“She started it,” Nezha said quickly. He rolled to a sitting position and pointed at Rin. “She dropped her—”
“I know what I saw,” Jun snapped. “And I saw you rolling around the floor like imbeciles. If I enjoyed training animals, I would be in the Cike. Shall I put in a word?”
Nezha cast his eyes down. “No, sir.”
“Put your weapon away and leave my class. You’re suspended for a week.”
“Yes, sir.” Nezha rose to his feet, tossed his staff at the weapons rack, and stalked off.
Jun then turned his attention to Rin. Blood dripped down her face, streaming from her nose, trickling down her forehead. She wiped clumsily at her chin, too nervous to meet Jun’s eyes.
He loomed above her. “You. Get up.”
She struggled to her feet. Her knee screamed in protest.
“Get that pathetic look off your face. You won’t receive any sympathy from me.”
She didn’t expect his sympathy. But neither was she expecting what came next.
“That was the most miserable display I’ve seen from a student since I left the Militia,” Jun said. “Your fundamentals are horrific. You move like a paraplegic. What did I just witness? Have you been asleep for the past month?”
He moved too fast. I couldn’t keep up. I don’t have years of training like he does. Even as the words came to her mind, they sounded like the pathetic excuses they were. She opened her mouth and closed it, too stunned to respond.
“I hate students like you,” Jun continued relentlessly. The sounds of staves clashing against one another had long died away. The entire class was listening. “You skip into Sinegard from your little village, thinking that this is it—you’ve made it, you’re going to make Mommy and Daddy proud. Maybe you were the smartest kid in your village. Maybe you were the best test taker your tutor has ever seen! But guess what? It takes more than memorizing a few Classics to be a martial artist.
“Every year we get someone like you, some country bumpkin who thinks that just because they were good at taking some test, they deserve my time and attention. Understand this, southerner. The exam proves nothing. Discipline and competence—those are the only things that matter at this school. That boy”—Jun jerked his thumb in the direction Nezha had gone—“may be an ass, but he has the makings of a commander in him. You, on the other hand, are just peasant trash.”
The entire class was staring at her now. Kitay’s eyes were wide with sympathy. Even Venka looked stunned.
Rin’s ears rang, drowning out Jun’s words. She felt so small. She felt as if she might crumble into dust. Don’t let me cry. Her eyes throbbed from the pressure of forcing back her tears. Please don’t let me cry.
“I do not tolerate troublemakers in my class,” Jun said. “I do not have the happy privilege to expel you, but as Combat Master I can do this: From now on you are banned from the practice facilities. You do not touch the weapons rack. You do not train in the studio during off-hours. You do not set foot in here while I am teaching a class. You do not ask older students to teach you. I don’t need you causing any more trouble in my studio. Now get out of my sight.”
Chapter 5
Rin stumbled out the courtyard door. Jun’s words echoed over and over in her head. She was suddenly dizzy; her legs wobbled and her vision went temporarily black. She slid down against the stone wall, hugging her knees to her chest while blood pumped furiously in her ears.
Then the pressure in her chest bubbled up and she cried for the first time since orientation, sobbing with her face pressed into her hands so that no one could hear.
She cried from the pain. She cried from the embarrassment. But mostly she cried because those two long years of studying for the Keju hadn’t meant a thing. She was years behind her peers at Sinegard. She had no martial arts experience, much less an inherited art—even one that looked as stupid as Nezha’s. She hadn’t trained since childhood, like Venka. She wasn’t brilliant, didn’t have an eidetic memory like Kitay.
And the worst thing was, now she had no way to make up for it. Without Jun’s tutelage, frustrating though it was, Rin knew she didn’t have a chance of making it past the Trials. No master would choose to take on an apprentice who couldn’t fight. Sinegard was primarily a military academy. If she couldn’t hold her own on the battlefield, then what was the point?
Jun’s punishment was as good as an expulsion. She was done. It was over. She’d be back in Tikany within a year.
But Nezha attacked first.
The more she considered this, the faster her despair crystallized into anger. Nezha had tried to kill her. She had acted only in self-defense. Why had she been thrown out of the class, when Nezha had gotten off with little more than a slap on the wrist?
But it was so clear why. Nezha was a Sinegardian noble, the son of a Warlord, and she was a country girl with no connections and no status. Expelling Nezha would have been troublesome and politically contentious. He mattered. She did not.
No—they couldn’t just do this to her. They might think they could sweep her away like rubbish, but she didn’t have to lie down and take it. She had come from nothing. She wasn’t going back to nothing.
The courtyard doors opened as class let out. Her classmates hurried past her, pretending they didn’t see her. Only Kitay hung behind.
“Jun will come around,” he said.
Rin took his proffered hand and stood up in silence. She wiped at her face with her sleeve and sniffed.
“I mean it,” Kitay said. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “He only suspended Nezha for a week.”
She shrugged his hand off violently, still wiping furiously at her eyes. “That’s because Nezha was born with a gold ingot in his mouth. Nezha got off because his father’s got half the faculty here by their balls. Nezha’s from Sinegard, so Nezha’s special, Nezha belongs here.”
“Come on, you belong here too, you passed the Keju—”
“The Keju doesn’t mean anything,” Rin said scathingly. “The Keju is a ruse to keep uneducated peasants right where they’ve always been. You slip past the Keju, they’ll find a way to expel you anyway. The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”
“Rin, that’s not true.”
“It is!” She slammed her fist against the wall. “But they’re not going to get rid of me like this. Not this easily. I won’t let them. I won’t.”
She swayed suddenly. Her vision pulsed black and then cleared.
“Great Tortoise,” said Kitay. “Are you all right?”
She whirled on him. “What are you talking about?”
“You’re sweating.”
Sweating? She wasn’t sweating. “I’m fine,” she said. Her voice sounded inordinately loud; it rang in her ears. Was she shouting?
“Rin, calm down.”
“I’m calm! I’m extremely calm!”
She was far from fucking calm. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to scream at someone. Anger pulsed through her like a wave of heat.
Then her stomach erupted with a pain like she had been stabbed. She gasped sharply and clutched at her midriff. She felt as if someone were sliding a jagged stone through her innards.
Kitay grasped at her shoulders. “Rin? Rin?”
She felt the sudden urge to vomit. Had Nezha’s blows given her internal damage?
Oh, fantastic, she thought. Now you’re humiliated and injured, too. Wait until they watch you limp into class; Nezha’s going to love that.
She shoved Kitay away. “I don’t need— Leave me alone!”
“But you’re—”
“I’m fine!”
Rin awoke that night to a deeply confusing sticky sensation.
Her sleeping pants felt cold, the way her pants had felt when she’d been little and peed in her sleep. But her legs were too sticky to be covered in urine. Heart pounding, she scrambled out of her bunk and lit a lamp with shaking fingers.