Yun Ganghwa was a person who ruined people's schemes without knowing there was one, Yeju would come to understand that this was simply who he was.
She met him the day before the duels in the equipment shed, where she had gone to look at the practice blades and think about how a person credibly loses without getting hurt. There was a boy already there though, alone, running a whetstone down a training sword nobody had asked him to sharpen.
"Isn't that rack blade?" Yeju asked/
"It's dull."
"They're supposed to be dull."
"They're supposed to be dull on the edge." He didn't look up. "This one's dull on the balance. Someone dropped it, probably bent the tang, and then just put it back on the rack. The next person who takes it into a duel gets their wrist turned and loses for no reason." He turned the blade over. "Then they'll think they were beaten. They won't have been. They'll have been robbed."
Yeju looked at him properly. Ducal grey. Second year.
"Yun Ganghwa," she said.
"Han Yeju." He set the blade down. "You're fighting my cousin tomorrow."
Yeju's stomach went cold. "Taewoong's your cousin?"
"Second cousin." He picked up the next blade off the rack and started on it. "He'll open with the high feint. He always opens with the high feint. Its his signature move."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you'll lose anyway, and I'd rather you lost to what he actually is." Whetstone steady. "He's better than you. That's not an insult, everyone in this school is better than you, you have an F-core and you've been casting for a fortnight. He's faster, he's trained since he was six, he'll be inside your guard before you finish a glyph. Count it. Two beats to close, one to disarm you. Three."
"You've counted it?"
"I count everything." He said it flatly, like admitting a medical condition. "It just happens. I watch a thing and it comes out in numbers." He finally looked up at her, and his eyes were tired in a way that did not belong on a seventeen-year-old. "So here's the number that matters. Nine people were in the crowd-split at the entrance. Nine. That's how many were close enough to the flame you set that they'd have burned if the split had gone the other direction. Still you have been walking around for two weeks as though that was skill."
The shed was very quiet.
"It wasn't skill," Yeju said.
"No."
"I know it wasn't skill."
"Good," said Yun Ganghwa, and went back to the whetstone, and that was, Yeju realized much later, the first time anyone in this world told her the truth for free.
Yeju learned that the school's gossip ran faster than she could walk, by the time she reached the library, her talk with Yun Ganghwa was already known.
"You spoke to Yun Ganghwa," said a voice at her shoulder.
Yeju did not startle, which took effort. The girl leaning over the back of her chair had glossy black hair, blunt bangs, and a folded paper fan she was tapping against her lower lip. She had come in without a sound and was standing much too close, seriously, too close.
"Cheon Miyu," she said. "Council. First year. Don't get up."
"I wasn't going to."
"That's interesting too." The fan tapped. "Nobody talks to Ganghwa. He's got a face like a closed book and he counts out loud when he's tired. Two people in this school have had a conversation with him that lasted longer than a sentence, and until Thursday, both of them were his cousins."
"I was bored, and he was just sharpening a blade."
"Ofcourse" Miyu came around the chair and sat on the edge of Yeju's table, which put her exactly in the way of the book Yeju had been pretending to read. "Here's my problem, Han Yeju. I read people. It's the only thing I'm actually good at, and I'm exceptionally good at it, though it does make me tiresome at parties." She smiled. It was a warm smile with nothing behind it yet. "I've read you many times this week. Different rooms, different angles. And I get different answers."
"That sounds like a you problem."
"It absolutely is. That's why I'm making it yours." Miyu slid off the table, and she was gone toward the stacks before Yeju could answer, tossing the last of it over her shoulder. "Good luck tomorrow. Try not to be interesting. I'd hate to have to actually work."
What a weirdo.
She was still turning it over that evening when a shadow fell across her table in the library and something landed on it. A card. Cream, thick, gold-edged.
Yeju read it.
YEON CHAE-RIN, first year, hereby challenges HAN YEJU, first year, to a contest of merit, to be held at a time and in a discipline of the challenged party's choosing.
She looked up. Yeon Chae-rin stood over her in the most expensively tailored uniform in the academy, golden ringlets, storm-blue eyes, chin at an angle that had been engineered by generations.
"A contest of what?" Yeju inquired
"Merit."
"Merit in what?"
"That's your choice. It's on the card. Read it" Chae-rin's chin went up another degree. "I'm told you're an anomaly. The frost calamity compliments you. A fire-track failure passed her practical because of you, which is absurd, because you have no core, so either the whole school is lying or you're something, and I intend to find out which by beating you at something."
"You want to beat me. At something. Any something?"
"Yes."
"But you don't know what yet?"
"That's what makes it fair," Chae-rin snapped. Under the gold and the tailoring, Yeju heard a girl who had been told her whole life she'd better be best at whatever the room picked.
[ Oh, ] said the panel, with interest. [ Oh, she's going to be a problem for you. ]
"I'll think about it," Yeju gave in.
"You'll accept."
"I'll think about it."
Chae-rin's mouth opened. Closed. She had visibly, no procedure for being neither accepted nor refused, so she stood there for a full three seconds with the whole social machinery of her house grinding on nothing.
"Fine," she said, at last, with enormous dignity. "Think. Quickly." She turned and got four steps before turning back. "Not tomorrow, obviously. Tomorrow you're being disassembled by Jin Taewoong, and I refuse to be seen challenging someone who's already been beaten that day. It's a question of standard."
Then she left, leaving Yeju sitting in the library contemplating if she could fake being sick for a year.
***
Bori was awake when she got back, which Bori never was.
"You're going to lose tomorrow," Bori said to the ceiling.
"That's the plan."
"I know it's the plan. You've hummed about it for four days." She turned a page of something in the dark, which should not have been possible. "I'm saying you're going to lose in a way you didn't plan. Those are different."
"That's very ominous, thank you."
"It's just what happens." A page turned. "You plan things and then something falls over. It happened at the entrance. It happened on the roof. It'll happen tomorrow. I've got it written down. Three for three." She rolled over. "Eat something before. You fight badly on an empty stomach."
"I fight badly on any stomach."
"Yes," Bori agreed, and went to sleep.
[ Balance check, ] the panel offered. [ 8,203 points. You've earned more in a fortnight from two girls looking at you funny than the store charges for a second-circle form. ]
"Don't."
[ I'm making a business observation. You could buy [Ember Coil] tonight. Four hundred. You'd still lose tomorrow, you'd just lose with a bigger fire. ] A pause. [ Or you could buy something on the Truths shelf and find out what your opponent's afraid of. That's the shelf people usually go to, when they're frightened and rich. ]
Yeju looked at the card. She must resist, she had to resist....
"No," she muttered "I lose tomorrow. Cheaply, quiet and boring, exactly as planned."
[ Of course. ]
[ Your plans have such a good record. ]