Chapter 9 #5
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—”