Yeon Chae-rin's second contest was archery, and she had been practicing for nine days. Yeju learned this from Yuna, who learned it from a girl in the archery club, who had watched Chae-rin arrive every morning at fifth bell with a bow she had bought specifically.
"She bought a bow," Yuna said, delighted, upside down. She was lying across the end of Yeju's bed with her head hanging off it, a position she had adopted about a week ago and never explained. "A hundred and forty sen. Bori looked it up."
"I didn't look it up," Bori said, from her own bed. "The archery club's treasurer told the whole night-kitchen. She's been shooting at four hundred targets a morning and she is terrible."
A hundred and forty sen, four hundred targets a morning, all of it in secret, all of it at me.
I have to lose this. If I win this I'll have to see her face.
Wait. Why do I care about her face?
"You're doing the thing," Yuna said.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet and your eyebrows do this." Yuna made a face that was, Yeju had to admit, an accurate rendition of a person doing bad arithmetic. "You've been doing it since I said the bow thing."
"I'm going to lose on purpose," Yeju said.
Bori turned a page. "You can't."
"I can absolutely lose on purpose. It's the one thing I'm good at. I've been losing on purpose for three weeks."
"You've been trying to lose on purpose for three weeks. Different." She did not look up. "Also, she's terrible. If you try to lose, you'll have to be worse than terrible, and she'll see it, because the only thing that girl can read in the entire world is whether someone's condescending to her. It's the one skill she has. Her whole family's built out of it."
Damn it.
"Why do you care," Bori said.
Yeju looked up. "What?"
"You've been at that page for an hour. You're not reading it." Bori did not look up from her own book. "You didn't care when Taewoong wanted to disassemble you in public. You cared about the shed. Now a duchess wants to shoot arrows at you and you've gone strange about it." She turned a page. "So. Why do you care."
Because in the book she does this to Do-hyun for four hundred chapters. It never works, it ruins her, and everybody claps.
"I don't," Yeju said.
Yuna, upside down, said: "You're doing the eyebrow thing again."
The contest was at fourth bell in the archery yard, and Chae-rin had drawn a crowd, because of course she had. Word had gotten around. Yeju arrived to find forty people along the fence and a bookmaker taking small money. Yeon Chae-rin stood at the line in a shooting glove clearly bought at the same time as the bow, radiating the fury of a person who has practiced in secret and is about to find out if it worked.
"Five arrows," Chae-rin said. "Closest to centre wins. I've brought a second bow because I assumed you wouldn't own one, which you don't, because you own nothing, which I say without malice."
"That's a lot of malice for a sentence with no malice in it."
"I said without malice." She thrust the bow out. "Take it."
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Yeju took it. It weighed more than she expected. She had held a bow twice in her first life, at a work retreat, and hit a hay bale once out of eleven attempts, and been given a small ironic trophy.
Chae-rin shot first.
Her first arrow hit the outer ring. Her second missed the boss entirely and went into the sand. Somebody on the fence made a noise. Chae-rin's shoulders went rigid. Her third hit the outer ring again. Her fourth hit the second ring, and the crowd made an encouraging sound, which was worse than the noise.
Her fifth arrow hit the third ring, by the standards of nine days of secret practice, a triumph.
She lowered the bow and looked at no one.
And she's proud of that fifth one, and she'd rather die than let anyone see it.
Yeju stepped to the line.
She had no plan. That was becoming the most reliable feature of her life. She put an arrow on the string the way she had seen the archery club do it, drew it back with an arm that had done nothing but cast eleven candles a day for sixteen days, held it for as long as her shoulder could stand, under a second, and let go.
It hit the second ring.
The crowd made a noise. Yeju stared at it.
What.
"That's beginner's luck," Chae-rin said, from behind her, in a voice with a crack running through it.
Yeju shot four more. Two hit the sand. One hit the outer ring. The last skidded off the top of the boss into the fence. One second-ring, one outer, three humiliations: by the scoring of the contest, a loss by a single ring.
Chae-rin had won.
She stood there with the bow in her hand and her face doing something complicated. Forty people waited for her to gloat. She did not gloat. She looked at Yeju's first arrow in the second ring for a long moment.
"You held it for less than a second," she said.
"My arm hurts."
"Nobody hits the second ring on a first arrow with a bad hold. That's not." She stopped. Her jaw set. "You did it again. You did the thing you did to Taewoong. The ridiculous version of the right thing, and it worked, and now everyone's going to say."
"You won," Yeju said.
"I know I won!" She was almost shouting now, which forty people were enjoying enormously. "That's not the point! The point is I practiced nine days, you picked up a bow you've never touched and lost by one ring, everyone here saw it, and tomorrow the story won't be that I won. It'll be that you nearly beat me with a borrowed bow, and I will have spent a hundred and forty sen to lose in public while winning."
Oh.
She's completely right, and she worked it out before I did.
Chae-rin took out the leather ledger and wrote in it, hard enough that Yeju heard the nib.
ARCHERY. WON.
Then, under it, smaller, she wrote something else, and shut the book before anyone could see. Only much later, when Yeju finally got a look at that page, did she learn it said: by one ring. she has never held a bow. investigate.
"Third contest," Chae-rin said. "I'll think of something."
"You always do."
"Don't be nice to me, we're rivals," said Yeon Chae-rin, and left with her bow, her ledger, her two-nothing record, looking like a woman who had lost something.
At the fence, Yuna hung over the rail with her chin on her arms.
"You know she's going to spend the whole night working out a third contest," she said.
"I know."
"You know she's going to pick something you're bad at, practice it for nine days, win, and then be furious." Yuna's grin was enormous. "And you know you're going to do the same thing again, lose by one ring, and she's going to buy another bow."
"That's not."
"She bought a bow, Yeju." Yuna reached over the fence and headpatted her. "You've been here twenty-nine days. There's a duchess out there with a bow, a ledger, and a feelings problem. It's your fault, and I've never enjoyed anything more in my entire life."
Chae-rin came back.
She got about thirty yards toward the hall, then turned and marched all the way back across the yard with her bow still in her hand. Forty people who had begun to disperse stopped dispersing.
"The bow," she said.
"What?"
"You're keeping the bow." She thrust it out. "I bought two. I'm not carrying two bows back to the hall like a peddler, and I'm certainly not returning one. That would require a conversation with the man in the shop, who was familiar with me." Her chin was doing its thing. "So you're keeping it. That's not a gift. It's a logistics problem, and you're the solution."
Yeju took the bow. "Chae-rin."
"Don't." She was already walking. "Third contest. I'll send a card."
Yuna waited until she was out of earshot, which took a while, because Chae-rin walked slowly when she was pretending not to have done something.
"A hundred and forty sen," Yuna said, "for two bows."
"Don't."
"She bought a spare bow. Nine days ago. Before she'd even told you what the contest was, in case the girl she was challenging didn't own one." Yuna's voice had gone up an octave. "That's planning. That's considerate. She's been considerate at you for nine days and she'd rather set herself on fire than say it out loud."
[ +2,200. ]
For LOSING?
[ For losing by one ring. ] A pause. [ The ledger's phrasing, not mine: 'Yeon Chae-rin has begun keeping a record of a person instead of a score.' ]