement that reminded me again of holding a musical instrument, and I knew, even before I opened my eyes, that it had worked.
    There it was. My arm. Unscarred, unbandaged, mole and all.
    “You have a good eye for detail,” Youta said.
    I touched the weaving gingerly, half expecting to feel skin — but my fingertips found the bandages, which my eyes insisted were not there. The difference made me feel queasy.
    “We have the ability to change only what the eye can see,” Youta said, noticing my grimace. “A shadow weaver’s principal tool is misdirection. You must try to prevent anyone from touching your arm, but if they do, simply act normally, and they will usually believe they have imagined it. That is the trick the senses play, you see. People trust their eyes above all else — but most people see what they wish to see, or what they believe they should see, not what is really there. It takes long study or intense desperation to overcome the illusions most of us carry in our own minds.”
    “Will I need to think about it all the time? To keep it there?”
    “As you grow used to it, it will become easier, just as you barely notice the concentration it takes to sit properly or to read. There are stories — my teachers told me — that at one time shadow weavers could fix their illusions in physical things so that the door in the wall would always be hidden or the piece of twine would always appear as a gold necklace. It was said that they could change the substance of things, too: turn a stone into a flower if they wished or simply
wish
a flower into existence. I have never met one of those people, though.” Youta smiled.
    Hesitantly I reached out, wincing, and laid my small, white hand on his large, sooty one. “I would be dead twice over if it were not for you. Will you be my teacher, Youta? Teach me to see things as they really are and to create more illusions.”
    His smile grew wider. “I will teach you everything I know.”

What Youta had said was true. Given a choice between what was real — but improbable — and what was false — yet expected — people really did see only what they wished to.
    Although I had never been indisposed during the months I had lived with Terayama-san, when I lay in my bed the following morning, groaning that my woman’s time had come and that I dare not move for the pain, Mai believed me without question.
    The room was darkened, cold cloths were laid on my forehead, and I was left in peace.
    Normally lying in bed without