The Soldier's Dao

They did not, in the end, all three come down into the gully at once. That alone told him something — these weren't soldiers, they were students, and students who've never been in a real fight default to caution the second the fight stops looking scripted.

The one who came first was heavier, slower, sword held in both hands in a stance that was at least trying to be defensible. Nathan watched him drop into the gully, watched him plant his feet on the uneven snow without testing it first, and understood with total clarity that this fight was already won or lost in the half-second before either of them moved.

He let the boy come to him. Ground he didn't have to cross was ground that couldn't betray his footing.

The exchange itself was almost nothing — three motions. A high cut Nathan didn't try to parry with a stolen sword he didn't know how to parry with, because parrying was a skill and he had none; instead he stepped inside it, took the flat of the blade across his already-ruined ribs rather than the edge across his throat, and put the pommel of the sword into the boy's throat hard enough to fold him over gasping in the snow.

Trade a wound you can survive for a fight you can't lose. Rule one, learned in a country whose name he'd never say again.

By the time the third disciple reached the lip of the gully, sword drawn, face gone from arrogant to uncertain, Nathan was on one knee in the snow, blood freezing in his hair, holding a stolen sword he didn't know how to use, next to two boys who weren't getting back up on their own — and he understood, watching the third one's eyes, that uncertainty had already done half his work for him.

"He's not — that's not real technique, that's not anything, he's just—" The boy's voice cracked on the last word.

"Barbaric?" Nathan finished for him, and even through split lips it came out steady. "Sure. Come find out what barbaric does at close range."

The boy did not come down into the gully.

Above, at the ledge, someone else had arrived — Nathan felt it before he understood it, a change in the quality of the silence, forty terrified candidates going from watching to not breathing. He looked up into gold-flecked robes and an unreadable, ageless face, and every instinct he had, honed across a decade of learning to read exactly how much danger a room contained, told him the same thing at once: that is not a disciple. That is not remotely a disciple.

"Elder Bai." The uninjured swordsman's voice went thin with relief and terror in equal measure.

The woman — Elder Bai Ruoxue, though Nathan wouldn't have the name until later — looked down into the gully for a long moment. At the boy Nathan had struck with a rock, still down. At the one holding his throat, wheezing. At Han Muyang, kneeling in blood-soaked snow, holding a sword like a man holding a crowbar, one eye swollen shut, staring back up at her without looking away.

"This one," she said finally, to no one in particular, "was ranked lowest of all forty-one candidates on entry. No prior technique. No family cultivation lineage worth mentioning. Weakest body assessment of the group."

She let the silence stretch exactly long enough for the surviving swordsman to start looking relieved.

"And he is the only candidate on this mountain," she said, "who is still standing after being struck down."

She descended into the gully without any visible effort at all — one moment above, the next simply there, the way something happens in a dream instead of the world — and crouched in front of Nathan, close enough that he could see she was younger than her voice had suggested, and infinitely more tired around the eyes than anyone that strong should look.

"What is your name," she said. Not unkindly. Not kindly either. Testing.

Somewhere underneath the pain and the cold and the impossible wrongness of everything, Nathan Cole made a decision that would shape every year that followed: he was not going to explain himself to anyone, not today, maybe not ever. Han Muyang had a name. Han Muyang had a life half-lived and a family somewhere down this mountain who would want him to come home. That was enough to build on.

"Han Muyang," he said.

Elder Bai studied him a moment longer, the way you'd study a debt you weren't sure yet was worth collecting.

"Congratulations, Han Muyang," she said. "You are the sect's newest outer disciple. I'd advise you to survive your first year. Most of the ones who enter the way you just did don't."

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