“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.