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“Again, Rose?!”
Rose was already on her knees, forehead touching the ground. “I’m sorry, master.
The man gave a frustrated sigh. “Do you know why you are apologizing to me?”
“My stance was wrong, leading me to stagger when you pushed me,” Rose said. She said nothing of how his push would no doubt leave a bruise in the coming days. Or how her stance was wrong because the punishments he had given her yesterday made it painful to stand in the proper position for too long. “And when I staggered I simply fell, rather than regaining my footing.”
“Precisely.” She could feel his cold gaze upon her and resisted the urge to shiver. It would only make him angrier. “I don’t know how many times I have to push you until you learn . If you cannot withstand a simple prodding after all this time, I have no hopes for you anymore!”
“I’m sorry, master,” she repeated herself. The cold ground scratched her forehead. “I will do better.”
“As you should. Are you not grateful to me for training you all these years?”
“I am grateful, master.”
“For taking you in as my student when I could have left you on the street to starve?”
“I am grateful, master.”
“I could have left you where I found you, but instead I brought you here, gave you a home, an education, and all you ever do is throw it back in my face with your failures.” He sighed again. “I wonder if you are even worthy of the snake spirit, or if you should find yourself another sacred creature. The gorilla, perhaps, Master Rilla always takes pity on those with less precision than I.”
“I’m sorry, master,” Rose said a third time, willing her voice not to shake. “I am grateful, master. I will do better - I will be better. Please, forgive me.”
It was silent for a long time. Rose held her breath - he always forgave her. Would he forgive her this time, too? Or would he finally throw her out like he sometimes threatened?
Finally he gave a third sigh, heavier and more frustrated than the previous two. He was always sighing when he had to deal with her. She was exhausting.
“Forgiveness is earned, Rose,” he said. “You know this. Stand up.”
She should have known it wouldn’t be so easy as simply apologizing. She did as he said, ignoring the pain in her forehead or her surely bruised calf, or the pain of kneeling when her body had already ached all through the morning. She brushed off her knees and followed him as he led her across the training grounds. The other students came into view, all of them running drills with their own masters and classes. She was reminded that her master did not choose students often, preferring to devote his life to study. She was the rare exception to this rule. She had to appreciate it. He focused solely on her, so her failures could not be excused as him not having time for an individual student. She had to be better.
Her master led her over to the edge of the training grounds, where the grove of ironwood trees grew. Rose swallowed.
“You will punch these trees,” he said, “until I tell you to stop. Or when you are no longer bothered by aches and pains. Whichever comes first.”
Rose could feel the eyes of the other students on her. She could hear some snickers from the older students and felt her face grow hot, and was grateful they couldn’t see it. Despite her master’s prestigious status in the Pai Zhuq, no one was jealous of her being his student. Instead, they all enjoyed her failure and humiliation. Some claimed that had her master chosen them instead, they would never fail. When she was trying to sleep at night and feeling vindictive, she wished she could trade places with any of them, even for a day, and let them handle her master instead.
“Yes, master,” she said quietly. He went to stand by the side. She got into position, making sure her stance was perfect, and punched.
The second her knuckle made contact with the hard, sturdy bark of the tree, pain shot through her entire body like lightning. It took everything in her not to cry out. She had done this before. This was standard training. The masters did this, and they never told her master to stop, so it was fine. She punched again, the other fist - lightning once more.
Rose punched again - then again - then again. She kept punching, pain ripping through her with every strike. She couldn’t stop. Not until she felt nothing, or he told her to stop. She could keep going until then.
She kept going, punching, punching, punching. She lost herself to the motion, blocking out the courtyard - the eyes she could feel on her, the giggling and snickers and comments, the judging gaze of her master. She bit down on her lip until she tasted blood so she wouldn’t cry out each time her fists landed. Wait for him to tell her to stop, or feel nothing. She could do one of those things, she was sure.
She kept punching. Sweat poured down her face, dripping uncomfortably from her chin. She ignored it. She wasn’t allowed to stop. Her knuckles were bleeding, she could see flashes of scarlet each time she pulled back, but she ignored that, too. She could do it. She could feel nothing, not be bothered by pain.
Yet she still felt every strike. Felt the shock travel through her knuckles to her wrist to her shoulder. She could hear the voices of her peers behind her as they watched in-between listening to their own teachers. Mocking her. Mocking her failure. Mocking her for being less than them, as if she had it easy and was messing up, as if they could do better than her, as if she wasn’t giving everything she had every day for someone who never-
Rose slammed her fist into the tree and splinters of bark went flying.
“Rose!” her master’s sharp voice broke through her haze of concentration. “Stop!”
Rose stopped, fist freezing just seconds from hitting the tree a second time.
Despite being told to stop, she remained in that position, ready to strike again. Sweat had soaked through her uniform. Her lungs hurt. She hadn’t been breathing through her movements the way she should have.
She took a deep breath. It was shaky going in and even shakier going out.
Her master stood before her, looking down at her with narrowed eyes.
“I no longer feel the pain, master,” she said dully. She hadn’t felt that last punch at all. She didn’t even feel the blood dripping down her knuckles anymore.
Her lungs burned. She tried breathing again. It didn’t help.
He stared at her a moment longer before nodding and waving his hand. “Go and clean up then. Meet me in the pavilion for your meditation lessons. It’s clear you need focus.”
She bowed in respect before she did as he had ordered. Once she was alone, out of sight, she stopped and leaned against the stone wall of the school, taking a deep breath. She had to calm herself. She had to breathe. But how could she, when she had inflicted such violence? That was not what the Pai Zhuq was about. She had learned from them all her life, she understood that in their teachings, violence for the sake of violence was prohibited, frowned upon. Violence was to be used only when necessary.
Yet when Rose had made that last punch, she had made it imagining her master’s face as the target.
She looked down at her knuckles. They were scuffed, bruised and bleeding. A fierce ache rippled through her entire body - she was still sore from him pushing her and from her punishments before.
Rose had lied to her master. It was not that she no longer felt the pain. It was that she had felt her anger more keenly than her pain.
Dai Shi wanted her to prove her loyalty to him by taking whatever he could throw at her.
If he pinned her to the floor on the training mat, she was not to fight back, but let him win. If he snarled at her for no reason, she was to bow her head and apologize. If he grabbed her by the throat and threw her across the room, she was to simply get back up and dust herself off.
She did it all without protest. Whatever brutality he forced on her, she could take, and she did. She had faced all of this before without a word, after all. And at least now she would be getting something in return.
The thought of vengeance kept her going every time she had to return to the school and resume her lessons. It was the thought of burning the place to the ground that helped her hold her tongue when her peers sneered at her. It was the dream of slashing his throat open that helped her center herself when her master berated her, smacking her arms and legs every time she didn’t have her stance just so.
Rose could suffer through anything at this point, all thanks to her master’s teachings.
When Dai Shi ordered her to prove her strength by hanging from the rafters by her arms until he said she could drop, she leapt up to the rafters and hung there. Even when her arms shook and her fingers cramped, even when she could no longer feel them at all, she didn’t let go. She hung for hours and didn’t make a sound.
When he said that if she cried, he might go easier on her, she was taken aback. Her master would never have offered such a thing - to cry was to show weakness. It was unacceptable. It was shameful. He never would have gone easier on her if she cried, he would have drilled her into the ground until she was too dehydrated to even spit.
In many ways there was no difference between Dai Shi and her master. Perhaps this was another way Dai Shi was better.
She smiled, held on tighter, and hung for another hour before Dai Shi grew bored and let her drop back to the floor, where she knelt in respect of him and thanked him for another chance to prove herself to him. He dismissed her, but unless she was mistaken, there was a glimmer of pride in his eyes as he looked at her.
She knew it was foolish, but it warmed her heart.