I petitioned Fei Liao to delay the execution.
I wrote the petition at the second notch and walked it across the yard before drills.
The reasoning I gave was direct.
I suspected that there were more Qinghe soldiers hiding in plain sight inside the Pei clan, and the rolls did not show them, because I had been the hand that did not written them down upon the clan's arrival. What their motives were after all this ti, I could not hazard to guess, or perhaps they saw their position advantageous in order to gain more information and feed it back to Qinghe. Again, I could not yet deduce the thods in which they could send information.
Regardless, I would sniff them out.
Shan Pei had shown the southern hill technique for scent-reading clan kinship, and I had been working the principle in my own draws for quite so ti now until I could replicate it. I would teach it to the four students as part of their early channel work. The exercise would double as an intelligence sweep of the Pei clan, run as cultivation practice, with the cohort none the wiser. Whatever defectors remained inside the clan would be marked by scent before the month was out. The blade would fall on Pei Yan only after every soldier she had brought through the gate had been nad.
Fei Liao read the petition at the table. He took up his brush and wrote his answer on the back of the sa paper and slid it across to .
Granted. The condemned will be held until you, the Squad Captain, na the day. Your reasoning is sound. The Commander will be inford by the next courier. Fei Liao.
I folded the paper and put it in my belt.
The work continued.
The morning of the seventh day after the petition, Xu Bing ca across the yard at the seventh notch.
"Squad Captain. The second cohort is at the southern road. Lieutenant Fei Liao is at the gate."
I crossed the yard.
The four were dismounted by the ti I reached the gate. The escort had already turned the horses back. Fei Liao stood with the tallest at the front of the group. The other three stood beside their packs.
The girl was at the back. She was a head shorter than the tallest of the boys and she stood with her weight balanced over both feet in a way the others had not learned. She was looking at the ridge above the river fork. She brought her eyes back down when I ca around the gate post and she did not adjust her posture.
The bold one inclined his head with the brief practical courtesy of a workshop. The brilliant one was beside him, smaller, sharper in the face. The quiet one stood at the girl's shoulder with his pack at his feet and his eyes on my face.
Fei Liao said, "Squad Captain. Your second cohort. Their papers are on my table." He nodded and walked back toward the garrison building.
I looked at the four.
"Nas?"
"Cao Yan, Squad Captain. Twenty. My father is a smith in Lanyu. We make tools and farm implents."
"Sun Hai. Nineteen. Sun family of Lanyu."
"Mu Renshu. Seventeen. My father is a quartermaster, Western Reaches infantry, third garrison."
"Lin Zhi. Eighteen. Of Heying village in the eastern grain plain. My family farms millet."
"Pick up your packs. Follow ."
I took them to the curriculum room.
I had them stand in line in front of the low table. I unrolled the page with the tenets.
"Read this out loud together."
They read.
"The cultivator's power belongs to those the cultivator protects. Knowledge withheld is knowledge betrayed. The cultivator who does not know his own heart cannot trust his own hand. A sect that buries its students has failed its students. The cultivator answers first to the people, second to the lord, last to himself."
"Again."
They read it again.
"Again."
The third reading. Their voices found each other.
"You have just spoken the Code of the River Fork Academy. You will speak it every morning. The Code binds you. You bind each other to it. If any one of you violates a tenet, the other three bring it to . If I violate a tenet, you bring it to Lieutenant Fei Liao. There is no level of authority above the Code. Now have a seat."
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringent.
They sat.
"The path you are now on has three stages. I will tell you what they are."
I held up one finger.
"Refinent. The first stage. You learn to read ambient Qi. You learn to feel the channels in your own body and in others. You will spend the next four weeks on this stage with and with Wei Bolin. You do not advance until you can hold the four foundational channels open under stress."
Two fingers.
"Foundational. The second stage. You learn to draw ambient Qi through the channels and produce it externally as a working force. There is no shortcut."
Three fingers.
"Master. The third stage. You contribute a technique back to the institution. The technique must be original. You must demonstrate it under combat conditions in front of the garrison and the master instructor. The contribution is recorded in the founding docunts. Your na attaches to the technique permanently. That is what makes you a Master. Reaching Master is the goal of every student in this room. It is what you are training toward, and it is what the Code binds you to pursue."
I lowered my hand.
"Licensing is renewed quarterly. The master instructor signs first. The district lieutenant counter-signs. The license is recorded in the garrison ledger alongside the household roll. The license is what allows you to practice cultivation as a registered cultivator of the Western Reaches. Without it, what you do is unsanctioned. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Squad Captain."
"Tell how each of you ca to be in this room. Cao Yan first."
Cao Yan straightened.
"Commander Xu ca to my father's shop in Lanyu, Squad Captain. She had hold a heated rod and tell her what I felt. I told her the heat moved up to my shoulders and stopped before it reached my chest."
I nodded. "Sun Hai."
"Commander Xu ca to my grandmother's house in Lanyu. My grandmother is Sun Ai. She tested herself with the Commander watching. I held bitterleaf in my left hand and mountain ginger in my right and told them what each one felt like."
I did not move.
Sun Ai.
"Sun Hai, is your grandmother a healer?"
"Yes, Squad Captain." His face brightened.
"I know the na, tell more about her."
"She trained at Chianji village as a young woman before she went west and settled in Lanyu and married my grandfather. She has been the senior healer of the western district for thirty years. She is eighty-one. She still receives patients in her front room. Squad Captain, I had a book sent to her in the late autumn that I was sure she would love.”
I raised a brow. "Which book?”
"Mother of Healing, Squad Captain. The one written in this village. The one Instructor Wei Suyin and Liu Jun assembled together. It records the thods of a healer nad Mother Pei, who studied under my grandmother as a young woman, forty years ago, before she returned to the eastern districts. My grandmother was thrilled to read it."
The room was quiet.
I looked at Sun Hai.
"Mother Pei was my mother."
Sun Hai's mouth opened with shock, as the did the other student’s faces.
"Sun Ai trained my mother. The book carries my mother's na in the title because everything in it began with what your grandmother taught her, forty years ago in this village. The clinic that produced the book was my mother's clinic. Instructor Wei Suyin and Liu Jun wrote it because my mother fell ill and could not do so herself, and because I wanted her work preserved. Your grandmother was the first teacher in that lineage. The book belongs as much to her as it does to anyone here."
The other three were staring.
Cao Yan spoke first, soft. "Squad Captain. The book is in my mother's house. She uses it for the children when they are sick. She paid a copyist three months' wages for it last year. The smith's wives in our quarter take turns reading it aloud at the public well in the evenings, when one of the children has fever and soone needs to know the right tea. I have heard my mother read the chapter on lung sickness six tis since the autumn."
Mu Renshu's voice was quieter still. "The third garrison clinic has a copy, Squad Captain. The dic on duty when my brother was injured used it. He read aloud from it while he set the bone. My father bought a second copy for the household. He said no quartermaster's son was going to grow up without it. He reads to my sisters from it before they sleep."
Lin Zhi did not speak right away. When she did, her voice was lower than it had been at the gate.
"The headman of my village has a copy. He read from it at my grandmother's bedside the week she died. He said the chapter on ending well was the chapter that made the death easier than the village had feared. I did not know who Mother Pei was. The book did not say where she was from. The headman cried when he closed it. My grandmother died at the third notch the next morning."
I let the warmth sit in my chest.
It was the first ti I had felt it since the fires.
Mother. Your work has gone further than you knew. Your teacher is alive in Lanyu and she is reading what your students wrote about you. Your students' students are sitting in this room. You are not gone.
"Sun Hai. We will speak about your grandmother again. I will write to her tonight. The clinic owes her a letter, and a great deal of gratitude.”
"Yes, Squad Captain."
"Mu Renshu, continue. Who tested you?"
"Commander Xu ca to the third garrison, Squad Captain. My father presented six soldiers' sons. She had us pour water into a cup at a marked level without spilling and tell her how we knew when to stop. I told her I felt the air pressure change as the cup filled."
"Lin Zhi."
"Commander Xu ca to my village, Squad Captain. The harvest was in. The headman nad . She had stand in the barley field and tell her where the wind would shift before it shifted."
I sat with that.
Four students. Four villages or households. Four screenings done by the Commander herself, in person, using a field test she had developed from the frawork I had given her at Lanyu. She has been finding every person in the territory who can feel ambient Qi without yet knowing what ambient Qi is, and she has been sending each one to .
Every cultivator in the Western Reaches is going to co through this room. She has decided there will be no other.
"Tomorrow you will eat at the clinic step at the second notch, and for now the eastern dormitory is yours. Instructor Wei Bolin will brief you in the morning on what cos next. Dismissed."
They picked up their packs and filed out.
I sat in the curriculum room alone for a breath after the door closed.
The influence of being a Squad Captain and Instructor of Cultivators is not one that I take lightly, regardless, this level of influence and trust can be used to gain favor, and with it, power to control our fates. It is not a thought that ca easy to bear, but as the old saying goes, better a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war.
And this was an age of war.
I rolled the tenets page and tied it with the garrison cord.
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