Please Fall for the Male Lead (Not Me)

The Hundred ran on the second sand ring on Saturdays, and the school pretended it did not exist with a thoroughness that took real effort from everybody.

"It's a ladder," Dae-sik said, walking her down. "Hundred rungs. You challenge up, three rungs maximum, and if you win you take his rung and he takes yours. There's a purse because there's a book, and there's a book because there's a purse. The faculty knows. The faculty comes. Master Heo sits on the north wall every single Saturday with his hat over his eyes, pretending to be asleep." He rolled his shoulders as he went, loosening. "It's not sanctioned. It's four hundred years old. The last headmaster who tried to close it lasted eleven weeks."

"What's the purse?"

"Twelve sen." He said it the way other people say a woman's name.

The path to the second ring went past the shrine, which was a stone shed with an open front and a dish of cold rice in it that somebody replaced every morning, and Yeju had walked past it thirty times without stopping.

Dae-sik stopped.

Inside, on a plinth, sat a fox. It was old grey stone, about the size of a cat, with its tails fanned out behind it in a spread that had been carved with more patience than the rest of it. Some of the tails had gone to nubs. The nose was worn down to a shine, and the shine ran in a smear where four hundred years of hands had come off it.

He rubbed the nose with two fingers. He did it fast, on his way past, without breaking stride, the way a man does a thing he would deny doing.

"How many tails," Yeju said.

"Nine. It's a nine-tail." He was already three steps on. "Exam luck. You rub it before anything you can fail. Man-deok says it's superstition, he did a whole hour on it, he's got a bestiary that says nine-tails are extinct." He grinned back over his shoulder. "The entry says extinct, mercifully. Two words. In a textbook. I've always liked that."

Mercifully.

That's a strange thing for a bestiary to say about an animal.

She looked back at the shrine. The dish of rice was fresh.

The second ring was chalk on sand, twenty paces, with the low wall on three sides and about a hundred and forty people on it. Yeju walked it once out of habit. Sand, raked. A water butt at the south, full, not leaking. A rack. Nothing wet anywhere, and she caught herself noting that, and made herself stop.

Bori was on the wall with a slate and eleven people queuing at her.

"Don't talk to me," she said. "I'm working."

Jin Taewoong came out of the rack end in ducal grey.

Oh.

Oh, no.

"Rank fourteen," Dae-sik said, cheerfully, stripping his coat off. "I'm seventeen. Three rungs. That's the rule, I can't go higher, believe me I've read it."

"Dae-sik."

"He's better than me." He handed her the coat, which weighed nothing, which was a coat that had been a coat for a very long time. "Everyone's better than me. I've got a hundred and eleven fights and I'm seventeen, which means I've lost more of them than anyone up here. I'm still up here." He cracked his neck. "Hold that. Don't drop it in the sand, it's my only one."

Taewoong took his line without looking at anyone. He had not spoken to Yeju since the tenth day, and he did not now, and the not-speaking had a lot of architecture in it.

They began.

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He opened with the high feint. Of course he did. He had opened with it in the spring, it had worked on a rank twenty, and it worked now. Dae-sik ate it on the shoulder and did not stop coming. That was the whole of Um Dae-sik's method, as far as Yeju could tell from the wall: he was not fast, he was not clever, and he did not stop coming. He took the feint. He took the cut that followed it. He took a rap across the knuckles that would have made Jang cry for a week. He closed to a distance where a duelist's blade is a stick. Then he was inside, and he was enormous.

Taewoong disengaged. He did it beautifully. He went back six feet in two steps and reset his guard, which is what you are supposed to do, which is what nineteen years of instructors would applaud, and Dae-sik was already there, because he had not stopped coming.

The exchange lasted about four seconds. Taewoong's blade went into the sand. Dae-sik's shoulder went into his chest, and Jin Taewoong sat down on the chalk.

The wall came apart.

Yeju stood there holding a coat that weighed nothing. She did not cheer. She was watching Dae-sik's left hand, which he had been holding against his ribs since the third exchange, which he did not put down when he raised the other one.

Taewoong got up. He took the sand off his palms without hurrying. Then he crossed to Dae-sik and put out his hand. Dae-sik shook it. The wall got louder.

"Clean," Taewoong said. "You came through the feint. Nobody comes through the feint; they read it or they don't, and you did neither, you simply refused it. I have no answer for that." He said it flat, like a man reading a report. "Twelve sen. My cousin will bring it at the sixth bell, I don't carry money."

"That's fine, Taewoong."

"It isn't fine, it's owed." He was already turning. He came past Yeju on his way to the rack, and he stopped, because he had decided to stop. She watched him decide it.

"You see?" he said.

"What?"

"That." He pointed at the ring with his chin. "He beat me. He did it with his shoulder and his refusal to be sensible. He did it for twelve sen. He was better than me for four seconds, in a place where four seconds is the whole thing. That's a loss. I can put it somewhere. I can train against it." His face had not changed at all. "I have nothing to do with what you did to me. There is nowhere in me to put a barrel."

He went to the rack. He did not look back, because he had said the whole of it.

He's been carrying that for thirty-nine days. He's rehearsed that. He waited for a day when he'd been beaten clean so he could tell me what a clean one feels like. He's right. He's going to be right about it forever.

Dae-sik came off the sand into the noise. About forty people wanted to touch him. He took all of it, grinning, with his left hand against his ribs. He was still holding it there when he got to Yeju, took his coat back, put it on one-armed.

"Ribs," she said.

"Sh."

"Since the third exchange."

"Sh." He got the coat closed. Up close he had gone a bad grey under the sunburn, and there was sweat on him that had nothing to do with the fight. "Don't. Please. I mean it, that's the first time I've asked anyone for anything in two years." He was still smiling for the wall, which took something. "Somyeong's mother's a healer, she'd tell Somyeong, Somyeong tells the captain, the captain pulls me off the ladder for the term. Then it's twelve sen a Saturday that I don't have."

"Why do you need twelve sen a Saturday?"

He counted it out. He did it fast, without thinking, which meant he did it every night.

"Boots, four. That's four sen a term and I've done a year on these ones, look at them, don't look at them. Ink and paper for Man-deok's essays, one. Bath house, one, and you can skip it, but you can only skip it about three weeks before people move away from you in the refectory." He shrugged the coat straight. "The rest goes home. Georim coast. My mother's got the boat and my brother's got the other half of the boat and neither half of the boat is a boat."

He's been fighting a hundred and eleven duels for boot money and half a boat.

"So don't tell," Dae-sik said. "That's all. I've got fourteen Saturdays left before the ladder resets. I'll be fine, it's a rib, ribs are just a thing that hurts."

He picked up a bread roll from somewhere. That was the other thing about him: there was always a roll.

"Anyway, it's moot in six weeks," he said, around it. "I'm off the ladder in the spring regardless."

"Why?"

"Field assessment." He said it with his mouth full, cheerfully, on his way to the wall, entirely without weight. "A slot came up on the roster Thursday. Second-year blade, they need a body to carry and haul, some first-year busted his collarbone in a shed. Registrar posted it Friday morning and I had my name on it by the ninth bell, and there were four of us in the queue, which frankly I found insulting, I was there first."

The sand ring was very loud. Yeju could not hear any of it.

"It pays," Dae-sik said. "That's the thing nobody tells you about the permit-zones. It's coursework for you lot, but if you're attached as labour it's a field stipend, and the school has to pay it, it's in the charter, it's four hundred years old." He was grinning. He was grinning at her with a broken rib and a bread roll, in the sunshine, on the best day of his year. "Eleven sen a day. Six days."

Sixty-six.

"Sixty-six sen," said Um Dae-sik. "That's my whole year in six days. Do you know what that is? That's the boat."

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