She was standing in the middle of the platform, on one of the banyan roots. And, to her dead, revered parents, “Watch over me, Father and Mother.” To leave her mark at the heart of things. A chance to be the brightest scholar in the world, to advise emperors and sages. If you reach the end of the duels.”Īnother smile. “It can do everything you could ever need or want, elder aunt. She didn’t know what was being offered here beyond myths and legends. “The power-” Liên started, and then stopped, because she didn’t know what to say. Surely…“Many things are possible, here,” Mei said. Dragons? No one had seen dragons in the world for centuries. It was awash with light, the banyan’s roots receding into shadow, and in the luminous mass of the river Liên saw a flash of large and iridescent scales. “People just don’t grow flutes!” Not even the famed scholars, whose ranks Liên so desperately ached to join. Liên lowered the flute away from her mouth. Her fingers fit easily onto the first three holes, and the flute was at her mouth, the smooth and warm touch of bamboo on her lips. It was so achingly familiar, so achingly comforting, and Liên let out a breath she hadn’t even been aware of holding.
A plain bamboo one, unlike the bone-white one Dinh was holding, with three simple holes and a shadowy, ghostly fourth one. “Take what?” But Liên’s hand closed on the thing protruding from her chest, and she drew it out with the same ease as she’d draw a brush from its holder. “Mei,” she tried to say, but it tasted like fire and blood in her mouth. “I don’t understand.”īut Mei’s hands were already on her chest-an odd flutter as they connected, then they did something that Liên didn’t fully see or understand, and a sharp, stabbing pain ran through her, as something that seemed to have become stuck between her ribs came out one small, excruciating bit at a time-and it hurt as it came out, and Liên couldn’t breathe anymore, and it felt like the time she’d knelt by her parents’ coffins, hoping against all hope they’d come back. It wasn’t yet to her mouth, but her fingers were on the holes already, and everything in her suggested impatience to play. Dinh, another of her classmates, an arrogant and borderline abusive woman who thought the world belonged to her. They were nothing but a dark silhouette at first-and then, as light slowly flooded the arena, seeping from Mei’s body into the stone, and from the stone into the banyan roots and the neighboring river, Liên saw who they were. Inside, on the platform, someone was waiting for Liên. As she did so, Liên finally realized the sound that had been bothering her since the gates opened wasn’t the background noises of the forest, but a slow and plaintive noise, the first bars of a poem set to music.
The wild at heart flute skin#
Her skin shone with the translucence of the finest jade, as if she were nothing more than a mask over light incarnate. Liên wanted to be seen for who she truly was.
She needed to excel, because she was the scholarship kid, the one on sufferance from the poorest family, the orphan everyone looked at with naked pity in their eyes. Liên didn’t much care about dreams, or power, but she wanted to excel.
She hadn’t been told much, merely rumors: that the arena was where the best scholar students went to prove themselves that Mei was the key that Mei’s revered teacher, the chair of the Academy, held power beyond Liên’s wildest dreams, and it all flowed through Mei. She readjusted the hairpins in her topknot: they’d slipped sideways while she was walking to the arena. Her tone and the pronouns she used for herself and for Liên sounded like something from a scholar’s chronicle. Leaves rustled, the ceaseless sound of a monsoon wind whipping tree branches in the forest. Liên bent, and her seal-Mother’s seal, the one she’d carried on a chain around her neck for more than nine years-touched the lock, and the letters shivered and rearranged themselves to match Mother’s style name on the seal. On the lock were characters that slowly morphed into letters.
They paused at iron-wrought gates with a huge lock and a clear sight of what lay beyond: a crumbling platform by the river, overgrown by banyan roots. She let Mei-the fey, mercurial schoolmate half the academy seemed to avoid-take her to the arena. Liên’s first duel at the Phụng Academy was bewildering, and almost unfair in its simplicity.
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