Cheon Miyu ran her investigation out of the third-floor council room, and Yeju only learned about it because Kwon Hae-su told her, over a stolen pot of tea, gleeful as a retired president watching her successor work.
"She's got a board," Hae-su said. "A whole board. She's pinned things to it. There's string."
"String."
"String, Yeju. Coloured string." Hae-su topped up both cups without asking. "I stuck my head in yesterday to steal a chair and she covered it with her coat, which was adorable, because she'd already told me about it on Tuesday when she wanted my read on the entrance report."
She has a board about me. With string. What goes on a board about me. There's nothing to put on a board.
There is, in fact, an enormous amount to put on a board.
"What's on it," Yeju said.
"You. Obviously." Hae-su blew on her tea. "The thing you need to understand about Miyu is she's not being sinister. Everyone thinks she's sinister because she smiles like that. She's just bored out of her skull. She reads a person in about four seconds, then she's got the rest of the conversation to fill, so she fills it with games." She grinned. "Then you came along. She read you four times and got four different answers, and now she's the happiest she's been in two years."
Hae-su put her cup down, which she didn't often do mid-story. "There's a thing you should know about her, though. She doesn't have friends. Not in a sad way, she's not lonely, she's got two hundred acquaintances and they all adore her. I mean she's never once, in the two years I've known her, been in a room where she wasn't working."
"Working at what?"
"Reading everyone." Hae-su turned the cup on its saucer. "Her mother's the Fan of Gyeongha. You know the name?"
Yeju did know the name. It had been in the book, three chapters in, as a piece of scenery: a retired court strategist so formidable the crown had built two separate policies around not asking her opinion.
"Miyu came here at eleven," Hae-su said. "By the second week the whole faculty had made the same joke to her face, which was ah, another one, and she smiled at every single one of them. She's been smiling at people for six years." She pushed the pot away. "So when she gets interested in someone, it's not sinister. It's the only thing that's ever been hers."
The council room door was open, which was either an oversight or an invitation. With Cheon Miyu it was never an oversight.
The board was on the far wall, a good one, the kind used for duty rosters, comprehensively repurposed. In the middle, a scrap of paper: HAN YEJU (F). Around it, at the compass points, four more scraps in the same neat hand. Between them, yes, string. Red, blue, green, and a fourth colour added recently, because that string was still bright.
Miyu was sitting under it with her feet on a chair, eating an apple.
"Come in," she said, without turning. "You've been standing there four seconds, which is three longer than most people manage before they either come in or run away."
Yeju came in. She read the four scraps.
A: SHE IS A TACTICIAN AND HIDES IT. B: SHE IS AN IDIOT AND IS EXTRAORDINARILY LUCKY. C: SHE IS SOMEONE'S PLANT (WHOSE). D: (blank)
"D's blank," Yeju said.
"D's blank." Miyu took a bite. "D is the one I like. Sit down, don't touch the string."
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Don't panic. Four theories, three of them wrong, one of them blank. Blank is fine. Blank means she doesn't have it.
Blank means she's left a space for something she can't name yet. Worse than a wrong theory. You can beat a wrong theory.
Yeju sat.
"Walk me through it," Miyu said, warm, the way you'd ask about someone's weekend. "A. You're a tactician. It fits the duel: you walked the ring, found the barrel, used a rank fourteen's own training against him. Beautiful. It's the theory the whole school has, and it's very flattering." She pointed the apple at the red string. "It's also garbage, because a tactician doesn't set a fire in a crowd at the entrance. That's an amateur's panic move that happened to work. A tactician goes under the arch. So A is wrong."
"That's a compliment and an insult at once."
"Most true things are." Another bite. "B. You're an idiot with monstrous luck. Fits the fire, fits the barrel, fits everything. It's the theory I'd hold if I hadn't been in the library on Thursday." The apple pointed at the blue string. "You corrected my grammar."
Yeju's stomach dropped six inches.
What. When. What grammar.
"I said 'four different answers,'" Miyu said, "and you said 'that sounds like a you problem,' then went back to your book. You had it open to page two hundred and eleven of A Practical History of the Loen Succession, which is a book nobody reads, and you'd been on that page eleven minutes without turning it." She smiled. "Idiots don't fake-read history. Idiots read the book or they don't sit down. So B's wrong."
I'm never reading in public again.
"C," Miyu went on, comfortable, "is that you're someone's plant. A house put you here. The council likes that one, the council likes conspiracies, they're tidy." The green string. "Wrong too, and it took me longest, because your brother's a Han and the Hans have money. But a plant has a handler. A plant gets letters. You get nothing. In three weeks you've had one piece of post, and it was a merchant trying to sell your brother sheep." She finished the apple and set the core neatly on the arm of the chair. "So. Not a tactician. Not an idiot. Not a plant."
The fourth string, the bright one, ran from HAN YEJU (F) to the blank scrap, and stopped nowhere on the way.
"So what's D," Yeju said.
"That's the interesting part." Miyu put her feet down. "D is that Baek Seorin has filed four complaints against you in three weeks, and she's never in her life filed more than two against the same person, and one ended with an unsolicited note about which practice hall is warm. D is that Professor Doksu has opened a file on a first-year, which he's done twice in nineteen years. D is that Do Yuna moved sixty places in eleven days. D is that a rank fourteen ducal cousin lost to a girl who threw her sword, and instead of telling everyone you cheated, he's told everyone you planned it, because he'd rather be beaten by a genius than an accident."
She leaned forward.
"D is that everyone who gets near you starts behaving strangely. That's not a theory about what you are. That's a pattern I can't get behind. So I left it blank."
"You've left something off," Yeju said.
Miyu's eyebrows went up a fraction. "Have I."
"You said everyone who gets near me starts behaving strangely. You put Seorin on there. Doksu. Yuna. Taewoong." Yeju nodded at the board. "You're not on it."
The council room went quiet, for precisely as long as it takes a clever person to decide whether to be honest.
"No," Miyu agreed. "I'm not."
"Why."
"Because I'd have to write down what I've been doing for three weeks, then look at it, and it says something I don't much like." Light. Smiling. The smile had gone thin at the edges. "I've reorganised my Thursdays. Did you know that? Moved a standing appointment with the vice-principal so I'd be in the library at the hour you use it. Twice. I told myself it was scheduling."
Oh no.
"So no, I'm not on the board." Miyu picked up her apple core, considered it, put it down again. "It's my board."
The board sat there with its four strings.
Say something. Say anything. Say a normal human sentence. She's watching your hands.
Yeju put her hands under the table.
"That's a lot of string for a girl who tests F," she said.
"Yes." Miyu stood and stretched, and the warmth came back over her like a coat going on. "Isn't it."
She walked Yeju to the door with a hand not quite touching the small of her back, close enough that Yeju could feel the heat of it through her uniform, and at the threshold she leaned in. Her mouth was very near Yeju's ear. She smelled like apples and ink.
"For what it's worth," Miyu murmured, "I don't think you're dangerous. I think something's happening to you, you're holding on to it with both hands, and it's making you very tired." She straightened, entirely pleasant, and the moment closed over like water. "Do come again. Bring nothing. I'll work it out eventually, and you'll be much more comfortable if you're in the room when I do."
The door shut.
Yeju stood in the corridor with her ears burning.
[ +2,100. ]
I need to lie down. Possibly in another prefecture.
[ She has a board, string, four theories, and a blank space. ] The panel's text sat a moment. [ Host. The blank one is close. ]