Kensei Jon's Arc

Chapter 47 of 49

The question Kensei feared came a week later. Ha-ni looked up from a book too advanced for her age and asked where she could learn more. The low school had nothing left. Kensei knew the answer, and he did not like it. There was only one school in the fifth city that taught past what she had already mastered. He and Jeon-min walked her there the next morning. The building rose tall and polished, its stone front trimmed with gold. A sign above the door showed a cylinder flanked by two round shapes. Students in clean coats climbed the wide steps. Everything about the place said money and rank. Kensei felt the old fear return, the one that told him people like him did not belong. "They will ask about her parents," Kensei said. "Both of us. On the registry." "Then we write both," Jeon-min said. "Same as before." Inside, a clerk sat behind a desk with a ledger. Kensei set Ha-ni's citizenship papers down and asked to enroll her in the advanced level. The clerk looked at the papers, then at Ha-ni, then at the two men in hanbok standing side by side. "She is two," the clerk said. "She reads the high books," Jeon-min said. "Test her." The clerk called for a teacher. A thin woman came with a slate and wrote a hard sum on it. Ha-ni answered before the chalk stopped moving. The teacher wrote a longer one. Ha-ni answered that too. Then she corrected a word the teacher had spelled wrong on the slate. The teacher stared, then wiped the slate clean. "She belongs in the advanced level," the teacher said. "Perhaps beyond it." The clerk turned the registry toward them. Two lines for parents. Kensei's hand did not shake this time. He wrote his name. Jeon-min wrote his beneath it. The clerk read both names, read that they were both fathers, and dipped his pen without a word. He stamped the page and filed it. "Fees are due each month," the clerk said. "She starts tomorrow." Outside, Ha-ni held both their hands and swung between them on the steps. She was in the best school the city had. No one had turned them away. No one had asked how two men made a daughter. But Kensei had seen the fee written on the clerk's paper. It was steep. Their five shops made good coin, yet this school took more each month than any single shop earned. And the teacher's words stayed with him. Perhaps beyond it. This city had one advanced school, and it was already the last one. If Ha-ni outgrew this the way she outgrew the low school, there would be nowhere left in the fifth city to send her.