by R. F. Kuang
“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 l
oud. “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.”