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“Jun expelled you,” Jiang repeated slowly. She couldn’t tell if he was amused or not. “What on earth did you do to him?”
“Um. Tackled another student during sparring, sort of. He started it,” she added quickly. “The other student, I mean.”
Jiang looked impressed. “Stupid and hotheaded.”
His eyes wandered over to the plants on the shelf behind her. He walked around her, lifted a poppy flower up to his nose, and sniffed experimentally. He made a face. He dug around in the deep pockets of his robes, fished out a pair of shears, then clipped the stem and tossed the broken end into a pile in the corner of a garden.
Rin began to inch toward the gate. Perhaps if she left now, Jiang would forget about the book. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t be in here—”
“Oh, you’re not sorry. You’re just annoyed I interrupted your training session, and you’re hoping I’ll leave without mentioning your stolen book.” Jiang snipped another stem off the poppy plant. “You’re a plucky one, you know that? Got banned from Jun’s class, so you thought you’d teach yourself Seejin.”
He made several syncopated wheezing noises. It took Rin a moment to realize he was laughing.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded. “Sir, if you’re going to report me, I just want to say—”
“Oh, I’m not going to report you. What fun would that be?” He was still chuckling. “Were you really trying to learn Seejin from a book? Do you have a death wish?”
“It’s not that hard,” she said defensively. “I just followed the pictures.”
He turned back toward her; his expression was one of amused disbelief. He opened the book, riffled through the pages with a practiced hand, and then stopped on the page detailing the first form. He brandished the book at her. “That one. Do that.”
Rin obliged.
It was a tricky form, full of shifting movements and ball change steps. She squeezed her eyes shut as she moved. She couldn’t concentrate in full sight of those luminous mushrooms, those bizarrely pulsing cacti.
When she opened her eyes, Jiang had stopped laughing.
“You’re nowhere near ready for Seejin,” he said. He slammed the book shut with one hand. “Jun was right. At your level you shouldn’t even be touching this text.”
Rin fought a wave of panic. If she couldn’t even use the Seejin text, she might as well leave for Tikany right now. She had found no other books that were half as useful or as clear.
“You might benefit from some animal-based fundamentals,” Jiang continued. “Yinmen’s work. He was Seejin’s predecessor. Have you heard of him?”
She glanced up at him in confusion. “I’ve looked for those. Those scrolls are incomplete.”
“Of course you won’t be learning from scrolls,” Jiang said impatiently. “We’ll discuss this in class tomorrow.”
“Class? You haven’t been here all semester!”
Jiang shrugged. “I find it difficult to bother myself with first-years I don’t find particularly interesting.”
Rin thought this was just irresponsible teaching, but she wanted to keep Jiang talking. Here he was in a rare moment of lucidity, offering to teach her martial arts that she couldn’t learn by herself. She was half-afraid that if she said the wrong thing, she would send him running off like a startled hare.
“So am I interesting?” she asked slowly.
“You’re a walking disaster,” Jiang said bluntly. “You’re training with arcane techniques at a rate that will lead to inevitable injury, and not the kind you recover from. You’ve misinterpreted Seejin’s texts so badly that I believe you’ve come up with a new art form all by yourself.”
Rin scowled. “Then why are you helping me?”
“To spite Jun, mostly.” Jiang scratched his chin. “I hate the man. Did you know he petitioned to have me fired last week?”
Rin was mostly surprised that Jun hadn’t tried that sooner.
“Also, anyone this obstinate deserves some attention, if only to make sure you don’t become a walking hazard to everyone around you,” Jiang continued. “You know, your footwork is remarkable.”
She flushed. “Really?”
“Placement is perfect. Beautiful angles.” He cocked his head. “Of course, everything you’re doing is useless.”
She scowled. “Well, if you’re not going to teach me, then—”
“I didn’t say that. You’ve done a good job working only with the text,” Jiang acknowledged. “A better job than many apprentices would have done. It’s your upper body strength that’s the problem. Namely, you have none.” He grabbed for her wrist and pulled her arm up as if he were examining a mannequin. “So skinny. Weren’t you a farmhand or something?”
“Not everyone from the south is a farmer,” she snapped. “I was a shopgirl.”
“Hm. No heavy labor, then. Pampered. You’re useless.”
She crossed her arms against her chest. “I wasn’t pampered—”
“Yeah, yeah.” He held up a hand to cut her off. “It doesn’t matter. Here’s the thing: all the technique in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t have the strength to back it up. You don’t need Seejin, kid. You need ki. You need muscle.”
“So what do you want me to do? Calisthenics?”
He stood still, contemplative, for a long moment. Then he beamed. “No. I have a better idea. Be at the campus gates for class tomorrow.”
Before she could respond, he strolled out of the garden.
“Wow.” Raban set down his chopsticks. “He must really like you.”
“He called me stupid and hotheaded,” Rin said. “And then he told me to be on time for class.”
“He definitely likes you,” Raban said. “Jiang’s never uttered anything nice to anyone in my year. He mostly yells at us to stay away from his daffodils. He told Kureel that her braids made her look like snakes were growing out the back of her head.”
“I heard he got drunk on rice wine last week and pissed into Jun’s window,” Kitay chipped in. “He sounds awesome.”
“How long has Jiang been here?” Rin asked. The Lore Master seemed amazingly young, at most half of Jun’s age. She couldn’t believe the other masters would put up with such aggravating behavior from someone who was clearly their junior.
“Not sure. He was here when I was a first-year, but that doesn’t mean much. I heard he came from the Night Castle twenty years ago.”
“Jiang was Cike?”
Among the divisions of the Militia, only the Cike bore an ill reputation. They were a division of soldiers holed up in the Night Castle, far up the Wudang mountain range, whose sole task was to carry out assassinations for the Empress. The Cike fought without honor. They respected no rules of combat, and they were notorious for their brutality. They operated in the darkness; they did the Empress’s dirty work and received no recognition afterward. Most apprentices would have quit the service rather than join the Cike.
Rin had a hard time reconciling her image of the whimsical Lore Master with that of a hardened assassin.
