East
Kirigi's compound sat above Gyeongju at an altitude where the tree line gave up and the wind didn't. Stone floors, paper walls, a training hall with one side open to the valley. Winter came in through the open side and stayed. The mats were cold by five in the morning and colder by six and by seven your feet stopped registering temperature at all, which was either adaptation or nerve damage and nobody asked which.
Nine students. He was the youngest by four years. The woman from Osaka was the oldest. She'd been here two years and moved like she'd earned every step on the floor. A man from Busan had arms like dock rope and a habit of cracking his knuckles before every bout that sounded like someone stepping on gravel. The rest were quiet, serious, and none of them talked to each other more than necessary because Kirigi didn't talk to anyone and the students had learned to match.
Julia had given him a scarf at the airport. Wool, dark gray, folded inside a brown paper bag with a note pinned to the inside.
Don't freeze. I'd have to explain it to Alfred.
He wore it every morning for the walk from the sleeping quarters to the training hall. The path was gravel and frost and it went uphill and the scarf smelled like the Paris flat for about a week and then it smelled like the mountain.
Kirigi had white hair and scarred hands and he didn't speak for the first week.
He wasn't being dramatic. He was watching. He stood at the edge of the mat with his arms behind his back and he watched the new student fall and get up and fall and get up and fall. Reading something in how the body hit the ground and how it came back.
He taught through demonstration. One showing. The full form, performed once, at speed, with a precision that made the movement look simple when it was anything but. Then he walked away. The student was expected to reproduce it. No repetition, no breakdown, no explanation of which muscle went where. One showing.
The first form was a hip throw that ended in a wrist lock. Kirigi did it once. The boy tried it and his hip was wrong and his grip was wrong and he hit the mat with his shoulder and the mat was stone under a thin layer of padding and the stone didn't care about his shoulder. He tried again. His hip was better. His grip was still wrong. Third time, clean. His shoulder ached for two days.
Most students needed five repetitions before the form held cleanly. The woman from Osaka did it in four, and that was after two years. He did it in three.
He didn't think about it. Three felt normal. He'd watch the form, and his body would reproduce it, and the first attempt would be close and the second would be closer and the third would be clean. Kirigi didn't comment. He just assigned harder forms.
The difficulty increased without announcement. Longer sequences. More complex transitions. Combinations that required the body to be in two positions within a half-second of each other. He fell more during the second month than the first because the forms were harder, but the gap between falling and landing clean kept shrinking, and Kirigi kept feeding him more.
A bird nested in the rafters of the training hall and nobody removed it because Kirigi didn't acknowledge it. It was a swallow, small and fast, and it came and went through the open wall and sat on the crossbeam during morning practice and watched the students fall with the same impassive attention Kirigi did. One of the students, the man from Busan, left crumbs on the crossbeam in the evening. The bird ate them. Kirigi saw this and said nothing about it either.
The bruise happened in the second month.
Sparring. The man from Busan, who outweighed him by sixty pounds and had dock-rope arms and a front kick that came from somewhere near the floor. It caught him in the left ribs. Clean hit, full contact, the kind of kick that rearranged your breathing for about three seconds. He went down. Got up. Finished the round.
That night the bruise ran from his hip to his armpit. Deep purple, the color of a bruise that was going to take a week to fade. He wrapped it flat and slept on his back because his left side was a single stripe of wrong.
Next morning the bruise was yellow.
Not fading-to-yellow. Full yellow. Overnight. The purple had cycled through blue and green and landed on the dull mustard of a bruise that was a week old, all of it compressed into about eight hours. He looked at it in the bathroom mirror and thought huh and pressed it with his thumb and it barely hurt and he wrapped it and went to practice.
The bathroom was shared. Cold tile, one mirror, no door. The man from Busan was brushing his teeth at the next sink and glanced at the boy's side and didn't comment. The man from Busan had taken a fall the same day. Same sparring session, different partner. He was still deep purple, favoring his left arm, moving gingerly on the mat. His bruise looked normal. Day-after colors. A day old. Still angry.
Kirigi's eyes tracked from the man's arm to the boy's flat wrap. Back to the arm. Back to the wrap. He didn't say anything. He assigned bigger sparring partners that week. Shorter recovery windows. Harder throws.
He'd never tracked his own recovery. He trained, he healed, he trained again. The gap between how fast he healed and how fast everyone else healed was invisible to him because he didn't have a baseline to compare against. Other people's bruises were other people's bruises. His were his. He'd never sat in a room with nine people doing the same physical work and compared recovery times. Kirigi had.
Letters came on Thursdays. The mail route to the compound was a man in a truck who drove up from Gyeongju and left a canvas bag at the gate and drove back down. The bag usually had supplies. Sometimes it had mail.
Zatanna's letters were fat envelopes with tea stains on the corners. The handwriting was the same loose rush from the rabbit note, letters leaning forward, always chasing the thought. She wrote the way she talked, which was all of it, every thought, the second it arrived.
I singed my eyebrows off during transmutation practice. Both of them. Dad said it was a learning experience. I said it was a fire hazard. He said those were the same thing. I'm wearing a hat until they grow back which should be like two weeks but honestly I think they're growing back faster than that because magic or genetics or because my face knows it looks stupid without eyebrows.
Also I learned to make a light construct that holds shape for six minutes now which is up from three and Dad said six is good but I could tell he was thinking about how his held for twenty at my age so that was fun. The construct was a horse this time. Not a bunny. I'm moving up the food chain. Next week I'm going to try a wolf.
The handwriting got smaller toward the bottom. It did that when she was embarrassed about how much she'd written.
She signed them Zee with a small rabbit drawn in the margin. This time the rabbit had a tiny backpack.
Julia's letters were single pages. Cream paper, expensive, precise penmanship that never varied by a millimeter.
Ducard was well. Madame Villiers had adopted a second dog. Gérard had opinions about the new dog. The flat's hot water had been fixed and then broken again. The surveillance van on Rue des Rosiers had been replaced by a different surveillance van, this one with German plates. She'd reported it.
Then white space. A full inch of nothing between the operational update and the last line.
Paris misses an argument partner.
Sofia's letters came on heavy card stock. The handwriting was the same careful script from every birthday card since he was eight. She didn't write often. When she did, every sentence had a surface and something underneath.
Family business expanding. Dad's focus east of the river now. Your father's clinic opened last month. Dad watched the opening twice. Once from across the street. Once from inside. Martha looked well. She wore the pearls.
The clinic. Thomas's clinic, the East End development, the thing Sofia had warned him about in the café. Carmine Falcone watching the opening twice meant Carmine was interested. Watching from inside meant he'd walked through the front door, which meant he wanted Thomas to know he'd been there. Martha wore the pearls. Sofia included that because Sofia noticed things about mothers.
He sat on the bed with the three letters spread on the mattress. Zee's handwriting loose and fast, Julia's ruled-straight, Sofia's careful and even. He picked up Julia's page and turned it over. Nothing on the back. Just the white space before the last line, deliberate and deniable.
He folded them and put them in the bag he'd brought from Paris and the bag sat under his bed next to the scarf that smelled like the mountain now and not like the flat.
The last day of the third month.
Morning practice. The form was long and fast and he did it in two repetitions. A new floor. The woman from Osaka watched from the edge of the mat with her arms crossed and her jaw tight. Two years and she did it in four.
Kirigi stood at the center of the mat. The boy finished the form and came to rest and Kirigi looked at him for about five seconds. The longest he'd ever held the boy's gaze.
Then he bowed.
Small. Precise. A forward tilt of the head and shoulders that lasted about one second. The first gesture of acknowledgment the boy had seen Kirigi make toward anyone.
The woman from Osaka was still standing at the edge of the mat. Two years. She'd never received one.
He bowed back. Kirigi straightened, turned, and walked to the next student without a word.
He went to lunch. Rice and fish and pickled vegetables and tea that was too hot. The man from Busan sat across from him and cracked his knuckles and ate his rice in the same grid-clearing pattern as always and neither of them said anything because talking wasn't what this place was for.
Under his bed, the letters waited. Three different handwritings. The scarf was folded on top.
He had two more months here. Then the mountain.