Hello, everybody. My first time posting here. Sorry if it's a bit of a mess. This is an alternate universe, so if you don't like that, then et cetera. It's shoujo-ai/yuri, though it starts fairly slow, and there probably won't be anything to frighten the horses with for a little while. Rosa Chinensis beta'd this for me, and I'm enormously grateful to her.

Glossary of sorts. Soror mystica – you know, I'm not completely sure what that means. But the soror part means "sister" and I think the mystica part is cognate. A sort of "mystical girlfriend," I guess. Hototogisu – the Japanese name for a species of cuckoo, found in various other countries as well. Liana syrup – in the Heian era, shaved ice was already a big feature among Japanese desserts/snacks; stately homes often had ice-houses where ice would keep well into the summer months. Liana syrup was squeezed from a kind of vine, I believe, and used for sweetening. Sei Shonagon thought it tres elegant. Kotatsu – a table, low to the floor, Japanese style. Um, I think that's it for this time.

And, of course, I do not own Maria-sama ga Miteru. You may all have cause to be glad of that quite soon.

I. A Confusticating Puzzlement

Ogasawara Sachiko left the Sorceresses' Guild in high dudgeon.

When Ogasawara Sachiko, Dragon-level Sorceress of the Molting-Cranes, was in any sort of dudgeon, never mind a high one, there was really no way of knowing it unless you crossed her. She looked exactly the same as she did when her mood was peaceful. If you did even such a minor thing as get in her way, as an unsuspecting flower-girl did at this point...

"Flowers, your ladyship, only a penny the bunch –"

"Begone, wretched child! Trade your bloodsoaked flowers to the lepers in Hell's Ditch for a little rumpy-pumpy, and drown yourself in the mud of Tanner's Lane! May the many hells embrace –"

Sachiko found that she was yelling at nothing. The child had fled at the first roar.

On some level or other, she felt ashamed of herself. She didn't ordinarily use such language – her mother would have been horrified by that little outburst. But anyone, sorceress or otherwise, who has done business with sailors and dockhands tends to pick such things up, and she was too consumed with anger to pay it much mind. She strode on, little noticing what went on about her, certainly not seeing how the people who had crowded the street ahead of her were jumping to get out of her way. They were little more than grey blurs to her, even the big, stupid, stolid-looking carthorse which was shying away from her, its nostrils dilated and eyes rolling. It was pulling its cart toward the entrance of the Clockmakers' Guild – ignoring the curses and lashes from its confused master – in an effort to get out of Sachiko's way.

Her conversation with the Grand Mugwump of the Dragon Order had all but unseated her reason. She had almost resigned her commission on the spot. It was all the more irksome as the current Grand Mugwump was her former teacher, Mizuno Youko.

"You may not go to the Sun Gorge with the other Questioners, Ogasawara-kun, because you do not yet have a soror mystica, or even a simple famula," Youko-sama had said. "I have told you repeatedly that this is a matter you have to attend to if you wish to function as a full member of the Guild. I'm surprised, and a little annoyed, that you have raised the subject of the Questioning, knowing full well that you are still delinquent in this matter –"

"Why do I need such a thing?" Sachiko had asked, hearing and hating the faint hint of a whine in her own voice. It stung that Youko, her dear friend and teacher, had addressed her by her family name instead of the simple "Sachiko" she had always used. "I work best alone, you know that. Suga-sama doesn't have a soror mystica, and neither does Fujiwara-dono –"

"They are established sorceresses, and even they have servants, as you know full well. A sorceress of our stage cannot go without. There are always practical matters that need attending to, and a sorceress cannot do her best work if she is constantly strangling in mundanity, and it is your duty as a Dragon to start teaching a younger sorceress what you have learned from me. I'm going to have to find a new one of my own, you know. Now that you have advanced to Dragon-level sorcery, I can no longer claim you as my soror mystica. I have to go to all the bother of finding and training someone new, in these few days before the third month begins, or I can't go either. Why should you be exempt?"

"Youko-sama. Please. They all dread me. None of them wants to get near me!"

"At least in part because you keep only a few people near you, and push everyone else away. That is hardly my fault, or anyone's, other than your own."

"I do my best –"

"You simply have to learn to get on with people, Sachiko. You need a body-servant. Look you, what of your cousin there, Touko-chan? She's flapping around loose, since she made Ox-level. She needs a mistress, you need a soror, what could be simpler?"

"Touko is – a dear girl in many ways –" Sachiko was floundering. Dear, mischievous, frustrating little Touko, she thought. Charming in small doses, but as a constant companion, she would drive me mad very quickly.

"What other options have you? The question is not rhetorical. Examine your options. All of them. You will be excluded from this Questioning unless you find someone, and find her fast."

Damn her, Sachiko thought bitterly. And quickly withdrew the thought, and said a countercurse. She needed to calm herself; anger could become an active agent all too easily, especially in the dreadful climate of these latter days. She wanted no harm to befall Youko-sama; she loved and admired Youko-sama. But Youko-sama was always pushing her into things she didn't want.

"That is my duty as your teacher," Youko-sama had told her, on one of the rare occasions when Sachiko had really complained. "You have too many requirements, Sachiko. You probably always will. Your friends can accommodate your requirements, up to a point. But I would not be doing my duty as your mistress if I did not encourage you to waive as many of them as possible. Your friends are on your side, but if you try conclusions with the world at large, you will lose."

Well, we'll see about that, Sachiko thought grimly. A famula, eh? Well, then, a famula it would be. Any famula. Any warm body off the street. Any one of these grey blurs will do the trick –

She looked at one of the grey blurs, which took the form of a bedraggled, rag-clothed girl with a sweet face and wide, terrified eyes, quickly withdrawing an outstretched hand and backing away from Sachiko, banging her foot on a stone, stumbling, and running away up the street.

Sachiko watched her go, a bit crestfallen. Perhaps it should wait until I'm in a better mood, she thought ruefully.

She was coming, more quickly than she liked, to the fifth ward of the great city of Heian Kyo. The Mountain Lily Inn, where she lived, was a few steps away. Now she had to face her roommates.

"I'm coming with you, Rei-chan," Yoshino-chan was saying stubbornly as Sachiko came into the second-floor suite they shared.

Hearing the tone of Yoshino-chan's voice, Sachiko tensed up. An old argument was playing itself out in a new guise, it seemed, at the kotatsu table in the middle of the common room. She would have to set aside her own troubles for the moment.

"Yoshino, sweet, you will receive treatment for your illness soon." Rei-san was using the pleading, adoring tone she used only with Yoshino-chan under Heaven. "It will take deep magic to restore your blood, and Fujiwara-dono said you would need to rest and prepare for a while, including much meditation. Let Noriko-chan come with me this time. Please? As a favor to me? You can accompany me on the Questioning next year. I'll insist upon it, in fact."

"I don't like that Noriko-san," Yoshino-chan said, her arms folded, glaring at the tabletop as if it had affronted her. "She's willful, and she's sure she's always right."

Rei-san was looking at her soror helplessly. The obvious response to this remark of Yoshino-chan's would only have made matters worse, of course. "Yoshino, my darling, I don't want to risk losing you when we're this close to..."

"Don't you try sweet-talking me!" Yoshino-chan shrieked. "I'm fly to your game! Keep up the mealy-mouthed fol-de-rol and I'll pop you one in the beezer!"

"But, my angel, my sweet sister..." Rei-san was near tears.

"Basta!" Yoshino-chan stood, her violet Ox-robes swirling angrily about her slender legs. "I'm eating out. I'm sleeping out, too! I'm never sharing a bed with you again, you stinker!"

"Baby pie!" Rei-san cried, distraught. But Yoshino-chan had stormed out, brushing past Sachiko without so much as glancing at her.

Sachiko stood where she was, looking at Hasekura Rei-san, her mouth slightly open. She never knew what to say at times like this. She liked Rei-san and Yoshino-chan very much, but they were terribly passionate. Whether they were pleased with each other or displeased, everybody in earshot knew about it.

Rei-san, having half-risen, slumped back in her place at the kotatsu, seemingly unable to move. Her proud, lovely face was sagging in sorrow.

Satou Sei-san, drinking rice-wine in the corner by the sliding windows, did not bother to restrain her laughter.

"You great bitch," Rei-san complained. "A true friend wouldn't laugh at my predicament!"

"A cat would laugh at your predicament," Satou-san averred, still chuckling. "A well-mannered, graceful friend like the Ogasawara over there would keep her laughter down in her belly where it couldn't bruise your flower-like feelings, but the laughter would be there all the same."

All Sachiko was hiding in her belly at the moment was a revolted grimace. Satou-san could say the most dreadful things. It was appalling. (A mental image of a little girl holding a mass of wilted flowers flashed across her consciousness, for some reason. She shook her head slightly.) "Satou-san, Rei-san might be best pleased if we were to help her with her problem or, failing that, leave it alone."

"I'm of the same mind as you! For once! What an astonishing turn of events!" Satou-san's good humor was irrepressible, more was the pity. Her amusement seemed to blossom as she stood, walking with her very slight limp to where Rei was seated at the kotatsu. The faint scar on Satou-san's right cheek became fainter when she smiled, but always spoke her for what she was: a ruffian in Western tunic-and-hose, a scofflaw, a hedge wizard with an invisible degree in rough-and-tumble. "Your wisdom never ceases to amaze, Sachiko old bean."

"Please do not call me an old bean," Sachiko requested calmly.

"And I am trying to help you, Rei-Rei," Satou-san went on, as if Sachiko had never spoken. "Honest and for true I am. I'm just going about it differently to how Sachiko would. Here's the problem, old sport, old swordmain, old wallowcrops –"

"I never understand that gaijin lingo of yours, Sei," Rei-san complained. "You've even got Yoshino speaking it now. It drives me mad."

"I'll drop the dialect humor, then, and come to the point. You're a dishrag, Rei."

"Curb your insolent tongue!" Rei-san leapt to her feet, her right hand reaching across to her sword's pommel –

– and quick as a wink, Satou-san's hand was on that same pommel, forestalling her. "I wouldn't, Lightning, if I was you." Her smile had somewhat faded, but was still strong, and something harder. "Remember what happened last time you challenged me to a duel?"

It was plain from Rei-san's face that she did remember, and that remembering liked her not.

Sachiko stepped briskly between them, facing Rei-san. "Rei-san, please be at peace. Do not be so quick to avenge yourself against one who knows no better."

"I bleed from fifty-seven wounds," Satou-san said happily.

Rei-san's face was stubborn. "She called me –"

And then Satou-san spoke roughly, with violence enough to startle the two out of speech: "I called you a dishrag, General, and a dishrag you are. Hear me, only a little, sweet playmate. I beat you when we fought, and you found that humiliating. But did you know that you came closer to beating me than any other swordmain ever has?"

"You never said that before."

"It's God's truth!" Satou-san spread her arms, her scarred face wearing that innocent look they knew so well and so warily. "And nothing but! You are tough. I've seen you go fifteen rounds against a far more seasoned opponent, and still wear that little smile of yours when you finally lost on points. I've seen you march ten miles a day like a soldier, and then laugh and tell jokes in the moonlight, singing like a hototogisu. I admire you greatly, my young nut. But you have a weak spot, and its name is Yoshino. You melt into liana syrup just at the sight of her. Which even I can understand. She's a dainty little bit."

Rei-san stirred a little, and Sachiko laid a hand on her wrist and gave her a pleading look.

"But if you can't be stronger with her, she's going to run roughshod over you your whole life, and she'll curse your weakness at the end of it. She may have been born with a weak chest, but in many ways she was stronger at birth than you'll ever be on your best damned day. You savvy?"

Rei-san's face had changed. Satou-san's words seemed to have hit home. Sachiko half-turned on the spot, and gave Satou-san a considering look.

"I 'savvy,'" Rei-san said. "What do you suggest –"

"No," Satou-san interrupted her. "No suggestions. You wouldn't trust any suggestion of mine, any road; I know it well." The good humor had returned to her face. "You should think about it some, decide for yourself what's best to do."

"Don't you think I've done that?" Rei-san's torment sang out clear as a flute; thankfully only her friends could hear. "I love her. So much... I've protected her all my life –"

"And, weak-chested but strong-willed, she hates being protected. By the bye, the sky is blue, and that color the rice paddies are is called 'green.'"

"But she's ill! She can't protect herself!"

"Which only makes her hate it more. Do you understand her so little? I understood so much about her within five minutes of knowing her. And she's not my soror mystica. Sachiko, honey, do you think I'm wrong? Mad? A fool?"

"Please don't call me 'honey,'" said Sachiko quietly, "and I've thought more than once that you may be mad. You are lost to all standards of decent behavior."

"My blushes," said Satou-san.

"But I don't think you're wrong," Sachiko added. "And I certainly don't think you're a fool."

Satou-san's smile faltered.

Rei-san was nodding. "I see. I see." She sighed, and slipped out of the fighting stance she had adopted upon rising. "I see. She'll probably be at the market. Excuse me, colleagues."

"Come back safely," said Sachiko.

Rei-san slipped out.

Sachiko looked at Satou-san. "Did I say the wrong thing, just now? You looked...disturbed."

"No," Satou-san said calmly, stroking her throat. "I think that's the first time you've ever paid me a compliment. That's all."

"I think highly of you, Satou-san. We have done good work together. I...I trust you to do what's right, when things are serious, if not at any other time. It's just that you're utterly impossible at those other times."

"I am impossible, or at least highly implausible," said Satou-san serenely. "You're not the first to say so... Thanks for the vote of confidence. It's so novel for anyone to express any confidence in me that I may even try to live up to it, just to preserve all that sweet innocent faith of yours."

"Am I truly innocent, Satou-san?"

"You worry about that? You're less innocent than you were when we met. You know the world a little better by now."

"You are one who has helped me know it." Sachiko had to acknowledge it.

"Another reason for you to be madly in love with me."

"I'm not – really, Satou-san –" Sachiko blushed and stepped back a bit, hating herself for it.

"I know you're not." Satou-san's voice was quite serious all a-sudden, and that made Sachiko look her directly in the eye. "And you can call me Sei, you know, with no fear of rape. You're one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, and though you're not exactly likeable on first acquaintance, you do grow on me. But as a bedfellow? I wouldn't dream of approaching you."

"Why not?" The subject made Sachiko uncomfortable, which was why she found it necessary to push her friend. She couldn't back down from a challenge. That was in her blood.

"Because we're too much alike."

"I'm sorry?"

"Congratulations! You managed not to sound affronted. A triumph, sweeting. I know how different we are. You come from one of the most powerful families in the land – only the Fujiwaras and the Kashiwagis are more powerful – and I'm an implausible jumped-up paddy girl who can only rub shoulders with you because we both have magical talent, and were scouted by the Guild. I'm as common as mud. Our backgrounds are nothing alike.

"But we're both proud, solitary types. We both prefer to go it alone. Maybe our reasons are different. We seem to be well enough as friends, at least so far. But if we became lovers, I think we'd be taking chunks out of each other's flesh in almost no time. Do you know?"

"I think I do. Satou-san – Sei-san – I mean no offense in the world, but why? I mean, why are you like that? It's...well, it's abnormal..."

"What, women loving women? Abnormal? Oh, surely not. Unusual, certainly, though perhaps not as unusual as you think. But remember who your friends are: me, who all the little girls run from, giggling and blushing? And Rei and Yoshino, who are so utterly besotted with one another that no man has a chance? If you really think it's abnormal, you've come to the wrong shop. And dubious though you are about our ways, you're comfortable living with us, aren't you?" That maddening smile. "Maybe you should think about why that is. Just a thought, my popkin." Sei started for the door. "I'm eating out. Drinking out, too. Don't wait up."

"Please don't call me 'popkin,'" Sachiko sighed. "Come back safely, Sei-san. Sei-san?"

"Yes?" She had turned at the door and stood expectant.

"Has there never been anyone who could melt you into liana syrup?"

Satou-san stared for a moment, then smiled again, bugging her eyes madly. "I'll never tell," she said. And she was gone.

The innkeeper, Goben-san, sent up dinner for one. The girl who brought it – Miyo-san, Goben-san's middle daughter – made eyes at Sachiko. Sachiko put her off as pleasantly as possible.

Because I live with Sei-san and Rei-san and Yoshino-chan, they all think I'm a deviant as well, she thought.

But am I?

She thought of what Sei-san had said. She looked at the girl: pouring the tea, chattering on in a friendly yet respectful way about her pet bird, who was very silly. She looked at the girl's bare arms and at the parts of her legs that showed below her robes and above her socks.

She tried to imagine it.

She found it not all that hard to imagine, in fact.

Well, she had no actual yearning for the girl. As such. The girl was pretty, and clean. She seemed lively enough. All it boiled down to was, if it were necessary, for some reason, Sachiko thought she would be able to manage.

Her thoughts went on through dinner, interrupted her after-dinner studies, and followed her to bed, much along these lines:

Had she ever yearned?

Once. But he was a man. And her yearning for him had long since become the opposite.

Had she ever yearned for any woman?

This is not a profitable line of inquiry.

Well, what sort of profit were we looking for, from a line of inquiry after all? Have you?

Well...she wasn't sure if it was a yearning exactly, but if she were honest with herself – a thing she'd been trying lately, with varied success – honestly, if Youko-sama had ever asked for her favors, she would have granted them gladly, without argument. She loved Youko-sama, and had slept in her tent on Questionings and other excursions, and had always been happy to do so. In some ways, she was closer to Youko-sama than to anyone. But Youko-sama had never so much as suggested it. She didn't know if Youko-sama's tastes even ran that way.

Had that disappointed her?

She spent so little time examining her feelings, she really didn't know. She had escaped the joyless silence of her family home, but seemed still to carry it with her, which discontented her. She had so far escaped the loveless, yet emotionally complex – if not actively unpleasant – marriage that had been planned for her, but it tended to loom whenever her parents wrote to her, which was often. But she had decisively escaped a milieu where everyone was interested in things that bored her to tears: gallantries and poems and choosing the right color paper to write a letter to someone you didn't much want to write to, or speak to, if it came to that.

She had escaped a world where putting on perfume was an art form.

Not everything about that world had bored her so terribly, but she had been unable to help thinking from time to time that there really must be more to life than this.

And more she had found. If all she'd found had been an unaccountable if usually benevolent friend called Sei-san, her quest would still have been a resounding success. But she had found much more, of course. Dear Rei-san and Yoshino-chan, and dear Youko-sama, and her own power, a power she had been told would only get more formidable as she got older. She had found a world that challenged her, and frightened her at times, perhaps, but nevertheless one she did not want to leave, especially not to marry him.

So when you thought of resigning, you were fooling no one, of course. You must find a famula, at least, as Youko-sama said. Preferably tomorrow.

Yes, but where?

She had retired for the night. It was dark. She had heard Rei-san and Yoshino-chan come in, around the hour of the Boar, still grousing at one another. She had heard Sei-san and someone else stumble in not long after, with much stifled hilarity. Unhappily Sachiko's was the middle chamber, and she could hear everything that happened in the two chambers on either side of hers: Rei-san's and Yoshino-chan's bitter if relatively low-key argument in the one, and Sei-san's chuckling and facetious inquiries mingled with her companion's giggling and assorted happy noises in the other. This was distracting but in a way comforting: they had come to seem the sounds of home to her.

Sleep finally stilled both sets of sound, but could not still her thoughts, it appeared.

Not long after the distant temple bell had sounded the hour of the Rat, Sachiko's latest fitful attempt to sleep was interrupted by a soft scraping against the paper door that led out to the little verandah.

Sachiko went quiet, listening. She was lying facing that very door, and she opened her eyes to slits so as to observe.

It was a cloudy night, and there weren't many lights in that direction, but she could just make out a shadow. Not a detailed one, but it seemed clear that the shadow was trying to gain entry.

She waited.

The door slid slowly, painfully open. She heard little gasps of dismay from her intruder whenever the door made a noise louder than a slither.

Clearly a rank amateur, and no magical knowledge, or it would have been the simplest thing in the world to muffle the noise of entry. So Sachiko already had two advantages.

The door was opened wide enough at last, and the intruder intruded. More visible now. Small. Clearly smaller than Sachiko. Not graceless, but not confident in his movements either. Turned his head this way and that. Looked long at Sachiko lying there, and actually let out a whimper.

You don't even have anything to whimper about yet, Sachiko thought. Just turn your back, and you will. My cabinet is right over there. If you're planning to rob me, that's where my valuables are likely to be. Not a difficult inference, is it, even for a first-time cat burglar? Go on. The cabinet. Go on, now –

The intruder obliged at last.

Sachiko said a very ugly word with a lot of spit in it, one of the words she could pronounce to perfection, and a fluttering dark red light burst out of her right hand, filling the room, and Sachiko roared "Who goes there?"

The intruder let out a high-pitched scream and fell to the floor as if struck. He had lost all his nerve at this one blow; he scrabbled across the floor to the far corner by the cabinet, away from the door he'd come in through. He huddled there, trembling and whimpering and sobbing and saying broken words of entreaty Sachiko couldn't make out at all.

She had risen from her pallet and stood over her prisoner, glaring at him. She moved her blazing hand a little closer to him (he positively keened and quaked) so as to get a good look at his face –

And did not see the face of a boy, as she had expected, but rather the grimy, terrified face of a girl she had last seen hobbling away from her up the street that afternoon, as fast as her stone-bruised foot would carry her.