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СКАЧАТЬ shattered, and then unified again. Nikan had in turn been at war with the khans of the northern Hinterlands and the tall westerners from across the great sea. Both times Nikan had proven itself too massive to suffer foreign occupation for very long.

      Of all Nikan’s attempted conquerors, the Federation of Mugen had come the closest. The island country had attacked Nikan at a time when domestic turmoil between the provinces was at its peak. It took two Poppy Wars and fifty years of bloody occupation for Nikan to win back its independence.

      The Empress Su Daji, the last living member of the troika who had seized control of the state during the Second Poppy War, now ruled over a land of twelve provinces that had never quite managed to achieve the same unity that the Red Emperor had imposed.

      The Nikara Empire had proven itself historically unconquerable. But it was also unstable and disunited, and the current spell of peace held no promise of durability.

      If there was one thing Rin had learned about her country’s history, it was that the only permanent thing about the Nikara Empire was war.

      The second subject, mathematics, was a slog. It wasn’t overly challenging but tedious and tiresome. The Keju did not filter for genius mathematicians but rather for students who could keep up things such as the country’s finances and balance books. Rin had been doing accounting for the Fangs since she could add. She was naturally apt at juggling large sums in her head. She still had to bring herself up to speed on the more abstract trigonometric theorems, which she assumed mattered for naval battles, but she found that learning those was pleasantly straightforward.

      The third section, logic, was entirely foreign to her. The Keju posed logic riddles as open-ended questions. She flipped open a sample exam for practice. The first question read: “A scholar traveling a well-trodden road passes a pear tree. The tree is laden with fruit so heavy that the branches bend over with its weight. Yet he does not pick the fruit. Why?”

      Because it’s not his pear tree, Rin thought immediately. Because the owner might be Auntie Fang and break his head open with a shovel. But those responses were either moral or contingent. The answer to the riddle had to be contained within the question itself. There must be some fallacy, some contradiction in the given scenario.

      Rin had to think for a long while before she came up with the answer: If a tree by a well-traveled road has this much fruit, then there must be something wrong with the fruit.

      The more she practiced, the more she came to see the questions as games. Cracking them was very rewarding. Rin drew diagrams in the dirt, studied the structures of syllogisms, and memorized the more common logical fallacies. Within months, she could answer these kinds of questions in mere seconds.

      Her worst subject by far was Classics. It was the exception to her rotating schedule. She had to study Classics every day.

      This section of the Keju required students to recite, analyze, and compare texts of a predetermined canon of twenty-seven books. These books were written not in the modern script but in the Old Nikara language, which was notorious for unpredictable grammar patterns and tricky pronunciations. The books contained poems, philosophical treatises, and essays on statecraft written by the legendary scholars of Nikan’s past. They were meant to shape the moral character of the nation’s future statesmen. And they were, without exception, hopelessly confusing.

      Unlike with logic and mathematics, Rin could not reason her way out of Classics. Classics required a knowledge base that most students had been slowly building since they could read. In two years, Rin had to simulate more than five years of constant study.

      To that end, she achieved extraordinary feats of rote memorization.

      She recited backward while walking along the edges of the old defensive walls that encircled Tikany. She recited at double speed while hopping across posts over the lake. She mumbled to herself in the store, snapping in irritation whenever customers asked for her help. She would not let herself sleep unless she had recited that day’s lessons without error. She woke up chanting classical analects, which terrified Kesegi, who thought she had been possessed by ghosts. And in a way, she had been—she dreamed of ancient poems by long-dead voices and woke up shaking from nightmares where she’d gotten them wrong.

       “The Way of Heaven operates unceasingly, and leaves no accumulation of its influence in any particular place, so that all things are brought to perfection by it … so does the Way operate, and all under the sky turn to them, and all within the seas submit to them.”

      Rin put down Zhuangzi’s Annals and scowled. Not only did she have no idea what Zhuangzi was writing about, she also couldn’t see why he had insisted on writing in the most irritatingly verbose manner possible.

      She understood very little of what she read. Even the scholars of Yuelu Mountain had trouble understanding the Classics; she could hardly be expected to glean their meaning on her own. And because she didn’t have the time or the training to delve deep into the texts—and since she could think of no useful mnemonics, no shortcuts to learning the Classics—she simply had to learn them word by word and hope that would be enough.

      She walked everywhere with a book. She studied as she ate. When she tired, she conjured up images for herself, telling herself the story of the worst possible future.

       You walk up the aisle in a dress that doesn’t fit you. You’re trembling. He’s waiting at the other end. He looks at you like you’re a juicy, fattened pig, a marbled slab of meat for his purchase. He spreads saliva over his dry lips. He doesn’t look away from you throughout the entire banquet. When it’s over, he carries you to his bedroom. He pushes you onto the sheets.

      She shuddered. Squeezed her eyes shut. Reopened them and found her place on the page.

      By Rin’s fifteenth birthday she held a vast quantity of ancient Nikara literature in her head, and could recite the majority of it. But she was still making mistakes: missing words, switching up complex clauses, mixing up the order of the stanzas.

      This was good enough, she knew, to test into a teacher’s college or a medical academy. She suspected she might even test into the scholars’ institute at Yuelu Mountain, where the most brilliant minds in Nikan produced stunning works of literature and pondered the mysteries of the natural world.

      But she could not afford any of those academies. She had to test into Sinegard. She had to test into the highest-scoring percentage of students not just in the village, but in the entire country. Otherwise, her two years of study would be wasted.

      She had to make her memory perfect.

      She stopped sleeping.

      Her eyes became bloodshot, swollen. Her head swam from days of cramming. When she visited Tutor Feyrik at his home one night to pick up a new set of books, her gaze was desperate, unfocused. She stared past him as he spoke. His words drifted over her head like clouds; she barely registered his presence.

      “Rin. Look at me.”

      She inhaled sharply and willed her eyes to focus on his fuzzy form.

      “How are you holding up?” he asked.

      “I can’t do it,” she whispered. “I only have two more months, and I can’t do it. Everything is spilling out of my head as quickly as I put it in, and—” Her chest rose and fell very quickly.

      “Oh, Rin.”

      Words spilled СКАЧАТЬ