Nevertheless, she dreaded the necessary dip into the mountain stream. It was spring, and the mountain’s daytime temperature was warm enough for her, but once night fell, she was likely to freeze to death if any part of her was still wet.
Best to do it sooner rather than later, then. While the sun was still strong.
Joslyn sighed and got to her feet, brushing the crumbs of the acorns on her dirty trousers. Her stomach rumbled, protesting that the business with the acorns was already over. Maybe she would find more on her walk to the stream. She adjusted the short sword in its makeshift sheath at her hip and headed down the trail.
What is the art of the sword master? she wondered as she walked.
#
The third day was not unlike the first two: She woke up cold and stiff, confronted with an empty stomach and the ku-sai’s question.
“What is the art of the sword master?”
“Protecting others,” she said on that third morning.
“No,” he said.
“Disarming the opponent,” she said the fourth day.
“Strength,” she said the fifth day.
“Agility,” she said on the sixth.
“Perseverance,” she said on the seventh.
“Why does it matter?” she asked the ku-sai on the eighth day. She was cranky and exhausted from lack of sleep, emaciated from lack of food. At least she was clean, had fresh water, and a polished short sword. She’d torn off a corner of her brizat and used it now to scrub the sword clean and bright every morning.
But she couldn’t eat the sword. Nor could she use it well enough to kill anything she could eat. Joslyn despaired that she would starve to death before the ku-sai ever accepted her as an apprentice. When he asked his question on the ninth morning, she said simply:
“I don’t know. Teach me the answer. Please.”
And finally he said something besides “No” or “Wrong.”
“I will teach you nothing until you answer my question correctly,” he said, and walked back into the hut.
Joslyn sat cross-legged on the ground, finally permitting her tears to fall.
#
Between her own foraging and the local squirrels, all the acorns within a reasonable radius of the hut were gone by the end of the ninth day. She’d tried eating bark a few days before but found it impossible to get down. She’d also had the smallest bite of a mushroom, worried that it might be poisonous, and sure enough, she felt immediately light-headed and spent her afternoon nauseated and dry-heaving after she’d emptied her stomach of water.
When the toe came into her ribs the morning of the tenth day, it seemed to take all of her energy simply to open her eyes.
“What is the art of the sword master?” the ku-sai asked.
“I don’t know,” Joslyn whispered. “I don’t know what the art of the sword master is.”
He walked away. Joslyn laid her head back onto the earth and fell asleep.
#
She needed a bath again, but couldn’t summon the energy to make it to the stream on the eleventh day. She needed to go there; there was nothing left in her water skin, and water was the only thing fooling her belly into thinking she had eaten.
I have come all this way only to starve to death on the side of a mountain, she thought bitterly.
The ku-sai had been her last hope, a myth whose thread she had followed north, across deserts and savannas and the foothills of the Zaris Mountains. She’d stopped in the village at the foot of the ku-sai’s mountain twelve days ago, seeking to barter one of her meager possessions for a little food and a little information. She’d managed only a crust of moldy bread and the instruction that there was an odd, grumpy old hermit who lived in the saddleback between this mountain and the next. He might be the one she sought.
Or he might just be an odd, grumpy old hermit.
Not that it mattered, they said. Finding his hut wouldn’t be hard, but he wouldn’t teach her. Many who were certainly more worthy than she had tried before, and he had refused each of them. Some of them were even highborn young men who’d taken their lives into their hands by traveling south or east or west from the Empire in the days when Terinto was even wilder than it was now.
The villagers looked Joslyn up and down, and she knew what they saw: A girl. A runt, undernourished and small for her age. And if she was unlucky, they saw a runaway slave.
Joslyn only spent a day in the village, thanked the tavern owner who’d given her the scrap of bread, and headed up the mountain with only her dull dagger and tarnished sword, angling for the saddleback where the hut was supposed to be.
She would find the ku-sai. He would train her to be a sword master, like he was. She would do this, because what else was there left for her to do? She could not go to any place with people; the slave hunters might find her. She would die before she would be a slave again. There had been a light of hope, for a moment, a promise of a very different destiny. One with laughter and love and security with her Anaís, but Anaís had left her for the stable boy, leaving Joslyn only with a flower by way of apology.
The ku-sai would accept her as a pupil. Or she would die on his doorstep.
“What is the art of the sword master?”
“I don’t know.”
#
“What is the art of the sword master?” asked the ku-sai on the twelfth morning.
Joslyn somehow managed to push herself up into a sitting position. Her eyes had sunken into her skull; the skin around her cheeks clung to the hollows; her lips were thin and chapped and stretched into a perpetual grimace.
Nothing but skin and bones. People had said that to her before, of her before, but they had always been wrong. She’d been hungry all her life, but this was actual starvation. Real starvation. Her skin and her bones were truly all she had left.
Her heavy head wobbled on her weak neck, but she looked straight into the ku-sai’s golden-brown eyes and croaked out:
“Death. The art of the sword master is death.”
The ku-sai did not move for a moment. He said nothing. Then he walked back into his hut, and Joslyn collapsed onto the ground.
A few minutes later, the ku-sai returned. He carried a wooden plate of scrambled eggs in one hand, in the other was a thick woolen blanket, its color the same green as the budding trees. He dropped the blanket next to her and rested the plate of eggs on top of it.
“Eat slowly, young kuna-shi,” he instructed. “If you eat too fast, you will only throw it all up again.”
Then he walked back inside the hut.
Joslyn didn’t understand what was happening. Had the old man taken pity on her? Why had he brought her the eggs? Was it a trick? Did the eggs contain a poison that would finally kill her?
Kuna-shi. Again, there was that Terintan dialect she didn’t quite understand. “Shi” meant child. What was kuna?
She sat up again, glancing suspiciously at the eggs. In the end, she couldn’t fight her hunger. She picked up the plate and shoveled the eggs into her mouth, slowly at first, then faster and faster. She’d eaten half of the eggs before her stomach cramped and she remembered the instruction about not eating too fast.
She put the plate on the ground, forced herself to rest for what she guessed was an hour, then ate the rest of the eggs.
Her stomach tried to reject the meal. She could feel it working, clenching around the eggs as it tried to remember how to perform the task of digestion. She wanted to throw up, but she didn’t know when she would get a meal again. She clenched her jaw and managed to keep it down. When she was sure she wouldn’t lose the eggs, she wrapped the blanket around her and fell back asleep.