Rebirth17 min read
My Little Sisterhood: An Unexpected Scholar
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I remember the smell of spring when I woke up in this body—damp earth, cut grass, and upstairs, the faint smoke of someone boiling tea. I remember the hill, the narrow stone path down to the fields, and the way children laughed as farmers bent their backs to seed and hoe.
"I'm Iris," I said aloud to the wind, like a child claiming a toy. "Iris Koehler, from the city a hundred lives ago. Don't you dare make me a fool."
"Who told you that name?" my mother said, when she heard me practicing. She hadn't called me by any name other than "little one" since I arrived in this family's life. "Susanne Palmer, must you put on airs?"
"Only when I'm studying." I shoved my manuscript—a crude list of the laws and histories I'd copied from the old school textbook I smuggled into this life—into a corner and raced outside.
"Be careful," Susanne said. "The mushroom time is short. If you dawdle, other folks will beat you to them."
"Then come with me," I said, but she only laughed and shook her head.
I was eight, scrawny, and sun-darkened from climbing the hills. I had a pair of big black eyes that watched everything like river stones. I had a secret: I remembered another life in full color and could read a book without eating the margins for dinner. That small advantage felt like a loadstone in my chest. I grinned, thinking of the book that put me here—the one where the county's golden son returns. I had skimmed its beginning in my old life. That knowledge had already begun to stitch the shape of future trouble.
"Two herrings and two sisters, and—" A man with a cart thundered past the lane gate. "Young master has come back."
"Who?" Hannah Finch, my second sister, whispered, eyes wide.
"Maybe he will take you away to be a lady's maid," Coraline Engel, my eldest sister, joked, but neither of them laughed for long.
The visitor was a middle-aged man in respectable robes, a small retinue in tow. He carried himself like the master of a manor even though he kept his hands folded as if restraining himself.
"Is that a relative?" I asked.
Susanne's face tightened for a half second before she hid the worry like a practiced hawk hiding its talons.
"You could have said 'good day,'" I muttered. "Instead you matched his weight with a brow."
"Go inside, Iris," Susanne said softly. "There are grown matters to hear."
I did as I was told, because at eight you learn early what "grown matters" look like: serious faces, cool air in the hall, the hush that presses like snow.
They'd brought someone with them—a boy, a child, kneeling like he had been born wearing the posture of "sorry." He looked too neat for those hills: white skin under a dusting of sun, precise cheekbones, and eyes that did not smile.
"Tell your choice," Susanne commanded him.
He lifted his head and said with a steadiness that didn't belong to his age, "I will stay with the Feng family, Mother."
You should have seen the relief wash my mother's face, like tide over rock. Coraline and Hannah exchanged looks that said the same thing: "Good. It could have been worse." Everyone sighed, some laughed, the guest from the manor bowed and left as if he had been a scout. Once the house closed, I sat down next to the boy in the room.
"Who are you?" I asked. "You're called 'young master' here. I will not let you steal all my mushrooms."
He looked at me then, cool as the river, and said nothing for a long moment. When he did, he said one thing: "I am Cesar Benton."
"Cesar?" I tried it in my mouth. It felt like iron, but calm. I had read this name before, in a book whose cover had peeled from overenthusiastic thumbs. He was meant to be the hero of another life. "How do you come to be kneeling on our floor?"
His mouth twitched, but not a smile. "I was left at your doorstep, nurse," he said, plainly. "I was raised here."
"Raised to be kind to small girls?" I sneered. "I won't let you get comfortable. If you leave, we will be glad."
He bowed without expression. "I owe you nothing," he said. "I owe you my life."
I watched him practice calligraphy, watched the way his fingers curved around the brush like they belonged to some older, more royal world. I looked at the gold lacquered incense burner the house set by his side. The man who came from the manor—the steward—had kept a polite distance. He left with a look that tasted like displeasure. I had the oddest feeling that our home had turned into a chessboard and everyone had only begun to move.
"Brother," I said one day when I dared to open my mouth, because in the book the laid-out fate depended on who I called brother. "If your family sent you away, you should go back."
Cesar's eyes were like a knife under water. He said nothing. From then he only answered to duty and to my mother's sovereign goodwill. He refused to bow to anyone else.
A fortnight later the manor returned, but this time in full parade: silk, lacquered carts, servants who painted their faces with the kind of courtesy reserved for the rich. The steward came inside and the household bristled. This time they had come for Cesar in earnest. Susanne's jaw tightened as she listened. She looked older by the candle's light and for the first time I saw it—fear.
"Mother," I said, quietly, "if they take him, we'll be safer."
"Child," she said, as if my words hurt her like a pin, "he is a son of honor. To give him away is to give away our house."
"I don't like him," I said. "He never smiles."
"Then you are young," Susanne murmured. "You will learn this later. He may be our family's guard someday."
"Guard or prisoner?" I wanted to say more, but Coraline and Hannah's hands tucked into mine like anchors, and the talk turned to husbands and marriage, things I had never desired—until I realized the alternative might be to let those strangers decide what was ours.
They asked Cesar to sign a marriage paper before he left. He took the brush, put his hand to the paper, and wrote with strokes that seemed to belong to a different climate.
"Here," he said, pressing the seal into red paste. "I will not break this vow. Even if I leave, I remain yours."
They left then, the steward putting his chin up like a man who had expected a different ending. He left a threat in his eyes, and Susanne's hands trembled with the aftertaste of something like war.
When they were gone, I told the family what I had learned: that this was not only a village matter. Cesar, I discovered, wore a name that belonged to another house—Cesar Benton of Lanling—and that changed the scale of everything. Susanne sank down and spoke in a voice I had not heard from her since my small childhood in this life: "Lanling? They will not forgive a marriage like this."
"Then we will go to school and work," I said, and all of them laughed because they thought I was joking. I was not joking.
"You must go to the Yunchuan Academy," I told them. "If I can gain a scholar's title, our house will have legal protection. A woman with honor may be safer for us than pleading with the steward."
They laughed again, but this time it faded and was replaced by wariness. For they knew the academy's gates were high and narrow for women, though the law said otherwise.
"Girls don't take the government exams," Coraline said. "Even now, women who become officials are unheard of."
"I will be the first then," I replied, and that was the beginning.
"We'll send you," Susanne said finally, with the helpless bravery only mothers possess.
So on an early morning, with two carts and handkerchiefs that smelled of onions and hope, I left the hills for the county. Hannah hugged me so hard I thought my ribs would break. Coraline pressed a packet into my hand. "Do not come back without success," she said, half-teasing, half-crying.
"I won't," I promised, and for once I told the truth.
Yunchuan Academy sat on the shoulder of a long mountain, and we climbed until my legs remembered what climbing was. There were boys and men of every age, none of them smaller than I, none of them kinder in the beginning. The teachers at the gate with their long beards made me feel like a mouse in a lion's mouth.
"You cannot enter," the gatekeeper said when I handed him the registration slip, "the quota of female pupils is filled."
"Then set me a test," I said.
He looked me up and down like a farmer inspecting a piglet. "You are only a girl. Why should we make an exception?"
"Because the law says nothing of quotas," I snapped, louder than I meant. Then a man—grey and small, with eyes like flints—looked up from underneath his book.
"Very well," he said. "One test. Pass, and you may stay. Fail, and you will never come back."
I passed it.
"Don't let arrogance grow," the man said later, frowning. "Merit is not the same as confidence. Yet you have both."
That man was Ambrose Reyes—my guardian-mentor at the academy. He would later give me the two most useful things a desperate girl can ask for: work and a reason to be dangerous.
The Academy, I discovered, was a place where men kept their pride and invented rules to shelter it. There were older teachers like Ansel Fischer who wanted order and the law intact, and younger boys like Jackson Henry who wanted to be the sun. There was a man who accepted me—Ambrose—and a man who made my life especially interesting, Axel Case, who wheeled through hallways in a carved chair and spoke like someone who had read a thousand books in one lifetime.
I met Juan Carson on the path: a small, sharp-eyed boy with a bag slung on his back. He offered to carry my book chest up the hill when my back nearly split. "I will not have a girl fall behind," he said, and my heart stuttered like a beetle inside a pot.
"You're good," I told him. "You will make someone proud."
"So will you," he said, with the illness of someone who had not been told praise and had learned to keep it like a jewel.
We studied under Ambrose. He gave me sheets to copy, essays to write, and laughed when my calligraphy still looked like a river had been crossed by ducks. He assigned me odd letters to transcribe and told me to read the classics like teeth on a bone.
"Do you wish to be an official?" Ambrose asked one night, his pipe sending a slow curl of smoke.
"I do," I said. "If it means keeping my sisters and mother safe and letting no steward push them into the dirt, then I will."
He did not question me. He looked over the ledger of all his students and said, dry as cinnamon, "Then I will teach you to be seen."
Other boys lined the halls. Nehemias Blake—tall, brutish, with a crown of vanity—liked to push around those who looked smaller. He enjoyed being a tide of pressure and used the privilege of weight to bend people until they cracked. He made chains of fear.
"That girl," he sniffed when he learned I had the top score on the test. "From the hills? Who gave her the right?"
"She worked for it," Juan said, quietly.
Nehemias smiled like a trap springing. "Work does not make you richer in taste."
"Keep still," I said, and Nehemias promptly discovered how dull his teeth were when he tried to scare a girl who knew how to bite back. We made an enemy.
The academy had a poetry circle: Jackson Henry sat like a monarch there. He ran the "Upper Mystery" society, the place where poets showed muscles and people measured themselves by the size of their verses.
I won the first month head of the class. They posted the rankings on the board and my name shone at the top like a ridiculous lantern. They murmured. Men could not bear to be watched by a female triumph.
"How?" they whispered. "She is just a child."
"She cheated," Nehemias told anyone who would listen. "Women are liars."
"Enough," Jackson Henry said, but his voice lacked heat. He had been beaten, and his pride smoldered like dry grass.
That evening I received an invitation written in explosive, extravagant strokes: Jackson Henry had requested my presence at the Upper Mystery's meeting for the Dragon Boat Festival. ONLY the best were invited.
"Why me?" I said to Juan.
"Because you upset someone at the top," he answered. "And because men like Jackson Henry get very dramatic when they are slighted."
"Then I will go," I said.
"Why?" Coraline asked when she received my letter home. "If you go to that house, you will only be shown how thin your clothes are compared to their robes."
"I go because I must," I said. "Either I let them set me up and be broken like an egg, or I enter and play the game they have arranged."
They held a meeting at the flying-cloud house on the hill. Jackson Henry arranged his seat like a stage, and the room fanned itself in watchful silk.
"Welcome," he said, cool as a coin. "We meet to celebrate verse and taste. Let us begin with a poem."
I read an old one, one of those I had learned in the past life and amended into a voice that was mine. The room still like pond-water as I recited. People listened. When I finished, applause crashed like a storm because it said everything they had been thinking but refused to say.
"You are bold," Jackson said later, with a corner smile. "You take the stage like a child of noble blood."
"Who told you what blood is?" I shot back. "Your own pride?"
No single person moved. Nehemias's smirk had turned to a crease.
"She is a novelty," he said loudly. "A joke. We find it in roaring."
"Enough," Jackson told him calmly. "Let us enjoy the evening."
At the end of the night Nehemias, stung by losing the public game, arranged that I should be made the joke of the event. He paid a pair of men with hands that smelled of wine to leave a roll of paper by the dais. It contained a slanderous scroll, a letter that accused me of stealing another student's lines and trading it about as applause bait. They spread it to the crowd. The room rustled with disapproval.
"She copied," someone declared. "Look at the phrasing. Not original."
"You accept this?" Jackson asked, although his jaw had thickened like a bruise. He valued fairness, but the crowd's momentum is like weather: it pushes a man to the edge.
"Prove it," I said.
They laughed. "You cannot. You are a girl."
"You forget," I said, "I came prepared."
I had the original. In an odd, small thing that saved me at that moment, Ambrose had trained me to keep copies of texts and record my own drafts. I had proof. I stood up and lifted the original, the pages smelling of ink and my own hands.
"Here," I said. "This is mine. I wrote it last month under Ambrose Reyes's counsel."
They stared. Some faces thawed. Jackson looked at me, then at the boy I had beaten out for ranking—he had a young, fierce look and tears of shame in his eyes.
"You are tenacious," Jackson admitted. "I misjudged."
Nehemias snarled at being shown wrong. He had been the one to spread the rumor because it took the focus off of his own failing.
"That will not stand," he vowed later, and for once his promise was like the hammer of a menacing clock.
I expected a quarrel. I did not expect the scope.
Nehemias began a campaign. He spread rumors of theft more subtle than the scroll: that my family had bought my way into the academy, that I had bribed the gatekeepers, that my name belonged to a foreign pocket of talent. He shoved quarrels into corridors, paid for whispers over porridge and wine, bought petty favors. Men like him are like rot: they spread in secret and eat their way out into open air.
But the more he lied, the less he used force and the more he used "proof." He picked up fragments and tied them into a net.
It took months before the net was complete. He had prepared so many small charges that one day they would look like a mountain of guilt.
I did not fear much. I had a stubbornness that had been tempered by hunger and poverty in the previous life. I also had new friends—Juan who kept my books, Axel Case who had gentle eyes and an interest in old things, and Axel's presence gave me new confidence. People talked about Axel because he never left his chair; he read slowly and spoke like a bell. He was reserved and wise.
One week, news arrived in the academy that would change everything: Nehemias had bribed a local magistrate to delay the posting of the next public list. He intended to place a forged letter into the county record claiming that I had been presented as a witch of influence because my family had once been prosperous. It was petty but it was the kind of petty that could tip a distant official into action.
Ambrose and I found this out because someone—somebody small and quick—brought us word. It was a boy who ran errands; his name was Forbes Harper. He had once been mocked by Nehemias and argued with him for a piece of bread. Unlike Nehemias he feared nothing of men who screamed. "He bought a judge," Forbes whispered. "He'll make the governor pause. If that goes public—"
"If that goes public we will be ruined," Ambrose said. "Come with me," he added simply.
Ambrose took the forms and we rode to the county square where the magistrate sat, a heavy man who liked to spend the afternoons contemning his desk. He had a heart tempered by little things. I waited outside because doors of judges are not for small forces of girls and scholars. Ambrose walked in with the calm of someone who had an account to set straight.
Ambrose returned with a stack of papers and a small card. The magistrate had been shown my original notes. The magistrate's fingers—fat and indifferent like a lazy cat's—had tapped the paper and said, "These are authentic."
The day that followed is one I remember for the way faces shifted; for the speed at which gossip could die and be resurrected anew; and for the manner men behave when they feel cornered.
Nehemias had arranged for a public humiliation at the Mid-Autumn Festival banquet. He had the governor's niece in his retinue and the power to assemble an audience. He wanted my face trodden. That was the plan. He believed he had arranged public shame better than any man: a show where I would confess to fraudulent writing, or be exposed.
They had called the county hall, arranged lanterns, and invited the whole academy—students, their families, the manor owners, and even the steward. The air smelled of spice and tension.
When I arrived, many faces were in the crowd: students who had feared to speak, parents who thought law meant more than fairness, and Coraline and Hannah standing like spears. Ambrose and Axel had come. Juan sat in the shadows, fingers tight. Jackson moved like a lion whose mane had been mussed. And Nehemias—ah, Nehemias walked in like a man who had already opened the box and smelled the triumph inside.
Nehemias took his place on the stage. His grin was wide. I could tell he had wangled the magistrate into silence and bought the trust of a few men. People were whispering and shuffling their feet in anticipation.
"Will you speak?" Nehemias called when the master of ceremonies said nothing.
I stepped forward with the paper in hand—the same original that had won me the upper hand earlier at the poetry meeting. It shivered against my palm like a small bird. The steward—Gideon Makarov—stood at the side with an expression like wet cloth: nervously tidy.
"Read," Nehemias said. "Tell us. Admit you stole the work."
I did not shout. I set the paper down on the small desk provided and looked at the audience.
"This paper is mine," I said. "It bears my drafts. It bears the ink smudges from the morning I stayed up to write when the house was sleeping."
A few people laughed. Some were ready to be entertained.
"Then where is your proof that Nehemias forged the letters?" Nehemias sneered. He had prepared that one like a small blade.
"Proof will come," Jackson Henry said from the crowd, and his voice had the power of a bell. He stepped forward and placed a folded letter atop the pile.
Nehemias's face drained for half a heartbeat, then he recovered, laughing. "You think a letter can save her?"
Then I asked to speak, and Ambrose handed me a sealed bundle of writing that had appeared as evidence of Nehemias's interventions: payments, bribes, notes in his own hand. Nehemias's face changed in the blink of a crowed day. He went from laughter to confusion, then to denial.
"What is this?" he said, whole body trembling. "This is forgery."
"You signed this note," Jackson said, placing the paper where everyone could see. "You wrote the numbers. You thought you were safe because you had made the magistrate your friend. But you had forgotten one thing—people keep their receipts."
Now the crowd was human weather: first a ripple of interest, then a storm. Someone in the back—one of the steward's petty clerks—had taken a photograph of the receipts and sent them to the governor's office. Those images had been forwarded by the magistrate himself to the county's central ledger. The ledger confirmed it. The stack of papers Ambrose laid out included the original receipts and a traced count of the payments.
I watched as Nehemias's face went through the sequence the old women of the mountains had taught me to recognize: pride, annoyance, astonishment, denial, and then collapse. First he raised his chin and declared, "This is a lie! I would never—"
He stumbled forward, his hands trembling. "You fools! You know nothing! The papers—someone forged them to cover their own shame." His voice had the tautness of a snapped string.
"Look," Jackson said calmly. "You signed it with the same blotch. You are not clever."
Nehemias's mouth opened. "I did not," he said, and the word had been barked with sudden desperation. "I did not!"
"Then prove it," Ambrose said, voice quiet and terrible. "Prove it in front of these people."
He could not. He had no proof because the only proof he'd had was the receipts, the marks of the coins that left his palm. The ledger confirmed them. People in the crowd began to mutter, then to shout. "He lied." "He bribed a magistrate." "He threatened a girl." Someone took out a phone and clicked a picture; another began to clap slowly like a metronome signaling a fall.
Nehemias's composure cracked. He slid down from the dais like a man whose boots had been taken from under him. For a moment his arrogance remained: "I demand a public trial!" he shouted, trying to change the script from humiliation to procedure. Men pulled at their robes and fussed with etiquette, but the change had already come.
"You paid for the magistrate's silence," the steward—Gideon—said quietly, "and you planned to plant evidence to make her a village liar. You thought the law would bow to your coin. The ledger says otherwise."
Nehemias's face turned to pale clay.
"Please," he said at last, his voice reduced to a child's. He whined like an animal surprised by itself. "Please, I didn't think— I didn't know they'd record the gifts—please!"
No one answered. The crowd moved like a tide of disgust. Someone recorded the beggar's confession on a device and uploaded it live; young men recorded videos with their phones, others began to take notes fervently. People clucked their tongues and whispered. A woman who had once been pushed aside by Nehemias stepped forward and spat, "You ruined my child." Others nodded. The air smelled of old tea and new judgment.
Nehemias crumpled to his knees in front of the dais. The stage lights made the sweat on his hairline sparkle like shame. He begged then, crawling, "Please, only a merciful word—"
No one gave him mercy. People who had been his servants stood and walked away. Those who had once feared his jibes pulled cameras and narrated: "He is a liar," one said. "He bought the judge," another added. Someone laughed. Others wept. The governor's cousin, a woman of silk and spite, turned her head and said nothing. The steward's face was cold.
"You will pay the costs," the magistrate said finally, having observed quietly. "You will reimburse every expense, you will attend the school for orders of public correction for three months, and you will apologize publicly every morning for a year."
Nehemias's knees clattered on the wooden floor. His voice shredded. "I will do anything—"
"Then start," Jackson said.
Nehemias's ego dissolved into a small pleading creature at their feet. He said "I'm sorry" over and over, and each repetition drew out a different shape of reaction: some whispered, some took pictures, many left. Girls who had once feared so much they wouldn't raise their eyes now stared and clapped like a court witnessing an execution. A few men slapped their knees to pump a rhythm of applause. Others busied themselves as if composure was the final currency.
For a full hour, Nehemias's humiliation played out. He went from arrogant to shocked to denial to collapse to begging. People recorded and uploaded his degradation. A riverside clerk took notes and sent an account to the governor's office that afternoon; it appeared on the public ledger by evening. He was fined and required to write apologies. He was kept near Jackson Henry's fist of public control so others could see consequences happen.
I watched him go through it, and I felt no joy. Only a steady clarity that the law, when wielded by those who believed in it, could keep the bitter at bay.
After the tide passed and the crowds thinned, Jackson came to me and said, softly, "Forgive me for the moment of pleasure I allowed them."
"Forgive you?" I repeated.
"You had to be seen, that was all. I thought you might have wanted to be crushed for courage. You surprised me."
"Good," I said. "Then we may proceed."
The steward—Gideon—stalked off with a look that probably calculated interest for his next move. Ambrose patted my shoulder. "You did well," he said. "Not only in craft, but in court. You managed to use the law without breaking yourself."
"Is this the end?" I asked, because I have learned to sniff the wind and see a longer shape.
"No," Ambrose said. "If he was petty enough to think bribing a magistrate would help, he will not stop at paper. Be ready."
I nodded. My mind already had a list—of names, of debt, of small things I would sharpen. I would not be naïve. I would not be bullied. Nor would I be the kind of girl who wears her victory as a crown; I would wear it as armor.
Days later, standing at the edge of the academy field, I watched the golden lanterns of the town swing like a promise. Axel Case rolled his chair by my side and said, "You did right."
"You always say that," I answered.
"When you are right," he said simply, "you have nothing to fear."
He was wrong sometimes and right sometimes, like the weather, but that night his words felt like a blanket. Coraline wrote me a letter that said, "We will wait for you at the table," and Hannah sent me a package of mushrooms for the pot, all charred with a sister's love. Susanne wrote, "Stay safe."
I sleep sometimes with the scroll of my first grade test under my pillow. It smells like dust and ink and the memory of climbing hills. I wake up, and there are always new forms to fill, new battles to face. But I can say this much with certainty:
I did not come here to be a child's prop.
I came here to be a scholar.
And I would learn to make even a steward feel the weight of a woman's vow.
The End
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