“Six. Seven if you include Lore, but Jiang withdrew his bid at the last minute.” Raban gave her a knowing look. “Why so curious about Altan?”
“Just wondering,” Rin said quickly.
“Taken a shine to our crimson-eyed hero, huh? You wouldn’t be the first.” Raban grinned. “Just be careful. Altan’s not too kind to admirers.”
“What’s he like?” She couldn’t help but ask. “As a person, I mean.”
Raban shrugged. “We haven’t had classes together since our first year. I don’t know him well. I don’t think anyone really does. He mostly keeps to himself. He’s quiet. Trains alone and doesn’t really have friends.”
“Sounds like someone we know.” Kitay jabbed an elbow at Rin.
She bristled. “Shut up. I have friends.”
“You have a friend,” Kitay said. “Singular.”
Rin pushed at Kitay’s arm. “But Altan’s so good,” she said. “At everything. Everyone adores him.”
Raban shrugged. “Altan’s more or less a god on this campus. Doesn’t mean he’s happy.”
Once the conversation had derailed to Altan, Rin forgot half the questions she had meant to ask about Jiang. She and Kitay prodded Raban for anecdotes about Altan until dinner break ended. That night, she tried asking Kureel and Arda, but neither of them could confirm anything substantial.
“I see Jiang in the infirmary sometimes,” said Arda. “Enro keeps a walled-off bed just for him. He stays for a day or two every other month and then leaves. Maybe he’s sick with something. Or maybe he just really likes the smell of disinfectant, I can’t tell. Enro caught him trying to get high off medicine fumes once.”
“Jun doesn’t like him,” said Kureel. “Not hard to see why. What kind of master acts like that? Especially at Sinegard?” Her face twisted with disapproval. “I think he’s a disgrace to the Academy. Why’re you asking?”
“No reason,” said Rin. “Just curious.”
Kureel shrugged. “Every class falls for it at first. Everyone thinks there’s more to Jiang than there is, that Lore is a real subject worth learning. But there’s nothing there. Jiang’s a joke. You’re wasting your time.”
But the Lore Master was real. Jiang was a faculty member of the Academy, even if all he did was wander around and annoy the other masters. No one else could have gotten away with provoking Jun like Jiang did on a regular basis. So if Jiang didn’t bother teaching, what was he doing at Sinegard?
Rin was slightly amazed when she saw Jiang waiting at the campus gates the next afternoon. She wouldn’t have put it past him to simply forget. She opened her mouth to ask where they were going, but he simply waved at her to follow him.
She assumed that she was just going to have to get used to being led around by Jiang with no clear explanation.
They had hardly started down the path before they ran into Jun, returning from city patrol with a group of his apprentices.
“Ah. The lackwit and the peasant.” Jun slowed to a stop. His apprentices looked somewhat wary, as if they’d seen this exchange before. “And where are you going on this fine afternoon?”
“None of your business, Loran,” Jiang said breezily. He tried to skirt around Jun, but Jun stepped into his path.
“A master leaving the grounds alone with a student. I wonder what they’ll say.” Jun narrowed his eyes.
“Probably that a master of his rank and standing could do much better than dicking around with female students,” Jiang replied cheerfully, looking directly at Jun’s apprentices. Kureel looked outraged.
Jun scowled. “She doesn’t have permission to leave the grounds. She needs written approval from Jima.”
Jiang stretched out his right arm and shoved his sleeve up to the elbow. At first Rin thought that he might punch Jun, but Jiang simply raised his elbow to his mouth and made a loud farting noise.
“That’s not written approval.” Jun looked unimpressed. Rin suspected he had seen this display many times before.
“I’m Lore Master,” Jiang said. “That comes with privileges.”
“Privileges like never teaching class?”
Jiang lifted his chin and said self-importantly, “I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.”
“You have taught her class and every class before it that Lore is a joke and the Lore Master is a bumbling idiot.”
“Tell Jima to fire me, then.” Jiang waggled his eyebrows. “I know you’ve tried.”
Jun raised his eyes to the sky in an expression of eternal suffering. Rin suspected that this was only a small part of an argument that had been going on for years.
“I’m reporting this to Jima,” Jun warned.
“Jima has better things to waste her time on. As long as I bring little Runin back in time for dinner, I doubt she’ll care. In the meantime, stop blocking the road.”
Jiang snapped his fingers and motioned for Rin to follow. Rin clamped her mouth shut and tripped down the path behind him.
“Why does he hate you so much?” Rin asked as they climbed down the mountain pass toward the city.
Jiang shrugged. “They tell me I killed half the men under his command during the Second War. He’s still bitter about it.”
“Well, did you?” Rin felt like she was obligated to ask.
He shrugged again. “Haven’t the faintest clue.”
Rin had no idea how to respond to this, and Jiang did not elaborate.
“So tell me about your class,” Jiang said after a while. “Same crowd of entitled brats?”
“I don’t know them very well,” Rin admitted. “They’re all . . . I mean . . .”
“Smarter? Better trained? More important than you?”
“Nezha’s the son of the Dragon Warlord,” Rin blurted out. “How am I supposed to compete with that? Venka’s father is the finance minister. Kitay’s father is defense minister, or something like that. Niang’s family are physicians to the Hare Warlord.”
Jiang snorted. “Typical.”
“Typical?”
“Sinegard likes to collect the Warlords’ broods as much as it can. Keeps them under the Empire’s careful watch.”
“What for?” she asked.
“Leverage. Indoctrination. This generation of Warlords hate each other too much to coordinate on anything of national importance, and the imperial bureaucracy has too little local authority to force them. Just look at the state of the Imperial Navy.”
“We have a navy?” Rin asked.
“Exactly.” Jiang snorted. “We used to. Anyhow, Daji’s hoping that Sinegard will forge a generation of leaders who like each other—and better, who will obey the throne.”
“She really struck gold with me, then,” Rin muttered.
Jiang shot her a sideways grin. “What, you’re not going to be a good soldier to the Empire?”
“I will,” Rin said hastily. “I just don’t think most of my classmates like me very much. Or ever will.”
“Well, that’s because you’re a dark little peasant brat who can’t pronounce your r’s,” Jiang said breezily. He made a turn into a narrow corridor. “This way.”
He led her into the meatpacking district, where the streets were cramped and crowded and smelled overwhelmingly like blood. Rin gagged and clamped a hand over her nose as they walked. Butcher shops lined the alleyways, built so close they were almost on top of one another in crooked rows like jagged teeth. After twenty minutes of twists and turns, they stopped at a little shack at the end of a block. Jiang rapped thrice on the rickety wooden door.
“What?” screeched a voice from within. Rin jumped.
“It’s me,” Jiang called back, unfazed. “Your favorite person in the whole wide world.”
There was the noise of clattering metal from inside. After a moment, a wizened little lady in a purple smock opened the door. She greeted Jiang with a curt nod but squinted suspiciously at Rin.
“This is the Widow Maung,” Jiang said. “She sells me things.”
“Drugs,” clarified the Widow Maung. “I am his drug dealer.”
“She means ginseng, and roots and such,” Jiang said. “For my health.”
The Widow Maung rolled her eyes.
Rin watched the exchange, fascinated.