By and large, Jiang’s metaphors meant little to her, but she learned quickly to avoid injury. And perhaps that was his point. She developed muscle memory. She learned that there were only so many permutations to the way a human body could move, only so many attack combinations that worked, that she could reasonably expect from her opponent. She learned to react automatically to these. She learned to predict Jiang’s moves seconds in advance, to read from the tilt of his torso and the flicker of his eyes what he was about to do next.
He pushed her relentlessly. He fought the hardest when she was exhausted. When she fell, he attacked her as soon as she’d gotten back on her feet. She learned to stay constantly on guard, to react to the slightest movements in her peripheral vision.
The day came when she angled her hip against his just so, forced his weight to the side and jammed all her force at an angle that hurled him over her right shoulder.
Jiang skidded across the stone floor and bumped against the garden wall, which shook the shelves so that a potted cactus came perilously close to shattering on the ground.
Jiang lay there for a moment, dazed. Then he looked up, met her eyes, and grinned.
Rin’s last day with Sunzi was the hardest.
Sunzi was no longer an adorable piglet but an absurdly fat monster that smelled heinously bad. It wasn’t remotely cute. Any affection Rin had felt for those trusting brown eyes was negated by the animal’s massive girth.
Carrying Sunzi up the mountain was torture. Sunzi no longer fit in any sort of sling or basket. Rin had to drape it over her shoulders, grasping it by its two front legs.
She could hardly move as fast as she had when Sunzi could still be cradled in her arms, but she had to, unless she wanted to go without breakfast—or worse, miss class. She rose earlier. She ran faster. She staggered up the mountain, gasping for air with every step. Sunzi lay against her back with its snout resting over one of her shoulders, basking in the morning sun while Rin’s muscles screamed with resentment. When she reached Sunzi’s drinking area, she let the pig drop to the ground and collapsed.
“Drink, you glutton,” she grumbled as Sunzi frolicked in the stream. “I can’t wait until the day they carve you up and eat you.”
On her way down the mountain, the sun began to beat down in earnest, eliciting rivulets of sweat all over Rin’s body despite the winter cold. She limped through the meatpacking district to the Widow Maung’s cottage and deposited Sunzi gracelessly on the floor.
It rolled over, squealed loudly and ran in a circle, chasing its own tail.
The Widow Maung came out to the front carrying a bucket of slops.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” Rin panted.
The Widow Maung shook her head. “There won’t be a tomorrow. Not for this one, anyway.” She rubbed Sunzi’s snout. “This one’s going to the butcher tonight.”
Rin blinked. “What? So soon?”
“Sunzi’s already reached his peak weight.” The Widow Maung slapped Sunzi’s sides. “Look at that girth. None of my pigs have ever grown so heavy. Perhaps your crazy teacher was right about the mountain water. Maybe I should send all my pigs up there.”
Rin rather hoped that she didn’t. Chest still heaving, she bowed low to the widow. “Thank you for letting me carry your pig.”
The Widow Maung harrumphed. “Academy freaks,” she muttered under her breath, and began to lead Sunzi back to the sty. “Come on, you. Let’s get you ready for the butcher.”
Oink? Sunzi looked imploringly at Rin.
“Don’t look at me,” Rin said. “It’s the end of the road for you.”
She couldn’t help but feel a stab of guilt; the longer she looked at Sunzi, the more she was reminded of its piglet form. She tore her eyes away from its dull, naive gaze and headed back up the mountain.
“Already?” Jiang looked surprised when Rin reported Sunzi’s fate. He was sitting on the far wall of the garden, swinging his legs over the edge like an energetic child. “Ah, I had high hopes for that pig. But in the end, swine are swine. How do you feel?”
“I’m devastated,” Rin said. “Sunzi and I were finally starting to understand each other.”
“No, you sod. Your arms. Your core. Your legs. How do they feel?”
She frowned and swung her arms about. “Sore?”
Jiang jumped off the wall and walked toward her. “I’m going to hit you,” he announced.
“Wait, what?”
She dug her heels into the ground and only managed to get her elbows up right before he slammed a fist at her face.
The force of his punch was enormous—harder than he’d ever hit her. She knew she should have deflected the blow at an angle, sent the ki dispersing into the air where it would dispel harmlessly. But she was too startled to do anything but block it head-on. She barely remembered to crouch so that the ki behind his punch channeled harmlessly through her body and into the ground.
A crack like a thunderbolt echoed beneath her.
Rin jumped back, stunned. The stone under her feet had splintered under the force of the dispelled energy. One long crack ran between her feet to the edge of the stone block.
They both stared down at it. The crack continued to splinter the stone floor, crawling all the way to the far end of the garden, where it stopped at the base of the willow tree.
Jiang threw his head back and laughed.
It was a high, wild laugh. He laughed like his lungs were bellows. He laughed like he was nothing human. He spread his arms out and windmilled them in the air, and danced with giddy abandon.
“You darling child,” he said, spinning toward her. “You brilliant child.”
Rin’s face split into a grin.
Fuck it, she thought, and leaped up to embrace him.
He picked her up and swung her through the air, around and around among the kaleidoscopically colorful mushrooms.
They sat together under the willow tree, staring serenely at the poppy plants. The wind was still today. Snow continued to fall lightly over the garden, but the first inklings of spring had arrived. The furious winter winds had gone to blow elsewhere; the air felt settled, for once. Peaceful.
“No more training today,” Jiang said. “You rest. Sometimes you must loose the string to let the arrow fly.”
Rin rolled her eyes.
“You have to pledge Lore,” Jiang continued excitedly. “No one—no one, not even Altan, picked things up this fast.”
Rin suddenly felt very awkward. How was she to tell him the only reason she wanted to learn combat was so she could get through the Trials and study with Irjah?
Jiang hated lies. Rin decided she might as well be straightforward. “I’d been thinking about pledging Strategy,” she said hesitantly. “Irjah said he might bid for me.”
He waved his hand. “Irjah can’t teach you anything you couldn’t learn by yourself. Strategy’s a limited subject. Spend enough time in the field with Sunzi’s Principles by your bed, and you’ll pick up everything you need to win a campaign.”
“But . . .”
“Who are the gods? Where do they reside? Why do they do what they do? These are the fundamental questions of Lore. I can teach you more than ki manipulation. I can show you the pathway to the gods. I can make you a shaman.”
Gods and shamans? It was often difficult to tell when Jiang was joking and when he wasn’t, but he seemed genuinely convinced that he could talk to heavenly powers.
She swallowed. “Sir . . .”
“This is important,” Jiang insisted. “Please, Rin. This is a dying art. The Red Emperor almost succeeded in killing it. If you don’t learn it, if no one learns it, then it disappears for good.”
The sudden desperation in his voice made her intensely uncomfortable.
She twisted a blade of grass between her fingers. Certainly she was curious about Lore, but she knew better than to throw away four years of training under Irjah to chase a subject that the other masters had long ago lost faith in. She hadn’t come to Sinegard to pursue stories on a whim, especially stories that were disdained by everyone else in the capital.
She was admittedly fascinated by myths and legends, and the way that Jiang made them sound almost real. But she was more interested in making it past the Trials. And an apprenticeship with Irjah opened doors at the Militia. It all but guaranteed an officer position and her choice of division. Irjah had contacts with each of the Twelve Warlords, and his protégées always found esteemed placements.