The Flower Capital was everything Wano's other regions weren't.
Clean streets. Lit lanterns. Music from open windows and the smell of food that had actually been cooked with the intention of being enjoyed rather than simply consumed. People moved through it with the ease of those who had never had reason to move otherwise — not because they were unaware of what was happening in the rest of the country, but because the arrangement required them not to be.
Ornn walked through it behind Holdem and kept his face neutral.
The tribute cart had made the journey from Amigasa Village to the Flower Capital without incident — down through the inland sea between Kuri and the capital, arriving in the early hours of the morning with its cargo mostly intact. The missing tenth had not been remarked upon. When he considered the scale of what Orochi apparently wasted on a single banquet, the arithmetic made a grim kind of sense.
After the handover, Holdem received his half-day leave with the satisfied air of a man completing a routine. He turned to Ornn with the cooperative blankness of someone operating under standing instructions.
"Where to?"
Tama had been very clear when she'd given the order, her small face entirely serious: Ornn's words are my words. Holdem had accepted this without visible conflict, which said something about the depth of the Kibi Dango's effect that Ornn filed away for consideration later.
"The most reputable entertainment house in the capital," Ornn said. "Take me there."
---
The house was called the Hanamaki-za, and it was exactly what a Flower Capital entertainment house was supposed to be — all polished wood and soft light and the sound of shamisen from behind paper screens, with the kind of cultivated atmosphere that announced its own exclusivity without needing to say so directly.
Holdem fit into this environment the way a very large rock fits into a garden pond. He was accommodated with the practiced ease of a staff trained to accommodate everything.
Ornn found the Mama-san — a compact woman with a pipe and the eyes of someone who had been assessing people professionally for several decades — and said what he'd come to say.
"I'm looking for Komurasaki."
The pipe paused. The eyes recalibrated.
"May I ask — who referred you, my lord?"
"Kyoshiro."
The name landed with the particular weight that Orochi's most trusted swordsman's name carried in the Flower Capital — which was to say, considerable. The Mama-san's expression shifted from assessment to accommodation in the space of a breath.
"Of course. One moment, please." She turned. "Toko — take this lord upstairs."
---
The girl who appeared was small, pink-haired, and had a smile fixed on her face with the quality of something that had been there long enough to become structural. She couldn't have been older than eight or nine. She moved with the quiet, unobtrusive efficiency of someone who had learned early that the best way to navigate difficult rooms was to take up as little space as possible.
Toko, Ornn noted, placing the name against the face. Shimotsuki Yasuie's daughter. The man with the afro who can't stop smiling even at his own execution. Who dies in the last hour before the dawn he spent his whole life working toward.
He followed her up the stairs.
Not this time.
---
The room was dim and fragrant and the shamisen was already playing when he entered — someone with their back to him, working through something slow and complicated, the melody doing the particular thing that good music did in small rooms: making the space feel larger than it was.
The hair was unmistakable. A shade of green that didn't occur in nature without intention, falling long and loose down a back held with the unconscious straightness of someone raised to hold themselves that way regardless of circumstances.
Kozuki Hiyori — Oden's daughter, Momonosuke's younger sister, currently the most sought-after entertainer in the Flower Capital under the name Komurasaki, hiding in the most visible possible location because twenty years of survival had taught her family that sometimes the safest place was directly in the light.
She reached the climax of the piece and stopped. Turned, with the practiced ease of someone who had rehearsed this particular entrance, the paper fan rising to cover the lower half of her face as she turned — the gesture simultaneously revealing and concealing, which was presumably the point.
Ornn looked at her.
She looked at him.
The fan lowered approximately two centimeters.
"You're..." She stopped. Recalibrated. Raised the fan back up. "My lord keeps his youth remarkably well."
"I'm in my early twenties," Ornn said.
"Yes," Hiyori said. "That's what I said."
The silence that followed had a different quality to the one that had preceded it. They were both, fairly clearly, working through the same problem from opposite sides: this was not the person either of them had been expecting to find in this room.
Denjiro had apparently been quite specific in his description of the patron she would be receiving. The description had not included early twenties, forge god, unusual skin tone, general air of someone who has recently been in several fights.
Ornn had been expecting someone with more— he wasn't entirely sure. More deliberate social architecture, perhaps. The Hiyori of the anime had always seemed to be operating three conversations ahead of whoever she was talking to.
The woman in front of him looked like she was trying to remember half a month of rehearsal and finding it unexpectedly inapplicable.
They sat.
The awkward silence settled in, found the room comfortable, and showed no signs of leaving.
---
Downstairs, the Mama-san turned from her post near the entrance to find Kyoshiro — Denjiro, one of the nine red scabbards, Oden's most loyal swordsman, currently performing the role of Orochi's favorite with the hollow dedication of a man who had burned everything he was for a cause that hadn't arrived yet — walking through the front door with an elderly man in tow.
"Master Kyoshiro." She stepped forward. "The guest you arranged to meet Komurasaki is already—"
Denjiro stopped walking.
"Already what."
"Already upstairs, my lord. He came in earlier and said you had referred him. I assumed—"
The elderly man beside Denjiro was still talking, cheerfully, about something involving a song he'd heard last autumn. Denjiro wasn't listening. His expression had undergone several rapid changes and arrived somewhere that wasn't quite alarm and wasn't quite fury and was working out which direction to commit to.
"Take care of the lord's comfort," he said, with the careful evenness of someone making a decision under time pressure. "Find him another companion for the evening. Tell him Komurasaki sends her regrets — she's unwell."
"But my lord, the arrangement—"
"I'll handle the arrangement." He was already moving toward the stairs. "Find someone. Now."
The Mama-san watched him go, and thought several things, and said none of them.
Upstairs, in a small room with a shamisen on the floor and two people sitting in silence on opposite sides of a table, Toko stood outside the closed door and waited with the patience of someone who had learned to wait very well.