the store. She worked silently until dark, took orders, filed inventory, and marked new orders in the ledger.
The thing about inventory was that one had to be very careful with how one wrote the numbers. So simple to make a nine look like an eight. Easier still to make a one look like a seven . . .
Long after the sun disappeared, Rin closed the shop and locked the door behind her.
Then she shoved a packet of stolen opium under her shirt and ran.
“Rin?” A small, wizened man opened the library door and peeked out at her. “Great Tortoise! What are you doing out here? It’s pouring.”
“I came to return a book,” she said, holding out a waterproof satchel. “Also, I’m getting married.”
“Oh. Oh! What? Come in.”
Tutor Feyrik taught a tuition-free evening class to the peasant children of Tikany, who otherwise would have grown up illiterate. Rin trusted him above anyone else, and she understood his weaknesses better than anyone else.
That made him the linchpin in her escape plan.
“The vase is gone,” she observed as she glanced around the cramped library.
Tutor Feyrik lit a small flame in the fireplace and dragged two cushions in front of it. He motioned for her to sit down. “Bad call. Bad night overall, really.”
Tutor Feyrik had an unfortunate adoration for Divisions, an immensely popular game played in Tikany’s gambling dens. It wouldn’t have been so dangerous if he were better at it.
“That makes no sense,” said Tutor Feyrik after Rin recounted to him the matchmaker’s tidings. “Why would the Fangs marry you off? Aren’t you their best source of unpaid labor?”
“Yes, but they think I’ll be more useful in the import inspector’s bed.”
Tutor Feyrik looked revolted. “Your folks are assholes.”
“So you’ll do it,” she said hopefully. “You’ll help.”
He sighed. “My dear girl, if your family had let you study with me when you were younger, we might have considered this . . . I told the Fangs then, I told her you might have potential. But at this stage, you’re speaking of the impossible.”
“But—”
He held up a hand. “More than twenty thousand students take the Keju each year, and hardly three thousand enter the academies. Of those, barely a handful test in from Tikany. You’d be competing against wealthy children—merchants’ children, nobles’ children—who have been studying for this their entire lives.”
“But I’ve taken classes with you, too. How hard can it be?”
He chuckled at that. “You can read. You can use an abacus. That’s not the kind of preparation it takes to pass the Keju. The Keju tests for a deep knowledge of history, advanced mathematics, logic, and the Classics . . .”
“The Four Noble Subjects, I know,” she said impatiently. “But I’m a fast reader. I know more characters than most of the adults in this village. Certainly more than the Fangs. I can keep up with your students if you just let me try. I don’t even have to attend recitation. I just need books.”
“Reading books is one thing,” Tutor Feyrik said. “Preparing for the Keju is a different endeavor entirely. My Keju students spend their whole lives studying for it; nine hours a day, seven days a week. You spend more time than that working in the shop.”
“I can study at the shop,” she protested.
“Don’t you have actual responsibilities?”
“I’m good at, uh, multitasking.”
He eyed her skeptically for a moment, then shook his head. “You’d only have two years. It can’t be done.”
“But I don’t have any other options,” she said shrilly.
In Tikany, an unmarried girl like Rin was worth less than a gay rooster. She could spend her life as a foot servant in some rich household—if she found the right people to bribe. Otherwise her options were some combination of prostitution and begging.
She was being dramatic, but not hyperbolic. She could leave town, probably with enough stolen opium to buy herself a caravan ticket to any other province . . . but where to? She had no friends or family; no one to come to her aid if she was robbed or kidnapped. She had no marketable skills. She had never left Tikany; she didn’t know the first thing about survival in the city.
And if they caught her with that much opium on her person . . . Opium possession was a capital offense in the Empire. She’d be dragged into the town square and publicly beheaded as the latest casualty in the Empress’s futile war on drugs.
She had only this option. She had to sway Tutor Feyrik.
She held up