The Poppy War

Chapter 1

“Take your clothes off.”

Rin blinked. “What?”

The proctor glanced up from his booklet. “Cheating prevention protocol.” He gestured across the room to a female proctor. “Go with her, if you must.”

Rin crossed her arms tightly across her chest and walked toward the second proctor. She was led behind a screen, patted thoroughly to make sure she hadn’t packed test materials up any orifices, and then handed a formless blue sack.

“Put this on,” said the proctor.

“Is this really necessary?” Rin’s teeth chattered as she stripped. The exam smock was too large for her; the sleeves draped over her hands so that she had to roll them up several times.

“Yes.” The proctor motioned for her to sit down on a bench. “Last year twelve students were caught with papers sewn into the linings of their shirts. We take precautions. Open your mouth.”

Rin obliged.

The proctor prodded her tongue with a slim rod. “No discoloration, that’s good. Eyes wide open.”

“Why would anyone drug themselves before a test?” Rin asked as the proctor stretched her eyelids. The proctor didn’t respond.

Satisfied, she waved Rin down the hallway where other prospective students waited in a straggly line. Their hands were empty, faces uniformly tight with anxiety. They had brought no materials to the test—pens could be hollowed out to contain scrolls with answers written on them.

“Hands out where we can see them,” ordered the male proctor, walking to the front of the line. “Sleeves must remain rolled up past the elbow. From this point forward, you do not speak to one another. If you have to urinate, raise your hand. We have a bucket in the back of the room.”

“What if I have to shit?” a boy asked.

The proctor gave him a long look.

“It’s a twelve-hour test,” the boy said defensively.

The proctor shrugged. “Try to be quiet.”

Rin had been too nervous to eat anything that morning. Even the thought of food made her nauseated. Her bladder and intestines were empty. Only her mind was full, crammed with an insane number of mathematical formulas and poems and treatises and historical dates to be spilled out on the test booklet. She was ready.

The examination room fit a hundred students. The desks were arranged in neat rows of ten. On each desk sat a heavy exam booklet, an inkwell, and a writing brush.

Most of the other provinces of Nikan had to section off entire town halls to accommodate the thousands of students who attempted the exam each year. But Tikany township in Rooster Province was a village of farmers and peasants. Tikany’s families needed hands to work the fields more than they did university-educated brats. Tikany only ever used the one classroom.

Rin filed into the room along with the other students and took her assigned seat. She wondered how the examinees looked from above: neat squares of black hair, uniform blue smocks, and brown wooden tables. She imagined them multiplied across identical classrooms throughout the country right now, all watching the water clock with nervous anticipation.

Rin’s teeth chattered madly in a staccato that she thought everyone could surely hear, and it wasn’t just from the cold. She clamped her jaw shut, but the shuddering just spread down her limbs to her hands and knees. The writing brush shook in her grasp, dribbling black droplets across the table.

She tightened her grip and wrote her full name across the booklet’s cover page. Fang Runin.

She wasn’t the only one who was nervous. Already there were sounds of retching over the bucket in the back of the room.

She squeezed her wrist, fingers closing over pale burn scars, and inhaled. Focus.

In the corner, a water clock rang softly.

“Begin,” said the examiner.

A hundred test booklets were opened with a flapping noise, like a flock of sparrows taking off at once.

Two years ago, on the day Tikany’s magistracy had arbitrarily estimated to be her fourteenth birthday, Rin’s foster parents had summoned her into their chambers.

This rarely happened. The Fangs liked to ignore Rin until they had a task for her, and then they spoke to her the way they would command a dog. Lock up the store. Hang up the laundry. Take this packet of opium to the neighbors and don’t leave until you’ve scalped them for twice what we paid for it.

A woman Rin had never seen before sat perched on the guest’s chair. Her face was completely dusted over with what looked like white rice flour, punctuated with caked-up dabs of color on her lips and eyelids. She wore a bright lilac dress dyed with a plum-flower pattern, cut in a fashion that might have suited a girl half her age. Her squat figure squeezed over the sides like a bag of grain.

“Is this the girl?” the woman asked. “Hm. She’s a little dark—the inspector won’t be too bothered, but it’ll drive your price down a bit.”

Rin had a sudden, horrifying suspicion of what was happening. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“Sit down, Rin,” said Uncle Fang.

He reached out with a leathery hand to maneuver her into a chair. Rin immediately turned to flee. Auntie Fang seized her arm and dragged her back. A brief struggle ensued, in which Auntie Fang overpowered Rin and jerked her toward the chair.

“I won’t go to a brothel!” Rin yelled.

“She’s not from the brothel, you idiot,” Auntie Fang snapped. “Sit down. Show some respect to Matchmaker Liew.”

Matchmaker Liew looked unfazed, as if her line of work often involved accusations of sex trafficking.

“You’re about to be a very lucky girl, sweet,” she said. Her voice was bright and falsely saccharine. “Would you like to hear why?”

Rin clutched the edge of her chair and stared at Matchmaker Liew’s red lips. “No.”

Matchmaker Liew’s smile tightened. “Aren’t you a dear.”

It turned out that after a long and arduous search, Matchmaker Liew had found a man in Tikany willing to marry Rin. He was a wealthy merchant who made a living importing pig’s ears and shark fins. He was twice divorced and three times her age.

“Isn’t that wonderful?” Matchmaker Liew beamed.

Rin bolted for the door. She hadn’t made it two steps before Auntie Fang’s hand shot out and seized her wrist.

Rin knew what came next. She braced herself for the blow, for the kicks to her ribs where bruises wouldn’t show, but Auntie Fang only dragged her back toward her chair.

“You will behave,” she whispered, and her clenched teeth promised punishment to come. But not now, not in front of Matchmaker Liew.

Auntie Fang liked to keep her cruelty private.

Matchmaker Liew blinked, oblivious. “Don’t be scared, sweet. This is exciting!”

Rin felt dizzy. She twisted around to face her foster parents, fighting to keep her voice level. “I thought you needed me at the shop.” Somehow, it was the only thing she could think to say.

“Kesegi can run the shop,” Auntie Fang said.

“Kesegi is eight.”

“He’ll grow up soon enough.” Auntie Fang’s eyes glittered. “And your prospective husband happens to be the village import inspector.”

Rin understood then. The Fangs were making a simple trade: one foster orphan in exchange for a near monopoly over Tikany’s black market in opium.

Uncle Fang took a long draught from his pipe and exhaled, filling the room with thick, cloying smoke. “He’s a rich man. You’ll be happy.”

No, the Fangs would be happy. They’d get to import opium in bulk without bleeding money for bribes. But Rin kept her mouth clamped shut—further argument would only bring pain. It was clear that the Fangs would have her married if they had to drag her to the bridal bed themselves.

They had never wanted Rin. They’d taken her in as an infant only because the Empress’s mandate after the Second Poppy War forced households with fewer than three children to adopt war orphans who otherwise would have become thieves and beggars.

Since infanticide was frowned upon in Tikany, the Fangs had put Rin to use as a shopgirl and opium runner since she was old enough to count. Still, for all the free labor she provided, the cost of Rin’s keep and feed was more than the Fangs cared to bear. Now was their chance to get rid of the financial burden she posed.

This merchant could afford to feed and clothe Rin for the rest of her life, Matchmaker Liew explained. All she had to do was serve him tenderly like a good wife and give him babies and take care of his household (which, as Matchmaker Liew pointed out, had not one but two indoor washrooms). It was a much better deal than a war orphan like Rin, with no family or connections, could otherwise hope to secure.

A husband for Rin, money for the matchmaker, and drugs for the Fangs.

“Wow,” Rin said faintly. The floor seemed to wobble beneath her feet. “That’s great. Really great. Terrific.”

Matchmaker Liew beamed again.

Rin concealed her panic, fought to keep her breathing even until the matchmaker had been ushered out. She bowed low to the Fangs and, like a filial foster daughter, expressed her thanks for the pains they had gone through to secure her such a stable future.

She returned to the store. She worked silently until dark, took orders, filed inventory, and marked new orders in the ledger.

The thing about inventory was that one had to be very careful with how one wrote the numbers. So simple to make a nine look like an eight. Easier still to make a one look like a seven . . .

Long after the sun disappeared, Rin closed the shop and locked the door behind her.

Then she shoved a packet of stolen opium under her shirt and ran.

“Rin?” A small, wizened man opened the library door and peeked out at her. “Great Tortoise! What are you doing out here? It’s pouring.”

“I came to return a book,” she said, holding out a waterproof satchel. “Also, I’m getting married.”

“Oh. Oh! What? Come in.”

Tutor Feyrik taught a tuition-free evening class to the peasant children of Tikany, who otherwise would have grown up illiterate. Rin trusted him above anyone else, and she understood his weaknesses better than anyone else.

That made him the linchpin in her escape plan.

“The vase is gone,” she observed as she glanced around the cramped library.

Tutor Feyrik lit a small flame in the fireplace and dragged two cushions in front of it. He motioned for her to sit down. “Bad call. Bad night overall, really.”

Tutor Feyrik had an unfortunate adoration for Divisions, an immensely popular game played in Tikany’s gambling dens. It wouldn’t have been so dangerous if he were better at it.

“That makes no sense,” said Tutor Feyrik after Rin recounted to him the matchmaker’s tidings. “Why would the Fangs marry you off? Aren’t you their best source of unpaid labor?”

“Yes, but they think I’ll be more useful in the import inspector’s bed.”

Tutor Feyrik looked revolted. “Your folks are assholes.”

“So you’ll do it,” she said hopefully. “You’ll help.”

He sighed. “My dear girl, if your family had let you study with me when you were younger, we might have considered this . . . I told the Fangs then, I told her you might have potential. But at this stage, you’re speaking of the impossible.”

“But—”

He held up a hand. “More than twenty thousand students take the Keju each year, and hardly three thousand enter the academies. Of those, barely a handful test in from Tikany. You’d be competing against wealthy children—merchants’ children, nobles’ children—who have been studying for this their entire lives.”

“But I’ve taken classes with you, too. How hard can it be?”

He chuckled at that. “You can read. You can use an abacus. That’s not the kind of preparation it takes to pass the Keju. The Keju tests for a deep knowledge of history, advanced mathematics, logic, and the Classics . . .”

“The Four Noble Subjects, I know,” she said impatiently. “But I’m a fast reader. I know more characters than most of the adults in this village. Certainly more than the Fangs. I can keep up with your students if you just let me try. I don’t even have to attend recitation. I just need books.”

“Reading books is one thing,” Tutor Feyrik said. “Preparing for the Keju is a different endeavor entirely. My Keju students spend their whole lives studying for it; nine hours a day, seven days a week. You spend more time than that working in the shop.”

“I can study at the shop,” she protested.

“Don’t you have actual responsibilities?”

“I’m good at, uh, multitasking.”

He eyed her skeptically for a moment, then shook his head. “You’d only have two years. It can’t be done.”

“But I don’t have any other options,” she said shrilly.

In Tikany, an unmarried girl like Rin was worth less than a gay rooster. She could spend her life as a foot servant in some rich household—if she found the right people to bribe. Otherwise her options were some combination of prostitution and begging.

She was being dramatic, but not hyperbolic. She could leave town, probably with enough stolen opium to buy herself a caravan ticket to any other province . . . but where to? She had no friends or family; no one to come to her aid if she was robbed or kidnapped. She had no marketable skills. She had never left Tikany; she didn’t know the first thing about survival in the city.

And if they caught her with that much opium on her person . . . Opium possession was a capital offense in the Empire. She’d be dragged into the town square and publicly beheaded as the latest casualty in the Empress’s futile war on drugs.

She had only this option. She had to sway Tutor Feyrik.

She held up the book she had come to return. “This is Mengzi. Reflections on Statecraft. I’ve only had this for three days, right?”

“Yes,” he said without checking his ledger.

She handed it to him. “Read me a passage. Any will do.”

Tutor Feyrik still looked skeptical, but flipped to the middle of the book to humor her. “The feeling of commiseration is the principle of . . .”

“Benevolence,” she finished. “The feeling of shame and dislike is the principle of righteousness. The feeling of modesty and complaisance is the principle of . . . the principle of, uh, propriety. And the feeling of approving and disapproving is the principle of knowledge.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And what does that mean?”

“No clue,” she admitted. “Honestly, I don’t understand Mengzi at all. I just memorized him.”

He flipped toward the end of the book, selected another passage, and read: “Order is present in the earthly kingdom when all beings understand their place. All beings understand their place when they fulfill the roles set out for them. The fish does not attempt to fly. The polecat does not attempt to swim. Only when each being respects the heavenly order may there be peace.” He shut the book and looked up. “How about this passage? Do you understand what it means?”

She knew what Tutor Feyrik was trying to tell her.

The Nikara believed in strictly defined social roles, a rigid hierarchy that all were locked into at birth. Everything had its own place under heaven. Princelings became Warlords, cadets became soldiers, and orphan shopgirls from Tikany should be content with remaining orphan shopgirls from Tikany. The Keju was a purportedly meritocratic institution, but only the wealthy class ever had the money to afford the tutors their children needed to actually pass.

Well, fuck the heavenly order of things. If getting married to a gross old man was her preordained role on this earth, then Rin was determined to rewrite it.

“It means I’m very good at memorizing long passages of gibberish,” she said.

Tutor Feyrik was silent for a moment. “You don’t have an eidetic memory,” he said finally. “I taught you to read. I would have known.”

“I don’t,” she acknowledged. “But I’m stubborn, I study hard, and I really don’t want to be married. It took me three days to memorize Mengzi. It was a short book, so I’ll probably need a full week for the longer texts. But how many texts are on the Keju list? Twenty? Thirty?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Then I’ll memorize them all. Every single one. That’s all you need to pass the Keju. The other subjects aren’t that hard; it’s the Classics that trip people up. You told me that yourself.”

Tutor Feyrik’s eyes were narrowing now, his expression no longer skeptical but calculated. She knew that look. It was the look he got when he was trying to predict his returns at Divisions.

In Nikan, a tutor’s success was tied to his reputation for Keju results. You attracted clients if your students made it into an academy. More students meant more money, and to an indebted gambler like Tutor Feyrik, each new student counted. If Rin tested into an academy, an ensuing influx of students could get Tutor Feyrik out of some nasty debts.

“Enrollment’s been slow this year, hasn’t it?” she pressed.

He grimaced. “It’s a drought year. Of course admission is slow. Not many families want to pay tuition when their children barely have a chance to pass regardless.”

“But I can pass,” she said. “And when I do, you’ll have a student who tested into an academy. What do you think that’ll do for enrollment?”

He shook his head. “Rin, I couldn’t take your tuition money in good faith.”

That posed a second problem. She steeled her nerve and looked him in the eye. “That’s okay. I can’t pay tuition.”

He balked visibly.

“I don’t make anything at the store,” Rin said before he could speak. “The inventory isn’t mine. I don’t get any wages. I need you to help me to study for the Keju at no cost, and twice as fast as you train your other students.”

Tutor Feyrik began to shake his head again. “My dear girl, I can’t—this is—”

Time to play her last card. Rin pulled her leather satchel out from under her chair and plunked it on the table. It hit the wood with a solid, satisfying smack.

Tutor Feyrik’s eyes followed her eagerly as she slipped a hand into the satchel and drew out one heavy, sweet-smelling packet. Then another. And then another.

“This is six tael worth of premium opium,” she said calmly. Six tael was half of what Tutor Feyrik might earn in an entire year.

“You stole this from the Fangs,” he said uneasily.

She shrugged. “Smuggling’s a difficult business. The Fangs know the risk. Packages go missing all the time. They can hardly report it to the magistrate.”

He twiddled his long whiskers. “I don’t want to get on the Fangs’ bad side.”

He had good reason to fear. People in Tikany didn’t cross Auntie Fang—not if they cared about their personal safety. She was patient and unpredictable as a snake. She might let faults go unacknowledged for years, and then strike with a well-placed poisonous pellet.

But Rin had covered her tracks.

“One of her shipments was confiscated by port authorities last week,” Rin said. “And she hasn’t had time to do inventory yet. I’ve just marked these packets as lost. She can’t trace them.”

“They could still beat you.”

“Not so badly.” Rin forced a shrug. “They can’t marry off damaged merchandise.”

Tutor Feyrik was staring at the satchel with obvious greed.

“Deal,” he said finally, and grasped for the opium.

She snatched it out of his reach. “Four conditions. One, you teach me. Two, you teach me for free. Three, you don’t smoke when you’re teaching me. And four, if you tell anyone where you got this, I’ll let your creditors know where to find you.”

Tutor Feyrik glared at her for a long moment, and then nodded.

She cleared her throat. “Also, I want to keep this book.”

He gave her a wry smile.

“You would make a terrible prostitute. No charm.”

“No,” said Auntie Fang. “We need you in the shop.”

“I’ll study at night,” Rin said. “Or during off-hours.”

Auntie Fang’s face pinched together as she scrubbed at the frying wok. Everything about Auntie Fang was raw: her expression, an open display of impatience and irritation; her fingers, red from hours of cleaning and laundering; her voice, hoarse from screaming at Rin; at her son, Kesegi; at her hired smugglers; at Uncle Fang, lying inert in his smoke-filled room.

“What did you promise him?” she demanded suspiciously.

Rin stiffened. “Nothing.”

Auntie Fang abruptly slammed the wok onto the counter. Rin flinched, suddenly terrified that her theft had been discovered.

“What is so wrong with getting married?” Auntie Fang demanded. “I married your uncle when I was younger than you are now. Every other girl in this village will get married by her sixteenth birthday. Do you think you’re so much better than them?”

Rin was so relieved that she had to remember to look properly chastised. “No. I mean, I don’t.”

“Do you think it will be so bad?” Auntie Fang’s voice became dangerously quiet. “What is it, really? Are you afraid of sharing his bed?”

Rin hadn’t even considered that, but now the very thought of it made her throat close up.

Auntie Fang’s lip curled in amusement. “The first night is the worst, I’ll give you that. Keep a wad of cotton in your mouth so you don’t bite your tongue. Do not cry out, unless he wants you to. Keep your head down and do as he says—become his mute little household slave until he trusts you. But once he does? You start plying him with opium—just a little bit at first, though I doubt he’s never smoked before. Then you give him more and more every day. Do it at night right after he’s finished with you, so he always associates it with pleasure and power.

“Give him more and more until he is fully dependent on it, and on you. Let it destroy his body and mind. You’ll be more or less married to a breathing corpse, yes, but you will have his riches, his estates, and his power.” Auntie Fang tilted her head. “Then will it hurt you so much to share his bed?”

Rin wanted to vomit. “But I . . .”

“Is it the children you’re afraid of?” Auntie Fang cocked her head. “There are ways to kill them in the womb. You work in the apothecary. You know that. But you’ll want to give him at least one son. Cement your position as his first wife, so he can’t fritter his assets on a concubine.”

“But I don’t want that,” Rin choked out. I don’t want to be like you.

“And who cares what you want?” Auntie Fang asked softly. “You are a war orphan. You have no parents, no standing, and no connections. You’re lucky the inspector doesn’t care that you’re not pretty, only that you’re young. This is the best I can do for you. There will be no more chances.”

“But the Keju—”

“But the Keju,” Auntie Fang mimicked. “When did you get so deluded? You think you’re going to an academy?”

“I do think so.” Rin straightened her back, tried to inject confidence into her words. Calm down. You still have leverage. “And you’ll let me. Because one day, the authorities might start asking where the opium’s coming from.”

Auntie Fang examined her for a long moment. “Do you want to die?” she asked.

Rin knew that wasn’t an empty threat. Auntie Fang was more than willing to tie up her loose ends. Rin had watched her do it before. She’d spent most of her life trying to make sure she never became a loose end.

But now she could fight back.

“If I go missing, then Tutor Feyrik will tell the authorities precisely what happened to me,” she said loudly. “And he’ll tell your son what you’ve done.”

“Kesegi won’t care,” Auntie Fang scoffed.

“I raised Kesegi. He loves me,” Rin said. “And you love him. You don’t want him to know what you do. That’s why you don’t send him to the shop. And why you make me keep him in our room when you go out to meet your smugglers.”

That did it. Auntie Fang stared at her, mouth agape, nostrils flaring.

“Let me at least try,” Rin begged. “It can’t hurt you to let me study. If I pass, then you’ll at least be rid of me—and if I fail, you still have a bride.”

Auntie Fang grabbed at the wok. Rin tensed instinctively, but Auntie Fang only resumed scrubbing it with a vengeance.

“You study in the shop, and I’ll throw you out on the streets,” Auntie Fang said. “I don’t need this getting back to the inspector.”

“Deal,” Rin lied through her teeth.

Auntie Fang snorted. “And what happens if you get in? Who’s going to pay your tuition, your dear, impoverished tutor?”

Rin hesitated. She’d been hoping the Fangs might give her the dowry money as tuition, but she could see now that had been an idiotic hope.

“Tuition at Sinegard is free,” she pointed out.

Auntie Fang laughed out loud. “Sinegard! You think you’re going to test into Sinegard?”

Rin lifted her chin. “I could.”

The military academy at Sinegard was the most prestigious institution in the Empire, a training ground for future generals and statesmen. It rarely recruited from the rural south, if ever.

“You are deluded.” Auntie Fang snorted again. “Fine—study if you like, if that makes you happy. By all means, take the Keju. But when you fail, you will marry that inspector. And you will be grateful.”

That night, cradling a stolen candle on the floor of the cramped bedroom that she shared with Kesegi, Rin cracked open her first Keju primer.

The Keju tested the Four Noble Subjects: history, mathematics, logic, and the Classics. The imperial bureaucracy in Sinegard considered these subjects integral to the development of a scholar and a statesman. Rin had to learn them all by her sixteenth birthday.

She set a tight schedule for herself: she was to finish at least two books every week, and to rotate between two subjects each day. Each night after she had closed up shop, she ran to Tutor Feyrik’s house before returning home, arms laden with more books.

History was the easiest to learn. Nikan’s history was a highly entertaining saga of constant warfare. The Empire had been formed a millennium ago under the mighty sword of the merciless Red Emperor, who destroyed the monastic orders scattered across the continent and created a unified state of unprecedented size. It was the first time the Nikara people had ever conceived of themselves as a single nation. The Red Emperor standardized the Nikara language, issued a uniform set of weights and measurements, and built a system of roads that connected his sprawling territory.

But the newly conceived Nikara Empire did not survive the Red Emperor’s death. His many heirs turned the country into a bloody mess during the Era of Warring States that followed, which divided Nikan into twelve rival provinces.

Since then, the massive country had been reunified, conquered, exploited, shattered, and then unified again. Nikan had in turn been at war with the khans of the northern Hinterlands and the tall westerners from across the great sea. Both times Nikan had proven itself too massive to suffer foreign occupation for very long.

Of all Nikan’s attempted conquerors, the Federation of Mugen had come the closest. The island country had attacked Nikan at a time when domestic turmoil between the provinces was at its peak. It took two Poppy Wars and fifty years of bloody occupation for Nikan to win back its independence.

The Empress Su Daji, the last living member of the troika who had seized control of the state during the Second Poppy War, now ruled over a land of twelve provinces that had never quite managed to achieve the same unity that the Red Emperor had imposed.

The Nikara Empire had proven itself historically unconquerable. But it was also unstable and disunited, and the current spell of peace held no promise of durability.

If there was one thing Rin had learned about her country’s history, it was that the only permanent thing about the Nikara Empire was war.

The second subject, mathematics, was a slog. It wasn’t overly challenging but tedious and tiresome. The Keju did not filter for genius mathematicians but rather for students who could keep up things such as the country’s finances and balance books. Rin had been doing accounting for the Fangs since she could add. She was naturally apt at juggling large sums in her head. She still had to bring herself up to speed on the more abstract trigonometric theorems, which she assumed mattered for naval battles, but she found that learning those was pleasantly straightforward.

The third section, logic, was entirely foreign to her. The Keju posed logic riddles as open-ended questions. She flipped open a sample exam for practice. The first question read: “A scholar traveling a well-trodden road passes a pear tree. The tree is laden with fruit so heavy that the branches bend over with its weight. Yet he does not pick the fruit. Why?”

Because it’s not his pear tree, Rin thought immediately. Because the owner might be Auntie Fang and break his head open with a shovel. But those responses were either moral or contingent. The answer to the riddle had to be contained within the question itself. There must be some fallacy, some contradiction in the given scenario.

Rin had to think for a long while before she came up with the answer: If a tree by a well-traveled road has this much fruit, then there must be something wrong with the fruit.

The more she practiced, the more she came to see the questions as games. Cracking them was very rewarding. Rin drew diagrams in the dirt, studied the structures of syllogisms, and memorized the more common logical fallacies. Within months, she could answer these kinds of questions in mere seconds.

Her worst subject by far was Classics. It was the exception to her rotating schedule. She had to study Classics every day.

This section of the Keju required students to recite, analyze, and compare texts of a predetermined canon of twenty-seven books. These books were written not in the modern script but in the Old Nikara language, which was notorious for unpredictable grammar patterns and tricky pronunciations. The books contained poems, philosophical treatises, and essays on statecraft written by the legendary scholars of Nikan’s past. They were meant to shape the moral character of the nation’s future statesmen. And they were, without exception, hopelessly confusing.

Unlike with logic and mathematics, Rin could not reason her way out of Classics. Classics required a knowledge base that most students had been slowly building since they could read. In two years, Rin had to simulate more than five years of constant study.

To that end, she achieved extraordinary feats of rote memorization.

She recited backward while walking along the edges of the old defensive walls that encircled Tikany. She recited at double speed while hopping across posts over the lake. She mumbled to herself in the store, snapping in irritation whenever customers asked for her help. She would not let herself sleep unless she had recited that day’s lessons without error. She woke up chanting classical analects, which terrified Kesegi, who thought she had been possessed by ghosts. And in a way, she had been—she dreamed of ancient poems by long-dead voices and woke up shaking from nightmares where she’d gotten them wrong.

“The Way of Heaven operates unceasingly, and leaves no accumulation of its influence in any particular place, so that all things are brought to perfection by it . . . so does the Way operate, and all under the sky turn to them, and all within the seas submit to them.”

Rin put down Zhuangzi’s Annals and scowled. Not only did she have no idea what Zhuangzi was writing about, she also couldn’t see why he had insisted on writing in the most irritatingly verbose manner possible.

She understood very little of what she read. Even the scholars of Yuelu Mountain had trouble understanding the Classics; she could hardly be expected to glean their meaning on her own. And because she didn’t have the time or the training to delve deep into the texts—and since she could think of no useful mnemonics, no shortcuts to learning the Classics—she simply had to learn them word by word and hope that would be enough.

She walked everywhere with a book. She studied as she ate. When she tired, she conjured up images for herself, telling herself the story of the worst possible future.

You walk up the aisle in a dress that doesn’t fit you. You’re trembling. He’s waiting at the other end. He looks at you like you’re a juicy, fattened pig, a marbled slab of meat for his purchase. He spreads saliva over his dry lips. He doesn’t look away from you throughout the entire banquet. When it’s over, he carries you to his bedroom. He pushes you onto the sheets.

She shuddered. Squeezed her eyes shut. Reopened them and found her place on the page.

By Rin’s fifteenth birthday she held a vast quantity of ancient Nikara literature in her head, and could recite the majority of it. But she was still making mistakes: missing words, switching up complex clauses, mixing up the order of the stanzas.

This was good enough, she knew, to test into a teacher’s college or a medical academy. She suspected she might even test into the scholars’ institute at Yuelu Mountain, where the most brilliant minds in Nikan produced stunning works of literature and pondered the mysteries of the natural world.

But she could not afford any of those academies. She had to test into Sinegard. She had to test into the highest-scoring percentage of students not just in the village, but in the entire country. Otherwise, her two years of study would be wasted.

She had to make her memory perfect.

She stopped sleeping.

Her eyes became bloodshot, swollen. Her head swam from days of cramming. When she visited Tutor Feyrik at his home one night to pick up a new set of books, her gaze was desperate, unfocused. She stared past him as he spoke. His words drifted over her head like clouds; she barely registered his presence.

“Rin. Look at me.”

She inhaled sharply and willed her eyes to focus on his fuzzy form.

“How are you holding up?” he asked.

“I can’t do it,” she whispered. “I only have two more months, and I can’t do it. Everything is spilling out of my head as quickly as I put it in, and—” Her chest rose and fell very quickly.

“Oh, Rin.”

Words spilled from her mouth. She spoke without thinking. “What happens if I don’t pass? What if I get married after all? I guess I could kill him. Smother him in his sleep, you know? Would I inherit his fortune? That would be fine, wouldn’t it?” She began to laugh hysterically. Tears rolled down her cheeks. “It’s easier than doping him up. No one would ever know.”

Tutor Feyrik rose quickly and pulled out a stool. “Sit down, child.”

Rin trembled. “I can’t. I still have to get through Fuzi’s Analects before tomorrow.”

“Runin. Sit.”

She sank onto the stool.

Tutor Feyrik sat down opposite her and took her hands in his. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “Once, not too long ago, there lived a scholar from a very poor family. He was too weak to work long hours in the fields, and his only chance of providing for his parents in their old age was to win a government position so that he might receive a robust stipend. To do this, he had to matriculate at an academy. With the last of his earnings, the scholar bought a set of textbooks and registered for the Keju. He was very tired, because he toiled in the fields all day and could only study at night.”

Rin’s eyes fluttered shut. Her shoulders heaved, and she suppressed a yawn.

Tutor Feyrik snapped his fingers in front of her eyes. “The scholar had to find a way to stay awake. So he pinned the end of his braid to the ceiling, so that every time he drooped forward, his hair would yank at his scalp and the pain would awaken him.” Tutor Feyrik smiled sympathetically. “You’re almost there, Rin. Just a little further. Please do not commit spousal homicide.”

But she had stopped listening.

“The pain made him focus,” she said.

“That’s not really what I was trying to—”

“The pain made him focus,” she repeated.

Pain could make her focus.

So Rin kept a candle by her books, dripping hot wax on her arm if she nodded off. Her eyes would water in pain, she would wipe her tears away, and she would resume her studies.

The day she took the exam, her arms were covered with burn scars.

Afterward, Tutor Feyrik asked her how the test went. She couldn’t tell him. Days later, she couldn’t remember those horrible, draining hours. They were a gap in her memory. When she tried to recall how she’d answered a particular question, her brain seized up and did not let her relive it.

She didn’t want to relive it. She never wanted to think about it again.

Seven days until the scores were out. Every booklet in the province had to be checked, double-checked, and triple-checked.

For Rin, those days were unbearable. She hardly slept. For the past two years she had filled her days with frantic studying. Now she had nothing to do—her future was out of her hands, and knowing that made her feel far worse.

She drove everyone else mad with her fretting. She made mistakes at the shop. She created a mess out of inventory. She snapped at Kesegi and fought with the Fangs more than she should have.

More than once she considered stealing another pack of opium and smoking it. She had heard of women in the village committing suicide by swallowing opium nuggets whole. In the dark hours of the night, she considered that, too.

Everything hung in suspended animation. She felt as if she were drifting, her whole existence reduced to a single score.

She thought about making contingency plans, preparations to escape the village in case she hadn’t tested out after all. But her mind refused to linger on the subject. She could not possibly conceive of life after the Keju because there might not be a life after the Keju.

Rin grew so desperate that for the first time in her life, she prayed.

The Fangs were far from religious. They visited the village temple sporadically at best, mostly to exchange packets of opium behind the golden altar.

They were hardly alone in their lack of religious devotion. Once the monastic orders had exerted even greater influence on the country than the Warlords did now, but then the Red Emperor had come crashing through the continent with his glorious quest for unification, leaving slaughtered monks and empty temples in his wake.

The monastic orders were gone now, but the gods remained: numerous deities that represented every category from sweeping themes of love and warfare to the mundane concerns of kitchens and households. Somewhere, those traditions were kept alive by devout worshippers who had gone into hiding, but most villagers in Tikany frequented the temples only out of ritualistic habit. No one truly believed—at least, no one who dared admit it. To the Nikara, gods were only relics of the past: subjects of myths and legends, but no more.

But Rin wasn’t taking any chances. She stole out of the shop early one afternoon and brought an offering of dumplings and stuffed lotus root to the plinths of the Four Gods.

The temple was very quiet. At midday, she was the only one inside. Four statues gazed mutely at her through their painted eyes. Rin hesitated before them. She was not entirely certain which one she ought to pray to.

She knew their names, of course—the White Tiger, the Black Tortoise, the Azure Dragon, and the Vermilion Bird. And she knew that they represented the four cardinal directions, but they formed only a small subset of the vast pantheon of deities that were worshipped in Nikan. This temple also bore shrines to smaller guardian gods, whose likenesses hung on scrolls draped over the walls.

So many gods. Which was the god of test scores? Which was the god of unmarried shopgirls who wished to stay that way?

She decided to simply pray to all of them.

“If you exist, if you’re up there, help me. Give me a way out of this shithole. Or if you can’t do that, give the import inspector a heart attack.”

She looked around the empty temple. What came next? She had always imagined that praying involved more than just speaking out loud. She spied several unused incense sticks lying by the altar. She lit the end of one of them by dipping it in the brazier, and then waved it experimentally in the air.

Was she supposed to hold the smoke to the gods? Or should she smoke the stick herself? She had just held the burned end to her nose when a temple custodian strode out from behind the altar.

They blinked at each other.

Slowly Rin removed the incense stick from her nostril.

“Hello,” she said. “I’m praying.”

“Please leave,” he said.

Exam results were to be posted at noon outside the examination hall.

Rin closed up shop early and went downtown with Tutor Feyrik half an hour in advance. A large crowd had already gathered around the post, so they found a shady corner a hundred meters away and waited.

So many people had accumulated by the hall that Rin couldn’t see when the scrolls were posted, but she knew because suddenly everyone was shouting, and the crowd was rushing forward, pressing Rin and Tutor Feyrik tightly into the fold.

Her heart beat so fast she could hardly breathe. She couldn’t see anything except the backs of the people before her. She thought she might vomit.

When they finally got to the front, it took Rin a long time to find her name. She scanned the lower half of the scroll, hardly daring to breathe. Surely she hadn’t scored well enough to make the top ten.

She didn’t see Fang Runin anywhere.

Only when she looked at Tutor Feyrik and saw that he was crying did she realize what had happened.

Her name was at the very top of the scroll. She hadn’t placed in the top ten. She’d placed at the top of the entire village. The entire province.

She had bribed a teacher. She had stolen opium. She had burned herself, lied to her foster parents, abandoned her responsibilities at the store, and broken a marriage deal.

And she was going to Sinegard.

Chapter 2

The last time Tikany had sent a student to Sinegard, the town magistrate threw a festival that lasted three days. Servants had passed baskets of red bean cakes and jugs of rice wine out in the streets. The scholar, the magistrate’s nephew, had set off for the capital to the cheers of intoxicated peasants.

This year, Tikany’s nobility felt reasonably embarrassed that an orphan shopgirl had snagged the only spot at Sinegard. Several anonymous inquiries were sent to the testing center. When Rin showed up at the town hall to enroll, she was detained for an hour while the proctors tried to extract a cheating confession from her.

“You’re right,” she said. “I got the answers from the exam administrator. I seduced him with my nubile young body. You caught me.”

The proctors didn’t believe a girl with no formal schooling could have passed the Keju.

She showed them her burn scars.

“I have nothing to tell you,” she said, “because I didn’t cheat. And you have no proof that I did. I studied for this exam. I mutilated myself. I read until my eyes burned. You can’t scare me into a confession, because I’m telling the truth.”

“Consider the consequences,” snapped the female proctor. “Do you understand how serious this is? We can void your score and have you jailed for what you’ve done. You’ll be dead before you’re done paying off your fines. But if you confess now, we can make this go away.”

“No, you consider the consequences,” Rin snapped. “If you decide my score is void, that means this simple shopgirl was clever enough to bypass your famous anticheating protocols. And that means you’re shit at your job. And I bet the magistrate will be just thrilled to let you take the blame for whatever cheating did or didn’t happen.”

A week later she was cleared of all charges. Officially, Tikany’s magistrate announced that the scores had been a “mistake.” He did not label Rin a cheater, but neither did he validate her score. The proctors asked Rin to keep her departure under wraps, threatening clumsily to detain her in Tikany if she did not comply.

Rin knew that was a bluff. Acceptance to Sinegard Academy was the equivalent of an imperial summons, and obstruction of any kind—even by provincial authorities—was tantamount to treason. That was why the Fangs, too, could not prevent her from leaving—no matter how badly they wanted to force her marriage.

Rin didn’t need validation from Tikany; not from its magistrate, not from the nobles. She was leaving, she had a way out, and that was all that mattered.

Forms were filled out, letters were mailed. Rin was registered to matriculate at Sinegard on the first of the next month.

Farewell to the Fangs was an understandably understated affair. No one felt like pretending they were especially sad to be rid of the other.

Only Rin’s foster brother, Kesegi, displayed any real disappointment.

“Don’t go,” he whined, clinging to her traveling cloak.

Rin knelt down and squeezed Kesegi hard.

“I would have left you anyway,” she said. “If not for Sinegard, then to a husband’s house.”

Kesegi wouldn’t let go. He spoke in a pathetic mumble. “Don’t leave me with her.”

Rin’s stomach clenched. “You’ll be all right,” she murmured in Kesegi’s ear. “You’re a boy. And you’re her son.”

“But it’s not fair.”

“It’s life, Kesegi.”

Kesegi began to whimper, but Rin extracted herself from his viselike embrace and stood up. He tried to cling to her waist, but she pushed him away with more force than she had intended. Kesegi stumbled backward, stunned, and then opened his mouth to wail loudly.

Rin turned away from his tear-stricken face and pretended to be preoccupied with fastening the straps of her travel bag.

“Oh, shut your mouth.” Auntie Fang grabbed Kesegi by the ear and pinched hard until his crying ceased. She glowered at Rin, standing in the doorway in her simple traveling clothes. In the late summer Rin wore a light cotton tunic and twice-mended sandals. She carried her only other set of clothing in a patched-up satchel slung over her shoulder. In that satchel Rin had also packed the Mengzi tome, a set of writing brushes that were a gift from Tutor Feyrik, and a small money pouch. That satchel held all of her possessions in the world.

Auntie Fang’s lip curled. “Sinegard will eat you alive.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Rin said.

To Rin’s great relief, the magistrate’s office supplied her with two tael as transportation fare—the magistrate had been compelled by Rin’s imperial summons to cover her travel costs. With a tael and a half, Rin and Tutor Feyrik managed to buy two places on a caravan wagon traveling north to the capital.

“In the days of the Red Emperor, an unaccompanied bride carrying her dowry could travel from the southernmost tip of Rooster Province to the northernmost peaks of the Wudang Mountains.” Tutor Feyrik couldn’t help lecturing as they boarded the wagon. “These days, a lone soldier wouldn’t make it two miles.”

The Red Emperor’s guards hadn’t patrolled the mountains of Nikan in a long time. To travel alone over the Empire’s vast roads was a good way to get robbed, murdered, or eaten. Sometimes all three—and sometimes not in that order.

“Your fare is going toward more than a seat on the wagon,” the caravan leader said as he pocketed their coins. “It’s paying for your bodyguards. Our men are the best in their business. If we run into the Opera, we’ll scare them right off.”

The Red Junk Opera was a religious cult of bandits and outlaws famous for their attempts on the Empress’s life after the Second Poppy War. It had faded to myth by now, but remained vividly alive in the Nikara imagination.

“The Opera?” Tutor Feyrik scratched his beard absentmindedly. “I haven’t heard that name for years. They’re still out and about?”

“They’ve quieted down in the last decade, but I’ve heard a few rumors about sightings in the Kukhonin range. If our luck holds, though, we won’t see hide or hair of them.” The caravan leader slapped his belt. “I would go load up your things. I want to head out before this day gets any hotter.”

Their caravan spent three weeks on the road, crawling north at what seemed to Rin an infuriatingly slow pace. Tutor Feyrik spent the trip regaling her with tales of his adventures in Sinegard decades ago, but his dazzling descriptions of the city only made her wild with impatience.

“The capital is nestled at the base of the Wudang range. The palace and the academy are both built into the mountainside, but the rest of the city lies in the valley below. Sometimes, on misty days, you’ll look over the edge and it’ll seem like you’re standing higher than the clouds themselves. The capital’s market alone is larger than all of Tikany. You could lose yourself in that market . . . you will see musicians playing on gourd pipes, street vendors who can fry pancake batter in the shape of your name, master calligraphers who will paint fans before your eyes for just two coppers.

“Speaking of. We’ll want to exchange these at some point.” Tutor Feyrik patted the pocket where he kept the last of their travel money.

“They don’t take taels and coppers in the north?” Rin asked.

Tutor Feyrik chuckled. “You really have never left Tikany, have you? There are probably twenty kinds of currency being circulated in this Empire—tortoise shells, cowry shells, gold, silver, copper ingots . . . all the provinces have their own currencies because they don’t trust the imperial bureaucracy with monetary supply, and the bigger provinces have two or three. The only thing everyone takes is standard Sinegardian silver coins.”

“How many can we get with this?” Rin asked.

“Not many,” Tutor Feyrik said. “But exchange rates will get worse the closer we get to the city. We’d best do it before we’re out of Rooster Province.”

Tutor Feyrik was also full of warnings about the capital. “Keep your money in your front pocket at all times. The thieves in Sinegard are daring and desperate. I once caught a child with his hand in my pocket. He fought for my coin, even after I’d caught him in the act. Everyone will try to sell you things. When you hear solicitors, keep your eyes forward and pretend you haven’t heard them, or they’ll hound you the entire way down the street. They’re paid to bother you. Stay away from cheap liquor. If a man is offering sorghum wine for less than an ingot for a jug, it’s not real alcohol.”

Rin was appalled. “How could you fake alcohol?”

“By mixing sorghum wine with methanol.”

“Methanol?”

“Wood spirits. It’s poisonous stuff; in large doses it’ll make you go blind.” Tutor Feyrik rubbed his beard. “While you’re at it, stay away from the street vendors’ soy sauce, too. Some places use human hair to simulate the acids in soy sauce at a lower cost. I hear hair has also found its way into bread and noodle dough. Hmm . . . for that matter, you’re best off staying away from street food entirely. They sell you breakfast pancakes for two coppers apiece, but they fry them in gutter oil.”

“Gutter oil?”

“Oil that’s been scooped off the street. The big restaurants toss their cooking oil into the gutter. The street food vendors siphon it up and reuse it.”

Rin’s stomach turned.

Tutor Feyrik reached out and yanked on one of Rin’s tight braids. “You’ll want to find someone to cut these off for you before you get to the Academy.”

Rin touched her hair protectively. “Sinegardian women don’t grow their hair out?”

“The women in Sinegard are so vain about their hair that they’ll imbibe raw eggs to maintain its gloss. This isn’t about aesthetics. I don’t want someone yanking you into the alleys. No one would hear from you until you turned up in a brothel months later.”

Rin looked reluctantly down at her braids. She was too dark-skinned and scrawny to be considered any great beauty, but she had always felt that her long, thick hair was one of her better assets. “Do I have to?”

“They’ll probably make you shear your hair at the Academy anyway,” said Tutor Feyrik. “And they’ll charge you for it. Sinegardian barbers aren’t cheap.” He rubbed his beard as he thought up more warnings. “Beware of fake currency. You can tell a silver’s not an imperial silver if it lands Red Emperor–side up ten throws in a row. If you see someone lying down with no visible injuries, don’t help them up. They’ll say you pushed them, take you to court, and sue you for the clothes off your back. And stay away from the gambling houses.” Tutor Feyrik’s tone turned sour. “Their people don’t mess around.”

Rin was starting to understand why he had left Sinegard.

But nothing Tutor Feyrik said could dampen her excitement. If anything, it made her even more impatient to arrive. She would not be an outsider in the capital. She would not be eating street food or living in the city slums. She did not have to fight for scraps or scrounge together coins for a meal. She had already secured a position for herself. She was a student of the most prestigious academy in all of the Empire. Surely that insulated her from the city’s dangers.

That night she cut off her braids by herself with a rusty knife she’d borrowed from one of the caravan guards. She jerked the blade as close to her ears as she dared, sawing back and forth until her hair gave way. It took longer than she had imagined. When she was done, she stared for a minute at the two thick ropes of hair that lay in her lap.

She had thought she might keep them, but now she could not see any sentimental value in doing so. They were just clumps of dead hair. She wouldn’t even be able to sell them for much up north—Sinegardian hair was famously thin and silky, and no one wanted the coarse tresses of a peasant from Tikany. Instead, she hurled them out the side of the wagon and watched them fall behind on the dusty road.

Their party arrived in the capital just as Rin was starting to go mad from boredom.

She could see Sinegard’s famous East Gate from miles off—an imposing gray wall topped by a three-tiered pagoda, emblazoned with a dedication to the Red Emperor: Eternal Strength, Eternal Harmony.

Ironic, Rin thought, for a country that had been at war more often than it had been at peace.

Just as they approached the rounded doors below, their caravan came to an abrupt halt.

Rin waited. Nothing happened.

After twenty minutes had passed, Tutor Feyrik leaned out of their wagon and caught the attention of a caravan guide. “What’s going on?”

“Federation contingent up ahead,” the guide said. “They’re here about some border dispute. They’re getting their weapons checked at the gate—it’ll be a few more minutes.”

Rin sat up straight. “Those are Federation soldiers?”

She’d never seen Mugenese soldiers in person—at the end of the Second Poppy War, all Mugenese nationals had been forced out of their occupied areas and either sent home or relocated to limited diplomatic and trading offices on the mainland. To those Nikara born after occupation, they were the specters of modern history—always lingering in the borderlands, an ever-present threat whose face was unknown.

Tutor Feyrik’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist before she could hop out of the wagon. “Get back here.”

“But I want to see!”

“No, you don’t.” He gripped her by the shoulders. “You never want to see Federation soldiers. If you cross them—if they even think you’ve looked at them funny—they can and will hurt you. They still have diplomatic immunity. They don’t give a shit. Do you understand?”

“We won the war,” she scoffed. “The occupation’s over.”

“We barely won the war.” He shoved her back into a sitting position. “And there’s a reason why all your instructors at Sinegard care only about winning the next one.”

Someone shouted a command at the front of the caravan. Rin felt a lurch; then the wagons began to move again. She leaned over the side of their wagon, trying to catch a glimpse up ahead, but all she could see was a blue uniform disappearing through the heavy doors.

And then, at last, they were through the gates.

The downtown marketplace was an assault on the senses. Rin had never seen so many people or things in one place at one time. She was quickly overwhelmed by the deafening clamor of buyers haggling with sellers over prices, the bright colors of flowery skeins of silk splayed out on grand display boards, and the cloyingly pungent odors of durian and peppercorn drifting up from vendors’ portable grills.

“The women here are so white,” Rin marveled. “Like the girls in wall paintings.”

The skin tones she observed from the caravan had moved up the color gradient the farther north they drove. She knew that the people of the northern provinces were industrialists and businessmen. They were citizens of class and means; they didn’t labor in the fields like Tikany’s farmers did. But she hadn’t expected the differences to be this pronounced.

“They’re pale as their corpses will be,” Tutor Feyrik said dismissively. “They’re terrified of the sun.” He grumbled in irritation as a pair of women with day parasols strolled past him, accidentally whacking him in the face.

Rin discovered quickly that Sinegard had the unique ability to make newcomers feel as unwelcome as possible.

Tutor Feyrik had been right—everyone in Sinegard wanted money. Vendors screamed at them persistently from all directions. Before Rin had even stepped off the wagon, a porter ran up to them and offered to carry their luggage—two pathetically light travel bags—for the small fee of eight imperial silvers.

Rin balked; that was almost a quarter of what they’d paid for a spot on the caravan.

“I’ll carry it,” she stammered, jerking her travel bag away from the porter’s clawing fingers. “Really, I don’t need—let go!”

They escaped the porter only to be assaulted by a crowd, each person offering a different menial service.

“Rickshaw? Do you need a rickshaw?”

“Little girl, are you lost?”

“No, we’re just trying to find the school—”

“I’ll take you there, very low fee, five ingots, only five ingots—”

“Get lost,” snapped Tutor Feyrik. “We don’t need your services.”

The hawkers slunk back into the marketplace.

Even the spoken language of the capital made Rin uncomfortable. Sinegardian Nikara was a grating dialect, brisk and curt no matter the content. Tutor Feyrik asked three different strangers for directions to the campus before one gave a response that he understood.

“Didn’t you live here?” Rin asked.

“Not since the occupation,” Tutor Feyrik grumbled. “It’s easy to lose a language when you never speak it.”

Rin supposed that was fair. She herself found the dialect nearly indecipherable; every word, it seemed, had to be shortened, with a curt r noise added to the end. In Tikany, speech was slow and rolling. The southerners drew out their vowels, rolled their words over their tongues like sweet rice congee. In Sinegard, it seemed no one had time to finish his words.

Even with directions, the city itself was no more navigable than its dialect. Sinegard was the oldest city in the country, and its architecture bore evidence of the multiple shifts in power in Nikan over the centuries. Buildings were either of new construction or were falling into decay, emblems of regimes that had long ago fallen out of power. In the eastern districts stood the spiraling towers of the old Hinterlander invaders from the north. To the west, blocklike compounds stood wedged narrowly next to one another, a holdover from Federation occupation during the Poppy Wars. It was a tableau of a country with many rulers, represented in a single city.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Rin asked after several minutes of walking uphill.

“Only vaguely.” Tutor Feyrik was sweating profusely. “It’s become a labyrinth since I was here. How much money have we got left?”

Rin dug out her coin pouch and counted. “A string and a half of silvers.”

“That should more than cover what we need.” Tutor Feyrik mopped at his brow with his cloak. “Why don’t we treat ourselves to a ride?”

He stepped out onto the dusty street and raised an arm. Almost immediately a rickshaw runner swerved across the road and halted jerkily in front of them.

“Where to?” panted the runner.

“The Academy,” said Tutor Feyrik. He tossed their bags into the back and climbed into the seat. Rin grasped the sides and was about to pull herself in when she heard a sharp cry behind her. Startled, she turned around.

A child lay sprawled in the center of the road. Several paces ahead, a horse-drawn carriage had veered off course.

“You just hit that kid!” Rin screamed. “Hey, stop!”

The driver yanked the horse’s reins. The wagon screeched to a halt. The passenger craned his neck out of the carriage and caught sight of the child feebly stirring in the street.

The child stood up, miraculously alive. Blood trickled down in tiny rivulets from the top of his forehead. He touched two fingers to his head and glanced down, dazed.

The passenger leaned forward and uttered a harsh command to the driver that Rin didn’t understand.

The wagon turned slowly. For an absurd moment Rin thought the driver was going to offer the child a lift. Then she heard the crack of a whip.

The child stumbled and tried to run.

Rin shrieked over the sound of clomping hooves.

Tutor Feyrik reached toward the gaping rickshaw runner and tapped him on the shoulder. “Go. Go!”

The runner sped up, dragged them faster and faster over the rutted streets until the exclamations of bystanders died away behind them.

“The driver was smart,” said Tutor Feyrik as they wobbled over the bumpy road. “You cripple a child, you pay a disabilities fine for their entire life. But if you kill them, you pay the funeral fee once. And that’s only if you’re caught. If you hit someone, better make sure they’re dead.”

Rin clung to the side of the carriage and tried not to vomit.

Sinegard the city was smothering, confusing, and frightening.

But Sinegard Academy was beautiful beyond description.

Their rickshaw driver dropped them at the base of the mountains at the edge of the city. Rin let Tutor Feyrik handle the luggage and ran up to the school gates, breathless.

She’d been imagining for weeks now what it would be like to ascend the steps to the Academy. The entire country knew how Sinegard Academy looked; the school’s likeness was painted on wall scrolls throughout Nikan.

Those scrolls didn’t come close to capturing the campus in reality. A winding stone pathway curved around the mountain, spiraling upward into a complex of pagodas built on successively higher tiers. At the highest tier stood a shrine, on the tower of which perched a stone dragon, the symbol of the Red Emperor. A glimmering waterfall hung like a skein of silk beside the shrine.

The Academy looked like a palace for the gods. This was a place out of legend. This was her home for the next five years.

Rin was speechless.

Rin and Tutor Feyrik were given a tour of the grounds by an older student who introduced himself as Tobi. Tobi was tall, bald-headed, and clad in a black tunic with a red armband. He wore a dedicatedly bored sneer to indicate he would rather have been doing anything else.

They were joined by a slender, attractive woman who initially mistook Tutor Feyrik for a porter and then apologized without embarrassment. Her son was a fine-featured boy who would have been very pretty if he hadn’t had such a resentful expression on his face.

“The Academy is built on the grounds of an old monastery.” Tobi motioned for them to follow him up the stone steps to the first tier. “The temples and praying grounds were converted to classrooms once the Red Emperor united the tribes of Nikan. First-year students have sweeping duty, so you’ll get familiar with the grounds soon enough. Come on, try to keep up.”

Even Tobi’s lack of enthusiasm couldn’t detract from the Academy’s beauty, but he did his best. He walked the stone steps in a rapid, practiced manner, not bothering to check whether his guests were keeping pace. Rin was left behind to help the wheezing Tutor Feyrik up the perilously narrow stairs.

There were seven tiers to the Academy. Each curve of the stone pathway brought into view a new complex of buildings and training grounds, embedded in lush foliage that had clearly been carefully cultivated for centuries. A rushing brook sliced down the mountainside, cleaving the campus neatly in two.

“The library is over there. Mess hall is this way. New students live at the lowest tier. Up there are the masters’ quarters.” Tobi pointed very rapidly to several stone buildings that all looked alike.

“What about that?” Rin asked, pointing to an important-looking building by the brook.

Tobi’s lip curled up. “That’s the outhouse, kid.”

The handsome boy snickered. Cheeks burning, Rin pretended to be very fascinated by the view from the terrace.

“Where are you from, anyway?” Tobi asked in a not-very-friendly tone.

“Rooster Province,” Rin muttered.

“Ah. The south.” Tobi sounded like something made sense to him now. “I guess multistory buildings are a new concept to you, but try not to get too overwhelmed.”

After Rin’s registration papers had been checked and filed, Tutor Feyrik had no reason to stay. They said their goodbyes outside the school gates.

“I understand if you’re scared,” Tutor Feyrik said.

Rin swallowed down the massive lump in her throat and clenched her teeth. Her head buzzed; she knew a dam of tears would break out from under her eyes if she didn’t suppress it.

“I’m not scared,” she insisted.

He smiled gently. “Of course you’re not.”

Her face crumpled, and she rushed forward to embrace him. She buried her face in his tunic so that no one could see her crying. Tutor Feyrik patted her on the shoulder.

She had made it all the way across the country to a place she had spent years dreaming of, only to discover a hostile, confusing city that despised southerners. She had no home in Tikany or Sinegard. Everywhere she traveled, everywhere she escaped to, she was just a war orphan who was not supposed to be there.

She felt so terribly alone.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said.

Tutor Feyrik’s smile fell. “Oh, Rin.”

“I hate it here,” she blurted suddenly. “I hate this city. The way they talk—that stupid apprentice—it’s like they don’t think I should be here.”

“Of course they don’t,” said Tutor Feyrik. “You’re a war orphan. You’re a southerner. You weren’t supposed to pass the Keju. The Warlords like to claim that the Keju makes Nikan a meritocracy, but the system is designed to keep the poor and illiterate in their place. You’re offending them with your very presence.”

He grasped her by the shoulders and bent slightly so that they were eye to eye. “Rin, listen. Sinegard is a cruel city. The Academy will be worse. You will be studying with children of Warlords. Children who have been training in martial arts since before they could even walk. They’ll make you an outsider, because you’re not like them. That’s okay. Don’t let any of that discourage you. No matter what they say, you deserve to be here. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“Your first day of classes will be like a punch to the gut,” Tutor Feyrik continued. “Your second day, probably even worse. You’ll find your courses harder than studying for the Keju ever was. But if anyone can survive here, it’s you. Don’t forget what you did to get here.”

He straightened up. “And don’t ever come back to the south. You’re better than that.”

As Tutor Feyrik disappeared down the path, Rin pinched the bridge of her nose, willing the hot feeling behind her eyes to go away. She could not let her new classmates see her cry.

She was alone in a city without a friend, where she barely spoke the language, at a school that she now wasn’t sure she wanted to attend.

He leads you down the aisle. He’s old and fat, and he smells like sweat. He looks at you and he licks his lips . . .

She shuddered, squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them again.

So Sinegard was frightening and unfamiliar. It didn’t matter. She didn’t have anywhere else to go.

She squared her shoulders and walked back through the school gates.

This was better. No matter what, this was a thousand times better than Tikany.

“And then she asked if the outhouse was a classroom,” said a voice from farther down in the line for registration. “You should have seen her clothes.”

Rin’s neck prickled. It was the boy from the tour.

She turned around.

He really was pretty, impossibly so, with large, almond-shaped eyes and a sculpted mouth that looked good even twisted into a sneer. His skin was a shade of porcelain white that any Sinegardian woman would have murdered for, and his silky hair was almost as long as Rin’s had been.

He caught her eye and smirked, continuing loudly as if he hadn’t seen her. “And her teacher, you know, I bet he’s one of those doddering failures who can’t get a job in the city so they spend their lives trying to scrape a living from local magistrates. I thought he might die on the way up the mountain, he was wheezing so loud.”

Rin had dealt with verbal abuse from the Fangs for years. Hearing insults from this boy hardly fazed her. But slandering Tutor Feyrik, the man who had delivered her from Tikany, who had saved her from a miserable future in a forced marriage . . . that was unforgivable.

Rin took two steps toward the boy and punched him in the face.

Her fist connected with his eye socket with a pleasant popping noise. The boy staggered backward into the students behind him, nearly toppling to the ground.

“You bitch!” he screeched. He righted himself and rushed at her.

She shrank back, fists raised.

“Stop!” A dark-robed apprentice appeared between them, arms flung out to keep them apart. When the boy struggled forward anyway, the apprentice quickly grabbed his extended arm by the wrist and twisted it behind his back.

The boy stumbled, immobilized.

“Don’t you know the rules?” The apprentice’s voice was low, calm, and controlled. “No fighting.”

The boy said nothing, mouth twisted into a sullen sneer. Rin fought the sudden urge to cry.

“Names?” the apprentice demanded.

“Fang Runin,” she said quickly, terrified. Were they in trouble? Would she be expelled?

The boy struggled in vain against the apprentice’s hold.

The apprentice tightened his grip. “Name?” he asked again.

“Yin Nezha,” the boy spat.

“Yin?” The apprentice let him go. “And what is the well-bred heir to the House of Yin doing brawling in a hallway?”

“She punched me in the face!” Nezha screeched. A nasty bruise was already blossoming around his left eye, a bright splotch of purple against porcelain skin.

The apprentice raised an eyebrow at Rin. “And why would you do that?”

“He insulted my teacher,” she said.

“Oh? Well, that’s different.” The apprentice looked amused. “Weren’t you taught not to insult teachers? That’s taboo.”

“I’ll kill you,” Nezha snarled at Rin. “I will fucking kill you.”

“Aw, shut it.” The apprentice feigned a yawn. “You’re at a military academy. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to kill each other throughout this year. But save it until after orientation, won’t you?”

Chapter 3

Rin and Nezha were the last ones to the main hall—a converted temple on the third tier of the mountain. Though the hall was not particularly large, its spare, dim interior gave an illusion of great space, making those inside feel smaller than they were. Rin supposed this was the intended effect when one was in the presence of both gods and teachers.

The class of first-years, no more than fifty in total, sat kneeling in rows of ten. They twisted their hands in their laps, blinking and looking around in silent anxiety. The apprentices sat in rows around them, chatting casually with one another. Their laughter sounded louder than normal, as if they were trying to make the first-years feel uncomfortable on purpose.

Moments after Rin sat down, the front doors swung open and a tiny woman, shorter even than the smallest first-year, strode into the hall. She walked with a soldier’s gait—perfectly erect, precise, and controlled.

Five men and one woman, all wearing dark brown robes, followed her inside. They formed a row behind her at the front of the room and stood with hands folded into their sleeves. The apprentices fell silent and rose to their feet, hands clasped behind them and heads tilted forward in a slight bow. Rin and the other first-years took their cue and hastily scrambled to their feet.

The woman gazed out at them for a moment, then gestured for them to sit.

“Welcome to Sinegard. I am Jima Lain. I am grand master of this school, commander of the Sinegardian Reserve Forces, and former commander of the Nikara Imperial Militia.” Jima’s voice cut through the room like a blade, precise and chilly.

Jima indicated the six people arrayed behind her. “These are the masters of Sinegard. They will be your instructors during your first year, and will ultimately decide whether to take you on as their apprentices following your end-of-year Trials.”

The masters were a solemn crowd, each more imposing than the last. None of them smiled. Each wore a belt of a different color—red, blue, purple, green, and orange.

Except one. The man to Jima’s left wore no belt at all. His robe, too, was different—no embroidery at the edges, no insignia of the Red Emperor stitched over his right breast. He was dressed as if he’d forgotten orientation was happening and had thrown on a formless brown cloak at the last minute.

This master’s hair was the pure white of Tutor Feyrik’s beard, but he was nowhere near as old. His face was curiously unlined but not youthful; it was impossible to tell his age. As Jima spoke, he dug his little finger around in his ear canal, and then brought his finger up to his eyes to examine the discharge.

He glanced up suddenly, caught Rin staring at him, and smirked.

She hastily looked away.

“You all are here because you achieved the highest Keju scores in the country,” said Jima, spreading her hands magnanimously. “You have beaten thousands of other pupils for the honor of studying here. Congratulations.”

The first-years cast awkward glances at one another, uncertain of whether they should be applauding themselves. A few tentative claps sounded across the room.

Jima smirked. “Next year a fifth of you will be gone.”

The silence then was acute.

“Sinegard does not have the time nor resources to train every child who dreams of glory in the military. Even illiterate farmers can become soldiers. But we do not train soldiers here. We train generals. We train the people who hold the future of the Empire in their hands. So, should I decide you are no longer worth our time, you will be asked to leave.

“You’ll notice that you were not given a choice of a field of study. We do not believe this choice should be left in the hands of the students. After your first year, you will be evaluated for proficiency in each of the subject tracks we teach here: Combat, Strategy, History, Weaponry, Linguistics, and Medicine.”

“And Lore,” interrupted the white-haired master.

Jima’s left eye twitched. “And Lore. If, in your end-of-year Trials, you are found worthy of one track of study, you will be approved to continue at Sinegard. You will then attain the rank of apprentice.”

Jima gestured to the older students surrounding them. Rin saw now that the apprentices’ armbands matched the masters’ belts in color.

“If no master sees fit to take you on as an apprentice, you will be asked to leave the Academy. The first-year retention rate is usually eighty percent. Look around you. This means that this time next year, two people in your row will be gone.”

Rin glanced around her, fighting a rising swell of panic. She had thought testing into Sinegard was a guarantee of a home for at least the next five years, if not a stable career afterward.

She hadn’t realized she might be sent home in months.

“We cull out of necessity, not cruelty. Our task is to train only the elite—the best of the best. We don’t have time to waste on dilettantes. Take a good look at your classmates. They will become your closest friends, but also your greatest rivals. You are competing against each other to remain at this academy. We believe it is through that competition that those with talent will make themselves known. And those without will be sent home. If you deserve it, you will be present next year as an apprentice. If you aren’t . . . well then, you should never have been sent here in the first place.” Jima seemed to look directly at Rin.

“Lastly, I will give a warning. I do not tolerate drugs on this campus. If you have even so much as a whiff of opium on you, if you are caught within ten paces of an illegal substance, you will be dragged out of the Academy and thrown into the Baghra prison.”

Jima fixed them with a last, stern look and then dismissed them with a wave of her hand. “Good luck.”

Raban, the apprentice who had broken up Rin and Nezha’s fight, led them out of the main hall to the dormitories on the lowest tier.

“You’re first-years, so you’ll have sweeping duties starting next week,” Raban said, walking backward to address them. He had a kind and soothing voice, the sort of tone Rin had heard village physicians adopt before amputating limbs. “First bell rings at sunrise; classes begin half an hour after that. Be in the mess hall before then or you miss breakfast.”

The boys were housed in the largest building on campus, a three-story structure that looked like it had been built long after the Academy grounds were seized from the monks. The women’s quarters were tiny in contrast, a spare one-story building that used to be a single meditation room.

Rin expected the dorm to be uncomfortably cramped, but only two other bunks showed signs of habitation.

“Three girls in one year is actually a record high,” Raban said before he left them to settle in. “The masters were shocked.”

Alone in the dorm, the three girls warily sized one another up.

“I’m Niang,” offered the girl to Rin’s left. She had a round, friendly face, and she spoke with a lilting accent that belied her northern heritage, though it was nowhere as indecipherable as the Sinegardian dialect. “I’m from the Hare Province.”

“Pleased,” the other girl drawled. She was inspecting her bedsheets. She rubbed the thin off-white material between her fingers, made a disgusted face, and then let the fabric drop. “Venka,” she said begrudgingly. “Dragon Province, but I grew up in the capital.”

Venka was an archetypical Sinegardian beauty; she was pretty in a pale way, and slim as a willow branch. Rin felt coarse and unsophisticated standing next to her.

She realized both were watching her expectantly.

“Runin,” she said. “Rin for short.”

“Runin.” Venka mangled the name with her Sinegardian accent, rolled the syllables through her mouth like some bad-tasting morsel. “What kind of name is that?”

“It’s southern,” Rin said. “I’m from Rooster Province.”

“That’s why your skin’s so dark,” Venka said, lip curling. “Brown as cow manure.”

Rin’s nostrils flared. “I went out in the sun once. You should try it sometime.”

Just as Tutor Feyrik had warned, classes escalated quickly. Martial arts training commenced in the second-tier courtyard immediately after sunrise the next day.

“What’s this?” Master Jun, the red-belted Combat instructor, regarded their huddled class with a disgusted expression. “Line up. I want straight rows. Stop clumping together like frightened hens.”

Jun possessed a pair of fantastically thick black eyebrows that almost met in the middle of his forehead. They rested on his swarthy face like a thundercloud over a permanent scowl.

“Backs straight.” Jun’s voice matched his face: gruff and unforgiving. “Eyes forward. Arms behind your backs.”

Rin strained to mirror the stances of her classmates in front of her. Her left thigh prickled, but she didn’t dare scratch it. Too late, she realized she had to pee.

Jun paced to the front of the courtyard, satisfied that they were standing as uncomfortably as possible. He stopped in front of Nezha. “What happened to your face?”

Nezha had developed a truly spectacular bruise over his left eye, a bright splotch of violet on his otherwise flawless mien.

“Got in a fight,” Nezha mumbled.

“When?”

“Last night.”

“You’re lucky,” Jun said. “If it had been any later, I would have expelled you.”

He raised his voice to address the class. “The first and most important rule of my class is this: do not fight irresponsibly. The techniques you are learning are lethal in application. If improperly performed, they will cause serious injury to yourself or your training partner. If you fight irresponsibly, I will suspend you from my class and lobby to have you expelled from Sinegard. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir,” they answered.

Nezha twisted his head over his shoulder and shot Rin a look of pure venom. She pretended not to see.

“Who’s had martial arts training before?” Jun asked. “Show of hands.”

Nearly the entire class raised their arms. Rin glanced around the courtyard, feeling a swell of panic. Had so many of them trained before the Academy? Where had they trained? How far ahead of her were they? What if she couldn’t keep up?

Jun pointed to Venka. “How many years?”

“Twelve,” said Venka. “I trained in the Gentle Fist style.”

Rin’s eyes widened. That meant Venka had been training almost since she could walk.

Jun pointed to a wooden dummy. “Backward crescent kick. Take the head off.”

Take the head off? Rin looked doubtfully at the dummy. Its head and torso had been carved from the same piece of wood. The head hadn’t been screwed on; it was solidly connected to the torso.

Venka, however, seemed entirely unperturbed. She positioned her feet, squinted at the dummy, and then whipped her back leg around in a twist that brought her foot high up over her head. Her heel cut through the air in a lovely, precise arc.

Her foot connected with the dummy’s head and lobbed it off, sent it flying clean across the courtyard. The head clattered against the corner wall and rolled to one side.

Rin’s jaw fell open.

Jun nodded curtly in approval and dismissed Venka. She returned to her place in the ranks, looking pleased.

“How did she do that?” Jun asked.

Magic, Rin thought.

Jun stopped in front of Niang. “You. You look bewildered. How do you think she did that?”

Niang blinked nervously. “Ki?”

“What is ki?”

Niang blushed. “Um. Inner energy. Spiritual energy?”

“Spiritual energy,” Master Jun repeated. He snorted. “Village nonsense. Those who elevate ki to the level of mystery or the supernatural do a great disservice to martial arts. Ki is nothing but plain energy. The same energy that flows through your lungs and blood vessels. The same energy that moves rivers downstream and causes the wind to blow.”

He pointed up to the bell tower on the fifth tier. “Two servicemen installed a newly smelted bell last year. Alone, they never would have lifted the bell all that distance. But with cleverly placed ropes, two men of average build managed to lift something many times their weight.

“The principle works in reverse for martial arts. You have a limited quantity of energy in your body. No amount of training will allow you to accomplish superhuman feats. But given the right discipline, knowing where to strike and when . . .” Jun slammed his fist out at the dummy’s torso. It splintered, forming a perfect radius of cracks around his hand.

He pulled his arm away. The dummy torso shattered into pieces that clattered to the ground. “You can do what average humans think impossible. Martial arts is about action and reaction. Angles and trigonometry. The right amount of force applied at the proper vector. Your muscles contract and exert force, and that force is dispelled through to the target. If you build muscle mass, you can exert greater force. If you practice good technique, your force disperses with greater concentration and higher effectiveness. Martial arts is no more complicated than pure physics. If that confuses you, then simply take the advice of the grand masters. Don’t ask questions. Just obey.”

History was a lesson in humility. Stooped, balding Master Yim began expounding on Nikan’s military embarrassments before they had even finished filing into the classroom.

“In the last century, the Empire has fought five wars,” Yim said. “And we’ve lost every single one of them. This is why we call this past century the Age of Humiliation.”

“Upbeat,” muttered a wiry-haired kid in the front.

If Yim heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it. He pointed to a large parchment map of the eastern hemisphere. “This country used to span half the continent under the Red Emperor. The Old Nikara Empire was the birthplace of modern civilization. The center of the world. All inventions originated from Old Nikan; among them the lodestone, the parchment press, and the blast furnace. Nikara delegates brought culture and methods of good governance to the islands of Mugen in the east and to Speer in the south.

“But empires fall. The old empire fell victim to its own splendor. Flush with victories of expansion in the north, the Warlords began fighting among themselves. The Red Emperor’s death set off a series of succession battles with no clear resolution. And so Nikan split into the Twelve Provinces, each headed by one Warlord. For most of recent history, the Warlords have been preoccupied with fighting each other. Until—”

“The Poppy Wars,” said the wiry-haired kid.

“Yes. The Poppy Wars.” Yim pointed to a country on Nikan’s border, a tiny island shaped like a longbow. “Without warning, Nikan’s little brother to the east, its old tributary nation, turned its dagger on the very country that had given it civilization. The rest you know, surely.”

Niang raised her hand. “Why did relations sour between Nikan and Mugen? The Federation was a peaceful tributary in the days of the Red Emperor. What happened? What did they want from us?”

“Relations were never peaceful,” Yim corrected. “And are not to this day. Mugen has always wanted more, even when it was a tributary. The Federation is an ambitious, rapidly growing country with a bulging population on a tiny island. Imagine you’re a highly militaristic country with more people than your land can sustain, and nowhere to expand. Imagine that your rulers have propagated an ideology that they are gods, and that you have a divine right to extend your empire across the eastern hemisphere. Suddenly the sprawling landmass right across the Nariin Sea looks like a prime target, doesn’t it?”

He turned back to the map. “The First Poppy War was a disaster. The fractured Empire could never stand up against well-trained Federation troops, who had been drilling for decades for this enterprise. So here’s a puzzle for you. How did we win the Second Poppy War?”

A boy named Han raised his hand. “The Trifecta?”

Muted snickers sounded around the classroom. The Trifecta—the Vipress, the Dragon Emperor, and the Gatekeeper—were three heroic soldiers who had unified the Empire against the Federation. They were real—the woman known as the Vipress still sat on the throne at Sinegard—but their legendary martial arts abilities were the subject of children’s tales. Rin had grown up hearing stories about how the Trifecta had single-handedly flattened entire Federation battalions, leveraging storms and floods with their supernatural powers. But even she thought it sounded ridiculous in a lecture about history.

“Don’t laugh. The Trifecta were important—without their political machinations, we might never have rallied the Twelve Provinces,” said Yim. “But that’s not the answer I’m looking for.”

Rin raised her hand. She had memorized this answer from Tutor Feyrik’s history primers. “We razed the heartland. Pursued a strategy of slash and burn. When the Federation army marched too far inland, their supply lines ran out and they couldn’t feed their armies.”

Yim acknowledged this answer with a shrug. “Good answer, but false. That’s just propaganda they put in the countryside textbooks. The slash-and-burn strategy hurt the rural countryside more than it hurt Mugen. Anyone else?”

It was the wiry-haired boy in the front who got it right. “We won because we lost Speer.”

Yim nodded. “Stand up. Explain.”

The boy shoved his hair back and stood. “We won the war because losing Speer made Hesperia intervene. And, uh, Hesperia’s naval abilities were vastly superior to Mugen’s. They won the war over the ocean theater, and Nikan got looped into the subsequent peace treaty. The victory wasn’t really ours at all.”

“Correct,” Yim said.

The boy sat, looking immensely relieved.

“Nikan did not win the Second Poppy War,” Yim reiterated. “The Federation is gone because we were so pathetic that the great naval powers to the west felt bad for us. We did such a terrible job defending our country that it took genocide for Hesperia to intervene. While Nikara forces were tied up on the northern front, a fleet of Federation ships razed the Dead Island overnight. Every man, woman, and child on Speer was butchered, and their bodies burned. An entire race, gone in a day.”

Their class was silent. They had grown up hearing stories about the destruction of Speer, a tiny island that punctuated the ocean between the Nariin Sea and Omonod Bay like a teardrop, lying just beside Snake Province. It had been the Empire’s only remaining tributary state, conquered and annexed at the height of the Red Emperor’s reign. It held a fraught place in Nikan’s history, a glaring example of the massive failure of the disunited army under the Warlords’ regime.

Rin had always wondered whether the loss of Speer was purely an accident. If any other province had been destroyed the way Speer had, the Nikara Empire wouldn’t have stopped with a peace treaty. They would have fought until the Federation of Mugen was in pieces.

But the Speerlies weren’t really Nikara at all. Tall and brown-skinned, they were an island people who had always been ethnically separate from the Nikara mainlanders. They spoke their own language, wrote in their own script, and practiced their own religion. They had joined the Imperial Militia only at the Red Emperor’s sword point.

This all pointed to strained relations between the Nikara and the Speerlies all the way up through the Second Poppy War. So, Rin thought, if any Nikara territory had to be sacrificed, Speer was the obvious choice.

“We have survived the last century through nothing more than sheer luck and the charity of the west,” said Yim. “But even with Hesperia’s help, Nikan only barely managed to drive out the Federation invaders. Under pressure from Hesperia, the Federation signed the Non-Aggression Pact at the end of the Second Poppy War, and Nikan has retained its independence since. The Federation has been relegated to trading outposts on the edge of the Horse Province, and for the past nearly two decades, they’ve more or less behaved.

“But the Mugenese grow restless, and Hesperia has never been good about keeping its promises. The heroes of the Trifecta have been reduced to one; the Emperor is dead, the Gatekeeper is lost, and only the Empress remains on the throne. Perhaps worse, we have no Speerly soldiers.” Yim paused. “Our best fighting force is gone. Nikan no longer possesses the assets that helped us survive the Second Poppy War. Hesperia cannot be relied upon to save us again. If the past centuries have taught us anything, it is that Nikan’s enemies never rest. But this time when they come, we intend to be ready.”

The noontime bell marked lunch.

Food was served from giant cauldrons lined up by the far wall—congee, fish stew, and loaves of rice flour buns—distributed by cooks who seemed wholly indifferent to their jobs.

The students were given portions just large enough to sate their growling stomachs, but not so much that they felt fully satisfied. Students who tried to pass through the line again were sent back to their tables empty-handed.

To Rin, the prospect of regular meals was more than generous—she’d frequently gone without dinner in the Fang household. But her classmates complained to Raban about the single portions.

“Jima’s philosophy is that hunger is good. It’ll keep you light, focused,” explained Raban.

“It’ll keep us miserable,” Nezha grumbled.

Rin rolled her eyes but kept her mouth shut. They sat crammed in two rows of twenty-five along the wooden table near the end of the mess hall. The other tables were occupied by the apprentices, but not even Nezha had the nerve to attempt to sit among them.

Rin found herself crammed between Niang and the wiry-haired boy who had spoken up in History class.

“I’m Kitay,” he introduced himself, once he’d finished inhaling his stew.

He was one year her junior and looked it—scrawny, freckled, with enormous ears. He also happened to have achieved the highest Keju score in Sinegard Municipality, by far the most competitive testing region, which was especially impressive for someone who had taken it a year early. He had a photographic memory, he wanted to study Strategy under Master Irjah once he got past the Trials, and didn’t she think Jun was kind of an asshole?

“Yes. And I’m Runin. Rin,” she said, once he let her get a word in.

“Oh, you’re the one Nezha hates.”

Rin supposed there were worse reputations to have. In any case, Kitay didn’t seem to hold it against her. “What’s his problem, anyway?” she asked.

“His father is the Dragon Warlord and his aunts have been concubines to the throne for generations. You’d be a prick too if your family was both rich and attractive.”

“Do you know him?” Rin asked.

“We grew up together. Me, Nezha, and Venka. Shared the same tutor. I thought they’d be nicer to me once we were all at the Academy.” Kitay shrugged, glancing at the far end of the table, where Nezha and Venka appeared to be holding court. “Guess I thought wrong.”

Rin wasn’t surprised that Nezha had cut Kitay out of his social circle. There was no way Nezha would have stuck around anyone half as witty as Kitay—there were too many opportunities for Kitay to upstage him. “What’d you do to offend him?”

Kitay pulled a face. “Nothing, except beat him on the exam. Nezha’s prickly about his ego. Why, what did you do?”

“I gave him that black eye,” she admitted.

Kitay raised an eyebrow. “Nice.”

Lore was scheduled for after lunch, and then Linguistics. Rin had been looking forward to Lore all day. But the apprentices who led them to the class looked like they were trying not to laugh. They climbed the winding steps to the fifth tier, higher up than any of their other classes. Finally they stopped at an enclosed garden.

“What are we doing here?” Nezha asked.

“This is your classroom,” said one of the apprentices. They glanced at each other, grinned, and then left. After five minutes, the cause of their amusement became clear. The Lore Master didn’t show. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty.

The class milled around the garden awkwardly, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do.

“We’ve been pranked,” suggested Han. “They led us to the wrong place.”

“What do they grow in here, anyway?” Nezha pulled a flower down to his nose and sniffed it. “Gross.”

Rin took a closer look at the flowers, then her eyes widened. She’d seen those petals before.

Nezha recognized it at the same moment that she did.

“Shit,” he said. “That’s a poppy plant.”

Their class reacted like a startled nest of dormice. They scurried hastily away from the poppy plant as if mere proximity would get them high.

Rin fought the absurd urge to burst out laughing. Here on the other side of the country was at least one thing she was familiar with.

“We’re going to be expelled,” Venka wailed.

“Don’t be stupid, it’s not our poppy plant,” Kitay said.

Venka flapped her hands around her face. “But Jima said if we were even within ten paces of—”

“It’s not like they can expel the entire class,” Kitay said. “I bet he’s testing us. Seeing if we really want to learn.”

“Or testing us to see how we’ll react around illegal drugs!” Venka shrilled.

“Oh, calm down,” Rin said. “You can’t get high just by touching it.”

Venka did not calm down. “But Jima didn’t say she had to catch us high, she said—”

“I don’t think it’s a real class,” Nezha interrupted. “I bet the apprentices are just having their bit of fun.”

Kitay looked doubtful. “It’s on our schedule. And we saw the Lore Master, he was at orientation.”

“Then where were his apprentices?” Nezha shot back. “What color was his belt? Why don’t you see anyone walking around with Lore stitched into their armbands? This is stupid.”

Nezha stalked out through the gates. Encouraged, the rest of the class followed him out, one by one. Finally Rin and Kitay were the only ones left in the garden.

Rin sat down and leaned back on her elbows, admiring the variety of plants in the garden. Aside from the blood-red poppy flowers, there were tiny cacti with pink and yellow blossoms, fluorescent mushrooms glowing faintly in the dark corners under shelves, and leafy green bushes that emitted a tealike odor.

“This isn’t a garden,” she said. “This is a drug farm.”

Now she really wanted to meet the Lore Master.

Kitay sat down next to her. “You know, the great shamans of legend used to ingest drugs before battle. Gave them magical powers, so the stories say.” He smiled. “You think that’s what the Lore Master teaches?”

“Honestly?” Rin picked at the grass. “I think he just comes in here to get high.”

Chapter 4

Classes only escalated in difficulty as the weeks progressed. Their mornings were devoted to Combat, Medicine, History, and Strategy. On most days Rin’s head was reeling by noon, crammed with names of theorems she’d never heard and titles of books she needed to finish by the end of the week.

Combat class kept their bodies exhausted along with their minds. Jun put them through a torturous series of calisthenics—they regularly ran up the Academy stairs and back down, did handstands in the courtyard for hours on end, and cycled through basic martial arts forms with bags of bricks hanging from their arms. Every week Jun took them to a lake at the bottom of the mountain and had them swim the entire length.

Rin and a handful of other students had never been taught to swim. Jun demonstrated the proper form exactly once. After that, it was up to them not to drown.

Their homework was heavy and clearly meant to push the first-years right up against their limits. So when the Weapons Master, Sonnen, taught them the correct proportions of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal necessary to mix the incendiary fire powder that powered war rockets, he also had them create their own impromptu missiles. And when the Medicine Master, Enro, assigned them to learn the names of all the bones in the human body, she also expected them to know the most common patterns of breakage and how to identify them.

It was Strategy, though, taught by Master Irjah, that was their hardest course. Their first day of class he distributed a thick tome—Sunzi’s Principles of War—and announced that they were to have it memorized by the end of the week.

“This thing is massive!” Han complained. “How are we supposed to do the rest of our homework?”

“Altan Trengsin learned it in a night,” said Irjah.

The class exchanged exasperated looks. The masters had been singing the praises of Altan Trengsin since the start of the term. Rin gathered he was some kind of genius, apparently the most brilliant student to come through Sinegard in decades.

Han looked as irritated as she felt. “Okay, but we’re not Altan.”

“Then try to be,” said Irjah. “Class dismissed.”

Rin settled into a routine of constant study and very little sleep; their course schedules left the first-years with no time to do anything else.

Autumn had just started to bite at Sinegard. A cold gust of wind accompanied them as they raced up the steps one morning. It rustled through the trees in a thunderous crescendo. The pupils had not yet received their thicker winter robes, and their teeth chattered in unison as they huddled together under a large mimosa tree at the far end of the second-tier courtyard.

Despite the cold, Jun refused to move Combat class indoors before the snowfall made it impossible to hold outside. He was a brutal teacher who seemed to delight in their discomfort.

“Pain is good for you,” he said as he forced them to crouch in low, torturous endurance stances. “The martial artists of old used to hold this position for an hour straight before training.”

“The martial artists of old must have had amazing thighs,” Kitay gasped.

Their morning calisthenics were still miserable, but at least they had finally moved past fundamentals to their first weapon-based arts: staff techniques.

Jun had just assumed his position at the fore of the courtyard when a loud shuffle sounded above his head. A smattering of leaves fell down right over where he stood.

Everyone glanced up.

Perched high up on a thick branch of the mimosa tree stood their long-absent Lore Master.

He wielded a large pair of gardening shears, cheerfully clipping leaves at random while singing an off-key melody loudly to himself.

After hearing a few words of the song, Rin recognized it as “The Gatekeeper’s Touches.” Rin knew it from her many trips delivering opium to Tikany’s whorehouses—it was an obscene ditty bordering on erotica. The Lore Master butchered the tune, but he sang it aloud with wild abandon.

“I can’t touch you there, miss / else you’ll perish from the bliss . . .”

Niang shook with suppressed giggles. Kitay’s jaw hung wide open as he stared at the tree.

“Jiang, I’ve got a class,” Jun snapped.

“So teach your class,” said Master Jiang. “Leave me alone.”

“We need the courtyard.”

“You don’t need all of the courtyard. You don’t need this tree,” Jiang said petulantly.

Jun whipped his iron staff through the air several times and slammed it against the base of the tree. The trunk actually shook from the impact. There was the crackling noise of deadweight dropping through several layers of dry mimosa leaves.

Master Jiang landed in a crumpled heap on the stone floor.

Rin’s first thought was that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Her second thought was that he must be dead.

But Jiang simply rolled to a sitting position, shook out his left leg, and brushed his white hair back past his shoulders. “That was rude,” he said dreamily as blood trickled down his left temple.

“Must you bumble around like a lackwit?” Jun snapped.

“Must you interrupt my morning gardening session?” Jiang responded.

“You’re not doing any gardening,” Jun said. “You are here purely to annoy me.”

“I think you’re flattering yourself.”

Jun slammed his staff on the ground, making Jiang jump in surprise. “Out!”

Jiang adopted a dramatically wounded expression and hauled himself up to his feet. He flounced out of the garden, swaying his hips like a whorehouse dancer. “If for me your heart aches / I’ll lick you like a mooncake . . .”

“You’re right,” Kitay whispered to Rin. “He has been getting high.”

“Attention!” Jun shouted at the gawking class. He still had a mimosa leaf stuck in his hair. It quivered every time he spoke.

The class hastily lined up in two rows before him, staves at the ready.

“When I give the signal, you will repeat the following sequence.” He demonstrated with his staff as he spoke. “Forward. Back. Upper left parry. Return. Upper right parry. Return. Lower left parry. Return. Lower right parry. Return. Spin, pass through the back, return. Understood?”

They nodded mutely. No one dared admit that they had missed nearly the entire sequence. Jun’s demonstrations were usually rapid, but he had moved faster just now than any of them could follow.

“Well then.” Jun slammed his staff against the floor. “Begin.”

It was a fiasco. They moved with no rhythm or purpose. Nezha blazed through the sequence at twice the speed of the rest of the class, but he was one of the only students who was able to do it at all. The rest of them either omitted half the sequence or badly mangled the directions.

“Ow!”

Kitay, parrying where he should have turned, hit Rin in the back. She jerked forward, knocking Venka in the head by accident.

“Stop!” Jun shouted.

Their flailing subsided.

“I’m going to tell you a story about the great strategist Sunzi.” Jun paced along their ranks, breathing heavily. “When Sunzi finished writing his great treatise, Principles of War, he submitted the chapters to the Red Emperor. The Emperor decided to test Sunzi’s wisdom by having him train a group of people with no military experience: the Emperor’s concubines. Sunzi agreed and assembled the women outside the palace gates. He told them: ‘When I say, “Eyes front,” you will look straight ahead. When I say, “Left turn,” you will face your left. When I say, “Right turn,” you must face your right. When I say, “About turn,” you must turn one hundred and eighty degrees. Is that clear?’ The women nodded. Sunzi then gave the signal, ‘Right turn.’ But the women only burst out laughing.”

Jun paused in front of Niang, whose face was pinched in trepidation.

“Sunzi told the Emperor, ‘If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame.’ So he turned to the concubines and repeated his instructions. ‘Right turn,’ he commanded. Again, the women fell about laughing.”

Jun swiveled his head slowly, making eye contact with each one of them. “This time, Sunzi told the Emperor, ‘If words of command are not clear, then the general is to blame. But if words of command are clear, but orders are not executed, then the troop leaders are to blame.’ Then he selected the two most senior concubines in the group and had them beheaded.”

Niang’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of her head.

Jun stalked back to the front of the courtyard and raised his staff. While they watched, terrified, Jun repeated the sequence, slowly this time, calling out the moves as he performed them. “Was that clear?”

They nodded.

He slammed his staff against the floor. “Then begin.”

They drilled. They were flawless.

Combat was a soul-sucking, spirit-crushing ordeal, but there was at least the fun of nightly practice sessions. These were guided drill periods supervised by two of Jun’s apprentices, Kureel and Jeeha. The apprentices were somewhat lazy teachers, and disproportionately enthused at the prospect of inflicting as much pain as possible on imagined opponents. As such, drill periods usually bordered on disaster, with Jeeha and Kureel milling around, shouting bits of advice while the pupils sparred against one another.

“Unless you’ve got a weapon, don’t aim for the face.” Jeeha guided Venka’s hand down so her extended knife hand strike would land on Nezha’s throat rather than his nose. “Aside from the nose, the face is practically all made of bone. You’ll only bruise your hand. The neck’s a better target. With enough force, you could fatally collapse the windpipe. At the very least, you’ll give him breathing trouble.”

Kureel knelt down next to Kitay and Han, who were rolling around the ground in mutual headlocks. “Biting is an excellent technique if you’re in a tight spot.”

A moment later, Han shrieked in pain.

A handful of first-years clustered around a wooden dummy as Jeeha demonstrated a proper knife hand strike. “Nikara monks used to believe this point was a major ki center.” Jeeha indicated a spot under the dummy’s stomach and punched it dramatically.

Rin took the bait to speed things along. “Is it?”

“Nah. No such thing as ki centers. But this area below the rib cage has a ton of necessary organs that are exposed. Also, it’s where your diaphragm is. Hah!” Jeeha slammed his fist into the dummy. “That should immobilize any opponent for a good few seconds. Gives you time to scratch out their eyes.”

“That seems vulgar,” said Rin.

Jeeha shrugged. “We aren’t here to be sophisticated. We’re here to fuck people up.”

“I’ll show you all one last blow,” Kureel announced as the session drew to a close. “This is the only kick you’ll ever need, really. A kick to bring down the most powerful warriors.”

Jeeha blinked in confusion. He turned his head to ask her what she meant. And Kureel raised her knee and jammed the ball of her foot into Jeeha’s groin.

Mandatory drill sessions lasted for only two hours, but the first-years began staying in the studio to practice their forms long after the period had ended. The only problem was that the students with previous training seized this chance to show off. Nezha performed a series of twirling leaps in the center of the room, attempting spinning kicks that became progressively more flamboyant. A small ring of his classmates gathered around to watch.

“Admiring our prince?” Kitay strolled across the room to stand next to Rin.

“I fail to see how this would be useful in battle,” Rin said. Nezha was now spinning a full 540 degrees in the air before kicking. It looked very pretty, but also very pointless.

“Oh, it’s not. A lot of old arts are like that—cool to watch, practically useless. The lineages were adapted for stage opera, not combat, and then adapted back. That’s where the Red Junk Opera got their name, you know. The founding members were martial artists posing as street performers to get closer to their targets. You should read the history of inherited arts sometime, it’s fascinating.”

“Is there anything you haven’t read about?” Rin asked. Kitay seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of almost every topic. That day over lunch he had given Rin a lecture on how fish-gutting techniques differed across provinces.

“I have a soft spot for martial arts,” said Kitay. “Anyway, it’s depressing when you see people who can’t tell the difference between self-defense and performance art.”

Nezha landed, crouched impressively, after a particularly high leap. Several of their classmates, absurdly, began to clap.

Nezha straightened up, ignoring the applause, and caught Rin’s eye. “That’s what family arts are,” he said, wiping the sweat off his forehead.

“I’m sure you’ll be the terror of the school,” said Rin. “You can dance for donations. I’ll toss you an ingot.”

A sneer twisted Nezha’s face. “You’re just jealous you have no inherited arts.”

“I’m glad I don’t, if they all look as absurd as yours.”

“The House of Yin innovated the most powerful kicking-based technique in the Empire,” Nezha snapped. “Let’s see how you’d like being on the receiving end.”

“I think I’d be fine,” Rin said. “Though it would be a dazzling visual spectacle.”

“At least I’m not an artless peasant,” Nezha spat. “You’ve never done martial arts before in your life. You only know one kick.”

“And you keep calling me a peasant. It’s like you only know one insult.”

“Duel me, then,” Nezha said. “Fight to incapacitation for ten seconds or first blood. Right here, right now.”

“You’re on,” Rin started to say, but Kitay slapped a hand over her mouth.

“Oh, no. Oh, no, no.” Kitay yanked Rin back. “You heard Jun, you shouldn’t—”

But Rin shrugged Kitay off. “Jun’s not here, is he?”

Nezha grinned nastily. “Venka! Get over here!”

Venka broke off her conversation with Niang at the other end of the room and flounced over, flushed at Nezha’s summons.

“Referee us,” Nezha said, not taking his eyes off Rin.

Venka folded her hands behind her back, imitating Master Jun, and lifted her chin. “Begin.”

The rest of their class had now formed a circle around Nezha and Rin. Rin was too angry to notice their stares. She had eyes only for Nezha. He began moving around her, darting back and forth with quick, elegant movements.

Kitay was right, Rin thought. Nezha really did look like he was performing stage opera. He didn’t seem particularly lethal then, just foolish.

She narrowed her eyes and crouched low, following Nezha’s movements carefully.

There. A clear opening. Rin raised a leg and kicked out, hard.

Her leg caught Nezha in midair with a satisfying whoomph.

Nezha uttered an unnatural shriek and clutched his crotch, whimpering.

The entire studio fell silent as all heads swiveled in their direction.

Nezha clambered to his feet, scarlet-faced. “You—how dare you—”

“Just as you said.” Rin dipped her head into a mocking bow. “I only know one kick.”

Humiliating Nezha felt good, but the political repercussions were immediate and brutal. It didn’t take long for their class to form alliances. Nezha, mortally offended, made it clear that associating with Rin meant social alienation. He pointedly refused to speak to her or acknowledge her existence, unless it was to make snide comments about her accent. One by one the members of their class, terrified of receiving the same treatment, followed suit.

Kitay was the one exception. He had grown up on Nezha’s bad side, he told Rin, and it wasn’t about to start bothering him now.

“Besides,” he said, “that look on his face? Priceless.”

Rin was grateful for Kitay’s loyalty, but was amazed by how cruel the other students could be. There was apparently no end of things about Rin to be mocked: her dark skin, her lack of status, her country accent. It was annoying, but Rin was able to brush the taunts off—until her classmates started snickering every time she talked.

“Is my accent so obvious?” she asked Kitay.

“It’s getting better,” he said. “Just try rolling the ends of your words more. Shorten your vowels. And add the r sound where it doesn’t exist. That’s a good rule of thumb.”

“Ar. Arrr.” Rin gagged. “Why do Sinegardians have to sound like they’re chewing cud?”

“Power dictates acceptability,” Kitay mused. “If the capital had been built in Tikany, I’m sure we’d be running around dark as wood bark.”

In the following days Nezha didn’t utter a single word to her, because he didn’t have to. His adoring followers wasted no opportunity to mock Rin. Nezha’s manipulations turned out to be brilliant—once he established that Rin was the prime target, he could just sit back and watch.

Venka, who was obsessively attached to Nezha, actively snubbed Rin whenever she had the chance. Niang was better; she wouldn’t associate with Rin in public, but she at least spoke to her in the privacy of their dorm.

“You could try apologizing,” Niang whispered one night after Venka had gone to sleep.

Apologizing was the last thing Rin had in mind. She wasn’t about to concede defeat by massaging Nezha’s ego. “It was his idea to duel,” she snapped. “It’s not my fault he got what he was asking for.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Niang said. “Just say you’re sorry, and then he’ll forget about you. Nezha just likes to be respected.”

“For what?” Rin demanded. “He hasn’t done anything to earn my respect. All he’s done is act high and mighty, like being from Sinegard makes him so special.”

“Apologizing won’t help,” interjected Venka, who apparently hadn’t been asleep after all. “And being from Sinegard does make us special. Nezha and I”—it was always Nezha and I with Venka—“have trained for the Academy since we could walk. It’s in our blood. It’s our destiny. But you? You’re nothing. You’re just some tramp from the south. You shouldn’t even be here.”

Rin sat up straight in her bed, suddenly hot with anger. “I took the same test as you, Venka. I have every right to be at this school.”

“You’re just here to fill up the quota,” Venka retorted. “I mean, the Keju has to seem fair.”

Annoying as Venka was, Rin scarcely had the time or energy to pay much attention to her. They stopped snapping at each other after several days, but only because they were too exhausted to speak. When training sessions ended for the week, they straggled back to the dormitory, muscles aching so much they could barely walk. Without a word, they shed their uniforms and collapsed on their bunks.

They awoke almost immediately to a rapping at their door.

“Get up,” said Raban when Rin yanked the door open.

“What the—”

Raban peered over her shoulder at Venka and Niang, who were whining incoherently from their bunks. “You too. Hurry up.”

“What’s the matter?” Rin mumbled grumpily, rubbing at her eyes. “We’ve got sweeping duty in six hours.”

“Just come.”

Still complaining, the girls wriggled into their tunics and met Raban outside, where the boys had already assembled.

“If this is some sort of first-year hazing thing, can I have permission to go back to bed?” asked Kitay. “Consider me bullied and intimidated, just let me sleep.”

“Shut up. Follow me.” Without another word, Raban took off toward the forest.

They were forced to jog to keep up with him. At first Rin thought he was taking them deep into the mountainside forest, but it was only a shortcut; after a minute they emerged in front of the main training hall. It was lit up from within, and they could hear loud voices from inside.

“More class?” asked Kitay. “Great Tortoise, I’m going on strike.”

“This isn’t class.” For some reason, Raban sounded very excited. “Get inside.”

Despite the audible shouting, the hall was empty. Their class bumbled around in groggy confusion until Raban motioned for them to follow him down the stairs to the basement floor. The basement was filled with apprentices crowded around the center of the room. Whatever stood at the center of attention, it sounded extremely exciting. Rin craned to get a glimpse over the apprentices’ heads but could see nothing but bodies.

“First-years coming through,” Raban yelled, leading their little group into the packed crowd. Through vigorous use of elbows, Raban carved them a path through the apprentices.

The spectacle at the center was two circular pits dug deep into the ground, each at least three meters in diameter and two meters deep. The pits stood adjacent to one another, and were ringed with waist-high metal bars to keep spectators from falling in. One pit was empty. Master Sonnen stood in the center of the other, arms folded across his broad chest.

“Sonnen always referees,” Raban said. “He gets the short straw because he’s the youngest.”

“Referees what?” Kitay asked.

Raban grinned widely.

The basement door opened. Even more apprentices began to stream inside, filling the already cramped hall to the brim. The press of bodies forced the first-years perilously close to the edges of the rings. Rin clenched the rail to keep from falling in.

“What’s going on?” Kitay asked as the apprentices jostled for positions closer to the rings. There were so many people in the room now that apprentices in the back had brought stools on which to stand.

“Altan’s up tonight,” Raban said. “Nobody wants to miss Altan.”

It must have been the twelfth time that week Rin had heard that name. The whole Academy seemed obsessed with him. Fifth-year student Altan Trengsin was associated with every school record, was every master’s favorite student, the exception to every rule. He had now become a running joke within their class.

Can you piss over the wall into town?

Altan can.

A tall, lithe figure suddenly dropped into Master Sonnen’s ring without bothering to use the rope ladder. As his opponent scrambled down, the figure stretched his arms behind his back, head tilted up toward the ceiling. His eyes caught the reflection of the lamplight above.

They were crimson.

“Great Tortoise,” said Kitay. “That’s a real Speerly.”

Rin peered inside the pit. Kitay was right; Altan didn’t look close to Nikara. His skin was several shades darker than any of the other students’; a darker hue, even, than Rin’s. But where Rin’s sun-browned skin made her look coarse and unsophisticated, Altan’s skin gave him a unique, regal air. His hair was the color of wet ink, closer to violet than black. His face was angular, expressionless, and startlingly handsome. And those eyes—scarlet, blazing red.

“I thought the Speerlies were dead,” said Rin.

“Mostly dead,” said Raban. “Altan’s the last one.”

“I am Bo Kobin, apprentice to Master Jun Loran,” announced his opponent. “I challenge Altan Trengsin to a fight to incapacitation.”

Kobin had to be twice Altan’s weight and several inches taller, yet Rin suspected this would not be a particularly close fight.

Altan shrugged noncommittally.

Sonnen looked bored. “Well, go on,” he said.

The apprentices fell into their opening stances.

“What, no introduction?” Kitay asked.

Raban looked amused. “Altan doesn’t need an introduction.”

Rin wrinkled her nose. “He’s a little full of himself, isn’t he?”

“Altan Trengsin,” Kitay mused. “Is Altan the clan name?”

“Trengsin. The Speerlies put clan names last,” Raban explained hastily. He pointed to the ring. “Shush, you’ll miss it.”

They already had.

She hadn’t heard Altan move, hadn’t even seen the scuffle begin. But when she looked back down at the ring, she saw Kobin pinned against the ground, one arm twisted unnaturally behind his back. Altan knelt above him, slowly increasing the pressure on Kobin’s arm. He looked impassive, detached, almost lackadaisical.

Rin clenched at the railing. “When did—when did he—”

“He’s Altan Trengsin,” Raban said, as if this were explanation enough.

“Yield,” Kobin shouted. “Yield, damn it!”

“Break,” said Sonnen, yawning. “Altan wins. Next.”

Altan released Kobin and offered him a hand. Kobin let Altan hoist him to his feet, then shook Altan’s hand once he stood up. Kobin took his defeat with good grace. There was no shame, it seemed, in being defeated by Altan Trengsin in less than three seconds.

“That’s it?” Rin asked.

“It’s not over,” Raban said. “Altan got a lot of challengers tonight.”

The next contender was Kureel.

Raban frowned, shaking his head. “She shouldn’t have been given permission for this match.”

Rin found this appraisal unfair. Kureel, who was one of Jun’s prized Combat apprentices, had a reputation for viciousness. Kureel and Altan appeared matched in height and strength; surely she could hold her own.

“Begin.”

Kureel charged Altan immediately.

“Great Tortoise,” Rin murmured. She had trouble following as Kureel and Altan began trading blows in close combat. They matched multiple strikes and parries per second, dodging and ducking around each other like dance partners.

A minute passed. Kureel flagged visibly. Her blows became sloppy, overextended. Droplets of sweat flew from her forehead every time she moved. But Altan was unfazed, still moving with that same feline grace he had possessed since the beginning of the match.

“He’s playing with her,” said Raban.

Rin couldn’t take her eyes off Altan. His movements were dancelike, hypnotic. Every action bespoke sheer power—not the hulking muscle that Kobin had embodied, but a compact energy, as if at every moment Altan were a tightly coiled spring about to go off.

“He’ll end it soon,” Raban predicted.

It was ultimately a game of cat and mouse. Altan had never been evenly matched with Kureel. He fought on another level entirely. He had acted the part of her mirror to humor her at first, and then to tire her out. Kureel’s movements slowed with every passing second. And, mockingly, Altan too slowed down his pace to match Kureel’s rhythm. Finally Kureel lunged desperately forward, trying to score a hit on Altan’s midriff. Instead of blocking it, Altan jumped aside, ran up against the dirt wall of the ring, rebounded off the other side, and twisted in the air. His foot caught Kureel in the side of the head. She snapped backward.

She was unconscious before Altan landed behind her, crouched like a cat.

“Tiger’s tits,” said Kitay.

“Tiger’s tits,” Raban agreed.

Two orange-banded Medicine apprentices jumped immediately into the pit to lift Kureel out. A stretcher was already waiting by the side of the ring. Altan hung in the center of the pit, arms folded, waiting calmly for them to finish. Even as they carried Kureel out of the basement, another student climbed down the rope ladder.

“Three challengers in one night,” Kitay said. “Is that normal?”

“Altan fights a lot,” said Raban. “Everyone wants to be the one who takes him down.”

“Has that ever happened?” Rin asked.

Raban just laughed.

The third challenger turned his shaved head up to the lamplight, and Rin realized with a start that it was Tobi—the apprentice from the tour.

Good, Rin thought. I hope Altan destroys him.

Tobi introduced himself loudly, whipping up yells from his Combat classmates. Altan picked at his sleeve and again said nothing. He might have rolled his eyes, but in the dim light Rin couldn’t be sure.

“Begin,” Sonnen said.

Tobi flexed his arms and sank back into a low crouch. Rather than forming fists with his hands, he curled his knobby fingers tightly as if wrapping them around an invisible ball.

Altan tilted his head as if to say, Well, come on.

The match quickly lost its elegance. It was a knockdown, bloody-knuckled, no-holds-barred struggle. It was heavy-handed and abrupt, and full of brute, animalistic force. Nothing was off-limits. Tobi clawed furiously at Altan’s eyes. Altan ducked his head and slammed an elbow into Tobi’s chest.

Tobi staggered back, wheezing for air. Altan backhanded him across the head as if disciplining a child. Tobi tumbled to the floor, then rebounded with a complicated flipping motion and barreled forward. Altan raised his fists in anticipation, but Tobi threw himself at Altan’s waist, pushing both of them back to the ground.

Altan slammed backward onto the dirt floor. Tobi pulled his right arm back and drove his clawed fingers into Altan’s stomach. Altan’s mouth opened in the shape of a soundless scream. Tobi dug his fingers in deeper and twisted. Rin could see veins protruding from his lower arm. His face warped into an wolf’s snarl.

Altan convulsed under Tobi’s grip and coughed. Blood sprayed from his mouth.

Rin’s stomach roiled.

“Shit,” Kitay kept saying. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“That’s Tiger Claws,” said Raban. “Tobi’s signature technique. Inherited arts. Altan won’t be able to shit properly for a week.”

Sonnen leaned forward. “All right, break—”

But then Altan wrapped his free hand around Tobi’s neck and jammed Tobi’s face down into his own forehead. Once. Twice. Tobi’s grip went slack.

Altan flung Tobi off and lunged forward. Half a second later their positions were reversed; Tobi lay inert on the ground as Altan kneeled atop him, hands pressed firmly around his neck. Tobi tapped frantically at Altan’s arm.

Altan flung Tobi away from him in disdain. He glanced at Master Sonnen as if awaiting further instructions.

Sonnen shrugged. “That’s the match.”

Rin let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

The Medicine apprentices jumped into the ring and hauled Tobi up. He moaned. Blood streamed from his nose.

Altan hung back, leaning against the dirt wall. He looked bored, disinterested, as if his stomach weren’t twisted into a sickening knot, as if he had never been touched at all. Blood dripped down his chin. Rin watched, partly in fascination and partly in horror, as Altan’s tongue snaked out and licked the blood from his upper lip.

Altan closed his eyes for a long time, and then tilted his head up and exhaled slowly through his mouth.

Raban grinned when he saw their expressions. “Make sense now?”

“That was—” Kitay flapped his hands. “How? How?”

“Doesn’t he feel pain?” Rin demanded. “He’s not human.”

“He’s not,” said Raban. “He’s a Speerly.”

The next day at lunch, all any of the first-years could talk about was Altan.

The entire class had fallen in love with him, to some extent, but Kitay especially was besotted with him. “The way he moves, it’s just—” Kitay waved his arms in the air, at a loss for words.

“He doesn’t talk much, does he?” Han said. “Wouldn’t even introduce himself. Prick.”

“He doesn’t need to introduce himself,” Kitay scoffed. “Everyone knows who he is.”

“Strong and mysterious,” Venka said dreamily. She and Niang giggled.

“Maybe he doesn’t know how to talk,” Nezha suggested. “You know how the Speerlies were. Wild and bloodthirsty. Hardly knew what to do with themselves unless they’d been given orders.”

“The Speerlies weren’t idiots,” Niang protested.

“They were primitive. Scarcely more intelligent than children,” Nezha insisted. “I heard that they’re more closely related to monkeys than human beings. Their brains are smaller. Did you know they didn’t even have a written language before the Red Emperor? They’re good at fighting, but not much else.”

Several of their classmates nodded as if this made sense, but Rin found it hard to believe that someone who fought with such graceful precision as Altan could possibly have the cognitive ability of a monkey.

Since arriving in Sinegard, she’d come to learn what it was like to be presumed stupid because of the shade of her skin. It rankled her. She wondered if Altan suffered the same.

“You heard wrong. Altan’s not stupid,” Raban said. “Best student in our class. Possibly in the entire Academy. Irjah says he’s never had such a brilliant apprentice.”

“I heard he’s a shoo-in for command when he graduates,” said Han.

“I heard he’s doped up,” Nezha said. He was clearly unused to not being the center of attention; he seemed determined to undermine Altan’s credibility in any way possible. “He’s on opium. You can see it in his eyes, they’re bloodshot all the time.”

“He’s got red eyes because he’s Speerly, you idiot,” Kitay said. “All the Speerlies had crimson eyes.”

“No, they didn’t,” said Niang. “Only the warriors.”

“Well, Altan’s clearly a warrior. And his eyes are red in the iris,” Kitay said. “Not the veins. He’s not an addict.”

Nezha’s lip curled. “Spend a lot of time staring at Altan’s eyes, do you?”

Kitay blushed.

“You haven’t heard the other apprentices talk,” Nezha continued smugly, like he was privy to special information that they weren’t. “Altan is an addict. I heard Irjah gives him poppy every time he wins. That’s why he fights so hard. Opium addicts will do anything.”

“That’s absurd,” said Rin. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She knew what addiction looked like. Opium smokers were yellowed, useless sacks of flesh. They did not fight like Altan did. They did not move like Altan did. They were not perfect, lethal animals of graceful beauty.

Great Tortoise, she realized. I’m just as obsessed with him myself.

“Six months after the Non-Aggression Pact was signed, Empress Su Daji formally banned the possession and use of all psychoactive substances within Nikan’s borders, and instituted a series of harshly retributive punishments in an attempt to wipe out illegal drug use. Of course, black markets in opium continue to thrive in many provinces, provoking debates over the efficiency of such policies.” Master Yim looked up at his class. They were invariably twitching, scratching in their booklets, or staring out the window. “Am I lecturing to a graveyard?”

Kitay raised his hand. “Can we talk about Speer?”

“What?” Yim furrowed his brow. “Speer doesn’t have anything to do with what we’re . . . Ah.” He sighed. “You’ve just met Trengsin, haven’t you?”

“He was awesome,” Han said fervently to nods of agreement.

Yim looked exasperated. “Every year,” he muttered. “Every year. Fine.” He tossed his lecture notes aside. “You want to talk about Speer, we’ll talk about Speer.”

The class was now paying rapt attention. Yim rolled his eyes as he shuffled through a thick stack of maps in his desk drawer.

“Why was Speer bombed?” Kitay asked with impatience.

“First things first,” said Yim. He flipped through several sheets of parchment until he found what he was looking for: a wrinkly map of Speer and the southern Nikan border. “I don’t tolerate hasty historiography,” he said as he tacked it up on the board. “We’ll start with appropriate political context. Speer became a Nikara colony during the Red Emperor’s reign. Who can tell me about Speer’s annexation?”

Rin thought that annexation was a light way to put it. The truth was hardly so clinical. Centuries ago the Red Emperor had taken the island by storm and forced the Speerlies into military service, turning the island warriors into the most feared contingent in the Militia until the Second Poppy War wiped them out.

Nezha raised his hand. “Speer was annexed under Mai’rinnen Tearza, the last warrior queen of Speer. The Old Nikara Empire asked her to give up her throne and pay tribute to Sinegard. Tearza agreed, mostly because she was in love with the Red Emperor or something, but she was opposed by the Speerly Council. Legend has it Tearza stabbed herself in desperation, and that final act convinced the Speerly Council of her passion for Nikan.”

The room was silent for a moment.

“That,” Kitay mumbled, “is the dumbest story I’ve ever heard.”

“Why would she kill herself?” Rin asked out loud. “Wouldn’t she have been more useful alive to argue her case?”

Nezha shrugged. “Reasons why women shouldn’t be in charge of small islands.”

This provoked a hubbub of responses. Yim silenced them with a raised hand. “It was not that simple. Legend, of course, has blurred the facts. The tale of Tearza and the Red Emperor is a love story, not a historical anecdote.”

Venka raised her hand. “I heard the Red Emperor betrayed her. He promised he wouldn’t invade Speer, but went back on his word.”

Yim shrugged. “It’s a popular theory. The Red Emperor was famed for his ruthlessness; a betrayal of that sort would not have been out of character. The truth is, we don’t know why Tearza died, or if anyone killed her. We know only that she did die, Speer’s tradition of warrior monarchs was discontinued, and the isle became annexed to the Empire until the Second Poppy War.

“Now, economically, Speer hardly pulled its weight as a colony. The island exported almost nothing of use to the Empire but soldiers. There is evidence that the Speerlies may not even have been aware of agriculture. Before the civilizing influence of the Red Emperor’s envoys, the Speerlies were a primitive people who practiced vulgar and barbaric rituals. They had very little to offer culturally or technologically—in fact, they seemed centuries behind the rest of the world. Militarily, however, the Speerlies were worth their weight in gold.”

Rin raised her hand. “Were the Speerlies really fire shamans?”

Muted snickers sounded around the classroom, and Rin immediately regretted speaking.

Yim looked amazed. “They still believe in shamans down in Tikany?”

Rin’s cheeks felt hot. She had grown up hearing stories upon stories about Speer. Everyone in Tikany was morbidly obsessed with the Empire’s frenzied warrior force and their supposed supernatural abilities. Rin knew better than to take the stories for the truth, but she’d still been curious.

But she had spoken without thinking. Of course the myths that had enthralled her in Tikany only sounded backward and provincial here in the capital.

“No—I mean, I don’t—” Rin stammered. “It’s just something I read, I was just wondering . . .”

“Don’t mind her,” Nezha said. “Tikany still thinks we lost the Poppy Wars.”

More snickers. Nezha leaned back, smug.

“But the Speerlies had some weird abilities, right?” Kitay swiftly came to Rin’s defense. “Why else would Mugen target Speer?”

“Because it’s a convenient target,” Nezha said. “Smack-dab between the Federation archipelago and Snake Province. Why not?”

“That makes no sense.” Kitay shook his head. “From what I’ve read, Speer was an island of little to no strategic value. It’s not even useful as a naval base—the Federation would be better off sailing directly over the narrow strait to Khurdalain. Mugen would only have cared about Speer if the Speerlies could do something that terrified them.”

“The Speerlies were terrifying,” Nezha said. “Primitive, drug-loving freaks. Who wouldn’t want them gone?”

Rin couldn’t believe Nezha could be so terribly crass in describing a tragic massacre, and was amazed when Yim nodded in agreement. “The Speerlies were a barbaric, war-obsessed race,” he said. “They trained their children for battle as soon as they could walk. For centuries, they subsisted by regularly raiding Nikara coastal villages, because they had no agriculture of their own. Now, the rumors of shamanism probably have more to do with their religion. Historians believe they had bizarre rituals in which they pledged themselves to their god—the Vermilion Phoenix of the South. But that was only ever a ritual. Not a martial ability.”

“The Speerly affinity for fire is well documented, though,” said Kitay. “I’ve read the war reports. There are more than a few generals, Nikara and Federation alike, who thought the Speerlies could manipulate fire at will.”

“All myths,” Yim said dismissively. “The Speerly ability to manipulate fire was a ruse used to terrify their enemies. It probably originated from their use of flaming weapons in nighttime raids. But most scholars today agree that the Speerly battle prowess is entirely a product of their social conditioning and harsh environment.”

“So why couldn’t our army copy them?” Rin asked. “If the Speerly warriors were really so powerful, why couldn’t we emulate their tactics? Why’d we have to enslave them?”

“Speer was a tributary. Not a slave colony,” Yim said impatiently. “And we could re-create their training programs, but again, their methods were barbaric. The way Jun tells it, you’re struggling with general training enough as it is. You’d hardly want to undergo the Speerly regimen.”

“What about Altan?” Kitay pressed. “He didn’t grow up on Speer, he was trained at Sinegard—”

“Have you ever seen Altan summon fire at will?”

“Of course not, but—”

“Has the very sight of him addled your minds?” Yim demanded. “Let me be perfectly clear. There are no shamans. There are no more Speerlies. Altan is human just like the rest of you. He possesses no magic, no divine ability. He fights well because he’s been training since he could walk. Altan is the last scion of a dead race. If the Speerlies prayed to their god, it clearly didn’t save them.”

Their obsession with Altan wasn’t entirely wasted in their lessons, though. After witnessing the apprentices’ matches, the first-years redoubled their efforts in Jun’s class. They wanted to become graceful, lethal fighters like Altan. But Jun remained a meticulous coach. He refused to teach them the flashy techniques they’d seen in the ring until they had thoroughly mastered their fundamentals.

“If you attempted Tobi’s Tiger Claws now, you couldn’t kill a rabbit,” he sneered. “You’d just as quickly break your own fingers. It’ll be months before you can channel the ki that sort of technique requires.”

At least he had finally bored of drilling them in formation. Their class was now handling their staves with reasonable competence—at least, the accidental injuries were minimal. Near the end of class one day, Jun lined them up in rows and ordered them to spar.

“Responsibly,” he emphasized. “Half speed if you must. I have no patience for idiotic injuries. Drill on the strikes and parries that you’ve practiced in the form.”

Rin found herself standing across from Nezha. Of course she was. He shot her a nasty smile.

She wondered, briefly, how they could possibly finish the match without harming each other.

“On my count,” said Jun. “One, two—”

Nezha launched himself forward.

The force behind his blow stunned her. She barely got her staff up over her head in time to block a swing that would have knocked her out cold—the impact sent tremors through her arms.

But Nezha continued to advance, ignoring Jun’s instructions completely. He swung his staff with savage abandon, but also with startlingly good aim. Rin wielded her weapon clumsily; the staff was still awkward in her arms, nothing like the spinning blur in Nezha’s hands. She could barely keep her grip on it; twice it almost spun out of her grasp. Nezha landed far more hits than she blocked. The first two—elbow strike, upper thigh strike—hurt. Then Nezha landed so many that she couldn’t feel them anymore.

She had been wrong about him. He had been showing off earlier, but his command of martial arts was prodigious and real. Last time they’d fought, he’d gotten cocky. Her lucky blow had been a fluke.

He was not being cocky now.

His staff connected with her kneecap with a sickening crunch. Rin’s eyes bulged. She crumpled to the ground.

Nezha wasn’t even bothering with his staff anymore. He kicked at her while she was still down, each blow more vicious than the last.

“That’s the difference between you and me,” muttered Nezha. “I’ve trained for this my entire life. You don’t get to just stroll in here and embarrass me. You understand? You’re nothing.”

He’s going to kill me. He’s actually going to kill me.

Enough with the staff. She couldn’t defend herself with a weapon she didn’t know how to use. She dropped the staff and lunged upward to tackle Nezha around the waist. Nezha dropped his staff and tripped over backward. She landed on top of him. He swung at her face; she forced a palm into his nose. They pummeled furiously at each other, a chaotic tangle of limbs.

Then something yanked hard at her collar, cutting off her airflow. Jun pried them apart in an impressive display of strength, held them suspended in the air for a minute, then flung them both to the ground.

“What part of block and parry was unclear?” he growled.

“She started it,” Nezha said quickly. He rolled to a sitting position and pointed at Rin. “She dropped her—”

“I know what I saw,” Jun snapped. “And I saw you rolling around the floor like imbeciles. If I enjoyed training animals, I would be in the Cike. Shall I put in a word?”

Nezha cast his eyes down. “No, sir.”

“Put your weapon away and leave my class. You’re suspended for a week.”

“Yes, sir.” Nezha rose to his feet, tossed his staff at the weapons rack, and stalked off.

Jun then turned his attention to Rin. Blood dripped down her face, streaming from her nose, trickling down her forehead. She wiped clumsily at her chin, too nervous to meet Jun’s eyes.

He loomed above her. “You. Get up.”

She struggled to her feet. Her knee screamed in protest.

“Get that pathetic look off your face. You won’t receive any sympathy from me.”

She didn’t expect his sympathy. But neither was she expecting what came next.

“That was the most miserable display I’ve seen from a student since I left the Militia,” Jun said. “Your fundamentals are horrific. You move like a paraplegic. What did I just witness? Have you been asleep for the past month?”

He moved too fast. I couldn’t keep up. I don’t have years of training like he does. Even as the words came to her mind, they sounded like the pathetic excuses they were. She opened her mouth and closed it, too stunned to respond.

“I hate students like you,” Jun continued relentlessly. The sounds of staves clashing against one another had long died away. The entire class was listening. “You skip into Sinegard from your little village, thinking that this is it—you’ve made it, you’re going to make Mommy and Daddy proud. Maybe you were the smartest kid in your village. Maybe you were the best test taker your tutor has ever seen! But guess what? It takes more than memorizing a few Classics to be a martial artist.

“Every year we get someone like you, some country bumpkin who thinks that just because they were good at taking some test, they deserve my time and attention. Understand this, southerner. The exam proves nothing. Discipline and competence—those are the only things that matter at this school. That boy”—Jun jerked his thumb in the direction Nezha had gone—“may be an ass, but he has the makings of a commander in him. You, on the other hand, are just peasant trash.”

The entire class was staring at her now. Kitay’s eyes were wide with sympathy. Even Venka looked stunned.

Rin’s ears rang, drowning out Jun’s words. She felt so small. She felt as if she might crumble into dust. Don’t let me cry. Her eyes throbbed from the pressure of forcing back her tears. Please don’t let me cry.

“I do not tolerate troublemakers in my class,” Jun said. “I do not have the happy privilege to expel you, but as Combat Master I can do this: From now on you are banned from the practice facilities. You do not touch the weapons rack. You do not train in the studio during off-hours. You do not set foot in here while I am teaching a class. You do not ask older students to teach you. I don’t need you causing any more trouble in my studio. Now get out of my sight.”

Chapter 5

Rin stumbled out the courtyard door. Jun’s words echoed over and over in her head. She was suddenly dizzy; her legs wobbled and her vision went temporarily black. She slid down against the stone wall, hugging her knees to her chest while blood pumped furiously in her ears.

Then the pressure in her chest bubbled up and she cried for the first time since orientation, sobbing with her face pressed into her hands so that no one could hear.

She cried from the pain. She cried from the embarrassment. But mostly she cried because those two long years of studying for the Keju hadn’t meant a thing. She was years behind her peers at Sinegard. She had no martial arts experience, much less an inherited art—even one that looked as stupid as Nezha’s. She hadn’t trained since childhood, like Venka. She wasn’t brilliant, didn’t have an eidetic memory like Kitay.

And the worst thing was, now she had no way to make up for it. Without Jun’s tutelage, frustrating though it was, Rin knew she didn’t have a chance of making it past the Trials. No master would choose to take on an apprentice who couldn’t fight. Sinegard was primarily a military academy. If she couldn’t hold her own on the battlefield, then what was the point?

Jun’s punishment was as good as an expulsion. She was done. It was over. She’d be back in Tikany within a year.

But Nezha attacked first.

The more she considered this, the faster her despair crystallized into anger. Nezha had tried to kill her. She had acted only in self-defense. Why had she been thrown out of the class, when Nezha had gotten off with little more than a slap on the wrist?

But it was so clear why. Nezha was a Sinegardian noble, the son of a Warlord, and she was a country girl with no connections and no status. Expelling Nezha would have been troublesome and politically contentious. He mattered. She did not.

No—they couldn’t just do this to her. They might think they could sweep her away like rubbish, but she didn’t have to lie down and take it. She had come from nothing. She wasn’t going back to nothing.

The courtyard doors opened as class let out. Her classmates hurried past her, pretending they didn’t see her. Only Kitay hung behind.

“Jun will come around,” he said.

Rin took his proffered hand and stood up in silence. She wiped at her face with her sleeve and sniffed.

“I mean it,” Kitay said. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “He only suspended Nezha for a week.”

She shrugged his hand off violently, still wiping furiously at her eyes. “That’s because Nezha was born with a gold ingot in his mouth. Nezha got off because his father’s got half the faculty here by their balls. Nezha’s from Sinegard, so Nezha’s special, Nezha belongs here.”

“Come on, you belong here too, you passed the Keju—”

“The Keju doesn’t mean anything,” Rin said scathingly. “The Keju is a ruse to keep uneducated peasants right where they’ve always been. You slip past the Keju, they’ll find a way to expel you anyway. The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”

“Rin, that’s not true.”

“It is!” She slammed her fist against the wall. “But they’re not going to get rid of me like this. Not this easily. I won’t let them. I won’t.”

She swayed suddenly. Her vision pulsed black and then cleared.

“Great Tortoise,” said Kitay. “Are you all right?”

She whirled on him. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re sweating.”

Sweating? She wasn’t sweating. “I’m fine,” she said. Her voice sounded inordinately loud; it rang in her ears. Was she shouting?

“Rin, calm down.”

“I’m calm! I’m extremely calm!”

She was far from fucking calm. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to scream at someone. Anger pulsed through her like a wave of heat.

Then her stomach erupted with a pain like she had been stabbed. She gasped sharply and clutched at her midriff. She felt as if someone were sliding a jagged stone through her innards.

Kitay grasped at her shoulders. “Rin? Rin?”

She felt the sudden urge to vomit. Had Nezha’s blows given her internal damage?

Oh, fantastic, she thought. Now you’re humiliated and injured, too. Wait until they watch you limp into class; Nezha’s going to love that.

She shoved Kitay away. “I don’t need— Leave me alone!”

“But you’re—”

“I’m fine!”

Rin awoke that night to a deeply confusing sticky sensation.

Her sleeping pants felt cold, the way her pants had felt when she’d been little and peed in her sleep. But her legs were too sticky to be covered in urine. Heart pounding, she scrambled out of her bunk and lit a lamp with shaking fingers.

She glanced down at herself and almost shrieked out loud. The soft candlelight illuminated pools of crimson everywhere. She was covered in an enormous amount of blood.

She fought to still her panic, to force her drowsy mind to think rationally. She felt no acute pain, only a deep discomfort and great irritation. She hadn’t been stabbed. She hadn’t somehow ejected all of her inner organs. A fresh flow of blood trickled down her leg that moment, and she traced it to the source with soaked fingers.

Then she was just confused.

Going back to sleep was out of the question. She wiped herself off with the parts of the sheet that weren’t soaked in blood, jammed a piece of cloth between her legs, and ran out of the dormitory to get to the infirmary before the rest of the campus woke.

Rin reached the infirmary in a sweaty, bloody mess, halfway to a nervous breakdown. The physician on call took one look at her and called his female assistant over. “One of those situations,” he said.

“Of course.” The assistant looked like she was trying hard not to laugh. Rin did not see anything remotely funny about the situation.

The assistant took Rin behind a curtain, handed her a change of clothes and a towel, and then sat her down with a detailed diagram of the female body.

It was a testament, perhaps, to the lack of sexual education in Tikany that Rin didn’t learn about menstruation until that morning. Over the next fifteen minutes, the physician’s assistant explained in detail the changes going on in Rin’s body, pointing to various places on the diagram and making some very vivid gestures with her hands.

“So you’re not dying, sweetheart, your body is just shedding your uterine lining.”

Rin’s jaw had been hanging open for a solid minute.

“What the fuck?”

She returned to the bunks with a deeply uncomfortable girdle strapped under her pants and a sock filled with heated uncooked rice grains. She placed the sock on her lower torso to dull the aching pain, but the cramping was so bad that she couldn’t crawl out of bed before classes started.

“Do you want me to get someone?” Niang asked.

“No,” Rin mumbled. “I’m fine. Just go.”

She lay in bed for the entire day, despairing at all the class she was missing.

I’ll be all right. She chanted it over and over to herself so that she wouldn’t panic. One missed day couldn’t hurt. Pupils got sick all the time. Kitay would lend her his notes if she asked. Surely she could catch up.

But this was going to happen every month. Every gods-damned month her uterus would tear itself to pieces, send flashes of rage through her entire body, and make her bloated, clumsy, light-headed, and worst of all, weak. No wonder women rarely remained at Sinegard.

She needed to fix this problem.

If only it weren’t so deeply embarrassing. She needed help. Venka seemed like someone who would have already begun menstruating. But Rin would have died rather than ask her how she’d managed it. Instead, she mumbled her questions to Kureel one night after she was sure Niang and Venka had gone to sleep.

Kureel laughed out loud in the darkness. “Just wear the girdle to class. You’ll be fine. You get used to the cramping.”

“But how often do I have to change it? What if it leaks in class? What if it gets on my uniform? What if someone sees?”

“Calm down,” said Kureel. “The first time is hard, but you’ll adapt to it. Keep track of your cycle, then you’ll know when it’s coming on.”

This wasn’t what Rin wanted to hear. “There’s no way to just stop it forever?”

“Not unless you cut out your womb,” Kureel scoffed, then paused at the look on Rin’s face. “I was kidding. That’s not actually possible.”

“It’s possible.” Arda, who was a Medicine apprentice, interrupted them quietly. “There’s a procedure they offer at the infirmary. At your age, it wouldn’t even require open surgery. They’ll give you a concoction. It’ll stop the process pretty much indefinitely.”

“Seriously?” Hope flared in Rin’s chest. She looked between the two apprentices. “Well, what’s stopping you from taking it?”

They both looked at her incredulously.

“It destroys your womb,” Arda said finally. “Basically kills one of your inner organs. You won’t be able to have children after.”

“And it hurts like a bitch,” Kureel said. “It’s not worth it.”

But I don’t want children, Rin thought. I want to stay here.

If that procedure could stop her menstruating, if it could help her remain at Sinegard, it was worth it.

Once her bleeding stopped, Rin went back to the infirmary and told the physician what she wanted. He did not argue with her; in fact, he seemed pleased.

“I’ve been trying to convince the girls here to do this for years,” he said. “None of them listen. Small wonder so few of you make it past your first year. They should make this mandatory.”

He made her wait while he disappeared into the back room, mixing together the requisite medicines. Ten minutes later he returned with a steaming cup.

“Drink this.”

Rin took the cup. It was dark porcelain, so she couldn’t tell the color of the liquid inside. She wondered if she should feel anything. This was significant, wasn’t it? There would be no children for her. No one would agree to marry her after this. Shouldn’t that matter?

No. No, of course not. If she’d wanted to grow fat with squealing brats, she would have stayed in Tikany. She had come to Sinegard to escape that future. Why hesitate now?

She searched herself for any twinge of regret. Nothing. She felt absolutely nothing, just as she had felt nothing the day she left Tikany, watching the dusty town recede forever into the distance.

“It’ll hurt,” the physician warned. “Much worse than it hurt when you were menstruating. Your womb will self-destruct over the next few hours. After this, it will stop fulfilling its function. When your body has matured fully, you can get a surgery to have your womb removed altogether, but this should solve your problem in the interim. You’ll be out of class for at least a week after this. But afterward, you’ll be free forever. Now, I’m required to ask you one more time if you’re certain this is what you want.”

“I’m certain.” Rin didn’t want to think it over any more. She held her breath and lifted the mug to her mouth, wincing at the taste.

The physician had added honey to mask the bitterness, but the sweetness only made it more horrible. It tasted the way that opium smelled. She had to swallow many times before she drained the entire mug. When she finished, her stomach felt numb and weirdly sated, bloated and rubbery. After a few minutes an odd prickling feeling tingled at the base of her torso, like someone was poking her with tiny needles from inside.

“Get back to your room before it starts to hurt,” the physician advised. “I’ll tell the masters you’re ill. The nurse will check on you tonight. You won’t want to eat, but I’ll have one of your classmates bring you some food just in case.”

Rin thanked him and ran with a wobbling gait back to her quarters, clutching her abdomen. The prickling had turned into an acute pain spreading across her lower stomach. She felt as if she had swallowed a knife and it was twisting in a slow circle inside her.

Somehow she made it back to her bed.

Pain is just a message, she told herself. She could choose to ignore it. She could . . . she could . . .

It was terrible. She whimpered aloud.

She did not sleep so much as lie in a fevered daze. She turned deliriously on the sheets, dreaming of unborn, misshapen infants, of Tobi digging his five claws into her stomach.

“Rin. Rin?”

Someone hovered over her. It was Niang, bearing a wooden bowl.

“I brought you some winter melon soup.” Niang knelt down beside Rin and held the bowl to her face.

Rin took one whiff of the soup. Her stomach seized painfully.

“I’m good,” she said weakly.

“There’s also this sedative.” Niang pushed a cup toward her. “The physician said it’s safe for you to take it now if you want to, but you don’t have to.”

“Are you joking? Give me that.” Rin grabbed the cup and guzzled it down. Immediately her head began to swim. The room became delightfully fuzzy. The stabbing in her abdomen disappeared. Then something rose up in the back of her throat. Rin lunged to the side of the bed and vomited into the basin she had set there. Blood splattered the porcelain.

She glanced down at the basin with a deranged satisfaction. Better to get the blood out this way, she thought, all at once, rather than slowly, every month, for years.

While she continued to retch, she heard the door to the dormitory open.

Someone walked inside and paused in front of her. “You’re insane,” said Venka.

Rin glared up at her, blood dripping from her mouth, and smiled.

Rin spent four delirious days in bed before she could return to class. When she did drag herself out of bed, against both Niang’s and the physician’s recommendations, she found she was hopelessly behind.

She had missed an entire unit on Mugini verb conjugations in Linguistics, the chapter on the demise of the Red Emperor in History, Sunzi’s analysis of geographical forecasting in Strategy, and the finer points of setting a splint in Medicine. She expected no lenience from the masters and received none.

The masters treated her like missing class was her fault, and it was. She had no excuses; she could only accept the consequences.

She flubbed questions every time a master called on her. She scored at the bottom of every exam. She didn’t complain. For the entire week, she endured the masters’ condescension in silence.

Oddly, she didn’t feel discouraged, but rather as if a veil had been lifted. Her first few weeks at Sinegard had been like a dream. Dazzled by the magnificence of the city and the Academy, she had allowed herself to drift.

She had now been painfully reminded that her place here was not permanent.

The Keju had meant nothing. The Keju had tested her ability to recite poems like a parrot. Why had she ever imagined that might have prepared her for a school like Sinegard?

But if the Keju had taught her anything, it was that pain was the price of success.

And she hadn’t burned herself in a long time.

She had grown content at the Academy. She had grown lazy. She had lost sight of what was at stake. She had needed to be reminded that she was nothing—that she could be sent back home at a moment’s notice. That as miserable she was at Sinegard, what awaited her in Tikany was much, much worse.

He looks at you and licks his lips. He brings you to the bed. He forces a hand between your legs. You scream, but no one hears you.

She would stay. She would stay at Sinegard even if it killed her.

She threw herself into her studies. Classes became like warfare, each interaction a battle. With every raised hand and every homework assignment, she competed against Nezha and Venka and every other Sinegardian. She had to prove that she deserved to be kept on, that she merited further training.

She had needed failure to remind her that she wasn’t like the Sinegardians—she hadn’t grown up speaking casual Hesperian, wasn’t familiar with the command structure of the Imperial Militia, didn’t know the political relationships between the Twelve Warlords like the back of her hand. The Sinegardians had this knowledge ingrained from childhood. She would have to develop it.

Every waking hour that she didn’t spend in class, she spent in the archives. She read the assigned texts out loud to herself; wrapping her tongue around the unfamiliar Sinegardian dialect until she had eradicated all hints of her southern drawl.

She began to burn herself again. She found release in the pain; it was comforting, familiar. It was a trade-off she was well used to. Success required sacrifice. Sacrifice meant pain. Pain meant success.

She stopped sleeping. She sat in the front row so that there was no way she could doze off. Her head ached constantly. She always wanted to vomit. She stopped eating.

She made herself miserable. But then, all of her options led to misery. She could run away. She could get on a boat and escape to another city. She could run drugs for another opium smuggler. She could, if it came down to it, return to Tikany, marry, and hope no one found out that she couldn’t have children until it was too late.

But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.

One month later, Rin tested at the top of one of Jima’s frequent Linguistics exams. She beat Nezha’s score by two points. When Jima announced the top five scores, Rin jerked upright, happily shocked.

She had spent the entire night cramming Hesperian verb tenses, which were infinitely confusing. Modern Hesperian was a language that followed neither rhyme nor reason. Its rules were close to pure randomness, its pronunciation guides haphazard and riddled with exceptions.

She couldn’t reason through Hesperian, so she memorized it, the way she memorized everything she didn’t understand.

“Good,” Jima said crisply when she handed Rin’s exam scroll back to her.

Rin was startled at how good “good” made her feel.

She found that she was fueled by praise from her masters. Praise meant that she had finally, finally received validation that she was not nothing. She could be brilliant, could be worth someone’s attention. She adored praise—craved it, needed it, and realized she found relief only when she finally had it.

She realized, too, that she felt about praise the way that addicts felt about opium. Each time she received a fresh infusion of flattery, she could think only about how to get more of it. Achievement was a high. Failure was worse than withdrawal. Good test scores brought only momentary relief and temporary pride—she basked in her grace period of several hours before she began to panic about her next test.

She craved praise so deeply that she felt it in her bones. And just like an addict, she did whatever she could to get it.

In the following weeks, Rin clawed her way up from the bottom of the ranks to become one of the top students in each class. She competed regularly with Nezha and Venka for the highest marks in nearly every subject. In Linguistics, she was second now only to Kitay.

She particularly enjoyed Strategy.

Gray-whiskered Master Irjah was the first teacher she’d ever had who didn’t rely principally on rote memorization as a learning method. He made the students solve logical syllogisms. He made them define concepts they had taken for granted, concepts like advantage and victory and war. He forced them to be precise and accurate in their answers. He rejected responses that were phrased vaguely or could have multiple interpretations. He stretched their minds, shattered their preconceptions of logic, and then pieced them back together.

He gave praise only sparingly, but when he did, he made sure that everyone in the class heard. Rin craved his approval more than anything.

Now that they had finished analyzing Sunzi’s Principles of War, Irjah spent the second half of class lobbing hypothetical military situations at them, challenging them to think their way out of various quagmires. Sometimes these simulations involved only questions of logistics (“Calculate how much time and how many supplies you need to move a force of this size across this strait”). Other times he drew up maps for them, indicating with symbols how many troops they had to work with, and forced them to come up with a battle plan.

“You are stuck behind this river,” said Irjah. “Your troops stand in a prime position for a ranged assault, but your main column has run out of arrows. What do you do?”

Most of their class suggested raids on the enemy’s weapons carriages. Venka wanted to abandon the ranged idea entirely and pursue a direct frontal assault. Nezha suggested they commission the nearby farmers to mass-produce arrows in one night.

“Gather scarecrows from the nearby farmers,” said Kitay.

Nezha snorted. “What?”

“Let him talk,” said Irjah.

“Dress them in spare uniforms, stick them in a boat, and send them downriver,” Kitay continued, ignoring him. “This area is a mountainous region notorious for heavy precipitation. We can assume it has rained recently, so there should be fog. That makes it difficult for the enemy forces to see the river clearly. Their archers will mistake the scarecrows for soldiers, and shoot until they resemble pincushions. We will then send our men downstream and have them collect the arrows. We use our enemy’s arrows to kill our enemies.”

Kitay won that one.

Another day Irjah presented them with a map of the Wudang mountain region marked with two red crosses to indicate two Federation battalions surrounding the Nikara army from both ends of the valley.

“You’re trapped in this valley. The villagers have mostly evacuated, but the Federation general holds a school full of children hostage. He says he will set the children free if your battalion surrenders. You have no guarantee he will honor the terms. How do you respond?”

They stared at the map for many minutes. Their troops had no advantage, no easy way out.

Even Kitay was puzzled. “Try an assault on the left flank?” he suggested. “Evacuate the children while they’re preoccupied with a small guerrilla force?”

“They’re on higher ground,” said Irjah. “They’ll shoot you down before you get the chance to draw your weapons.”

“Light the valley on fire,” Venka tried. “Distract them with the smoke?”

“Good way to burn yourselves to death.” Irjah snorted. “Remember, you do not have the high ground.”

Rin raised her hand. “Cut around the second army and get onto the dam. Break the dam. Flood the valley. Let everyone inside drown.”

Her classmates turned to stare at her in horror.

“Leave the children,” she added. “There’s no way to save them.”

Nezha laughed out loud. “We’re trying to win this simulation, idiot.”

Irjah motioned for Nezha to be silent. “Runin. Please elaborate.”

“It’s not a victory either way,” said Rin. “But if the costs are so high, I would throw all my tiles in. This way they die, and we lose half our troops but no more. Sunzi writes that no battle takes place in isolation. This is just one small move in the grand scheme of the war. The numbers you’ve given us indicate that these Federation battalions are massive. I’m guessing they constitute a large percentage of the entire Federation army. So if we give up some of our own troops, we lessen their advantage in all subsequent battles.”

“You’d rather kill your own people than let the opponent’s army walk away?” Irjah asked.

“Killing isn’t the same as letting die,” Rin objected.

“They’re casualties nonetheless.”

Rin shook her head. “You don’t let an enemy walk away if they’ll certainly be a threat to you later. You get rid of them. If they’re that far inland, they know the lay of almost the entire country. They have a geographical advantage. This is our one chance to take out the enemy’s greatest fighting force.”

“Sunzi said to always give the enemy a way out,” Irjah said.

Rin privately thought that this was one of Sunzi’s stupider principles, but hastily pulled together a counterargument. “But Sunzi didn’t mean to let them take that way out. The enemy just has to think the situation is less dire than it is, so they don’t grow desperate and do stupid and mutually destructive things.” Rin pondered for a moment. “I suppose they could try to swim.”

“She’s talking about decimating entire villages!” Venka protested. “You can’t just break a dam like that. Dams take years to rebuild. The entire river delta will flood, not just that valley. You’re talking about famine. Dysentery. You’ll mess with the agriculture of the entire region, create a whole host of problems that mean decades of suffering down the line—”

“Problems that can be solved,” Rin maintained stubbornly. “What was your solution, to let the Federation walk free into the heartland? Fat lot of good the agricultural regions will do you when your whole country’s been occupied. You would offer up the whole country to them on a platter.”

“Enough, enough.” Irjah slammed the table to silence them. “Nobody wins this one. You’re dismissed for today. Runin, I want to have a word. My office.”

“Where did you come by this solution?” Irjah held up a booklet.

Rin recognized her scrawling handwriting at the top.

Last week Irjah had assigned them to write essay responses to another simulated quagmire—a counterfactual scenario where the Militia had lost popular support for a war of resistance against the Federation. They couldn’t rely on peasants to supply soldiers with food or animal feed, could not use peasant homes as lodging without forceful entry. In fact, outbreaks of rebellion in rural areas added several layers of complication to coordinating troop movements.

Rin’s solution had been to burn down one of the minor island villages.

The twist was that the island in question belonged to the Empire.

“The first day of Yim’s class we talked about how losing Speer ended the Second Poppy War,” she said.

Irjah frowned. “You based this essay on the Speerly Massacre?”

She nodded. “Losing Speer during the Second Poppy War pushed Hesperia over the edge—made them uncomfortable enough that they didn’t want Mugen expanding farther into the continent. I thought the destruction of another minor island might do the same for the Nikara population, convince them that the real enemy was Mugen. Remind them what the threat was.”

“Surely Militia troops attacking a province of the Empire would send the wrong message,” Irjah objected.

“They wouldn’t know it was Militia troops,” she said. “We would pose as a Federation squadron. I suppose I should have been clearer about that in the essay. Better still if Mugen just went ahead and attacked the island for us, but you can’t leave these things to chance.”

He nodded slowly as he perused her essay. “Crude. Crude, but clever. Do you think that’s what happened?”

It took her a moment to understand his question. “In this simulation, or during the Poppy Wars?”

“The Poppy Wars.” Irjah tilted his head, watching her carefully.

“I’m not entirely sure that’s not what happened,” Rin said. “There’s some evidence that the attack on Speer was allowed to succeed.”

Irjah’s expression betrayed nothing, but his fingers tapped thoughtfully against his wooden desk. “Explain.”

“I find it very difficult to believe that the strongest fighting force in the Militia could have been annihilated so easily. That, and the island was suspiciously poorly defended.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Well, I’m not certain, but it seems as if—I mean, maybe someone on the inside—a Nikara general, or someone else who was privy to certain information—knew about the attack on Speer but didn’t alert anyone.”

“Now why would we have wanted to lose Speer?” Irjah asked quietly.

She took a moment to formulate a coherent argument. “Maybe they knew Hesperia wouldn’t stand for it. Maybe they wanted to generate popular support to distract from the Red Junk movement. Maybe because we needed a sacrifice, and Speer was expendable in a way other regions weren’t. We couldn’t let any Nikara die. But Speerlies? Why not?”

She had been grasping at straws when she had started to speak, but the moment she said it, her answer sounded startlingly plausible to her.

Irjah looked deeply uncomfortable. “You must understand that this is a very awkward part of Nikan’s history,” he said. “The way that the Speerlies were treated was . . . regrettable. They were used and exploited by the Empire for centuries. Their warriors were regarded as little more than vicious dogs. Savages. Until Altan came to study at Sinegard, I don’t believe anyone really thought the Speerlies were capable of sophisticated thought. Nikan does not like to speak of Speer, and for good reason.”

“Yes, sir. It was just a theory.”

“Anyhow.” Irjah leaned back in his chair. “That isn’t all I wanted to discuss. Your strategy in the valley worked for the purposes of the exercise, but no competent ruler would ever give those orders. Do you know why?”

She contemplated in silence for a minute. “I confused tactics with grand strategy,” she said finally.

Irjah nodded. “Elaborate.”

“The tactic would have worked. We might have even won the war. But no ruler would have chosen that option, because the country would have fallen apart afterward. My tactic doesn’t grant the possibility of peace.”

“Why is that?” Irjah pressed.

“Venka was right about destroying the agricultural heartland. Nikan would suffer famine for years. Rebellions like the Red Junk Opera would spring up everywhere. People would think it was the Empress’s fault that they were starving. If we used my strategy, what would happen next is probably a civil war.”

“Good,” said Irjah. He raised his eyebrows. “Very good. You know, you are astoundingly bright.”

Rin tried to conceal her delight, though she felt a flutter of warmth spread across her body.

“Should you perform well in the Trials,” Irjah continued, “you might do well as a Strategy apprentice.”

Under any other circumstances his words would have thrilled her. Rin managed a resigned smile. “I’m not sure I’ll make it that far, sir.”

His brow crinkled. “Why’s that?”

“Master Jun kicked me out of his class. I probably won’t pass the Trials.”

“How on earth did that happen?” Irjah demanded.

She recounted her last, disastrous class with Jun without bothering to edit the story. “He let Nezha off with a suspension, but told me not to come back.”

“Ah.” Irjah frowned. “Jun didn’t punish you because you were brawling. Tobi and Altan did far worse than that their first year. He punished you because he’s a purist about the school—he thinks any student who isn’t descended from a Warlord isn’t worth his time. But never mind what Jun thinks. You’re clever, you’ll pick up whatever techniques they covered this month without much trouble.”

Rin shook her head. “It won’t make much difference. He’s not letting me back in.”

“What?” Irjah looked outraged. “That’s absurd. Does Jima know?”

“Jima can’t intervene in a Combat matter. Or won’t. I’ve asked.” Rin stood up. “Thanks for your time, sir. If I make it past the Trials, I’d be honored to study with you.”

“You’ll find a way,” Irjah said. His eyes twinkled. “Sunzi would.”

Rin hadn’t been completely forthcoming with Irjah. He was right—she would find a way.

Starting with the fact that she hadn’t given up on martial arts.

Jun had banned her from his class, but he hadn’t banned her from the library. The stacks at Sinegard contained a wealth of martial arts instruction tomes, the largest collection in all the Empire. Rin had within reach the secrets of most inherited arts, excepting those tightly guarded techniques like the House of Yin’s.

In the course of her research Rin discovered that existing martial arts literature was hugely comprehensive and dauntingly complex. She learned that martial arts revolved largely around lineage: different forms belonged to different families, similar techniques taught and improved upon by pupils who had shared the same master. More often than not, schools became torn by rivalries or schisms, so techniques splintered and developed independently of others.

The history was deeply enjoyable, almost more entertaining than novels. But practicing the techniques turned out to be devilishly hard. Most tomes were too dense to serve as useful manuals. A majority assumed that the student was reading the book along with a master who could demonstrate the techniques in real life. Others expounded for pages about a certain school’s breathing techniques and philosophy of fighting, but only sporadically mentioned things like kicking and punching.

“I don’t want to read about the balance in the universe,” Rin grumbled, tossing aside what seemed like the hundredth text she’d tried. “I want to know how to beat people up.”

She attempted asking the apprentices for help.

“Sorry,” Kureel said without meeting her eyes. “Jun said that teaching first-years outside of the practice rooms was against the rules.”

Rin doubted this was a real rule, but she should have known better than to ask one of Jun’s apprentices.

Asking Arda was also not an option; she spent all her time in the infirmary with Enro and never returned to the bunks before midnight.

Rin was going to have to teach herself.

A month and a half in, she finally found a gold mine of information in the texts of Ha Seejin, quartermaster under the Red Emperor. Seejin’s manuals were wonderfully illustrated, filled with detailed descriptions and clearly labeled diagrams.

Rin perused the pages gleefully. This was it. This was what she needed.

“You can’t take this one out,” said the apprentice at the front desk.

“Why not?”

“It’s from the restricted shelves,” said the apprentice, as if this were obvious. “First-years don’t get access to those.”

“Oh. Sorry. I’ll take it back.”

Rin walked to the back end of the library. She glanced furtively about to make sure no one was watching. She stuffed the tome down her shirt. Then she turned around and walked back out.

Alone in the courtyard, book in hand, Rin learned. She learned to shape the air with her fists, to imagine a great spinning ball in her arms to guide the shape of her movements. She learned to root her legs against the ground so she couldn’t be tipped over, not even by opponents twice her weight. She learned to form fists with her thumb on the outside, to always keep her guard up around her face, and to shift her balance quickly and smoothly.

She became very good at punching stationary objects.

She attended the matches at the rings regularly. She arrived in the basement early and secured a place by the railing so that she didn’t miss a single kick or throw. She hoped that by watching the apprentices fight, she could absorb their techniques.

This actually helped—to some extent. By closely examining the apprentices’ movements, Rin learned to identify the right place and time for various techniques. When to kick, when to dodge, when to roll madly on the floor to avoid—wait, no, that was an accident, Jeeha had simply tripped. Rin didn’t have muscle memory of sparring against another person, so she had to hold these contingencies in her head. But vicarious sparring was better than nothing.

She also attended the matches to watch Altan.

She would have been lying to herself if she didn’t admit that she derived great aesthetic pleasure from staring at him. With his lithe, muscled form and chiseled jawline, Altan was undeniably handsome.

But he was also the paragon of good technique. Altan did everything that the Seejin text recommended. He never let his guard down, never allowed an opening, never let his attention slip. He never telegraphed his next move, didn’t bounce erratically or go flat on his heels to advertise to his opponent when he was going to kick. He always attacked from angles, never from the front.

Rin had initially conceived of Altan as simply a good, strong fighter. Now she could see that he was, in every sense, a genius. His fighting technique was a study in trigonometry, a beautiful composition of trajectories and rebounded forces. He won consistently because he had perfect control of distance and torque. He had the mathematics of fighting down to a science.

He fought more often than not. Throughout the semester his challengers only grew in number—it seemed every single one of Jun’s apprentices wanted to have a go at him.

Rin watched Altan fight twenty-three matches before the end of the fall. He never lost.

Chapter 6

Winter descended on Sinegard with a vengeance. The students enjoyed one last pleasant day of autumn sun, and woke the next morning to find that a cold sheet of snow had fallen over the Academy. The snow was lovely to observe for all of two serene minutes. Then it became nothing but a pain in the ass.

The entire campus turned into a risk zone for broken limbs—the streams froze over; the stairways became slushy and treacherous. Outdoor classes moved indoors. The first-years were assigned to scatter salt across the stone walkways at regular intervals to melt the snow, but the slippery paths sent a regular stream of students to the infirmary regardless.

As far as Lore went, the icy weather was the last straw for most of the class, who had been intermittently frequenting the garden in hopes that Jiang might make an appearance. But waiting around in a drug garden for a never-present teacher was one thing; waiting in freezing cold temperatures was another.

In the months since the semester began, Jiang hadn’t shown up once to class. Students occasionally spotted him around campus doing inexcusably rude things. He had in turn flipped Nezha’s lunch tray out of his hands and walked away whistling, petted Kitay on the head while making a pigeon-like cooing noise, and tried to snip Venka’s hair off with garden shears.

Whenever a student managed to pin him down to ask about his course, Jiang made a loud farting noise with his mouth and elbow and skirted away.

Rin alone continued to frequent the Lore garden, but only because it was a convenient place to train. Now that first-years avoided the garden out of spite, it was the one place where she was guaranteed to be alone.

She was grateful that no one could see her fumbling through the Seejin text. She had picked up the fundamentals with little trouble, but discovered that even just the second form was devilishly hard to put together.

Seejin was fond of rapidly twisting footwork. Here the diagrams failed her. The models’ feet in the drawings were positioned in completely different angles from picture to picture. Seejin wrote that if a fighter could extricate himself from any awkward placement, no matter how close he was to falling, he would have achieved perfect balance and therefore the advantage in most combat positions.

It sounded good in theory. In practice, it meant a lot of falling over.

Seejin recommended pupils practice the first form on an elevated surface, preferably a thick tree branch or the top of a wall. Against her better judgment, Rin climbed to the middle of the large willow tree overhanging the garden and positioned her feet hesitantly against the bark.

Despite Jiang’s absence throughout the semester, the garden remained impeccably well kept. It was a kaleidoscope of garishly bright colors, similar in color scheme to the decorations outside Tikany’s whorehouses. Despite the cold, the violet and scarlet poppy flowers had remained in full blossom, their leaves trimmed in tidy rows. The cacti, which were twice the size they had been at the start of term, had been moved into a new set of clay pots painted in eerie patterns of black and burnt orange. Underneath the shelves, the luminescent mushrooms still pulsed with a faintly disturbing glow, like tiny fairy lamps.

Rin imagined that an opium addict could pass entire days in here. She wondered if that was what Jiang did.

Poised precariously on the willow tree, struggling to stand up straight against the harsh wind, Rin held the book in one hand, mumbling instructions out loud while she positioned her feet accordingly.

“Right foot out, pointing straight forward. Left foot back, perpendicular to the straight line of the right foot. Shift weight forward, lift left foot . . .”

She could see why Seejin thought this might be good balance practice. She also saw why Seejin strongly recommended against attempting the exercise alone. She wobbled perilously several times, and regained her balance only after a few heart-stopping seconds of frantic windmilling. Calm down. Focus. Right foot up, bring it around . . .

Master Jiang walked around the corner, loudly whistling “The Gatekeeper’s Touches.”

Rin’s right foot slid out from beneath her. She teetered off the edge of the branch, dropped the book, and would have plummeted to the stone floor if her left ankle hadn’t snagged in the crook of two dividing branches.

She jolted to a halt with her face inches from the ground and gasped out loud in relief.

Jiang stared down silently at her. She gazed back, head thundering while the blood rushed down into her temples. The last notes of his song dwindled and faded away in the howling wind.

“Hello there,” he said finally. His voice matched his demeanor: placid, disengaged, and idyllically curious. In any other context, it might have been soothing.

Rin struggled ungracefully to haul herself upward.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m stuck,” she mumbled.

“Mmm. Appears so.”

He clearly wasn’t going to help her down. Rin wriggled her ankle out of the branch, tumbled to the floor, and landed in a painful heap at Jiang’s feet. Cheeks burning, she clambered to her feet and brushed the snow off her uniform.

“Elegant,” Jiang remarked.

He tilted his head very far to the left, studying her intently as if she were a particularly fascinating specimen. Up close, Jiang looked even more bizarre than Rin had first thought. His face was a riddle; it was neither lined with age nor flushed with youth but rather invulnerable to time, like a smooth stone. His eyes were a pale blue color she had never seen on anyone in the Empire.

“Bit daring, aren’t you?” He sounded like he was suppressing laughter. “Do you often dangle from trees?”

“You startled me, sir.”

“Hmmph.” He puffed air through his cheeks like a little child. “You’re Irjah’s pet pupil, aren’t you?”

Her cheeks flushed. “I—I mean, I don’t . . .”

“You are.” He scratched his chin and scooped her book off the ground, riffling through its pages with a mild curiosity. “Dusky little peasant prodigy, you. He can’t stop raving about you.”

She shuffled her feet, wondering where this was going. Had that been a compliment? Was she supposed to thank him? She tucked a lock of hair back behind her ear. “Um.”

“Oh, don’t pretend to be bashful. You love it.” Jiang glanced casually down at the book and gazed back up at her. “What are you doing with a Seejin text?”

“I found it in the archives.”

“Oh. I take that back. You’re not daring. You’re just stupid.”

When Rin looked confused, Jiang explained: “Jun explicitly forbade Seejin until at least your second year.”

She hadn’t heard this rule. No wonder the apprentice hadn’t let her sign the book out of the archives. “Jun expelled me from his class. I wasn’t informed.”

“Jun expelled you,” Jiang repeated slowly. She couldn’t tell if he was amused or not. “What on earth did you do to him?”

“Um. Tackled another student during sparring, sort of. He started it,” she added quickly. “The other student, I mean.”

Jiang looked impressed. “Stupid and hotheaded.”

His eyes wandered over to the plants on the shelf behind her. He walked around her, lifted a poppy flower up to his nose, and sniffed experimentally. He made a face. He dug around in the deep pockets of his robes, fished out a pair of shears, then clipped the stem and tossed the broken end into a pile in the corner of a garden.

Rin began to inch toward the gate. Perhaps if she left now, Jiang would forget about the book. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t be in here—”

“Oh, you’re not sorry. You’re just annoyed I interrupted your training session, and you’re hoping I’ll leave without mentioning your stolen book.” Jiang snipped another stem off the poppy plant. “You’re a plucky one, you know that? Got banned from Jun’s class, so you thought you’d teach yourself Seejin.”

He made several syncopated wheezing noises. It took Rin a moment to realize he was laughing.

“What’s so funny?” she demanded. “Sir, if you’re going to report me, I just want to say—”

“Oh, I’m not going to report you. What fun would that be?” He was still chuckling. “Were you really trying to learn Seejin from a book? Do you have a death wish?”

“It’s not that hard,” she said defensively. “I just followed the pictures.”

He turned back toward her; his expression was one of amused disbelief. He opened the book, riffled through the pages with a practiced hand, and then stopped on the page detailing the first form. He brandished the book at her. “That one. Do that.”

Rin obliged.

It was a tricky form, full of shifting movements and ball change steps. She squeezed her eyes shut as she moved. She couldn’t concentrate in full sight of those luminous mushrooms, those bizarrely pulsing cacti.

When she opened her eyes, Jiang had stopped laughing.

“You’re nowhere near ready for Seejin,” he said. He slammed the book shut with one hand. “Jun was right. At your level you shouldn’t even be touching this text.”

Rin fought a wave of panic. If she couldn’t even use the Seejin text, she might as well leave for Tikany right now. She had found no other books that were half as useful or as clear.

“You might benefit from some animal-based fundamentals,” Jiang continued. “Yinmen’s work. He was Seejin’s predecessor. Have you heard of him?”

She glanced up at him in confusion. “I’ve looked for those. Those scrolls are incomplete.”

“Of course you won’t be learning from scrolls,” Jiang said impatiently. “We’ll discuss this in class tomorrow.”

“Class? You haven’t been here all semester!”

Jiang shrugged. “I find it difficult to bother myself with first-years I don’t find particularly interesting.”

Rin thought this was just irresponsible teaching, but she wanted to keep Jiang talking. Here he was in a rare moment of lucidity, offering to teach her martial arts that she couldn’t learn by herself. She was half-afraid that if she said the wrong thing, she would send him running off like a startled hare.

“So am I interesting?” she asked slowly.

“You’re a walking disaster,” Jiang said bluntly. “You’re training with arcane techniques at a rate that will lead to inevitable injury, and not the kind you recover from. You’ve misinterpreted Seejin’s texts so badly that I believe you’ve come up with a new art form all by yourself.”

Rin scowled. “Then why are you helping me?”

“To spite Jun, mostly.” Jiang scratched his chin. “I hate the man. Did you know he petitioned to have me fired last week?”

Rin was mostly surprised that Jun hadn’t tried that sooner.

“Also, anyone this obstinate deserves some attention, if only to make sure you don’t become a walking hazard to everyone around you,” Jiang continued. “You know, your footwork is remarkable.”

She flushed. “Really?”

“Placement is perfect. Beautiful angles.” He cocked his head. “Of course, everything you’re doing is useless.”

She scowled. “Well, if you’re not going to teach me, then—”

“I didn’t say that. You’ve done a good job working only with the text,” Jiang acknowledged. “A better job than many apprentices would have done. It’s your upper body strength that’s the problem. Namely, you have none.” He grabbed for her wrist and pulled her arm up as if he were examining a mannequin. “So skinny. Weren’t you a farmhand or something?”

“Not everyone from the south is a farmer,” she snapped. “I was a shopgirl.”

“Hm. No heavy labor, then. Pampered. You’re useless.”

She crossed her arms against her chest. “I wasn’t pampered—”

“Yeah, yeah.” He held up a hand to cut her off. “It doesn’t matter. Here’s the thing: all the technique in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t have the strength to back it up. You don’t need Seejin, kid. You need ki. You need muscle.”

“So what do you want me to do? Calisthenics?”

He stood still, contemplative, for a long moment. Then he beamed. “No. I have a better idea. Be at the campus gates for class tomorrow.”

Before she could respond, he strolled out of the garden.

“Wow.” Raban set down his chopsticks. “He must really like you.”

“He called me stupid and hotheaded,” Rin said. “And then he told me to be on time for class.”

“He definitely likes you,” Raban said. “Jiang’s never uttered anything nice to anyone in my year. He mostly yells at us to stay away from his daffodils. He told Kureel that her braids made her look like snakes were growing out the back of her head.”

“I heard he got drunk on rice wine last week and pissed into Jun’s window,” Kitay chipped in. “He sounds awesome.”

“How long has Jiang been here?” Rin asked. The Lore Master seemed amazingly young, at most half of Jun’s age. She couldn’t believe the other masters would put up with such aggravating behavior from someone who was clearly their junior.

“Not sure. He was here when I was a first-year, but that doesn’t mean much. I heard he came from the Night Castle twenty years ago.”

“Jiang was Cike?”

Among the divisions of the Militia, only the Cike bore an ill reputation. They were a division of soldiers holed up in the Night Castle, far up the Wudang mountain range, whose sole task was to carry out assassinations for the Empress. The Cike fought without honor. They respected no rules of combat, and they were notorious for their brutality. They operated in the darkness; they did the Empress’s dirty work and received no recognition afterward. Most apprentices would have quit the service rather than join the Cike.

Rin had a hard time reconciling her image of the whimsical Lore Master with that of a hardened assassin.

“Well, that’s just the rumor. None of the masters will say anything about him. I get the feeling that Jiang’s considered a bit of an embarrassment to the school.” Raban rubbed the back of his head. “The apprentices love to gossip, though. Every class plays the ‘Who is Jiang?’ guessing game. My class was convinced that he was the founder of the Red Junk Opera. The truth’s been stretched so many times that the only thing certain is that we know absolutely nothing about him.”

“Surely he’s had apprentices before,” said Rin.

“Jiang is the Lore Master,” Raban said slowly, as if talking to a child. “Nobody pledges Lore.”

“Because Jiang won’t take any students?”

“Because Lore is a bloody joke,” said Raban. “Every other track at Sinegard prepares you for a government position or for command in the Militia. But Lore is . . . I don’t know, Lore’s odd. I think it was originally meant to be a study of the Hinterlanders, to see if there’s any substance to their witch-magic rituals, but everyone lost interest pretty quickly. I know Yim and Sonnen have both petitioned Jima to have the class canceled, but it’s still offered every year. I’m not sure why.”

“Surely there have been Lore students in the past,” said Kitay. “What have they said?”

Raban shrugged. “It’s a new discipline—the others have been taught since the Red Emperor founded this school, but Lore’s only been around for two decades or so—and no one’s stuck with the course all the way through. I hear that a couple years ago some suckers took the bait, but they dropped out of Sinegard and were never heard from again. No one in their right mind now would pledge Lore. Altan was the exception, but nobody ever knows what’s going on in Altan’s head.”

“I thought Altan pledged Strategy,” said Kitay.

“Altan could have pledged whatever he wanted. For some reason he was hell-bent on Lore, but then Jiang changed his mind and Altan had to settle for Irjah instead.”

This was news to Rin. “Does that happen often—students choosing the master?”

“Very rarely. Most of us are relieved to get one bid; it’s an especially impressive student who gets two.”

“How many bids did Altan get?”

“Six. Seven if you include Lore, but Jiang withdrew his bid at the last minute.” Raban gave her a knowing look. “Why so curious about Altan?”

“Just wondering,” Rin said quickly.

“Taken a shine to our crimson-eyed hero, huh? You wouldn’t be the first.” Raban grinned. “Just be careful. Altan’s not too kind to admirers.”

“What’s he like?” She couldn’t help but ask. “As a person, I mean.”

Raban shrugged. “We haven’t had classes together since our first year. I don’t know him well. I don’t think anyone really does. He mostly keeps to himself. He’s quiet. Trains alone and doesn’t really have friends.”

“Sounds like someone we know.” Kitay jabbed an elbow at Rin.

She bristled. “Shut up. I have friends.”

“You have a friend,” Kitay said. “Singular.”

Rin pushed at Kitay’s arm. “But Altan’s so good,” she said. “At everything. Everyone adores him.”

Raban shrugged. “Altan’s more or less a god on this campus. Doesn’t mean he’s happy.”

Once the conversation had derailed to Altan, Rin forgot half the questions she had meant to ask about Jiang. She and Kitay prodded Raban for anecdotes about Altan until dinner break ended. That night, she tried asking Kureel and Arda, but neither of them could confirm anything substantial.

“I see Jiang in the infirmary sometimes,” said Arda. “Enro keeps a walled-off bed just for him. He stays for a day or two every other month and then leaves. Maybe he’s sick with something. Or maybe he just really likes the smell of disinfectant, I can’t tell. Enro caught him trying to get high off medicine fumes once.”

“Jun doesn’t like him,” said Kureel. “Not hard to see why. What kind of master acts like that? Especially at Sinegard?” Her face twisted with disapproval. “I think he’s a disgrace to the Academy. Why’re you asking?”

“No reason,” said Rin. “Just curious.”

Kureel shrugged. “Every class falls for it at first. Everyone thinks there’s more to Jiang than there is, that Lore is a real subject worth learning. But there’s nothing there. Jiang’s a joke. You’re wasting your time.”

But the Lore Master was real. Jiang was a faculty member of the Academy, even if all he did was wander around and annoy the other masters. No one else could have gotten away with provoking Jun like Jiang did on a regular basis. So if Jiang didn’t bother teaching, what was he doing at Sinegard?

Rin was slightly amazed when she saw Jiang waiting at the campus gates the next afternoon. She wouldn’t have put it past him to simply forget. She opened her mouth to ask where they were going, but he simply waved at her to follow him.

She assumed that she was just going to have to get used to being led around by Jiang with no clear explanation.

They had hardly started down the path before they ran into Jun, returning from city patrol with a group of his apprentices.

“Ah. The lackwit and the peasant.” Jun slowed to a stop. His apprentices looked somewhat wary, as if they’d seen this exchange before. “And where are you going on this fine afternoon?”

“None of your business, Loran,” Jiang said breezily. He tried to skirt around Jun, but Jun stepped into his path.

“A master leaving the grounds alone with a student. I wonder what they’ll say.” Jun narrowed his eyes.

“Probably that a master of his rank and standing could do much better than dicking around with female students,” Jiang replied cheerfully, looking directly at Jun’s apprentices. Kureel looked outraged.

Jun scowled. “She doesn’t have permission to leave the grounds. She needs written approval from Jima.”

Jiang stretched out his right arm and shoved his sleeve up to the elbow. At first Rin thought that he might punch Jun, but Jiang simply raised his elbow to his mouth and made a loud farting noise.

“That’s not written approval.” Jun looked unimpressed. Rin suspected he had seen this display many times before.

“I’m Lore Master,” Jiang said. “That comes with privileges.”

“Privileges like never teaching class?”

Jiang lifted his chin and said self-importantly, “I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.”

“You have taught her class and every class before it that Lore is a joke and the Lore Master is a bumbling idiot.”

“Tell Jima to fire me, then.” Jiang waggled his eyebrows. “I know you’ve tried.”

Jun raised his eyes to the sky in an expression of eternal suffering. Rin suspected that this was only a small part of an argument that had been going on for years.

“I’m reporting this to Jima,” Jun warned.

“Jima has better things to waste her time on. As long as I bring little Runin back in time for dinner, I doubt she’ll care. In the meantime, stop blocking the road.”

Jiang snapped his fingers and motioned for Rin to follow. Rin clamped her mouth shut and tripped down the path behind him.

“Why does he hate you so much?” Rin asked as they climbed down the mountain pass toward the city.

Jiang shrugged. “They tell me I killed half the men under his command during the Second War. He’s still bitter about it.”

“Well, did you?” Rin felt like she was obligated to ask.

He shrugged again. “Haven’t the faintest clue.”

Rin had no idea how to respond to this, and Jiang did not elaborate.

“So tell me about your class,” Jiang said after a while. “Same crowd of entitled brats?”

“I don’t know them very well,” Rin admitted. “They’re all . . . I mean . . .”

“Smarter? Better trained? More important than you?”

“Nezha’s the son of the Dragon Warlord,” Rin blurted out. “How am I supposed to compete with that? Venka’s father is the finance minister. Kitay’s father is defense minister, or something like that. Niang’s family are physicians to the Hare Warlord.”

Jiang snorted. “Typical.”

“Typical?”

“Sinegard likes to collect the Warlords’ broods as much as it can. Keeps them under the Empire’s careful watch.”

“What for?” she asked.

“Leverage. Indoctrination. This generation of Warlords hate each other too much to coordinate on anything of national importance, and the imperial bureaucracy has too little local authority to force them. Just look at the state of the Imperial Navy.”

“We have a navy?” Rin asked.

“Exactly.” Jiang snorted. “We used to. Anyhow, Daji’s hoping that Sinegard will forge a generation of leaders who like each other—and better, who will obey the throne.”

“She really struck gold with me, then,” Rin muttered.

Jiang shot her a sideways grin. “What, you’re not going to be a good soldier to the Empire?”

“I will,” Rin said hastily. “I just don’t think most of my classmates like me very much. Or ever will.”

“Well, that’s because you’re a dark little peasant brat who can’t pronounce your r’s,” Jiang said breezily. He made a turn into a narrow corridor. “This way.”

He led her into the meatpacking district, where the streets were cramped and crowded and smelled overwhelmingly like blood. Rin gagged and clamped a hand over her nose as they walked. Butcher shops lined the alleyways, built so close they were almost on top of one another in crooked rows like jagged teeth. After twenty minutes of twists and turns, they stopped at a little shack at the end of a block. Jiang rapped thrice on the rickety wooden door.

“What?” screeched a voice from within. Rin jumped.

“It’s me,” Jiang called back, unfazed. “Your favorite person in the whole wide world.”

There was the noise of clattering metal from inside. After a moment, a wizened little lady in a purple smock opened the door. She greeted Jiang with a curt nod but squinted suspiciously at Rin.

“This is the Widow Maung,” Jiang said. “She sells me things.”

“Drugs,” clarified the Widow Maung. “I am his drug dealer.”

“She means ginseng, and roots and such,” Jiang said. “For my health.”

The Widow Maung rolled her eyes.

Rin watched the exchange, fascinated.

“The Widow Maung has a problem,” Jiang continued cheerfully.

The Widow Maung cleared her throat and spat a thick wad of phlegm into the dirt next to where Jiang stood. “I do not have a problem. You are making up this problem for reasons unbeknownst to me.”

“Regardless,” Jiang said, maintaining his idyllic smile, “the Widow Maung has graciously allowed you to help her in resolving her problem. Madam, would you bring out the animal?”

The Widow Maung disappeared into the back of the shop. Jiang motioned for Rin to follow him inside. Rin heard a loud squealing sound from behind the wall. Moments later, the Widow Maung returned with a squirming animal clutched in her arms. She plopped it on the counter before them.

“Here’s a pig,” Jiang said.

“That is a pig,” Rin agreed.

The pig in question was a tiny thing, no longer than Rin’s forearm. Its skin was spotted black and pink. The way its snout curved up made it look like it was grinning. It was oddly cute.

Rin scratched it behind the ears and it nuzzled her forearm affectionately.

“I named it Sunzi,” Jiang said happily.

The Widow Maung looked like she couldn’t wait for Jiang to leave.

Jiang hastened to explain. “The Widow Maung needs little Sunzi watered every day. The problem is Sunzi requires a very special sort of water.”

“Sunzi could drink sewage water and be fine,” the Widow Maung clarified. “You’re just making things up for this training exercise.”

“Can we just do it like we rehearsed?” Jiang demanded. It was the first time Rin had seen anyone actually get to him. “You’re killing the mood.”

“Is that something you’re often told?” the Widow Maung inquired.

Jiang snorted, amused, and clapped Rin on the back. “Here’s the situation. The Widow Maung needs Sunzi to drink this very special sort of water. Fortunately, this fresh, crystal-clear water can be found in a stream at the top of the mountain. The catch is getting Sunzi up the mountain. This is where you come in.”

“You’re joking,” Rin said.

Jiang beamed. “Every day you will run into town to visit the Widow Maung. You will lug this adorable piglet up the mountain and let him drink. Then you will bring him back and return to the Academy. Understood?”

“It’s a two-hour trip up the mountain and back!”

“It’s a two-hour trip now,” Jiang said cheerfully. “It’ll be longer once this little guy starts growing.”

“But I have class,” she protested.

“Better get up early, then,” said Jiang. “It’s not like you have Combat in the morning anyway. Remember? Someone got expelled?”

“But—”

“Someone,” Jiang drawled, “does not want very much to stay at Sinegard.”

The Widow Maung snorted loudly.

Glowering, Rin gathered up Sunzi the piglet in her arms and tried not to wrinkle her nose at the smell.

“Guess I’ll be seeing a lot of you,” she grumbled.

Sunzi squirmed and nuzzled into the crook of her arm.

Every day over the next four months, Rin rose before the sun came up, ran as fast as she could down the mountain pass and into the meatpacking district to fetch Sunzi, strapped the piglet to her back, and ran back up the mountain. She took the long way up, routing around Sinegard so that none of her classmates would see her running around with a squealing pig.

She was often late to Medicine.

“Where the hell have you been? And why do you smell like swine?” Kitay wrinkled his nose as she slid into the seat next to him.

“I’ve been carrying a pig up a mountain,” she said. “Obeying the whims of a madman. Finding a way out.”

It was desperate behavior, but she had fallen on desperate times. Rin was now relying on the campus madman to keep her spot at Sinegard. She began to sit in the back of the room so that nobody could smell the traces of Sunzi on her when she returned from the Widow Maung’s butcher shop.

From the way everyone kept their distance, she wasn’t sure it mattered.

Jiang did more than make her carry the pig. In an astonishing streak of reliability, he stood waiting for her in the garden every day at class time.

“You know, animal-based martial arts weren’t developed for combat,” he said. “They were first created to promote health and longevity. The Frolics of the Five Animals”—he held up the Yinmen scroll that Rin had spent so long looking for—“is actually a system of exercises to promote blood circulation and delay the inconveniences of old age. It wasn’t until later that these forms were adapted for fighting.”

“So why am I learning them?”

“Because Jun’s curriculum skips the Frolics entirely. Jun teaches a simplified version of watered-down martial arts adapted purely to human biomechanics. But it leaves out far too much. It whittles away centuries of lineage and refinement all for the sake of military efficiency. Jun can teach you how to be a decent soldier. But I can teach you the key to the universe,” Jiang said grandly, before bumping his head on a low-hanging branch.

Training with Jiang was nothing like training with Jun. There were obvious hierarchies to Jun’s lesson plans, a clear progression from basic techniques to advanced.

But Jiang taught Rin every random thing that came to his deeply unpredictable mind. He would revisit a lesson if he found it particularly interesting; if not, he pretended like it had never happened. Occasionally he would go on long tirades without provocation.

“There are five principal elements present in the universe—get that look off your face, it’s not as absurd as it sounds. The masters of old used to believe that all things were made of fire, water, air, earth, and metal. Obviously, modern science has proven that false. Still, it’s a useful mnemonic for understanding the different types of energy.

“Fire: the heat in your blood in the midst of a fight, the kinetic energy that makes your heart beat faster.” Jiang tapped his chest. “Water: the flowing of force from your muscles to your target, from the earth up through your waist, into your arms. Air: the breath you draw that keeps you alive. Earth: how you stay rooted to the ground, how you derive energy from the way you position yourself against the floor. And metal, for the weapons you wield. A good martial artist will possess all five of these in balance. If you can control each of these with equal skill, you will be unstoppable.”

“How do I know if I’ve got control of them?”

He scratched a spot behind his ears. “Good question. I’m not actually sure.”

Asking Jiang for clarification was inevitably infuriating. His answers were always bizarrely worded and absurdly phrased. Some didn’t make sense until days later; some never did. If she asked him to explain, he changed the subject. If she let his more absurd comments slide (“Your water element is off balance!”), he poked and prodded about why she wasn’t asking more questions.

He spoke oddly, always a little too quickly or a little too slowly, with strange pauses between his words. He laughed in two ways; one laugh was off-kilter—nervous, high-pitched, and obviously forced—the other great and deep and booming. The first kind she heard constantly; the second was rare, and startling when it burst forth. He rarely met her gaze, but rather focused always at a spot on her brow between her eyes.

Jiang moved through the world like he didn’t belong there. He acted as if he came from a country of near-humans, people who acted almost exactly like Nikara but not quite, and his behavior was that of a confused visitor who had stopped bothering with trying to imitate those around him. He didn’t belong—not simply in Sinegard, but in the very idea of a physical earth. He acted like the rules of nature did not apply to him.

Perhaps they didn’t.

One day they went to the highest tier of the Academy, up past the masters’ lodges. The single building on this tier was a tall, spiraling pagoda, nine stories stacked elegantly on top of one another. Rin had never been inside.

She recalled from that tour so many months ago that Sinegard Academy had been built on the grounds of an old monastery. The pagoda on the highest tier could have still been a temple. Old stone trenches for burning incense sat outside the pagoda entrance. Guarding either side of the door were two large cylinders mounted on tall rods to let them spin. When she looked closer, Rin saw Old Nikara characters carved into the sides.

“What do these do?” she asked, idly spinning one cylinder.

“They’re prayer wheels. But we don’t have time to get into that today,” Jiang said. He gestured for her to follow him. “In here.”

Rin expected that the nine stories of the pagoda would be proper floors connected by flights of stairs, but the interior was merely a winding staircase that led to the very top, an empty cylinder of air in the middle. A solitary beam of sunlight shone in from a square opening in the ceiling, illuminating dust motes floating through the air. A series of musty paintings had been hung on the sides of the staircase. They looked like they hadn’t been cleaned in decades.

“This is where the statues to the Four Gods used to stand,” said Jiang, pointing up into the dark void.

“Where are they now?”

He shrugged. “The Red Emperor had most religious imagery stripped and looted when he took over Sinegard. Most of it’s been melted down into jewelry. But that doesn’t matter.” He beckoned for Rin to follow him up the staircase.

He lectured as they climbed. “Martial arts came to the Empire by way of a warrior named Bodhidharma from the southeastern continent. When Bodhidharma found the Empire during his travels of the world, he journeyed to a monastery and demanded entry, but the head abbot refused him entrance. So Bodhidharma sat his ass in a nearby cave and faced the wall for nine years, listening to the ants scream.”

“Listening to what?”

“The ants scream, Runin. Keep up.”

She muttered something unrepeatable. Jiang ignored her.

“Legend has it that the intensity of his gaze bored a hole into the cave wall. The monks were either so moved by his religious commitment or so seriously impressed that anyone could be so obstinate that they finally let him into their temple.” Jiang paused in front of a painting depicting a dark-skinned warrior and a group of pale men in robes. “That’s Bodhidharma there in the center.”

“That guy on the left has blood spurting out of a stump,” Rin observed.

“Yeah. Legend also has it that one monk was so impressed with his commitment that he cut off his hand in sympathy.”

Rin recalled the myth of Mai’rinnen Tearza committing suicide for the sake of Speer’s unification with the mainland. Martial arts history seemed to be riddled with people making pointless sacrifices.

“Anyhow. The monks at the temple were interested in what Bodhidharma had to say, but because of their sedentary lives and poor diets, they were weak as shit. Scrawnier than you, even. Kept falling asleep during his lectures. Bodhidharma found this somewhat annoying, so he devised three sets of exercises to improve their health. Now, these monks were in constant physical danger from outlaws and robbers, but were also forbidden by their religious code to carry weapons, so they modified many of the exercises to form a system of weaponless self-defense.”

Jiang stopped before another painting. It depicted a row of monks lined up on a wall, frozen in identical stances.

Rin was amazed. “That’s—”

“Seejin’s first form. Yeah.” Jiang nodded in approval. “Bodhidharma warned the monks that martial arts was about the refinement of the individual. Martial arts used well would produce a wise commander, a man who could see clearly through fog and understand the will of the gods. The martial arts in their conception were not meant solely as military tools.”

Rin struggled to envision the techniques Jun had taught their class as purely health exercises. “But there had to be an evolution in the arts.”

“Correct.” Jiang waited for her to ask the question he wanted to hear.

She obliged. “When did the arts become adapted for mass military use?”

Jiang bobbed his head, pleased. “Shortly before the days of the Red Emperor, the Empire was invaded by the horsemen from the Hinterlands to the north. The occupation force introduced a number of repressive measures to control the indigenous population, which included forbidding the Nikara to carry weapons.”

Jiang stopped again before a painting depicting a horde of Hinterlander hunters riding upon massive steeds. Their faces were twisted into wild, barbaric scowls. They held bows that were longer than their torsos. At the bottom of the painting, Nikara monks were shown cowering in fear or strewn about in various states of dismemberment.

“The temples that were once havens of nonviolence became instead a sanctuary for anti-Northerner rebels and a center for revolutionary planning and training. Soldiers and sympathizers would don monks’ robes and shave their heads, but train for war within the temple grounds. In sacred spaces like these, they plotted the overthrow of their oppressors.”

“And health exercises would hardly have helped them,” Rin said. “The martial techniques had to be adapted.”

Jiang nodded again. “Exactly. The arts then taught in the temple required the progressive mastery of hundreds of long, intricate forms. These could take decades to master. The leaders of the rebellion, thankfully, realized that this approach was unsuitable to the rapid development of a fighting force.”

Jiang turned around to face her. They had reached the top of the pagoda. “And so modern martial arts were developed: a system based on human biomechanics rather than the movements of animals. The enormous variety of techniques, some of which were only marginally useful to a soldier, were distilled into an essential core of forms that could be taught to a soldier in five years rather than fifty. This is the basis of what you are taught at Sinegard. This is the common core that is taught to the Imperial Militia. This is what your classmates are learning.” He grinned. “I am showing you how to beat it.”

Jiang was an effective if unconventional combat instructor. He made her hold her kicks up in the air for long minutes until her leg trembled. He made her duck as he hurled projectiles at her off the weapons rack. He made her do the same exercise blindfolded, and then admitted later that he just thought it would be funny.

“You’re a real asshole,” she said. “You know that, right?”

Once Jiang was pleased with her fundamentals, they began to spar. They sparred every day, for hours at a time. They sparred bare-fisted and with weapons; sometimes she was bare-fisted while he bore a weapon.

“Your state of mind is just as important as the state of your body,” Jiang lectured. “In the confusion of a fight, your mind must be still and steady as a rock. You must be grounded in your center, able to see and control everything. Each of the five elements must be in balance. Too much fire, and you’ll lash out recklessly. Too much air and you’ll fight skittishly, always on the defensive. Too much earth, and—are you even listening?”

She was not. It was hard to concentrate while Jiang jabbed an unguarded halberd at her, forcing her to dance around to avoid sudden impalement.

By and large, Jiang’s metaphors meant little to her, but she learned quickly to avoid injury. And perhaps that was his point. She developed muscle memory. She learned that there were only so many permutations to the way a human body could move, only so many attack combinations that worked, that she could reasonably expect from her opponent. She learned to react automatically to these. She learned to predict Jiang’s moves seconds in advance, to read from the tilt of his torso and the flicker of his eyes what he was about to do next.

He pushed her relentlessly. He fought the hardest when she was exhausted. When she fell, he attacked her as soon as she’d gotten back on her feet. She learned to stay constantly on guard, to react to the slightest movements in her peripheral vision.

The day came when she angled her hip against his just so, forced his weight to the side and jammed all her force at an angle that hurled him over her right shoulder.

Jiang skidded across the stone floor and bumped against the garden wall, which shook the shelves so that a potted cactus came perilously close to shattering on the ground.

Jiang lay there for a moment, dazed. Then he looked up, met her eyes, and grinned.

Rin’s last day with Sunzi was the hardest.

Sunzi was no longer an adorable piglet but an absurdly fat monster that smelled heinously bad. It wasn’t remotely cute. Any affection Rin had felt for those trusting brown eyes was negated by the animal’s massive girth.

Carrying Sunzi up the mountain was torture. Sunzi no longer fit in any sort of sling or basket. Rin had to drape it over her shoulders, grasping it by its two front legs.

She could hardly move as fast as she had when Sunzi could still be cradled in her arms, but she had to, unless she wanted to go without breakfast—or worse, miss class. She rose earlier. She ran faster. She staggered up the mountain, gasping for air with every step. Sunzi lay against her back with its snout resting over one of her shoulders, basking in the morning sun while Rin’s muscles screamed with resentment. When she reached Sunzi’s drinking area, she let the pig drop to the ground and collapsed.

“Drink, you glutton,” she grumbled as Sunzi frolicked in the stream. “I can’t wait until the day they carve you up and eat you.”

On her way down the mountain, the sun began to beat down in earnest, eliciting rivulets of sweat all over Rin’s body despite the winter cold. She limped through the meatpacking district to the Widow Maung’s cottage and deposited Sunzi gracelessly on the floor.

It rolled over, squealed loudly and ran in a circle, chasing its own tail.

The Widow Maung came out to the front carrying a bucket of slops.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Rin panted.

The Widow Maung shook her head. “There won’t be a tomorrow. Not for this one, anyway.” She rubbed Sunzi’s snout. “This one’s going to the butcher tonight.”

Rin blinked. “What? So soon?”

“Sunzi’s already reached his peak weight.” The Widow Maung slapped Sunzi’s sides. “Look at that girth. None of my pigs have ever grown so heavy. Perhaps your crazy teacher was right about the mountain water. Maybe I should send all my pigs up there.”

Rin rather hoped that she didn’t. Chest still heaving, she bowed low to the widow. “Thank you for letting me carry your pig.”

The Widow Maung harrumphed. “Academy freaks,” she muttered under her breath, and began to lead Sunzi back to the sty. “Come on, you. Let’s get you ready for the butcher.”

Oink? Sunzi looked imploringly at Rin.

“Don’t look at me,” Rin said. “It’s the end of the road for you.”

She couldn’t help but feel a stab of guilt; the longer she looked at Sunzi, the more she was reminded of its piglet form. She tore her eyes away from its dull, naive gaze and headed back up the mountain.

“Already?” Jiang looked surprised when Rin reported Sunzi’s fate. He was sitting on the far wall of the garden, swinging his legs over the edge like an energetic child. “Ah, I had high hopes for that pig. But in the end, swine are swine. How do you feel?”

“I’m devastated,” Rin said. “Sunzi and I were finally starting to understand each other.”

“No, you sod. Your arms. Your core. Your legs. How do they feel?”

She frowned and swung her arms about. “Sore?”

Jiang jumped off the wall and walked toward her. “I’m going to hit you,” he announced.

“Wait, what?”

She dug her heels into the ground and only managed to get her elbows up right before he slammed a fist at her face.

The force of his punch was enormous—harder than he’d ever hit her. She knew she should have deflected the blow at an angle, sent the ki dispersing into the air where it would dispel harmlessly. But she was too startled to do anything but block it head-on. She barely remembered to crouch so that the ki behind his punch channeled harmlessly through her body and into the ground.

A crack like a thunderbolt echoed beneath her.

Rin jumped back, stunned. The stone under her feet had splintered under the force of the dispelled energy. One long crack ran between her feet to the edge of the stone block.

They both stared down at it. The crack continued to splinter the stone floor, crawling all the way to the far end of the garden, where it stopped at the base of the willow tree.

Jiang threw his head back and laughed.

It was a high, wild laugh. He laughed like his lungs were bellows. He laughed like he was nothing human. He spread his arms out and windmilled them in the air, and danced with giddy abandon.

“You darling child,” he said, spinning toward her. “You brilliant child.”

Rin’s face split into a grin.

Fuck it, she thought, and leaped up to embrace him.

He picked her up and swung her through the air, around and around among the kaleidoscopically colorful mushrooms.

They sat together under the willow tree, staring serenely at the poppy plants. The wind was still today. Snow continued to fall lightly over the garden, but the first inklings of spring had arrived. The furious winter winds had gone to blow elsewhere; the air felt settled, for once. Peaceful.

“No more training today,” Jiang said. “You rest. Sometimes you must loose the string to let the arrow fly.”

Rin rolled her eyes.

“You have to pledge Lore,” Jiang continued excitedly. “No one—no one, not even Altan, picked things up this fast.”

Rin suddenly felt very awkward. How was she to tell him the only reason she wanted to learn combat was so she could get through the Trials and study with Irjah?

Jiang hated lies. Rin decided she might as well be straightforward. “I’d been thinking about pledging Strategy,” she said hesitantly. “Irjah said he might bid for me.”

He waved his hand. “Irjah can’t teach you anything you couldn’t learn by yourself. Strategy’s a limited subject. Spend enough time in the field with Sunzi’s Principles by your bed, and you’ll pick up everything you need to win a campaign.”

“But . . .”

“Who are the gods? Where do they reside? Why do they do what they do? These are the fundamental questions of Lore. I can teach you more than ki manipulation. I can show you the pathway to the gods. I can make you a shaman.”

Gods and shamans? It was often difficult to tell when Jiang was joking and when he wasn’t, but he seemed genuinely convinced that he could talk to heavenly powers.

She swallowed. “Sir . . .”

“This is important,” Jiang insisted. “Please, Rin. This is a dying art. The Red Emperor almost succeeded in killing it. If you don’t learn it, if no one learns it, then it disappears for good.”

The sudden desperation in his voice made her intensely uncomfortable.

She twisted a blade of grass between her fingers. Certainly she was curious about Lore, but she knew better than to throw away four years of training under Irjah to chase a subject that the other masters had long ago lost faith in. She hadn’t come to Sinegard to pursue stories on a whim, especially stories that were disdained by everyone else in the capital.

She was admittedly fascinated by myths and legends, and the way that Jiang made them sound almost real. But she was more interested in making it past the Trials. And an apprenticeship with Irjah opened doors at the Militia. It all but guaranteed an officer position and her choice of division. Irjah had contacts with each of the Twelve Warlords, and his protégées always found esteemed placements.

She could lead troops of her own within a year of graduating. She could be a nationally renowned commander within five. She couldn’t throw that away on a mere fancy.

“Sir, I just want to learn to be a good soldier,” she said.

Jiang’s face fell.

“You and the rest of this school,” he said.

Chapter 7

Jiang did not appear in the garden the next day, or the day after. Rin went to the garden faithfully in the hope that he would return, but she knew, deep down, that Jiang was done with teaching her.

One week later she saw him in the mess hall. She abruptly put her bowl down and made a beeline toward him. She had no clue what she might say, but knew that she needed to at least talk to him. She would apologize, promise to study with him even if she became Irjah’s apprentice, or say something . . .

Before she could corner him he upended his tray over a startled apprentice’s head and dashed out the kitchen door.

“Great Tortoise,” said Kitay. “What did you do to him?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Jiang was unpredictable and fragile, like an easily startled wild animal, and she hadn’t realized how precious his attention was until she had scared him away.

After that, he acted as if he didn’t even know her. She continued to see brief glimpses of him around campus, just as everyone did, but he refused to acknowledge her.

She should have tried harder to patch things up with him. She should have actively sought him out and admitted her mistake, nebulous though it was.

But she found it less and less of a priority as the term came to an end, and the competition between the first-years reached a frenzied peak.

Throughout the year, the possibility of being culled from Sinegard had hung like a sword over their heads. Now that threat was imminent. In two weeks they would undergo the series of exams that constituted the Trials.

Raban relayed the rules to them. The Trials would be administered and observed by the entire faculty. Depending on their performance, the masters would submit bids for apprenticeship. If a student received no bids, he or she would leave the Academy in disgrace.

Enro exempted all students who were not intent on pledging Medicine from her exam, but the other subjects—Linguistics, History, Strategy, Combat, and Weaponry—were mandatory. There was, of course, no scheduled exam for Lore.

“Irjah, Jima, Yim, and Sonnen give oral exams,” said Raban. “You’ll be questioned in front of a panel of the masters. They’ll take turns interrogating you, and if you mess up, that’s the end of your session for that subject. The more questions you answer, the more you get to prove how much you know. So study hard—and speak carefully.”

Jun did not conduct an oral exam. The Combat exam consisted of the Tournament.

This would take course over the two days of exams. The first-years would duel in the rings using the same rules that the apprentices used in their matches. They would compete in three preliminary rounds determined by random draws, and based on their win-loss ratios, eight would advance to elimination rounds. Those eight would be placed in a randomized bracket and fight one another until the final round.

Reaching the eliminations in the Tournament was no guarantee of gaining a sponsor, and losing early was not a guarantee of expulsion. But those students who advanced further in the tournament had more chances to show the masters how well they fought. And the winner of the Tournament always received a bid.

“Altan won his year,” Raban said. “Kureel won hers. You’ll notice they both landed the two most prestigious apprenticeships at Sinegard. There’s no actual prize for winning, but the masters like placing bets. Get your ass kicked, and no master will want to take you on.”

“I want to pledge Medicine, but we’ve got to memorize so many extra texts on top of the readings we’ve done so far, and if I do I won’t have time study for History . . . Do you think I should pledge History? Do you think Yim likes me enough?” Niang flapped her hands in the air, agitated. “My brother said I shouldn’t rely on getting a Medicine apprenticeship; there are four of us taking Enro’s exam and she only ever picks three, so maybe I won’t get it . . .”

“Enough, Niang,” Venka snapped. “You’ve been talking about this for days.”

“What do you want to pledge?” Niang persisted.

“Combat. And that’s the last time we’re talking about it,” Venka said shrilly. Rin suspected that if Niang said another word, Venka might scream.

But Rin couldn’t blame Niang. Or Venka, really. The first-years gossiped obsessively about apprenticeships, and it was both understandable and grating. Rin had learned about the hierarchy of masters through eavesdropping on conversations in the mess hall: bids from Jun and Irjah were ideal for apprentices who wanted command positions in the Militia, Jima rarely chose apprentices unless they were nobility destined to become court diplomats, and Enro’s bid mattered only to the few of them who wanted to be military physicians.

“Training under Irjah would be nice,” said Kitay. “Of course, Jun’s apprentices have their pick of divisions, but Irjah can get me into the Second.”

“The Rat Province’s division?” Rin wrinkled her nose. “Why?”

Kitay shrugged. “They’re Army Intelligence. I would love to serve in Army Intelligence.”

Jun was out of the question for Rin, though she too hoped Irjah might take her. But she knew Irjah wouldn’t place a bid unless she proved she had the martial arts to back up her Strategy prowess. A strategist who couldn’t fight had no place in the Militia. How could she draw up battle plans if she’d never been on the front lines? If she didn’t know what real combat was like?

For her, it all came down to the Tournament.

As for the apprentices, it was apparently the most exciting thing to happen on campus all year. They began speculating wildly about who might win and who would beat whom—and they didn’t try very hard to keep the betting books secret from the first-years. Word spread quickly about who the front-runners were.

Most of the money backed the Sinegardians. Venka and Han were solid contenders for the semifinals. Nohai, a massive kid from a fishing island in Snake Province, was widely backed to reach the quarterfinals. Kitay had his fair share of supporters, although this was largely because he had demonstrated a talent for dodging so well that most of his sparring opponents grew frustrated and got sloppy after several long minutes.

Oddly, a number of apprentices put decent money on Rin. Once word got out that she had been training privately with Jiang, the apprentices took an inordinate degree of interest in her. It helped that she was nipping at Kitay’s heels in every other one of their classes.

The clear front-runner in their year, however, was Nezha.

“Jun says he’s the best to come through his class since Altan,” Kitay said, jabbing vehemently at his food. “Won’t shut up about him. You should have seen him take out Nohai yesterday. He’s a menace.”

Nezha, who had been a pretty, slender child at the start of the year, had since packed on an absurd amount of muscle. He’d cut short his stupidly long hair in favor of a clipped military cut similar to Altan’s. Unlike the rest of them, he already looked like he belonged in a Militia uniform.

He had also garnered a reputation for striking first and thinking later. He had injured eight sparring partners over the course of the term, all in increasingly severe “accidents.”

But of course Jun had never punished him—not as severely as he deserved, anyhow. Why would something so mundane as rules apply to the son of the Dragon Warlord?

As the date of the exams loomed closer, the library became oppressively silent. The only sound among the stacks was the furious scribbling of brushes on paper as the first-years tried to commit an entire year’s lessons to memory. Most study groups had disbanded, since any advantage given to a study partner was potentially a lost spot in the ranks.

But Kitay, who didn’t need to study, obliged Rin purely out of boredom.

“Sunzi’s Eighteenth Mandate.” Kitay didn’t bother looking at the texts. He had memorized the entirety of Principles of War on his first read-through. Rin would have killed for that talent.

Rin squinted her eyes in concentration. She knew she looked stupid, but her head was swimming again, and squinting was the only way to make it stop. She felt very cold and hot all at once. She hadn’t slept in three days. All she wanted was to collapse on her bunk, but another hour of cramming was worth more than an hour of sleep.

“It’s not one of the Seven Considerations . . . wait, is it? No, okay: always modify plans according to circumstances . . . ?”

Kitay shook his head. “That’s the Seventeenth Mandate.”

Rin cursed out loud and rubbed her fists against her forehead.

“I wonder how you people do it,” Kitay mused. “You know, actually having to try to remember things. Your lives sound so difficult.”

“I will murder you with this ink brush,” Rin grumbled.

“Sunzi’s appendix is all about why soft ends make for bad weapons. Didn’t you do the extra reading?”

“Quiet!” Venka snapped from the opposite desk.

Kitay dipped his head out of Venka’s sight and cracked a grin at Rin. “Here’s a hint,” he whispered. “Menda in the temple.”

Rin gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. Oh. Of course. “All warfare is based on deception.”

In preparation for the Tournament, their entire class had taken Sunzi’s Eighteenth Mandate to heart. The pupils stopped using the open practice rooms during common hours. Anyone with an inherited art suddenly stopped bragging about it. Even Nezha had ceased to hold his nightly performances in the studio.

“This happens every year,” Raban had said. “It’s a bit silly, to be honest. As if martial artists your age ever have anything worth stealing.”

Silly or not, their class freaked out in earnest. Everyone was accused of having a hidden weapon up his or her sleeve; whoever had never displayed an inherited art was alleged to be harboring one in secret.

Niang confided to Rin one night that Kitay was actually the heir to the long-forgotten Fist of the North Wind, an art that allowed the user to incapacitate opponents by touching a few choice pressure points.

“I might have had a hand in spreading that story,” Kitay admitted when Rin asked him about it. “Sunzi would call it psychological warfare.”

She snorted. “Sunzi would call it horseshit.”

The first-years weren’t allowed to train after curfew, so the preparation period turned into a contest of who could find the most creative way of sneaking past the masters. The apprentices, of course, began vigilantly patrolling the campus after curfew to catch students who had stolen outside to train. Nohai reported that he’d stumbled across a sheet detailing points for such captures in the boys’ dormitory.

“It’s almost like they’re enjoying this,” Rin muttered.

“Of course they enjoy it,” said Kitay. “They get to watch us suffer through the same things they did. This time next year we’ll be equally obnoxious.”

Displaying a stunning lack of sympathy, the apprentices had also taken advantage of the first-years’ anxiety to establish a flourishing market in “study aids.” Rin laughed when Niang returned to the dormitory with what Niang thought was willow bark aged a hundred years.

“That’s a ginger root,” Rin said with a snicker. She weighed the wrinkled root in her hand. “I mean, I suppose it’s good in tea.”

“How do you know?” Niang looked dismayed. “I paid twenty coppers for that!”

“We dug up ginger roots all the time in our garden back at home,” Rin said. “Put them in the sun and you can sell them to old men looking for a virility cure. Does absolutely nothing, but it makes them feel better. We’d also sell wheat flour and call it rhino’s horn. I’ll bet you the apprentices have been selling barley flour, too.”

Venka, whom Rin had seen stowing a vial of powder under her pillow a few nights before, coughed and looked away.

The apprentices also sold information to first-years. Most sold bogus test answers; others offered lists of purported exam questions that seemed highly plausible but obviously wouldn’t be confirmed until after the Trials. Worst, though, were the apprentices who posed as sellers to root out the first-years who were willing to cheat.

Menda, a boy from the Horse Province, had agreed to meet with an apprentice after hours in the temple on the fourth tier to purchase a list of Jima’s exam questions. Rin didn’t know how the apprentice had managed the timing, but Jima had been meditating in said temple that very night.

Menda was noticeably absent from campus the next day.

Meals became silent and reserved affairs. Everyone ate with a book held before his or her nose. If any students ventured to strike up a conversation, the rest of the table quickly and violently shushed them. In short, they made themselves miserable.

“Sometimes I think this is as bad as the Speer Massacre,” Kitay said cheerfully. “And then I think—nah. Nothing is as bad as the casual genocide of an entire race! But this is pretty bad.”

“Kitay, please shut up.”

Rin continued to train alone in the garden. She never saw Jiang anymore, but that was just as well; masters were banned from training the students for the Tournament, although Rin suspected Nezha was still receiving instruction from Jun.

One day she heard footsteps as she approached the garden gate. Someone was inside.

At first she hoped it might be Jiang, but when she opened the door she saw a lean, graceful figure with indigo-black hair.

It took her a moment to process what she’d stumbled upon.

Altan. She’d interrupted Altan Trengsin in his practice.

He wielded a three-pronged trident—no, he didn’t just wield it, he held it intimately, curved it through the air like a ribbon. It was both an extension of his arm and a dance partner.

She should have turned to go, found somewhere else to train, but she couldn’t help her curiosity. She couldn’t look away. From a distance, he was extraordinarily beautiful. Up close, he was hypnotizing.

He turned at the sound of her footsteps, saw her, and stopped.

“I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t know you were—”

“It’s a school garden,” he said neutrally. “Don’t leave on my account.”

His voice was more somber than she had anticipated. She had imagined a harsh, barking tone to match his brutal movements in the ring, but Altan’s voice was surprisingly melodious, soft and deep.

His pupils were oddly constricted. Rin couldn’t tell if it was simply the light in the garden, but his eyes didn’t seem red then. Rather, they looked brown, like hers.

“I’ve never seen that form before,” Rin uttered.

Altan raised an eyebrow. She immediately regretted opening her mouth. Why had she said that? Why did she exist? She wanted to crumble into ashes and scatter away into the air.

But Altan just looked surprised, not irritated. “Stick around Jiang long enough, and you’ll learn plenty of arcane forms.” He shifted his weight to his back leg and brought his arms in a flowing motion around to the other side of his torso.

Rin’s cheeks burned. She felt very clumsy and vast, like she was taking up space that belonged to Altan, even though she was on the other end of the garden. “Master Jiang didn’t say anyone else liked to come here.”

“Jiang likes to forget about a lot of things.” He tilted his head at her. “You must be quite the student, if Jiang’s taken an interest in you.”

Was that bitterness in his voice, or was she imagining things?

She remembered then that Jiang had withdrawn his bid for Altan, right after Altan had declared he wanted to pledge Lore. She wondered what had happened, and if it still bothered Altan. She wondered if she’d annoyed him by bringing Jiang up.

“I stole a book from the library,” she managed. “He thought that was funny.”

Why was she still talking? Why was she still here?

The corner of Altan’s mouth quirked up in a terribly attractive grin, which set her heart beating erratically. “What a rebel.”

She flushed, but Altan just turned away and completed the form.

“Don’t let me stop you from training,” he said.

“No, I—I came here to think. But if you’re here—”

“I’m sorry. I can leave.”

“No, it’s okay.” She didn’t know what she was saying. “I was going to—I mean, I’ll just . . . bye.”

She quickly backed out of the garden. Altan didn’t say anything else.

Once she had closed the garden gates behind her, Rin buried her face in her hands and groaned.

“Is there ever a place for meekness in battle?” Irjah asked. This was the seventh question he had posed to her.

Rin was on a streak. Seven was the maximum number of questions any master could ask, and if she nailed this one, she would ace Irjah’s exam. And she knew the answer—it was lifted directly from Sunzi’s Twenty-Second Mandate.

She lifted her chin and responded in a loud, clear voice. “Yes, but only for the purposes of deception. Sunzi writes that if your opponent is of choleric temper, you should seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak so that he grows arrogant. The good tactician plays with his enemy like a cat plays with a mouse. Feign weakness and immobility, and then pounce on him.”

The seven masters each marked small notes into their scrolls. Rin bounced slightly on her heels, waiting for them to continue.

“Good. No further questions.” Irjah nodded and gestured at his colleagues. “Master Yim?”

Yim pushed his chair back and rose slowly. He consulted his scroll for a moment, and then gazed at Rin over the top of his spectacles. “Why did we win the Second Poppy War?”

Rin sucked in a breath. She had not prepared for this question. It was so basic she’d thought she didn’t need to. Yim had asked it on the first day of class, and the answer was a logical fallacy. There was no “why,” because Nikan hadn’t won the Second Poppy War. The Republic of Hesperia had, and Nikan had simply ridden the foreigners’ coattails to a victory treaty.

She considered answering the question directly, but then thought she might try a more original response. She had only one shot at an answer. She wanted to impress the masters.

“Because we gave up Speer,” she said.

Irjah jerked his head up from his scroll.

Yim raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean because we lost Speer?”

“No. I mean it was a strategic decision to sacrifice the island so that the Hesperian parliament might decide to intervene. I think the command in Sinegard knew the attack was going to happen and didn’t warn the Speerlies.”

“I was at Speer,” Jun interrupted. “This is amusing historiography at best, slander at worst.”

“No, you weren’t,” Rin said before she could stop herself.

Jun looked amazed. “Excuse me?”

All seven masters were watching her intently now. Rin remembered too late that Irjah had disliked this theory. And that Jun hated her.

But it was too late to stop. She weighed the costs in her head. The masters rewarded bravery and creativity. If she backed off, it would be a sign of uncertainty. She had begun digging this hole for herself. She might as well finish.

She took a deep breath. “You can’t have been at Speer. I read the reports. None of the regular Militia were there the night the island was attacked. The first troops didn’t arrive until sunrise, after the Federation had left. After the Speerlies had all been killed.”

Jun’s face darkened to the color of an overripe plum. “You dare accuse—”

“She’s not accusing anyone of anything,” Jiang interrupted serenely. It was the first time he’d spoken since the start of her exam. Rin glanced at him in surprise, but Jiang just scratched his ear, not even looking at her. “She’s merely attempting a clever answer to an otherwise inane question. Honestly, Yim, this one has gotten pretty old.”

Yim shrugged. “Fair enough. No further questions. Master Jiang?”

All the masters twitched in irritation. From what Rin understood, Jiang was present only as a formality. He never gave an exam; he mostly just made fun of the students when they tripped over their answers.

Jiang gazed levelly into Rin’s eyes.

She swallowed, feeling the unsettling sensation of his searching gaze. It was like she was as transparent as a puddle of rainwater.

“Who is imprisoned in the Chuluu Korikh?” he asked.

She blinked. Not once in the four months that he had trained her had Jiang ever mentioned the Chuluu Korikh. Neither had Master Yim or Irjah, or even Jima. Chuluu Korikh wasn’t medical terminology, wasn’t a reference to a famous battle, wasn’t some linguistic term of art. It could be a deeply loaded phrase. It could also be gibberish.

Either Jiang was posing a riddle, or he just wanted to throw her off.

But she didn’t want to admit defeat. She didn’t want to look clueless in front of Irjah. Jiang had asked her a question, and Jiang never asked questions during the Trials. The masters were expecting an interesting answer now; she couldn’t disappoint them.

What was the cleverest way to say I don’t know?

The Chuluu Korikh. She’d studied Old Nikara with Jima for long enough now that she could gloss this as stone mountain in the ancient dialect, but that didn’t give her any clues. None of Nikan’s major prisons were built under mountains; they were either out in the Baghra Desert or in the dungeons of the Empress’s palace.

And Jiang hadn’t asked what the Chuluu Korikh was. He’d asked who was imprisoned there.

What kind of prisoner couldn’t be held in the Baghra Desert?

She pondered this until she had an unsatisfying answer to an unsatisfying question.

“Unnatural criminals,” she said slowly, “who have committed unnatural crimes?”

Jun snorted audibly. Jima and Yim looked uncomfortable.

Jiang gave a minuscule shrug.

“Fine,” he said. “That’s all I have.”

Oral exams concluded by midmorning on the third day. The pupils were sent to lunch, which no one ate, and then herded to the rings for the commencement of the Tournament.

Rin drew Han for her first opponent.

When it was her turn to fight she climbed down the rope ladder and looked up. The masters stood in a row before the rails. Irjah gave her a slight nod, a tiny gesture that filled her with determination. Jun folded his arms over his chest. Jiang picked at his fingernails.

Rin had not fought any of her classmates since her expulsion from Combat. She had not even watched them fight. The only person she had ever sparred against was Jiang, and she had no clue if he was a good approximation of how her classmates might fight.

She was entering this Tournament blind.

She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath, willing herself to at least appear calm.

Han, on the other hand, looked very disconcerted. His eyes darted across her body and then back up to her face as if she were some wild animal he had never seen before, as if he didn’t know quite what to make of her.

He’s scared, she realized.

He must have heard the rumors that she had studied with Jiang. He didn’t know what to believe about her. Didn’t know what to expect.

What was more, Rin was the underdog in this match. No one expected her to fight well. But Han had trained with Jun all year. Han was a Sinegardian. Han had to win, or he wouldn’t be able to face his peers after.

Sunzi wrote that one must always identify and exploit the enemy’s weaknesses. Han’s weakness was psychological. The stakes were much, much higher for him, and that made him insecure. That made him beatable.

“What, you’ve never seen a girl before?” Rin asked.

Han blushed furiously.

Good. She made him nervous. She grinned widely, baring teeth. “Lucky you,” she said. “You get to be my first.”

“You don’t have a chance,” Han blustered. “You don’t know any martial arts.”

She merely smiled and slouched back into Seejin’s fourth opening stance. She bent her back leg, preparing herself to spring, and raised her fists to guard her face.

“Don’t I?”

Han’s face clouded with doubt. He had recognized her posture as deliberate and practiced—not at all the stance of someone who had no martial arts training.

Rin rushed him as soon as Sonnen signaled them to begin.

Han played defensive from the start. He made the mistake of giving her the forward momentum, and he never recovered. From the outset, Rin controlled every part of the bout. She attacked, he reacted. She led him in the dance, she decided when to let him parry, and she decided where they would go. She fought methodically, purely from muscle memory. She was efficient. She played his moves against him and confused him.

And Han’s attacks fell into such predictable patterns—if one of his kicks missed, he would back up and attempt it again, and again, until she forced him to change direction.

Finally he let his guard down, let her get in close. She jammed her elbow hard into his nose. She felt a satisfying crack. Han dropped to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Rin knew she hadn’t hurt him that badly. Jiang had punched her in the nose at least twice. Han was more stunned than injured. He could have gotten up. He didn’t.

“Break,” ordered Sonnen.

Rin wiped the sweat off her forehead and glanced up at the railing.

There was silence above the ring. Her classmates looked like they had on the first day of class—startled and bewildered. Nezha looked dumbfounded.

Then Kitay began to clap. He was the only one.

She fought two more matches that day. They were both variations on her match with Han—pattern recognition, confusion, finishing blow. She won both of them.

Over the span of a day Rin went from the underdog to a leading contender. All those months spent lugging that stupid pig around had given her better endurance than her classmates. Those long, frustrating hours with the Seejin forms had given her impeccable footwork.

The rest of the class had learned their fundamentals from Jun. They moved the same way, sank into the same default patterns when nervous. But Rin didn’t. Her best advantage was her unpredictability. She fought like nothing they had been expecting, she threw them off rhythm, and so she continued to win.

At the end of the first day, Rin and six others, including Nezha and Venka, advanced undefeated into elimination rounds. Kitay had ended the first day with a 2–1 record but advanced on good technique.

The quarterfinals were scheduled for the second day. Sonnen drew up a randomized bracket and hung it on a scroll outside the main hall for all to see. The pairings placed Rin against Venka first thing in the morning.

Venka had trained in martial arts for years, and it showed. She was all rapid strikes and slick, impeccable footwork. She fought with a savage viciousness. Her technique was precise to the centimeter, her timing perfect. She was just as fast as Rin, perhaps faster.

The one advantage Rin had was that Venka had never fought with an injury.

“She’s sparred plenty of times,” said Kitay. “But nobody is actually willing to hit her. Everyone’s always stopped before the punch lands. Even Nezha. I’ll bet you none of her home tutors were willing to hit her, either. They would have been fired immediately, if not thrown in jail.”

“You’re kidding,” Rin said.

“I know I’ve never hit her.”

Rin rubbed a fist into her palm. “Maybe it’ll be good for her, then.”

Still, injuring Venka was no easy task. More by sheer luck than anything, Rin managed to land a blow early on in the match. Venka, underestimating Rin’s speed, had brought her guard back up too slowly after an attempted left hook. Rin took the opening and whipped a backhand through at Venka’s nose.

Bone broke under Rin’s fist with an audible crack.

Venka immediately retreated. One hand flew to her face, groping around her swelling nose. She glanced down at her blood-covered fingers and then back up at Rin. Her nostrils flared. Her cheeks turned a ghastly white.

“Problem?” Rin asked.

The look Venka gave her was pure murder.

“You shouldn’t even be here,” she snarled.

“Tell that to your nose,” Rin said.

Venka was visibly unhinged. Her pretty sneer was gone, her hair messy, her face bloodied, her eyes wild and unfocused. She was on edge, off rhythm. She attempted several more wild blows until Rin caught her with a solid roundhouse kick to the side of her head.

Venka sprawled to the side and stayed on the ground. Her chest heaved rapidly up and down. Rin couldn’t tell if she was crying or panting.

She didn’t really care.

The applause as Rin emerged from the ring was scattered at best. The audience had been rooting for Venka. Venka was supposed to be in the finals.

Rin didn’t care about that, either. She was used to this by now.

And Venka wasn’t the victory she wanted.

Nezha tore his way through the other side of the bracket with ruthless efficiency. His fights were always scheduled in the other ring concurrently with Rin’s, and they invariably ended earlier. Rin never saw Nezha in action. She only saw his opponents carried out on stretchers.

Alone among Nezha’s opponents, Kitay emerged from his bout unharmed. He had lasted a minute and a half before surrendering.

There were rumors Nezha would be disqualified for intentional maiming, but Rin knew better than to hope. The faculty wanted to see the heir to the House of Yin in the finals. As far as Rin knew, Nezha could kill someone without repercussion. Jun, certainly, would allow it.

No one was surprised when Rin and Nezha both won their semifinals rounds. Finals were postponed until after dinner so that the apprentices could also come and watch.

Nezha disappeared somewhere halfway through dinner. He was likely getting private coaching from Jun. Rin briefly considered reporting it to get Nezha disqualified, but knew that would be a hollow victory. She wanted to see this through to the finish.

She picked at her food. She knew she needed energy, but the thought of eating made her want to vomit.

Halfway through the break, Raban approached her table. He was sweating hard, as if he had just run all the way up from the lower tier.

She thought he was going to congratulate her on making it to finals, but all he said was “You should surrender.”

“You’re joking,” Rin responded. “I’m going to win this thing.”

“Look, Rin—you haven’t seen any of Nezha’s fights.”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied with my own.”

“Then you don’t know what he’s capable of. I just dealt with his semifinals opponent in the infirmary. Nohai.” Raban looked deeply rattled. “They’re not sure if he’s going to be able to walk again. Nezha shattered his kneecap.”

“Seems like Nohai’s problem.” Rin didn’t want to hear about Nezha’s victories. She was feeling queasy enough as it was. The only way she could go through with the finals was if she convinced herself that Nezha was beatable.

“I know he hates you,” Raban continued. “He could cripple you for life.”

“He’s just a kid.” Rin scoffed with a confidence she didn’t feel.

“You’re just a kid!” Raban sounded agitated. “I don’t care how good you think you are. Nezha’s got six inches and twenty pounds of muscle on you, and I swear he wants to kill you.”

“He has weaknesses,” she said stubbornly. That had to be true. Didn’t it?

“Does it matter? What does this Tournament mean to you anyway?” Raban asked. “There’s no way you’re getting culled now. Every master is going to submit a bid for you. Why do you have to win?”

Raban was right. At this point Irjah would have no qualms about bidding for her. Rin’s position at Sinegard was safe.

But it wasn’t about bids now, it was about pride. It was about power. If she surrendered to Nezha, he would hold it over her for the rest of their time at the Academy. No—he’d hold it over her for life.

“Because I can,” she said. “Because he thought he could get rid of me. Because I want to break his stupid face.”

The basement hall was silent as Rin and Nezha climbed into the ring. The air was thick with anticipation, a voyeuristic bloodlust. Months of hateful rivalry were coming to a head, and everyone wanted to watch the fallout of their collision.

Both Jun and Irjah wore deliberately neutral expressions, giving nothing away. Jiang was absent.

Nezha and Rin bowed shortly, never taking their eyes off each other, and both immediately backed away.

Nezha kept his gaze trained intently on Rin’s, almond eyes narrowed in a tight focus. His lips were pressed in concentration. There were no jeers, no taunts. Not even a snarl.

Nezha was taking her seriously, Rin realized. He took her as an equal.

For some reason, this made her fiercely proud. They stared at each other, daring each other to break eye contact first.

“Begin,” said Sonnen.

She leaped at him immediately. Her right leg lashed out again and again, forcing him back in retreat.

Kitay had spent all of lunch helping her strategize. She knew Nezha could be blindingly fast. Once he got momentum, he wouldn’t stop until his opponent was incapacitated or dead.

Rin needed to overwhelm him from the beginning. She needed to constantly put him on the defensive, because to be on the defensive against Nezha was certain defeat.

The problem was that he was terribly strong. He didn’t possess the brute force of Kobin, or even Kureel, but he was so precise in his movements that it didn’t matter. He channeled his ki with a brilliant precision, built it up and then released it through the smallest pressure point to create the maximum impact.

Unlike Venka, Nezha could absorb losses and continue. She bruised him once or twice. He adapted and hit her back. And his blows hurt.

They were two minutes in. Rin had now lasted longer than any of Nezha’s previous opponents, and something had become clear to her: He wasn’t invincible. The techniques that had seemed impossibly difficult to her before now were transparently beatable. When Nezha kicked, his movements were wide and obvious like a boar’s. His kicks held terrifying power, but only if they landed.

Rin made sure they never landed.

There was no way she would let him maim her. But she was not here merely to survive. She was here to win.

Exploding Dragon. Crouching Tiger. Extended Crane. She cycled through the movements in Seejin’s Frolics as they were needed. The movements she’d practiced so many times before, linked together one after another in that damned form, snapped automatically into play.

But if Nezha was baffled by Rin’s fighting style, he didn’t show it. He remained calm and concentrated, attacking with methodical efficiency.

They were now four minutes in. Rin felt her lungs seizing, trying to pump oxygen into her fatigued body. But she knew that if she was tired, so was Nezha.

“He gets desperate when he’s tired,” Kitay had said. “And he’s the most dangerous when he’s desperate.”

Nezha was getting desperate.

There was no control to his ki anymore. He threw punch after punch in her direction. He didn’t care about the maiming rule. If he got her on the ground, he would kill her.

Nezha swept a low kick at the back of her knees. Rin made a frantic call and let him connect, sinking backward, pretending she’d lost her balance. He moved in immediately, looming over her. She grounded herself against the floor and kicked up.

She nailed him directly in his solar plexus with more force than she’d ever kicked with before—she could feel the air forced out of his lungs. She flipped up off the ground, and was astonished to find Nezha still reeling backward, gasping for air.

She flung herself forward and punched wildly at his head.

He dropped to the floor.

Shocked murmurs swept through the audience.

Rin circled Nezha, hoping he wouldn’t get up, but knowing he would. She wanted to end it. Slam her heel into the back of his head. But the masters cared about honor. If she hit Nezha while he was down, she’d be sent packing from Sinegard in minutes.

Never mind that if he did the same, she doubted anyone would bat an eye.

Four seconds passed. Nezha raised a shaking hand and slammed it into the ground. He dragged himself forward. His forehead was bleeding, dripping scarlet into his eyes. He blinked it away and glared up at her.

His eyes screamed murder.

“Continue,” said Sonnen.

Rin circled Nezha warily. He crouched like an animal, like a wounded wolf rising on its haunches.

The next time she threw a punch he grabbed her arm and pulled her in close. Her breath hitched. He raked his nails across her face and down to her collarbone.

She jerked her arm out of his grasp and cycled backward in rapid retreat. She felt a sharp sting under her left eye, across her neck. Nezha had drawn blood.

“Watch yourself, Yin,” Sonnen warned.

Both of them ignored him. Like a warning would make any difference, Rin thought. The next time Nezha lunged at her she pulled him to the floor with her. They rolled around in the dirt, each attempting to pin the other and failing.

He punched madly in the air, flinging blows haphazardly at her face.

She dodged the first one. He swung his fist back in reverse and caught her with a backhand that left her gasping. The lower half of her face went numb.

He’d slapped her.

He’d slapped her.

A kick she could take. A knife hand strike she could absorb. But that slap had a savage intimacy. An undertone of superiority.

Something in Rin broke.

She couldn’t breathe. Black tinged the edges of her vision—black, and then scarlet. An awful rage filled her, consumed her thoughts entirely. She needed revenge like she needed to breathe. She wanted Nezha to hurt. She wanted Nezha punished.

She lashed back, fingers curled into claws. He let go of her to jump back, but she followed him, redoubling her frenzied attacks. She wasn’t as fast as he was. He retaliated, and she was too slow to block, and he hit her on the thigh, on the arm, but her body wouldn’t register the damage. Pain was a message she was ignoring, to be felt later.

No—pain led to success.

He struck her face one, twice, thrice. He beat her like an animal and yet she kept fighting.

“What is wrong with you?” he hissed.

More important was what was wrong with him. Fear. She could see it in his eyes.

He had her backed against the wall, hands around her neck, but she grabbed his shoulders, jammed her knee up into his rib cage, and rammed an elbow into the back of his head. He collapsed forward to the ground, wheezing. She flung herself down and ground her elbow into his lower back. Nezha cried out, arched his back in agony.

Rin pinned Nezha’s left arm to the floor with her foot and held his neck down with her right elbow. When he struggled, she slammed her fist into the back of his head and ground his face against the dirt until it was clear that he wouldn’t get up.

“Break,” said Sonnen, but she barely heard him. Blood thundered in her ears to a rhythm like war drums. Her vision was filtered through a red lens that registered only enemy targets.

She grasped a handful of Nezha’s hair in her hand and yanked his head up again to slam into the floor.

“Break!”

Sonnen’s arms were around her neck, restraining her, dragging her off Nezha’s limp form.

She staggered away from Sonnen. Her body was burning up, feverish. She reeled, suddenly dizzy. She felt full to bursting with heat; she had to dispel it, force it out somewhere or she’d surely die, but the only place to put it was in the bodies of everyone else around her—

Something deep inside her rational mind screamed.

Raban reached for her as she climbed up out of the ring. “Rin, what—”

She shoved his hand away.

“Move,” she panted. “Move.”

But the masters crowded around her, a hubbub of voices—hands reaching, mouths moving. Their presence was suffocating. She felt if she screamed she could disintegrate them entirely, wanted to disintegrate them—but the very small part of her that was still rational reined it in, sent her reeling for the exit instead.

Miraculously they cleared a path for her. She pushed her way through the crowd of apprentices and ran to the stairwell. She barreled up the stairs, burst out the door of the main hall into the cold open air, and sucked in a great breath.

It wasn’t enough. She was still burning.

Ignoring the shouts of the masters behind her, she set off at a run.

Jiang was in the first place she looked, the Lore garden. He was sitting cross-legged, eyes closed, still as the stone he sat upon.

She lurched through the garden gates, gripping at the doorpost. The world swirled sideways. Everything looked red: the trees, the stones, Jiang most of all. He flared in front of her like a torch.

He opened his eyes to the sound of her crashing through the gate. “Rin?”

She had forgotten how to speak. The flames within her licked out toward Jiang, sensed his presence like a fire sensed kindling and yearned to consume him.

She became convinced that if she didn’t kill him, she might explode.

She moved to attack him. He scrambled to his feet, dodged her outstretched hands, and then upended her with a deft throw. She landed on her back. He pinned her to the ground with his arms.

“You’re burning,” he said in amazement.

“Help me,” she gasped. “Help.”

He leaned forward and cupped her head in his hands.

“Look at me.”

She obeyed with great difficulty. His face swam before her.

“Great Tortoise,” he murmured, and let go of her.

His eyes rolled up in the back of his head and he began uttering indecipherable noises, syllables that didn’t resemble any language she knew.

He opened his eyes and pressed the palm of his hand to her forehead.

His hand felt like ice. The searing cold flooded from his palm to her forehead and into the rest of her body, through the same rivulets the flame was coursing through; arresting the fire, stilling it in her veins. She felt as if she’d been doused in a freezing bath. She writhed on the floor, breathing in shock, trembling as the fire left her blood.

Then everything was still.

Jiang’s face was the first thing she saw when she regained consciousness. His clothes looked rumpled. There were deep circles under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in days. How long had she been asleep? Had he been here the entire time?

She raised her head. She was lying in a bunk in the infirmary, but she wasn’t injured, as far as she could tell.

“How do you feel?” Jiang asked quietly.

“Bruised, but okay.” She sat up slowly and winced. Her mouth felt like it was filled with cotton. She coughed and rubbed at her throat, frowning. “What happened?”

Jiang offered her a cup of water that had been sitting beside her bunk. She took it gratefully. The water sluiced down her dry throat with the most wonderful sensation.

“Congratulations,” Jiang said. “You’re this year’s champion.”

His tone did not sound congratulatory at all.

Rin felt none of the exhilaration that she should have, anyway. She couldn’t even relish her victory over Nezha. She didn’t feel the least bit proud, just scared and confused.

“What did I do?” she whispered.

“You have stumbled upon something that you’re not ready for,” said Jiang. He sounded agitated. “I never should have taught you the Five Frolics. From this point forward you’re just going to be a danger to yourself and everyone around you.”

“Not if you help me,” she said. “Not if you teach me otherwise.”

“I thought you just wanted to be a good soldier.”

“I do,” she said.

But more than that, she wanted power.

She had no idea what had happened in the ring; she would be foolish not to feel terrified by it, and yet she had never felt power like it. In that instant, she had felt as if she could defeat anyone. Kill anything.

She wanted that power again. She wanted what Jiang could teach her.

“I was ungrateful that day in the garden,” she said, choosing her words carefully. If she spoke too obsequiously then it would scare Jiang off. But if she didn’t apologize, then Jiang might think that she hadn’t learned anything since they’d last spoken. “I wasn’t thinking. I apologize.”

She watched his eyes apprehensively, looking for that telltale distant expression that indicated that she had lost him.

Jiang’s features did not soften, but neither did he get up to leave. “No. It was my fault. I didn’t realize how much like Altan you are.”

Rin jerked her head up at the mention of Altan.

“He won in his year, you know,” Jiang said flatly. “He fought Tobi in the finals. It was a grudge match, just like your match with Nezha. Altan hated Tobi. Tobi made some jabs about Speer their first week of school, and Altan never forgave him. But he wasn’t like you; he didn’t squabble with Tobi throughout the year like a pecking hen. Altan swallowed his anger and concealed it under a mask of indifference until, at the very end, in front of an audience that included six Warlords and the Empress herself, he unleashed a power so potent that it took Sonnen, Jun, and myself to restrain him. By the time the smoke cleared, Tobi was so badly injured that Enro didn’t sleep for five days while she watched over him.”

“I’m not like that,” she said. She hadn’t beaten Nezha that badly. Had she? It was hard to remember through that fog of anger. “I’m not—I’m not like Altan.”

“You are precisely the same.” Jiang shook his head. “You’re too reckless. You hold grudges, you cultivate your rage and let it explode, and you’re careless about what you’re taught. Training you would be a mistake.”

Rin’s gut plummeted. She was suddenly afraid that she might go mad; she had been given a tantalizing taste of incredible power, but was this the end of the road?

“So that’s why you withdrew your bid for Altan?” she asked. “Why you refused to teach him?”

Jiang looked puzzled.

“I didn’t withdraw my bid,” he said. “I insisted they put him under my watch. Altan was a Speerly, already predisposed to rage and disaster. I knew I was the only one who could help him.”

“But the apprentices said—”

“The apprentices don’t know shit,” Jiang snapped. “I asked Jima to let me train him. But the Empress intervened. She knew the military value of a Speerly warrior, she was so excited . . . in the end, national interests superseded the sanity of one boy. They put him under Irjah’s tutelage, and honed his rage like a weapon, instead of teaching him to control it. You’ve seen him in the ring. You know what he’s like.”

Jiang leaned forward. “But you. The Empress doesn’t know about you.” He muttered to himself more than he spoke to her. “You’re not safe, but you will be . . . They won’t intervene, not this time . . .”

She watched Jiang’s face, not daring to hope. “So does that mean—”

He stood up. “I will take you on as an apprentice. I hope I will not come to regret it.”

He extended a hand toward her. She reached up and grasped it.

Of the original fifty students who matriculated at Sinegard at the start of the term, thirty-five received bids for apprenticeship. The masters sent their scrolls to the office in the main hall to be picked up by the students.

Those students who received no scrolls were asked to hand in their uniforms and make arrangements to leave the Academy immediately.

Most students received one scroll only. Niang, to her delight, joined two other students in the Medicine track. Nezha and Venka pledged Combat.

Kitay, convinced he’d lost his bids the moment he surrendered to Nezha, tugged at his hair so frantically the entire way to the front office that Rin was half-afraid he’d go bald.

“It was a stupid thing,” Kitay said. “Cowardly. No one’s surrendered uninjured in the last two decades. Nobody’s going to want to sponsor me now.”

Up until the Tournament he’d been expecting bids from Jima, Jun, and Irjah. But only one scroll was waiting for him at the registrar.

Kitay unfurled it. His face split into a grin. “Irjah thinks surrendering was brilliant. I’m pledging Strategy!”

The registrar handed two scrolls to Rin. Without opening them, she knew they were from Irjah and Jiang. She could choose between Strategy and Lore.

She pledged Lore.

Chapter 8

Sinegard Academy gave students four days off from studies to celebrate the Summer Festival. The next term would begin as soon as they returned.

Most students took this as a chance to visit their families. But Rin didn’t have time to travel all the way back to Tikany, nor did she want to. She had planned on spending the break at the Academy, until Kitay invited her to stay at his estate.

“Unless you don’t want to,” Kitay said nervously. “I mean, if you already have plans—”

“I have no plans,” Rin said. “I’d love to.”

She packed for her excursion into the city the next morning. This took mere seconds—she had very few personal belongings. She carefully folded two sets of school tunics into her old travel satchel, and hoped Kitay would not find it rude if she wore her uniform during the festival. She had no other clothing; she’d gotten rid of her old southerner’s tunics the first chance she got.

“I’ll get a rickshaw,” Rin offered as she met Kitay at the school gates.

Kitay looked puzzled. “Why do we need a rickshaw?”

Rin frowned. “Then how are we getting there?”

Kitay opened his mouth to reply just as a massive horse-drawn carriage pulled up by the gates. The driver, a portly man in robes of rich gold and burgundy, hopped off the coachman’s seat and bowed deeply in Kitay’s direction. “Master Chen.”

He blinked at Rin, as if trying to decide whether to bow to her as well, and then managed a perfunctory head dip.

“Thanks, Merchi.” Kitay handed their bags to the servant and helped Rin into the carriage.

“Comfortable?”

“Very.”

From their vantage point in the carriage, they could see almost all the city nested in the valley below: the spiraling pagodas of the administrative district rising through a faint blanket of mist, white houses built into the valley slopes with curved tiled roofs, and the winding stone walls of the alleyways leading downtown.

From the shaded interior of the carriage, Rin felt insulated from the dirty city streets. She felt clean. For the first time since she had arrived in Sinegard, she felt as if she belonged here. She leaned against the side and enjoyed the warm summer breeze against her face. She had not rested like this in a long time.

“We will discuss what happened to you in detail when you return,” Jiang had told her. “But your mind has just suffered a very particular trauma. The best thing you can do for yourself now is rest. Let the experience germinate. Let your mind heal.”

Kitay, tactfully, did not ask her what had happened. Rin was grateful for it.

Merchi drove them at a brisk pace down the mountain pass. They continued on the main city road for an hour and then turned left onto the isolated road that led into the Jade District.

When Rin had arrived in Sinegard a year ago, she and Tutor Feyrik had traveled through the working-class district, where the inns were cheap and gambling houses stood around every corner. Her daily trips to see the Widow Maung had led her through the loudest, dirtiest, and smelliest parts of the city. What she’d seen of Sinegard so far was no different from Tikany—it was just noisier and more cramped.

Now, riding in the Chen family’s carriage, she saw how splendid Sinegard could be. The roads of the Jade District were freshly paved, and glistened like they had been scrubbed clean that very morning. Rin saw no wooden shacks, no evident dumping grounds for chamber pots. She saw no grumpy housewives steaming breads and dumplings on outdoor grills, too poor to afford indoor stoves. She saw no beggars.

She found the stillness unsettling. Tikany was always bustling with activity—drifters collecting trash to repackage and sell; old men sitting on stoops outside, smoking or playing mahjong; little children wearing jumpers that exposed their butt cheeks, wandering around the streets followed by squatting grandparents ready to catch them when they toppled over.

She saw none of that here. The Jade District was composed of pristine barriers and walled-off gardens. Aside from their carriage, the roads were empty.

Merchi stopped the carriage before the gates of a massive compound. They swung ponderously open, revealing four long rectangular buildings arranged in a square, enclosing an enormous garden pavilion. Several dogs rushed them at the entrance, tiny white things whose paws were as immaculately clean as the tiled path they walked on.

Kitay gave a shout, climbed out of the carriage, and knelt down. His dogs leaped on him, tails wagging with delirious delight.

“This one’s the Dragon Emperor.” He tickled a dog under its chin. “They’re all named after the great rulers.”

“Which one’s the Red Emperor?” Rin asked.

“The one that’s going to pee on your foot if you don’t move.”

The estate’s housekeeper was a short, plump woman with freckled, leathery skin named Lan. She spoke with a friendly, girlish voice that was at odds with her wrinkled face. Her Sinegardian accent was so strong that even after several months’ practice with the heavily accented Widow Maung, Rin still could only barely decipher it.

“What do you want to eat? I’ll cook you anything you want. I know the culinary styles of all twelve provinces. Except the Monkey Province. Too spicy. It’s not good for you. I also don’t do stinky tofu. My only constraint is what’s on the market, but I can get just about anything at the import store. Any favorite recipes? Lobster? Or water chestnuts? You name it, I’ll cook it.”

Rin, who was accustomed to eating the uninspired slop of the Academy canteen, was at a loss for a response. How was she to explain she simply didn’t have the repertoire of meals that Lan demanded? Back in Tikany, the Fangs were fond of a dish named “whatever,” which was quite literally made of whatever scraps were left at the shop—usually fried eggs and glass noodles.

“I want Seven Treasure Soup,” Kitay intervened, leaving Rin to wonder what on earth that was. “And Lion’s Head.”

Rin blinked. “What?”

Kitay looked amused. “Oh, you’ll see.”

“You could act less like a dazed peasant, you know,” Kitay said as Lan laid out a spread of quail, quail eggs, shark fin soup served in turtle’s shell, and pig’s intestines before them. “It’s just food.”

But “just food” was rice porridge. Maybe some vegetables. A piece of fish, pork, or chicken whenever they could get it.

Nothing on the table was “just” anything.

Seven Treasure Soup turned out to be a deliciously sweet congee-based concoction of red dates, honeyed chestnuts, lotus seeds, and four other ingredients that Rin could not identify. Lion’s Head, she discovered with some relief, was not actually a lion’s head, but rather a ball of meat mixed with flour and boiled amid strips of white tofu.

“Kitay, I am a dazed peasant.” Rin tried fruitlessly to pick up a quail egg with her chopsticks. Finally she gave up and used her fingers. “You eat like this? All the time?”

Kitay blushed. “You get used to it. I had a hard time our first week at school. The Academy canteen was awful.”

It was hard not to feel jealous of Kitay. His private washroom was bigger than the cramped bedroom Rin had shared with Kesegi. His estate’s library rivaled the stacks at Sinegard. Everything Kitay owned was replaceable; if he got mud on his shoes, he threw them away. If his shirt ripped, he got a new one—a newly made shirt, tailored to his precise height and girth.

Kitay had spent his childhood in luxurious comfort, with nothing better to do than study for the Keju. For him, testing into Sinegard had been a pleasant surprise; a confirmation of something he’d always known was his destiny.

“Where’s your father?” Rin asked. Kitay’s father was the defense minister to the Empress herself. She was privately relieved she wouldn’t have to converse with him yet—the thought itself was terrifying—but she couldn’t help feeling curious about the man. Would he be an older version of Kitay—wiry-haired, just as brilliant, and exponentially more powerful?

Kitay made a face. “Defense meetings. You wouldn’t know it, but the whole city is on high security alert. The entire City Guard will be on duty all this week. We don’t need another Opera incident.”

“I thought the Red Junk Opera was dead,” said Rin.

“Mostly dead. You can’t kill a movement. Somewhere out there, some religious lunatics are intent on killing the Empress.” Kitay speared a chunk of tofu. “Father’s going to be at the palace until the parade is over. He’s directly responsible for the Empress’s safety. If anything goes wrong, Father’s head is on the line.”

“Isn’t he worried?”

“Not really. He’s done this for decades; he’ll be all right. Besides, the Empress is a martial artist herself; she’s hardly an easy target.” Kitay launched into a series of anecdotes his father had told him about serving in the palace, about hilarious encounters with the Empress and the Twelve Warlords, about court gossip and provincial politics.

Rin listened in amazement. What was it like to grow up knowing that your father served at the right hand of the Empress? What a difference an accident of birth made. In another world she might have grown up at an estate like this, with all of her desires within reach. In another world, she might have been born into power.

Rin spent the night in a massive suite she had all to herself. She hadn’t slept so long or so well since she came to Sinegard. It was as if her body had shut down after weeks of abuse. She awoke feeling better and clearer-minded than she had in months.

After a lackadaisical breakfast of sweet congee and spiced goose eggs, Kitay and Rin wandered downtown to the marketplace.

Rin hadn’t set foot downtown since arriving to Sinegard with Tutor Feyrik a year prior. The Widow Maung lived on the other side of the city, and her strict academic schedule had left her with no time to explore Sinegard on her own.

She had thought the market was overwhelming last year. Now, at peak activity during the Summer Festival, it seemed like the city had exploded. Pop-up vendor carts were parked everywhere, crammed into the alleyways so tightly that shoppers had to navigate the market in a cramped, single-file line. But the sights. Oh, the sights. Rin saw rows upon rows of pearl necklaces and jade bracelets. Stands of smooth egg-sized rocks that displayed characters, sometimes entire poems, only if you dipped them in water. Stations where calligraphy masters wrote names on giant, lovely fans, wielding their black ink brushes with the care and bravado of swordsmen.

“What do these do?” Rin stopped in front of a rack bearing tiny wooden statues of fat little boys. The boys’ tunics were yanked down, exposing their penises. She couldn’t believe anything this obscene was on sale.

“Oh, those are my favorite,” Kitay said.

By way of explanation, the vendor picked up a teapot and poured water over the statues. The clay darkened as the statues turned wet. Water began spurting out of the penises like sprays of urine.

Rin laughed. “How much are these?”

“Four silvers for one. I’ll give you two for seven.”

Rin blanched. All she had was a single string of imperial silvers and a handful of copper coins left over from the money Tutor Feyrik had helped her exchange. She had never had to spend money at the Academy, and hadn’t considered how expensive things might be in Sinegard when she wasn’t living on the Academy’s coin.

“Do you want it?” Kitay asked.

Rin waved her hands wildly. “No, I’m good, I can’t really . . .”

Understanding dawned on Kitay’s face. “My gift.” He handed a string of silvers to the merchant. “One urinating statue for my easily entertained friend.”

Rin blushed. “Kitay, I can’t.”

“It costs nothing.”

“It costs a lot to me,” she said.

Kitay placed the statue in her hand. “If you say one more thing about money, I’m leaving you to get lost.”

The market was so massive that Rin was reluctant to stray too far from the entrance; if she became lost in those winding pathways, how would she ever find her way out? But Kitay navigated the market with the ease of a seasoned connoisseur, pointing out which shops he liked and which he didn’t.

Kitay’s Sinegard was full of wonders, completely accessible, and crammed with things that belonged to him. Kitay’s Sinegard wasn’t terrifying, because Kitay had money. If he tripped, half the shop owners on the street would help him up, hoping for a handsome tip. If his pocket were cut, he’d go home and get another purse. Kitay could afford to be victimized by the city because he had room to fail.

Rin couldn’t. She had to remind herself that, despite Kitay’s absurd generosity, none of this was hers. Her only ticket into this city was through the Academy, and she’d have to work hard to keep it.

At night the marketplace lit up with lanterns, one for each vendor. Together the lanterns looked like a horde of fireflies, casting unnatural shadows on everything their light touched.

“Have you ever seen shadow puppetry?” Kitay stopped in front of a large canvas tent. A line of children stood at the entrance doling out copper shells for entrance. “I mean, it’s for little kids, but . . .”

“Great Tortoise.” Rin’s eyes widened. In Tikany, they told stories about shadow puppetry. She fished the change out of her pocket. “I got this.”

The tent was packed with rows of children. Kitay and Rin filed into the back, trying to pretend they weren’t at least five years older than the rest of the audience. At the front, a massive silk screen hung from the top of the tent, illuminated from behind with soft yellow light.

“I tell you now about the rebirth of this nation.”

The puppeteer spoke from a box beside the screen, so that even his silhouette was invisible. His voice filled the cramped tent, deep and smooth and resonant. “This is the tale of the salvation and reunion of Nikan. This is the story of the Trifecta, the three warriors of legend.”

The light behind the screen dimmed and then flared a bright scarlet hue.

“The Warrior.” The first shadow appeared on the screen: the silhouette of a man with a massive sword almost as tall as he was. He was heavily armored, with spiked pads protruding out from his shoulders. The plume on his helmet furled into the air above him.

“The Vipress.” The slender form of a woman appeared next to the Warrior. Her head tilted coquettishly to one side; her left arm bent as if she wielded something behind her back. A fan, perhaps. Or a dagger.

“And the Gatekeeper.” The Gatekeeper was the thinnest of the three, a stooped figure wrapped in robes. By his side crawled a large tortoise.

The scarlet hue of the screen faded away to a soft yellow that pulsed slowly like a heartbeat. The shadows of the Trifecta grew larger and then disappeared. A silhouette of a mountainous land appeared in their place. And the puppeteer began his story in earnest.

“Sixty-five years ago, in the wake of the First Poppy War, the people of Nikan suffered under the weight of their Federation oppressors. Nikan lay sick, feverish under the clouds of the poppy drug.” Translucent ribbons drifted up from the profile of the countryside, giving the illusion of smoke. “The people starved. Mothers sold their infants for a pound of meat, for a bolt of cloth. Fathers killed their children rather than watch them suffer. Yes, that’s right. Children just like you!

“The Nikara thought the gods had abandoned them, for how else could the barbarians from the east have wreaked such destruction upon them?”

The screen turned the same sickly yellow pallor as the cheeks of poppy addicts. A line of Nikara peasants knelt with their heads bent to the floor, as if weeping.

“The people found no protection in the Warlords. The rulers of the Twelve Provinces, once powerful, were now weak and disorganized. Preoccupied with ancient grudges, they wasted time and soldiers fighting against each other rather than uniting to drive out the invaders from Mugen. They squandered gold on drink and women. They breathed the poppy drug like air. They taxed their provinces at exorbitant rates, and gave nothing back. Even when the Federation destroyed their villages and raped their women, the Warlords did nothing. They could do nothing.

“The people prayed for heroes. They prayed for twenty years. And finally, the gods sent them.”

A silhouette of three children, hand in hand, appeared on the lower left corner of the screen. The child in the center stood taller than the rest. The one on his right had long, flowing hair. The third child, standing a little removed from the other two, had his profile turned away toward the end of the screen, as if he was looking at something the other two could not see.

“The gods did not send these heroes from the skies. Rather they chose three children—war orphans, peasants whose parents had been killed in village raids. They were born of the humblest origins. But they were meant to walk with the gods.”

The child in the center strode purposefully to the middle of the screen. The other two followed him at a distance, like he was their leader. The limbs of the shadows moved so smoothly there might have been little men in costume behind the screen, not puppets made of paper and string. Rin marveled at the technique involved, even as she was further absorbed into the story.

“When their village burned, the three children formed a pact to seek revenge against the Federation and liberate their country from the invaders, so that no more children would suffer as they had.

“They trained for many years with the monks of the Wudang temple. By the time they matured, their martial arts skills were prodigious, and they rivaled in skill fully grown men who had been training for decades. At the end of their apprenticeship, they journeyed to the top of the highest peak in all of the land: Mount Tianshan.”

A massive mountain came into view. It took up almost the entire screen; the shadows of the three heroes were minuscule beside it. But as they walked toward the mountain, the peak grew smaller and smaller, flatter and flatter, until the heroes stood on flat ground at the very top.

“There are seven thousand steps that lead up to the peak of Mount Tianshan. And at the very top, far up so high that the strongest eagle could not circle the peak, lies a temple. From that temple, the three heroes walked into the heavens and entered the Pantheon, the home of the gods.”

The three heroes now approached a gate similar to those that guarded the entrance to the Academy. The doors were twice the heroes’ height, decorated with intricately curling patterns of butterflies and tigers, and guarded by a great tortoise that bowed its head low as it let them pass.

“The first hero, strongest among his companions, was summoned by the Dragon Lord. The hero stood a head taller than his friends. His back was broad, his arms like tree trunks. He had been deemed by the gods to be the leader of the three.

“‘If I am to command the armies of Nikan, I must have a great blade,’ he said, and knelt at the feet of the Dragon Lord. The Dragon Lord bade him stand, and bestowed upon him a massive sword. Thus he became the Warrior.”

The Warrior’s figure swung the huge sword in a great arc above his head and brought it smashing downward. Sparks of red and gold light emitted from the ground where the sword struck.

“The second hero was a girl among the two men. She walked past the Dragon Lord, the Tiger Lord, and the Lion Lord, for they were gods of war and therefore gods of men. She said: ‘I am a woman, and women need different weapons than men. The woman’s place is not in the thick of battle. The woman’s battlefield is in deception and seduction.’ And she knelt before the plinth of the Snail Goddess Nüwa. The Goddess Nüwa was pleased by her words, and made the second hero as deadly as a serpent, as bewitching as the most hypnotic of snakes. Thus was born the Vipress.”

A great serpent slithered out from under the Vipress’s dress and undulated about her body, coiling upward to rest on her shoulders. The audience applauded the graceful trick of puppetry.

“The third hero was the humblest among his peers. Weak and sickly, he had never been able to train to the extent of his two friends. But he was loyal and unswerving in his devotion to the gods. He did not beg a favor from any deity in the Pantheon, for he knew he was not worthy. Instead he knelt before the humble tortoise who had let them in.

“‘I ask only for the strength to protect my friends and the courage to protect my country,’ he said. The tortoise replied, ‘You will be given this and more. Take the chain of keys from around my neck. From this day forth you are the Gatekeeper. You have the means to unlock the menagerie of the gods, inside which are kept beasts of every kind, both creatures of beauty and monsters vanquished by heroes long past. You will command them as you see fit.’”

The Gatekeeper’s shadow raised his robed hands slowly, and from his back unfurled many shadows of different shapes and sizes. Dragons. Demons. Beasts. They enveloped the Gatekeeper like a shroud of darkness.

“When they came back down the mountain, the monks who had once trained them realized the three had surpassed in skill even the oldest master at the temple. Word spread, and martial artists across the land bowed down to the prodigious skill of the three heroes. The Trifecta’s reputation grew. Now that their names were known in all of the Twelve Provinces, the Trifecta sent out word to each of the Warlords to invite them to a great banquet at the base of Mount Tianshan.”

Twelve figures, each representing a different province, appeared on the screen. Each wore a helmet with a plume shaped like the province he hailed from: Rooster, Ox, Hare, Monkey, and on and on.

“The Warlords, who were full of pride, were each furious that the other eleven had been invited. Each had thought that he alone had been summoned by the Trifecta. Plotting was what the Warlords did best, and immediately they set about planning to get revenge on the Trifecta.”

The screen beamed an eerie, misty purple. The shadows of the Warlords dipped their heads toward one another over their bowls as if conducting nefarious negotiations.

“But halfway through their meal, they found they could not move. The Vipress had poisoned their drinks with a numbing agent, and the Warlords had drunk many bowls of the sorghum wine. As they lay incapacitated in their seats, the Warrior stood on the table before them. He announced: ‘Today I declare myself the Emperor of Nikan. If you oppose me, I will cut you down and your lands will become mine. But if you pledge to serve me as an ally, to fight as a general under my banner, I will reward you with status and power. Never again will you fight to defend your borders from another Warlord. Never again will you struggle for domination. All will be equal under me, and I will be the greatest leader this kingdom has seen since the Red Emperor.’”

The shadow of the Warrior raised his sword to the sky. Lightning erupted from the sword point, a symbol of a blessing from the heavens themselves.

“When the Warlords regained control of their limbs, each and every one of them agreed to serve the new Dragon Emperor. And so Nikan was united without the shedding of a single drop of blood. For the first time in centuries, the Warlords fought under the same banner, rallying to the Trifecta. And for the first time in recent history, Nikan presented a united front against the Federation invaders. At long last, we drove out the oppressors. And the Empire, again, became free.”

The mountainous silhouette of the country returned again, only this time the land was filled with spiraling pagodas, with temples and many villages. It was a country freed from invaders. It was a country blessed by the gods.

“Today we celebrate the unity of the Twelve Provinces,” said the puppeteer. “We celebrate the Trifecta. And we pay homage to the gods who have gifted them.”

The children burst into applause.

Kitay was frowning when they exited the tent. “I never realized how horrible that story was,” he said quietly. “When you’re little, you think the Trifecta were being so clever, but really this is just a story of poison and coercion. Nikara politics as usual.”

“I don’t know anything about Nikara politics,” said Rin.

“I do.” Kitay made a face. “Father’s told me everything that happens at the palace. It’s just the same as the puppeteer said. The Warlords are always at each other’s throats, vying for the Empress’s attention. It’s pathetic.”

“What do you mean?”

Kitay looked anxious. “You know how the Warlords were so busy fighting each other that they let Mugen wreck the country during the Poppy Wars? Father’s convinced that’s happening again. Remember what Yim said the first day of class? He was right. Mugen isn’t just sitting quietly on that island. My father thinks it’s only a matter of time before they attack again, and he’s worried the Warlords aren’t taking the threat seriously enough.”

The Empire’s fragmentation seemed to be a concern of every master at the Academy. Although the Militia was technically under the Empress’s control, its twelve divisions drew soldiers largely from their home provinces and lay under the direct command of the provincial Warlords. And provincial relations had never been good—Rin had not realized how deep-seated northern contempt for the south was until she arrived in Sinegard.

But Rin didn’t want to talk about politics. This break was the first time in a long time that she was able to let herself relax, and she didn’t want to dwell on matters like some impending war that she could do nothing to stop. She was still dazed by the visual spectacle of the shadow puppetry, and she wished Kitay would leave the serious matters be.

“I liked the part about the Pantheon,” she said after a while.

“Of course you did. It’s the only part that’s pure fiction.”

“Is it, though?” Rin asked. “Who’s to say the Trifecta weren’t shamans?”

“The Trifecta were martial artists. Politicians. Immensely talented soldiers, sure, but the part about shamanism is just exaggeration,” said Kitay. “The Nikara love embellishing war stories, you know that.”

“But where did the stories come from?” Rin persisted. “The Trifecta’s powers are terribly specific for a kid’s tale. If their powers were only myth, then how come that myth is always the same? We heard about the Trifecta all the way in Tikany. Across the provinces, the story has never changed. They’re always the Gatekeeper, the Warrior, and the Vipress.”

Kitay shrugged. “Some poet got creative, and those characters caught on. It’s not that hard to believe. More credible than the existence of shamans, anyhow.”

“But there have been shamans before,” said Rin. “Back before the Red Emperor conquered Nikan.”

“There’s no conclusive proof. There are just anecdotes.”

“The Red Emperor’s scribes kept track of foreign imports down to the last banana cluster,” Rin objected. “They were hardly likely to exaggerate about their enemies.”

Kitay looked skeptical. “Sure, but none of that means the Trifecta were actually shamans. The Dragon Emperor’s dead, and no one’s seen or heard of the Gatekeeper since the Second Poppy War.”

“Maybe he’s just in hiding. Maybe he’s still out there, waiting for the next invasion. Or—maybe—what if the Cike are shamans?” The idea had just occurred to Rin. “That’s why we don’t know anything about them. Maybe they’re the only shamans left—”

“The Cike are just killers,” Kitay scoffed. “They stab, kill, and poison. They don’t call down gods.”

“As far as you know,” Rin said.

“You’re really hung up on this idea of shamans, aren’t you?” Kitay asked. “It’s just a kid’s story, Rin.”

“The Red Emperor’s scribes wouldn’t have kept extensive documentation of a kid’s story.”

Kitay sighed. “Is that why you pledged Lore? You think you can become a shaman? You think you can summon gods?”

“I don’t believe in gods,” said Rin. “But I believe in power. And I believe the shamans had some source of power that the rest of us don’t know how to access, and I believe it’s still possible to learn.”

Kitay shook his head. “I’ll tell you what shamans are. At some point in time some martial artists were really powerful, and the more battles they won, the more stories spread. They probably encouraged those stories, too, thinking it’d scare their enemies. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Empress made up those stories about the Trifecta being shamans herself. It’d certainly help her hold on power. She needs it now, more than ever. The Warlords are getting restless—I bet we’re barely years from a coup. But if she’s really the Vipress, then how come she hasn’t just summoned giant snakes to subdue the Warlords to her will?”

Rin couldn’t think of a glaring counterargument to this theory, so she conceded with silence. Debating with Kitay became pointless after a while. He was so convinced of his own rationality, of his encyclopedic knowledge of most things, that he had difficulty conceiving of gaps in his understanding.

“I notice the puppeteer glossed over how we actually won the Second Poppy War,” Rin said after a while. “You know. Speer. Butchery. Thousands dead in a single night.”

“Well, it was a kid’s story after all,” said Kitay. “And genocide is a little depressing.”

Rin and Kitay spent the next two days lazing around, indulging in every act of sloth they hadn’t been able to at the Academy. They played chess. They lounged in the garden, stared idly at the clouds, and gossiped about their classmates.

“Niang’s pretty cute,” Kitay said. “So is Venka.”

“Venka’s been obsessed with Nezha since we got there,” Rin said. “Even I could see that.”

Kitay waggled his eyebrows. “One might say you’ve been obsessed with Nezha.”

“Don’t be disgusting.”

“You are. You’re always asking me about him.”

“Because I’m curious,” Rin said. “Sunzi says to know your enemy.”

“Fuck Sunzi. You just think he’s pretty.”

Rin tossed the chessboard at his head.

At Kitay’s insistence, Lan cooked them spicy peppercorn hot pot, and delicious though it was, Rin had the singular experience of weeping while eating. She spent most of the next day squatting over the toilet with a burning rectum.

“You think this is how the Speerlies felt?” Kitay asked. “What if burning diarrhea is the price of lifelong devotion to the Phoenix?”

“The Phoenix is a vengeful god,” Rin groaned.

They sampled all the wines in Kitay’s father’s liquor closet and got wonderfully, dizzyingly drunk.

“Nezha and I spent most of our childhood raiding this closet. Try this one.” Kitay passed her a small ceramic bottle. “White sorghum wine. Fifty percent alcohol.”

Rin swallowed hard. It slid down her throat with a marvelous burn.

“This is liquid fire,” she said. “This is the sun in a bottle. This is the drink of a Speerly.”

Kitay snickered.

“You wanna know how they brew this?” he asked. “The secret ingredient is urine.”

She spat the wine out.

Kitay laughed. “They just use alkaline powder now. But the tale goes that a disgruntled official pissed all over one of the Red Emperor’s distilleries. Probably the best accidental discovery of the Red Emperor’s era.”

Rin rolled over onto her stomach to look sideways at him. “Why aren’t you at Yuelu Mountain? You should be a scholar. A sage. You know so much about everything.”

Kitay could expound for hours on any given subject, and yet showed little interest in their studies. He had breezed through the Trials because his eidetic memory made studying unnecessary, but he had surrendered to Nezha the moment the Tournament took a dangerous turn. Kitay was brilliant, but he didn’t belong at Sinegard.

“I wanted to,” Kitay admitted. “But I’m my father’s only son. And my father’s the defense minister. So what choice do I have?”

She fiddled with the bottle. “You’re an only child, then?”

Kitay shook his head. “Older sister. Kinata. She’s at Yuelu now—studying geomancy, or something like that.”

“Geomancy?”

“The artful placement of buildings and things.” Kitay waved his hands in the air. “It’s all aesthetics. Supposedly it’s important, if your greatest aspiration is to marry someone important.”

“You haven’t read every book about it?”

“I only read about the interesting things.” Kitay rolled over onto his stomach. “You? Any siblings?”

“None,” she said. Then she frowned. “Yes, actually. I don’t know why I said that. I have a brother—well, foster brother. Kesegi. He’s ten. Was. He’s eleven now, I guess.”

“Do you miss him?”

Rin hugged her knees to her chest. She didn’t like the way her stomach suddenly felt. “No. I mean—I don’t know. He was so little when I left. I used to take care of him. I guess I’m glad that I don’t have to do that anymore.”

Kitay raised an eyebrow. “Have you written to him?”

“No.” She hesitated. “I don’t know why. I guess I assumed the Fangs didn’t want to hear from me. Or maybe that he’d be better off if he just forgot about me.”

She had wanted to at least write Tutor Feyrik in the beginning, but things had been so awful at the Academy that she couldn’t bear to tell him about it. Then, as time passed, and as her schoolwork became more exhausting, it had become so painful to think about home that she’d just stopped.

“You didn’t like it at home, huh?” Kitay asked.

“I don’t like thinking about it,” she mumbled.

She never wanted to think about Tikany. She wanted to pretend that she’d never lived there—no, that it had never existed. Because if she could just erase her past, then she could write herself into whoever she wanted to be in the present. Student. Scholar. Soldier. Anything except who she used to be.

The Summer Festival culminated in a parade in Sinegard’s city center.

Rin arrived at the grounds with the members of the House of Chen—Kitay’s father and willowy mother, his two uncles and their wives, and his older sister. Rin had forgotten how important Kitay’s father actually was until she saw the entire clan decked out in their house colors of burgundy and gold.

Kitay suddenly grabbed Rin’s elbow. “Don’t look to your left. Pretend like you’re talking to me.”

“But I am talking to you.” Rin immediately looked to her left.

And saw Nezha, standing in a crowd of people wearing gowns of silver and cerulean. A massive dragon was embroidered across the back of his robe, the emblem of the House of Yin.

“Oh.” She jerked her head away. “Can we go stand over there?”

“Yes, let’s.”

Once they were safely ensconced behind Kitay’s rotund second uncle, Rin peered out to gawk at the members of the House of Yin. She found herself staring at two older versions of Nezha, one male and one female. Both were well into their twenties and unfairly attractive. Nezha’s entire family, in fact, looked like they belonged on wall paintings—they appeared more like idealized versions of humans than actual people.

“Nezha’s father isn’t there,” said Kitay. “That’s interesting.”

“Why?”

“He’s the Dragon Warlord,” said Kitay. “One of the Twelve.”

“Maybe he’s sick,” said Rin. “Maybe he hates parades as much as you do.”

“I’m here, though, aren’t I?” Kitay fussed with his sleeves. “You don’t just miss the Summer Parade. It’s a display of unity of all the Twelve Provinces. One year my father broke his leg the day before and he still made it, doped up on sedatives the entire time. If the head of the House of Yin hasn’t come, that means something.”

“Maybe he’s embarrassed,” Rin said. “Furious that his son lost the Tournament. He’s too ashamed to show his face.”

Kitay cracked a smile.

A bugle sounded through the thin morning air, followed by a servant shouting for all members of the procession to fall into order.

Kitay turned to Rin. “So, I don’t know if you can . . .”

“No, it’s fine,” she said. Of course she wouldn’t be riding with the House of Chen. Rin was not in Kitay’s family; she had no business being in the procession. She spared him the embarrassment of bringing it up. “I’ll watch you from the marketplace.”

After a good deal of squeezing and elbowing, Rin escaped the crowd and found a spot on top of a fruit stand where she could get a good view of the parade without being crushed to death in the horde of Sinegardians who had gathered downtown. As long as the thatched straw roof did not suddenly cave in, the fruit stand owner need never know.

The parade began with an homage to the Heavenly Menagerie, the roster of mythical creatures that were held by legend to exist in the era of the Red Emperor. Giant dragons and lions snaked through the crowd, undulating up and down on poles controlled by dancers hidden within. Firecrackers popped in rhythm as they moved, like coordinated bursts of thunder. Next came a massive scarlet effigy on tall poles that had been set carefully aflame: the Vermilion Phoenix of the South.

Rin watched the Phoenix curiously. According to her history books, this was the god whom the Speerlies had venerated above all others. In fact, Speer had never worshipped the massive pantheon of gods that the Nikara did. The Speerlies had only ever worshipped their Phoenix.

The creature following the Phoenix resembled nothing Rin had ever seen before. It bore the head of a lion, antlers like a deer’s, and the body of a four-legged creature; a tiger, perhaps, but its feet ended in hooves. It wove quietly through the parade; its puppeteers beat no drums, sang no chants, rang no bells to announce its coming.

Rin puzzled over the creature until she matched it with a description she had heard in stories told in Tikany. It was a kirin, the noblest of earthly beasts. Kirins walked the lands of Nikan only when a great leader had passed away, and then only in times of great peril.

Then the procession turned to the illustrious houses, and Rin quickly lost interest. Aside from seeing Kitay’s moping face, there was nothing fun about watching palanquin after palanquin of important people dressed in their house colors.

The sun shone at full force overhead. Sweat dripped down Rin’s temples. She wished she had something to drink. She shielded her face with her sleeve, waiting for the parade to end so she could find Kitay.

Then the crowd around her began screaming, and Rin realized with a start that borne on a palanquin of golden silk, surrounded by a platoon of both musicians and bodyguards, the Empress had arrived.

The Empress was flawed in many ways.

Her face was not perfectly symmetrical. Her eyebrows were finely arched, one slightly above the other, which gave her an expression of constant disdain. Even her mouth was uneven; one side of her mouth curved higher than the other.

And yet she was without question the most beautiful woman Rin had ever seen.

It was not enough to describe her hair, which was darker than the night and glossier than butterfly wings. Or her skin, which was paler and smoother than any Sinegardian could have wished for. Or her lips, which were the color of blood, as if she had just been sucking at a cherry. All of these things could have applied to normal women in the abstract, might even have been remarkable on their own. But on the Empress they were simple inevitabilities, casual truths.

Venka would have paled in comparison.

Youth, Rin thought, was an amplification of beauty. It was a filter; it could mask what one was lacking, enhance even the most average features. But beauty without youth was dangerous. The Empress’s beauty did not require the soft fullness of young lips, the rosy red of young cheeks, the tenderness of young skin. This beauty cut deep, like a sharpened crystal. This beauty was immortal.

Afterward, Rin could not have described what the Empress had been wearing. She could not recall whether or not the Empress spoke, or if the Empress waved in her direction. She could not remember anything the Empress did at all.

She would only remember those eyes, deep pools of black, eyes that made her feel as if she were suffocating, just like Master Jiang’s did, but if this was drowning then Rin didn’t want air, didn’t need it so long as she could keep gazing into those glittering obsidian wells.

She couldn’t look away. She couldn’t even imagine looking away.

As the Empress’s palanquin moved out of sight, Rin felt an odd pang in her heart.

She would have torn apart kingdoms for this woman. She would have followed her to the gates of hell and back. This was her ruler. This was whom she was meant to serve.

Chapter 9

“Fang Runin of Tikany, Rooster Province,” Rin said. “Second-year apprentice.”

The office clerk stamped the Academy’s crest in the space next to her name on the registration scroll, and then handed her three sets of black apprentice tunics. “What track?”

“Lore,” Rin said. “Under Master Jiang Ziya.”

The clerk consulted the scroll again. “You sure?”

“Pretty sure,” Rin said, though her pulse quickened. Had something happened?

“I’ll be right back,” the clerk said, and disappeared into the back office.

Rin waited by the desk, growing more and more anxious as the minutes passed. Had Jiang left the Academy? Been fired? Suffered a nervous breakdown? Been arrested for opium possession off campus? For opium possession on campus?

She thought suddenly of the day she had enrolled for Sinegard, when the proctors had tried to detain her for cheating. Had Nezha’s family filed a complaint against her for costing their heir the championship? Was that even possible?

Finally the clerk returned with a sheepish look on his face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s been so long since anyone’s pledged Lore. We’re not sure what color your armband is supposed to be.”

In the end they took leftover cloth from the first-years’ uniforms and fashioned her a white armband.

Classes began the next day. After pledging, Rin still spent half her time with the other masters. As she was the only one in her track, she studied Strategy and Linguistics along with Irjah’s apprentices. She found to her dismay that though she hadn’t pledged Medicine, second-years still had to suffer a mandatory emergency triage class under Enro. History had been replaced with Foreign Relations under Master Yim. Jun still wouldn’t allow her to train under him, but she was eligible to study weapons-based combat with Sonnen.

Finally her morning classes ended, and Rin was left with half the day to spend with Jiang. She ran up the steps toward the Lore garden. Time to meet with her master. Time to get answers.

“Describe to me what we are studying,” said Jiang. “What is Lore?”

Rin blinked. She’d rather been hoping that he would tell her.

Rin had tried many times over the break to rationalize to herself why she’d chosen to study Lore, only to find herself uttering vague, circular truisms.

It came down to an intuition. A truth she knew for herself but couldn’t prove to anyone else. She was studying Lore because she knew Jiang had tapped into some other source of power, something real and mystifying. Because she had tapped into that same source the day of the Tournament. Because she had been consumed by fire, had seen the world turned red, had lost control of herself and been saved by the man whom everyone else at the school deemed insane.

She had seen the other side of the veil, and now her curiosity was so great she would go mad unless she understood what had happened.

That didn’t mean she had the faintest inkling of what she was doing.

“Weird things,” she said. “We’re studying very weird things.”

Jiang raised an eyebrow. “How articulate.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just here because I wanted to study with you. Because of what happened during the Trials. I don’t actually know what I’m getting into.”

“Oh, you do.” Jiang lifted his index finger and touched the tip to a spot on her forehead precisely between her eyes, the spot from which he’d stilled the fire inside her. “Deep in your subconscious mind, you know the truth of things.”

“I wanted to—”

“You want to know what happened to you during the Tournament.” Jiang cocked his head to the side. “Here is what happened: you called a god, and the god answered.”

Rin made a face. Again with the gods? She had been hoping for answers throughout the entire break, had thought that Jiang might make things clear once she returned, but she was now more confused than ever.

Jiang lifted a hand before she could protest. “You don’t know what any of this means yet. You don’t know if you’ll ever replicate what happened in the ring. But you do know that if you don’t get answers now, the hunger will consume you and your mind will crack. You’ve glimpsed the other side and you can’t rest until you fill in the blanks. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to you was common in the era before the Red Emperor, back when Nikara shamans didn’t know what they were doing. If this had continued, you would have gone mad. But I am here to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m going to keep you sane.”

Rin wondered how someone who regularly strolled through campus without clothes on could say that with a straight face.

And she wondered what it said about her that she trusted him.

Understanding came, like all things with Jiang, in infuriatingly small increments. As Rin had learned before the Trials, Jiang’s preferred method of instruction was to do first and explain later, if ever. She learned early on that if she asked the wrong question, she wouldn’t get the answer she wanted. “The fact that you’re asking,” Jiang would say, “is evidence that you’re not ready to know.”

She learned to shut up and simply follow his lead.

He carefully laid out a foundation for her, though at first his demands seemed menial and pointless. He made her transcribe her history textbook into Old Nikara and back. He made her spend a chilly fall afternoon squatting over the stream catching minnows with her bare hands. He demanded she complete all assignments for every class using her nondominant left hand, so that her essays took twice as long to finish and looked like a child had written them. He made her live by twenty-five-hour days for an entire month. He made her go nocturnal for an entire two weeks, so that all she ever saw was the night sky and an eerily quiet Sinegard, and he was wholly unsympathetic when she complained about missing her other classes. He made her see how long she could go without sleeping. He made her see how long she could go without waking up.

She swallowed her skepticism, took a leap of faith, and chose to follow his instructions, hoping that enlightenment might be on the other side. Yet she did not leap blindly, because she knew what was at the other end. Daily, she saw the proof of enlightenment before her.

Because Jiang did things that no human should be able to do.

The first time, he made the leaves at his feet spin without moving a muscle.

She thought it was a trick of the wind.

And then he did it again, and then a third time, just to prove he had utter control over it.

“Shit,” she said, and then repeated, “Shit. Shit. Shit. How. How?”

“Easily,” he said.

She gaped at him. “This is—this isn’t martial arts, it’s . . .”

“It’s what?” he pressed.

“It’s supernatural.”

He looked smug. “Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”

“I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?”

“Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”

He made the wind howl at his command. He made trees rustle by pointing at them. He made water ripple without touching it, and could cause shadows to twist and screech with a whispered word.

She realized that Jiang showed her these things because she would not have believed them if he’d merely told her they were possible. He was building up a background of possibilities for her, a web of new concepts. How did you explain to a child the idea of gravity, until they knew what it meant to fall?

Some truths could be learned through memorization, like history textbooks or grammar lessons. Some had to be ingrained slowly, had to become true because they were an inevitable part of the pattern of all things.

Power dictates acceptability, Kitay had once told her. Did the same apply to the fabric of the natural world?

Jiang reconfigured Rin’s perception of what was real. Through demonstrations of impossible acts, he recalibrated the way she approached the material universe.

It was easier because she was so willing to believe. She fit these challenges to her conceptions of reality into her mind without too much trauma from adjustment. The traumatic event had already occurred. She had felt herself consumed by fire. She had known what it meant to burn. She hadn’t imagined it. It had happened.

She learned to resist denying what Jiang showed her because it didn’t square with her previous notions of how things worked. She learned to stop being shocked.

Her experience during the Tournament had torn a great, jagged hole through her understanding of the world, and she waited for Jiang to fill it in for her.

Sometimes, if she bordered on asking the right question, he sent her to the library to find the answer herself.

When she asked him where Lore had been practiced before, he sent her on a wild goose chase after all that was odd and cryptic. He made her read texts on the ancient dream walkers of the southern islands and their plant spirit healing practices. He made her write detailed reports about village shamans of the Hinterlands to the north, about how they fell into trances and journeyed as spirits in the bodies of eagles. He had her pore over decades of testimony from southern Nikara villagers who claimed to be clairvoyant.

“How would you describe all of these people?” he inquired.

“Oddities. People with abilities, or people who were pretending to have abilities.” Other than that, Rin saw no way that these groups of people were linked. “How would you describe them?”

“I would call them shamans,” he said. “Those who commune with the gods.”

When she asked him what he meant by the gods, he made her study religion. Not just Nikara religion—all religions of the world, every religion that had been practiced since the dawn of time.

“What does anyone mean by gods?” he asked. “Why do we have gods? What purpose does a god serve in a society? Vex these issues. Find these answers for me.”

In a week, she produced what she thought was a brilliant report on the difference between Nikara and Hesperian religious traditions. She proudly recounted her conclusions to Jiang in the Lore garden.

The Hesperians had only one church. They believed in one divine entity: a Holy Maker, separate from and above all mortal affairs, wrought in the image of a man. Rin argued that this god, this Maker, was a means by which Hesperia’s government maintained order. The priests of the Order of the Holy Maker held no political office but exerted more cultural control than the Hesperian central government did. Since Hesperia was a large country without warlords who had absolute power over each of its states, rule of law had to be enforced by propagation of the myth of moral codes.

The Empire, in contrast, was a country of what Rin labeled superstitious atheists. Of course, Nikan had its gods in abundance. But like the Fangs, the majority of Nikara were religious only when it suited them. The Empire’s wandering monks constituted a small minority of the population, mere curators of the past, rather than part of any institution with real power.

Gods in Nikan were the heroes of myths, tokens of culture, icons to be acknowledged during important life events like weddings, births, or deaths. They were personifications of emotions that the Nikara themselves felt. But no one actually believed that you would have bad luck for the rest of the year if you forgot to light incense to the Azure Dragon. No one really thought that you could keep your loved ones safe by praying to the Great Tortoise.

The Nikara practiced these rituals regardless, went through the motions because there was comfort in doing so, because it was a way for them to express their anxieties about the ebbs and flows of their fortunes.

“And so religion is merely a social construct in both the east and west,” Rin concluded. “The difference lies in its utility.”

Jiang had been listening attentively throughout her presentation. When she finished, he blew air out of his cheeks like a child and rubbed at his temples. “So you think Nikara religion is simply superstition?”

“Nikara religion is too haphazard to hold any degree of truth,” Rin said. “You have the four cardinal gods—the Dragon, the Tiger, the Tortoise, and the Phoenix. Then you have local household gods, village guardian gods, animal gods, gods of rivers, gods of mountains . . .” She counted them off on her fingers. “How could all of them exist in the same space? How could the spiritual realm be, with all these gods vying for dominance? The best explanation is that when we say ‘god’ in Nikan, we mean a story. Nothing more.”

“So you have no faith in the gods?” Jiang asked.

“I believe in the gods as much as the next Nikara does,” she replied. “I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.”

She said this with a straight face, but she was exaggerating.

Because she knew that something was real. She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world. She was not truly such a skeptic as she pretended to be.

But the best way to get Jiang to explain anything was by taking radical positions, because when she argued from the extremes, he made his best arguments in response.

He hadn’t yet taken the bait, so she continued: “If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?”

“But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?” Jiang countered. “Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa? Why burn incense to the heavenly pantheon? Believing in any religion involves sacrifice. Why would any poor, penniless Nikara farmer knowingly make sacrifices to entities he knew were just myths? Who does that benefit? How did these practices originate?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Rin.

“Then find out. Find out the nature of the cosmos.”

Rin thought it was somewhat unreasonable to ask her to puzzle out what philosophers and theologians had been trying to answer for millennia, but she returned to the library.

And came back with more questions still. “But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?”

“Because you’re part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn’t understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I know you want power.” He tapped her forehead again. “But how can you borrow power from the gods when you don’t understand what they are?”

Under Jiang’s orders, Rin spent more time in the library than most fifth-year apprentices. He assigned her to write essays on a daily basis, the prompt always derived from a topic they had arrived at after hours of conversation. He made her draw connections between texts of different disciplines, texts that were written centuries apart, and texts written in different languages.

“How do Seejin’s theories of transmitting ki through human air passages relate to the Speerly practice of inhaling the ash of the deceased?”

“How has the roster of Nikara gods changed over time, and how did this reflect the eminence of different Warlords at different points in history?”

“When did the Federation begin worshipping their sovereign as a divine entity, and why?”

“How does the doctrine of separation of church and state affect Hesperian politics? Why is this doctrine ironic?”

He tore apart her mind and pieced it back together, decided he didn’t like the order, tore it apart again. He strained her mental capacity just as Irjah did. But Irjah stretched Rin’s mind within known parameters. His assignments simply made Rin more nimble within the spaces she was already familiar with. Jiang forced her mind to expand outward into entirely new dimensions.

He did, in essence, the mental equivalent of making her carry a pig up a mountain.

She obeyed on every count, and wondered what alternative worldview he was trying to make her piece together. She wondered what he was trying to teach her, other than that none of her notions of how the world worked were true.

Meditation was the worst.

Jiang announced in the third month of the term that henceforth Rin would spend an hour each day meditating with him. Rin half hoped he would forget this stipulation, the same way he occasionally forgot what year it was, or what his name was.

But of all the rules Jiang imposed on her, he chose this one to observe faithfully.

“You will sit still for one hour, every morning, in the garden, without exception.”

She did. She hated it.

“Press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. Feel your spine elongate. Feel the spaces between your vertebrae. Wake up!”

Rin inhaled sharply and jerked out of her slump. Jiang’s voice, always so quiet and soothing, had been putting her to sleep.

The spot above her left eyebrow twitched. She fidgeted. Jiang would scold her if she scratched it. She raised her brow as high as it could go instead. The itching intensified.

“Sit still,” Jiang said.

“My back hurts,” Rin complained.

“That’s because you’re not sitting up straight.”

“I think it’s cramped from sparring.”

“I think you’re full of shit.”

Five minutes passed in silence. Rin twisted her back to one side, then the other. Something popped. She winced.

She was painfully bored. She counted her teeth with her tongue. She counted again starting from the opposite direction. She shifted her weight from one butt cheek to the other. She felt an intense urge to get up, move, jump around, anything.

She peeked one eye open and found Master Jiang staring directly back at her.

“Sit. Still.”

She swallowed her protest and obeyed.

Meditation felt like a massive waste of time to Rin, who was used to years of stress and constant studying. It felt wrong to be sitting so still, to have nothing occupying her mind. She could barely stand three minutes of this torture, let alone sixty. She was so terrified of the thought of not thinking that she wasn’t able to accomplish it because she kept thinking about not thinking.

Jiang, on the other hand, could meditate indefinitely. He became like a statue, serene and tranquil. He seemed like air, like he might fade away if she didn’t concentrate enough on him. He seemed like he’d simply left his body behind and gone somewhere else.

A fly settled on her nose. Rin sneezed violently.

“Start the time over,” Jiang said placidly.

“Damn it!”

When spring returned to Sinegard, when the weather was warm enough that Rin could stop bundling up in her thick winter robes, Jiang took her on a hiking trip into the nearby Wudang mountain range. They walked for two hours in silence, until noon, when Jiang chose to stop at a sunny alcove that overlooked the entire valley below.

“The subject of today’s lesson will be plants.” He sat down, pulled off his satchel, and emptied the contents onto the grass. Out spilled an assortment of plants and powders, the severed arm of a cactus, several bright red poppy flowers with pods still attached, and a handful of sun-dried mushrooms.

“Are we getting high?” Rin said. “Oh, wow. We’re getting high, aren’t we?”

“I’m getting high,” said Jiang. “You’re watching.”

He lectured as he crushed the poppy seeds in a small stone bowl with a pestle. “None of these plants are native to Sinegard. These mushrooms were cultivated in the forests of the Hare Province. You won’t find them anywhere else; they do well only in tropical climates. This cactus grows best in the Baghra Desert between our northern border and the Hinterlands. This powder is derived from a bush found only in the rain forests of the southern hemisphere. The bush grows small orange fruit that are tasteless and sticky. But the drug is made from the dried, shredded root of the plant.”

“And possession of all of these in Sinegard is a capital offense,” Rin said, because she felt one of them might as well mention that.

“Ah. The law.” Jiang sniffed at an unidentified leaf and then tossed it away. “So inconvenient. So irrelevant.” He looked suddenly at her. “Why does Nikan frown upon drug use?”

He did this often: hurled questions at her that she hadn’t prepared answers to. If she spoke too quickly or made a hasty generalization, he challenged it, backed her up into an argumentative corner until she spelled out exactly what she meant and justified it rigorously.

Rin had enough practice by now to reason carefully before uttering a response. “Because use of psychedelics is associated with blown minds, wasted potential, and social chaos. Because drug addicts can give very little to society. Because it is an ongoing plague on our country left by the dear Federation.”

Jiang nodded slowly. “Well put. Do you agree?”

Rin shrugged. She had seen enough of the opium dens of Tikany to know the effects of addiction. She understood why the laws were so harsh. “I agree now,” she said carefully. “But I suppose I’ll change my mind after you’ve had your say.”

Jiang’s mouth quirked into a lopsided grin. “It is the nature of all things to have a dual purpose,” he said. “You’ve seen what poppy does to the common man. And given what you know of addiction, your conclusions are reasonable. Opium makes wise men stupid. It destroys local economies and weakens entire countries.”

He weighed another handful of poppy seeds in his palm. “But something so destructive inherently and simultaneously has marvelous potential. The poppy flower, more than anything, displays the duality of hallucinogens. You know poppy by three names. In its most common form, as opium nuggets smoked from a pipe, poppy makes you useless. It numbs you and closes you off to the world. Then there is the madly addictive heroin, which is extracted as a powder from the sap of the flower. But the seeds? These seeds are a shaman’s dream. These seeds, used with the proper mental preparation, give you access to the entire universe contained within your mind.”

He put the poppy seeds down and gestured to the array of psychedelics before him. “Shamans across continents have used plants to alter their states of consciousness for centuries. The medicine men of the Hinterlands used this flower to fly upward like an arrow to enter into communion with the gods. This one will put you into a trance where you might enter the Pantheon.”

Rin’s eyes widened. Here it was. Slowly the lines began to connect. She was finally beginning to understand the purpose of the last six months of research and meditation. So far she had been pursuing two separate lines of inquiry—the shamans and their abilities; the gods and the nature of the universe.

Now, with the introduction of psychedelic plants, Jiang drew these threads into one unified theory, a theory of spiritual connection through psychedelics to the dream world where the gods might reside.

The separate concepts in her mind flung connections at one another, like a web suddenly grown overnight. The formative background Jiang had been laying suddenly made total, utter sense.

She had an outline, but the picture hadn’t fully developed. Something didn’t square.

“Contained within my mind?” Rin repeated carefully.

Jiang glanced sideways at her. “Do you know what the word entheogen means?”

She shook her head.

“It means the generation of the god within,” he said. He reached out and tapped her forehead in that same place. “The merging of god and person.”

“But we aren’t gods,” she said. She had spent the past week in the library trying to trace Nikara theology to its roots. Nikara religious mythology was full of encounters between the mortal and divine, but nowhere in her research had anyone mentioned anything about god-creation. “Shamans communicate with gods. They don’t create gods.”

“What’s the difference between a god within and a god outside? What is the difference between the universe contained in your mind and the universe external?” Jiang tapped both of her temples. “Wasn’t that the basis of your criticism of Hesperia’s theological hierarchy? That the idea of a divine creator separate from us and ruling over us made no sense?”

“Yes, but . . .” She trailed off, trying to make sense of what she wanted to say. “I didn’t mean that we are gods, I meant that . . .” She wasn’t sure what she meant. She looked at Jiang in supplication.

For once, he gave her the easy answer. “You must conflate these concepts. The god outside you. The god within. Once you understand that these are one and the same, once you can hold both concepts in your head and know them to be true, you’ll be a shaman.”

“But it can’t be so simple,” Rin stammered. Her mind was still reeling. She struggled to formulate her thoughts. “If this is . . . then . . . then why doesn’t everyone do this? Why doesn’t anyone in the opium houses stumble upon the gods?”

“Because they don’t know what they’re looking for. The Nikara don’t believe in their deities, remember?”

“Fine,” Rin said, refusing to rise to the bait of having her own words thrown in her face. “But why not?” She had thought the Nikara religious skepticism was reasonable, but not when people like Jiang could do the things they did. “Why aren’t there more believers?”

“Once there were,” Jiang said, and she was surprised at how bitter he sounded. “Once there were monasteries upon monasteries. Then the Red Emperor in his quest for unification came and burned them down. Shamans lost their power. The monks—the ones with real power, anyhow—died or disappeared.”

“Where are they now?”

“Hidden,” he said. “Forgotten. In recent history, only the nomadic clans of the Hinterlands and the tribes of Speer had anyone who could commune with the gods. This is no coincidence. The national quest to modernize and mobilize entails a faith in one’s ability to control world order, and when that happens, you lose your connection with the gods. When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality. Once, this academy was a monastery. Now it is a military training ground. You’ll find this same pattern has repeated itself in all the great powers of this world that have entered a so-called civilized age. Mugen doesn’t have shamans. Hesperia doesn’t have shamans. They worship men whom they believe are gods, not gods themselves.”

“What about Nikara superstition?” Rin asked. “I mean—in Sinegard, obviously, where people are educated, religion’s defunct, but what about the little villages? What about folk religion?”

“The Nikara believe in icons, not gods,” said Jiang. “They don’t understand what they’re worshipping. They’ve prioritized ritual over theology. Sixty-four gods of equal standing? How convenient, and how absurd. Religion cannot be packaged so cleanly. The gods are not so neatly organized.”

“But I don’t understand,” she said. “Why have the shamans disappeared? Wouldn’t the Red Emperor be all the more powerful for having shamans in his army?”

“No. In fact, the opposite is true. The creation of empire requires conformity and uniform obedience. It requires teachings that can be mass-produced across the entire country. The Militia is a bureaucratic entity that is purely interested in results. What I teach is impossible to duplicate to a class of fifty, much less a division of thousands. The Militia is composed almost entirely of people like Jun, who think that things matter only if they are getting results immediately, results that can be duplicated and reused. But shamanism is and always has been an imprecise art. How could it be anything else? It is about the most fundamental truths about each and every one of us, how we relate to the phenomenon of existence. Of course it is imprecise. If we understood it completely, then we would be gods.”

Rin was unconvinced. “But surely some teachings could be spread.”

“You overestimate the Empire. Think of martial arts. Why were you able to defeat your classmates in the trial? Because they learned a version that is watered down, distilled and packaged for convenience. The same is true of their religion.”

“But they can’t have forgotten completely,” Rin said. “This class still exists.”

“This class is a joke,” said Jiang.

“I don’t think it’s a joke.”

“You, and no one else,” said Jiang. “Even Jima doubts the value of this course, but she can’t bring herself to abolish it. On some level, Nikara has never given up hope that it can find its shamans again.”

“But it has them,” she said. “I’ll bring shamanism back to this world.”

She glanced hopefully toward him, but Jiang sat frozen, staring over the edge of the cliff as if his mind were somewhere far away. He looked very sad then.

“The age of the gods is over,” he said finally. “The Nikara may speak of shamans in their legends, but they cannot abide the prospect of the supernatural. To them, we are madmen.” He swallowed. “We are not madmen. But how can we convince anyone of this, when the rest of the world believes it so? Once an empire has become convinced of its worldview, anything that evidences the contrary must be erased. The Hinterlanders were banished to the north, cursed and suspected of witchcraft. The Speerlies were marginalized, enslaved, thrown into battle like wild dogs, and ultimately sacrificed.”

“Then we’ll teach them,” she said. “We’ll make them remember.”

“No one else would have the patience to learn what I have taught you. It’s merely our job to remember. I have searched for years for an apprentice, and only you have ever understood the truth of the world.”

Rin felt a pang of disappointment at those words; not for herself but for the Empire. It was difficult to know that she lived in a world where humans had once freely spoken to the gods but no longer did.

How could an entire nation simply forget about gods that might grant unimaginable power?

Easily, that’s how.

The world was simpler when all that existed was what you could perceive in front of you. Easier to forget the underlying forces that constructed the dream. Easier to believe that reality existed only on one plane. Rin had believed that up until this very moment, and her mind still struggled to readjust.

But she knew the truth now, and that gave her power.

Rin stared silently out over the valley below, still grappling to absorb the magnitude of what she had just learned. Meanwhile Jiang packed the powders into a pipe, lit it up, and took a long, deep draught.

His eyes fluttered closed. A serene smile spread over his face.

“Up we go,” he said.

The thing about watching someone get high was that if you weren’t getting high yourself, things got very boring very soon. Rin prodded Jiang after a few minutes, and when he didn’t stir, she went back down the mountain by herself.

If Rin had thought Jiang might let her start using hallucinogens to meditate, she was wrong. He made her help out in the garden, had her watering the cacti and cultivating the mushrooms, but forbade her to try any plants until he gave her permission.

“Without the right mental preparation, psychedelics won’t do anything for you,” he said. “You’ll just become terribly annoying for a while.”

Rin had accepted this initially, but it had now been weeks. “When am I going to be mentally prepared, then?”

“When you can sit still for five minutes without opening your eyes,” he said.

“I can sit still! I’ve been sitting still for nearly a year! That’s all I’ve been doing!”

Jiang brandished his garden shears at her. “Don’t take that tone with me.”

She slammed her tray of cacti clippings on the shelf. “I know there are things you’re not teaching me. I know you’re keeping me behind on purpose. I just don’t understand why.”

“Because you worry me,” said Jiang said. “You have an aptitude for Lore like no one I’ve ever met, not even Altan. But you’re impatient. You’re careless. And you skimp on meditating.”

She had been skimping on meditating. She was supposed to keep a meditation log, to document each time she made it to the end of an hour successfully. But as coursework from her other classes piled up, Rin had neglected her daily requisite period of doing nothing.

“I don’t see the point,” she said. “If it’s focus that you want, I can give you focus. I can concentrate on anything. But to empty my mind? To be devoid of all thought? All sense of self? What good does that serve?”

“It serves to sever you from the material world,” Jiang answered. “How do you expect to reach the spirit realm when you’re obsessing over the things in front of you? I know why it’s hard for you. You like beating your classmates. You like harboring your old grudges. It feels good to hate, doesn’t it? Up until now you’ve been storing your anger up and using it as fuel. But unless you learn to let it go, you are never going to find your way to the gods.”

“So give me a psychedelic,” she suggested. “Make me let it go.”

“Now you’re being rash. I’m not letting you meddle in things that you barely understand yet. It’s too dangerous.”

“How dangerous could it be to just sit still?”

Jiang stood up straight. The hand holding the shears dropped to his side. “This isn’t some fairy story where you wave your hand and ask the gods for three wishes. We are not fucking around here. These are forces that could break you.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” she snapped. “Nothing’s been happening to me for months. You keep going on about seeing the gods, but all that happens when I meditate is that I get bored, my nose itches, and every second takes an eternity.”

She reached for the poppy flowers.

He slapped her hand away. “You’re not ready. You’re not even close to ready.”

Rin flushed. “They’re just drugs—”

“Just drugs? Just drugs?” Jiang’s voice rose in pitch. “I’m going to issue you a warning. And I’m only going to do it once. You’re not the first student to pledge Lore, you know. Oh, Sinegard’s been trying to produce a shaman for years. But you want to know why no one takes this class seriously?”

“Because you keep farting in faculty meetings?”

He didn’t even laugh at that, which meant this was more serious than she’d thought.

Jiang, in fact, looked pained.

“We’ve tried,” he said. “Ten years ago. I had four students just as brilliant as you, without Altan’s rage or your impatience. I taught them to meditate, I taught them about the Pantheon, but those apprentices only had one thing on their minds, which was to call on the gods and siphon their power. Do you know what happened to them?”

“They called the gods and became great warriors?” Rin said hopefully.

Jiang fixed her with his pale, suffocating gaze. “They all went mad. Every single one. Two were calm enough to be locked in an asylum for the rest of their lives. The other two were a danger to themselves and others around them. The Empress had them sent to Baghra.”

She stared at him. She had no idea what to say to that.

“I have met spirits unable to find their bodies again,” said Jiang. He looked very old then. “I have met men who are only halfway to the spirit realm, caught between our world and the next. What does that mean? It means don’t. Fuck. Around.” He tapped her forehead with each word. “If you don’t want that brilliant little mind of yours to shatter, you’ll do as I say.”

The only time Rin felt fully grounded was during her other classes. These were proceeding at twice the rate as they had her first year, and though Rin barely managed to keep up given the absurd course load Jiang had already assigned her, it was nice to study things that made sense for a change.

Rin had always felt like an outsider among her classmates, but as the year carried on, she began to feel as if she inhabited an entirely separate world from them. She was steadily growing further and further away from the world where things functioned as they should, where reality was not constantly in flux, where she thought she knew the shape and nature of things instead of being constantly reminded that really she knew nothing at all.

“Seriously,” Kitay asked over lunch one day. “What are you learning?”

Kitay, like everyone else in her class, thought that Lore was a course in religious history, a smorgasbord of anthropology and folk mythology. She hadn’t bothered to correct them. Easier to spread a believable lie than to convince them of the truth.

“That none of my beliefs about the world were true,” Rin answered dreamily. “That reality is malleable. That hidden connections exist in every living object. That the whole of the world is merely a thought, a butterfly’s dream.”

“Rin?”

“Yes?”

“Your elbow is in my porridge.”

She blinked. “Oh. Sorry.”

Kitay slid his bowl farther away from her arm. “They talk about you, you know. The other apprentices.”

Rin folded her arms. “And what do they say?”

He paused. “You can probably catch the drift. It’s not, uh, good.”

Had she expected anything else? She rolled her eyes. “They don’t like me. Big surprise.”

“It’s not that,” Kitay said. “They’re scared of you.”

“Because I won the Tournament?”

“Because you stormed in here from a rural township no one’s ever heard of, then threw away one of the school’s most prestigious bids to study with the academy madman. They can’t figure you out. They don’t know what you’re trying to do.” Kitay cocked his head at her. “What are you trying to do?”

She hesitated. She knew that look on Kitay’s face. He’d been wearing it more often of late, as her own studies grew more and more distant from topics that she could easily explain to a layman. Kitay hated not having full access to information, and she hated keeping things from him. But how was she supposed to articulate the point of studying Lore to him, when often she could barely justify it to herself?

“Something happened to me that day in the ring,” she said finally. “I’m trying to figure out what.”

She’d braced herself to deal with Kitay’s clinical skepticism, but he only nodded. “And you think Jiang has the answers?”

She exhaled. “If he doesn’t, nobody does.”

“You’ve heard the rumors, though—”

“The madmen. The dropouts. The prisoners at Baghra,” she said. Everyone had their own horror story about Jiang’s previous apprentices. “I know. Trust me, I know.”

Kitay gave her a long, searching look. Finally he nodded toward her untouched bowl of porridge. She’d been cramming for one of Jima’s exams; she’d forgotten to eat.

“Just take care of yourself,” he said.

Second-years were granted eligibility to fight in the ring.

Now that Altan had graduated, the star of the matches turned out to be Nezha, who was rapidly becoming an even more formidable fighter under Jun’s brutal training. Within a month he was challenging students two or three years his senior; by their second spring he was the undefeated champion of the rings.

Rin had been eager to enter the matches, but one conversation with Jiang had put an end to her aspirations.

“You don’t fight,” he said one day as they were balancing on posts above the stream.

She immediately splashed into the water.

“What?” she sputtered once she climbed out.

“The matches are only for apprentices whose masters have consented.”

“Then consent!”

Jiang dipped a toe into the water and pulled it back out gingerly. “Nah.”

“But I want to fight!”

“Interesting, but irrelevant.”

“But—”

“No buts. I’m your master. You don’t question my orders, you obey them.”

“I’ll obey orders that make sense to me,” she retorted as she teetered wildly on a post.

Jiang snorted. “The matches aren’t about winning, they’re about demonstrating new techniques. What are you going to do, light up in front of the entire student body?”

She didn’t push the point further.

Aside from the matches, which Rin attended regularly, she rarely saw her roommates; Niang was always working overtime with Enro, and Venka spent her waking hours either on patrol with the City Guard or training with Nezha.

Kitay began studying with her in the women’s dormitory, but only because it was the one place on campus always guaranteed to be empty. The newest class of first-years had no women, and Kureel and Arda had left the Academy at the end of Rin’s first year. Both had been offered prestigious positions as junior officers, in the Third and Eighth Divisions respectively.

Altan, too, was gone. But no one knew which division he had joined. Rin had expected it to be the talk of campus. But Altan had vanished as if he’d never been at Sinegard. The legend of Altan Trengsin had already begun to fade within their class, and when the next group of first-years came to Sinegard, none of them even knew who Altan was.

As the months passed, Rin found that one unexpected benefit of being the only apprentice who had pledged Lore was that she was no longer in direct competition with the rest of her classmates.

By no means did they become friendly. But Rin stopped hearing jokes about her accent, Venka stopped wrinkling her nose every time they were both in the women’s dormitory, and one by one the other Sinegardians grew accustomed to, if not enthusiastic about, her presence.

Nezha was the sole exception.

They shared every class except Combat and Lore. They each did their best to utterly ignore the other’s existence. Many of their advanced classes were so small that this often became incredibly awkward, but Rin supposed cold disengagement was better than active bullying.

Still, she paid attention to Nezha. How could she not? He was clearly the star of the class—inferior to Kitay perhaps in only Strategy and Linguistics, but otherwise Nezha had essentially become the new Altan of the school. The masters adored him; the incoming class of pupils thought he was a god.

“He’s not that special,” she grumbled to Kitay. “He didn’t even win his year’s Tournament. Do any of them know that?”

“Sure they do.” Kitay, not looking up from his language homework, spoke with the patient exasperation of someone who’d had this conversation many times before.

“Then why don’t they worship me?” Rin complained.

“Because you don’t fight in the ring.” Kitay filled in a final blank on his chart of Hesperian verb conjugations. “And also because you’re weird and not as pretty.”

In general, however, the childish infighting within their class had disappeared. It was partly because they were simply getting older, partly because the stress of the Trials had disappeared—apprentices were secure in their enrollment so long as they kept their grades up—and partly because their coursework had gotten so difficult they couldn’t be bothered with petty rivalries.

But near the end of their second year, the class began to split again—this time along provincial and political lines.

The proximate cause was a diplomatic crisis with Federation troops on the border of Horse Province. An outpost brawl between Mugenese traders and Nikara laborers had turned deadly. The Mugenese had sent in armed policemen to kill the instigators. The border patrol of the Horse Province responded in kind.

Master Irjah was summoned immediately to the Empress’s diplomatic party, which meant Strategy was canceled for two weeks. The students didn’t know that, though, until they found the hastily scrawled note Irjah had left behind.

“‘Don’t know when I’ll be back. Open fire from both sides. Four civilians dead.’” Niang read Irjah’s note aloud. “Gods. That’s war, isn’t it?”

“Not necessarily.” Kitay was the only one who seemed utterly calm. “There are skirmishes all the time.”

“But there were casualties—”

“There are always casualties,” said Kitay. “This has been going on for nearly two decades. We hate them, they hate us, a handful of people die because of it.”

“Nikara citizens are dead!” Niang exclaimed.

“Sure, but the Empress isn’t going to do anything about it.”

“There’s nothing she can do,” Han interrupted. “Horse Province doesn’t have enough troops to hold a front—our population’s too small, there’s no one to recruit from. The real problem is that some Warlords don’t know how to put national interest first.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nezha said.

“What I know is that my father’s men are dying on the border,” said Han. The sudden venom in his voice surprised Rin. “Meanwhile, your father’s sitting pretty in his little palace, turning a blind eye because he’s kept nice and safe between two buffer provinces.”

Before anyone could move, Nezha’s hand shot toward the back of Han’s neck and slammed his face into the desk.

The classroom fell silent.

Han looked up, too stunned to retaliate. His nose had broken with an audible crack; blood streamed freely down his chin.

Nezha released Han’s neck. “Shut up about my father.”

Han spat out something that looked like a fragment of a tooth. “Your father’s a fucking coward.”

“I said shut up—”

“You have the biggest surplus of troops in the Empire and you won’t deploy them,” Han said. “Why, Nezha? Planning to use them for something else?”

Nezha’s eyes flashed. “You want me to break your neck?”

“The Mugenese aren’t going to invade,” Kitay interrupted quickly. “They’ll make noise on the Horse Province border, sure, but they won’t commit ground troops. They don’t want to make Hesperia angry—”

“The Hesperians don’t give a shit,” said Han. “They haven’t bothered with the eastern hemisphere for years. No ambassadors, no diplomats—”

“Because of the armistice,” Kitay said. “They think they don’t need to. But if the Federation tips the balance, they’ll have to intervene. And Mugen’s leadership knows that.”

“They also know we have no coordinated frontier defense and no navy,” Han snapped. “Don’t be delusional.”

“A ground invasion is not rational for them,” Kitay insisted. “The armistice benefits them. They don’t want to bleed thousands of men in the Empire’s heartland. There will be no war.”

“Sure.” Han crossed his arms. “What are we training for, then?”

The second crisis came two months later. Several border cities in Horse Province had begun to boycott Mugenese goods. The Mugenese governor-generals responded by methodically closing, looting, then burning down any Nikara businesses located on the Mugenese side of the border.

When the news broke, Han abruptly departed the Academy to join his father’s battalion. Jima threatened permanent expulsion if he left without permission; Han responded by tossing his armband onto her desk.

The third crisis was the death of the Federation’s emperor. Nikara spies reported that the crown prince Ryohai was lined up to succeed to the throne, news that deeply unsettled every master at the academy. Prince Ryohai—young, hotheaded, and violently nationalist—was a leading member of Mugen’s war party.

“He’s been calling for a ground invasion for years,” Irjah explained to the class. “Now he has his chance to actually do it.”

The next six weeks were terribly tense. Even Kitay had stopped arguing that Mugen would do nothing. Several students, most from the outer north, put in requests for a home leave. They were denied without exception. A few left regardless, but most obeyed Jima’s command—if it came down to a war, then some affiliation with Sinegard was better than none.

The new Emperor Ryohai did not declare a ground invasion. The Empress sent a diplomatic party to the longbow island, and by all accounts was politely received by Mugen’s new administration. The crisis passed. But a cloud of anxiety hung over the academy still—and nothing could not erase the growing fear that their class might be the first to graduate into a war.

The one person seemingly uninterested in news of Federation politics was Jiang. If asked about Mugen, he grimaced and waved the subject away; if pressed, he squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and sang out loud like a little child.

“But you fought the Federation!” Rin exclaimed. “How can you not care?”

“I don’t remember that,” Jiang said.

“How can you not remember that?” she demanded. “You were in the Second Poppy War—all of you were!”

“That’s what they tell me,” Jiang said.

“So then—”

“So I don’t remember,” Jiang said loudly, and his voice took on a fragile, tremulous tone that made Rin realize she had better drop the subject or risk sending him on a weeklong spell of absence or erratic behavior.

But as long as she didn’t bring up the Federation, Jiang continued to conduct their lessons in the same meandering, lackadaisical manner. It had taken Rin until the end of her first year of apprenticeship to learn to meditate for an hour without moving; once she could do that, Jiang had demanded that she meditate for five. This took her nearly another year. When she finally managed it, Jiang gave her a small opaque flask, the kind used to store sorghum wine, and instructed her to take it to the top of the mountain.

“There’s a cave near the peak. You’ll know it when you see it. Drink down that flask, then start meditating.”

“What’s in it?”

Jiang examined his fingernails. “Bits and things.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes. Days. Weeks. Months. I can’t tell you before you start.”

Rin told her other masters that she would be absent from class for an indefinite period of time. By now they had resigned themselves to Jiang’s nonsense; they waved her off and told her to try not to be gone for more than a year. She hoped they were joking.

Jiang did not accompany her to the top. He bade her farewell from the highest tier of the campus. “Here’s a cloak in case you get cold. There’s not much up there in terms of rain shelter. I’ll see you on the other side.”

It rained the entire morning. Rin hiked miserably, wiping mud off her shoes every few steps. When she reached the cave, she was shivering so hard that she almost dropped the flask.

She glanced around the muddy interior. She wanted to build a fire to warm herself, but couldn’t find any material for kindling that wasn’t soaked through. She huddled into the far end of the cave, as far away from the rain as she could get, and assumed a cross-legged stance. Then she closed her eyes.

She thought of the warrior Bodhidharma, meditating for years while listening to the ants scream. She suspected that the ants wouldn’t be the only ones screaming when she was done.

The contents of the flask turned out to be a slightly bitter tea. She thought it might be a hallucinogen distilled in liquid, but hours passed and her mind was as clear as ever.

Night fell. She meditated in darkness.

At first it was horribly difficult.

She couldn’t sit still. She was hungry after six hours. All she thought about was her stomach. But after a while the hunger was so overwhelming that she couldn’t think about it anymore, because she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been this hungry.

On the second day she felt dizzy. She was woozy with hunger, so starved that she couldn’t feel her stomach. Did she even have a stomach? What was a stomach?

On the third day her head was delightfully light. She was just air, just breath, just a breathing organ. A fan. A flute. In, out, in, out, and on and on.

On the fifth day things moved too fast, too slow, or not at all. She felt infuriated by the slow passage of time. Her brain was racing in a way that wouldn’t calm; she felt as if her heartbeat must now be faster than a hummingbird’s. How had she not dissolved? How had she not vibrated into nothingness?

On the seventh day she tipped into the void. Her body became very still; so still that she forgot she had one. Her left finger itched and she was amazed at the sensation. She didn’t scratch it, but observed the itch as if from the outside and marveled that after a very long time, it went away by itself.

She learned how breath moved through her body as if through an empty house. Learned how to stack her vertebrae one by one on top of each other so her spine formed a perfectly straight line, an unobstructed channel.

But her still body became heavy, and as it became heavy it became easier and easier to discard it, and to drift upward, weightless, into that place she could glimpse only from behind closed eyelids.

On the ninth day she suffered a geometric assault of lines and shapes without form or color, without regard to any aesthetic value except randomness.

You stupid shapes, she thought over and over again like a mantra. You stupid fucking shapes.

On the thirteenth day she had a horrible sensation of being trapped, as if buried within stone, as if covered in mud. She was so light, so weightless, but she had nowhere to go; she rebounded around inside this bizarre vessel called a body like a caught firefly.

On the fifteenth day she became convinced that her consciousness had expanded to encompass the totality of life on the planet—the germination of the smallest flower to the eventual death of the largest tree. She saw an endless process of energy transfer, growing and dying, and she was part of every stage of it.

She saw bursts of color and animals that probably didn’t exist. She did not see visions, precisely, because visions would have been far more vivid and concrete. But nor were the apparitions merely thoughts. They were like dreams, an uncertain plane of realness somewhere in between, and it was only by washing out every other thought from her mind that she could perceive them clearly.

She stopped counting the days. She had traveled somewhere beyond time; a place where a year and a minute felt the same. What was the difference between finite and infinite? There was being and nonbeing and that was it. Time was not real.

The apparitions became solid. Either she was dreaming, or she had transcended somewhere, but when she took a step forward, her foot touched cold stone. She looked around and saw that she stood in a tiled room no larger than a washroom. There were no doors.

A form appeared before her, dressed in strange garb. At first she thought it was Altan, but the figure’s face was softer, its crimson eyes rounder and kinder.

“They said you’d come,” said the figure. The voice was a woman’s, deep and sad. “The gods have known you’d come.”

Rin was at a loss for words. Something about the Woman was deeply familiar, and it wasn’t just her resemblance to Altan. The shape of her face, the clothes she wore . . . they sparked memories Rin didn’t know she had, of sands and water and open skies.

“You will be asked to do what I refused to do,” said the Woman. “You will be offered power beyond your imagination. But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain. The Pantheon controls the fabric of the universe. To deviate from their premeditated order you must give them something in return. And for the gifts of the Phoenix, you will pay the most. The Phoenix wants suffering. The Phoenix wants blood.”

“I have blood in abundance,” Rin answered. She had no idea what possessed her to say it, but she continued. “I can give the Phoenix what it desires, if the Phoenix gives me power.”

The Woman’s tone grew agitated. “The Phoenix doesn’t give. Not permanently. The Phoenix takes, and takes, and takes . . . Fire is insatiable, alone among the elements . . . it will devour you until you are nothing . . .”

“I’m not afraid of fire,” said Rin.

“You should be,” hissed the Woman. She glided slowly toward Rin; she didn’t move her legs, didn’t quite walk, but simply appeared larger and closer with every passing moment—

Rin couldn’t breathe. She didn’t feel the least bit calm; this was nothing like the peace she was supposed to have achieved, this was terrible . . . She suddenly heard a cacophony of screams echoing around her ears, and then the Woman was screaming and shrieking, writhing in the air like a tortured dancer, even as she reached out and seized Rin’s arm . . .

. . . Images spun around Rin, brown-skinned bodies dancing around a campfire, mouths open in grotesque leers, shouting words in a language that sounded like something she’d heard in a dream she no longer remembered . . . The campfire flared and the bodies fell back, burned, charred, disintegrating to nothing but glistening white bones, and Rin thought that was the end of it—death ended things—but the bones jumped back up and continued to dance . . . One of the skeletons looked at her with its bare, toothy smile, and beckoned with a fleshless hand:

“From ashes we came and to ashes we return . . .”

The Woman’s grip around Rin’s shoulders tightened; she leaned forward and whispered fiercely in Rin’s ear: “Go back.”

But Rin was enticed by the fire . . . she looked past the bones into the flames, which were furling upward like something alive, taking the shape of a living god, an animal, a bird . . .

The bird lowered its head at them.

The Woman burst into flame.

Then Rin was floating upward again, flying like an arrow at the sky to the realm of the gods.

When she opened her eyes, Jiang was crouched in front of her, watching her intently with his pale eyes. “What did you see?”

She took a deep breath. Tried to orient herself to possessing a body again. She felt so clumsy and heavy, like a puppet formed badly out of wet clay.

“A great circular room,” she said hesitantly, squinting to remember her final vision. She did not know if she was having trouble finding the words, or if it was simply her mouth that refused to obey. Every order she gave her body seemed to happen only after a delay. “It was arranged like a set of trigrams, but with thirty-two points splitting into sixty-four. And creatures on pedestals all around the circle.”

“Plinths,” Jiang corrected.

“You’re right. Plinths.”

“You saw the Pantheon,” he said. “You found the gods.”

“I suppose.” Her voice trailed off. She felt somewhat confused. Had she found the gods? Or had she only imagined those sixty-four deities, spinning about her like glass beads?

“You seem skeptical,” he said.

“I was tired,” she answered. “I don’t know if it was real, or . . . I mean, I could have just been dreaming.” How were her visions any different from her imagination? Had she seen those things only because she wanted to?

“Dreaming?” Jiang tilted his head. “Have you ever seen anything like the Pantheon before? In a diagram? Or a painting?”

She frowned. “No, but—”

“The plinths. Were you expecting those?”

“No,” she said, “but I’ve seen plinths before, and the Pantheon wouldn’t have been too difficult to conjure from my imagination.”

“But why that particular dream? Why would your sleeping mind have chosen to extract those images from your memory compared to any other images? Why not a horse, or a field of jasmine flowers, or Master Jun riding buck naked on the back of a tiger?”

Rin blinked. “Is that something you dream about?”

“Answer the question,” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said, frustrated. “Why do people dream what they dream?”

But he was smiling, as if that was precisely what he’d wanted to hear. “Why indeed?”

She had no response to that. She stared blankly out at the mouth of the cave, mulling these thoughts in her mind, and realized that she had awoken in more ways than one.

Her map of the world, her understanding of reality, had shifted. She could see the outlines, even if she didn’t know how to fill in the blanks. She knew the gods existed and that they spoke, and that was enough.

It had taken a long time, but she finally had a vocabulary for what they were learning now. Shamans: those who communed with the gods. The gods: forces of nature, entities as real and yet ephemeral as wind and fire themselves, things inherent to the existence of the universe.

When Hesperians wrote of “God,” they wrote of the supernatural.

When Jiang talked of “gods,” he talked of the eminently natural.

To commune with the gods was to walk the dream world, the world of spirit. It was to relinquish that which she was and become one with the fundamental state of things. The space in limbo where matter and actions were not yet determined, the fluctuating darkness where the physical world had not yet been dreamed into existence.

The gods were simply those beings that inhabited that space, forces of creation and destruction, love and hatred, nurturing and neglect, light and dark, cold and warm . . . they opposed one another and complemented one another; they were fundamental truths.

They were the elements that constituted the universe itself.

She saw now that reality was a facade; a dream conjured by the undulating forces beneath a thin surface. And by meditating, by ingesting the hallucinogen, by forgetting her connection to the material world, she was able to wake up.

“I understand the truth of things,” she murmured. “I know what it means to exist.”

He smiled. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

She understood, then, that Jiang was very far from mad.

He might, in fact, be the sanest person she had ever met.

A thought occurred to her. “So what happens when we die?”

Jiang raised an eyebrow. “I think you can answer that.”

She mulled over this for a moment. “We go back to the world of spirit. We—we leave the illusion. We wake up.”

Jiang nodded. “We don’t die so much as we return to the void. We dissolve. We lose our ego. We change from being just one thing to becoming everything. Most of us, at least.”

She opened her mouth to ask what he meant by that, but Jiang reached out and poked her in the forehead. “How do you feel?”

“Incredible,” she said. She felt more clearheaded than she had in months, as if all this time she’d been trying to peer through a fog and it had suddenly disappeared. She was ecstatic; she’d solved the puzzle, she knew the source of her power, and now all that remained was to learn to siphon it out at will. “So what now?”

“Now we’ve solved your problem,” said Jiang. “Now you know how you are connected to a greater web of cosmological forces. Sometimes martial artists who are particularly attuned to the world will find themselves overwhelmed by one of those forces. They suffer an imbalance—an affinity to one god over the others. This happened to you in the ring. But now you know where that flame came from, and when it happens to you again, you can journey to the Pantheon to find its balance. Now you’re cured.”

Rin jerked her head toward her master.

Cured?

Cured?

Jiang looked pleased, relieved, and serene, but Rin only felt confused. She hadn’t studied Lore so that she could still the flames. Yes, the fire had felt awful, but it had also felt powerful. She had felt powerful.

She wanted to learn to channel it, not to suppress it.

“Problem?” Jiang asked.

“I . . . I don’t . . .” She bit down on her lip before the words tumbled out of her mouth. Jiang was violently averse to any discussion of warfare; if she kept asking about military use, then he might drop her again the way he had before the Trials. He already thought she was too impulsive, too reckless and impatient; she knew how easily she might scare him off.

Never mind. If Jiang wasn’t going to teach her to call the power, then she’d figure it out for herself.

“So what’s the point of this?” she asked. “Just to feel good?”

“The point? What point? You’re enlightened. You have a better understanding of the cosmos than most theologians alive!” Jiang waved his hands around his head. “Do you have any idea what you can do with this knowledge? The Hinterlanders have been interpreting the future for years, reading the cracks in a tortoise shell to divine events to come. They can fix illnesses of the body by healing the spirit. They can speak to plants, cure diseases of the mind . . .”

Rin wondered why the Hinterlanders would achieve all of this and not militarize their abilities, but she held her tongue. “So how long will that take?”

“It makes no sense to speak of this in measurements of years,” said Jiang. “The Hinterlanders don’t allow interpretation of divinations until one has been training for at least five. Shamanic training is a process that lasts across your lifetime.”

She couldn’t accept that, though. She wanted power, and she wanted it now—especially if they were on the verge of a war with the Mugenese.

Jiang was watching her curiously.

Be careful, she reminded herself. She still had too much to learn from Jiang. She’d have to play along.

“Anything else?” he asked after a while.

She thought of the Speerly Woman’s admonitions. She thought of the Phoenix, and of fire and pain.

“No,” she said. “Nothing else.”