Fleeing was out of the question, any one of the cultivators present could have run him down like a wolf taking a squirrel with a broken leg. Fighting was out on much the same grounds. He had killed a worm on his own, but that was a far cry from taking on the Fringe Town cultivators charged with keeping the peace.

Father Jin was being marched out of the house and made to stand aside. He looked more angry than scared, but his eyes passed over Sunwhisper as if he was a piece of the scenery, not the person to blame for this travesty.

They must not have told him what he had done. Sunwhisper could still feel the energy of the fruit he had eaten swirling in his core, and he had no reason to doubt what the raven had told him; there would be other cultivators who could tell that he had recently eaten raw Soma.

The good news was, he wasn’t going to be held hostage by the sacred bird's knowledge, as he had gotten caught all on his own. But what had led them here a whole day later?

"We know you helped her," Kuei said, "there’s no point in denying it."

"Helped who?" Sunwhsiper was genuinely caught off guard.

"What did I just say?" Kuei slapped him lightly enough that it was pure theater, merely a means of emphasizing the difference in their status.

"Apologies, honorable artist," Sunwhisper said, and then he saw Janna. She was being led away by Timu, her wrists bound by thick cords. None of the other Jins seemed to be under arrest, they were merely being detained.

"You are in the woods the same night your adopted sister steals twenty Soma fruits from the town store. Don’t pretend that was a coincidence, it would only shame you more."

"I do not wish to lie to you," Sunwhisper said, buying time. Why would they think Janna was the thief? She wasn’t skilled enough to fool the wards, not by a long measure. "I had no idea that she would do something like this."

"I don’t need to waste my time with you." Kuei stared him down, and then addressed the man who was holding his shoulder. "Take him in, he’s a part of this. He will have to pay the price along with the girl."

In moments, Sunwhisper found himself being hustled across town almost at a jog. His spear, retracted into a rod, was banging against his hip as he went. They hadn’t searched him, at least not yet, and as usual, no one seemed to consider him enough of a threat to worry about what he had on his belt.

They threw him and Janna into the same pit and covered it with a bamboo mesh inscribed with mana charged scripts. The pit was a dozen feet deep, and lined with warded bricks, though the floor was only dirt.

"I’m sorry I got you involved," Janna said. Her hair was a mess, and her eyes were red-rimmed, but she looked unharmed.

"I don’t think you did," Sunwhisper said.

"You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. They told me they found you meditating in the woods. They think you were my lookout. I don’t know what you were doing out there, but it wasn’t helping me. This is all my fault."

Sunwhisper didn’t argue further, there was no reason for him to incriminate himself at this point.

"What did you do?" He asked.

Janna squatted and thrust her hand into the soft earth, coming up with a clod clenched in her fist.

"Did you know I’m not like my family?"

Sunwhisper had trouble following this line of questioning, but he was becoming accustomed to not understanding what Janna was feeling or thinking. "What do you mean?"

"I don’t have a water affinity," she said with such pain that it was nearly a sob. "I’m earth aspected."

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

"Earth is a better element." Unless you were on a boat, it simply had more utility.

"Not for my family." She turned her back on him, speaking to the bricks. "There’s a reason father does not support me like he does his sons. It’s because we are different. I heard him say once that he didn’t even know if I was really his daughter."

"Elemental affinities do appear to be heritable,” Sunwhisper said, “at least insofar as the families I have observed tended to share them, but there are probably other factors at work as well. It may be epigenetic, or involve the interaction of numerous genes from both your mother and father, the recombination of which results in one of several possible discrete expressions.”

"What is that? A riddle?" Janna crossed her arms over her chest. "You say the strangest things sometimes, and I don’t know if you mean to hurt me, or if you truly don’t think like other people."

"You are his true daughter," Sunwhisper said, "probably."

"Well," she sighed, still not looking at him, "it doesn’t matter. I have shamed the family, and they will be lucky if losing me is all they suffer for it."

Sunwhisper touched one of the bricks along the wall; it looked like a relatively new construction, but that could be the wards preserving the cell from erosion. He had no doubt that the bamboo bars, if he chose to test them, would be tougher than steel.

"How did you do it?” He asked. Janna lacked his own advantages, and she was not much more advanced as a cultivator than he was. Being arrested was certainly a setback, but he assumed Makoto could get him out of it now that there was someone else to take the blame. The border guardian’s motivations were mysterious to some extent, but self-preservation had to be among them, and he didn’t want anyone discovering that his cousin was actually a demon from the Tree of Heaven. He wasn’t angry at Janna for causing him to be caught. The fact that she had managed to steal so many fruits without being marked made her much more interesting than she had been before.”

“How did you get by the wards without being marked?"

Finally, she turned around, meeting his eyes as if in challenge.

"I dug."

The dirt under her fingernails.

"Under the fence? That night?"

"Under the fence, under the forest. I started almost six months ago, after the last Reaping. Father gave me the smallest slice of a single fruit and said I should be grateful. I started planning it then."

"And no one noticed you moving dirt around all that time?"

"There were some close calls, but I was careful.” She stood up straight, and there was a hint of pride in what she said. Janna had been working in secret for months with no one to share in her victory when it came. “I used my own time and made excuses. They found the tunnel, but it doesn’t come out anywhere near our home. I thought that would be enough. I’m still not sure how they knew I was the one that dug it."

Sunwhisper considered the kind of effort and patience this kind of enterprise would have required compared with his own rash heist. His respect for Janna was duly adjusted.

"You worked very hard." He said.

"Better a genius of hard work than a genius of geniuses," Janna said, a little smugly. Then her face fell. "It’s over now though. I only ate half a fruit because I didn’t want to make myself sick. The rest were recovered. I may not taste anything like it for the rest of my life."

"Maybe not," Sunwhisper said. "Let’s wait and see what they want from us." He had been thinking about how the raven had been able to see that he’d eaten the fruit, and he wanted to process as much of the excess mana in his body as he could before he came before an elder for judgment. The last thing he would need then is to have the echoes of stolen fruit coursing through his meridians as they decided the depth of his complicity. As for the fruits he still had tucked into his storage compartment, Makoto hadn’t mentioned them, so it seemed they were relatively safe there. He certainly didn’t want to leave them behind.

He chose the driest corner and sat with his back against the bricks, beginning his first full meditation on the Path of the Honing Edge.

Janna watched him for a while, this tall young man with the face of a Makoto. Had the border guardian been this strange when he was young? She did not know him well, but he was a fixture in the village and had spoken at various Reapings. Apparently, their family had close ties. When the issue of fostering Shishio had come up, there had been talk of how much the border guardian had done to help them over the years, and how he had even helped Father Jin in his training before Janna was born. Her mother spoke fondly of him.

The elder had lost his son, everyone knew that, but it had been a lifetime ago. She had heard her father say that the border guardian’s wife had spoken out against the Reaping festival, and been shamed because of it, so ashamed that she took her own life, or that was the rumor.

The elder Makoto was one of the strongest cultivators in Fringe, everyone knew that, and this boy, he must have been strong too, to have practiced the pure arts in the Middle Kingdom. He had damaged his core, but clearly not given up on being a cultivator. If he could sustain a loss like that, and still be training at a time like this, then maybe there was hope for her too.

She took the opposite corner and lost herself in the workings of her own path, the Meditations of Deepest Stone.