Rin waited by the desk, growing more and more anxious as the minutes passed. Had Jiang left the Academy? Been fired? Suffered
a nervous breakdown? Been arrested for opium possession off campus? For opium possession
She thought suddenly of the day she had enrolled for Sinegard, when the proctors had tried to detain her for cheating. Had Nezha’s family filed a complaint against her for costing their heir the championship? Was that even possible?
Finally the clerk returned with a sheepish look on his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But it’s been so long since anyone’s pledged Lore. We’re not sure what color your armband is supposed to be.”
In the end they took leftover cloth from the first-years’ uniforms and fashioned her a white armband.
Classes began the next day. After pledging, Rin still spent half her time with the other masters. As she was the only one in her track, she studied Strategy and Linguistics along with Irjah’s apprentices. She found to her dismay that though she hadn’t pledged Medicine, second-years still had to suffer a mandatory emergency triage class under Enro. History had been replaced with Foreign Relations under Master Yim. Jun still wouldn’t allow her to train under him, but she was eligible to study weapons-based combat with Sonnen.
Finally her morning classes ended, and Rin was left with half the day to spend with Jiang. She ran up the steps toward the Lore garden. Time to meet with her master. Time to get answers.
“Describe to me what we are studying,” said Jiang. “What is Lore?”
Rin blinked. She’d rather been hoping that he would tell her.
Rin had tried many times over the break to rationalize to herself why she’d chosen to study Lore, only to find herself uttering vague, circular truisms.
It came down to an intuition. A truth she knew for herself but couldn’t prove to anyone else. She was studying Lore because she knew Jiang had tapped into some other source of power, something real and mystifying. Because she had tapped into that same source the day of the Tournament. Because she had been consumed by fire, had seen the world turned red, had lost control of herself and been saved by the man whom everyone else at the school deemed insane.
She had seen the other side of the veil, and now her curiosity was so great she would go mad unless she understood what had happened.
That didn’t mean she had the faintest inkling of what she was doing.
“Weird things,” she said. “We’re studying very weird things.”
Jiang raised an eyebrow. “How articulate.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m just here because I wanted to study with you. Because of what happened during the Trials. I don’t actually know what I’m getting into.”
“Oh, you do.” Jiang lifted his index finger and touched the tip to a spot on her forehead precisely between her eyes, the spot from which he’d stilled the fire inside her. “Deep in your subconscious mind, you know the truth of things.”
“I wanted to—”
“You want to know what happened to you during the Tournament.” Jiang cocked his head to the side. “Here is what happened: you called a god, and the god answered.”
Rin made a face. Again with the gods? She had been hoping for answers throughout the entire break, had thought that Jiang might make things clear once she returned, but she was now more confused than ever.
Jiang lifted a hand before she could protest. “You don’t know what any of this means yet. You don’t know if you’ll ever replicate what happened in the ring. But you do know that if you don’t get answers now, the hunger will consume you and your mind will crack. You’ve glimpsed the other side and you can’t rest until you fill in the blanks. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to you was common in the era before the Red Emperor, back when Nikara shamans didn’t know what they were doing. If this had continued, you would have gone mad. But I am here to make sure that doesn’t happen. I’m going to keep you sane.”
Rin wondered how someone who regularly strolled through campus without clothes on could say that with a straight face.
And she wondered what it said about her that she trusted him.
Understanding came, like all things with Jiang, in infuriatingly small increments. As Rin had learned before the Trials, Jiang’s preferred method of instruction was to do first and explain later, if ever. She learned early on that if she asked the wrong question, she wouldn’t get the answer she wanted. “The fact that you’re asking,” Jiang would say, “is evidence that you’re not ready to know.”
She learned to shut up and simply follow his lead.
