by Fonda Lee
She walked outside with Lan. They were alone. The sun had set, leaving a smoggy afterglow that outlined the roofs of the buildings positioned around the central courtyard. Shae sank onto a stone bench next to the draping maple tree and heaved a deep sigh. Lan sat down next to her. For a second they didn’t speak. Then they glanced at each other and both laughed weakly.
“That could have gone worse,” she said.
“Like I said, he was in a good mood today. The doctor says he needs to start wearing less jade, but that’s a battle I’ve been putting off.” Lan looked away for a second, but Shae caught the wince that flashed across his face.
“How’s Ma?” Shae asked.
“She’s doing well. She likes it out there. It’s very peaceful.”
Long ago, their mother had resigned herself to a life of single parenthood and catering to her demanding father-in-law in exchange for a secure and comfortable life as the respected widow of the No Peak clan’s ruling family. As soon as Shae had turned eighteen, Kaul Wan Ria had retired to the family’s coastal cottage home in Marenia, a three-hour drive south from Janloon. To Shae’s knowledge, she’d not been back to the city since.
Lan said, “You should make the trip out to visit her. No rush—once you’re settled.”
“And you?” Shae asked. “How’re you doing?”
Lan turned his face toward her, his left eye narrowed. Everyone said that he looked like their father, but Shae didn’t see it. Her brother had a steadfast and soulful manner, not like the ferocious-looking guerrilla in the old photographs on her grandfather’s wall. He seemed about to say something to her, then appeared to change his mind and said something else. “I’m fine, Shae. Clan business keeps me busy.”
Guilt washed in. She hadn’t been reliable about responding to Lan’s letters when she’d been in Espenia; she could hardly expect him to confide in her now. She was not even sure she wanted his confidence, not if it meant hearing about territorial disputes, or misbehaving Lantern Men, or Fists that had been killed in duels—clan things she’d told herself she would keep out of from now on. Nevertheless, she thought about how her brother had been shouldering the position of Pillar while coping with Eyni leaving him and their grandfather’s dramatic decline, with only Hilo and nasty old Doru to help him. “I haven’t been here for you,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“You have to live your own life, Shae.”
There was no reprimand in his voice, and Shae gave thanks to the gods that Lan was the first member of the family she’d met upon returning. He didn’t make her feel ashamed for leaving, nor ashamed for returning. That was more than she deserved—and more than she could expect from the rest of her family.
The jet lag was catching up, and she was exhausted now. The lights went on in the house and then dimmed; Kyanla’s shape moved in the upper windows, drawing shut the blinds. In the dark, the motionless outlines of the benches and trees Shae had played around as a child seemed coolly remonstrative, like aloof relatives. She realized that Kekon had a special smell, a certain indescribable, spicy, sweaty fragrance. Was that what she’d smelled like to all her Espenian classmates? She imagined the odor seeping back into her pores. She put a hand on Lan’s arm. His jade aura coursed around her like a low bass vibration, and she leaned in closer, but not too close.
Shae checked into a hotel room in the city and spent the next three days searching for an apartment. Though she didn’t want to be too near the Kaul home, it wasn’t as if she could live wherever she wanted. She could take off her jade but not her face or her name; there were parts of the city it would be best for her to avoid. Even confining the search to districts firmly in No Peak control, she spent from dawn until past dusk taking the malodorously crowded subway from stop to stop, sweating ferociously in the summer heat, visiting one building after another.
This could be a whole lot easier, she griped to herself more than a few times. The right word from Lan to a Lantern Man landlord would’ve yielded her a well-appointed apartment in no time. The rent would be half what it really was, if that, and the landlord would rest assured that some building permit or construction contract he’d been waiting on would be approved right away. She held fast to her pledge to do without family help. She’d lived frugally as a student, and when converted, the Espenian money she’d saved from her summer internship last year would be more than enough to cover six months of rent in Janloon if she was judicious. By the end of the third day of searching, she was sore-footed and weary but had signed for a modest though convenient one-bedroom loft in North Sotto and was pleased with herself.
Hilo was waiting in the lobby of the hotel when she returned. He was slouched in one of the overstuffed leather armchairs, but when he saw Shae come in, he sat up, and the Fist that was with him—one of the Maik brothers, Shae couldn’t remember which one—got up from the chair next to him and moved to the other side of the room to let them talk alone.
Her brother didn’t look any different from the last time she’d seen him two years ago, and Shae wondered, with unexpected self-consciousness, if she looked any different to him, if her hair or clothes made her look older, and foreign. Hilo was her senior by a mere eleven months; when she’d left, they’d been equals, of a sort. Now she was unemployed, single, and jadeless. He was one of the most powerful men in Janloon, with hundreds of Green Bones at his command.
She’d known she couldn’t avoid this moment but had told herself it could wait a little longer. Had Lan told him where to find her, or had the hotel staff tipped off his Fingers? As he rose to greet her, Shae braced herself. A hotel lobby was really not the place she’d pictured doing this. “Hilo,” she said.
He embraced her with great affection. “What are you doing here in a hotel? Are you avoiding me?” He sounded genuinely hurt; Shae had forgotten how sensitive he could be sometimes. He put his hands on either side of her face and kissed both her cheeks and her forehead. “I’ve forgotten the past,” he said. “Everything’s forgiven, now that you’re back. You’re my little sister, how could I not forgive you?”
He sounded like Grandda, she thought, with his forgiveness. No forgiveness on his part, of course, for calling her a whore and a clan traitor, and volunteering, in front of her, Lan, and grandfather, to kill Jerald if given the word. If Jerald hadn’t been an Espenian military officer, and Lan hadn’t been in the room to talk everyone down, Kaul Sen might very well have given it, too.
Part of her was determined to stay angry at Hilo. It would’ve been easy if he was still furious at her. But Hilo’s magnanimity was like his jade aura—fierce and unequivocal. She felt its warmth gathering her in, thawing the tension she was carrying like armor plating in her back and shoulders. “I wasn’t avoiding you,” she said. “I just got in and needed some time to get settled, that’s all.”
He took a step back from her, still holding on to her elbows. “Where’s your jade?”
“I’m not wearing it,” she said.
A frown marred Hilo’s face. He leaned in and lowered his voice. “We need you, Shae.” He brought his eyes level with hers, fixing her with an insistent gaze. “The Mountain is going to come after us. All the signs point to it. They think we’re weak. Grandda just sits there and never leaves the house. I don’t trust Doru far enough to spit on him. With you back, though, things will be different. Grandda always liked you best, and with the two of us together behind Lan—”
“Hilo,” she said. “I’m not getting involved. Just because I’m back in Janloon doesn’t mean I’m in the clan business.”
He tilted his head. “But we need you,” he said simply.
A few cruel words at this moment would drive him away. She itched to do it—to hurt him, to reject him, to provoke him—but she was tired of their old rivalry. Fighting Hilo was a crutch, an addictive bad habit she’d had all her life, one she’d tried to leave behind along with her jade, and did not want to return to. They were both adults. She had to remind herself that he was now the Horn of No Peak. If she was goin
g to live on Kekon for any length of time, it wouldn’t do to be on his bad side.
Shae quelled her defensiveness. “I’m not ready,” she said. “I need to figure things out for myself for a while. You can try to respect that, can’t you?”
A few expressions battled openly on Hilo’s face; he appeared to be holding his disappointment in check as he attempted to judge her sincerity. He had come to her, all smiles and brotherly warmth, and when Hilo put himself forward freely, he expected the same of others. Meeting him less than halfway was risky. When he spoke again, his voice was more measured.
“All right. Take the time you need, like you said. But there’s nothing to figure out, Shae. If you don’t want to be a Kaul, you shouldn’t have come back.” He raised a finger before she could reply. “Don’t argue; I don’t want to forget that I’ve forgiven you. You want me to leave you alone for now, I will. But I’m not as patient as Lan.”
He walked away, his jade aura rapidly receding from her like a strong wave sweeping back out to sea. “Hilo,” she called after him. “Say hello to Anden for me.”
Her brother half turned his head to speak over his shoulder. “Go say hello to him yourself.” His lieutenant slid her a remonstrative look as the two of them disappeared into the warm night beyond the doors of the hotel.
CHAPTER
7
Kaul Dushuron Academy
Even in the shade, sweat trickled down the backs and faces of the year-eight students. Ten of them stood nervously, each behind a short tower of hot bricks. “One more,” said the master, and the assistant year-threes hurried to the fire pit with tongs, carefully but quickly removing bricks from the flames and placing another on top of each of the ten smoldering stacks. One of the waiting year-eights, named Ton, muttered quietly, “Ah, what to choose, pain or failure?”
Ton had undoubtedly intended the question for his classmates and not meant for it to be overheard, but Master Sain’s senses were sharp. “Considering that if you fail to pass the Trials at the end of the year, you’ll never wear another pebble of jade again in your life, I would venture to say pain,” he answered drily. The schoolmaster glared down the row of hesitating pupils. “Well? Are you hoping for the bricks to cool?”
Emery Anden rubbed the training band around his left wrist, more out of habit than any real need for additional contact with the jade stones studded into the leather. He closed his eyes, trying to grasp and focus the uncommon energy only a small percentage of Kekonese ever learned to manipulate. A choice between pain or failure, indeed, as Ton had put it. Unleashing proper Strength would break the bricks, but exerting Steel would prevent him from being burned by the blistering hot clay. Unless, as this exercise was meant to instruct, a person could do both: use Strength and Steel in conjunction. A truly skilled Green Bone, of the kind Anden and all his classmates desired to be, could call upon any of the six disciplines—Strength, Steel, Perception, Lightness, Deflection, and Channeling—at any time.
Next to Anden, there was a resounding crack and a muffled yelp of pain from Ton. This isn’t as hard as algebra, Anden reassured himself, then slammed the heel of his hand into the center of the top brick. It crumpled into the one underneath it, and that one into the one beneath it, in a cascading wave of force that lasted only a second but that Anden felt clearly like a line of slowly toppling playing cards, the impact shuddering back up in the other direction as well, dispersing into his arm, shoulder, and body. He pulled his hand away at once, snapping eyes open and examining his hands.
“Hold them out,” said Sain, sounding nearly bored. He paced down the row of students, rubbing the back of his pebbly skinned neck with disappointment. “I see some of you will be spending your break time this afternoon visiting the infirmary,” he said, wrinkling his nose at the blistered hands. He kicked an unbroken brick on the ground. “Others will be bruising yourselves in remedial Strength training.” He came to the end of the row, looked down at Anden’s six broken bricks and unburnt hands, and grunted—the closest thing to praise the deputy headmaster ever offered.
Anden kept his eyes humbly on the cracked bricks in front of him. Smiling or relishing personal success would be an uncouth thing to do, and even though Anden had been born on Kekon and never been off it, he was always on guard against giving the impression of being foreign in some way; it was an old and unconscious impulse he’d had all his life.
Sain clapped his hands together. “Put your bands away. I’ll see you next week, when we’ll do this again until you improve or are too crippled to graduate.”
The trainees touched clasped hands to their foreheads, stifling groans and shuffling aside for the year-threes who came forward to clean up the rubble. Anden turned away, unbuckled the training band from his wrist, and stowed it in its case. Then he squatted down, steadied himself against a wall, and squeezed his eyes shut as the crash hit. Higher jade sensitivity meant worse jade withdrawal, even from short exposure. Sometimes it took Anden twice as long as other students to recover, but he was practiced now. He breathed and forced himself to relax through the disorienting sensation of the world being torn out from under his feet, everything going dim and fractured around the edges, before finally righting and settling into a duller normalcy. In under a minute he had it under control and stood back up, shouldering his bag.
“I heard a grunt from Sain over there,” said Ton, submerging his hand in the basin of cool water a pair of the year-threes had dutifully brought over to their seniors. “Nicely done, Emery.” The name came out sounding Kekonese: Em-Ri.
“My bricks were thinner,” Anden replied politely. “How’s your hand?”
Ton winced, wrapping his palm in a towel and holding his arm stiffly across his stomach. He was a scrawny boy, shorter than Anden, but his Strength was excellent. Jade was strange that way; sometimes it was a skinny woman who could bend a metal bar, or a big, heavy man with the Lightness to run up a wall or leap from a roof—more evidence if there needed to be any that the abilities jade unlocked were something other than physical. “I wish medical Channeling worked better on skin wounds,” Ton said, glum. “Had to happen right before Boat Day, too.” He paused, glancing up at Anden. “Hey, keke, a few of us are planning to hit up the bars in the Docks before the ship sinking next week. You want to come, if you don’t have other plans?”
Anden had the distinct feeling he was being invited as an afterthought—that was often the case—but of course he did not have other plans, and he thought that perhaps Lott Jin would be part of the group going, so he said, “Sure, that sounds good.”
“Great,” said Ton, “see you then.” He cradled his burn and started across the field toward the infirmary. Anden began to walk in the opposite direction, toward the dormitories, musing as he went. After more than seven years at the Academy, he’d grown accustomed to existing in a respectable but somewhat lonely social borderland that only he inhabited, one in which he was never actually excluded, but never actively included either. His classmates were all cordial to him (they had to be), and he could count Ton and a few others as real friends, but Anden knew he made many of his peers faintly uncomfortable in more ways than one and didn’t expect complete acceptance.
Pau Noni, one of the other year-eights, jogged up to him from across the field, her face flushed from the humid midday heat. “Anden! You have a visitor waiting for you out front.” She pointed down the path toward the Academy’s entry pavilion.
A visitor? Anden squinted toward the gates, nudging his glasses up the sweaty bridge of his nose. Nearsightedness made it even harder to come off jade and lose one’s sense of Perception. Who might be visiting him? Anden’s schoolbag bounced against his shoulders as he loped across the training field.
The small east field was one of several on the sixty-acre campus. Kaul Dushuron Academy was built on a hill in Widow’s Park. Although the bustling city of Janloon and its suburbs extended on all sides, the Academy’s high walls, and the old elm and camphor trees that shaded the long, single-level buildings
, separated the grounds from the metropolis and preserved the feel of a traditional Green Bone training sanctuary. The Academy was Kaul Sen’s legacy, a tribute to his son, but even more profoundly, it was one of the most visible pieces of evidence that Green Bone culture had cemented itself into a central position in Kekonese society. When he stopped to consider it, Anden could appreciate that the Academy was as much a symbol as it was a school.
As he came to the small rock garden behind the main entrance, Anden slowed. A man was sitting on one of the low retaining walls, slouched in a posture of boredom. He wore tailored beige pants and his shirt sleeves were rolled halfway up his forearms; his jacket was draped on the wall next to him. At Anden’s approach, the man rose to his feet with languid grace, and Anden saw that it was Kaul Hilo.
A nervous sensation crept around Anden’s chest.
“You look surprised to see me, cousin,” said Hilo. “You didn’t think I’d forget to come wish you a happy birthday, did you?”
Anden had turned eighteen a few days prior. The day had gone unacknowledged, as personal celebrations were considered gauche and frowned upon by the Academy’s instructors. Anden recovered and touched clasped hands to his forehead in respectful greeting. “No, Kaul-jen, it’s just that I know you’re busy these days. I’m honored you’d pay me a visit.”
“I’m honored, Kaul-jen,” Hilo mimicked, his voice exaggeratedly stiff. The left side of his mouth curled into a teasing smile. “What’s with all the formality, Andy? This place isn’t sanding you flat, is it?” Hilo spread his arms wide. “It didn’t work on me.”
You’re a Kaul. The whole school is named after your father. There was privilege even among jadeless initiates; anyone with a different lineage or less talent would have been expelled for the number of misdemeanors Hilo had accumulated as a trainee. Now he was the Horn of No Peak. Go figure.