“Youwere the one who told me to try harder. I had to think fast.” She grinned. “I know I shall make for an excellent student under your—”
Whatever she had been about to say vanished from her mind, for at that moment, Zen smiled. It was slow, and small, a slight curving of his mouth that crinkled his eyes and dimpled his cheeks, cracking the facade of stern rigidity to his features and giving a glimpse of a boy who might have been. A night of black clouds, parting to reveal a bright moon.
“If I train you and take you to Guarded Mountain,” he said, “you promise you’ll study hard and stay away from channeling qì irresponsibly?”
Lan pressed a fist to her palm in a salute. “I swear it on all the pork buns in the Last Kingdom.”
“Well, now.” His eyes held playfulness like a dusting of stars. “That is a very serious vow.”
In a journey with three disciples, I am bound to find a master.
—Kontencian Analects (Classic of Society),2:3
In typical Lan fashion, she woke up late for her first day of class. The morning bells were already halfway through their chiming as she washed with clear spring water from the bucket the disciples filled each night. Then, she flung on her new practitioner’s páo and followed the stream of white-robed disciples down the footpaths to the school halls.
The disciples began their day with morning chores. These rotated each day so that more favorable tasks (such as organizing tomes in the bookhouse) and less favorable tasks (cleaning the latrines) were equally distributed among all. Then, with the sound of the bell, the disciples raced to the refectory for a breakfast of congee, vegetable stew, and some tofu dishes. Lan managed to chat up the cook, a cheerful, plump-faced woman named Taub, whose son, Chue, was a disciple. They’d fled the Elantian Conquest in their southwestern village together and crossed paths with the Master of Iron Fists, who’d subsequently brought them to safety in Skies’ End, Taub told Lan between extra scoops of tofu and red bean soup.
Lan found the classes as fascinating as the masters who taught them. There was Nur, the Master of Light Arts, a kindly, slight man who moved like the shifting waters of a river. For Lan’s first lesson, he had her practice channeling qì to specific parts of her body while she watched the other disciples leap from impossibly high places and scale walls. Cáo, the Master of Archery, handed Lan a basket of jujubes and had her toss one into the air. Faster than she could blink, the master had sent an arrow cleaving through the heart of thejujube.
And he’d done it with his eyes closed.
Ip’fong, the Master of Iron Fists, was a ruddy man with a torso harder than boulders. Iron Fists, Lan learned, was a specific style of martial arts. He had taught at the School of Eternal Spring, which specialized in all types of martial arts; of his fellow masters and their disciples, he was the sole survivor. For Lan’s first class, he set her a variety of strength-training exercises. Sweating profusely as she attempted to do a push-up balancing on two fingers, Lan watched her fellow disciples practice sparring and neatly lop heads off wooden dummies with flying kicks.
Yeshin Noro Ulara, Master of Swords, was relentless. Lan suspected she’d been chomping at the bit to punish Lan for her transgressions on that first day in the Chamber of a Hundred Healings. For Lan’s first lesson, the master had her spar with Dilaya with wooden sticks, without any instruction or guidance. Dilaya did not bother to hide her vindictive pleasure with every blow she landed on Lan.
Lan did not even manage to touch Dilaya.
“That’s bad luck,” Shàn’jun said, grimacing sympathetically when she plopped down next to him at the refectory, covered in fresh bruises. He reached into the hemp satchel he always carried with him. Lan heard clinking sounds inside. “Good thing I always come prepared. Hold still.”
“Everyone knows Yeshin Noro Dilaya would do anything to win her mother’s favor,” Chue chimed in over his hearty bowl of tofu stew. “She wants to earn Ulara’s sword.”
“Why?” Lan asked, holding out her arm as Shàn’jun began to apply acrid-smelling creams to her bruises.
“Because it’s Falcon’s Claw,” Chue said dreamily. “Every disciple of Swords knows it: it’s the legendary dao of the Jorshen Steel clan. The handle’s made of ivory, and it comes with a thumb ring Jorshen hunters used to wear to hunt. The lore says that every generation, the leader of the Jorshen Steel clan would select an heir from one of the eight Jorshen noble houses.”
This piqued Lan’s interest.“Clan?”she repeated, setting down her bowl of congee. “As in the Ninety-Nine Clans?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Like most Hin, Lan had grown up thinking of the clans as a cross between ancient history and myth—not as real, live, flesh-and-blood people who walked and talked and had prickly dispositions. “Are there many other clan members here?”
“I’m descended from a clan,” Chue said cheerfully. “The Muong clan.”
“The presence of the clans began to fade in the late Middle Kingdom,” Shàn’jun supplied, drawing back to examine his work on her arm. “In a bid to appease the Imperial Court’s growing unease over their presence, many of the smaller clans spread out to try to assimilate into the mainstream Hin culture. Most of the Hin are descended from clans, though with the rise of the Last Kingdom, families began to keep any association with a clan a secret.”
“Think of the Hin as a huge clan, too,” Chue chimed in. “Only, they expanded so rapidly, they became synonymous with the people and the culture of the kingdom. Most dynasties—all but a handful—have been founded by Hin emperors.”
“And the other clans rebelled against the Hin Imperial Court?” Lan filled in.
She seemed to have said the wrong thing. Shàn’jun’s expression was still, a pond without a ripple, but Chue—his face fell. “Not all,” he said, sounding hurt. “The Muong people only ever wanted to keep to our own culture and customs.”
“Many clans were known to have developed their own special branches of practitioning,” Shàn’jun said. He rolled down her sleeve and began tucking his vials and balms back into his hemp satchel, but Lan had the distinct impression that he was intentionally avoiding meeting her gaze. “These arts are passed down through their bloodlines. Some grew exceptionally powerful, and the Imperial Court became afraid. So they sought to limit both practitioning and the presence of the clans. But the Ninety-Nine Clans were still around…until the end of the Middle Kingdom.” He said this with his eyes downcast. Chue’s head was lowered as he made a great show of slurping his congee.
For the first time in her life, Lan had nothing to say. She had learned the broad strokes of her kingdom’s history with her tutors as a child, and then she’d picked up scraps of stories from the elders and the villagers, the townsfolk and the dishwashers.
Now it felt as though she were learning a part of history that had somehow disappeared from the books, been scrubbed from the collective memories of the Hin.
She was quiet for the rest of the meal.
