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Finally the clerk returned with a sheepish look on his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s been so long since anyone’s pledged Lore. We’re not sure what color your armband is supposed to be.”
In the end they took leftover cloth from the first-years’ uniforms and fashioned her a white armband.
Classes began the next day. After pledging, Rin still spent half her time with the other masters. As she was the only one in her track, she studied Strategy and Linguistics along with Irjah’s apprentices. She found to her dismay that though she hadn’t pledged Medicine, second-years still had to suffer a mandatory emergency triage class under Enro. History had been replaced with Foreign Relations under Master Yim. Jun still wouldn’t allow her to train under him, but she was eligible to study weapons-based combat with Sonnen.
Finally her morning classes ended, and Rin was left with half the day to spend with Jiang. She ran up the steps toward the Lore garden. Time to meet with her master. Time to get answers.
“Describe to me what we are studying,” said Jiang. “What is Lore?”
Rin blinked. She’d rather been hoping that he would tell her.
Rin had tried many times over the break to rationalize to herself why she’d chosen to study Lore, only to find herself uttering vague, circular truisms.
It came down to an intuition. A truth she knew for herself but couldn’t prove to anyone else. She was studying Lore because she knew Jiang had tapped into some other source of power, something real and mystifying. Because she had tapped into that same source the day of the Tournament. Because she had been consumed by fire, had seen the world turned red, had lost control of herself and been saved by the man whom everyone else at the school deemed insane.
She had seen the other side of the veil, and now her curiosity was so great she would go mad unless she understood what had happened.
That didn’t mean she had the faintest inkling of what she was doing.
“Weird things,” she said. “We’re studying very weird things.”
Jiang raised an eyebrow. “How articulate.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just here because I wanted to study with you. Because of what happened during the Trials. I don’t actually know what I’m getting into.”
“Oh, you do.” Jiang lifted his index finger and touched the tip to a spot on her forehead precisely between her eyes, the spot from which he’d stilled the fire inside her. “Deep in your subconscious mind, you know the truth of things.”
“I wanted to—”
“You want to know what happened to you during the Tournament.” Jiang cocked his head to the side. “Here is what happened: you called a god, and the god answered.”
Rin made a face. Again with the gods? She had been hoping for answers throughout the entire break, had thought that Jiang might make things clear once she returned, but she was now more confused than ever.
Jiang lifted a hand before she could protest. “You don’t know what any of this means yet. You don’t know if you’ll ever replicate what happened in the ring. But you do know that if you don’t get answers now, the hunger will consume you and your mind will crack. You’ve glimpsed the other side and you can’t rest until you fill in the blanks. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to you was common in the era before the Red Emperor, back when Nikara shamans didn’t know what they were doing. If this had continued, you would have gone mad. But I am here to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m going to keep you sane.”
Rin wondered how someone who regularly strolled through campus without clothes on could say that with a straight face.
And she wondered what it said about her that she trusted him.
Understanding came, like all things with Jiang, in infuriatingly small increments. As Rin had learned before the Trials, Jiang’s preferred method of instruction was to do first and explain later, if ever. She learned early on that if she asked the wrong question, she wouldn’t get the answer she wanted. “The fact that you’re asking,” Jiang would say, “is evidence that you’re not ready to know.”
She learned to shut up and simply follow his lead.
He carefully laid out a foundation for her, though at first his demands seemed menial and pointless. He made her transcribe her history textbook into Old Nikara and back. He made her spend a chilly fall afternoon squatting over the stream catching minnows with her bare hands. He demanded she complete all assignments for every class using her nondominant left hand, so that her essays took twice as long to finish and looked like a child had written them. He made her live by twenty-five-hour days for an entire month. He made her go nocturnal for an entire two weeks, so that all she ever saw was the night sky and an eerily quiet Sinegard, and he was wholly unsympathetic when she complained about missing her other classes. He made her see how long she could go without sleeping. He made her see how long she could go without waking up.
She swallowed her skepticism, took a leap of faith, and chose to follow his instructions, hoping that enlightenment might be on the other side. Yet she did not leap blindly, because she knew what was at the other end. Daily, she saw the proof of enlightenment before her.
Because Jiang did things that no human should be able to do.
The first time, he made the leaves at his feet spin without moving a muscle.
She thought it was a trick of the wind.
And then he did it again, and then a third time, just to prove he had utter control over it.
“Shit,” she said, and then repeated, “Shit. Shit. Shit. How. How?”
“Easily,” he said.
She gaped at him. “This is—this isn’t martial arts, it’s . . .”
“It’s what?” he pressed.
“It’s supernatural.”
He looked smug. “Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”
“I’m supposed to take it as true that you’re a god?”
“Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”
He made the wind howl at his command. He made trees rustle by pointing at them. He made water ripple without touching it, and could cause shadows to twist and screech with a whispered word.
She realized that Jiang showed her these things because she would not have believed them if he’d merely told her they were possible. He was building up a background of possibilities for her, a web of new concepts. How did you explain to a child the idea of gravity, until they knew what it meant to fall?
Some truths could be learned through memorization, like history textbooks or grammar lessons. Some had to be ingrained slowly, had to become true because they were an inevitable part of the pattern of all things.
Power dictates acceptability, Kitay had once told her. Did the same apply to the fabric of the natural world?
Jiang reconfigured Rin’s perception of what was real. Through demonstrations of impossible acts, he recalibrated the way she approached the material universe.
It was easier because she was so willing to believe. She fit these challenges to her conceptions of reality into her mind without too much trauma from adjustment. The traumatic event had already occurred. She had felt herself consumed by fire. She had known what it meant to burn. She hadn’t imagined it. It had happened.
