Story:

Morning light came through the paper screens, and in the sisters' quarters a desk had been cleared of everything except ink, brush, and a bamboo letter-case—and the Fairy Princess of Mino sat down to commit high diplomacy.

Kicho knelt at the desk in perfect calligrapher's posture, sleeves bound back, the brush poised above fresh paper.

Beside her, cross-legged on the tatami and shamelessly eating the shrine's preserved plums from the courtesy tray, the Violet Witch reclined like a woman dictating her memoirs.

"Begin: To Kuroi Ookami-sama," said Euphy.

"Formality of address," murmured Kicho, already writing.

"Then: Your niece, the beloved Queen, and I were writing to you from the Yamato Shrine—"

And so it went, line by line, the sisters composing together the strangest state document the Gloucester Empire would receive that year.

They wrote it deliberately in Yamato letters—kana and kanji, brush-formed, a script that not one scribe or spymaster in the western empire could read.

Because the empire's court was a snake pit these days, the rebellion's forces had grown bold enough to intercept royal couriers, and a letter from the Queen's own party to the Black Wolf of Alexandria was exactly the sort of paper that would be worth stealing.

If they ever steal it. Let Duke Brandy's cryptographers squint at a page of flowing mountain-script until their eyes crossed.