Chapter 32: Three Taps

"He taps twice," said Seol.

She was standing in the middle of Cha’s training floor in a borrowed practice uniform two sizes too big, holding a wooden sword like she’d held one a thousand times before. Which, it turned out, she had. In secret. In the back garden of the Gu estate, when her husband was at the magistrate’s playing go.

"Every time," she said. "Before he attacks. He taps the flat of his blade against his left palm. Twice. Tap, tap. He doesn’t even know he does it. He’s done it for forty years."

She demonstrated. Tap, tap. Then she stepped forward and swung — a straight, heavy cut from high right to low left.

"Then that. Always that. Every duel I ever watched. He opens with the Falling Pine."

Instructor Cha was leaning against the wall with her arms folded, watching like a hawk.

"The Falling Pine," she said slowly. "Then?"

"Then he steps back. Waits for you to answer. He likes to see what you’ll do. He thinks it’s elegant." Seol’s lip curled. "He thinks everything he does is elegant."

"And his weakness?"

Seol smiled.

It was the scariest smile I’d ever seen on a woman. And I’d seen Hwang’s.

"His left knee," she said. "He fell off a horse fourteen years ago. It healed badly. He hides it. He never steps forward on it first, ever. Watch his feet, Mu-jin. Right foot always leads. If you can make him put his weight on that left knee, he’s a quarter-breath slower turning to that side."

Cha’s eyes narrowed. "A quarter breath."

"That’s not much," I said.

"Against a First-rate," said Cha, "a quarter breath is the difference between losing an arm and losing a head."

Great. So I’d only lose an arm.

"And one more thing." Seol tossed the wooden sword to me. I caught it. Barely. "He can’t stand being laughed at."

I blinked. "What?"

"Twenty-one years, I never once saw that man lose his temper in a fight. Not when he was cut. Not when he was losing." Seol’s eyes glittered. "But at his sixtieth birthday banquet, the magistrate’s wife laughed at his poem. Just a little giggle. Behind her fan." She shook her head. "He didn’t speak to anyone for three days. He lost every game of go for a month."

I thought about the laundry women. WE CAN SEE YOU, ELDER GU. The way he flinched on the noodle shop roof when they went oooooh.

A man who’d fight through a sword cut but couldn’t stand a giggle.

Cha pushed off the wall.

"Tap twice," she said. "Falling Pine. Step back. Right foot leads. Bad left knee. Can’t stand laughter." She looked at me. "That’s not a lot."

"It’s more than I had this morning."

"It’s more than anyone has ever had on Gu Seung-hwan." She looked at Seol. Up and down. Slowly. With a new kind of interest. "Twenty-one years of watching. And you remember all of it."

"I had nothing else to do," said Seol simply.

The room went quiet.

Cha looked at her for a long moment. Something passed between them. Two women who’d been married off young to old men who never saw them.

"No," said Cha quietly. "I suppose you didn’t."

We drilled until my arms were jelly.

Seol played Elder Gu. Tap, tap, Falling Pine, step back. Over and over. Every time, I tried to slip to her left. Every time, I was too slow. Every time, Cha said, "Dead," in a completely flat voice.

"Dead."

"Dead."

"Dead."

The thirty-first time, I got to the left side. Felt Seol’s wooden sword whistle past my ear instead of through my skull.

"...Missing an arm," said Cha. "Better."

By the time the moon came up, Seol’s hands were bleeding through the old scrapes on her palms — the ones from climbing out of her locked window. She hadn’t said a word about it.

Cha noticed. She grabbed Seol’s wrist. Turned her hand over. Looked at the blood. At the marks on her wrists.

Then she let go and walked behind the curtain without a word.

She came back with the jasmine oil.

"Table," she said to Seol.

Seol raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"

"You’ve been swinging a sword for three hours with torn palms and a body that rode three hours in the dark two nights ago. You’re shaking. Your shoulders are up around your ears." Cha set the oil on the shelf. "Table. Now."

Seol looked at me. I shrugged.

"She does this," I said. "Just go with it."

Seol looked at Cha for a long second. Then she smiled — that wild, wicked smile — and started untying her borrowed uniform right there in the middle of the training floor.

"I’ve never had anyone give me a massage," she said.

"Never?" said Cha.

"Twenty-one years. Never." The uniform dropped. Seol walked to the table bare and climbed onto it and lay down on her stomach, her wild black hair spilling over the edge. "My husband thought it was a waste of money."

Cha’s jaw went tight.

She poured oil into her palms. Warmed it. Then she put her hands on Seol’s shoulders — and pressed.

Seol let out a sound like a door opening after twenty-one years.

I stood there holding my wooden sword like an idiot.

"Mu-jin," said Cha, without looking up.

"Yeah?"

"Focus practice." She tilted her head at Seol’s legs. "Feet. Calves. Same rules as last night. Steady qi through your hands. Every stutter, fifty forms."

"I already owe you four hundred."

"Then you’d better not stutter."

So I put down the sword. Oiled my hands. And took Seol’s foot in both of them.

She yelped. Then laughed. "That tickles!"

"Focus," said Cha.

"I’m focused!"

"Not you. Him."

I pushed my thread of qi into her foot. Steady. Into the arch. The heel. Around the ankle bone, where the skin was rubbed raw from her riding boot. Up her calf. Long slow strokes.

At the other end of the table, Cha was working Seol’s back the way she’d taught me — thumbs on either side of the spine, slow, deep, a thin icy thread of qi going in with every press.

Two threads. One from each end. Meeting somewhere in the middle of a woman who’d never been touched gently in her life.

Seol stopped laughing.

She went quiet. Then she made a little sound. Then a bigger one. Her fingers twisted in the sheet. Her back arched up into Cha’s hands. Her leg pushed back into mine.

"Oh," she breathed. "Oh — what — what are you two doing—"

"Correcting you," said Cha.

[Target: Seol Hwa-ryeon.]

[Desire — MAXIMUM.]

Yeah. She’d already been there. The window just flashed again, like it was laughing at all of us.

My thread held.

I moved higher. Behind her knees. The backs of her thighs. My hands met Cha’s somewhere around Seol’s lower back. Our fingers bumped. Slid past each other.

Cha looked up at me across the table.

I looked at her.

Neither of us stopped.

"Go lower," Cha said quietly. "I’ll take her shoulders."

"Is that part of the lesson?"

"Everything is part of the lesson."

I went lower.

Seol gasped. Pushed back into my hands. Cha leaned down and said something in her ear that I couldn’t hear, and Seol’s whole body shivered from head to foot, and she laughed and moaned at the same time, and grabbed Cha’s wrist with one hand and reached back blindly for mine with the other.

My thread stuttered.

"Fifty," said Cha, a little breathless.

"You did that on purpose."

"Gu Seung-hwan will do things on purpose too."

Seol rolled over.

Onto her back. Right there on the table between us. Hair everywhere. Oil shining on her skin. Chest heaving. Looking up at Cha first, then at me, with those wild, wide-awake eyes.

"Twenty-one years," she whispered, "and nobody ever touched me like this."

She grabbed Cha’s practice jacket and pulled. And she grabbed my collar with the other hand and pulled.

"So don’t stop," said Madam Seol Hwa-ryeon. "Either of you."

Cha stared down at her. Then at me.

For a second the ice instructor was gone. She looked nineteen. Married off. Nobody asking.

Then she smiled. Slow. A little shaky.

"...Same rules," she said, and untied her sash.

Let’s just say the stool in Cha’s training room is still fine.

The massage table is not.

And I owe her eight hundred sword forms.

[Focus state: unstable.]

[Meridian repair: +1 day.]

[Harmony formation: locked. 24 days remaining.]

One day. That’s all I got for that.

Because focus is really hard when two women are laughing at you on a broken massage table.

The three of us were lying in a heap on the training floor on top of the fallen sheets, sweaty and oily and breathing hard, Seol in the middle with her head on Cha’s shoulder and her foot on my stomach, when the door banged.

Not a knock. A bang. Then another.

"BRO! BRO, ARE YOU IN THERE?"

Tae-man.

Cha sat up so fast she cracked her head on the broken table leg.

"Gong Tae-man," she said coldly through the door. "If you open that door, you will fail every class I teach until you die."

"I’M NOT OPENING IT! I’M NOT OPENING IT!" A pause. Heavy breathing. He’d been running. "Bro. It’s Seo-ah."

Everything inside me went cold.

"What about her?"

"A carriage just came through the academy gate. Black lacquer. Ministry seal on the door. Six guards." Another gasp of breath. "It’s her father, bro. He came in person. He’s in the headmistress’s office right now."

I was on my feet before I even knew I’d stood up.

"She had seven more days—"

"Not anymore." Tae-man’s voice cracked through the door. "I heard the guards talking. He’s taking her back to the capital."

A pause.

"Tomorrow morning, bro. At dawn."