“It’ll hurt,” the physician warned. “Much worse than it hurt when you were menstruating. Your womb will self-destruct over the next few hours. After this, it will stop fulfilling its function. When your body has matured fully, you can get a surgery to have your womb removed altogether, but this should solve your problem in the interim. You’ll be out of class for at least a week after this. But afterward, you’ll be free forever. Now, I’m required to ask you one more time if you’re certain this is what you want.”
“I’m certain.” Rin didn’t want to think it over any more. She held her breath and lifted the mug to her mouth, wincing at the taste.
The physician had added honey to mask the bitterness, but the sweetness only made it more horrible. It tasted the way that opium smelled. She had to swallow many times before she drained the entire mug. When she finished, her stomach felt numb and weirdly sated, bloated and rubbery. After a few minutes an odd prickling feeling tingled at the base of her torso, like someone was poking her with tiny needles from inside.
“Get back to your room before it starts to hurt,” the physician advised. “I’ll tell the masters you’re ill. The nurse will check on you tonight. You won’t want to eat, but I’ll have one of your classmates bring you some food just in case.”
Rin thanked him and ran with a wobbling gait back to her quarters, clutching her abdomen. The prickling had turned into an acute pain spreading across her lower stomach. She felt as if she had swallowed a knife and it was twisting in a slow circle inside her.
Somehow she made it back to her bed.
It was terrible. She whimpered aloud.
She did not sleep so much as lie in a fevered daze. She turned deliriously on the sheets, dreaming of unborn, misshapen infants, of Tobi digging his five claws into her stomach.
“Rin. Rin?”
Someone hovered over her. It was Niang, bearing a wooden bowl.
“I brought you some winter melon soup.” Niang knelt down beside Rin and held the bowl to her face.
Rin took one whiff of the soup. Her stomach seized painfully.
“I’m good,” she said weakly.
“There’s also this sedative.” Niang pushed a cup toward her. “The physician said it’s safe for you to take it now if you want to, but you don’t have to.”
“Are you joking? Give me that.” Rin grabbed the cup and guzzled it down. Immediately her head began to swim. The room became delightfully fuzzy. The stabbing in her abdomen disappeared. Then something rose up in the back of her throat. Rin lunged to the side of the bed and vomited into the basin she had set there. Blood splattered the porcelain.
She glanced down at the basin with a deranged satisfaction.
While she continued to retch, she heard the door to the dormitory open.
Someone walked inside and paused in front of her. “You’re insane,” said Venka.
Rin glared up at her, blood dripping from her mouth, and smiled.
Rin spent four delirious days in bed before she could return to class. When she did drag herself out of bed, against both Niang’s and the physician’s recommendations, she found she was hopelessly behind.
She had missed an entire unit on Mugini verb conjugations in Linguistics, the chapter on the demise of the Red Emperor in History, Sunzi’s analysis of geographical forecasting in Strategy, and the finer points of setting a splint in Medicine. She expected no lenience from the masters and received none.
The masters treated her like missing class was her fault, and it was. She had no excuses; she could only accept the consequences.
She flubbed questions every time a master called on her. She scored at the bottom of every exam. She didn’t complain. For the entire week, she endured the masters’ condescension in silence.
Oddly, she didn’t feel discouraged, but rather as if a veil had been lifted. Her first few weeks at Sinegard had been like a dream. Dazzled by the magnificence of the city and the Academy, she had allowed herself to drift.
She had now been painfully reminded that her place here was not permanent.
The Keju had meant nothing. The Keju had tested her ability to recite poems like a parrot. Why had she ever imagined that might have prepared her for a school like Sinegard?
But if the Keju had taught her anything, it was that pain was the price of success.
And she hadn’t burned herself in a long time.
