CHAPTER
41
First of Class
At Kaul Dushuron Academy, Pre-Trials are held two months prior to the final Trials, which occur at the end of the year before the arrival of the rainy spring season. Unlike the Trials, which span two weeks and are closed, secretive examinations administered by the Academy’s schoolmasters, the Pre-Trials are a one-day, public affair resembling a sports meet. Though the six jade disciplines are the focus of the event, in true Kekonese fashion, competitive matches in poetry recital, speed math, and logic games, among others, are also held, attracting their own ardent followers and bettors.
A month ago, Anden had been excited about Pre-Trials, but now he saw it only as an obstacle before graduation, and appreciated it only insofar as it gave him something to focus on. He’d eaten his breakfast silently and mechanically in the dining hall that morning, unable to share in the nervous banter of the other year-eights around him. He’d consulted the posted schedule and given his morning events his best effort, but didn’t linger after each one to find out his scores, nor did he join the crowd of classmates who congregated around the bulletin board in the hall to see the updated rankings after each event. Ostensibly, the Pre-Trials were a condensed, low-pressure way for graduating students to prepare for the more arduous exams to come, but most year-eights—at least, those angling for a position in the clan, which was a majority of them—were as anxious about it as they were about the real tests at the end of the year. Family members came to watch Pre-Trials—so
did clan leadership. It was typical for the Horn and his top Fists to be there, scouting which graduates they would take as Fingers. Senior Luckbringers would be observing the academic competitions. Schoolmasters would be either reasonably harsh, or sadistically draconian for the next two months depending on how their pupils performed today.
Anden could not muster the will to care. He barely spoke to anyone at lunch and left the hall as soon as he’d eaten, arriving early to wait his turn at the tower event. It was overcast and cool enough that the participants wore T- shirts under their uniform tunics and their breaths fogged in the air. There was a slight wind, but it wasn’t strong enough that Anden was worried about it. He craned his neck to see up to the highest platform crowning the several that ringed the thick fifty-foot-tall wooden pole. When he was called up, he rubbed the training band around his wrist out of habit, running his thumb over the jade stones. A bell sounded.
He ran to build momentum, then leapt, Lightly, platform to platform, using both arms and legs to catch and propel himself upward with each gathering and heaving of jade energy that it took to send his body up into the air against gravity. The ground receded rapidly; the seconds elongated so that as he sprang from one narrow foothold to the next, it felt as if he dangled in space for so long that he might lose his grasp on Lightness and fall to a bone- shattering finale. His heart raced, but his deep breaths were steady and he felt no anxiety. He didn’t care if he won or lost. He didn’t even care if he fell. He kept his eyes focused on the top platform, and when he reached it, he heard the bell sound from far below and then a round of stomping applause loud enough for him to know that he’d gotten the best time of the day so far.
Up here the wind was stronger; it whistled in his ears. He could see so far out: not only the rest of the Academy grounds and Widow’s Park, but all the way to the flat gleam of the reservoir and forested Palace Hill with the Kaul house in the north, and the quilt of downtown Janloon to the east—a patchwork of clay roofs and concrete buildings and steel skyscrapers. He wished he could sit, dangle his legs for a minute, imagine that the city was as peaceful as it looked from up here.
He came back down; it took only a little Lightness to descend. Dudo was bouncing on the balls of his feet near the base of the tower, ready to take the next run. “You won that handily,” he said to Anden. “None of the rest of us can beat that time.”
“I haven’t been eating much,” Anden replied, to be polite, though it was also true. Not that it would make any difference, and not that the Pre-Trials were the reason for his lack of appetite. He passed Dudo, took a towel from one of the volunteer year-sixes and wiped the sweat from his face. When he looked up, he saw Maik Kehn in the front row of the audience, and he began to look around, thinking for a moment that must mean Hilo was here too.
Then he remembered that Maik Kehn was now the Horn, and no one expected the new Pillar to have the time to make an appearance here this year. Maik caught Anden’s eye and nodded to him.
At this time last year, Anden had been one of the year-sevens watching from the back of the crowd. It had been a damp, cold day; Anden remembered rubbing and blowing into his hands, and stamping his feet to keep warm. Hilo had been here; he’d sat right at the front with Maik Tar.
Anden had caught glimpses of his cousin chatting with Maik, remarking on one student or another, smiling and applauding and apparently enjoying himself a great deal. During the breaks, he stood up and stretched and wandered onto the field to speak with the year-eights. They treated him like a god in their midst, saluting him deeply, hanging on to his every word, but the Horn put them at ease. He clapped them on the backs and complimented their efforts; he joked about the schoolmasters and told stories of when he’d been at the Academy and the trouble he’d gotten into as a student. Anden had hung back, watching.
“You’ll be up there next year.” Lan had come up behind Anden, startling him.
“Lan-jen,” Anden said. “I didn’t know the Pillar came to Pre-Trials.”
“I like to come if I can,” Lan said. “At least to hand out the awards and say a few words at the end. I’ll come for the whole day, when it’s your turn.”
Anden had looked away, embarrassed that the Pillar would make any special effort for him.
“Did they have Pre-Trials when you were here?” Anden had asked.
Lan shook his head. “I was in the very first graduating class. Grandda and two of his teachers founded the Academy the year after the Many Nations War ended. I suppose it existed before that, but not as a real school, just Green Bones training students in basements and secret camps. There were only fifty of us that first year. We had the one building and that training field.” He gestured around the Academy grounds. “When I come here now,
all this seems new. Though I guess it has been sixteen years since I left. Time goes by quickly, and things change.”
The Pillar’s voice held a tint of regret, and Anden wondered if he was thinking about something in particular. He never found out; Lan’s presence had been noticed and some Academy faculty members had come over to pay their respects. Anden had sidled away, to watch the year-eights enviously and wonder how, since he possessed neither Hilo’s magnetism nor Lan’s gravity, he’d ever live up to being a Kaul himself.
Lan was not here today, as he’d promised he’d be. For Anden, that one simple fact drained all meaning from the spectacle. Pre-Trials seemed a hollow, shallow thing now, a pantomime he had to go through to get to the real goal: graduation, jade, a place in the clan, vengeance for what had been done to his family.
Anden’s next event was knife throwing, in which he placed second to Lott, who everyone knew was unbeatable. His final event was Channeling, or as all the Academy students called it, the Massacre of the Mice. Life can only Channel into life, but offensive Channeling was too dangerous for students to perform on each other in this kind of competitive public setting. So at Pre- Trials the year-eights stood behind a table in the packed Gathering Hall and each was given a cage of five white lab mice. They were not allowed to touch the mice with anything but one finger, and the judges disqualified anyone trying to cheat by using Strength or Deflection on the small creatures.
Various attempts had been made over the years to try to upgrade the popular event to be more exciting—who didn’t want to see a man try to Channel into a bull? For practical and budgetary reasons, the proposals were always overruled.
Channeling was Anden’s strongest discipline, and he tried not to think about how it was well known to have been his mother’s as well. When the bell went off, he didn’t bother to try to touch the mice with his fingers. They were too nimble for that. He hovered both hands over the cage, quickly Perceiving all five tiny throbbing lives burning like tea lights. He chose one mouse at random, focused on it, lifted his palm slightly and brought it down, Channeling in one short, accurate burst. He felt the mouse’s small heart seize up and stop. A brief, electric warmth tingled up his arm as the animal’s life escaped. Four more quick, strong pops of Channeled energy and Anden stepped back, hands behind his back to indicate he was done. When the bell
went off, two other students in the round of eight had killed all their mice, but Anden had the winning time of the day.
He felt a little sad as the judge held up his cage to the applause of the spectators. The five tiny bodies had been alive minutes ago and now they were gone, so easily snuffed out. It was the way of all things, to live and die at the whim of more powerful creatures, but he didn’t care enough about the Pre-Trials to feel as if he’d had to kill them. It was a foolish guilt; he’d surely won the First of Class award today—why couldn’t he try to be happy, even for a little while?
“Congratulations,” Ton said, as they walked out of the Hall.
“You looked as if you weren’t even really trying,” Heike added.
Other fellow students came up to offer him praise as the entire exhausted but elated group lined up in the central field behind the Gathering Hall, waiting for the presentation of awards and the final closing words from Grandmaster Le. With the weeks ticking down to graduation, they’d become more interested in Anden all of a sudden, more aware of the fact that he would soon be the highest-ranked Green Bone among them, likely their leader, and clearly favored by the fierce young Pillar.
Anden tried to nod and smile and say a few words of thanks here and there, but he felt strange and detached, almost apart from his own body. He’d been wearing jade and expending jade energy all day, and after his recent solitude, the clamor of so many other auras was overwhelming. Ever since the funeral, he’d kept to himself, stuck to the routine motions of training and schoolwork. The other students were tentative around him, uncertain of what to say to someone who grieved Kaul Lan as a real person rather than as the Pillar whose death had ignited the revenge killings on Poor Man’s Road and sent Janloon spiraling into a storm of clan violence. It was just as well they didn’t try; he wouldn’t have known how to accept their sympathy. All he knew now was that remorse had a natural limit. After a certain amount of time, it finished eating a person hollow and had to alchemize into anger that could be turned outward lest it consume its host entirely.
Anden knew he was to blame for Lan’s death. He did not believe Hilo’s reassurances to the contrary. But Lan himself was to blame as well. So too were Shae, and Hilo. He couldn’t hate his own family for their failings, but he could hate those who’d made those failings fatal. He could hate Gam Oben, whose final blow had done its deadly work after all. He could hate Ayt
Mada, and Gont Asch, and the entire Mountain clan. And shine, that Espenian-brewed poison. He hated it.
Lan had been ambushed, they said, by Mountain clan members armed with machine guns, who, when they failed to shoot him, drowned him in the harbor. That’s all Anden knew—all anyone knew, it seemed. Even the identity of Lan’s killers was unknown. Whoever they were, and whatever had happened that night, Anden was certain they wouldn’t have succeeded if Lan had been himself. If he hadn’t been injured, unstable, drug-addled, as Anden had seen him. If Anden had gone to Hilo like he should have, or if he’d told Shae everything he knew that evening after the relayball game, maybe they would have convinced Lan to wear less of his jade until he was better, taken away the shine so he couldn’t use it as a crutch, or at least known enough to
make sure he wasn’t alone that night … “Emery.” Someone nudged him. “Go on.”
Anden looked up. Grandmaster Le had apparently already made his speech and announced the winners of the individual events, then called Anden’s name. The grandmaster was now waiting expectantly to present Anden with the First of Class award, his thin mouth slowly turning down in a scowl with each second of delay.
Anden hurried up to the front and touched his hands to his forehead while bending deeply and apologetically. The First of Class award was coveted because the reward was great—a single jade stud presented in a ceremonial green velvet box. It would be affixed to his training band and guarantee that so long as he received passing grades in the final Trials, he would graduate with four jade stones—the maximum anyone could receive at the Academy.
Anden accepted the box, saluted again, and returned to his place. He felt no great triumph, just a sense of grim relief.
Grandmaster Le said a few other things about the upcoming Trials and the need for graduating Green Bones to be especially well prepared in this time of strife and uncertainty, then wished all the graduates luck and called the Pre-Trials to a close. The crowd began to break up. Families and groups of friends gathered for photographs. Anden turned to go back to his dormitory room, but his classmates were milling together nearby and he caught the sound of Lott Jin’s voice in the conversation.
“The Kauls are fooling themselves if they think they’ll get many Fingers out of the Academy this year,” Lott was saying. “Not when following the
Horn means ending up as worm food.”
“Well, no one thinks Maik’s the Horn that Kaul was,” Pau conceded.
Heike agreed. “Patrolling and collecting tribute is one thing. Even clean- bladed duels don’t always end in death, not if someone concedes. But fighting enemy Green Bones with more experience and more jade, who want to pick the stones off your dead body? That’s different.”
“In good times, everyone wants to be a Finger, at least for a couple of years. You get respect for it, even if you don’t win jade or make Fist. But in a real war?” Lott’s voice rose in scorn. “They’re going to find out that not everyone’s as foolish and jade-hungry as—”
He didn’t get to finish because Anden spun around and barged into the knot of his classmates. He couldn’t say why he did so now—he’d heard talk like this before and kept quiet, but now his jaw and fists were clenched, the precious green box he’d just won was gripped tightly in one hand. The others students stood astonished as Anden rounded on Lott. “I’m sick of listening to you talk shit all the time.” He was more stunned than anyone by the disgust in his voice. “Any coward more concerned with saving his own skin than defending the clan in a time of war doesn’t deserve jade.”
They were entirely taken aback. They’d never seen him this angry before, not in eight whole years. But Lan was dead, and things were different now.
Different from how they’d been in the Gathering Hall on the night of the typhoon, back when Anden had still believed that his cousins had everything under control and there was no need for him to speak up.
Even in grief Anden had dwelled on the fact that Lott Jin had said barely a word to him in weeks, had seemed to outright avoid him. Seeing Lott’s mouth hang open in amazement now gave Anden a burning rush of cruel satisfaction. Why was Lott always so selfish? Did he think that he was the only one who ever feared for his life, or who wished things were not the way they were? How dare he speak so arrogantly, as if he could simply give up on the clan and walk away?
Lott’s mouth snapped shut. “Have I offended you, Emery?” He drew out the syllables of Anden’s name in an exaggerated Espenian accent, emphasizing their foreign sound. “I didn’t realize it bothered you so much to hear anyone question the clan or say a single word against the great Kaul family.” Lott’s eyes glittered. “You might be First of Class, but none of us have taken oaths or been given rank yet. You can’t tell us what to do or how
we can talk.”
“We’re year-eights,” Anden shot back. “No Peak is depending on us. The lower years will be watching to see what we do. That kind of talk is bad for the clan, and you were having it out here in the middle of the field, where anyone could hear you.” He flung his rebuke at the other student in a mounting fury; doubts were like viruses, easily spread from mouth to mouth.
“Your father’s a Fist; you should know better.”
“Don’t tell me what I ought to know, and don’t talk to me about my da,”
Lott snarled, and suddenly there was a dangerous charge in the air. They were both wearing jade today, and Anden felt the other young man’s aura flare like a grease fire. The huddle of year-eights shifted nervously. Dueling was forbidden on Academy grounds and there were instructors nearby. Already, some of the other milling students and their relatives on the field were pausing to glance over at their group.
“Come on, now,” said Ton, stepping partway between Anden and Lott.
“We’re all a little jade-addled from today. Maybe we were talking a little too freely. I don’t think there was insult meant from anyone here, was there?” He looked pointedly at both Lott and Anden.
“I suspect there was,” Lott said angrily, but then his gaze slid abruptly behind Anden’s shoulder and he stopped. In the same instant, Anden felt the unmistakable liquid heat of Kaul Hilo’s jade aura wash over him.
“Andy.” Hilo put a hand on Anden’s shoulder and joined their circle as if he did it every day. “Kehn told me everything—said you were incredible today. All I caught was the awards. Had to come see you up there as First of Class, at least. Sorry I couldn’t make it earlier.” Hilo’s lips rose in the lopsided insouciant smile he’d always possessed, but Anden could see that he’d changed. His youthful appearance was shot through with darker shadows that played around his eyes and mouth. There were angles to his face and fresh scars on his hands. The Pillar’s presence quieted the group at once, disrupted its direction like a boulder landing in the center of a small stream.
“I … I’m glad you could come at all, Hilo-jen,” Anden managed.
Hilo said, “Introduce me to your friends, Andy.”
Anden went around the circle. When they reached Lott, Hilo said, with great interest, “The son of Lott Penshugon? I’m sorry your father couldn’t be here to watch you in Pre-Trials. I’m sure he wanted to come, but I’m
counting on him to hold the Sogen district for No Peak.” The Pillar appeared not to notice Lott’s tense shoulders and rigid face, and said even more amiably, “I’ll tell him how well you did. He says you can throw a knife even better than he does, and you’re the sort that can carry his jade, I can see that already. You should talk to Maik-jen. Anytime; no need to wait until the graduation ceremony to do it.”
Lott’s face and neck flushed. “Thank you, Kaul-jen.” His jaw twitched as he saluted Hilo, his eyes jumping sideways to Anden for a suspicious instant.
“That goes for all of you,” the Pillar went on, his eyes sweeping around the small circle of year-eights. “I’ve been telling Andy you’re the biggest, strongest class to come out of the Academy in years. I’m already old compared to you. You’re the future of the clan and a credit to your families.”
“Thank you, Kaul-jen,” Ton said, and the others echoed him.
“Our blood for the clan,” Dudo added fervently, dipping deeply in salute.
“Soon, my friend, but not yet,” said Hilo lightly, tugging Dudo up by the back of his collar. “You’ve got two more months to be an Academy student.
Not just a student, but a year-eight. It’s practically your duty to make the lives of the lower years miserable and to get the masters to declare you the worst class ever by the time you leave. Every class does it. I’d tell you some stories from my year, but it’s the night after Pre-Trials—why aren’t you all racing off campus to get drunk by now?”
Several of them laughed, then thanked the Pillar again and hurried away with backward glances. Lott cast one final unconvinced look at both Anden and Hilo, then followed the others.
Hilo walked with Anden across the mostly empty field. His voice changed, lost its lightness. “You and Lott’s son were ready to have it out back there. What were you having words with him about when I arrived?”
“It wasn’t important,” Anden mumbled. As angry as he was at Lott Jin, he was hesitant to speak badly of him in front of the Pillar. But Hilo continued to wait expectantly for an answer, until Anden felt he had to respond. “He was saying the clan won’t get as many Fingers as you think it will. That those who have a choice won’t want to take such a risk during wartime.”
“We won’t get oaths from all of them, that’s true. Maybe not even as many as we’re hoping for. Is that why you were so angry?”
“It was the way Lott was talking, Hilo-jen. He was being disrespectful.”
Hilo nodded in understanding. “You were putting him in his place, then?”
“I …” Anden wasn’t sure. There was the faintest teasing suggestion in Hilo’s voice and in the curve of his eyebrow. Anden was appalled to think that his cousin might suspect some other reason for his emotional outburst at Lott. “I had to say something.”
“Andy,” said Hilo sternly, “a lot of those boys who’re your classmates now will be your Fingers later. You’ve got to learn: There’s a way to discipline a man so he hates you forever, and another way to do it so he loves you all the more for it. To know what it is, you have to know the man. What do you know about your friend back there?”
Anden hesitated. What did he know about Lott Jin?
Hilo said, “I’ll tell you what I know: His old man’s a boor. As loyal and green as they come, lucky for us, but Lott Pen walks through life like he’s begging for someone to start something with him. Always glaring, never a kind word to anyone. The sort of person who kicks dogs. No wonder his son mouths off and has such a gloomy face. Not sure how to be his own man, with a father like that. Not sure what to think of the clan.”
They were walking in the opposite direction of the dormitories, but Anden followed without a word. He had the feeling that Hilo was telling him something he thought was very important: valuable advice for a future Fist.
Hilo said, “What you were saying to him just as I came up—it made your friend feel less than his da, and he couldn’t handle that. He’d have taken any scolding or beating from you so long as it made him seem better than his old man.”
No one could deny that Kaul Hilo had a way with his people. It came from a genuine concern, and was a talent more mysterious to Anden than any jade ability. They passed through the entry gates and walked down to the parking lot where the Duchesse was parked. “People are like horses, Andy.
Fingers and Fists too—everyone. Any old horse will run when it’s whipped, but only fast enough to avoid the whipping,” Hilo said. “Racehorses, though, they run because they look at the horse on their left, they look at the one on their right, and they think, No way am I second to these fuckers.”
It began to rain, lightly, a cold winter drizzle. Anden glanced anxiously at the sky and rubbed the outside of his arms, but Hilo stood with his hands in his pockets, elbows jutting loosely forward as he leaned against the Duchesse. “Sometimes, Andy, the people you think you can count on, they let you down in a bad way, and that’s hard to take. But for the most part, you
give a man something to live up to, you tell him he can be more than he is now, more than other people think he’ll ever be, and he’ll try his godsdamned best to make it true.”
Anden had the sudden and distinct impression that he was being gently chastised for failing today, in his reaction to Lott and the other year-eights. If it hadn’t been for his cousin’s appearance, he’d have antagonized the very students Hilo was depending on to join the ranks of No Peak in the spring.
Anden dropped his eyes; he understood that he, too, had been given something to live up to. “You’re right, Hilo-jen.” It wasn’t enough to be a Green Bone, even to be First of Class—he had to be a Kaul.
“Don’t look like that,” Hilo said. “Like you think I’m disappointed in you when I’m not. We all have to learn. You stood up to another man and demanded respect for the clan. That shows your heart was in the right place, and that’s what matters. Now, let me see the new green you got for being First of Class.”
Anden handed his cousin the small green box. Hilo opened it and removed the single round stone, the size of a shirt button and twice as thick, mounted with a simple metal clasp. He held the piece up and studied it. The jade was a flawless, vivid, translucent green, edging nearly into blue. Even in the low light at the end of a cloudy day, it seemed almost to glow in Hilo’s fingers.
The Pillar made an appreciative noise in his throat, and for an instant, Anden felt an insensible anxiety, a wild, irrational possessiveness, the sudden desire to seize back his prize.
His cousin smiled as if he could read this instinct in Anden’s face or in his aura. He reached out and took Anden’s left wrist. With a deliberateness that was almost tender, he loosened the leather training band and set the fourth jade stone into a vacant grommet next to the three others. He closed the clasp over the leather so it sat snugly against Anden’s skin, then adjusted the band’s buckle to fit. “There,” he said, giving his cousin a playful tap across the cheek. “That’s better, isn’t it?”
Anden closed his eyes for a minute, reveling in the new energy that streamed like light through his tired muscles and frayed nerves. Even with his eyes closed, he felt as if everything was deliciously clear and heartbreakingly beautiful—the rain striking his skin felt as if it sizzled with sensation, there were a hundred thousand different notes of sound and smell and taste in the breeze, and his cousin’s aura—the shape and place and quality of it—was
clearer to him than sight. Anden laughed, a little self-conscious at grinning so stupidly. He could do Pre-Trials all over again, right now, and do better than he had before, he was sure of it. Every piece of jade gained was like an improvement on the realness of the world, the power he had over his own body and everything around it. He opened his eyes to see Hilo watching him with pride, but also envy. “Do you feel this way every time you get new jade?” Anden asked.
“No.” Hilo glanced away. He put an unconscious hand to his chest. “You never forget your first stones—the first six or so. You remember the day you got each one, how you got it, what it felt like, everything. The ones after that add less and less. Every Green Bone levels off at some point. When you’re carrying all the jade you’re meant to carry, adding more doesn’t make a difference. With some people, it goes the other way—it starts ruining them.”
Anden’s euphoria slid away at Hilo’s words. Ruined. His mother, his uncle, now Lan—it seemed wrong, disrespectful, to think of them in that way, but what other way was there? Even the wondrous rush of new jade could not suppress the apprehension that rose in Anden—for himself, for others. He could see just a few of Hilo’s jade studs in the space under the collar of his shirt and between the first two buttons, always left undone. But he knew that there was more adorning his cousin’s torso, many dangerous trophies added in the last month alone. “That won’t happen to you, Hilo-jen, will it?” he asked, unable to hide his worry.
Hilo shook his head a little sadly. “I don’t feel anything anymore.”