Book 1: Chapter 3

The reason Linua hated mornings wasn’t because she was one of those people who struggled to get going after first waking up, but because every morning was spent with her father’s side of family. Today, however, she woke up with the vague feeling that, for once, she had something to look forward to, except that she couldn’t remember why. It wasn’t until she was dressed and was sitting down to a breakfast prepared by Helged that she remembered. The Astronomy Club had a mystery, and she had to find out what it was.

Breakfast every day consisted of eggs carefully cooked into perfect rounds with no part of the white was still runny; six neat fingers of white toast with the crusts cut off; an apple, carefully cored and peeled and cut evenly into eight segments; a glass of orange juice with no bits; and a small cup of yoghurt mixed evenly with raspberry jam that had been carefully sieved to remove the seeds.

One of the things Linua liked about Helged was that the latter was willing to indulge Linua’s food preferences, instead of forcing her to eat pointless and nasty things like bread crusts or orange juice with bits in.

What Linua ate was one of the few things in her life she had any control over, a power she guarded jealously.

“There you go, lovey,” Helged said.

Helged was short and slightly plump with curly, frizzy hair and a harried expression. Despite the fact that she constantly acted like she was several minutes late, the house ran smoothly under her management.

“Looks like a nice day,” Helged observed. She always said things like this. She was from a small island far the north where, apparently, it mostly rained, and the people greeted each other with comments on the weather instead of saying ‘hello.’

For Linua, visiting the paternal side of her family in the morning automatically made it not a nice day, which was six days out of seven. Helged noticed Linua glumly poking at her yoghurt with her spoon.

“You seem a bit down. What’s the matter, dearie?”

Linua knew it wasn’t worth explaining because Helged was always very sympathetic, but she never seemed to get it. Linua tried anyway.

“It’s because of Cousin Sayo Dahn. He’ll complain when we get put together for wushu practice. He always says I’m no good.”

“Oh, he’s just jealous, lovey,” Helged said comfortably.

This was why Linua rarely bothered confiding this sort of thing to Helged. Sayo Dahn wasn’t jealous. He was a resentful little snob who seemed to think Linua was inferior because she was half-Keretu on her mother’s side, instead of one hundred percent Shang like everyone else in her father’s family.

Grandmother’s house was set on the hillside overlooking the city and the estuary. It was a large house, with a multitude of peaked gables, small columns on either side of the front door, and an old-fashioned walled garden for growing vegetables.

It was unimpressive, however, when compared to Linua’s destination, Castle Yi.

Castle Yi was on the opposite side of the city of Herkow, further up the river valley. It had been built many hundreds of years ago, when Herkow was nothing but a small trading village, so it had a real moat and a functional drawbridge with a gatehouse, although the defences had been superfluous for over two centuries now.

The car carrying Linua swept over the drawbridge and into the courtyard beyond. Linua got out, the usual dread thickening in her stomach.

The Castle belonged to her father’s people. The Yi family were one of the twelve original Houses, each of which was descended from a Wushu Guardian. The nine surviving Houses were no longer considered as politically important as they had been, but they guarded their heritage jealously, and many of them were still very wealthy.

After her parents had … after the thing that had happened to her parents, her grandmother and the Yi family had fought each other over custody of Linua. The current arrangement was the answer. Linua lived with her grandmother, but visited Castle Yi every morning, and returned to her grandmother in the afternoon, a state of affairs that pleased no-one, least of all Linua. But the adults had professed themselves able to live with it, which was apparently the important thing, so every morning Linua was deposited in the castle courtyard.

Once out of the car, she went straight to the dojo, a massive, sprawling complex with multiple practice halls. The adults practised wushu in their own hall, but Linua went into the one dedicated to the training of the Yi children. Here she changed into the heavy, white gi which the Castle staff had put in her locker.

Waiting inside the children’s practice hall was the person Linua liked least in the world—Wai Bing Sheyboh.

Nowadays everyone on Inanna went by given names first and surnames last, but when everyone had first settled here thousands of years ago, the Shang Houses had had names which worked the opposite way round, with the surname first. The Houses like to be very traditional about everything, as if things that were thousands of years old were automatically better and wiser than anything to be found in the modern day. Therefore, Wai Bing was his given name and Sheyboh was his title, meaning teacher. He wasn’t a Yi by blood, but had been recruited by Great-Grandfather Yi for his talent at wushu, and had served the Yi family for decades.

Sheyboh stood at the head of the gym with his arms crossed, frowning as he watched his charges jogging around the room to warm up. Linua had seven cousins with whom she trained. Only two were her direct cousins—Sayo Hui was sixteen, and would soon be moving to the adult’s practice hall, and her younger brother, Sayo Dahn, was twelve. Their mother was the sister of Linua’s father. The rest were third cousins as opposed to first cousins, although the Yi family didn’t make those kinds of distinctions in the way that Keretu people did.

Aside from Sayo Dahn, the other Yi offspring were always reasonably friendly, but everyone knew Linua wasn’t really a proper Yi. The cousins had started their training younger and spent far longer each day practising wushu than Linua did, and the skill gap was noticeable. No matter how hard Linua tried she was always the worst trained and the least prepared, and she simply couldn’t win against the cousins.

Naturally Linua was usually paired during training with the only cousin who couldn’t stand her. Sayo Dahn felt that being made to practice with Linua, the weakest at wushu, was an insulting commentary on his own abilities. She had regularly overheard Sayo Dahn complaining to the other cousins that he wasn’t being sufficiently challenged because his partner was too unskilled. He would never have dared say openly that to Sheyboh—in the Yi family, obedience to authority was practically worshipped—so he spent most of the morning sessions burning silently with resentment, but nevertheless making it completely clear to Linua exactly what he thought of her.

Linua bowed to Sheyboh, then slipped into the gaggle of cousins who were still doing circuits. After a few minutes of warm up, Sheyboh gave a sharp, peremptory command. He spoke in Zuyu, as did everyone in Castle Yi, which was the language spoken by the Houses. The rest of the city mostly spoke Keretic, and even the Yi children were educated in Keretic nowadays, but within the Castle, as always, tradition prevailed.

The cousins all hastened to stand before Sheyboh so they could start doing the forms. Sheyboh was very keen for their forms to be perfect, and they practiced them every day. According to Sheyboh, his pupils very rarely succeeded in demonstrating a perfect form—least of all Linua. Despite this being a daily occurrence, Sheyboh never failed to be shocked and astounded when the forms were not performed to his standard, and he was voluble in expressing his dissatisfaction.

“What is this?” he said to Linua now, as she flowed from Praying Mantis pose to Tree Snake pose. “How can you fail at something so simple? You do not even try!”

Linua had thought she was trying, and the customary burn of resentment ignited inside her. But she didn’t say anything. In the Yi family, you just didn’t.

“It is like you are deliberately trying to disrespect your family and your ancestors,” Sheyboh said, looming over her as she sank into a low guard position. “You are have no respect and you are lazy. Your father would be so ashamed and disappointed.”

Sheyboh said things like this all the time, and he said it to all the cousins not just to Linua. Despite this, he had reduced Linua to tears on more than one occasion by referencing her father, of whom Linua only had vague memories. But in every single memory Linua had of him, he had been kind and smiling. Despite anything Sheyboh said, she didn’t think her father would have been ashamed or disappointed by her wushu forms. He had, after all, demonstrated shocking unloyalty to the Yi family by marrying Linua’s mother and supporting her in her astronomy career, instead of staying as a member of the Yi. There had been a big ruckus about that at the time.

But Linua’s father was gone, and sometimes, when she was feeling really low, she thought that maybe the reason he wasn’t there because she hadn’t been good enough, or clever enough, or talented enough. Sheyboh’s unkind words never failed to strike unerringly at the slender chord of fear inside her that, despite being hidden, was nevertheless as razor sharp and painful as wire.

As Linua moved from low guard to high guard, Sheyboh switched to Sayo Dahn and began haranguing him instead. Linua breathed out, grateful that he wasn’t yelling at her, although as far as she could see, Sayo Dahn and everyone else were not only doing the forms correctly, but with beauty and grace.

Sometimes she thought that Sheyboh had invented this mystical standard of perfection that no-one could ever obtain, just so he could tell them off for not having reached it.

“Do you know what is happening this Nimrasday?” Sheyboh demanded of them all, once he had finished critiquing their forms.

Yes, they all knew.

“The Venerable Tai Wu is coming!”

Uncle Tai Wu was the only person in the last three generations who had ascended, which meant he had the ability to channel Chi into the martial forms of wushu. He was now sixty years of age, and the Yi family were anxiously awaiting his successor.

Linua had once heard Sayo Hui explain to the other cousins that the family had hoped for great things of the current generation of Yi children. One of them, surely, would find the path to ascendance. The wisdom of the ancient sages indicated that it was not something that could be predicted, nor could it be trained. It was something that would announce itself when the time was right.

This did not stop the Yi family from putting the latest generation of cousins through a rigorous training program. It was also—Sayo Hui said—the reason Sheyboh was so particularly hard on them. He probably felt under pressure to produce the next Guardian.

Sheyboh paced up and down in front of them, expostulating angrily.

“Do you think the Venerable Tai Wu will be impressed by this?” he demanded. “No, he will not! You are all a disgrace, except for Sayo Hui. I am sad and ashamed. You must practice harder to be worthy of your parents and the Yi family! By failing to do the forms properly you are not just hurting your parents and your family, you are hurting yourselves. If you do not learn properly, you will never be a credit to the House of Yi. I will tell Zu Geng Sheyboh you must practice more!”

Zu Geng was the one who taught the evening sessions, which Linua was never present for. Once or twice he had taken the morning sessions, and Linua thought it was horribly, terribly unfair that it was Wai Bing Sheyboh who was the morning teacher, and Zu Geng who was the evening teacher. Zu Geng was funny and irreverent, but when he gave instructions he had a precise way of speaking that really made you listen. Linua’s mornings wouldn’t have been nearly so ghastly if she had had Zu Geng to teach her every day.

That session the class were practising the Shuang Tui Ji Dao move, so they separated into pairs. Linua was stuck, as always, with Sayo Dahn, who was as awkward and obstreperous as it was possible for a partner to be. They struggled resentfully through the rest of the morning with each other, while Sheyboh stormed up and down criticising everything he saw, until it was time for meditation practice.

If there was one thing Linua liked about coming to Castle Yi, it was the meditation practice. It was commonly thought that meditation was more likely to assist a practitioner in connecting with their Chi sufficiently enough to transcend, so it was strongly encouraged.

Meditation practice was led by Auntie Hui Ying, who had married into the Yi clan and was therefore not intense and highly strung like the rest of the Yi women. Auntie Hui Ying was probably Linua’s favourite person at Castle Yi.

Auntie Hui Ying glided into the gym with her customary unhurried pace and a beaming smile. She and Sheyboh bowed to one another.

“You will find they are sadly lacking in discipline and attention,” Sheyboh said disapprovingly. “I beg you to teach them to practice their focus.”

Auntie Hui Ying just smiled and waited for him to leave. Nothing Sheyboh ever said seemed to affect her, and she invariably ignored every single bit of his advice.

Sometimes she made the cousins sit cross-legged on the floor and they had to imagine they were sitting on a high mountain surrounded by white mist. Sometimes they had to stand, with their feet grounded, and imagine they were a tree with deep roots. Today she made them lie down and imagine they were lying in the mud of a tidal flat, floating and one with the earth, while they breathed in and out with the tide.

Linua loved these sessions. It was the absolute highlight of her daily visits to Castle Yi. It was true that, while attempting to achieve inner oneness with the world and connect to her Chi, Linua often fell asleep, but she was always tired because she worked so hard, and Auntie Hui Ying never seemed to mind.

By the time meditation was finished, and Linua had hurriedly showered and changed back into her own clothes, it was noon and time for her to return to her grandmother’s house for lunch.

Strictly speaking, Linua was supposed to stay at the castle for lunch, but in the past that had proved disastrous, because the food often involved things like raw fish, fermented sauces, odd-tasting pastes, and nasty bitter-flavoured tea. Linua had utterly refused to eat any of it, and after several bouts of dizziness, one fainting spell, and a great deal of arguing and shouting, the Yi family had relented and allowed Linua to return to her grandmother before lunchtime instead of afterwards. This was immensely satisfying, as it was the one time in her life when Linua had got her way about anything.

So, at one o’clock precisely, Linua was ushered into the dining room at Grandmother’s house. It was a cold, sombre room facing north, with heavy mahogany chairs covered in chintz, and a long, polished wooden table set with two place settings, one for her grandmother and one for Linua.

Grandmother was having steak pudding today, but Linua always had the same thing. When Helged brought her plate in, it had one poached chicken breast, two scoops of mashed potato sieved to remove all lumps, and a spoonful of peas. Grandmother never failed to make a comment about Linua’s choice of food.

Today she said, “Goodness me, I’d have thought you’d get tired of that eventually.”

Linua didn’t reply, but then Grandmother never expected her to.

The second thing Grandmother always asked about was what Linua had done at the Observatory the previous evening. Thanks to Dr Aedan, that was easy, and used up a few more minutes.

“The Journal of Astrophysics arrived today,” Grandmother said. “I’ve put together a pack for you to read in the car on the way to the Observatory. You’ll find Cabo’s paper on using magnetic observations to predict solar flares particularly interesting. I would like to hear what you think of it.”

Linua’s heart sank. She hated it when Grandmother wanted her to make intelligent and erudite conversation about the papers she was supposed to read.

“Thanks,” she said.

Once in the car, though, she put the journal papers away in her satchel, and stared out the window. Maybe tonight she would find out what the Astronomy Club had been up to.