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But she knew the truth now, and that gave her power.
Rin stared silently out over the valley below, still grappling to absorb the magnitude of what she had just learned. Meanwhile Jiang packed the powders into a pipe, lit it up, and took a long, deep draught.
His eyes fluttered closed. A serene smile spread over his face.
“Up we go,” he said.
The thing about watching someone get high was that if you weren’t getting high yourself, things got very boring very soon. Rin prodded Jiang after a few minutes, and when he didn’t stir, she went back down the mountain by herself.
If Rin had thought Jiang might let her start using hallucinogens to meditate, she was wrong. He made her help out in the garden, had her watering the cacti and cultivating the mushrooms, but forbade her to try any plants until he gave her permission.
“Without the right mental preparation, psychedelics won’t do anything for you,” he said. “You’ll just become terribly annoying for a while.”
Rin had accepted this initially, but it had now been weeks. “When am I going to be mentally prepared, then?”
“When you can sit still for five minutes without opening your eyes,” he said.
“I can sit still! I’ve been sitting still for nearly a year! That’s all I’ve been doing!”
Jiang brandished his garden shears at her. “Don’t take that tone with me.”
She slammed her tray of cacti clippings on the shelf. “I know there are things you’re not teaching me. I know you’re keeping me behind on purpose. I just don’t understand why.”
“Because you worry me,” said Jiang said. “You have an aptitude for Lore like no one I’ve ever met, not even Altan. But you’re impatient. You’re careless. And you skimp on meditating.”
She had been skimping on meditating. She was supposed to keep a meditation log, to document each time she made it to the end of an hour successfully. But as coursework from her other classes piled up, Rin had neglected her daily requisite period of doing nothing.
“I don’t see the point,” she said. “If it’s focus that you want, I can give you focus. I can concentrate on anything. But to empty my mind? To be devoid of all thought? All sense of self? What good does that serve?”
“It serves to sever you from the material world,” Jiang answered. “How do you expect to reach the spirit realm when you’re obsessing over the things in front of you? I know why it’s hard for you. You like beating your classmates. You like harboring your old grudges. It feels good to hate, doesn’t it? Up until now you’ve been storing your anger up and using it as fuel. But unless you learn to let it go, you are never going to find your way to the gods.”
“So give me a psychedelic,” she suggested. “Make me let it go.”
“Now you’re being rash. I’m not letting you meddle in things that you barely understand yet. It’s too dangerous.”
“How dangerous could it be to just sit still?”
Jiang stood up straight. The hand holding the shears dropped to his side. “This isn’t some fairy story where you wave your hand and ask the gods for three wishes. We are not fucking around here. These are forces that could break you.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” she snapped. “Nothing’s been happening to me for months. You keep going on about seeing the gods, but all that happens when I meditate is that I get bored, my nose itches, and every second takes an eternity.”
She reached for the poppy flowers.
He slapped her hand away. “You’re not ready. You’re not even close to ready.”
Rin flushed. “They’re just drugs—”
“Just drugs? Just drugs?” Jiang’s voice rose in pitch. “I’m going to issue you a warning. And I’m only going to do it once. You’re not the first student to pledge Lore, you know. Oh, Sinegard’s been trying to produce a shaman for years. But you want to know why no one takes this class seriously?”
“Because you keep farting in faculty meetings?”
He didn’t even laugh at that, which meant this was more serious than she’d thought.
Jiang, in fact, looked pained.
“We’ve tried,” he said. “Ten years ago. I had four students just as brilliant as you, without Altan’s rage or your impatience. I taught them to meditate, I taught them about the Pantheon, but those apprentices only had one thing on their minds, which was to call on the gods and siphon their power. Do you know what happened to them?”
“They called the gods and became great warriors?” Rin said hopefully.
Jiang fixed her with his pale, suffocating gaze. “They all went mad. Every single one. Two were calm enough to be locked in an asylum for the rest of their lives. The other two were a danger to themselves and others around them. The Empress had them sent to Baghra.”
She stared at him. She had no idea what to say to that.
“I have met spirits unable to find their bodies again,” said Jiang. He looked very old then. “I have met men who are only halfway to the spirit realm, caught between our world and the next. What does that mean? It means don’t. Fuck. Around.” He tapped her forehead with each word. “If you don’t want that brilliant little mind of yours to shatter, you’ll do as I say.”
The only time Rin felt fully grounded was during her other classes. These were proceeding at twice the rate as they had her first year, and though Rin barely managed to keep up given the absurd course load Jiang had already assigned her, it was nice to study things that made sense for a change.
Rin had always felt like an outsider among her classmates, but as the year carried on, she began to feel as if she inhabited an entirely separate world from them. She was steadily growing further and further away from the world where things functioned as they should, where reality was not constantly in flux, where she thought she knew the shape and nature of things instead of being constantly reminded that really she knew nothing at all.
“Seriously,” Kitay asked over lunch one day. “What are you learning?”
Kitay, like everyone else in her class, thought that Lore was a course in religious history, a smorgasbord of anthropology and folk mythology. She hadn’t bothered to correct them. Easier to spread a believable lie than to convince them of the truth.
“That none of my beliefs about the world were true,” Rin answered dreamily. “That reality is malleable. That hidden connections exist in every living object. That the whole of the world is merely a thought, a butterfly’s dream.”
“Rin?”
“Yes?”
“Your elbow is in my porridge.”
She blinked. “Oh. Sorry.”
Kitay slid his bowl farther away from her arm. “They talk about you, you know. The other apprentices.”
Rin folded her arms. “And what do they say?”
He paused. “You can probably catch the drift. It’s not, uh, good.”
Had she expected anything else? She rolled her eyes. “They don’t like me. Big surprise.”
“It’s not that,” Kitay said. “They’re scared of you.”
“Because I won the Tournament?”
