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“The Cike are just killers,” Kitay scoffed. “They stab, kill, and poison. They don’t call down gods.”
“As far as you know,” Rin said.
“You’re really hung up on this idea of shamans, aren’t you?” Kitay asked. “It’s just a kid’s story, Rin.”
“The Red Emperor’s scribes wouldn’t have kept extensive documentation of a kid’s story.”
Kitay sighed. “Is that why you pledged Lore? You think you can become a shaman? You think you can summon gods?”
“I don’t believe in gods,” said Rin. “But I believe in power. And I believe the shamans had some source of power that the rest of us don’t know how to access, and I believe it’s still possible to learn.”
Kitay shook his head. “I’ll tell you what shamans are. At some point in time some martial artists were really powerful, and the more battles they won, the more stories spread. They probably encouraged those stories, too, thinking it’d scare their enemies. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Empress made up those stories about the Trifecta being shamans herself. It’d certainly help her hold on power. She needs it now, more than ever. The Warlords are getting restless—I bet we’re barely years from a coup. But if she’s really the Vipress, then how come she hasn’t just summoned giant snakes to subdue the Warlords to her will?”
Rin couldn’t think of a glaring counterargument to this theory, so she conceded with silence. Debating with Kitay became pointless after a while. He was so convinced of his own rationality, of his encyclopedic knowledge of most things, that he had difficulty conceiving of gaps in his understanding.
“I notice the puppeteer glossed over how we actually won the Second Poppy War,” Rin said after a while. “You know. Speer. Butchery. Thousands dead in a single night.”
“Well, it was a kid’s story after all,” said Kitay. “And genocide is a little depressing.”
Rin and Kitay spent the next two days lazing around, indulging in every act of sloth they hadn’t been able to at the Academy. They played chess. They lounged in the garden, stared idly at the clouds, and gossiped about their classmates.
“Niang’s pretty cute,” Kitay said. “So is Venka.”
“Venka’s been obsessed with Nezha since we got there,” Rin said. “Even I could see that.”
Kitay waggled his eyebrows. “One might say you’ve been obsessed with Nezha.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“You are. You’re always asking me about him.”
“Because I’m curious,” Rin said. “Sunzi says to know your enemy.”
“Fuck Sunzi. You just think he’s pretty.”
Rin tossed the chessboard at his head.
At Kitay’s insistence, Lan cooked them spicy peppercorn hot pot, and delicious though it was, Rin had the singular experience of weeping while eating. She spent most of the next day squatting over the toilet with a burning rectum.
“You think this is how the Speerlies felt?” Kitay asked. “What if burning diarrhea is the price of lifelong devotion to the Phoenix?”
“The Phoenix is a vengeful god,” Rin groaned.
They sampled all the wines in Kitay’s father’s liquor closet and got wonderfully, dizzyingly drunk.
“Nezha and I spent most of our childhood raiding this closet. Try this one.” Kitay passed her a small ceramic bottle. “White sorghum wine. Fifty percent alcohol.”
Rin swallowed hard. It slid down her throat with a marvelous burn.
“This is liquid fire,” she said. “This is the sun in a bottle. This is the drink of a Speerly.”
Kitay snickered.
“You wanna know how they brew this?” he asked. “The secret ingredient is urine.”
She spat the wine out.
Kitay laughed. “They just use alkaline powder now. But the tale goes that a disgruntled official pissed all over one of the Red Emperor’s distilleries. Probably the best accidental discovery of the Red Emperor’s era.”
Rin rolled over onto her stomach to look sideways at him. “Why aren’t you at Yuelu Mountain? You should be a scholar. A sage. You know so much about everything.”
Kitay could expound for hours on any given subject, and yet showed little interest in their studies. He had breezed through the Trials because his eidetic memory made studying unnecessary, but he had surrendered to Nezha the moment the Tournament took a dangerous turn. Kitay was brilliant, but he didn’t belong at Sinegard.
“I wanted to,” Kitay admitted. “But I’m my father’s only son. And my father’s the defense minister. So what choice do I have?”
She fiddled with the bottle. “You’re an only child, then?”
Kitay shook his head. “Older sister. Kinata. She’s at Yuelu now—studying geomancy, or something like that.”
“Geomancy?”
“The artful placement of buildings and things.” Kitay waved his hands in the air. “It’s all aesthetics. Supposedly it’s important, if your greatest aspiration is to marry someone important.”
“You haven’t read every book about it?”
“I only read about the interesting things.” Kitay rolled over onto his stomach. “You? Any siblings?”
“None,” she said. Then she frowned. “Yes, actually. I don’t know why I said that. I have a brother—well, foster brother. Kesegi. He’s ten. Was. He’s eleven now, I guess.”
“Do you miss him?”
Rin hugged her knees to her chest. She didn’t like the way her stomach suddenly felt. “No. I mean—I don’t know. He was so little when I left. I used to take care of him. I guess I’m glad that I don’t have to do that anymore.”
Kitay raised an eyebrow. “Have you written to him?”
“No.” She hesitated. “I don’t know why. I guess I assumed the Fangs didn’t want to hear from me. Or maybe that he’d be better off if he just forgot about me.”
She had wanted to at least write Tutor Feyrik in the beginning, but things had been so awful at the Academy that she couldn’t bear to tell him about it. Then, as time passed, and as her schoolwork became more exhausting, it had become so painful to think about home that she’d just stopped.
“You didn’t like it at home, huh?” Kitay asked.
“I don’t like thinking about it,” she mumbled.
She never wanted to think about Tikany. She wanted to pretend that she’d never lived there—no, that it had never existed. Because if she could just erase her past, then she could write herself into whoever she wanted to be in the present. Student. Scholar. Soldier. Anything except who she used to be.
The Summer Festival culminated in a parade in Sinegard’s city center.
Rin arrived at the grounds with the members of the House of Chen—Kitay’s father and willowy mother, his two uncles and their wives, and his older sister. Rin had forgotten how important Kitay’s father actually was until she saw the entire clan decked out in their house colors of burgundy and gold.
Kitay suddenly grabbed Rin’s elbow. “Don’t look to your left. Pretend like you’re talking to me.”
