She didn’t want to relive it. She never wanted to think about it again.
Seven days until the scores were out. Every booklet in the province had to be checked, double-checked, and triple-checked.
For Rin, those days were unbearable. She hardly slept. For the past two years she had filled her days with frantic studying. Now she had nothing to do—her future was out of her hands, and knowing that made her feel far worse.
She drove everyone else mad with her fretting. She made mistakes at the shop. She created a mess out of inventory. She snapped at Kesegi and fought with the Fangs more than she should have.
More than once she considered stealing another pack of opium and smoking it. She had heard of women in the village committing suicide by swallowing opium nuggets whole. In the dark hours of the night, she considered that, too.
Everything hung in suspended animation. She felt as if she were drifting, her whole existence reduced to a single score.
She thought about making contingency plans, preparations to escape the village in case she hadn’t tested out after all. But her mind refused to linger on the subject. She could not possibly conceive of life after the Keju because there might not be a life after the Keju.
Rin grew so desperate that for the first time in her life, she prayed.
The Fangs were far from religious. They visited the village temple sporadically at best, mostly to exchange packets of opium behind the golden altar.
They were hardly alone in their lack of religious devotion. Once the monastic orders had exerted even greater influence on the country than the Warlords did now, but then the Red Emperor had come crashing through the continent with his glorious quest for unification, leaving slaughtered monks and empty temples in his wake.
The monastic orders were gone now, but the gods remained: numerous deities that represented every category from sweeping themes of love and warfare to the mundane concerns of kitchens and households. Somewhere, those traditions were kept alive by devout worshippers who had gone into hiding, but most villagers in Tikany frequented the temples only out of ritualistic habit. No one truly believed—at least, no one who dared admit it. To the Nikara, gods were only relics of the past: subjects of myths and legends, but no more.
But Rin wasn’t taking any chances. She stole out of the shop early one afternoon and brought an offering of dumplings and stuffed lotus root to the plinths of the Four Gods.
The temple was very quiet. At midday, she was the only one inside. Four statues gazed mutely at her through their painted eyes. Rin hesitated before them. She was not entirely certain which one she ought to pray to.
She knew their names, of course—the White Tiger, the Black Tortoise, the Azure Dragon, and the Vermilion Bird. And she knew that they represented the four cardinal directions, but they formed only a small subset of the vast pantheon of deities that were worshipped in Nikan. This temple also bore shrines to smaller guardian gods, whose likenesses hung on scrolls draped over the walls.
So many gods. Which was the god of test scores? Which was the god of unmarried shopgirls who wished to stay that way?
She decided to simply pray to all of them.
“If you exist, if you’re up there, help me. Give me a way out of this shithole. Or if you can’t do that, give the import inspector a heart attack.”
She looked around the empty temple. What came next? She had always imagined that praying involved more than just speaking out loud. She spied several unused incense sticks lying by the altar. She lit the end of one of them by dipping it in the brazier, and then waved it experimentally in the air.
Was she supposed to hold the smoke to the gods? Or should she smoke the stick herself? She had just held the burned end to her nose when a temple custodian strode out from behind the altar.
They blinked at each other.
Slowly Rin removed the incense stick from her nostril.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m praying.”
“Please leave,” he said.
Exam results were to be posted at noon outside the examination hall.
Rin closed up shop early and went downtown with Tutor Feyrik half an hour in advance. A large crowd had already gathered around the post, so they found a shady corner a hundred meters away and waited.
So many people had accumulated by the hall that Rin couldn’t see when the scrolls were posted, but she knew because suddenly everyone was shouting, and the crowd was rushing forward, pressing Rin and Tutor Feyrik tightly into the fold.
Her heart beat so fast she could hardly breathe. She couldn’t see anything except the backs of the people before her. She thought she might vomit.
When they finally got to the front, it took Rin a long time to find her name. She scanned the lower half of the scroll, hardly daring to breathe. Surely she hadn’t scored well enough to make the top ten.
She didn’t see Fang Runin anywhere.
Only when she looked at Tutor Feyrik and saw that he was crying did she realize what had happened.
Her name was at the very top of the scroll. She hadn’t placed in the top ten. She’d placed at the top of the entire village. The entire province.
She had bribed a teacher. She had stolen opium. She had burned herself, lied to her foster parents, abandoned her responsibilities at the store, and broken a marriage deal.
And she was going to Sinegard.
Chapter 2
The last time Tikany had sent a student to Sinegard, the town magistrate threw a festival that lasted three days. Servants had passed baskets of red bean cakes and jugs of rice wine out in the streets. The scholar, the magistrate’s nephew, had set off for the capital to the cheers of intoxicated peasants.
This year, Tikany’s nobility felt reasonably embarrassed that an orphan shopgirl had snagged the only spot at Sinegard. Several anonymous inquiries were sent to the testing center. When Rin showed up at the town hall to enroll, she was detained for an hour while the proctors tried to extract a cheating confession from her.
“You’re right,” she said. “I got the answers from the exam administrator. I seduced him with my nubile young body. You caught me.”
The proctors didn’t believe a girl with no formal schooling could have passed the Keju.
She showed them her burn scars.
“I have nothing to tell you,” she said, “because I didn’t cheat. And you have no proof that I did. I studied for this exam. I mutilated myself. I read until my eyes burned. You can’t scare me into a confession, because I’m telling the truth.”
“Consider the consequences,” snapped the female proctor. “Do you understand how serious this is? We can void your score and have you jailed for what you’ve done. You’ll be dead before you’re done paying off your fines. But if you confess now, we can make this go away.”
“No, you consider the consequences,” Rin snapped. “If you decide my score is void, that means this simple shopgirl was clever enough to bypass your famous anticheating protocols. And that means you’re shit at your job. And I bet the magistrate will be just thrilled to let you take the blame for whatever cheating did or didn’t happen.”
A week later she was cleared of all charges. Officially, Tikany’s magistrate announced that the scores had been a “mistake.” He did not label Rin a cheater, but neither did he validate her score. The proctors asked Rin to keep her departure under wraps, threatening clumsily to detain her in Tikany if she did not comply.