“I listened to your presentation,” said the boy, who trailed behind Sanie as she hurried along the corridors.
“Boy, wait until your voice is several octaves lower and you can drink sorghum wine before courting me.”
“What is octave?”
“Never mind that. Where’s your mother?”
“I’m an orphan.”
“I should have thought so.” Sanie felt a twinge of something that she rarely felt anymore.
“Eight is a better number than five. There are eight corners in a room, eight hours in a day, and eight elements in Avalian mythology. How do you know there are five, and only five Nonessentials that we can sacrifice for the power of Tyistry?”
He said all of this in one breath, as if afraid that she would stop him in the middle. The surest way to become a teacher’s favorite, she realized four years too late, was to show insatiable curiosity in their subject. But she had zero inclination for the business of cultivating young minds.
She stopped sharply. The boy backed a few steps away and gave her the wide-eyed look she often saw in Sorsei’s friends.
“You listened to my dissertation defense about the Nonessentials.”
“I told you,” he said with a grin.
“Aren’t you afraid that I’ll break your legs too?”
“I’m a child!” he sputtered.
“And I’m a woman. But, I’ll go easy if you remember the five Nonessentials that I told everyone about.”
“Tang, ka, vu, ai, and ou,” he recited at once. “In the Classical Language, they mean peace, reason, resilience, attachment, and youth.”
“What are you, a prodigy?”
“I’m Riley, of the Celestial Sect.”
“’I’m Riley, at your service,’” she mimicked.
“Take me as your apprentice, and I will be at your service.” Riley puffed out his chest.
Sanie stared down at him. Ethnicity should not matter after the Academy drummed into their skulls that there were no better alternatives to justice! Liberty! Equality! Which could never be at odds with one another. Yet, ethnicity was the centerpiece. He was a mongrel, as Yonasta had noted with disdain.
Human beings thrive on inconsistencies. They see this mongrel and lament that his parents were disinhibited, even animalistic. Then they put on trial Sanie’s people, the Shadow Sect, who were so repulsed by mongrels that they practically inbred. They rallied behind the Celestial Sect to demolish all three hundred or ten thousand—who cared enough to count the bodies?—members this most ancient of Tyistry Sects. Granted, wartime meant no time for justice! Liberty! Equality! Least of all for the Shadow Sect, which technically contributed the instigator of the war, her dear Mama. What did they call her dear mother? The False Messiah, the Thought Demon, or That Shadow Bitch. Maybe only Gouffer the clown made use of that last epithet.
The boy was proud of his Celestial heritage and obviously thought she shared it. She should break both his legs for it. Symbolic revenge for her people. Annoyingly enough, he really was still a child. Although she should end him anyways. Exceptional mortals should be culled from the rest of their rubbish kind, but exceptional Tyists should be extinguished. After all, her dear Mama was a prodigy, and sixty thousand or three million people died before the war finally burned out.
Well, he was only half Celestial. Was the other half Centralian? He must be a war baby. A Celestial Tyist ventured to the Centralian Empire to join the war efforts and seduced a hapless mortal. Nine months later, this squirt in front of her came along.
He was misinterpreting her silence as serious consideration of his proposition. No way she could explain everything going on in her mind to this squirt. She thanked her good foresight in choosing Kaleb, with his infinite tolerance of children, as her mate.
She grabbed his hands. He flinched but didn’t pull away.
“You’re no orphan. These hands never knew labor.”
“I grew up with my aunt and uncle.”
She swept back his long bangs. A distorted left eye ringed by snarled skin stared back at her. A cruel place for a Core. She continued along the corridor, and his tippety-tappety steps followed along.
“So what’s your story? Your aunt and uncle beat you? Your Master abandoned you? Is the Celestial Sect sending orphans off to war now?”
“No—I chose to leave Celestial Island. I wasn’t getting better. No one there’s any good. I wasn’t gonna win the Tyistry Games by staying there.”
Ah. He wants to win the Tyistry Games. How cliché. Great toe of Roren, Sanie couldn’t be any less interested in the quadrennial spitting contest among juvenile Tyists who thought they had something to prove.
She stopped suddenly so that he almost bumped into her again, and then tracked back a few steps.
The Headmaster of the Imperial Academy sat in an empty classroom. At separate times, Sanie had thought the Headmaster’s greatest virtues to be balance, restraint, or tolerance, which she now realized were three sides of the same triangle. One day, the guilt of creating so much ignorance and impatience caught up with Anshtar, Roren, Ava, or whatever deity was the trend nowadays, and they created the good Headmaster. He was always in the center of motley of students, looking from face to eager face.
But now he sat in the back corner of a deserted classroom, smoking a long pipe and staring at the empty blackboard. The pipe was perhaps his one fault. But maybe it wasn’t all bad. After all, the Treelanders in the south were hooked on betel nuts, and supposedly that’s the source of their illustriousness.
“Headmaster,” said Sanie with a bow. “I was just passing by.”
The Headmaster exhaled slowly. The corners of his eyes wrinkled with a lifetime of smiles.
“How do you do? How was your defense?”
“Very well, thank you.” Sanie paused. “Headmaster, what are you doing tomorrow evening?”
It was disrespectful in Centralian society for a student to ask this of a teacher, and the Headmaster took a puff from his pipe before answering, “I will be basking in the memories of the last graduation ceremony I will officiate.”
It was then that Sanie realized that this time two days from now, the Imperial Academy might not exist. The Headmaster knew about the rebellion. Perhaps he was involved in it. Perhaps he was leading it.
But her Headmaster wouldn’t be baited into a scuffle as Yonasta had been, and Sanie couldn’t find it in herself to insult or physically disable him without instigation. So she took her own advice, put her head down, and walked away.
“Sanie,” he said when she was almost at the threshold of the classroom.
“Yes, Headmaster?”
“Sanie, did we do the right thing? Is it time for a Centralian republic to emerge from the ashes of autocracy?”
This was not a didactic question. It was pleading. For the first time in her four years at the Academy, the old man seemed uncertain.
Suddenly, Sanie remembered the night of her escape from the Sunland warlords. For a moment, Sorsei’s father had paused and wondered if he was doing the right thing, freeing the daughter of the False Messiah from enslavement, betraying his benefactors, dooming his side of the war. That was when Sanie could no longer tolerate him.
Sanie’s mother, the False Messiah, also wondered if she had done the right thing after betraying her own kind. She had died during childbirth, and her question came from the grave, in a letter that Sorsei’s father handed her, folded again and again until it fit into a hidden pocket sown onto the inside of his inner shirt.
The Sunland warlords used Sanie’s mother’s powers—the evil, forbidden powers of the Shadow Sect—to control other Tyists and wage war. Her mother’s way to correct the tragedy had been to shoot the quill makers. She revealed the secret location of Shadow Island, so that the Celestial Sect, assisted by the Whole Wide World except for the Sunland warlords, could kill everyone on it. Genocide was too evil for evildoers, yet the Whole Wide World agreed that the extinction of the Shadow Sect, womb of Thought Demons like Sanie’s mother, was the Exception. I don’t know if I made the right choice, wrote her mother, but I did it so that my daughter may live in a world without wars driven by Tyists.
Sanie had torn the letter and then burned it. Did we do the right thing? When that question is asked, the answer is almost always no.
Sanie looked at the Headmaster with pity and left without saying more. Years of admiration gone just like that—how very short was the list of those she admired.
Still, the Celestial-Centralian mongrel boy was following her!
“I won’t adopt you!” Sanie exclaimed. “I have a daughter already, and another on the way. I won’t teach you either! There’s no one less fitting to be a teacher. Find someone like that old man—he’s a good teacher.”
“Just tell me how you learned it all.”
She learned Tyistry with a Sunland warlord berating her through drills. Her physician, Sorsei’s father, looked on and told the warlord that she needed a break every time she was on the verge of dehydration. She had zero desire to propagate Tyistry either biologically or educationally.
“You’re not very smart. You had to save me! I’m no use to you.”
“You went easy on him. You are much, much stronger.”
That he knew her abilities should have alerted her, but it’s been a while since someone stroked her ego like so.
“I will be your best student,” he pleaded.
“You would be my only student.”
“Do you ever want it back?”
This stopped her.
“Because I’m like you!” he continued. “I also gave up ai. I’m also unattached to anything in this world.”
In retrospect, that he knew her Nonessential should have alarmed her too.
“Unattached, huh? Then what do you want from the Tyistry Games? The gold? The opportunities? Honor?”
“I don’t want any of it! Not really.”
Now she was the hypocrite. After all, why had she come to the Academy and ensnared a best friend, a degree, and a husband to steer her across the five lands and seven seas? Again, she felt a twinge of guilt. He had an odd amount of bravery, obstinacy, and chivalry, however misplaced, for someone who hadn’t grown back all his adult teeth.
“I will consider it,” she finally said. “Meet me at the Western Gate into the village tomorrow morning, at the hour of the hare.”
Yes, she meant the Western Gate, the one next to the toothless man who sold fermented soy each morning. Yes, the hour of the hare came after the hour of the tiger and before dragon. She repeated this and received his profuse appreciation and finally detached herself from the squirt.
At the hour of the hare the next morning, she fully expected to be aboard the ship of Kaleb her husband, with Sorsei her daughter in hand, off to travel the five lands and seven seas, with nary a thought about Academies, Games, or Tyistry Sects.
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