The placement lists went up outside the admin hall at seventh bell. By the time Yeju got there the crowd was three deep, and somebody had already started arguing about her.
She wormed to the front on the strength of being small. Four sheets of paper, pinned to a board with a brass rail in front of it that everyone leaned on, worn shiny in the middle from forty years of leaning. Group Four was the shed: remedial drills, twelve names in a cramped hand at the bottom of the fourth sheet. Group One was the top. The good hall, the good instructors, nine names on the first sheet, printed larger, as though the paper itself wanted you to know.
She read Group Four twice. Her name wasn't on it. She read Group Three, which was fine. She read Group Two, which was survivable. Then, because there was nowhere else to look, she read Group One.
No. No no no. That's a mistake, that's a clear error, that's a boy with the same name as me, that's...
HAN YEJU. Group One. Provisional.
Provisional? What does provisional even mean!? It means they haven't decided if I'm real yet.
"You're in One," said a boy beside her, flat with the awe of a person reading a weather report about somebody else's house burning down. "You're an F-core and yet you're in One. My brother's a third-year. He says it's never happened."
"It's provisional," Yeju said.
"Yeah, but you're in One!"
Behind her somebody said she's the one who threw the sword, and somebody else said no, she planned the barrel. Yeju stood at the brass rail with a full and complete understanding that her life was over.
[ Congratulations. ]
Don't.
[ Group One trains in the east hall under Gang Wolha. Ring seven. Retired vanguard captain. Nine students, personally selected. One appointed by the placement board over her written objection. ] The panel let that hang. [ She filed an objection, host. In writing. About you. I thought you'd want to know what you're walking into. ]
I want to walk into a shed.
[ Yes. You've mentioned. Repeatedly. In song. ]
The east hall at eighth bell held nine students standing in a line and one woman sitting on a stool in front of them. The woman was smoking a pipe indoors, against four separate regulations.
Yeju had seen Gang Wolha at a distance, though the difference was like heaven and earth. Up close she wasn't tall. That was the first surprise. Compact, broad through the shoulders, grey coming in at the temples of hair chopped off at the jaw with no ceremony. The left side of her face carried a lattice of old scarring that ran up under a patch and vanished. She wore the vanguard coat with the rank stripped off, and she looked down the line of nine the way a butcher looks at a delivery.
"Sit" she said.
Nobody sat. There were no chairs.
"On the floor." She tapped the pipe out against the stool leg. A small pile of ash landed on the immaculate boards of the good hall, and a boy from a ducal house physically flinched. "Right. Nine of you are here because you're the best first-years in this school. That's not a compliment, it's an address. It means when the wall comes down in four years, you'll be standing in the gap with the rest of them behind you, but how well you die is a matter of some professional interest to me."
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She put the pipe in her coat and looked down the line, stopping Yeju.
"And then there's you."
Here we go.
"Han Yeju. F-core. Decorative." No cruelty in it, which was worse. "I objected to your placement in writing. Would you like to know what I wrote?"
"No," Yeju muttered.
That got a snort out of her, quick and gone. "I wrote that you'd won a duel by accident, the board was confusing luck with quality, i mean putting a girl with no core in a room with nine prodigies would get her killed inside a year." She leaned forward with her forearms on her knees. "The board overruled me. It's full of men who read the duel report and got excited. So you're in my hall, and I've got a problem. I don't teach the dead, and by my read you might as well be a walking corpse"
The hall was very quiet. Somebody's uniform creaked.
"Now," said Gang Wolha. "Tell me why I'm wrong."
That's not fair. That's not a question. That's a cliff with a question painted on it.
Yeju's mouth got there before her brain did, which was becoming a habit.
"You're not wrong," she said.
Wolha's eye didn't move. "Go on."
"I won by accident. I know I won by accident. The barrel had been leaking since Tuesday. Taewoong stepped in it because his instructors trained him to drive through a committed mage, and I threw my sword because I had nothing else to throw." Her hands were doing something stupid, so she put them behind her back. "So you're right about the duel. You're wrong about the year."
"Am I."
"You said I'd get killed inside a year in a room with nine prodigies." Her voice came out steadier than the rest of her. "I've been in this school for three weeks. In these weeks I've been trampled at, set on fire, complained about four times, and put in a ring with a rank fourteen who wanted to fulfill his one sided spite . I'm still here. Not because I'm good. Because I keep noticing where the water is."
Nobody said anything. The ash sat on the good hall's floor.
Then Gang Wolha laughed. A short ugly bark of a laugh that came out of her like something dislodged.
"Everyone else in this line," she said, "would have told me they'd work hard." She stood up off the stool. "Right. Group One. Warm up. Not you." She pointed the pipe stem at Yeju without looking. "You stay after."
The others were glad to be out of that situation, practically hopping off to warm up, relieved of not being chosen. Yeju stood in place. Nine of the best first-years in the school began a drill she couldn't do, in a hall she wasn't supposed to be in, under a woman who had a formal objection to her existence.
[ For the record ] said the panel. [ That was three sentences of the truth in a row. You didn't scheme once. ]
I panicked.
[ Yes. Your panic is truthful. It's your only reliable feature. ]
The drill was called the ladder.
It ran in pairs. One student threw a first-circle form at a moving target board while the other called corrections, then they swapped. The pair that dropped the fewest went last in the rotation and got the most rest. Simple, brutal, built entirely on the assumption that everyone in the room could throw fifty forms in an afternoon without thinking about it. The ducal boy, Jang, threw forty-one before he complained about his wrist. The girl next to him threw thirty-eight and then complained about nothing, so Yeju filed her under watch.
Yeju threw four before she had to sit down.
Nobody said anything about it, which was worse than if they had. Jang looked at her once, the glance you give a chair left in a corridor, then went back to his rotation. The girl who didn't complain glanced over twice. On the second glance she opened her mouth. Then Wolha said "Rotate" from her stool, the moment closed. The ladder went on without Yeju in it for another ninety minutes while she sat against the wall with her hands shaking.
Forty-one, thirty-eight, thirty-five, thirty-three. Four. I'm not in this room. They'll be polite about it for a month, then they'll stop noticing I'm here. Fine. That's the plan. I wanted the shed, and this is a shed with better lighting.
Except the shed doesn't go to the Rift line.
Two hours later, when the nine had gone, the hall smelling of sweat and pipe smoke, Gang Wolha sat back down on her stool and looked at Yeju for a long moment.
"The water," she said. "At the duel. You saw the barrel before the bell."
"I was just checking"
"Why."
Because I'm an editor and I've read four hundred chapters of what happens to people who don't check the room.
"Habit," Yeju said.
Wolha packed the pipe slowly one-handed, the practised motion of ten thousand repetitions. "I'm going to tell you what I saw. Then you can lie to me about it, and I'll let you, because we've only just met." She thumbed the bowl. "I saw an F-core walk a duel ring twice, clock a hazard everyone else had been stepping around all morning, then not use it. You didn't herd him north. He herded himself. You just knew what north was worth."
She struck a match.
"Everyone in this school sees an accident-prone extra. I've spent nineteen years on the Rift front watching who lives. It's never the strongest." The match caught. "It's the one who knows what they are worth. Sit down, Han Yeju. You're my problem now."