by Fonda Lee
Shae nodded. “They also won’t want the war to go on long enough for the KJA audit results to be publicized and the reform bills to be enacted. Even if there’s nothing to be done about the jade they’ve already stolen, if the public turns against them, it will be harder for them to keep hold of disputed and conquered territories.” The Weather Man took a swallow of water, staring thoughtfully across the courtyard as she spoke. “The council wants to bring you and Ayt into a room to begin negotiations. Let them do it. Show them that we’re willing to talk. It’ll mollify the Lantern Men, keep them on our side, and it’ll prevent the Espenians from taking any action so long as they think we might come to a peaceful resolution. The longer we hold out, the better our negotiating position will become. We can use the council to stall until spring.”
The Pillar sighed. “These sorts of things—the council, the KJA, the Espenians, these political things. They’re not for me. I never paid attention to them.”
“You have to now,” Shae said firmly, though her eyes held an unexpected hint of sympathy. “There’s only so much I can do as Weather Man. You’re the Pillar. We can win every battle on the streets and still lose the clan if you don’t realize that the war is bigger than you think. Right now, Ayt is on a different level than we are. She’s been working for months or years to gain advantage over us beyond city territory—producing shine offshore, circumventing the KJA and seizing jade … things that no Green Bone clan has thought to do before. Unless we can rise to that level and beat her on it, we can’t survive, much less destroy the Mountain.” A matter-of-fact vindictiveness flattened her voice. “Not just defeat it, but destroy it.”
Hilo tapped his fingers thoughtfully on the metal arm of the chair as he regarded his sister. At last he said, “I’m not bringing up the past against you, I promised just now I wouldn’t, but tell me: Who broke it off, you or Jerald?”
Shae sat up and stared. “What does that have to do with anything?”
He smiled, with an ease he hadn’t felt for days. “I’m just curious.”
“It was mostly mutual.” She frowned, then quietly amended, “He did.”
Hilo stood from his chair. A dozen aches and pains made themselves known throughout his body, but he didn’t lose his smile. “Figures,” he said.
Shae slid him a dangerous sideways look as he came around the table and circled behind her chair. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“When we were little kids, I used to beat you up, but you’d never give in. Never. You’d spit in my face and only come after me later when I wasn’t looking. You didn’t let things go. Nearly bashed in my skull that one time, do you remember? Then in the Academy, you were like some kind of machine; you never let anyone see you sweat, least of all me. You scared the shit out of boys. You were always too smart, too dangerous, for some foreign water–blooded pretty face in a uniform, don’t you know that? For his own sake, he figured it out before you did, is all.” Hilo draped his arms over Shae’s shoulders and hugged her, then spoke into her ear. “I could still kill him for you.”
“Screw you, Hilo,” she snapped. “I can kill my ex-boyfriends myself.”
He laughed, half expecting her to break one of his wrists just to make a point. When she didn’t, he kissed her brow, then let go of her and walked back to the house.
CHAPTER
41
First of Class
At Kaul Dushuron Academy, Pre-Trials are held two months prior to the final Trials, which occur at the end of the year before the arrival of the rainy spring season. Unlike the Trials, which span two weeks and are closed, secretive examinations administered by the Academy’s schoolmasters, the Pre-Trials are a one-day, public affair resembling a sports meet. Though the six jade disciplines are the focus of the event, in true Kekonese fashion, competitive matches in poetry recital, speed math, and logic games, among others, are also held, attracting their own ardent followers and bettors.
A month ago, Anden had been excited about Pre-Trials, but now he saw it only as an obstacle before graduation, and appreciated it only insofar as it gave him something to focus on. He’d eaten his breakfast silently and mechanically in the dining hall that morning, unable to share in the nervous banter of the other year-eights around him. He’d consulted the posted schedule and given his morning events his best effort, but didn’t linger after each one to find out his scores, nor did he join the crowd of classmates who congregated around the bulletin board in the hall to see the updated rankings after each event. Ostensibly, the Pre-Trials were a condensed, low-pressure way for graduating students to prepare for the more arduous exams to come, but most year-eights—at least, those angling for a position in the clan, which was a majority of them—were as anxious about it as they were about the real tests at the end of the year. Family members came to watch Pre-Trials—so did clan leadership. It was typical for the Horn and his top Fists to be there, scouting which graduates they would take as Fingers. Senior Luckbringers would be observing the academic competitions. Schoolmasters would be either reasonably harsh, or sadistically draconian for the next two months depending on how their pupils performed today.
Anden could not muster the will to care. He barely spoke to anyone at lunch and left the hall as soon as he’d eaten, arriving early to wait his turn at the tower event. It was overcast and cool enough that the participants wore T-shirts under their uniform tunics and their breaths fogged in the air. There was a slight wind, but it wasn’t strong enough that Anden was worried about it. He craned his neck to see up to the highest platform crowning the several that ringed the thick fifty-foot-tall wooden pole. When he was called up, he rubbed the training band around his wrist out of habit, running his thumb over the jade stones. A bell sounded.
He ran to build momentum, then leapt, Lightly, platform to platform, using both arms and legs to catch and propel himself upward with each gathering and heaving of jade energy that it took to send his body up into the air against gravity. The ground receded rapidly; the seconds elongated so that as he sprang from one narrow foothold to the next, it felt as if he dangled in space for so long that he might lose his grasp on Lightness and fall to a bone-shattering finale. His heart raced, but his deep breaths were steady and he felt no anxiety. He didn’t care if he won or lost. He didn’t even care if he fell. He kept his eyes focused on the top platform, and when he reached it, he heard the bell sound from far below and then a round of stomping applause loud enough for him to know that he’d gotten the best time of the day so far.
Up here the wind was stronger; it whistled in his ears. He could see so far out: not only the rest of the Academy grounds and Widow’s Park, but all the way to the flat gleam of the reservoir and forested Palace Hill with the Kaul house in the north, and the quilt of downtown Janloon to the east—a patchwork of clay roofs and concrete buildings and steel skyscrapers. He wished he could sit, dangle his legs for a minute, imagine that the city was as peaceful as it looked from up here.
He came back down; it took only a little Lightness to descend. Dudo was bouncing on the balls of his feet near the base of the tower, ready to take the next run. “You won that handily,” he said to Anden. “None of the rest of us can beat that time.”
“I haven’t been eating much,” Anden replied, to be polite, though it was also true. Not that it would make any difference, and not that the Pre-Trials were the reason for his lack of appetite. He passed Dudo, took a towel from one of the volunteer year-sixes and wiped the sweat from his face. When he looked up, he saw Maik Kehn in the front row of the audience, and he began to look around, thinking for a moment that must mean Hilo was here too. Then he remembered that Maik Kehn was now the Horn, and no one expected the new Pillar to have the time to make an appearance here this year. Maik caught Anden’s eye and nodded to him.
At this time last year, Anden had been one of the year-sevens watching from the back of the crowd. It had been a damp, cold day; Anden remembered rubbing and blowing into his hands, and stamping his feet to keep warm. Hi
lo had been here; he’d sat right at the front with Maik Tar. Anden had caught glimpses of his cousin chatting with Maik, remarking on one student or another, smiling and applauding and apparently enjoying himself a great deal. During the breaks, he stood up and stretched and wandered onto the field to speak with the year-eights. They treated him like a god in their midst, saluting him deeply, hanging on to his every word, but the Horn put them at ease. He clapped them on the backs and complimented their efforts; he joked about the schoolmasters and told stories of when he’d been at the Academy and the trouble he’d gotten into as a student. Anden had hung back, watching.
“You’ll be up there next year.” Lan had come up behind Anden, startling him.
“Lan-jen,” Anden said. “I didn’t know the Pillar came to Pre-Trials.”
“I like to come if I can,” Lan said. “At least to hand out the awards and say a few words at the end. I’ll come for the whole day, when it’s your turn.” Anden had looked away, embarrassed that the Pillar would make any special effort for him.
“Did they have Pre-Trials when you were here?” Anden had asked.
Lan shook his head. “I was in the very first graduating class. Grandda and two of his teachers founded the Academy the year after the Many Nations War ended. I suppose it existed before that, but not as a real school, just Green Bones training students in basements and secret camps. There were only fifty of us that first year. We had the one building and that training field.” He gestured around the Academy grounds. “When I come here now, all this seems new. Though I guess it has been sixteen years since I left. Time goes by quickly, and things change.”
The Pillar’s voice held a tint of regret, and Anden wondered if he was thinking about something in particular. He never found out; Lan’s presence had been noticed and some Academy faculty members had come over to pay their respects. Anden had sidled away, to watch the year-eights enviously and wonder how, since he possessed neither Hilo’s magnetism nor Lan’s gravity, he’d ever live up to being a Kaul himself.
Lan was not here today, as he’d promised he’d be. For Anden, that one simple fact drained all meaning from the spectacle. Pre-Trials seemed a hollow, shallow thing now, a pantomime he had to go through to get to the real goal: graduation, jade, a place in the clan, vengeance for what had been done to his family.
Anden’s next event was knife throwing, in which he placed second to Lott, who everyone knew was unbeatable. His final event was Channeling, or as all the Academy students called it, the Massacre of the Mice. Life can only Channel into life, but offensive Channeling was too dangerous for students to perform on each other in this kind of competitive public setting. So at Pre-Trials the year-eights stood behind a table in the packed Gathering Hall and each was given a cage of five white lab mice. They were not allowed to touch the mice with anything but one finger, and the judges disqualified anyone trying to cheat by using Strength or Deflection on the small creatures. Various attempts had been made over the years to try to upgrade the popular event to be more exciting—who didn’t want to see a man try to Channel into a bull? For practical and budgetary reasons, the proposals were always overruled.
Channeling was Anden’s strongest discipline, and he tried not to think about how it was well known to have been his mother’s as well. When the bell went off, he didn’t bother to try to touch the mice with his fingers. They were too nimble for that. He hovered both hands over the cage, quickly Perceiving all five tiny throbbing lives burning like tea lights. He chose one mouse at random, focused on it, lifted his palm slightly and brought it down, Channeling in one short, accurate burst. He felt the mouse’s small heart seize up and stop. A brief, electric warmth tingled up his arm as the animal’s life escaped. Four more quick, strong pops of Channeled energy and Anden stepped back, hands behind his back to indicate he was done. When the bell went off, two other students in the round of eight had killed all their mice, but Anden had the winning time of the day.
He felt a little sad as the judge held up his cage to the applause of the spectators. The five tiny bodies had been alive minutes ago and now they were gone, so easily snuffed out. It was the way of all things, to live and die at the whim of more powerful creatures, but he didn’t care enough about the Pre-Trials to feel as if he’d had to kill them. It was a foolish guilt; he’d surely won the First of Class award today—why couldn’t he try to be happy, even for a little while?
“Congratulations,” Ton said, as they walked out of the Hall.
“You looked as if you weren’t even really trying,” Heike added.
Other fellow students came up to offer him praise as the entire exhausted but elated group lined up in the central field behind the Gathering Hall, waiting for the presentation of awards and the final closing words from Grandmaster Le. With the weeks ticking down to graduation, they’d become more interested in Anden all of a sudden, more aware of the fact that he would soon be the highest-ranked Green Bone among them, likely their leader, and clearly favored by the fierce young Pillar.
Anden tried to nod and smile and say a few words of thanks here and there, but he felt strange and detached, almost apart from his own body. He’d been wearing jade and expending jade energy all day, and after his recent solitude, the clamor of so many other auras was overwhelming. Ever since the funeral, he’d kept to himself, stuck to the routine motions of training and schoolwork. The other students were tentative around him, uncertain of what to say to someone who grieved Kaul Lan as a real person rather than as the Pillar whose death had ignited the revenge killings on Poor Man’s Road and sent Janloon spiraling into a storm of clan violence. It was just as well they didn’t try; he wouldn’t have known how to accept their sympathy. All he knew now was that remorse had a natural limit. After a certain amount of time, it finished eating a person hollow and had to alchemize into anger that could be turned outward lest it consume its host entirely.
Anden knew he was to blame for Lan’s death. He did not believe Hilo’s reassurances to the contrary. But Lan himself was to blame as well. So too were Shae, and Hilo. He couldn’t hate his own family for their failings, but he could hate those who’d made those failings fatal. He could hate Gam Oben, whose final blow had done its deadly work after all. He could hate Ayt Mada, and Gont Asch, and the entire Mountain clan. And shine, that Espenian-brewed poison. He hated it.
Lan had been ambushed, they said, by Mountain clan members armed with machine guns, who, when they failed to shoot him, drowned him in the harbor. That’s all Anden knew—all anyone knew, it seemed. Even the identity of Lan’s killers was unknown. Whoever they were, and whatever had happened that night, Anden was certain they wouldn’t have succeeded if Lan had been himself. If he hadn’t been injured, unstable, drug-addled, as Anden had seen him. If Anden had gone to Hilo like he should have, or if he’d told Shae everything he knew that evening after the relayball game, maybe they would have convinced Lan to wear less of his jade until he was better, taken away the shine so he couldn’t use it as a crutch, or at least known enough to make sure he wasn’t alone that night …
“Emery.” Someone nudged him. “Go on.”
Anden looked up. Grandmaster Le had apparently already made his speech and announced the winners of the individual events, then called Anden’s name. The grandmaster was now waiting expectantly to present Anden with the First of Class award, his thin mouth slowly turning down in a scowl with each second of delay.
Anden hurried up to the front and touched his hands to his forehead while bending deeply and apologetically. The First of Class award was coveted because the reward was great—a single jade stud presented in a ceremonial green velvet box. It would be affixed to his training band and guarantee that so long as he received passing grades in the final Trials, he would graduate with four jade stones—the maximum anyone could receive at the Academy. Anden accepted the box, saluted again, and returned to his place. He felt no great triumph, just a sense of grim relief.
Grandmaster Le said a few other things about
the upcoming Trials and the need for graduating Green Bones to be especially well prepared in this time of strife and uncertainty, then wished all the graduates luck and called the Pre-Trials to a close. The crowd began to break up. Families and groups of friends gathered for photographs. Anden turned to go back to his dormitory room, but his classmates were milling together nearby and he caught the sound of Lott Jin’s voice in the conversation.
“The Kauls are fooling themselves if they think they’ll get many Fingers out of the Academy this year,” Lott was saying. “Not when following the Horn means ending up as worm food.”
“Well, no one thinks Maik’s the Horn that Kaul was,” Pau conceded.
Heike agreed. “Patrolling and collecting tribute is one thing. Even clean-bladed duels don’t always end in death, not if someone concedes. But fighting enemy Green Bones with more experience and more jade, who want to pick the stones off your dead body? That’s different.”
“In good times, everyone wants to be a Finger, at least for a couple of years. You get respect for it, even if you don’t win jade or make Fist. But in a real war?” Lott’s voice rose in scorn. “They’re going to find out that not everyone’s as foolish and jade-hungry as—”
He didn’t get to finish because Anden spun around and barged into the knot of his classmates. He couldn’t say why he did so now—he’d heard talk like this before and kept quiet, but now his jaw and fists were clenched, the precious green box he’d just won was gripped tightly in one hand. The others students stood astonished as Anden rounded on Lott. “I’m sick of listening to you talk shit all the time.” He was more stunned than anyone by the disgust in his voice. “Any coward more concerned with saving his own skin than defending the clan in a time of war doesn’t deserve jade.”