I can’t resist picking it up. This can’t be a communal practice instrument. It’s too valuable. The pearlflute is marbled with swirls of cream on cream. The colors tease at flashing lavender and rose as I turn it. I press it to my lips and blow.
The sound is so much lovelier than the books said. It’s powerful but precise. Not like the volcano drum, which flattens everything in a radius around it. It’s as if this sound seeks out every person within a half li and trills a private concert just behind each person’s ear. As the note dies down, I realize too late that everyone in every practice room must have just heard me blow the pearlflute.
I quickly set it down right as the shoji door slides open with such force that it bounces back in its frame.
“Who blew my pearlflute!” Aiyah, it’s Suki! Stupid me. She stands in the doorway, twirling a little pearlsilk parasol over one shoulder and wearing ludicrous high-heeled skates. Her face swarms with vicious satisfaction.
“Excuse me, this room is taken,” I say with more calm than I feel.
“You blew my pearlflute! I heard you.”
“It must have been someone else playing their pearlflute.”
“Only three students at Pearl Famous have a pearlflute, and the only other first-year is a boy!”
“You must be mistaken.”
“You can’t blow someone else’s wind instrument without consent! Especially a pearlflute! Now you’ve really done it, Shinian snake.”
I push past her and skate out. To my surprise, she doesn’t follow. The clouds in the Season of Spirits help cover me as I speed down the row of practice rooms.
A great noise arises within the walls. It’s the sound of little metal balls clattering down mazes. I turn back and see Suki with the emergency cord in her hand, surrounded by her court of girls from the House of Flowering Blossoms, all of them clutching parasols and wearing high-heeled skates.
I look at them standing there, shoulder to shoulder, almost humming with power. Power over me. Power that I gave to them.
At the sound of the alarm, everyone comes out of their practice rooms to see what the matter is. The gaping students crowd the path.
“Let me through!” I say, pressing past, but I’m slowed down by the trinket hanging around my neck. Suddenly, Suki’s hand is yanking my hair.
“She blew my pearlflute! You all heard it?”
Students murmur that they did as they gather closer around us.
“Disgusting! Don’t put it to your lips again, Your Grace!” cries Etsuko.
“She eats bleached bladder stones!” screeches Noriko.
Suki twists her fist in my hair so that I’m forced to face her.
“Now you’ve truly failed to keep the monkey pleased. Everyone, you’re all witnesses! She defiled my pearlflute!” Suki says. “Further evidence that she is a spy sent to steal or destroy everything!”
“Leave her!” says a deep voice. Everyone turns. Doi stands there, fingers pointed and arm pulled back in the ibis spring-bow position.
“Wah! So protective!” sneers Suki. “Is she your girlfriend?”
Doi flings herself toward Suki, but I cross my arms and block her.
“Fighting outside of wu liu class will get you in trouble!” I cry out.
“Listen to your little girlfriend, Doi,” says Suki.
Doi shoves me out of the way. She leaps and splits her legs out in a double flying halberd butterfly at Suki’s head but I quickly chop her feet down with my palms like cleavers so that they miss their mark.
“Stop!” I shout. I can’t let Doi get punished for my sake again.
I hear the sound of metal slicing toward us and kick my skate back by instinct. I block Suki’s skate right before it slices into Doi’s bare shin.
“Stop! Both of you!”
Suki and Doi hurl toward each other, trapping me in the middle. I use the blades of my skates to block Suki’s blades flying at Doi’s head and limbs and use my fist and elbows to knock the trajectory of Doi’s punches away from Suki.
Doi punching from the left; Suki spinning from the right. Doi lunging from the front; Suki leaping from the back. I’m fighting both of them and it’s like writing the same words with both hands at once. My reasons for fighting the two of them are so different but also the same. I’m fighting Suki to protect Doi. I’m fighting Doi to protect Doi. And I’m using only defensive moves to protect myself.
Suki pushes away from Doi and me. She leaps into a triple mantis spin and flies at me with her skate blade pointed straight at my chest. I try to come out of the backward double-elbow block that I’m using to hold Doi back with but I’m too late to block Suki. The steel of her blade strikes me straight in the chest.
I gasp for breath and look down, expecting to see red.
There is no wound. With shaking hands, I pull out the cord around my neck from the front of my robe. She hit the trinket. It saved me.
Doi tries to lunge around me at Suki, but I turn and check her body with mine. Doi and I are face-to-face as she huffs at me, “Do you understand the situation you’re in, you fool? You can’t afford to be caught fighting!” She kicks her skate under my right skate, where the dragon tail coil used to be, and the impact unbalances me and sends me sliding outside their reach.
There’s a burst of motion and the sound of skate blades slicing against each other and a cry and then Doi and Suki are standing apart, panting.
