The School of Broken Oaths

Hina kept getting one point of luck in all the wrong places. A fallen tile missed her, a lie reached her first, and her tired hands still held the weak warrior school together after three hard years of festival work and unpaid praise. She wore a stolen calm in public, but the seam of it cracked whenever she touched the poetry book pinned in her sash. Then the queen called her to a back alley, and a dead minister, a broken oath, and a search of her room pulled her into the school's worst winter. The one man who kept standing beside her also kept pretending not to know the chess piece in her sleeve.