Page 69

“Hurry up,” the clerk grunted.

“Y-yes,” he said, breathless, almost stumbling on his next step under the weight of his luggage. His bag kept knocking painfully against his rib cage, bruising his bones. Inside was everything he needed for the next three days: dried red dates and millet buns wrapped in paper, two blankets, a water pitcher, a chamber pot, candles, and his inkstone and brushes. He had checked the contents twelve times before he left this morning, terrified that he would forget something crucial, like food, and starve before he could finish writing out his answers. With a pang of something close to nostalgia, he remembered the first stage of the exams; those had been so straightforward in comparison, conducted within a day inside a courtyard, allowing them to return home and recover for the night.

“I said, hurry,” the clerk snapped at him as they walked through a covered colonnade, then a set of heavy, bronze-studded doors, into a dark, wide room that reminded him of a dungeon.

He forced himself to move faster, panting now. Without the sun, the temperature dropped at once. The air inside was cold and stagnant as death, but that didn’t stop the sweat from dripping down his forehead and dampening the back of his robes. His stomach roiled and heaved, and the bile in his throat crept to his mouth. He was gripped by a disturbing, vivid image of himself throwing up all over the clerk. If that happened, would he be automatically disqualified? The very possibility made his nausea intensify.

Clear your head, Rujia had told him before they parted. Try not to think of anything else.

He wished he could. But he was afraid that clearing his head would erase all the things he’d memorized, and he wouldn’t be able to recall them again. He kept his thoughts bottled up tightly instead, mentally reviewing and repeating poems and dates and ticking them off the way he had checked his luggage earlier until it felt like his skull might shatter from the pressure.

The room had been divided into rows upon rows of identical cells. There were no doors; they simply faced out, so anyone passing by could check in on the examiners inside. The clerk stopped short before one of the cells and jabbed his finger toward it. “In here,” he instructed. “Prepare your materials. The exams will be starting shortly.”

Junyi squeezed himself into the tiny space. It was about the size of a standard closet, but empty, save for a plain wooden board that extended from one side to another. Stupidly, he thought it was a barrier of sorts, then realized this was meant to function both as a bed and a desk, though it was much too narrow for either. The floor was a dull gray, and in the corner, where he stood shivering, was a mysterious dark stain that hadn’t been fully scrubbed away. He prayed it wasn’t blood.

With trembling fingers, he set his bag down and drew the strings open. When he’d managed to unpack everything, he peered cautiously out of his cell and was met with numerous pale, anxious faces blinking back at him. Then, with a lurch, he recognized the face opposite him, on the left.

Qiming’s lips curled.

Talking was forbidden, yet Junyi could read his thoughts as if he’d spat them across the room: You’re just some boy from a peasant family with delusional dreams of success. You’re nothing. You’re nobody.

Junyi reeled backward, his heart pounding. He had the awful sensation that there were bees buzzing just underneath his skin. His scalp and fingertips tingled with foreboding, the familiar prospect of failure. It was all he knew. To try and to fail, despite his best efforts.

But he remembered what Keran had said. He’d improved. He wasn’t as prepared as he wanted, but he was more prepared than he’d ever been before. This time, it could be different. He needed to ignore Qiming and focus. Here was his chance to change his life forever, and he would grasp it.

He breathed in.

His hand tightened around the brush until it stopped quivering.

Three days later, Junyi squinted into the sun.

He staggered through the gates in a disoriented, bleary-eyed haze. His head was spinning, his face burning as if he were on the tail end of a fever. He felt sick, hollow, somehow, like his essence had been drained out of him inside that cell. Like all the statistics and policies he’d learned and then regurgitated had taken up physical space within his body. He barely had the strength left to carry his bag, even though it was much lighter now than it had been going in.

“Junyi! Over here!”

He lifted his head.

Rujia and Keran were waiting for him outside the compound. They were easy to spot among the throngs of impatient parents simply because of their otherworldly elegance, their godlike beauty. At the sight of them, he was overcome by an unexpected tide of emotion he hadn’t felt since his mother passed. It was warmth. It was a sense of safety, or something like it. It was the astounding realization that he wasn’t alone, that he had people to look for in a crowd, people who would look for him too.

His nose prickled. Tears burned in his throat, the exhaustion and uncertainty of the past few months threatening to send him toppling over on the grass.

“How did you do?” Rujia asked him.

He wiped his face roughly, embarrassed. “I—I don’t know. I mean, I think . . .” He shook his head, finding himself incapable of thought. “No, I don’t know.”

“What were the questions?” Keran pressed. “Were they difficult?”

He shook his head again. He couldn’t remember a single thing he had written. Perhaps it was for the best this way. There were plenty of students who wished to discuss every question immediately afterward, hoping they could recreate the exam and predict their own marks, but the idea of reliving anything from the exams made him feel violently ill.

“Well, it’s over now,” Rujia said, smiling at him, though the corners of her mouth were tense. “Congratulations. You deserve a long break after this.”

“It’s over,” he repeated. The relief hadn’t hit him yet, but maybe it would once they returned home. He missed his bed terribly. Or not even his bed, but any bed that didn’t also serve as a table. His back and shoulders still ached from the rigid wooden board.

Keran opened his mouth to say something too but paused and frowned at his forearm.

“What’s wrong?” Junyi asked.

In one swift, subtle movement, Keran tugged his sleeve all the way down to cover his wrist. “Nothing,” he said, his voice mild. But he wore an expression Junyi would never have imagined he’d see on his tutor. Keran was easily the most composed, fearless person Junyi knew. He could silence a room with a single glance, could intimidate the emperor into obedience. Yet just now, Junyi could have sworn he almost looked afraid.