The little girl looked Lindon straight in the eyes. “I, Wei Mon Eri, challenge Wei Shi Lindon to a duel of honor before the entire clan.”
The words echoed in the courtyard, accompanied by shocked silence.
They planned this, Lindon realized, hearing the girl’s recited challenge. They needed to distract the other families from their dishonor.
Perhaps the First Elder would have prevented Wei Mon Keth from speaking further, had he been given a chance. He’d surely seen more complex gambits from subtle opponents. But Lindon’s father had opened his mouth, and thereby opened a crack in his son’s armor. Now, Lindon was feeling the sting of the blade.
When a child first passed their test of spirit and received a Foundation-level badge, they were taught a rudimentary Foundation technique. This technique was the same for everyone in the clan, and was designed to acclimate children to feeling and cycling their own madra. When the child was ready, they would learn a more advanced cycling technique, one suited for their future Path. Unless the child was Unsouled.
Lindon would never learn a Path, so there was no point in preparing his soul for one. Even eight years after reaching Foundation, Lindon practiced the same basic cycling technique. Asking him to fight was like asking a soldier to step onto a battlefield armed only with a training sword.
Even the ten-year-old daughter of the Mon family would be better off than he was. She was a Striker on the Path of the White Fox, and surely her family would have taught her a better Foundation technique. Lindon had the advantage of size and weight, but she had the advantage of superior madra control.
He had no certainty in being able to defeat a girl five years his junior. He should have been used to shame by now, but that realization still hurt.
“Well?” Mon Eri demanded, when Lindon hadn’t responded to her challenge. The entire courtyard, packed with the heart of the Wei clan, stood waiting for his response. “Do you accept or not?”
“He has no reason to fight,” Jaran said, with a glance back at his son. “Only the Mon family has something to prove. Besides, you can see his injury for yourself.”
Wei Mon Keth crossed his arms and gave a harsh laugh. “If he is not a coward, he will answer.”
Hundreds of the Wei clan were gathered, including the First Elder. The weight of the combined attention pressed into him on every side, like a tightening fist.
The pressure seemed to push his shame deeper, rubbing it in like salt into a wound. He was useless, he was crippled, and now everyone was staring at him. The pain that leaked through his sling-bound arm was nothing compared to this. Lindon looked up to Whisper’s tower, imagining he could feel eyes on him even from the room at the top.
“When a traveler cannot find a path, sometimes he must make his own.”
Eri stepped forward when Lindon didn’t answer immediately, rubbing her fist like she couldn’t wait to drive it into Lindon’s face. Her father held her back, looking somewhat surprised.
When Lindon’s voice finally came out, even he was somewhat surprised. “In the Wei clan, there is only one family that produces cowards,” he said to Keth, the head of the Mon family.
Laughter and whispers traveled quietly around the gathered families, and Keth’s face turned red with anger. He forced out a few words: “Then you accept?”
It was up to the challenged party to set the terms, so he did. “Seven dawns from now,” Lindon said. “To surrender.”
For Lindon, there was no winning this fight. Either he defeated Eri, in which case he had beaten a ten-year-old girl, or he wouldn’t. No matter the outcome, he would lose face for his family.
He could only salvage a little by putting up a brave front, bowing to Wei Mon Eri with his fists pressed together. After a moment in which she looked like she would attack him, she returned the salute.
“If this distraction is over, I will get on with the business at hand,” the First Elder said. He flourished his smooth orus branch, looking down on Teris.
As the first strike cracked across Teris’ back, leading to a cry of pain, his family paid no heed. They were still watching Lindon.
When he wasn’t carrying out a special task for his Soulsmith mother, Lindon spent the second half of every day in the clan archive. The building was scarcely more noticeable than any ordinary house, with faded white walls and a wide purple-tiled roof. If Lindon had never seen it before, he might have mistaken it for the home of one of the Wei clan’s smaller families.
As the sun passed noon, he arrived in the archive. He first retrieved a broom to sweep the front step, which took twice as long as normal since he was forced to work one-handed, then re-organized the Path manuals that a few young Coppers had disturbed the previous evening. His fingers itched when he worked on this shelf, and he had to fight the temptation to sneak a glimpse, though the minimum penalty for an Unsouled studying sacred arts was a private beating. He’d survived such punishments before, and he would again. If he had to discover his own Path, he would eventually need an example.
For now, he’d settle for a shortcut.
The Eighth Elder was supposed to monitor the archive, but Lindon could never tell when the man was doing his job properly or not. As a Forger on the Path of the White Fox, the man was a master of the Fox Mirror technique; he could craft illusions as precise as a mirror’s reflection. More than once, Lindon had dared to sneak a glimpse into a simple Path manual, and the elder had appeared out of nowhere to punish him. Other times, Lindon had left the archives to spot the elder passed out on the roof.
For his purposes, so long as he didn’t open a Path, he had the archive to himself. Once he’d finished his chores, which took him only an hour or two, he began to gather the scrolls, folders, tablets, and books he needed for research.
Following a Path of the sacred arts was often likened to a journey, and he would never embark on a journey without a plan.
Shortcuts of advancement were common legends in Sacred Valley, and while many were proven to be effective—like the fruit of an ancestral orus tree—most were too rare, expensive, or dangerous for ordinary sacred artists. Lindon needed to hunt for a loophole, which meant poring over every option one by one.
Fortunately, the archive was not the clan’s most popular building. He had plenty of time to himself.
One scroll contained a personal letter from an explorer who had visited the four peaks of Sacred Valley in search of exotic madra aspects. She wrote of Greatfather’s tears, a spring that bubbled at the top of the mountain known as the Greatfather.
“One handful of water restored my aching body and flagging spirit. Two sent me into a cycling trance from which I would not emerge for three nights and days, having imparted to my spirit a density and potency that I had never before known. As I had not bathed in all that time, I dipped myself briefly into the spring, only to find the water anything but gentle. It scoured my arm like a frozen blade, and when I removed my hand, I found my skin more youthful and supple than ever before, in great contrast to the rest of my body. I advise any artist of the Jade to visit Greatfather’s peak as soon as they are able, provided they can withstand the storms and the pain of the pool itself.”
Lindon held down the scroll with his broken arm and copied the passage with his own brush, though the spring was not a possibility for him. Not yet. The Holy Wind School, which claimed the Greatfather as their territory, would never allow anyone less prestigious than a clan elder to visit their spring. And then only if they brought generous gifts.