ON ONE'S PATH

After that, they were free for the day.
Most of Class 5 shuffled off to rest, murmuring about beds and baths and the boys' lodge, which everyone seemed to know how to find. Godori heard the words, nodded along, and then walked in the opposite direction.
He couldn't help it. He had spent his whole life in one small village, and now he was standing inside something enormous. The corridors ran on and on, polished cedar that smelled faintly of incense and old rain. Paper screens glowed with afternoon light. He passed rooms full of scrolls, rooms full of weapons racked neatly on the walls, and a room that seemed to contain nothing but a single, very serious-looking teapot. He crossed a covered bridge over a pond where fat orange fish drifted below like lanterns in the water. He climbed a staircase just to see what was at the top, and what was at the top was a balcony with a view of the whole hillside, maple trees blazing red against the sky.
"Amazing," he breathed, to nobody.
He walked until his ribs began to complain, and kept walking anyway. Somewhere along the way, the sound of wood striking wood grew louder, and he followed it down a long stone path until the trees opened onto a wide field of packed earth, ringed with wooden posts and straw targets.
The training ground.
It was full.
Students in gray coats were everywhere, swinging practice swords, sparring in pairs, firing small bursts of fire and wind at the posts. Someone had frozen a barrel solid. Someone else was running laps with a log on each shoulder, yelling at nobody in particular.
Godori hesitated at the edge. *Too many people.* He did not feel like being stared at while he failed at things.
So he sat down on a stone bench under a pine tree, folded his bandaged hands in his lap, and waited.
It took an hour. The sun slid lower, the shadows stretched, and one by one the students drifted away, wiping sweat from their faces and complaining about dinner. At last the last of them left, and the field fell quiet.
Godori stood up.
*Now.*
He walked to the center of the ground, planted his feet, and closed his eyes.
His body was a wreck. His ribs ached with every breath. His burned shoulder pulled tight whenever he lifted his arm, and the skin of his hand was still raw under the cloth. But the kai fist had taught him one thing above everything else: a body that hurts can still train.
He began with the basics, calling up the thin thread of kai and walking it slowly through his arms and chest and legs. Then he thought of something else.
*Last week, in the village, before the exam. A Shibu on patrol.*
He remembered it clearly. The man had been standing at the edge of the square, bored, arms folded. A crow had landed on the fence beside him, and without even looking, he had lifted two fingers and released a small, glowing ball of pure kai. It had hummed through the air, popped against a post, and left a smoking dent in the wood.
Godori's eyes opened.
*I want to do that.*
He raised his right hand, palm out, and pushed.
Nothing.
He tried again. A flicker, a faint shimmer in his fingertips, then it collapsed like a sneeze that never arrived.
Again. The kai coughed out of his palm in a sad little puff and dissolved.
Again. He gritted his teeth, squeezed harder, and something in his shoulder twisted with a hot, bright jab of pain. He staggered and nearly dropped to one knee.
"Ow," he hissed. "Ow ow ow."
*Why isn't it flowing?* He could feel it, a tightness in the kai, a stiffness, as though the thread were catching on something inside him. But he didn't know what. And with the burns pulling at every muscle, he couldn't move as freely as he needed.
He wiped his forehead with his sleeve and set his jaw.
*Again.*
He tried it fifty times. Sixty. His arm shook. A tiny spark of kai broke loose once, flew about the length of a hand, and fizzled out. Godori stared at the spot where it had died.
"I got it to go a little," he said, to the empty field. "That's progress."
Beneath a tree at the edge of the grounds, someone watched him in silence.
She had been standing there since he started. A tall girl in a gray coat, her hair silver-white and tied in a loose braid that fell over one shoulder, a faint chill clinging to the air around her like the breath of winter. She had watched him fail sixty-one times. She had watched him get back up sixty-one times. And she had noticed, with a small crease of her brow, that he was getting no better.
At last she sighed, pushed off the trunk, and walked across the field.
"You're doing it wrong."
Godori yelped and spun around, nearly losing his balance. "Huh?"
"Your posture." She stopped a few steps away and tilted her head, studying him. "Your shoulders are tight. Your hips are locked. And you're pushing the kai out of your hand like you're trying to squeeze juice out of a stone. That's not how release works."
**╔══════════════════════════╗****IREL EMBER****Rank: Class 3****Affinity: Ice****╚══════════════════════════╝**
Godori blinked at the window that seemed to hang in the air beside her, then at the girl herself. "You're a senior."
"Class 3. Hold still."
Before he could ask what she meant, she stepped around behind him, put one hand on his shoulder and the other on his hip, and shifted him like a scarecrow. "Feet apart. Not that far. Bend your knees a little. Lower your shoulders. No, *lower*, you're not being fitted for armor. Good."
He stood there, stiff as a post, a little afraid to breathe.
"Now," Irel said, stepping back. "Kai isn't something you throw. It's part of you. Think of it as your body, the same as your blood, your breath, your arm. You wouldn't clench your fist and *shove* your heartbeat. You let it move."
"Okay," said Godori. "How?"
"Calm down first. You're so tense I can hear you."
He tried. He breathed in. His shoulders crept back up around his ears. Irel looked at him with an expression of deep patience.
"Down," she said.
He lowered them.
"Good. Close your eyes and look for your center, just below the navel. That's where it starts. Feel the kai there. Don't force it. Just watch where it wants to go." Her voice had softened, steady and quiet like snow falling. "Then direct it, slowly, by hand. Up the spine. Down the arm. Into the palm. Anywhere you want it. The kai moves where you guide it, not where you shove it. That's all there is to it."
"And it works for a kai ball too?"
"The same rule. It's always the same rule."
Godori let out a long breath. His shoulders loosened, truly this time. In the dark behind his eyelids, the center of his body glowed, a small, faint, shy point of light. He had felt it a thousand times and never really *looked* at it. Now he watched it ripple, and he coaxed it gently up his spine, down his arm, along the bones of his wrist. It flowed. It actually flowed, easily, smoothly, with no catching and no pain.
The kai gathered in his palm. It swelled.
"Now," Irel said softly.
His eyes opened. He thrust out his hand.
A ball of kai the size of a melon burst from his palm, pale and humming, and shot across the field. It slammed into a wooden target board forty paces away with a loud crack, and the board split down the middle and fell over.
Silence.
Godori stared at his hand. Then at the board. Then at his hand again.
"It was big," he said, in a small voice.
"It was big," Irel agreed. "Not strong. Hit a rock and it'd bounce off. But it's *real*." She folded her arms and almost smiled. "Master it, and that technique will carry you farther than you think."
"I did it." Godori's face split into a huge grin. He turned and bowed so deeply that his nose nearly hit his knees. "Thank you! Thank you so much! I've been trying for ages, I thought something was wrong with me—"
"Nothing's wrong with you. You were just clenching." She turned to go, then glanced back with a faint smile. "I'm Irel Ember. But call me Irel."
"Godori Fushiku!"
"I know," she said, a hint of amusement in her voice. "Everyone does."
She waved over her shoulder and walked off toward the great dark shape of the academy, the winter chill trailing after her, and soon she was gone between the lanterns.
Godori stood grinning at the empty field like a fool.
Then he noticed it was dark.
Properly dark. The sun had dropped behind the hills while he wasn't looking, and the sky was a deep, bruised blue. The lanterns along the paths had been lit, one by one, little pools of orange floating in the gloom. Somewhere, an owl said something rude.
"Oh," said Godori. "It's late."
He picked up his bag, brushed the dust off his knees, and decided it was time to go in. He would find his bed. He would fall into it. He would sleep for a week.
He walked halfway across the field before he stopped.
*Where... is the boys' lodge?*
He stood very still.
He thought back. Ragna had said the boys' lodge and the girls' lodge were on opposite sides of the compound. Everyone else had known where to go. Everyone else had walked off confidently in one direction. And Godori, who had not been listening, who had been thinking about the fish and the tea room and the balcony, had simply... wandered away.
"I never asked," he whispered.
The owl said something rude again.
He turned in a slow circle. Three paths led away from the training ground. They all looked the same. They all had lanterns. They all led into the dark.
"Okay," he told himself. "Okay. It's a building. I'll find a building. A lodge looks like a lodge."
He picked the left path with great confidence.
Two minutes later he walked into a storage shed and a rake fell on his head.
He tried the right path. It ended at the pond, where a fish looked up at him with an expression of grave disappointment. He tried the middle path, and the middle path led him straight back to the field, where the broken board lay on its side, as if mocking him.
"Not funny," Godori muttered.
He considered knocking on a door and asking for directions. Then he remembered rule four, the one about not leaving without permission, and wondered whether wandering lost around the grounds at night counted as something Ragna would find *less charming* than usual. He considered the rule about fighting. He considered the possibility of explaining himself to a sleepy class 1 Shibu on the first night.
He pictured the half-lidded eyes above the linen mask. *You forgot to ask where you sleep?*
"No," said Godori, aloud, to the owl. "Absolutely not."
He sat down on a stone lantern base, rested his chin on his bandaged fist, and stared at the enormous silent academy looming over him, its hundred dark windows blinking out one by one.
His stomach growled. His ribs ached. His rice ball from his grandfather was long gone.
The boy who had beaten a giant of fire in front of the whole village was now stuck in the dark, sitting on a lantern, with no idea where his bed was.
"Great," he sighed. "Just great."