CHAPTER
56
Graduation Day
In years to come, the city would recall the holiday week that came to pass as the New Year’s bloodletting of the Janloon clans. Many referred to it as the vengeance of the Kauls. In some parts of the city it was nodded at approvingly, in others it elicited the nervous tugging of earlobes. What was apparent by the time the districts settled into a new stalemate was that neither clan would be enjoying a swift victory. Despite all doubts to the contrary, the youngest grandchildren of the Torch had fended off annexation, and in so doing, solidified unquestioned clan leadership.
It was tradition for the graduating year-eights of Kaul Dushuron Academy, who finished their Trials before the holidays but had to wait until the auspicious start of the year for final results and graduation, to spend the first week after the break performing back-breaking service on the campus grounds—a final lesson in the Divine Virtue of humility—before being allowed to take their oaths and receive their jade. Anden was still recovering in the hospital and not able to join his classmates in scrubbing paving stones, repairing fences, pruning trees, and guiding clueless year-ones from place to place. True to Hilo’s prediction, however, he was out of Janloon General Hospital two days before graduation, and well enough to attend convocation on an overcast spring day, gray with the threat of rain.
Word had spread that Anden had been the only one with the Pillar at the battle that had killed Gont Asch. When he arrived in formal Academy robes
to line up in the Gathering Hall before the ceremonies, a deep hush preceded him wherever he walked. At the check-in table, Master Sain inclined his head with more respect than Anden had ever received from an instructor. “Emery.
Stand at the end of the line. You’ll be the last to enter.” Anden knew that to mean he’d received the highest marks in the Trials, which, combined with First of Class standing in the Pre-Trials, had compensated for his only slightly better than average academic scores to place him Rank One.
Anden saluted and retreated to the end of the forming line. “Ton,” he said in greeting. Ton startled before raising his hands in a salute. “Anden-jen,” he said. “I’m glad to see you’re well.” There was a formality in Ton’s voice, the tone of a Finger addressing a Fist, and Anden stopped, uncertain of how to respond. He wanted to correct Ton for addressing him as a Green Bone even before the graduation ceremony, but it was clear from the other teen’s manner that he’d done it deliberately. Anden swallowed his growing discomfort and turned to nod hello to Dudo and Pau; both of them dipped into salutes.
Anden’s gaze drifted behind them to Lott. A fleeting emotion, the dim shadow of an ache, passed through Anden’s center, but that was all; he didn’t have room for anything else. That part of him felt numb. Lott, who ever since his father’s violent death, had a grim, hollow-eyed look about him, inclined his head toward Anden civilly. “Jen.”
Anden turned and faced the front of the line, closing his hands within the long sleeves of his formal black robes. Two weeks of convalescence, healing sessions with Dr. Truw, and administered SN1 had done what Hilo had promised it would: Anden felt physically recovered, and more like himself than he’d been when he’d awoken in the hospital, distraught and parched with jade craving. Even so, it had been a mental struggle to work himself up to the event today, to prepare himself to stand before the staring eyes of not just his fellow students, but the entire clan.
“You’re a hero, Andy,” Hilo had said, but Anden didn’t feel like a hero.
He felt damaged and unsure of himself. He thought of the SN1 still circulating like a pollutant through his bloodstream. These people knew what he’d done but didn’t see what he’d become: a danger. A volatile substance, held stable with the aid of dubious modern science.
At the sounding of the drums outside, the one hundred and twenty-six men and thirty-two women who’d completed the full eight years of Green Bone training at Kaul Du Academy shuffled out of the Gathering Hall and
into the main courtyard, filing neatly into rows in front of the low stage that had been set up facing the hundreds of folding chairs containing watching relatives and clan members.
Anden knelt on the pavers with his classmates under the tent that had been erected to shield against the threat of rain. As Grandmaster Le began speaking, Anden looked over his shoulder into the rows of spectators. He found the Kauls at once, sitting front and center. Hilo was in a sharp olive suit and black vest he’d bought just for the occasion; he looked much better, his face still scarred but no longer gaunt. He was clearly in good spirits, as he’d been on the car ride over, exuding the cheerful nonchalance that had almost disappeared from him in recent months. He had one arm curled around Wen’s shoulders. Anden saw him tug her affectionately to the side of his body and pull the hood of her jacket over her head to cut the slight but damp wind. On Hilo’s other side was Maik Kehn, and next to Wen was the Weather Man. Shae sat erect, in a dark skirt and blouse, her gaze serious and slightly preoccupied, but when she noticed Anden watching, she gave him a small smile.
He brought his attention back to the front as Grandmaster Le called forward the first group of students. All year-eights were required to declare their intended allegiances prior to final Trials, and these eleven graduates had elected to take penitent’s oaths. A Learned One from the Temple of Divine Return mounted the few steps onto the platform to administer the oath of penitence. The eleven students stood and approached the stage; they knelt at the front of the assembly and recited the lines binding them to a life of religious service, then touched their heads to the ground before rising and walking behind their classmates. The next twenty-five students had committed their jade abilities to the healing arts; they were called forward to take oaths before a master physician of the College of Bioenergetic Medicine, where they would continue their training. Anden shifted, his legs numb, as a third group of eighteen graduates was called up before Grandmaster Le himself to pledge themselves to the honorable profession of teaching the jade disciplines. They would return to the Academy as assistant teachers the following week, with the hope of one day becoming masters.
At last, the remainder of the class, the large group who’d declared service and loyalty to the No Peak clan, came forward en masse to take their oaths. A ripple went through the spectators and graduates alike as the Pillar of the clan
strode down the center aisle and mounted the stage with quick steps. Hilo turned and looked out across the crowd. Anden thought he looked pleased.
Roughly a hundred new Green Bones for the clan, nearly two-thirds of the graduating class. Some would become Luckbringers, but a majority would start as Fingers, for Kehn and his Fists to command.
Everyone waited for Hilo to begin speaking the jade warrior’s oaths line by line, so the gathered graduates could repeat after him. Instead, for a long time he said nothing while an uncomfortable pause lengthened. People began glancing at one another in confusion. Grandmaster Le cleared his throat impatiently, but Hilo shook his head. “Grandmaster,” he said, smiling, and speaking loudly enough that the crowd could hear him, “I didn’t appreciate this place enough when I was standing down there in those black robes, so let me take in this beautiful sight for a minute. I’m not a student anymore, so you can’t even wallop me for holding you up.” The crowd chuckled at this. He’s truly the Pillar now, and everyone knows it, Anden thought. And still himself, mostly.
“Brothers and sisters,” Hilo shouted. “The Pillar is the master of the clan, but Pillars change, and still the brotherhood survives and continues. You’re taking this oath as much to one another as you are to me. So who knows the Green Bone warrior’s oaths by heart and can lead his classmates in taking them first?”
This was not how the ceremony was supposed to go, but even Grandmaster Le didn’t try to intercede when Lott stepped forward from the line. “I will, Kaul-jen.”
Hilo nodded and motioned the teen onto the stage. Anden watched, his heart beating in his throat, as Lott walked calmly up the three steps and knelt before Hilo, who leaned in to whisper something briefly into his ear before stepping back. Anden caught a glimpse of Lott’s bleak and determined expression as he raised his clasped hands to his forehead. “The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master,” he began in a strong voice that carried clearly across the courtyard. And the voices of a hundred of his classmates rose up and echoed him: The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master!
As his lips moved, reciting the oath he’d already taken two weeks ago, Anden couldn’t tear his eyes from the sight of Lott kneeling up there in front of everyone, hands raised and eyes lowered before Hilo’s warm but penetrating gaze. A bewildered grief rose in Anden. He was certain this was
never what Lott had wanted; he’d never wanted to follow in his father’s bloody footsteps. It ought to be him, Anden, up there instead. The Kauls were his family; he’d already proven himself worthy of jade, and everyone was acknowledging him as Hilo’s protégé and a fearsome new force in the clan.
And yet, he was stricken for Lott, and horribly, incomprehensibly grateful not to be on the stage, because it seemed, for a long, surreal moment, that Lott was him, that he’d taken Anden’s place as he’d appeared when kneeling on the wooden floor of the training hall of the Kaul estate after New Year’s dinner, and now Anden was looking at himself through someone else’s eyes, seeing blood and jade and tragedy.
“On my honor, my life, and my jade,” Lott finished, and touched his head to the ground. The other new Green Bones of No Peak repeated his words, closing the oath. As he had with Anden, Hilo drew Lott to his feet, embraced him, and with one hand on his shoulder, said something to him in a low voice that Anden couldn’t hear. Lott gave a short, tight nod, then stepped off the stage to take his place back in the line. Hilo clasped his hands in sharp salute and raised his voice, addressing the new members of the clan. “I accept your oaths and call you my brothers-in-arms.”
“Our blood for the Pillar!” someone shouted. A few other voices rose up as Hilo descended the stage. “No Peak! No Peak!” Anden began to turn to the crowd to see who’d started the chant, but Grandmaster Le, glaring disapprovingly, brought up his hands to demand silence. All the graduates, and many members of the audience, had grown up under the grandmaster’s strict rule, and instinctively fell quiet.
“Now,” said Grandmaster Le with more than a touch of reproof at both the overly dramatic oath-taking performance and the crowd’s reaction, “we must award these graduates the jade they’ve earned for their years of hard work, discipline, and training.”
At the back of the stage was a table with four separate groupings of small wooden boxes. Every set of eyes swiveled eagerly to Master Sain as he took a box from the first pile and opened it. “Au Satingya,” he read from the inside of the lid.
Immediately following final Trials, all the year-eights had turned in their training bands and the jade they contained. Now their jade would be returned permanently, possibly with fewer or more stones than they’d surrendered, depending on how they’d performed in the exams. Each pile on the table
represented a level of accomplishment in the jade disciplines. Au Sati, who stepped onto the stage to polite applause, had earned one jade stone, strung onto a metal chain. Grandmaster Le lifted it from the box and placed it over Au’s head. Au would become one of the lowest-ranked Fingers, or if he was bright enough with numbers, an entry-level Luckbringer.
“Goro Gorusuto,” said Master Sain, calling up the next graduate as Au saluted and stepped back off the stage. So it went, until the first group of boxes was cleared, and a larger grouping of graduates began coming up one at a time to receive two stones of jade each. For some of the young men and women graduating, the jade they were awarded today would be the only green they would ever wear. For others, it was merely the first of more to come, with jade passed down through families, awarded by superiors in the clan, or most prestigious of all, won in duels and battles.
When the higher-ranked students who’d each earned three stones began filing across the stage, Anden found himself so nervous he could barely watch. Dudo received his jade, then Pau and Ton, all of them breaking into smiles once they’d gotten past the grandmaster and joined their fellow graduates on the other side. The collection of boxes on the table grew smaller. There were only a dozen or so boxes in the final pile containing the reward for the top students, the ones who’d earned the maximum of four jade pieces—as much jade as one would expect on a senior Finger or a junior Fist, more than most Kekonese and any foreigners could safely tolerate.
Putting on that much jade ought to be easy for Anden now, after what he’d been through. It would be a momentarily disorienting rush, like what he’d experienced during training, nothing like the powerful, crippling high he’d suffered in front of the Twice Lucky. Yet still, his fingers began to feel numb and chilled, and his stomach clenched in craving and visceral reluctance. The grandmaster began calling up the final students. An especially loud round of foot-stomping applause greeted Lott as he stepped up and bent his head for the grandmaster. Anden could hear his fellow graduates nearby, already chatting, congratulating each other, discussing how they’d have their stones reset, whether they wanted thumb rings or eyebrow studs or other, more daring piercings. There was only one box left on the
table.
“Emery Anden,” said Master Sain.
The chatter died as Anden stood up. Suddenly he felt as if he was in a
waking dream, a self-consciously fictive state in which he was doing something without believing that he was really there. His legs moved him forward, his shoes hit the steps, and when he reached the stage, he heard someone shout, “Kaul-jen!”
Applause broke out, and other voices echoed the first. “Kaul-jen!”
Anden paused, thinking the crowd was shouting for Hilo. When he realized they were cheering him, heat flowed into his face. They’re saying I’m a Kaul. A mixed-blood orphan like him, and they were placing him alongside Lan and Hilo and Shae. It was the greatest flattery he could imagine, and he was mortified. Because it wasn’t true; he wasn’t like them. As Grandmaster Le lifted out the four jade stones on a silver chain, Anden stumbled back as if
the box contained a venomous spider.
“No,” he blurted.
Grandmaster Le frowned, his motion arrested. “What do you mean, no?”
“I don’t—” Anden choked out. “I don’t want to wear jade.”
In all his years at the Academy, he’d never seen the grandmaster entirely taken aback, as he was now, his gray eyebrows like two bristly arches, his lined face locked into place. Master Sain and the other faculty members onstage looked at each other in bewilderment, but none seemed to know what to say. A graduate refusing his jade? Such a thing had never happened.
Anden heard the stunned silence before the whispers of disbelief began to rise. He didn’t dare fix his eyes anywhere but at his feet; he was disgracing himself, disgracing Hilo and Shae. Burning with shame, he clasped his shaking hands and brought them to his bowed forehead in a salute of deepest apology before turning and descending the stage without speaking.
He had never seen Hilo so livid with confusion and rage. The Pillar came straight for him as soon as Grandmaster Le brought the graduation ceremony to a quick and awkward conclusion. The crowd of watching clan members parted before Hilo in fearful haste. Hilo’s fingers locked around Anden’s bicep like talons. He dragged his unresisting cousin away from his fellow graduates, around the back of the stage, putting several feet of distance between them and the silent stares of so many others. Hilo spun Anden to face him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Anden tried to speak, but when he opened his mouth, he didn’t know what to say. There seemed to be no way to explain what he’d done. Hilo’s hand was still clamped around his arm, and through it, Anden could feel his cousin’s jade aura shrilling like a swarm of infuriated hornets. “I’m sorry,” he managed at last.
“You’re sorry?” Hilo seemed unable to find words of his own for a moment. “What’s this about, Andy? What’s come over you? You made a fool of yourself in front of the clan, in front of all your Green Bone brothers. You made a fool of me.”
“I’m not like you, Hilo,” Anden burst out, anguished. Everything he’d feared about himself, every doubt he’d tamed with strict training and faith in the clan, every nightmare involving bloody bathtub water and his mother’s screams had seemed in one instant to rise out of that small box on the stage, overwhelming even the horrible knowledge that he was ruining all that he’d ever wanted. “I’m not someone who should have jade, who was ever meant to have jade. If I start wearing it today, I’ll only want more and more, as much as I had when I killed Gont. I’ll become worse than my ma, the crazy Mad Witch; I know I will. I can feel it in my blood now, no matter what you say.” He could barely breathe enough to speak. “You could dope me up on shine, on that poisonous Espenian stuff that killed Lan, but that’s not how I want to live. I don’t want to be what you’re making me: a-a—”
“A what?” Hilo demanded angrily. “A Green Bone? A part of this family?”
“A weapon,” Anden finished in a whisper.
Hilo released him with a jerk and stepped back. His face contorted in a baffling mix of emotions, foremost among them hurt, his eyes widening in deeply wounded surprise, as if Anden had pulled out a knife and cut him across the cheek. Behind Hilo’s shoulder, Anden glimpsed Shae approaching, Kehn and Wen following her but stopping some distance away, holding back from intruding.
The Pillar took a step forward and raised his hands to seize his cousin by the shoulders. Anden flinched, certain for a second that Hilo would really hurt him now, but Hilo merely said, in a calm, forced voice, “This is my fault, Andy.” He gave Anden a firm shake to force him to look up. “That fight—it was too much, too quickly. And landing in the hospital afterward, that was a scary thing. You scared yourself. I’m the one to blame, but I had to
do it, because we needed you. I couldn’t have done it myself, couldn’t have saved the clan without you. We still need you.”
Anden felt terrible guilt searing his face as Hilo said, in a quiet voice that was both entreating and reproving, “You humiliated both of us just now, but I know you didn’t mean to; I’m not going to hold it against you. Let’s go back out there together to find Grandmaster Le and get your graduation jade. It’s what you worked for all these years. We’ll forget this happened, and we’ll do it right this time, build you up slowly. You’re a member of this family, Andy.
You were raised to be a Green Bone.”
Anden felt his resolve quaver, but then he shook his head vehemently.
“I’m too sensitive to jade; it makes me too powerful. It makes me enjoy killing too much.” He swallowed thickly. “The Mountain knows how much of a threat I am now. If I wear any green at all, Ayt will do whatever she can to have me killed, and I’ll have to kill so many others just to stay alive …”
His words were rushing out in a torrent of desperation. “And every time I kill, I’ll enjoy it, more and more, and earn more jade, and all the shine in the world won’t help me in the end, I know it.”
Hilo threw up his hands. “The Mountain’s wanted me dead for years! We live with death and madness angling for us, but we do what we have to do, we deal with it! You think I had it any easier than you last week? I had to go through fucking jade withdrawal when I was most of the way to being a corpse, and still wake up to be the godsdamned Pillar.” His voice rose; he forced it back down with visible effort. “Being powerful makes you a target, being a Kaul makes you a target, but a Green Bone never turns his back on his family or his clan.” The light in Hilo’s dilated pupils was dangerous.
“Think about what you’re doing, Andy.”
Shae appeared next to them suddenly. She spoke in a voice that was low and resolute, and carried a current of cold reproach that she turned on her brother. “This is Anden’s decision, Hilo. He’s graduated and taken oaths; he’s a man now.”
“Who do you think those oaths are to?” Hilo demanded. “Those are clan oaths, made to the Pillar. They’re what we live and die by. If you do this, Andy, you’re betraying me.” The grimace on Hilo’s face was terrible. “How could you say I made you into a weapon? Like I didn’t love you and treat you like my little brother, like you were nothing to me but a tool? How could you say that?” He took a step backward, shoulders trembling as if it was
physically painful to hold himself back from murdering his miserable cousin where he stood. His face and voice turned suddenly cold and remote with scorn. “You do this and you’re out of the family.”
“Hilo,” Shae hissed, looking as if she would strike him. “Stop this.”
“Hilo-jen …” Anden pleaded, his body turning cold.
“Get out of my sight,” Hilo said. When Anden didn’t move, he roared, “Get out of my sight! You ungrateful, traitorous mongrel, I never want to see you again!”
Anden stumbled backward, stricken, the force of Hilo’s flushed fury strangling whatever words might have tried to escape his throat. He turned and ran.
He ran until he left the grounds of the Academy. He tore off his graduation robes and threw them into the dirt and kept running in his dress pants and thin shirt, muddying them as he scrambled through the forest of Widow’s Park without regard for direction. He ran until tears blurred his vision and exertion scalded his lungs and legs. When he stopped running, he kept stumbling and pushing through the trees, as if he could escape what had happened, as if he could lose his shame in the woods.
When he emerged onto a main road, he saw where he was and he began running again. The cemetery gates were open for visiting hours, and he panted his way up the gravesite-cluttered hillside, half sobbing, until he collapsed in a heap in front of Lan’s headstone at the foot of the Kaul family memorial. “I’m sorry,” he gasped, trembling, the wind chilling the sweat- soaked shirt to his skin. Fat raindrops had begun to fall, streaking the lenses of his glasses and plastering the hair to his head. Rain splattered the marble slab, darkening it from a whitish green to a color almost like dirty jade. “I’m sorry, Lan.” Anden sat and wept.
When Shae showed up minutes or hours later, she was carrying a black umbrella, which she held over him, letting the rain fall on her uncovered head as she stood next to him gazing at the family’s final resting place. “He would’ve been proud of you, Anden,” she said matter-of-factly. “He was always proud of you.”