The Dragon Republic

Chapter 11

Nezha pushed her door open. “You awake?”

“What’s going on?” Rin yawned. It was still dark outside her porthole, but Nezha was dressed in full uniform. Behind him stood Kitay, looking half-asleep and very crabby.

“Come upstairs,” said Nezha.

“He wants to show us the view,” Kitay grumbled. “Get a move on so I can go back to sleep.”

Rin followed them down the hall, hopping on one foot as she pulled her shoes on.

The Seagrim was blanketed in such a dense blue mist that they might have been sailing through clouds. Rin could not see the landmarks surrounding them until they were close enough for shapes to emerge through the fog. On her left, great cliffs guarded the narrow entrance to Arlong: a dark sliver of space inside the yawning stone wall. Against the light of the rising sun, the rock face glimmered a bright crimson.

Those were the famous Red Cliffs of the Dragon Province. The cliff walls were said to shine a brighter red with every failed invasion against the stronghold, painted with the blood of sailors whose ships had been dashed against those stones.

Rin could just make out massive characters etched into the walls; words that she could see only if she tilted her head the right way and if the faint sunlight hit them just so. “What do those say?”

“Can’t you read it?” Kitay asked. “It’s just Old Nikara.”

She tried not to roll her eyes. “Translate for me, then.”

“You actually can’t,” Nezha said. “All of those characters have layers upon layers of meaning, and they don’t obey modern Nikara grammar rules, so any translation must be imperfect and unfaithful.”

Rin had to smile. Those were words recited straight from the Linguistics texts they’d both read at Sinegard, back when their biggest concern was the next week’s grammar quiz. “So which translation do you think is right?”

“‘Nothing lasts,’” said Nezha, at the same time that Kitay said, “‘The world doesn’t exist.’”

Kitay wrinkled his nose at Nezha. “‘Nothing lasts’? What kind of translation is that?”

“The historically accurate one,” Nezha said. “The last faithful minister of the Red Emperor carved those words into the cliffs. When the Red Emperor died, his empire fragmented into provinces. His sons and generals snapped up prize pieces of land like wolves. But the minister of the Dragon Province didn’t pledge allegiance to any of the newly formed states.”

“I assume that didn’t end well,” Rin said.

“It’s as Father says: there’s no such thing as neutrality in a civil war,” Nezha said. “The Eight Princes came for the Dragon Province and tore Arlong apart. Thus the minister’s epigram. Most think it’s a nihilistic cry, a warning that nothing lasts. Not friendships, not loyalties, and certainly not empire. Which makes it consistent with your translation, Kitay, if you think about it. This world is ephemeral. Permanence is an illusion.”

As they spoke, the Seagrim passed into a channel through the cliffs so narrow that Rin marveled that the warship did not breach its hull along the rocks. The ship must have been designed according to the exact specifications of the channel—and even then, it was a remarkable feat of navigation that they slipped through the walls without so much as scraping stone.

As they penetrated the passage, the cliffs themselves appeared to cleave open, revealing Arlong between them like a pearl hidden inside an oystershell. The city within was startlingly lush, all waterfalls and running streams and more green than Rin had ever seen in Tikany. On the other side of the channel, she could just trace the faint outlines of two mountain chains peeking over the mist: the Qinling Mountains to the east and the Daba range to the west.

“I used to climb up those cliffs all the time.” Nezha pointed toward a steep set of stairs carved into the red walls that made Rin dizzy just looking at them. “You can see everything from up there—the ocean, the mountains, the entire province.”

“So you could see attackers coming from every direction from miles off,” Kitay said. “That’s very useful.”

Now Rin understood. This explained why Vaisra was so confident in his military base. Arlong might be the most impenetrable city in the Empire. The only way to invade was by sailing through a narrow channel or scaling a massive mountain range. Arlong was easy to defend and tremendously difficult to attack—the ideal wartime capital.

“We used to spend days on the beaches, too,” said Nezha. “You can’t see them from here, but there are coves hidden under the cliff walls if you know where to find them. In Arlong the river banks are so large that if you didn’t know any better, you’d think you were on the ocean.”

Rin shuddered at the thought. Tikany had been landlocked, and she couldn’t imagine growing up this close to so much water. She would have felt so vulnerable. Anything could land on those shores. Pirates. Hesperians. The Federation.

Speer had been that vulnerable.

Nezha cast her a sideways look. “You don’t like the ocean?”

She thought of Altan pitching backward into black water. She thought of a long, desperate swim and of nearly losing her mind. “I don’t like the way it smells,” she said.

“But it just smells like salt,” he said.

“No. It smells like blood.”

The moment the Seagrim dropped anchor, a group of soldiers escorted Vaisra off the ship and ensconced him inside a curtained sedan chair to be carted off to the palace. Rin had not seen Vaisra in more than a week, but she’d heard rumors his condition had worsened. She supposed the last thing he wanted was for word to spread.

“Should we be concerned?” she asked, watching as the chair made its way down the pier.

“He just needs some shoreside rest.” Nezha’s words didn’t sound forced, which Rin took as a good sign. “He’ll recover.”

“In time to lead a campaign north, you think?” Kitay asked.

“Certainly. And if not Father, then my brother. Let’s get you to the barracks.” Nezha motioned toward the gangplank. “Come on. I’ll introduce you to the ranks.”

Arlong was an amphibious city composed of a series of interconnected islands scattered inside a wide swath of the Western Murui. Nezha led Rin, Kitay, and the Cike into one of the slim, ubiquitous sampans that navigated Arlong’s interior. As Nezha guided their boat into the inner city, Rin swallowed down a wave of nausea. The city reminded her of Ankhiluun; it was far less shabby but just as disorienting in its reliance on waterways. She hated it. What was so wrong with dry land?

“No bridges?” she asked. “No roads?”

“No need. Whole island’s linked by canals.” Nezha stood at the stern, steering the sampan forward with gentle sweeps of the rudder. “It’s arranged in a circular grid, like a conch shell.”

“Your city looks like it’s halfway to sinking,” Rin said.

“That’s on purpose. It’s nearly impossible to launch a land invasion on Arlong.” He guided the sampan around a corner. “This was the first capital of the Red Emperor. Back during his wars with the Speerlies, he surrounded himself with water. He never felt safe without it—he chose to build a city at Arlong for precisely that reason. Or so the myth goes.”

“Why was he obsessed with water?”

“How else do you protect yourself from beings who control fire? He was terrified of Tearza and her army.”

“I thought he was in love with Tearza,” Rin said.

“He loved her and feared her,” Nezha said. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

Rin was glad when they finally pulled up to a solid sidewalk. She felt far more comfortable on land, where the floorboards wouldn’t shift under her feet, where she was at no risk of tipping into the water.

But Nezha looked happier over water than she’d ever seen him. He controlled the rudder like it was a natural extension of his body, and he hopped lightly from the edge of the sampan to the walkway as if it were no more difficult than walking through a grassy field.

He led them into the heart of Arlong’s military district. As they walked, Rin saw a series of tower ships, vessels that could carry entire villages, mounted with massive catapults and studded with rows and rows of iron cannons shaped like dragons’ heads, mouths curled in vicious sneers, waiting to spit fire and iron.

“These ships are stupidly tall,” she said.

“That’s because they’re designed to capture walled cities,” Nezha said. “Naval warfare is a matter of collecting cities like gambling chips. Those structures are meant to overtop walls along major waterways. Strategically speaking, most provinces are just empty space. The major cities control economic and political levers, the transportation and communications routes. So control the city and you’ve controlled the province.”

“I know that,” she said, slightly irked that he thought she needed a primer on basic invasion strategy. “I’m just concerned about their maneuverability. How much agility do you get in shallow waters?”

“Not much, but that doesn’t matter. Most naval warfare is still decided by hand-to-hand combat,” Nezha explained. “The tower ships take down the walls. We go in and pick up the pieces.”

Ramsa piped up from behind them, “I don’t understand why we couldn’t have taken this beautiful, giant fleet and blasted the shit out of the Autumn Palace.”

“Because we were attempting a bloodless coup,” Nezha said. “Father wanted to avoid a war if he could. Sending a massive fleet up to Lusan might have given the wrong message.”

“So what I’m hearing is that it’s all Rin’s fault,” said Ramsa. “Classic.”

Nezha walked backward so that he could face them as he talked. He looked terribly smug as he gestured to the ships around them. “A few years ago we added crossbeams to increase structural integrity in the hulls. And we redesigned the rudders—they have more mobility now, so they can operate in a broader range of water depths . . .”

“And your rudder?” Kitay inquired. “Still plunging those depths?”

Nezha ignored him. “We’ve improved our anchors, too.”

“How so?” Rin asked, mostly because she could tell he wanted to brag.

“The teeth. They’re arranged circularly instead of in one direction. Means they hardly ever break.”

Rin found this very funny. “Does that happen often?”

“You’d be surprised,” Nezha said. “During the Second Poppy War we lost a crucial naval skirmish because the ship started drifting out to sea without its crew during a maelstrom. We’ve learned from that mistake.”

He continued to elucidate newer innovations as they walked, gesturing with the pride of a newborn parent. “We started building the hulls with the broadest beam aft—makes it easier to steer at slow speeds. The junks have sails divided into horizontal panels by bamboo slats that make them more aerodynamic.”

“You know a lot about ships,” Rin said.

“I spent my childhood next door to a shipyard. It’d be embarrassing if I didn’t.”

Rin stopped walking, letting the others pass her until she and Nezha stood alone. She lowered her voice. “Be honest with me. How long have you been preparing for this war?”

He didn’t miss a beat. Didn’t even blink. “As long I’ve been alive.”

So Nezha had spent his entire childhood readying himself to betray the Empire. So he had known, when he came to Sinegard, that one day he would lead a fleet against his classmates.

“You’ve been a traitor since birth,” she said.

“Depends on your perspective.”

“But I was fighting for the Militia until now. We could have been enemies.”

“I know.” Nezha beamed. “Aren’t you so glad we’re not?”

The Dragon Army absorbed the Cike into its ranks with impressive efficiency. A young woman named Officer Sola received them at the barracks. She couldn’t have been more than a few years older than Rin, and she wore the green armband that indicated she had graduated from Sinegard with a Strategy degree.

“You trained with Irjah?” Kitay asked.

Sola glanced at Kitay’s own faded armband. “What division?”

“Second. I was with him at Golyn Niis.”

“Ah.” Sola’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “How did he die?”

Skinned alive and hung over a city wall, Rin thought.

“With honor,” Kitay said.

“He’d be proud of you,” Sola said.

“Well, I’m quite sure he would have called us traitors.”

“Irjah cared about justice,” Sola said in a hard voice. “He would have been with us.”

Within the hour Sola had assigned them to bunks in the barracks, given them a walking tour of the sprawling base that occupied three mini islands and the canals in between, and outfitted them with new uniforms. These were made of warmer, sturdier material than any Militia suits Rin had ever seen. The cloth base came with a set of lamellar armor made up of overlapping leather and metal plates so confusing that Sola had to demonstrate in detail what went where.

Sola didn’t point them to any changing rooms, so Rin stripped down along with her men, pulled her new uniform on, and stretched her limbs out. She was amazed at the flexibility. The lamellar armor was far more sophisticated than the flimsy uniforms the Militia issued, and likely cost three times as much.

“We have better blacksmiths than they do up north.” Sola passed Rin a chest plate. “Our armor’s lighter. Deflects more.”

“What should we do with these?” Ramsa held up a bundle of his old clothing.

Sola wrinkled her nose. “Burn them.”

The barracks and armory were cleaner, larger, and better stocked than any Militia facility Rin had ever visited. Kitay rifled through the gleaming rows of swords and knives until he found a set that suited him; the rest of them turned in their weapons to the blacksmith for refurbishment.

“I was told you had a detonations expert in your squadron.” Sola pulled the curtain aside to reveal the full store of the First Platoon’s explosives. Stacks upon stacks of missiles, rockets, and fire lances were arranged neatly in pyramidal piles waiting in the cool darkness to be loaded onto warships.

Ramsa made a highly suggestive whimpering noise. He lifted a missile shaped like a dragon head out from the pile and turned it over in his hands. “Is this what I think it is?”

Sola nodded. “It’s a two-stage rocket. The main vessel contains the booster. The rest detonates in midair. Gives it a little extra thrust.”

“How’d you manage these?” Ramsa demanded. “I’ve been working on this for at least two years.”

“And we’ve been working on it for five.”

Ramsa pointed at another pile of explosives. “What do those do?”

“They’re fin-mounted winged rockets.” Sola sounded amused. “The fins are for guided flight. We see better accuracy with these than the two-stage rockets.”

Someone with a bad sense of humor had carved the head to look like a fish with a droopy expression. Ramsa ran his fingers along the fins. “What kind of range do you get on these?”

“That depends,” said Sola. “On a clear day, sixty miles. Rainy days, as far as you can get them.”

Ramsa weighed the missile in his hands, looking so delighted that Rin suspected he might have gotten an erection. “Oh, we are going to have fun with these.”

“Are you hungry?” Nezha knocked on the doorframe.

Rin glanced up. She was alone in the barracks. Kitay had left to find the Dragon Province’s archives, and the other Cike members’ first priority had been finding the mess hall.

“Not very,” she said.

“Good. Do you want to see something cool?”

“Is it another ship?” she asked.

“Yes. But you’ll really like this one. Nice uniform, by the way.”

She smacked his arm. “Eyes up, General.”

“I’m just saying the colors look good on you. You make a good Dragon.”

Rin heard the shipyard long before they reached it. Over the cacophonous din of screeches and hammering, they had to yell to hear each other. She had assumed what she saw in the harbor was a completed fleet, but apparently several more vessels were still under construction.

Her eyes landed immediately on the ship at the far end. It was still in its initial stages; only a skeleton thus far. But if she imagined the structure to be built around it, it was titanic. It seemed impossible that a thing like that could ever stay afloat, let alone get past the channel through the Red Cliffs.

“We’re going to board that to the capital?” she asked.

“That one isn’t ready. It keeps getting updated with plans from the west. It’s Jinzha’s pet project; he’s a perfectionist about stuff like this.”

“A pet project,” she repeated. “Your siblings just build massive boats for their pet projects.”

Nezha shook his head. “It was supposed to be finished in time for the northern campaign, whenever that gets off the ground. Now it’ll be much longer. They’ve changed the design to a defensive warship. It’s meant to guard Arlong now, not to lead the fleet.”

“Why is it behind schedule?”

“Fire broke out in the shipyard overnight. Some idiot on watch kicked his lamp over. Set construction back by months. They had to import the timber from the Dog Province. Father had to get pretty creative with that—it’s hard to ship in massive amounts of lumber and hide the fact that you’re building a fleet. Took a few weeks of dealing with Moag’s smugglers.”

Rin could see blackened edges on some of the skeleton’s outer boards. But the rest had been replaced with new timber, smoothed to a shine.

“The whole thing made a big stir in the city,” Nezha said. “Some people kept saying it was a sign from the gods that the rebellion would fail.”

“And Vaisra?”

“Father took it as a sign that he should go out and get himself a Speerly.”

Instead of taking a river sampan back to the military barracks, Nezha led her down the stairs to the base of the pier, where Rin could still hear the noise of the shipyard over the water rushing gently against the posts that kept the pier up. At first she thought they had walked into a dead end, until Nezha stepped from the glassy sand and right onto the river.

“What the hell?”

After a second she realized he was standing not on the water, but rather on a large circular flap that almost matched the river’s greenish-blue hue.

“Lily pads,” Nezha said before she could ask. Arms spread for balance, he shifted his weight just so as the waves lifted the lily pad under his feet.

“Show-off,” Rin said.

“You’ve never seen these before?”

“Yes, but only in wall scrolls.” She grimaced at the pads. Her balance wasn’t half as good as Nezha’s, and she wasn’t keen to fall into the river. “I didn’t know they grew so large.”

“They don’t usually. These will only last a month or two before they sink. They grow naturally in the freshwater ponds up the mountain, but our botanists found a way to militarize them. You’ll find them up and down the harbor. The better sailors don’t need rowboats to get to their ships; they can just run across the lily pads.”

“Calm down,” she said. “They’re just stepping stones.”

“They’re militarized lily pads. Isn’t that great?”

“I think you just like using the word ‘militarized.’”

Nezha opened his mouth to respond, but a voice from atop the pier cut him off.

“Had enough of playing tour guide?”

A man descended the steps toward them. He wore a blue soldier’s uniform, and the black stripes on his left arm marked him as a general.

Nezha hastily hopped off the lily pads onto the wet sand and sank to one knee. “Brother. Good to see you again.”

Rin realized in retrospect she should have knelt as well, but she was too busy staring at Nezha’s brother. Yin Jinzha. She had seen him once, briefly, three years back at her first Summer Festival in Sinegard. Back then she’d thought that Jinzha and Nezha could have been twins, but upon closer inspection, their similarities were not really so pronounced. Jinzha was taller, more thickly built, and he carried himself with the air of a firstborn—a son who knew he was heir to his father’s entire estate, while his younger siblings would be left to a fate of squabbling over the refuse.

“I heard you screwed up at the Autumn Palace.” Jinzha’s voice was deeper than Nezha’s. More arrogant, if that was possible. It sounded oddly familiar to Rin, but she couldn’t quite place it. “What happened?”

Nezha rose to his feet. “Hasn’t Captain Eriden briefed you?”

“Eriden didn’t see everything. Until Father recovers I’m the senior ranking general in Arlong, and I’d like to know the details.”

It’s Altan, Rin realized with a jolt. Jinzha spoke with a clipped, military precision that reminded her of Altan at his best. This was a man used to competence and immediate obedience.

“I don’t have anything to add,” Nezha said. “I was on the Seagrim.”

Jinzha’s lip curled. “Out of harm’s way. Typical.”

Rin expected Nezha to lash out at that, but he swallowed the barb with a nod. “How is Father?”

“Better now than last night. He’d been straining himself. Our physician didn’t understand how he was still alive at first.”

“But Father told me it was just a flesh wound.”

“Did you even get a good look at him? That blade went nearly all the way through his shoulder bone. He’s been lying to everyone. It’s a wonder he’s even conscious.”

“Has he asked for me?” Nezha asked.

“Why would he?” Jinzha gave his brother a patronizing look. “I’ll let you know when you’re needed.”

“Yes, sir.” Nezha dipped his head and nodded. Rin watched this exchange, fascinated. She’d never seen anyone who could bully Nezha the way Nezha tended to bully everyone else.

“You’re the Speerly.” Jinzha looked suddenly at Rin, as if he had just remembered she was there.

“Yes.” For some reason Rin’s voice came out strangled, girlish. She cleared her throat. “That’s me.”

“Go on, then,” Jinzha said. “Let’s see it.”

“What?”

“Show me what you can do,” Jinzha said very slowly, as if talking to a small child. “Make it big.”

Rin shot Nezha a confused look. “I don’t understand.”

“They say you can call fire,” Jinzha said.

“Well, yes—”

“How much? How hot? To what degree? Does it come from your body, or can you summon it from other places? What does it take for you to trigger a volcano?” Jinzha spoke at such a terribly fast clip that Rin had trouble deciphering his curt Sinegardian accent. She hadn’t struggled with that in years.

She blinked, feeling rather stupid, and when she spoke she stumbled over her words. “I mean, it just happens—”

“‘It just happens,’” he mimicked. “What, like a sneeze? What help is that? Explain to me how to use you.”

“I’m not someone for you to use.”

“Fancy that. The soldier won’t take orders.”

“Rin’s had a long journey,” Nezha cut in hastily. “I’m sure she’d be happy to demonstrate for you in the morning, when she’s had some rest . . .”

“Soldiers get tired, that’s part of the job,” Jinzha said. “Come on, Speerly. Show us what you’ve got.”

Nezha placed a placating hand on Rin’s arm. “Jinzha, really . . .”

Jinzha made a noise of disgust. “You should hear the way Father talks about them. Speerlies this, Speerlies that. I told him he’d be better off launching an invasion from Arlong, but no, he thought he could win a bloodless coup if he just had you. Look how that worked out.”

“Rin’s stronger than you can imagine,” Nezha said.

“You know, if the Speerlies were so strong, you think they’d be less dead.” Jinzha’s lip curled. “Spent my whole childhood hearing about what a marvel your precious Altan was. Turns out he was just another dirt-skinned idiot who blew himself up for nothing.”

Rin’s vision flashed red. When she looked at Jinzha she didn’t see flesh but a charred stump, ashes peeling off what used to be a man—she wanted him dying, dead, hurting. She wanted him to scream.

“You want to see what I can do?” she asked. Her voice sounded very distant, as if someone were speaking at her from very far away.

“Rin . . .” Nezha cautioned.

“No, fuck off.” She shrugged his hand off her arm. “He wants to see what I can do.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Get back.”

She turned her palms out toward Jinzha. It took nothing to summon the anger. It was already there, waiting, like water bursting forth from a dam—I hate, I hate, I hate—

Nothing happened.

Jinzha raised his eyebrows.

Rin felt a twinge of pain in her temples. She touched her finger to her eyes.

The twinge blossomed into a searing bolt of agony. She saw an explosion of colors branded behind her eyelids: reds and yellows, flames flickering over a burning village, the silhouettes of people writhing inside, a great mushroom cloud over the longbow island in miniature.

For a moment she saw a character she couldn’t recognize, swimming into shape like a nest of snakes, lingering just in front of her eyes before it disappeared. She drifted in a moment between the world in her mind and the material world. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see . . .

She sagged to her knees. She felt Nezha’s arms hoisting her up, heard him shouting for someone to help. She struggled to open her eyes. Jinzha stood above her, staring down with open contempt.

“Father was right,” he said. “We should have tried to save the other one.”

Chaghan slammed the door shut behind him. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Rin’s fingers clenched and unclenched around the bedsheets while Chaghan unpacked his satchel beside her. Her voice trembled; she had spent the last half hour trying simply to breathe normally, but still her heart raced so furiously that she could barely hear her own thoughts. “I got careless. I was going to call the fire—just a bit, I didn’t really want to hurt him, and then—”

Chaghan grabbed her wrists. “Why are you shaking?”

She hadn’t realized she was. She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling, but thinking about it only made her shake harder.

“He won’t want me anymore,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“Vaisra.”

She was terrified. If she couldn’t call the fire, then Vaisra had recruited a Speerly for nothing. Without the fire, she might be tossed away.

She’d been trying since she regained consciousness to call the fire, but the result was always the same—a searing pain in her temples, a burst of color, and flashes of visions she never wanted to see again. She couldn’t tell what was wrong, only that the fire remained out of her reach, and without the fire she was nothing but useless.

Another tremor passed through her body.

“Just calm down,” Chaghan said. He set the satchel on the floor and knelt beside her. “Focus on me. Look in my eyes.”

She obeyed.

Chaghan’s eyes, pale and without pupils or irises, were normally unsettling. But up close they were strangely alluring, two shards of a snowy landscape embedded in his thin face that drew her in like some hypnotized prey.

“What is wrong with me?” she whispered.

“I don’t know. Why don’t we find out?” Chaghan rummaged in his satchel, closed his fist around something, and offered her a handful of bright blue powder.

She recognized the drug. It was the ground-up dust of some dried northern fungus. She’d ingested it once before with Chaghan in Khurdalain, when she’d taken him to the immaterial realm where Mai’rinnen Tearza was haunting her.

Chaghan wanted to accompany her to the inner recesses of her mind, the point where her soul ascended to the plane of the gods.

“Afraid?” he asked when she hesitated.

Not afraid. Ashamed. Rin didn’t want to bring Chaghan into her mind. She was scared of what he might see.

“Do you have to come?” she asked.

“You can’t do it alone. I’m all you’ve got. You have to trust me.”

“Will you promise to stop if I ask you to?

Chaghan scoffed, reached for her hand, and pressed her finger into the powder. “We’ll stop when I say we can stop.”

“Chaghan.”

He gave her a frank look. “Do you really have another option?”

The drug began to act almost from the moment it hit her tongue. Rin was surprised at how fast and clean the high was. Poppy seeds were so frustratingly slow, a gradual crawl into the realm of spirit that worked only if she concentrated, but this drug was like a kick through the door between this world and the next.

Chaghan grabbed her hand just before the infirmary faded from her vision. They departed the mortal plane in a swirl of colors. Then it was just the two of them in an expanse of black. Drifting. Searching.

Rin knew what she had to do. She honed in on her anger and created the link to the Phoenix that pulled their souls from the chasm of nothing toward the Pantheon. She could almost feel the Phoenix, the scorching heat of its divinity washing over her, could almost hear its malicious cackle—

Then something dimmed its presence, cut her off.

Something massive materialized before them. There was no way to describe it other than a giant word, slashed into empty space. Twelve strokes hung in the air, a great pictogram the shimmering hue of green-blue snakeskin, glinting in the unnatural brightness like freshly spilled blood.

“That’s impossible,” Chaghan said. “She shouldn’t be able to do this.”

The pictogram looked both entirely familiar and entirely foreign. Rin couldn’t read it, though it had to be written in the Nikara script. It came close to resembling several characters she knew but deviated from all of them in significant ways.

This was something ancient, then. Something old; something that predated the Red Emperor. “What is this?”

“What does it look like?” Chaghan reached out an incorporeal hand as if to touch it, then hastily drew it back. “This is a Seal.”

A Seal? The term sounded oddly familiar. Rin remembered fragments of a battle. A white-haired man floating in the air, lightning swirling around the tip of his staff, opening a void to a realm of things not mortal, things that didn’t belong in their world.

You’re Sealed.

Not anymore.

“Like the Gatekeeper?” she asked.

“The Gatekeeper was Sealed?” Chaghan sounded astonished. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I had no idea!”

“But that would explain so much! That’s why he’s been lost, why he doesn’t remember—”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Seal blocks your access to the world of spirit,” Chaghan explained. “The Vipress left her venom inside you. That’s what it’s made of. It will keep you from accessing the Pantheon. And over time it will grow stronger and stronger, eating away at your mind until you lose even your memories associated with the Phoenix. It’ll make you a shell of yourself.”

“Please tell me you can get rid of it.”

“I can try. You’ll have to take me inside.”

“Inside?”

“The Seal is also a gateway. Look.” Chaghan pointed into the heart of the character, where the glimmering snake blood formed a swirling circle. When Rin focused on it, it did indeed seem to call to her, drawing her into some unknown dimension beyond. “Go inside. I’m betting that’s where Daji’s left the venom. It exists here in the form of memory. Daji’s power dwells in desire; she’s conjured the things that you want the most to prevent you from calling the fire.”

“Venom. Memory. Desire.” Very little of this was making sense to Rin. “Look—just tell me whatever the fuck I’m supposed to do with it.”

“You destroy it however you can.”

“Destroy what?”

“I think you’ll know when you see it.”

Rin didn’t have to ask how to pass the gate. It pulled her in as soon as she approached it. The Seal seemed to fold in over them, growing larger and larger until it enveloped them. Swirls of blood drifted around her, undulating, as if trying to decide what shape to take, what illusion to create.

“She’ll show you the future you want,” Chaghan said.

But Rin didn’t see how that could possibly work for her, because her greatest desires didn’t exist in the future. They were all in the past. She wanted the last five years back. She wanted lazy days on the Academy campus. She wanted lackadaisical strolls in Jiang’s garden, she wanted summer vacations at Kitay’s estate, she wanted, she wanted . . .

She was on the sands of the Isle of Speer again—vibrant, beautiful Speer, lush and vivid like she had never seen it before. And there Altan was, healthy and whole, smiling like she had never really seen him smile.

“Hello,” he said. “Are you ready to come home?”

“Kill him,” Chaghan said urgently.

But hadn’t she already? At Khurdalain she’d fought a beast with Altan’s face, and she’d killed him then. Then at the research facility she’d let him walk out on the pier, let him sacrifice himself to save her.

She’d already killed Altan, over and over, and he kept coming back.

How could she harm him now? He looked so happy. So free from pain. She knew so much more about him now, she knew what he had suffered, and she couldn’t touch him. Not like this.

Altan drew closer. “What are you doing out here? Come with me.”

She wanted to go with him more than anything. She didn’t even know where he would take her, only that he would be there. Oblivion. Some dark paradise.

Altan extended his hand toward her. “Come.”

She steeled herself. “Stop this,” she managed. “Chaghan, I can’t—stop it—take me back—”

“Surely you’re joking,” Chaghan said. “You can’t even do this?”

Altan took her fingers in his. “Let’s go.”

“Stop it!”

She wasn’t sure what she did but she felt a burst of energy, saw the Seal contort and writhe around Chaghan, like a predator sniffing out some new and interesting prey, and saw his mouth open in some soundless scream of agony.

Then they weren’t on Speer anymore.

This was nowhere she had ever seen.

They were somewhere high up on a mountain, cold and dark. A series of caves were carved into stone, all glowing with candle fire on the inside. And sitting on the ledge, shoulders touching, were two boys: one dark haired and one fair haired.

She was an outsider in this memory, but the moment she stepped closer her perspective shifted and she wasn’t the voyeur anymore but the subject. She saw Altan’s face up close, and she realized she was looking at him the way Chaghan once had.

Altan’s face was entirely too close to hers. She could make out every last terrible and wonderful detail: the scar running up from his right cheek, the clumsy way his hair had been tied up, the dark lids over his crimson eyes.

Altan was awful. Altan was beautiful. And as she looked into his eyes she realized the feeling that overcame her was not love; this was a total, paralyzing fear. This was the terror of a moth drawn to the flame.

She hadn’t thought that anyone else felt that way. It was such a familiar feeling that she almost cried.

“I could kill you,” said Altan, muttering the death threat like a love song, and when she-as-Chaghan struggled against him he pressed his body closer.

“So you could,” Chaghan said, and that was such a familiar voice, the coy, level voice. She’d always marveled at how Chaghan could speak so casually to Altan. But Chaghan hadn’t been joking, she realized, he’d been afraid; he had been constantly terrified every time he was around Altan. “So what?”

Altan’s fingers closed over Chaghan’s; too hot, too crushing, an attempt at human contact with absolute disregard for the object of his affection.

His lips brushed against Chaghan’s ear. She shuddered involuntarily; she thought he might bite her, move his mouth lower against her neck and rip out her arteries.

She realized that Chaghan felt this fear often.

She realized that Chaghan probably enjoyed it.

“Don’t,” Chaghan said.

She didn’t listen; she wanted to stay in this vision, had the sickening desire to watch it play out to its conclusion.

“That’s enough.”

A wave of darkness slammed down onto them, and when she opened her eyes she was back in the infirmary, sprawled on top of her bed. Chaghan sat bolt upright on the floor, eyes wide open, expression blank.

She grabbed him by the collar. “What was that?”

Chaghan stirred awake. His features settled into something like contempt. “Why don’t you ask yourself?”

“You hypocrite,” she said. “You’re just as obsessed with him—”

“Are you sure that wasn’t you?”

“Don’t lie to me!” she shrieked. “I know what I saw, I know what you were doing, I bet you only wanted to get in my mind because you wanted to see him from another angle—”

He flinched back.

She hadn’t expected him to flinch. He looked so small. So vulnerable.

Somehow, that made her angrier.

She clenched his collar tighter. “He’s dead. All right? Can’t you get that in your fucking head?”

“Rin—”

“He’s dead, he’s gone, and we can’t bring him back. And maybe he loved you, maybe he loved me, but that doesn’t fucking matter anymore, does it? He’s gone.”

She thought he might hit her then.

But he just leaned forward, shoulders hunched over his knees, and pressed his face into his hands. When he spoke he sounded like he was on the verge of tears. “I thought I could catch him.”

“What?”

“Sometimes before the dead pass on, they linger,” he whispered. “Especially your kind. Anger depends on resentment, and your dead exist in resentment. And I think he’s still out there, drifting between this world and the next, but each time I try all I get is fragments of memories, and as more time passes I can’t even remember the beautiful things, and I thought maybe—with the venom—”

“You don’t know how to fix me, do you?” she asked. “You never did.”

Chaghan didn’t answer.

She released his collar. “Get out.”

He packed up his satchel and left without a word. She almost called him back, but she couldn’t think of a single thing to say before he slammed the door.

Once Chaghan was gone, Rin shouted down the hallway until she got the attention of a physician, whom she berated until she obtained a sleeping draught in twice the recommended dosage. She swallowed that in two large gulps, crawled back onto her bed, and fell into the deepest sleep she’d had in a long time.

When she woke, the physician refused her another sleeping draught for another six hours. So she waited in fearful apprehension, anticipating a visit from Jinzha or Nezha or even Vaisra himself. She didn’t know what to expect, only that it couldn’t be anything good. Who had any use for a Speerly who couldn’t summon fire?

But her only visitor was Captain Eriden, who instructed her that she was to continue acting as if she were in full command of her abilities. She was still Vaisra’s trump card, Vaisra’s hidden weapon, and she was still to appear at his side, even if only as a psychological weapon.

He didn’t convey Vaisra’s disappointment. He didn’t have to. Vaisra’s absence stung more than anything else.

She chugged down the next sleeping draught they gave her. The sun had set by the time she woke again. She was terribly hungry. She stood up, unlocked the door, and walked down the hallway, barefoot and groggy, with the vague intention of demanding food from the first person she saw.

“Well, fuck you, too!”

Rin stopped walking.

The voice came from a door near the end of the hallway. “What was I supposed to do? Hang myself like the women of Lü? I bet you’d like that.”

Rin recognized that voice—shrill, petulant, and furious. She tiptoed down the hall and stood just beyond the door.

“The women of Lü preserved their dignity.” A male voice this time, much older and deeper.

“And who put my dignity in my cunt?”

Rin caught her breath. Venka. It had to be.

“Would you prefer I were a lifeless corpse?” Venka screamed. “Would you prefer my spine were broken, my body crushed, just so long as nothing had gone between my legs?”

The male voice again. “I wish you had never been taken. You know that.”

“You’re not answering the question.” A choked noise. Was Venka crying? “Look at me, Father. Look at me.”

Venka’s father said something in response, too softly for Rin to hear. A moment later the door slammed open. Rin ducked around the corner and froze until she heard the footsteps recede down the hall in the opposite direction.

She exhaled in relief. She considered for a moment, then walked toward the door. It was open, hanging slightly ajar. She placed her fingertips on the wooden panel and pushed.

It was Venka. She had shorn her hair off completely—and clearly some time ago, because it was starting to grow back in little dark patches. But her face was the same—ridiculously pretty, all sharp angles and piercing eyes.

“What the hell do you want?” Venka demanded. “Can I help you?”

“You were being loud,” Rin said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. Next time my father disowns me, I’ll keep it down.”

“You were disowned?”

“Well. Probably not. It’s not like he’s got other heirs to spare.” Venka’s eyes were red around the rims. “I wish he would, it’s better than him trying to tell me what to do with my own body. When I was pregnant—”

“You’re pregnant?”

“Was.” Venka scowled. “No thanks to that fucking doctor. He kept saying that fucking cunt Saikhara didn’t permit abortions.”

“Saikhara?”

“Nezha’s mother. She’s got some funny ideas about religion. Grew up in Hesperia, did you know that? She worships their stupid fucking Maker. She doesn’t just pretend for diplomatic reasons, she actually believes in that shit. And she runs around obeying everything he wrote in some little book, which apparently includes forcing women to bear the children of their rapists.”

“So what did you do?”

Venka’s throat pulsed. “Got creative.”

“Ah.”

They both stared at the floor for a minute. Venka broke the silence. “I mean, it only hurt a little bit. Not as bad as—you know.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I thought about when I did it. Kept thinking about their piggy little faces, and then it wasn’t difficult. And the Lady Saikhara can go fuck herself.”

Rin sat down on the edge of her bed. It felt oddly good to be around Venka—angry, impatient, abrasive Venka. Venka gave voice to the raw anger that everyone else seemed to have patched over, and for that Rin was grateful.

“How are your arms?” she asked. Last time she’d seen Venka her arms were swathed in so many bandages that Rin wasn’t sure if she’d lost use of them altogether. But her bandages were gone now, and her arms weren’t dangling uselessly by her sides.

Venka flexed her fingers. “Right one’s healed. Left one won’t, ever. It was bent all funny, and I can’t move three fingers on my left hand.”

“Can you still shoot?”

“Works just as well as long as I can hold a bow. They had a glove designed for me. Keeps the three fingers bent back so I don’t have to. I’d be just fine on the field with a little practice. Not like anyone believes me.” Venka shifted in her bed. “But what are you doing here? Did Nezha win you over with his pretty words?”

Rin shifted. “Something like that.”

Venka was looking at her with something that might have been jealousy. “So you’re still a soldier. Lucky you.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Rin said.

“Why not?”

For a moment Rin considered telling Venka everything—about the Vipress, about the Seal, about what she had seen with Chaghan. But Venka didn’t have the patience for details. Venka didn’t care that much.

“I just—I can’t do what I did anymore. Not like that.” She hugged her chest with her arms. “I don’t think I’ll ever do that again.”

Venka pointed to her eyes. “Is that what you’ve been crying about?”

“No—I just . . .” Rin took a shaky breath. “I don’t know if I’m useful anymore.”

Venka rolled her eyes. “Well, you can still hold a sword, can’t you?”

Chapter 12

In the following week, three more provinces announced their independence from the Empire.

As Nezha predicted, the southern Warlords capitulated first. After all, the south had no reason to stay loyal to the Empire or Daji. The Third Poppy War had hit them the hardest. Their refugees were starving, their bandit epidemic had exploded, and the attack at the Autumn Palace had destroyed any chance that they might win concessions or promises of aid at the Lusan summit.

The southern Warlords notified Arlong of their intentions to secede through breathless delegates traveling over land if they were close enough, and by messenger pigeon if they weren’t. Days later the Warlords themselves arrived at Arlong’s gates.

“Rooster, Monkey, and Boar.” Nezha counted the provinces off as they watched Eriden’s guards escort the portly Boar Warlord into the palace. “Not bad.”

“That puts us at four provinces to eight,” Rin said. “Not incredible odds.”

“Five to seven. And they’re good generals.” That was true. None of the southern Warlords had been born into their ranks; they’d all assumed them in the bloodbaths of the Second and Third Poppy Wars. “And Tsolin will come through.”

“How are you so sure?”

“Tsolin knows how to pick sides. He’ll show up eventually. Cheer up, this is about as good as we expected.”

Rin had imagined that once the four-province alliance solidified, they would march on the north immediately. But politics quickly crushed her hopes for rapid action. The southern Warlords had not brought their armies with them to Arlong. Their military forces remained in their respective capitals, hedging their bets, watching before joining the fray. The south was playing a waiting game. By seceding they had insulated themselves from Vaisra’s ire, but so long as they didn’t commit troops against the Empire, there was still the chance that Daji would welcome them back with open arms, all sins forgiven.

Days passed. The order to ship out didn’t come. The four-province alliance spent hours and hours debating strategy in an endless series of war councils. Rin, Nezha, and Kitay were all present at these; Nezha because he was a general, Kitay because he, in a bizarre turn of events, was now considered a competent strategist if not an especially well-liked one, and Rin purely because Vaisra wanted her there.

She suspected her purpose was to intimidate, to give some reassurance that if the island-destroying Speerly was alive and well in Arlong, then this war could not be so difficult to win.

She tried her best to act as if that weren’t a lie.

“We need cross-division squadrons, or this alliance is just a suicide pact.” General Hu, Vaisra’s senior strategist, had long ago given up on masking his frustration. “The Republican Army has to act as a cohesive whole. The men can’t think they’re still squadrons of their old province.”

“I’m not putting my men under the command of soldiers I’ve never met,” said the Boar Warlord. Rin detested Cao Charouk; he seemed to do nothing but complain so fiercely about everything Vaisra’s staff suggested that often she wondered why he’d come to Arlong at all. “And those squads won’t function. You’re asking men who have never met to fight together. They don’t know the same command signals, they don’t use the same codes, and they don’t have time to learn.”

“Well, you lot don’t seem keen on attacking the north anytime soon, so I imagine they’ll have months at the least,” Kitay muttered.

Nezha made a choking noise that sounded like a laugh.

Charouk looked as if he would very much like to skewer Kitay on a flagpole if given the chance.

“We can’t beat Daji fighting as four separate armies,” General Hu said quickly. “Our scouts report she’s assembling a coalition in the north as we speak.”

“Doesn’t matter if they don’t have a fleet,” said the Monkey Warlord, Liu Gurubai. He was the most cooperative among the southern Warlords; sharp-tongued and clever-eyed, he spent most meetings stroking his thick, dark whiskers while he played both sides at the table.

If they were dealing only with Gurubai, Rin thought, they might have moved north by now. The Monkey Warlord was cautious, but he at least responded to reason. The Boar and Rooster Warlords, however, seemed determined to hunker down in Arlong behind Vaisra’s army. Gong Takha had passed the last few days sitting silent and sullen at the table while Charouk continuously blustered his suspicion of everyone else in the room.

“But they will. Daji is now commissioning ships from civilian centers for a restored Imperial Navy. They’re converting grain transport ships into war galleys, and they’ve constructed naval yards at multiple sites in Tiger Province.” General Hu tapped on the map. “The longer we wait, the more time they have to prepare.”

“Who’s leading that fleet?” asked Gurubai.

“Chang En.”

“That’s surprising,” Charouk said. “Not Jun?”

“Jun didn’t want the job,” said General Hu.

Charouk raised an eyebrow. “That’d be a first.”

“It’s wise on his part,” said Vaisra. “No one wants to have to give Chang En orders. When his officers question him, they lose their heads.”

“That’s certainly a sign the Empire’s on the decline,” tutted Takha. “That man is wicked and wasteful.”

The Wolf Meat General was notorious for his brutality. When Chang En had staged his coup against the previous Horse Warlord, his troops had split skulls in half and hung strings of the severed heads across the capital walls.

“Or it just means, you know, that all the good generals are dead,” Jinzha drawled. He had been remarkably restrained in council so far, though Rin had been watching the contempt build on his face for hours.

“You would know,” said Charouk. “Did your apprenticeship with him, didn’t you?”

Jinzha bristled. “That was five years ago.”

“Not so long for such a short career.”

Jinzha opened his mouth to retort, but Vaisra cut him off with a raised hand. “If you’re going to accuse my eldest son of treachery—”

“No one is accusing Jinzha of anything,” said Charouk. “Again, Vaisra, we just don’t think Jinzha is the right choice to lead your fleet.”

“Your men couldn’t be in better hands. Jinzha studied warcraft at Sinegard, he commanded troops in the Third Poppy War—”

“As did we all,” said Gurubai. “Why not give one of our generals the job? Or why not one of us?”

“Because you three are too important to spare.”

Even Rin couldn’t help but cringe at that naked flattery. The southern Warlords exchanged wry looks. Gurubai made a show of rolling his eyes.

“All right, then because the men of the Dragon Province are not prepared to fight under anyone else,” Vaisra said. “Believe it or not, I am trying to find the solution that best protects you.”

“And yet it’s our troops you want on the front lines,” said Charouk.

“Dragon Province is committing more troops than any of you, asshat,” Rin snapped. She couldn’t help it. She knew Vaisra had wanted her to simply observe, but she couldn’t stand watching this mess of passivity and petty infighting. The Warlords were acting like children, squabbling as if someone else would win their war for them if they only procrastinated long enough.

Everyone stared at her as if she’d suddenly grown wings. When Vaisra didn’t cut her off, she kept going. “It’s been three fucking days. Why the fuck are we arguing about division makeup? The Empire is weak now. We need to send a force up north now.”

“Then how about we just send you?” asked Takha. “You sank the longbow island, didn’t you?”

Rin didn’t miss a beat. “You want me to kill off half the country? My powers don’t discriminate.”

Takha looked to Vaisra. “What is she even doing here?”

“I’m the commander of the Cike,” Rin said. “And I’m standing right in front of you.”

“You’re a little girl with no command experience and hardly a year of combat under your belt,” Gurubai said. “Do not presume to tell us how to fight a war.”

“I won the last war. You wouldn’t even be standing here without me.”

Vaisra placed a hand on her shoulder. “Runin, hush.”

“But he—”

“Silence,” he said sternly. “This discussion is beyond you. Let the generals talk.”

Rin swallowed her protest.

The door creaked open. A palace aide poked his head in through the gap. “The Snake Warlord is here to see you, sir.”

“Let him in,” Vaisra said.

The aide stepped inside to hold the door open.

Ang Tsolin walked inside, unaccompanied and unarmed. Jinzha moved to his right to let Tsolin stand next to his father. Nezha shot Rin a smug look, as if to say I told you so.

Vaisra looked equally vindicated. “I’m glad to see you join us, Master.”

Tsolin scowled. “You didn’t have to sail through my fleet.”

“Going the other way would have taken longer.”

“They came for my family first.”

“I assume you had the foresight to extricate them in time.”

Tsolin folded his arms. “My wife and children will arrive tomorrow morning. I want them set up with your most secure accommodations. If I catch so much as a whiff of a spy in their quarters, I will turn over my entire fleet to the Empire’s use.”

Vaisra dipped his head. “Whatever you ask.”

“Good.” Tsolin bent forward to examine the maps. “These are all wrong.”

“How so?” Jinzha asked.

“The Horse Province hasn’t remained inactive. They’re gathering their troops to the Yinshan base.” Tsolin pointed to a spot just above Hare Province. “And Tiger Province is bringing their fleet toward the Autumn Palace. They’re closing off your attack routes. You don’t have much time.”

“Then tell me what I ought to do,” Vaisra said. Rin was amazed at how his tone could shift—once commanding, but now deferential and meek, a student seeking a teacher’s aid.

Tsolin gave him a wary look. “Good men are dead because of you. I hope you know.”

“Then they died for a good cause,” Vaisra said. “I suspect you know that, too.”

Tsolin didn’t answer. He simply sat down, pulled the maps toward him, and began to examine the attack lines with the weary, practiced air of a man who had spent his entire life fighting wars.

As the days dragged on, despite the northern offensive’s ongoing delay, Arlong itself continued to mobilize for war like a tightening spring. War preparations were integrated into almost every facet of civilian life. Steely-eyed children worked the furnaces at the armory and carried messages back and forth across the city. Their mothers produced immaculately stitched uniforms at an astonishing rate. In the mess hall, grandmothers stirred congee in giant vats while their grandchildren ferried bowls around to the soldiers.

Another week passed. The Warlords continued to shout at each other in the council room. Rin couldn’t bear the constant waiting, so she took out her adrenaline with Nezha.

Sparring was a welcome exercise. The skirmish at Lusan had made it abundantly clear to her that she had been relying far too much on calling the fire. Her reflexes had flagged, her muscles had atrophied, and her stamina was pathetic.

So at least once every day, she and Nezha picked up their weapons and hiked up to empty clearings far up on the cliffs. She lost herself in the sheer, mindless physicality of their bouts. When they were sparring, her mind couldn’t languish on any one thought for too long. She was too busy calculating angles, maneuvering steel on steel. The immediacy of the fight was its own kind of drug, one that could numb her to anything else she might accidentally feel.

Altan couldn’t torture her if she couldn’t think.

Blow by blow, bruise by bruise, she relearned the muscle memory that she had lost, and she relished it. Here she could channel the adrenaline and fear that kept her vibrating with anxiety on a daily basis.

The first few days left her wrecked and aching. The next few were better. She filled in her uniform. She lost her hollow, skeletal appearance. This was the only reason she was grateful for the council’s slow deliberation—it gave her time to become the soldier she used to be.

Nezha was not a lenient sparring partner, and she didn’t want him to be. The first time he held back out of fear of hurting her, she swept out a leg and knocked him to the ground.

He propped himself up on his stomach. “If you wanted to go for a tumble, you could have just asked.”

“Don’t be disgusting,” she said.

Once she stopped losing hand-to-hand bouts in under thirty seconds, they moved on to padded weapons.

“I don’t understand why you insist on using that thing,” he said after he disarmed her of her trident for the third time. “It’s clumsy as hell. Father’s been telling me to get you to switch to a sword.

She knew what Vaisra wanted. She was tired of that argument.

“Reach matters more than maneuverability.” She wedged her foot under the trident and kicked it up into her hands.

Nezha came at her from the right. “Reach?”

She parried. “When you summon fire, there’s no one who’s going to get close to you.”

He hung back. “Not to state the obvious, but you can’t really do that anymore.”

She scowled at him. “I’ll fix it.”

“Suppose you don’t?”

“Suppose you stop underestimating me?”

She didn’t want to tell him that she’d been trying. That every night she climbed up to this same clearing where no one would see her, took a dose of Chaghan’s stupid blue powder, approached the Seal, and tried to burn the ghost of Altan out of her mind.

It never worked. She could never bring herself to hurt him, not that wonderful version of Altan that she’d never known. When she tried to fight him, he grew angry. And then he reminded her why she’d always been terrified of him.

The worst part was that Altan seemed to be getting stronger every time. His eyes burned more vividly in the dark, his laughter rang louder, and several nights he’d nearly choked the breath from her before she got her senses back. It didn’t matter that he was only a vision. Her fear made him more present than anything else.

“Look alive.” Rin jabbed at Nezha’s side, hoping to catch him off guard, but he whipped his blade out and parried just in time.

They sparred for a few more seconds, but she was quickly losing heart. Her trident suddenly seemed twice as heavy in her arms; she felt like she was fighting at a third her normal speed. Her footwork was sloppy, without form or technique, and her swings grew increasingly haphazard and unguarded.

“It’s not the worst thing,” Nezha said. He batted a wild blow away from his head. “Aren’t you glad?”

She stiffened. “Why would I be glad?”

“I mean, I just thought . . .” He touched a hand to his temple. “Isn’t it at least nice to have your mind back to yourself?”

She slammed the hilt of the trident down into the ground. “You think I’d lost my mind?”

Nezha rapidly backtracked. “No, I mean, I thought—I saw how you were hurting. That looked like torture. I thought you might be a little relieved.”

“It’s not a relief to be useless,” she said.

She twirled the trident over her head, whipped it around to generate momentum. It wasn’t a staff—and she should know better than to wield it with staff techniques—but she was angry now, she wasn’t thinking, and her muscles settled into familiar but wrong patterns.

It showed. Nezha may as well have been sparring with a toddler. He sent the trident spinning out of her hands in seconds.

“I told you,” he said. “No flexibility.”

She snatched the trident up off the ground. “Still has longer reach than your sword.”

“So what happens if I get in close?” Nezha twisted his blade between the trident’s gaps and closed the distance between them. She tried to fend him off, but he was right—he was out of the trident’s reach.

He raised a dagger to her chin with his other hand. She kicked savagely at his shin. He buckled to the ground.

“Bitch,” he said.

“You deserved it.”

“Fuck you.” He rocked back and forth on the grass, clutching his leg. “Help me up.”

“Let’s take a break.” She dropped the trident and sat down on the grass beside him. Her lung capacity hadn’t returned. She was still tiring too quickly; she couldn’t last more than two hours sparring, much less a full day in the field.

Nezha hadn’t even broken a sweat. “You’re much better with a sword. Please tell me you know that.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“That thing is useless! It’s too heavy for you! But I’ve seen you with a sword, and—”

“I’ll get used to it.”

“I just think that you shouldn’t make life-or-death choices based on sentimentality.”

She glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He ripped a handful of grass from the ground. “Forget it.”

“No, say it.”

“Fine. You won’t trade because it’s his weapon, isn’t it?”

Rin’s stomach twisted. “That’s idiotic.”

“Oh, come on. You’re always talking about Altan like he was some great hero. But he wasn’t. I saw him at Khurdalain, and I saw the way he spoke to people—”

“And how did he speak to people?” she asked sharply.

“Like they were objects, and he owned them, and they didn’t matter to him apart from how they could serve.” His tone turned vicious. “Altan was a shitty person and a shittier commander, and he would have let me die, and you know that, and here you are, running around with his trident, babbling on about revenge for someone you should hate.”

The trident suddenly felt terribly heavy in Rin’s hands.

“That’s not fair.” She heard a faint buzzing in her ears. “He’s dead—You can’t—That’s not fair.”

“I know,” Nezha said softly. The anger had left him as quickly as it had come. He sounded exhausted. He sat, shoulders slouched, mindlessly shredding blades of grass with his fingers. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I know how much you cared about him.”

“I’m not talking about Altan,” she said. “Not with you. Not now. Not ever.”

“All right,” he said. He gave her a look that she didn’t understand, a look that might have been equal parts pity and disappointment, and that made her desperately uncomfortable. “All right.”

Three days later the council finally came to a joint decision. At least, Vaisra and Tsolin came up with a solution short of immediate military action, and then argued the others into submission.

“We’re going to starve them out,” Vaisra announced. “The south is the agricultural breadbasket of the Empire. If the northern provinces won’t secede, then we’ll simply stop feeding them.”

Takha balked. “You’re asking us to reduce our exports by at least a third.”

“So you’ll bleed income for a year or two,” said Vaisra. “And then your prices will jack up in the next year. The north is in no position to become agriculturally self-sufficient now. If you make this one-time sacrifice, that’s likely the end of tariffs, too. Beggars have no leverage.”

“What about the coastal routes?” Charouk asked.

Rin had to admit that was a fair point. The Western Murui and Golyn River weren’t the only rivers that crossed into the northern provinces. Those provinces could easily smuggle food up the coastline by sending merchants down in the guise of southerners to buy up food stores. They had more than enough silver.

“Moag will cover them,” said Vaisra.

Charouk looked amazed. “You’re trusting the Pirate Queen?”

“It’s in her best interest,” Vaisra said. “For every blockade runner’s ship she seizes, her fleet gets seventy percent of the profits. She’d be a fool to double-cross us.”

“The north has other grain supplies, though,” Gurubai pointed out. “Hare Province has arable land, for instance—”

“No, they don’t.” Jinzha looked smug. “Last year the Hare Province suffered a blight and ran out of seed grain. We sold them several boxes of high-yielding seed.”

“I remember,” said Tsolin. “If you were trying to curry favor, it didn’t work.”

Jinzha grinned nastily. “We weren’t. We sold them damaged seeds, which lulled them into consuming their emergency stores. If we cut off their external supply, a famine should hit in about six months.”

For once, the Warlords seemed impressed. Rin saw reluctant nods around the table.

Only Kitay looked unhappy.

“Six months?” he echoed. “I thought we were trying to move out in the next month.”

“They won’t have felt the blockade by then,” said Jinzha.

“It doesn’t matter! It’s only the threat of the blockade that matters, you don’t need them to actually starve—”

“Why not?” Jinzha asked.

Kitay looked horrified. “Because then you’d be punishing thousands of innocent people. And because that’s not what you told me when you asked me to do the figures—”

“It doesn’t matter what you were told,” Jinzha said. “Know your place.”

Kitay kept talking. “Why starve them slowly? Why wait at all? If we mount an offensive right now, we can end this war before winter sets in. Any later and we’ll be trapped up north when the rivers freeze.”

General Hu laughed. “The boy presumes to know how to fight a campaign better than we do.”

Kitay looked livid. “I actually read Sunzi, so yes.”

“You’re not the only Sinegard student at the table,” said General Hu.

“Sure, but I got in during an era when acceptance actually took brains, so your opinion doesn’t count.”

“Vaisra!” General Hu shouted. “Discipline this boy!”

“‘Discipline this boy,’” Kitay mimicked. “‘Shut up the only person who has a halfway viable strategy, because my ego can’t take the heat.’”

“Enough,” Vaisra said. “You’re out of line.”

“This plan is out of line,” Kitay retorted.

“You’re dismissed,” Vaisra said. “Stay out of sight until you’re sent for.”

For a brief, terrifying moment Rin thought Kitay might start mocking Vaisra, too, but he just threw his papers down onto the table, knocking over inkwells, and stalked toward the door.

“Keep throwing fits like that and Father won’t have you at his councils anymore,” Nezha said.

He and Rin had both followed Kitay out, which Rin thought was a rather dangerous move on Nezha’s part, but Kitay was too angry to be grateful for the gesture.

“Keep ignoring me and we won’t have a palace to hold councils in,” Kitay snapped. “A blockade? A fucking blockade?”

“It’s our best option for now,” Nezha said. “We don’t have the military capability to sail north alone, but we could just wait them out.”

“But that could take years!” Kitay shouted. “And what happens in the meantime? You just let people die?”

“Threats have to be credible to work,” Nezha said.

Kitay shot him a disdainful look. “You try dealing with a country with a famine crisis, then. You don’t unite a country by starving innocent people to death.”

“They’re not going to starve—”

“No? They’re going to eat wood bark? Leaves? Cow dung? I can think of a million strategies better than murder.”

“Try being diplomatic, then,” Nezha snapped. “You can’t disrespect the old guard.”

“Why not? The old guard has no clue what they’re doing!” Kitay shouted. “They got their positions because they’re good at factional maneuvering! They graduated from Sinegard, sure, but that was when the entire curriculum was just emergency basic training. They don’t have a thorough grounding in military science or technology, and they’ve never bothered to learn, because they know they’ll never lose their jobs!”

“I think you’re underestimating some rather qualified men,” Nezha said drily.

“No, your father is in a double bind,” Kitay said. “No, wait, I’ve got it, here’s what it is—the men he can trust aren’t competent, but the men who are competent, he must keep on a taut leash, because they might calculate to defect.”

“So what, he trusts you instead?”

“I’m the only one who knows what I’m doing.”

“And you basically only joined up yesterday, so can you not act so startled that my father trusts you less than men who have served him for decades?”

Kitay stormed off, muttering under his breath. Rin suspected they wouldn’t see him emerge from the library for days.

“Asshole,” Nezha grumbled once Kitay was out of earshot.

“Don’t look at me,” Rin said. “I’m on his side.”

She didn’t care so much about the blockade. If the northern provinces were holding out, then starvation served them right. But she couldn’t bear the idea that they were about to kick a hornet’s nest—because then their only strategy would be to wait, hide, and hope the hornets didn’t sting first.

She couldn’t stand the uncertainty. She wanted to be on the attack.

“Innocent people aren’t going to die,” Nezha insisted, though he sounded more like he was trying to convince himself. “They’ll surrender before it gets that bad. They’ll have to.”

“And if they don’t?” she asked. “Then we attack?”

“We attack, or they starve,” Nezha said. “Win-win.”

Arlong’s military operations turned inward. The army stopped preparing ships to sail out and focused on building up defense structures to make Arlong completely invulnerable to a Militia invasion.

A defensive war was starting to seem more and more likely. If the Republic didn’t launch their northern assault now, then they’d be stuck at home until the next spring. They were more than halfway into autumn, and Rin remembered how vicious the Sinegardian winters were. As the days became colder, it would get harder to boil water and prepare hot food. Disease and frostbite would spread quickly through the camps. The troops would be miserable.

But the south would remain warm, hospitable, and ripe for the picking. The longer they waited, the more likely it was the Militia would sail downriver toward Arlong.

Rin didn’t want to fight a defensive battle. Every great treatise on military strategy agreed that defensive battles were a nightmare. And Arlong, impenetrable as it was, would still take a heavy beating from the combined forces of the north. Surely Vaisra knew that, too; he was too competent to believe otherwise. But in meeting after meeting, he chastised Kitay for speaking up, appeased the Warlords, and did nothing close to inciting the alliance to action.

Rin was beginning to think that even independent action by Dragon Province would be better than nothing. But the orders did not come.

“Father’s hands are tied,” said Nezha, again and again.

Kitay remained holed up in the library, drawing up war plans that would never be used with increasing frustration.

“I knew joining up with you would be treason,” he raged at Nezha. “I didn’t think it would be suicide.”

“The Warlords will come around,” Nezha said.

“Fat chance. Charouk’s a lazy pig who wants to hide behind Republican swords, Takha doesn’t have the spine to do anything but hide behind Charouk, and Gurubai might be the smartest of the lot, but he’s not sticking his neck out if the other two won’t.”

There has to be something else, Rin thought. Something we don’t know about. There was no way Vaisra would just sit back and let winter come without taking the initiative. What was he waiting for?

For lack of better options, she put her blind faith in Vaisra. She sucked it up when her men asked her about the delay. She closed her ears to the rumors that Vaisra was considering a peace agreement with the Empress. She realized she couldn’t influence policy, so she poured her focus into the only things she could control.

She sparred more bouts with Nezha. She stopped wielding her trident like a staff. She became familiar with the generals and lieutenants of the Republican Army. She did her best to integrate the Cike into the Dragon Province’s military ecosystem, though both Baji and Ramsa rankled at the strict ban on alcohol. She learned the Republican Army’s command codes, communications channels, and amphibious attack formations. She prepared herself for war, whenever it came.

Until the day came when gongs sounded frantically across the harbor, and messengers ran up the docks, and all of Arlong was alight with the news that ships were sailing into the Dragon Province. Great white ships from the west.

Then Rin understood what the stalling had been about.

Vaisra hadn’t been pulling back from the northern expedition after all.

He’d been waiting for backup.

Chapter 13

Rin squeezed through the crowd behind Nezha, who made liberal use of elbows to get them to the front of the harbor. The dock was already thronged with curious civilians and soldiers alike, all angling to get a good look at the Hesperian ship. But no one was looking out at the harbor. All heads were tilted to the sky.

Three whale-sized crafts sailed through the clouds above. Each had a long, rectangular basket strapped to its underbelly, with cerulean flags sewn along the sides. Rin blinked several times as she stared.

How could structures so massive possibly stay afloat?

They looked absurd and utterly unnatural, as if some god were moving them through the sky at will. But it couldn’t be the work of the gods. The Hesperians didn’t believe in the Pantheon.

Was this the work of their Maker? The possibility made Rin shiver. She’d always been taught that the Hesperian’s Holy Maker was a construct, a fiction to control an anxious population. The singular, anthropomorphized, all-powerful deity that the Hesperians believed in could not possibly explain the complexity of the universe. But if the Maker was real, then everything she knew about the sixty-four deities, about the Pantheon, was wrong.

What if her gods weren’t the only ones in the universe? What if a higher power did exist—one that only the Hesperians had access to? Was that why they were so infinitely more advanced?

The sky filled with a sound like the drone of a million bees, amplified a hundred times over as the flying crafts drew closer.

Rin saw people standing at the edges of the hanging baskets. They looked like little toys from the ground. The flying whales began approaching the harbor to land, looming larger and larger in the sky until their shadows enveloped everyone who stood below. The people inside the baskets waved their arms over their heads. Their mouths opened wide—they were shouting something, but no one could hear them over the noise.

Nezha dragged Rin backward by the wrist.

“Back away,” he shouted into her ear.

There followed a brief period of chaos while the city guard wrangled the crowd back from the landing area. One by one the flying crafts thudded to the ground. The entire harbor shook from the impact.

At last, the droning noise died away. The metal whales shriveled and slumped to the side as they deflated over the baskets. The air was silent.

Rin watched, waiting.

“Don’t let your eyes pop out of your head,” said Nezha. “They’re just foreigners.”

“Just foreigners to you. Exotic creatures to me.”

“They didn’t have missionaries down in Rooster Province?”

“Only on the coastlines.” Hesperian missionaries had been banned from the Empire after the Second Poppy War. Several dared to continue visiting cities peripheral to Sinegard’s control, but most kept their distance from rural places like Tikany. “All I’ve ever heard are stories.”

“Like what?”

“The Hesperians are giants. They’re covered in red fur. They boil infants and eat them in soup.”

“You know that never happened, right?”

“They’re pretty convinced of it in the south.”

Nezha chuckled. “Let’s let bygones be bygones. They’re coming now as friends.”

The Empire had a troubled history with the Republic of Hesperia. During the First Poppy War, the Hesperians had offered military and economic aid to the Federation of Mugen. Once the Mugenese had obliterated any notion of Nikara sovereignty, the Hesperians had populated the coastal regions with missionaries and religious schools, intent on wiping out the local superstitious religions.

For a short time, the Hesperian missionaries had even outlawed temple visits. If any shamanic cults still existed after the Red Emperor’s war on religion, the Hesperians drove them even further underground.

During the Second Poppy War, the Hesperians became the liberators. The Federation had committed too many atrocities for the Hesperians, who had always claimed that their occupation benefited the natives, to pretend neutrality was morally defensible. After Speer burned, the Hesperians sent their fleets to the Nariin Sea, joined forces with the Trifecta’s troops, pushed the Federation all the way back to their longbow island, and orchestrated a peace agreement with the newly reformed Nikara Empire in Sinegard.

Then the Trifecta seized dictatorial control of the country and threw the foreigners out by the ship. Whatever Hesperians remained were smugglers and missionaries, hiding in international ports like Ankhiluun and Khurdalain, preaching their word to anyone who bothered to entertain them.

When the Third Poppy War began, those last Hesperians had sailed away on rescue ships so fast that by the time Rin’s contingent had reached Khurdalain they might never have been there. As the war progressed, the Hesperians had been willful bystanders, watching aloof from across the great sea while Nikara citizens burned in their homes.

“They might have come a little earlier,” Rin quipped.

“There’s been a war ravishing the entire western continent for the past two decades,” said Nezha. “They’ve been a bit distracted.”

This was news to her. Until now, news of the western continent had been so utterly irrelevant to her it might not have existed. “Did they win?”

“You could say that. Millions are dead. Millions more are without home or country. But the Consortium states came out in power, so they consider that a victory. Although I don’t—”

Rin grabbed his arm. “They’re coming out.”

Doors had opened at the sides of each basket. One by one the Hesperians filed out onto the dock.

Rin recoiled at the sight of them.

Their skin was terribly pale—not the flawless porcelain-white shade that Sinegardians prized, but more like the tint of a freshly gutted fish. And their hair looked all the wrong colors—garish shades of copper, gold, and bronze, nothing like the rich black of Nikara hair. Everything about them—their coloring, their features, their proportions—simply seemed off.

They didn’t look like people; they looked like things out of horror stories. They might have been demon-possessed monsters conjured up for Nikara folk heroes to fight. And though Rin was too old for folktales, everything about these light-eyed creatures made her want to run.

“How’s your Hesperian?” Nezha asked.

“Rusty,” she admitted. “I hate that language.”

They had all been forced to study several years of diplomatic Hesperian at Sinegard. Rules of pronunciation were haphazard at best and its grammar system was so riddled with exceptions it might not exist at all.

None of Rin’s classmates had paid much attention to their Hesperian grammar lessons. They had all assumed that as the Federation was the primary threat, Mugini was more important to learn.

Rin supposed things would be very different now.

A column of Hesperian sailors, identical in their close-cropped hair and dark gray uniforms, walked out of the baskets and formed two neat lines in front of the crowd. Rin counted twenty of them.

She examined their faces but couldn’t tell one apart from the next. They all seemed to have the same lightly colored eyes, broad noses, and strong jaws. They were all men, and each held a strange-looking weapon across his chest. Rin couldn’t determine the weapon’s purpose. It looked like a series of tubes of different lengths, joined together near the back with something like a handle.

A final soldier emerged from the basket door. Rin assumed he was their general by his uniform, which bore multicolored ribbons on the left chest where the others’ were bare. He struck Rin immediately as dangerous. He stood at least half a head taller than Vaisra, he sported a chest as wide as Baji’s, and his weathered face was lined and intelligent.

Behind the general walked a row of hooded Hesperians clothed in gray cassocks.

“Who are they?” Rin asked Nezha. They couldn’t be soldiers; they wore no armor and held no weapons.

“The Gray Company,” he said. “Representatives of the Church of the Divine Architect.”

“They’re missionaries?”

“Missionaries who can speak for the central church. They’re highly trained and educated. Think of them like graduates from the Sinegard Academy of religion.”

“What, they went to priest school?”

“Sort of. They’re scientists, too. In their religion, the scientists and priests are one and the same.”

Rin was about to ask what that meant when a last figure emerged from the center basket. She was a woman, slender and petite, wearing a buttoned black coat with a high collar that covered her neck. She looked severe, alien, and elegant all at once. Her attire was certainly not Nikara, but her face was not Hesperian. She seemed oddly familiar.

“Hello.” Baji whistled behind Rin. “Who is that?”

“It’s Lady Yin Saikhara,” said Nezha.

“Is she married?” Baji asked.

Nezha shot him a disgusted look. “That’s my mother.”

That was why Rin recognized the woman’s face. She had met the Lady of Dragon Province once, years ago, on her first day at Sinegard. Lady Saikhara had taken Rin’s guardian Tutor Feyrik for a porter, and she had dismissed Rin entirely as southerner trash.

Perhaps the past four years had done wonders for Lady Saikhara’s attitude, but Rin was strongly inclined to dislike her.

Lady Saikhara paused before the crowd, eyes roving the harbor as if surveying her kingdom. Her gaze landed on Rin. Her eyes narrowed—in recognition, Rin thought; perhaps Saikhara remembered Rin as well—but then she grasped the Hesperian general’s arm and pointed, her face contorted into what looked like fear.

The general nodded and spoke an order. At once, all twenty Hesperian soldiers pointed their barrel tube weapons at Rin.

A hush fell over the crowd as the civilians hastily backed away.

Several cracks split the air. Rin dove to the ground by instinct. Eight holes dotted the dirt in front of her. She looked up.

The air smelled like smoke. Gray flumes unfurled from the tips of the barrel tubes.

“Oh, fuck,” Nezha muttered under his breath.

The general shouted something that Rin couldn’t understand, but she didn’t have to translate what he’d said. There was no way to interpret this as anything but a threat.

She had two default responses to threats. And she couldn’t run away, not in this crowd, so her only choice was to fight.

Two of the Hesperian soldiers came running toward her. She slammed her trident against the closest one’s shins. He doubled over, just briefly. She jammed an elbow into the side of his head, grabbed him by the shoulders, and barreled forward, using him as a human shield to deter further fire.

It worked until something landed over Rin’s shoulders. A fishing net. She flailed, trying to wriggle out, but it only tightened around her arms. Whoever held it yanked hard, knocking her off balance.

The Hesperian general loomed above her, his weapon pointed straight down at her face. Rin looked up the barrel. The smell of fire powder was so thick she nearly choked on it.

“Vaisra!” she shouted. “Help—”

Soldiers swarmed around her. Strong arms pinned her arms over her head; others grabbed her ankles, rendering her immobile. She heard the clank of steel next to her head. She twisted around and saw a wooden tray on the ground beside her, upon which lay a vast assortment of thin devices that looked like torture instruments.

She’d seen devices like that before.

Someone pulled her head back and jerked her mouth open. One of the Gray Company, a woman with skin like alabaster, knelt over her. She pressed something hard and metallic against Rin’s tongue.

Rin bit at her fingers.

The woman snatched her hand away.

Rin struggled harder. Miraculously, the grips on her shoulders loosened. She flailed out and upturned the tray, scattering the instruments across the ground. For a single, desperate moment, she thought she might break free.

Then the general slammed the butt of his weapon into her head and Rin’s vision exploded into stars that winked out into nothing.

“Oh, good,” said Nezha. “You’re awake.”

Rin found herself lying on a stone floor. She scrambled to her feet. She was unbound. Good. Her hand jumped for a weapon that wasn’t there, and when she couldn’t find her trident she curled her hands into fists. “What—”

“That was a misunderstanding.” Nezha grabbed her by the shoulders. “You’re safe, we’re alone. What happened out there was a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“They thought you were a threat. My mother told them to attack as soon as they reached land.”

Rin’s forehead throbbed. She touched her fingers to where she knew a massive bruise was forming. “Your mother is a real bitch, then.”

“She often is, yes. But you’re in no danger. Father is talking them down.”

“And if he can’t?”

“He will. They’re not idiots.” Nezha grabbed her hand. “Will you stop that?”

Rin had begun pacing back and forth in the small chamber like a caged animal, teeth chattering, rubbing her hands agitatedly up and down her arms. But she couldn’t stand still; her mind was racing in panic, if she stopped moving she would start to shake uncontrollably.

“Why would they think I was a threat?” she demanded.

“It’s, ah, a little complicated.” Nezha paused. “I guess the simplest way to put it is that they want to study you.”

“Study?”

“They know what you did to the longbow island. They know what you can do, and as the most powerful country on earth of course they’re going to investigate it. Their proposed treaty terms, I think, were that they’d get to examine you in exchange for military aid. Mother put it in their heads that you weren’t going to come quietly.”

“So what, Vaisra’s selling me for their aid?”

“It’s not like that. My mother . . .” Nezha continued talking, but Rin wasn’t listening. She scrutinized him, considering.

She had to get out of here. She had to rally the Cike and get them out of Arlong. Nezha was taller, heavier, and stronger than she was, but she could still take him—she’d go after his eyes and scars, gouge her fingernails into his skin and knee his balls repeatedly until he dropped his guard.

But she might still be trapped. The doors could be locked from the outside. And if she broke the door down, there could be—no, there certainly were guards outside. What about the window? She could tell from a glance they were on the second, maybe third story, but maybe she could scale down somehow, if she could manage to knock Nezha unconscious. She just needed a weapon—the chair legs might do, or a shard of porcelain.

She lunged for the flower vase.

“Don’t.” Nezha’s hand shot out and gripped her wrist. She struggled to break free. He twisted her arm painfully behind her back, forced her to her knees, and pressed a knee against the small of her back. “Come on, Rin. Don’t be stupid.”

“Don’t do this,” she gasped. “Nezha, please, I can’t stay here—”

“You’re not allowed to leave the room.”

“So now I’m a prisoner?”

“Rin, please—”

“Let me go!”

She tried to break free. His grip tightened. “You’re not in any danger.”

“So let me go!”

“You’ll derail negotiations that have been years in the making—”

“Negotiations?” she screeched. “You think I give a fuck about negotiations? They want to dissect me!”

“And Father won’t let that happen! You think he’s about to give you up? You think I’d let that happen? I’d die before I let anyone hurt you, Rin, calm down—”

That did nothing to calm her down. Every second she stood still felt like a vise tightening around her neck.

“My family has been planning this war for over a decade,” Nezha said. “My mother has been pursuing this diplomatic mission for years. She was educated in Hesperia; she has strong ties to the west. As soon as the third war was over, Father sent her overseas to solidify Hesperian military support.”

Rin barked out a laugh. “Well, then she cut a shitty deal.”

“We won’t take it. The Hesperians are greedy and malleable. They want resources only the Empire can offer. Father can talk them down. But we must not anger them. We need their weapons.” Nezha let go of her arms when it was clear she’d stopped struggling. “You’ve been in the councils. We won’t win this war without them.”

Rin twisted around to face him. “You want whatever those barrel things are.”

“They’re called arquebuses. They’re like hand cannons, except they’re lighter than crossbows, they can penetrate wooden panels, and they shoot for longer distance.”

“Oh, I’m sure Vaisra just wants crates and crates of them.”

He gave her a frank look. “We need anything we can get our hands on.”

“But suppose you win this war, and the Hesperians don’t want to leave,” she said. “Suppose it’s the First Poppy War all over again.”

“They have no interest in staying,” he said dismissively. “They’re done with that now. They’ve found their colonies too difficult to defend, and the war’s weakened them too much to commit the kind of ground resources they could before. All they want is trade rights and permission to dump missionaries wherever they want. At the end of this war we’ll make them leave our shores quickly enough.”

“And if they don’t want to go?”

“I expect we’ll find a way,” Nezha said. “Just as we have before. But at present, Father’s going to choose the lesser of two evils. And so should you.”

The doors opened. Captain Eriden walked inside.

“They’re ready for you,” he said.

“‘They’?” Rin echoed.

“The Dragon Warlord is entertaining the Hesperian delegates in the great hall. They’d like to speak to you.”

“No,” Rin said.

“You’ll be fine,” Nezha said. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

“We have very different ideas of what defines ‘stupid,’” she said.

“The Dragon Warlord would prefer not to be kept waiting.” Eriden motioned with a hand. Two of his guards strode forward and seized Rin by the arms. She managed a last, panicked glance over her shoulder at Nezha before they escorted her out the door.

The guards deposited Rin in the short walkway that led to the palace’s great hall and shut the doors behind her.

She stepped hesitantly forward. She saw the Hesperians sitting in gilded chairs around the center table. Jinzha sat at his father’s right hand. The southern Warlords had been relegated to the far end of the table, looking flustered and uncomfortable.

Rin could tell she’d walked into the middle of a heated argument. A thick tension crackled in the air, and all parties looked flustered, red-faced, and furious, as if they were about to come to blows.

She hung back in the hallway for a moment, concealed by the corner wall, and listened.

“The Consortium is still recovering from its own war,” the Hesperian general was saying. Rin struggled to make sense of his speech at first, but gradually the language returned to her. She felt like a student again, sitting in the back of Jima’s classroom, memorizing verb tenses. “We’re in no mood to speculate.”

“This isn’t speculation,” Vaisra said urgently. He spoke Hesperian like it was his native tongue. “We could take back this country in days, if you just—”

“Then do it yourselves,” the general said. “We’re here to do business, not alchemy. We are not interested in transforming frauds into kings.”

Vaisra sat back. “So you’re going to run my country like an experiment before you choose to intervene.”

“A necessary experiment. We didn’t come here to lend ships at your will, Vaisra. This is an investigation.”

“Into what?”

“Whether the Nikara are ready for civilization. We do not distribute Hesperian aid lightly. We made that mistake before. The Mugenese seemed even more ready for advancement than you are. They had no factional infighting, and their governance was more sophisticated by far. Look how that turned out.”

“If we’re underdeveloped, it’s because of years of foreign occupation,” Vaisra said. “That’s your fault, not ours.”

The general shrugged, indifferent. “Even so.”

Vaisra sounded exasperated. “Then what are you looking for?”

“Well, it would be cheating if we told you, wouldn’t it?” The Hesperian general gave a thin smile. “But all of this is a moot point. Our primary objective here is the Speerly. She has purportedly leveled an entire country. We’d like to know how she did it.”

“You can’t have the Speerly,” Vaisra said.

“Oh, I don’t think you get to decide.”

Rin strode into the room. “I’m right here.”

“Runin.” If Vaisra looked surprised, he quickly recovered. He stood up and gestured to the Hesperian general. “Please meet General Josephus Tarcquet.”

Stupid name, Rin thought. A garbled collection of syllables that she could hardly pronounce.

Tarcquet rose to his feet. “I believe we owe you an apology. Lady Saikhara had us rather convinced that we were dealing with something like a wild animal. We didn’t realize that you would be so . . . human.”

Rin blinked at him. Was that really supposed to be an apology?

“Does she understand what I’m saying?” Tarcquet asked Vaisra in choppy, ugly Nikara.

“I understand Hesperian,” Rin snapped. She deeply wished that she’d learned Hesperian curse words at Sinegard. She didn’t have the full vocabulary range to express what she wanted to say, but she had enough. “I’m just not keen on dialoguing with fools who want me dead.”

“Why are we even speaking to her?” Lady Saikhara burst out.

Her voice was high and brittle, as if she had just been crying. The pure venom in her glare startled Rin. This was more than contempt. This was a vicious, murderous hatred.

“She is an unholy abomination,” Saikhara snarled. “She is a mark against the Maker, and she ought to be dragged off to the Gray Towers as soon as possible.”

“We’re not dragging anyone off.” Vaisra sounded exasperated. “Runin, please, sit—”

“But you promised,” Saikhara hissed at him. “You said they’d find a way to fix him—”

Vaisra grabbed at his wife’s wrist. “Now is not the time.”

Saikhara jerked her hand free and slammed a fist down on the table. Her cup toppled over, spilling hot tea across the embroidered cloth. “You swore to me. You said you’d make this right, that if I brought them back they’d find a way to fix him, you promised—”

“Silence, woman.” Vaisra pointed to the door. “If you cannot calm yourself, then you will leave.”

Saikhara shot Rin a tight-lipped look of fury, muttered something under her breath, and stormed out of the room.

A long silence hung over her absence. Tarcquet looked somewhat amused. Vaisra leaned back in his chair, took a draught of tea, then sighed. “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She tends to be ill-tempered after travel.”

“She’s desperate for answers.” A woman in a gray cassock, the one who had stood over Rin at the dock, laid her hand on Vaisra’s. “We understand. We’d like to find a cure, too.”

Rin shot her a curious look. The woman’s Nikara sounded remarkably good—she could have been a native speaker if her tones weren’t so oddly flat. Her hair was the color of wheat, straight and slick, braided into a serpent-like coil that rested just over her shoulder. Gray eyes like castle walls. Pale skin like paper, so thin that blue veins were visible beneath. Rin had the oddest urge to touch it, just to see if it felt human.

“She’s a fascinating creature,” said the woman. “It is rare you meet someone possessed by Chaos who yet remains so lucid. None of our Hesperian madmen have been so good at fooling their observers.”

“I’m standing right in front of you,” Rin said.

“I’d like to get her in an isolation chamber,” the woman continued, as if Rin hadn’t spoken. “We’re close to developing instruments that can detect raw Chaos in sterile environments. If we could bring her back to the Gray Towers—”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Rin said.

General Tarcquet stroked the arquebus that lay in front of him. “You wouldn’t really have a choice, dear.”

The woman lifted a hand. “Wait, Josephus. The Divine Architect values free thought. Voluntary cooperation is a sign that reason and order yet prevail in the mind. Will the girl come willingly?”

Rin stared at the two of them in disbelief. Did Vaisra possibly believe that she would say yes?

“You could even keep her on campaign for the time being,” the woman said to Vaisra, as if they were discussing something no more pressing than dinner arrangements. “I would only require regular meetings, perhaps once a week. They would be minimally invasive.”

“Define ‘minimally,’” Vaisra said.

“I would only observe her, for the most part. I’d perhaps conduct a few experiments. Nothing that will affect her permanently, and certainly nothing that would affect her fighting ability. I’d just like to see how she reacts to various stimuli—”

A ringing noise grew louder and louder in Rin’s ears. Everyone’s voices became both slurred and magnified. The conversation proceeded, but she could decipher only fragments.

“—fascinating creature—”

“—prized soldier—”

“—tip the balance—”

She found herself swaying on her feet.

She saw in her mind’s eye a face she hadn’t let herself imagine for a long time. Dark, clever eyes. Narrow nose. Thin lips and a cruel, excited smile.

She saw Dr. Shiro.

She felt his hands moving over her, checking her restraints, making sure she couldn’t move an inch from the bed he’d strapped her down on. She felt his fingers feeling around in her mouth, counting her teeth, moving down past her jaw to her neck to locate her artery.

She felt his hands holding her down as he pushed a needle into her vein.

She felt panic, fear, and rage all at once and she wanted to burn but she couldn’t, and the heat and fire just bubbled up in her chest and built up inside her because the fucking Seal had gotten in the way, but the heat just kept building and Rin thought she might implode—

“Runin.” Vaisra’s voice cut through the fog.

She focused with difficulty on his face. “No,” she whispered. “No, I can’t—”

He got up from his seat. “This isn’t the same as the Mugenese lab.”

She backed away from him. “I don’t care, I can’t do this—”

“What are you debating?” demanded the Boar Warlord. “Hand her to them and be done with it.”

“Quiet, Charouk.” Vaisra drew Rin hastily into the corner of the room, far from where the Hesperians could hear. He lowered his voice. “They will force you either way. If you cooperate you will garner us sympathy.”

“You’re trading me for ships,” she said.

“No one is trading you,” he said. “I am asking you for a favor. Please, will you do this for me? You’re in no danger. You’re no monster, and they’ll discover that soon enough.”

And then she understood. The Hesperians wouldn’t find anything. They couldn’t, because Rin couldn’t call the fire anymore. They could run all the experiments they liked, but they wouldn’t find anything. Daji had ensured that there was nothing left to find.

“Runin, please,” Vaisra murmured. “We don’t have a choice.”

He was right about that. The Hesperians had made it clear that they would study her by force if necessary. She could try to fight, but she wouldn’t get very far.

Part of her wanted desperately to say no. To say fuck it, to take her chances and try her best to escape and run. Of course, they’d hunt her down, but she had the smallest chance of making it out alive.

But hers wasn’t the only life at stake.

The fate of the Empire hung in the balance. If she truly wanted the Empress dead, then Hesperian airships and arquebuses were the best way to get it done. The only way she could generate their goodwill was if she went willingly into their arms.

When you hear screaming, Vaisra had told her, run toward it.

She’d failed at Lusan. She couldn’t call the fire anymore. This might be the only way to atone for the colossal wrongs she’d committed. Her only chance to put things right.

Altan had died for liberation. She knew what he would say to her now.

Stop being so fucking selfish.

Rin steeled herself, took a breath, and nodded. “I’ll do it.”

“Thank you.” Relief washed over Vaisra’s face. He turned to the table. “She agrees.”

“One hour,” Rin said in her best Hesperian. “Once a week. No more. I’m free to go if I feel uncomfortable, and you don’t touch me without my express permission.”

General Tarcquet removed his hand from his arquebus. “Fair enough.”

The Hesperians looked far too pleased. Rin’s stomach twisted.

Oh, gods. What had she agreed to?

“Excellent.” The gray-eyed woman rose from her chair. “Come with me. We’ll begin now.”

The Hesperians had already occupied the entire block of buildings just west of the palace, furnished residences that Rin suspected Vaisra must have prepared long ago. Blue flags bearing an insignia that looked like the gears of a clock hung from the windows. The gray-eyed woman motioned for Rin to follow her into a small, windowless square room on the first floor of the center building.

“What do you call yourself?” asked the woman. “Fang Runin, they said?”

“Just Rin,” Rin muttered, glancing around the room. It was bare except for two long, narrow stone tables that had recently been dragged there, judging from the skid marks on the stone floor. One table was empty. The other was covered with an array of instruments, some made of steel and some of wood, few of which Rin recognized or could guess the function of.

The Hesperians been preparing this room since they got here.

A Hesperian soldier stood in the corner, arquebus slung over his shoulder. His eyes tracked Rin every time she moved. She made a face at him. He didn’t react.

“You may call me Sister Petra,” said the woman. “Why don’t you come over here?”

She spoke truly excellent Nikara. Rin would have been impressed, but something felt off. Petra’s sentences were perfectly smooth and fluent, perhaps more grammatically perfect than those of most native speakers, but her words came out sounding all wrong. The tones were just the slightest bit off, and she inflected everything with the same flat clip that made her sound utterly inhuman.

Petra picked a cup off the edge of the table and offered it to her. “Laudanum?”

Rin recoiled, surprised. “For what?”

“It might calm you down. I’ve been told you react badly to lab environments.” Petra pursed her lips. “I know opiates dampen the phenomena you manifest, but for a first observation that won’t matter. Today I’m interested only in baseline measurements.”

Rin eyed the cup, considering. The last thing she wanted was to be off her guard for a full hour with the Hesperians. But she knew she had no choice but to comply with whatever Petra asked of her. She could reasonably expect that they wouldn’t kill her. She had no control over the rest. The only thing she could control was her own discomfort.

She took the cup and emptied it.

“Excellent.” Petra gestured to the bed. “Up there, please.

Rin took a deep breath and sat down at the edge.

One hour. That was it. All she had to do was survive the next sixty minutes.

Petra began by taking an endless series of measurements. With a notched string she recorded Rin’s height, wingspan, and the length of her feet. She measured the circumference around Rin’s waist, wrists, ankles, and thighs. Then with a smaller string she took a series of smaller measurements that seemed utterly pointless. The width of Rin’s eyes. Their distance from her nose. The length of each one of her fingernails.

This went on forever. Rin managed not to flinch too hard from Petra’s touch. The laudanum was working well; a lead weight had settled comfortably in her bloodstream and kept her numb, torpid, and docile.

Petra wrapped the string around the base of Rin’s thumb. “Tell me about the first time you communed with, ah, this entity you claim to be your god. How would you describe the experience?”

Rin said nothing. She had to present her body for examination. That didn’t mean she had to entertain small talk.

Petra repeated her question. Again Rin kept silent.

“You should know,” Petra said as she put the tape measure away, “that verbal cooperation is a condition of our agreement.”

Rin gave her a wary look. “What do you want from me?”

“Only your honest responses. I am not solely interested in the stock of your body. I’m curious about the possibilities for the redemption of your soul.”

If Rin’s mind had been working any faster she would have managed some clever retort. Instead she rolled her eyes.

“You seem confident our religion is false,” Petra said.

“I know it’s false.” The laudanum had loosened Rin’s tongue, and she found herself spilling the first thoughts that came to her mind. “I’ve seen evidence of my gods.”

“Have you?”

“Yes, and I know that the universe is not the doing of a single man.”

“A single man? Is that what you think we believe?” Petra tilted her head. “What do you know about our theology?”

“That it’s stupid,” Rin said, which was the extent of what she’d ever been taught.

They’d studied Hesperian religion—Makerism, they called it—briefly at Sinegard, back when none of them thought the Hesperians would return to the Empire’s shores during their lifetime. None of them had taken their studies of Hesperian cultures seriously, not even the instructors. Makerism was only ever a footnote. A joke. Those foolish westerners.

Rin remembered idyllic walks down the mountainside with Jiang during the first year of her apprenticeship, when he’d made her research differences between eastern and western religions and hypothesize the reasons they existed. She remembered sinking hours into this question at the library. She’d discovered that the vast and varied religions of the Empire tended to be polytheistic, disordered, and irregular, lacking consistency even across villages. But the Hesperians liked to invest their worship in a single entity, typically represented as a man.

“Why do you think that is?” Rin had asked Jiang.

“Hubris,” he’d said. “They already like to think they are lords of the world. They’d like to think something in their own image created the universe.”

The question that Rin had never entertained, of course, was how the Hesperians had become so vastly technologically advanced if their approach to religion was so laughably wrong. Until now, it had never been relevant.

Petra plucked a round metal device about the size of her palm off the table and held it in front of Rin. She clicked a button at the side, and its lid popped off. “Do you know what this is?”

It was a clock of some sort. She recognized Hesperian numbers, twelve in a circle, with two needles moving slowly in rotation. But Nikara clocks, powered by dripping water, were installations that took up entire corners of rooms. This thing was so small it could have fit in her pocket.

“Is it a timepiece?”

“Very good,” Petra said. “Appreciate this design. See the intricate gears, perfectly shaped to form, that keep it ticking on its own. Now imagine that you found this on the ground. You don’t know what it is. You don’t know who put it there. What is your conclusion? Does it have a designer, or is it an accident of nature, like a rock?”

Rin’s mind moved sluggishly around Petra’s questions, but she knew the conclusion Petra wanted her to reach.

“There exists a creator,” she said after a pause.

“Very good,” Petra said again. “Now imagine the world as a clock. Consider the sea, the clouds, the skies, the stars, all working in perfect harmony to keep our world turning and breathing as it does. Think of the life cycles of forests and the animals that live in them. This is no accident. This could not have been forged through primordial chaos, as your theology tends to argue. This was deliberate creation by a greater entity, perfectly benevolent and rational.

“We call him our Divine Architect, or the Maker, as you know him. He seeks to create order and beauty. This isn’t mad reasoning. It is the simplest possible explanation for the beauty and intricacy of the natural world.”

Rin sat quietly, running those thoughts through her tired mind.

It did sound terribly attractive. She liked the thought that the natural world was fundamentally knowable and reducible to a set of objective principles imposed by a benevolent and rational deity. That was much neater and cleaner than what she knew of the sixty-four gods—chaotic creatures dreaming up an endless whirlpool of forces that created the subjective universe, where everything was constantly in flux and nothing was ever written. Easier to think that the natural world was a neat, objective, and static gift wrapped and delivered by an all-powerful architect.

There was only one gaping oversight.

“So why do things go badly?” Rin asked. “If this Maker set everything in motion, then—”

“Then why couldn’t the Maker prevent death?” Petra supplied. “Why do things go wrong if they were designed according to plan?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

Petra gave her a small smile. “Don’t look so surprised. That is the most common question of every new convert. Your answer is Chaos.”

“Chaos,” Rin repeated slowly. She’d heard Petra use this word at the council earlier. It was a Hesperian term; it had no Nikara equivalent. Despite herself, she asked, “What is Chaos?”

“It is the root of evil,” Petra said. “Our Divine Architect is not omnipotent. He is powerful, yes, but he leads a constant struggle to fashion order out of a universe tending inevitably toward a state of dissolution and disorder. We call that force Chaos. Chaos is the antithesis of order, the cruel force trying constantly to undo the Architect’s creations. Chaos is old age, disease, death, and war. Chaos manifests in the worst of mankind—evil, jealousy, greed, and treachery. It is our task to keep it at bay.”

Petra closed the timepiece and placed it back on the table. Her fingers hovered over the instruments, deliberating, and then selected a device with what looked like two earpieces and a flat circle attached to a metal cord.

“We don’t know how or when Chaos manifests,” she said. “But it tends to pop up more often in places like yours—undeveloped, uncivilized, and barbaric. And cases like yours are the worst outbreaks of individual Chaos that the Company has ever seen.”

“You mean shamanism,” Rin said.

Petra turned back to face her. “You understand why the Gray Company must investigate. Creatures like you pose a terrible threat to earthly order.”

She raised the flat circle up under Rin’s shirt to her chest. It was icy cold. Rin couldn’t help but flinch.

“Don’t be scared,” Petra said. “Don’t you realize I’m trying to help you?”

“I don’t understand,” Rin murmured, “why you would even keep me alive.”

“Fair question. Some think it would be easier simply to kill you. But then we would come no closer to understanding Chaos’s evil. And it would only find another avatar to wreak its destruction. So against the Gray Company’s better judgment, I am keeping you alive so that at last we may learn to fix it.”

“Fix it,” Rin repeated. “You think you can fix me.”

“I know I can fix you.”

There was a fanatic intensity to Petra’s expression that made Rin deeply uncomfortable. Her gray eyes gleamed a metallic silver when she spoke. “I’m the smartest scholar of the Gray Company in generations. I’ve been lobbying to come study the Nikara for decades. I’m going to figure out what is plaguing your country.”

She pressed the metal disc hard between Rin’s breasts. “And then I’m going to drive it out of you.”

At last the hour was over. Petra put her instruments back on the table and dismissed Rin from the examination room.

The last of the laudanum wore off just as Rin returned to the barracks. Every feeling that the drug had kept at bay—discomfort, anxiety, disgust, and utter terror—came flooding back to her all at once, a sickening rush so abrupt that it wrenched her to her knees.

She tried to get to the lavatory. She didn’t make it two steps before she lurched over and vomited.

She couldn’t help it. She hunched over the puddle of her sick and sobbed.

Petra’s touch, which had seemed so light, so noninvasive under the effect of laudanum, now felt like a dark stain, like insects burrowing their way under Rin’s skin no matter how hard she tried to claw them out. Her memories mixed together; confusing, indistinguishable. Petra’s hands became Shiro’s hands. Petra’s room became Shiro’s laboratory.

Worst of all was the violation, the fucking violation, and the sheer helplessness of knowing that her body was not hers and she had to sit still and take it, this time not because of any restraints, but due to the simple fact that she’d chosen to be there.

That was the only thing that kept her from packing her belongings and immediately leaving Arlong.

She needed to do this because she deserved this. This was, in some horrible way that made complete sense, atonement. She knew she was monstrous. She couldn’t keep denying that. This was self-flagellation for what she’d become.

It should have been you, Altan had said.

She should have been the one who died.

This came close.

After she had cried so hard that the pain in her chest had faded to a dull ebb, she pulled herself to her feet and wiped the tears and mucus off her face. She stood in front of a mirror in the lavatory and waited to come out until the redness had faded from her eyes.

When the others asked her what had happened, she said nothing at all.

Chapter 14

War came in the water.

Rin awoke to shouting outside the barracks. She threw her uniform on in a panicked frenzy; blindly attempted to force her right foot into her left shoe before she gave up and ran out the door barefoot, trident in hand.

Outside, half-dressed soldiers ran around and into one another in a confused swarm of activity while commanders shouting contradicting orders. But nobody had weapons drawn, projectiles weren’t flying through the air, and Rin couldn’t hear the sound of cannon fire.

Finally she noticed that most of the troops were running toward the beachfront. She followed them.

At first she didn’t understand what she was looking at. The water was dusted over with spots of white, as if a giant had blown dandelion puffs over the surface. Then she reached the edge of the pier and saw in closer detail the silver crescents hanging just beneath the surface. Those spots of white were the bloated underbellies of fish.

Not just fish. When she knelt by the water she saw puffy, discolored corpses of frogs, salamanders, and turtles. Something had killed every living thing in the water.

It had to be poison. Nothing else could kill so many animals so quickly. And that meant the poison had to be in the water—and all the canals in Arlong were interconnected—which meant that perhaps every drinking source in Arlong was now tainted . . .

But why would anyone from Dragon Province poison the water? For a minute Rin stood there stupidly, thinking, assuming that it must have been someone from within the province itself. She didn’t want to consider the alternative, which was that the poison came from upriver, because that would mean . . .

“Rin! Fuck—Rin!”

Ramsa tugged at her arm. “You need to see this.”

She ran with him to the end of the pier, where the Cike were huddled around a dark mass on the planks. A massive fish? A bundle of clothes? No—a man, she saw that now, but the figure was hardly human.

It stretched a pale, skeletal hand toward her. “Altan . . .”

Her breath caught in her throat. “Aratsha?”

She had never before seen him in his human form. He was an emaciated man, covered from head to toe in barnacles embedded into blue-white skin. The lower half of his face was concealed by a scraggly beard so littered with sea worms and small fish that it was difficult to parse out the human bits of him.

She tried to slide her arms beneath him to help him up, but pieces of him kept coming away in her hands. A clump of shells, a stick of bone, and then something crackly and powdery that crumbled to nothing in her fingers. She tried not to push him away in disgust. “Can you speak?”

Aratsha made a strangled noise. At first she thought he was choking on his own spit, but then frothy liquid the color of curdled milk bubbled out the sides of his mouth.

“Altan,” he repeated.

“I’m not Altan.” She reached for Aratsha’s hand. Was that something she should do? It felt like something she should do. Something comforting and kind. Something a commander would do.

But Aratsha didn’t seem to even notice. His skin had gone from bluish white to a horrible violet color in seconds. She could see his veins pulsing beneath, a sludgy, inky black.

“Ahh, Altan,” said Aratsha. “I should have told you.”

He smelled of seawater and rot. Rin wanted to vomit.

“What?” she whispered.

He peered up at her through milky eyes. They were filmy like the eyes of a fish at market, oddly unfocused, staring out at two sides like he’d spent so long in the water that he didn’t know what to make of the things on land.

He murmured something under his breath, something too quiet and garbled for her to decipher. She thought she heard a whisper that sounded like “misery.” Then Aratsha disintegrated in her hands, flesh bubbling into water, until all that was left was sand, shells, and a pearl necklace.

“Fuck,” Ramsa said. “That’s gross.”

“Shut up,” Baji said.

Suni wailed loudly and buried his head in his hands. No one comforted him.

Rin stared numbly at the necklace.

We should bury him, she thought. That was proper, wasn’t it?

Should she be grieving? She couldn’t feel grief. She kept waiting to feel something, but it never hit, and it never would. This was not an acute loss, not the kind that had left her catatonic after Altan’s death. She had barely known Aratsha; she’d just given him orders and he had obeyed, without question, loyal to the Cike until the day he died.

No, what sickened her was that she felt disappointed, irritated that now that Aratsha was gone they didn’t have a shaman who could control the river. All he’d ever been to her was an immensely useful chess piece, and now she couldn’t use him anymore.

“What’s going on?” Nezha asked, panting. He’d just arrived.

Rin stood up and brushed the sand off her hands. “We lost a man.”

He looked down at the mess on the pier, visibly confused. “Who?”

“One of the Cike. Aratsha. He’s always in the water. Whatever hit the fish must have hit him, too.”

“Fuck,” Nezha said. “Were they targeting him?”

“I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “That’s a lot of trouble for one shaman.”

This couldn’t be about just one man. Fish were floating dead across the entire harbor. Whoever had poisoned Aratsha had meant to poison the entire river.

The Cike were not the target. The Dragon Province was.

Because yes, Su Daji was that crazy. Daji was a woman who had welcomed the Federation into her territory to keep her throne. She would easily poison the southern provinces, would readily sentence millions to starvation, to keep the rest of her empire intact.

“How many troops?” Vaisra demanded.

All of them were crammed into the office—Captain Eriden, the Warlords, the Hesperians, and a smattering of whatever ranked officers were available. Decorum did not matter. The room had turned into a din of frantic shouting. Everyone spoke at once.

“We haven’t counted the men who haven’t made it to the infirmary—”

“Is it in the aquifers?”

“We have to shut down the fish markets—”

Vaisra shouted over the noise. “How many?”

“Almost the entire First Brigade has been hospitalized,” said one of the physicians. “The poison was meant to affect the wildlife. It’s weaker on men.”

“It’s not fatal?”

“We don’t think so. We’re hoping to see full recovery in a few days.”

“Is Daji insane?” General Hu asked. “This is suicide. This doesn’t just affect us, it kills everything that the Murui touches.”

“The north doesn’t care,” Vaisra said. “They’re upstream.”

“But that means they’d need a constant source of poison,” said Eriden. “They’d have to introduce the agent to the stream daily. And it can’t be as far as the Autumn Palace, or they screw over their own allies.”

“Hare Province?” Nezha suggested.

“That’s impossible,” Jinzha said. “Their army is pathetic; they barely have defense capabilities. They’d never strike first.”

“If they’re pathetic, then they’d do whatever Daji told them.”

“Are we sure it’s Daji?” Takha asked.

“Who else would it be?” Tsolin demanded. He turned to Vaisra. “This is the answer to your blockade. Daji’s weakening you before she strikes. I wouldn’t wait around to see what she does next.”

Jinzha banged a fist on the table. “I told you, we should have sailed up a week ago.”

“With whose troops?” Vaisra asked coolly.

Jinzha’s cheeks turned a bright red. But Vaisra wasn’t looking at his son. Rin realized his remarks were meant for General Tarcquet.

The Hesperians had been watching silently at the back of the room, expressions impassive, standing with their arms crossed and lips pursed like teachers observing a classroom of unruly students. Every so often Sister Petra would scratch something into the writing pad she carried around everywhere, her lips curled in amusement. Rin wanted to hit her.

“This neutralizes our blockade,” Tsolin said. “We can’t wait any longer.”

“But water moves steadily out to sea,” said Lady Saikhara. “You never step in the same stream twice. In a matter of days the poisonous agent should have washed out into Omonod Bay, and we’ll be fine.” She looked imploringly around the table for someone to agree. “Shouldn’t it?”

“But it’s not just the fish.” Kitay’s voice was a strangled whisper. He said it again, and this time the room fell quiet when he spoke. “It’s not just the fish. It’s the entire country. The Murui supplies tributaries to all of the major southern regions. We’re talking about all agricultural irrigation channels. Rice paddies. The water doesn’t stop flowing there; it stays, it lingers. We are talking about massive crop failure.”

“But the granaries,” Lady Saikhara said. “Every province has stockpiled grain for lean years, yes? We could requisition those.”

“And leave the south to eat what?” Kitay countered. “You force the south to give up their grain stores, and you’re going to start bleeding allies. We don’t have food, we don’t even have water—”

“We have water,” Saikhara said. “We’ve tested the aquifers, they’re untouched. The wells are fine.”

“Fine,” said Kitay. “Then you’ll just starve to death.”

“What about them?” Charouk jabbed a finger in Tarcquet’s direction. “They can’t send us food aid?”

Tarcquet raised an eyebrow and looked expectantly at Vaisra.

Vaisra sighed. “The Consortium will not make investments until they feel better assured of our chances at victory.”

There was a pause. The entire council looked toward General Tarcquet. The Warlords wore uniform expressions of desperate, pathetic, pleading hope. Sister Petra continued to scratch at her writing pad.

Nezha broke the silence. He spoke in deliberate, unaccented Hesperian. “Millions of people are going to die, sir.”

Tarcquet crossed his arms. “Then you’d better get this campaign started, hadn’t you?”

The Empress’s ploy had the effect of setting fire to an anthill. Arlong erupted in a frenzy of activity, finally triggering battle plans that had been in place for months.

A war over ideology had suddenly become a war of resources. Now that waiting out the Empire was clearly no longer an option, the southern Warlords had no choice but to donate their troops to Vaisra’s northern campaign.

Executive orders went out to generals, then filtered down through commanders to squadron leaders to soldiers. Within minutes Rin had orders to report to the Fourteenth Brigade on the Swallow, departing in two hours from Pier Three.

“Nice, you’re in the first fleet,” Nezha said. “With me.”

“Joyous day.” She stuffed a change of uniform into a bag and hoisted it over her shoulder.

He reached over to ruffle her hair. “Look alive, little soldier. You’re finally getting what you wanted.”

En route to the pier they dodged through a maze of wagons carrying hemp, jute, lime for caulking, tung oil, and sailing cloth. The entire city smelled and sounded like a shipyard; it echoed everywhere with the same faint, low groan, the noise of dozens of massive ships detaching their anchors, paddle-wheels beginning to turn.

“Move!” A wagon driven by Hesperian soldiers narrowly missed running them over. Nezha pulled Rin to the side.

“Assholes,” he muttered.

Rin’s eyes followed the Hesperians to the warships. “I guess we’ll finally get to see Tarcquet’s golden troops in action.”

“Actually, no. Tarcquet’s only bringing a skeleton platoon. The rest are staying in Arlong.”

“Then why are they even going?”

“Because they’re here to observe. They want to know if we’re capable of coming close to winning this war, and if we are, if we’re capable of running this country effectively. Tarcquet told Father some babble about stages of human evolution last night, but I think they really just want to see if we’re worth the trouble. Everything Jinzha does gets reported to Tarcquet. Everything Tarcquet sees goes back to the Consortium. And the Consortium decides when they want to lend their ships.”

“We can’t take this Empire without them, and they won’t help us until we take the Empire.” Rin made a face. “Those are the terms?”

“Not quite. They’ll intervene before this war is over, once they’re sure it isn’t a lost cause. They’re willing to tip the scales, but we have to prove first that we can pull our own weight.”

“So just another fucking test,” Rin said.

Nezha sighed. “More or less, yes.”

The sheer arrogance, Rin thought. It must be nice, possessing all the power, so that you could approach geopolitics like a chess game, popping in curiously to observe which countries deserved your aid and which didn’t.

“Is Petra coming with us?” she asked.

“No. She’ll stay on Jinzha’s ship.” Nezha hesitated. “But, ah, Father told me to make it clear that your meetings resume as usual when we rejoin my brother’s fleet.”

“Even on campaign?”

“They’re most interested in you on campaign. Petra promised it wouldn’t be much. An hour every week, as agreed.”

“It doesn’t sound like much to you,” Rin muttered. “You’ve never been someone’s lab rat.”

Two fleets were preparing to sail out from the Red Cliffs. The first, commanded by Jinzha, would go up the Murui through the center of Hare Province, the agricultural heartland of the north. The second fleet, led by Tsolin and General Hu, would race up the rugged coastline around Snake Province to destroy Tiger Province ships before they could be deployed inland to fend off the main vanguard.

Combined, they were to squeeze the northeastern provinces between the inland attack and the coast. Daji would be forced to fight an enemy on two fronts, and both over water—a terrain the Militia had never been comfortable with.

In terms of sheer manpower, the Republic was still outnumbered. The Militia had tens of thousands of men on the Republican Army. But if Vaisra’s fleet did its job, and if the Hesperians kept their word, there was a good chance they might win this war.

“Guys! Wait!”

“Oh, shit,” Nezha muttered.

Rin turned around to see Venka running barefoot down the pier toward them. She clutched a crossbow to her chest.

Nezha cleared his throat as Venka came to a halt in front of him. “Uh, Venka, this isn’t a good time.”

“Just take this,” Venka panted. She passed the crossbow into Rin’s hands. “I took it from my father’s workshop. Latest model. Reloads automatically.”

Nezha shot Rin an uncomfortable glance. “This isn’t really—”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Venka asked. She ran her fingers over the body. “See this? Intricate trigger latch mechanism. We finally figured out how to get it to work; this is just the prototype but I think it’s ready—”

“We’re boarding in minutes,” Nezha interrupted. “What do you want?”

“Take me with you,” Venka said bluntly.

Rin noticed Venka had a pack strapped to her back, but she didn’t have a uniform.

“Absolutely not,” Nezha said.

Venka’s cheeks reddened. “Why not? I’m all better now.”

“You can’t even bend your left arm.”

“She doesn’t need to,” Rin said. “Not if she’s firing a crossbow.”

“Are you insane?” Nezha demanded. “She can’t run around with a crossbow that big; she’ll be exhausted—”

“Then we’ll mount it on the ship,” Rin said. “And she’ll be removed from the heat of the battle. She’ll need protection between rounds to reload, so she’ll be surrounded by a unit of archers. It’ll be safe.”

Venka looked triumphantly at Nezha. “What she said.”

“Safe?” Nezha echoed, incredulous.

“Safer than the rest of us,” Rin amended.

“But she’s not done . . .” Nezha looked Venka up and down, hesitating, clearly at a loss for the right words. “You’re not done, uh . . .”

“Healing?” Venka asked. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“Venka, please.”

“How long did you think I’d need? I’ve been sitting on my ass for months. Come on, please, I’m ready.”

Nezha looked helplessly at Rin, as if hoping she’d make the entire situation dissipate. But what did he expect her to say? Rin didn’t even understand the problem.

“There has to be room on the ships,” she said. “Let her go.”

“That’s not your call. She could die out there.”

“Occupational hazard,” Venka shot back. “We’re soldiers.”

“You are not a soldier.”

“Why not? Because of Golyn Niis?” Venka barked out a laugh. “You think once you’re raped you can’t be a soldier?”

Nezha shifted uncomfortably. “That’s not what I said.”

“Yes, it is. Even if you won’t say it, that’s what you’re thinking!” Venka’s voice rose steadily in pitch. “You think that because they raped me, I’m never going to go back to normal.”

Nezha reached for her shoulder. “Meimei. Come on.”

Meimei. Little sister. Not by blood, but by virtue of the closeness of their families. He was trying to invoke his ritual concern for her to dissuade her from going. “What happened to you was horrible. Nobody blames you. Nobody here agrees with your father, or my mother—”

“I know that!” Venka shouted. “I don’t give a shit about that!

Nezha looked pained. “I can’t protect you out there.

“And when have you ever protected me?” Venka slapped his hand away from her shoulder. “Do you know what I thought when I was in that house? I kept hoping someone might come for me, I really thought someone was coming for me. And where the fuck were you? Nowhere. So fuck you, Nezha. You can’t keep me safe, so you might as well let me fight.”

“Yes, I can,” Nezha said. “I’m a general. Go back. Or I’ll have someone drag you back.”

Venka grabbed the crossbow back from Rin and pointed it at Nezha. A bolt whizzed out, narrowly missed Nezha’s cheek, and embedded itself into a post several feet behind his head, where it quivered in the wood, humming loudly.

“You missed,” Nezha said calmly.

Venka tossed the crossbow on the pier and spat at Nezha’s feet. “I never miss.”

Captain Salkhi of the Swallow stood waiting for the Cike at the base of the gangplank. She was a lean, petite woman with closely cropped hair, narrow eyes, and pinkish-brown skin—not the dusky tint of a southerner, but the tanned hue of a pale northerner who had spent too much time in the sun.

“I’m assuming I’m to treat you lot as I would any other soldiers,” she said. “Can you handle ground operations?”

“We’ll be fine,” said Rin. “I’ll walk you through their specialties.”

“I’d appreciate that.” Salkhi paused. “And what about you? Eriden told me about your, ah, problem.”

“I’ve still got two arms and two legs.”

“And she has a trident,” Kitay said, walking up behind her. “Very helpful for catching fish.”

Rin turned around, pleasantly surprised. “You’re coming with us?”

“It’s either your ship or Nezha’s. And frankly, he and I have been getting on each other’s nerves.”

“That’s mostly your fault,” she said.

“Oh, it absolutely is,” he said. “Don’t care. Besides, I like you better. Aren’t you flattered?”

That was about as close to a peace offering from Kitay as she was going to get. Rin grinned. Together they boarded the Swallow.

The vessel was no multidecked warship. This was a sleek, tiny model, similar in build to an opium skimmer. A single row of cannons armed it on each side, but no trebuchets mounted its decks. Rin, who had gotten used to the amenities of the Seagrim, found the Swallow uncomfortably cramped.

The Swallow belonged to the first fleet, one of seven light, fast skimmers capable of tight tactical maneuvers. They would sail ahead two weeks in advance while the heavier fleet commanded by Jinzha prepared to ship out.

During that time they would be cut off from the chain of command at Arlong.

That didn’t matter. Their instructions were short and simple: find the source of the poison, destroy it, and punish every last man involved. Vaisra hadn’t specified how. He’d left that up to the captains, which was why everyone wanted to get to them first.

Chapter 15

The Swallow’s crew planned to keep sailing upstream until they weren’t surrounded by dead fish, or until the poison’s source became apparent. The facility would have to be near a main river juncture, and close enough to the Murui that there would be no chance the poison would wash out to the ocean or get blocked up in a dead end. They traveled north up the Murui until they reached the border of Hare Province, where the river branched off into several tributaries.

Here the skimmers split up. The Swallow took the westernmost route, a lazy bending creek that trailed slowly through the province’s interior heartland. They went cautiously with their flag stowed away, disguising themselves as a merchant ship to avoid Imperial suspicion.

Captain Salkhi kept a clean, tightly disciplined ship. The Fourteenth Brigade rotated shifts on deck, either watching the shoreline or paddling down below. The soldiers and crew accepted the Cike into their fold with wary indifference. If they had questions about what the shamans could or couldn’t do, they kept them to themselves.

“Seen anything?” Rin joined Kitay at the starboard railing, legs aching after a long paddling shift. She should have gone to sleep, according to the schedule, but midmorning was the only time that their breaks overlapped.

She was relieved that she and Kitay were on friendly terms again. They hadn’t returned to normal—she didn’t know if they would ever return to normal—but at least Kitay didn’t emanate cold judgment every time he looked at her.

“Not yet.” He stood utterly still, eyes fixed on the water, as if he could trace a path to the chemical source through sheer force of will. He was angry. Rin could tell when he was angry—his cheeks went a pale white, he held himself too rigidly, and he went long periods without blinking. She was just glad that he wasn’t angry with her.

“Look.” She pointed. “I don’t think this is the right tributary.”

Dark shapes moved under the muggy green water. Which meant the river life was still alive and healthy, unaffected by poison.

Kitay leaned forward. “What’s that?”

Rin followed his gaze but couldn’t tell what he was looking at.

He pulled a netted pole from the bulkhead, scooped it into the water, and plucked out a small object. At first Rin thought he’d caught a fish, but when Kitay deposited it onto the deck she saw it was some kind of dark and leathery pouch, about the size of a pomelo, knotted tightly at the end so that it looked oddly like a breast.

Kitay pinched it up with two fingers.

“That’s clever,” he said. “Gross, but clever.”

“What is it?”

“It’s incredible. This has to be a Sinegard graduate’s work. Or a Yuelu graduate. No one else is this smart.” He held the object toward her. She recoiled. It smelled awful—a combination of rank animal odor and the sharp, acrid smell of poison that brought back memories of embalmed pig fetuses from her medical classes with Master Enro.

She wrinkled her nose. “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“Pig’s bladder.” Kitay turned it over in his palm and gave it a shake. “Resistant to acid, at least to some degree. It’s why the poison hasn’t been diluted before it reached Arlong.”

He rubbed the edge of the bladder between his fingers. “This stays intact so the agent doesn’t dissolve into the water until it reaches downstream. It was meant to last several days, a week at most.”

The bladder popped open under the pressure. Liquid spilled out onto Kitay’s hand, making his skin hiss and pucker. A yellow cloud seeped into the air. The acrid odor intensified. Kitay cursed and flung the bladder back out over the side of the ship, then hastily wiped his skin against his uniform.

“Fuck.” He examined his hand, which had developed a pale, angry rash.

Rin yanked him away from the gas cloud. To her relief, it dissipated in seconds. “Tiger’s tits, are you—”

“I’m fine. It’s not deep, I don’t think.” Kitay cradled his hand inside his elbow and winced. “Go get Salkhi. I think we’re getting close.”

Salkhi split the Fourteenth Brigade into squads of six that dispersed through the surrounding region for a ground expedition. The Cike found the poison source first. It was visible the moment they emerged from the tree line—a blocky, three-story building with bell towers at both ends, erected in the architectural style of the old Hesperian missions.

At the southern wall, a single pipe extended over the river—a channel meant to move waste and sewage into the water. Instead, it dispensed poisonous pods into the river with a mechanical regularity.

Someone, or something, was dropping them off from inside.

“This is it.” Kitay motioned for the rest of the Cike to crouch low behind the bushes. “We’ve got to get someone in there.”

“What about the guard?” Rin whispered.

“What guard? There’s no one there.”

He was right. The mission looked barely garrisoned. Rin could count the soldiers on one hand, and after half an hour of scoping the perimeter, they didn’t find any others on patrol.

“That makes no sense,” she said.

“Maybe they just don’t have the men,” Kitay said.

“Then why poke the dragon?” Baji asked. “If they don’t have backup, that strike was idiotic. This whole town is dead.”

“Maybe it’s an ambush,” Rin said.

Kitay looked unconvinced. “But they’re not expecting us.”

“It could be protocol. They might all just be hiding inside.”

“That’s not how you lay out defenses. You only do that if you’re under siege.”

“So you want us to attack a building with minimal intelligence? What if there’s a platoon in there?”

Kitay pulled a flare rocket from his pocket. “I know a way to find out.”

“Hold on,” Ramsa said. “Captain Salkhi said not to engage.”

“Fuck Salkhi,” Kitay said with a violence that was utterly unlike him. Before Rin could stop him he lit the fuse, aimed, and loosed the flare toward the patch of woods behind the mission.

A bang rocked the forest. Several seconds later Rin heard shouts from inside the mission. Then a group of men armed with farming implements emerged from the doors and ran toward the explosion.

“There’s your guard,” Kitay said.

Rin hoisted her trident. “Oh, fuck you.”

Kitay counted under his breath as he watched the men. “About fifteen. There are twenty of us.” He glanced back at Baji and Suni. “Think you can keep them out of the mission until the others get here?”

“Don’t insult us,” Baji said. “Go.”

Only two guards remained at the mission’s doors. Kitay dispatched one with his crossbow. Rin grappled with the other for a few minutes until at last she disarmed him and slammed her trident into his throat. She wrenched it back out and he dropped.

The doors stood wide open before them. Rin peered into the dark interior. The smell of rotting corpses hit her like a wall, so thick and sharp that her eyes watered. She covered her mouth with her sleeve. “You coming?”

Thud.

She turned. Kitay stood over the second guard, crossbow pointed down, wiping flecks of blood off his chin with the back of his hand. He caught her staring him.

“Just making sure,” he said.

Inside they found a slaughterhouse.

Rin’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness. Then she saw pig carcasses everywhere she looked—tossed on the floor, piled up in the corner, splayed over tables, all sliced open with surgical precision.

“Tiger’s tits,” she muttered.

Someone had killed them all solely for their bladders. The sheer waste amazed her. So much rotting meat was piled on these floors, and refugees in the next province over were so thin their ribs pushed through their ragged garments.

“Found them,” Kitay said.

She followed his line of sight across the room. A dozen open barrels stood lined up against the wall. They contained the poison in liquid form—a noxious yellow concoction that sent toxic fumes spiraling lazily into the air above them. Above the barrels were shelves and shelves of metal canisters. More than Rin could count.

Rin had seen those canisters before, stacked neatly on shelves just like these. She’d stared up at them for hours while Mugenese scientists strapped her to a bed and forced opiates into her veins.

Kitay’s face had turned a greenish color. He knew that gas from Golyn Niis.

“I wouldn’t touch that.” A figure emerged from the stairwell opposite them. Kitay jerked his crossbow up. Rin crouched back, trident poised to throw as she squinted to make out the figure’s face in the darkness.

The figure stepped into the light. “Took you long enough.”

Kitay let his arms drop. “Niang?”

Rin wouldn’t have recognized her. War had transformed Niang. Even into their third year at Sinegard, Niang had always looked like a child—innocent, round-faced, and adorable. She’d never looked like she belonged at a military academy. Now she just looked like a soldier, scarred and hardened like the rest of them.

“Please tell me you’re not behind this,” said Kitay.

“What? The pods?” Niang traced her fingers over the edge of a barrel. Her hands were covered in angry red welts. “Clever design, wasn’t it? I was hoping someone might notice.”

As Niang moved farther into light, Rin saw that the welts hadn’t just formed on her hands. Her neck and face were mottled red, as if her skin had been scraped raw with the flat side of a blade.

“Those canisters,” Rin said. “They’re from the Federation.”

“Yes, they really saved us some labor, didn’t they?” Niang chuckled. “They produced thousands of barrels of that stuff. The Hare Warlord wanted to use it to invade Arlong, but I was smarter about it. Put it into the water, I said. Starve them out. The really hard part was converting it from a gas into a liquid. That took me weeks.”

Niang pulled a canister off the wall and weighed it in her hand, as if preparing to throw. “Think you could do better?”

Rin and Kitay flinched simultaneously.

Niang lowered her arm, snickering. “Kidding.”

“Put that down,” Kitay said quietly. His voice was taut, carefully controlled. “Let’s talk. Let’s just talk, Niang. I know someone put you up to this. You don’t have to do this.”

“I know that,” Niang said. “I volunteered. Or did you think I’d sit back and let traitors divide the Empire?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rin said.

“I know enough.” Niang lifted the canister higher. “I know you threatened to starve out the north so they’d bow to the Dragon Warlord. I know you’re going to invade our provinces if you don’t get your way.”

“So your solution is to poison the entire south?” Kitay asked.

“You’re one to talk,” Niang snarled. “You made us starve. You sold us that blighted grain. How does it feel getting a taste of your own medicine?”

“The embargo was just a threat,” Kitay said. “No one has to die.”

“People have died!” Niang pointed a finger at Rin. “How many did she kill on that island?”

Rin blinked. “Who gives a fuck about the Federation?”

“There were Militia troops there, too. Thousands of them.” Niang’s voice trembled. “The Federation took prisoners of war, shipped them over to labor camps. They took my brothers. Did you give them a chance to get off the island?”

“I . . .” Rin cast Kitay a desperate look. “That’s not true.”

Was it true?

Surely someone would have told her if it were true.

Kitay wouldn’t meet her eyes.

She swallowed. “Niang, I didn’t know—”

“You didn’t know!” Niang screamed. The canister swung perilously in her hand. “That makes it all better, doesn’t it?”

Kitay held a palm out, crossbow lowered. “Niang, please, put that down.”

Niang shook her head. “This is your fault. We just fought a war. Why couldn’t you just leave us alone?”

“We don’t want to kill you,” Rin said. “Please—”

“How generous!” Niang lifted the canister over her head. “She doesn’t want to kill me! The Republic will take pity on—”

“Fuck this,” Kitay muttered. In one fluid movement he lifted his crossbow, aimed, and shot an arrow straight into Niang’s left breast.

The thud echoed like a final heartbeat.

Niang’s eyes bulged open. She tilted her head down, examined her chest as if idly curious. Her knees gave out beneath her. The canister slipped from her hand and rolled to a halt by the wall.

The canister’s lid burst off with a pop. Yellow smoke streamed out from it, rapidly filling the far end of the room.

Kitay lowered his crossbow. “Let’s go.”

They ran. Rin glanced over her shoulder just as they passed the door. The gas was almost too thick to see clearly, but she couldn’t mistake the sight of Niang, twitching and jerking in a shroud of acid eating ravenously into her skin. Red spots blooming mercilessly across her body, as if she were a paper doll dropped in a pool of ink.

Light rain misted the air over the Swallow as it drifted down the tributary to rejoin the main fleet.

The crew had argued briefly over what to do with the canisters. They couldn’t just leave them in the mission, but none of them wanted to have the gas on board. Finally Ramsa had suggested that they destroy the mission with a controlled burn. This was purportedly to deter anyone from approaching it until Jinzha could send a squadron to retrieve any remaining canisters, but Rin suspected that Ramsa just wanted an excuse to blow something up.

So they’d drenched the place in oil, piled kindling on the roof and in the makeshift slaughterhouse, and then fired flaming crossbow bolts from the ship once they were a safe sailing distance away.

The building had caught fire immediately, a lovely conflagration that remained visible from miles away. The rain hadn’t yet managed to smother all of the flame. Little bursts of red still burned at the base of the building and smoke stretched out to embrace the sky from the towers.

A crack of thunder split the sky. Seconds later the light drizzle turned into fat, hard drops that slammed loudly and relentlessly against the deck. Captain Salkhi ordered the crew to set out barrels to capture fresh water. Most of the crew descended to their cabins, but Rin sat down on the deck, pulled her knees up to her chest, and tilted her head back. Raindrops hit the back of her throat, wonderfully fresh and cool. She gargled the rainwater, let it splash over her face and clothes. She knew the poison hadn’t tainted her or she would have seen its effects, but somehow she couldn’t feel clean.

“I thought you hated water,” Kitay said.

She looked up. He stood over her, a miserable, drenched mess. He still had his crossbow clenched in his hands.

“You all right?” she asked.

His eyes were dead things. “No.”

“Sit with me.”

He obeyed without a word. Only when he was next to her did she see how violently he was trembling.

“I’m sorry about Niang,” she said.

He jerked out a shrug. “I’m not.”

“I thought you liked her.”

“I barely knew her.”

“You did like her. I remember. You thought she was cute. You told me that at school.”

“Yes, and then that bitch went and poisoned half the country.”

He tilted his head upward. His eyes were red, and she couldn’t tell his tears apart from the rain. He took a long, shuddering breath.

Then he broke.

“I can’t keep doing this.” The words spilled out of him between choked, sudden sobs. “I can’t sleep. I can’t go a second without seeing Golyn Niis. I close my eyes and I’m hiding behind that wall again and the screams don’t stop because the killing goes on all night—”

Rin reached for his hand. “Kitay . . .”

“It’s like I’m frozen in one moment. And no one knows it because everyone else has moved on except me, but to me everything that’s happened since Golyn Niis is a dream, and I know it’s not real because I’m still behind the wall. And the worst part—the worst part is that I don’t know who’s causing the screams. It was easier when only the Federation was evil. Now I can’t figure out who’s right or wrong, and I’m the smart one, I’m always supposed to have the right answer, but I don’t.”

She didn’t know what she could possibly say to comfort him, so she curled her fingers around his and held them tight. “Me neither.”

“What happened on that island?” he asked abruptly.

“You know what happened.”

“No. You never told me.” He straightened up. “Was it conscious? Did you think about what you were doing?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I try not to remember.”

“Did you know you were killing them?” he pressed. “Or did you just . . .” His fingers clenched into a fist and then unclenched beneath hers.

“I just wanted it to be over,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t want to hurt them, not really, I just wanted it to end.”

“I didn’t want to kill her. I just—I don’t know why I—”

“I know.”

“That wasn’t me,” he insisted, but she wasn’t the one he needed to convince.

All she could do was squeeze his hand again. “I know.”

Signals were sent, courses were reversed. Within a day the dispersed skimmers had fled hastily down the Murui to rejoin the main armada.

When Rin saw the Republican fleet from the front it seemed deceptively small, ships arranged in a narrow formation. Then they approached from the side and the full menace of the flotilla was splayed out in front of her, a marvelous and breathtaking display of force. Compared to the warships, the Swallow was just a tiny thing, a baby bird returning to the flock.

Captain Salkhi lit several lanterns to signal their return, and the patrol ships at the fore signaled back their permission to break through the line. The Swallow slipped into the ranks. An hour later Jinzha boarded their ship. The crew assembled on deck to report.

“We’ve stopped the poison at the source, but there may be canisters left in the ruins,” Salkhi told Jinzha. “You’ll want to send a squadron up there to see if you can retrieve it.”

“Were they producing it themselves?” Jinzha asked.

“That’s unlikely,” Salkhi said. “That wasn’t a research facility, it was a makeshift slaughterhouse. It seems like that was just the distribution point.”

“We think they got it from the Federation facility on the coast,” said Rin. “The one where I was—The one they took me to.”

Jinzha frowned. “That’s all the way out in Snake Province. Why bring it here?”

“They couldn’t have set it off in Snake Province,” Kitay said. “The current takes the poison out to sea instead of to Arlong. So someone must have gone there recently, retrieved the canisters, and carted them over to Hare Province.”

“I hope that’s right,” said Jinzha. “I don’t want to entertain the alternative.”

Because the alternative, of course, was terrifying—that they were fighting a war not only against the Empire, but also against the Federation. That the Federation had survived, and had retained its weapons, and was sending them to Vaisra’s enemies.

“Did you take prisoners?” Jinzha asked.

Salkhi nodded. “Two guardsmen. They’re in the brig. We’ll turn them over for interrogation.”

“There’s no need for that.” Jinzha waved a hand. “We know what we need to know. Bring them out to the beach.”

“Your brother has a flair for public spectacle,” Kitay told Nezha.

The screaming had been going on for more than an hour now. Rin had almost gotten used to it, though it made it difficult to stomach her dinner.

The Hare Province guardsmen were strung up against posts in the ground, beaten for good measure. Jinzha had stripped them, flayed them, then poured diluted poison from one of the pods into a flask and boiled it. Now it ran in rivulets down the guardsmen’s skin, tracing a steaming, angrily red path over their cheeks, their collarbones, down toward their exposed genitals, while the Republican soldiers sat back on the beach and watched.

“This wasn’t necessary,” Nezha said. His dinner rations sat untouched beside him. “This is grotesque.”

Kitay laughed, a flat, hollow noise. “Don’t be naive.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“This is necessary. The Republic’s just taken a massive blow. Vaisra can’t undo the poisoning of the river, or the fact that thousands of people are going to starve. But give a few men a little pain, do it in public, and it’ll all be all right.”

“Does it make it all right to you?” Rin asked.

Kitay shrugged. “They poisoned a fucking river.”

Nezha wrapped his arms around his knees. “Salkhi says you were in there for a while.”

Rin nodded. “We saw Niang. Meant to tell you that.”

Nezha blinked, surprised. “And how is she?”

“Dead,” said Kitay. He was still staring at the men on the posts.

Nezha watched him for a moment, then raised an eyebrow at Rin. She understood his question. She shook her head.

“I hadn’t thought about fighting our own classmates,” Nezha murmured after a pause. “Who else do we know in the north? Kureel, Arda . . .”

“My cousins,” Kitay said without turning around. “Han. Tobi. Most of the rest of our class, if they’re still alive.”

“I suppose it’s not easy going to war against friends,” Nezha said.

“Yes, it is,” Kitay said. “They have a choice. Niang made her choice. She just happened to be dead fucking wrong.”

Chapter 16

The guardsmen had stopped twitching by sunset.

Jinzha ordered their bodies burned as a final display. But there was far less retributive pleasure in watching corpses burn compared to hearing men scream, and eventually the smell of cooked meat grew so pungent on the beach that the soldiers started migrating back toward their ships.

“Well, that was fun.” Rin stood up and brushed the crumbs off her uniform. “Let’s go back.”

“You’re going to sleep already?” Kitay asked.

“I’m not staying here,” she said. “It reeks.”

“Not so fast,” Nezha said. “You’re off the Swallow. You’ve been reassigned to the Kingfisher.”

“Just her?” Kitay asked.

“No, all of you. Cike, too. Jinzha wants you for strategic consultation, and he thinks the Cike can do more damage from a warship. The Swallow’s not an attack boat.”

Rin glanced toward the Kingfisher, where Hesperian soldiers and Gray Company were clearly visible on deck.

“Yes, that’s intentional.” Nezha inferred the question from the exasperated look on her face. “They wanted to keep a closer eye on you.”

“I already let Petra prod me like an animal once a week,” Rin said. “I don’t want to see them when I’m trying to eat.”

Nezha held his hands up. “Jinzha’s orders. Nothing we can do.”

Rin suspected Captain Salkhi had also requested a transfer on grounds of disobedience. Salkhi had been deeply frustrated that the Cike had stormed the mission without her command, and Baji hadn’t helped things by pointing out that they wouldn’t have needed the rest of her troops regardless. Rin’s suspicion was confirmed when Jinzha took twenty minutes informing her and the Cike that they would follow his orders to the letter or find themselves tossed into the Murui.

“I don’t care that my father thinks the sun shines out of your ass,” he said. “You’ll act like soldiers or you’ll be punished as deserters.”

“Asshole,” Rin muttered as they left his office.

“He’s absolutely awful,” Kitay agreed. “It’s a rare person who makes Nezha look like the pleasant sibling.”

“I’m not saying I want him to drown in the Murui,” Ramsa said, “but I want him to drown in the Murui.”

With the fleet united, the Republic’s northern expedition began in earnest. Jinzha set a direct course that cut straight through Hare Province, which was agriculturally rich and comparatively weak. They would pick off the low-hanging fruit and solidify their supply base before taking on the full force of the Militia.

Hesperians aside, Rin found that traveling on the Kingfisher was a marked improvement from the Swallow. At least a hundred yards long from bow to stern, the Kingfisher was the only turtle boat in the fleet, with a closed top deck wrapped over by wood paneling and steel plates that made it nearly immune to cannon fire. The Kingfisher functioned as more or less a floating piece of armor, and for good reason—it carried Jinzha, Admiral Molkoi, almost all of the fleet’s senior strategists, and most of the Hesperian delegation.

Flanking the Kingfisher were a trio of sister galleys known as the Seahawks—warships with floating boards attached to the port and starboard sides shaped like a bird’s wings. Two were affectionately named the Lapwing and the Waxwing. The Griffon, commanded by Nezha, sailed directly behind the Kingfisher.

The other two galleys guarded the pride and battering ram of the fleet—two massive tower ships that someone with a bad sense of humor had named the Shrike and the Crake. They were monstrously large and top-heavy, outfitted with two mounted trebuchets and four rows of crossbows each.

The fleet proceeded up the Murui in a phalanx formation, lined up to adjust to the narrowing breadth of the river. The smaller skimmers alternately ducked in between the warships or followed them in a straightforward line, like a trail of ducklings following their mother.

It was such a beauty of riverine warfare, Rin thought, that the troops never had to weary themselves with marching. They just had to wait to be ferried to the Empire’s most important cities, which were all close to the water. Cities needed water to survive, just like bodies needed blood. So if they wanted to seize the Empire, they needed only to sail through its arteries.

At dawn the fleet reached the border of Radan township. Radan was one of Hare Province’s larger economic centers, targeted by Jinzha because of its strategic location at the junction of two waterways, its possession of several well-stocked granaries, and the simple fact that it barely had a military.

Jinzha ordered an immediate invasion without negotiation.

“Is he afraid they’ll refuse?” Rin asked Kitay.

“More likely he’s afraid they’ll surrender,” Kitay said. “Jinzha needs this expedition to be based on fear.”

“What, the tower ships aren’t scary enough?”

“That’s a bluff. This isn’t about Radan, it’s about the next battle. Radan needs to used as an example.”

“Of what?”

“What happens when you resist,” Kitay said grimly. “I’d go get your trident. We’re about to start.”

The Kingfisher was fast approaching Radan’s river gates. Rin lifted her spyglass to get a closer look at the township’s hastily assembled fleet. It was a laughably pathetic amalgamation of outdated vessels, mostly single-mast creations with sails made of oiled silk. Radan’s ships were merchant vessels and fishing boats with no firing capacity. They had clearly never been used for warfare.

The Cike alone could have taken the city, Rin thought. They were certainly eager for it. Suni and Baji had been pacing the deck for hours, impatient to finally see action. The two of them could have likely broken the outer defenses by themselves. But Jinzha had wanted to commit his full resources to breaking Radan. That wasn’t strategy, it was showmanship.

Jinzha strode onto the deck, took one look at the Radan defense fleet, and yawned into his hand. “Admiral Molkoi.”

The admiral dipped his head. “Yes, sir?”

“Blow those things out of the water.”

The ensuing battle was so one-sided that it seemed impossible. It wasn’t a fight, it was a comic tragedy.

Radan’s men had rubbed their sails down with oil. It was standard practice for merchants, who wanted to keep their sails waterproof and immune to rot. It was not so clever against pyrotechnics.

The Seahawks fired a series of double-headed dragon missiles that exploded midair into a swarm of smaller explosives, which spread a penumbral shower of fire across the Radan fleet. The sails caught fire immediately. Entire sheets of blistering flame engulfed the pathetic armada, roaring so loudly that for an instant it was all anyone could hear.

Rin found it oddly pleasing to watch, the same way it was fun to kick down sandcastles just because she could.

“Tiger’s tits,” Ramsa said, perched on the prow while flickering flames reflected in his eyes. “It’s like they weren’t even trying.”

Hundreds of men leaped overboard to escape the searing heat.

“Have the archers pick off anyone who gets out of the river,” said Jinzha. “Let the rest burn.”

The skirmish took less than an hour from start to finish. The Kingfisher sailed triumphantly through the blackened remains of Radan’s fleet to anchor right at the town border. Ramsa marveled at how thoroughly the cannons had demolished the river gates, Baji complained that he hadn’t gotten to do anything, and Rin tried not to look into the water.

Radan’s fleet was destroyed and its gates in shambles. The remaining population of the township laid down their weapons and surrendered with little trouble. Jinzha’s men poured into the city and evacuated all civilians from their residences to clear the way for plundering.

Women and children lined up in the streets, heads down, quivering with fear as the soldiers marched them out the gates and along the beach. There they huddled in terrified bundles, glassy eyes staring at the remains of Radan’s fleet.

The Republican soldiers were careful not to harm the civilians. Jinzha had been very adamant that the civilians were not to be mistreated. “They are not prisoners, and they are not victims,” he’d said. “Let’s call them potential members of the Republic.”

For potential citizens of the Republic, they looked well and truly terrified of their new government.

They had good reason to fear. Their sons and husbands had been lined up in rows along the shore, held at sword point. They were told their fates hadn’t yet been decided, that the Republican leadership was debating overnight on whether or not to kill them.

Jinzha intended to let the civilians pass the night unsure of whether they would live until the sun rose.

In the morning, he would announce to the crowd that he had received orders from Arlong. The Dragon Warlord had meditated on their fates. He recognized that it was no fault of their own that they were misled into resistance by their corrupt leaders, seduced by an Empress who no longer served them. He realized this decision was not made by these honest, common people. He would be merciful.

He would put the decision in the hands of the people.

He would have them vote.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Kitay asked.

“They’re proselytizing,” Rin said. “Spreading the good word of the Maker.”

“Doesn’t seem like fantastic timing.”

“I suppose they have to take a captive audience when they can get it.”

They sat cross-legged on the shore in the Kingfisher’s shadow, watching as the Gray Company’s missionaries made their way through the clumps of huddled civilians. They were too far away for Rin to hear what they were saying, but every now and then she saw a missionary kneel down next to several miserable civilians, put his hands on their shoulders even as they flinched away, and speak what was unmistakably a prayer.

“I hope they’re talking in Nikara,” said Kitay. “Otherwise they’ll sound ominous as hell.”

“I don’t think it matters if they are.” Rin found it hard not to feel a sense of guilty pleasure watching the crowds shrinking from the missionaries, despite the Hesperians’ best efforts.

Kitay passed her a stick of dried fish. “Hungry?”

“Thanks.” She took the fish, worked her teeth around the tail, and jerked off a bite.

There was an art to eating the salted mayau fish that made up the majority of their rations. She had to chew it up just so to make it soft enough that she could extract the meat from around the bones and spit out the spindly things. Too little chewing and the bones lacerated her throat; too much and the fish lost all flavor.

Salted mayau was a clever army food. It took so long to eat that by the time Rin was finished, no matter how little she’d actually consumed, she felt full on salt and saliva.

“Have you seen their penises?” Kitay asked.

Rin nearly spat out her fish. “What?”

He gestured with his hands. “Hesperian men are supposed to be much, ah, bigger than Nikara men. Salkhi said so.”

“How would Salkhi know?”

“How do you think?” Kitay waggled his eyebrows. “Admit it, you’ve thought about it.”

She shuddered. “Not if you paid me.”

“Have you seen General Tarcquet? He’s massive. I bet he—”

“Don’t be disgusting,” she snapped. “They’re horrible. And they smell awful. They’re . . . I don’t know, it’s like something curdled.”

“It’s because they drink cow’s milk, I think. All that dairy is screwing with their systems.”

“I just thought they weren’t showering.”

“You’re one to talk. Have you gotten a whiff of yourself recently?”

“Hold on.” Rin pointed across the river. “Look over there.”

Some of the civilian women had started screaming at a missionary. The missionary stepped hastily away, hands out in a nonthreatening position, but the women didn’t stop shrieking until he’d retreated all the way down the beach.

Kitay gave a low whistle. “That’s going well.”

“I wonder what they’re saying to them,” Rin said.

“‘Our Maker is great and powerful,’” he said pompously. “‘Pray with us and you shall never go hungry again.’”

“‘All wars will be stopped.’”

“‘All enemies will fall down dead, smitten by the Maker’s great hand.’”

“‘Peace will cover the realm and the demon gods will be banished to hell.’” Rin hugged her knees to her chest as she watched the missionary stand on the beach, seeking out another cluster of civilians to terrify. “You’d think they’d just leave us well enough alone.”

Hesperian religion wasn’t new to the Empire. At the height of his reign, the Red Emperor had frequently received emissaries from the churches of the west. Scholars of the church took up residence in his court at Sinegard and entertained the Emperor with their astronomical predictions, star charts, and nifty inventions. Then the Red Emperor died, the coddled scholars were persecuted by jealous court officials, and the missionaries were expelled from the continent for centuries.

The Hesperians had made intermittent efforts to come back, of course. They’d almost succeeded during the first invasion. But now the common Nikara people remembered only the lies the Trifecta had spread about them after the Second Poppy War. They killed and ate infants. They lured young women to their convents to serve as sex slaves. They’d more or less become monsters in folklore. If the Gray Company hoped to win converts, they had their work cut out for them.

“They’ve got to try regardless,” Kitay said. “I read it in their holy texts once. Their scholars argue that as the Divine Architect’s blessed and chosen people, their obligation is to preach to every infidel they encounter.”

“‘Chosen’? What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.” Kitay nodded past Rin’s shoulder. “Why don’t you ask her?”

Rin twisted around.

Sister Petra was striding briskly down the shore toward them.

Rin swallowed her last bite of fish too quickly. It crawled painfully down her throat, each swallow a painful scratch of unsoftened bone.

Sister Petra met Rin’s eyes and beckoned with a finger. Come. That was an order.

Kitay patted her shoulder as he stood up. “Have fun.”

Rin reached for his sleeve. “Don’t you dare leave me—”

“I’m not getting in the middle of this,” he said. “I’ve seen what those arquebuses can do.”

“Congratulations,” Petra said as they returned to the Kingfisher. “I’m told this was a great victory.”

“‘Great’ is a word for it,” Rin said.

“And the fire did not come to you in battle? Chaos did not rear its head?”

Rin stopped walking. “Would you rather I had burned those people alive?”

“Sister Petra?” A missionary ran up from behind them. He looked startlingly young. He couldn’t have been a day over sixteen. His face was open and babyish, and his wide blue eyes were lashed like a girl’s.

“How do you say ‘I’m from across the great sea’?” he asked. “I forgot.”

“Like so.” Petra pronounced the Nikara phrase with flawless accuracy.

“I’m from across the great sea.” The boy looked delighted as he repeated the words. “Did I get it right? The tones?”

Rin realized with a start that he was looking at her.

“Sure,” she said. “That was fine.”

The boy beamed at her. “I love your language. It’s so beautiful.”

Rin blinked at him. What was wrong with him? Why did he look so happy?

“Brother Augus.” Petra’s voice was suddenly sharp. “What’s in your pocket?”

Rin looked and saw a handful of wotou, the steamed cornmeal buns that along with mayau fish comprised most of the soldiers’ meals, peeking out the side of Augus’s pocket.

“Just my rations,” he said quickly.

“And were you going to eat them?” Petra asked.

“Sure, I’m just taking a walk—”

“Augus.”

His face fell. “They said they were hungry.”

“You’re not allowed to feed them,” Rin said flatly. Jinzha had made that order adamantly clear. The civilians were to go hungry for the night. When the Republic fed them in the morning, their terror would be transformed into goodwill.

“That’s cruel,” Augus said.

“That’s war,” Rin said. “And if you can’t follow basic orders, then—”

Petra swiftly intervened. “Remember your training, Augus. We do not contradict our hosts. We are here to spread the good word. Not to undermine the Nikara.”

“But they’re starving,” Augus said. “I wanted to comfort them—”

“Then comfort them with the Maker’s teachings.” Petra placed a hand on Augus’s cheek. “Go.”

Rin watched Augus dart back down the beach. “He shouldn’t be on this campaign. He’s too young.”

Petra turned and gestured for Rin to follow her onto the Kingfisher. “Not so much younger than your soldiers.”

“Our soldiers are trained.”

“And so are our missionaries.” Petra led Rin down to her quarters on the second deck. “The brothers and sisters of the Gray Company have dedicated their lives to spreading the word of the Divine Architect across Chaos-ridden lands. All of us have been trained at the company academies since we were very young.”

“I’m sure it’s easy to find barbarians to civilize.”

“There are indeed many on this hemisphere that have not found their way to the Maker.” Petra seemed to have missed Rin’s sarcasm entirely. She motioned for Rin to sit down on the bed. “Would you like laudanum again?”

“Are you going to touch me again?”

“Yes.”

At this rate Rin was going to run the risk of backsliding into her opium addiction. But this choice was between the demon she knew and the foreigner she didn’t. She took the proffered cup.

“Your continent has been closed off to us for a long time,” Petra said as Rin drank. “Some of our superiors argued that we should stop learning your languages. But I’ve always known we would come back. The Maker demands it.”

Rin closed her eyes as the familiar numbing sensation of laudanum seeped through her bloodstream. “So, what, your missionaries are walking up and down that beach giving everyone long spiels about clocks?”

“One need not comprehend the true form of the Divine Architect to act according to his will. We know that barbarians must crawl before they walk. Heuristics will do for the unenlightened.”

“You mean easy moral rules for people who are too dumb to understand why they matter.”

“If you must be vulgar about it. I am confident that in time, at least some of the Nikara will gain true enlightenment. In a few generations, some of you may even be fit to join the Gray Company. But heuristics must first be developed for the lesser peoples—”

“Lesser peoples,” Rin echoed. “What are lesser peoples?”

“You, of course,” Petra said, utterly straight-faced, as if this were a simple matter of fact. “It’s no fault of your own. The Nikara haven’t evolved to our level yet. This is simple science; the proof is in your physiognomy. Look.”

She pulled a stack of books onto the table and flipped them open for Rin to see.

Drawings of Nikara people covered every page. They were heavily annotated. Rin couldn’t decipher the scrawling, flat Hesperian script, but several phrases popped out.

See eye fold—indicates lazy character.

Sallow skin. Malnutrition?

On the last page, Rin saw a heavily annotated drawing of herself that must have been done by Petra. Rin was glad that Petra’s handwriting was far too small for her to decipher. She didn’t want to read any conclusions about herself.

“Since your eyes are smaller, you see within a smaller periphery than we do.” Petra pointed to the diagrams as she explained. “Your skin has a yellowish tint that indicates malnutrition or an unbalanced diet. Now see your skull shapes. Your brains, which we know to be an indicator of your rational capacity, are by nature smaller.”

Rin looked at her in disbelief. “You think you’re just naturally smarter than me?”

“I don’t think that,” Petra said. “I know it. The proof is all well-documented. The Nikara are a particularly herdlike nation. You listen well, but independent thought is difficult for you. You reach scientific conclusions centuries after we discover them.” Petra shut the book. “But worry not. In time, all civilizations will become perfect in the eyes of the Maker. That is the Gray Company’s task.”

“You think we’re stupid,” Rin said, almost to herself. She had the ridiculous urge to laugh. Did the Hesperians really take themselves this seriously? They thought this was science? “You think we’re all inferior to you.”

“Look at those people on the beach,” Petra said. “Look at your country, squabbling over the refuse of wars you’ve been fighting for centuries. Do they look evolved to you?”

“And what, your own wars just happen to be civilized? Millions of you died, didn’t they?”

“They died because we were fighting the forces of Chaos. Our wars are not internal. They are crusader’s battles. But look back to your own history, and tell me that any of your internal wars were fought for anything other than naked greed, ambition, or sheer cruelty.”

Rin didn’t know whether it was the laudanum, or whether Petra was truly correct, but she hated that she didn’t have an answer.

In the morning, the remaining men of Radan were walked at sword point to the town square and instructed to cast their votes by throwing tiles into burlap bags. They could pick from two tile colors: white for yes and black for no.

“What happens if they vote against?” Rin asked Nezha.

“They’ll die,” he said. “Well, most of them. If they fight.”

“Don’t you think that kind of misses the point?”

Nezha shrugged. “Everyone joins the Republic by their own free choice. We’re just, well, tipping the scales a little bit.”

The voting took place one man at a time and lasted just over an hour. Rather than counting the tiles, Jinzha dumped the bags out onto the ground so that everyone could see the colors. By an overwhelming majority, the village of Radan had elected to join the Republic.

“Good decision,” he said. “Welcome to the future.”

He ordered a single skimmer to remain behind with its crew to enforce martial law and collect a monthly grain tax until the war’s end. The fleet would confiscate a seventh of the township’s food stores, leaving just enough to tide Radan over through the winter.

Nezha looked both pleased and relieved as they departed on the Murui. “That’s what you get when the people decide.”

Kitay shook his head. “No, that’s what you get when you’ve killed all the brave men and let the cowards vote.”

The Republican Fleet’s subsequent skirmishes were similarly easy to the point of overkill. More often than not they took over townships and villages without a fight. A few cities put up resistance, but never to any effect. Against the combined strength of Jinzha’s Seahawks, resisters usually capitulated within half a day.

As they went north, Jinzha detached brigades, and then entire platoons, to rule over recently liberated territory. Other crews bled soldiers to man those empty ships, until several skimmers had to be grounded and left on shore because the fleet had been spread too thin.

Some of the villages they conquered didn’t put up a resistance at all, but readily joined the Republic. They sent out volunteers in boats laden with food and supplies. Hastily stitched flags bearing the colors of Dragon Province flew over city walls in a welcoming gesture.

“Look at that.” Kitay pointed. “Vaisra’s flag. Not the flag of the Republic.”

“Does the Republic even have a flag?” Rin asked.

“I’m not sure. It’s curious that they think they’re being conquered by Dragon Province, though.”

On Kitay’s advice, Jinzha placed the volunteer ships and sailors in the front of the fleet. He didn’t trust Hare Province sailors to fight on their home territory, and he didn’t want them in strategically crucial positions in case they defected. But the extra ships were, in the worst-case scenario, excellent bait. Several times Jinzha sent allied ships out first to lure townships into opening their gates before he stormed them with his warships.

For a while it seemed like they might take the entire north in one clean, unobstructed sweep. But their fortunes finally took a turn for the worse at the northern border of Hare Province when a massive thunderstorm forced them to make anchor in a river cove.

The storm wasn’t so much dangerous as it was boring. River storms, unlike ocean storms, could just be waited out if they grounded ships. So for three days the troops holed up belowdecks, playing cards and telling stories while rain battered at the hull.

“In the north they still offer divine sacrifices to the wind.” The Kingfisher’s first mate, a gaunt man who had been at sea longer than Jinzha had been alive, had become the favorite storyteller of the mess. “In the days before the Red Emperor, the Khan of the Hinterlands sent down a fleet to invade the Empire. But a magician summoned a wind god to create a typhoon to destroy the Khan’s fleet, and the Khan’s ships turned to splinters in the ocean.”

“Why not sacrifice to the ocean?” asked a sailor.

“Because oceans don’t create storms. This was a god of the wind. But wind is fickle and unpredictable, and the gods have never taken lightly to being summoned by the Nikara. The moment the Khan’s fleet was destroyed, the wind god turned on the Nikara magician who had summoned him. He pulled the magician’s village into the sky and dropped it down in a bloody rain of ripped houses, crushed livestock, and dismembered children.”

Rin stood up and quietly left the mess.

The passageways belowdecks were eerily quiet. Absent was the constant grinding sound of men working the paddle wheels. The crew and soldiers were concentrated in the mess, if they weren’t sleeping, and so the passage was empty except for her.

When she pressed her face to the porthole she saw the storm raging outside, the vicious waves swirling about the cove like eager hands reaching to rip the fleet apart. In the clouds she thought she saw two eyes—bright, cerulean, maliciously intelligent.

She shivered. She thought she heard laughter in the thunder. She thought she saw a hand reach from the skies.

Then she blinked, and the storm was just a storm.

She didn’t want to be alone, so she ventured downstairs to the soldiers’ cabins, where she knew she could find the Cike.

“Hello there.” Baji waved her inside. “Nice of you to join.”

She sat down cross-legged beside him. “What are you playing?”

Baji tossed a handful of dice into a cup. “Divisions. Ever played?”

Rin thought briefly back to Tutor Feyrik, the man who had gotten her to Sinegard, and his unfortunate addiction to the game. She smiled wistfully. “Just a bit.”

Nominally, no gambling of any kind was permitted on the ships. Lady Yin Saikhara, since her pilgrimage to the west, had instituted strict rules about vices such as drinking, smoking, gambling, and consorting with prostitutes. Almost everyone ignored them. Vaisra never enforced them.

It turned out to be a rather vicious game. Ramsa kept accusing Baji of cheating. Baji was not cheating, but they discovered that Ramsa was when a handful of dice spilled out of his sleeve, at which point the game turned into a wrestling match that ended only when Ramsa bit Baji on the arm hard enough to draw blood.

“You mangy little brat,” Baji cursed as he wrapped a linen around his elbow.

Ramsa grinned, displaying teeth stained red.

All of them were clearly bored, going stir-crazy while waiting out the storm. But Rin suspected that they were also itching for action. She’d cautioned them not to put their full abilities on display where Hesperian soldiers might be watching. Petra knew about one shaman; she didn’t need to discover the rest.

Concealment had turned out to be fairly easy on campaign. Suni and Baji’s abilities were freakish, yes, but not necessarily in the realm of the supernatural. In the chaos of a melee, they could pass themselves off as hypercompetent soldiers. It had worked so far. As far as Rin knew, the Hesperians suspected nothing. Suni and Baji might be getting frustrated holding themselves back, but at least they were free.

For once, Rin thought, she’d made some decent decisions as commander. She hadn’t gotten them killed. The Republican troops treated them better than the Militia ever had. They were getting paid, they were as safe as they’d ever be, and that was as good as she could do for them.

“What are the Gray Company like?” Baji asked as he scooped the dice off the floor for a new game. “I heard that woman talks your ear off every time you’re together.”

“It’s stupid,” Rin muttered. “Religious lecturing.”

“Load of hogwash?” Ramsa asked.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “They might be right about some things.”

She wished she could discard the Hesperian faith more easily, but so many parts of it made sense. She wanted to believe it. She wanted to see her catastrophic actions as a product of Chaos, an entropic mistake, and to believe that she could repent for them by reinforcing order in the Empire, reversing devastation the way one pieced together a broken teacup.

It made her feel better. It made every battle she’d fought since Adlaga feel like another step toward putting things right. It made her feel less like a killer.

“You know their Divine Architect doesn’t exist,” Baji said. “I mean, you understand why that’s obvious, right?”

“I’m not sure,” she said slowly. Certainly the Maker didn’t exist on the same psychospiritual plane as the sixty-four gods of the Pantheon, but was that enough to discount the Hesperians’ theory? What if the Pantheon was, in fact, a manifestation of Chaos? What if the Divine Architect truly existed on a higher plane, out of reach of anyone but his chosen and blessed people?

“I mean, look at their airships,” she said. “Their arquebuses. If they’re claiming religion made them advanced, they might be right about some things.”

Baji opened his mouth to respond and promptly closed it. Rin looked up and saw a shock of white hair in the doorway.

No one spoke. The dice clattered loudly to the floor and stayed there.

Ramsa broke the silence. “Hi, Chaghan.”

Rin hadn’t spoken to Chaghan since Arlong. When the fleet had sailed, she’d partly hoped that Chaghan might just elect to stay on land. He was never one for the thick of battle, and after their falling-out she couldn’t imagine why he’d stay with her. But the twins had remained with the Cike, and Rin had found herself crossing the room whenever she saw a hint of white hair.

Chaghan paused by the door, Qara close behind him.

“Having fun?” he asked.

“Sure,” Baji said. “You want in?”

“No, thank you,” Chaghan said. “But it’s nice to see you’re all having such a good time.”

No one responded to that. Rin knew she was being mocked, she just didn’t have the energy to get into it with Chaghan right now.

“Does it hurt?” Qara asked.

Rin blinked. “What?”

“When the gray-eyed one takes you to her cabin,” Qara said. “Does it hurt?”

“Oh. It’s—it’s not so bad. It’s just a lot of measurements.”

Qara cast her what looked like a glance of sympathy, but Chaghan grabbed his sister by the arm and stormed out of the cabin before she could speak.

Ramsa gave a low whistle and began to pick the dice up off the floor.

Baji gave Rin a curious look. “What happened between you two?”

“Stupid shit,” Rin muttered.

“Stupid shit about Altan?” Ramsa pressed.

“Why would you think it was about Altan?”

“Because with Chaghan, it’s always about Altan.” Ramsa tossed his dice into a cup and shook. “Honestly? I think Altan was Chaghan’s only friend. He’s still grieving. And there’s nothing you can do to make that hurt less.”

Chapter 17

The storm passed with minimal damage. One skimmer capsized—the force of the winds had ripped it from its anchor. Three men drowned. But the crew managed to salvage most of its supplies, and the drowned men had been only foot soldiers, so Jinzha wrote it off as a minor setback.

The moment the skies cleared, he gave the order to continue upriver toward Ram Province. It was one step closer to the military center of the Empire and, as Kitay anticipated, the first territory that would present a fighting challenge.

The Ram Warlord had holed up inside Xiashang, his capital, instead of mounting a border defense. This was why the Republic encountered little other than local volunteer militias throughout their destructive trek north. The Ram Warlord had chosen to bide his time and wait for Jinzha’s troops to tire before fighting a defensive battle.

That should have been a losing strategy. The Republican Fleet was simply bigger than whatever force the Ram Warlord could have rounded up. They knew they could take Ram Province; it was only a matter of time.

The only wrinkle was that Xiashang had unexpectedly robust defenses. Thanks to Qara’s birds, the Republican forces had a good layout map of the capital’s defensive structures. Even the tower ships with their trebuchets would have a difficult time breaching those walls.

As such, Rin spent her next few evenings in the Kingfisher’s office, crammed around a table with Jinzha’s leadership coterie.

“The walls are the problem. You can’t blow through them.” Kitay pointed to a ring he’d drawn around the walls of the city. “They’re made of packed earth, three feet thick. You could try ramming them with cannonballs, but it’d just be a waste of good fire powder.”

“What about a siege?” Jinzha asked. “We could force a surrender if they think we’re willing to wait.”

“You’d be a fool,” said General Tarcquet.

Jinzha bristled visibly. The leadership exchanged awkward looks.

Tarcquet was always present at strategy councils, though he rarely spoke and never offered the assistance of his own troops. He’d made his role clear. He was there to judge their competence and quietly deride their mistakes, which made his input both irreproachable and grating.

“If this were my fleet I’d throw everything I have at those walls,” Tarcquet says. “If you can’t take a minor capital, you won’t take the Empire.”

“But this is not your fleet,” Jinzha said. “It’s mine.”

Tarcquet’s lip curled in contempt. “You are in command because your father thought you’d at least be smart enough to do whatever I told you.”

Jinzha looked furious, but Tarcquet held up a hand before he could respond. “You can’t pull off this bluff. They know you don’t have the supplies or the time. You’ll have to fold in weeks.”

Despite herself, Rin agreed with Tarcquet’s assessment. She’d studied this precise problem at Sinegard. Of all the successful defensive campaigns on military record, most were when cities had warded off invaders through protracted siege warfare. A siege turned a battle into a waiting game of who starved first. The Republican Fleet had the supplies to last for perhaps a month. It was unclear how long Xiashang could last. It would be foolish to wait and find out.

“They certainly don’t have enough food for the entire city,” Nezha said. “We made sure of that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kitay said. “The Ram Warlord and his people will be fine. They’ll just let the peasants starve; Tsung Ho has done that before.”

“Do we try negotiating?” Nezha asked.

“Won’t work—Tsung Ho hates Father,” Jinzha said. “And he has no incentive to cooperate, because he’ll just assume that under the Republican regime he’d be deposed sooner or later.”

“A siege might work,” said Admiral Molkoi. “Those walls are not so impenetrable. We’d just have to break them down at a choke point.”

“I wouldn’t,” Kitay said. “That’s what they’ll be preparing for. If you’re going to storm the city, you want the element of surprise. Some gimmick. Like a false peace proposal. But I don’t think they’d fall for that; Tsung Ho is too smart.”

A thought occurred to Rin. “What about Fuchai and Goujian?”

The men stared blankly at her.

“Fuchai and who?” Jinzha asked.

Only Kitay and Nezha looked like they understood. The tale of Fuchai and Goujian was a favorite story of Master Irjah’s. They’d all been assigned to write term papers about it during their second year.

“Fuchai and Goujian were two generals during the Era of Warring States,” Nezha explained. “Fuchai destroyed Goujian’s home state, and then made Goujian his personal servant to humiliate him. Goujian performed the most degrading tasks to make Fuchai believe he bore him no ill will. One time when Fuchai fell sick, Goujian volunteered to taste his stool to tell how bad his illness was. It worked—ten years later, Fuchai set Goujian free. The first thing Goujian did was hire a beautiful concubine and send her to Fuchai’s court in the guise of a gift.”

“The concubine, of course, killed Fuchai,” Kitay said.

Jinzha looked baffled. “You’re saying I send the Ram Warlord a beautiful concubine.”

“No,” Rin said. “I’m saying you should eat shit.”

Tarcquet barked out a laugh.

Jinzha reddened. “Excuse me?”

“The Ram Warlord thinks he holds all the cards,” Rin said. “So initiate a negotiation. Humiliate yourself, present yourself as weaker than you are, and make him underestimate your forces.”

“That won’t tear down his walls,” said Jinzha.

“But it will make him cocky. How does his behavior change if he’s not anticipating an attack? If he instead thinks you’re running away? Then we have an opening to exploit.” Rin cast about wildly in her head for ideas. “You could get someone behind those walls. Open the gates from the inside.”

“There’s no way you manage that,” Nezha said. “You’d need to get an entire platoon to fight through from the inside, and you can’t hide that many men in one ship.”

“I don’t need an entire platoon,” Rin said.

“No squadron is capable of that.”

She crossed her arms. “I can think of one.”

For once, Jinzha wasn’t looking at her with disdain.

“Who do we send to negotiate with the Ram Warlord, then?” he asked.

Rin and Nezha both answered at once. “Kitay.”

Kitay frowned. “Because I’m a good negotiator?”

“No.” Nezha clapped him on the shoulder. “Because you’ll be a really, really bad one.”

“I was under the impression that I was receiving your grand marshal.” The Ram Warlord lounged casually on his chair, tapping his fingers together as he appraised the Republican delegation with sharp, intelligent eyes.

“You’ll be meeting with me,” Kitay said. He spoke in a perfectly tremulous voice, obviously nervous and pretending not to be. “The Dragon Warlord is indisposed.”

The Republican delegation was deliberately shabby. Kitay was guarded only by two infantry soldiers from the Kingfisher. His life had to seem cheap. Jinzha hadn’t wanted to let Rin come, but she refused to stay behind while Kitay went to face the enemy.

Their delegations had met at a neutral stretch along the shore. The backdrop made the meeting seem more like a competitive fishing match than the site of a war negotiation. This move, Rin assumed, was designed to humiliate Kitay.

The Ram Warlord looked Kitay up and down and pursed his lips. “Vaisra can’t be bothered, so he sends a little puppy to negotiate for him.”

Kitay puffed himself up. “I’m not a puppy. I’m the son of Defense Minister Chen.”

“Yes, I wondered why you looked familiar. You’re a far cry from your old man, aren’t you?”

Kitay cleared his throat. “Jinzha sent me here with proposed terms for a truce.”

“A truce should be settled between leaders. Jinzha does not even afford me the respect that he ought a Warlord.”

“Jinzha has entrusted negotiations to me,” Kitay said stiffly.

The Ram Warlord’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, I understand. Injured then? Or dead?”

“Jinzha is fine.” Kitay let his voice tremble just a bit at the end. “He sends his regards.”

The Ram Warlord leaned forward in his chair, like a wolf examining his prey. “Really.”

Kitay cleared his throat again. “Jinzha instructed me to convey that the truce can only benefit you. We will take the north. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to join our forces. If you agree to our terms then we’ll leave Xiashang alone, so long as your men serve in our—”

The Ram Warlord cut him off. “I have no interested in joining Vaisra’s so-called republic. It’s just a ploy to put himself on the throne.”

“That’s paranoid,” Kitay said.

“Does Yin Vaisra seem like a man inclined to share power to you?”

“The Dragon Warlord intends to implement the representative democracy style of government practiced in the west. He knows the provincial system isn’t working—”

“Oh, but it’s working very well for us,” said the Ram Warlord. “The only dissenters are those poor suckers in the south, led by Vaisra himself. The rest of us see a system that’s granted us stability for two decades. There’s no need to disrupt that.”

“But it will be disrupted,” Kitay insisted. “You’ve seen the fault lines yourself. You’re weeks away from going to war with your neighbors over riverways, you have more refugees than you can deal with, and you’ve received no Imperial aid.”

“That, you’re wrong about,” said the Ram Warlord. “The Empress has been exceedingly generous to my province. Meanwhile, your embargo failed, your fields are poisoned, and you’re quickly running out of time.”

Rin shot Kitay a glance. His face betrayed nothing, but she knew, on the inside, he must be gloating.

As they spoke, a single merchant ship drifted toward Xiashang, marked with smugglers’ colors provided to them by Moag. It would claim to have run up from Monkey Province with illegal shipments of grain. Jinzha had packed soldiers into the hold and dressed the few sailors who would remain visible on deck as river traders.

If the Ram Warlord was expecting smuggler ships, then he might very well let it within the city gates.

“There’s a way out here that doesn’t end in your death,” Kitay said.

“Negotiations are a matter of leverage, little boy,” said the Ram Warlord. “And I don’t see your fleet.”

“Maybe your spies should look harder,” Kitay said. “Maybe we’ve hidden it.”

They had hidden it, deep inside a canyon crevice two miles downstream from Xiashang’s gates. Jinzha had sent a smaller fleet of skimmers manned by skeleton crews out toward a different tributary to make it appear that the Dragon Fleet was avoiding Xiashang entirely by sailing east toward Tiger Province instead. They’d done this very conspicuously in broad daylight. The Ram Warlord’s spies had to have seen.

The Ram Warlord shrugged. “Perhaps. Or perhaps you’ve taken the easy route down the Udomsap tributary instead.”

Rin fought to keep her expression neutral.

“The Udomsap isn’t so far from you,” said Kitay. “By river or by ground, you’re lying in Jinzha’s warpath.”

“Bold words from a little boy.” The Ram Warlord snorted.

“A little boy speaking for a great army,” Kitay said. “Sooner or later, we’ll come for you. And then you’ll regret it.”

The blustering was an act, but Rin suspected the frustration in his voice was real. Kitay was playing his part so well that Rin couldn’t help but feel a sudden urge to step in front of him, to protect him. Standing one-on-one before a Warlord, Kitay just looked like a boy: thin, scared, and far too young for his position.

“No. I don’t think we will.” The Ram Warlord reached over and ruffled Kitay’s hair. “I think you’re trapped. That storm hit you harder than you’ll admit. And you don’t have the troops to press on into the winter, and you’re running out of supplies, so you want me to throw open my gates and save your skins. Tell Jinzha he can take his truce and shove it up his butt.” He smiled, displaying teeth. “Run along down the river, now.”

“I admit this might have been a terrible idea,” said Kitay.

Rin’s spyglass was trained on Xiashang’s gates. She had a sick feeling in her stomach. The fleet had been waiting around the bend since dark. The sun had been up for hours. The gates were still closed.

“You don’t think he bought it,” Rin said.

“I was so sure he’d buy it,” said Kitay. “Men like that are so incredibly arrogant that they always need to think that they’ve outsmarted everyone else. But maybe he did.”

Rin didn’t want to entertain that thought.

Another hour passed. No movement. Kitay started walking in circles, chewing at his thumbnail so hard that it bled. “Someone should suggest a retreat.”

Rin lowered her spyglass. “You’d be sentencing my men to death.”

“It’s been half a day,” he said curtly. “Chances are they’re dead already.”

Jinzha, who had been pacing the length of the deck in agitation, motioned toward them. “It’s time to pursue other options. Those men are gone.”

Rin’s fists tightened. “Don’t you dare—”

“They could have captured them.” Kitay tried to calm her down. “He could be planning to use them as hostages.”

“We don’t have anyone important on that ship,” Jinzha said, which Rin thought was a rather cruel way of describing some of his best soldiers. “And knowing Tsung Ho, he’d just set it on fire.”

The sun crawled to high noon.

Rin fought the creep of despair. The later it got in the day, the worse their chances of storming the walls. They had already lost the element of surprise. The Ram Warlord surely knew they were coming by now, and he’d had half the day to prepare defenses.

But what other choice did the Republic have? The Cike were trapped behind those gates. Any later and their chances of survival dwindled to nothing. Waiting was useless. Escape would be humiliating.

Jinzha seemed to have been thinking the same. “They’re out of time. We attack.”

“That’s what they want, though!” Kitay protested. “This is the battle they want to have.”

“Then we’ll give them that fight.” Jinzha signaled Admiral Molkoi to give the order. For once, Rin was glad that he’d ignored Kitay.

The Republican Fleet surged forward, a symphony of war drums and churning paddle-wheels.

Xiashang had prepared well to meet the charge. The Militia went on the offensive immediately. A wave of arrows greeted the Republican Fleet as soon as it crossed into range. For an instant it was impossible to hear anything over the sound of arrows thudding into wood, steel, and flesh. And it didn’t stop. The artillery assault kept coming in wave after wave from archers who seemed to have an endless supply of arrows.

The Republican archers returned fire, but they might have been shooting aimlessly at the sky. The defenders simply ducked down and let the bolts whiz overhead while Republican rockets exploded harmlessly against the massive city walls.

The Kingfisher was safe ensconced within its turtleshell armor, but the other Republican ships had been effectively reduced to sitting ducks. The tower ships floated uselessly in the water. Their trebuchet crews couldn’t launch any missiles—they couldn’t move without fear of being turned into pincushions.

The Lapwing, the Seahawk closest to the walls, sent a double-headed dragon missile screeching through the air only for a Ram archer to shoot it out of the sky. Upon impact it fell sizzling back toward the boat. The Lapwing’s crew scattered before the shower of missiles fell upon their own munitions supply. Rin heard one round of explosions, and then another—a chain reaction that engulfed the Seahawk ship in smoke and fire.

The Shrike, however, had managed to steer its towers to just beside the city gate. Rin squinted at the ship, trying to gauge its distance from the wall. The towers were just tall enough to clear the parapets, but as long as the wall was manned with archers, the tower was useless. Anyone who scaled the siege engine would just be picked off at the top.

Someone had to take those archers out.

Rin glared at the wall, frustrated, cursing the Seal. If she could call the Phoenix she could have just sent a torrent of flame over the barriers, could have cleared it out in under a minute.

But she didn’t have the fire. Which meant she had to get up there herself, and she needed explosives.

She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Ramsa!”

He was crouched ten meters away behind the mast. She screamed his name thrice to no avail. At last she threw a scrap of wood at his shoulder to get his attention.

He yelped. “What the hell?”

“I need a bomb!”

He opened his mouth to respond just as another set of missiles exploded against the turtle boat’s side. He shook his head and gestured frantically at his empty knapsack.

“Anything?” she mouthed.

He dug deep in his pocket, pulled out something round, and rolled it across the floor toward her. She picked it up. A pungent smell hit her nose.

“Is this a shit bomb?” she yelled.

Ramsa waved his hands helplessly. “It’s all I’ve got left!”

It would have to do. She shoved the bomb into her shirt. She’d worry about ignition when she got to the wall. Now she needed some way to climb up to the top. And a shield, something huge, heavy and large enough to cover her entire body . . .

Her eyes landed on the rowboats.

She turned to Kitay. “Pull a boat up.”

“What?”

She pointed to the siege tower. “Get me up in a boat!”

His eyes widened in understanding. He barked a series of orders to the soldiers behind him. They ran out to the mainmast, ducking beneath shields raised over their heads.

Rin jumped into a rowboat with two other soldiers. Kitay directed the men to fasten the ropes at the end, typically meant to lower the rowboat into the water, onto the mast pulley. The rowboat teetered wildly when they started hoisting it up the mast. It hadn’t been secured well. Halfway up it threatened to flip over until they scrambled to redistribute their weight.

An arrow whistled past Rin’s head. The Ram archers had seen them.

“Hold on!” She twisted the ropes. The rowboat tilted nearly horizontal, a functional full-body shield. Rin crouched down, clinging fast to a seat so she wouldn’t tumble out. A crossbow bolt slid through the bottom of the boat and cut through the arm of the soldier to her left. He screamed and let go. A second later Rin heard him crunch on the deck.

She held her breath. The boat was almost to the top of the wall.

“Get ready.” She bent her knees and rocked the boat so that it would swing forward. Their first swing toward the wall fell short by a yard. Rin caught a brief, dizzying glimpse of the drop beneath her feet.

Another series of arrows studded the rowboat as they swung backward.

Their second swing got them close enough.

“Go!”

They jumped to the wall. Rin slipped on impact. Her knees skidded on solid rock but her feet kicked off into terrifying, empty space. She flung her arms forward and seized a groove cut in the wall. She strained to pull herself up just far enough that she could slam her elbow into the ridge and drag her torso over.

She tumbled gracelessly onto the walkway and staggered to her feet just as a Ram soldier swung a blade at her head. She blocked it with her trident, wrestled it in a circle, sent it spinning uselessly away, and then butted him in the side with the other end. He tumbled down the stairs and smashed into his comrades.

That gave her a temporary reprieve. She scanned the wall of archers. Ramsa’s shit bomb wouldn’t kill them, but it would distract them. She just needed a way to ignite it.

Again she cursed the Seal. She could have just lit it with a snap of her fingers; it would have been so easy.

She cast her eyes about for a lamp, a brazier, something . . . there. Five feet away sat a lump of burning coals in a brass pot. The Ram defenders must have been using it to light their own missiles.

She hefted the bomb in her hands, tossed it toward the pot, and prayed.

She heard a faint, dull pop.

She took a deep breath. Acrid, shit-flavored smoke spilled over the parapets, thick and blinding.

“We’re in trouble,” said the Republican soldier at her left.

She squinted through the smoke at a column of Ram reinforcements approaching fast from the lefthand walkway.

She looked frantically about the wall for a way to get down. She saw a stairwell to her left, but too many soldiers stood crowded at the base. The only other way down was across the other side of the wall, but the walkway didn’t go all the way around—a ridge of wall no thicker than her heel stood between her and the other stairwell.

No time to think. She jumped onto the outer edge of the wall, dug her heels in, and began running before she could teeter to either side. Every few steps she felt her balance jerk horrifically to one side. Somehow she righted herself and kept going.

She heard the twangs of several bows. Rather than duck, she took a flying leap toward the stairwell. She landed painfully on her side and skidded to a halt. Her shoulder and hip screamed in protest, but her arms and legs still worked. She crawled frantically down the stairs, arrows whizzing over her head.

Behind the gates was a war zone.

She’d stumbled into a crush of bodies, a clamor of steel. Blue uniforms dotted the crowd. Republican soldiers. Relief washed over her. They weren’t dead after all, just late.

“About time!”

Two wonderfully familiar tornadoes of destruction appeared before her. Suni picked up a Ram soldier as if he were a doll, hoisted him over his head, and flung him into the crowd. Baji slammed his rake down into someone’s neck, yanked it up, and twirled it in a circle to knock an incoming arrow out of the air.

“Nice,” Rin said.

He helped her to her feet. “What took you so long?”

Rin opened her mouth to respond just as someone tried to grapple her from behind. She jammed her elbow back by instinct and felt the rewarding crunch of a shattering nose. Her assailant’s grip loosened. She struggled free. “We were waiting for your signal!”

“We gave a signal! Sent a flare up ten minutes ago! Where’s the fucking army?”

Rin pointed to the wall. “There.”

A thud shook Xiashang’s gates. The Shrike had landed its siege tower.

Republican soldiers funneled over the wall like a swarm of ants. Bodies hurtled to the ground like tumbling bricks, while grappling hooks flew into the sky and embedded themselves at regular intervals along the wall.

She saw almost as many blue uniforms as green ones now. Slowly the press of Republican soldiers expanded through the center square.

“Get to the gates,” Rin told Baji.

“Way ahead of you.” Baji scattered the throng of soldiers guarding one suspension wheel with a well-aimed swing of his rake. Suni took the other wheel. Together they dug their heels into the ground and pushed. Republican soldiers formed a protective circle around them, fending off the press of defenders.

“Push!” someone screamed.

Rin didn’t have the chance to look behind her to see what was happening. The wave of steel was too blinding. Something sliced open her left cheek. Blood splattered across her face. It was in her eyes—she wiped at them with her sleeve, but that only made them sting worse.

She lashed blindly out with her trident. Steel crunched into bone, and her attacker dropped to the ground. Lucky blow. Rin fell back behind the Republican line and blinked furiously until her vision cleared.

She heard a screeching grind from the suspension wheels. She hazarded a glance over her shoulder. With a massive groan, the gates of Xiashang swung open.

Behind them was the fleet.

The tide had turned. Republican soldiers flooded the square, a deluge of so many blue uniforms that for a moment Rin lost sight of the Ram defenders entirely. Somewhere a horn blew, followed by a series of gong strikes that rang so loudly they drowned out any other sound.

Distress signals. But signals to whom? Rin clambered up onto a crate, trying to see above the melee.

She spotted movement in the southwest corridor. She squinted. A new platoon of soldiers, armed and battle-fresh, ran toward the square. The local backup militia? No—they were wearing blue uniforms, not green.

But that wasn’t the ocean blue of the Republican uniforms.

Rin almost dropped her trident. Those weren’t Nikara soldiers.

Those were Federation troops.

For a moment she thought, panicking, that the Federation was still at large, that they had taken this chance to launch a simultaneous invasion on Xiashang. But that made no sense. The Federation had already been behind the city gates. And they weren’t attacking the Xiashang city guard, they were only attacking troops clearly marked in Republican uniforms.

Realization hit like a punch to the gut.

The Ram Warlord had allied with the Federation.

The ground tilted beneath her feet. She saw smoke and fire. She saw bodies eaten by gas. She saw Altan, walking backward away from her on a pier—

“Get down!” Baji shouted.

Rin flung herself to the ground just as a spear hit the wall where her head had been.

She struggled to her feet. She couldn’t see an end to the column of Federation soldiers. How many were there? Did they equal Republican numbers?

What had seemed like an easy victory was about to turn into a bloodbath.

She raced up the stairway to get a better look at the city’s layout. Just past the town square she saw a three-story residence embedded in a massive, sculpture-dotted garden. That had to be the Ram Warlord’s private quarters. It was the largest building in Xiashang.

She knew the best way to end this.

“Baji!” She waved her trident to get his attention. When he looked up, she pointed toward the Ram Warlord’s mansion. “Cover me.”

He understood immediately. Together they forced their bloody way through the throng until they broke out on the other side of the square. Then they ran for the gardens.

The mansion was guarded by two stone lions, mouths open in wide, greedy caverns. The doors were bolted shut.

Good. That meant someone was hiding inside.

Rin aimed a savage kick at the handle, but the doors didn’t budge.

“Please,” said Baji. She got out of his way. He took three steps back and slammed his shoulder into the doors. Wood splintered. The doors crashed open.

Baji picked himself up off the floor and pointed behind her. “We’ve got trouble.”

Rin turned around to see a fresh wave of Federation soldiers running toward the mansion. Baji planted himself in the doorway, rake raised.

“You good?” Rin asked.

“You go. I’ve got this.”

She ran indoors. The halls were brightly lit but appeared entirely empty—which would have been the worst of outcomes, because that would mean the Ram Warlord’s family had already evacuated to somewhere safe. Rin stood still in the center of the hall, heart pounding, straining to listen for any sound of inhabitants.

Seconds later she heard a baby’s shrill wail.

Yes. She concentrated, trying to track the noise. She heard it again. This time the baby’s cry was stifled, like someone had clamped a sleeve over its mouth, but in the empty house it rang clear as a bell.

The sound came from the chambers to her left. Rin crept forward, shoes moving silently across the marble floor. At the end of the hall she saw a single silkscreen door. The baby’s cries were getting louder. She placed a hand on the door and pulled. Locked. She took a step back and kicked it down. The flimsy bamboo frame gave way with no trouble.

A crowd of at least fifteen women stared up at her, tears of terror streaming down their fat and puffy cheeks, clumped together like flightless birds fattened for the slaughter.

They were the Warlord’s wives, Rin guessed. His daughters. Their servant girls and nursemaids.

“Where is Tsung Ho?” she demanded.

They huddled closer together, mute and trembling.

Rin’s eyes fell on the baby. An old woman at the back of the room had it clutched in her hands. It was swaddled in red cloth. That meant it was a baby boy. A potential heir.

The Ram Warlord would not let that child die.

“Give him to me,” Rin said.

The woman frantically shook her head and pressed the child closer to her chest.

Rin leveled her trident at her. “This is not worth dying for.”

One of the girls dashed forward, flailing at her with a curtain pole. Rin ducked down and kicked out. Her foot connected with the girls’ midriff with a satisfying whumph. The girl collapsed on the ground, wailing in pain.

Rin put a foot on the girl’s sternum and pressed down, hard. The girls’ agonized whimpers gave her a savage, amused satisfaction. She felt a distinct lack of sympathy toward the women. They chose to be here. They were Federation allies, they knew what was happening, this was their fault, they should all be dead . . .

No. Stop. She took a deep breath. The red cleared from her eyes.

“Any of you try that again and I’ll gut you,” she said. “The baby. Now.”

Whimpering, the old woman relinquished the baby into her hands.

He immediately started to scream. Rin’s hands moved automatically to cup around his rear and the back of his head. Leftover instincts from days she’d spent carrying around her infant foster brother.

She had a sudden urge to coo to the baby and rock him until his sobbing ceased. She shut it down. She needed the baby to scream, and to scream loudly.

She backed out of the women’s quarters, waving her trident in front of her.

“You lot stay here,” she warned the women. “If any of you move, I will kill this child.”

The women nodded silently, tears streaking their powdered faces.

Rin kicked the screen door closed and returned to the center of the main hall.

“Tsung Ho!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

Silence.

The baby quivered in her arms. His cries had diminished to distressed whimpers. Rin briefly considered pinching his arms to make him scream.

There was no need. The sight of her bloody trident was enough. He caught one glimpse of it, opened his mouth, and shrieked.

Rin shouted over the baby, “Tsung Ho! I’ll murder your son if you don’t come out.”

She heard him approaching long before he attacked.

Too slow. Too fucking slow. She spun around, dodged his blade, and slammed the butt of her trident into his stomach. He doubled over. She caught his blade inside the trident’s prongs and twisted it out of his hand. He dropped to all fours, scrambling for his weapon. She kicked it out of the way and jammed the hilt of her trident into the back of his head. He dropped to the floor.

“You traitor.” She aimed a savage strike at his kneecaps. He howled in a pain. She hit them again. Then again.

The baby wailed louder. She walked to a corner, placed him delicately on the floor, then resumed her assault on his father. The Ram Warlord’s kneecaps were visibly broken. She moved on to his ribs.

“Please, mercy, please . . .” He curled into a pathetic bundle, arms wrapped over his head.

“When did you let the Mugenese into your gates?” she asked. “Before they burned Golyn Niis, or after?”

“We didn’t have a choice,” he whispered. He made a high keening noise as he drew his shattered knees to his chest. “They were lined up at our gates, we didn’t have any options—”

“You could have fought.”

“We would have died,” he gasped.

“Then you should have died.”

Rin slammed her trident butt against his head. He fell silent.

The baby continued to scream.

Jinzha was so pleased by their victory that he temporarily relaxed the army prohibition on alcohol. Jugs of fine sorghum wine, all plundered from the Ram Warlord’s mansion, were passed through the ranks. The soldiers camped out on the beach that night in an unusually good mood.

Jinzha and his council met by the shore to decide what to do with their prisoners. In addition to the captured Federation soldiers there were also the men of the Eighth Division—a larger Militia force than any conquered town they had dealt with so far. They were too big of a threat to let loose. Short of a mass execution, their options were to take an unwieldy number of prisoners—far too many to feed—or to let them go.

“Execute them,” Rin said immediately.

“More than a thousand men?” Jinzha shook his head. “We’re not monsters.”

“But they deserve it,” she said. “The Mugenese, at least. You know if the tables were turned, if the Federation had taken our men prisoners, they’d be dead already.”

She was so sure that it was a moot debate. But nobody nodded in agreement. She glanced around the circle, confused. Was the conclusion not clear? Why did they all look so uncomfortable?

“They’d be good at the wheels,” Admiral Molkoi said. “It’d give our men a break.”

“You’re joking,” Rin said. “You’d have to feed them, for starters—”

“So we’ll give them a subsistence diet,” said Molkoi.

“Our troops need that food!”

“Our troops have survived on less,” Molkoi said. “And it is best they don’t get used to the excess.”

Rin gawked at him. “You’ll put our troops on stricter rations so men who have committed treason can live?”

He shrugged. “They’re Nikara men. We won’t execute our own kind.”

“They stopped being Nikara the moment they let the Federation stroll into their homes,” she snapped. “They should be rounded up. And beheaded.”

None of the others would meet her eye.

“Nezha?” she asked.

He wouldn’t look at her. All he did was shake his head.

She flushed with anger. “These soldiers were collaborating with the Federation. Feeding them. Housing them. That’s treason. That should be punishable by death. Forget the soldiers—you should have the whole city punished!”

“Perhaps under Daji’s reign,” said Jinzha. “Not under the Republic. We can’t garner a reputation for brutality—”

“Because they helped them!” She was shouting now, and they were all staring at her, but she didn’t care. “The Federation! You don’t know what they did—just because you spent the war hiding in Arlong, you didn’t see what—”

Jinzha turned to Nezha. “Brother, put a muzzle on your Speerly, or—”

“I am not a dog!” Rin shrieked.

Sheer rage took over. She launched herself at Jinzha—and didn’t manage two steps before Admiral Molkoi tackled her to the ground so hard that for a moment the night stars blinked out of the sky, and it was all she could do to simply breathe.

“That’s enough,” Nezha said quietly. “She’s calmed down. Let her go.”

The pressure on her chest disappeared. Rin curled into a ball, choking miserably.

“Someone take her outside of camp,” Jinzha said. “Bind her, gag her, I don’t care. We’ll deal with this in the morning.”

“Yes, sir,” said Molkoi.

“She hasn’t eaten,” Nezha said.

“Then have someone bring her food or water if she asks,” Jinzha said. “Just get her out of my sight.”

Rin screamed.

No one could hear her—they’d banished her to a stretch of forest outside the camp perimeter—so she screamed louder, again and again, bashing her fists against a tree until blood ran down her knuckles while rage built up hotter and hotter in her chest. And for a moment she thought—hoped—that the crimson fury sparking in her vision might explode into flames, real flames, finally—

But nothing. No sparks lit her fingers; no divine laughter rippled through her thoughts. She could feel the Seal at the back of her mind, a pulsing, sickly thing, blurring and softening her anger every time it reached a peak. And that only doubled her rage, made her shriek louder in frustration, but it was a pointless tantrum because the fire remained out of her grasp; dancing, taunting her behind the barrier in her head.

Please, she thought. I need you, I need the fire, I need to burn . . .

The Phoenix remained silent.

She sank to her knees.

She could hear Altan laughing. That wasn’t the Seal, that was her own imagination, but she heard it as clearly as if he were standing right beside her.

“Look at you,” he said.

“Pathetic,” he said.

“It’s not coming back,” he said. “You’re lost, you’re done, you’re not a Speerly, you’re just a stupid little girl throwing a temper tantrum in the forest.”

Finally her voice and strength gave out and the anger ebbed pathetically, ineffectually, away. Then she was alone with the indifferent silence of the trees, with no company except for her own mind.

And Rin couldn’t stand that, so she decided to get as drunk as she possibly could.

She’d picked up a small jug of sorghum wine back at camp. She chugged it down in under a minute.

She wasn’t used to drinking. The masters at Sinegard had been strict—the smallest whiff of alcohol was grounds for expulsion. She still preferred the sickly sweetness of opium smoke to the burn of sorghum wine, but she liked how it seared her delightfully from the inside. It didn’t make the anger go away, but it reduced it to a dull throb, an aching pain rather than a sharp, fresh wound.

By the time Nezha came out for her she was utterly soused, and she wouldn’t have heard him approach if he hadn’t shouted for her every step he took.

“Rin? Are you there?”

She heard his voice around the other side of a tree. She blinked for a few seconds before she remembered how to push words out of her mouth. “Yes. Don’t come around.”

“What are you doing?”

He circled the tree. She hastily yanked her trousers back up with one hand. A dripping jug dangled from the other.

“Are you pissing in a jug?”

“I’m preparing a gift for your brother,” she said. “Think he’ll like it?”

“You can’t give the grand marshal of the Republican Army a jug of urine.”

“But it’s warm,” she mumbled. She shook it at him. Piss sloshed out the side.

Nezha hastily stepped away. “Please put that down.”

“You sure Jinzha doesn’t want it?”

“Rin.”

She sighed dramatically and complied.

He took her clean hand and led her to a patch of grass by the river, far away from the soiled jug. “You know you can’t lash out like that.”

She squared her shoulders. “And I have been appropriately disciplined.”

“It’s not about discipline. They’ll think you’re mad.”

“They already think I’m mad,” she retorted. “Savage, dumb little Speerly. Right? It’s in my nature.”

“That’s not what I . . . Come on, Rin.” Nezha shook his head. “Anyhow. I’ve, uh, got bad news.”

She yawned. “Did we lose the war? That was quick.”

“No. Jinzha’s demoted you.”

She blinked several times, uncomprehending. “What?”

“You’re unranked. You’re to serve as a foot soldier now. And you’re not in command of the Cike anymore.”

“So who is?”

“No one. There is no Cike. They’ve all been reassigned to other ships.”

He watched her carefully to gauge her reaction, but Rin just hiccupped.

“That’s all right. They hardly listened to me anyway.” She derived a kind of bitter satisfaction from saying this out loud. Her position as commander had always been a sham. To be fair, the Cike did listen to her when she had a plan, but she usually didn’t. Really, they’d effectively been running themselves.

“You know what your problem is?” Nezha asked. “You have no impulse control. Absolutely zero. None.”

“It’s terrible,” she agreed, and started to giggle. “Good thing I can’t call the fire, huh?”

He responded to that with such a long silence that eventually it began to embarrass her. She wished now that she hadn’t drunk so much. She couldn’t think properly through her helplessly muddled mind. She felt terribly foolish, crude, and ashamed.

She had to practice whispering her words before she could voice them out loud. “So what’s happening now?”

“Same thing as usual. They’re gathering up the civilians. The men will cast their votes tonight.”

She sat up. “They should not get a vote.”

“They’re Nikara. All Nikara get the option to join the Republic.”

“They helped the Federation!”

“Because they didn’t have a choice,” Nezha said. “Think about it. Put yourself in their position. You really think you would have done any better?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “I did. I was in their position. I was in worse—they had me strapped down to a bed, they were torturing me and torturing Altan in front of me and I was terrified, I wanted to die—”

“They were scared, too,” he said softly.

“Then they should have fought back.”

“Maybe they didn’t have the choice. They weren’t trained soldiers. They weren’t shamans. How else were they going to survive?”

“It’s not enough just to survive,” she hissed. “You have to fight for something, you can’t just—just live your life like a fucking coward.”

“Some people are just cowards. Some people just aren’t that strong.”

“Then they shouldn’t have votes,” she snarled.

The more she thought about it, the more ludicrous Vaisra’s proposed democracy seemed. How were the Nikara supposed to rule themselves? They hadn’t run their own country since before the days of the Red Emperor, and even drunk, she could figure out why—the Nikara were simply far too stupid, too selfish, and too cowardly.

“Democracy’s not going to work. Look at them.” She was gesturing at trees, not people, but it hardly made a difference to her. “They’re cows. Fools. They’re voting for the Republic because they’re scared—I’m sure they’d vote just as quickly to join the Federation.”

“Don’t be unfair,” Nezha said. “They’re just people: they’ve never studied warcraft.”

“So then they shouldn’t rule!” she shouted. “They need someone to tell them what to do, what to think—”

“And who’s that going to be? Daji?”

“Not Daji. But someone educated. Someone who’s passed the Keju, who’s graduated from Sinegard. Someone who’s been in the military. Someone who knows the value of a human life.”

“You’re describing yourself,” said Nezha.

“I’m not saying it would be me,” Rin said. “I’m just saying it shouldn’t be the people. Vaisra shouldn’t let them elect anyone. He should just rule.”

Nezha tilted his head to the side. “You want my father to make himself Emperor?”

A wave of nausea rocked her stomach before she could respond. There was no time to get up; she lurched forward onto her knees and heaved the contents of her stomach against the tree. Her face was too close to the ground. A good deal of vomit splashed back onto her cheek. She rubbed clumsily at it with her sleeve.

“You all right?” Nezha asked when she’d stopped dry-heaving.

“Yes.”

He rubbed his hand in circles on her back. “Good.”

She spat a gob of regurgitated wine onto the dirt. “Fuck off.”

Nezha lifted a clump of mud up from the riverbank. “Have you ever heard the story of how the goddess Nüwa created humanity?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell it to you.” Nezha molded the mud into a ball with his palms. “Once upon a time, after the birth of the world, Nüwa was lonely.”

“What about her husband, Fuxi?” Rin only knew the myths about Nüwa and Fuxi both.

“Absent spouse, I guess. Myth doesn’t mention him.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Anyway, Nüwa gets lonely, decides to create some humans to populate the world to keep her company.” Nezha pressed his fingernails into the ball of mud. “The first few people she makes are incredibly detailed. Fine features, lovely clothes.”

Rin could see where this was going. “Those are the aristocrats.”

“Yes. The nobles, the emperors, the warriors, everyone who matters. Then she gets bored. It’s taking too long. So she takes a rope and starts flinging mud in all directions. Those become the hundred clans of Nikan.”

Rin swallowed. Her throat tasted like acid. “They don’t tell that story in the south.”

“And why do you think that is?” Nezha asked.

She turned that over in her mind for a moment. Then she laughed.

“My people are mud,” she said. “And you’re still going to let them run a country.”

“I don’t think they’re mud,” Nezha said. “I think they’re still unformed. Uneducated and uncultured. They don’t know better because they haven’t been given the chance. But the Republic will shape and refine them. Develop them into what they were meant to be.”

“That’s not how it works.” Rin took the clump of mud from Nezha’s hand. “They’re never going to become more than what they are. The north won’t let them.”

“That’s not true.”

“You think that. But I’ve seen how power works.” Rin crushed the clump in her fingers. “It’s not about who you are, it’s about how they see you. And once you’re mud in this country, you’re always mud.”

Chapter 18

“You’re joking,” Ramsa said.

Rin shook her head, and her temples throbbed at the sudden movement. Under the harsh light of dawn, she’d come to deeply regret ever touching alcohol, which made the task of informing the Cike they’d been disbanded very distasteful. “I’m unranked. Jinzha’s orders.”

“Then what about us?” Ramsa demanded.

She gave him a blank look. “What about you?”

“Where are we supposed to go?”

“Oh.” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember. “You’re being reassigned. You’re on the Griffon, I think, and Suni and Baji are on the tower ships—”

“We’re not together?” Ramsa asked. “Fuck that. Can’t we just refuse?”

“No.” She pressed a palm into her aching forehead. “You’re still Republic soldiers. You have to follow orders.”

He stared at her in disbelief. “That’s all you’ve got?”

“What else am I supposed to say?”

“Something!” he shouted. “Anything! We’re not the Cike anymore, and you’re just going to take that lying down?”

She wanted to cover her ears with her hands. She was so exhausted. She wished Ramsa would just go away and break the news to the others for her so that she could lie down and go to sleep and stop thinking about anything.

“Who cares? The Cike’s not that important. The Cike is dead.”

Ramsa grabbed at her collar. But he was so scrawny, shorter even than her, that it only made him look ridiculous.

“What is wrong with you?” he demanded.

“Ramsa, stop.”

“We joined this war for you,” he said. “Out of loyalty to you.”

“Don’t be dramatic. You entered this war because you wanted Dragon silver, you like blowing shit up, and you’re a wanted criminal everywhere else in the Empire.”

“I stuck with you because we thought we’d stay together.” Ramsa sounded like he was about to cry, which was so absurd that Rin almost laughed. “We’re always supposed to be together.”

“You’re not even a shaman. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. Why do you care?”

“Why don’t you care? Altan named you commander. Protecting the Cike is your duty.”

“I didn’t ask to be commander,” she snapped. Altan’s invocation brought up feelings of obligation, duty, that she didn’t want to think about. “All right? I don’t want to be your Altan. I can’t.”

What had she done since she’d been put in charge? She’d hurt Unegen, driven Enki away, seen Aratsha killed, and gotten her ass kicked so badly by Daji that she couldn’t even properly be called a shaman anymore. She hadn’t led the Cike so much as encouraged them to make a series of awful decisions. They were better off without her. It infuriated her that they couldn’t see that.

“Aren’t you angry?” Ramsa asked. “Doesn’t this piss you off?”

“No,” she said. “I take orders.”

She could have been angry. Could have resisted Jinzha, could have lashed out like she’d always done. But anger had only ever helped her when it manifested in flames, and she couldn’t call on that anymore. Without the fire she wasn’t a shaman, wasn’t a proper Speerly, and certainly wasn’t a military asset. Jinzha had no reason to listen to or respect her.

And she knew by now that the fire was never coming back.

“You could at least try,” Ramsa said. “Please.”

There was no fight left in his voice, either.

“Just grab your things,” she said. “And tell the others. They want you to report in ten.”

In a matter of weeks the last strongholds of Hare and Ram Provinces capitulated to the Republic. Their Warlords were sent back to Arlong in chains to grovel before Vaisra for their lives. Their cities, townships, and villages were all subjected to plebiscites.

When the civilians elected to join the Republic—and they invariably voted to join, for the alternative was that all men over the age of fifteen would be put to death—they became a part of Vaisra’s sprawling war machine. The women were put to work sewing Republican uniforms and spinning linens for the infirmaries. The men were either recruited as infantry or sent south to work in Arlong’s shipyards. A seventh of their food stores were confiscated to contribute to northern campaign’s swelling supply lines, and Republican patrols stayed behind to ensure regular shipments of grain upriver.

Nezha bragged constantly that this was perhaps the most successful military campaign in Nikara history. Kitay told him to stop getting high on his own hubris, but Rin could not deny their astonishing string of victories.

The daily demands of the campaign were so grueling, however, that she rarely got the chance to revel in their wins. The cities, townships, and villages began to blur together in her mind. Rin stopped thinking in terms of night and day, and started thinking in battle timetables. The days bled into one another, a string of extraordinarily demanding predawn combat assignments and snatched hours of deep and dreamless sleep.

The only benefit was that she managed to temporarily lose herself in the sheer physical activity. Her demotion didn’t affect her as much as she’d thought it would. Most days she was too tired to even remember it had happened.

But she was also secretly relieved that she did not have to think anymore about what to do with her men. That the burden of leadership, which she’d never adequately met, had been lifted entirely from her shoulders. All she had to do was worry about carrying out her own orders, and that she did splendidly.

Her orders were doubling, too. Jinzha might have begun to appreciate her ability, or he might have simply disliked her so much he wanted her dead without having to take the blame, but he began to put her on the front lines of every ground operation. This was typically not a coveted position, but she relished it.

After all, she was terribly good at war. She had trained for this. Maybe she couldn’t call the fire anymore, but she could still fight, and landing her trident into the right joint of flesh felt just as good as incinerating everything around her.

She gained a reputation on the Kingfisher as an eminently capable soldier, and despite herself she started to bask in it. It awakened an old streak of competitiveness that she had not felt since Sinegard, when the only thing getting her through months of grueling and miserable study had been the sheer delight of having her talents recognized by someone.

Was this how Altan had felt? The Nikara had honed him as a weapon, had put him to military uses since he was a small child, but still they’d lauded him. Had that kept him happy?

Of course she wasn’t happy, not quite. But she had found some sort of contentment, the satisfaction that came from being a tool that served its purpose quite well.

The campaigns were like drugs in their own right. Rin felt wonderful when she fought. In the heat of battle, human life could be reduced to the barest mechanics of existence—arms and legs, mobility and vulnerability, vital points to be identified, isolated, and destroyed. She found an odd pleasure in that. Her body knew what to do, which meant she could turn her mind off.

If the Cike were unhappy, she didn’t know. She didn’t speak to them anymore. She barely saw them after they were reassigned. But she found it harder and harder to care because she was losing the capacity to think about much at all.

In time, sooner than she’d expected, she even stopped longing for the fire that she’d lost. Sometimes the urge crept up on her on the eve of battle and she rubbed her fingers together, wishing that she could make them spark, fantasizing about how quickly her troops could win battles if she could call down a column of fire to scorch out the defensive line.

She still felt the Phoenix’s absence like a hole carved out of her chest. The ache never quite went away. But the desperation and frustration ebbed. She stopped waking up in the morning and wanting to scream when she remembered what had been taken from her.

She’d long since stopped trying to break down the Seal. Its dark, pulsing presence no longer pained her daily like a festering wound. In the small moments when she did permit herself to linger on it, she wondered if it had begun to take her memories.

Master Jiang had seemed to know absolutely nothing about who he had been twenty years ago. Would the same happen to her?

Already some of her earlier memories were starting to feel fuzzy. She used to remember intricately the faces of every member of her foster family in Tikany. Now they seemed like blurs. But she couldn’t tell if the Seal had eaten those memories away, or if they had simply corroded over time.

That didn’t worry her as much as it should have. She couldn’t pretend that if the Seal stole her past from her little by little—if she forgot Altan, forgot what she’d done on Speer, and let her guilt wash away into a white nothingness until, like Jiang, she was just an affable, absent-minded fool—some part of her wouldn’t be relieved.

When Rin wasn’t sleeping or fighting, she was sitting with Kitay in his cramped office. She was no longer invited to Jinzha’s councils, but she learned everything from Kitay secondhand. He, in turn, enjoyed bouncing his ideas off of her. Talking through the multitudes of possibilities out loud gave relief to the frantic activity inside his mind.

He alone didn’t share the Republic’s delight over their incredible series of victories.

“I’m concerned,” he admitted. “And confused. Hasn’t this whole campaign felt too easy to you? It’s like they’re not even trying.”

“They are trying. They’re just not very good at it.” Rin was still buzzing from the high of battle. It felt very good to excel, even if excellence meant cutting down poorly trained local soldiers, and Kitay’s moodiness irritated her.

“You know the battles you’re fighting are too easy.”

She made a face. “You could give us a little bit of credit.”

“Do you want praise for beating up untrained, unarmed villagers? Good job, then. Very well done. The superiorly armed navy crushes a pathetic peasant resistance. What a shocking turn of events. That doesn’t mean you’re taking this Empire on a silver platter.”

“It could just mean that our navy is superior,” she said. “What, you think Daji’s giving up the north on purpose? That doesn’t get her anything.”

“She’s not giving it up. They’re building a shipyard, we’ve known that since the beginning—”

“And if their navy were any use, we would have seen it. Maybe we’re actually just winning this war. It wouldn’t kill you to admit it.”

But Kitay shook his head. “You’re talking about Su Daji. This is the woman who managed to unite all twelve provinces for the first time since the death of the Red Emperor.”

“She had help.”

“But she’s had no help since. If the Empire were going to fracture, you’d think it would have already. Don’t get cocky, Rin. We’re playing a game of wikki against a woman who’s had decades of practice against far more fearsome opponents. I’ve said this to Jinzha, too. There’s a counteroffensive coming soon, and the longer we wait for it, the worse it’s going to be.”

Kitay was obsessed with the problem of whether the fleet ought to curtail its campaign for the winter or to sail directly to Tiger Province, rendezvous with Tsolin’s fleet and take on Jun and his army. On the one hand, if they could solidify their hold on the coastline through Tiger Province, then they would have a back channel to run supplies and reinforce land columns to eventually encircle the Autumn Palace.

On the other, taking the coastline would involve a massive military commitment from troops that the Republic didn’t yet have. Until the Hesperians decided to lend aid, they would have to settle for conquering the inland regions first. But that could take another couple of months—which required time that they also didn’t have.

They were racing against time. Nobody wanted to be stuck in an invasion when winter hit the north. Their task was to solidify a revolutionary base and corner the Empire inside its three northernmost provinces before the Murui’s tributaries froze over and the fleet was stuck in place.

“We’re cutting it close, but we should be up to the Edu pass within a month,” Kitay told her. “Jinzha has to make his decision by then.”

Rin did the calculations in her head. “Upriver sailing should take us a month and a half.”

“You’re forgetting about the Four Gorges Dam,” Kitay said. “Up through Rat Province the Murui’s blocked up, so the current won’t be as strong as it should be.”

“A month, then. What do you think happens when we get there?”

“We pray to the heavens that the rivers and lakes haven’t frozen yet,” Kitay said. “Then we see what our options are. At this point, though, Jinzha’s wagered this war on the weather.”

Rin’s weekly meetings with Sister Petra remained the thorn in her side that progressively stung worse. Petra’s examinations had become increasingly invasive, but she had also started withholding the laudanum. She was finished with taking baseline measurements. Now she wanted to see evidence of Chaos.

When week after week Rin failed to call the fire, Petra grew impatient.

“You are hiding it from me,” she accused. “You refuse to cooperate.”

“Or maybe I’m cured,” Rin said. “Maybe Chaos went away. Maybe your holy presence scared it off.”

“You lie.” Petra wrenched Rin’s mouth open with more force than she needed and began tapping around her teeth with what felt like a two-pronged instrument. The cold metal tips dug painfully into Rin’s enamel. “I know how Chaos works. It never disappears. It disguises itself in the face of the Maker but always it returns.”

Rin wished that were the case. If she had the fire back she’d incinerate Petra where she stood, and fuck the consequences. If she had the fire, then she wouldn’t be so terribly helpless, bowing down to Jinzha’s commands and cooperating with the Hesperians because she was only a lowly foot soldier.

But if she gave in to her anger now, the worst she could do was make a mess in Petra’s lab, wind up dead at the bottom of the Murui, and destroy any hope of a Hesperian-Nikara military alliance. Resistance meant doom for her and everyone she cared about.

So even though it tasted like the bitterest bile, she swallowed her rage.

“It’s really gone,” she said when Petra released her jaw. “I told you it’s been Sealed off. I can’t call it anymore.”

“So you say.” Petra looked deeply skeptical, but she dropped the subject. She placed the instrument back on her table. “Raise your right hand and hold your breath.”

“Why?”

“Because I asked.”

The Sister never lost her temper with Rin, no matter what Rin said. Petra had a freakishly calm composure. She never betrayed any emotion other than an icy professional curiosity. Rin almost wished that Petra would strike her, just so she knew she was human, but frustration seemed to slide off of her like rainwater from a tin roof.

However, as time passed with no results, she did start subjecting Rin to baser and baser experiments. She made Rin solve puzzles meant for children while she kept time with her little watch. She made Rin perform simple tasks of memorization that seemed designed to make her fail, watching without blinking as Rin became so frustrated that she started throwing things at the wall.

Eventually Petra asked her to stand for examinations naked.

“If you wanted to ogle me you could have asked earlier,” Rin said.

Petra didn’t react. “Quickly, please.”

Rin yanked her uniform off and tossed it in a bundle on the floor.

“Good.” Petra passed her an empty cup. “Now urinate in this for me.”

Rin stared at her in disbelief. “Right now?”

“I’m doing fluids analysis tonight,” Petra said. “Go on.”

Rin handed the cup back. “I’m not doing that.”

“Would you like a sheet for privacy?”

“I don’t care,” Rin said. “This isn’t about science. You don’t have a clue what you’re doing, you’re just being spiteful.”

Petra sat down and crossed one leg over the other. “Urinate, please.”

“Fuck that.” Rin tossed the cup onto the floor. “Admit it. You’ve no idea what you’re doing. All your treatises and all your instruments, and you don’t have a single clue about how shamanism works or how to measure Chaos, if that really even exists. You’re shooting in the dark.”

Petra stood up from her chair. Her nostrils flared white.

Rin had finally struck a nerve. She hoped that Petra might hit her then, if only to break that inhuman mask of control. But Petra only cocked her head to the side.

“Remember your situation.” Her voice retained its icy calm. “I am asking you to cooperate only out of etiquette. Refuse, and I will have you strapped to that bed. Now. Will you behave?”

Rin wanted to kill her.

If she hadn’t been so exhausted, if she had been an ounce more impulsive, then she would have. It would have been so easy to knock Petra to the floor and jam every sharp instrument on the table into her neck, her chest, her eyes. It would have felt so good.

But Rin couldn’t act on impulse anymore.

She felt the sheer, overwhelming weight of Hesperia’s military might restricting her options like an invisible cage. They held her life hostage. They held her friends and her entire nation hostage.

Against all of that, Sealed off from the fire and the Phoenix, she was helpless.

So she held her tongue and forced down her fury as Petra’s requests became more and more humiliating. She complied when Petra made her lean naked against the wall while she drew intricate diagrams of her genitals. She sat still when Petra inserted a long, thick needle into her right arm and drew so much blood that she fainted when she stood up to return to her quarters and couldn’t stand back up for half a day. And she bit her tongue and didn’t react when Petra waved a packet of opium under her nose, trying to entice her to draw the fire out by offering her favorite vice.

“Go on,” Petra said. “I’ve read about your kind. You can’t resist the smoke. You crave it in your bones. Isn’t that how the Red Emperor subdued your ancestors? Call the fire for me, and I’ll let you have a little.”

That last meeting left Rin so furious that the moment she left Petra’s quarters, she shrieked in fury and punched the wall so hard that her knuckle split open. For a moment she stood still, stunned, while blood ran down the back of her hand and dripped off her wrist. Then she sank to her knees and started to cry.

“Are you all right?”

It was Augus, the baby-faced, blue-eyed missionary. Rin gave him a wary look. “Go away.”

He reached for her bleeding hand. “You’re upset.”

She jerked it out of his grasp. “I don’t want your pity.”

He sat down next to her, fished a linen out of his pocket, and passed it to her. “Here. Why don’t you wrap that up?”

Rin’s knuckle was bleeding faster than she had realized. After getting her blood drawn the week before, the very sight of it made her want to faint. Reluctantly she took the cloth.

Augus watched as she looped it tightly around her hand. She realized she couldn’t tie off the knot by herself.

“I can do that,” he offered.

She let him.

“Are you all right?” he asked again when he was finished.

“Does it fucking look like—”

“I meant with Sister Petra,” he clarified. “I know she can be difficult.”

Rin shot him a sideways look. “You don’t like her?”

“We all admire her,” he said slowly. “But . . . ah, do you understand Hesperian? This language is hard for me.”

“Yes.”

He switched, speaking deliberately slowly so that she could keep up. “She’s the most brilliant Gray Sister of our generation and the foremost expert of Chaos manifestations on the eastern continent. But we don’t all agree with her methods.”

“What does that mean?”

“Sister Petra is old-fashioned about conversion. Her school believes that the only pathway to salvation is patterning civilizations on the development of Hesperia. To obey the Maker you must become like us. You must stop being Nikara.”

“Attractive,” Rin muttered.

“But I think that when we wish to win barbarians over and convert them to the greater good, we should use the same strategies that Chaos uses to draw souls to evil,” Augus continued. “Chaos enters through the other’s door and comes out his own. So should we.”

Rin pressed her bound knuckles against the wall to stem the pain. Her dizziness subsided. “From what I know, you lot are more fond of blowing our doors up.”

“Like I said. Conservative.” Augus shot her an embarrassed smile. “But the Company has been changing its ways. Take the bow, for instance. I’ve read about the Nikara tradition of performing deep bows to superiors—”

“That’s only for special occasions,” she said.

“Even so. Decades ago, the Company would have argued that bowing to a Nikara would be an utter affront to the dignity of the white race. We are chosen by the Maker, after all. We are the highest evolved persons, and we shouldn’t show respect to you. But I don’t agree with that.”

Rin fought the urge to roll her eyes. “That’s nice of you.”

“We are not equals,” Augus said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends. And I don’t think the path to salvation involves treating you like you’re not people.”

Augus, Rin realized, really thought that he was being kind.

“I think I’m good now,” she said.

He helped her to her feet. “Would you like me to walk you back to your quarters?”

“No. Thank you. I can manage.”

When she returned to her room, she drew the packet of opium out from her pocket. She hadn’t quite stolen it. Petra had left it in her lap and hadn’t commented on it when Rin stood up to leave. She meant for Rin to have it.

Rin yanked up a loose floorboard and hid the drugs where no one could see. She wasn’t going to use it. She didn’t know what sick game Petra was playing, but she couldn’t tempt her that far.

Still, it relieved her to know that if it became too much, that if she wanted it all to end and she wanted to float higher, higher, away from her body and shame and humiliation and pain until she left it permanently, then the opium was there.

If any other Hesperians shared Augus’s opinions, they didn’t show it. Tarcquet’s men on the Kingfisher kept a chilly distance from the Nikara. They ate and slept by themselves, and every time Rin drifted within earshot of their conversations, they fell quiet until she’d passed. They continued to observe the Nikara without intervening—coldly amused by their incompetence, and mildly surprised by their victories.

Only once did they put their arquebuses to any use. One evening a commotion broke out on the lower deck. A group of prisoners from Ram Province broke out of their holding cell and attacked a handful of missionaries who had been proselytizing in the brig.

They might have been trying to escape. They might have thought to use the Hesperians as hostages. Or they might have simply wanted to lash out at foreigners for getting too close—Ram Province had suffered greatly under occupation and had no great love of the west. When Rin and the other soldiers on patrol reached the source of the shouting, the prisoners had the missionaries pinned to the floor, alive but incapacitated.

Rin recognized Augus, gasping desperately for breath while a prisoner wedged an arm under his throat.

His eyes locked on to hers. “Help—”

“Get back!” the prisoner shouted. “Everyone get back, or they’re dead!”

More Republican soldiers crowded the hallway in seconds. The skirmish should have been resolved instantly. The prisoners were unarmed and outnumbered. But they had also been marked for their strength as pedalers. Jinzha had specifically ordered that they be treated well, and no one wanted to attack for fear of causing irreparable injury.

“Please,” Augus whispered.

Rin faltered. She wanted to dart forward and pull his attacker off. But the Republican soldiers were holding back, waiting for orders. She couldn’t jump alone into the fray; they’d tear her apart.

She stood, trident raised, watching as Augus’s face turned a grotesque blue.

“Out of the way!” Tarcquet and his guard pushed through the commotion, arquebuses raised.

Tarcquet took one look at the prisoners and shouted an order. A round of shots rang through the air. Eight men dropped to the ground. The air curdled with the familiar smell of fire powder. The missionaries broke free, gasping for breath.

“What is this?” Jinzha forced his way through the crowd. “What’s happened?”

“General Jinzha.” Tarcquet signaled to his men, who lowered their weapons. “Good of you to show up.”

Jinzha surveyed the bodies on the floor. “You’ve cost me good labor.”

Tarcquet cocked his arquebus. “I would improve your brig security.”

“Our brig security is fine.” Jinzha looked white-faced with fury. “Your missionaries weren’t supposed to be down there.”

Augus rose to his feet, coughing. He reached for Jinzha’s arm. “Prisoners deserve mercy, too. You can’t just—”

“Fuck your mercy.” Jinzha pushed Augus away. “You’re on my ship. You’ll obey orders, or you can take a swim in the river.”

“Don’t speak to my people like that.” Tarcquet stepped in between them. The difference between him and Jinzha was almost laughable—Jinzha was tall by Nikara standards, but Tarcquet towered over him. “Perhaps your father didn’t make it clear. We are diplomats on your ship. If you want the Consortium to even consider funding your pathetic war, you will treat every Hesperian here like royalty.”

Jinzha’s throat bobbed. Rin watched the anger pass through his expression; saw Jinzha shove down the impulse to react. Tarcquet held all the leverage. Tarcquet could not be reproached.

Rin derived some small satisfaction from that. It felt good to see Jinzha humiliated, treated with the same condescension with which he’d always treated her.

“Am I understood?” Tarcquet asked.

Jinzha glared up at him.

Tarcquet cocked his head. “Say ‘yes, sir’ or ‘no, sir.’”

Jinzha had murder written across his face. “Yes, sir.”

Tensions ran high for several days afterward. A pair of Hesperian soldiers began following the missionaries around wherever they went, and the Nikara kept their wary distance. But unless one of theirs was in danger, Tarcquet’s soldiers did not fire their weapons.

Tarcquet continued his constant assessment of Jinzha’s campaign. Rin saw him every now and then on deck, obnoxiously marking notes into a small book while he surveyed the fleet moving up the river. And Rin wondered what he thought of them—their unresponsive gods, their weapons that seemed so primitive, and their bloody, desperate war.

Two months into the campaign, they sailed at last into Rat Province. Here their string of victories came to an end.

Rat Province’s Second Division was the intelligence branch of the Militia, and its espionage officers were the best in the Twelve Provinces. By now, it had also had several months of warning time to put together a better defensive strategy than Hare or Ram Provinces had been able to mount.

The Republic arrived to find villages already abandoned, granaries emptied, and fields scorched. The Rat Warlord had either recalled his civilians to metropolitan centers farther upriver or sent them fleeing to other provinces. Jinzha’s soldiers found clothing, furniture, and children’s toys scattered across the grassy roads. Whatever couldn’t be taken was ruined. In village after village they found burned, useless seed grain and rotting piles of livestock carcasses.

The Rat Warlord wasn’t trying to mount a defense of his borders. He had simply retreated to Baraya, his heavily barricaded capital city. He planned to starve the fleet out. And Baraya had a better chance of success than Xiashang had—its gates were thicker, its residents better prepared, and it was more than a mile inland, which neutralized the attack capabilities of the Shrike and the Crake.

“We should just stop here and turn back.” Kitay paced his office floor, frustrated. “Ride out the winter. We’ll starve otherwise.”

But Jinzha had become increasingly irascible, less and less willing to listen to his advisers and more adamant that they had to storm forward.

“He wants to move on Baraya?” Rin asked.

“He wants to press north as fast as we can.” Kitay tugged anxiously at his hair. “It’s a terrible idea. But he won’t listen to me.”

“Then who’s he listening to?”

“Any of the leadership who agree with him. Molkoi especially. He’s in the old guard—I told Vaisra that was a bad idea, but who listens to me? Nezha’s on my side, but of course Jinzha won’t listen to his little brother, it’d mean losing face. This could throw away all of our gains so far. You know, there’s a good chance we’ll all just starve to death up north. That’d be hilarious, wouldn’t it?”

But, as Jinzha announced to the Kingfisher, they absolutely would not starve. They would take Rat Province. They would blow open the gates to the capital city of Baraya, and win themselves enough supplies to last out the winter.

Easy orders to give. Harder to implement, especially when they reached a stretch of the Murui so steep that Jinzha had no choice but to order his troops to move the ships over land. The flooded riverbanks earlier had made it possible for them to sail directly over lowland roads. But now they were forced to disembark and roll the ships over logs to reach the next waterway wide enough to accommodate the warships.

It took an entire day of straining against ropes to simply pull the massive tower ships onto dry land, and much longer to cut down enough trees to roll them across the bumpy terrain. One week bled into two weeks of backbreaking, mindless, numbing labor. The only advantage of this was that Rin was so exhausted that she didn’t have the time to be bored.

Patrol shifts were slightly more exciting. These were a chance to get away from the din of ships rolling over logs and explore the surrounding land. Thick forests obscured all visibility past a mile, and Jinzha sent out daily parties to root through the trees for any sightings of the Militia.

Rin found these relaxing, until word got back to the base that the noon patrol had caught sight of a Militia scouting party.

“And you just let them go?” Jinzha demanded. “Are you stupid?”

The men on patrol were from the Griffon, and Nezha hastily interceded on their behalf. “They weren’t worth the fight, brother. Our men were outnumbered.”

“But they had the advantage of surprise,” Jinzha snapped. “Instead, the entire Militia now knows our precise location. Send your men back out. No one sleeps until I have proof every last scout is dead.”

Nezha bowed his head. “Yes, brother.”

“And take Salkhi’s men with you. Yours clearly can’t be trusted to get the job done.”

The next day, Salkhi and Nezha’s joint expedition returned to the Kingfisher with a string of severed heads and empty Militia uniforms.

That appeased Jinzha, but ultimately it made no difference. First the Militia scouts returned in larger and larger numbers. Then the attacks began en masse. The Militia soldiers hid in the mountains. They never launched a frontal assault, but maintained a constant stream of arrow fire, picking off soldiers unawares.

The Republican troops fared badly against these scattered, unpredictable attacks. Panic swept through the camp, destroying morale, and Rin understood why. The Republican Army felt out of place on land. They were used to fighting from their ships. They were most comfortable in water, where they had a quick escape route.

They had no escape routes now.

Chapter 19

Snow started falling the day that they finally returned to the river. At first it drifted down in fat, lazy flakes. But within hours it had transformed into a blinding blizzard, with winds so fierce that the troops could hardly see five feet in front of them. Jinzha was forced to keep his fleet grounded by the edge of the river while his soldiers holed up in their ships to wait out the storm.

“I’ve always been amazed by snow.” Rin traced shapes into the porthole condensation as she stared out at the endless, hypnotizing flurry outside. “Every winter, it’s a surprise. I can never believe it’s real.”

“They don’t have snow down south?” Kitay asked.

“No. Tikany gets so dry that your lips bleed when you try to smile, but never cold enough for the snow to fall. Before I came north, I’d only heard about it in stories. I thought it was a beautiful idea. Little flecks of the cold.”

“And how did you find the snow at Sinegard?”

A howl of wind drowned out Rin’s response. She pulled down the porthole cover. “Fucking miserable.”

The blizzard let up by the next morning. Outside, the forest had been transformed, like some giant had drenched the trees in white paint.

Jinzha announced that the fleet would remain grounded for one more day to pass the New Year’s holiday. Everywhere else in the Empire, New Year’s would be a weeklong affair involving twelve-course banquets, firecrackers, and endless parades. On campaign, a single day would have to be enough.

The troops disembarked to camp out in the winter landscape, glad for the chance to escape the close quarters of the cabins.

“See if you can get that fire going,” Nezha told Kitay.

The three of them sat huddled together on the riverbank, rubbing their hands together while Kitay fumbled with a piece of flint to start a fire.

Somewhere Nezha had scrounged up a small packet of glutinous rice flour. He poured the flour out into a tin bowl, added some water from his canteen, and stirred it together with his fingers until it formed a small ball of dough.

Rin prodded at the measly fire. It fizzled and sputtered; the next gust of wind put it out entirely. She groaned and reached for the flint. They wouldn’t have boiling water for at least half an hour. “You know, you could just take that to the kitchen have them cook it.”

“The kitchen isn’t supposed to know I have it,” said Nezha.

“I see,” Kitay said. “The general is stealing rations.”

“The general is rewarding his best soldiers with a New Year’s treat,” Nezha said.

Kitay rubbed his hands up and down his arms. “Oh, so it’s nepotism.”

“Shut up,” Nezha mumbled. He rubbed harder at the ball of dough, but it crumbled to bits in his fingers.

“You haven’t added enough water.” Rin grabbed the bowl from him and kneaded the dough with one hand, adding droplets of water with the other until she had a wet, round ball the size of her fist.

“I didn’t know you could cook,” Nezha said curiously.

“I used to all the time. No one else was going to feed Kesegi.”

“Kesegi?”

“My little brother.” The memory of his face rose up in Rin’s mind. She forced it back down. She hadn’t seen him in four years. She didn’t know if he was still alive, and she didn’t want to wonder.

“I didn’t know you had a little brother,” Nezha said.

“Not a real brother. I was adopted.”

No one asked her to elaborate, so she didn’t. She rolled the dough into a snakelike strip between both palms, then broke it up piece by piece into thumb-sized lumps.

Nezha watched her hands with the wide-eyed fascination of a boy who’d clearly never been in the kitchen. “Those balls are smaller than the tangyuan I remember.”

“That’s because we don’t have red bean paste or sesame to fill them with,” she said. “Any chance you scrounged up some sugar?”

“You have to add sugar?” Nezha asked.

Kitay laughed.

“We’ll eat them bland, then,” she said. “It’ll taste better in little pieces. More to chew.”

When the water finally came to a boil, Rin dropped the rice flour balls into the tin cauldron and stirred them with a stick, creating a clockwise current so that they wouldn’t stick to each other.

“Did you know that cauldrons are a military invention?” Kitay asked. “One of the Red Emperor’s generals came up with the idea of tin cookware. Can you imagine? Before that, they were stuck trying build fires large enough for giant bamboo steamers.”

“A lot of innovations came from the military,” Nezha mused. “Messenger pigeons, for one. And there’s a good argument that most of the advances in blacksmithing and medicine were a product of the Era of Warring States.”

“That’s cute.” Rin peered into the cauldron. “Proves that war’s good for something, then.”

“It’s a good theory,” Nezha insisted. “The country was in chaos during the Era of Warring States, sure. But look at what it brought us—Sunzi’s Principles of War; Mengzi’s theories on governance. Everything we know now about philosophy, about warfare and statecraft, was developed during that era.”

“So what’s the tradeoff?” Rin asked. “Thousands of people have to die so that we can get better at killing each other in the future?”

“You know that’s not my argument.”

“It’s what it sounds like. It sounds like you’re saying that people have to die for progress.”

“It’s not progress they’re dying for,” Nezha said. “Progress is the side effect. And military innovation doesn’t just mean we get better at killing each other, it means we get better equipped to kill whoever decides to invade us next.”

“And who do you think is going to invade us next?” Rin asked. “The Hinterlanders?”

“Don’t rule them out.”

“They’d have to stop killing each other off, first.”

The tribes of the northern Hinterlands had been at constant war since any of them could remember. In the days of the Red Emperor, the students of Sinegard had been trained primarily to fend off northern invaders. Now they were just an afterthought.

“Better question,” Kitay said. “What do you think is the next great military innovation?”

“Arquebuses,” Nezha said, at the same moment that Rin said, “Shamanic armies.”

Both of them turned to stare at her.

“Shamans over arquebuses?” Nezha asked.

“Of course,” she said. The thought had just occurred to her, but the more she considered it, the more attractive it sounded. “Tarcquet’s weapon is just a glorified rocket. But imagine a whole army of people who could summon gods.”

“That sounds like a disaster,” Nezha said.

“Or an unstoppable military,” Rin said.

“I feel like if that could be done, it would have been,” said Nezha. “But there’s no written history on shamanic warfare. The only shamans the Red Emperor employed were the Speerlies, and we know how that went.”

“But the predynastic texts—”

“—are irrelevant.” Nezha cut her off. “Fortification technology and bronze weapons didn’t become military standard until well into the Red Emperor’s rule, which is about the same time that shamans started disappearing from the record. We have no idea how shamans would change the nature of warfare, whether they could be worked into a military bureaucracy.”

“The Cike’s done pretty well,” Rin challenged.

“When there are fewer than ten of you, sure. Don’t you think hundreds of shamans would be a disaster?”

“You should become one,” she said. “See what it’s like.”

Nezha flinched. “You’re not serious.”

“It’s not the worst idea. Any of us could teach you.”

“I have never met a shaman in complete control of their own mind.” Nezha looked strangely bothered by her suggestion. “And I’m sorry, but knowing the Cike does not make me terribly optimistic.”

Rin pulled the cauldron off of the fire. She knew she was supposed to let the tangyuan cool for a few minutes before serving, but she was too cold, and the vapors misting up from the surface were too enticing. They didn’t have bowls, so they wrapped the cauldron in leaves to keep their hands from burning and passed it around in a circle.

“Happy New Year,” Kitay said. “May the gods send you blessings and good fortune.”

“Health, wealth, and happiness. May your enemies rot and surrender quickly before we have to kill more of them.” Rin stood up.

“Where are you going?” Nezha asked.

“Gotta go take a piss.”

She wandered toward the woods, looking for a large enough tree to hide behind. By now she’d spent so much time with Kitay that she wouldn’t have minded squatting down right in front of him. But for some reason, she felt far less comfortable stripping in front of Nezha.

Her ankle twisted beneath her. She spun around, failed to catch her balance, and fell flat on her rear. She spread her hands to catch her fall. Her fingers landed on something soft and rubbery. Confused, she glanced down and brushed the snow away from the surface.

She saw a child’s face buried in snow.

His—she thought it was a boy, though she couldn’t quite tell—eyes were wide open, large and blank, with long lashes fringed with snow, embedded in dark shadows on a thin, pale face.

Rin rose unsteadily to her feet. She picked up a branch and brushed the rest of the snow off the child’s body. She uncovered another face. And then another.

It finally sank in that this was not natural, that she ought to be afraid, and then she opened her mouth and screamed.

Nezha ordered a squadron to walk through the surrounding square mile with torches held low to the ground until the ice and snow had melted enough that they could see what had happened.

The snow peeled away to reveal an entire village of people, frozen perfectly where they lay. Most still had their eyes open. Rin saw no blood. The villagers didn’t appear to have died from anything except for the cold, and perhaps starvation. Everywhere she found evidence of fires, hastily constructed, long fizzled out.

No one had given her a torch. She was still shaken from the experience, and every sudden movement made her jump, so it was best that she didn’t hold on to anything potentially dangerous. But she refused to go back to camp alone, either, so she stood by the edge of the forest, watching blankly as the soldiers brushed snow off yet another family of corpses. Their bodies were curled in a heap together, the mother’s and father’s bodies wrapped protectively around their two children.

“Are you all right?” Nezha asked her. His hand wandered hesitantly toward her shoulder, as if he wasn’t sure whether to touch her or not.

She brushed it away. “I’m fine. I’ve seen bodies before.”

Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off of them. They looked like a set of dolls lying in the snow, perfectly fine except for the fact that they weren’t moving.

Most of the adults still had large bundles fastened to their backs. Rin saw porcelain dishes, silk dresses, and kitchen utensils spilling out of those bags. The villagers seemed to have packed their entire homes up with them.

“Where were they going?” she wondered.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Kitay said. “They were running.”

“From what?”

Kitay said it, because no one else seemed able to. “Us.”

“But they didn’t have anything to fear.” Nezha looked deeply uncomfortable. “We would have treated them the way we’ve treated every other village. They would have gotten a vote.”

“That’s not what their leaders would have told them,” said Kitay. “They would have imagined we were coming to kill them.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Nezha said.

“Is it?” Kitay asked. “Imagine it. You hear the rebel army is coming. Your magistrates are your most reliable sources of information, and they tell you that the rebels will kill your men, rape your women, and enslave your children, because that’s what you’re always supposed to say about the enemy. You don’t know any better, so you pack up everything you can and flee.”

Rin could imagine the rest. These villagers would have run from the Republic just as they had once run from the Federation. But winter had come earlier that year than they’d predicted, and they didn’t get to the lowland valleys in time. They couldn’t find anything to eat. At some point it was too much work to stay alive. So they decided with the rest of the families that this was as good a place as any to end it, and together they lay down and embraced each other, and perhaps it didn’t feel so terrible near the end.

Perhaps it felt just like going to sleep.

Through the entire campaign, she had never once paused to consider just how many people they had killed or displaced. The numbers added up so quickly. Several thousand from famine—maybe several hundred thousand—and then all the soldiers they’d cut down every time, multiplied across villages.

They were fighting a very different war now, she realized. They were not the liberators but the aggressors. They were the ones to fear.

“War’s different when you’re not struggling for survival.” Kitay must have been thinking the same thing she was. He stood still, hands clutching his torch, eyes fixed on the bodies at his feet. “Victories don’t feel the same.”

“Do you think it’s worth it?” Rin asked him quietly so that Nezha couldn’t hear.

“Frankly, I don’t care.”

“I’m being serious.”

He considered for a moment. “I’m glad that someone’s fighting Daji.”

“But the stakes—”

“I wouldn’t think too long about the stakes.” Kitay glanced at Nezha, who was still staring at the bodies, eyes wide and disturbed. “You won’t like the answers you come up with.”

That evening the snowstorms started up again and did not relent for another week. It confirmed what everyone had been afraid of. Winter had arrived early that year, and with a vengeance. Soon enough the tributaries would freeze and the Republican Fleet would be stuck in the north unless they turned back. Their options were dwindling.

Rin paced the Kingfisher for days, growing more agitated with every passing minute. She needed to move, fight, attack. She didn’t like sitting still. Too easy to fall prey to her own thoughts. Too easy to see the faces in the snow.

Once during a late-night stroll she stumbled across the leadership leaving Jinzha’s office. None of them looked happy. Jinzha stormed past her without saying a word; he might not have even noticed her. Nezha lingered behind with Kitay, who wore the peeved, tight-lipped expression that Rin had learned meant that he hadn’t gotten his way.

“Don’t tell me,” Rin said. “We’re moving forward.”

“We’re not just moving forward. He wants us to bypass Baraya entirely and take Boyang.” Kitay slammed a fist against the wall. “Boyang! Is he mad?”

“Military outpost on the border of Rat Province and Tiger Province,” Nezha explained to Rin. “It’s not a terrible idea. The Militia used Boyang as a fortress during the first and second invasions. It’ll have built-in defenses, make it easier to last out the winter. We can break the siege at Baraya from there.”

“But won’t someone already be there?” Rin asked. If the Militia was garrisoned anywhere, it had to be in Tiger or Rat Province. Any farther north and they’d be fighting in Sinegard for the heart of Imperial territory.

“If someone’s already there, then we’ll fight them off,” said Nezha.

“In icy waters?” Kitay challenged. “With a cold and miserable army? If we keep going north, we’re going to lose every advantage we’ve gained by coming so far.”

“Or we could cement our victory,” Nezha argued. “If we win at Boyang, then we control the delta at the Elehemsa tributary, which means—”

“Yes, yes, you cut around the coast to Tiger Province, you can send reinforcements to either through riverways,” Kitay said irritably. “Except you’re not going to win Boyang. The Imperial Fleet is almost certainly there, but for some reason Jinzha would prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. I don’t know what’s wrong with your brother, but he’s getting reckless and he’s making decisions like a madman.”

“My brother is not a madman.”

“Oh, no, he might be the best wartime general I’ve ever seen. No one’s denying he’s done well so far. But he’s only good because he’s the first Nikara general who’s been trained to think from a naval perspective first. Once the rivers freeze, it’s going to turn into a ground war, and then he won’t have a clue what to do.”

Nezha sighed. “Look, I understand your point. I’m just trying to see the best in our situation. If it were up to me I wouldn’t go to Boyang, either.”

Kitay threw his hands up. “Well, then—”

“This isn’t about strategy. It’s about pride. It’s about showing the Hesperians that we won’t back down from a challenge. And for Jinzha, it’s about proving himself to Father.”

“These things always come back to your father,” Kitay muttered. “Both of you need help.”

“So say that to Jinzha,” Rin said. “Tell him that he’s being stupid.”

“There’s no possible version of that argument that goes well,” Nezha said. “Jinzha decides what he wants. You think I can contradict him and get away with it?”

“Well, if you can’t,” Kitay said, “then we’re fucked.”

An hour later the paddle wheels creaked into motion, carrying the Republican Fleet through a minor mountain range.

“Look up.” Kitay nudged Rin’s arm. “Does that look normal to you?”

At first it seemed to her like the sun was gradually coming up over the mountains, the lights were so bright. Then the glowing objects rose higher, and she saw that they were lanterns, lighting up the night sky one by one like a field of blooming flowers. Long ribbons dangled from the balloons, displaying a message easily read from the ground.

Surrender means immunity.

“Did they really think that would work?” Rin asked, amused. “That’s like screaming, ‘Go away, please.’”

But Kitay wasn’t smiling. “I don’t think it’s about propaganda. We should turn back.”

“What, just because of some lanterns?”

“It’s what the lanterns mean. Whoever set them up is waiting for us in there. And I doubt they have the firepower to match the fleet, but they’re still fighting on their own territory, and they know that river. They’ve staked it out for who knows how long.” Kitay motioned to the closest soldier. “Can you shoot?”

“As well as anyone else,” said the soldier.

“Good. You see that?” Kitay pointed to a lantern drifting a little farther out from the others. “Can you hit it? I just want to see what happens.”

The soldier looked confused, but obeyed. His first shot missed. His second arrow flew true. The lantern exploded into flames, sending a shower of sparks and coal tumbling toward the river.

Rin hit the ground. The explosion seemed impossibly loud for such a small, harmless-looking lantern. It just kept going, too—the lantern must have been loaded with multiple smaller bombs that went off in succession at various points in the air like intricate fireworks. She watched, holding her breath, hoping that none of the sparks would set off the other lanterns. That might spark a chain reaction that turned the entire cliffside into a column of fire.

But the other lanterns didn’t go off—the first had exploded too far from the rest of the pack—and at last, the explosions started to fizzle out.

“Told you,” Kitay said once they’d ceased completely. He picked himself off the ground. “We’d better go tell Jinzha we need a change in route.”

The fleet crept down a secondary channel of the tributary, a narrow pass between jagged cliffs. This would add a week to their travel time, but it was better than certain incineration.

Rin scanned the gray rocks with her spyglass and found crevices, cliff ledges that could easily conceal enemies, but saw no movement. No lanterns. The pass looked abandoned.

“We’re not in the clear yet,” Kitay said.

“You think they booby-trapped both rivers?”

“They could have,” Kitay said. “I would.”

“But there’s nothing here.”

A boom shook the air. They exchanged a look and ran out to the prow.

The skimmer at the head of the fleet was in full blaze.

Another boom echoed through the pass. A second ship exploded, sending blast fragments up so high that they crashed across the Kingfisher’s deck. Jinzha threw himself to the ground just before a piece of the Lapwing could skewer his head to the mast.

“Get down!” he roared. “Everybody down!”

But he didn’t have to tell them—even from a hundred yards away the burst impacts shook the Kingfisher like an earthquake, knocking everyone on deck off their feet.

Rin crawled as close as she could to the edge of the deck, spyglass in hand. She popped up from the railing and glanced frantically about the mountains, but all she saw were rocks. “There’s no one up there.”

“Those aren’t missiles,” Kitay said. “You’d see the heat glow in the air.”

He was right—the source of the explosions wasn’t from the air; they weren’t detonating on the decks. The very water itself was erupting around the fleet.

Chaos took over the Kingfisher. Archers scrambled to the top deck to open fire on enemies who weren’t there. Jinzha screamed himself hoarse ordering the ships to reverse direction. The Kingfisher’s paddle wheels spun frantically backward, pushing the turtle boat out of the tributary, only to bump into the Crake. Only after a frantic exchange of signal flags did the fleet begin backtracking sluggishly downriver.

They weren’t moving fast enough. Whatever was in the water must have been laced together by some chain reaction mechanism, because a minute later another skimmer went up in flames, and then another. Rin could see the explosions starting below the water, each one detonating the next like a vicious streak, getting closer and closer to the Kingfisher.

A massive gust of water shot out of the river. At first Rin thought it was just the force of the explosions, but the water spiraled, higher and higher like a whirlpool in reverse, expanding to surround the warships, forming a protective ring that centered around the Griffon.

“What the fuck,” Kitay said.

Rin dashed to the prow.

Nezha stood beneath the Griffon’s mast, arms stretched out to the tower of water as if reaching for something.

He met Rin’s gaze, and her heart skipped a beat.

His eyes were shot through with streaks of ocean blue—not the eerie cerulean gleam of Feylen’s glare, but a darker cobalt, the color of old gems.

“You too?” she whispered.

Through the protective wave of water she saw explosions, splashes of orange and red and yellow. Warped by the water, it almost seemed pretty, a painting of angry bursts. Shrapnel seemed frozen in place, arrested by the wall. The water hung in the air for an impossibly long time, steady while the explosives went off one by one in a series of deafening booms that echoed around the fleet. Nezha collapsed on the deck.

The wave dropped, slammed inward, and drenched the wretched remains of the Republican fleet.

Rin needed to get to the Griffon.

The great wave had knocked Nezha’s ship and Kingfisher together into a dismal wreck. Their decks were separated by only a narrow gap. Rin took a running start, jumped, skidded onto the Griffon’s deck, and ran toward Nezha’s limp form.

All the color had drained from his face. He was already porcelain pale, but now his skin looked transparent, his scars cracks in shattered glass over bright blue veins.

She pulled him up into a sitting position. He was breathing, his chest heaving, but his eyes were squeezed shut, and he only shook his head when she tried to ask him questions.

“It hurts.” Finally, intelligible words—he twisted in her arms, scrabbling at something on his back. “It hurts . . .”

“Here?” She put her hand on the small of his back.

He managed a nod. Then a sudden, wordless scream.

She tried to help him pull his shirt off, but he kept thrashing in her arms, so she had to slice it apart with a knife and yank the pieces away. Her fingers splayed over his exposed back. Her breath caught in her throat.

A massive dragon tattoo, silver and cerulean in the colors of the House of Yin, covered his skin from shoulder to shoulder. Rin couldn’t remember seeing it before—but then, she couldn’t remember seeing Nezha shirtless before. This tattoo had to be old. She could see a rippled scar arcing down the left side where Nezha had once been pierced by a Mugenese general’s halberd. But now the scar glistened an angry red, as if freshly branded into his skin. She couldn’t tell if she was imagining things in her panic, but the dragon seemed to undulate under her fingers, coiling and thrashing against his skin.

“It’s in my mind.” Nezha let out another strangled cry of pain. “It’s telling me—fuck, Rin . . .”

Pity washed over her, a dark wave that sent bile rising up in her throat.

Nezha gave a low moan. “It’s in my head . . .”

She had an idea of what that was like.

He grabbed her wrists with a strength that startled her. “Kill me.”

“I can’t do that,” she whispered.

She wanted to kill him. All she wanted was to put him out of his pain. She couldn’t bear to look at him like this, screaming like it was never going to end.

But she’d never forgive herself for that.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jinzha had arrived. He was looking down at Nezha with a genuine concern that Rin had never seen on his face.

“It’s a god,” she told him. She was certain. She knew exactly what was going through Nezha’s head, because she’d suffered it before. “He called a god and it won’t go away.”

She had a good idea of what had happened. Nezha, watching the fleet exploding around him, had tried to protect the Griffon. He might not have been aware of what he was doing. He might only remember wishing that the waters would rise, would protect them from the fires. But some god had answered and done exactly what he’d wished, and now he couldn’t get it to give him his mind back.

“What are you talking about?” Jinzha knelt down and tried to pull Nezha out of her grasp, but she wouldn’t let go.

“Get back.”

“Don’t you touch him,” he snarled.

She smacked his hand away. “I know what this is, I’m the only one who can help him, so if you want him to live, then get back.”

She was astounded when Jinzha complied.

Nezha thrashed in her arms, moaning.

“So help him,” Jinzha begged.

I’m fucking trying, Rin thought. She forced herself to calm. She could think of only one thing that might work. If this was a god—and she was almost certain that this was a god—then the only way to silence its voice was to shut off Nezha’s mind, close off his connection to the world of spirit.

“Send a man to my bunk,” she told Jinzha. “Cabin three. Have him pull up the second floorboard in the right corner and bring me what’s hidden under there. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

“Then hurry.”

He stood up and started to bark out orders.

“Get out.” Nezha was curling in on himself, muttering. He scrabbled at his shoulder blades, digging his nails deep into his skin, drawing blood. “Get out—get out!”

Rin grabbed his wrists and forced them away from his back. He wrenched them, flailing, out of her grip. A stray hand hit her across the chin. Her head whipped to the side. For a moment she saw black.

Nezha looked horrified. “I’m sorry.” He clutched at his shoulders like he was trying to shrink. “I’m so sorry.”

Rin heard a groaning noise. It came from the deck—the ship was moving, ever so slowly. Something was pushing at it from below. She looked up, and her stomach twisted with dread. The waves were swelling, rising around the Griffon like a hand preparing to clench its fingers in a fist. They had grown higher than the mast.

Nezha might lose control entirely. He might drown them all.

“Nezha.” She grasped his face between her palms. “Look at me. Please, look at me. Nezha.”

But he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, listen to her—his seconds of lucidity had passed, and it was all she could do to hold him tight so that he wouldn’t shred his own skin while he moaned and screamed.

An eternity later she heard footsteps.

“Here,” Jinzha said, pressing the packet into her hand. Rin crawled onto Nezha’s chest, pinning down his arms with her knees, and tore the packet open with her teeth. Nuggets of opium tumbled out onto the deck.

“What are you doing?” Jinzha demanded.

“Shut up.” Rin scraped up two nuggets and held them tightly in her fist.

What now? She didn’t have a pipe on hand. She couldn’t call the fire to just light up the opium nuggets and make him inhale, and making a fire would take an eternity—everything on deck was drenched.

She had to get the opium into him somehow.

She couldn’t think of any other way. She balled the nuggets up in her hand and forced them into his mouth. Nezha thrashed harder, choking. She pinched his jaw shut, then wrenched it open and pushed the nuggets farther into his mouth until he swallowed.

She held his arms down and leaned over him, waiting. A minute passed. Then two. Nezha stopped moving. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head. Then he stopped breathing.

“You could have killed him,” said the ship’s physician.

Rin recognized Dr. Sien from the Cormorant. He was the physician who had tended to Vaisra after Lusan, and appeared to be the only man permitted to treat the members of the House of Yin.

“I just assumed you’d have something for that,” she said.

She stood slouched against the wall, exhausted. She was amazed she’d been allowed into Nezha’s cabin, but Jinzha had only given her a tight nod on his way out.

Nezha lay still on the bed between them. He looked awful, paler than death, but he was breathing steadily. Every rise and fall of his chest gave Rin a small jolt of relief.

“Lucky we had the drug on hand,” said Dr. Sien. “How did you know?”

“Know what?” Rin asked cautiously. Did Dr. Sien know that Nezha was a shaman? Did anyone? Jinzha had seemed utterly confused. Was Nezha’s secret his alone?

“To give him opium,” Dr. Sien said.

That told her nothing. She hazarded a half truth in response. “I’ve seen this illness before.”

“Where?” he asked curiously.

“Um.” Rin shrugged. “You know. Down in the south. Opium’s a common remedy for it there.”

Doctor Sien looked somewhat disappointed. “I have treated the sons of the Dragon Warlord since they were babies. They have never told me anything about Nezha’s particular ailment, only that he often feels pain, and that opium is the only way to calm him. I don’t know if Vaisra and Saikhara know the cause themselves.”

Rin looked down at Nezha’s sleeping face. He looked so peaceful. She had the oddest urge to brush the hair back from his forehead. “How long has he been sick?”

“He began having seizures when he was twelve. They’ve become less frequent as he’s gotten older, but this one was the worst I’ve seen in years.”

Has Nezha been a shaman since he was a child? Rin wondered. How had he never told her? Did he not trust her?

“He’s in the clear now,” said Dr. Sien. “The only thing he’ll need is sleep. You don’t have to stay.”

“It’s all right. I’ll wait.”

He looked uncomfortable. “I don’t think General Jinzha—”

“Jinzha knows I just saved his brother’s life. He’ll permit it, and he’s an ass if he doesn’t.”

Dr. Sien didn’t argue. After he closed the door behind him, Rin curled up on the floor next to Nezha’s bed and closed her eyes.

Hours later she heard him stirring. She sat up, rubbed the grime from her eyes, and knelt next to him. “Nezha?”

“Hmm.” He blinked at the ceiling, trying to make sense of his surroundings.

She touched the back of her finger to his left cheek. His skin was much softer than she had thought it would be. His scars were not raised bumps like she’d expected, but rather smooth lines running across his skin like tattoos.

His eyes had returned to their normal, lovely brown. Rin couldn’t help noticing how long his lashes were; they were so dark and heavy, thicker even than Venka’s. It’s not fair, she thought. He’d always been much prettier than anyone had the right to be.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

Nezha blinked several times and slurred something that didn’t sound like words.

She tried again. “Do you know what’s going on?”

His eyes darted around the room for a while, and then focused on her face with some difficulty. “Yes.”

She couldn’t hold back her questions any longer. “Do you understand what just happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”

All Nezha did was blink.

She leaned forward, heart pounding. “I could have helped you. Or—or you could have helped me. You should have told me.”

His breathing started to quicken.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked again.

He mumbled something unintelligible. His eyelids fluttered shut.

She nearly shook him by the collar, she was so desperate for answers.

She took a deep breath. Stop it. Nezha was in no state to be interrogated now.

She could force him to talk. If she pressed harder, if she yelled at him to give her the truth, then he might tell her everything.

That would be a secret revealed under opium, however, and she would have coerced him when he was in no state to refuse.

Would he hate her for it?

He was only half-conscious. He might not even remember.

She swallowed down a sudden wave of revulsion. No—no, she wouldn’t do that to him. She couldn’t. She’d have to get her answers another way. Now was not the time. She stood up.

His eyes opened again. “Where are you going?”

“I should let you rest,” she said.

He shifted in his bed. “No . . . don’t go . . .”

She paused at the door.

“Please,” he said. “Stay.”

“All right,” she said, and returned to his side. She took his hand in hers. “I’m right here.”

“What’s happening to me?” he murmured.

She squeezed his fingers. “Just close your eyes, Nezha. Go back to sleep.”

The remains of the fleet sat stuck in a cove for the next three days. Half the troops had to be treated for burn wounds, and the repulsive smell of rotting flesh became so pervasive that the men took to wrapping cloth around their faces, covering everything except their eyes. Eventually Jinzha had made the decision to administer morphine and medicine only to the men who had a decent chance of survival. The rest were rolled into the mud, facedown, until they stopped moving.

They didn’t have time to bury their dead so they dragged them into piles interlaced with parts of irreparable ships to form funeral pyres and set them on fire.

“How strategic,” Kitay said. “Don’t need the Empire getting hold of good ship wood.”

“Do you have to be like this?” Rin asked.

“Just complimenting Jinzha.”

Sister Petra stood before the burning corpses and gave an entire funeral benediction in her fluent, toneless Nikara while soldiers stood around her in a curious circle.

“In life you suffered in a world wreaked by Chaos, but you have offered your souls to a beautiful cause,” she said. “You died creating order in a land bereft of it. Now you rest. I pray your Maker will take mercy on your souls. I pray that you will come to know the depths of his love, all-encompassing and unconditional.”

She then began chanting in a language that Rin didn’t recognize. It seemed similar to Hesperian—she could almost recognize the roots of words before they took on an entirely different shape—but this seemed something more ancient, something weighted down with centuries of history and religious purpose.

“Where do your people think souls go when they die?” Rin murmured quietly to Augus.

He looked surprised she had even asked. “To the realm of the Maker, of course. Where do your people think they go?”

“Nowhere,” she said. “We disappear back to nothing.”

The Nikara spoke of the underworld sometimes, but that was more a folk story than a true belief. No one really imagined they might end up anywhere but in darkness.

“That’s impossible,” Augus said. “The Maker creates our souls to be permanent. Even barbarians’ souls have value. When we die, he refines them and brings them to his realm.”

Rin couldn’t help her curiosity. “What is that realm like?”

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “A land utterly without Chaos; without pain, disease, or suffering. It is the kingdom of perfect order that we spend our lives trying to re-create on this earth.”

Rin saw the joyful hope beaming out of Augus’s face as he spoke, and she knew that he believed every word he was saying.

She was starting to see why the Hesperians clung so fervently to their religion. No wonder they had won converts over so easily during occupation. What a relief it would be to know that at the end of this life there was a better one, that perhaps upon death you might enjoy the comforts you had always been denied instead of fading away from an indifferent universe. What a relief to know that the world was supposed to make sense, and that if it didn’t, you would one day be justly compensated.

A line of captains and generals stood before the burning pyre. Nezha was at the end, leaning heavily on a walking stick. It was the first time Rin had seen him in two days.

But when she approached him, he turned to walk away. She called out his name. He ignored her. She dashed forward—he couldn’t outrun her, not with his walking stick—and grabbed his wrist.

“Stop running away,” she said.

“I’m not running,” he said stiffly.

“Then talk to me. Tell me what I saw on the river.”

Nezha’s eyes darted around at the soldiers standing within earshot. He lowered his voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t lie to me. I saw what you did. You’re a shaman!”

“Rin, shut up.”

She didn’t let go of his wrist. “You moved the water at will. I know it was you.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You didn’t see anything, and you won’t tell anyone anything—”

“Your secret is safe from Petra, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “But I don’t understand why you’re lying to me.”

Without responding, Nezha turned and limped briskly away from the pyres. She followed him to a spot behind the charred hull of a transport skimmer. The questions poured out of her in an unstoppable torrent. “Did they teach you at Sinegard? Does Jun know? Is anyone else in your family a shaman?”

“Rin, stop—”

“Jinzha doesn’t know, I figured that out. What about your mother? Vaisra? Did he teach you?”

“I am not a shaman!” he shouted.

She didn’t flinch. “I’m not stupid. I know what I saw.”

“Then draw your own conclusions and stop asking questions.”

“Why are you hiding this?”

He looked pained. “Because I don’t want it.”

“You can control the water! You could single-handedly win us this war!”

“It’s not that easy, I can’t just—” He shook his head. “You saw what happened. It wants to take over.”

“Of course it does. What do you think we all go through? So you control it. You get practice at reining it in, you shape it to your own will—”

“Like you can?” he sneered. “You’re the equivalent of a spiritual eunuch.”

He was trying to throw her off, but she didn’t let that distract her. “And I would kill to have the fire back. It’s difficult, I know, the gods aren’t kind—but you can control them! I can help you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, shut up—”

“Unless you’re just scared, which is no excuse, because men are dying while you’re sitting here indulging in your own self-pity—”

“I said shut up!”

His hand went into the skimmer’s hull, an inch from her head. She didn’t flinch. She turned her head slowly, trying to pretend her heart wasn’t slamming against her chest.

“You missed,” she said calmly.

Nezha pulled his hand away from the hull. Blood trickled down his knuckles from four crimson dots.

She should have been afraid, but when she searched his face, she couldn’t find a shred of anger. Just fear.

She had no respect for fear.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“Oh, trust me.” Her lip curled. “You couldn’t.”

Chapter 20

“A puzzle for you,” said Kitay. “The water erupts around the ships, blows holes in the sides like cannonballs, and yet we never see a hint of an explosion above the water. How does the Militia do this?”

“I assume you’re about to tell me,” Rin said.

“Come on, Rin, just play along.”

She fiddled with the shrapnel fragments strewn across his worktable. “Could have been archers aiming at the base. They could have fixed rockets on the front ends of their arrows?”

“But why would they do that? The deck’s more vulnerable than the hull. And we would have seen them in the air if they were alight, which they’d have to be to explode on impact.”

“Maybe they found out a way to hide the heat glow,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said. “But then why the chain reaction? Why start with the skimmers, instead of aiming directly at the Kingfisher or the tower ships?”

“I don’t know. Scare tactics?”

“That’s stupid,” he said dismissively. “Here’s a hint: The explosives were in the water to begin with. That’s why we never saw them. They really were underwater.”

She sighed. “And how would they have managed that, Kitay? Why don’t you just tell me the answer?”

“Animal intestines,” he said happily. He pulled out a rather disgusting translucent tube from under the table, inside of which he’d threaded a thin fuse. “They’re completely waterproof. I’m guessing they used cow intestines, since they’re longer, but any animal would do, really, because it just has to keep the fuse dry enough to let it burn down. Then they rig up the interior so that slow-burning coils light the fuse on impact. Cool, eh?”

“Sort of like the pig stomachs.”

“Sort of. But those were designed to erode over time. Depending on how slow the coils burn, these could keep a fuse dry for days if they were sealed well enough.”

“That’s incredible.” Rin stared at the intestines, considering the implications. The mines were ingenious. The Militia could win riverine battles without even being present, as long as they could guarantee that the Republican fleet would travel over a given stretch of water.

When had the Militia developed this technology?

And if they had this capability, were any of the river routes safe?

The door slammed open. Jinzha strode in unannounced, holding a rolled-up scroll in one hand. Nezha followed in his wake, still limping on his walking stick. He refused to meet Rin’s eye.

“Hello, sir.” Kitay cheerfully waved a cow intestine at him. “I’ve solved your problem.”

Jinzha looked repulsed. “What is that?”

“Water mines. It’s how they blew up the fleet.” Kitay offered the intestine up to Jinzha for inspection.

Jinzha wrinkled his nose. “I’ll trust your word for it. Did you figure out how to deactivate them?”

“Yes, it’s easy enough if we just puncture the waterproofing. The hard part is finding the mines.” Kitay rubbed his chin. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any expert divers on deck.”

“I can figure that part out.” Jinzha spread his scroll over Kitay’s table. It was a closely detailed map of Rat Province, on which he’d circled in red ink a spot just inland of a nearby lake. “I need you to draw up detailed plans for an attack on Boyang. Here’s all the intelligence we have.”

Kitay leaned forward to examine the map. “This is for a springtime operation?”

“No. We attack as soon as we can get there.”

Kitay blinked twice. “You can’t be considering taking Boyang with a damaged fleet.”

“A full three-fourths of the fleet is serviceable. We’ve mostly lost skimmers—”

“And the warships?”

“Can be repaired in time.”

Kitay tapped his fingers on the table. “Do you have men to man those ships?”

Irritation flickered over Jinzha’s face. “We’ve redistributed the troops. There will be enough.”

“If you say so.” Kitay chewed at his thumbnail, staring intensely down at Jinzha’s scribbles. “There’s still a slight problem.”

“And what’s that?”

“Well, Lake Boyang’s an interesting natural phenomenon—”

“Get to the point,” Jinzha said.

Kitay traced his finger down the map. “Usually lake water levels go down during the summer and go up during colder seasons. That should advantage deep-hulled ships like ours. But Boyang gets its water source directly from Mount Tianshan, and during the winter—”

“Tianshan freezes,” Rin realized out loud.

“So what?” Jinzha asked. “That doesn’t mean the lake drains immediately.”

“No, but it means the water level goes down every day,” Kitay said. “And the shallower the lake, the less mobility your warships have, especially the Seahawks. I’m guessing the mines were put there to stall us.”

“Then how long do we have?” Jinzha pressed.

Kitay shrugged. “I’m not a prophet. I’d have to see the lake.”

“I told you it’s not worth it.” Nezha spoke up for the first time. “We should head back south while we still can.”

“And do what?” Jinzha demanded. “Hide? Grovel? Explain to Father why we’ve come home with our tails tucked between our legs?”

“No. Explain about the territory we’ve taken. The men we’ve added to our ranks. We regroup, and fight from a position of strength.”

“We have plenty of strength.”

“The entire Imperial Fleet will be waiting for us in that lake!”

“So we will take it from them,” Jinzha snarled. “We’re not running home to Father because we were scared of a fight.”

This isn’t really an argument, Rin thought. Jinzha had made up his mind, and he would shout down anyone who opposed him. Nezha—the younger brother, the inferior brother—was never going to change Jinzha’s mind.

Jinzha was hungry for this fight. Rin could read it so clearly on his face. And she could understand why he wanted it so badly. A victory at Boyang might effectively end this war. It might achieve the final and devastating proof of victory that the Hesperians were demanding. It might compensate for Jinzha’s latest string of failures.

She’d known a commander who made decisions like that before. His bones, if any had survived incineration, were lying at the bottom of Omonod Bay.

“Aren’t your troops worth more than your ego?” she asked. “Don’t sentence us to death just because you’ve been humiliated.”

Jinzha didn’t even deign to look at her. “Did I authorize you to talk?”

“She has a point,” Nezha said.

“I am warning you, brother.”

“She’s telling the truth,” Nezha said. “You’re just not listening because you’re terrified that someone else is right.”

Jinzha strode over to Nezha and casually slapped him across the face.

The crack echoed around the little room. Rin and Kitay sat frozen in their seats. Nezha’s head whipped to the side, where it stayed. Slowly he touched his fingers to his cheek, where a red mark was blooming outward over his scars. His chest rose and fell; he was breathing so heavily that Rin thought for sure he would strike back. But he did nothing.

“We could probably get to Boyang in time if we leave immediately,” Kitay said neutrally, as if nothing had happened.

“Then we’ll set sail within an hour.” Jinzha pointed to Kitay. “You get to my office. Admiral Molkoi will give you full access to scout reports. I want attack plans by the end of the day.”

“Oh, joy,” Kitay said.

“What’s that?”

Kitay sat up straight. “Yes, sir.”

Jinzha stormed out of the room. Nezha lingered by the doorway, eyes darting between Rin and Kitay as if unsure of whether he wanted to stay.

“Your brother’s losing it,” Rin informed him.

“Shut up,” he said.

“I’ve seen this before,” she said. “Commanders break under pressure all the time. Then they make shitty decisions that get people killed.”

Nezha sneered at her, and for an instant he looked identical to Jinzha. “My brother is not Altan.”

“You sure about that?”

“Say whatever you want,” he said. “At least we’re not Speerly trash.”

She was so shocked that she couldn’t think of a good response. Nezha stalked out and slammed the door shut behind him.

Kitay whistled under his breath. “Lovers’ spat, you two?”

Rin’s face suddenly felt terribly hot. She sat down beside Kitay and busied herself by pretending to fiddle with the cow intestine. “Something like that.”

“If it helps, I don’t think you’re Speerly trash,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Let me know if you do.” Kitay shrugged. “Incidentally, you could try being more careful about how you talk to Jinzha.”

She made a face. “Oh, I’m aware.”

“Are you? Or do you like not having a seat at the table?”

“Kitay . . .”

“You’re a Sinegard-trained shaman. You shouldn’t be a foot soldier; it’s below you.”

She was tired of having that argument. She changed the subject. “Do we really have a chance at taking Boyang?”

“If we work the paddle wheels to death. If the Imperial Fleet is as weak as our most optimistic estimates say.” Kitay sighed. “If the heaven and the stars and the sun line up for us and we’re blessed by every god in that Pantheon of yours.”

“So, no.”

“I honestly don’t know. There are too many moving pieces. We don’t know how strong the fleet is. We don’t know their naval tactics. We’ve probably got superior naval talent, but they’ll have been there longer. They’ll know the lake terrain. They had time to booby-trap the rivers. They’ll have a plan for us.”

Rin searched the map, looking for any possible way out. “Then do we retreat?”

“It’s too late for that now,” Kitay said. “Jinzha’s right about one thing: we don’t have any other options. We don’t have supplies to last out the winter, and chances are if we escape back to Arlong, then we’ll lose all the progress we’ve made—”

“What, we can’t just hunker down in Ram Province for a few months? Have Arlong ship up some supplies?”

“And give Daji the entire winter to build a fleet? We’ve gotten this far because the Empire has never had a great navy. Daji has the men, but we have the ships. That’s the only reason we’re at parity. If Daji gets three months’ leeway, then this is all over.”

“Some Hesperian warships would be great right around now,” Rin muttered.

“And that’s the root of it all.” Kitay gave her a wry look. “Jinzha’s being an ass, but I think I understand him. He can’t afford to look weak, not with Tarcquet sitting there judging his every move. He’s got to be bold. Be the brilliant leader his father promised. And we’ll blaze forward right with him, because we simply have no other option.”

“How many of you can swim?” Jinzha asked.

Prisoners stood miserably in line on the slippery deck, heads bent as rain poured down on them in relentless sheets. Jinzha paced up and down the deck, and the prisoners flinched every time he stopped in front of them. “Show of hands. Who can swim?”

The prisoners glanced nervously at one another, no doubt wondering which response would keep them alive. No hands went up.

“Let me put it this way.” Jinzha crossed his arms. “We don’t have the rations to feed everyone. No matter what, some of you are going to end up at the bottom of the Murui. It’s only a question of whether you want to starve to death. So raise your hand if you’ll be useful.”

Every hand shot up.

Jinzha turned to Admiral Molkoi. “Throw them all overboard.”

The men started screaming in protest. Rin thought for a second that Molkoi might actually comply, and that they would have to watch the prisoners clawing over each other in the water in a desperate bid to survive, but then she realized that Jinzha didn’t really intend to execute them.

He was watching to see who wouldn’t resist.

After a few moments Jinzha pulled fifteen men out of the line and dismissed the rest to the brig. Then he held up a water mine wrapped in cow intestine and passed it through the line so the men could take a better look at the fuse.

“The Militia’s been planting these in the water. You will swim through the water and disable them. You will be tethered to the ship with ropes, and you will be given sharp rocks to do the job. If you find an explosive, cut the intestine and ensure that water floods the tube. Try to escape, and my archers will shoot you in the water. Leave any mines intact, and you will die with us. It’s in your interest to be thorough.”

He tossed several lines of rope at the men. “Go on, then.”

Nobody moved.

“Admiral Molkoi!” Jinzha shouted.

Molkoi signaled to his men. A line of guards strode forward, blades out.

“Do not test my patience,” Jinzha said.

The men scrambled hastily for the ropes.

The storms only intensified in the following week, but Jinzha forced the fleet forward to Boyang at an impossible pace. The soldiers were exhausted at the paddle wheels trying to meet his demands. Several prisoners dropped dead after being forced to paddle consecutive shifts without a night’s sleep, and Jinzha had their bodies tossed unceremoniously overboard.

“He’s going to tire his army out before we even get there,” Kitay grumbled to Rin. “Bet you wish we’d brought those Federation troops along now, don’t you?”

The army was both weary and hungry. Their rations had been dwindling. They now received dried fish twice a day instead of three times, and rice only once in the evenings. Most of the extra provisions they’d obtained in Xiashang had been lost in the explosions. Morale drooped by the day.

The soldiers became even more disheartened when scouts returned with details of the lake defense. The Imperial Navy was indeed stationed at Boyang, as all of them had feared, and it was far better equipped than Jinzha had anticipated.

The navy rivaled the size of the fleet that had sailed out from Arlong. The one consolation was that it was nowhere near the technological level of Jinzha’s armada. The Empress had hastily constructed it in the months since Lusan, and the lack of preparation time showed—the Imperial Fleet was a messy amalgamation of badly constructed new ships, some with unfinished decks, and conscripted old merchant boats with no uniformity of build. At least three were leisure barges without firing capacity.

But they had more ships, and they had more men.

“Ship quality would have mattered if they were out over the ocean,” Kitay told Rin. “But the lake will turn this battle into a crucible. We’ll all be crammed in together. They just need to get their men to board our ships, and it’ll be over. Boyang’s going to turn red with blood.”

Rin knew one way the Republic could easily win. They wouldn’t even have to fire a shot. But Nezha refused to speak to her. She only ever saw him when he came aboard the Kingfisher for meetings in his brother’s office. Each time they crossed paths he hastily looked away; if she called his name, he only shook his head. Otherwise, they might have been complete strangers.

“Do we expect anything to come of this?” Rin asked.

“Not really,” Kitay said. He held his crossbow ready against his chest. “It’s just a formality. You know how aristocrats are.”

Rin’s teeth chattered as the Imperial flagship drifted closer to the Kingfisher. “We shouldn’t have even come.”

“It’s Jinzha. Always worried about his honor.”

“Yes, well, he might try worrying more about his life.”

Against the counsel of his admirals, Jinzha had demanded a last-minute negotiation with the flagship of the Imperial Navy. Gentlemen’s etiquette, he called it. He had to at least give the Wolf Meat General a chance to surrender. But the negotiation would not even be a charade; it was only a risk, and a stupid one.

Chang En had refused a private meeting. The most he would acquiesce to was a temporary cease-fire and a confrontation held over the open water, and that meant their ships were forced to draw dangerously close together in the final moments before the firing began.

“Hello, little dragon!” Chang En’s voice rang over the still, cold air. For once, the waters were calm and quiet. Mist drifted from the surface of Boyang Lake, shrouding the assembled fleets in a cloudy fog.

“You’ve done well for yourself, Master,” Jinzha called. “Admiral of the Imperial Navy, now?”

Chang En spread his arms. “I take what I want when I see it.”

Jinzha lifted his chin. “You’ll want to take this surrender, then. You can retain your position in my father’s employ.”

“Oh, fuck off.” Chang En’s jackal laughter rang high and cruel across the lake.

Jinzha raised his voice. “There’s nothing Su Daji can do for you. Whatever she’s promised you, we’ll double it. My father can make you a general—”

“Your father will give me a cell in Baghra and relieve me of my limbs.”

“You’ll have immunity if you lay down your arms now. I give you my word.”

“A Dragon’s word means nothing.” Chang En laughed again. “Do you think me stupid? When has Vaisra ever kept a vow he’s made?”

“My father is an honorable man who only wants to see this country unified under a just regime,” Jinzha said. “You’d serve well by his side.”

He wasn’t just posturing. Jinzha spoke like he meant it. He seemed to truly hope that he could convince his former master to switch loyalties.

Chang En spat into the water. “Your father’s a Hesperian puppet dancing for donations.”

“And you think Daji is any better?” Jinzha asked. “Stand by her, and you’re guaranteeing years of bloody warfare.”

“Ah, but I’m a soldier. Without war, I’m out of a job.”

Chang En lifted a gauntleted hand. His archers lifted their bows.

“Negotiator’s honor,” Jinzha cautioned.

Chang En smiled widely. “Talks are over, little dragon.”

His hand fell.

A single arrow whistled through the air, grazed Jinzha’s cheek, and embedded itself in the bulkhead behind him.

Jinzha touched his fingers to his cheek, pulled them away, and watched his blood trickle down his pale white hand as if shocked that he could bleed.

“Let you off easy that time,” Chang En said. “Wouldn’t want the fun to be over too quick.”

Lake Boyang lit up like a torch. Flaming arrows, fire rockets, and cannon fire turned the sky red, while below, smokescreens went off everywhere to shroud the Imperial Navy behind a murky gray veil.

The Kingfisher sailed straight into the mist.

“Bring me his head,” Jinzha ordered, ignoring his men’s frantic shouts for him to duck down.

The rest of the fleet spread out across the lake to decrease their vulnerability to incendiary attacks. The closer they clumped, the faster they would all go up in flames. The Seahawks and trebuchets started to return the fire, launching missile after missile over the Kingfisher and into the opaque wall of gray.

But their spread-out formation only made the Republicans weak against Imperial swarming tactics. Tiny, patched-up skimmers shot into the gaps between the Republican warships and pushed them farther apart, isolating them to fight on their own.

The Imperial Navy targeted the tower ships first. Imperial skimmers attacked the Crake with relentless cannon fire from all sides. Without its own skimmer support, the Crake began shaking in the water like a man in his death throes.

Jinzha ordered the Kingfisher to come to the Crake’s aid, but it, too, was trapped, cut off from the fleet by a phalanx of old Imperial junks. Jinzha ordered round after round of cannon fire to clear them a path. But even the bombed-out junks took up space in the water, which meant all they could do was stand and watch as the Wolf Meat General’s men swarmed aboard the Crake.

The Crake’s men were exhausted and spread too thin to begin with. The Wolf Meat General’s men were out for blood. The Crake never stood a chance.

Chang En cut a ferocious path through the upper deck. Rin saw him raise a broadsword over his head and cleave a soldier’s skull in half so neatly he might have been slicing a winter melon. When another soldier took the opportunity to charge him from behind, Chang En twisted around and shoved his blade so hard into his chest that it came out clean on the other side.

The man was a monster. If Rin hadn’t been so terrified for her life, she might have stood there on the deck and simply watched.

“Speerly!” Admiral Molkoi pointed to the empty mounted crossbow in front of her, then waved at the Crake. “Cover them!”

He said something else, but just then a wave of cannons exploded against the Kingfisher’s sides. Rin’s ears rang as she made her way to the crossbow. She could hear nothing else. Hands shaking, she fitted a bolt into the slot.

Her fingers kept slipping. Fuck, fuck—she hadn’t fired a crossbow since the Academy, she’d never served in the artillery, and in her panic she’d almost forgotten completely what to do . . .

She took a deep breath. Wind it up. Aim. She squinted at the end of the Crake.

The Wolf Meat General had cornered a captain near the edge of the prow. Rin recognized her as Captain Salkhi—she must have been reassigned to the Crake after the Swallow was lost in the burning channel. Rin’s stomach twisted in dread. Salkhi still had her weapon, was still trading blows, but it wasn’t even close. Rin could tell that Salkhi was struggling to hold on to her blade while Chang En hacked at her with lackadaisical ease.

Rin’s first shot didn’t even make it to the deck. She had the direction right but the height wrong; the bolt pinged uselessly off the Crake’s hull.

Salkhi brought her sword up to block a blow from above, but Chang En slammed his blade so strongly against hers that she dropped it. Salkhi was weaponless, trapped against the prow. Chang En advanced slowly, grinning.

Rin fitted a new bolt into the crossbow and, squinting, lined up the shot with Chang En’s head. She pulled the trigger. The bolt sailed over the burning seas and slammed into the wood just next to Salkhi’s arm. Salkhi jumped at the noise, twisted around by instinct . . .

She had barely turned when the Wolf Meat General slammed his blade into the side of her neck, nearly decapitating her. She dropped to her knees. Chang En reached down and dragged her upright by her collar until she was dangling a good foot above the ground. He pulled her close, kissed her on her mouth, and tossed her over the side of the ship.

Rin stood frozen, watching Salkhi’s body disappear under the waves.

Slowly the tide of red took over the Crake. Despite a steady stream of arrow fire from the Shrike and the Kingfisher, Chang En’s men dispatched its crew like a pack of wolves falling on sheep. Someone shot a flaming arrow at the masthead, and the Crake’s blue and silver flag went up in flames.

The tower ship now turned on its sister ships. Its catapults and incendiaries were no longer aimed at the Imperial Navy, but at the Kingfisher and the Griffon.

Meanwhile the Imperial skimmers, small as they were, ran circles around Jinzha’s fleet. In shallow waters the Republic’s massive warships simply didn’t have maneuverability. They drifted helplessly like sick whales while a frenzy of smaller fish tore them apart.

“Put us by the Shrike,” Jinzha ordered. “We have to keep at least one of our tower ships.”

“We can’t,” Molkoi said.

“Why not?”

“The water level’s too low on that side of the lake. The Shrike’s been grounded. Any farther and we’ll get stuck in the mud ourselves.”

“Then at least get us away from the Crake,” Jinzha snapped. “We’re about to be stuck as is.”

He was right. While Chang En wrestled for control of the Crake, the tower ship had drifted so far into narrow waters that it could not extricate itself.

But the Kingfisher and the Griffon still had more firepower than the Imperial junks. If they just kept shooting, they might cement their hold on the deeper end of the lake. They had to. They had no other way out.

The Imperial Navy, however, had ground to a halt around the Crake.

“What on earth are they doing?” Kitay asked.

They didn’t seem to be stuck. Rather, Chang En seemed to have ordered his fleet to sit completely still. Rin scoured the decks for any sign of activity—a lantern signal, a flag—and saw nothing.

What were they waiting for?

Something dark flitted across the upper field of her spyglass. She moved her focus up to the mast.

A man stood at the very top.

He wore neither a Militia nor a Republican uniform. He was garbed entirely in black. Rin could hardly make out his face. His hair was a straggly, matted mess that hung into his eyes and his skin was both pale and dark, mottled like ruined marble. He looked as if he’d been dragged up from the bottom of the ocean.

Rin found him oddly familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen him before.

“What are you looking at?” Kitay asked.

She blinked into the spyglass, and the man was gone.

“There’s a man.” She pointed. “I saw him, he was right there—”

Kitay frowned, squinting at the mast. “What man?”

Rin couldn’t speak. Dread pooled at the bottom of her stomach.

She’d remembered. She knew exactly who that was.

A sudden chill had fallen over the lake. New ice crackled over the water’s surface. The Kingfisher’s sails suddenly dropped without warning. Its crew looked around the deck, bewildered. No one had given that order. No one had lowered the sails.

“There’s no wind,” Kitay murmured. “Why isn’t there a wind?”

Rin heard a whooshing noise. A blur shot past her eyes, followed by a scream that grew fainter and fainter until it abruptly cut off.

She heard a crack in the air far above her head.

Admiral Molkoi appeared suddenly on the cliff wall, his body bent at grotesque angles like a broken doll on display. He hung there for a moment before skidding down the rock face and into the lake, leaving behind a crimson streak on gray.

“Oh, fuck,” Rin muttered.

What seemed like a lifetime ago, she and Altan had freed someone very powerful and very mad from the Chuluu Korikh.

The Wind God Feylen had returned.

The Kingfisher’s deck erupted into shouts. Some soldiers ran to the mounted crossbows, aiming their bolts at nothing. Others dropped to the deck and wrapped their arms around their necks as if hiding from wild animals.

Rin finally regained her senses. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Everybody get belowdecks!”

She grabbed Kitay’s arm and pulled him toward the closest hatch, just as a piercing gust of wind slammed into them from the side. They crumpled together against the bulkhead. His bent elbow went straight into her rib cage.

“Ow!” she cried.

Kitay picked himself off the deck. “Sorry.”

Somehow they managed to drag themselves toward the hatch and tumbled more than walked down the stairs to the hold, where the rest of the crew huddled in the pitch darkness. There passed a long silence, pregnant with terror. No one spoke a word.

Light filled the chamber. Gust after gust of wind ripped the wooden panels cleanly away from the ship as if peeling off layers of skin, exposing the cowering and vulnerable crew underneath.

The strange man perched before them on the jagged wood like a bird alighting on a branch. Rin could see his eyes clearly now—bright, gleaming, malicious dots of blue.

“What’s this?” asked Feylen. “Little rats, hiding with nowhere to go?”

Someone shot an arrow at his head. He waved a hand, annoyed. The arrow jerked to the side and came whistling back into the soldiers’ ranks. Rin heard a dull thud. Someone collapsed to the floor.

“Don’t be so rude.” Feylen’s voice was quiet, reedy and thin, but in the eerily still air they could hear every word he said. He hovered above them, effortlessly drifting above the ground, until his bright eyes landed on Rin. “There you are.”

She didn’t think. If she stopped to think, then fear would catch up. Instead she launched herself at him, screaming, trident in hand.

He sent her spinning to the planks with a flick of his fingers. She got up to rush him again but didn’t even get close. He hurled her away every time she approached him, but she kept trying, again and again. If she was going to die, then she’d do it on her feet.

But Feylen was just toying with her.

Finally he yanked her out of the ship and started tossing her around in the air like a rag doll. He could have flung her into the opposite cliff if he’d wanted to; he could have lifted her high into the air and sent her plummeting into the lake, and the only reason he hadn’t was that he wanted to play.

“Behold the great Phoenix, trapped inside a little girl,” sneered Feylen. “Where is your fire now?”

“You’re Cike,” Rin gasped. Altan had appealed to Feylen’s humanity once. It had almost worked. She had to try the same. “You’re one of us.”

“A traitor like you?” Feylen chuckled as the winds hurtled her up and down. “Hardly.”

“Why would you fight for her?” Rin demanded. “She had you imprisoned!”

“Imprisoned?” Feylen sent Rin tumbling so close to the cliff wall that her fingers brushed the surface before he jerked her back in front of him. “No, that was Trengsin. That was Trengsin and Tyr, the pair of them. They crept up on us in the middle of the night, and still it took them until midday to pin us down.”

He let her drop. She hurtled down to the lake, crashed into the water, and was certain she was about to drown just before Feylen yanked her back up by her ankle. He emitted a high-pitched cackle. “Look at you. You’re like a little cat. Drenched to the bone.”

A pair of rockets shot toward Feylen’s head. He swept them carelessly out of the air. They fell to the water and fizzled out.

“Is Ramsa still at it?” he asked. “How adorable. Is he well? We never liked him, we’ll rip out his fingernails one by one after this.”

He tossed Rin up and down by her ankle as he spoke. She clenched her teeth to keep from crying out.

“Did you really think you were going to fight us?” He sounded amused. “We can’t be killed, child.”

“Altan stopped you once,” she snarled.

“He did,” Feylen acknowledged, “but you’re a far cry from Altan Trengsin.”

He stopped tossing her and held her still in the air, buffeted on all sides by winds so strong she could barely keep her eyes open. He hung before her, arms outstretched, tattered clothes rippling in the wind, daring her to attack and knowing that she couldn’t.

“Isn’t it fun to fly?” he asked. The winds whipped harder and harder around her until it felt like a thousand steel blades jamming into every tender point of her body.

“Just kill me,” she gasped. “Get it over with.”

“Oh, we’re not going to kill you,” said Feylen. “She told us not to do that. We’re just supposed to hurt you.”

He waved a hand. The winds yanked her away.

She flew up, weightless and utterly out of control, and crumpled against the masthead. She hung there, splayed out like a dissected corpse, for just the briefest moment before the drop. She landed in a crumpled heap on the Kingfisher’s deck. She couldn’t draw enough breath to scream. Every part of her body was on fire. She tried making her limbs move but they wouldn’t obey her.

Her senses came back in blurs. She saw a shape above her, heard a garbled voice shouting her name.

“Kitay?” she whispered.

His arms shifted under her midriff. He was trying to lift her up, but the pain of the slightest movement was enormous. She whimpered, shaking.

“You’re okay,” Kitay said. “I’ve got you.”

She clutched at his arm, unable to speak. They huddled against each other, watching the planks continue to peel off the Kingfisher. Feylen was stripping the fleet apart, bit by bit.

Rin could do nothing but convulse with fear. She squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t want to see. The panic had taken over, and the same thoughts echoed over and over in her mind. We’re going to drown. He’s going to rip the ships apart and we will fall into the water and we will drown.

Kitay shook her shoulder. “Rin. Look.”

She opened her eyes and saw a shock of white hair. Chaghan had climbed out on the broken planks, was teetering wildly on the edge. He looked like a little child dancing on a roof. Somehow, despite the howling winds, he did not fall.

He lifted his arms above his head.

Instantly the air felt colder. Thicker, somehow. Just as abruptly, the wind stopped.

Feylen hung still in the air, as if some invisible force was holding him in place.

Rin couldn’t tell what Chaghan was doing, but she could feel the power in the air. It seemed as if Chaghan had established some invisible connection to Feylen, some thread that only the two of them could perceive, some psychospiritual plane upon which to wage a battle of wills.

For a moment it seemed as if Chaghan was winning.

Feylen’s head jerked back and forth; his legs twitched, as if he were seizing.

Rin’s grip tightened on Kitay’s arm. A bubble of hope rose in her chest.

Please. Please let Chaghan win.

Then she saw Qara hunched over on the deck, rocking back and forth, muttering something over and over under her breath.

“No,” Qara whispered. “No, no, no!”

Chaghan’s head jerked to the side. His limbs moved spastically, flailing without purpose or direction, as if someone who had very little knowledge of the human body was controlling him from somewhere far away.

Qara started to scream.

Chaghan went limp. Then he flew backward, like a little white flag of surrender, so frail that Rin was afraid the winds themselves might rip him apart.

“You think you can contain us, little shaman?” The winds resumed, twice as ferocious. Another gust swept both Chaghan and Qara off the ship into the churning waves below.

Rin saw Nezha watching, horrified, from the Griffon, just close enough to be in earshot.

“Do something!” she screamed. “You coward! Do something!”

Nezha stood still, his mouth open, eyes wide as if he were trapped. His expression went slack. He did nothing.

A gust of wind tore the Kingfisher’s deck in half, ripping the very floorboards from beneath Rin’s feet. She fell through the fragments of wood, bumped and dragged along the rough surface, until she hit the water.

Kitay landed beside her. His eyes were closed. He sank instantly. She wrapped her arms around his chest, kicking furiously to keep them both afloat, and struggled to swim toward the Kingfisher, but the water kept sweeping them backward.

Her gut clenched.

The current.

Lake Boyang emptied into a waterfall on its southern border. It was a short, narrow drop; small enough that its current had little effect on heavy warships. It was harmless to sailors. Deadly to swimmers.

The Kingfisher rapidly receded from Rin’s sight as the current dragged them faster and faster to the edge. She saw a rope drifting beside them and grabbed wildly for it, desperate for anything to hang on to.

Miraculously it was still tethered to the fleet. The line went taut; they stopped drifting. She forced her freezing fingers around the cord against the rushing waters, struggled to wrap it in loops around Kitay’s torso, her wrists.

Her limbs had gone numb with the cold. She couldn’t move her fingers; they were locked tight around the rope.

“Help us!” she screamed. “Someone help!”

Someone stood up from the Kingfisher’s prow.

Jinzha. Their eyes met across the water. His face was wild, frantic—she wanted to think he had seen her, but maybe his attention was fixed only on his own disappearing chance of survival.

Then he disappeared. She couldn’t tell if Jinzha had cut the rope or if he’d simply gone down under another burst of Feylen’s attack, but she felt a jerk in the line just before it went slack.

They spun away from the fleet, hurtling toward the waterfall. There was one second of weightlessness, a confusing and delicious moment of utter disorientation, and then the water claimed them.

Chapter 21

Rin ran across a dark field, chasing after a fiery silhouette that she was never going to catch. Her legs moved as if treading water—she was too slow, too clumsy, and the farther back she fell from the silhouette, the more her despair weighed her down, until her legs were so heavy that she couldn’t run any longer.

“Please,” she cried. “Wait.”

The silhouette stopped.

When Altan turned around, she saw he was already burning, his handsome features charred and twisted, blackened skin peeled away to reveal pristine, gleaming bone.

And then he was looming above her. Somehow he was still magnificent, still beautiful, even when arrested in the moment of his death. He knelt in front of her, took her face in his scorching hands, and brought their foreheads close together.

“They’re right, you know,” he said.

“About what?” She saw oceans of fire in his eyes. His grip was hurting her; it always had. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to let her go or to kiss her.

His fingers dug into her cheeks. “It should have been you.”

His face morphed into Qara’s.

Rin screamed and jerked away.

“Tiger’s tits. I’m not that ugly.” Qara wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Welcome to the world of the living.”

Rin sat up and spat out a mouthful of lake water. She was shivering uncontrollably; it took her a while before she could push words out from between numb, clumsy lips. “Where are we?”

“Right by the riverbank,” Qara said. “Maybe a mile out of Boyang.”

“What about the rest?” Rin fought a swell of panic. “Ramsa? Suni? Nezha?”

Qara didn’t answer, which meant she didn’t know, which meant that the Cike had either gotten away or drowned.

Rin took several deep breaths to keep from hyperventilating. You don’t know they’re dead, she told herself. And Nezha, if anyone, had to be alive. The water protected him like he was its child. The waves would have shielded him, whether he consciously called them or not.

And if the others are dead, there’s nothing you can do.

She forced her mind to compartmentalize, to lock up her concern and shove it away. She could grieve later. First she needed to survive.

“Kitay’s all right,” Chaghan told her. He looked like a living corpse; his lips were the same dark shade as his fingers, which were blue up to the middle joint. “Just went out to get some firewood.”

Rin pulled her knees up to her chest, still shaking. “Feylen. That was Feylen.”

The twins nodded.

“But why—what was he—” She couldn’t understand why they looked so calm. “What’s he doing with them? What does he want?”

“Well, Feylen the man probably wants to die,” Chaghan said.

“Then what does—”

“The Wind God? Who knows?” He rubbed his hands up and down his arms. “The gods are agents of pure chaos. Behind the veil they’re balanced, each one against the other sixty-three, but if you set them loose in the material world, they’re like water bursting from a broken dam. With no opposing force to check them, they’ll do whatever they want. And we never know what the gods want. He’ll create a light breeze one day, and then a typhoon the next. The one thing you can expect is inconsistency.”

“But then why’s he fighting for them?” Rin asked. Wars took consistency. Unpredictable and uncontrollable soldiers were worse than none.

“I think he’s scared of someone,” Chaghan said. “Someone who can frighten him into obeying orders.”

“Daji?”

“Who else?”

“Good, you’re awake.” Kitay emerged into the clearing, carrying a bundle of sticks. He was drenched, curly hair plastered to his temples. Rin saw bloody scratches all over his face and arms where he’d hit the rocks, but otherwise he looked unharmed.

“You’re all right?” she asked.

“Eh. My bad arm’s feeling a bit off, but I think it’s just the cold.” He tossed the bundle onto the damp dirt. “Are you hurt?”

She was so cold it was hard to tell. Everything just felt numb. She flexed her arms, wiggled her fingers, and found no trouble. Then she tried to stand up. Her left leg buckled beneath her.

“Fuck.” She ran her fingers over her ankle. It was painfully tender to the touch, throbbing wherever she pressed it.

Kitay knelt down beside her. “Can you wiggle your toes?”

She tried, and they obeyed. That was a minor relief. This wasn’t a break, then, just a sprain. She was used to sprains. They’d been common for students at Sinegard; she’d learned how to deal with them years ago. She just needed something like cloth for compression.

“Does anyone have a knife?” she asked.

“I’ve got one.” Qara fished around in her pockets and tossed a small hunting knife in her direction.

Rin unsheathed it, held her trouser leg taut, and cut off a strip at the ankle. She ripped that longways into two pieces and wrapped them tightly around her ankle.

“At least you don’t have to worry about keeping it cool,” said Kitay.

She didn’t have the energy to laugh. She flexed her ankle, and another tremor of pain shot up her leg. She winced. “Are we the only ones who made it out?”

“If only. We’ve got a bit of company.” He nodded to his left.

She followed his line of sight and saw a cluster of bodies—maybe seven, eight—huddled together a little ways up the riverbank. Gray cassocks, light hair. No army uniforms. They were all from the Gray Company.

She could recognize Augus. She wouldn’t have been able to pick the rest out of a line—Hesperian faces looked so similar to her, all pale and sparse. She noticed with relief that Sister Petra was not among them.

They looked miserable. They were breathing and blinking—moving just enough that Rin could tell they were alive, but otherwise they seemed frozen stiff. Their skin was pale as snow; their lips were turning blue.

Rin waved at them and pointed to the bundle of sticks. “Come over here. We’ll build a fire.”

She may as well try to be kind. If she could save some of the Gray Company from freezing to death, they might win her some political capital with the Hesperians when—if—they made it back to Arlong.

The missionaries made no move to get up.

She tried again in slow, deliberate Hesperian. “Come on, Augus. You’re going to freeze.”

Augus registered no recognition when she called his name. She might not have been speaking Hesperian at all. The others had either blank stares or vaguely frightened expressions on their faces. She shuffled toward them, and several scuttled backward as if scared she might bite them.

“Forget it,” Kitay said. “I’ve been trying to talk to them for the last hour, and my Hesperian is better than yours. I think they’re in shock.”

“They’ll die if they don’t warm up.” Rin raised her voice. “Hey! Get over here!”

More scared looks. Three of them leveled their weapons at her.

Shit. Rin stumbled back.

They had arquebuses.

“Just leave them,” Chaghan muttered. “I’m in no mood to be shot.”

“We can’t,” she said. “The Hesperians will blame us if they die.”

He rolled his eyes. “They don’t have to know.”

“They’ll find out if even one of those idiots ever finds their way back.”

“They won’t.”

“But we don’t know that. And I’m not killing them to make sure.”

If it weren’t for Augus, she wouldn’t have cared. But blue-eyed devil or not, she couldn’t let him freeze to death. He’d been kind to her on the Kingfisher when he hadn’t needed to be. She felt obligated to return the favor.

Chaghan sighed. “Then leave them a fire. And then we’ll move far enough that they’ll feel safe to approach it.”

That wasn’t a bad idea. Kitay had a small flame going within minutes, and Rin waved toward the Hesperians. “We’re going to sit over there,” she called. “You can use this one.”

Again, no response.

But once she’d moved farther down the bank, she saw the Hesperians inching slowly toward the fire. Augus stretched his hands out over the flame. That was a small relief. At least they wouldn’t die of sheer idiocy.

Once Kitay had built a second fire, all four of them stripped their uniforms off without self-consciousness. The air was icy around them, but they were colder in their drenched clothes than without. Naked, they huddled together over the flames, holding their hands as close to the fire as they could get without burning their skin. They squatted in silence for what seemed like hours. Nobody wanted to expend the energy to talk.

“We’ll get back to the Murui.” Rin finally spoke as she pulled her dry uniform back on. It felt good to say the words out loud. It was something pragmatic, a step toward solid action, and it quelled the panic building in her stomach. “There’s plenty of loose driftwood around here. We could make a raft and just float downstream through the minor tributaries until we hit the main river, and if we’re careful and only move at night, then—”

Chaghan didn’t let her finish. “That’s a terrible idea.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because there’s nothing to go back to. The Republic’s finished. Your friends are dead. Their bodies are probably lining the bottom of Lake Boyang.”

“You don’t know that,” she said.

He shrugged.

“They’re not dead,” she insisted.

“So run back to Arlong, then.” He shrugged again. “Crawl into Vaisra’s arms and hide as long as you can before the Empress comes for you.”

“That’s not what I—”

“That’s exactly what you want. You can’t wait to go groveling to his feet, waiting for your next command like some trained dog.”

“I’m not a fucking dog.”

“Aren’t you?” Chaghan raised his voice. “Did you even put up a fight when they stripped you of command? Or were you glad? Can’t give orders for shit, but you love taking them. Speerlies ought to know what it’s like to be slaves, but I never imagined you’d enjoy it.”

“I was never a slave,” Rin snarled.

“Oh, you were, you just didn’t know it. You bow down to anyone who will give you orders. Altan pulled on your fucking heartstrings, played you like a lute—he just had to say the right words, make you think he loved you, and you’d run after him to the Chuluu Korikh like an idiot.”

“Shut up,” she said in a low voice.

But then she saw what this was all about now. This wasn’t about Vaisra. This wasn’t about the Republic at all. This was about Altan. All these months later, after everything they’d been through, everything was still about Altan.

She could give Chaghan that fight. He’d fucking had it coming.

“Like you didn’t worship him,” she hissed. “I’m not the one who was obsessed with him. You dropped everything to do whatever he asked you to—”

“But I didn’t go with him to the Chuluu Korikh,” he said. “You did.”

“You’re blaming me for that?”

She knew where this was going. She understood now what Chaghan had been too cowardly to say to her face all these months—that he blamed Altan’s death on her.

No wonder he hated her.

Qara put a hand on her brother’s arm. “Chaghan, don’t.”

Chaghan shook her off. “Someone let Feylen loose. Someone got Altan captured. It wasn’t me.”

“And someone told him where the Chuluu Korikh was in the first place,” Rin shouted. “Why? Why would you do that? You knew what was in there!”

“Because Altan thought he could raise an army.” Chaghan spoke in a loud, flat voice. “Because Altan thought he could reset the course of history to before the Red Emperor and bring the world back to a time when Speer was free and the shamans were at the height of their power. Because for a time that vision was so beautiful that even I believed it. But I stopped. I realized that he’d gone crazy and that something had broken and that that path was just going to lead to his death.

“But you? You followed him right to the very end. You let them capture him on that mountain, and you let him die on that pier.”

Guilt coiled tightly in Rin’s gut, wrenching and horrible. She had nothing to say. Chaghan was right; she’d known he was right, she just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

He cocked his head to the side. “Did you think he’d fall in love with you if you just did what he asked?”

“Shut up.”

His expression turned vicious. “Is that why you’re in love with Vaisra? Do you think he’s Altan’s replacement?”

She rammed her fist into his mouth.

Her knuckles met his jaw with a crack so satisfying she didn’t even feel where his teeth punctured her skin. She’d broken something, and that felt marvelous. Chaghan toppled over like a straw target. She lunged forward, reaching for his neck, but Kitay grabbed her from behind.

She flailed in his grasp. “Let me go!”

His grip tightened. “Calm down.”

Chaghan pulled himself to a sitting position and spat a tooth onto the ground. “And she says she’s not a dog.”

Rin lunged to hit him again, but Kitay yanked her back.

“Let me go!”

“Rin, stop—”

“I’ll kill him!”

“No, you won’t,” Kitay snapped. He forced Rin into a kneeling position and twisted her arms painfully behind her back. He pointed at Chaghan. “You—stop talking. Both of you stop this right now. We’re alone in enemy territory. We split up from each other and we’re dead.”

Rin struggled to break free. “Just let me at him—”

“Oh, go on, let her try,” Chaghan said. “A Speerly that can’t call fire, I’m terrified.”

“I can still break your skinny chicken neck,” she said.

“Stop talking,” Kitay hissed.

“Why?” Chaghan sneered. “Is she going to cry?”

“No.” Kitay nodded toward the forest. “Because we’re not alone.”

Hooded riders emerged from the trees, sitting astride monstrous warhorses much larger than any steed Rin had ever seen. Rin couldn’t identify their uniforms. They were garbed in furs and leathers, not Militia greens, but they didn’t seem like friends, either. The riders aimed their bows toward them, bowstrings stretched so taut that at this distance the arrows wouldn’t just pierce their bodies, they would fly straight through them.

Rin rose slowly, hand creeping toward her trident. But Chaghan grabbed her wrist.

“Surrender now,” he hissed.

“Why?”

“Just trust me.”

She jerked her hand out of his grip. “That’s likely.”

But even as her fingers closed around her weapon, she knew they were trapped. Those longbows were massive—at this distance, there would be no dodging those arrows.

She heard a rustling noise from upriver. The Hesperians had seen the riders. They were trying to run.

The riders twisted around and loosed their bowstrings into the forest. Arrows thudded into the snow. Rin saw Augus drop to the ground, his face twisted in pain as he clutched at a feathered shaft sticking out of his left shoulder.

But the riders hadn’t shot to kill. Most of the arrows were aimed at the dirt around the missionaries’ feet. Only a few of the Hesperians were injured. The rest had collapsed from sheer fright. They huddled together in a clump, arms raised high, arquebuses unfired.

Two riders dismounted and wrenched the weapons out of the missionaries’ trembling hands. The missionaries put up no resistance.

Rin’s mind raced as she watched, trying to find a way out. If she and Kitay could just get to the stream, then the current would carry them downriver, hopefully faster than the horses could run, and if she held her breath and ducked deep enough then she’d have some cover from the arrows. But how to get to the water before the riders loosed their bowstrings? Her eyes darted around the clearing—

Put your hands up.

No one spoke the order but she heard it—a deep, hoarse command that resonated loudly in her mind.

A warning shot whistled past her, inches from her temple. She ducked down, grabbed a clump of mud to fling at the riders. If she could distract them, just for a few seconds . . .

The riders turned their bows back toward her.

“Stop!” Chaghan ran out in front of the riders, waving his arms over his head.

A sound like a gong echoed through the clearing, so loud that Rin felt her temples vibrating.

A flurry of images from someone else’s imagination forced their way into her mind’s eye. She saw herself on her knees, arms up. She saw herself stuck through with arrows, bleeding from a dozen different wounds. She saw a vast and dizzying landscape—a sparse steppe, desert dunes, a thunderous stampede as riders set out on horseback to seek something, destroy something . . .

Then she saw Chaghan, facing the riders with his fists clenched, felt the sheer intent radiating out from his form—we’re here in peace we’re here in peace I am one of you we’re here in peace—and she realized that this wasn’t some just psychospiritual battle of wills.

This was a conversation.

Somehow, the riders could communicate without moving their lips. They conveyed images and fragments of intent without spoken language directly into their receivers’ minds. Rin glanced at Kitay, checking to make sure that she hadn’t gone mad. He was staring at the riders, eyes wide, hands trembling.

Stop resisting, boomed the first voice.

Frantic babbles erupted from the bound Hesperians. Augus doubled forward and yelled, clutching his head. He was hearing it, too.

Whatever Chaghan said in response, it was enough to persuade the riders that they weren’t a threat. Their leader lifted a hand and barked out a command in a language Rin didn’t understand. The riders lowered their bows.

The leader swung himself off his horse in one fluid motion and strode toward Chaghan.

“Hello, Bekter,” Chaghan said.

“Hello, cousin,” Bekter responded. He’d spoken in Nikara; his words came out harsh and twisted. He wrenched sounds out of the air like he was ripping meat from bone, as if he were unused to spoken language.

“Cousin?” Kitay echoed out loud.

“We’re not proud of it,” Qara muttered.

Bekter shot her a quick smile. Whatever passed mentally between them happened too fast for Rin to understand, but she caught the gist of it—something lewd, something violent, horrid, and dripping in contempt.

“Go fuck yourself,” Qara said.

Bekter called something to his riders. Two of them jumped to the ground, wrenched Chaghan’s and Qara’s arms behind their backs, and forced them to their knees.

Rin snatched up her trident, but arrows dotted the ground around her before she could move.

“You won’t get a third warning,” Bekter said.

She dropped the trident and placed her hands behind her head. Kitay did the same. The riders tied Rin’s hands together, pulled her to her feet, and dragged her, stumbling miserably, toward Bekter so that the four of them knelt before him in a single line.

“Where is he?” Bekter asked.

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” Kitay said.

“The Wind God. I believe the mortal’s name is Feylen. We are hunting him. Where has he gone?”

“Downriver, probably,” said Kitay. “If you know how to fly, you might catch up!”

Bekter ignored him. His eyes roved over Rin’s body, lingering in places that made her flinch. Hazy images came unbidden to her mind, too blurry for her to see more than shattered limbs and flesh on flesh.

“Is this the Speerly?” he asked.

“You can’t hurt her,” Chaghan said. “You’re sworn.”

“Sworn not to hurt you. Not them.”

“They’re under my charge. This is my territory.”

Bekter laughed. “You’ve been gone a long time, little cousin. The Naimads are weak. The treaty is shattering. The Sorqan Sira’s decided to come down and clean up your mess.”

“‘Charge’?” Rin repeated. “‘Treaty’? Who are you people?”

“They’re watchers,” Qara murmured.

“Of what?”

“People like you, little Speerly.” Bekter pulled off his hood.

Rin flinched back, repulsed.

His face was covered in mottled burns, ropey and raised, a mountainous terrain of pain running from cheek to cheek. He smiled at her, and the way the scars crinkled around the sides of his mouth was a terrible sight.

She spat at his feet. “Had a bad encounter with a Speerly, didn’t you?”

Bekter smiled. More images invaded her mind. She saw men on fire. She saw blood staining the dirt.

Bekter leaned in so close that she could feel his breath, hot and rank on her neck. “I survived it. He did not.”

Before Rin could speak, a hunting horn pierced the air.

The thunder of hooves followed. Rin craned her neck to look over her shoulder. Another group of riders approached the clearing, this one far larger than Bekter’s contingent. They formed a circle with their horses, surrounding them.

Their ranks parted. A slight little woman, reaching no higher than Rin’s elbow, moved through the lines.

She walked the way Chaghan and Qara did. She was delicate, birdlike, as if she were some ethereal being for whom being anchored to the earth was a mere inconvenience. Her cloud-white hair fell just past her waist, looped in two intricate braids interwoven with what looked like shells and bone.

Her eyes were the opposite of Chaghan’s—darker than the bottom of a well, and black all the way through.

“Bow,” Qara muttered. “She is the Sorqan Sira.”

Rin ducked her head. “Their leader?”

“Our aunt.”

The Sorqan Sira clicked her tongue as she strode past Chaghan and Qara, who knelt with their eyes cast down as if in shame. Kitay she ignored completely.

She stopped in front of Rin. Her bony fingers moved over Rin’s face, gripping at her chin and cheekbones.

“How curious,” she said. Her Nikara was fluent but oddly syncopated in a way that made her words sound laced with poetry. “She looks like Hanelai.”

The name meant nothing to Rin, but the riders tensed.

“Where did they find you?” the Sorqan Sira asked. When Rin didn’t answer, she smacked her cheek lightly. “I am talking to you, girl. Speak.”

“I don’t know,” Rin said. Her knees throbbed. She wished desperately that they would let her stop kneeling.

The Sorqan Sira dug her fingernails into Rin’s cheek. “Where did they hide you? Who found you? Who protected you?”

“I don’t know,” Rin repeated. “Nowhere. No one.”

“You are lying.”

“She’s not,” Chaghan said. “She didn’t know what she was until a year ago.”

The Sorqan Sira gave Rin a long, suspicious look, but released her.

“Impossible. The Mugenese were supposed to have killed you off, but you Speerlies keep turning up like rats.”

“Chaghan has always drawn Speerlies like moths to a candle,” Bekter said. “You remember.”

“Shut up,” Chaghan said hoarsely.

Bekter smiled widely. “Remember what you wrote in your letters? The Speerly has suffered. The Mugenese were not kind. But he survived, and he is powerful.”

Was he talking about Altan? Rin fought the urge to vomit.

“He has his mind for now but he is hurting.” Bekter’s voice took on a high, mocking pitch. “But I can fix him. Give him time. Don’t make me kill him. Please.”

Chaghan jammed his elbow backward into Bekter’s stomach. In an instant Bekter seized Chaghan’s bound wrists and twisted them so far behind his back that Rin thought surely he’d broken them.

Chaghan’s mouth opened in a silent scream.

A sound like a thunderclap ricocheted through Rin’s mind. She saw the riders wince; they’d heard it, too.

“Enough of this,” said the Sorqan Sira.

Bekter released Chaghan, whose head lurched forward as if he’d been shot.

The Sorqan Sira bent down before him and brushed his hair back behind his ears, petting it softly like a mother grooming a misbehaved child.

“You’ve failed,” she said softly. “Your duty was to observe and cull when necessary. Not to join their petty wars.”

“We tried to stay neutral,” Chaghan said. “We didn’t intervene, we never—”

“Don’t lie to me. I know what you’ve done.” The Sorqan Sira stood up. “There will be no more of the Cike. We are putting an end to your mother’s little experiment.”

“Experiment?” Rin echoed. “What experiment?”

The Sorqan Sira turned toward her, eyebrows raised. “Precisely what I said. The twins’ mother, Kalagan, thought it would be unjust to deny the Nikara access to the gods. The Cike was Kalagan’s last chance. She has failed. I have decided there will be no more shamans in the Empire.”

“Oh, you’ve decided?” Rin struggled to stand up straight. She still didn’t fully understand what was happening, but she didn’t need to. The dynamic of this encounter had become abundantly clear. The riders thought her an animal to be put down. They thought they could determine who had access to the Pantheon.

The sheer arrogance of that made her want to spit.

The Sorqan Sira looked amused. “Did I upset you?”

“We don’t need your permission to exist,” she snapped.

“Yes, you do.” The Sorqan Sira cast her a disdainful smile. “You’re little children, grasping in a void that you don’t understand for toys that don’t belong to you.”

Rin wanted to slap the contempt off of her face. “The gods don’t belong to you, either.”

“But we know that. And that is the simple difference. You Nikara are the only people foolish enough to call the gods into this world. We Ketreyids would never dream of the folly your shamans commit.”

“Then that makes you cowards,” Rin said. “And just because you won’t call them down doesn’t mean that we can’t.”

The Sorqan Sira threw her head back and began to laugh—a harsh, cackling crow’s laugh. “My word. You sound just like them.”

“Who?”

“Has no one ever told you?” The Sorqan Sira grasped Rin’s face in her hands once more. Rin flinched away, but the Sorqan Sira’s fingers tightened around her cheeks. She pressed her face against Rin’s, so close that all Rin could see was those dark, obsidian eyes. “No? Then I’ll show you.”

Visions pierced Rin’s mind like knives forced into her temples.

She stood on a desert steppe, in the shadow of dunes stretching out as far as she could see. Sand whipped around her ankles. The wind struck a low and melancholy note.

She looked down at herself and saw white braids woven with shells and bone. She realized she was in the memory of a much younger Sorqan Sira. To her left she saw a young woman who had to be the twins’ mother, Kalagan—she had the same high cheekbones as Qara, the same shock of white hair as Chaghan.

Before them stood the Trifecta.

Rin stared at them in wonder.

They were so young. They couldn’t have been much older than she was. They could have been fourth-years at Sinegard.

Su Daji as a girl was already impossibly, bewitchingly beautiful. She emanated sex even when she was standing still. Rin saw it in the way she shifted her hips back and forth, the way she swept her curtain of hair over her shoulders.

To Daji’s left stood the Dragon Emperor. His face was stunningly, shockingly familiar. Sharp angles, a long straight nose, thick and somber eyebrows. Strikingly handsome, pale and perfectly sculpted in a way that didn’t seem human.

He had to be from the House of Yin.

He was a younger, gentler Vaisra. He was Nezha without his scars and Jinzha without his arrogance. His face could not be called kind; it was too severe and aristocratic. But it was an open, honest, and earnest face. A face she immediately trusted, because she couldn’t see a way that this man was capable of any evil.

She understood now what they meant in the old stories when they said that soldiers defected to him in droves and knelt at his feet. She would have followed him anywhere.

Then there was Jiang.

If she had ever doubted that her old master could possibly be the Gatekeeper, there was no mistaking his identity now. His hair, shorn close to his ears, was still the same unnatural white, his face as ageless as it had been when she’d met him.

But when he spoke, and his face twisted, he became a complete stranger.

“You don’t want to fight us on this,” he said. “You’re running out of time. I’d clear out while you still can.”

The Jiang that Rin had known was placid and cheerful, drifting through the world with a kind of detached curiosity. He spoke softly and whimsically, as if he were a curious bystander to his own conversations. But this younger Jiang had a harshness to his face that startled Rin, and every word he spoke dripped with a casual cruelty.

It’s the fury, she realized. The Jiang she knew was utterly peaceful, immune to insult. This Jiang was consumed with some kind of poisonous wrath that radiated from within.

Kalagan’s voice trembled with anger. “Our people have claimed the area north of the Baghra Desert for centuries. Your Horse Warlord has forgotten himself. This is not diplomacy, it is sheer arrogance.”

“Perhaps,” Jiang said. “You still didn’t have to dismember his son and send the fingers back to the father.”

“He dared to threaten us,” said Kalagan. “He deserved what he got.”

Jiang shrugged. “Maybe he did. I never liked that kid. But do you know what our dilemma is, dearest Kalagan? We need the Horse Warlord. We need his troops and his warhorses, and we can’t get those if they’re too busy running around the Baghra Desert fending off your arrows.”

“Then he should retreat,” said the Sorqan Sira.

Jiang inspected his fingernails. “Or perhaps we’ll make you retreat. Would it be so hard for you to just go settle somewhere else? Ketreyids are all nomads, aren’t you?”

Kalagan lifted her spear. “You dare—”

Jiang wagged a finger. “I wouldn’t.”

“Do you think this is wise, Ziya?”

A girl emerged from the ranks of the riders. She bore a remarkable resemblance to Chaghan, but she stood taller, stronger, and her face was flushed with more color.

“Get back, Tseveri,” said the Sorqan Sira, but Tseveri walked toward Jiang until they were separated by only inches.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked softly.

“Politics, really,” Jiang said. “It’s nothing personal.”

“We taught you everything you know. Three years ago we took pity on you and took you in. We’ve sheltered you, hidden you, healed you, given you secrets no Nikara has ever obtained. Aren’t we family to you?”

She spoke to Jiang intimately, like a sister. But if Jiang was bothered, he hid it well behind a mask of amused indifference.

“Would a simple thank-you suffice?” he asked. “Or did you also want a hug?”

“Be careful who you turn your back on,” warned Tseveri. “You don’t need the Horse Warlord, not truly. You still need us. You need our wisdom. There’s so much you still don’t know—”

“I doubt it.” Jiang sneered. “I’ve had enough of playing philosopher with a people so timid they shrink from the Pantheon. I need hard power. Military might. The Horse Warlord can give us that. What can you give me? Endless conversations about the cosmos?”

“You’ve no idea how ignorant you still are.” Tseveri gave him a pitying look. “I see you’ve anchored yourselves. Did it hurt?”

Rin had no idea what that meant, but she saw Daji flinch.

“Don’t be surprised,” Tseveri said. “You’re so obviously bound. I can see it shining out of you. You think it makes you strong, but it’s going to destroy you.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jiang said.

“No?” Tseveri tilted her head. “Then here’s a prophecy for you. Your bond will shatter. You will destroy one another. One will die, one will rule, and one will sleep for eternity.”

“That’s impossible,” Daji scoffed. “None of us can die. Not while the others live.”

“That’s what you think,” said Tseveri.

“Enough of this,” Riga said. Rin was stricken by how much he even sounded like Nezha. “This isn’t what we came for.”

“You came to start a war you don’t need to fight. And you ignore me at your peril.” Tseveri reached for Jiang’s hand. “Ziya. Please. Don’t do this to me.”

Jiang refused to meet her eye.

Daji yawned, making a desultory attempt to cover her mouth with the back of a dainty pale hand. “We can do this the easy way. Nobody needs to get hurt. Or we could just start fighting.”

Kalagan leveled her spear at her. “Don’t presume, little girl.”

A crackling energy charged the air. Even through the distance of memory Rin could sense how the fabric of the desert had changed. The boundaries of the material world were thinning, threatening to warp and give way to the world of spirit.

Something was happening to Jiang.

His shadow writhed madly against the bright sand. The shape was not Jiang’s own, but something terrible—a myriad of beasts, so many in size and form, shifting faster and faster, with a growing desperation, as if frantic to break free.

The beasts were in Jiang, too. Rin could see them, shadows rippling under his skin, horrible patches of black straining to get out.

Tseveri cried something in her own language—a plea or an incantation, Rin didn’t know, but it sounded like despair.

Daji laughed.

“No!” Rin shouted, but Jiang didn’t hear her—couldn’t hear her, because all of this had already come to pass. All she could do was watch helplessly as Jiang forced his hand into Tseveri’s rib cage and ripped out her still-beating heart.

Kalagan screamed.

“That’s enough,” said the present Sorqan Sira, and the last things Rin saw were Daji whipping her needles toward the Ketreyids, Jiang and his beasts pinning down the Sorqan Sira, and Riga, standing impassively, watching the carnage with that wise and caring face, arms raised beatifically as if he blessed the slaughter with his presence.

“We gave the Nikara the keys to the heavens, and they stole our land and murdered my daughter.” The Sorqan Sira’s voice was flat, emotionless, as if she were merely recounting an interesting anecdote, as if her pain had already been processed so many times she could not feel it anymore.

Rin bent over on her hands and knees, gasping. She couldn’t scrub the image of Jiang from her mind. Jiang, her master, cackling with his hands covered with blood.

“Surprised?” asked the Sorqan Sira.

“But I knew him,” Rin whispered. “I know what he’s like, he’s not like that . . .”

“How would you know what the Gatekeeper is like?” The Sorqan Sira sneered. “Have you ever asked him about his past? Did you have any idea?”

The worst part was that it all made sense—the truth had dawned on Rin, awful and bitter, and the mystery of Jiang was clear to her now; she knew why he’d fled, why he’d hidden in the Chuluu Korikh.

He must have been starting to remember.

The man she had met at Sinegard had been no more than a shade of a person; a pathetic, affable shade of a personality suppressed. He had not been pretending. She was certain of that. No one could pretend that well.

He had simply not known. The Seal had stolen his memories, just like it would one day steal hers, and hidden them behind a wall in his mind.

Was it better now that he remained in his stone prison, suspended halfway between amnesia and sanity?

“You see now. You’ll understand if we’d rather put an end to you.” The Sorqan Sira nodded to Bekter.

Her unspoken command rang clear in Rin’s mind. Kill them.

“Wait!” Rin struggled to her feet. “Please—you don’t have to—”

“I don’t entertain begging, girl.”

“I’m not begging, I’m bartering,” Rin said quickly. “We have the same enemy. You want Daji dead. You want revenge. Yes? So do I. Kill us, and you’ve lost an ally.”

The Sorqan Sira scoffed. “We can kill the Vipress easily enough ourselves.”

“No, you can’t. If you could, she’d be dead already. You’re scared of her.” Rin thought frantically as she spoke, spinning an argument together from thin air. “In twenty years you haven’t even ventured south, haven’t attempted to take back your lands. Why? Because you know the Vipress will destroy you. You’ve lost to her before. You don’t dare to face her again.”

The Sorqan Sira’s eyes narrowed, but she said nothing. Rin felt a desperate stab of hope. If her words angered the Ketreyids, that meant she had touched on a fragment of the truth. It meant she still had a chance of convincing them.

“But you’ve seen what I can do,” she continued. “You know that I could fight her, because you know what Speerlies are capable of. I’ve faced the Empress before. Set me free, and I’ll fight your battles for you.”

The Sorqan Sira shot Chaghan a question in her own language. They conversed for a moment. Chaghan’s words sounded hesitant and deferential; the Sorqan Sira’s harsh and angry. Their eyes darted once in a while to Kitay, who shifted uncomfortably, confused.

“She will do it,” Chaghan said finally in Nikara. “She won’t have a choice.”

“I’ll do what?” Rin asked.

They ignored her to keep arguing.

“This is not worth the risk,” Bekter interrupted. “Mother, you know this. Speerlies go mad faster than the rest.”

Chaghan shook his head. “Not this one. She’s stable.”

“No Speerlies are stable,” said Bekter.

“She fought it,” Chaghan insisted. “She’s off opium. She hasn’t touched it in months.”

“An adult Speerly who doesn’t smoke?” The Sorqan Sira cocked her head. “That’d be a first.”

“It makes no difference,” Bekter said. “The Phoenix will take her. It always does. Better to kill her now—”

Chaghan spoke over him, appealing directly to his aunt. “I have seen her at her worst. If the Phoenix could, then it would have already.”

“He’s lying,” Bekter snarled. “Look at him, he’s pathetic, he’s protecting them even now—”

“Enough,” said the Sorqan Sira. “I’ll have the truth for myself.”

Again, she grasped the sides of Rin’s face. “Look at me.”

Her eyes seemed different this time. They had become dark and hollow expanses, windows into an abyss that Rin did not want to see. Rin let out an involuntary whine, but the Sorqan Sira’s fingers tightened under her jaws. “Look.”

Rin felt herself pitching forward into that darkness. The Sorqan Sira wasn’t forcing a vision into her mind, she was forcing Rin to dredge one up herself. Memories loomed before her, haphazard and jagged fragments of visions that she’d done her best to bury. She was wrought in a sea of fire, she was pitching backward into black water, she was kneeling at Altan’s feet, blood pooling in her mouth.

The Seal loomed over her.

It had grown. It was thrice as large as she had last seen it, an expanded and hypnotic array of colors, swirling and pulsing like a heartbeat, arranged like a character she still could not recognize.

Rin could feel Daji’s presence inside it—sickening, addictive, seductive. Whispers sounded all about her, as if Daji were murmuring into her ear, promising her wonderful things.

I’ll take you away from this. I’ll give you everything you’ve ever wanted. I’ll give him back to you.

You only have to give in.

“What is this?” the Sorqan Sira murmured.

Rin couldn’t answer.

The Sorqan Sira let go of her face.

Rin dropped to her knees, hands splayed against solid ground. The sun spun in circles above her.

It took her a moment to realize the Sorqan Sira was laughing.

“She’s afraid of you,” the Sorqan Sira whispered. “Su Daji is afraid of you.”

“I don’t understand,” Rin said.

“This changes everything.” The Sorqan Sira barked a command. The riders standing nearest Rin seized her by the arms and hoisted her to her feet.

“What are you doing?” Rin struggled against their grip. “You can’t kill me, you still need me—”

“Oh, child. We are not going to kill you.” The Sorqan Sira reached out and stroked the backs of her fingers down Rin’s cheek. “We are going to fix you.”

Chapter 22

The Ketreyids tied Rin against a tree, though this time they were considerably gentler. They placed her bound wrists in her lap instead of twisting them painfully behind her back, and they left her legs untied once the extent of her ankle injury became obvious.

She couldn’t have run far even without a sprained ankle. Her limbs tingled from fatigue, her head was swimming, and her vision had started going fuzzy. She slouched back against the tree, eyes closed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything.

“What are they doing?” Kitay asked.

Rin focused with difficulty on the clearing. The Ketreyids were arranging wooden poles to create a latticed dome-like structure, just large enough to accommodate two people. When the dome was finished, they draped thick blankets over its top until it was completely covered.

The Ketreyids had also added logs to their measly campfire. It was a roaring bonfire now, flames leaping higher than the Sorqan Sira’s head. Two riders carried a pile of rocks in from the shore, all at least the size of Rin’s head, and placed them over the flames one by one.

“They’re preparing for a sweat,” Chaghan explained. “That’s what the rocks are for. You’ll go inside that yurt with the Sorqan Sira. They’ll put the rocks inside one by one and pour water over them while they’re hot. That fills the yurt with steam and drives the temperatures up to just under what will kill you. “

“They’re going to steam me like a fish,” Rin said.

“It’s risky. But that’s the only way to draw something like the Seal out. What Daji’s left inside you is like a venom. Over time it will keep festering in your subconscious and corrupt your mind.”

She blinked in alarm. “You could have told me that!”

“I didn’t think it was worth scaring you when I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“You weren’t going to tell me I was going mad?”

“You would have noticed eventually.”

“I hate you,” she said.

“Calm down. The sweat will extract the venom from your mind.” Chaghan paused. “Well. It’ll give you a better chance than anything else. It doesn’t always work.”

“That’s optimistic,” Kitay said.

Chaghan shrugged. “If it doesn’t work, the Sorqan Sira will put you out of your misery.”

“That’s nice of her,” Rin mumbled.

“She’d do it swiftly,” Qara assured her. “Quick slice to the arteries, so clean you’ll barely even feel it. She’s done it before.”

“Can you walk?” asked the Sorqan Sira.

Rin jerked awake. She didn’t remember dozing off. She was still exhausted; her body felt like it was weighted down with rocks.

She blinked the sleep from her eyes and glanced around. She was lying curled on the ground. Thankfully, someone had untied her arms. She pulled herself to a sitting position and stretched the cricks out of her back.

“Can you walk?” the Sorqan Sira repeated.

Rin flexed her ankle. Pain shot up her leg. “I don’t think so.”

The Sorqan Sira raised her voice. “Bekter. Lift her.”

Bekter glanced down at Rin with a look of distaste.

“I hate you, too,” she told him.

She was sure that he would lash out. But the Sorqan Sira’s command must truly have been law, because he simply knelt down, pulled her into his arms, and carried her to the yurt. He made no effort to be gentle. She jostled uncomfortably in his arms, and her sprained ankle smashed against the yurt’s entrance when he deposited her inside.

She bit back a cry of pain to deny him the pleasure of hearing it. He shut the tent flap on her without another word.

The yurt’s interior was pitch-black. The Ketreyids had padded its lattice sides with so many layers of blankets that not a single ray of light could penetrate the exterior.

The air inside was cold, silent, and peaceful, like the belly of a cave. If Rin didn’t know where she was, she would have thought the walls were made of stone. She exhaled slowly, listening as her breath filled the empty space.

Light flooded the yurt as the Sorqan Sira entered through the flap. She carried a bucket of water in one hand and a ladle in the other.

“Lie down,” she told Rin. “Get as close as you can to the walls.”

“Why?”

“So you don’t fall onto the rocks when you faint.”

Rin curled into the corner, back braced against the taut cloth, and pressed her cheek to the cool dirt. The tent flap closed. Rin heard the Sorqan Sira crawling across the yurt to sit right beside her.

“Are you ready?” the Sorqan Sira asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“No. But you should prepare your mind. This will go badly if you are frightened.” The Sorqan Sira called to the riders outside, “First stone.”

A shovel appeared through the flap, bearing a single rock glowing a bright, angry red. The rider outside tipped the rock over into a muddy bed at the center of the yurt, withdrew the shovel, and shut the flap.

In the darkness, Rin heard the Sorqan Sira dip the ladle into the water.

“May the gods hear our prayers.” Water splashed over the rock. A loud hiss filled the yurt. “May they grant our wishes to commune.”

A wave of steam hit Rin’s nose. She fought the urge to sneeze.

“May they clear our eyes to see,” said the Sorqan Sira. “Second rock.”

The rider deposited another rock into the mud bed. Another splash, another hiss. The steam grew thicker and hotter.

“May they give us the ears to hear their voices.”

Rin was starting to feel light-headed. Panic clawed at her chest. She could barely breathe. Even though her lungs filled with air, she felt as if she were drowning. She couldn’t lie still any longer. She pawed at the edges of the tent, desperate for a whiff of cold air, anything . . . the steam was in her face now, every part of her was burning, she was being boiled alive.

The rocks kept coming—a third, a fourth, a fifth. The steam became unbearable. She tried covering her nose with her sleeve, but that too was damp, and trying to breathe through it was the worst form of torture.

“Empty your mind,” the Sorqan Sira ordered.

Rin’s heart pumped furiously, so hard that she could feel it in her temples.

I’m going to die in here.

“Stop resisting,” the Sorqan Sira said urgently. “Relax.”

Relax? The only thing Rin wanted to do then was scramble out of the yurt. She didn’t care if she burned her feet on the rocks, didn’t care if she had to slip through the mud, she just wanted to get out into the open air where she could breathe.

Only years of meditation practice under Jiang stopped her from getting up and running out.

Breathe.

Just breathe.

She could feel her heartbeat slowing, crawling nearly to a stop.

Her vision swirled and sparked. She saw little lights in the darkness, candles that flickered in the edges of her sight, stars that winked away when she looked upon them . . .

The Sorqan Sira’s breath tickled her ear. “Soon you will see many things. The Seal will tempt you. Remember that none of what you see is real. This will be a test of your resolve. Pass, and you will emerge intact, in full possession of your natural abilities. Fail, and I will cut your throat.”

“I’m ready,” Rin gasped. “I know pain.”

“This isn’t pain,” said the Sorqan Sira. “The Vipress never makes you suffer. She fulfills your wishes. She promises you peace when you know you ought to be fighting a war. That’s worse.”

She pressed her thumb against Rin’s forehead. The ground tipped away.

Rin saw a stream of bright colors, bold and gaudy, which resolved themselves into definable shapes only when she squinted. Reds and golds became streamers and firecrackers; blues and purples became fruits, berries, and cups of pouring wine.

She looked around, dazed. She was standing in a massive banquet hall. It was twice the size of the Autumn Palace’s throne room, packed with long tables at which sat gorgeously dressed guests. She saw platters of dragon fruit carved like flowers, soup steaming from turtle shells, and entire roasted pigs sitting on tables of their very own, with attendants designated to carve away pieces of meat for the guests. Sorghum wine ran down gilded trenches carved into the table sides so that the diners could fill their cups themselves whenever they wished.

Faces she knew drifted in and out of her sight, faces she hadn’t seen for so long that they felt like they were from a different lifetime. She saw Tutor Feyrik sitting two tables away, meticulously picking the bones from a cut of fish. She saw Masters Irjah and Jima, laughing at the high table with the rest of the Academy masters.

Kesegi waved at her from his seat. He was unchanged since she’d last seen him—still ten years old, tawny-skinned, all knees and elbows. She stared at him. She’d forgotten what a wonderful smile he had, cheeky and irreverent.

She saw Kitay, dressed in a general’s uniform. His wiry hair was grown long, pulled into a bun at the back of his head. He was deep in conversation with Master Irjah. When he caught her eye, he winked.

“Hello, you,” said a familiar voice.

She turned, and her heart caught in her throat.

Of course it was Altan. It was always Altan, lurking behind every corner of her mind, haunting every decision she made.

But this was an Altan who was alive and whole—not the way she’d known him at Khurdalain, when he’d been burdened by a war that he would kill himself winning. This was the best possible version of him, the way she’d tried to remember him, the way he’d rarely ever been. The scars were still on his face, his hair was still messy and overgrown, tied back in a careless knot, and he still wielded that trident with the casual grace of someone who spent more time on the battlefield than off.

This was an Altan who fought because he adored it and was good at it, and not because it was the only thing he had ever been trained to do.

His eyes were brown. His pupils were not constricted. He did not smell of smoke. When he smiled, he almost looked happy.

“You’re here.” She couldn’t manage anything but a whisper. “It’s you.”

“Of course I am,” he said. “Not even a border skirmish could keep me from you today. Tyr wanted to have my head on a stake, but I don’t think even he could stand up to Mother and Father’s wrath.”

A border skirmish?

Tyr?

Mother and Father?

The confusion lasted for only a moment, and then she understood. Dreams came with their own logic, and this was nothing but a beautiful dream. In this world, Speer had never been destroyed. Tearza had not died and abandoned her people to slavery, and her kin had not been slaughtered overnight on the Dead Island.

She almost laughed out loud. In this illusion, their biggest concern was a fucking border skirmish.

“Are you nervous?” Altan asked.

“Nervous?” she echoed.

“I’d be surprised if you weren’t,” he said. His voice dropped to a conspiring whisper. “Unless you’re having second thoughts. And—I mean, if you are, it’s fine by me. If we’re being honest, I’ve never been too fond of him, either.”

“‘Him’?” Rin echoed.

“He’s just jealous that you’re getting married first while nobody wants him.” Ramsa shouldered his way between them, chewing on a red bean bun. He dipped his head toward Altan. “Hello, Commander.”

Altan rolled his eyes. “Don’t you have fireworks to light?”

“That’s not until later,” said Ramsa. “Your parents said they’ll castrate me if I go near them now. Something about safety hazards.”

“That sounds about right.” Altan ruffled Ramsa’s hair. “Why don’t you scurry along and enjoy the feast?”

“Because this conversation is much more interesting.” Ramsa took a large bite of the bun and spoke with his mouth full. “So what’s it going to be, Rin? Will we have a runaway bride? Because I’d like to finish eating first.”

Rin’s mouth hung open. Her eyes darted between Ramsa and Altan, trying to detect proof that they were illusions—some imperfection, some lack of substance.

But they were so solid, detailed and full of life. And they were so, so happy. How could they be this happy?

“Rin?” Altan nudged her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head. “I don’t—This isn’t . . .”

Concern crossed his face. “Do you need to lie down for a moment?”

“No, I just . . .”

He took her arm. “I’m sorry I was making fun of you. Come on, we’ll go find you a bench.”

“No, that’s not what I . . .” She shrugged him off and backed away. She was walking backward, she knew she was, but somehow every time she took a step she ended up no farther from Altan than she had been to begin with.

“Come with me,” Altan repeated, and his voice resonated around the room. The colors of the banquet hall dimmed. The guests’ faces blurred. He was the only defined figure in sight.

He extended his hand toward her. “Quickly now.”

She knew what would happen to her if she obeyed.

Everything would be over. The illusion might last another few minutes, or an hour, or a week. Time worked differently in illusions. She might enjoy this one for a lifetime. But in reality, she would have succumbed to Daji’s poison. Her life would be over. She would never wake up from this spell.

But would that be so wrong?

She wanted to go with him. She wanted to go so badly.

“No one has to die,” Altan said, voicing her own thoughts out loud. “The wars never happened in the first place. You can have everything back. Everyone. No one has to go.”

“But they are gone,” she whispered, and the instant she said it, its truth became apparent. The faces in the banquet hall were lies. Her friends were dead. Tutor Feyrik was gone. Master Irjah was gone. Golyn Niis was gone. Speer was gone. Nothing could bring them back. “You can’t tempt me with this.”

“Then you can join them,” Altan said. “Would that be so bad?”

The lights and streamers dimmed. The tables faded to nothing; the guests disappeared. She and Altan were alone, two spots of flame in a dark passage.

“Is this what you want?” His mouth closed over hers before she could speak. Scorching hands moved on her body and trailed downward.

Everything was so terribly hot. She was burning. She’d forgotten how it felt to truly burn—she was immune to her own flame, and she’d never been caught in Altan’s fire, but this . . . this was an old, familiar pain, terrible and delicious all at once.

“No.” She fought to find her voice. “No, I don’t want this—”

Altan’s hands tightened on her waist.

“You did,” he said, pressing closer. “It was written all over your face. Every time.”

“Don’t touch me.” She pressed her hands against his chest and tried to push him away, to no avail.

“Don’t pretend you don’t want this,” said Altan. “You need me.”

She couldn’t breathe. “No, I don’t . . .”

“Don’t you?”

He brought his hand to her cheek. She cringed back, but his burning fingers rested firm on her skin. His hands moved down to her neck. His thumbs stopped where her collarbones met, a familiar resting place. He squeezed. Fire lanced through her throat.

“Come back.” The Sorqan Sira’s voice cut through her mind like a knife, granting her several delicious, cool seconds of lucidity. “Remember yourself. Submit to him and you lose.”

Rin convulsed on the ground.

“I don’t want this,” she moaned. “I don’t want to see this—I want to get out—”

“It’s the poison,” said the Sorqan Sira. “The sweat amplifies it, brings it to a boil. You must purge yourself, or the Seal will kill you.”

Rin whimpered. “Just make it stop.”

“I can’t. It must get worse before it gets better.” The Sorqan Sira seized her hand and squeezed it. “Remember, he exists only in your mind. He only has as much power as you give him. Can you do this?”

Rin nodded and gripped the Sorqan Sira’s arm. She couldn’t find the breath to say the words send me back, but the Sorqan Sira nodded. She threw another ladleful of water onto the rocks.

The heat in the yurt redoubled. Rin choked; her back arched, the material world faded away, and the pain returned. Altan’s fingers were around her neck again, squeezing, choking her.

He leaned down. His lips brushed against hers. “Do you know what I want you to do?”

She shook her head, gasping.

“Kill yourself,” he ordered.

“What?”

“I want you to kill yourself,” he repeated. “Make things right. You should have died on that pier. And I should have lived.”

Was that true?

It must have been true, if it had lingered so long in her subconscious. And she couldn’t lie to herself; she knew, had always known that if Altan had lived and if she had died then things would have gone much differently. Aratsha would still be alive, the Cike would not have disbanded, they would not have lost to Feylen, and the Republican fleet might not be in fragments at the bottom of Lake Boyang.

Jinzha had said it first. We should have tried to save the other one.

“You are the reason why I died,” Altan continued, relentless. “Make this right. Kill yourself.”

She swallowed. “No.”

“Why not?” His fingers tightened around her neck. “You’re not particularly useful to anyone alive.”

She reached up for his hands. “Because I’m done taking orders from you.”

He was a product of her own mind. He had only as much power as she gave him.

She pried his fingers off her neck. One by one, they came away. She was nearly free. He squeezed harder but she kicked out, nailed him in the shin, and the moment he let go she scrambled backward away from him and sank into a low crouch, poised to strike.

“Really?” he scoffed. “You’re going to fight me?”

“I won’t surrender to you anymore.”

“‘Surrender’?” he repeated, like it was such a ludicrous word. “Is that how you’ve thought of it? Oh, Rin, it was never about that. I didn’t want surrender from you. I had to manage you. Control you. You’re so fucking stupid, you had to be told what to do.”

“I’m not stupid,” she said.

“Yes, you are.” He smiled, patronizing and handsome and hateful all at once. “You’re nothing. You’re useless. Compared to me you’re—”

“I’m nothing at all,” she interrupted. “I was a terrible commander. I couldn’t function without opium. I still can’t call the fire. You can tell me everything I hate about myself, but I already know. You can’t say anything to hurt me more.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” Suddenly his trident was in his hand, spinning as he advanced. “How’s this, then? You wanted me dead.”

She flinched. “No. I never.”

“You hated me. You were afraid of me, you couldn’t wait to be rid of me. Admit it, when I died you laughed.”

“No, I wept,” she said. “I wept for days, until I couldn’t breathe anymore, and then I tried to stop breathing, but every time, Enki brought me back to life, and then I hated myself because you said that I had to keep living, and I hated living because you’re the one who said I had to—”

“Why would you mourn me?” he asked quietly. “You barely even knew me.”

“You’re right,” she said. “I loved an idea of you. I was infatuated with you. I wanted to be you. But I didn’t know you then, and I’ll never really know what you were. I’m finished wondering now, Altan. I’m ready to kill you.”

The trident materialized in her hands.

She had a weapon now. She wasn’t defenseless against him. She’d never been defenseless. She had just never thought to look.

Altan’s eyes flickered to the prongs. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“You are not real,” she said calmly. “He’s dead, and I can’t hurt him anymore.”

“Look at me,” he said. “Look at my eyes. Tell me I’m not real.”

She lunged. He parried. She disentangled their prongs and advanced again.

He raised his voice. “Look at me.”

“I am,” she said softly. “I see everything.”

He faltered.

She stabbed him through the chest.

His eyes bulged open, but otherwise he didn’t move. A slow trickle of blood spilled out the side of his mouth. A red circle blossomed on his chest.

It wasn’t a fatal blow. She’d stabbed him just under the sternum. She had missed his heart. Eventually he might bleed to death, but she didn’t want him gone just yet. She needed him alive and conscious.

She still needed absolution.

Altan peered down at the prongs emerging from his chest. “Would you like to kill me?”

She withdrew her trident. Blood spilled out faster onto his uniform. “I’ve done it before.”

“But could you do it now?” he inquired. “Could you end me? If you kill me here, Rin, I’ll go.”

“I don’t want that.”

“Then you still need me.”

“Not the way I did.”

She’d realized, finally realized, that chasing the legacy of Altan Trengsin would give her no truth. She couldn’t replicate him in her mind, no matter how many times she tortured herself going over the memories. She could only inherit his pain.

And what was there to replicate? Who was Altan, really?

A scared boy from Speer who just wanted to go home, a broken boy who had learned that there was no home to return to, and a soldier who stayed alive just to spite everyone who thought he should be dead. A commander with no purpose, nothing to fight for, and nothing to care about except burning down the world.

Altan was no hero. That was so clear to her now, so stunningly clear that she felt as if she’d been doused in ice water; submerged and reborn.

She didn’t owe him her guilt.

She didn’t owe him anything.

“I still love you,” she said, because she had to be honest.

“I know. You’re a fool for it,” he said. He stepped forward, reached for her hand, and entwined his fingers in hers. “Kiss me. I know you’ve wanted to.”

She touched his blood-soaked fingers against her cheek. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and thought about what might have been.

“I loved you, too,” he said. “Do you believe that?”

“No, I don’t,” she said, and pressed her trident into his chest once more.

It slid smoothly in with no resistance. Rin didn’t know if that was because the vision of Altan was already fading, immaterial, or if Altan within this dream space was deliberately aiding her, sinking the three prongs neatly into that space in his rib cage that stood just over his heart.

When Rin breathed again it was a new and frightening sensation, at once mechanical and also terribly confusing. Was this her body, this mortal and clumsy vessel? One finger at a time she learned the inner workings of her body again. Learned the way air moved through her lungs. Learned to hear the sound of her heart pumping inside her.

She saw light all around her and above her, a perfect circle of blue. It took her a moment to realize that it was the roof of the yurt, pulled open to let the steam escape.

“Don’t move,” said the Sorqan Sira.

The Sorqan Sira placed a hand over Rin’s chest, clenched her fingers, and started to chant. Sharp nails dug into Rin’s skin.

Rin screamed.

It wasn’t over. She felt a terrible pulling sensation, as if the Sorqan Sira had wrapped her fingers around Rin’s heart and wrenched it out of her rib cage.

She looked down. The Sorqan Sira’s fingers hadn’t broken skin. The tugging came from something within; something sharp and jagged inside her, something that didn’t want to let go.

The Sorqan Sira’s chanting grew louder. Rin felt an immense pressure, so great she was sure that her lungs were bursting. It grew and grew—and then something gave. The pressure disappeared.

For a moment all she could do was lie flat and breathe, eyes fixed on the blue circle above.

“Look.” The Sorqan Sira opened her palm toward Rin. Inside was a clot of blood the size of her fist, mottled black and rotten. It smelled putrid.

Rin shrank instinctively away. “Is that . . . ?”

“Daji’s venom.” The Sorqan Sira made a fist over the clot and squeezed. Black blood oozed through the cracks between her fingers and dripped onto the glowing rocks. The Sorqan Sira peered curiously at her stained fingers, then shook the last few drops onto the rocks, where they hissed loudly and disappeared. “It’s gone now. You’re free.”

Rin stared at the stained rocks, at a loss for words. “I don’t . . .” She choked before she could finish. Then it happened all at once. Her entire body shook, racked with a grief she hadn’t even known was there. She buried her head in her hands, whimpering incoherently, fingers thick with tears and snot.

“It’s all right to cry,” the Sorqan Sira said quietly. “I know what you saw.”

“Then fuck you,” Rin choked. “Fuck you.”

Her chest heaved. She lurched forward and vomited over the stones. Her knees shook, her ankle throbbed, and she collapsed onto herself, face inches from her vomit, eyes squeezed shut to stem the tide of tears.

Her heart slammed against her rib cage. She tried to focus on her pulse, counting her heartbeats with every passing second to calm down.

He’s gone.

He’s dead.

He can’t hurt me anymore.

She reached for her anger, the anger that had always served as her shield, and couldn’t find it. Her emotions had burned her out from the inside; the raging flames had died out because they had nothing left to consume. She felt drained, hollowed out and empty. The only things that remained were exhaustion and the dry ache of loss in her throat.

“You are allowed to feel,” the Sorqan Sira murmured.

Rin sniffled and wiped her nose with her sleeve.

“But don’t feel bad for him,” said the Sorqan Sira. “That was never him. The man you know has gone somewhere he’ll be at peace. Life and death, they’re equal to this cosmos. We enter the material world and we go away again, reincarnated into something better. That boy was miserable. You let him go.”

Yes, Rin knew; in the abstract she knew this truth, that to the cosmos they were fundamentally irrelevant, that they came from dust and returned to dust and ash.

And she should have taken comfort in that, but in that moment she didn’t want to be temporary and immaterial; she wanted to be forever preserved in the material world in a moment with Altan, their foreheads pressed together, eyes meeting, arms touching and interlacing, trying to meld into the pure physicality of the other.

She wanted to be alive and mortal and eternally temporary with him, and that was why she cried.

“I don’t want him to be gone,” she whispered.

“Our dead don’t leave us,” said the Sorqan Sira. “They’ll haunt you as long as you let them. That boy is a disease on your mind. Forget him.”

“I can’t.” She pressed her face into her hands. “He was brilliant. He was different. You’d have never met anyone like him.”

“You would be stunned.” The Sorqan Sira looked very sad. “You have no idea how many men are like Altan Trengsin.”

“Rin! Oh, gods.” Kitay was at her side the instant she emerged from the yurt. She knew, could tell from the expression on his face, that he’d been waiting outside, teeth clenched in anxiety, for hours.

“Hold her up,” the Sorqan Sira told him.

He slipped an arm around her waist to take the weight off her ankle. “You’re all right?”

She nodded. Together they limped forward.

“Are you sure?” he pressed.

“I’m better,” she murmured. “I think I’m better than I’ve been in a long time.”

She stood for a minute, leaning against his shoulder, simply basking in the cold air. She had never known that the air itself could taste or feel so sweet. The sensation of the wind against her face was crisp and delicious, more refreshing than cool rainwater.

“Rin,” Kitay said.

She opened her eyes. “What?”

He was staring pointedly at her chest.

Rin fumbled at her front, wondering if her clothes had somehow burned away in the heat. She wouldn’t have noticed if they had. The sensation of having a physical body still felt so entirely new to her that she might as well have been walking around naked.

“What is it?” she asked, dazed.

The Sorqan Sira said nothing.

“Look down,” Kitay said. His voice sounded oddly strangled.

She glanced down.

“Oh,” she said faintly.

A black handprint was scorched into her skin like a brand just below her sternum.

Kitay whirled on the Sorqan Sira. “What did you—”

“It wasn’t her,” Rin said.

This mark was Altan’s work and legacy.

That bastard.

Kitay was watching her carefully. “Are you all right with this?”

“No,” she said.

She put her hand over her chest, placed her fingers inside the outlines of Altan’s.

His hand was so much bigger than hers.

She let her hand drop. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“Rin . . .”

“He’s dead,” she said, voice trembling. “He’s dead, he’s gone, do you understand? He’s gone, and he’s never going to touch me again.”

“I know,” said Kitay. “He won’t.”

“Call the flame,” the Sorqan Sira said abruptly. She had been standing quietly, observing their exchange, but now her voice carried an odd urgency. “Do it now.”

“Hold on,” Kitay said. “She’s weak, she’s exhausted—”

“She must do it now,” the Sorqan Sira insisted. She looked strangely frightened, and that terrified Rin. “I have to know.”

“Be reasonable—” Kitay began, but Rin shook her head.

“No. She’s right. Stand back.”

He let go of her arm and stepped several paces backward.

She closed her eyes, exhaled, and let her mind sink into the state of ecstasy. The place where rage met power. And for the first time in months she let herself hope that she might feel the flame again, a hope that had become as unattainable as flying.

It was infinitely easier now to generate the anger. She could plunder her own memories with abandon. There were no more parts of her mind that she didn’t dare prod, that still bled like open wounds.

She traversed a familiar path through the void until she saw the Phoenix as if through a mist; heard it like an echo, felt it like the remembrance of a touch.

She felt for its rage, and she pulled.

The fire didn’t come.

Something pulsed.

Flashes of light seared behind her eyelids.

The Seal remained, burned into her mind, still present. The ghost of Altan’s laughter echoed in her ears.

Rin held the flame in the palm of her hand for only an instant, just enough to tantalize her and leave her gasping for more, and then it disappeared.

There was no pain this time, no immediate threat that she might be sucked into a vision and lose her mind to the fantasy, but still Rin sank to her knees and screamed.

Chapter 23

“There’s another way,” said the Sorqan Sira.

“Shut up,” Rin said.

She’d come so close. She’d almost had the fire back, she’d tasted it, only to have it wrenched out of her grasp. She wanted to lash out at something, she just didn’t know who or what, and the sheer pressure made her feel like she might explode. “You said you’d fixed it.”

“The Seal is neutralized,” said the Sorqan Sira. “It cannot corrupt you any longer. But the venom ran deep, and it still blocks your access to the world of spirit—”

“Fuck all you know.”

“Rin, don’t,” Kitay warned.

She ignored him. She knew this wasn’t the Sorqan Sira’s fault, but still she wanted to hurt, to cut. “Your people don’t know shit. No wonder the Trifecta killed you off, no wonder you lost to three fucking teenagers—”

A shrieking noise slammed into her mind. She fell to her knees, but the noise kept reverberating, growing louder and louder until it solidified into words that vibrated in her bones.

You dare reproach me? The Sorqan Sira loomed over Rin like a giant, standing tall as a mountain while everything else in the clearing shrank. I am the Mother of the Ketreyids. I rule the north of the Baghra, where the scorpions are fat with poison and the great-mawed sandworms lie in the red sands, ready to swallow camels whole. I have tamed a land created to wither humans away until they are polished bone. Do not think to defy me.

Rin couldn’t speak for the pain. The shriek intensified for several torturous seconds before finally ebbing away. She rolled onto her back and sucked in air in great, heaving gulps.

Kitay helped her sit up. “This is why we are polite to our allies.”

“I will await your apology,” said the Sorqan Sira.

“I’m sorry,” Rin muttered. “I just—I thought I had it back.”

She’d numbed herself to her loss during the campaign. She hadn’t realized how desperately she still wanted the fire back until she touched it again, just for a moment, and everything had come rushing back; the thrill, the blaze, the sheer roaring power.

“Do not presume that all is lost,” said the Sorqan Sira. “ You will never access the Phoenix on your own unless Daji removes the Seal. That she will never do.”

“Then it’s all over,” Rin said.

“No. Not if another soul calls the Phoenix for you. A soul that is bound to your own.” The Sorqan Sira looked pointedly at Kitay.

He blinked, confused.

“No,” Rin said immediately. “I don’t—I don’t care what you can do, no—”

“Let her speak,” Kitay said.

“No, you don’t understand the risk—”

“Yes, he does,” said the Sorqan Sira.

“But he doesn’t know anything about the gods!” Rin cried.

“He doesn’t now. Once you’ve been twinned, he will know everything.”

“Twinned?” Kitay repeated.

“Do you understand the nature of Chaghan and Qara’s bond?” the Sorqan Sira asked.

Kitay shook his head.

“They’re spiritually linked,” Rin said flatly. “Cut him, and she feels the pain. Kill him and she dies.”

Horror flitted across Kitay’s face. He tried to mask it, but she saw.

“The anchor bond connects your souls across the psychospiritual plane,” said the Sorqan Sira. “You can still call the Phoenix if you do it through the boy. He will be your conduit. The divine power will flow straight through him and into you.”

“I’m going to become a shaman?” Kitay asked.

“No. You will only lend your mind to one. She will call the god through you.” The Sorqan Sira tilted her head, considering the both of them. “You are good friends, yes?”

“Yes,” Kitay said.

“Good. The anchor takes best on two souls that are already familiar. It’s stronger. More stable. Can you bear a little pain?”

“Yes,” Kitay said again.

“Then we should perform the bonding ritual as soon as we can.”

“Absolutely not,” Rin said.

“I’ll do it,” Kitay said firmly. “Just tell me how.”

“No, I’m not letting you—”

“I’m not asking your permission, Rin. We don’t have another choice.”

“But you could die!”

He barked out a laugh. “We’re soldiers. We’re always about to die.”

Rin stared at him in disbelief. How could he sound so cavalier? Did he not understand the risk?

Kitay had survived Sinegard. Golyn Niis. Boyang. He’d suffered enough pain for a lifetime. She wasn’t putting him through this, too. She’d never be able to forgive herself.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” she said. “You’ve never spoken to the gods, you—”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t get to talk like that. You don’t get to keep this world from me, like I’m too stupid or too weak for it—”

“I don’t think you’re weak.”

“Then why—”

“Because you don’t know anything about this world, and you never should.” She didn’t care if the Phoenix tormented her, but Kitay . . . Kitay was pure. He was the best person she had ever known. Kitay shouldn’t know how it felt to call a god of vengeance. Kitay was the last thing in the world that was still fundamentally kind and good, and she’d die before she corrupted that. “You have no idea how it feels. The gods will break you.”

“Do you want the fire back?” Kitay asked.

“What?”

“Do you want the fire back? If you can call the Phoenix again, will you use it to win us this war?”

“Yes,” she said. “I want it more than anything. But I can’t ask you to do this for me.”

“Then you don’t have to ask.” He turned to the Sorqan Sira. “Anchor us. Just tell me what I have to do.”

The Sorqan Sira was looking at Kitay with an expression that almost amounted to respect. A thin smile spread across her face. “As you wish.”

“It’s not so bad,” Chaghan said. “You take the agaric. You kill the sacrifice. Then the Sorqan Sira binds you, and your souls are linked together forever after. You don’t need to do much but exist, really.”

“Why a living sacrifice?” Kitay asked.

“Because there’s power in a soul released from the material world,” Qara said. “The Sorqan Sira will use that power to forge your bond.”

Chaghan and Qara had been enlisted to prepare Rin and Kitay for the ritual, which involved a tedious process of painting a line of characters down their bare arms, running from their shoulders to the tips of their middle fingers. The characters had to be written at precisely the same time, each stroke synchronous with its pair.

The twins worked with remarkable coordination, which Rin would have appreciated more if she weren’t so upset.

“Stop moving,” Chaghan said. “You’re making the ink bleed.”

“Then write faster,” she snapped.

“That would be nice,” Kitay said amiably. “I need to pee.”

Chaghan dipped his brush into an inkwell and shook away the excess drops. “Ruin one more character and we’ll have to start over.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Rin grumbled. “Why don’t you just take another hour? With luck the war will be over before you’re done!”

Chaghan lowered his brush. “We didn’t have a choice in this. You know that.”

“I know you’re a little bitch,” she said.

“You have no other choice.”

“Fuck you.”

It was a petty exchange, and it didn’t make Rin feel nearly as good as she thought it would. It only exhausted her. Because Chaghan was right—the twins had to comply with the Sorqan Sira or they would certainly have been killed, and if they hadn’t, Rin would still have no way out.

“It’ll be all right,” Qara said gently. “An anchor makes you stronger. More stable.”

Rin scoffed. “How? It just seems like a good way to lose two soldiers for every one.”

“Because it makes you resilient to the gods. Every time you call them down, you are like a lantern, drifting away from your body. Drift too far, and the gods root themselves in your physical form instead. That’s when you lose your mind.”

“Is that what happened to this Feylen?” Kitay asked.

“Yes,” said Qara. “He went out too far, got lost, and the god planted itself inside.”

“Interesting,” Kitay said. “And the anchor absolutely prevents that?”

He sounded far too excited about the procedure. He drank the twins’ words in with a hungry expression, cataloging every new sliver of information into his prodigious memory. Rin could almost see the gears turning in his mind.

That scared her. She didn’t want him entranced with this world. She wanted him to run far, far away.

“It’s not perfect, but it makes it much harder to lose your mind,” Chaghan said. “The gods can’t uproot you with an anchor. You can drift as far as you want into the world of spirit, and you’ll always have a way to come back.”

“You’re saying I’ll stop Rin from going crazy,” Kitay said.

“She’s already crazy,” Chaghan said.

“Fair enough,” Kitay said.

The twins worked in silence for a long while. Rin sat up straight, eyes closed, breathing steadily as she felt the wet brush tip move against her bare skin.

What if the anchor did make her stronger? She couldn’t help feeling a thrill of hope at the thought. What would it be like to call the Phoenix without fear of losing her mind to the rage? She might summon fire whenever she wanted, for as long as she wanted. She might control it the way Altan had.

But was it worth it? The sacrifice seemed so immense—not just for Kitay, but for her. To link her life to his would be such an unpredictable, terrifying liability. She would never be safe unless Kitay was, too.

Unless she could protect him. Unless she could guarantee that Kitay was never in danger.

At last Chaghan put his brush down. “You’re finished.”

Rin stretched and examined her arms. Swirling black script covered her skin, made of words that almost resembled a language that she could understand. “That’s it?”

“Not yet.” Chaghan passed them a fistful of red-capped toadstools. “Eat these.”

Kitay prodded a toadstool with his finger. “What are these?”

“Fly agaric. You can find it near birch and fir trees.”

“What’s it for?”

“To open up the crack between the worlds,” Qara said.

Kitay looked confused.

“Tell him what it’s really for,” Rin said.

Qara smiled. “To get you incredibly high. Much more elegant than poppy seeds. Faster, too.”

Kitay turned the mushroom over in his hand. “Looks poisonous.”

“They’re psychedelics,” Chaghan said. “They’re all poisonous. The whole point is to deliver you right to the doorstep of the afterworld.”

Rin popped the mushrooms in her mouth and chewed. They were tough and tasteless, and she had to work her teeth for several minutes before they were tender enough to go down. She had the unpleasant sensation that she was chewing through a lump of flesh every time her teeth cut into the fibrous chunks.

Chaghan passed Kitay a wooden cup. “If you don’t want to eat the mushroom you can drink the agaric instead.”

Kitay sniffed it, took a sip, and gagged. “What’s in this?”

“Horse urine,” Chaghan said cheerfully. “We feed the mushrooms to the horses, and you get the drug after it passes. Goes down easier.”

“Your people are disgusting,” Kitay muttered. He pinched his nose, tossed the contents of the cup back into his throat, and gagged.

Rin swallowed. Dry lumps of mushroom pushed painfully down her throat.

“What happens to you when your anchor dies?” she asked.

“You die,” Chaghan said. “Your souls are bound, which means they depart this earth together. One pulls the other along.”

“That’s not strictly true,” Qara said. “It’s a choice. You can choose to depart this earth together. Or you may break the bond.”

“You can?” Rin asked. “How?”

Qara exchanged a look with Chaghan. “With your last word. If both partners are willing.”

Kitay frowned. “I don’t understand. Why is this a liability, then?”

“Because once you have an anchor, they become a part of your soul. Your very existence. They know your thoughts. They feel what you feel. They are the only ones who completely and fully understand you. Most would die rather than give that up.”

“And you’d both have to be in the same place when one of you died,” said Chaghan. “Most people aren’t.”

“But you can break it,” Rin said.

“You could,” Chaghan said. “Though I doubt the Sorqan Sira will teach you how.”

Of course not. Rin knew the Sorqan Sira would want Kitay as insurance—not only to ensure that her weapon against Daji kept working, but as a failsafe in case she ever decided to put Rin down.

“Did Altan have an anchor?” she asked. Altan had possessed an eerie amount of control for a Speerly.

“No. The Speerlies didn’t know how to do it. Altan was . . . whatever Altan was doing, that was inhuman. Near the end, he was staying sane off of sheer willpower alone.” Chaghan swallowed. “I offered many times. He always said no.”

“But you already have an anchor,” said Rin. “You can have more than one?”

“Not at the same time. A pairwise bond is optimal. A triangular bond is deeply unstable, because unpredictability in reciprocation means that any defection on one end affects the other two in ways that you cannot protect against.”

“But?” Kitay pressed.

“But it can also amplify your abilities. Make you stronger than any shaman has the right to be.”

“Like the Trifecta,” Rin realized. “They’re bonded to each other. That’s why they’re so powerful.”

It made so much sense now—why Daji had not killed Jiang if they were enemies. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t, without killing herself.

She sat up with a start. “So that means . . .”

“Yes,” said Chaghan. “As long as Daji is alive, the Dragon Emperor and the Gatekeeper are both still alive. It’s possible their bond was dissolved, but I doubt it. Daji’s power is far too stable. The other two are out there, somewhere. But my guess is that they can’t be doing too well, because the rest of the country thinks they’re dead.”

You will turn against another. One will die, one will rule, and one will sleep for eternity.

Kitay voiced the question on Rin’s mind. “Then what happened to them? Why did they go missing?”

Chaghan shrugged. “You’d have to ask the other two. Have you finished drinking?”

Kitay drained the cup and winced. “Ugh. Yes.”

“Good. Now eat the mushrooms.”

Kitay blinked. “What?”

“There’s no agaric in that cup,” Chaghan said.

“Oh, you asshole,” Rin said.

“I don’t understand,” Kitay said.

Chaghan gave him a thin smile. “I just wanted to see if you’d drink horse piss.”

The Sorqan Sira waited outside before a roaring fire. The flames seemed alive to Rin; its tendrils jumped too high, reached too far, like little hands trying to pull her into the blaze. If she let her gaze linger, the smoke, turned purple by the Sorqan Sira’s powders, started taking on the faces of the dead. Master Irjah. Aratsha. Captain Salkhi. Altan.

“Are you ready?” asked the Sorqan Sira.

Rin blinked the faces away.

She knelt across Kitay on the frigid dirt. Despite the cold, they were permitted to wear only trousers and undershirts that exposed their bare arms. The inky characters trailing down their skin shone in the firelight.

She was terrified. He didn’t look afraid at all.

“I’m ready,” he said. His voice was steady.

“Ready,” she echoed.

Between them lay two long, serrated knives and a sacrifice.

Rin didn’t know how the Ketreyids had managed to trap an adult deer, massive and healthy, without any visible wounds, in just a matter of hours. Its legs were bound tightly together. Rin suspected that the animal had been sedated, because it lay quite still on the dirt, eyes half-open as if it were resigned to its fate.

The effect of the agaric had begun to set in. Everything seemed terribly bright. When objects moved in her field of vision, they left behind trails like streaks of paint that sparked and swirled before they faded away.

She focused with difficulty on the deer’s neck.

She and Kitay were to make two cuts, one on either side of the animal, so that neither could bear full responsibility for its death. Alone, each wound would be insufficient to kill. The deer might drag itself away, cover the cut in mud and somehow survive. But wounds on both sides meant certain death.

Rin picked her knife off the ground and gripped it tightly in her hands.

“Repeat after me,” said the Sorqan Sira, and uttered a slow stream of Ketreyid words. The foreign syllables sounded clunky and awkward in Rin’s mouth. She knew their meaning only because the twins had explained them to her.

We will live as one. We will fight as one.

And we will kill as one.

“The sacrifice,” said the Sorqan Sira.

They brought their knives down.

Rin found it harder than she’d expected. Not because she was unused to killing—cutting through flesh was as easy to her now as breathing. It was the fur that offered resistance. She clenched her teeth and pushed harder. The knife sank into the deer’s side.

The deer arched its neck and screamed.

Rin’s knife hadn’t gone in deep enough. She had to widen the cut. Her hands shook madly; the handle was loose between her fingers.

But Kitay dragged his knife across the deer’s side with one clean, steady stroke.

Blood pooled, fast and dark, around their knees. The deer stopped writhing. Its head drooped to the ground.

Through the haze of the agaric, Rin saw the moment the deer’s life left its body—a golden, shimmering aura that lingered over the corpse like an ethereal copy of its physical form before drifting upward like smoke. She tilted her head up, watched it floating higher and higher toward the heavens.

“Follow it,” said the Sorqan Sira.

She did. It seemed such a simple matter. Under the agaric’s influence her soul was lighter than air itself. Her mind ascended, her material body became a distant memory, and she flew up into the vast and dark void that was the cosmos.

She found herself standing on the periphery of a great circle, its circumference etched with glowing Hexagrams—characters that together spelled the nature of the universe, the sixty-four deities that constituted all that was and would ever be.

The circle tilted and became a pool, inside which swam two massive carp, one white, one black, each with a large dot of the opposite color on its flank. They drifted lazily, chasing each other in a slow-moving, eternal circle.

She saw Kitay on the other side of the circle. He was naked. It was not a physical nakedness; he was made more of light than he was of body—but every thought, every memory, and every feeling he’d ever had shone out toward her. Nothing was hidden.

She was similarly naked before him. All of her secrets, her insecurities, her guilt, and her rage had been laid bare. He saw her cruelest, most brutal desires. He saw parts of her that she didn’t even understand herself. The part that was terrified of being alone and terrified of being the last. The part that realized it loved pain, adored it, could find release only in pain.

And she could see him. She saw the way that concepts were stored in his mind, great repositories of knowledge linked together to be called up at a moment’s notice. She saw the anxiety that came with being the only person he knew who was this smart. She saw how scared he was, trapped and isolated in his own mind, watching his world break down around him because of irrationalities that he could not fix.

And she understood his sadness. The grief; the loss of a father, but more than just that—the loss of an empire, the loss of loyalty, of duty, his sole meaning for existence—

She saw his fury.

How had it taken her this long to understand? She wasn’t the only one fueled by anger. But where her rage was explosive, immediate and devastating, Kitay’s burned with a silent determination; it festered and rotted and lingered, and the strength of his hate stunned her.

We’re the same.

Kitay wanted vengeance and blood. Under that frail veneer of control was an ongoing scream of rage that originated in confusion and culminated in an overwhelming urge for destruction, if only so he could tear the world down and rebuild it in a way that made sense.

The circle glowed between them. The black carp and white carp began to swim in a circle, faster and faster until the darkness and brightness were indistinct; not gray, not melded into each other but yet the same entity—two sides of the same coin, necessary complements balancing each other like the Pantheon was balanced.

The circle spun and they spun with it—faster and faster, until the Hexagrams blurred and melded into a glowing hoop. For a moment Rin was lost in the convergence—up became down, right became left, all distinctions were broken . . .

Then she felt the power, and it was magnificent.

She felt like she had when Shiro injected her veins with heroin. It was the same rush, the same dizzying flood of energy. But this time her spirit did not drift farther and farther from the material world. This time she knew where her body was; could return to it in seconds if she wanted. She was halfway between the spirit world and the material world. She could perceive both, affect both.

She had not gone up to meet her god; her god had been drawn down into her. She felt the Phoenix all about her, the rage and fire, so deliciously warm that it tickled as it coursed over her.

She was so delighted that she wanted to laugh.

But Kitay was moaning. He had been for some time now, but she was so entranced with the power that she’d hardly noticed.

“It’s not taking.” The Sorqan Sira intruded sharply on Rin’s reverie. “Stop it, you’re overpowering him.”

Rin opened her eyes and saw Kitay curled into a ball, whimpering on the ground. He jerked his head back and uttered a long, keening scream.

Her sight blurred and shifted. One moment she was looking at Kitay and the next she couldn’t see him at all. All she could see was fire, vast expanses of fire over which only she had control . . .

“You’re erasing him,” hissed the Sorqan Sira. “Pull yourself back.”

But why? She’d never felt so good before. She never wanted this sensation to stop.

“You are going to kill him.” The Sorqan Sira’s fingers dug into her shoulder. “And then nothing will save you.”

Dimly, Rin understood. She was hurting Kitay, she had to stop, but how? The fire was so alluring, it reduced her rational mind to just a whisper. She heard the Phoenix’s laughter echoing around her mind, growing louder and stronger with every passing moment.

“Rin,” Kitay gasped. “Please.”

That brought her back.

Her grasp of the material world was fading. Before it disappeared entirely she snatched up her knife and stabbed down into her leg.

Spots of white exploded in her vision. The pain chased the fire away, induced a stark clarity back to her mind. The Phoenix fell silent. The void was still.

She saw Kitay across the spirit plane—kneeling, but alive, present, and whole.

She opened her eyes to dirt. Slowly she pulled herself in a sitting position, wiped the soil off the side of her face. She saw Kitay looking around in a daze, blinking as if he were seeing the world for the first time.

She reached for his hand. “Are you all right?”

He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I—I’m fine, I think, I just . . . Give me a moment.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Welcome to my world.”

“I feel like I’m living in a dream.” He examined the back of his hand, turned it over in the fading sunlight as if he didn’t trust the evidence of his own body. “I suppose—I saw the physical proof of your gods. I knew this power existed. But everything I know about the world—”

“The world you knew doesn’t exist,” she said softly.

“No shit.” Kitay’s hands clenched the dirt and grass like he was afraid the ground might disappear under his fingertips.

“Try it,” said the Sorqan Sira.

Rin didn’t have to ask what she meant.

She stood upon shaky legs and turned to face away from Kitay. She opened her palms. She felt the fire inside her chest, a warm presence waiting to pour out the moment she called it.

She summoned it forward. A warm flame appeared in her hands—a tame, quiet little thing.

She tensed, waiting for the pull, the urge to draw out more, more. But she felt nothing. The Phoenix was still there. She knew it was screaming for her. But it couldn’t get through. A wall had been built in her mind, a psychic structure that repelled and muted the god to just a faint whisper.

Fuck you, said the Phoenix, but even now it sounded amused. Fuck you, little Speerly.

She shouted with delight. She hadn’t just recovered, she had tamed a god. The anchor bond had set her free.

She watched, trembling, as fire accumulated on her palms. She called it higher. Made it leap through the air in arcs like fish jumping from the ocean. She could command it as completely as Altan had been able to. No. She was better than Altan had ever been, because she was sober, she was stable, and she was free.

The fear of madness was gone, but not the impossible power. The power remained, a deep well from which she could draw when she chose.

And now she could choose.

She saw Kitay watching her. His eyes were wide, his expression equal parts fear and awe.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. “Can you feel it?”

He didn’t answer. He touched a hand to his temple, his gaze fixed so hard on the flames that she could see them reflected bright in his eyes, and he laughed.

That night the Ketreyids fed them a bone broth—scorching hot, musky, tangy, and salty all at once. Rin guzzled it as fast as she could. It scalded the back of her throat, but she didn’t care. She’d been subsisting on dried fish and rice gruel for so long that she’d forgotten how good proper food could taste.

Qara passed her a mug. “Drink more water. You’re getting dehydrated.”

“Thanks.” Rin was still sweating despite the cold onset of night. Little droplets beaded all over her skin, soaking straight through her clothing.

Across the fire, Kitay and Chaghan were engaged in an animated discussion which, as far as Rin could tell, involved the metaphysical nature of the cosmos. Chaghan drew diagrams in the dirt with a stick while Kitay watched, nodding enthusiastically.

Rin turned to Qara. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Qara said.

Rin shot Kitay a glance. He wasn’t paying her any attention. He’d seized the stick from Chaghan and was scrawling a very complicated mathematical equation below the diagrams.

Rin lowered her voice. “How long have you and your brother been anchored?”

“For our entire lives,” Qara said. “We were ten days old when we performed the ritual. I can’t remember life without him.”

“And the bond has always . . . it’s always been equal? One of you doesn’t diminish the other?”

Qara raised an eyebrow. “Do you think I’ve been diminished?”

“I don’t know. You always seem so . . .” Rin trailed off. She didn’t know how to phrase it. Qara had always been a mystery to her. She was the moon to her brother’s sun. Chaghan was such an overbearing personality. He loved the spotlight, loved to lecture everyone around him in the most condescending way possible. But Qara had always preferred the shadows and the silent company of her birds. Rin had never heard her express an opinion that wasn’t her brother’s.

“You think Chaghan dominates me,” Qara said.

Rin blushed. “No, I just—”

“You’re worried you’ll overpower Kitay,” Qara said. “You think your rage will become too much for him and that he’ll become only a shade of you. You think that’s what has happened to us.”

“I’m scared,” Rin said. “I almost killed him. And if that—that imbalance, or whatever, is a risk, I want to know. I don’t want to strip him of his ability to challenge me.”

Qara nodded slowly. She sat silently for a long while, frowning.

“My brother doesn’t dominate me,” she said at last. “At least, not in a way I could ever possibly know. But I’ve never challenged him.”

“Then how—”

“Our wills have been united since we were children. We desire the same things. When he speaks, he voices both our thoughts. We are two halves of the same person. If I seem withdrawn to you, it is because Chaghan’s presence in the mortal world frees me to dwell among the spirit world. I prefer animal souls to mortals, to whom I’ve never had much to say. That doesn’t mean I’m diminished.”

“But Kitay’s not like you,” Rin said. “Our wills aren’t aligned. If anything, we disagree more often than not. And I don’t want to . . . erase him.”

Qara’s expression softened. “Do you love him?”

“Yes,” Rin said immediately. “More than anyone else in the world.”

“Then you don’t need to worry,” Qara said. “If you love him, then you can trust yourself to protect him.”

Rin hoped that was true.

“Hey,” Kitay said. “What’s so interesting over there?”

“Nothing,” Rin said. “Just gossip. Have you cracked the nature of the cosmos?”

“Not yet.” Kitay tossed his stick onto the dirt. “But give me a year or two. I’m getting close.”

Qara stood up. “Come. We should get some sleep.”

Sometime during the day the Ketreyids had built several more yurts, clustered together in a circle. The yurt designated for Rin and her companions was at the very center. The message was clear. They were still under Ketreyid watch until the Sorqan Sira chose to release them.

The yurt felt far too cramped for four people. Rin curled up on her side, knees drawn up to her chest, although all she wanted to do was sprawl out, let all of her limbs loose. She felt suffocated. She wanted open air—open sands, wide water. She took a deep breath, trying to stave off the same panic that had crept up on her during the sweat.

“What’s the matter?” Qara asked.

“I think I’d rather sleep outside.”

“You’ll freeze outside. Don’t be stupid.”

Rin propped herself up on her side. “You look comfortable.”

Qara smiled. “Yurts remind me of home.”

“How long has it been since you’ve been back?” Rin asked.

Qara thought for a moment. “They sent us down south when we turned eleven. So it has been a decade, now.”

“Do you ever wish you could go home?”

“Sometimes,” Qara said. “But there’s not much at home. Not for us, anyway. It’s better to be a foreigner in the Empire than a Naimad on the steppe.”

Rin supposed that was to be expected when one’s tribe was responsible for training a handful of traitorous murderers.

“So—what, no one talks to you back home?” she asked.

“Back home we are slaves,” Chaghan said flatly. “The Ketreyids still blame our mother for the Trifecta. They will never accept us back into the fold. We’ll pay penance for that forever.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them. Rin had more questions, she just didn’t know how to ask them.

If she were in a different mood, she would have yelled at the twins for their deception. They’d been spies for all of these years, watching the Cike to determine whether or not they would hold stable. Whether they did a good enough job culling their own, immuring the maddest among them in the Chuluu Korikh.

What if the twins had decided that the Cike had grown too dangerous? Would they have simply killed them off? Certainly the Ketreyids felt as if they had the right. They looked down on Nikara shamans with the same supercilious arrogance as the Hesperians, and Rin hated that.

But she held her tongue. Chaghan and Qara had suffered enough.

And she, if anyone, knew what it was like to be an outcast in her own country.

“These yurts.” Kitay put his palms on the walls; his outspread arms reached across a third of the diameter of the hut. “They’re all this small?”

“We build them even smaller on the steppe,” Qara said. “You’re from the south; you’ve never seen real winds.”

“I’m from Sinegard,” Kitay said.

“That’s not the true north. Everything below the sand dunes counts as the south to us. On the steppe, the night gusts can rip the flesh off your face if they don’t freeze you to death first. We stay in yurts because the steppe will kill you otherwise.”

No one had a response to that. A peaceful quiet fell over the yurt. Kitay and the twins were asleep in moments; Rin could tell by the sound of their steady, even breathing.

She lay awake with her trident clutched close to her chest, staring at the open roof above her, that perfect circle that revealed the night sky. She felt like a little rodent burrowing down in its hole, trying to pretend that if it lay low enough, then the world outside wouldn’t bother it.

Maybe the Ketreyids stayed in their yurts to hide from the winds. Or maybe, she thought, with stars this bright, if you believed that above you lay the cosmos, then you had to construct a yurt to provide some temporary feeling of materiality. Otherwise, under the weight of swirling divinity, you might feel you had no significance at all.

Chapter 24

A fresh blanket of snow had fallen while they slept. It made the sun shine brighter, the air bite colder. Rin walked outside and stretched her aching muscles, squinting against the harsh light.

The Ketreyids were eating in shifts. Six riders at a time sat by the fire, wolfing down their food while the others stood guard by the periphery.

“Eat your fill.” The Sorqan Sira ladled out two steaming bowls of stew and handed them to Rin and Kitay. “You have a hard ride before you. We’ll pack you a bag of dried meat and some yak’s milk, but eat as much as you can now.”

Rin took the proffered bowl. The stew smelled terribly good. She huddled on the ground and pressed next to Kitay for warmth, bony elbows touching bony hips. Little details about him seemed to stand out in stark relief. She had never noticed before just how long and thin his fingers were, or how he always smelled faintly of ink and dust, or how his wiry hair curled just so at the tips.

She’d known him for more than four years by now, but every time she looked at him, she discovered something new.

“So that’s it?” Kitay asked the Sorqan Sira. “You’re letting us go? No strings attached?”

“The terms are met,” she replied. “We have no reason to harm you now.”

“So what am I to you?” Rin asked. “A pet on a long leash?”

“You are my gamble. A trained wolf set loose.”

“To kill an enemy that you can’t face,” Rin said.

The Sorqan Sira smiled, displaying teeth. “Be glad that we still have some use for you.”

Rin didn’t like her phrasing. “What happens if I succeed, and you no longer have use for me?”

“Then we’ll let you keep your lives as a token of our gratitude.”

“And what happens if you decide I’m a threat again?”

“Then we’ll find you again.” The Sorqan Sira nodded to Kitay. “And this time, his life will be on the line.”

Rin had no doubt the Sorqan Sira would put an arrow through Kitay’s heart without hesitation.

“You still don’t trust me,” she said. “You’re playing a long game with us, and the anchor bond was your insurance.”

The Sorqan Sira sighed. “I am afraid, child. And I have the right to be. The last time we taught Nikara shamans how to anchor themselves, they turned on us.”

“But I’m nothing like them.”

“You are far too much like them. You have the same eyes. Angry. Desperate. You’ve seen too much. You hate too much. Those three were younger than you when they came to us, more timid and afraid, and still they slaughtered thousands of innocents. You are older than they were, and you’ve done far worse.”

“That’s not the same,” Rin said. “The Federation—”

“Deserved it?” asked the Sorqan Sira. “Every single one? Even the women? The children?”

Rin flushed. “But I’m not—I didn’t do it because I liked it. I’m not like them.”

Not like that vision of a younger Jiang, who laughed when he killed, who seemed to delight in being drenched in blood. Not like Daji.

“That’s what they thought about themselves, too,” said the Sorqan Sira. “But the gods corrupted them, just as they will corrupt you. The gods manifest your worst and cruelest instincts. You think you are in control, but your mind erodes by the second. To call the gods is to gamble with madness.”

“It’s better than doing nothing.” Rin knew that she was already walking a fine line, that she ought to keep her mouth shut, but the Ketreyids’ constant high-minded pacifistic lecturing infuriated her. “I’d rather go mad than hide behind the Baghra Desert and pretend that atrocities aren’t happening when I could have done something about them.”

The Sorqan Sira chuckled. “You think that we did nothing? Is that what they taught you?”

“I know that millions died during the first two Poppy Wars. And I know that your people never crossed down south to stop it.”

“How many people do you think Vaisra’s war has killed?” the Sorqan Sira asked.

“Fewer than would have died otherwise,” Rin said.

The Sorqan Sira didn’t answer. She just let the silence stretch on and on until Rin’s answer began to seem ridiculous.

Rin picked at her food, no longer hungry.

“What will you do with the foreigners?” Kitay asked.

Rin had forgotten about the Hesperians until Kitay asked. She peered around the camp but couldn’t spot them. Then she saw a larger yurt a little off to the edge of the clearing, guarded heavily by Bekter and his riders.

“Perhaps we will kill them.” The Sorqan Sira shrugged. “They are holy men, and nothing good ever comes of the Hesperian religion.”

“Why do you say that?” Kitay asked.

“They believe in a singular and all-powerful deity, which means they cannot accept the truth of other gods. And when nations start to believe that other beliefs lead to damnation, violence becomes inevitable.” The Sorqan Sira cocked her head. “What do you think? Shall we shoot them? It’s kinder than leaving them to die of exposure.”

“Don’t kill them,” Rin said quickly. Tarcquet made her uncomfortable and Sister Petra made her want to put her hand through a wall, but Augus had never struck her as anything other than naive and well-intentioned. “Those kids are missionaries, not soldiers. They’re harmless.”

“Those weapons are not harmless,” said the Sorqan Sira.

“No,” Kitay said. “They are faster and deadlier than crossbows, and they are most deadly in inexperienced hands. I would not return their weapons.”

“Safe passage back will be difficult, then. We can spare only one steed for the two of you. They will have to walk through enemy territory.”

“Would you give them supplies to make rafts?” Rin asked.

The Sorqan Sira frowned, considering. “Can they find their own way back over the rivers?”

Rin hesitated. Her altruism extended only so far. She didn’t want to see Augus dead, but she wasn’t about to waste time shepherding children who never should have come along in the first place.

She turned to Kitay. “If they can make it to the Western Murui, they’re fine, right?”

He shrugged. “More or less. Tributaries get tricky. They could get lost. Could end up at Khurdalain.”

She could accept that risk. It did enough to alleviate her conscience. If Augus and his companions weren’t clever enough to make it back to Arlong, then that was their own fault. Augus had been kind to her once. She’d made sure the Ketreyids didn’t put an arrow in his head. She owed him nothing more than that.

Chaghan was alone when Rin found him, sitting at the edge of the river with his knees pulled up to his chest.

“Don’t they think you might run?” she asked.

He gave her a wry smile. “You know I don’t run very fast.”

She sat down beside him. “So what happens to you now?”

His face was unreadable. “The Sorqan Sira doesn’t trust us to watch over the Cike any longer. She’s taking us back north.”

“And what will happen to you there?”

His throat bobbed. “That depends.”

She knew he didn’t want her pity, so she didn’t burden him with it. She took a deep breath. “I wanted to say thank you.”

“For what?”

“You vouched for me.”

“I was just saving my own skin.”

“Of course.”

“I was also rather hoping that you wouldn’t die,” he admitted.

“Thanks for that.”

An awkward silence passed between them. She saw Chaghan’s eyes dart toward her several times, as if he was debating whether to broach the next subject.

“Say it,” she finally said.

“Do you really want me to?”

“Yes, if you’re going to be this awkward otherwise.”

“Fine,” he said. “Inside the Seal, what you saw—”

“It was Altan,” she said promptly. “Altan, alive. That’s what I saw. He was alive.”

Chaghan exhaled. “So you killed him?”

“I gave him what he wanted,” she said.

“I see.”

“I also saw him happy,” she said. “He was different. He wasn’t suffering. He’d never suffered. He was happy. That’s how I’ll remember him.”

Chaghan didn’t say anything for a long time. She knew he was trying not to cry in front of her; she could see the tears welling up in his eyes.

“Is that real?” she asked. “In another world, is that real? Or was the Seal just showing me what I wanted to see?”

“I don’t know,” Chaghan said. “Our world is a dream of the gods. Maybe they have other dreams. But all we have is this story unfolding, and in the script of this world, nothing’s going to bring Altan back to life.”

Rin leaned back. “I thought I knew how this world worked. How the cosmos worked. But I don’t know anything.”

“Most Nikara don’t,” Chaghan said, and he didn’t even try to mask his arrogance.

Rin snorted. “And you do?”

“We know what constitutes the nature of reality,” said Chaghan. “We’ve understood it for years. But your people are fragile and desperate fools. They don’t know what’s real and what’s false, so they’ll cling to their little truths, because it’s better than imagining that their world might not matter so much after all.”

It was starting to become clear to her now, why the Hinterlanders might view themselves as caretakers of the universe. Who else understood the nature of the cosmos like they did? Who even came close?

Perhaps Jiang had known, a long time ago when his mind was still his. But the man she’d known had been shattered, and the secrets he’d taught her were only fragments of the truth.

“I thought it was hubris, what you did,” she murmured. “But it’s kindness. The Hinterlanders maintain the illusion so you can let everyone else live in the lie.”

“Don’t call us that,” Chaghan said sharply. “Hinterlander is not a name. Only the Empire uses this word, because you assume everyone who lives on the steppe is the same. Naimads are not Ketreyids. Call us by our names.”

“I’m sorry.” She crossed her arms against her chest, shivering against the biting wind. “Can I ask you something else?”

“You’re going to ask me regardless.”

“Why do you hate me so much?”

“I don’t hate you,” he said automatically.

“Sure seemed like it. Seemed like it for a long time, even before Altan died.”

Finally he twisted around to face her. “I can’t look at you and not see him.”

She knew he would say that. She knew, and still it hurt. “You thought I couldn’t live up to him. And that’s—that’s fair, I never could. And—and if you were jealous, for some reason, I understand that, too, but you should just know that—”

“I wasn’t just jealous,” he said. “I was angry. At both of us. I was watching you make all the same mistakes Altan did, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I saw Altan confused and angry all those years, and I saw him walk down the path he chose like a blind child, and I thought precisely the same was happening to you.”

“But I know what I’m doing. I’m not blind like he was—”

“Yes, you are, you don’t even realize it. Your kind has been treated as slaves for so long that you’ve forgotten what it is like to be free. You’re easily angered, and you latch quickly onto things—opium, people, ideas—that soothe your pain, even temporarily. And that makes you terribly easy to manipulate.” Chaghan paused. “I’m sorry. Do I offend?”

“Vaisra isn’t manipulating me,” Rin insisted. “He’s . . . we’re fighting for something good. Something worth fighting for.”

He gave her a long look. “And you really believe in his Republic?”

“I believe the Republic is a better alternative to anything we’ve got,” she said. “Daji has to die. Vaisra’s our best shot at killing her. And whatever happens next can’t possibly be worse than the Empire.”

“You really think that?”

Rin didn’t want to talk about this anymore. Didn’t want her mind to drift in that direction. Not once since the disaster at Lake Boyang had she seriously considered not returning to Arlong, or the idea that there might not be anything to return to.

She had too much power now, too much rage, and she needed a cause for which to burn. Vaisra’s Republic was her anchor. Without that, she’d be lost, drifting. That thought terrified her.

“I have to do this,” she said. “Otherwise I have nothing.”

“If you say so.” Chaghan turned to gaze at the river. He seemed to have given up on arguing the point. She couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or not. “Maybe you’re right. But eventually, you’ll have to ask yourself precisely what you’re fighting for. And you’ll have to find a reason to live past vengeance. Altan never managed that.”

“You’re sure you know how to ride this?” Qara handed the warhorse’s reins to Rin.

“No, but Kitay does.” Rin peered up at the black warhorse with trepidation. She’d never been entirely comfortable around horses—they were so much bigger up close, their hooves so poised to split her head open—but Kitay had spent enough of his childhood riding around on his family’s estate that he could handle most animals with ease.

“Keep off the main roads,” Chaghan said. “My birds tell me the Empire’s taking back much of its territory. You’ll run into Militia patrols if you’re seen traveling in broad daylight. Stick to the tree line when you can.”

Rin was about to ask about the horses’ feed when Chaghan and Qara both looked sharply to the left, like two hunting animals alerted to their prey.

She heard the noises a second later. Shouts from the Ketreyid camp. Arrows thudding into bodies. And a moment later, the unmistakable sound of a firing arquebus.

“Shit,” Kitay breathed.

The twins were already racing back. Rin snatched her trident off the ground and followed.

The camp was in chaos. Ketreyids ran about, grabbing at the reins of spooked horses trying to break free. The air was sharp with the acrid smoke of fire powder. Bullet holes riddled the yurts. Ketreyid bodies were strewn across the ground. And the Gray Company missionaries, half of them wielding arquebuses, fired indiscriminately around the camp.

How had they gotten their arquebuses back?

Rin heard a shot and threw herself to the ground as a bullet burrowed into the tree behind her.

Arrows whistled overhead. Each one found its mark with a thickening thud. A handful of Hesperians dropped to the ground, arrows pierced cleanly into their skulls. A few others ran, panicked, from the clearing. No one chased them.

The only one left was Augus. He wielded two arquebuses, one in each hand, their barrels drooping clumsily against the ground.

He’d never fired one. Rin could tell—he was shaking; he had absolutely no idea what to do.

The Sorqan Sira uttered a command under her breath. The riders moved at once. Instantly twelve arrowheads were pointed at Augus, bowstrings stretching taut.

“Don’t shoot!” Rin cried. She ran forward, blocking their arrows’ paths with her body. “Don’t shoot—please, he’s confused—”

Augus didn’t seem to notice. His eyes locked on Rin’s. He raised the arquebus in his right hand. The barrel formed a direct line to her chest.

It didn’t matter if he’d never fired an arquebus before. He couldn’t miss. Not from this distance.

“Demon,” he said.

“Rin, get back,” Kitay said tightly.

Rin stood frozen, unable to move. Augus waved his weapons erratically about, pointed them alternately between the Sorqan Sira, Rin, and Kitay. “Maker give me the courage, protect me from these heathens . . .”

“What is he saying?” the Sorqan Sira demanded.

Augus squeezed his eyes shut. “Show them the strength of heaven and smite them with your divine justice . . .”

“Augus, stop!” Rin walked forward, hands raised in what she hoped was a nonthreatening gesture, and spoke in clearly enunciated Hesperian. “You have nothing to be afraid of. These people aren’t your enemies, they’re not going to hurt you—”

“Savages!” Augus screamed. He waved one arquebus in an arc before him. The Ketreyids hissed and scattered backward; several sank into a low crouch. “Get out of my head!”

“Augus, please,” Rin begged. “You’re scared, you’re not yourself. Look at me, you know who I am, you’ve met me—”

Augus leveled the arquebus again at her.

The Sorqan Sira’s silent command rippled through the clearing. Fire.

Not a single Ketreyid rider loosed their bow.

Rin glanced around in confusion.

“Bekter!” the Sorqan Sira shouted. “What is this?”

Bekter smiled, and Rin realized with a twist of dread what was happening.

This wasn’t an accident. The Hesperians had been set free on purpose.

This was a coup.

A furious flurry of flashing images ricocheted back and forth in the clearing, a silent war of minds between Bekter and the Sorqan Sira blasted to everyone present, like they were wrestlers performing for an audience.

Rin saw Bekter cutting the Hesperians’ bonds and placing the arquebuses in their hands. They stared at him, brain-addled in terror. He told them they were about to play a game. He challenged them to outrun his arrows. The Hesperians scattered.

She saw the girl Jiang had murdered—Tseveri, the Sorqan Sira’s daughter—riding across the steppe with a little boy seated before her. They were laughing.

She saw a band of warriors—Speerlies, she realized with a start—at least a dozen of them, flames rolling off of their shoulders as they marched through burned yurts and charred bodies.

She felt a scorching fury radiating out of Bekter, a fury that the Sorqan Sira’s weakening protests only amplified, and she understood: This wasn’t just some ambition-fueled power struggle. This was vengeance.

Bekter wanted to do for his sister Tseveri what the Sorqan Sira never could. He wanted retribution. The Sorqan Sira wanted Nikara shamans controlled, but Bekter wanted them dead.

Too long you’ve let the Cike run unchecked in the Empire, Mother. Bekter’s voice rang loud and clear. Too long you’ve shown mercy to the Naimad scum. No more.

The riders agreed.

They’d long since shifted their loyalties. Now they only had to dispose of their leader.

The exchange was over in an instant.

The Sorqan Sira reeled back. She seemed to have shrunk in on herself. For the first time, Rin saw fear on her face.

“Bekter,” she said. “Please.”

Bekter spoke an order.

Arrows dotted the earth around Augus’s feet. Augus gave a strangled yelp. Rin lunged forward, but it was too late. She heard a click, then a small explosion.

The Sorqan Sira dropped to the ground. Smoke curled from the spot where the bullet had burrowed into her chest. She looked down, then back up at Augus, face contorted in disbelief, before slumping to the side.

Chaghan rushed forward. “Ama!”

Augus dropped the arquebus he’d fired and raised the second one to his shoulder.

Several things happened at once.

Augus pulled the trigger. Qara threw herself in front of her brother. A bang split the night and together the twins collapsed, Qara falling back into Chaghan’s arms.

The riders turned to flee.

Rin screamed. A rivulet of fire shot from her mouth and slammed into Augus’s chest, knocking him over. He shouted, writhing madly to put out the flames, but the fire didn’t stop; it consumed his air, poured into his lungs, seized him from inside like a hand until his torso was charcoal and he couldn’t scream anymore.

Augus’s death throes slowed to an insect-like twitching as Rin sank to her knees. She closed her mouth. The flames died away, and Augus lay still.

Behind her Chaghan was cradling his sister. A dark splotch of blood appeared over Qara’s right breast as if painted by an invisible artist, blossoming larger and larger like a blooming poppy flower.

“Qara—Qara, no . . .” Chaghan’s hands moved frantically over her breast, but there was no arrowhead to pull out; the metal shard had buried itself too deep for him to save her.

“Stop,” Qara gasped. She lifted a shaking hand and touched it to Chaghan’s chest. Blood bubbled out between her teeth. “Let go. You have to let go.”

“I’m going with you,” Chaghan said.

Qara’s breath came in short, pained gasps. “No. Too important.”

“Qara . . .”

“Do this for me,” Qara whispered. “Please.”

Chaghan pressed his forehead against Qara’s. Something passed between them, an exchange of thoughts that Rin could not hear. Qara reached a shaking hand to her chest, drew a pattern in her own blood on the pale skin of Chaghan’s cheek, and then placed her palm against it.

Chaghan exhaled. Rin thought she saw something pass in the space between them—a gust of air, a shimmer of light.

Qara’s head fell to the side. Chaghan pulled her limp form into his arms and dropped his head.

“Rin,” Kitay said urgently.

She spun around. Ten feet away, Bekter sat astride his horse, bow raised.

She lifted her trident, but she had no chance. From this close Bekter had an easy shot. They’d be dead in seconds.

But Bekter wasn’t shooting. His arrow was nocked to his bow, but the string wasn’t pulled taut. He had a dazed look in his eye; his gaze flickered between the bodies of the Sorqan Sira and Qara.

He’s in shock, Rin realized. Bekter couldn’t believe what he’d done.

She hefted her trident over her head, poised to throw. “Murder’s not so easy, is it?”

Bekter blinked, as if just coming to his senses, and then aimed his bow at her.

“Go on,” she told him. “We’ll see who’s faster.”

Bekter looked at the gleaming tips of her trident, then down at Chaghan, who was rocking back and forth over Qara’s form. He lowered his bow just a fraction.

“You did this,” Bekter said. “You killed Mother. That’s what I’ll tell them. This is your fault.” His voice wavered; he seemed to be trying to convince himself. His bow shook in his hands. “All of this is your fault.”

Rin hurled her trident. Bekter’s horse bolted. The trident flew a foot over his head and shot through empty air. Rin aimed a burst of flame in his direction, but she was too slow—within seconds Bekter was gone from her sight, disappeared into the forest to follow his band of traitors.

For a long time, the only sound in the clearing came from Chaghan. He wasn’t crying, not quite. His eyes were dry. But his chest heaved erratically, his breath came out in short, strangled bursts, and his eyes stared wide down at his sister’s corpse as if he couldn’t believe what he was looking at.

Our wills have been united since we were children, Qara had said. We are two halves of the same person.

Rin couldn’t possibly imagine how it felt to have that stripped away.

At last Kitay bent down over the Sorqan Sira’s body and rolled her flat on her back. He pulled her eyelids closed.

Then he touched Chaghan gently on the shoulder. “Is there something we should—”

“There’s going to be war,” Chaghan said abruptly. He laid Qara out on the dirt before him, then arranged her hands on her chest, one clasped over the other. His voice was flat, emotionless. “Bekter’s the chieftain now.”

“Chieftain?” Kitay repeated. “He just killed his own mother!”

“Not by his own hand. That’s why he gave the Hesperians those guns. He didn’t touch her, and his riders will attest to that. They’ll be able to swear it before the Pantheons, because it’s true.”

There was no emotion on Chaghan’s face. He looked utterly, terrifying calm.

Rin understood. He’d shut down, replaced his feelings with a focus on calm pragmatism, because that was the only way he could block out the pain.

Chaghan took a deep, shuddering breath. For a moment the facade cracked, and Rin could see pain twisting across his face, but it disappeared just as fast as it came. “This is . . . this changes everything. The Sorqan Sira was the only one keeping the Ketreyids in check. Now Bekter will lead them to slaughter the Naimads.”

“Then go,” Rin said. “Take the warhorse. Ride north. Go back to your clan and warn them.”

Chaghan blinked at her. “That horse is for you.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“We’ll find another way,” Kitay said. “It’ll take us a little longer, but we’ll figure it out. You need to go.”

Slowly, Chaghan stood up on shaky legs and followed them to the riverbank.

The horse was waiting tamely where they’d left it. It seemed completely unbothered by the commotion in the clearing. It had been trained well not to panic.

Chaghan lifted his foot into the stirrup and swung himself up into the saddle in one graceful, practiced movement. He grasped the reins in both hands and looked down at them. He swallowed. “Rin . . .”

“Yes?” she answered.

He looked very small atop the horse. For the first time, she saw him for what he was: not a fearsome shaman, not a mysterious Seer, but just a boy, really. She’d always thought Chaghan so ethereally powerful, so detached from the realm of mortals. But he was human after all, smaller and thinner than the rest of them.

And for the first time in his life, he was alone.

“What am I going to do?” he asked quietly.

His voice trembled. He looked so utterly lost.

Rin reached for his hand. Then she looked at him, really looked him in the eyes. They were so similar when she thought about it. Too young to be so powerful, not close to ready for the positions they had been thrust into.

She squeezed his fingers. “You fight. “