MANY YEARS AGO, there lived a scholar named Dieu, who had studied for eighteen years and whose tutor finally reckoned that she was ready for the imperial exams in Ahnfi.
In those days, Ahnfi was the greatest city in the world, from the shores of the Mother Sea to the dry places where the dragons’ bastards lurked in the black sand dunes. To be anyone who was anyone, you should have been born in the capital to one of the six great families, ideally as an able-bodied eldest boy, ideally without a single mark on your skin and without a taste for esoteric magic or radical politics. Since most people in the capital could not even manage this small thing, the next best thing was to excel at the imperial examinations, held every four years in the Hall of Ferocious Jade.
Unlike the examinations at the provincial and commandery levels, which took place every other year, the imperial examinations were dazzlingly complex, dangerously competitive, and thanks to some eight generations of mysterious deaths in the Hall of Ferocious Jade, more than a little haunted. The candidates came from all over the empire, and the prestige, wealth, and power of an imperial appointment meant that no one who had come so far intended to go home with anything less than top marks.
Dieu’s great-grandfather had finagled a pass to the imperial examinations and then got assassinated before he had gotten a chance to use it. Her grandmother would have gone to the examinations, but she got distracted by a life of crime in the high mountain passes. Dieu’s father might have been a fine scholar, but he died young with his wives in a river fording as they fled from their enemies one terrible autumn night.
So in the end, there was only Dieu left, living in a tiny house in Hue County, being raised by a series of diligent tutors and compassionate maids. There was a hawthorn tree in the front, a tiny garden in the back, and a wind from the north that seemed to blow as much good as bad. The house was rented, so she truly possessed only few treasured books, a face that was long and oval like a grain of rice, a mouth that smiled rather too little, and a little jade chip that guaranteed the bearer entry to the imperial examinations.
She was an over-serious girl, and years of studying late into the long Hue County night left her with an inclination to slouch. Except for the slouch, she would have been tall, and except for her squint, likewise acquired, she might have been passingly pretty.
Instead, Dieu was well-read in the classics, clever with compositions and translations, and versed in the many laws of the land. At the age of twenty-eight, her tutor nodded and collected enough money to purchase for her a suit of good traveling clothes, a decent map, a few paper talismans, and a little embroidered bag on a woven string so she could wear the jade chip around her neck.
“Well, I have taught you all I could teach you,” he said to her one crisp fall morning. “You are as ready as anyone can be to enter the Hall of Ferocious Jade and emerge a court official rather than a bundle of bones tied up with your own guts—”
* * *
“Oh!” Sinh Cam exclaimed, sitting up in surprise. “That’s right! A bundle of bones tied up with their own guts, that’s what we say.”
“It’s a tiger’s term?” Chih asked. “I thought it was just what the ghosts of the examination hall did to those scholars who who didn’t follow the proper sacrifices . . .”
“No, it’s ours,” said Sinh Loan pleasantly. “It’s what we call someone who is a disappointment. Because that’s what we turn them into. Please continue.”
“Of course.”
* * *
“I’m not sure I’m ready,” Dieu said. “I still have to memorize the lesser chrestomathies, and I feel like I still have a ways to go on the errata of the greater ones. And my Vihnese is still—”
“I don’t think they really test on the lesser chrestomathies any longer,” her tutor said with confidence, “and who speaks Vihnese anymore, anyway?”
“Well, the Vihnese do . . .”
“And I have every confidence that you will excel as it was expected that your great-grandfather would have done. You come from a good family, you are tenacious, you love the intricacies of the classics and how they bind the world to lawful congress, and anyway, the money is quite gone, and so your instruction is at an end.”
Dieu understood that at least, and nodded dejectedly, though she remembered to pay proper obeisance and thanks to her tutor before he set off for points unknown.
Then she handed the keys to the small house with the hawthorn tree in Hue County over to the impatient landlord, took a last long look around the town she had never left in all her life, and started the long trek east.
* * *
“Oh, we never knew any of that about Dieu,” rumbled Sinh Cam, and Sinh Loan nodded speculatively. Their faces possessed a similar curiosity, a strange thing to see stamped on the face of both a woman and a tiger. Sinh Hoa had dropped her head to her large paws, and she only blinked sleepily at the fire.
“It is appropriate they know more about Scholar Dieu,” Sinh Loan said finally, glancing down at her neatly filed nails. “Dieu was, for all of her blessings and beauty, actually a human after all. Next, you must speak of Ho Thi Thao.”
Sinh Loan sat up straight, giving the impression of a cat setting her tail neatly around her toes.
“Please, continue.”
Chih swallowed, remembered not to smile, and obeyed.