The Dragon Republic

Chapter 25

The journey back to Arlong took twenty-nine days. Rin knew because she carved one notch each day into the side of their raft; imagining, as the time stretched on, how the war must be going. Each mark represented a question, another possible alternate outcome. Had Daji invaded Arlong yet? Was the Republic still alive? Was Nezha?

She took solace during the journey in the fact that she didn’t see the Imperial Fleet on the Western Murui, but that meant little. The fleet might have already passed them. Daji might be marching on Arlong instead of sailing—the Militia had always been far more comfortable with ground warfare. Or the fleet could have taken a coastal route, could have destroyed Tsolin’s forces before sailing south for the Red Cliffs.

Meanwhile their raft bobbled insignificantly down the Western Murui, drifting on the current because both of them were too exhausted to row.

Kitay had cobbled the raft together over two days using ropes and hunting knives the Ketreyids had left behind. It was a flimsy thing, tied together from the washed-up remains of the Republican fleet, and just large enough for the two of them to lie down without touching.

Rafting was slow progress. They kept cautiously to the shores to avoid dangerous currents like the one that had swept them over the falls at Boyang. When they could, they drifted under tree cover to stay hidden.

They had to be careful with their food. They’d salvaged two weeks’ worth of dried meat from the Ketreyids’ rations, and occasionally they managed a catch of fish, but still their bones became ever more visible under their skin as the days went on. They lost both muscle mass and stamina, which made it even more important to avoid patrols. Even with Rin’s reacquisition of her abilities, there was little chance they could win in any real skirmish if they couldn’t even run a mile.

They spent their days sleeping to conserve energy. One of them would curl up on the raft while the other kept a lonely vigil by the spear attached to a shield which served as an oar and rudder. One afternoon Rin awoke to find Kitay etching diagrams into the raft with a knife.

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “What are you doing?”

Kitay rested his chin on his fist, tapping his knife against the raft. “I’ve been thinking about how best to weaponize you.”

She sat up. “Weaponize?”

“Bad word?” He continued to scratch at the wood. “Optimize, then. You’re like a lamp. I’m trying to figure out how to make you burn brighter.”

Rin pointed to a wobbly carved circle. “Is that supposed to be me?”

“Yes. That represents your heat source. I’m trying to figure out exactly how your abilities work. Can you summon fire from anywhere?” Kitay pointed across the river. “For instance, could you make those reeds light up?”

“No.” She knew the answer without trying it. “It has to come from me. Within me.”

Yes, that was right. When she called the flame it felt like it was being tugged out from something inside her and through her.

“It comes out my hands and mouth,” she said. “I can do it from other places too, but it feels easier that way.”

“So you’re the heat source?”

“Not so much the source. More like . . . the bridge. Or the gate, rather.”

“The gate,” he repeated, rubbing his chin. “Is that what the Gatekeeper’s name means? Is he a conduit to every god?”

“I don’t think so. Jiang . . . Jiang is an open door for certain creatures. You saw what the Sorqan Sira showed us. I think that he’s only able to call those beasts. All the monsters of the Emperor’s Menagerie, isn’t that how the story goes? But the rest of us . . . it’s hard to explain.” Rin struggled to find the words. “The gods are in this world, but they’re also still in their own, but while the Phoenix is in me it can affect the world—”

“But not in the way that it wants to,” Kitay interrupted. “Or not always.”

“Because I don’t let it,” she said. “It’s a matter of control. If you’ve got enough presence of mind, you redirect the god’s power for your purposes.”

“And if not? What happens if you open the gate all the way?”

“Then you’re lost. Then you become like Feylen.”

“But what does that mean?” he pressed. “Do you have any control over your body left at all?”

“I’m not sure. There were a few times—just a few—I thought Feylen was inside, fighting for his body back. But you saw what happened.”

Kitay nodded slowly. “Must be hard to win a mental battle with a god.”

Rin thought of the shamans encased in stone within the Chuluu Korikh, trapped forever with their thoughts and regrets, comforted only by the knowledge that this was the least horrible alternative. She shuddered. “It’s nearly impossible.”

“So we’ll just have to figure out how to beat the wind with fire.” Kitay pushed his fingers through his overgrown bangs. “That’s a pretty puzzle.”

There wasn’t much else to do on the raft, so they started experimenting with the fire. Day after day they pushed Rin’s abilities to see how far she could go, how much control she could manage.

Up until then, Rin had been calling the fire on instinct. She’d been too busy fighting the Phoenix for control of her mind to ever bother examining the mechanics of the flame. But under Kitay’s pointed questions and guided experiments, she figured out the exact parameters of her abilities.

She couldn’t seize control of a fire that already existed. She also couldn’t control fire that had left her body. She could give the fire a shape and make it erupt into the air, but the lingering flames would dissipate in seconds unless they found something to consume.

“What does it feel like for you?” she asked Kitay.

He paused for a moment before he answered. “It doesn’t hurt. At least, not so much as the first time. It’s more like—I’m aware of something. Something’s moving in the back of my head, and I’m not sure what. I feel a rush, like the shot of adrenaline you get when you look over the edge of a cliff.”

“And you’re sure it doesn’t hurt?”

“Promise.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “You make the same face every time I summon a flame any bigger than a campfire. It’s like you’re dying.”

“Do I?” He blinked. “Just a reflex, I think. Don’t worry about it.”

He was lying to her. She loved that about him, that he’d care enough to lie to her. But she couldn’t keep doing this to him. She couldn’t hurt Kitay and not worry about it.

If she could, she’d be lost.

“You have to tell me when it’s too much,” she said.

“It’s really not so bad.”

“Cut the crap, Kitay—”

“It’s the urges I feel more than anything,” he said. “Not the pain. It makes me hungry. It makes me want more. Do you understand that feeling?”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s the Phoenix’s most basic impulse. Fire devours.”

“Devouring feels good.” He pointed at an overhanging branch. “Try that shooty thing again.”

Over the next few days she learned a number of different tricks. She could create balls of fire and hurl them at targets up to ten yards away. She could make shapes out of flame so intricate that she could have put on an entire puppet show with them. She could, by shoving her hands into the river, boil the water around them until steam misted the air and fish bubbled belly-up to the surface.

Most important, she could carve out protective spaces in the fire, up to ten feet from her own body, so that Kitay never burned even when everything around them did.

“What about mass destruction?” he asked after a few days of exploring minor tricks.

Rin stiffened. “What do you mean?”

His tone was carefully neutral. Purely academic. “What you did to the Federation, for instance—can we replicate that? How much flame can you summon?”

“That was different. I was on the island. In the temple. I’d . . . I’d just seen Altan die.” She swallowed. “And I was angry. I was so angry.”

In that moment, she’d been capable of an inhuman, vicious, and terrible rage. But she wasn’t sure she could replicate that rage, because it had been sparked by Altan’s death, and what she felt now when she thought about Altan wasn’t fury, but grief.

Rage and grief were so different. Rage gave her the power to burn down countries. Grief only exhausted her.

“And if you went back to the temple?” Kitay pressed. “If you went back and summoned the Phoenix?”

“I’m not going back to that temple,” Rin said immediately. She didn’t know what it was, but Kitay’s enthusiasm was making her uncomfortable—he was looking at her with the sort of intense curiosity that she had only ever seen in Shiro and Petra.

“But if you had to? If we only had one option, if everything would be lost if you didn’t do it?”

“We’re not putting that on the table.”

“I’m not saying you have to. I’m saying we have to know if it’s even an option. I’m saying you have to at least try.”

“You want me to practice a genocidal event,” she said slowly. “Just to be clear.”

“Start small,” he suggested. “Then get bigger. See how far you can go without the temple.”

“That’ll destroy everything in sight.”

“We haven’t seen signs of human life all day. If anyone lived here, they’re long gone. This is empty land.”

“What about wildlife?”

Kitay rolled his eyes. “You and I both know that wildlife is the least of your concerns. Stop hedging, Rin. Do it.”

She nodded, put her palms out, and closed her eyes.

Flame wrapped her like a warm blanket. It felt good. It felt too good. She was burning without guilt or consequence. She was unrestrained power. She could feel herself tipping back into that state of ecstasy, could have lost herself in the dreamy oblivion of the wildfire that surged higher, faster, brighter, if she hadn’t heard a high-pitched keening that wasn’t coming from her.

She looked down. Kitay lay curled in a fetal position on the raft, hands clutching his mouth, trying to suppress his screams.

She reined the fire back in with difficulty.

Kitay made a choking noise and buried his head in his hands.

She dropped to her knees beside him. “Kitay—”

“I’m fine,” he gasped. “Fine.”

She tried to put her hands on him, but he pushed her away with a violence that shocked her.

“Just let me breathe.” He shook his head. “It’s all right, Rin. I’m not hurt. It’s just—it’s all in my head.”

She could have slapped him. “You’re supposed to tell me when it’s too much.”

“It wasn’t too much.” He sat up straight. “Try that again.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t get a good look at your blast radius just then,” he said. “Try it again.”

“Absolutely not,” she snapped. “I don’t care that you’ve got a death wish. I can’t keep doing this to you.”

“Then go right up to the edge,” he insisted. “The point right before it hurts too much. Let’s figure out what the limit is.”

“That’s insane.”

“It’s better than finding out on a battlefield. Please, Rin, we won’t get a better chance to do this.”

“What is wrong with you?” she demanded. “Why does this matter so much?”

“Because I need to know the full extent of what you can do,” Kitay said. “Because if I’m strategizing for Arlong’s defense then I need to know where to put you, and why. Because if I went through all of this for you, then the very least you can do is show me what maximum power looks like. If we’ve turned you back into a weapon, then you’re going to be a damn good one. And stop panicking over me, Rin. I’m fine until I say I’m not.”

So she called the flame again and again, pushing the limits every time, until the shores burned pitch-black around them. She kept going even while Kitay screamed because he’d ordered her not to stop unless he said so explicitly. She kept going until his eyes rolled back into his head and he went limp on the raft. And even then, when he revived seconds later, the first thing he said to her was: “Fifty yards.”

When at last they reached the Red Cliffs, Rin saw with immense relief that the flag of the Republic still flew over Arlong.

So Vaisra was safe, and Daji was still a distant threat.

Their next challenge was to get back into the city without getting shot. Arlong, expecting a Militia assault, had hunkered down behind its defenses. The massive gates to the harbor past the Red Cliffs were locked. Crossbows were lined up against every flat surface overlooking the channel. Rin and Kitay could hardly march up to the city doors—any sudden, unexpected movement would get them stuck full of arrows. They discovered this when they saw a wild monkey wander too close to the walls and startle a line of trigger-happy archers.

They were so exhausted that they found this ridiculously funny. A month’s worth of travel and their biggest concern was friendly fire.

Finally they decided to get some sentries’ attention in the least threatening way possible. They hurled rocks at the sides of the cliff and waited while pinging noises echoed around the channel until at last a line of soldiers emerged on the cliffside, crossbows pointed down.

Rin and Kitay immediately put their hands up.

“Don’t shoot, please,” Kitay called.

The sentry captain leaned over the cliff wall. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“We’re Republican soldiers back from Boyang,” Kitay called, gesturing to their uniforms.

“Uniforms are cheap on corpses,” said the captain.

Kitay pointed to Rin. “Not uniforms that fit her.”

The captain looked unconvinced. “Back away or I’ll shoot.”

“I wouldn’t,” Rin called. “Or Vaisra will be asking why you’ve killed his Speerly.”

The sentries hooted with laughter.

“Good one,” said the captain.

Rin blinked. Did they not recognize her? Did they not know who she was?

“Maybe he’s new,” Kitay said.

“Can I hurt him?” she muttered.

“Just a little.”

She tilted her head back and opened her mouth. Breathing fire was harder than shooting it from her hands because it gave her less directional control, but she liked the dramatic effect. A stream of fire shot into the air and unfurled itself into the shape of a dragon that hung for a moment in front of the awed soldiers, undulating grandly, before rushing the captain.

He was never in any real danger. Rin extinguished the flames as soon as they made contact. But he still screamed and fell backward as if he were being charged by a bear. When at last he resurfaced over the cliff wall, his face had turned bright pink, and smoke drifted up from his singed eyebrows.

“I should shoot you just for that,” he said.

“Why don’t you just tell Vaisra that the Speerly’s back,” Rin said. “And bring us something to eat.”

Word of their return seemed to have spread instantly to the entire harbor. A massive crowd of soldiers and civilians alike surrounded them the moment they passed through the gates. Everyone had questions, and they shouted them from every direction so loudly that Rin could barely make out a word.

The questions she did understand were about soldiers still missing from Boyang. The people wanted to know if any others were still alive. If they were on their way back. Rin didn’t have the heart to answer.

“Who dragged you out of hell?” Venka elbowed her way through the soldiers. She seized Rin by the arms, looked her up and down, and then wrinkled her pert nose. “You smell.”

“Nice to see you, too,” Rin said.

“No, really, it’s rank. It’s like you’ve taken a knife blade to my nose.”

“Well, we haven’t seen properly clean water in over a month, so—”

“So what’s the story?” Venka interrupted. “Did you break out of prison? Take out an entire battalion? Swim the whole length back down the Murui?”

“We drank horse piss and got high,” said Kitay.

“Come again?” Venka asked.

Rin was about to explain when she caught sight of Nezha pushing his way to the front of the crowd.

“Hello,” she said.

He stopped just before her and stared, blinking rapidly as if he didn’t know what he was looking at. His arms hung awkwardly at his sides, slightly uplifted, like he wasn’t sure what to do with them.

“Can I?” he asked.

She stretched her arms toward him. He pulled her in against him so hard that she stiffened on instinct. Then she relaxed, because Nezha was so warm, so solid, and hugging him was such a wonderful feeling that she just wanted to bury her face into his uniform and stand there for a very long time.

“I can’t believe it,” Nezha murmured into her ear. “We thought for sure . . .”

She pressed her forehead against his chest. “Me too.”

Her tears were falling thick and fast. The embrace had already stretched on much longer than it should have, and finally Nezha let her go, but he didn’t take his arms off her shoulders.

Finally he spoke. “Where is Jinzha?”

“What do you mean?” Rin asked. “He didn’t return with you?”

Nezha just shook his head, eyes wide, before he was pushed aside by two massive bodies.

“Rin!”

Before she could speak, Suni wrapped her in a tight hug, lifting her a good foot off the ground, and she had to pound frantically at his shoulder before he released her.

“All right.” Ramsa reached up and frantically patted Suni’s shoulder. “You’re going to crush her.”

“Sorry,” Suni said, abashed. “We just thought . . .”

Rin couldn’t help but grin even as she felt her ribs for bruises. “Yeah. Good to see you, too.”

Baji grabbed her hand, pulled her in, and pounded her on the shoulder. “We knew you weren’t dead. You’re too spiteful to go that easy.”

“How did you get back?” Rin asked.

“Feylen didn’t just wreck our ships, he whipped up a storm that wrecked everything in the lake,” Baji said. “He was aiming for the big ships, though; somehow a few of the skimmers held together. About a quarter of us managed to get out of the maelstrom. I’ve no idea how we paddled back out to the river alive, but here we are.”

Rin had an idea of how that had happened.

Ramsa’s eye flickered between her and Kitay. “Where are the twins?”

“That’s a long story,” Rin said.

“Not dead?” Baji asked.

“I . . . ah, it’s complicated. Chaghan isn’t. But Qara—” She paused, searching for the right words to say next, just as she saw a tall figure approaching from just over Baji’s shoulder.

“Later,” she said quietly.

Baji turned his head, saw who she was looking at, and immediately stepped aside. A hush fell over the soldiers, who parted ranks to let the Dragon Warlord through.

“You’ve returned,” said Vaisra. He looked neither pleased nor displeased but somewhat impatient, as if he’d simply been expecting her.

Rin instinctively ducked her head. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Vaisra gestured toward the palace. “Go clean yourself up. I’ll be in my office.”

“Tell me everything that happened at Boyang,” Vaisra said.

“Haven’t they already told you?” Rin sat down opposite him. She smelled better than she had in weeks. She’d cut her oily, lice-ridden hair; scrubbed herself in cold water; and traded in her stained, pungent clothes for a fresh uniform.

A part of her had been hoping for a warmer welcome—a smile, a hand on her shoulder, at least some indication that Vaisra was glad she was back—but all he gave her was solemn expectation.

“I want your account,” he said.

Rin considered pinning the blame on Jinzha’s tactical decisions, but there was no point in antagonizing Vaisra by rubbing salt into an open wound. Besides, nothing Jinzha had done could have prevented what had happened once the battle began. He might as well have been fighting the ocean itself.

“The Empress has another shaman in her employ. His name is Feylen. He channels the Wind God. He used to be in the Cike, until that went sideways. He wrecked your fleet. Took him minutes.”

“What do you mean, he used to be in the Cike?” Vaisra asked.

“He was put down,” Rin said. “I mean, he went mad. A lot of shamans do. Altan let him back out of the Chuluu Korikh by accident—”

“By accident?”

“On purpose, but he was stupid to do it. And now I suppose Daji’s found a way to lure him onto her side.”

“How did she do that?” Vaisra demanded. “Money? Power? Can he be bought?”

“I don’t think he cares about any of that. He’s . . .” Rin paused, trying to figure out how to explain it to Vaisra. “He doesn’t want what humans want. The god has . . . like with me, with the Phoenix—”

“He’s lost his mind,” Vaisra supplied.

She nodded. “I think Feylen needs to fulfill the god’s fundamental nature. The Phoenix needs to consume. But the Wind God needs chaos. Daji’s found some way to bend that to her will, but you won’t be able to tempt him with anything humans might want.”

“I see.” Vaisra was silent for a moment. “And my son?”

Rin hesitated. Had they not told him about Jinzha? “Sir?”

“They didn’t bring back a body,” Vaisra said.

His mask cracked then. For the briefest moment, he looked like a father.

So he did know. He just wouldn’t admit to himself that if Jinzha hadn’t made his way back to Arlong with the rest of the fleet, then he was probably dead.

“I didn’t see what happened to him,” Rin said. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s no point speculating, then,” Vaisra said coolly. His mask reassembled itself. “Let’s move on. I assume you’ll want to rejoin the infantry?”

“Not the infantry.” Rin took a deep breath. “I want command of the Cike again. I want a seat at the strategy table. I want direct say in anything you want the Cike to do.”

“And why’s that?” Vaisra asked.

Because Chaghan can’t be right about my being your dog. “Because I deserve it. I broke the Seal. I’ve gotten the fire back.”

Vaisra raised an eyebrow. “Show me.”

She turned an open palm toward the ceiling and summoned a fist-sized ball of fire. She made it run up and down the length of her arm, made it twist around her in the air before calling it back into her fingers. Even after a month of practice, she was still amazed at how easy it was, how delightfully natural it felt to control the flame the way she controlled her fingers. She let it take shapes—a rat, a rooster, an undulating orange dragon—and then she closed her fingers over her palm.

“Very nice,” Vaisra said approvingly. The mask was gone now; he was finally smiling. She felt a warm rush of encouragement.

“So. Command?”

He waved a hand. “You’re reinstated. I’ll let the generals know. How did you manage this?”

“That’s a long story.” She paused, wondering where to start. “We, ah, ran into some Ketreyids.”

He frowned. “Hinterlanders?”

“Don’t call them that. They’re Ketreyids.” She gave him a quick account of what the Ketreyids had done, told him about the Sorqan Sira and the Trifecta.

She omitted the part about the anchor bond. Vaisra didn’t need to know.

“Then what happened?” Vaisra asked. “Where are they?”

“They’re gone. And the Sorqan Sira’s dead.”

“What?”

She told him about Augus. She knew Vaisra would be surprised, but she hadn’t expected his reaction. The color drained from his face. His entire body tensed.

“Who else knows?” he demanded.

“Just Kitay. And a couple of Ketreyids, but they’re not telling anyone.”

“Tell no one this happened,” he said quietly. “Not even my son. If the Hesperians find out, our lives are forfeit.”

“It was their fault to begin with,” she muttered.

“Shut up.” He slammed a hand on the table. She flinched back, startled.

“How could you be so stupid?” he demanded. “You should have brought them back safe, that would have ingratiated us to General Tarcquet—”

“Tarcquet made it back?” she interrupted.

“Yes, and many of the Gray Company are with him. They escaped south in one of the skimmers. They are deeply unhappy with our naval capabilities and are this close to pulling out of the continent, which is a thought I assume never crossed your mind when you decided to murder one of them.”

“Are you joking? They were trying to kill us—”

“So you should have incapacitated him or fled. The Gray Company is untouchable. You couldn’t have picked a worse Hesperian to kill.”

“This isn’t my fault,” Rin insisted. “He’d gone mad, he was waving an arquebus around—”

“Listen to me,” Vaisra said. “You are walking a very fine line right now. The Hesperians are not just upset, they are terrified. They thought you a curiosity before. Then they saw what happened at Boyang. Now they are convinced that each and every one of you is a mindless agent of Chaos who could bring about the end of the world. They’re going to hunt down every shaman in this empire and put them in cages if they can. The only reason why they haven’t touched you is because you volunteered, and they know you’ll cooperate. Do you understand now?”

Fear struck Rin. “Then Suni and Baji—”

“—are safe,” Vaisra said. “The Hesperians don’t know about them. And they’d better not find out, because then Tarcquet will know we’ve lied to him. Your job is to keep your head down, to cooperate, and to draw the least possible attention to yourself. You have a reprieve for now. Sister Petra has agreed to postpone your meetings until one way or another, this war has concluded. So behave yourself. Do not give them further reason for irritation. Otherwise we are all lost.”

Then Rin understood.

Vaisra wasn’t angry at her. This wasn’t about her at all. No, Vaisra was frustrated. He’d been frustrated for months, playing an impossible game with the Hesperians where they kept changing the rules.

She dared to ask. “They’re never bringing their ships, are they?”

He sighed. “We don’t know.”

“They still won’t give you a straight answer? All this because they’re still deciding?”

“Tarcquet claims they haven’t finished their evaluation,” Vaisra said. “I admit I do not understand their standards. When I ask, they utter idiotic vagaries. They want signs of rational sentience. Proof of the ability to self-govern.”

“But that’s ridiculous. If they’d just tell us what they wanted—”

“Ah, but then that would be cheating.” Vaisra’s lip curled. “They need proof that we’ve independently attained civilized society.”

“But that’s a paradox. We can’t achieve that unless they help.”

He looked exhausted. “I know.”

“Then that’s fucked.” She threw her hands up in the air. “This is all just a spectacle to them. They’re never going to come.”

“Maybe.” Vaisra looked decades older then, lined and weary. Rin imagined how Petra might sketch him in her book. Nikara man, middle-aged. Strong build. Reasonable intelligence. Inferior. “But we are the weaker party. We have no choice but to play their game. That’s how power works.”

She found Nezha waiting for her outside the palace gates.

“Hi,” she said tentatively. She looked him up and down, trying to get a read on his expression, but he was just as inscrutable as his father.

“Hello,” he said back.

She tried a smile. He didn’t return it. For a minute they just stood there staring at each other. Rin was torn between running into his arms again and simply running away. She still didn’t know where she stood with him. The last time they’d spoken—really spoken—she’d been sure that he would hate her forever.

“Can we talk?” he asked finally.

“We are talking.”

He shook his head. “Alone. In private. Not here.”

“Fine,” she said, and followed him along the canal to the edge of a pier, where the waves were loud enough to drown their voices out from any curious eavesdroppers.

“I owe you an explanation,” he said at last.

She leaned against the railing. “Go on.”

“I’m not a shaman.”

She threw her hands up. “Oh, don’t fuck with me—”

“I’m not,” he insisted. “I know I can do things. I mean, I know I’m linked to a god, and I can—sort of—call it, sometimes . . .”

“That’s what shamanism is.”

“You’re not listening to me. Whatever I am, it’s not what you are. My mind’s not my own—my body belongs to some—some thing . . .”

“That’s just it, Nezha. That’s how it is for all of us. And I know it hurts, and I know it’s hard, but—”

“You’re still not listening,” he snapped. “It’s no sacrifice for you. You and your god want the same damn thing. But I didn’t ask for this—”

She raised her eyebrows. “Well, it doesn’t just happen by accident. You had to want it first. You had to ask the god.”

“But I didn’t. I never asked, and I’ve never wanted it.” The way Nezha said it made her fall quiet. He sounded like he was about to cry.

He took a deep breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was so quiet she had to step closer to hear him. “Back at Boyang, you called me a coward.”

“Look, all I meant was that—”

“I’m going to tell you a story,” he interrupted. He was trembling. Why was he trembling? “I want you to just listen. And I want you to believe me. Please.”

She crossed her arms. “Fine.”

Nezha blinked hard and stared out over the water. “I told you once that I had another brother. His name was Mingzha.”

When he didn’t continue, Rin asked, “What was he like?”

“Hilarious,” Nezha said. “Chubby, loud, and incredible. He was everyone’s favorite. He was so full of energy, he glowed. My mother had miscarried twice before she gave birth to him, but Mingzha was perfect. He was never sick. My mother adored him. She was hugging him constantly. She dressed him up in so many golden bracelets and anklets that he jangled when he walked.” He shuddered. “She should have known better. Dragons like gold.”

“Dragons,” Rin repeated.

“You said you’d listen.”

“Sorry.”

Nezha was sickly pale. His skin was almost translucent; Rin could see blue veins under his jaw, crisscrossing with his scars.

“My siblings and I spent our childhood playing by the river,” he said. “There’s a grotto about a mile out from the entrance to this channel, this underwater crystal cave that the servants liked telling stories about, but Father had forbidden us to enter it. So of course all we ever wanted to do was explore it.

“My mother took sick one night when Mingzha was six. During that time my father had been called to Sinegard on the Empress’s orders, so the servants weren’t as concerned with watching us as they might have been. Jinzha was at the Academy. Muzha was abroad. So the responsibility for watching Mingzha fell to me.”

Nezha’s voice cracked. His eyes looked hollow, tortured. Rin didn’t want to hear any more. She had a sickening suspicion of where this story was headed, and she didn’t want it spoken out loud, because that would make it true.

She wanted to tell him it was all right, he didn’t have to tell her, they never had to speak about this again, but Nezha was talking faster and faster, like he was afraid the words would be buried inside him if he didn’t spit them out now.

“Mingzha wanted to—no, I wanted to explore that grotto. It was my idea to begin with. I put it in Mingzha’s head. It was my fault. He didn’t know any better.”

Rin reached for his arm. “Nezha, you don’t have to—”

He shoved her away. “Can you please shut up and just listen for once?”

She fell silent.

“He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” he whispered. “That’s what scares me. They say the House of Yin is beautiful. But that’s because dragons like beautiful things, because dragons are beautiful and they create beauty. When he emerged from the cave, all I could think about was how bright his scales were, how lovely his form, how magnificent.”

But they’re not real, Rin thought desperately. Dragons are just stories.

Weren’t they?

Even if she didn’t believe in Nezha’s story, she believed in his pain. It was written all over his face.

Something had happened all those years ago. She just didn’t know what.

“So beautiful,” Nezha murmured, even as his knuckles whitened. “I couldn’t stop staring.

“Then he ate my brother. Devoured him in seconds. Have you watched a wild animal eat before? It’s not clean. It’s brutal. Mingzha didn’t even have time to scream. One moment he was there, clutching at my leg, and the next moment he was a mess of blood and gore and shining bones, and then there was nothing.

“But the dragon spared me. He said he had something better for me.” Nezha swallowed. “He said he was going to give me a gift. And then he claimed me for his own.”

“I’m so sorry,” Rin said, because she didn’t know what else to say.

Nezha didn’t seem to have even heard. “My mother wishes I’d died that day. I wish I’d died. I wish it had been me. But it’s selfish even to wish I were dead—because if I had died, then Mingzha would have lived, and the Dragon Lord would have cursed him like he cursed me, he would have touched him like he touched me.”

She didn’t dare ask what that meant.

“I’m going to show you something,” he said.

She was too stunned to say anything. She could only watch, aghast, as he undid the clasps of his tunic with trembling fingers.

He yanked it down and turned around. “Do you see this?”

It was his tattoo—an image of a dragon in blue and silver. She’d seen it before, but he wouldn’t remember.

She touched her index finger to the dragon’s head, wondering. Was this tattoo the reason Nezha had always healed so quickly? He seemed able to survive anything—blunt trauma, poisonous gas, drowning.

But at what price?

“You said he claimed you for his own,” she said softly. “What does that mean?”

“It means it hurts,” he said. “Every moment that I’m not with him. It feels like anchors digging into my body; hooks trying to drag me back into the water.”

The mark didn’t look like a scar that was almost ten years old. It looked freshly inflicted; his skin shone an angry crimson. The glint of sunlight made the dragon seem as if it was writhing over Nezha’s muscles, pressing itself deeper and deeper into his raw skin.

“And if you went back to him?” she asked. “What would happen to you?”

“I’d become part of his collection,” he said. “He’d do what he wanted to me, satisfy himself, and I’d never leave. I’d be trapped, because I don’t think I can die. I’ve tried. I’ve cut my wrists, but I never bleed out before my wounds stitch themselves back together. I’ve jumped off the Red Cliffs, and sometimes the pain is enough for me to think I’ve managed it this time, but I always wake up. I think the Dragon is keeping me alive. At least until I return to him.

“The first time I saw that grotto, there were faces all along the cave floor. It took me a while to realize I was fated to become one of them.”

Rin withdrew her finger, suppressing a shudder.

“So now you know,” Nezha said. He yanked his shirt back on. His voice hardened. “You’re disgusted—don’t say you aren’t, I can see it on your face. I don’t care. But don’t you tell anyone what I’ve just told you, and don’t you ever fucking dare call me a coward to my face.”

Rin knew what she should have done. She should have said she was sorry. She should have acknowledged his pain, should have begged his forgiveness.

But the way he said it—his long-suffering martyr’s voice, like she had no right to question him, like he was doing her a favor by telling her . . . that infuriated her.

“I’m not disgusted by that,” she said.

“No?”

“I’m disgusted by you.” She fought to keep her voice level. “You’re acting like it’s a death sentence, but it’s not. It’s also a source of power. It’s kept you alive.”

“It’s a fucking abomination,” he said.

“Am I an abomination?”

“No, but—”

“So what, it’s fine for me to call the gods, but you’re too good for it? You can’t sully yourself?”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“Well, that’s the implication.”

“It’s different for you, you chose that—”

“You think that makes it hurt any less?” She was shouting now. “I thought I was going mad. For the longest time I didn’t know which thoughts were my own and which thoughts were the Phoenix’s. And it fucking hurt, Nezha, so don’t tell me I don’t know anything about that. There were days I wanted to die too, but we’re not allowed to die, we’re too powerful. Your father said it himself. When you have this much power and this much is at stake you don’t fucking run from it.”

He looked furious. “You think I’m running?”

“All I know is that hundreds of soldiers are dead at the bottom of Lake Boyang, and you might have done something to prevent it.”

“Don’t you dare pin that on me,” he hissed. “I shouldn’t have this power. Neither of us should. We shouldn’t exist, we’re abominations, and we’d be better off dead.”

“But we do exist. By that logic it’s a good thing the Speerlies were killed.”

“Maybe the Speerlies should have been killed. Maybe every shaman in the Empire should die. Maybe my mother’s right—maybe we should get rid of you freaks, and get rid of the Hinterlanders, too, while we’re at it.”

She stared at him in disbelief. This wasn’t Nezha. Nezha—her Nezha—couldn’t possibly be saying this to her. She was so sure that he would realize he’d crossed the line, would back down and apologize, that she was stunned when his expression only hardened.

“Don’t tell me Altan wasn’t better off dead,” he said.

All shreds of pity she’d felt for him fled.

She pulled her shirt up. “Look at me.”

Immediately Nezha averted his eyes, but she grabbed at his chin and forced him to look at her sternum, down at the handprint scorched into her skin.

“You’re not the only one with scars,” she said.

Nezha wrenched himself from her grasp. “We are not the same.”

“Yes, we are.” She yanked her shirt back down. Her eyes blurred with tears. “The only difference between us is that I can suffer pain, and you’re still a fucking coward.”

She couldn’t remember how they parted, only that one moment they were glaring at each other and the next she was stumbling back to the barracks in a daze, alone.

She wanted to run after Nezha and say she was sorry, and she also wanted never to see him again.

Dimly she understood that something had broken irreparably between them. They’d fought before. They’d spent their first three years together fighting. But this wasn’t like those childish schoolyard squabbles.

They weren’t coming back from this.

But what was she supposed to do? Apologize? She had too much pride to grovel. She was so sure she was right. Yes, Nezha had been hurt, but hadn’t they all been hurt? She’d been through Golyn Niis. She’d been tortured on a lab table. She’d watched Altan die.

Nezha’s particular tragedy wasn’t worse because it had happened when he was a child. It wasn’t worse because he was too scared to confront it.

She’d been through hell, and she was stronger for it. It wasn’t her fault that he was too pathetic to do the same.

She found the Cike sitting in a circle on the barracks floor. Baji and Ramsa were playing dice while Suni watched from a top bunk to make sure Ramsa didn’t cheat, as he always did.

“Oh, dear,” Baji said as she approached. “Who made you cry?”

“Nezha,” she mumbled. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Ramsa clicked his tongue. “Ah, boy trouble.”

She sat down in between them. “Shut up.”

“Want me to do something about it? Put a missile in his toilet?”

She managed a smile. “Please don’t.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

Baji tossed the dice on the floor. “So what happened up north? Where’s Chaghan?”

“Chaghan won’t be with us for a while,” she said. She took a deep breath and willed herself to push Nezha to the back of her mind. Forget him. Focus on something else. That was easy enough—she had so much to tell the Cike.

Over the next half hour she spoke to them about the Ketreyids, about Augus, and about what had happened in the forest.

They were predictably furious.

“So Chaghan was spying on us the entire time?” Baji demanded. “That lying fuck.”

“I always hated him,” Ramsa said. “Always prancing around with his mysterious mutters. Figures he’d been up to something.”

“Can you really be surprised, though?” Suni, to Rin’s shock, seemed the least bothered. “You had to know they had some other agenda. What else would Hinterlanders be doing in the Cike?”

“Don’t call them Hinterlanders,” Rin said automatically.

Ramsa ignored her. “So what were the Hinterlanders going to do if Chaghan decided we were getting too dangerous?”

“Kill you, probably,” Baji said. “Pity they went back north, though. Would have been nice to have someone deal with Feylen. It’ll be a struggle.”

“A struggle?” Ramsa repeated. He laughed weakly. “You think last time we tried to put him down was a struggle?”

“What happened last time?” Rin asked.

“Tyr and Trengsin lured him into a small cave and stabbed so many knives through his body that even if he could have shamanized, it wouldn’t have done a lick of good,” Baji said. “It was kind of funny, really. When they brought him back out he looked like a pincushion.”

“And Tyr was all right with that?” Rin asked.

“What do you think?” Baji asked. “Of course not. But that was his job. You can’t command the Cike if you don’t have the stomach to cull.”

A cascade of footsteps sounded outside the room. Rin peered around the door to see a line of soldiers marching out, fully equipped with shields and halberds. “Where are they all going? I thought the Militia hadn’t moved south yet.”

“It’s refugee patrol,” Baji said.

She blinked. “Refugee patrol?”

“You didn’t see all them coming in?” Ramsa asked. “They were pretty hard to miss.”

“We came in through the Red Cliffs,” Rin said. “I haven’t seen anything but the palace. What do you mean, refugees?”

Ramsa exchanged an uncomfortable look with Baji. “You missed a lot while you were gone, I think.”

Rin didn’t like what that implied. She stood up. “Take me there.”

“Our patrol shift isn’t until tomorrow morning,” Ramsa said.

“I don’t care.”

“But they’re fussy about that,” Ramsa insisted. “Security is tight on the refugee border, they’re not going to let us through.”

“I’m the Speerly,” Rin said. “Do you think I give a shit?”

“Fine.” Baji hauled himself to his feet. “I’ll take you. But you’re not going to like it.”

Chapter 26

“Makes the barracks look nice, huh?” Ramsa asked.

Rin didn’t know what to say.

The refugee district was an ocean of people crammed into endless rows of tents stretching toward the valley. The crowds had been kept out of the city proper, hemmed behind hastily constructed barriers of shipping planks and driftwood.

It looked as if a giant had drawn a line in the sand with one finger and pushed everyone to one side. Republican soldiers wielding halberds paced back and forth in front of the barrier, though Rin wasn’t sure who they were guarding—the refugees or the citizens.

“The refugees aren’t allowed past that barrier,” Baji explained. “The, uh, citizens didn’t want them crowding the streets.”

“What happens if they cross?” Rin asked.

“Nothing too terrible. Guards toss them back to the other side. It happened more often at the beginning, but a few beatings taught everyone their lesson.”

They walked a few more paces. A horrible stench hit Rin’s nose—the smell of too many unwashed bodies packed together for far too long. “How long have they been there?”

“At least a month,” Baji said. “I’m told they started flooding in as soon as we moved on Rat Province, but it only got worse once we came back.”

Rin could not believe that anyone had been living in these camps for that long. She saw clouds of flies everywhere she looked. The buzzing was unbearable.

“They’re still trickling in,” Ramsa said. “They come in waves, usually at night. They keep trying to sneak past the borders.”

“And they’re all from Hare and Rat Provinces?” she asked.

“What are you talking about? These are southern refugees.”

She blinked at him. “I thought the Militia hadn’t moved south.”

Ramsa exchanged a glance with Baji. “They’re not fleeing the Militia. They’re fleeing the Federation.”

“What?”

Baji scratched the back of his head. “Well, yes. It’s not like the Mugenese soldiers all just laid down their weapons.”

“I know, but I thought . . .” Rin trailed off. She felt dizzy. She’d known Federation troops remained on the mainland, but she’d thought they were contained to isolated units. Rogue soldiers, scattered squadrons. Roving mercenaries, forming predatory coalitions with provincial cities if they were large enough, but not enough to displace the entire south.

“How many are there?” she asked.

“Enough,” Baji said. “Enough that they constitute an entirely separate army. They’re fighting for the Militia, Rin. We don’t know how; we don’t know what deal she brokered with them. But soon enough we’ll be fighting a war on two fronts, not one.”

“Which regions?” she demanded.

“They’re everywhere.” Ramsa listed the provinces off on his fingers. “Monkey. Snake. Rooster.”

Rin flinched. Rooster?

“Are you all right?” Ramsa asked.

But she was already running.

She knew immediately these were her people. She knew them by their tawny skin that was almost as dark as hers. She knew them by the way they talked—the soft country drawl that made her feel nostalgic and uncomfortable at the same time.

That was the tongue she had grown up speaking—the flat, rustic dialect that she couldn’t speak without cringing now, because she’d spent years at school beating it out of herself.

She hadn’t heard anyone speak the Rooster dialect in so long.

She thought, stupidly, that they might recognize her. But the Rooster refugees shrank away when they saw her. Their faces grew closed and sullen when she met their eyes. They crawled back into their tents if she approached.

It took her a moment to realize that they weren’t afraid of her, they were afraid of her uniform.

They were afraid of Republican soldiers.

“You.” Rin pointed to a woman about her height. “Do you have a spare set of clothes?”

The woman blinked at her, uncomprehending.

Rin tried again, slipping clumsily into her old dialect like it was an ill-fitting pair of shoes. “Do you have another, uh, shirt? Pants?”

The woman gave a terrified nod.

“Give them to me.”

The woman crawled into her tent. She reappeared with a bundle of clothing—a faded blouse that might have once been dyed with a poppy flower pattern, and wide slacks with deep pockets.

Rin felt a sharp pang in her chest as she held the blouse out in front of her. She hadn’t seen clothes like this in a long time. They were made for fieldworkers. Even the poor of Sinegard would have laughed at them.

Stripping her Republican uniform worked. The Roosters stopped avoiding her when they saw her. Instead, she became effectively invisible as she navigated through the sea of tightly packed bodies. She shouted to get attention as she moved down the rows of tents.

“Tutor Feyrik! I’m looking for a Tutor Feyrik! Has anyone seen him?”

Responses came in reluctant whispers and indifferent mutters. No. No. Leave us alone. No. These refugees were so used to hearing desperate cries for lost ones that they’d closed their ears to them. Someone knew a Tutor Fu, but he wasn’t from Tikany. Someone else knew a Feyrik, but he was a cobbler, not a teacher. Rin found it pointless trying to describe him; there were hundreds of men who could have fit his description—with every row she passed she saw old men with gray beards who turned out not to be Tutor Feyrik after all.

She pushed down a swell of despair. It had been stupid to hope in the first place. She’d known she’d never see him again; she’d resigned herself to that fact long ago.

But she couldn’t help it. She still had to try.

She tried broadening her search. “Is anyone here from Tikany?”

Blank looks. She moved faster and faster through the camp, breaking into a run. “Tikany? Please? Anyone?”

Then at last she heard one voice through the crowd—one that was laced not with casual indifference but with sheer disbelief.

“Rin?”

She stumbled to a halt. When she turned around she saw a spindly boy, no more than fourteen, with a mop of brown hair and large, downward-sloping eyes. He stood with a sodden shirt dangling from one hand and a bandage clutched in the other.

“Kesegi?”

He nodded wordlessly.

Then she was sixteen years old again herself, crying as she held him, rocking him so hard they almost fell to the dirt. He hugged her back, wrapping his long and scrawny limbs all the way around her like he used to.

When had he gotten so tall? Rin marveled at the change. Once, he’d barely come up to her waist. Now he was taller than she by about an inch. But the rest of him was far too skinny, close to starved; he looked like he’d been stretched more than he had grown.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“Mother’s here with me. Father’s dead.”

“The Federation . . . ?”

“No. It was the opium in the end.” He gave a false laugh. “Funny, really. He heard they were coming, and he ate an entire pan of nuggets. Mother found him just as we were packing up to leave. He’d been dead for hours.” He gave her an awkward smile. A smile. He’d lost his father, and he was trying to make her feel better about it. “We just thought he was sleeping.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice came out flat. She couldn’t help it. Her relationship with Uncle Fang had been one between master and servant, and she couldn’t conjure up anything that remotely resembled grief.

“Tutor Feyrik?” she asked.

Kesegi shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw him in the crowd when we left, I think, but I haven’t seen him since.”

His voice cracked when he spoke. She realized that he was trying to imitate a deeper voice than he possessed. He stood up overly straight, too, to appear taller than he was. He was trying to pass himself off as an adult.

“So you’ve come back.”

Rin’s blood froze. She’d been walking blindly without a destination, assuming Kesegi had been doing the same, but of course they’d been walking back to his tent.

Kesegi stopped. “Mother. Look who I found.”

Auntie Fang gave Rin a thin smile. “Well, look at that. It’s the war hero. You’ve grown.”

Rin wouldn’t have recognized her if Kesegi hadn’t introduced her. Auntie Fang looked twenty years older, with the complexion of a wrinkled walnut. She had always been so red-faced, perpetually furious, burdened with a foster child she didn’t want and a husband addicted to opium. She used to terrify Rin. But now she seemed shriveled dry, as if the fight had been drained from her completely.

“Come to gloat?” Auntie Fang asked. “Go on, look. There’s not much to see.”

“Gloat?” Rin repeated, baffled. “No, I . . .”

“Then what is it?” Auntie Fang asked. “Well, don’t just stand there.”

How was it that even now Auntie Fang could still make her feel so stupid and worthless? Under her withering glare Rin felt like a little girl again, hiding in the shed to avoid a beating.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she managed. “I just—I wanted to see if—”

“If we were still alive?” Auntie Fang put bony hands on narrow hips. “Well, here we are. No thanks to you soldiers—no, you were too busy drowning up north. It’s Vaisra’s fault we’re here at all.”

“Watch your tone,” Rin snapped.

It shocked her when Auntie Fang cringed backward like she was expecting to be hit.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that.” Auntie Fang adopted a wheedling, wide-eyed expression that looked grotesque on her leathery face. “The hunger’s just getting to me. Can’t you get us some food, Rin? You’re a soldier, I bet they’ve even made you a commander, you’re so important, surely you could call in some favors.”

“They’re not feeding you?” Rin asked.

Auntie Fang laughed. “Not unless you’re talking about the Lady of Arlong walking around handing out tiny bowls of rice to the skinniest children she can find while the blue-eyed devils follow her around to document how wonderful she is.”

“We don’t get anything,” Kesegi said, and she noticed for the first time how gaunt, how hollow his cheeks were. “Not clothes, not blankets, not medicine. Most of us forage for our own food—we were eating fish for a while, but they’d all been poisoned with something, and we got sick. They didn’t warn us about that.”

Rin found that impossible to believe. “They haven’t opened any kitchens for you?”

“They have, but those kitchens feed perhaps a hundred mouths before they close.” Kesegi shrugged his bony shoulders. “Look around. Someone starves to death every day in this camp. Can’t you see?”

“But I thought—surely, Vaisra would—”

“Vaisra?” Auntie Fang snorted. “You’re on a first-name basis, are you?”

“No—I mean, yes, but—”

“Then you can talk to him!” Auntie Fang’s beady eyes glittered. “Tell him we’re starving. If he can’t feed all of us, just have them deliver food to me and Kesegi. We won’t tell anyone.”

“But that’s not how it works,” Rin stammered. “I mean—I can’t just—”

“Do it, you ungrateful cunt,” Auntie Fang snarled. “You owe us.”

“I owe you?” Rin repeated in disbelief.

“I took you into our home. I raised you for sixteen years.”

“You would have sold me into marriage!”

“And then you would have had a better life than any of us.” Auntie Fang pointed a skinny, accusing finger at Rin’s chest. “You would never have lacked for anything. All you had to do was spread your legs every once in a while, and you would have had anything you wanted to eat, anything you wanted to wear. But that wasn’t enough for you—you wanted to be special, to be important, to run off to Sinegard and join the Militia on its merry adventures.”

“You think this war has been fun for me?” Rin shouted. “I watched my friends die! I almost died!”

“We’ve all nearly died,” Auntie Fang scoffed. “Please. You’re not special.”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Rin said.

“Oh, I know.” Auntie Fang swept into a low bow. “You’re so important. So respected. Do you want us to grovel at your feet, is that it? Heard your old bitch of an aunt was in the camps, so you couldn’t pass up the chance to rub it in her face?”

“Mother, stop,” Kesegi said quietly.

“That’s not why I came,” Rin said.

Auntie Fang’s mouth twisted into a sneer. “Then why did you come?”

Rin didn’t have an answer for her.

She didn’t know what she’d expected to find. Not home, not belonging, not Tutor Feyrik—and not this.

This was a mistake. She shouldn’t have come at all. She’d cut her ties to Tikany a long time ago. She should have kept it that way.

She backed away quickly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” she tried to say, but the words stuck in her throat.

She couldn’t look either of them in the eyes. She didn’t want to be here anymore, she didn’t want to feel like this anymore. She backed out onto the main path and broke into a quick walk. She wanted to run away, but couldn’t out of pride.

“Rin!” Kesegi shouted. He dashed out after her. “Wait.”

She halted in her tracks. Please say something to make me stay. Please.

“Yes?”

“If you can’t get us food, can you ask them for some blankets?” he asked. “Just one? It gets so cold at night.”

She forced herself to smile. “Of course.”

Over the next week a torrent of people poured into Arlong on foot, in rickety carts, or on rafts hastily constructed of anything that could float. The river became a slow-moving eddy of bodies packed against each other so tightly that the famous blue waters of the Dragon Province disappeared under the weight of human desperation.

Republican soldiers checked the new arrivals for weapons and valuables before corralling them in neat lines to whichever quarters of the refugee district still had space.

The refugees met with very little kindness. Republican soldiers, Dragons especially, were terribly condescending, shouting at the southerners when they couldn’t understand the rapid Arlong dialect.

Rin spent hours each day walking the docks with Venka. She was glad to have escaped processing duty, which involved standing guard over miserable lines while clerks marked the refugees’ arrivals and issued them temporary residence papers. That was probably more important than what she and Venka were doing, which was fishing out the refuse from the segments of the Murui near the refugee chokepoints, but Rin couldn’t bear to be around the large crowds of brown skin and accusing eyes.

“We’re going to have to cut them off at some point,” Venka remarked as she lifted an empty jug from the water. “They can’t possibly all fit here.”

“Only because the refugee district is tiny,” Rin said. “If they opened up the city barriers, or if they funneled them into the mountainside, there would be plenty of space.”

“Plenty of space, maybe. But we haven’t got enough clothes, blankets, medicine, grain, or anything else.”

“Up until now the southerners were producing the grain.” Rin felt obligated to point that out.

“And now they’ve run from home, so no one is producing food,” Venka said. “Doesn’t really help us. Hey, what’s this?”

She reached gingerly into the water and drew a barrel out onto the dock. She set it on the ground. Out tumbled what at first looked like a soggy bundle of clothing. “Gross.”

“What is it?” Rin stepped closer to get a better look and immediately regretted it.

“It’s dead, look.” Venka held the baby out to show Rin the infant’s sickly yellow skin, the bumpy evidence of relentless mosquito attacks, and the red rashes that covered half its body. Venka slapped its cheeks. No response. She held it over the river as if to throw it back in.

The infant started to whimper.

An ugly expression twisted across Venka’s face. She looked so suddenly, murderously hateful that Rin was sure she was about to hurl the infant headfirst into the harbor.

“Give it to me,” Rin said quickly. She pulled the infant from Venka’s arms. A sour smell hit her nose. She gagged so hard she nearly dropped the infant, but got a grip on herself.

The baby was swaddled in clothes large enough to fit an adult. That meant someone had loved it. They wouldn’t have parted with the clothes otherwise—it was now the dead of winter, and even in the warm south, the nights got cold enough that refugees traveling without shelter could easily freeze to death.

Someone had wanted this baby to survive. Rin owed it a fighting chance.

She strode hastily to the end of the dock and handed the bundle off to the first soldier she saw. “Here.”

The soldier stumbled under the sudden weight. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“I don’t know, just see to it that it’s cared for,” Rin said. “Take it to the infirmary, if they’ll let you.”

The soldier gripped the infant tightly in his arms and set off at a run. Rin returned to the river and resumed dragging her spear halfheartedly through the water.

She wanted very badly to smoke. She couldn’t get the taste of corpses out of her mouth.

Venka broke the silence first. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

She looked defensive. Furious. But that was Venka’s default reaction to everything; she’d rather die than admit vulnerability. Rin suspected Venka was thinking about the child that she’d lost, and she wasn’t sure what to say, only that she felt terribly sorry for her.

“You knew it was alive,” Rin said finally.

“Yes,” Venka snapped. “So what?”

“And you were going to kill it.”

Venka swallowed hard and jabbed her spear back into the water. “That thing doesn’t have a future. I was doing it a favor.”

Wartime Arlong was an ugly thing. Despair settled over the capital like a shroud as the threat of armies closing in from both the north and the south grew closer every day.

Food was strictly rationed, even for citizens of Dragon Province. Every man, woman, and child who wasn’t in the Republican Army was conscripted for labor. Most were sent to work in the forges or the shipyards. Even small children were put to task cutting linen strips for the infirmary.

Sympathy was the greatest scarcity. The southern refugees, crammed behind their barrier, were uniformly despised by soldiers and civilians alike. Food and supplies were offered begrudgingly, if at all. Rin discovered that if soldiers weren’t positioned to guard the supply deliveries, they would never reach the camps.

The refugees latched on to any potentially sympathetic advocates they could. Once word of Rin’s connection to the Fangs spread, she became an involuntarily appointed, unofficial champion of refugee interests in Arlong. Every time she was near the district she was accosted by refugees, all pleading for a thousand different things that she couldn’t obtain—more food, more medicine, more materials for cooking fires and tents.

She hated the position they’d thrown her into because it led only to frustration from both sides. The Republican leadership grew irritated because she kept making impossible requests for basic human necessities, and the refugees started resenting her because she could never deliver.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Rin complained bitterly to Kitay. “Vaisra’s the one who always said we had to treat prisoners well. And this is how we treat our own people?”

“It’s because the refugees have no strategic advantage to them whatsoever, unless you count the mild inconvenience that their stacked-up bodies might present Daji’s army,” Kitay said. “If I may be blunt.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

“I’m just reporting what they’re all thinking. Don’t kill the messenger.”

Rin should have been angrier, but she understood, too, just how pervasive that mind-set was. To most Dragons, the southerners barely registered as Nikara. She could see through a northerner’s eyes the stereotypical Rooster—a cross-eyed, buck-toothed, swarthy idiot speaking a garbled tongue.

It shamed and embarrassed her terribly, because she used to be exactly like that.

She’d tried to erase those parts of herself long ago. At fourteen she’d been lucky enough to study under a tutor who spoke near-standard Sinegardian. And she’d gone to Sinegard young enough that her bad habits were quickly and brutally knocked out of her. She’d adapted to fit in. She’d erased her identity to survive.

And it humiliated her that the southerners were now seeking her out, that they had the audacity to wander close to her, because they made her more like them by sheer proximity.

She’d long since tried to kill her association with Rooster Province, a place that had given her few happy memories. She’d almost succeeded. But the refugees wouldn’t let her forget.

Every time she came close to the camps, she saw angry, accusing stares. They all knew who she was now. They made a point of letting her know.

They’d stopped shouting invectives at her. They’d long since passed the point of rage; now they lived in resentful despair. But she could read their silent faces so clearly.

You’re one of us, they said. You were supposed to protect us. You’ve failed.

Three weeks after Rin’s return to Arlong, the Empress sent a direct message to the Republic.

About a mile from the Red Cliffs, the Dragon Province border patrol had captured a man who claimed to have been sent from the capital. The messenger carried only an ornamented bamboo basket across his back and a small Imperial seal to verify his identity.

The messenger insisted he would not speak unless Vaisra received him in the throne room with the full audience of his generals, the Warlords, and General Tarcquet. Eriden’s guards stripped him down and checked his clothes and baskets for explosives or poisonous gas, but found nothing.

“Just dumplings,” the messenger said cheerfully.

Reluctantly they let him through.

“I bear a message from the Empress Su Daji,” he announced to the room. His lower lip flopped grotesquely when he spoke. It seemed infected with something; the left side was thick with red, pus-filled blisters. His words were barely understandable through his thick Rat accent.

Rin’s eyes narrowed as she watched him approach the throne. He wasn’t a Sinegardian diplomat or a Militia representative. He didn’t carry himself like a court official. He had to be a common soldier, if even that. But why would Daji leave diplomacy up to someone who could barely even speak?

Unless the messenger wasn’t here for any real negotiations. Unless Daji didn’t need someone who could think quickly or speak smoothly. Unless Daji only wanted someone who would take the most delight in antagonizing Vaisra. Someone who had a grudge against the Republic and wouldn’t mind dying for it.

Which meant this was not a truce. This was a one-sided message.

Rin tensed. There was no way the messenger could harm Vaisra, not with the ranks of Eriden’s men blocking his way to the throne. But still she gripped her trident tight, eyes tracking the man’s every movement.

“Speak your piece,” Vaisra ordered.

The messenger grinned broadly. “I come to deliver tidings of Yin Jinzha.”

Lady Saikhara stood up. Rin could see her trembling. “What has she done with my son?”

The messenger sank to his knees, placed his basket on the marble floor, and lifted the lid. A pungent smell wafted through the hall.

Rin craned her head, expecting to see Jinzha’s dismembered corpse.

But the basket was filled with dumplings, each fried to golden perfection and pressed in the pattern of a lotus flower. They had clearly gone bad after weeks of travel—Rin could see dark mold crawling around their edges—but their shape was still intact. They had been meticulously decorated, brushed with lotus seed paste and inked over with five crimson characters.

The Dragon devours his sons.

“The Empress enjoins you to enjoy a dumpling of the rarest meat,” said the messenger. “She expects you might recognize the flavor.”

Lady Saikhara shrieked and slumped across the floor.

Vaisra met Rin’s eyes and jerked a hand across his neck.

She understood. She hefted her trident and charged toward the messenger.

He reeled backward just slightly, but otherwise made no effort to defend himself. He didn’t even lift his arms. He just sat there, smiling with satisfaction.

She buried her trident into his chest.

It wasn’t a clean blow. She’d been too shocked, distracted by the dumplings to aim properly. The prongs slid through his rib cage but didn’t pierce his heart.

She yanked them back out.

The messenger gurgled a laugh. Blood bubbled through his crooked teeth, staining the pristine marble floor.

“You will die. You will all die,” he said. “And the Empress will dance upon your graves.”

Rin stabbed again and this time aimed true.

Nezha rushed to his mother and lifted her in his arms. “She’s fainted,” he said. “Someone, help—”

“There’s something else,” General Hu said while palace attendants gathered around Saikhara. He pulled a scroll out of the basket with remarkably steady hands and brushed the crumbs off the side. “It’s a letter.”

Vaisra hadn’t moved from his throne. “Read it.”

General Hu broke the seal and unrolled the scroll. “I am coming for you.”

Lady Saikhara sat up and gave a low moan.

“Get her out of here,” Vaisra snapped to Nezha. “Hu. Read.”

General Hu continued. “My generals sail down the Murui River as you dawdle in your castle. You have nowhere to flee. You have nowhere to hide. Our fleet is larger. Our men are more numerous. You will die at the base of the Red Cliffs like your ancestors, and your corpses will feed the fish of the Murui.”

The hall fell silent.

Vaisra seemed frozen to his chair. His expression betrayed nothing. No grief, no fear. He could have been made of ice.

General Hu rolled the scroll back up and cleared his throat. “That’s all it says.”

Within a fortnight Vaisra’s scouts—exhausted, horses ridden half to death—returned from the border and confirmed the worst. The Imperial Fleet, repaired and augmented since Boyang, had begun its winding journey south carrying what seemed like the entire Militia.

Daji intended to end this war in Arlong.

“They’ve spotted the ships from the Yerin and Murin beacons,” reported a scout.

“How are they already this close?” General Hu asked, alarmed. “Why weren’t we told earlier?”

“They haven’t reached Murin yet,” the scout explained. “The fleet is simply massive. We could see it through the mountains.”

“How many ships?”

“A few more than they had at Boyang.”

“The good news is that the larger warships will get stuck wherever the Murui narrows,” Captain Eriden said. “They’ll have to roll them on logs to move over land. We have two, maybe two and a half weeks yet.” He reached over to the map and tapped a point on Hare Province’s northwestern border. “I’m guessing they’ll be here by now. Should we send men up, try to stall them at the narrow bends?”

Vaisra shook his head. “No. This doesn’t alter our grand strategy. They want us to split our defenses, but we won’t take the bait. We concentrate on fortifying Arlong, or we lose the south altogether.”

Rin stared down at the map, at the angry red dots representing both Imperial and Federation troops. The Republic was wedged in on both sides—the Empire from the north, the Federation from the south. It was hard not to panic as she imagined Daji’s combined forces closing in around them like an iron fist.

“Deprioritize the northern coastline. Bring Tsolin’s fleet back to the capital.” Vaisra sounded impossibly calm, and Rin was grateful for it. “I want scouts with messenger pigeons positioned at mile intervals along the Murui. Every time that fleet moves, I want to know. Send messengers to Rooster and Monkey. Recall their local platoons.”

“You can’t do that,” Gurubai said. “They’re still dealing with the Federation remnants.”

“I don’t care about the Federation,” Vaisra said. “I care about Arlong. If everything we’ve heard about this fleet is true, then this war is over unless we can hold our base. We need all of our men in one place.”

“You’re leaving entire villages to die,” Takha said. “Entire provinces.”

“Then they will die.”

“Are you joking?” demanded Charouk. “You think we’re just going to stand here while you renege on your promises? You said that if we defected, you would help us eradicate the Mugenese—”

“And I will,” Vaisra said impatiently. “Can’t you see? We beat Daji and we win back the south, too. Once their backer is gone, the Mugenese will surrender—”

“Or they will understand that the civil war has weakened us, and they’ll pick off the pieces no matter what happens,” Charouk countered.

“That won’t happen. Once we’ve won Hesperian support—”

“‘Hesperian support,’” Charouk scoffed. “Don’t be a child. Tarcquet and his men have been loitering in the city for quite some time now, and that fleet isn’t showing up on the horizon.”

“They will come if we crush the Militia,” Vaisra said. “And we cannot do that if we’re wasting time fighting a war on two fronts.”

“Forget this,” said Gurubai. “We should take our troops and return home now.”

“Go right ahead,” Vaisra said calmly. “You wouldn’t last a week. You need Dragon troops and you know that, or you’d have never come in the first place. None of you can hold your home provinces, not with the numbers you have. Otherwise you would have gone back a long time ago.”

There was a short silence. Rin could tell from Gurubai’s expression that Vaisra was right. He’d called their bluff.

They had no choice now but to follow his lead.

“But what happens after you win Arlong?” Nezha asked suddenly.

All heads turned in his direction.

Nezha lifted his chin. “We unite the country just to let the Mugenese tear it apart again? That’s not a democracy, Father, that’s a suicide pact. You’re ignoring a massive threat just because it’s not Dragon lives at stake—”

“Enough,” Vaisra said, but Nezha spoke over him.

“Daji invited the Federation here in the first place. You don’t need to finish us off.”

Father and son glared at each other over the table.

“Your brother would never have defied me like this,” Vaisra said quietly.

“No, Jinzha was rash and reckless and never listened to his best strategists, and now he’s dead,” said Nezha. “So what are you going to do, Father? Act out of some petty sense of revenge, or do something to help the people in your Republic?”

Vaisra slammed his hands on the table. “Silence. You will not contradict me—”

“You’re just throwing your allies to the wolves! Does no one realize how horrific this is?” Nezha demanded. “General Hu? Rin?”

“I . . .” Rin’s tongue was lead in her mouth.

All eyes were suddenly, terrifyingly on her.

Vaisra folded his arms over her chest as he watched her, eyebrows raised as if to say, Go on.

“They’re invading your home,” Nezha said.

Rin flinched. What did he expect her to say to that? Did he think that just because she was from the south, she would contradict Vaisra’s orders?

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The Dragon Warlord is right—we split our forces and we’re dead.”

“Come on,” Nezha said impatiently. “Of all people, you should—”

“Should what?” she sneered. “I should hate the Federation the most? I do, but I also know that dispatching troops south plays right into Daji’s hands. Would you rather we simply deliver Arlong to her?”

“You’re unbelievable,” Nezha said.

She gave him her best imitation of Vaisra’s level stare. “I’m just doing my job, Nezha. You might try doing yours.”

Chapter 27

“I’ve outlined a number of tactics in this.” Kitay handed Rin a small pamphlet. “Captain Dalain will have her own ideas, but based on historical record, these have worked the best, I think.”

Rin flipped through the pages. “Did you rip these out of a book?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t have time to copy it all down, so I just annotated.”

She squinted to read his scrawling handwriting in the margins. “Logging?”

“It’s a lot of time and manpower, I know, but you don’t have many other good options.” He tugged anxiously at his bangs. “It’ll be more of an annoyance to them than anything, but it does save us a few hours.”

“You’ve scratched out the guerrilla tactics,” she observed.

“They won’t do you much good. Besides, you shouldn’t be trying to destroy the fleet, or even parts of it.”

Rin frowned. That was exactly what she had been planning to do. “Don’t tell me you think it’s too dangerous.”

“No, I think you simply can’t. You don’t understand just how big the fleet is. You can’t burn them all before they catch on to you, not with your range of fire. Don’t try anything clever.”

“But—”

“When you take risks, you’re gambling with my life, too,” Kitay said sternly. “No stupid shit, Rin, I mean it. Keep to the directive. Just slow them down. Buy us some time.”

Vaisra had ordered two platoons to sail up the Murui and obstruct the Imperial Navy’s progress. They were racing against the clock, scrambling for extra time so that they could continue fortifying Arlong and wait for Tsolin’s fleet on the northern shore to race back down the coastline. If they could delay the Imperial Navy for at least a few days, if Arlong could muster its defenses in time, and if Tsolin’s ships could beat Daji’s back to the capital, then they might have a fighting chance against the Empire.

It was a lot of ifs.

But it was all they had.

Rin had immediately volunteered the Cike for the task of delaying the fleet. She couldn’t stand being around the refugees anymore, and she wanted to get Baji and Suni well away from the Hesperians before their restlessness manifested in disaster.

She wished she could bring Kitay with her. But he was too valuable to send out on what was most likely a suicide mission for anyone who wasn’t a shaman, and Vaisra wanted him behind city walls to rig up defense fortifications.

And while Rin was glad that Kitay would be out of harm’s way, she hated that they were about to be separated for days without a means of communication.

If danger came, she wouldn’t be able to protect him.

Kitay read the look on her face. “I’ll be all right. You know that.”

“But if anything happens—”

“You’re the one going into a war zone,” he pointed out.

“Everywhere is a war zone.” She folded the manual shut and stuffed it into her shirt pocket. “I’m scared for you. For both of us. I can’t help that.”

“You haven’t got time to be scared.” He squeezed her arm. “Just keep us alive, won’t you?”

Rin made one last stop by the forge before she left Arlong.

“What can I do for you?” The blacksmith shouted at her over the furnace. The flames had been burning nonstop for days, mass-producing swords, crossbow bolts, and armor.

She handed him her trident. “What do you make of this metal?”

He ran his fingers over the hilt and felt around the prongs to test their edges. “It’s fine stuff. But I don’t do many battle tridents. You don’t want me to mess around with this too much, I’d ruin the balance. But I can sharpen the prongs if you need.”

“I don’t want to sharpen it,” she said. “I want you to melt it down.”

“Hmm.” He tested the trident’s balance over his palm. “Speerly-built?”

“Yes.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And you’re sure you want this reforged? I can’t find anything wrong with it.”

“It’s ruined for me,” she said. “Destroy it completely.”

“This is a very unique weapon. You won’t get a trident like this again.”

Rin shrugged. “That’s fine.”

He still looked unsure. “Speerly craft is impossible to replicate. No one’s alive now who knows how they made their weapons. I’ll do my best, but you might just end up with a fisherman’s tool.”

“I don’t want a trident,” she said. “I want a sword.”

Two skimmers departed from the Red Cliffs that morning. The Harrier, led by Nezha, raced upriver to hold the city of Shayang, situated on a crucial, narrow bend in the upper river delta. Shayang’s inhabitants had long since evacuated down to the capital, but the city itself used to be a military base—Nezha needed only garrison the old cannon forts.

Rin’s crew, headed by Captain Dalain, a lean, handsome woman, followed at a slower pace, paddling at a crawl in what was supposed to have been Jinzha’s warship.

It wasn’t close to finished. They hadn’t even named it. Jinzha was supposed to choose a name when construction was done, and now no one could bring themselves to do it in his stead. The bulkheads of the upper deck hadn’t been put in, the bottom decks were sparse and unfurnished, and cannons hadn’t been fitted to the sides.

But none of that mattered, because the paddle-wheels were functional. The ship had basic maneuverability. They didn’t need to sail it into enemy territory, they just had to get it twenty miles up the river.

Kitay’s pamphlet turned out to be brilliant. He’d sketched a series of little tricks to create maximal delays. Once they anchored Jinzha’s warship, the Cike and Captain Dalain’s crew spread out over a span of ten miles, and with incredible efficiency, implemented each one of them.

They erected a series of dams using a combination of logs and sandbags. Realistically these would buy them only half a day or so, but they would still tire out the soldiers forced to dive into deep water to clear them away.

Upriver from those, they planted wooden stakes in the river to tear holes in the bottom of enemy ships. Kitay, with Ramsa’s enthusiastic support, had wanted to plant the same sort of water mines that the Empire had used on them, but they’d run out of time before he could figure out how to dry the intestines properly.

They stretched multiple iron cables across the river, usually right after bends. If the Wolf Meat General was smart, he would just send soldiers out to disassemble the posts instead of trying to hack through the cables. But the posts were hidden well behind reeds and the cables were invisible underwater, so they might cause a destructive backlog if the fleet rammed into them unawares.

They set up a number of garrisons at three-mile intervals of the Murui. Each would be manned by ten to fifteen soldiers armed with crossbows, cannons, and missiles.

Those soldiers were most likely going to die. But they might manage to pick off a handful of Militia troops, or at best damage a ship or two before the Wolf Meat General blew them apart. And in terms of bodies and time, the tradeoff was worth it.

Near the northern border of the Dragon Province, right before the Murui forked into the Golyn, they sank Jinzha’s warship into the water.

“That’s a pity,” said Ramsa as they evacuated their equipment onto land. “I heard it was supposed to be the greatest warship ever built in the Empire’s history.”

“It was Jinzha’s ship,” Rin said. “Jinzha’s dead.”

The warship had been a conquest vessel built for a massive invasion of northern territory. There would be no such invasion now. The Republic was fighting for its last chance at survival. Jinzha’s warship would serve best by sitting heavy in the Murui’s deep waters and obstructing the Imperial Fleet for as long as it could.

They smashed in the paddles and hacked apart the masts before they disembarked, just to make sure the warship was destroyed beyond the point of any possibility that the Imperial Fleet might repurpose it to sail on Arlong.

Then they rowed small lifeboats to the shore and prepared for a hasty march inland.

Ramsa had laced the two bottom decks with several hundred pounds of explosives, all rigged to destroy the warship’s fundamental structures. The fuses were linked together for a chain reaction. All they needed now was a light.

“Everyone good?” Rin called.

From what she could see, the soldiers had all cleared the beach. Most them had already set off at a run toward the forest as ordered.

Captain Dalain gave her a nod. “Do it.”

Rin raised her arms and sent a thin ribbon of fire dancing across the river.

The flame disappeared onto the warship, where the fuse had been laid just where Rin’s range ran out. She didn’t wait to check if it caught.

Ten yards past the tree line, she heard a series of muffled booms, followed by a long silence. She stumbled to a halt and looked over her shoulder. The warship wasn’t sinking.

“Was that it?” she asked. “I thought it’d be louder.”

Ramsa looked similarly confused. “Maybe the fuses weren’t linked properly? But I was sure—”

The next round of blasts threw them off their feet. Rin hit the dirt, hands clamped over her ears, eyes squeezed shut as her very bones vibrated. Ramsa collapsed beside her, shaking madly. She couldn’t tell if he was laughing or trembling.

When at last the eruptions faded, she hauled herself to her feet and dragged Ramsa up to higher ground. They turned around. Just over the tree line, they could just see the Republican flag flying high, shrouded by billowing black smoke.

“Tiger’s tits,” whispered Ramsa.

For a long, tense moment it seemed like the warship might stay afloat. The sails remained perfectly upright, as if suspended from the heavens by a string. Rin and Ramsa stood side by side, fingers laced together, watching the smoke expand outward to envelop the sky.

At last the sound of splintering wood echoed through the still air as the support beams collapsed one by one. The middle mast disappeared suddenly, as if the ship had folded in on itself, devouring its own insides. Then with a creaking groan, the warship turned on its side and sank into the black water.

They made camp that night to the sound of more explosions, though these were coming from at least seven miles away. The Imperial Navy had reached the border town at Shayang. The noise was impossible to escape. The bombing went on through the night. Rin heard so many rounds of cannon fire that she could not imagine anything still remained of Shayang except for smoke and rubble.

“Are you all right?” Baji asked.

The crew was supposed to be grabbing a few hours’ sleep before their journey downriver, but Rin could barely even close her eyes. She sat upright, hugging her knees, unable to look away from the flashing lights in the night sky.

“Hey. Calm down.” Baji put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re shaking. What’s wrong?”

She nodded in Shayang’s direction. “Nezha’s over there.”

“And you’re afraid for him?”

She whispered without thinking. “I’m always afraid for him.”

“Ah. I get it.” Baji gave her a curious look. “You’re in love.”

“Don’t be disgusting. Just because you think the whole world is tits and—”

“No need to get defensive, kiddo. He’s a good-looking fellow.”

“We’re done talking.”

Baji snickered. “Fine. Don’t engage. Just answer this. Would you be here without him?”

“What, camping out by the Murui?”

“Fighting this war,” he clarified. “Serving under his father.”

“I serve the Republic,” she said.

“Whatever you say,” he said, but she could see from the look in his eyes that he hardly believed her.

“Why are you still here, then?” she asked. “If you’re so skeptical. I mean—you’ve got no allegiance to the Republic, and gods know the Cike barely still exists. Why haven’t you just run?”

Baji looked somber for a moment. He never looked this serious; he always had such an outsize personality, an endless series of dirty jokes and lewd comments. Rin had never bothered to consider that that might be a front.

“I did think about that for a minute,” he said after a pause. “Suni and I both. Before you got back we thought seriously about splitting.”

“But?”

“But then we’d have nothing to do. I’m sure you can understand, Rin. Our gods want blood. That’s all we can think about. And it doesn’t matter that when we’re not high, we’ve nominally got our minds back. You know that’s not how it works. To anyone else a peaceful life would be heaven right now, but for us it’d just be torture.”

“I understand,” she said quietly.

She knew it would never end for Baji, either; that constant urge to destroy. If he didn’t kill enemy combatants then he would start taking it out on civilians and do whatever he’d done to get himself into Baghra in the first place. That was the contract the Cike had signed with their gods. It ended only in madness or death.

“I have to be on a battlefield,” Baji said. He swallowed. “Wherever I can find one. There’s nothing else to it.”

Another explosion rocked the night so hard that even from seven miles away they could feel the ground shake beneath them. Rin drew her knees closer to her chest and trembled.

“You can’t do anything about that,” Baji told her after it had passed. “You’ll just have to trust that Nezha knows how to do his job.”

“Tiger’s fucking tits,” Ramsa shouted. He was standing farther uphill, squinting through his spyglass. “Are you guys seeing this?”

Rin stood up. “What is it?”

Ramsa motioned frantically for them to join him at the top of the hill. He handed Rin his spyglass and pointed. “Look there. Right between those two trees.”

Rin squinted through the lens. Her gut dropped. “That’s not possible.”

“Well, it’s not a fucking illusion,” Ramsa said.

“What isn’t?” Baji demanded.

Wordlessly, Rin handed him the spyglass. She didn’t need it. Now that she knew what to look for, even her naked eye could see the outline of the Imperial Navy winding slowly through the trees.

She felt like she was watching a mountain range move.

“That thing’s not a ship,” Baji said.

“No,” Ramsa said, awed. “That’s a fortress.”

The centerpiece of the Imperial Navy was a monstrous structure: a square, three-decked fortress that looked as if the entire siege barrier at Xiashang had come detached from the ground to slowly float down the river.

How many troops could that fortress hold? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

“How does that thing stay afloat?” Baji demanded. “It can’t have any mobility.”

“They don’t need mobility,” Rin said. “The rest of the fleet exists to guard it. They just need to get that fortress close enough to the city. Then they’ll swarm it.”

Ramsa said what they were all thinking. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Cheer up,” said Baji. “Maybe they’ll take prisoners.”

We can’t fight them. Rin’s chest constricted with sharp and suffocating dread. Their entire mission seemed so pointless now. Logs and dams might stall the Militia for a few hours, but a fleet that powerful could eventually barrel its way through anything.

“Question,” Ramsa said. He was peering through his spyglass again. “What do Tsolin’s flags look like?”

“What?”

“Have they got green snakes on them?”

“Yes—”

A terrible suspicion hit her. She seized the spyglass from him, but she already knew what she would see. The ships trailing at the rearguard bore the unmistakable coiled insignia of the Snake Province.

“What’s going on?” Baji asked.

Rin couldn’t speak.

It wasn’t just a handful of ships that belonged to Tsolin. She’d seen six by her count now. Which meant one of two things—either Tsolin had skirmished and lost early to the Imperial Navy, and his ships had been repurposed for Imperial use, or Tsolin had defected.

“I will take your silence to mean the worst,” Baji said.

Captain Dalain ordered an immediate retreat back to Arlong. The soldiers dismantled their camp in minutes. Paddling downstream, they could be back to warn Arlong within a day, but Rin didn’t know if advance warning would even make a difference. The addition of Tsolin’s ships meant the Imperial Navy had nearly doubled in size. It didn’t matter how good Arlong’s defenses were. They couldn’t possibly fight off a fleet that big.

Cannon fire from Shayang continued throughout the night, then stopped abruptly just before dawn. At sunrise they saw a series of smoke signals from Nezha’s soldiers unfurling in the distant sky.

“Shayang’s gone,” Dalain interpreted. “The Harrier’s grounded, but the survivors are falling back to Arlong.”

“Should we go to their aid?” someone asked.

Dalain paused. “No. Row faster.”

Rin pulled her oar through the muddy water, trying not to imagine the worst. Nezha might be fine. Shayang hadn’t been a suicide mission—Nezha had been instructed to hold the fort for as long as he could before escaping into the forest. And if he were seriously injured, the Murui would come to his aid. His god wouldn’t desert him. She had to believe that.

Around noon, they heard a distant round of cannon fire once more.

“That’ll be the warship,” Ramsa said. “They’re trying to blow their way through.”

“Good,” Rin said.

Sinking the warship had perhaps been Kitay’s best idea. The Imperial Fleet couldn’t simply blast it to bits—the bulk of the structure lay underwater, where cannon fire couldn’t touch it. Exploding the top layers would only make it harder to extract the sunken bottom from the Murui.

Half an hour later, the cannon fire stopped. The Militia must have caught on. Now they would have to send in divers with hooks to trawl and clear the river. That might take them two days, three at the most.

But after that, they would resume their slow but relentless journey to Arlong. And without Tsolin, there was nothing left to stop them.

“We know,” Kitay said upon Rin’s return. He’d rushed out to greet her at the harbor. He looked utterly disheveled; his hair stood up in every direction as if he’d spent the last few hours pacing and tugging at his bangs. “Found out two hours ago.”

“But why?” she cried. “And when?”

Kitay shrugged helplessly. “All I know is we’re fucked. Come on.”

She followed him at a run to the palace. Inside the main stateroom, Eriden and a handful of officers stood clustered around a map that was no longer even close to accurate, because it had simply erased Tsolin’s ships from the board.

But the Republic hadn’t just lost ships. This wasn’t a neutral setback. It would have been better if Tsolin had simply retreated, or if he had been killed. But this defection meant that the entire fleet they had relied on now augmented Daji’s forces.

Captain Eriden replaced the pieces meant to represent Tsolin’s fleet with red ones and stood back from the table. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”

No one had anything to say. The numbers differential was almost laughable. Rin imagined a glistening snake coiling its body around a small rodent, squeezing until the light dimmed from its eyes.

“That’s a lot of red,” she muttered.

“No shit,” Kitay said.

“Where’s Vaisra?” she asked.

Kitay drew her to the side and murmured into her ear so Eriden wouldn’t hear. “Alone in his office, probably hurling vases at the wall. He asked not to be disturbed.” He pointed to a scroll lying on the edge of the table. “Tsolin sent that letter this morning. That’s when we found out.”

Rin picked the scroll up and unrolled it. She already knew its contents, but she needed to read Tsolin’s words herself out of some morbid curiosity, the same way she couldn’t help taking a closer look at decomposing animal carcasses.

Tsolin wrote in a thin, lovely script. Each stroke tapered carefully to a fine point, an effortless calligraphic style that took years to master. This wasn’t a letter written in haste. This was a letter written laboriously by a man who still cared about decorum.

All across the page Rin saw characters crossed out and rewritten where water had blotted the ink. Tsolin had wept as he wrote.

Chapter 28

The Imperial Navy was due to reach the Red Cliffs in forty-eight hours. Arlong became a swarm of desperate, frantic activity as the Republican Army hastened to finish its defensive preparations in the next two days. The furnaces burned at all hours, day and night, turning out mountains of swords, shields, and javelins. The Red Cliffs became a chimney for the engines of war.

The blacksmith sent for Rin the evening of the first day.

“The ore was a marvel to work with,” he said as he handed her a sword. It was a lovely thing—a thin, straight blade with a crimson tassel fixed to the pommel. “You wouldn’t happen to have more like it, would you?”

“You’d have to sail back to the island,” she murmured, turning the blade over in her hands. “Root around the skeletons, see what you find.”

“Fair enough.” The blacksmith produced a second blade, identical to the first. “Fortunately, there was enough excess metal for a backup. In case you lose one.”

“That’s useful. Thank you.” She held the first blade out, arm straight, to test its weight. The hilt felt molded perfectly to her grasp. The blade was a tad longer than anything she’d ever used, but it was lighter than it looked. She swung it in a circle over her head.

The blacksmith backed out of her range. “I thought you’d want the extra reach.”

She tossed the hilt from hand to hand. She’d been afraid the length would feel awkward, but it only extended her reach, and the light weight more than made up for it. “Are you calling me short?”

He chuckled. “I’m saying your arms aren’t very long. How does it feel?”

She traced the tip of her blade through the air and let it pull her through the familiar movements of Seejin’s Third Form. She was surprised at how good it felt. Nezha had been right—she really was much better with a sword. She’d fought her first battles with one. She’d made her first kill with one.

Why had she been using a trident for so long? That seemed so stupid in retrospect. She’d practiced with the sword for years at Sinegard; it felt like a natural extension of her arm. Wielding one again felt like trading a ceremonial gown for a comfortable set of training clothes.

She gave a yell and hurled the sword toward the opposite wall. It stuck into the wood right where she’d aimed, perfectly angled, hilt quivering.

“How is it?” asked the blacksmith.

“It’s perfect,” she said, satisfied.

Fuck Altan, fuck his legacy, and fuck his trident. It was time she started using a weapon that would keep her alive.

The sun had gone down by the time she returned to the barracks. Rin moved hastily through the canals, arms sore from hours of lugging sandbags into empty houses.

“Rin?” A small figure emerged from the corner just before she reached the door.

She jumped, startled. Her new blades clattered to the floor.

“It’s just me.” The figure stepped into the light.

“Kesegi?” She swiped the swords off the ground. “How’d you get past the barrier?”

“I need you to come with me.” He reached out to seize her hand. “Quick.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I can’t tell you here.” He bit his lip, eyes darting nervously around the barracks. “But I’m in trouble. Will you come?”

“I . . .” Rin glanced distractedly toward the barracks. This could go terribly badly. She’d been ordered not to interact with the refugees unless she was on duty, and given the current tensions in Arlong, she would be the last to receive the benefit of the doubt. What if someone saw?

“Please,” Kesegi said. “It’s bad.”

She swallowed. What was she thinking? This was Kesegi. Kesegi was family, the very last family that she had. “Of course. Lead the way.”

Kesegi set off at a run. She followed close behind.

She assumed something had happened behind the barrier. Some brawl, some accident or skirmish between guards and refugees. Auntie Fang would be at the bottom of it; she always was. But Kesegi didn’t take her back to the camps. He led her behind the barracks, past the clanging shipyards to an empty warehouse at the far end of the harbor.

Behind the warehouse stood three dark silhouettes.

Rin halted. None of those figures could be Auntie Fang; they were all too tall.

“Kesegi, what’s going on?”

But Kesegi pulled her straight toward the warehouse.

“I brought her,” he called loudly.

Rin’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, and the strangers’ faces became clear. She groaned. Those weren’t refugees.

She turned to Kesegi. “What the hell?”

He looked away. “I had to get you here somehow.”

“You lied to me.”

He set his jaw. “Well, you wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

“Just hear us out,” said Takha. “Please don’t go. We’ll only get this one chance to speak.”

She crossed her arms. “We’re hiding from Vaisra behind warehouses now?”

“Vaisra has done enough to ruin us,” said Gurubai. “That much is obvious. The Republic has abandoned the south. This alliance must be aborted.”

She fought the impulse to roll her eyes. “And what’s your alternative?”

“Our own revolution,” he said immediately. “We revoke our support for Vaisra, defect from the Dragon Army, and return to our home provinces.”

“That’s suicide,” Rin said. “Vaisra is the only one protecting you.”

“You can’t even say that with a straight face,” Charouk said. “Protection? We’ve been duped from the beginning. It is time to stop hoping Vaisra will throw us scraps from the table. We must return home and fight the Mugenese off on our own. We should have done that from the beginning.”

“You and what army?” Rin asked coolly.

This entire conversation was moot. Vaisra had called this bluff months ago. The southern Warlords couldn’t go home. Alone, their provincial armies would be destroyed by the Federation.

“We’ll need to build an army,” Gurubai acknowledged. “It won’t be easy. But we’ll have the numbers. You’ve seen the camps. You know how many of us there are.”

“I also know that they are untrained, unarmed, and starving,” she said. “You think they can fight Federation troops? The Republic is your only chance at survival.”

“Survival?” Charouk scoffed. “We’re all going to die within the week. Vaisra’s gambled our lives on the Hesperians, and they will never come.”

Rin faltered. She didn’t have a good answer to that. She knew, just as they did, that the Hesperians were unlikely to ever find the Nikara worthy of their aid.

But until General Tarcquet declared explicitly that the Consortium had refused, the Republic still had a fighting chance. Defecting to the south was certain suicide—especially because if Rin abandoned Vaisra, then no one was left to protect her from the Gray Company. She might run from Arlong and hide. She might elude the Hesperians for a long time, if she was clever, but they would track her down eventually. They wouldn’t relent. Rin understood now that people like Petra would never let challenges to the Maker slip away so easily. They would hunt down and kill or capture every shaman in the Empire for further study. Rin might still fight them off, might even hold her own for a while—fire against airships, the Phoenix against the Maker—but that confrontation would be terrible. She didn’t know if she’d come out alive.

And if the southern Warlords defected from the Republic, then no one was left to protect them from the Militia or the Federation. That calculation was so obvious. Why couldn’t they see it?

“Give up this fool’s hope,” Gurubai urged her. “Ignore Vaisra’s nonsense. The Hesperians are staying away on purpose, just as they did during the Poppy Wars.”

“What are you talking about?” Rin demanded.

“You really think they didn’t have a single piece of information about what was going on this continent?”

“What does that matter?”

“Vaisra sent his wife to them,” Gurubai said. “Lady Saikhara spent the second and third Poppy Wars tucked safely away on a Hesperian warship. The Hesperians had full knowledge of what was happening. And they didn’t send a single sack of grain or crate of swords. Not when Sinegard burned, not when Khurdalain fell, and not when the Mugenese raped Golyn Niis. These are the allies you’re waiting for. And Vaisra knows that.”

Rin folded her arms across her chest. “Why don’t you just say what you’re suggesting?”

“Has this really never crossed your mind?” Gurubai asked. “This war has been orchestrated by Vaisra and the Hesperians to put him in a prime position to consolidate control of this country. They didn’t come during the third war because they wanted to see the Empire bleed. They won’t come now until Vaisra’s challengers are dead. Vaisra is no true democrat, nor a champion of the people. He’s an opportunist building his throne with Nikara blood.”

“You’re mad,” Rin said. “No one is crazy enough to do that.”

“You’d have to be crazy not to see it! The evidence is right in front of you. The Federation troops never made it as far inland as Arlong. Vaisra lost nothing in the war.”

“He nearly lost his son—”

“And he got him back with no trouble at all. Face it, Yin Vaisra was the only victor of the Third Poppy War. You’re too smart to believe otherwise.”

“Don’t patronize me,” Rin snapped. “And even if that’s all true, that doesn’t change anything. I already know the Hesperians are assholes. I’d still fight for the Republic.”

“You shouldn’t fight for an alliance with people who think we’re barely human,” said Charouk.

“Well, that still gives me no reason to fight for you—”

“You should fight for us because you’re one of us,” said Gurubai.

“I am not one of you.”

“Yes, you are,” Takha said. “You’re a Rooster. Just like me.”

She stared at him in disbelief.

The sheer hypocrisy. He’d disowned her easily enough at Lusan, had treated her like an animal. Now he wanted to claim they were one and the same?

“The south would rise for you,” Gurubai insisted. “Do you have any idea how much power you hold? You are the last Speerly. The entire continent knows your name. If you raised your sword, tens of thousands would follow. They’d fight for you. You’d be their goddess.”

“I’d also be a traitor to my closest friends,” she said. They were asking her to abandon Kitay. Nezha. “Don’t try to flatter me. It won’t work.”

“Your friends?” Gurubai scoffed. “Who, Yin Nezha? Chen Kitay? Northerners who would spit on your very existence? Are you so desperate to be like them that you’ll ignore everything else at stake?”

She bristled. “I don’t want to be like them.”

“Yes, you do,” he sneered. “That’s all you want, even if you don’t realize it. But you’re southern mud in the end. You can butcher the way you talk, you can turn away from the stench of the refugee camps and pretend that you don’t smell, too, but they are never going to think you’re one of them.”

That did it. Rin’s sympathy evaporated.

Did they really believe they could sway her with provincial ties? Rooster Province had never done anything for her. For the first sixteen years of her life, Tikany had tried to grind her into the dirt. She’d lost her ties to the south the moment she’d left for Sinegard.

She’d escaped the Fangs. She’d carved out a place for herself in Arlong. She was one of Vaisra’s best soldiers. She wouldn’t go back now. She couldn’t.

For her, the south had only ever meant abuse and misery. She owed it nothing. Certainly not a suicide mission. If the Warlords wanted to throw their lives away, they could do that by themselves.

She saw the way Kesegi was looking at her—stricken, disappointed—and she willed herself not to care.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m not one of you. I’m a Speerly. And I know where my loyalties lie.”

“If you stay here you’ll die for nothing,” Gurubai said. “We all will.”

“Then go back,” she sneered. “Take your troops. Go home. I won’t stop you.”

They didn’t move. Their faces—stricken, ashen—confirmed she’d called their bluff. They couldn’t run. Alone in their provinces, they didn’t have a chance. They might—might, though Rin strongly doubted they had the numbers—be able to fight off the Mugenese troops on their own. But if Arlong fell, it was only a matter of time until Daji came for them, too.

Without her support, their hands were tied. The southern Warlords were trapped.

Gurubai’s hand moved to the sword at his waist. “Will you tell Vaisra?”

Her lip curled. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Will you tell Vaisra?” he repeated.

Rin gave him an incredulous smile. Was he really going to fight her? Was he really even going to try?

She couldn’t help relishing this. For once she held all the power; for once, she held their fates in her hands and not the other way around.

She could have killed them right there and been done with it. Vaisra might have even praised her for the demonstration of loyalty.

But it was the eve of battle. The Militia was creeping to their doorstep. The refugees needed some sort of leadership if they were going to survive—certainly no one else was looking out for them. And if she murdered the Warlords now, the resulting chaos would hurt the Republic. The southern armies’ numbers weren’t great enough to win the battle, but their defection was more than enough to guarantee defeat, and that wasn’t something Rin wanted on her hands.

She loved that this was her decision—that she could disguise this cruel calculation as mercy.

“Go to sleep,” she said softly, as if speaking to children. “We’ve a battle to fight.”

She escorted Kesegi back to the refugee quarters over his protests. She took him the long way around the city, trying to keep as much distance from the barracks as possible. For ten minutes they walked in stony silence. Every time Rin looked at Kesegi he stared angrily forward, pretending he hadn’t seen her.

“You’re angry with me,” she said.

He didn’t respond.

“I can’t give them what they want. You know that.”

“No, I don’t,” he said curtly.

“Kesegi—”

“And I don’t know you anymore.”

She had to admit that was true. Kesegi had said farewell to a sister and found a soldier in her place. But she didn’t know him anymore, either. The Kesegi she’d left had been just a tiny child. This Kesegi was a tall, sullen, and angry boy who had seen too much suffering and didn’t know who to blame for it.

They resumed walking in silence. Rin was tempted to turn around and head back, but she didn’t want Kesegi caught alone on the wrong side of barrier. The night patrol had lately taken to flogging refugees who wandered out of bounds to set an example.

Finally Kesegi said, “You could have written.”

“What?”

“I kept waiting for you to write. Why didn’t you?”

Rin didn’t have a good response to that.

Why hadn’t she written? The Masters had permitted it. All of her classmates had regularly written home. She remembered watching Niang send eight separate letters to each of her siblings every week, and being amazed that anyone had so much to say about their grueling coursework.

But the thought of writing the Fangs had never even crossed her mind. Once she reached Sinegard, she’d locked her memories of Tikany tightly away in the back of her mind and willed herself to forget.

“You were so young,” she said after a pause. “I guess I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

“Bullshit,” Kesegi said. “You’re my sister. How could I not remember you?”

“I don’t know. I just . . . I thought it’d be easier if we made a clean break with each other. I mean, it’s not like I was ever coming home once I got out—”

His voice hardened. “And you didn’t ever think I wanted to get out, too?”

She felt a wave of irritation. How had this suddenly become her fault? “You could have if you wanted to. You could have studied—”

“When? When you left it was just me and the shop; and after Father started getting worse, I had to do everything around the house. And Mother isn’t kind, Rin. You knew that—I begged you to not leave me with her—but you left anyway. Off in Sinegard on your adventures—”

“They weren’t adventures,” she said coldly.

“But you were in Sinegard,” he said plaintively, with the voice of a child who had only heard stories of the former capital, who still thought it was a land of riches and marvels. “And I was stuck in Tikany, hiding from Mother every chance I got. And then the war started and all we did every single day was huddle terrified in underground shelters and hope that the Federation hadn’t come to our town yet, and if they did, then they might not kill us immediately.”

She stopped walking. “Kesegi.”

“They kept saying you were going to come for us.” His voice cracked. “That a fire goddess from the Rooster Province had destroyed the longbow island, and that you were going to come back home to liberate us, too.”

“I wanted to. I would have—”

“No, you wouldn’t have. Where were you all those months? Launching a coup in the Autumn Palace. Starting another war.” Venom crept into his voice. “You don’t get to say you don’t want any part of this. This is your fault. Without you we wouldn’t be here.”

She could have replied. She could have argued with him, said it wasn’t her fault but the Empress’s, told him there were political forces at play that were much larger than any of them.

But she simply couldn’t form the sentences. None of them felt genuine.

The simple truth was that she’d abandoned her foster brother and hadn’t thought about him for years. He’d barely crossed her mind until they’d met in the camp. And she would have forgotten him again if he weren’t standing right here before her.

She didn’t know how to fix that. She didn’t know if fixing it was even possible.

They turned the corner toward a line of single-story stone buildings. They had made it to the Hesperian quarters. A few more minutes and they’d be back at the refugee district. Rin was glad of it. She wanted to get away from Kesegi. She couldn’t bear the full brunt of his resentment.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a blue uniform disappear around the back of the closest building. She would have dismissed it, but then she heard the sounds—a rhythmic shuffle, a muffled moan.

She’d heard those noises before. She’d delivered parcels of opium to Tikany’s whorehouses plenty of times. She just couldn’t imagine how this could be the time or the place.

Kesegi heard it, too. He stopped walking.

“Run to the barrier,” she hissed.

“But—”

“I’m not asking.” She pushed him. “Go.”

He obeyed.

She broke into a run. She saw two half-naked bodies behind the building. Hesperian soldier, Nikara girl. The girl whimpered, trying to scream, but the soldier covered her mouth with one hand, grasped her hair with the other, and jerked her head back to expose her neck.

For a moment all Rin could do was stand and watch.

She’d never seen a rape before.

She’d heard about them. She’d heard too many stories from the women who had survived Golyn Niis, had imagined it vividly so many times that they invaded her nightmares and made her wake up shaking in rage and fear.

And the only thing she could think about was whether this was how Venka had suffered at Golyn Niis. Whether Venka’s face had contorted like this girl’s was, mouth open in a silent scream. Whether the Mugenese soldiers who had pinned her down had been laughing like the Hesperian soldier was now.

Bile rose up in Rin’s throat. “Get off of her.”

The soldier couldn’t, or refused to, understand her. He just kept going, panting like an animal.

Rin couldn’t believe those were noises of pleasure.

She threw herself into the soldier’s side. He twisted around and flung an awkward fist toward her face, but she ducked easily, grabbed his wrists, kicked in his kneecaps, and wrestled him into submission until he was lying on the ground, pinned down between her knees.

She reached down, feeling for his testicles. When she found them, she squeezed. “Is this what you wanted?”

He writhed frantically beneath her. She squeezed harder. He made a gurgling noise.

She dug her fingernails into soft flesh. “No?”

He screeched in pain.

She called the flame. His screams grew louder, but she grabbed his discarded shirt off the ground, shoved it into his mouth, and didn’t let him go until his member had turned to charcoal in her hands.

When he finally stopped moving, she climbed off his chest, sat down next to the trembling girl, and put her arm around her shoulders. Neither of them spoke. They just huddled together, watching the soldier with cold satisfaction as he twitched, mewling feebly, on the dirt.

“Is he going to die?” the girl asked.

The soldier’s whimpers were getting softer. Rin had burned half of his lower body. Some of the wounds were cauterized. It might take a long while for the blood loss to kill him. She hoped he was conscious for it “Yes. If no one takes him to a physician.”

The girl didn’t sound scared, just idly curious. “Will you take him?”

“He’s not in my platoon,” Rin said. “Not my problem.”

More minutes passed. Blood pooled slowly beneath the soldier’s waist. Rin sat with the girl in silence, heart hammering, mind racing through the consequences.

The Hesperians would know the killer was her. The burn marks would give her away—only the Speerly killed with fire.

Tarcquet’s retaliation would be terrible. He might not settle for Rin’s death—if he found out what had just happened, he might abandon the Republic altogether.

Rin had to get rid of that body.

Eventually the soldier’s chest stopped rising and falling. Rin shuffled forward on her knees and felt his neck for a pulse. Nothing. She stood up and extended a hand to the girl. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Can you walk?”

“Don’t worry about me.” The girl sounded remarkably calm. She’d stopped trembling. She bent forward to wipe the blood and fluids off of her legs with the hem of her torn dress. “It’s happened before.”

Chapter 29

“Tiger’s fucking tits,” Kitay said.

“I know,” Rin said.

“And you just dumped him in the harbor?”

“Weighed him down with rocks first. I picked a pretty deep stretch by the docks; no one’s going to find him—”

“Holy shit.” Kitay ran a hand through his bangs and yanked as he paced around the library. “You’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”

“It might be all right.” Rin tried to convince herself as she said it, but she still felt terribly light-headed. She’d come to Kitay because he was the one person she trusted to figure out what to do, but now both of them were panicking. “Look, no one saw me—”

“How do you know?” he asked shrilly. “No one caught you dragging a Hesperian corpse halfway across the city? No one was looking out their windows? You’d be willing to stake your life on the fact that not a single person saw?”

“I didn’t drag it, I dumped it in a sampan and rowed out to shore.”

“Oh, that solves everything—”

“Kitay. Listen.” She took a deep breath, trying to get her mind to slow down enough to work properly. “It’s been over an hour. If they’d seen, don’t you think I’d be dead by now?”

“Tarcquet could be biding his time,” Kitay said. “Waiting until morning to set an army on you.”

“He wouldn’t wait.” Rin was certain of that. The Hesperians didn’t fuck around. If Tarcquet found out that a shaman, of all people, had killed one of his men, then her body would already be riddled with bullet holes. He wouldn’t have given her the chance to escape.

The more time that passed, the more she hoped—believed—that Tarcquet didn’t know. Vaisra didn’t know. They might never know. Rin wasn’t telling anyone, and the refugee girl would certainly keep her mouth shut.

Kitay rubbed his palms against his temples. “When did this happen?”

“I told you. Just over an hour ago, when I was walking Kesegi back to the barriers from the old warehouses.”

“What on earth were you doing by the warehouses?”

“Southern Warlords ambushed me. Wanted to talk. They’re thinking of defecting back to their home provinces to deal with the Federation armies and they wanted me to come along, and they had this insane theory about the Hesperians, and—”

“What did you say?”

“Of course I refused. That’d be a death sentence.”

“Well, at least you didn’t commit treason.” Kitay managed a shaky laugh. “And then, what, you just wandered back to the barracks and murdered a Hesperian on the way?”

“You didn’t see what he was doing.”

He threw his hands up. “Does it fucking matter?”

“He was on a girl,” she said angrily. “He had her by her neck and he wouldn’t stop—”

“So you decided to scorch any possible chance we have of surviving the Red Cliffs?”

“The Hesperians aren’t fucking coming, Kitay.”

“They’re still here, aren’t they? If they really didn’t care they’d have packed up and gone. Did that ever cross your mind? When your back is to the wall there’s a massive difference between zero and one percent but no, you’d rather guarantee it’s zero—”

Her cheeks burned. “I didn’t think—”

“Of course not,” Kitay snapped. His knuckles had gone white. “You never think, do you? You always just pick whatever fights you want, whenever you want, and fuck the consequences—”

Rin raised her voice. “Would you rather I had let him rape her?”

Kitay fell silent.

“No,” he said after a long pause. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—I didn’t mean that.”

“I didn’t think so.”

He pressed his face into his hands. “Gods, I’m just scared. And you didn’t have to kill him, you could have—”

“I know,” she said. She felt drained. All the adrenaline had gone out of her at once, and now she only wanted to collapse. “I know, I wasn’t thinking, I saw it happening and I just—”

“It’s my life on the line now, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.” He sighed. “I don’t think—You didn’t have—Fine. It’s fine. I understand.”

“I really don’t think anyone saw.”

“Fine.” He took a deep breath. “Are you going to go back to the barracks?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

They sat together on the floor for a long while in silence. He rested his head against her shoulder. She clutched at his hands. Neither of them could sleep. They were both watching the library windows, waiting to see Hesperian troops lined up at the door, to hear the fall of heavy boots in the hallway. Rin couldn’t help but feel a twinge of relief at every additional moment that passed.

It meant the Hesperians weren’t coming. It meant that, for now, she was safe.

But what happened when the Hesperians woke up in the morning and discovered a missing soldier? What happened when they started to search? They wouldn’t find him for days at least, she’d made sure of that, but the sheer fact that a soldier was missing might derail Hesperian negotiations regardless.

If the fallout didn’t land on Rin, then would they punish the entire Republic?

The southern Warlords’ words rose unbidden to her mind. You shouldn’t fight for an alliance with people who think we’re barely human.

“Tell me what the southern Warlords said,” Kitay said, startling her.

She sat up. “About what?”

“The Hesperians. What’s this theory?”

“Just the usual. They don’t trust them, they think they’ll bring a second coming of the occupation, and . . . Oh.” She frowned. “They also think that the Hesperians let the Mugenese invade on purpose. They think Vaisra knew the Federation was going to launch an invasion, and that the Hesperians knew, too, but neither of them acted because they wanted the empire weakened and ripe for the taking.”

Kitay blinked. “Really.”

“I know. That’s crazy.”

“No,” he said. “That makes sense.”

“You can’t be serious. That would be awful.”

“But it tracks with everything we know, doesn’t it?” Kitay gave a short laugh that bordered on manic. “I’d been thinking it from the start, actually, but I thought, ‘Nah, no one could be that insane. Or evil.’ But think about the Republic’s ships. Think about how long it took to build that entire fleet. Vaisra’s been planning his civil war for years—that’s obvious. But he never launched an attack until now. Why?”

“Maybe he wasn’t ready,” she said.

“Or maybe he needed the country weakened if he was ever going to wage a successful war against the Vipress. Needed us shattered so he could pick up the pieces.”

“He needed someone else to attack first,” she said slowly.

He nodded. “And the Federation was the best pawn for that task. I bet he laughed when they marched on Sinegard. I bet he’d been wanting that war for years.”

Rin wanted to say no, say of course Vaisra wouldn’t let innocent people die, but she knew that wasn’t true. She knew Vaisra was more than happy to wipe entire provinces off his map as long as it meant he kept his Republic.

Gods, as long as he kept his city.

Which meant Hesperian passivity during the Second Poppy War had not been some political mistake, or a delay in communications, but entirely deliberate. Which meant that Vaisra had known the Federation would kill hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and he’d let it happen.

When she thought about it now, it should have been so easy to realize that they’d been manipulated. They had been trapped in a geopolitical chess game that had been years, perhaps decades in the making.

And she hadn’t simply been fooled. She’d been deliberately blind to the clues around her, and she’d sat back and let everything happen.

She’d been stupidly, passively asleep for such a long time. She’d spent so much effort fighting in the trenches for Vaisra’s Republic that she’d barely considered what might happen after.

If they won, what price would the Hesperians demand for their aid? Would Petra’s experiments escalate once Vaisra no longer needed Rin on the battlefield?

It seemed so foolish now to imagine that as long as Vaisra vouched for her, she was safe from those arquebuses. Months ago she’d been lost and afraid, desperate to find an anchor, and that had primed her to trust him. But she’d also seen, over and over again by now, how easily Vaisra manipulated those around him like shadow puppets.

How quickly would he trade her away?

“Oh, Kitay.” She exhaled slowly. She suddenly felt very, very afraid. “What are we going to do?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

She thought through the possibilities out loud. “We have no good options. If we defect to the south, we’re dead.”

“And if you leave Arlong, then the Hesperians will hunt you down.”

“But if we stay loyal to the Republic, we’re just building a cage for ourselves.”

“And none of that even matters if we don’t survive the day after tomorrow.”

They stared at each other. Rin heard a heartbeat echoing against the silence; hers or Kitay’s, she didn’t know.

“Tiger’s tits,” she said. “We’re going to die. None of this even matters because Feylen is going to wreck us under the Red Cliffs and we’re all going to die.”

“Not necessarily.” Kitay stood up abruptly. “Come with me.”

She blinked up at him. “What?”

“You’ll see. I’ve been meaning to show you something ever since you got back.” He clasped her hands and pulled her to her feet. “I just haven’t had the chance. Follow me.”

Somehow they ended up in the armory. Rin wasn’t entirely sure they were supposed to be there, because Kitay had kicked through the lock to get in, but at this point she didn’t care.

He led her to a back storage room, pulled a bundle wrapped in a canvas sheet out from a corner, and dropped it on the table. “This is for you.”

She peeled the sheet back. “A pile of leather. Thank you. I love it.”

“Just unfold it,” he said.

She held up the contraption, a confusing combination of riding straps, iron rods, and long sheets of leather. She peered at it from all angles but couldn’t make sense of what she was looking at. “What is this?”

“You know how none of us have been able to defeat Feylen?” Kitay asked.

“Because he keeps flinging us into cliff walls? Yes, Kitay, I remember that.”

“Listen.” He had a manic glint in his eye. “What if he couldn’t? What if you could fight him on his turf? Well, turf doesn’t really apply, but you know what I mean.”

She stared at him, uncomprehending. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’ve got far more control of that fire now, yes?” he asked. “Could probably call it without thinking?”

“Sure,” she said slowly. The fire felt like a natural extension of her now; she could extend it farther, burn hotter. But she was still confused. “You already know that. What does that have to do with anything?”

“How hot can you make it?” he pressed.

She frowned. “Isn’t all fire the same temperature?”

“Actually, no. You get different sorts of flames on different surfaces. There’s a difference between a candle flame and a blacksmith’s fire, for instance. I’m not an expert, but—”

“Why does that matter?” she interrupted. “I couldn’t get close enough to burn Feylen anyway, and I don’t have that kind of reach.”

He shook his head impatiently. “But what if you could?”

“We’re not all geniuses like you,” she snapped. “Just tell me what you’re going on about.”

He grinned. “Remember the signal lanterns before Boyang? The ones that would have exploded?”

“Of course, but—”

“Do you want to know how they work?”

She sighed and resigned herself to giving him free rein to talk as much as he wanted. “No, but I think you’re about to tell me.”

“Hot air rises,” he said gleefully. “Cool air sinks. The balloons trap the hot air in a small space and it lifts up the entire apparatus.”

She considered this for a moment. She was starting to understand where he was going, but she wasn’t sure if she liked the conclusion. “I weigh a lot more than a paper balloon.”

“It’s about the ratio,” Kitay insisted. “For instance, heavier birds need larger wings.”

“But even the largest bird is tiny compared to—”

“So you’d need even bigger wings. And you’ll need a hotter fire. But you have the strongest heat source in existence, so all we had to do was get you an apparatus to turn that into flying power. The wings, if you will.”

She blinked at him, and then looked down at the pile of leather and metal. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“Not in the slightest,” he said happily. “Do you want to try it on?”

She gingerly unfolded the apparatus. It was surprisingly light, the leather smooth under her hands. She wondered where Kitay had found the material. She held it up, marveling at the neat stitching.

“You did this all in a week?”

“Yeah. I’d been thinking about it for a while, though. Ramsa came up with the idea.”

“Ramsa did?”

He nodded. “Half of munitions is aerodynamics. He’s spent a long time figuring out how to make things fly right.”

Rin was somewhat wary of gambling her life on the designs of a boy whose greatest passion in life was watching things explode, but she supposed that at this point she had very few options.

With Kitay’s help, she fastened the strap over her chest as tightly as she could manage. The iron rods shifted uncomfortably against her back, but otherwise the wings were surprisingly flexible, greased to rotate smoothly with every movement of her arms.

“You know, Altan used to give himself wings,” she said.

“He did? Could he fly?”

“I doubt it. They were made of fire. I think he just did it to look pretty.”

“Well, I think I can give you some functional ones.” He tightened the straps around her shoulders. “Everything fit okay?”

She lifted her arms, feeling somewhat like an overgrown bat. The leather wings looked pretty, but they seemed far too thin to sustain her body weight. The interlacing rods that kept the apparatus together also looked so terribly fragile she was sure she could snap them in half over her knee. “You sure that’s going to be enough to keep me up?”

“I didn’t want to add too much to your weight. The rods are as slender as they’ll go. Any heavier and you’ll sink.”

“They could also break and send me plummeting to my death,” she pointed out.

“Have a little faith in me.”

“It’s gonna hurt you if I crash.”

“I know.” He sounded far too giddy for her comfort. “Shall we go try this out?”

They found an open clearing up on the cliffs, well out of range of anything that was remotely flammable. Kitay had wanted to test his invention by pushing Rin off a ledge, but reluctantly agreed to let her try levitating over level ground first.

The sun was just beginning to rise over the Red Cliffs, and Rin would have found it exceptionally lovely if she weren’t so terrified that she could hear her heartbeat slamming in her eardrums.

She stepped out into the middle of the clearing, arms raised stiffly over her sides. She felt both exceedingly scared and stupid.

“Well, go on.” Kitay backed up several paces. “Give it a try.”

She gave the wings an awkward flap. “So I just . . . light up?”

“I think so. Try to keep it localized to your arms. You want the heat trapped in the air pockets under the wings, not dispersed in the air.”

“All right.” She willed the flame to dance up her palms and into her neck and shoulders. Her upper body felt deliciously warm, but almost immediately her wings began to smoke and sizzle.

“Kitay?” she called, alarmed.

“That’s just the binding agent,” said Kitay. “It’ll be fine, it’ll just burn off—”

Her voice rose several pitches. “It’s fine if the binding agent burns off?”

“That’s just the excess substance. The rest should hold—I think.” He didn’t sound convincing in the least. “I mean, we tested the solvent at the forge, so in theory . . .”

“Right,” she said slowly. Her knees were shaking. Her head felt terribly light. “Why do I let you do this?”

“Because if you die, I die,” he said. “Can you make those flames a little larger?”

She closed her eyes. Her leather wings lifted at her sides, expanding from the hot air.

Then she felt it—a heavy pressure yanking on her upper body, like a giant had reached down and jerked her up by the arms.

“Shit,” she breathed. She looked down. Her feet had risen off the ground. “Shit. Shit!”

“Go higher!” Kitay called.

Great Tortoise. She was rising higher, without even trying—no, she was practically shooting upward. She kicked her legs, wobbling in the air. She had no lateral directional control, and she couldn’t figure out how to slow her ascent, but holy gods, she was flying.

Kitay shouted something at her, but she couldn’t hear him over the rush of the flames surrounding her.

“What?” she yelled back.

Kitay flapped his arms and ran in a zig-zag motion.

Did he want her to fly sideways? She puzzled over the mechanics of it. She could decrease the heat on one side. As soon as she tried it she nearly flipped over and ended up hanging awkwardly in midair with her hip level with her head. She hastily righted herself.

She couldn’t drift laterally, then. But how did birds change direction? She tried to remember. They didn’t move straight to one side, they tilted their wings. They didn’t drift, they swooped.

She beat her wings down several times and rose several feet into the air. Then she adjusted the curve of her arms so that the wings beat to the side, not downward, and tried again.

Immediately she careened to the left. The swift change in direction was terribly disorienting. Her stomach heaved; her flames flickered madly. For a moment she lost sight of the ground, and didn’t right herself until she was mere feet away from the dirt.

She jerked herself out of the dive, gasping. This was going to take some practice.

She flapped her wings to regain altitude. She shot up faster than she’d anticipated. She flapped them again. Then again.

How far could she go? Kitay was still shouting something from the ground, but she was too far up to understand him. She rose higher and higher with each steady beat of her wings. The ground became dizzyingly far away, but she had eyes only for the great expanse of sky above her.

How far could the fire take her?

She couldn’t help but laugh as she soared, a high, desperate, frantic laugh of relief. She rose so high that she could no longer make out Kitay’s face, until Arlong turned into little splotches of green and blue, until she had even passed through a layer of clouds.

Then she stopped.

She hung alone in an expanse of blue.

A calm washed over her then, a calm that she couldn’t ever remember feeling. There was nothing up here she could kill. Nothing she could hurt. She had her mind to herself. She had the world to herself.

She floated in the air, suspended at the point between heaven and earth.

The Red Cliffs looked so beautiful from up here.

Her mind wandered to the last minister of the Red Emperor, who had etched those ancient words into the cliffside. He’d written a scream to the heavens, an open plea to future generations, a message for the Hesperians who would one day sail into that harbor and bomb it.

What had he wanted to tell them?

Nothing lasts.

Nezha and Kitay had both been wrong. There was another way to interpret those carvings. If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed. The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.

Nothing lasts.

This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.

She, the Last Speerly, called the greatest power of all.

And the Hesperians, no matter how hard they tried, could never take this from her.

Landing was the tricky part.

Her first instinct was to simply extinguish the fire. But then she dropped like a rock, plummeting at a breakneck speed for several heart-stopping moments until she managed to get her wings spread and a fire lit beneath them. That made her come to a lurching halt so rough she was shocked the wings didn’t rip right off her arms.

She drifted back up, heart hammering.

She’d have to glide down somehow. She thought through the movements in her head—she’d decrease the heat, little by little, until she was close enough to the ground.

It almost worked. She hadn’t counted on how fast her velocity would increase. Suddenly she was thirty feet from the ground and hurtling far too quickly toward Kitay.

“Move!” she shouted, but he didn’t budge. He just reached his hands out, grabbed her wrists, and swung her about until they collapsed in a tangled, laughing heap of leather and silk and limbs.

“I was right,” he said. “I’m always right.”

“Well, don’t be so smug about it.”

He groaned happily and rubbed his arms. “So how was it?”

“Incredible.” She flung her arms around him and hugged him tight. “You genius. You wonderful, wonderful genius.”

Kitay leaned back, arms raised. “Careful, you’ll break the wings.”

She twisted her head around to check them and marveled at the thin, careful craftsmanship that held the apparatus together. “I can’t believe you did this in a week.”

“I had some time on my hands,” said Kitay. “Wasn’t out there trying to stop a fleet or anything.”

“I love you,” she said.

Kitay gave her a tired smile. “I know.”

“We still don’t know what we’re going to do after—” she started, but he shook his head.

“I know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about the Hesperians. For once, I haven’t the faintest idea, and I hate it. But we’ll figure our way out of it. We’ve figured our way out of this, we’re going to survive the Red Cliffs, we’re going to survive Vaisra, and we’ll keep surviving until we’re safe and the world can’t touch us. One enemy at a time. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” she said.

Once her legs had stopped shaking, he helped her strip out of her gear. Then they climbed back down the cliff, still light-headed and giddy with victory, laughing so hard that their sides hurt.

Because yes, the fleet was still coming, and yes, they might very well die the next morning, but in that instant it didn’t matter, because fuck it, she could fly.

“You’ll need some air support,” Kitay said after a while.

“Air support?”

“You’ll be a very conspicuous, very obvious target. You’ll want someone fending off the people shooting at you. They throw rocks, we throw them back. A line of archers would be nice.”

Rin snorted. Arlong’s defenses were spread thin as things were. “They’re not going to give us a line of archers.”

“Yeah, probably not.” He shot her a sideways look, considering. “Should we try Eriden before the last council starts? See if he’ll lend us at least one of his men?”

“No,” she said. “I have a better idea.”

Rin found Venka the first place she looked—training in the archery yard, furiously decimating straw targets. Rin stood in the corner for a moment, watching her from behind a post.

Venka hadn’t fully learned yet to compensate for her stiff arms, which seemed to spasm uncontrollably and to bend only with effort. They must have hurt badly—her face tightened every time she reached for her quiver.

She hadn’t taken her left arm brace off. She’d just locked her upper wrist into place instead. She was shooting while overcorrecting for a hyperextended arm, Rin realized. But for the amount of control she had left, Venka had a stunning degree of accuracy. Her speed was also absurd. By Rin’s count she could shoot twenty arrows a minute, maybe more.

Venka was no Qara, but she’d do.

“Nice go,” Rin called at the end of a fifteen-arrow streak.

Venka doubled over, panting. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

In response, Rin crossed the archery range and handed Venka a silk-wrapped parcel.

Venka glared at it suspiciously, then placed her bow on the ground so she could accept. “What’s this?”

“A present.”

Venka’s lip curled. “Is it someone’s head?”

Rin laughed. “Just open it.”

Venka unwrapped the silk. After a moment she looked up, eyes hard, flinty and suspicious. “Where did you get this?”

“Picked it up in the north,” Rin said. “It’s Ketreyid-made. You like it?”

Before they’d returned to Arlong, she and Kitay had bundled all the weapons they could scavenge onto the raft. Most of them had been short knives and hunting bows that neither of them could use.

“This is a silkworm thorn bow,” Venka declared. “Do you know how rare this is?”

Rin wouldn’t have known silkworm thorn from driftwood, but she took that as a good sign. “I thought you’d like it better than those bamboo creations.”

Venka turned the bow over in her hands, then held it up to her eyes to examine the bowstring. Her arms shook. She glanced down at her trembling elbows, openly disgusted. “You don’t want to waste a silkworm thorn bow on me.”

“It’s not a waste. I saw you shoot.”

“That?” Venka snorted. “That’s nowhere close to before.”

“The bow will help. Silkworm thorn’s lighter, I think. But we can also get you a crossbow, if it’ll help with distance.”

Venka squinted at her. “What exactly are you saying?”

“I need air support.”

“Air . . . ?”

“Kitay’s built a contraption to help me fly,” Rin said bluntly.

“Oh, gods.” Venka laughed. “Of course he has.”

“He’s Chen Kitay.”

“Indeed he is. Does it work?”

“Shockingly, yes. But I need backup. I need someone with very good aim.”

She was absolutely sure Venka would say yes. She could read longing all over Venka’s face. She was looking at the bow the way some might a lover.

“They won’t let me fight,” she said finally. “Not even from the parapets.”

“So fight for me,” Rin said. “The Cike’s not in the army and the Republic can’t tell me who I can recruit. And we’re down a few men.”

“I heard.” A smile cracked across Venka’s face. Rin hadn’t seen her look so genuinely happy in a long, long time. Venka held the bow tight to her chest, caressing the carved grip. “Well, then. I’m at your service, Commander.”

Chapter 30

At dawn, Arlong’s civilians began clearing out of the city. The evacuation proceeded with impressive efficiency. The civilians had been packed and prepared for this for weeks. All families were ready to go with two bags each of clothing, medical supplies, and several days’ worth of food.

By midafternoon the city center had been hollowed out. Arlong became a shell of a city. The Republican Army quickly transformed the larger residences into defense bases with sandbags and hidden explosives.

Soldiers accompanied the civilians to the base of the cliffs, where they began a long, winding climb up to the caves inside the rock face. The pass was narrow and treacherous, and some heights could not be scaled except by using several stringy rope ladders embedded into the rock with nails.

“That’s a rough climb,” Rin said, looking doubtfully up the rock wall. The ladders were so narrow the evacuees would have to go up one by one, with no one to aid them. “Can everyone make it?”

“They’ll get over it.” Venka walked up behind her with two small, sniffling children in tow, a brother and sister who’d been separated from their parents in the crowd. “Our people have been using those hills as hideouts for years. We hid there during the Era of Warring States. We hid there when the Federation came. We’ll survive this, too.” She hoisted the girl up onto her hip and jerked her brother along. “Come on, hurry up.”

Rin glanced backward over her shoulder at the masses of people moving below.

Maybe the caves would keep the Dragons safe. But the southern refugees had been ordered to occupy the valley lowlands, and that was just open space.

The official word was that the caves were too small to accommodate everyone, and so the refugees would have to make do. But the valley provided no shelter at all. Exposed to the elements, with no natural or military barriers to hide behind, the refugees would have no protection from the weather or the Militia—and certainly not from Feylen.

But where else were they going to go? They wouldn’t have fled to Arlong if home were safe.

“I’m hungry,” complained the boy.

“I don’t care.” Venka tugged at his skinny wrist. “Stop crying. Walk faster.”

“This battle will take place primarily in three stages,” said Vaisra. “One, we will fend them off at the outer channel between the Red Cliffs. Two, we win the ground battle in the city. Three, they will try to retreat along the coast, and we will pick them off. We’ll get to that stage if we are miraculously lucky.”

His officers nodded grimly.

Rin glanced around the council room, amazed by how many faces she’d never seen before. A good half of the officers were newly promoted. They wore the stripes of senior leadership, but they looked five years older than Rin at most.

So many young, scared faces. The military command had been killed off at the top. This was rapidly becoming a war fought by the children.

“Can that warship even get through the cliffs?” asked Captain Dalain.

“Daji’s familiar with the channel,” said Admiral Kulau, the young navy officer who had replaced Molkoi. He sounded as if he were deepening his voice to seem older. “She’ll have designed it so it can.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Eriden said. “If their warship even starts depositing troops outside the channel, then we’re in trouble.” He leaned over the map. “That’s why we have archers stationed here and here—”

“Why aren’t there any back-end fortifications?” Kitay interrupted.

“The invasion will come from the channel,” Vaisra said. “Not the valley.”

“But the channel’s the obvious avenue of attack,” Kitay said. “They know you’re expecting them. If I’m Daji, and I have a numerical advantage that large, then I split my troops and send a third column round the back while everyone’s distracted.”

“No one’s ever attacked Arlong from land routes,” Kulau said. “They’d be eviscerated on the mountaintops.”

“Not if they’re unguarded,” Kitay insisted.

Kulau cleared his throat. “They’re not unguarded. They’ve got fifty men guarding them.”

“Fifty men can’t beat a column!”

“Chang En’s not going to send a full column of his crack troops round the back. You have a fleet that big, you man it.”

No one spoke the more obvious answer, which was that the Republican Army simply didn’t have the troops for better fortifications. And if any part of Arlong warranted a defense, then it was the palace and military barracks. Not the valley lowlands. Not the southerners.

“Of course, Chang En will want this to turn into a land battle,” Vaisra continued smoothly. “There they have the sheer advantage in numbers. But this fight remains winnable as long as we keep it amphibious.”

The channel had already been blocked up with so many iron chains and underwater obstacles that it almost functioned as a dam. The Republic was banking on mobility over numbers—their armed skimmers could dart between the Imperial ships, breaking up formations while the munitions crews shot bombs down from their cliffside stations.

“What’s the makeup of their fleet?” asked a young officer Rin didn’t recognize. He sounded terribly nervous. “Which ships do we target?”

“Aim for the warships, not the skimmers,” Kulau said. “Anything that has a trebuchet should be a target. But the bulk of their troops are on that floating fortress. If you can sink any ships, sink that first.”

“You want us in a fan formation at the cliffs?” Captain Dalain asked.

“No,” said Kulau. “If we spread out then they’ll just obliterate us. Stay in a narrow line and plug up the channel.”

“We’re not worried about their shaman?” Dalain asked. “If we clump our ships together, he’s just going to blast our fleet against the cliffs.”

“I’ll take care of Feylen,” Rin said.

The generals blinked at her. She looked around the table, eyes wide open. “What?”

“Last time you ended up stranded for a month,” said Captain Eriden. “We’ll be fine against Feylen—we have fifteen squadrons of archers positioned across the cliff walls.”

“And he’ll just fling them off the cliffs,” said Rin. “They won’t be more than an annoyance.”

“And you won’t be?”

“No,” she said. “This time, I can fly.”

The generals looked as if they were unsure whether to laugh. Only General Tarcquet, sitting silently as usual in the back of the room, looked mildly curious.

“I built her a, uh, flying kite sort of contraption,” Kitay explained. He made some gestures with his hands that clarified nothing. “It’s made up of some leather wings with rods, and she can generate flames hot enough to levitate herself using the same principle that lifts a lantern—”

“Have you tried it?” Vaisra asked. “Does it work?”

Rin and Kitay nodded.

“Wonderful,” Gurubai said drily. “So, assuming she’s not mad, that’s the Wind God taken care of. There’s still the rest of the Imperial Navy to deal with, and we’re still outnumbered three to one.”

The officers shifted uneasily.

It was easier for Rin if she compartmentalized the battle to simply dealing with Feylen. She didn’t want to think about the rest of the fleet, because the truth was there was no easy way to deal with the fleet. They were outnumbered, they were on the defensive, and they were trapped.

Kitay sounded far calmer than she felt. “There’s a number of different tactics we can try. We can try to break them up and storm their warships. The important thing is that we don’t let that fortress get to the shore, because then it turns into a land battle for the city.”

“And Jun’s forces won’t be so formidable,” Kulau added. “They’ll be exhausted. The Militia isn’t used to naval battles, they’ll be seasick and dizzy. Meanwhile our army was designed for riverine warfare, and our soldiers are fresh. We’ll just outfight them.”

The room looked unconvinced.

“Here’s an option we haven’t considered,” General Hu said after a short pause. “We could surrender.”

Rin found it disheartening that this wasn’t immediately met with general outcry.

Several seconds passed in silence. Rin glanced sideways at Vaisra but couldn’t read his expression.

“That wouldn’t be a terrible idea,” Vaisra said finally.

“It wouldn’t.” General Hu glanced desperately around the room. “Look, I’m not the only one thinking it. They’re going to slaughter us. No one’s come back from a numbers disadvantage like this in history. If we cut our losses now, we still come out of this alive.”

“As always,” Vaisra said slowly, “you are the voice of reason, General Hu.”

General Hu looked profoundly relieved, but his smile faded as Vaisra continued to speak. “Why not surrender? The consequences couldn’t possibly be so terrible. All that would happen is that every single person in this room would be flayed alive, Arlong destroyed, and any hope of democratic reform would be quashed in the Empire for at least the next few centuries. Is that what you want?”

General Hu had turned pale. “No.”

“I have no place in my army for cowards,” Vaisra said softly. He nodded to the soldier standing beside Hu. “You there. You’re his aide?”

The boy nodded, eyes huge. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. “Yes, sir.”

“Ever been in battle?” Vaisra asked.

The boy’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Yes, sir. I was at Boyang.”

“Excellent. And what is your name?”

“Zhou Anlan, sir.”

“Congratulations, General Zhou. You’ve been promoted.” Vaisra turned to General Hu. “You can leave.”

General Hu forced his way through the crowded bodies and left without another word. The door swung shut behind him.

“He’s going to defect,” said Vaisra. “Eriden, see that he’s stopped.”

“Permanently?” Eriden asked.

Vaisra considered that briefly. “Only if he struggles.”

After the council had been dismissed, Vaisra motioned for Rin to stay behind. She exchanged a panicked glance with Kitay as he filtered out with the others. Once the room had emptied, Vaisra closed the door behind him.

“When this is over I want you to go pay a visit to our friend Moag,” he said quietly.

She was so relieved that he hadn’t mentioned the Hesperians that for a moment all she did was blink at him, uncomprehending. “The Pirate Queen?”

“Make it quick,” Vaisra said. “Leave the corpse and bring back the head.”

“Wait. You want me to kill her?”

“Was I not sufficiently clear?”

“But she’s your biggest naval ally—”

“The Hesperians are our biggest naval ally,” Vaisra said. “Do you see Moag’s ships in the bay?”

“I don’t see any Hesperian ships in the bay,” Rin pointed out.

“They will come. Give them time. But Moag’s going to be nothing but trouble once this war’s over. She’s operated extralegally for too long, and she couldn’t get used to a naval authority that isn’t her own. Smuggling’s in her blood.”

“So let her smuggle,” Rin said. “Keep her happy. What’s the problem with that?”

“There’s no way to keep her happy. Ankhiluun exists because of the tariffs. Once we have free trade with the Hesperians, that makes the entire premise of Ankhiluun irrelevant. All she’ll have left is opium smuggling, and I don’t intend to be half as lenient toward opium as Daji is. There’s a war coming once Moag realizes all her income streams are drying up. I’d rather nip it in the bud.”

“And this request has nothing to do with the fact that she hasn’t sent ships?” Rin asked.

Vaisra smiled. “An ally’s only useful if they do as they’re told. Moag’s proven herself unreliable.”

“So you want me to commit preemptive murder.”

“Let’s not be as dramatic as that.” He waved a hand. “We’ll call it insurance.”

“I think the wall’s ready,” Kitay said, rubbing his eyes. He looked exhausted. “I wanted to triple-check the fuses, but there wasn’t time.”

They stood at the edge of the cliffs, watching the sun set between the two sides of the channel like a ball falling down a ravine. Dark water shimmered below, reflecting crimson rock and a burnt-orange sun. It looked like a flood of blood gushing out from a freshly sliced artery.

When Rin squinted at the opposite cliff, she could just see the lines where fuses had been strung together and tucked with nails into the rock, like a sprawling, ugly patchwork of protruding veins.

“What are they chances they don’t go off?” she asked.

Kitay yawned. “They’ll probably go off.”

“Probably,” she repeated.

“You’re just going to have to trust Ramsa and I did our jobs. If they don’t go off, we’re all dead.”

“Fair enough.” Rin hugged her arms across her chest. She felt tiny standing over the massive precipice. Empires had been won and lost under these cliffs. They were on the brink of losing another one.

“Do you think we can win tomorrow?” she asked quietly. “I mean, is there even the slightest chance?”

“I’ve done the math seven different ways,” Kitay said. “Compiled all the intelligence we have and compared the probabilities and everything.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know.” His fists clenched and unclenched, and Rin could tell he was resisting the urge to start tugging at his hair. “That’s the frustrating part. You know the one thing that all the great strategists agree upon? It actually doesn’t matter what numbers you have. It doesn’t matter how good your models are, or how brilliant your strategies are. The world is chaotic and war is fundamentally unpredictable and at the end of the day you don’t know who will be the last man standing. You don’t know anything going into a battle. You only know the stakes.”

“Well, they’re pretty fucking high,” Rin said.

If they lost, their rebellion would be vanquished and Nikan would descend into darkness for a another several decades at least, rent apart by factional warfare and lingering Federation presence.

But if they won, the Empire would become a Republic, primed to hurtle into the new and glorious future with Vaisra at the helm and the Hesperians at his side.

And then Rin would have to worry about what happened after.

An idea struck her then—just the smallest tendril of one, but it was there; a fierce, burning spark of hope. Vaisra might have just handed her a way out.

“How do you get to the rookery?” she asked.

“I can take you,” Kitay said. “Who do you want to send a letter to?”

“Moag.” Rin turned to begin the climb back toward the city.

Kitay followed. “What for?”

“There’s something she should know.” She was already composing the message in her head. If—no, when—she left the Republic, she would need an ally. Someone who could get her out of the city fast. Someone who wasn’t linked to the Republic.

Moag was a liar, but Moag had ships. And now, Moag had a death sentence over her head that she didn’t know about. That gave Rin leverage, which gave her an ally.

“Call it insurance,” she said.

Traveling at its current pace, the Imperial Navy would breach the channel at dawn. That gave Arlong six more hours to prepare. Vaisra ordered his troops to sleep in rotating two-hour shifts so they would meet the Militia with as much stamina as possible.

Rin understood the rationale, but she couldn’t see how she was possibly supposed to close her eyes. She vibrated with nervous energy, and even sitting still made her uneasy—she needed to be moving, running, hitting something.

She paced around the field outside the barracks. Little rivulets of fire danced through the air around her, swirling in perfect circles. That made her feel the slightest bit better. It was proof that she still had control over something.

Someone cleared his throat. She turned around. Nezha stood at the door, bleary-eyed and disheveled.

“What’s happened?” she asked sharply. “Did anything—”

“I had a dream,” he mumbled.

She raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“You died.”

She made her flames disappear. “What is going on with you?”

“You died,” he repeated. He sounded dazed, only half-present, like a little schoolboy disinterestedly reciting his Classics. “You—they shot you down over the water, and I saw your body floating up in the water. You were so still. I saw you drown, and I couldn’t save you.”

He started to cry.

“What the fuck,” she muttered.

Was he drunk? High? She didn’t know what she was supposed to do, only that she didn’t want to be alone with him. She glanced toward the barracks. What would happen if she just left?

“Please don’t leave,” Nezha said, as if reading her mind.

She folded her arms against her chest. “I didn’t think you ever wanted to see me again.”

“Why would you think that?”

“‘It would be best if we died,’” she said. “Who said that?”

“I didn’t mean that—”

“Then what? Where do you draw the line? Suni, Baji, Altan—we’re all monsters in your book, aren’t we?”

“I was angry that you called me a coward—”

“Because you are a coward!” she shouted. “How many men died at Boyang? How many are going to die today? But no, Yin Nezha has the power to stop the river and he won’t do it, because he’s fucking scared of a tattoo on his back—”

“I told you, it hurts—”

“It always hurts. You call the gods anyway. We’re soldiers—we make the sacrifices we must, no matter what it takes. But I suppose you would put your own comfort over a chance to crush the Empire—”

“Comfort?” Nezha repeated. “You think it’s about comfort? Do you know how it felt, when I was in his cave? Do you know what he did to me?”

“Yes,” she said. “Exactly the same thing the Phoenix did to me.”

Rin knew Nezha’s pain. She just didn’t have the sympathy for it.

“You’re acting like a fucking child,” she said. “You’re a general, Nezha. Do your job.”

Anger darkened his face. “Just because you’ve decided to worship your abuser doesn’t mean we all—”

Rin stiffened. “No one abused me.”

“Rin, you know that’s not true.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m sorry.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Look—I really am. I didn’t come here to talk about that. I don’t want to fight.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you could die out there,” he said. “We both could.” His words poured out in a torrent, as if he were afraid that if he stopped speaking they would run out of time, as if he would only ever get this one chance. “I saw it happen, I saw you bleeding out in the water, and I couldn’t do anything about it. That was the worst part.”

“Are you high?” she demanded.

“I just want to make things right between us. What’s that going to take?” Nezha spread his arms. “Should I let you hit me? Do you want to? Go ahead, take a swing. I won’t move.”

Rin almost took him up on the offer. But the moment she made a fist, her anger dissipated.

Why was it that whenever she looked at Nezha, she wanted to either kill him or kiss him? He made her either furious or deliriously happy. The one thing he did not make her feel was secure.

With him there was no neutrality, no in between. She loved him or she hated him, but she didn’t know how to do both.

She lowered her fist.

“I really am sorry,” Nezha said. “Please, Rin. I don’t want us to end like this.”

He tried to say something else, but the sudden boom of the signal gongs drowned out his voice. They reverberated through the barracks with such loud urgency that Rin could feel the ground trembling beneath her feet.

The familiar taste of blood filled her mouth. Panic, fear, and adrenaline flooded her veins. But this time they didn’t make her collapse; she didn’t want to curl into a ball and rock back and forth until it was over. She was used to this now, and she could use it as a fuel. Turn it into bloodlust.

“We should be in position,” she said. She tried to walk past him into the barracks to get her equipment, but he grabbed at her arm.

“Rin, please—you have more enemies than you think you do—”

She shrugged him off. “Let me go!”

He blocked her path. “I don’t want this to be the last conversation we ever have.”

“Then don’t die out there,” she said. “Problem solved.”

“But Feylen—”

“We’re not going to lose to Feylen this time,” she said. “We’re going to win, and we’re going to live.”

He sounded like a terrified child woken up from a bad dream. “But how do you know?”

She didn’t know what made her do it, but she put her hand on Nezha’s shoulder. It wasn’t an apology or forgiveness, but it was a concession. An acknowledgment.

And for just a moment, she felt a hint of that old camaraderie, a flicker she’d felt once, a year ago at Sinegard, when he’d thrown her a sword and they’d fought back to back, enemies turned to comrades, firmly on the same side for the first time in their lives.

She saw the way he was looking at her. She knew he felt it, too.

“Between us, we have the fire and the water,” she said quietly. “I’m quite sure that together, we can take on the wind.”

Chapter 31

“I can feel my heartbeat in my temples.” Venka leaned over her mounted crossbow and checked the gears for what seemed like the hundredth time. It was cranked to maximum, fitted in with twelve reloading bolts. “Don’t you love this part?”

“I hate this part,” Kitay said. “Feels like we’re waiting for our executioner.”

His hairline sported visible bald patches. He was going mad waiting for the Imperial Navy to show up, and Rin knew why. They both liked it so much better when they were on the offensive, when they could decide when to attack and where.

They’d been taught at Sinegard that fighting a defensive battle by sitting behind fixed fortifications was courting disaster because it just gave the enemy the advantage of initiative. Unless a siege was at play, sitting behind defenses was almost always a doomed strategy, because there were no locks that couldn’t be broken, and no fortresses that were impregnable.

And this would not be a siege. Daji had no interest in starving them out. She didn’t need to. She intended to smash right through the gates.

“Arlong hasn’t been taken for centuries,” Venka pointed out.

Kitay’s hands twitched. “Well, its luck had to run out sometime.”

The Republic was as prepared as it ever would be. The generals had set their defensive traps. They’d divided and positioned their troops—seven artillery stations all along the upper cliffs, the majority stationed on the Republican Fleet in formation inside the channel, and the rest either guarding the shore or barricading the heavily fortified palace.

Rin wished that the Cike could be up on the cliff fighting by her side, but neither Baji nor Suni could offer much air support against Feylen. They were both stationed on warships at the center of the Republican Fleet where, right in the brunt of enemy fire, their abilities might stay hidden from Hesperian observers, and also where they’d be able to cause the most damage.

“Is Nezha in position?” Kitay peered over the channel.

Nezha was assigned to the front of the fleet, leading one of the three remaining warships that could hold its own in a naval skirmish. He was to drive his ship directly into the center of the Imperial Fleet and split it apart.

“Nezha’s always in position,” said Venka. “He’s sprung like a—”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Kitay said.

Venka grinned.

They could hear a faint series of booms echoing from beyond the mouth of the channel. In truth, the battle had already begun—a flimsy handful of riverside forts that constituted Arlong’s first line of defense had already engaged the Militia, but they were manned with only enough soldiers to keep the cannons firing.

Kitay had estimated those would buy them all of ten minutes.

“There,” Venka said sharply. “I see them.”

They stood up.

The Imperial Navy sailed directly into their line of sight. Rin caught her breath, trying not to panic at the sheer size of Daji’s fleet combined with Tsolin’s.

“What’s Chang En doing?” Kitay demanded.

The Wolf Meat General had lashed his boats together, tied them stern to stern into a single, immobile structure. The fleet had become a single, massive battering ram, with the floating fortress at the very center.

“To fight the seasickness, you think?” Venka asked.

Rin frowned. “Has to be.”

That seemed like a clever move. The Imperial troops weren’t used to fighting over moving water, so they might do better on a locked platform. But a static formation was also particularly dangerous where battling Rin was concerned. If one ship went up in flames, so did the rest of them.

Had Daji not discovered that Rin had figured a way around the Seal?

“It’s not seasickness,” Kitay said. “It’s so Feylen won’t blow them out of the water. And it gives them the advantage if we try to board. They get troop mobility between ships.”

“We’re not going to board,” said Rin. “We’re going to torch that thing.”

“That’s the spirit,” Venka said with an optimism that nobody felt.

The locked fleet crawled toward the cliffs at a maddeningly slow pace. War drums echoed around the channel as the fortress moved inexorably forward.

“I wonder how many men it takes to propel that thing,” Venka mused.

“They don’t need much paddling force,” Rin said. “They’re sailing downstream.”

“Okay, but what about lateral movement—”

“Please stop talking,” Kitay snapped.

Rin knew their chattering was idiotic, but she couldn’t help it. She and Venka had the same problem. They had to keep running their mouths, because the wait would drive them crazy otherwise.

“The gate isn’t going to hold,” Rin said despite Kitay’s glare. “It’ll be like kicking down a sandcastle.”

“You’re giving it five minutes, then?” Venka asked.

“More like two. Get ready to fire that thing.”

Venka patted Kitay’s shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

He rolled his eyes. “The gate wasn’t my idea.”

In a last-ditch effort, Vaisra had ordered his troops to chain the gates of the channel shut with every spare link of iron in the city. It might have deterred a pirate ship, but against this fleet, it was little more than a symbolic gesture. From the sounds of it, the Militia intended to simply knock the gates over with a battering ram.

Boom. Rin felt stone vibrating beneath her feet.

“How old are those gates?” she wondered out loud.

Boom.

“Older than this province,” said Venka. “Maybe as old as the Red Emperor. Lot of architectural value.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Isn’t it?”

Boom. Rin heard the sharp crack of fracturing wood, and then a noise like fabric ripping.

Arlong’s gates were down.

The Imperial Navy poured through. The channel lit up with pyrotechnics. Massive twenty-foot cannons embedded into Arlong’s cliff walls went off one by one, sending scorching, boulder-sized balls shrieking into the sides of Chang En’s ships. Each one of Kitay’s carefully planted water mines went off in lovely, timed succession to the sound of firecrackers magnified by a thousand.

For a moment the Imperial Fleet was hidden behind a massive cloud of smoke.

“Nice,” Venka marveled.

Kitay shook his head. “That’s nothing. They can absorb the losses.”

He was right. When the smoke cleared, Rin saw that there had been more noise than damage. The fleet pressed on through the explosions. The floating fortress remained untouched.

Rin paced toward the cliff edge, sword in hand.

“Patience,” Kitay muttered. “Now’s not the time.”

“We should be down there,” she said. She felt like a coward waiting up on the cliff, hiding out of sight while soldiers burned below.

“We’re only three people,” Kitay said. “We’d be cannon fodder. You dive in now, you’ll just get shot full of iron.”

Rin hated that he was right.

The cliffs shook continuously under their feet. The Imperial Navy was returning fire. Loaded missiles shot out of the siege towers, showering tiny rockets onto the cliffside artillery stations. Shielded Militia archers returned two crossbow bolts for every one that reached their decks.

Rin’s stomach twisted with horror as she watched. The Militia was using precisely the same siege-breaking strategy that Jinzha had employed on the northern campaign—eviscerate the archers first, then barrel through land resistance.

The Republican warships took the worst damage. One had already been blown so thoroughly out of the water that its fragmented remains were blocking the paths of its sister ships.

The Imperial cannons fired low to aim at the paddle-wheels. The Republican ships tried to rotate in the water to keep their back paddles out of the line of fire, but they were rapidly losing mobility. At this rate, Nezha’s ships would be reduced to sitting ducks.

Rin still saw no sign of Feylen.

“Where is he?” Kitay muttered. “You’d think they would bring him out right away.”

“Maybe he’s bad with orders,” Rin said. Feylen had seemed so terrified of Daji, she didn’t want to think about the kind of torture it took to persuade him to fight.

But at this rate, the Militia didn’t even need to bring Feylen out. Two artillery stations had gone down. The other five were running out of ammunition and had slowed their rate of fire. Most of Nezha’s warships were dead in the water, while the core of the Imperial Navy had sustained very little fire damage.

Time to rectify that. Rin stood up. “I’m going in.”

“Now’s the time,” Kitay agreed. He handed her a jug of oil from a tidy pile stocked next to the crossbow, and then pointed down at the channel. “I’m thinking center left of that tower ship. You want to split that formation apart. Get the ropes going and the rest will catch fire.”

“And don’t look down,” Venka said helpfully.

“Shut up.” Rin stepped backward, dug her feet against the ground, and broke into a run. The wind whipped against her face. Her wings rippled against the drag. Then the cliff disappeared under her feet, her head pitched downward, and there was no fear, no sound, only the thrilling and sickening lurch of the drop.

She let herself dive for a moment before she opened her wings. When she spread her arms the resistance hit her like a punch. Her arms felt like they were being torn from their sockets. She gasped—not from the pain, but from the sheer exhilaration. The river was a blur, ships and armies dissolving into solid streaks of browns and blues and greens.

Arrows emerged in her line of sight. They looked like needles from a distance; gaining in size at a frightening pace. She veered to the left. They whizzed harmlessly past her.

She’d gotten within range of the tower ship. She leveled off the dive. She opened her mouth and palms; a stream of fire shot out from her extremities, setting ablaze everything she passed.

She dropped the oil just before she pulled up.

She heard the glass shatter as the jar hit the deck, the crackle as the flames caught. She smiled as she soared upward to the opposite cliff wall. When she hazarded a glance backward she saw arrows lose momentum and drop back to the ground as they struggled to reach her.

Her feet found solid earth. She dropped to her knees and doubled over on all fours, panting while she surveyed the damage below.

The ropes had caught a steady, spreading fire. She could see them blackening and fraying where she’d dropped the oil.

She looked up. Across the channel, Venka methodically shoved another round of bolts into her crossbow loading mechanism, while Kitay waved for her to return.

The muscles in her arms burned, but she couldn’t afford too much time for recovery. She crawled to the edge of the cliff and hauled herself to her feet.

She squinted, mapping out her next flight pattern. She caught Venka’s attention and pointed toward a cluster of ships untouched by the fire. Venka nodded and redirected her crossbow.

Rin took a deep breath, jumped off the cliff, and swooped down, basking again in the rush of adrenaline. Javelins came whistling in her direction, one after another, but all she had to do was swerve and they soared uselessly into empty air.

She felt giddy as she set sails ablaze and felt the warm heat of the fire buoying her up as it spread. Was this how Altan had always felt in the heat of battle? She understood now why he’d summoned himself wings, even though he couldn’t fly with them.

It was symbolic. Ecstatic. In this moment she was invincible, divine. She hadn’t just summoned the Phoenix, she’d become it.

“Nice job,” Kitay said once she’d landed. “The fire’s spread to three ships, they haven’t managed to put it out—wait, can you breathe?”

“I’m okay,” she gasped. “Just—give me a moment . . .”

“Guys,” Venka said sharply. “This is bad.”

Rin staggered to her feet and joined her near the precipice.

Burning the ropes had worked. The Imperial formation had begun to splinter, its outward ships drifting away from the center. Nezha had seized the opening to wedge his warship straight through the main cluster, where he’d managed to blow smoking holes into the side of the floating fortress.

But now he was stuck. The Imperial Navy had lowered wide planks onto his ship’s sides. Nezha was about to get swarmed.

“I’m going down there,” Rin said.

“To do what?” Kitay asked. “Burn them and you burn Nezha.”

“Then I’ll land and fight. I can direct fire more accurately from the ground, I just have to get there.”

Kitay looked reluctant. “But Feylen—”

“We don’t know where Feylen is. Nezha’s in trouble. I’m going.”

“Rin. Look at the hills.” Venka pointed toward the lowland valleys. “I think they’ve sent ground troops.”

Rin exchanged a glance with Kitay.

Before he could speak she launched herself into the sky.

The ground column was impossible to miss. Rin could see them so clearly through the forest, a thick band of troops marching on Arlong from behind. They were barely half a mile from the refugee evacuation areas. They’d reach them in minutes.

She cursed into the wind. Eriden had claimed his scouts hadn’t seen anything in the valley.

But how did one miss an entire brigade?

Her mind raced. Venka and Kitay were both screaming at her, but she couldn’t hear them.

Should she go? How much good could she do? She couldn’t destroy a column of soldiers on her own. And she couldn’t abandon the naval battle—if Feylen appeared while she was miles away he could sink the entirety of their fleet before she could return.

But she had to tell someone.

She scanned the channel. She knew Vaisra and his generals were ensconced behind fortifications near the shore where they could oversee the battle, but they would refuse to do anything even if she warned them. The naval battle had few enough soldiers to spare.

She had to warn the Warlords.

They were scattered throughout the battleground with their troops, she just didn’t know where.

No one could hear her shout from this high up. Her only option was to write them a message in the sky. She beat her wings twice to gain altitude and flew forward until she hung right over the channel, in clear sight but high out of range.

She decided on two words.

Valley invaded.

She pointed down. Flames poured from her fingers and lingered for a few seconds where she’d placed them before they dissipated. She wrote the two characters over and over, going over strokes that had faded from the air, praying that someone below would see the message.

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then, near the shoreline, she saw a line of soldiers peeling away from the front. Someone had noticed.

She redirected her attention to the channel.

Nezha’s ship had been almost completely overrun by Imperial troops. The ship’s cannons had gone silent. By now its crew had to be mostly dead or incapacitated.

She didn’t stop to think. She dove.

She landed badly. Her dive was too steep and she hadn’t pulled up in time. She skidded forward on her knees, yelping in pain as her skin scraped along the deck.

Militia soldiers converged on her instantly. She called down a column of flame, a protective circle that incinerated everything within a five-foot radius and pushed the approaching soldiers back.

Her eyes fell on a blue uniform in a sea of green. She barreled through the burning bodies, arms shielding her head, until she reached the single Republican soldier in sight.

“Where’s Nezha?” she asked.

He stared past her with unfocused eyes. Blood trickled in a single line from his forehead across his face.

She shook him hard. “Where’s Nezha?”

The officer opened his mouth just as an arrow embedded itself in his left eye. Rin flung the body away, ducked, and snatched a shield up from the deck just before three arrows thudded into the space where her head had been.

She advanced slowly along the deck, flames roaring out of her in a semicircle to repel Militia troops. Soldiers crumpled in her path, twitching and burning, while others hurled themselves into the water to escape the fire.

Through the blaze she heard the faint sound of clashing steel. She dimmed the wall of flame just for a moment to see Nezha and a handful of remaining Republican soldiers dueling with General Jun’s platoon on the other end of the deck.

He’s still alive. Warm hope filled her chest. She ran toward Nezha, shooting targeted ribbons of flame into the melee. Tendrils of fire wrapped around Militia soldiers’ necks like whips while balls of flame consumed their faces, blinding their eyes, scorching their mouths, asphyxiating them. She kept going until all soldiers in her vicinity had dropped to the ground, either dead or dying. It felt bizarrely, exhilarating good to know she had so much control over the flame, that she now possessed such potent and novel ways of killing.

When she pulled the fire back in, Nezha had fought Jun to submission.

“You’re a good soldier,” said Nezha. “My father doesn’t want you dead.”

“Don’t bother.” A sneer twisted Jun’s face. He raised his sword to his chest.

Nezha moved faster. His blade flashed through the air. Rin heard a thick chop that reminded her of a butcher shop. Jun’s severed hand dropped to the ground.

Jun stumbled forward on his knees, staring at his bloody stump like he couldn’t believe what he was looking at.

“It won’t be that easy for you,” said Nezha.

“You ingrate,” Jun seethed. “I created you.”

“You taught me the meaning of fear,” Nezha said. “Nothing more.”

Jun made a wild grab for the dagger in Nezha’s belt, but Nezha kicked out—one short, precise blow against Jun’s severed stump. Jun howled in pain and fell over onto his side.

“Do it,” Rin said. “Quickly.”

Nezha shook his head. “He’s a good prisoner—”

“He tried to kill you!” Rin shouted. She summoned a ball of flame to her right hand. “If you won’t, then I will—”

Nezha grabbed her shoulder. “Stop!”

Jun struggled to his feet and made a mad scramble for the edge of the ship.

“No!” Nezha rushed forward, but it was too late. Rin saw Jun’s feet disappear over the railing. She heard a splash several seconds later. She and Nezha hurried to the railing to look over the edge, but Jun didn’t resurface.

Nezha whirled on her. “We could have taken him prisoner!”

“Look, I didn’t hurl him off the side.” She couldn’t see how this was her fault. “And I just saved your life. You’re welcome, by the way.”

Rin saw Nezha open his mouth to retort just before something wet and heavy slammed into her from above and knocked her to the deck. Her wings jammed painfully into her shoulders. She was caught under a water-soaked canvas, she realized. Her fire did nothing but fill the inside of the canvas with scorching steam. She had to call it back in before she choked.

Someone was holding the canvas down, trapping her inside. She kicked frantically, trying to wriggle out to no avail. She twisted harder until her head broke through the side.

“Hello.” The Wolf Meat General leered down at her.

She roared flames at his face. He slugged the back of his gauntleted hand against her head. She slammed back against the deck; her vision exploded into sparks. Dimly she saw Chang En lift his sword over her neck.

Nezha hurled himself into Chang En’s side. They landed sprawled in a heap. Nezha scrambled to his feet and backed away, sword raised. Chang En picked his sword off the deck, cackling, and then attacked.

Rin lay flat on her back, blinking at the sky. All of her extremities tingled, but they wouldn’t obey when she tried to move them. From the corner of her eye she caught glimpses of a fight; she heard a deafening flurry of blows, steel raining down on steel.

She had to help Nezha. But her fists wouldn’t open; the fire wouldn’t come.

Her vision started fading to black, but she couldn’t lose consciousness. Not now. She bit down hard on her tongue, willing the pain to keep her awake.

Finally she managed to lift her head. Chang En had backed Nezha into a corner. Nezha was flagging, clearly struggling simply to stand up straight. Blood soaked the entire left side of his uniform.

“I’ll saw your head off,” Chang En sneered. “Then I’ll feed it to my dogs, just like I did your brother’s.

Nezha screamed and redoubled his assault.

Rin groaned and rolled over onto her side. Flames sparked and burst in her palms—just tiny lights, nowhere near the intensity she needed. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to concentrate. To pray.

Please, I need you . . .

Nezha’s strikes came nowhere close to landing. Chang En disarmed him with ease and kicked his sword across the deck. Nezha scrambled for the hilt. Chang En swept a leg behind his knees, kicking him to the ground, and placed a boot on his chest.

Hello, little one, said the Phoenix.

Flames burst out of every part of her. The fire was no longer localized to her control points—her hands and mouth—but blazed around her entire body like a suit of armor, glowing and untouchable.

She pointed a finger at Chang En. A thick stream of fire slammed into his face. He dropped his sword and buried his head in his hands, trying to smother the flames, but the blaze only extended across his entire body, burning brighter and brighter as he screamed.

Rin stopped just short of killing him. She didn’t want to make this easy for him.

Chang En had stopped moving. He lay flat on his back, covered in grotesque burns. His face and arms had turned black, shot through with cracks that revealed blistered, bubbling skin.

Rin stood over him and opened her palms downward.

Nezha grabbed her shoulder. “Don’t.”

She shot him an exasperated look. “Don’t tell me you want to take him prisoner, too.”

“No,” he said. “I want to do it.”

She stepped back and gestured to Chang En’s limp form. “All yours.”

“I’ll need a sword,” he said.

Wordlessly, she handed hers over.

Nezha traced the tip of the blade over Chang En’s face, jabbing it into the blistered skin between his crackled cheekbones. “Hey. Wake up.”

Chang En’s eyes opened.

Nezha forced the sword point straight down into Chang En’s left eye.

Chang En grabbed at empty air, trying to wrench the blade from Nezha’s grasp, but Nezha gave him a savage kick to the ribs, then several more to the face.

Nezha wanted to watch Chang En bleed. Rin didn’t try to stop him. She wanted to watch, too.

Nezha pressed the sword point to Chang En’s neck. “Stop moving.”

Whimpering, Chang En lay still. His gouged eye dangled grotesquely on the side of his face, still connected by lumpy strings. The other eye blinked furiously, drenched in blood.

Nezha grasped the hilt with both hands and brought it down hard. Blood splashed across both of their faces.

Nezha let the sword drop and backed away slowly. His chest heaved. Rin put her hand on his back.

He leaned into her, shaking. “It’s over.”

“No, it’s not,” she whispered.

It had barely just begun. Because the air had suddenly gone still—so still that every flag in the channel dropped, and the sound of every shout and clash of steel was amplified in the absence of wind.

She reached out and grabbed Nezha’s fingers in hers, just as the ship ripped out from beneath them.

Chapter 32

The force of the gale tore them apart.

For a moment Rin hung weightless in the air, watching driftwood and bodies floating absurdly beside her, and then she dropped into the water with the rest of what used to be the ship’s upper deck.

She couldn’t see Nezha. She couldn’t see anything. She sank fast, weighted down by the wreckage. She flailed desperately around in the black water, trying to find some path to the surface.

And there it was—a glimmer of light through the mass of bodies. Her lungs burned. She had to get up there. She kicked, but something tugged at her legs. She’d gotten tangled in the flag, and wet cloth underwater was strong as iron steel. Panic fogged her mind. The flag only ensnared her more the harder she kicked, dragging her down to the riverbed.

Calm. She forced herself to empty her mind. Calm down. No anger, no panic, just nothingness. She found that silent place of clarity that allowed her to think.

She wasn’t drowned yet. She still had the strength to kick her way to the surface. And the cloth wasn’t tied in such a hopeless knot, it was simply looped twice around her leg. She reached forward. A few quick movements and she broke free. Relieved, she swam upward, forcing herself not to panic, focusing on the simple act of pushing herself through the water until her head broke the surface.

She didn’t see Nezha as she dragged herself to shore. She scanned the wreckage, but she couldn’t find him. Had he surfaced at all? Was he dead? Crushed, impaled, drowned—

No. She had to trust that he was fine. He could control the water itself; it couldn’t possibly kill him.

Could it?

The howl of unnatural wind pierced the channel and lingered, punctuated only by the sound of splintering wood.

Oh, gods.

Rin looked up.

Feylen hung suspended in the air above her, slamming ships against the cliff wall with mere sweeps of his arm. Driftwood and debris swirled in a hazardous circle around him. With winds as fast as these, any one of those pieces might kill her.

Rin’s mouth had gone dry. Her knees buckled. All she wanted was to find a hole and hide. She stood paralyzed by fear and despair. Feylen was going to batter their fleet around the channel until there was nothing left. Why fight? Death would be easier if she didn’t resist . . .

She ground her fingernails into her palm until the pain brought her to her senses.

She couldn’t run.

Who else was going to fight him? Who else possibly could?

She’d lost her sword in the water, but she spied a javelin on the ground. Fat lot of good it would do against Feylen, but it felt better to hold a weapon. She scooped it up, opened her wings, and summoned a flame around her arms and shoulders. Steam fizzled around her, a choking cloud of mist. Rin waved it away, hoping desperately her wings were waterproof.

She focused on generating a steady, concentrated stream of flame around her sides, so searingly hot that the air around her blurred, and the grass at her feet wilted and shriveled into gray ash.

Slowly she rose up toward the Wind God.

Up close, Feylen looked miserable. His skin was pallid, pockmarked, overgrown with sores. They hadn’t given him new clothes—his black Cike uniform was ripped and dirty. Face-to-face he was no fearsome deity. Just a man with tattered garb and broken eyes.

Her fear faded away, replaced by pity. Feylen should have died a long time ago. Now he was a prisoner in his own body, sentenced to watch and suffer while the god he detested manipulated him as a gateway to the material world.

Without the Seal, without Kitay, Rin might have turned into something just like him.

The man is gone, she reminded herself. Defeat the god.

“Hey, asshole!” she shouted. “Over here!”

Feylen turned. The winds calmed.

She tensed, anticipating a sudden blast. She had only Kitay’s guarantee that she could correct course with her wings if Feylen sent her spinning, but that was a better chance than anyone else had.

But Feylen only hung still in the air, head cocked to the side, watching her rise to meet him like a child curiously observing the antics of a little bug.

“Cute trick,” he said.

A piece of driftwood shot past her left arm. She wobbled and righted herself.

Feylen’s cerulean eyes met hers. She shuddered. She was acutely aware of how fragile she was. She was fighting the Wind God in his own domain, and she was a little thing held in the air by nothing more than two sheets of leather and a cage of metal. He could tear her apart and dash her against those cliffs so easily.

But she didn’t just have her wings. She had a javelin. And she had the fire.

She opened her mouth and palms and shot every bit of flame she had at him—three lines of fire roaring from her body all at once. Feylen disappeared behind a wall of red and orange. The winds around him stilled. Debris began dropping out of the air, a rain of wreckage that dotted the waters below.

His retaliatory blow caught her off guard. A gust of force hit her so hard and fast that she hadn’t braced herself, hadn’t even tensed. She hurtled backward, tumbling through the air in circles until the cliff wall appeared perilously close before her eyes. Her nose scraped the rock before she managed to redirect her momentum and pull herself right-side up.

She drifted back toward Feylen, heart hammering.

She hadn’t burned him to death, but she’d come close. Feylen’s face and hair had turned black. Smoke wafted out from his scorched robes.

He looked shocked.

“Try again,” she called.

His next attack was series of unrelenting winds blasting her from different, unpredictable directions so she couldn’t just ride out the current. One moment he forced her toward the ground, and the next he buoyed her upward, just to let her drop again.

She maneuvered the winds as well as she could, but it was like swimming against a waterfall. She was a little bird caught in a storm. Her wings were nothing against his overwhelming force. All she could do was keep from plummeting to the ground.

She suspected the only reason Feylen hadn’t yet flung her against the rocks was because he was toying with her.

But he hadn’t finished her off at Boyang, either. We’re not going to kill you, he’d said. She told us not to do that. We’re just supposed to hurt you.

The Empress had commanded him to bring her in alive. That gave her an advantage.

“Careful,” she shouted. “Daji won’t be happy with broken goods.”

Feylen’s entire demeanor changed when she spoke Daji’s name. His shoulders hunched; he seemed to shrink into himself. His eyes darted around, as if petrified that Daji could see him even so high in the air.

Rin stared at him, amazed. What had Daji done to him?

How was Daji so powerful that she could terrify a god?

Rin took the chance to fly in closer. She didn’t know how Daji had subdued Feylen, but she was now sure that Feylen couldn’t kill her.

Daji still wanted her alive, and that gave her her only advantage.

How did one kill a god? She and Kitay had puzzled over the dilemma for hours. She’d wished they could bring him into the Chuluu Korikh. Kitay had wished they could just bring the Chuluu Korikh to him.

In the end, they’d compromised.

Rin eyed the web of fuses lining the opposite cliff wall. If she couldn’t kill Feylen with fire, then she’d bury him under the mountain.

She only had to get him close enough to the rocks.

“I know you’re still in there.” She drifted closer to Feylen. She needed to distract him, if only for a few seconds’ reprieve. “I know you can hear me.”

He took the bait. The winds calmed.

“I don’t care how powerful your god is. You still own this body, Feylen, and you can take it back.”

Feylen stared wordlessly at her, unmoving, but she saw no dimming of the blue, no twitch of recognition in his eyes. His expression was an inscrutable wall, behind which she had no idea if the real Feylen was still alive.

She still had to try.

“I saw Altan in the afterlife,” she said. A lie, but one shrouded in the truth, or at least her version of it. “He wanted me to pass something on to you. Do you want to know what he said?”

Cerulean flickered to black. Rin saw it—she hadn’t imagined it, it wasn’t a trick of the light, she knew she’d seen it. She continued to fly forward. Feylen was afraid now; she could read it all over his face. He drifted backward every time she drew closer.

They were so close to the cliff wall.

She was mere feet away from him. “He wanted me to tell you he’s sorry.”

The winds ceased entirely. A silence descended over the channel. In the still air Rin could hear everything—every haggard breath Feylen took, every round of cannon fire from the ships, every wretched scream from below.

Then Feylen laughed. He laughed so hard that corresponding pulses of wind shot through the air, alternating blasts so fierce that she had to flap frantically to stay afloat.

“This was your plan?” he screeched. “You thought he would care?”

“You do care.” Rin kept her voice calm, level. Feylen was in there. She’d seen him. “I saw you, you remember us. You’re Cike.”

“You mean nothing to us.” Feylen sneered. “We could destroy your world—”

“Then you would have done it. But you’re still bound, aren’t you? She’s bound you. You gods have no power except what we give you. You came through that gate to take your orders. And I’m ordering you to go back.”

Feylen roared. “Who are you to presume?”

“I’m your commander,” she said. “I cull.”

She shot her fire not at him, but the cliff wall. Feylen shrieked with laughter as the flames streamed harmlessly past him.

He hadn’t seen the fuses. He didn’t know.

Rin flapped frantically backward, trying to put as much distance between herself and the cliff as she could.

For a long, torturous instant, nothing happened.

And then the mountain moved.

Mountains weren’t supposed to shift like that. The natural world wasn’t supposed to reshape itself so completely in seconds. But this was real; this was an act of men, not gods. This was Kitay and Ramsa’s handiwork come to fruition. Rin could only stare as the entire top ledge of the cliff slipped down like roofing tiles cascading to the floor.

A shrieking howl pierced through the cascade of tumbling rock. Feylen was whipping up a tornado. But even those last, desperate gusts of wind could not stop thousands of tons of exploded rock jerked downward with the inevitable force of gravity.

When their rumbling stopped, nothing moved beneath them.

Rin sagged in the air, chest heaving. The fire still burned through her arms, but she couldn’t sustain it for long, she was so exhausted. She was struggling just to breathe.

The blood-soaked channel beneath her could have been a meadow of flowers. She imagined that the crimson waves were fields of poppy blossoms, and the moving bodies were just little ants scurrying pointlessly about.

She thought it looked so beautiful.

Could they be winning? If winning meant killing as many people as they could, then yes. She couldn’t tell which side had control over the river, only that it was awash with blood, and that broken ships were dashed against the cliff sides. Feylen had been killing indiscriminately, destroying Republican and Imperial ships alike. She wondered how high the casualty rate had climbed.

She turned toward the valley.

The destruction there was enormous. The palace was on fire, which meant the Militia troops had long ago slashed their way through the refugee camps. The troops would have cut the southerners down like reeds.

Drown in the channel, or burn in the city. Rin had the hysterical urge to laugh, but breathing hurt too much.

She realized suddenly she was losing altitude.

Her fire had gone out. She’d been falling without noticing. She forced flames back into the wings and beat frantically even as her arms screamed in protest.

Her descent halted—she was close enough to the cliffs that she could see Kitay and Venka waving at her.

“I did it!” she screamed to them.

She saw Kitay’s mouth moving, but couldn’t hear him. He pointed.

Too late she turned around. A javelin shot past her midriff, passed harmlessly under her wing. Fuck. Her stomach lurched. She wobbled but righted herself.

The next javelin struck her shoulder.

For a moment, she simply felt confused. Where was the pain? Why was she still hanging in the air? Her own blood floated around her face in great fat drops that for some reason hadn’t fallen, little bulbous things that she couldn’t believe had come from her.

Then her flames receded into her body. Gravity resumed its pull. Her wings creaked and folded against her back. Then she was just deadweight plummeting headfirst into the river.

Her senses shut down upon impact. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t see. She tried to swim, kick herself to the surface, but her arms and legs wouldn’t obey her, and besides, she didn’t know which way was up. She choked involuntarily. A torrent of water flooded her mouth.

I’m going to die, she thought. I’m really going to die.

But was this so bad? It was wonderfully, peacefully silent under the surface. She couldn’t feel any pain in her shoulder—her whole body had gone numb. She relaxed her limbs and drifted helplessly toward the river bottom. Easier to give up control, easier to stop struggling. Even her burning lungs didn’t bother her so much. In a moment she would open her mouth, and water would rush in, and that would be the end.

This wasn’t such a bad way to go. At least it was quiet.

Someone seized her hard. Her eyes shot open.

Nezha pulled her head toward his and kissed her hard, his lips forming a seal around hers. A bubble of air passed into her mouth. It wasn’t much, but her vision cleared, her lungs stopped burning, and her limbs began to respond to her commands. Adrenaline kicked in. She needed more air. She grabbed at Nezha’s face.

He pushed her away, shaking his head. She started to panic. He seized her wrists and held her until she stopped flailing madly in the water. Then he wrapped his arms around her torso and pulled them both toward the surface.

He didn’t kick his legs. He didn’t have to swim at all. He only held her against him while a warm current bore them gently upward.

Something shrieked in the air above them just as they broke the surface. A javelin slammed into the water several feet away. Nezha yanked them back down into the depths, but Rin kicked and struggled. All she wanted to do was get to the surface, she was so desperate to breathe . . .

Nezha grasped her face with his hands.

Too exposed, he mouthed.

She understood. They needed to come up somewhere near a broken ship, something that would give them cover. She stopped thrashing. Nezha guided them several yards farther downriver. Then the current buoyed them up and deposited them safely onto the shore.

Her first breath above the surface was the best thing she’d ever tasted. She doubled over, coughing and vomiting river water, but she didn’t care because she was breathing.

Once her lungs were empty of water, she lay back and summoned the fire. Little flames lit up her wrists, danced across her entire body, and bathed her in delicious warmth. Steam hissed as her clothes dried.

Groaning, she rolled over onto her side. Her right shoulder was a bloody mess. She didn’t want to look at it. She knew her wings were a crumpled disaster. Something sharp shoved deeper into her skin every time she moved. She struggled to rip the contraption off, but the metal harness had twisted and bent. It wouldn’t give.

She felt for where it pressed into her lower back. Her fingers came away bloody.

She tried not to panic. Something was stuck, that was all. She knew she wasn’t supposed to pull it out until she was with a physician, that the object piercing her back was the only thing stopping her blood spilling out. And she couldn’t see well enough from this angle—she’d be stupid to try to remove it herself.

But she could barely move without digging the rod deeper into her back. She might end up severing her own spine.

Nezha was in no state to help her. He had curled into a small, trembling ball, his arms wrapped around his knees. She crawled toward him and tried to hoist him into a sitting position using her good arm. “Hey. Hey.”

He didn’t respond.

He was twitching all over. His eyes fluttered madly while little whimpering noises escaped his mouth. He raised his hands, trying to claw at the tattoo on his back.

Rin glanced at the river. The water had started moving in eerie, erratic patterns. Odd little waves ran against the current. Blood-soaked columns rose out of the river at random. A handful splashed harmlessly near the shore, but one was growing larger and larger near the center of the river.

She had to knock Nezha out. That, or she had to get him high—but this time she had no opium . . .

“I brought it,” he gasped.

“What?”

He placed a trembling hand over his pocket. “Stole it—brought it here, just in case . . .”

She shoved her hand into his pocket and drew out a fist-sized packet wrapped tightly in bamboo leaves. She tore it open with her teeth, choking at the familiar, sickly sweet taste. Her body ached with an old craving.

Nezha sucked in air through clenched teeth. “Please . . .”

She clutched two nuggets in her hand and ignited a small fire beneath them. With her other hand she hoisted Nezha upright and tilted his head over the fumes.

He inhaled for a long time. His eyes fluttered closed. The water began to calm. The little waves sank beneath the surface. The columns lowered slowly and disappeared. Rin exhaled in relief.

Then Nezha shrank away from the smoke, coughing. “No—no, I don’t want that much—”

She gripped him tighter. “I’m sorry.”

He’d only smoked several whiffs. That would wear off in under an hour. That wasn’t enough time. She needed to make sure the god was gone.

She forced the opium under his nose and clamped a hand over his mouth to force him to inhale. He thrashed in protest, but he was already weak and his struggles grew more and more feeble as he inhaled more of the smoke. Finally he lay still.

Rin threw the half-burned nuggets into the dirt. She brushed a hand over Nezha’s forehead, pushed strands of wet hair out of his eyes.

“You’ll be all right,” she whispered. “I’ll send someone out after you.”

“Stay,” he murmured. “Please.”

“I’m sorry.” She leaned forward and lightly kissed his forehead. “We’ve got a battle to win.”

His voice was so faint she had to lean down to hear it. “But we’ve won.”

She choked with desperate laughter. He hadn’t seen the burning city. He didn’t know that Arlong barely existed anymore. “We haven’t won.”

“No . . .” His eyes opened. He struggled to raise his arm. He pointed at something past her shoulder. “Look. There.”

She turned her head.

There on the seam of the horizon sailed a fleet, waves and waves of warships. Some glided over water; some floated through the air. There were so many that they almost seemed like a mirage, endless doubles of the same row of white sails and blue flags against a brilliant sun.

Chapter 33

“How lovely,” spoke a voice, familiar and beautiful, that made Rin’s heart sink and her mouth fill with the taste of blood.

She lowered Nezha onto the sand and forced herself to stand up. Metal shifted beneath her flesh, and she bit back a cry of pain. The agony in her back and shoulder was almost unbearable. But she was not going to die lying down.

How could the Empress still terrify her like this? Daji was just a lone woman now, without an army or a fleet. Her general’s garb was ripped and drenched. She limped when she walked, and her shoes left behind imprints of blood. Yet she approached with her chin lifted high, her eyebrows arched, and her lips curved in an imperious smile as if she had just won a great victory, emanating a dark, seductive beauty that made irrelevant her sodden robes, her shattered ships.

Rin hated that beauty. She wanted to drag her nails across it until white flesh gave way under her fingers. She wanted to gouge Daji’s eyes out of their sockets, crush them in her fists, and drip the gelatinous ruin over her porcelain skin.

And yet.

When she looked at Daji her entire body felt weak. Her pulse raced. Her face felt hot. She couldn’t tear her eyes from Daji’s face. She had to look and keep looking, otherwise she would never be satisfied.

She forced herself to focus. She needed a weapon—she snatched a sharp piece of driftwood off the ground.

“Get back,” she whispered. “Come any closer and I’ll burn you.”

Daji only laughed. “Oh, my darling. Haven’t you learned?”

Her eyes flashed.

Suddenly Rin felt the overwhelming urge to kill herself, to drag the driftwood against her own wrists until red lines opened along her veins, and twist.

Hands shaking, she pressed the sharpest edge of the driftwood to her skin. What am I doing? Her mind screamed for her to stop, but her body didn’t care. She could only watch as her hands moved on their own, preparing to saw her veins apart.

“That’s enough,” Daji said lightly.

The urge disappeared. Rin dropped the driftwood, gasping.

“Will you listen now?” Daji asked. “I’d like you to stand still, please. Arms up.”

Rin immediately put her arms up over her head, stifling a scream as her wounds tore anew.

Daji limped closer. Her eyes flickered over the remains of Rin’s harness, and her right lip curled up in amusement. “So that’s how you dealt with poor Feylen. Clever.”

“Your best weapon is gone,” Rin said.

“Ah, well. He was a pain to begin with. One moment he’d try to sink our own fleet, and the next all he wanted to do was float among the clouds. Do you know how absurdly difficult it was to get him to do anything?” Daji sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to finish the job myself.”

“You’ve lost,” Rin said. “Hurt me, kill me, it’s still over for you. Your generals are dead. Your ships are driftwood.”

A round of cannon fire punctuated her words, a roar so loud that it drowned out every other sound along the shore. It went on for so long that Rin couldn’t imagine that anything remained floating in the channel.

But Daji didn’t look faintly bothered. “You think that’s winning? You aren’t the victors. The are no victors in this fight. Vaisra has ensured that civil war will continue for decades. He’s only deepened the fractures. No man can stitch this country back together now.”

She continued to limp forward until they were separated by only several feet.

Rin’s eyes darted around the shore. They stood on an isolated stretch of sand, hidden behind the wreckage of great warships. The only other soldiers in sight were corpses. No one was coming to her rescue. It was just her and the Empress now, facing off in the shadows of the unforgiving cliffs.

“So how did you manage the Seal?” Daji asked. “I was rather convinced that it was unbreakable. It can’t have been one of the twins; they would have done it long ago if they could.” She tilted her head. “Oh, no, let me guess. Did you find the Sorqan Sira? Is that old bat still alive?”

“Fuck you, murderer,” Rin said.

“I presume that means you’ve found yourself an anchor, too?” Daji’s eyes flitted toward Nezha. He wasn’t moving. “I do hope it’s not him. That one’s almost gone.”

“Don’t you dare touch him,” Rin hissed.

Daji knelt over Nezha, fingers tracing over the scars on his face. “He’s very pretty, isn’t he? Despite everything. He reminds me of Riga.”

I must get her away from him. Rin strained to move, eyes bulging, but her limbs remained fixed in place. The flame wouldn’t come, either; when she reached for the Phoenix, all her rage crashed pointlessly against her own mind, like waves crashing against cliffs.

“The Ketreyids showed me what you’ve done,” she said loudly, hoping it would distract Daji.

It worked. Daji stood up. “Really.”

“The Sorqan Sira showed us everything. You can try to convince me that you’re trying to save the Empire, but I know what kind of person you are—you betray those who help you and you throw lives away like they’re nothing. I saw you attack them, I saw you three murder Tseveri—”

“Be quiet,” Daji said. “Don’t say that name.”

Rin’s jaw locked shut.

Rin stood frozen, heart slamming against her ribs, as Daji approached her. She had just been spinning words out of the air, hurling everything she could to get Daji away from Nezha.

But something had pissed Daji off. Two high spots of color rose in her cheeks. Her eyes narrowed. She looked furious.

“The Ketreyids should have surrendered,” she said quietly. “We wouldn’t have hurt them if they weren’t so fucking stubborn.”

Daji stretched a pale hand out and ran her knuckles over Rin’s cheeks. “Always such a hypocrite. I acted from necessity, just like you. We are precisely the same, you and I. We’ve acquired more power than any mortal should have the right to, which means we have to make the decisions no one else can. The world is our chessboard. It’s not our fault if the pieces get broken.”

“You hurt everything you touch,” Rin whispered.

“And you’ve killed in numbers exponentially greater than we ever managed. What really separates us, darling? That you committed your war crimes by accident, and mine were intentional? Would you really do things differently, if you had another chance?”

The hold on Rin’s jaw loosened.

Daji had given her permission to answer.

She couldn’t say yes. She could lie, of course, but it wouldn’t matter; not here, where no one but Daji was listening, and Daji already knew the truth.

Because if she had another chance, if she could go back to that moment in time when she stood in the temple of the Phoenix and faced her god, she would make the same decision. She would release the volcano. She would encase Mugen in tons of molten stone and choking ash.

She would destroy the country completely and without mercy, the same way that its armies had treated her. And she’d laugh.

“Do you understand now?” Daji tucked a strand of hair behind Rin’s ear. “Come with me. We’ve much to discuss.”

“Fuck off,” Rin said.

Daji’s mouth pressed in a thin line. The compulsion seized Rin’s legs and forced her to move, shuddering, toward Daji. One by one Rin’s feet dragged through the sand. Sweat beaded on her temples. She tried to shut her eyes and couldn’t.

“Kneel,” Daji commanded.

No, spoke the Phoenix.

The god’s voice was terribly quiet, a tiny echo across a vast plain. But it was there.

Rin struggled to remain standing. A horrible pain shot through her legs, forcing them down, growing stronger every moment that she refused. She wanted to scream but couldn’t open her mouth.

Daji’s eyes flashed yellow. “Kneel.”

You will not kneel, said the Phoenix.

The pain intensified. Rin gasped, fighting the pull, her mind split between two ancient gods.

Just another battle. And, as always, anger was her greatest ally.

Rage drowned out the Vipress’s hypnosis. Daji had sold out the Speerlies. Daji had killed Altan, and Daji had started this war. Daji didn’t get to lie to her anymore. Didn’t get to torture and manipulate her like prey.

The fire came in fits and bursts, little balls of flame that Rin hurled desperately from her palms. Daji only dodged daintily to the side and flicked a wrist out. Rin jerked aside to avoid a needle that wasn’t there. The sudden movement pulled the broken contraption deeper into her back.

She yelped and doubled over.

Daji laughed. “Had enough?”

Rin screeched.

A thin stream of fire lanced over her entire body—enveloping her, protecting her, amplifying her every movement.

This was power like she’d never felt.

That’s a state of ecstasy, Altan told her once. You don’t get tired. . . . You don’t feel pain. All you do is destroy.

Rin had always felt so unhinged—volleying between powerlessness and utter subjugation to the Phoenix—but now the fire was hers. Was her. And that made her feel so giddy that she almost screamed with laughter because for the first time ever, she had the upper hand.

Daji’s resistance was nothing. Rin backed her easily up against the hull of the nearest beached ship. Her fist smashed into the wood next to Daji’s face, missing it by an inch. Wood cracked, splintered, and smoked under her knuckles. The entire ship groaned. Rin drew her fist back again and slammed it into Daji’s jaw.

Daji’s head jerked to the side like a broken doll’s. Rin had split her lip; blood trickled down her chin. Yet still she smiled.

“You’re so weak,” she whispered. “You have a god but you have no idea what you’re doing with it.”

“Right now, I know exactly what I want to do with it.”

She placed her glowing-hot fingers around Daji’s neck. Pale flesh crackled and burned under her touch. She started to squeeze. She thought she’d feel a thrill of satisfaction.

It didn’t come.

She couldn’t just kill her. Not like this. This was too quick, too easy.

She had to destroy her.

She moved her hands up. Placed her thumbs under the bases of Daji’s eye sockets. Dug her nails into soft flesh.

“Look at me,” Daji hissed.

Rin shook her head, eyes squeezed tight.

Something popped under her left thumb. Warm liquid streamed down her wrist.

“I’m already dying,” Daji whispered. “Don’t you want to know who I am? Don’t you want to know the truth about us?”

Rin knew she should end things right then.

She couldn’t.

Because she did want to know. She’d been tortured by these questions. She had to understand why the Empire’s greatest heroes—Daji, Riga, and Jiang, her Master Jiang—had become the monsters they did. And because here, at the end of things, she doubted now more than ever that she was fighting for the right side.

Her eyes fluttered open.

Visions swarmed her mind.

She saw a city burning the way Arlong burned now; buildings charred and blackened, corpses lining the streets. She saw troops marching in uniform lines of terrifying numbers, while the city’s surviving inhabitants crouched by their doorsteps, heads bent and arms raised.

This was the Nikara Empire under Mugenese occupation.

“We couldn’t do anything,” Daji said. “We were too weak to do anything when their ships arrived at our shores. And for the next five decades, when they raped us, beat us, spat on us and told us we were worth less than dogs, we couldn’t do anything.”

Rin squeezed her eyes shut, but the images wouldn’t go away. She saw a beautiful little girl standing alone before a heap of bodies, soot across her face, tears streaming down her cheeks. She saw a young boy lying in a starved, broken heap in the corner of the alley, curled around jagged, shattered bottles. She saw a white-haired boy screaming profanities and waving his fists at the retreating backs of soldiers who did not care.

“Then we escaped, and we had power within our hands to change the fate of the Empire,” Daji said. “So what do you think we did?”

“That doesn’t excuse anything.”

“It explains and justifies everything.”

The visions shifted again. Rin saw a naked girl shrieking and crying beside a cave while snakes writhed over her body. She saw a tall boy crouching on the shore while a dragon encircled him, whipping up higher and higher waves that surrounded his body like a tornado. She saw a white-haired boy on his hands and knees, beating his fists against the ground while shadows writhed and stretched out of his back.

“Tell me you wouldn’t have given up everything,” Daji said. “Tell me you wouldn’t sacrifice everything and everyone you knew for the power to take back your country.”

Months flashed before Rin’s eyes. Next she saw the Trifecta, fully grown, kneeling by the body of Tseveri, who was just one girl, and the choice seemed so clear and obvious. Against the suffering of a teeming mass of millions, what was one life? Twenty lives? The Ketreyids were so few; how hard could the comparison be?

What difference could it possibly make?

“We didn’t want to kill Tseveri,” Daji whispered. “She saved us. She convinced the Ketreyids to take us in. And Jiang loved her.”

“Then why—”

“Because we had to. Because our allies wanted that land, and the Sorqan Sira said no, and we needed to win it through force and fear. We had one chance to unite the Warlords and we weren’t going to throw it away.”

“But then you gave it away!” Rin cried. “You didn’t take it back! You sold it to the Mugenese—”

“If your arm were rotting, wouldn’t you cut it off to save your body? The provinces were rebelling. Corrupt. Diseased. I would have sacrificed it all for a united core. I knew we weren’t strong enough to defend the whole country, only a part of it. So I culled. You know that; you command the Cike. You know what rulers must sometimes do.”

“You sold us.”

“I did it for them,” Daji said softly. “I did it for the empire Riga left me. And you don’t understand the stakes, because you don’t know the meaning of true fear. You don’t know how much worse it could have been.”

Daji’s voice broke.

And for the second time, Rin saw the facade break, saw through the carefully crafted mirage that Daji had been presenting to the world for decades. This woman wasn’t the Vipress, wasn’t the scheming ruler Rin had learned to hate and fear.

This woman was afraid. But not of her.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” Daji whispered. “I’m sorry I hurt Altan. I wish I’d never had to. But I had a plan to protect my people, and you simply got in the way. You didn’t know your true enemy. You wouldn’t listen.”

Rin was so furious with her then, because she couldn’t hate her anymore. Who was she supposed to fight for now? What side was she supposed to be on? She didn’t believe in Vaisra’s Republic, not anymore, and she certainly didn’t trust the Hesperians, but she didn’t know what Daji wanted her to do.

“You can go ahead and kill me,” said Daji. “You probably could. I’d fight back, of course, but you’d probably win. I would kill me.”

“Shut up,” Rin said.

She wanted to tighten her fists and choke the life out of Daji. But the rage had drained away. She didn’t have the will to fight anymore. She wanted to be angry—things were so much easier when she was just blindly angry—but the anger wouldn’t come.

Daji twisted out from her grip, and Rin didn’t try to stop her.

Daji was as good as dead regardless. Her face was a grotesque ruin—black liquid gushed out from her gouged eye. She stumbled to the side, fingers feeling for the ship.

Her good eye locked on to Rin’s. “What do you think happens to you after I’m gone? Don’t imagine for a moment you can trust Vaisra. Without me, Vaisra has no use for you. Vaisra discards his allies without blinking when they are no longer convenient, and if you don’t believe me when I say you’re next, then you’re a fool.”

Rin knew Daji was right.

She just didn’t know where that left her.

Daji shook her head and held her hands out, open and unthreatening. “Come with me.”

Rin took a small step forward.

Wood groaned above her head. Daji skirted backward. Too late, Rin looked up just in time to see the ship’s mast crashing down on her.

Rin couldn’t even scream. It took everything she had just to breathe. Air came in hoarse, painful bursts; it felt like her throat had been reduced to the diameter of a pin. Her entire back burned with agony.

Daji knelt down in front of her. Stroked her cheek. “You’ll need me. You don’t realize it now, but you’ll figure it out soon. You need me far more than you need them. I just hope you survive.”

She leaned down so close that Rin could feel her hot breath on her skin. Daji grabbed Rin by the chin and forced her to look up, into her good eye. Rin stared into a black pupil inside a ring of yellow, pulsing hypnotically, an abyss daring her to fall inside.

“I’ll leave you with this.”

Rin saw a beautiful young girl—Daji, it had to be—in a huddled heap on the ground, naked, clothes clutched to her chest. Dark blood dripped down pale thighs. She saw the young Riga sprawled on the ground, unconscious. She saw Jiang lying on his side, screaming, as a man kicked him in the ribs, over and over and over.

She dared to look up. Their tormenter was not Mugenese.

Blue eyes. Yellow hair. The soldier brought his boot down, over and over and over, and each time Rin heard another set of cracks.

She leaped forward in time, just a few minutes. The soldier was gone, and the children were clinging to each other, crying, covered in each other’s blood, crouching in the shadow of a different soldier.

“Get out of here,” said the soldier, in a tongue she was far too familiar with. A tongue she would have never believed would utter a kind word. “Now.”

Then Rin understood.

It had been a Hesperian soldier that raped Daji, and a Mugenese soldier who saved her. That was the frame the Empress had been locked into since childhood; that was the crux that had formed every decision afterward.

“The Mugenese weren’t the real enemy,” Daji murmured. “They never were. They were just poor puppets serving a mad emperor who started a war that he shouldn’t have. But who gave them those ideas? Who told them they could conquer the continent?”

Blue eyes. White sails.

“I warned you about everything. I told you this from the beginning. Those devils are going to destroy our world. The Hesperians have a singular vision for the future, and we’re not in it. You already know this. You must have realized it, now that you’ve seen what they’re like. I can see it in your eyes. You know they’re dangerous. You know you’ll need an ally.”

Questions formed on Rin’s tongue, too many to count, but she couldn’t summon the breath to speak them. Her vision was tunneling, turning black at the edges. All she could see was Daji’s pale face, dancing above her like the moon.

“Think about it,” Daji whispered, tracing her cool fingers over Rin’s cheek. “Figure out who you’re fighting for. And when you know, come find me.”

“Rin? Rin!” Venka’s face loomed over her. “Fucking hell. Can you hear me?”

Rin felt a great weight lifting off her back and shoulders. She lay flat, eyes open wide, sucking in great gulps of air.

“Hey.” Venka snapped her fingers in front of her. “What’s my name?”

Rin moaned. “Just help me up.”

“Close enough.” Venka wedged her arms under her stomach and helped Rin roll onto her side. Every tiny movement sent fresh spasms of pain rippling through her back. She collapsed into Venka’s arms, breathless with agony.

Venka’s hands moved over her skin, feeling for injuries. Rin felt her fingers pause on her back.

“Oh, that’s not good,” Venka murmured.

“What?”

“Uh. Can you breathe all right?”

“Ribs,” Rin gasped. “My—ow!”

Venka pulled her hands away from Rin. They were slippery with blood. “There’s a rod stuck under your skin.”

“I know,” Rin said through gritted teeth. “Get it out.” She reached back to try again to yank it out herself, but Venka grabbed her wrist before she could.

“You’ll lose too much blood if it comes out now.”

Rin knew that, but the thought of the rod digging deeper inside her was making her panic spiral. “But I’m—”

“Just breathe for a minute. All right? Can you do that for me? Just breathe.”

“How bad is it?” Kitay’s voice. Thank the gods.

“Several ribs broken. Don’t move, I’ll get a stretcher.” Venka set off at a run.

Kitay knelt down beside her. His voice dropped to a whisper. “What happened? Where’s the Empress?”

Rin swallowed. “She got away.”

“Obviously.” Kitay’s fingers tightened on her shoulder. “Did you let her go?”

“I . . . what?”

Kitay gave her a hard look. “Did you let her go?”

Had she?

She found that she couldn’t answer.

She could have killed Daji. She’d had plenty of opportunities to burn, strangle, stab, or choke the Empress before the beam fell. If she’d wanted to, she could have ended everything then and there.

Why hadn’t she?

Had the Vipress manipulated her into letting her go? Was Rin’s reluctance a product of her own thoughts or Daji’s hypnosis? She could not remember if she had chosen to let Daji escape, or if she had simply been outsmarted and defeated.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

“You don’t know,” Kitay asked, “or you don’t want to tell me?”

“I thought it’d be so clear,” she said. Her head swam; her eyes fluttered closed. “I thought the choice was obvious. But now I really don’t know.”

“I think I understand,” Kitay said after a long pause. “But I’d keep that to yourself.”

Chapter 34

Rin jolted awake to the sound of gongs. She tried to spring out of bed, but the moment she lifted her head, a searing pain rippled through her back.

“Whoa.” Venka’s blurry face came into view. She put a hand on Rin’s shoulder and forced her back down. “Not so fast.”

“But the morning alarm,” Rin said. “I’m going to be late.”

Venka laughed. “To what? You’re off duty. We’re all off duty.”

Rin blinked. “What?”

“It’s over. We won. You can relax.”

After months of warfare, of sleeping and eating and waking on the same strict schedule, that statement was so incredulous to Rin that for a moment the words themselves sounded like they’d been spoken in a different language.

“We’re finished?” she asked faintly.

“For now. But don’t be too disappointed, you’ll have plenty to do once you’re up and moving.” Venka cracked her knuckles. “Soon we’ll be running cleanup.”

Rin struggled to prop herself up on her elbows. The pain in her lower back pulsed along with her heartbeat. She clenched her teeth to stave it off. “What else is there? Update me.”

“Well, the Empire hasn’t exactly surrendered. They’re decapitated, but the strongest provinces—Tiger, Horse, and Snake—are still holding out.”

“But the Wolf Meat General’s dead,” Rin said. Venka already knew that—she’d seen it happen—but saying it out loud made her feel better.

“Yeah. We captured Tsolin alive, too. Jun made it out, though.” Venka picked up an apple from Rin’s bedside. She began paring it with rapid, sure movements, fingers moving so fast that Rin was amazed she didn’t peel her own skin off. “Somehow he swam out of the channel and got away—he’s well on his way back to Tiger Province now. Horse and Snake are loyal to him, and he’s a better strategist than Chang En was. They’ll put up a good fight. But the war should be over soon.”

“Why?”

Venka pointed out the window with her paring knife. “We have help.”

Rin shifted around in her bed to peer outside, clutching the windowsill for support. A seemingly infinite number of warships crowded the harbor. She tried to calculate how many Hesperian troops that entailed. Thousands? Tens of thousands?

She should have been relieved the civil war was as good as over. Instead, when she looked at those white sails, all she could feel was dread.

“Something wrong?” Venka asked.

Rin took a breath. “Just . . . disoriented a bit, I think.”

Venka handed the peeled apple to Rin. “Eat something.”

Rin wrapped her fingers around it with difficulty. It was amazing how hard the simple act of chewing was; how much it hurt her teeth, how it strained her jaw. Swallowing was agony. She couldn’t manage more than a few bites. She put the apple down. “What happened to the Militia deserters?”

“A couple tried to flee over the mountains, but their horses got scared when the dirigibles came,” Venka said. “Trampled them underfoot. Their bodies are still stuck in the mud. We’ll probably send a crew to get those horses back. How’s your . . . well, how’s everything feeling?”

Rin reached backward to feel at her wounds. Her back and shoulder were covered in a swath of bandages. Her fingers kept brushing against raised skin that hurt to touch. She winced. She didn’t want to see what lay beneath the wrappings. “Did they tell you how bad it was?”

“Can you still wiggle your toes?”

Rin froze. “Venka.”

“I’m kidding.” Venka cracked a smile. “It looks worse than it is. It’ll take you a while, but you’ll get full mobility back. Your biggest concern is scarring. But you were always ugly, so it’s not like that will make a difference.”

Rin was too relieved to be angry. “Go fuck yourself.”

“There’s a mirror inside that cabinet door.” Venka pointed to the back corner of the room and stood up. “I’ll give you some time alone.”

After Venka closed the door, Rin pulled off her shirt, climbed gingerly to her feet, and stood naked in front of the mirror.

She was stunned by how repulsive she looked.

She’d always known that nothing could make her attractive; not with her mud-colored skin, sullen face, and short, jagged hair that had never been styled with anything more sophisticated than a rusty knife.

But now she just looked like a broken and battered thing. She was an amalgamation of scars and stitches. On her arm, dotted white reminders of the hot wax she’d once used to burn herself to stay awake studying. On her back and shoulders, whatever lay behind those bandages. And just under her sternum, Altan’s handprint, as dark and vivid as the day she’d first seen it.

Exhaling slowly, she pressed her left hand to the spot over her stomach. She couldn’t tell if she was only imagining it, but it felt hot to the touch.

“I should apologize,” said Kitay.

She jumped. She hadn’t heard the door open. “Fucking hell—”

“Sorry.”

She scrambled to pull her shirt back on. “You might have knocked!”

“I didn’t realize you’d be up.” He crossed the room and perched himself on the side of her bed. “Anyway, I wanted to apologize. That wound is my fault. Didn’t put padding around the gears—I didn’t have time, so I was just going for something functional. The rod went in about three inches at a slant. The physicians said you’re lucky it didn’t sever your spine.”

“Did you feel it, too?” she asked.

“Just a little,” Kitay said. He was lying, she knew that, but in that moment she was just grateful he would even try to spare her the guilt. He lifted his shirt and twisted around to show her a pale white scar running across his lower back. “Look. They’re the same shape, I think.”

She peered enviously at the smooth white lines. “That’s prettier than mine will be.”

“Don’t get too jealous.”

She moved her hands and arms about, gingerly testing the temporary boundaries of her mobility. She tried to raise her right arm above her head, but gave up when her shoulder threatened to tear itself apart. “I don’t think I want to fly for a while.”

“I gathered.” Kitay picked her unfinished apple up off the windowsill and took a bite. “Good thing you won’t have to.”

She sat back down on the bed. It hurt to stand for too long.

“The Cike?” she asked.

“All alive and accounted for. None with serious injuries.”

She nodded, relieved. “And Feylen. Is he . . . you know, properly dead?”

“Who cares?” Kitay said. “He’s buried under thousands of tons of rock. If there’s anything alive down there, it won’t bother us for a millennium.”

Rin tried to take comfort in that. She wanted to be sure Feylen was dead. She wanted to see a body. But for now, this would have to do.

“Where’s Nezha?” she asked.

“He’s been in here. Constantly. Wouldn’t leave, but I think someone finally got him to go take a nap. Good thing, too. He was starting to smell.”

“So he’s all right?” she asked quickly.

“Not entirely.” Kitay tilted his head at her. “Rin, what did you do to him?”

She hesitated.

Could she tell Kitay the truth? Nezha’s secret was so personal, so intensely painful, that it would feel like an awful betrayal. But it also entailed immense consequences that she didn’t know how to grapple with, and she couldn’t stand keeping that to herself. At least not from the other half of her soul.

Kitay said out loud what she had been thinking. “We’re both better off if you don’t hide things from me.”

“It’s an odd story.”

“Try me.”

She told him everything, every last painful, disgusting detail.

Kitay didn’t flinch. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Nezha’s been a prick his whole life. I imagine it’s hard to be pleasant when you’re in chronic pain.”

Rin managed a laugh. “I don’t think that’s entirely it.”

Kitay was silent for a moment. “So am I to understand that’s why he’s been moping for days? Did he call the dragon at the Red Cliffs?”

Rin’s stomach twisted with guilt. “I didn’t make him do it.”

“Then what happened?”

“We were in the channel. We were—I was drowning. But I didn’t force him. That wasn’t me.”

What she wanted was for Kitay to tell her she hadn’t done anything wrong. But as usual, all he did was tell her the truth. “You didn’t have to force him. You think that Nezha would let you die? After you’d called him a coward?”

“The pain’s not so bad,” she insisted. “Not so bad that you want to die. You’ve felt it. We both survived it.”

“You don’t know how it feels for him.”

“It can’t possibly be worse.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe it’s worse than you could even imagine.”

She drew her knees up to her chest. “I never wanted to hurt him.”

Kitay’s voice held no judgment, only curiosity. “Why’d you say those things to him, then?”

“Because his life is not his own,” she said, echoing Vaisra’s words from so long ago. “Because when you have this much power, it’s selfish to sit on it just because you’re scared.”

But that wasn’t entirely it.

She was also jealous. Jealous that Nezha might have access to such enormous power and never consider using it. Jealous that Nezha’s entire identity and worth did not hinge on his shamanic abilities. Nezha had never been referred to solely by his race. Nezha had never been someone’s weapon. They had both been claimed by gods, but Nezha got to be the princeling of the House of Yin, free from Hesperian experimentation, and she got to be the last heir of a tragic race.

Kitay knew that. Kitay knew everything that crossed her mind.

He sat quietly for a long time.

“I’m going to tell you something,” he finally said. “And I don’t want you to take it as a judgment, I want you to take it as a warning.”

She gave him a wary look. “What?”

“You’ve known Nezha for a few years,” he said. “You met him when he’d perfected his masks and pretensions. But I’ve known him since we were children. You think that he’s invincible, but he is more fragile than you think. Yes, I know he’s a prick. But I also know that he’d throw himself off a cliff for you. Please stop trying to break him.”

The trial of Ang Tsolin took place the next morning on a raised dais before the palace. Republican soldiers crowded the courtyard below, wearing uniform expressions of cold resentment. Civilians had been barred from attendance. Word of Tsolin’s betrayal was common knowledge by now, but Vaisra didn’t want a riot. He didn’t want Tsolin to die in chaos. He wanted to give his old master a precise, cleanly executed death, every silent second drawn out as long as possible.

Captain Eriden and his guards led Tsolin to the top of the platform. They’d let him keep his dignity—he was neither blindfolded nor bound. Under different circumstances he might have been receiving the highest honors.

Vaisra met Tsolin at the center of the dais, handed him a wrapped sword, and leaned forward to murmur something into his ear.

“What’s happening?” Rin murmured into Kitay’s ear.

“He’s giving him the option of suicide,” Kitay explained. “A respectable end for a disgraceful traitor. But only if Tsolin confesses to and repents for his wrongs.”

“Will he?”

“Doubt it. Even an honorable suicide can’t overcome that kind of disgrace.”

Tsolin and Vaisra stood still on the dais, silently regarding each other. Then Tsolin shook his head and handed the sword back.

“Your regime is a puppet democracy,” he said aloud. “And all you have done is hand your country over to be ruled by the blue-eyed devils.”

A murmur of unease swept through the soldiers.

Vaisra’s eyes roved the crowd and fell on Rin. He beckoned to her with one finger.

“Come here,” he said.

She glanced around her, hoping he was pointing to someone else.

“Go,” Kitay muttered.

“What does he want with me?”

“What do you think?”

She blanched. “I’m not doing this.”

He gave her a gentle nudge. “It’s best if you don’t think too much about it.”

She shuffled forward, leaning heavily on her cane. She could still only barely walk. The worst was the pain in her lower back, because it wasn’t localized. The node seemed connected to every muscle in her body—every time she took a step or moved her arms, she felt like she’d been stabbed.

The soldiers parted to clear her a path to the platform. She ascended with slow, shaking steps. Every step pulled painfully at the stitches in her lower back.

Finally she stopped before the Snake Warlord. He met her gaze with tired eyes. Even now, even when he was completely at her mercy, he still looked like he pitied her.

“A puppet to the end,” Tsolin whispered, so softly that only she could hear. “When are you going to learn?”

“I’m not a puppet,” she said.

He shook his head. “I thought you might be the smart one. But you let him take everything he needed from you and just rolled over like a whore.”

She would have responded, but Vaisra spoke over her.

“Do it,” he said coldly.

She didn’t have to ask what he meant. She knew what he wanted from her. Right now, unless she wanted to arouse suspicion, she needed to be Vaisra’s obedient weapon of the Republic.

She placed her right palm on Tsolin’s chest, just over his heart, and pushed. Her curled fingers seared with flames so hot her nails went straight into his flesh as if she were clawing at soft tofu.

Tsolin twitched and jerked but kept his mouth shut. She paused, marveling at how long he managed not to scream.

“You’re brave,” she said.

“You’re going to die,” he gasped. “You fool.”

Her fingers closed around something that she thought might be his heart. She squeezed. Tsolin’s head dropped. Over his slumped shoulder, she saw Vaisra nod and smile.

Rin wanted to get out of Arlong immediately after that. But Kitay argued, and she reluctantly agreed, that they wouldn’t make it a mile out the channel. She still couldn’t walk properly, much less run. Her open wounds required daily checkups in the infirmary that neither of them had the medical knowledge to conduct on their own.

They also didn’t have an escape plan. They’d heard only silence from Moag. If they left now, they’d have to travel on foot unless they could steal a riverboat, and Arlong’s dock security was too good for them to manage that.

They had no choice other than to wait, at least until Rin had healed up enough to hold her own in a fight.

Everything hung in a tense equilibrium. Rin received no word from Vaisra or the Hesperians. Sister Petra hadn’t summoned her for an examination in months. Rin and Kitay made no overt moves to escape. Vaisra didn’t have any reason to suspect her allegiances had shifted, so she was operating on a fairly loose leash. That gave her time to figure out her next move. She was a mouse inching closer to a trap. It would spring when she moved to escape, but only then.

A week after Tsolin’s execution, the palace servants delivered a heavy, silk-wrapped package to her room. When she unwrapped it she found a ceremonial dress with instructions to put it on and appear on the dais in an hour.

Rin still couldn’t lift her hands all the way over her head, so she enlisted Venka’s assistance.

“What the fuck do I do with this?” Rin held up a loose rectangle of cloth.

“Calm down. It’s a shawl, you drape it just under your shoulders.” Venka took the cloth from Rin and wrapped it loosely over Rin’s upper arms. “Like so. So that it flows like water, see?”

Rin was getting too hot and frustrated to care how well her clothes flowed. She snatched up another loose rectangle that looked identical to her shawl. “Then what about this?”

Venka blinked at her as if she were an idiot. “You tie that around your waist.”

The biggest injustice, Rin thought, was that despite her injuries, they were still forcing her to walk in the victory parade. Vaisra had insisted it was crucial for decorum. He wanted to put on a show for the Hesperians. A display of Nikara gratitude and etiquette. Proof they were civilized.

Rin was so tired of having to prove her humanity.

The robe was quickly wearing down her patience. The damned thing was hot, stifling, and so tight it restricted her mobility in ways that made her breathing quicken. Putting it on required so many moving pieces she was tempted to throw the whole pile in the corner and set it on fire.

Venka made a noise of disgust as she watched Rin fasten the sash around her waist with a quick sailor’s knot. “That looks horrendous.”

“It’s going to come undone otherwise.”

“There’s more than one way to tie a knot. And that’s far too loose besides. You look like you’ve been caught getting frisky with a courtier.”

Rin pulled at the sash until it pressed into her ribs. “Like this?”

“Tighter.”

“But I can’t breathe.”

“That’s the point. Stop only when it feels like your ribs are going to crack.”

“I think my ribs have cracked. Twice over now.”

“Then a third time can’t do much more damage.” Venka took the sash out of Rin’s hands and began retying the knot herself. “You are incredible.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“How did you come this far without learning any feminine wiles?”

That was such an absurd phrase that Rin snorted into her sleeve. “We’re soldiers. Where did you learn feminine wiles?”

“I’m aristocracy. My whole life my parents were determined to get me married to some minister.” Venka smirked. “They were a little miffed when I joined the military instead.”

“They didn’t want you at Sinegard?” Rin asked.

“No, they hated the idea. But I insisted on it. I wanted glory and attention. Wanted them to write stories about me. Look how that turned out.” Venka yanked the knot tight. “You have a visitor, by the way.”

Rin turned around.

Nezha stood in the doorway, hands dangling awkwardly by his sides. He cleared his throat. “Hello.”

Venka patted Rin’s shoulder. “Have fun.”

“That’s a pretty knot,” Nezha said.

Venka winked as she flounced past him. “Even prettier on the wearer.”

The creak as the door swung shut might have been the loudest noise Rin had ever heard.

Nezha crossed the room to stand beside her in front of the mirror. They looked at each other in the glass. She was struck by the imbalance between them—how much taller he was, how pale his skin looked next to hers, how elegant and natural he looked in ceremonial garb.

She looked ridiculous. He looked like he belonged.

“You look good,” he said.

She snorted. “Don’t lie to my face.”

“I would never lie to you.”

The following silence felt oppressive.

It seemed obvious what they should be talking about, but she didn’t know how to raise the subject. She never knew how to bring things up around him. He was so unpredictable, warm one minute and cold to her the next. She never knew where she stood with him; never knew if she could trust him, and that was so damn frustrating because aside from Kitay he was the one person whom she wanted to tell everything.

“How do you feel?” she finally asked.

“I’ll live,” he said lightly.

She waited for him to continue. He didn’t.

She was terrified to say anything more. She knew a chasm had opened between them, she just didn’t know how to close it.

“Thank you,” she tried.

He raised an eyebrow. “For what?”

“You didn’t have to save me,” she said. “You didn’t have to . . . do what you did.”

“Yes, I did.” She couldn’t tell if the lightness in his tone was forced or not. “How would it go over if I let our Speerly die?”

“It hurt you,” she said. And I had you smoke enough opium to kill a calf. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “We’re fine.”

But they weren’t fine. Something had shattered between them, and she was sure that it was her own fault. She just didn’t know how to make it right.

“Okay.” She broke the silence. She couldn’t stand this anymore; she needed to flee. “I’m going to go find—”

“Did you see her die?” Nezha asked abruptly, startling her.

“Who?”

“Daji. We never found a body.”

“I gave your father my report,” she said. She’d told Vaisra and Eriden that Daji was dead, drowned, sunk at the bottom of the Murui.

“I know what you told him. Now I want you to tell me the truth.”

“That’s the truth.”

Nezha’s voice hardened. “Don’t lie to me.”

She crossed her arms. “Why would I lie about that?”

“Because they haven’t found a body.”

“I was trapped under a fucking mast, Nezha. I was too busy trying not to die to think.”

“Then why did you tell Father that she’s dead?”

“Because I think she is!” Rin quickly pulled an explanation out of thin air. “I saw Feylen crash that ship. I saw her fall into the water. And if you can’t find a body that just means she’s buried down there with the other ten thousand corpses clogging up your channel. What I don’t understand is why you’re acting like I’m a traitor when I just killed a god for you.”

“I’m sorry.” Nezha sighed. “No, you’re right. I just—I want us to be able to trust each other.”

His eyes looked so sincere. He’d really bought it.

Rin exhaled, marveling at how narrowly she’d gotten away.

“I’ve never lied to you.” She placed a hand on his arm. It was so easy to act. She didn’t have to fake her affection for him. It felt good to tell Nezha what he wanted to hear. “And I never will. I swear.”

Nezha gave her a smile. A real smile. “I like when we’re on the same side.”

“Me too,” she said, and that, finally, wasn’t a lie. How desperately she wished they could stay that way.

The parade turnout was pathetic. That didn’t surprise Rin. In Tikany, people came out for festivals only because they bore the promise of free food and drink, but battle-wrecked Arlong didn’t have the resources to spare either. Vaisra had ordered an extra ration of rice and fish distributed across the city, but to civilians who had just lost their homes and relatives, that was little cause to celebrate.

Rin still could only barely walk. She’d stopped using her cane, but she couldn’t move more than fifty yards without getting exhausted, and both her arms and legs were riddled by a tight, sore ache that seemed to only be getting worse.

“We can have you ride on a sedan chair if you need,” Kitay said when she faltered on the dais.

Rin clutched his proffered arm. “I’ll walk.”

“But you’re hurting.”

“Entire city’s hurting,” she said. “That’s the point.”

She hadn’t seen the city outside the infirmary until now, and the devastation was painful to look at. The fires in the outer city had burned for nearly a day after the battle, extinguished only by rainfall. The palace remained intact, though blackened at the bottoms. The lush greenery of the canal islands had been replaced by withered dead trees and ash. The infirmaries were overcrowded with the wounded. The dead lay in neat lines by the beach, awaiting a proper burial.

Vaisra’s parade wasn’t a testament to victory, but an acknowledgment of sacrifice. Rin appreciated that. There were no gaudy musicians, no flagrant displays of wealth and power. The army walked the streets to show that they had survived. That the Republic was alive.

Saikhara headed the procession, breathtaking in robes of cerulean and silver. Vaisra strode just behind her. His hair was streaked with far more white than it had been months ago, and he walked with just the barest hint of a limp, but even those signs of weakness seemed only to add to his dignity. He was dressed like an Emperor, and Saikhara looked like his Empress. She was their divine mother and he was their savior, father, and ruler all at once.

Behind that celestial couple stood the entire military might of the west. Hesperian soldiers lined the streets. Hesperian dirigibles drifted slowly through the air above them. Vaisra may have promised to usher in a democratic government, but if he intended to stake his claim to the entire Empire, Rin doubted that anyone could stop him.

“Where are the southern Warlords?” Kitay asked. He kept twisting around to get a look at the line of generals. “Haven’t seen them all day.”

Rin searched the crowd. He was right; the Warlords were absent. She couldn’t see a single southern refugee, either.

“Do you think they’ve left?” she asked.

“I know they haven’t. The valleys are still full of refugee camps. I think they chose not to come.”

“What for, a show of protest?”

“I suppose it makes sense,” he said. “This wasn’t their victory.”

Rin could understand that. The victory at the Red Cliffs had solved very few of the south’s problems. Southern troops had bled for a regime that only continued to treat them as a necessary sacrifice. But the Warlords were sacrificing prudence for symbolic protest. They needed Hesperian troops to clear out the Federation enclaves in their home provinces. They should have been doing their best to win back Vaisra’s favor.

Instead, they’d made clear their loyalties, just as they had to her in that alley days ago.

She wondered what that meant for the Republic. The south hadn’t submitted an open declaration of war. But they’d hardly demonstrated obedient cooperation, either. Would Vaisra now send those armed dirigibles to conquer Tikany?

Rin planned to be gone long before it came to that.

The procession culminated in a funeral rite for the dead on the river bank. The turnout for this was much larger. A mass of civilians lined up under the cliffs. Rin couldn’t tell if the water was only reflecting the Red Cliffs, but it seemed as if the channel was still shot through with blood.

Vaisra’s generals and admirals stood in a straight line on the beach. Ribbons on posts marked those with rank who were absent. Rin counted more ribbons than people.

“That’s a hell of a lot of digging.” She looked out over the stacks of drenched, rotting corpses. The soldiers had spent days trawling the river for bodies, which otherwise would have poisoned the river with the foul taste of decay for years.

“They don’t bury their dead in Arlong,” Kitay said. “They send them out to sea.”

They watched as soldiers loaded pyramids of bodies onto rafts, then pushed them out into the water one by one. Each pyre was draped with a funeral shroud dipped in oil. At Vaisra’s command, Eriden’s men shot a barrage of flaming arrows onto the fleet of bodies. Each one found its target. The pyres caught fire with a sharp, satisfying crackle.

“I could have done that,” Rin said.

“It means less when you do it.”

“Why?”

“Because the only thing that makes it significant is the possibility that they don’t aim true.” Kitay nodded over her shoulder. “Look who’s here.”

She followed his line of sight to find Ramsa, Baji, and Suni standing by the edge of the shore a little ways away from a huddle of civilians. They were looking back at her. Ramsa gave her a little wave.

She couldn’t help grinning in relief.

She hadn’t gotten a chance to talk to the Cike since the eve of the battle. She’d known they were all right, but they hadn’t been permitted in the infirmary, and she didn’t want to make a fuss for fear of arousing Hesperian suspicion. This might be their only chance to talk privately.

She leaned close to murmur in Kitay’s ear. “Is anyone looking?”

“I think you’re fine,” he said. “Hurry.”

She shuffled, limping, as quickly as she could down the shore.

“I see they finally let you out of the death farm,” Baji said in greeting.

“‘Death farm’?” she repeated.

“Ramsa’s nickname for the infirmary.”

“It’s because they’d roll out corpses every day in grain wagons,” Ramsa said. “Glad you weren’t in one of them.”

“How bad is it?” Baji asked.

She instinctively brushed her fingers over her lower back. “Manageable. Hurts, but I can walk without assistance now. You all got through unscathed?”

“More or less.” Baji showed her his bandaged shins. “Scraped those when I was jumping off a ship. Ramsa threw a fuse too late, got a bad burn on his knee. Suni’s completely fine. The man can survive anything.”

“Good,” she said. She glanced quickly around the beach. No one was paying attention to them; the crowd’s eyes were fixed on the funeral pyres. She lowered her voice regardless. “We can’t stay here anymore. Get ready to run.”

“When?” Baji asked. None of them looked surprised. Rather, they all seemed to have been expecting it.

“Soon. We’re not safe here. Vaisra doesn’t need us anymore and we can’t count on his protection. The Hesperians don’t know you and Suni are shamans, so we have a bit of leeway. Kitay doesn’t think they’ll move in immediately. But we shouldn’t drag our feet.”

“Thank the gods,” Ramsa said. “I couldn’t stand them. They smell horrible.”

Baji gave him a look. “Really? That’s your biggest complaint? The smell?”

“It’s rank,” Ramsa insisted. “Like tofu gone sour.”

Suni spoke up for the first time. “If you’re worried, why don’t we get out tonight?”

“That works,” Rin said.

“Any particulars?” Ramsa asked.

“I don’t have a plan beyond escape. We tried to get Moag on board, but she hasn’t responded. We’ll have to just make our way out of the city on our own.”

“One problem,” Baji said. “Suni and I are on night patrol. Think it’ll tip them off if we go missing?”

Rin assumed that was precisely the reason why they had been put on night patrol.

“When do you get off?” she asked.

“An hour before dawn.”

“So we’ll go then,” she said. “Make straight for the cliffs. Don’t wait at the gates, that’ll only attract attention. We’ll figure out what to do once we’re out of the city. Does that work?”

“Fine,” Baji said. Ramsa and Suni nodded.

There was nothing else to discuss. They stood together in a cluster, watching the funeral in silence for a few minutes. The flames on the pyres had grown to a full blaze. Rin didn’t know what was propelling the pyres farther out to sea, but the way the flames blurred the air above them was oddly hypnotizing.

“It’s pretty,” Baji said.

“Yeah,” she said. “It is.”

“You know what’s going to happen to them, right?” Ramsa said. “They’ll float for about three days. Then the pyres will start to break apart. Burned wood is weak and bodies are heavy as shit. They sink into the ocean, and they’ll bloat and crumble unless the fish nibble everything but the bones first.”

His brittle voice carried over the still morning air. Heads were turning.

“Will you stop?” Rin muttered.

“Sorry,” said Ramsa. “All I’m saying is that they should have just burned them on land.”

“I don’t think they got all the bodies,” Baji said. “I saw more corpses in the river than that. How many Imperial soldiers do you think are still down there?”

Rin shot him a look. “Baji, please—”

“You know, it’s funny. The fish will feed on the corpses. Then you’ll eat the fish, and you’ll literally be feeding on the bodies of your enemies.”

She glared at him through blurry eyes. “Do you have to do that?”

“What, you don’t think it’s funny?” He put his arm around her. “Hey. Don’t cry—I’m sorry.”

She swallowed hard. She hadn’t meant to cry. She wasn’t even sure why she was crying—she didn’t know any of the bodies on the pyre, and she didn’t have any reason to grieve.

Those bodies weren’t her fault. She still felt miserable.

“I don’t like feeling this way,” she whispered.

“Me neither, kid.” Baji rubbed her shoulder. “But that’s war. You might as well be on the winning side.”

Chapter 35

Rin couldn’t sleep that night. She sat upright in her infirmary bed, staring out the window at the still harbor, counting down the minutes until dawn. She wanted to pace the hallway, but didn’t want the infirmary staff to find her behavior odd. She also wished desperately she could be with Kitay, poring over every possible contingency one last time, but they’d been sleeping in separate rooms every night. She couldn’t risk giving away any sign that she intended to leave until she’d made it out of the city gates.

She’d packed nothing. She owned very little that mattered—she’d bring along her backup longsword, the one that wasn’t lost at the bottom of the channel, and the clothes on her back. She’d leave everything else behind in the barracks. The more she took with her, the faster Vaisra would realize that she had left for good.

Rin had no idea what she was going to do once she got out. Moag still hadn’t returned her missive. She might not have even received it. Perhaps she had and elected to ignore it. Or she might have taken it straight to Vaisra.

Ankhiluun might have been a terrible gamble. But Rin simply had no other options.

All she knew was that she needed to get out of the city. For once, she needed to be a step ahead of Vaisra. No one suspected that she might leave, which meant no one was keeping her from going.

She had no advantages past that, but she’d figure out the rest once the Red Cliffs were well behind her.

“Fancy a drink?” asked a voice.

She jumped, hands scrabbling for her sword.

“Tiger’s tits,” Nezha said. “It’s just me.”

“Sorry,” she breathed. Could he read the fear on her face? She hastily rearranged her features into some semblance of calm. “I’m still twitchy. Every noise I hear sounds like cannon fire.”

“I know that feeling.” Nezha held up a jug. “This might help.”

“What is that?”

“Sorghum wine. We’re off duty for the first time since any of us can remember.” He grinned. “Let’s go get smashed.”

“Who’s us?” she asked cautiously.

“Me and Venka. We’ll go grab Kitay, too.” He extended his hand to her. “Come on. Unless you’ve got something better to do?”

Rin wavered, mind racing furiously.

It was a horrible idea to get drunk on the eve of her escape. But Nezha might suspect something if both she and Kitay refused. He was right—neither she nor Kitay had a plausible excuse to be anywhere else. All of them had been off duty since the Hesperians docked in the harbor.

If she wasn’t planning to turn traitor, why on earth would she say no?

“Come on,” Nezha said again. “A few drinks won’t hurt.”

She managed a smile and took his hand. “You read my mind.”

She tried to calm her racing heartbeat as she followed him out of the barracks.

This was all right. She could afford this one liberty. Once she left Arlong, she might never see Nezha again. She knew, despite their bond, that he could never leave his father’s side. She didn’t want him to remember her as a traitor. She wanted him to remember her as a friend.

She had at least until the hour before dawn. She might as well say a proper goodbye.

Rin didn’t know where Nezha and Venka had found so much liquor in a city that prohibited its sale to soldiers. When she’d made it outside the infirmary, they were waiting on the street with an entire wagon of sealed jugs. Nezha retrieved Kitay from the barracks. Then they pushed the wagon together up to the highest tower of the palace, where they sat overlooking the Red Cliffs, surveying the wreckage of the fleets floating below.

For the first few minutes they didn’t speak. They just drank furiously, trying to get as inebriated as possible. It didn’t take very long.

Venka kicked at Nezha’s foot. “You sure we’re not getting jailed for this?”

“We just won the most important battle in the history of the Empire.” Nezha gave her a lazy smile. “I think you’re fine to imbibe.”

“He’s trying to frame us,” Rin said.

She hadn’t meant to start drinking. But Venka and Nezha had kept urging her, and she hadn’t known how to say no without drawing suspicion. Once she started it was harder and harder to stop. Sorghum wine was only horrible for the first few swallows, when it felt like it was burning away at her esophagus, but very quickly a delicious, giddy numbness settled over her body and the wine began tasting like water.

It’ll wear off in a few hours, she thought dimly. She’d be fine by dawn.

“Believe me,” Nezha said. “I wouldn’t need this to frame any of you.”

Venka sniffed at her jug. “This stuff is gross.”

“What do you like better?” Nezha asked.

“Bamboo rice wine.”

“The lady is demanding,” Kitay said.

“I’ll procure it,” Nezha vowed.

“‘I’ll procure it,’” Kitay mimicked.

“Problem?” Nezha asked.

“No, just a question. Have you ever considered being less of a pretentious fuck?”

Nezha put his jug down. “Have you ever considered how close you’re standing to the roof?”

“Boys, boys.” Venka twirled a strand of hair between her fingers, while Kitay flicked droplets of wine at Nezha.

“Stop it,” Nezha snapped.

“Make me.”

Rin drank steadily, watching with lidded eyes as Nezha scooted on his knees across the tower and tackled Kitay to the floor. She supposed she should be afraid that they might fall off the edge, but drunk as she was, it just seemed very funny.

“I learned something,” Kitay announced abruptly, shoving Nezha off of him.

“You’re always learning things,” said Venka. “Kitay the scholar.”

“I’m an intellectually curious man,” Kitay said.

“Always hunkering down in the library. You know, I made a wager once at Sinegard that you spent all that time jerking off.”

Kitay spat out a mouthful of wine. “What?”

Venka propped her chin up on her hands. “Well, were you? Because I’d like to get my money back.”

Kitay ignored her. “My point being—listen, guys, this is actually interesting. You know why the Militia troops were fighting like they’d never held a sword before?”

“They were fighting with a bit more skill than that,” Nezha said.

“I don’t want to talk about troops,” said Venka.

Nezha elbowed her. “Indulge him. Else he’ll never shut up.”

“It’s malaria,” Kitay said. He sounded at first like he was hiccupping, but then he rolled on his side, giggling so hard his entire frame shook. He was drunk, Rin realized; perhaps more drunk than she was, despite the risk.

Kitay must be feeling the way she did—happy, deliriously so, for once in the company of friends who weren’t in danger, and she suspected that he, too, wanted to suspend reality and break the rules, to ignore the fact that they were about to part forever and just share these last jugs of wine.

She didn’t want dawn to come. She would draw this moment out forever if she could.

“They’re not used to southern diseases,” Kitay continued. “The mosquitos weakened them more than anything we did. Isn’t that amazing?”

“Marvelous,” Venka said drily.

Rin wasn’t paying attention. She scooted closer to the edge of the tower. She wanted to fly again, to feel that precipitous drop in her stomach, the sheer thrill of the dive.

She dangled one foot over the edge and relished the feeling of the wind buffeting her limbs. She leaned forward just the slightest bit. What if she jumped right now? Would she enjoy the fall?

“Get away from there.” Kitay’s voice cut through the fog in her mind. “Nezha, grab her—”

“On it.” Strong arms wrapped around her midriff and dragged her away from the edge. Nezha gripped her tightly, anticipating a struggle, but she just hummed a happy note and slouched back against his chest.

“Do you have any idea how much trouble you are?” he grumbled.

“Hand me another jug,” she said.

Nezha hesitated, but Venka readily obliged.

Rin took a long draught, sighed, and lifted her fingertips to her temples. She felt as if a current were running through her limbs, like she had stuck her hand in a bolt of lightning. She rested her head back against the wall and squeezed her eyes shut.

The best part of being drunk was how nothing mattered.

She could dwell on thoughts that used to hurt too much to think about. She could conjure memories—Altan burning on the pier, the corpses in Golyn Niis, Qara’s body in Chaghan’s arms—all without cringing, without the attendant torment. She could reminisce with a quiet detachment, because nothing mattered and nothing hurt.

“Sixteen months.” Kitay had started counting aloud on his fingers. “That’s almost a year and a half we’ve been at war now, if you start from the invasion.”

“That’s not that long,” said Venka. “The First Poppy War took three years. The Second Poppy War took five. The succession battles after the Red Emperor could take as long as seven.”

“How do you fight a war for seven years?” Rin asked. “Wouldn’t you get bored of fighting?”

“Soldiers get bored,” Kitay said. “Aristocrats don’t. To them, it was all a big game. I guess that’s the problem.”

“Here’s a thought experiment.” Venka waved her hands in a small arc like a rainbow. “Imagine some alternate world where this war hadn’t happened. The Federation never invaded. No, scratch that, the Federation doesn’t even exist. Where are you?”

“Any particular point in time?” Kitay asked.

Venka shook her head. “No, I meant, what are you doing with your life? What do you wish you were doing?”

“I know what Kitay’s doing.” Nezha tilted his head back, shook the last drops from his jug into his mouth, then looked disappointed when it refused to yield any more. Venka passed him another jug. Nezha attempted to pop the cork, failed, muttered a curse under his breath, and smashed the neck against the wall.

“Careful,” said Rin. “That’s premium stuff.”

Nezha lifted the broken edges to his lips and smiled.

“Go on,” Kitay said. “Where am I?”

“You’re at Yuelu Academy,” Nezha said. “You’re conducting groundbreaking research on—on some irrelevant shit like the movement of planetary bodies, or the most effective accounting methods across the Twelve Provinces.”

“Don’t mock accounting,” Kitay said. “It’s important.”

“Only to you,” Venka said.

“Regimes have fallen because rulers didn’t balance their accounts.”

“Whatever.” Venka rolled her eyes. “What about the rest of you?

“I’m good at war,” Rin said. “I’d still be doing wars.”

“Against who?” Venka asked.

“Doesn’t matter. Anyone.”

“There might not be any wars left to fight now,” Nezha said.

“There’s always war,” Kitay said.

“The only thing permanent about this Empire is war,” Rin said. The words were so familiar she said them without thinking, and it took her a long moment to realize she was reciting an aphorism from a history textbook she’d studied for the Keju. That was incredible—even now, the vestiges of that exam were still burned into her mind.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized that the only permanent thing about her might be war. She couldn’t imagine where she’d be if she weren’t a soldier anymore. The past four years had been the first time in her life that she’d felt like she was worth something. In Tikany, she’d been an invisible shopgirl, far beneath everyone’s notice. Her life and death had been utterly insignificant. If she’d been run over by a rickshaw on the street, no one would have bothered to stop.

But now? Now civilians obeyed her command, Warlords sought her audience, and soldiers feared her. Now she spoke to the greatest military minds in the country as if they were equals—or at least as if she belonged in the room. Now she was drinking sorghum wine on the highest tower of the palace of Arlong with the son of the Dragon Warlord.

No one would have paid so much attention to her if she weren’t so very good at killing people.

A twinge of discomfort wormed through her gut. Once she left Vaisra’s employ, what on earth was she supposed to do?

“We could all just switch to civilian posts now,” Kitay said. “Let’s all be ministers and magistrates.”

“You have to get elected first,” Nezha said. “Government by the people, and all that. People have to like you.”

“Rin’s out of a job, then,” Venka said.

“She can be a custodian,” said Nezha.

“Did you want someone to rearrange your face?” Rin asked. “Because I’ll do it for free.”

“Rin’s never going to be out of a job,” Kitay said hastily. “We’ll always need armies. There’ll always be another enemy to fight.”

“Like who?” Rin asked.

Kitay counted them off on his fingers. “Rogue Federation units. The fractured provinces. The Hinterlanders. Don’t look at me like that, Rin; you heard Bekter, too. The Ketreyids want war.”

“The Ketreyids want to go to war with the other clans,” Venka said.

“And what happens when that spills over? We’ll be fighting another border war within the decade, I promise.”

“That’s just mop-up duty,” Nezha said dismissively. “We’ll get rid of them.”

“Then we’ll create another war,” said Kitay. “That’s what militaries do.”

“Not a military controlled by a Republic,” Nezha said.

Rin sat up. “Have any of you pictured it? A democratic Nikan? Do you really think it’ll work?”

The prospect of a functioning democracy had rarely bothered her during the war itself. There was always the more pressing threat of the Empire at hand. But now they’d actually won, and Vaisra had the opportunity to turn his abstract dream into a political reality.

Rin doubted he would. Vaisra had too much power now. Why on earth would he give it away?

She couldn’t say she blamed him. She still wasn’t convinced democracy was even a good idea. The Nikara had been fighting among themselves for a millennium. Were they going to stop just because they could vote for their rulers? And who was going to vote for those rulers? People like Auntie Fang?

“Of course it’ll work,” Nezha said. “I mean, imagine all the senseless military disputes the Warlords get into every year. We’ll end that. All arguments get settled in council, not on a battlefield. And once we’ve united the entire Empire, we can do anything.”

Venka snorted. “You actually believe that shit?”

Nezha looked miffed. “Of course I believe it. Why do you think I fought this war?”

“Because you want to make Daddy happy?”

Nezha aimed a languid kick at her ribs.

Venka dodged and swiped another jug of wine from the wagon, cackling.

Nezha leaned back against the tower wall. “The future is going to be glorious,” he said, and there wasn’t a trace of sarcasm in his voice. “We live in the most beautiful country in the world. We have more manpower than the Hesperians. We have more natural resources. The whole world wants what we have, and for the first time in our history we’re going to be able to use it.”

Rin rolled onto her stomach and propped her chin up on her hands.

She liked listening to Nezha talk. He was so hopeful, so optimistic, and so stupid.

He could spout all the ideology he wanted, but she knew better. The Nikara were never going to rule themselves, not peacefully, because there was no such thing as a Nikara at all. There were Sinegardians, then the people who tried to act like Sinegardians, and then there were the southerners.

They weren’t on the same side. They’d never been.

“We’re hurtling into a bright new era,” Nezha finished. “And it’ll be magnificent.”

Rin spread her arms. “Come here,” she said.

He leaned into her embrace. She held his head against her chest and rested her chin on the top of his head, silently counting his breaths.

She was going to miss him so much.

“You poor thing,” she said.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

She just hugged him tighter. She didn’t want this moment to end. She didn’t want to have to go. “I just don’t want the world to break you.”

Eventually Venka started retching off the side of the tower.

“It’s okay,” Kitay said when Rin moved to stand up. “I’ve got her.”

“You’re sure?”

“We’ll be fine. I’m not close to as drunk as the rest of you.” He draped Venka’s arm over his shoulder and guided her carefully toward the stairs.

Venka hiccupped and mumbled something incomprehensible.

“Don’t you dare puke on me,” Kitay told her. He looked over his shoulder at Rin. “You shouldn’t be staying out with wounds like that. Go get some sleep soon.”

“I will,” Rin promised.

“You’re sure?” Kitay pressed.

She read the concern on his face. We’re running out of time.

“I’ll be out here for an hour,” she said. “Tops.”

“Good.” Kitay turned to leave with Venka. Their footsteps faded down the staircase, and then it was just Rin and Nezha left on the rooftop. The night air had suddenly become very cold, which at that point seemed to Rin like a good excuse to sit closer to Nezha.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“Splendid,” she said, and repeated the word twice when the consonants didn’t seem to come out right. “Splendid. Splendid.” Her tongue sat heavy in her mouth. She’d stopped drinking hours ago, had nearly sobered up by now, but the evening chill had numbed her extremities.

“Good.” Nezha stood up and offered her his hand. “Come with me.”

“But I like it here,” she whined.

“We’re freezing here,” he said. “Just come on.”

“Why?”

“Because it’ll be fun,” he said, which at that point sounded like a good reason to do anything.

Somehow they ended up on the harbor. Rin lurched into Nezha’s side as she walked. She hadn’t sobered up as quickly as she’d hoped. The ground tilted treacherously beneath her feet every time she moved. “If you’re trying to drown me, then you’re being a little obvious about it.”

“Why do you always think someone’s trying to kill you?” Nezha asked.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

They stopped at the end of the pier, farther out than any of the fishing crafts were docked. Nezha jumped into a little sampan and gestured for her to follow.

“What do you see?” he asked as he rowed.

She blinked at him. “Water.”

“And illuminating the water?”

“That’s moonlight.”

“Look closely,” he said. “That’s not just the moon.”

Rin’s breath caught in her throat. Slowly her mind made sense of what she was seeing. The light wasn’t coming from the sky. It was coming from the river itself.

She leaned over the side of the sampan to get a closer look. She saw darting little sparks among a milky background. The river was not just reflecting the stars, it was adding its own phosphorescent glow—lightning flashes breaking over minuscule movements of the waves, luminous streams washing over every ripple. The sea was on fire.

Nezha pulled her back by the wrist. “Careful.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off the water. “What is it?”

“Fish and mollusks and crabs,” he said. “When you put them in the shadow they produce light of their own, like underwater flames.”

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.

She wondered if he was going to kiss her now. She didn’t know much about being kissed, but if the old stories were anything to judge by, now seemed like a good time. The hero always took his maiden somewhere beautiful and declared his love under the stars.

She would have liked Nezha to kiss her, too. She would have liked to share this final memory with him before she fled. But he only stared thoughtfully at her, his mind fixed on something she couldn’t guess at.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked after a pause.

“Anything,” she said.

“Why did you hate me so much at school?”

She laughed, surprised. “Wasn’t it obvious?”

She had so many answers, it seemed a ridiculous question. Because he was obnoxious. Because he was rich and special and popular, and she wasn’t. Because he was the heir to the Dragon Province, and she was a war orphan and a mud-skinned southerner.

“No,” said Nezha. “I mean—I understood I wasn’t the nicest to you.”

“That’s an understatement.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that. But Rin, we managed to hate each other so much for three years. That’s not normal. That goes back to first-year jitters. Was it all because I made fun of you?”

“No, it’s because you scared me.”

“I scared you?”

“I thought you were going to be the reason why I’d have to leave,” she said. “And I didn’t have anywhere else to go. If I’d been expelled from Sinegard, then I might well have died. So I feared you, I hated you, and that never really went away.”

“I didn’t realize,” he said quietly.

“Bullshit,” she said. “Don’t act like you didn’t know.”

“I swear that never crossed my mind.”

“Really? Because it had to. We weren’t on the same level, and you knew it, and that’s how you got away with everything you did, because you knew I could never retaliate. You were rich and I was poor and you exploited it.” She was surprised by how quickly the words came, how easily she could still feel her lingering resentment toward him. She’d thought she’d put it behind her a long time ago. Perhaps not. “And the fact that it’s never fucking crossed your mind that the stakes were vastly different between us is frustrating, to be frank.”

“That’s fair,” Nezha said. “Can I ask you another question?”

“No. I get to ask my question first.”

Whatever game they were playing suddenly had rules, was suddenly open to debate. And the rules, Rin decided, meant reciprocity. She stared at him expectantly.

“Fine.” Nezha shrugged. “What is it?”

She was glad she had the liquid courage of lingering alcohol to say what came next. “Are you ever going to go back to that grotto?”

He stiffened. “What?”

“The gods can’t be physical things,” she said. “Chaghan taught me that. They need mortal conduits to affect the world. Whatever the dragon is . . .”

“That thing is a monster,” he said flatly.

“Maybe. But it’s beatable,” she said. Perhaps she was still flush with the victory of defeating Feylen, but it seemed so obvious to her, what Nezha had to do if he wanted to be freed. “Maybe it was a person once. I don’t know how it became what it is, and maybe it’s as powerful as a god should be now, but I’ve buried gods before. I’ll do it again.”

“You can’t beat that thing,” Nezha said. “You have no idea what you’re up against.”

“I think have some idea.”

“Not about this.” His voice hardened. “You will never ask me about this again.”

“Fine.”

She leaned backward and let her fingers trail through the luminous water. She made flames trickle up her arms, delighting in how their intricate patterns were reflected in the blue-green light. Fire and water looked so lovely together. It was a pity they destroyed each other by nature.

“Can I ask another question now?” he asked.

“Go ahead.”

“Did you mean it when you said we should raise an army of shamans?”

She recoiled. “When did I say that?”

“New Year’s. Back on the campaign, when we were sitting in the snow.”

She laughed, amused that he had even remembered. The northern campaign felt like it had been lifetimes ago. “Why not? It’d be marvelous. We’d never lose.”

“You understand that’s precisely what the Hesperians are terrified of.”

“For good reason,” she said. “It’d fuck them up, wouldn’t it?”

Nezha leaned forward. “Did you know that Tarcquet is seeking a moratorium on all shamanic activity?”

She frowned. “What does that mean?”

“It means you promise never to call on your powers again, and you’ll be punished if you do. We report every living shaman in the Empire. And we destroy all written knowledge of shamanism so it can’t be passed down.”

“Very funny,” she said.

“I’m not joking. You’d have to cooperate. If you never call the fire again, you’ll be safe.”

“Fat chance,” she said. “I’ve just gotten the fire back. I don’t intend to give it up.”

“And if they tried to force you?”

She let the flames dance across her shoulders. “Then good fucking luck.”

Nezha stood up and moved across the sampan to sit down beside her. His hand grazed the small of her back.

She shivered at his touch. “What are you doing?”

“Where’s your injury?” he asked. He pressed his fingers into the scar in her side. “Here?”

“That hurts.”

“Good,” he said. His hand moved behind her. She thought he was going to pull her into him, but then she felt a pressure at the small of her back. She blinked, confused. She didn’t realize that she had been stabbed until Nezha drew his hand away, and she saw the blood on his fingers.

She slumped to the side. He pulled her into his arms.

His face ebbed in and out of her vision. She tried to speak, but her lips were heavy, clumsy; all she could do was push air out in incoherent whispers. “You . . . but you . . .”

“Don’t try to speak,” Nezha murmured, and he brushed his lips against her forehead as he drove the knife deeper into her back.

Chapter 36

The morning sun was a dagger to Rin’s eyes. She moaned and curled onto her side. For a single, blissful moment, she couldn’t remember how she had ended up there. Then awareness came slowly and painfully—her mind lapsed into flashes of images, fragments of conversations. Nezha’s face. The sour aftertaste of sorghum wine. A knife. A kiss.

She rolled over into something wet, sticky, and putrid. She had vomited in her sleep. A wave of nausea racked her body, but when her stomach heaved nothing came out. Everything hurt. She reached to feel at her back, terrified. Someone had stitched her up—blood was crusted around the wound, but it wasn’t bleeding.

She might be fucked, but she wasn’t dying just yet.

Two bolts chained her to the wall—one around her right wrist, and one between her ankles. The chains had some slack, but not very much; she couldn’t crawl farther than halfway across the room.

She tried to sit up, but a wave of dizziness forced her back onto the floor. Her thoughts moved in slow, confused strains. She tried without hope to call the fire. Nothing happened.

Of course they’d drugged her.

Slowly, her tired mind worked through what had happened. She’d been so stupid, she wanted to kick herself. She’d been this close to getting out, until she’d caved to sentiment.

She’d known Vaisra was a manipulator. She’d known the Hesperians would come after her. But never had she dreamed that Nezha might hurt her. She should have incapacitated him in the barracks and snuck out of Arlong before anyone saw. Instead, she’d hoped they could have one last night together before they parted forever.

Fool, she thought. You loved him and you trusted him, and you walked straight into his trap.

After Altan, she should have known better.

She glanced around the room. She was alone. She didn’t want to be alone—if she was a prisoner then she needed to at least know what was coming for her. Minutes passed and no one entered the room, so she screamed. Then she screamed again and kept screaming, on and on until her throat burned.

The door slammed open. Lady Yin Saikhara walked into the room. She carried a whip in her right hand.

Fuck, Rin thought sluggishly, just before the whip lashed across her left shoulder to the right side of her hip. For a moment Rin lay frozen, the crack ringing in her ears. Then the pain sank in, so fierce and white-hot that it brought her to her knees. The whip came down again. Right shoulder this time. Rin couldn’t bite back her screams.

Saikhara lowered the whip. Rin could just see the barest tremble in her hands, but otherwise the Lady of Arlong stood stiff, imperious, pale with that raw hate that Rin had never understood.

“You were supposed to tell them,” Saikhara said. Her hair was loose and disheveled, her voice a tremulous snarl. “You were supposed to help them fix him.”

Rin crawled toward the far corner of the room, trying to get out of Saikhara’s striking range. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You creature of Chaos,” Saikhara hissed. “You snake-tongued deceiver, you pawn of the greatest evil, this is all your fault . . .”

Rin realized for the first time that the Lady of Arlong might not be entirely sane.

She raised her hands over her head and crouched against the back corner in case Saikhara decided to bring the whip down again. “What do you think is my fault?”

Saikhara’s eyes looked wide and unfocused; she spoke staring at a point a yard to Rin’s left. “They were going to fix him. Vaisra promised. But they came back from the campaign and they said they’ve come no closer to knowing the truth, and you’re still here, you dirty little thing—”

“Wait,” Rin said. Puzzle pieces fitted slowly together in her mind; she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen this connection before. “Fix who?”

Saikhara only glared.

“Did they say they’d fix Nezha?” Rin demanded. “Did the Hesperians say they could cure his dragon mark?”

Saikhara blinked. A mask froze over her features, the same mask her son and husband were so adept at.

But she didn’t have to say anything. Rin understood the truth now; it was lying so obviously before her.

“You promised,” Saikhara had hissed at Vaisra. “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.”

Sister Petra had promised Saikhara a cure to her son’s affliction—this was the entire reason Saikhara had fought so hard to bring the Gray Company to the Empire. Which meant Vaisra and Saikhara had both known Nezha was a shaman all this time.

But they hadn’t traded him to the Hesperians.

No, they’d only jeopardized every other shaman in the empire. They’d handed her to Petra to repeat what Shiro had put her through, just for some hope of saving their boy.

“I don’t know what you think they’ll learn,” Rin said quietly. “But hurting me can’t fix your son.”

No, Nezha was likely going to suffer the dragon’s curse until he died. That curse had to be beyond Hesperian knowledge. That thought gave her some small, vicious satisfaction.

“Chaos deceives masterfully.” Saikhara moved her hand rapidly over her chest, forming symbols with her fingers that Rin had never seen. “It conceals its true nature and imitates order to subvert it. I know I cannot elicit the truth from you. I am only a novice initiate. But the Gray Company will have their turn.”

Rin watched her warily, paying close attention to the whip. “Then what do you want?”

Saikhara pointed toward the window. “I’m here to watch.”

Rin followed her gaze, confused.

“Go ahead,” Saikhara said. She looked oddly, viciously triumphant. “Enjoy the show.”

Rin stumbled toward the window and peered outside.

She saw that she was being held in a third-story room of the palace, facing the center courtyard. Underneath, a crowd of troops—Republican and Hesperian both—had assembled in a semicircle around a raised dais. Two blindfolded prisoners walked slowly up the stairs, arms tied behind their backs, flanked on both sides by Hesperian soldiers.

The prisoners stopped at the edge of the dais. The soldiers prodded them with their arquebuses until they stepped forward to stand at the center. The one on the left tilted his head up to the sun.

Even with the blindfold, Rin recognized that dark, handsome face.

Baji stood straight, unyielding.

Beside him, Suni hunched down between his shoulders as if he could make himself a smaller target. He looked terrified.

Rin twisted around. “What is this?”

Saikhara’s gaze was fixed on the window, eyes narrowed, mouth pressed in the thinnest of lines. “Watch.”

Someone struck a gong. The crowd parted. Rin watched, veins icy with dread, as Vaisra ascended the dais and took a position several feet in front of Suni and Baji. He raised his arms. He shouted something that Rin couldn’t make out over the crowd. All she heard was the soldiers roaring in approval.

“Once upon a time, the Red Emperor had all the monks in his realm put to death.” Saikhara spoke quietly behind her. “Why do you think he did it?”

Four Hesperian soldiers lined up in front of Baji, arquebuses leveled at his torso.

“What are you doing?” Rin screamed. “Stop!”

But of course Vaisra couldn’t hear her down there, not over the shouting. She strained helplessly against her chains, screeching, but all she could do was watch as he lifted his hand.

Four staggered shots punctuated the air. Baji’s body jerked from side to side in a horrible dance with each bullet, until the last one caught him dead center in the chest. For a long, bizarre minute he remained standing, teetering back and forth, like his body couldn’t decide which way to fall. Then he collapsed to his knees, head bent, before a last round of gunfire knocked him to the floor.

“So much for your gods,” Saikhara said.

Below, the soldiers reloaded their arquebuses and fired a second round of bullets into Suni.

Slowly Rin turned around.

Rage filled her mind, a visceral urge not just to defeat but to destroy, to incinerate Saikhara so thoroughly that not even her bones would remain, and to do it slowly, to make the agony last as long as possible.

She reached for her god. At first there was no response, only an opium-dulled nothing. Then she heard the Phoenix’s reply—a distant shriek, ever so faint.

That was enough. She felt the heat in her palms. She had the fire back.

She almost laughed. After all the opium she had smoked, her tolerance had become much, much higher than the Yins had imagined.

“Your false gods have been discovered,” Saikhara said softly. “Chaos will die.”

“You know nothing of the gods,” Rin whispered.

“I know enough.” Saikhara raised the whip again. Rin moved faster. She turned her palms toward Saikhara and fire burst out—just a small stream, not even a tenth of her full range, but it was enough to set Saikhara’s robes aflame.

Saikhara skirted backward, screeching for help while the lash fell repeatedly against Rin’s shoulder; slicing across open wounds. Rin raised her arms to shield her head, but the whip lacerated her wrists instead.

The doors opened. Eriden burst inside, followed by two soldiers. Rin redirected the flames at them, but they held damp, fireproof tarps in front of them. The fire sizzled and failed to catch. One kicked her to the ground and pinned her down by the arms. The other forced a wet cloth over her mouth.

Rin tried not to inhale, but her vision dimmed and she convulsed, gasping. The thick taste of laudanum invaded her mouth, cloying and potent. The effect was immediate. Her flames died away. She couldn’t sense the Phoenix—could barely even hear or see at all.

The soldiers let go of her. She lay limp on the floor, dazed, drool leaking out the side of her mouth as she blinked blankly at the door.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Eriden said to Nezha’s mother.

Saikhara spat in Rin’s direction. “She should be sedated.”

“She was sedated. You were reckless.”

“And you were incompetent,” Saikhara hissed. “This is on your head.”

Eriden said something in response, but Rin could no longer understand him. Eriden and Saikhara were only vague, blurry streaks of colors, and their voices were distorted, meaningless babbles of nonsense.

Vaisra came for her hours later. She watched the door open through bloated eyelids, watched him cross the room to kneel down beside her.

“You,” she croaked.

She felt his cool fingertips brush against her forehead and push her tangle of hair past her ears.

He sighed. “Oh, Runin.”

“I did everything for you,” she said.

His expression was uncharacteristically kind. “I know.”

“Then why?”

He pulled his hand back. “Look out at the channel.”

She glanced, exhausted, toward the window. She didn’t have to look—she knew what he wanted her to see. The battered ships lying in pieces along the channel, a fourth of the fleet crushed beneath an avalanche of rocks, the bodies drowned and bloated drifting as far as the river ran.

“That’s what happens when you bury a god,” she said.

“No. That’s what happens when men are fool enough to toy with heaven.”

“But I’m not like Feylen.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said gently. “You could be.”

She pulled herself to a sitting position. “Vaisra, please—”

“Don’t beg. There’s nothing I can do. They know about the man you killed. You burned him and dumped his body in the harbor.” Vaisra sounded so disappointed. “Really, Rin? After everything? I told you to be careful. I wished you’d listened.”

“He was raping a girl,” she said. “He was on her, I couldn’t just—”

“I thought,” Vaisra said slowly, as if talking to a child, “I taught you how the balance of power fell.”

She struggled to stand up. The floor tilted under her feet—she had to push herself up against the wall. She saw double every time she moved her head, but at last she managed to look Vaisra in the eye. “Do it yourself, then. No firing squads. Use a sword. Grant me that respect.”

Vaisra raised an eyebrow. “Did you think we were going to kill you?”

“You’re coming with us, sweetheart.” General Tarcquet’s voice; a slow, indifferent drawl.

Rin flinched. She hadn’t heard the door open.

Sister Petra stepped inside and stood just a little behind Tarcquet. Her eyes were like flint beneath her shawl.

“What do you want?” Rin growled at her. “Here to get more urine samples?”

“I admit I thought you could still be converted,” Petra said. “This saddens me, truly. I hate to see you like this.”

Rin spat at her feet. “Go fuck yourself.”

Petra stepped forward until they were standing face-to-face. “You did have me fooled. But Chaos is clever. It can disguise itself as rational and benevolent. It can make us merciful.” She lifted her hand to stroke the side of Rin’s face. “But in the end, it must always be hunted down and destroyed.”

Rin snapped at her fingers. Petra jerked her hand back. Too late. Rin had drawn blood.

Petra skirted back and Rin laughed, let blood drip from her teeth. She saw sheer terror reflected in Petra’s eyes, and that alone was so oddly gratifying—Petra had never shown fear before, had never shown anything—that she didn’t care about the disgust on Tarcquet’s face or the disapproval on Vaisra’s.

They all already thought her a mad animal. She’d only fulfilled their expectations.

And why shouldn’t she? She was done playing the Hesperians’ game of hiding, pretending she wasn’t lethal when she was. They wanted to see a beast. She’d give them one.

“This isn’t about Chaos.” She grinned at them. “You’re all so terrified, aren’t you? I have power that you don’t, and you can’t stand it.”

She opened her palms out. Nothing happened—the laudanum still weighed thick on her mind—but Petra and Tarcquet jumped back nonetheless.

Rin cackled.

Petra wiped her bloody hand on her dress, leaving behind thick, red streaks on gray cloth. “I will pray for you.”

“Pray for yourself.” Rin lunged forward again, just to see what Petra would do.

The Sister turned on her heels and fled. The door slammed behind her. Rin slunk back, snorting with mirth.

“Hope you got your kicks in,” Tarcquet said drily. “Won’t be a lot of laughs where you’re going. Our scholars like to keep busy.”

“I’ll bite my tongue out before they touch me,” Rin said.

“Oh, it won’t be so bad,” Tarcquet said. “We’ll toss you some opium every once in a while if you behave. They told me you like that.”

Her pride fled her.

“Don’t give me to them,” she begged Vaisra. She couldn’t posture anymore, couldn’t conceal her fear; her entire body trembled with it, and although she wanted to be defiant, all she could think of was Shiro’s laboratory, of lying helpless on a hard table while hands she couldn’t see probed at her body. “Vaisra. Please. You still need me.”

Vaisra sighed. “I’m afraid that’s no longer true.”

“You wouldn’t have won this war without me. I’m your best weapon, I’m the steel behind your rule, you said—”

“Oh, Runin.” Vaisra shook his head. “Look outside the window. That fleet is the steel behind my rule. See those warships? Imagine the size of those cargo holds. Imagine how many arquebuses those ships are carrying. You think I really need you?”

“But I’m the only one who can call a god—”

“And Augus, an idiotic boy without the least bit of military training, went up against one of the Hinterlands’ most powerful shamans and killed her. Oh yes, Runin, I told them. Now imagine what scores of trained Hesperian soldiers could do. My dear, I assure you I don’t need your services any longer.” Vaisra turned to Tarcquet. “We’re done here. Cart her off whenever you wish.”

“I am not keeping that thing on my ship,” Tarcquet said.

“We’ll deliver her before you depart, then.”

“And you can guarantee she won’t sink us into the ocean?”

“She can’t do anything as long as you give her regular doses of laudanum,” said Vaisra. “Post a guard. Keep her doped up and covered in wet blankets, and she’ll be tame as a kitten.”

“Too bad,” Tarcquet said. “She’s entertaining.”

Vaisra chuckled. “She is that.”

Tarcquet gave Rin a last, lingering glance. “The Consortium’s delegates will be here soon.”

Vaisra dipped his head. “And I would hate to keep the Consortium waiting.”

They turned their backs toward her and moved to the door.

Rin rushed forward, panicked.

“I did everything for you.” Her voice came out shrill, desperate. “I killed Feylen for you.”

“And history will remember you for it,” Vaisra said softly over his shoulder. “Just as history will praise me for the decisions I make now.

“Look at me!” she screamed. “Look at me! Fuck you! Look at me!”

He didn’t respond.

She still had one card left to play, and she hurled it wildly at him. “Are you going to let them take Nezha, too?”

That made him stop.

“What’s this?” Tarcquet asked.

“Nothing,” said Vaisra. “She’s drugged, she’s babbling—”

“I know everything,” Rin said. Fuck Nezha, fuck his secrets—if he was going to backstab her then she would do the same. “Your son is one of us, and if you’re going to kill us all then you’ll have to kill him, too.”

“Is this true?” Tarcquet asked sharply.

“Clearly not,” said Vaisra. “You’ve met the boy. Come, we’re wasting time—”

“Tarcquet saw,” Rin breathed. “Tarcquet was on the campaign. Remember how those waters moved? That wasn’t the Wind God, General. That was Nezha.”

Vaisra said nothing.

She knew she had him.

“You knew, didn’t you?” she demanded. “You’ve always known. Nezha went to that grotto because you let him.”

Because how else did two little boys escape the palace guard to explore a cave they were forbidden from entering? How, without the Dragon Warlord’s express permission?

“Were you hoping he’d die? Or—no.” Her voice shook. “You wanted a shaman, didn’t you? You knew what the dragon could do and you wanted a weapon of your own. But you wouldn’t take the chance on Jinzha. Not your firstborn. But your second son? Your third? They were expendable. You could experiment.”

“What is she talking about?” Tarcquet demanded.

“That’s why your wife hates me,” Rin said. “That’s why she hates all shamans. And that’s why your son hates you. And you can’t hide it. Petra already knows. Petra said she was going to fix him—”

Tarcquet raised an eyebrow. “Vaisra . . .”

“This is nothing,” Vaisra said. “She’s raving. Your men will have to put up with that on the ship.”

Tarcquet laughed. “They don’t speak the language.”

“Be glad. Her dialect is an ugly one.”

“Stop lying!” Rin tried to rush Vaisra. But the chains jerked painfully at her ankle and flung her back onto the floor.

Tarcquet gave a last chuckle as he left. Vaisra lingered for a moment in the doorway, watching her impassively.

Finally he sighed.

“The House of Yin has always done what it has needed to,” he said. “You know that.”

When she woke again she decided she wanted to die.

She considered dashing her head against the wall. But every time she knelt facing the window, hands braced against stone, she started shaking too badly to finish the job.

She wasn’t afraid to die; she was afraid she wouldn’t bash her head in hard enough. That she’d only shatter her skull but not lose consciousness, that she’d be subject to hours of crushing pain that didn’t kill her but left her to a life of unbearable agony and half of her original capacity to think.

In the end, she was too much a coward. She gave up and curled up miserably on the floor to await whatever came next.

After a few minutes she felt a sharp jabbing sensation in her left arm. She jerked her head up, eyes darting around the room to find what had bitten her. A spider? A rat? She saw nothing. She was alone.

The prickling intensified into a sharp lance of pain. She yelped out loud and scrambled to sit up.

She couldn’t find the cause of the pain. She squeezed her arm tight, rubbed frantically up and down, but the pain wouldn’t disappear. She felt it as acutely as if someone were carving deep gashes into her flesh, but she couldn’t see blood bubbling up on her skin or lines splitting the surface.

At last she realized that this wasn’t happening to her.

This was happening to Kitay.

Did they have him? Were they hurting him? Oh, gods. The only thing worse than being tortured was knowing that Kitay was being tortured—to feel it happening, to know that it was ten times worse on his end, and to be unable to stop it.

Thin, scratchy white lines that looked like scars from a long-healed wound materialized under her skin.

Rin squinted at their shape. They weren’t random cuts to inflict pain—the pattern was too deliberate. They looked like words.

Hope flared up in her chest. Was Kitay doing this to himself? Was he trying to write to her? She closed her fists, teeth clenched against the pain, while she watched the white lines form a single word.

Where?

She crawled to the window and peered outside, counting the windows that led up to hers. Third floor. First room in the center hallway, just above the courtyard dais.

Now she just had to write back. She cast her eyes around the room for a weapon but knew she’d find nothing. The walls were too smooth, and her cell had been stripped of furniture.

She examined her fingernails. They were untrimmed, sharp and jagged. That might do the trick. They were terribly dirty—that might cause infection—but she’d worry about that later.

She took a deep breath.

She could do this. She’d scarred herself before.

She managed just three characters before she couldn’t bring herself to scratch any more. Palace 1–3.

She watched her arm with bated breath. There was no response.

That wasn’t necessarily bad. Kitay had to have seen. Maybe he just had nothing else to say.

Quickly she smeared the blood over her arms to hide the cuts, just in case any guards ventured in to check on her. And if they saw, then she would simply pretend she had gone mad.

Chapter 37

Something clanged against the window.

Rin jerked her head up. She heard a second clang. She half ran, half crawled to the windowsill and saw a grappling hook lodged against the iron bars. She peeked over the edge. Kitay was scaling up the wall on a single rope. He grinned up at her, teeth gleaming in the moonlight. “Hi there.”

She stared back, too relieved to speak, hoping desperately that she wasn’t hallucinating.

Kitay hoisted himself through the window, dropped soundlessly to the floor, and fished a long needle out of his pocket. “How many locks?”

She jangled her chains at him. “Just two.”

“Right.” Kitay knelt by her ankles and set to work. A minute later the bolt sprang free. Rin kicked the shackles off her legs, relieved.

“Stop that,” he whispered.

“Sorry.” She was still drowsy from the laudanum. Moving felt like swimming and thinking took twice as long.

Kitay moved on to the bolt around her right wrist.

She sat quietly, trying her best not to move. Half a minute later she heard something outside the door. She strained her ears. She heard it again—footsteps. “Kitay—”

“I know.” His sweaty fingers slipped and fumbled as he worked the needle around the lock. “Stop moving.”

The footsteps grew louder.

Kitay yanked at the bolt, but the chains held firm.

“Fuck!” He dropped the needle. “Fuck, fuck—”

Panic squeezed at Rin’s chest. “They’re coming.”

“I know.” He glared at the iron cuff for a moment, breathing heavily. Then he yanked his shirt over his head, twisted it into a thick knot, and pressed it at her face. “Open your mouth.”

“What?”

“So you don’t bite off your tongue.”

She blinked. Oh.

She didn’t argue. There was no time to think about it, no time to come up with a better plan. This was it. She let Kitay wedge the cloth into her mouth as far back as it would go until it was pressed down on her tongue, holding her teeth immobile.

“Should I tell you when?” he asked.

She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.

“Fine.” Several seconds passed. Then he stomped down on her hand.

Her mind flashed white. Her body jerked. She arched her back, legs kicking uncontrollably at nothing. She heard herself screaming through the cloth, but it seemed to come from very far away. For a few seconds she was detached from herself; it was someone else’s scream, someone else’s hand in pieces. Then her mind reconciled with her body and she began bashing her other hand against the floor, desperate for some secondary pain to mask the intensity of the first.

“Stop that—Rin, stop!” Kitay grabbed her shoulder and held her still.

Tears leaked out the sides of her eyes. She couldn’t speak; she could barely breathe.

“Did you hear that?” The voices from the hallway sounded terribly close. “I’m going in.”

“Suit yourself, but I’m not coming with you.”

“She’s sedated—”

“Does she sound sedated? Go get the captain.”

Footsteps echoed down the hallway.

“We have to do this fast,” Kitay hissed. He’d turned a ghastly pale. He was feeling this, too; he had to be in agony, and Rin had no idea how he’d suppressed it.

She nodded and shut her eyes again, gasping while he yanked at her hands. Fresh stabs of pain lanced up her arm.

She made the mistake of looking and saw white bone piercing through her flesh. Her vision pulsed black.

“Try wriggling free,” Kitay said.

She gave her arm a tentative pull and nearly screamed in frustration. She was still stuck.

“Put that rag back in,” he said.

She obeyed. He stomped down again.

This time the hand broke clean through. She felt it, a clean crack that reverberated through the rest of her body. Kitay clenched her wrist firmly and extricated her hand with one vicious pull.

Somehow all the pieces came through still attached to her arm. He wrapped her mangled fingers in his shirt. “Tuck this into your elbow. Press down when you can, it’ll stanch the bleeding.”

She was so dizzy from the pain that she couldn’t stand. Kitay hoisted her up by the armpits to a standing position. “Come on.”

She leaned against him, unresponsive. Kitay lightly slapped the sides of her face until her eyes blinked open.

“Can you climb?” he asked. “Please, Rin, we’ve got to go.”

She groaned. “I have one arm and I’m still high.”

He dragged her toward the window. “I know. I feel it, too.”

She looked at him and realized his hand was hanging limp by his side. That his face was drawn, pale, and slick with sweat. They were tied together. Her pain was his pain. But he was fighting through it.

Then she could, too. She owed him that.

“I can climb,” she said.

“It’ll be easy,” he said. Relief shone clear on his face. “We learned this at Sinegard. Twist the rope around your foot to make a little platform. You’ll be standing on about an inch of it. Slide down a little bit at a time.” He ripped a square off of the shirt and pressed it into her good hand. “That’s for the rope burn. Wait until I’m all the way down so I can catch you.”

He patted her cheeks several times to drag her back to alertness and then hauled himself out the window.

Rin had no idea how she made it down the wall. Her limbs moved with dreamlike slowness, and the stones kept swimming before her eyes. Several times the rope threatened to come free from her leg and she spun terrifyingly in the air until Kitay yanked it taut. When she couldn’t hold on any longer, she jumped the last six feet and crashed into Kitay. Pain shot up her ankles.

“Quiet.” Kitay clamped a hand over her mouth before she could gasp. He pointed out into the darkness. “There’s a boat waiting that way, but you’ve got to get across the dais unnoticed.”

She realized then that they were standing on the execution stage. She glanced behind her. She saw two bodies. They hadn’t bothered to remove them.

“Don’t look,” Kitay whispered.

But she couldn’t not look, not when they were standing so close. Suni and Baji lay bent and broken in browning piles of their own blood. The last two shamans of the Cike, victims of her stupidity.

She glanced around the courtyard. She couldn’t see the night patrol, but surely they would be circling back around the palace any moment. “Won’t they see us?”

“We have a distraction,” Kitay said.

Before she could ask, he stuck his fingers into his mouth and whistled.

A figure appeared at the other end of the courtyard on cue. He stepped into the moonlight, and his profile came into sharp relief. Ramsa.

Rin started toward him, but Kitay yanked her back by the arm. Ramsa met her eyes, shook his head, and pointed to a line of guards emerging from the far corner.

Rin froze. They were three against twenty guards, half of whom were Hesperians armed with arquebuses, and she couldn’t call the fire.

Ramsa calmly pulled two bombs out of his pocket.

“What’s he doing?” Rin strained against Kitay’s grip. “He’s going to get himself killed.”

Kitay didn’t budge. “I know.”

“Let me go, I have to help him—”

“You can’t.”

A shout rang through the night. One of the guards had seen Ramsa. The patrol group broke into a run, swords drawn.

Ramsa knelt on the ground. His fingers worked desperately at the fuse. Sparks flew all around him, but the bombs didn’t light.

Rin tugged at Kitay’s hands. “Kitay, please—”

He dragged her farther back into the shadow. “He’s not the one we’re trying to save.”

She saw a flash of fire powder. The Hesperian guards had fired.

Ramsa stood up. Somehow the first round of shots had missed him. He’d managed to get the fuse to light. He laughed in delight, holding his bombs over his head.

The second round of fire tore him apart.

Time dilated terribly. Rin saw everything happen in slow, deliberate, and intricate detail. One bullet smashed through Ramsa’s jaw and came out the other side in a spray of red. One burrowed through his neck. One embedded itself in his chest. Ramsa stumbled back. The bombs fell out of his hands and hit the ground.

Rin thought she could see the barest hint of a flame at the point of ignition. Then a ball of fire expanded out like a blooming flower, and then the blast radius consumed the courtyard.

“Ramsa . . .” She sagged against Kitay’s shoulder, arms stretched toward the blast site. Her mouth worked and she pushed air through her throat, but she didn’t hear her own voice until a long moment after she spoke. “Ramsa, no—”

Kitay jerked her upright. “He’s bought us an escape window. Let’s go.”

The sampan that awaited them behind the canal bend was hidden so well in the shadows that Rin thought for a few terrifying seconds that it wasn’t there at all. Then the boatman steered the craft out from under the willow leaves, stopped before them, and extended his hand. He wore a Hesperian military uniform, but his face was hidden under a Nikara archer’s helmet.

“Sorry we couldn’t get to you earlier.” The boatman was a her. Venka lifted up her helmet for a brief moment and winked. “Get in.”

Rin, too exhausted to feel bewildered, stumbled hastily into the sampan. Kitay jumped in after her and tossed the side rope overboard.

“Where’d you get that uniform?” he asked. “Nice touch.”

“Went corpse-hunting.” Venka kicked the boat away from shore and steered them swiftly down the canal.

Rin collapsed onto a seat, but Venka nudged her with her foot. “Down on the floor. Cover yourself with that tarp.”

She crouched down in the space between seats. Kitay helped drag the tarp over her head.

“How did you know to find us?” Rin asked.

“Father tipped me off,” Venka said. “I knew something weird was happening on the tower, I just wasn’t able to place what. The moment I caught the gist of what was going on I ran and found Kitay before Vaisra’s men could, but we couldn’t figure out where they were keeping you until Kitay tried that thing with his skin. Neat trick, by the way.”

“You realize you’ve just declared treason on your country,” Rin said.

“Seems like the least of our concerns,” Venka said.

“You can still go back,” Kitay said. “I’m serious, Venka. Your whole family is here, you’ve got no business running away with us. I can take the sampan from here, you can hop off—”

“No,” she said curtly.

“Think hard about this,” he insisted. “You’ve still got plausible deniability. You can leave now; no one knows you’re on this boat. But you come with us and you can never go back.”

“Pity,” Venka said dismissively. She turned to Rin. Her voice took on a hard edge. “I heard what you did to that Hesperian soldier.”

“Yeah,” Rin said. “So?”

“So well done. I hope it hurt.”

“It looked like it did.”

Venka nodded in silence. Neither of them had anything else to say about it.

“Any luck with the others?” Venka asked Kitay after a pause.

He shook his head. “Wasn’t time. The only one I could reach was Gurubai. He should be with the ship now if he got past the guards—”

“Gurubai?” Rin repeated. “What are you talking about?”

“Vaisra’s going after the southern Warlords,” Kitay explained. “He’s won his Empire. Now he’s consolidating his power. He started with you, and now he’s just cleaning up the others. I tried to give them some warning, but couldn’t reach them in time.”

“They’re dead?”

“Not all of them. They’ve got Charouk in the cells. Don’t know if they’ll execute him or let him languish, but they’ll certainly never set him free. The Rooster Warlord put up a fight, so they shot him when the riots started—”

“Riots? What the hell is going on?”

“The camps have turned into a war zone,” Venka said. “They’d doubled the guard all around the refugee district—said it was for safety, but the moment the troops came in for the Warlords they all knew what was happening. The southern troops started the revolt. We’ve been hearing fire powder going off all night—I think Vaisra set the Hesperians loose on them.”

Rin struggled to take all of this in. The world, it seemed, had turned upside down in the span of several hours. “They’re just killing them? Civilians too?”

“That’s likely.”

“Then what about Kesegi?” Rin asked. “Did he get out?”

Venka frowned. “Who?”

“I—no one.” Rin swallowed. “Never mind.”

“Think about it this way,” Venka said brightly. “At least it’s bought you a distraction.”

Rin retreated back under the tarp and lay still, counting her breaths to distract herself from the mess that was her hand. She wanted to look at it, survey the damage in her mangled fingers, but she couldn’t bring herself to unwrap the bloody cloth. She knew there would be no salvaging that hand. She’d seen the cracked bones.

“Venka?” Kitay’s voice, urgent.

“What?”

“I thought you covered your bases.”

“I did.”

Rin sat up. They’d moved faster than she thought—the palace was a distant sight, and they were already sailing past the shipyard. She twisted around to see what Venka and Kitay were staring at.

Nezha stood alone at the end of the pier.

Rin scrambled upright, her good hand flung outward. She was still reeling from the laudanum, but she could just elicit the smallest whispers of flame in her palm, could probably jerk out a larger torrent if she focused—

Kitay tackled her back down under the tarp. “Get down!”

“I’ll kill him.” Fire burst out from her palm and her lips. “I’ll kill him—”

“No, you won’t.” He moved to pin her wrists down.

Without thinking she pummeled at Kitay with both fists, trying to break free. Then her injured hand whacked against the side of the boat, and the pain was so horrendous that for a moment everything went white. Kitay clamped a hand over her mouth before she could scream. She collapsed into his arms. He held her against him and rocked her back and forth while she muffled her shrieks into his shoulder.

Venka fired two arrows in rapid succession across the harbor. They both missed by a yard. Nezha jerked his head to the side when they whistled past him, but otherwise stood his ground. He didn’t move the entire time the sampan crossed the shipyard toward the dark cover of cliff shadows on the other side of the channel.

“He’s letting us go,” said Kitay. “Hasn’t even sounded the alarm.”

“You think he’s on our side?” Venka asked.

“He’s not,” Rin said flatly. “I know he’s not.”

She knew with certainty that she’d lost Nezha forever. With Jinzha killed and Mingzha long dead, Nezha was the last male heir to the House of Yin. He stood to inherit the most powerful nation this side of the Great Ocean and become the ruler he’d prepared his entire life to be.

Why would he throw that away for a friend? She wouldn’t.

“This is my fault,” she said.

“It’s not your fault,” Kitay said. “We all thought we could trust that bastard.”

“But I think he tried to warn me.”

“What are you talking about? He stabbed you.”

“The night before the fleet came.” She took a deep breath. “He came to find me. He said I had more enemies than I thought I did. I think he was trying to warn me.”

Venka pursed her lips. “Then he didn’t try very hard.”

Two ships with deep builds and slender sides awaited them outside the channel. Both bore the flag of Dragon Province.

“Those are opium skimmers,” Rin said, confused. “Why are they—”

“Those are fake flags. They’re Red Junk ships.” Kitay helped her to her feet as the sampan bumped up against the closest skimmer’s hull. Kitay whistled up at the deck. Several seconds later, four ropes dropped into the water around them.

Venka fastened them to hooks on the four sides of the sampan. Kitay whistled again, and slowly they began to rise.

“Moag sends her regards.” Sarana winked at Rin as she helped her aboard. “We got your message. Figured you’d want a ride farther south. Just didn’t think things would get this bad.”

Rin was both deeply relieved and frankly amazed that the Lilies had come for her at all. She couldn’t remember why she’d ever hated Sarana; right now she only wanted to kiss her. “So you decided to pick a fight with a giant?”

“You know how Moag is. Always wants to snatch up trump cards, especially when they’ve been tossed out.”

“Did Gurubai make it?” Kitay asked.

“The Monkey Warlord? Yes, he’s belowdecks. Little bit bloodied up, but he’ll be fine.” Sarana’s gaze landed on Rin’s wrapped hand. “Tiger’s tits. What’s under there?”

“You don’t want to see,” Rin said.

“Do you have a physician on board?” Kitay asked. “I have triage training otherwise, but I’ll need equipment—boiling water, bandages—”

“Downstairs. I’ll take her.” Sarana put her arm around Rin and helped her across the deck.

Rin glanced over her shoulder as they walked, peering at the receding cliffs. It seemed incredible that they had not been followed out of the channel. Vaisra certainly knew she’d escaped by now. Troops should be pouring out of the barracks. She’d be surprised if the entire city weren’t put under lockdown. The Hesperians would scour the city, the cliffs, and the waters until they had her back in custody.

But the Red Junk skimmers were so clearly visible under the moonlight. They hadn’t bothered to hide. Hadn’t even turned their lamps off.

She stumbled over a bump in the floor panels.

“All right there?” Sarana asked.

“They’re going to catch us,” Rin said. Everything felt so idiotically meaningless—her escape, Ramsa’s death, the river rendezvous. The Hesperians were going to board them in an hour. What was the point?

“Don’t underestimate an opium skimmer,” said Sarana.

“Your fastest skimmer couldn’t outrun a Hesperian warship,” Rin said.

“Probably not. But we have a little time. Command miscommunications always happen when you have two armies and leaders who aren’t familiar with each other. The Hesperians don’t know it’s not a Republican ship and the Republicans won’t know if the Hesperians have given permission to fire, or if they even need it. Everyone assumes that someone else is taking care of it.”

Sarana’s plan was to escape through command chain inefficiency. Rin didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “That doesn’t buy you escape, it buys you maybe half an hour.”

“Sure.” Sarana pointed to the other skimmer. “Thus the second ship.”

“What is that, a decoy?”

“Pretty much. We stole the idea from Vaisra,” Sarana said cheerfully. “In a second we’re going to cloak all of our abovedeck lights, but that ship’s going to posture like it’s ready for a fight. It’s rigged up with twice the firepower of a usual skimmer. They won’t get close enough to board, so they’ll be forced to blow it out of the water.”

That was clever, Rin thought. If the Hesperians didn’t notice the second skimmer escaping into the night, they might conclude that she’d drowned.

“Then what about its crew?” she asked. “That thing is crewed, right? You’re just going to sacrifice Lilies?”

Sarana’s smile looked carved into her face. “Cheer up. With luck, they’ll think it’s you.”

The Lilies’ physician laid Rin’s hand on a table, gingerly unwrapped it, and took a sharp breath when she saw the damage. “You sure you don’t want any sedatives?”

“No.” Rin twisted her head around to face the wall. The look on the physician’s face was worse than the sight of her mangled fingers. “Just fix it.”

“If you move, I’ll have to sedate you,” the physician warned.

“I won’t.” Rin clenched her teeth. “Just give me a gag. Please.”

The physician barely looked older than Sarana, but she acted with practiced, efficient movements that set Rin slightly more at ease.

First she doused the wounds with some kind of clear alcohol that stung so badly that Rin nearly bit through the cloth. Then she stitched together the places where the flesh had split apart to reveal the bone. Rin’s hand was already stinging so badly from the alcohol that it almost masked the pain, but the sight of the needle dipping repeatedly into her flesh made her so nauseated she had to stop in the middle to dry-heave.

At last, the physician prepared to set the bone. “You’ll want to hold on to something.”

Rin grasped the edge of the chair with her good hand. Without warning, the physician pressed down.

Rin’s eyes bulged open. She couldn’t stop her legs from kicking madly at the air. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

“You’re doing well,” the physician murmured as she tied a cloth splint over the set hand. “The worst part’s over.”

She pressed Rin’s hand between two wooden planks and tied them together with several loops of twine to render the hand immobile. Rin’s fingers were splayed outward, frozen in position.

“See how that feels,” said the physician. “I’m sorry it looks so clumsy. I can build you something more lightweight, but it’ll take a few days, and I don’t have the supplies on the ship.”

Rin raised the splint to her eyes. Between the planks she could see only the tips of her fingers. She tried to wiggle her fingers, but she couldn’t tell if they were obeying her or not.

“Am I all right to remove the gag?” the physician asked.

Rin nodded.

The physician pulled it out of her mouth.

“Will I be able to use this hand?” she asked the moment she could speak.

“There’s no telling how this might heal. Most of your fingers are actually fine, but the center of your hand is cracked straight through the middle. If—”

“Am I losing this hand?” Rin interrupted.

“That’s likely. I mean, you can never quite predict how—”

“I understand.” Rin sat back, trying not to panic. “All right. That’s—that’s okay. That . . .”

“You’ll want to consider getting it amputated if it heals and you still don’t have mobility.” The physician attempted to sound soothing, but her quiet words only made Rin want to scream. “That might be better than walking around with . . . ah, dead flesh. It’s more prone to infections, and the recurring pain might be so bad that you want it gone entirely.”

Rin didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how she was supposed to absorb the information that she was now effectively one-handed, that she’d have to relearn everything if she wanted to fight with a sword again.

This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening to her.

“Breathe slowly,” said the physician.

Rin realized she’d been hyperventilating.

The physician put a hand on her wrist. “You’ll be all right. It’s not as bad as you think it is.”

Rin raised her voice. “Not as bad?”

“Most amputees learn to adjust. In time, you’ll—”

“I’m supposed to be a soldier!” Rin shouted. “What the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

“You can summon fire,” said the physician. “What do you need a sword for?”

“I thought the Hesperians were only here for military support and trade negotiations. This treaty basically turns us into a colony.” Venka was talking when Rin, despite the physician’s protests, walked into the captain’s quarters. She glanced up. “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”

“Didn’t want to,” Rin said. “What are we talking about?”

“The physician said the laudanum would have you out for hours,” Kitay said.

“I didn’t take it.” She sat down beside him. “I’ve had enough of opiates for a while.”

“Fair enough.” He glanced over at her splint, then flexed his own fingers. Rin noticed the sweat drenching his uniform, the half-moon marks where he’d dug his nails into his palm. He’d felt every second of her pain.

She cleared her throat and changed the subject. “Why are we talking about treaties?”

“Tarcquet has staked his claim to the continent,” said the Monkey Warlord. Gurubai looked awful. Flecks of dried blood covered both his hands and the left side of his face, and his expression was hollow and haggard. He’d escaped the crackdown, but just barely. “The treaty terms were atrocious. The Hesperians got their trade rights—we’ve waived our rights to any tariffs, but they get to keep theirs. They also won the right to build military bases anywhere they want on Nikara soil.”

“Bet they got permission for missionaries, too,” Kitay said.

“They did. And they wanted the right to market opium in the Empire again.”

“Surely Vaisra said no,” Rin said.

“Vaisra signed every clause,” Gurubai said. “He didn’t even put up a fight. You think he had a choice? He doesn’t even have full control over domestic affairs anymore. Everything he does has to be approved by a delegate from the Consortium.”

“So Nikan’s fucked.” Kitay threw his hands up in the air. “Everything’s fucked.”

“Why would Vaisra want this?” Rin asked. None of this made sense to her. “Vaisra hates giving up control.”

“Because he knows it’s better to be a puppet Emperor than to have nothing at all. Because this arrangement plies him with so much silver he’ll choke on it. And because now he has the military resources necessary to take the rest of the Empire.” Gurubai leaned back in his chair. “You’re all too young to remember the days of joint occupation. But things are going right back to how they were seventy years ago.”

“We’ll be slaves in our own country,” Kitay said.

“‘Slave’ is a strong way of putting it,” Gurubai said. “The Hesperians aren’t much into forced labor, at least on this continent. They prefer relying on forces of economic coercion. The Divine Architect appreciates rational and voluntary choice, and all that nonsense.”

“That’s fucked,” Rin said.

“It was inevitable the moment Vaisra invited them to his hall. The southern Warlords saw this coming. We tried to warn you. You wouldn’t listen.”

Rin shifted uncomfortably in her seat. But Gurubai’s tone wasn’t accusatory, simply resigned.

“We can’t do anything about it now,” he said. “We need to go back down to the south first. Clean out the Federation. Make it safe for our people to come home.”

“What’s the point?” Kitay asked. “You’re the agricultural center of the Empire. Fight off the Federation and you’ll just be doing Vaisra a favor. He’s going to come for you sooner or later.”

“Then we’ll fight back,” Rin said. “They want the south, they’ll have to bleed for it.”

Gurubai gave her a grim smile. “That sounds about right.”

“We’re going to take on Vaisra and the entire Consortium.” Kitay let that sink in for a moment, and then let out a mad, high-pitched giggle. “You can’t be serious.”

“We don’t have any other options,” said Rin.

“You could all run,” Venka said. “Go to Ankhiluun, get the Black Lilies to hide you. Lie low.”

Gurubai shook his head. “There’s not a single person in the Republic who doesn’t know who Rin is. Moag’s on our side, but she can’t keep every lowlife in Ankhiluun from talking. You’d all last at most a month.”

“I’m not running,” Rin said.

She wasn’t going to let Vaisra hunt her down like a dog.

“You’re not fighting another war, either,” Kitay said. “Rin. You have one functional hand.”

“You don’t need both hands to command troops,” she said.

“What troops?”

She gestured around the ship. “I’m assuming we’ll have the Red Junk fleet.”

Kitay scoffed. “A fleet so powerful that Moag’s never dared to move on Daji.”

“Because Ankhiluun’s never been at stake,” Rin said. “Now it is.”

“Fine,” Kitay snapped. “You’ve got a fleet maybe a tenth of the size of what the Hesperians could bring. What else you got? Farm boys? Peasants?”

“Farm boys and peasants become soldiers all the time.”

“Yes, given time to train and weapons, neither of which you have.”

“What would you have us do, then?” Rin asked softly. “Die quietly and let Vaisra have his way?”

“That’s better than getting more idiots killed for a war that you can’t win.”

“I don’t think you realize how big our power base is,” said Gurubai.

“Really?” Kitay asked. “Did I just miss the army you’ve got hidden away somewhere?”

“The refugees you saw at Arlong don’t represent even a thousandth of the southern population,” said Gurubai. “There are a hundred thousand men who picked up axes to fend off the Federation when it became clear we weren’t getting aid. They’ll fight for us.”

He pointed at Rin. “They’ll fight especially for her. She’s already become myth in the south. The vermilion bird. The goddess of fire. She’s the savior they’ve been waiting for. She’s the symbol they’ve been waiting this whole war to follow. What do you think happens when they see her in person?”

“Rin’s been through enough,” Kitay said. “You’re not turning her into some kind of figurehead—”

“Not a figurehead.” Rin cut him off. “I’ll be a general. I’ll lead the entire southern army. Isn’t that right?”

Gurubai nodded. “If you’ll do it.”

Kitay gripped her shoulder. “Is that what you want to be? Another Warlord in the south?”

Rin didn’t understand that question.

Why did it matter what she wanted to be? She knew what she couldn’t be. She couldn’t be Vaisra’s weapon anymore. She couldn’t be the tool of any military; couldn’t close her eyes and lend her destructive abilities to someone else who told her where and when to kill.

She had thought that being a weapon might give her peace. That it might place the blame of blood-soaked decisions on someone else so that she was not responsible for the deaths at her hands. But all that had done was make her blind, stupid, and so easily manipulated.

She was so much more powerful than anyone—Altan, Vaisra—had ever let her be. She was finished taking orders. Whatever she did next would be her sole, autonomous choice.

“The south is going to go to war regardless,” she said. “They’ll need a leader. Why shouldn’t it be me?”

“They’re untrained,” Kitay said. “They’re unarmed, they’re probably starving—”

“Then we’ll steal food and equipment. Or we’ll get it shipped in. Perks of allying with Moag.”

He blinked at her. “You’re going to lead peasants and refugees against Hesperian dirigibles.”

Rin shrugged. She was mad to be so cavalier, she knew that. But they were backed against a wall, and their lack of options was almost a relief, because it meant simply that they fought or they died. “Don’t forget the pirates, too.”

Kitay looked like he was on the verge of ripping out every strand of hair left on his head.

“Do not assume that because the southerners are untrained they will not make good soldiers,” said Gurubai. “Our advantage lies in numbers. The fault lines of this country don’t lie at the level that Vaisra was prepared to engage. The real civil war won’t be fought at the provincial level.”

“But Vaisra’s not the Empire,” Kitay said. “The split was with the Empire.”

“No, the split is with people like us,” Rin said suddenly. “It’s the north and the south. It always was.”

The pieces had been working slowly through her opium-addled mind, but when they finally clicked, the epiphany came like a shock of cold water.

How had it taken her this long to figure this out? There was a reason why she’d always felt uncomfortable championing the Republic. The vision of a democratic government was an artificial construct, teetering on the implausibility of Vaisra’s promises.

But the real base of opposition came from the people who had lost the most under Imperial rule. The people who, by now, hated Vaisra the most.

Somewhere out there, hiding within the wreckage of Rooster Province, was a little girl, terrified and alone. She was choking on her hopelessness, disgusted by her weakness, and burning with rage. And she would do anything to get the chance to fight, to really fight, even if that meant losing control of her own mind.

And there were millions more like her.

The magnitude of this realization was dizzying.

The maps of war rearranged themselves in Rin’s mind. The provincial lines disappeared. Everything was merely black and red—privileged aristocracy against stark poverty. The numbers rebalanced, and the war she’d thought she was fighting suddenly looked very, very different.

She’d seen the resentment on the faces of her people. The glare in their eyes when they dared to look up. They were not a people grasping for power. Their rebellion would not fracture over stupid personal ambitions. They were a people who refused to be killed, and that made them dangerous.

You can’t fight a war on your own, Nezha had once told her.

No, but she could with thousands of bodies. And if a thousand fell, then she would throw another thousand at him, and then another thousand. No matter what the power asymmetry, war on this scale was a numbers game, and she had lives to spare. That was the single advantage that the south had against the Hesperians—that there were so, so many of them.

Kitay seemed to have realized this, too. The incredulity slid off his face, replaced by grim resignation.

“Then we’re going to war against Nezha,” he said.

“The Republic’s already declared war on us,” she said. “Nezha knows what side he chose.”

She didn’t have to debate this any longer. She wanted this war. She wanted to go up against Nezha again and again until at the end, she was the only one standing. She wanted to watch his scarred face twist in despair as she took away from him everything he cared about. She wanted him tortured, diminished, weakened, powerless, and begging on his knees.

Nezha had everything she used to want. He was aristocracy, beauty, and elegance. Nezha was the north. He had been born into a locus of power, and that made him feel entitled to use it, to make decisions for millions of people whom he considered inferior to himself.

She was going to wrench that power away from him. And then she’d pay him back in kind.

Finally, spoke the Phoenix. The god’s voice was dimmed by the Seal, but Rin could hear clearly every ring of its laughter. My darling little Speerly. At last we agree.

All shreds of affection she’d once felt for Nezha had burned away. When she thought of him she felt only a cruel, delicious hatred.

Let it smolder, said the Phoenix. Let it grow.

Anger, pain, and hatred—that was all kindling for a great and terrible power, and it had been festering in the south for a very long time.

“Let Nezha come for us,” she said. “I’m going to burn his heart out of his chest.”

After a pause, Kitay sighed. “Fine. Then we’ll go to war against the strongest military force in the world.”

“They’re not the strongest force in the world,” Rin said. She felt the god’s presence in the back of her mind—eager, delighted, and at last perfectly aligned with her intentions.

Together, spoke the Phoenix, we will burn down this world.

She slammed her fist against the table. “I am.”