Chapter 9
What Song Baiyu Does Not Say
Three days passed.
The Exhibition was quietly concluded in private — Headmaster Fang informed the remaining bracket holders that due to the arena damage, final rankings would be determined by the performance record to date. Song Baiyu was placed first. Wei Liang second. Neither of them was consulted on whether they found this acceptable.
The court observer, Inspector Luo Mingzhi, did not leave.
He moved into a guest room in the senior instructor wing and began spending his mornings in the Academy's restricted archive and his afternoons in a small office he had been allocated by the Headmaster, in which he conducted a series of meetings with people who arrived wearing plain robes and left looking thoughtful.
Shen Wuque remained on the Academy grounds in a state of polite territorial ambiguity, neither expelled nor officially welcomed, occupying a room in the guest quarters and appearing at meal times with the confidence of someone whose paperwork was in order.
Wei Liang sparred with Achilles every morning.
This had become the shape of his days: dawn training in the outer court, theory lectures through the morning, afternoon self-practice, evenings in the soul-space. The other students gave him wider berth now — not hostility exactly, more the careful distance reserved for things whose classification you are not sure of. Even Fen Zhu had settled into a watchful silence that was more unsettling than his contempt had been.
Song Baiyu found him on the fourth morning at the edge of the inner court, sitting against the wall watching Achilles run through sword drills alone.
She sat down beside him without asking.
✦ ✦ ✦
"The match," she said, after a while.
"Was interrupted."
"Before the interruption."
"Before the interruption, your Crane had broken my binding twice with the resonance. Once more and it might have severed."
"And your summon had reflected my Crane's own resonance back at it with a precision I do not understand and knocked out our synchronization."
"Yes."
"So." She drew her knees up slightly. "We had each found the other's weakness."
"It would have kept going for a while."
"Until one of us made an error." She was quiet. "I do not make many errors."
"Neither does he."
Song Baiyu looked at Achilles, who had transitioned from sword drills to something that involved the shield and a series of precise angled deflections against an imaginary opponent, each movement flowing into the next with the economy of someone who has done this for so long it has become closer to instinct than thought.
"He is not like anything in the classification texts," she said.
"No."
"He thinks."
"He does."
"And you talk to him. Not the way a summoner directs a beast. The way—" she paused, searching for the word — "the way people talk to someone they trust."
"He told me things about his life last night that I do not think he has said to anyone in a very long time. Maybe ever."
Song Baiyu was quiet for a moment.
"My Crane does not speak," she said. It was not a complaint, exactly. More like something stated for accuracy, with a faint quality underneath it that Wei Liang could not name immediately.
He thought about what Achilles had told him. About the things held at a distance until they become regrets.
"But you know what it feels," he said. "You deep-synchronize. You share perception. That is not nothing."
She turned her head and looked at him, and for a moment the carefully maintained distance in her expression was absent, replaced by something more unguarded.
"No," she agreed. "It is not nothing."
✦ ✦ ✦
The conversation shifted, as conversations do, to other things.
To the conspiracy that Shen Wuque had dropped into the arena like a stone into a well. To her thoughts on it, which were precise and unsentimental: two council members with means and motive, a sealed investigation, twelve years of accumulated cover. To what Wei Liang intended to do about it.
"I do not know yet," he said honestly.
"You are angry."
"I am angry."
"But controlled."
"Someone told me the difference between anger as fuel and anger as direction." He glanced at Achilles. "I am working on it."
Song Baiyu followed his gaze.
"The people targeting you," she said, "will not stop because you have been warned. They will recalibrate. Whatever Shen Wuque reports back — whether it favors you or not — there will be a next move."
"I know."
"You will need allies. Not just a strong summon."
Wei Liang looked at her.
She did not look away. She had the quality, he had noticed, of saying important things in tones so level that it took a moment to register their full weight. She had just offered something that in the social architecture of Tianlong Academy was not trivial — the implied support of the Song lineage, the most decorated summoner family of the current generation, extended to an unclassified orphan who had been at the Academy for less than two months.
"Why?" he asked.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Because the match was interrupted," she said. "And I want to know how it would have ended."
It was not the whole answer. Wei Liang understood that. But it was the answer she was willing to give, and he had learned, from Achilles, something about the wisdom of not pressing for more than what was offered.
"So do I," he said.
Achilles finished his drills and turned, registering them both with a look that was entirely too perceptive for Wei Liang's comfort.
"Your form is improving," Achilles told Wei Liang, which was high praise from him.
"I have a good teacher."
Achilles looked at Song Baiyu with the assessing directness he applied to everything. "You fought well," he told her, without apparent motive beyond accuracy.
Song Baiyu blinked. She had, Wei Liang suspected, not been complimented directly on her combat performance in a very long time — people were more likely to discuss her as a phenomenon than address her as a person.
"Thank you," she said, with something in it that was almost surprise.