THE BURNING GOD
R. F. Kuang

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Rebecca Kuang

Map by Eric Gunther, copyright © Springer Cartographics 2017

Cover illustration © JungShan

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

R.F. Kuang asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008339142

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008339166

Version: 2020-09-17

Dedication

To my dear readers, who stayed with this series until the end, and came prepared with a bucket for their tears

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Prologue

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part II

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Part III

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Epilogue

Dramatis Personae

Acknowledgments

Also by R. F. Kuang

About the Publisher

Map

PROLOGUE

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Daji said.

The campfire burned an unnatural shade of purple, sparking and hissing reproachfully as if it could sense her guilt. Tendrils of flame reached out like grasping hands that transformed into flickering faces that, months later, still made Daji’s stomach twist with shame. She looked away.

But the dead were seared into the backs of her eyelids, their mouths still open in shock at her betrayal. Their whispers echoed in her mind, the same way they echoed every night in her dreams.

Murderer, they said. Ingrate. Whore.

Fear squeezed her chest. “Riga, I don’t think—”

“Too late for second guesses now, sweetheart.” Across the fire, Riga was binding a struggling deer with his usual brutal, callous efficiency. He’d already arranged three serrated knives, all looted from the corpses of Ketreyid archers, in a perfect triangle around the fire. Daji hadn’t touched hers. She’d been too scared—the glinting metal looked poisonous, resentful. “We’re far past the point of no return, don’t you think?”

The deer arched its neck, straining to break free. Riga grasped its antlers with one hand and slammed its head to the ground.

The flames jumped higher; the whispers intensified. Daji flinched. “This feels wrong.”

Riga snorted. “When did you become such a coward?”

“I’m just worried. Tseveri said—”

“Who cares what she said?” Riga sounded brittle, defensive. Daji knew he, too, was ashamed. She could tell some small part of him wished they’d never started down this path. But he could never admit that. If he did, he’d break.

Riga, pinning the deer’s neck down with one knee, jerked twine around its front legs. The deer’s mouth opened as if to scream, but the only sound it could make was a hoarse, eerie rasp. “Tseveri’s always been full of shit. Prophecy, my ass—don’t believe that babble. She was just saying whatever the Sorqan Sira wanted us to hear.”

“She said this would kill us,” Daji said.

“That’s not precisely what she said.”

“It’s close enough.”

“Oh, Daji.” Riga tightened the last knot with a cruel yank, examined his handiwork for a moment, then moved to sit down beside her. His hand massaged her back in slow circles. He meant to be comforting. It felt like a trap. “Do you think I’d ever let anything happen to you?”

Daji struggled to keep her breathing even.

Do what he says, she reminded herself. That was the deal she’d made with Ziya. Keep your head down and obey, or Riga will find some way to get rid of you. She should be glad for this ritual. It was protection—the ultimate guarantee that Riga could not kill her without killing himself, a shield for her and Ziya both.

But still she was so afraid. What if this was worse than death?

She found her voice. “There has to be some other way—”

“There isn’t,” Riga snapped. “We won’t last much longer like this. This war’s gotten too big. Our enemies have grown too many.” He gestured with his knife toward the forest. “And if Ziya keeps acting like that, he won’t last another day.”

He won’t last because you’ve pushed him, Daji wanted to snap back. But she held her tongue for fear of stoking his temper. His cruelty.

You don’t have another choice. She’d realized long ago that she needed to make herself absolutely necessary to Riga if she wanted to stay safe. Indispensable, anchored and chained to his very life.

“Come on, Ziya.” Riga cupped his hands around his mouth and called out. “Let’s get this over with.”

The trees were silent.

Riga raised his voice. “Ziya. I know you’re out there.”

Maybe he ran, Daji thought. Clever bastard.

She wondered what Riga might do if Ziya really did try to escape. He’d chase him, of course, and likely catch him—Riga had always been the strongest and fastest of them all. The punishment would be terrible. But Daji might fend Riga off for a few minutes, buy Ziya some time, and even if that cost her her life at least one of them would be spared.

But seconds later Ziya came wandering through the forest, stumbling as if drunk. His eyes had that bemused, wild look that Daji had recently grown accustomed to seeing on his face. She knew it meant danger. Her hand crept toward her knife.

Riga stood and approached Ziya like a keeper might a tiger, hands spread cautiously out before him. “How are you?”

“How am I?” Ziya tilted his head. “Whatever do you mean?”

Daji saw Riga’s throat pulse.

“Can you come sit down?” Riga asked.

Ziya shook his head, snickering.

“This isn’t funny,” Riga snarled. “Come here, Ziya.”

“Ziya?” Ziya’s eyes tipped to the sky. “Who’s that?”

Riga reached for his sword. Daji raised her knife. They’d prepared for this, all three of them, with Ziya’s consent. They had to strike just before he opened the gate—

Ziya’s face split into a horrible grin. “Kidding.”

Riga relaxed. “Fuck you.”

Daji exhaled and tried to slow her frantically beating heart.

Ziya sat down cross-legged in front of the fire. His eyes flickered toward the bound deer with a cursory interest. “It’s acting very tame, isn’t it?”

He picked his own knife up from the ground and dangled it before the deer. Fire glinted off the serrated edge. The deer lay still, indifferent. It might have been dead save for its resigned, labored breathing.

“Daji shoved a wad of opium down its mouth,” Riga said.

“Ah.” Ziya winked at her. “Clever girl.”

Daji wished the drug had taken effect earlier. She wished Riga had given it time. But that would require empathy—a trait he most certainly did not possess.

“Look alive, Daji.” Riga brandished his knife at her. “Let’s not drag this out.”

Daji sat frozen in place. For a brief moment she considered running. Her knees trembled.

No. There’s no way out. If she didn’t do this for herself, she at least had to do it for Ziya.

He liked to fucking joke. He’d never been able to take anything seriously; only he would be amused by the prospect of losing his own mind. But her fear—hers and Riga’s—was real. Ziya had been careening on the line between sanity and madness for months, and they didn’t know when he’d tip into the void for good. Only this could bring him back.

But oh, how it had cost them.

“Knives up,” Riga said.

They obeyed. The deer was tame beneath the blades, eyes open and glassy.

Riga began to speak. Every word of the incantation they’d lied, tortured, and murdered to obtain made the fire rise higher and higher, until flames ten feet high jumped toward the night sky. When Tseveri had spoken these words, they had sounded like music. On Riga’s tongue, they sounded like a curse. Daji squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the screams in her mind.

Riga finished chanting. Nothing happened.

They sat there for a long time, their confusion mounting, until Ziya’s laughter broke the silence.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Riga demanded.

“You’re saying it wrong,” Ziya said.

“The fuck does that mean?”

“It’s your accent. This won’t work with you butchering the words like that.”

“You do it, then.” Riga spat something else under his breath. Mugenese words, a slur he’d picked up as a child. Horse lover.

“I don’t know the words,” Ziya said.

“Yes, you do.” A malicious edge crept into Riga’s voice. “She taught them to you first.”

Ziya stiffened.

Don’t do it, Daji thought. Let’s kill him and run.

Ziya began the incantation. His voice turned gradually from a hoarse whisper to a shout, forceful and fluid. This time the words sounded closer to how they’d sounded on Tseveri’s tongue. This time they held power.

“Now,” Riga whispered, and they raised their knives to slaughter the last necessary innocent.

When it was over, the void flung them back into their material bodies with a shock like icy water. Daji lurched forward, gasping. The earth felt so solid under her legs, the air so sweet. The world became the familiar made strange—solid and beautiful and mystifying. Daji was burning inside, shaking from the sheer power arcing through her body.

She felt more alive than she’d ever been. Now she was three souls instead of one; now she was complete; now she was more.

They hadn’t fully returned yet from the world of spirit. Their connection hadn’t severed. She was still reading into Ziya’s and Riga’s souls, and their thoughts crashed into her mind so loudly she struggled to separate them from her own.

From Ziya, she felt cold and naked fear combined with a terrible relief. He didn’t want this. He’d never wanted any of this. He was so scared of what he might become but also grateful for his deliverance from the alternative. He was grateful to be bound.

From Riga, she felt both giddy delight and a dizzying rush of ambition. He wanted more. He wasn’t even paying attention to the panic radiating from Ziya. His thoughts were on greater things. He saw them on a battlefield, at a negotiating table, on three thrones.

To Riga, this had been the last obstacle. Now they were tipping forward into the future he’d always imagined for them.

Daji wanted it, too. She just wasn’t sure she’d survive it.

Slowly she opened her eyes. The blood coating her hands looked black in the moonlight. The fire had nearly gone out, yet the smoke threatened to suffocate. Daji almost fell forward into the embers, almost smothered her face in the ash and let it end there.

Strong fingers gripped her shoulder and dragged her back.

“Easy.” Riga grinned.

Daji couldn’t share in his euphoria.

Years later, when she tortured herself with memories of the three of them at the beginning, before everything had gone so dreadfully wrong, she could never remember how it felt when they were first anchored. Couldn’t remember the thrill of power, or the terrifying yet delightful sense of being known. All she remembered was a curdling dread—the certainty that one day, the secrets they’d stolen would be paid for in blood.

And Tseveri. Always in her mind she saw the dead girl’s wretched face, and heard so clearly the last warning she’d uttered before Ziya ripped her heart out of her chest.

Here’s a prophecy for you, she’d said.

One will die.

One will rule.

And one will sleep for eternity.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Rin’s wrist throbbed.

The air always felt different on the morning of an ambush, as if an electric charge, the crackling residue of a thunderstorm, thrummed through her and every soldier around her. Rin had never felt energy like this when she’d fought for the Republic. In the beginning, Yin Vaisra’s troops had been consummate professionals—sullen, grim, there to finish the job and get out. By the end, they’d been fearful. Desperate.

But the soldiers of the Southern Coalition were angry, and that force alone had driven them through grueling weeks of basic training, had quickly shaped them into capable killers even though not so long ago many of them had never even touched a sword.

It helped that their fight was personal. Khudla wasn’t their town, but this was their province, and everyone in Monkey Province had suffered the same way under Mugenese occupation. Displacement, looting, rape, murder, mass executions. A thousand Golyn Niis–level massacres had played out over the land, and no one had cared, because no one in the Republic or the Empire had ever cared much about the south.

But some in the south had survived to avenge their dead, and those were the men and women who comprised Rin’s troops.

As the minutes trickled past, the gathered ranks bristled in anticipation like hunting dogs straining against the leash. And Rin’s wrist stung like a conducting rod, a million little jolts of pain shooting through her elbow every second.

“Stop rubbing,” Kitay admonished. “You’re irritating it.”

“It hurts,” she said.

“Because you’re rubbing it. Leave it alone and it’ll heal faster.”

Rin ran her fingers over the cracked, bumpy skin that covered the bone of her wrist where it should have extended into a right hand. She clenched her jaw, trying to resist the urge to dig her nails into flesh long rubbed raw.

She’d had the hand amputated the night they made port in Ankhiluun. By then, after two weeks at sea, the appendage had all but rotted into a gangrenous mess. For all of the Black Lily physician’s efforts to sterilize the wound, there had remained so many points of exposure in her skin that it was a miracle the infection hadn’t spread farther up her arm. The procedure was short. Moag’s personal physician had cut away Rin’s hand, trimmed down the rotting flesh, and sewed her skin into a neat flap over the exposed bone.

The wound itself healed cleanly enough. But when Rin stopped taking laudanum, the wrist became a torch of unbearable agony. Phantom pains flashed through fingers she no longer had several times an hour. Sometimes they were so bad she slammed her hand at the wall to dull the pricks with a greater pain, only to remember that the hand wasn’t there. The pain was imaginary. And she couldn’t dull pain that existed purely in her mind.

“You’re going to make it bleed,” Kitay said.

Rin had, without thinking, begun to scratch again. She cupped her fingers over the stump and squeezed hard, trying to drive out the itching with sheer, numbing pressure. “It’s driving me mad. It’s not just the itching, it’s the fingers. It’s like I can still feel them, and they’re being pricked with a thousand needles, only I can’t do anything about it.”

“I think I get it,” Kitay said. “I feel it, too, sometimes. Little tremors out of nowhere. Which is strange, if you think about it—I’m the one with fingers, but the pain is coming from you.”

Before her surgery, they’d worried that cutting away her rotted right hand might also sever Kitay’s. They didn’t know the limits of their anchor bond. They knew that death for one meant death for both. They felt each other’s pain, and injuries to one manifested in pale, faintly visible scars for the other. But they didn’t know what that meant for amputations.

By the time they docked in Ankhiluun, however, Rin’s infections were so inflamed that the pain for both of them was unbearable, and Kitay had declared through gritted teeth that if Rin wouldn’t cut away the hand, he’d gnaw it off himself.

To their great relief, his own arm remained intact. A ridged white line appeared around his wrist like a bracelet where the incision was made, but his fingers were still functional, if somewhat stiff. Occasionally Rin saw him struggling to hold an ink brush, and he now took much longer to dress in the mornings. But he still had his hand, and though Rin was relieved, she couldn’t help but feel a constant, lingering jealousy.

“Can you see it?” She waved her wrist at him. “A little ghost hand?”

“You should put a hook on that,” he said.

“I’m not putting a fucking hook on it.”

“A blade, then. Then maybe you’d start practicing.”

She shot him an irritated look. “I’ll get around to it.”

“You’re never going to get around to it,” he said. “Keep acting like this and the first time you pick up a sword will be the last.”

“I won’t need to—”

“You know you might. Think, Rin, what happens when—”

“Not now,” she snapped. “I don’t want to talk about this now.”

She hated practicing with a sword. She hated fumbling at things with her left hand that her right hand had once done unconsciously. It made her feel helpless and stupid and inadequate, and she had spent such a long time trying to convince herself that she wasn’t powerless anymore. The first time she’d grasped a sword, a week after her surgery, her left arm had shaken with such debilitating weakness that she’d immediately flung the blade to the ground in disgust. She couldn’t bear feeling like that again.

“I see the problem,” Kitay said. “You’re nervous.”

“I don’t get nervous.”

“Bullshit. You’re terrified. That’s why you’re fidgeting. You’re scared.”

For good fucking reason, Rin thought.

Her throbbing wrist wasn’t the problem, just the symptom. She was searching for something, anything to go wrong. Their position could have been compromised. The Mugenese could know they were coming.

Or they might simply lose.

She hadn’t dealt with defenses this good before. The Mugenese at Khudla knew Rin’s troops were coming; their guard had been up for days. And they were primed to fear nighttime attacks now, even though most ambushing forces wouldn’t dare launch such a tricky operation without adequate light. This would be no easy, devastating raid.

But Rin couldn’t fail today.

Khudla was a test. She’d been begging the Monkey Warlord for a command position ever since they’d escaped Arlong, only to be told over and over that she couldn’t lead entire columns into battle until she had the experience. Today, at last, he’d put her in charge.

Liberating Khudla was her mission, and hers alone. Until now she’d been fighting like a unit of one, a juggernaut of fire that the Southern Coalition threw into battles like a wide-range missile. Now she was leading a brigade of hundreds.

These soldiers fought under her command. That terrified her. What if they died under her command?

“We have this down like clockwork. The guard changes every thirty minutes,” Kitay said. They’d been over this a dozen times before, but he was repeating it to calm her down. “You’ll know when the voices change. Get as close as you can before sunset, and then hit during the transition. Do you know the signals?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

If only saying it made it so.

The minutes crawled past. Rin watched the sun dipping toward the mountains, dropping reluctantly, as if dragged downward by some creature in the valley below.

After Rin had raised the Phoenix on the Isle of Speer and ended the Third Poppy War, there was no formal surrender by the Federation of Mugen. Emperor Ryohai and his progeny were turned instantly into charcoal statues under mountains of ash. No one in the Mugenese imperial family survived to negotiate for peace.

So there had been no armistice, no treaty. No Mugenese generals provided a map of their troop placements and turned their weapons over to the Nikara leadership. Instead, all remaining Federation soldiers on the mainland became rogue threats—highly skilled roving soldiers without mission or nation. Yin Vaisra, the former Dragon Warlord and newly elected President of the Nikara Republic, could have dealt conclusively with them months ago, but he’d let them roam free to undercut his own allies in a long-term ploy to strengthen his grasp on the crumbling Nikara Empire. Now those scattered platoons had organized into several large independent bands terrorizing the south. For all intents and purposes, the Nikara and the Mugenese remained at war. Even without support from the longbow island, the Mugenese had essentially colonized the south in a matter of months. And Rin had let them, obsessed as she’d been with Vaisra’s insurrection while the real war was being fought at home.

She’d failed the south once. She wouldn’t do it again.

“Kazuo says the ships are still coming,” spoke a voice in Mugini. It was a boy’s voice, thin and reedy.

“Kazuo is a fucking idiot,” said his companion.

Rin and Kitay crouched hidden behind the tall grass. They’d crept close enough to the Mugenese camp that they could hear patrolmen gossiping idly, their hushed voices traveling far over still night air. Still, Rin’s Mugini was rusty from more than a year of disuse, and she had to strain her ears to understand what they were saying.

“This language is like insect chitter,” Nezha had once complained, back when they’d been stupid young children crammed into a classroom at Sinegard, when they had yet to realize that the war they were training to fight wasn’t hypothetical.

Nezha had hated Mugini lessons, Rin remembered. He hadn’t been able to comprehend the language when spoken at its standard rapid clip, so he’d spent class each day mocking it, making his fellow students laugh with gibberish that sounded so much like real sentences.

“Click click click,” he’d said, and made scuttling noises between his teeth. “Like little bugs.”

Like crickets, Rin thought. They’d started calling the Mugenese that in the countryside. Rin didn’t know if it was a new slur or an old insult recycled from a time before her birth. She wouldn’t have been surprised by the latter. History moved in circles—she’d learned that very well by now.

“Kazuo said that ships have started coming into the ports in Tiger Province,” said the first voice she’d heard, the boy’s voice. “They’re docking in the shadows, ferrying us back handful by handful—”

The second patrolman snorted. “That’s bullshit. We’d know by now if they had.”

There was a brief silence. Someone stirred in the grass. The patrolmen were lying down, Rin realized. Perhaps they were stargazing. That was stupid of them, wildly irresponsible. But they sounded so very young; they sounded not like soldiers but like children. Did they simply not know any better?

“The moon is different here,” the first patrolman said wistfully.

Rin recognized that phrase. She’d learned it at Sinegard—it was an old Mugini expression, some aphorism derived from a myth about a ferryman who loved a woman who lived on a distant star, who built her a bridge between two worlds so that they could finally embrace.

The moon is different here. He meant he wanted to go home.

The Mugenese were always talking about going home. She heard about it every time she eavesdropped on them. They spoke about home like it still existed, like the longbow island was some beautiful paradise where they could easily return if only the ships would come to harbor. They spoke about their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers who awaited them on their shores, spared somehow from the scorching pyroclastic flows.

“You’d better get used to this moon,” said the second patrolman.

The more they spoke, the younger they sounded. Rin pictured their faces in her head; their voices brought to mind gangly limbs and fuzzy upper lips. They couldn’t be older than her—they had to be just over twenty, possibly younger.

She remembered fighting a boy her age during the siege at Khurdalain, what seemed like an eternity ago. Remembered his wide moonlike face and soft hands. Remembered how his eyes bulged when she ran her blade through his stomach.

He must have been so scared. He might have been as scared as she was.

She felt Kitay stiffen beside her.

“They don’t want to be here, either.” He’d told her this weeks ago. He’d been interrogating some of their Mugenese prisoners, and he’d come away far more sympathetic to them than she was comfortable with. “They’re just kids. A quarter of them are younger than we are, and they didn’t sign up for this war. Most of them were pulled from their homes and thrown into vicious training camps so that their families wouldn’t go to prison or starve. They don’t want to kill, they just want to go home.”

But their home didn’t exist anymore. Those boys had nowhere to escape to. If the gates of reconciliation had ever been open, if there’d ever been the option of repatriating enemy combatants and building slowly toward peace, Rin had slammed them shut long ago.

A wide chasm of guilt, her ever-faithful friend, yawned in the back of her mind.

She pushed it away.

She’d done such a good job of burying her memories; that was the only way she could keep herself sane.

Children can be murderers, she reminded herself. Little boys can be monsters.

The lines of war had become far too blurred. Every Mugenese soldier who’d ever put on a uniform was complicit, and Rin didn’t have the patience to separate the guilty from the innocent. Speerly justice was absolute. Her retribution was conclusive. She didn’t have time to dawdle on what could have been; she had a homeland to liberate.

Her wrist had started to throb again. She exhaled slowly, closed her eyes, and repeated their plan of attack over and over in her mind in an attempt to shake off her nerves.

She traced her fingers across the scars on her stomach. Let them linger on the spot where Altan’s handprint was burned into her like a brand. She envisioned those boy patrolmen and transformed them into targets.

I’ve killed millions of you before, she thought. This is routine now. This is nothing.

The sun was a little crimson dot now, the top of it barely visible over the mountaintops. The patrolmen had rotated from their post. The fields, for now, were empty.

“It’s time,” Kitay murmured.

Rin stood up. They faced each other, hands clasped between them.

“At dawn,” she said.

“At dawn,” he agreed. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead.

This was their standard way of parting, the way they said everything they never spoke out loud. Fight well. Keep us safe. I love you.

Every goodbye had to be so much harder for Kitay, who wagered his life on hers every time she set foot on the battlefield.

Rin wished she didn’t have that vulnerability. If she could cut out the part of the soul that endangered Kitay—that was endangered by Kitay—then she would.

But the fact that his life was at stake lent an edge to her fighting. It made her sharper, warier, less likely to take risks and more likely to strike hard and fast when she could. She no longer fought from pure rage. She fought to protect him—and that, she had discovered, changed everything.

Kitay gave her one last nod, then disappeared behind the ranks.

“Does he always stay behind?” Officer Shen asked.

Rin liked Officer Shen. A Monkey Province native and veteran of the last two Poppy Wars, Shen Sainang was brusque, efficient, and pragmatic. She despised factional politics, which perhaps explained why she was one of the few officers who had volunteered to follow Rin into her first battle as commander. Rin was grateful for that.

But Shen was too observant. Always asking too many questions.

“Kitay doesn’t fight,” Rin said.

“Why not?” Shen asked. “He’s Sinegard-trained, isn’t he?”

Because Kitay was Rin’s single link to the heavens. Because Kitay needed to be in a safe and quiet place so that his mind could function as a channel between her and the Phoenix. Because every time Kitay was exposed and vulnerable it doubled Rin’s chances of dying.

That was Rin’s greatest secret. If the Monkey Warlord knew Kitay was her anchor, he’d know the only way to kill her. And Rin didn’t trust him or the Southern Coalition enough to give them that chance.

“He’s a Sinegard-trained strategist,” Rin said. “Not a foot soldier.”

Shen looked unconvinced. “He carries a sword like one.”

“Yes, and his mind’s more valuable than the sword,” Rin said curtly, shutting down the discussion. She nodded toward Khudla. “It’s time.”

Adrenaline rushed her veins then. Her heartbeat began pounding in her ears, an internal countdown to the slaughter. Across the village perimeter, eight pairs of eyes were trained on Rin—eight squadron leaders, waiting at their vantage points, watching for the flame.

At last, Rin saw a line of Mugenese troops moving down the field. There it was—the patrol switch.

She raised her left hand and gave the signal—a thin stream of fire, burning the air ten feet over her head before it winked away.

The fields moved. Soldiers poured in from the northern and eastern fronts. They flooded out of hiding points in riverbanks, ravines, and forests like ants storming out of an anthill. Rin watched with satisfaction. So what if her columns were thinner than the defense? The Mugenese wouldn’t know the first place to look.

She heard a series of signal whistles, clear indications that every squadron had moved successfully into position. Officer Shen’s troops took the east. Officer Lin’s troops took the north.

Rin stormed the southern quarter alone.

The Mugenese weren’t ready. Most had been asleep or preparing to go to sleep. They staggered out of their tents and barracks, rubbing at their eyes. Rin almost laughed at the way their faces morphed into uniform expressions of horror when they saw what had turned the night air so very warm.

She lifted her arms. Wings shot out of her shoulders, glowing ten feet high.

Kitay had once accused her of being too flamboyant, of sacrificing efficiency for attention.

What did it matter? There was no point to subtlety when everyone knew what she was. And Rin wanted this image burned into their eyelids, the last thing they saw before they died—a Speerly and her god.

Men scattered before her like startled hens. One or two had the sense to hurl swords in her direction. Their movements were panicked, their aim poor. Rin advanced, hand splayed outward, fire ensconcing everything she saw.

Then the screaming started, and the ecstasy set in.

Rin had spent so long hating how she felt when she burned, hating her fire and her god. Not anymore. She could admit to herself now that she liked it. She liked letting her basest instincts take over. She reveled in it.

She didn’t have to think hard to summon the rage. She only had to remember the corpses at Golyn Niis. The corpses in the research laboratory. Altan burning on the pier, a miserable end to the miserable life they’d given him.

Hate was a funny thing. It gnawed at her insides like poison. It made every muscle in her body tense, made her veins boil so hot she thought her head might split in half, and yet it fueled everything she did. Hate was its own kind of fire and if you had nothing else, it kept you warm.

Once, Rin had wielded fire like a blunt instrument, letting the Phoenix’s will control her as if she were the weapon and not the other way around. Once, she’d only known how to act as a gateway for a torrent of divine fire. But such unrestrained explosions were only useful when one intended genocide. Campaigns for liberation demanded precision.

She had spent weeks with Kitay practicing the intricacies of calling the flame. She’d learned to shape it like a sword. To lash it out in tendrils like a whip. She’d learned to mold it into moving, dancing entities—lions, tigers, phoenixes.

She’d learned so many ways to kill with fire. She liked going for the eyes the best. Burning limbs to ash took too long. The human body could sustain a burn for a surprisingly long time, and she wanted her fights over quickly. Really, the entire face presented an excellent target—hair would keep burning, and light head wounds fazed combatants more than other minor wounds could. But if she aimed for the eyes, she could scorch retinas, seal eyelids shut, or blister the surrounding skin, all of which would blind her opponents in seconds.

She saw a flash of movement to her right. Someone was trying to charge her.

The Phoenix cackled. The audacity.

Half a second before he reached her, she opened her palm toward his face.

His eyes popped one by one. Viscous fluid dribbled down his cheeks. He opened his mouth to scream, and Rin sent flames pouring down his throat.

This was only grotesque if she saw her opponents as human. But she didn’t see humans, because Sinegard and Altan had taught her to compartmentalize and detach. Learn to look and see not a man but a body. The soul is not there. The body is simply a composite of different targets, and all of them burn so bright.

“Do you know where the Mugenese come from?” Altan had asked her once. “Do you know what kind of race they are?”

They had been sailing down the Murui toward Khurdalain then. The Third Poppy War had just begun. She’d been fresh out of Sinegard, stupid and naive, a student who was struggling with the fact that she was now a soldier. Altan had just become her commander and she had hung on his every word, so in awe of him she could barely string together a sentence.

She’d realized he was waiting for her to answer, so she’d said the first thing that came to mind. “They’re. Um. Related to us?”

“Do you know how?”

She could have repeated any textbook answer to him. Migration induced by droughts or flooding. Exiled aristocracy. Clan warfare dating back to the days of the Red Emperor. No one was really certain. She’d been taught many theories that were all equally plausible. But she’d suspected that Altan wasn’t really interested in her answer, so she had shaken her head instead.

She’d guessed right. He’d wanted to tell a story.

“A long time ago the Red Emperor had a pet,” he’d said. “It was a beastly thing, some very intelligent ape he’d found in the mountains. One ugly, vicious fucker. Do you know this tale?”

“I don’t,” she’d whispered. “Tell me.”

“The Red Emperor kept it in a cage in his palace,” he continued. “Occasionally he brought it out for guests to see. They liked to watch it kill things. They’d release pigs or roosters into its cage to watch it dismember them. I imagine they had great fun. Until one day the beast sprang free of its cage, killed a minister with its bare hands, kidnapped the Red Emperor’s daughter, and escaped back to the mountains.”

“I didn’t know the Red Emperor had a daughter,” Rin had said, stupidly. For some reason, she’d found this the most striking detail. History only remembered the princes—the Red Emperor’s sons.

“No one does. He would have erased her from the record, after what happened. She became pregnant by the beast but couldn’t find any means of expelling the fetus from her womb, not while she was its prisoner, so she gave birth to a little brood of half-men and raised them in the mountains. Years later the Red Emperor sent his generals to chase them out of the Empire, and they fled to the longbow island.”

Rin had never heard that iteration of the story, but it made sense. The Nikara did like to compare the Mugenese to monkeys. Half-men, they called them; short and little—even though when she had finally seen a Federation soldier with her own eyes she wouldn’t have been able to tell him apart from a Nikara villager.

Altan had paused then, watching her, waiting for her response.

But she’d only had one question, which she hadn’t wanted to ask, because she’d known Altan wouldn’t have an answer.

If they were beasts, how did they kill us?

Who decided who counted as human? The Nikara thought the Speerlies were beasts, too, and they’d made them warrior slaves for centuries. The enemy was not human—fine. But if they were animals, then they must be inferior. If the Mugenese were inferior, though, then how could they have been the victors? Did that mean that, in this world, one had to be a beast to survive?

Maybe no one was truly a beast. Maybe that was just how murder became possible. You took away someone’s humanity, and then you killed them. At Sinegard, Strategy Master Irjah had taught them once that during the heat of battle, they should regard their opponents as objects, abstract and disparate parts and not the sum, because that would make it easier to plunge a blade into a pumping heart. But maybe if you looked at someone as not an object but an animal, you could not only commit the murder without flinching, you could let yourself take some pleasure in it. Then it felt good, the same way kicking down anthills felt good.

“Monkeys raping humans. Half-breed brats. Beastly freaks. Stupid savages.” Altan had said the last words with bitter relish, and Rin had thought that perhaps it was because those were the same words so many others used to describe him. “That’s where the Mugenese come from.”

Rin carved her way through the camp in minutes. The Mugenese presented almost no resistance. The soldiers she’d faced at Sinegard and Khurdalain had been well trained and lethally armed, with lines of glinting swords and an endless supply of chemical weapons they hurled into civilian centers at will. But these soldiers ran instead of fighting, and they died with an ease that astounded her.

This was all too simple, so simple that it made Rin slow down. She wanted to savor this power differential. Once I was your screaming victim, begging for your mercy. And now you cower before me.

She shouldn’t have slowed.

Because once she slowed, she noticed how unprepared they were. How utterly unlike soldiers they seemed. How young they looked.

The boy before her had a sword, but he wasn’t using it. He didn’t even try to fight, only stumbled back with his arms raised, begging for her mercy.

“Please don’t,” he kept saying.

He might have been the patrolman from before; he spoke in that same reedy, wobbly voice. “Please.”

She stayed her hand only because she realized he was speaking Nikara.

She considered him for a moment. Was he Nikara? Was he a prisoner of war? He wasn’t wearing a Mugenese uniform, he might have been an innocent …

“Please,” he said again. “Don’t—”

His accent sealed his fate. His tones were too clipped. He wasn’t Nikara after all, just a clever Mugenese soldier who thought he might fool her into taking mercy.

“Burn,” she said.

The boy fell backward. She saw his mouth open, saw his face curdle into a piteous scream just as it blackened and solidified, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

In the end, it was always so easy to kill her heart. It didn’t matter that they looked like boys. That they were nothing, nothing like the monsters she had once known. In this war of racial totality, none of that mattered. If they were Mugenese, that meant they were crickets and that meant when she crushed them under her heel, the universe hardly registered their loss.

Once, Altan had made her watch him burn a squirrel alive.

He’d caught it for their breakfast with a simple netted trap. It was still alive when he retrieved it from the trees, wriggling in his grasp. But instead of snapping its neck, he’d decided to teach her a lesson.

“Do you know how exactly fire kills a person?” he’d asked. She’d shaken her head.

She’d watched, entranced, as he conjured fire into his palms.

Altan had such remarkable control over the shape of fire. He was a puppeteer, casually twisting flames into the loveliest shapes: now a flying bird, now a twisting dragon, now a human figure, flailing inside the cage he made with his fingers until he clamped his palms shut.

She’d been captivated, watching his fingers dance through the air. His question had caught her off guard, and when she spoke, her words were clumsy and stupid. “Through heat? I mean, um …”

His lip had curled. “Fire is such an inefficient way to kill. Did you know the moment of death is actually quite painless? The fire eats up all the breathable air around the victim, and they choke to death.”

She blinked at him. “You don’t want that?”

“Why would you want that? If you want a quick death, you use a sword. Or an arrow.” He’d twirled a stream of flame around his fingers. “You don’t throw Speerlies into battle unless you want to terrorize. We want our victims to suffer first. We want them to burn, and slowly.”

He’d picked up the bound squirrel and wrapped his fingers around its middle. The squirrel couldn’t scream, but Rin had imagined the sound, quivering little gasps that corresponded to its twitching limbs.

“Watch the skin,” he’d said.

Once the fur burned off, she’d been able to glimpse the pink underneath, bubbling, crackling, hardening to black. “First it boils. Then it starts to slough off. Watch the color. Once you’ve turned it black, and once that black spreads, there’s nothing that can bring them back.”

He had held the squirrel out toward her. “Hungry?”

She had glanced down at its little black eyes, bulging and glassy, and her stomach roiled. And she hadn’t known what was worse, the way the animal’s legs twitched in its death throes, or the fact that the roasted flesh smelled so terribly good.

By the time she’d finished in the southern quarter, the rest of her soldiers had corralled the last Mugenese holdouts into a corner in Khudla’s eastern district. They parted to let her through to the front.

“Took you a while,” Officer Shen said.

“Got held up,” Rin said. “Having too much fun.”

“The southern quarter—”

“Finished.” Rin rubbed her fingers together, and crackled blood burned black fell to the ground. “Why aren’t we attacking?”

“They’ve taken hostages inside the temple,” Shen said.

That was smart. Rin regarded the structure. It was one of the nicer village temples she’d seen in a while, made from stone and not wood. It wouldn’t burn easily, and the Mugenese artillery inside had good vantage points from the upper floors.

“They’re going to shoot us out,” Shen said.

As if to prove her point, a fire rocket shrieked overhead and exploded against the tree ten paces from where they crouched.

“So storm them,” Rin said.

“We’re afraid they might have gas.”

“They would have used it by now.”

“They could be waiting for you,” Shen pointed out.

That was fair logic. “Then we’ll burn it.”

“We can’t get past the stone—”

“You can’t get past stone.” Rin wiggled her fingers in the air. A fiery dragon danced around her palm. She squinted at the temple, considering. It fell easily within her range; she could extend her flames to a radius of fifty yards. She only needed to sneak a flame through a window. Once past stone, her fire would find plenty of things to burn.

“How many hostages?” Rin asked.

“Does it matter?” Shen asked.

“It does to me.”

Shen paused for a long moment, and then nodded. “Maybe five, six. No more than eight.”

“Are they important?” Women and children could die without many ramifications. Local leadership likely couldn’t.

“Not as far as I can tell. Souji’s people are on the other side of town. And he doesn’t have family.”

Rin mulled over her options one last time.

She could still have her troops storm the temple, but she’d suffer casualties, especially if the Mugenese really did have gas canisters. The Southern Army couldn’t afford casualties; their numbers were low enough already.

And her margin of victory mattered. This was her great test. If she came home from this not just victorious but with minimal losses, the Monkey Warlord would give her an army. The decision, then, was clear; she wasn’t slinking back with only half her troops.

“Who else knows about the hostages?” she asked Shen.

“Just the men here.”

“What about the villagers?”

“We’ve evacuated everyone we could find,” Shen said, which was code for No one will speak of what you did.

Rin nodded. “Get your men out of here. At least a hundred paces. I don’t want them to inhale any smoke.”

Shen looked pale. “General—”

Rin raised her voice. “I wasn’t asking.”

Shen nodded and broke into a run. The field cleared in seconds. Rin stood alone in the yard, rubbing her fingers against her palm.

Can you feel this, Kitay? Can you tell what I’m doing?

No time for hesitation. She had to do this before the Mugenese ventured out to investigate the silence.

She turned her palm out. Fire roared. She directed the core of the flame toward the locks on the temple doors. She saw the metal warping, twisting into an unbreakable shape.

Then the Mugenese must have caught on, because someone inside started to scream.

Rin increased the heat to a roar loud enough to drown it out, yet somehow it pierced the wall of sound. It was a high squeal of pain. Maybe a woman’s, maybe a child’s. It almost sounded like a baby. But that didn’t mean anything—she knew how shrilly a grown man could scream.

She increased the force of her flame, made it roar so loudly that she couldn’t hear herself think. But still the scream penetrated the wall of fire.

She squeezed her eyes shut. She imagined herself falling backward into the Phoenix’s warmth, into that distant space where nothing mattered but rage. The thin wail wavered.

Burn, she thought, shut up and burn.

CHAPTER 2

“Well done,” Kitay said.

She threw her arms around him, pulled him tight against her, and lingered in his embrace for a long while. By now she should have become used to their brief separations, but leaving him behind felt harder and harder every time.

She tried to convince herself that it wasn’t solely because Kitay was the one source of her power. That it wasn’t just because of her selfish concern that if anything happened to him, she was useless.

No, she also felt responsible for him. Guilty, rather. Kitay’s mind was stretched like a rope between her and the Phoenix, and between the rage and hatred and shame, he felt everything. He kept her safe from madness, and she subjected him to madness in return. Nothing she ever did could repay that debt.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“I’m all right,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

“You’re lying.” Even in the dim light of dawn, Rin could see his legs were trembling. He was far from all right—he could barely stand. They had this same argument after every battle. Every time she came back and saw what she’d done to him, saw his pale, drawn face and knew that to him, it felt like torture. Every time he denied it.

She’d limit her use of flame if only he asked. He never asked.

“I’ll be fine,” he amended gently. He nodded over her shoulder. “And you’re drawing a bit of attention.”

Rin turned and saw Khudla’s survivors.

This had happened often enough that she knew what to expect.

First they wandered forward in little, tentative clumps. Curious whispering, terrified pointing. Then, when they realized that this new army was not Mugenese but Nikara, not Militia but something new entirely, and that Rin’s soldiers were not here to replace their oppressors, they grew braver.

Is she the Speerly? they asked. Are you the Speerly?

Are you one of us?

And then the whispers grew louder as the crowd swelled, bodies coalescing around her. They spoke her name, her race, her god. Her legend had already spread to this place; she could hear it rippling through the field.

They reached out to touch her.

Rin’s chest constricted. Her breathing quickened; her throat felt blocked.

Kitay’s hand tightened around her arm. He didn’t have to ask what was wrong; he knew.

“Are you—” he began.

“It’s fine,” she murmured. “It’s fine.”

These hands were not the enemy’s. She was not in danger. She knew that, but her body didn’t. She took a deep breath and composed her face. She had to play the part—had to look like not the scared girl she’d once been or the tired soldier that she was, but the leader they needed.

“You’re free,” she told them. Her voice quivered with exhaustion; she cleared her throat. “Go.”

A hush ran through the crowd when they saw that she spoke their language—not the abrasive Nikara of the north, but the slow, rolling dialect of the south.

They still regarded her with a kind of awed terror. But she knew this was the kind of fear that turned into love.

Rin raised her voice and spoke, this time without a tremor. “Go tell your families that they’ve been saved. Tell them the Mugenese can’t harm you any longer. And when they ask who broke your shackles, tell them the Southern Coalition is marching across the Empire with the Phoenix at its fore. Tell them we’re taking back our home.”

As the sun climbed through the sky, Rin commenced Khudla’s liberation.

This was supposed to be the fun part. It was supposed to feel good, telling grateful villagers that their erstwhile occupiers were smoldering piles of ash.

But Rin dreaded liberation. Combing through a half-destroyed village to find survivors only meant yet another survey of the extent of Federation cruelty. She’d rather face the battlefield again than confront that suffering. It didn’t matter that she’d already seen the worst at Golyn Niis, that she’d witnessed the worst things one could do to a human body dozens of times over. It never got easier.

She’d learned by now that the Mugenese implemented the same three measures every time they occupied a city, three directives so clean and textbook that she could have written a full treatise on how to subdue a population herself.

First, the Mugenese rounded up every Nikara man who resisted their occupation, marched them to the killing fields, and either shot or beheaded them. Beheading was more common; arrows were valuable resources and couldn’t always be retrieved intact. They didn’t kill all the local men, just those who had threatened to make trouble. They needed laborers.

Second, the Mugenese either repurposed or stripped away the village infrastructure. Anything sturdy they turned into soldiers’ barracks, and anything flimsy they tore apart for firewood. When the loose wood was gone, they scoured the homes for furniture, blankets, valuables, and ceramics with which to furnish their barracks. They were very efficient at turning villages into empty shells. Rin often found liberated villagers crowded in pigsties, cramped together knee to knee just to keep warm.

Third, the Mugenese co-opted the local leadership. After all, what did you do when you didn’t speak the local language? When you didn’t grasp the nuances of regional politics? You didn’t supplant the existing leadership structure—that would result in chaos. You grafted yourself onto it. You got the local bullies to do your dirty work for you.

Rin hated the Nikara collaborators. Their crimes, to her, seemed almost worse than those of the Federation. The Mugenese were at least targeting the enemy race—a natural instinct in wartime. But collaborators helped the Mugenese murder, mutilate, and violate their own kind. That was inconceivable. Unforgivable.

Rin and Kitay were always split on how to handle the captured collaborators. Kitay begged for lenience. They were desperate, he argued. They were trying to save their own skins. They might have saved some villagers’ skins. Sometimes compliance saves you pain. Compliance might have saved us at Golyn Niis.

Bullshit, Rin retorted. Compliance was cowardice. She had no respect for anyone who would rather die than fight. She wanted the collaborators to burn.

But the matter was out of their hands. The villagers invariably settled things themselves. Sometime in the next week, if not in the next day, they would drag the collaborators into the middle of the square, extract their confessions, and then flay, whip, beat, or stone them. Rin never had to intervene. The south delivered its own justice. The catharsis of violence hadn’t happened yet in Khudla—it was too early in the morning for a public execution, and the villagers were too starved and exhausted to form a mob—but Rin knew that soon enough, she would hear screaming.

Meanwhile, she had survivors to find. She was looking for prisoners. The Federation always took captives—political dissidents, soldiers too willful to control but too useful to let die, or hostages they hoped might dissuade their incoming attackers. Sometimes the bodies were freshly dead—either from one last act of vengeance by desperate Mugenese soldiers under siege, or suffocated by smoke from Rin’s flames.

More often, however, she found them alive. You couldn’t kill hostages if you ever meant to use them.

Kitay led soldiers to search in the eastern edge of the village through the Mugenese-occupied buildings that had escaped the brunt of the destruction. He had a particular talent for finding survivors. He’d once hidden for weeks behind a bricked-up wall at Golyn Niis, cringing and hugging his knees while Federation soldiers dragged Nikara soldiers from their hiding spots and shot them on the streets. He knew how to look for the signs—tarps or stacked debris that seemed out of place, faint footprints in the dust, echoes of shallow breathing in frightened silence.

Rin alone took on the burned wreckage.

She dreaded this task: pulling charred boards aside to find bodies broken and bleeding but still breathing. Too many times they were beyond saving. Half the time she’d caused the destruction herself. Once flames started burning, they were difficult to put out.

Still, she had to try.

“Is anyone here?” she called repeatedly. “Make a noise. Any noise. I’m listening.”

She went through every cellar, every abandoned lot and well; shouted out for survivors many times and made sure she listened hard to the echoing silence. It would be a horrible fate to be chained up, slowly starving or suffocating to death because your village had been liberated but the survivors forgot about you. Her eyes watered as she stumbled through a smoky grain cellar. She doubted she’d find anything—already she’d stumbled over two corpses—but she waited a moment before she left. Just in case.

Her patience rewarded her.

“In the back,” called a voice.

Rin pulled a flame into her hand, illuminating the far wall of the cellar. She couldn’t see anything but empty grain sacks. She stepped closer.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“Souji.” She heard the clink of chains. “Likely the man you’re looking for.”

She decided she wasn’t dealing with an ambush. She knew that flat-tongued, rustic accent. The best Mugenese spies couldn’t imitate it; they’d all trained only to speak the curt Sinegardian dialect.

She crossed to the other end of the cellar, stopped, and amplified her torchlight.

Her first goal at Khudla had been liberation. Her second goal was to locate Yang Souji, the famed rebel leader and local hero who had until recently been fending off the Mugenese in southern Monkey Province. The closer she’d marched to Khudla, the more myths and rumors she’d heard about him. Yang Souji had eyes that could see for ten thousand miles. He could speak to animals; he knew when the Mugenese were coming because the birds always warned him. His skin was invulnerable to all kinds of metal—swords, arrowheads, axes, spears.

The man chained to the floor was none of those things. He looked surprisingly young—he couldn’t be more than a few years older than she was. A scraggly beard had sprouted over his neck and chin, some indication of how long he’d been chained up, but he sat up straight with his shoulders rolled back, and his eyes shone bright in the firelight.

Despite herself, Rin found him surprisingly handsome.

“So you’re the Speerly,” he said. “I thought you’d be taller.”

“And I thought you’d be older,” she said.

“Then we’re both a disappointment.” He jangled his chains at her. “Took you long enough. Did you really need all night?”

She knelt down and began working at the locks. “Not even a thank-you?”

“You’re going to do that one-handed?” he asked skeptically.

She fumbled with the pin. “Look, if you’re going to—”

“Give me that.” He plucked the pin from her fingers. “Just hold the lock up where I can see it and give me some light—there you go.”

As she watched him work at the lock with remarkable dexterity, she couldn’t help but feel a flicker of jealousy. It still stung, how the simplest things—picking locks, getting dressed, filling her canteen—had become so damnably difficult overnight.

She’d lost her hand to such a stupid turn of events. If they’d only had a key back then. If they’d just been able to steal a motherfucking key.

Her stump itched. She clenched her teeth and willed herself not to scratch it.

Souji undid the lock in less than a minute. He shook his hands free and sighed, cradling his wrists. He bent over toward the chains around his ankles. “That’s better. Can you give me some more light?”

She moved the flame closer to the lock, careful not to singe his skin.

She noticed the middle finger on his right hand was missing its top joint. It didn’t look like an accident—the middle finger on his left hand was missing a joint as well.

“What’s wrong with your hands?” she asked.

“My mother’s first two children died in infancy,” he explained. “She thought that the gods were stealing them because they were so lovely. So when I entered the world she gnawed the first joint off both my middle fingers.” He wiggled his left hand at her. “Made me a bit less attractive.”

Rin snorted. “The gods don’t want fingers.”

“So what do they want?”

“Pain,” she said. “Pain, and your sanity.”

Souji popped the lock, shook the chains away, and clambered to his feet. “I suppose you would know.”

After all likely survivors had been rescued from the wreckage, Rin’s troops fell on the battlefield like vultures.

The first time the newly minted soldiers of the Southern Coalition had scavenged for supplies in the wake of a battle, they’d been reluctant to touch the corpses. They’d been superstitious, scared of angering vengeful ghosts of the unburied dead who couldn’t return home. Now they raided bodies with hardened disregard, stripping them of anything of value. They looked for weapons, leather, clean linens—Mugenese uniforms were blue, but could be easily dyed—and, prized above all, shoes.

The Southern Coalition’s troops suffered terribly from shoddy footwear. They fought in straw sandals, and cotton if they could obtain it, but those cotton shoes were more like slippers, sewn weeks before the battle by wives, mothers, and sisters. Most were fighting in footwear of plaited straw that broke midmarch, fell apart in sticky mud, and offered no protection against the cold.

The Mugenese, however, had sailed over the Nariin Sea wearing leather boots—fine, solid, warm, and waterproof. Rin’s soldiers had become very adept at untying the laces, yanking boots off stiffening feet, and tossing them into wheelbarrows to be redistributed later according to size.

While Rin’s soldiers combed through the fields, Souji led her toward the former village headman’s office, which the Mugenese had repurposed into a headquarters. He provided running commentary on the ruins as they walked, like a disgruntled host apologetic that his home had been found in such a mess.

“It looked loads better than this months ago. Khudla’s a nice village—had some lovely historic architecture, until they tore down everything for firewood. And we made those barricades,” he said somewhat sulkily, pointing to the sandbags around the headquarters. “They just stole them.”

For a simple village’s defenses, Souji’s barricades had been surprisingly well constructed. He’d organized pillboxes the way she would have done it—wooden stakes driven into the ground to provide a lattice framework for layers of sandbags. She’d been taught that method at Sinegard. These defenses, Rin realized, had been built according to Militia guidelines.

“Then how did they get through in the end?” she asked.

Souji blinked at her as if she were an idiot. “They had gas.”

So Officer Shen was right. Rin stifled a shudder, imagining the impact of the noxious yellow fumes on unsuspecting civilians. “How much?”

“Just one canister,” Souji said. “I think they’d been hoarding it, because they didn’t use it when they first came. Waited until the third day of fighting, when they had us all barricaded into one place, and then they popped it over the wall. We fell apart pretty quickly after that.”

They reached the headquarters. Souji tried the door. It swung open without trouble; no one was left to lock it from the inside.

Food littered the table of the central conference room. Souji picked a wheat bun off its place, tore off a bite, then spat it back out. “Disgusting.”

“What, too stale for you?”

“No. It’s got too much salt. Gross.” Souji tossed the wheat bun back onto the table. “Salt doesn’t belong in buns.”

Rin’s mouth watered. “They have salt?”

She hadn’t tasted salt in weeks. Most salt in the Empire was imported from the basins of Dog Province, but those trade networks had completely broken down during Vaisra’s civil war. Out in the arid eastern Monkey Province, Rin’s army had been subsisting on the blandest rice gruel and boiled vegetables. There were rumored to be a few jars of fermented soy paste hidden in the kitchens at Ruijin, but if they existed, Rin had never seen nor tasted them.

“We had salt,” Souji corrected. He bent over to examine the contents of a barrel. “Looks like they’ve eaten through most of it. There’s only a handful left.”

“Take that back to the public kitchen. We’ll treat everyone.” Rin leaned over the commander’s desk. Documents were strewn all over its surface. Rin found troop numbers, food ration records, and letters written in a scrawled, messy script that she could barely read. Here and there she could make out a few words. Wife. Home. Emperor.

She collected them into a neat pile. She and Kitay would pore over them later, see if they bore any meaningful news about the Mugenese. But they were likely months old, like the other correspondence they’d found. Every dead Mugenese general kept letters from the mainland on their desk, as if rereading those Mugini characters could maintain their connection to a motherland they must have known was gone.

“They were reading Sunzi?” Rin picked up the slim text—a Nikara edition, not a translation. “And the Bodhidharma? Where’d they get these?”

“Those were mine. Stole them out of the Sinegard library way back in the day.” Souji plucked the booklet from her hand. “I take them with me everywhere I go. Those bastards wouldn’t have been able to make head or tail of them.”

Rin glanced at him, surprised. “You’re a Sinegard graduate?”

“Not a graduate. I was there for two years. Then the famine struck, so I went home. Jima didn’t let me back in when I returned. But I still needed a paycheck, so I enlisted in the Militia.”

So he’d passed the Keju. That was rare for someone from his background—Rin should know. She regarded Souji with a newfound respect. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because they thought that if I left once, then I’d do it again. That I’d always prioritize my family over my military career. Guess they were right. I would have left the ranks the moment we got wind of the Mugenese invasion.”

“And what about now?”

“Whole family’s dead.” His voice was flat. “Died this past year.”

“I’m sorry. Was it the Federation?”

“No. The flood.” Souji jerked out a shrug. “We’re usually pretty good at seeing floods coming. Not hard to read the weather if you know what you’re doing. But not this time. This was man-made.”

“The Empress broke the dams,” Rin said automatically. Chaghan and Qara felt like such a distant memory that she could speak this lie without struggle. Best that Souji didn’t know that the Cike, her old regiment, had deliberately caused the flood that killed his family.

“Broke the dams to stem an enemy that she’d invited in herself.” Souji’s voice turned bitter. “I know. I’d learned to swim at Sinegard. They hadn’t. There’s nothing where my village used to be.”

Rin felt a stab of guilt. She did her best to ignore it. She shouldn’t have to shoulder the blame for that particular atrocity. That flood had been the fault of the twins, an act of environmental warfare to slow the Federation’s progress inland.

Who could say if it had worked, or if it had even mattered? What was done was done. The only way to live with your transgressions, Rin had learned, was to lock them away in your mind and leave them in the abyss.

“Why can’t you just blow them up?” Souji asked abruptly.

She blinked at him. “What?”

“When you ended the war. When the longbow island went up in smoke. What’s stopping you from doing that again in the south?”

“Prudence,” she said. “If I burn them, I burn everyone. Fire on that scale doesn’t discriminate. A massive genocide on our own territory would—”

“We don’t need a massive genocide. Just a little one would do.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking for.” She turned away; she didn’t want to meet his eyes. “Even the little fires hurt people they shouldn’t.”

She’d grown tired of this question. That was what everyone wanted to know—why she couldn’t simply snap her fingers and incinerate the Mugenese camp like she’d done to their entire island. If she’d finished off a nation once, why couldn’t she do it again? Why couldn’t she end this whole war in seconds? Wasn’t that so obviously the next move?

She wished she could do it. There were times when she wanted so badly to send walls of flame roaring across the entire south, clearing out the Mugenese the way one might raze a field of blighted crops, with no regard for the collateral damage.

But every time that desire surged within her, she ran up against the same pulsing black venom that clouded her mind—Su Daji’s parting gift, the Seal that cut her off from direct access to the Pantheon.

Maybe it was a blessing that her mind remained blocked by the Seal, that she was forced to use Kitay as a conduit for her power. Kitay kept her sane. Stable. He let her call the fire, but only in targeted, limited bursts.

Without Kitay, Rin was terrified of what she might do.

“If I were you,” Souji said, “I would have gotten rid of them all. One single blaze, and the south would be clean. Fuck prudence.”

She shot him a wry look. “Then you’d be dead, too.”

“Just as well,” he said, and sounded like he meant it.

Rin felt as if eternity had passed by the time the sun set. Twenty-four hours ago, she had led troops into battle for the first time. That afternoon, she’d liberated a village. Now her wrist throbbed, her knees shook, and a headache pounded behind her eyes.

She could not silence the memory of that scream in the temple. She needed to silence it.

Back in her tent, she dug a packet of opium out from the bottom of her traveling satchel and pressed a nugget into a pipe.

“Do you have to?” Kitay asked. It wasn’t really a question. They’d had this argument a thousand times, and every time arrived at the same lack of resolution. He just felt obligated to express his displeasure. By now they were simply going through the motions.

“It’s not your business,” she said.

“You need to sleep. You’ve been up nearly forty-eight hours.”

“I’ll sleep after this. I can’t relax without it.”

“It smells awful.”

“So go sleep somewhere else.”

Silently Kitay stood up and walked out of the tent.

Rin didn’t watch him go. She lifted the pipe to her mouth, lit the bowl with her fingers, and breathed in deep. Then she curled over on her side and drew her knees into her chest.

In seconds she saw the Seal—a live, pulsing thing, reeking so strongly of the Vipress’s venom that Su Daji might have been standing in the tent right next to her. She used to curse the Seal, used to barrel pointlessly against the immutable barrier of venom that wouldn’t leave her mind.

But she’d since found a better use for it.

Rin drifted toward the glistening characters. The Seal tilted toward her, opened, and swallowed her. There was a brief moment of blinding, terrifying darkness, and then she was in a dark room with no doors or windows.

Daji’s poison was composed of desire—the things she would kill for, the things she missed so badly she wanted to die.

Altan materialized on cue.

Rin used to be so afraid of him. She’d felt a little thrill of fear every time she’d looked at him, and she’d liked it. When he was alive, she’d never known if he was going to caress or throttle her. The first time she’d seen him inside the Seal, he’d nearly convinced her to follow him into oblivion. But now she kept him leashed in her mind, firmly under control, and he spoke only when she wanted him to.

Still the fear remained. She couldn’t help it, nor did she want to.

She needed someone who could still scare her.

“There you are.” He reached a hand out to stroke her cheek. “Did you miss me?”

“Get back,” she said. “Sit down.”

He held his hands up and obeyed, crossing his legs on the dark floor. “Whatever you say, darling.”

She sat down across from him. “I killed dozens of people last night. Probably some of them innocent.”

Altan tilted his head to the side. “And how did that make you feel?” His tone was perfectly neutral, without judgment.

Even so, she felt a swell in her chest, a familiar toxic squeeze, like her lungs were eroding under the sheer weight of her guilt. She exhaled, fighting to remain calm. Altan stayed under her control only so long as she was calm. “You would have done it.”

“And why would I have done it, kiddo?”

“Because you were ruthless,” she said. “You did strategy by the numbers. You would have known you had to do it. You couldn’t risk your troops. Soldiers are worth more than civilians, it’s just math.”

“So there it is.” He gave her a patronizing smile. “You did what you needed to. You’re a hero. Did you enjoy it?”

She didn’t lie. Why would she? Altan was her secret, her conjuration, and no one would ever know what she said here. Not even Kitay.

“Yes.”

“Show it to me,” Altan said. Hunger was etched across his face. “Show me everything.”

She let him see. Relived it all, second by second, in vivid, lurid detail. She showed him the bodies doubling over. The babble of terrified voices pleading for mercy—No, no, please, no. The temple transforming into a pillar of flame.

“Good,” said Altan. “That’s very good. Show me more.”

She brought out the memories of ashes, of pristine white bone poking out from charred black piles. She could never burn the bones away entirely, no matter how hard she tried. Some fragment always remained.

She stayed for another minute to let herself feel it—feel all of it, the guilt, the remorse, the horror. She could only feel them in this space, where they wouldn’t be debilitating, where they wouldn’t make her want to crawl across the floor and scratch long streaks of blood into her forearms and thighs.

Then she left the memories alone. Interred here, they wouldn’t haunt her again.

She always felt so clean afterward. Like the world was covered in stains and with every enemy she reduced to ash, it became just a little bit more pure.

This was both her absolution and her penance. Once she self-flagellated in her mind, once she replayed the atrocities over and over so much the images lost meaning, then she’d given the dead their due respect. She owed them nothing more.

She opened her eyes. The memory of Altan threatened to resurge in her thoughts, but she forced it back down. He appeared only when she allowed it, only when she wanted to see him.

Once, her memories of Altan had nearly driven her mad. Now his company was one of the only things keeping her sane.

She was finding it easier and easier to cut him off. She’d learned now to divide her mind into clean, convenient compartments. Thoughts could be blocked. Memories suppressed. Life was so much easier when she blockaded off the part of her that agonized over what she’d done. And as long as she kept those parts of her mind separate—the part that felt pain and the part that fought wars—then she would be all right.

“You think they’re going to join up?” Kitay asked.

“I’m not sure,” Rin said. “They’ve been a bit surly about everything so far. Ingrates.”

They watched, arms crossed, as the men who called themselves the Iron Wolves carried salvageable wreckage out of the village center.

The Iron Wolves were Souji’s troops. More of them had survived Khudla’s occupation than Rin had feared—their numbers ranked at least five hundred. That was a relief. The Southern Army desperately needed new troops, but suitable recruits were difficult to find in Mugenese-occupied villages. Most young men with any inclination to fight were already buried in the killing fields. The lucky survivors were either too young or too old—or too frightened—to make good soldiers.

But Souji’s Iron Wolves were strong, healthy men with plenty of combat experience. Until now, they had been roving protectors of the Monkey Province’s backwaters. Many had fled into the forests when Khudla fell. Now they’d returned in hordes. They would make excellent soldiers—but the question was whether they could be convinced to join the Coalition.

Rin wasn’t sure. So far the Iron Wolves had been less than grateful to their liberators. In fact the rescue operations had taken a heated turn; Souji’s men were terribly territorial and reluctant to take commands that didn’t come from Souji himself. They were irked, it seemed, that someone else had swooped in to claim the title of savior. Already Kitay had mediated three quarrels over resource allocation between Iron Wolves and soldiers of the Southern Coalition.

“What’s going on there?” Rin asked suddenly.

She pointed. Two of Souji’s yellow-banded troops were marching toward their camp, both lugging sacks of rice behind them.

“Ah, fuck.” Kitay looked exasperated. “Not this again.”

“Hey!” Rin stood up and cupped her hand around her mouth. “You! Stop there.”

They kept walking as if they hadn’t heard her. She had to run at them, shouting, before they finally stopped.

“Where are you taking that?” she demanded.

They exchanged looks of obvious irritation. The taller one spoke. “Souji told us to bring some rice out to the tents.”

“We’ve set up a communal kitchen.” Rin pointed. “You can eat there. That’s where all the salvaged food goes. All the scavenging teams were ordered to—”

The shorter one cut her off. “Well, see, we don’t take orders from you.”

She blinked at him. “I liberated this place.”

“And that’s very kind of you, miss. But we’ve got this village under control now.”

Rin was amazed when, without so much as a final look of disdain, they slung the rice sacks up onto their shoulders and stalked insolently off.

I’ll teach you to listen. Her palm sang with heat. She raised her fist, pointed it toward their retreating backs—

“Don’t.” Kitay caught her by the wrist. “Now isn’t the time to start a fight.”

“They should be terrified of me,” she snarled. “The sheer nerve—”

“You can’t be mad about stupidity. Just let them go. If we want them on our side, you can’t go around burning their balls off.”

“What the hell is Souji telling his men?” she hissed. “He knows I’m in command!”

“I doubt he’s passed that on.”

“They’re in for a rude awakening, then.”

“And while that’s true, you don’t have to convince the soldiers,” Kitay said. “You’ve got to convince Souji. He’s the problem.”

“Should have just left him in the cellar,” Rin grumbled. “Or we could kill him now.”

“Too hard to pull off,” Kitay said, unfazed. Rin suggested casual murder on such a regular basis that he’d learned to brush it off. “The timing would be too suspicious. We’d certainly lose his men. You could try to make it look like an accident, but even then it’d be difficult to spin. Souji’s not the type to go around tripping off cliffs.”

“Then we have to undercut him,” Rin said. “Knock him off his pedestal.”

But how? She pondered this for a moment. Discrediting him would be too hard. Those men loved Souji. She couldn’t sever those bonds overnight.

“That’s not necessary,” Kitay said. “Don’t cut the head off the snake if you can tame it. You’ve just got to convince him where his interests lie.”

“But how?”

He shot her a droll look. “Oh, I think you’re good enough at that.”

She rubbed her wrist stump into the palm of her good fist. “I’ll go have a nice long chat with him then, shall I?”

He sighed. “Be nice.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Souji asked. He was crouched over a campfire, digging into a bowl of steaming white rice that smelled much better than the vats of barley porridge in the communal kitchen.

“Get up,” Rin said. “We’re going for a walk.”

“Why?”

“For privacy.”

Souji’s eyes narrowed. He must have known what was coming, because he gave a nearly imperceptible shake of his head to the closest Iron Wolves. Leave us, it said. I’m fine.

The men turned and left. Souji stood up. “All right, Princess. I’ll walk with you.”

Rin wrinkled her nose. “Princess?”

“Sinegard educated? Former Militia elite? That’s royalty in my book.”

He didn’t make it sound like a compliment. Rin chose not to retort; she held her tongue until they’d walked deep into the forest, out of earshot from camp. She might as well let Souji keep his dignity with his men. He’d be less grumpy about taking orders if she did.

She tried a diplomatic opening. “I’m sure you’ve realized by now we have men and resources that you don’t.”

“Stop.” He held up a hand. “I know what you want. We’re not joining any coalitions. Your war isn’t my problem.”

She scoffed. “You were happy enough about taking our aid yesterday.”

“The Mugenese are my problem. But don’t pretend that this is all about the Federation. Your Southern Coalition is baiting the Republic and you’re an idiot if you think I’m getting involved with that.”

“Soon enough you won’t have a choice. Yin Vaisra—”

Souji rolled his eyes. “Vaisra doesn’t care about us.”

“He will,” she insisted. “You think Vaisra’s going to stop after he’s conquered the north? I’ve met the Hesperians, I know their intentions. They won’t stop until they’ve put a church in each of our villages—”

Souji picked at his teeth with the nail of his little finger. “Churches never killed anyone.”

“They prop up regime ideologies that do.”

“Come on, you’re grasping at straws—”

“Am I? You’ve dealt with them before, have you? No, you’ll regret saying that when you’re all under Hesperian rule. I’ve spoken to them. I know how they look at us. None of this—our villages, our people, our freedom—will survive under their intended world order.”

“Don’t talk to me about survival,” Souji snapped. “I’ve been keeping our people alive for months while you’ve been playing the hunting dog over at Vaisra’s court. What did that get you?”

“I was a fool,” Rin said bluntly. “I know that. I was stupid then and I should have seen the signs. But I’m back in the south now, and we can build this army, if you bring your Iron Wolves—”

He cut her off with a laugh. “That’s a no, Princess.”

“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “That was an order. Not a request.”

He reached out and flicked her on the nose. “And you don’t understand: we are not, and never will be, under your command.”

Rin blinked, stunned that he would even dare.

So this was how things were going to go.

“Oh, Souji.” She pulled a flame into her palm. “You don’t understand how this works.”

She darted toward him just as he reached for his sword. She’d anticipated that. As he swung, she dodged his blade and jammed a foot hard into his left kneecap. He buckled. She swept the other leg out from under him and jumped down onto his chest as he fell, fingers grasping for his neck. She squeezed.

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” She leaned down close until her lips brushed his skin, until her breath scorched the side of his face. “I’m not Sinegardian elite. I’m that savage, mud-skinned Speerly bitch that wiped a country off the map. And sometimes when I get a little too angry, I snap.”

She let just the faintest trickle of fire seep from under her fingers. Souji’s eyes bulged. She dug her fingertips farther into his skin.

“You’re coming back with me to Ruijin. The Iron Wolves now fight under my command. You’ll keep your position as their leader, but you’ll make the hierarchy clear to your men. And if you try to mutiny, I’ll pick this up where I left off. Understand?”

Souji’s throat bobbed. He pawed feebly at her arm.

She tightened her grip. “You’re my bitch now, Souji. You do anything I ask without complaint. You’ll lick the dirt off my boots if I want. Is that clear?”

He nodded, patting frantically at her wrist.

She didn’t budge. Blisters formed and popped under his chin. “I didn’t hear an answer.”

“Yes,” he croaked.

“Yes, what?” She relaxed her grip just enough to let him speak.

“Yes, I’m your bitch. I’ll do what you want. Anything. Just—please—”

She released him and let him stand. Little tendrils of smoke wafted out from his neck. Visible beneath his collar was a first-degree burn, a pale red imprint of her skinny fingers.

It would heal quickly, but that scar would never disappear. Souji might cover it with his collar and hide it from his men, but it would be clear as day to him every time he so much as glanced at his reflection.

“Why don’t you go put a poultice on that?” she asked. “Wouldn’t want it infected.”

He backed away from her. “You’re insane.”

“Everyone vying for this country is insane,” she said. “But none of them have skin as dark as ours. I’m the least terrible option you’ve got.”

Souji stared at her for a long time. Rin couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t tell if his eyes glinted with rage or humiliation. She curled her fist and tensed, ready for another round.

To her surprise, he began to laugh. “All right. You win, you fucking bitch.”

“Don’t call me a bitch.”

“You win, General.” He held his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender. “I’ll march back with you. Where are we going? Dalian? Heirjiang?”

“I told you,” she said. “Ruijin.”

He raised a brow. “Why Ruijin?”

“It’s built into the mountains. Keeps us safe from almost everything. Why not?”

“I just assumed you’d be somewhere farther south. Near Rooster Province, if your goal is liberation.”

“What are you talking about? The occupied areas are clustered at the Monkey border.”

“No, they aren’t. Most of them are bunched down south in Rooster Province.”

“Where, the capital?” Rin frowned. None of this tracked with her intelligence.

“No, somewhere farther down south,” Souji said. “A few weeks’ march from the ocean. A cluster of tiny villages, you won’t know it.”

“Tikany,” she said automatically.

A little township no one had ever heard of. A dusty, arid place with no riches and no special culture; nothing except a docile population still addicted to opium from the second invasion. A place where Rin had once hoped she would never in her life return.

“Yeah.” Souji arched an eyebrow. “That’s one of them. Why, do you know the place?”

He said something else after that, but she didn’t hear it.

Tikany. The Mugenese were still in Tikany.

We’re fools, she thought. We’ve been fighting on the wrong front this entire time.

“Tell your men to pack up,” she said. “We head out for Ruijin in two hours.”

CHAPTER 3

That evening they began their march back to the base camp of the Southern Coalition. Ruijin lay within the backwoods of the Monkey Province, a poor and calcified land racked by years of banditry, warlord campaigns, famines, and epidemics. It had been the capital of the Monkey Province in antiquity, a lush city famed for its stone shrines built elegantly into the topiary of surrounding bamboo groves. Now it comprised ruins of its former splendor, half eroded by rain and half devoured by the forest.

That made it an excellent place to hide. For centuries, the people of Monkey Province prided themselves on their ability to blend into the mountains during troubled times. They built houses on stilts or up in the trees to keep safe from tigers. They paved winding paths through the dark forest invisible to the untrained eye. In all the stories of old, the Monkeys were stereotyped as backward mountain people—cowards who hid away in trees and caves while the wars of the world passed them by. But those were the same traits that kept them alive.

“Where are we going?” Souji grumbled a week into a continuously uphill hike, during which they’d encountered nothing but endless bumpy paths through hilly forest. “There’s nothing up here.”

“That’s what you think.” Rin bent low to check the scores against the base of a poplar tree—a clue that they were still on the right path—and motioned for the column to follow.

The way up the pass was easier than she had remembered it. The sheen had melted off the edges of the ice. She could see plenty of green beneath sheets of snow that hadn’t been visible when she’d set out two weeks ago. Against all odds, the Southern Coalition had made it to spring.

Winter in the Monkey Province had been a frigid, arid ordeal for the Southern Coalition. It didn’t snow, it hailed. The cold, dry air robbed their breaths from under their noses. The ground turned into a hard, brittle thing. Nothing grew. They’d come so close to starving, and likely would have if an ambushed Mugenese enclave ten miles away hadn’t turned out to possess a shocking amount of food stores.

The soldiers hadn’t distributed their spoils. Rin couldn’t forget the faces of the villagers who’d come out from hiding, thin and exhausted, their relief quickly turning to horror when they realized their liberators were here simply to cart their grain away.

She pushed the memory from her mind. That was a necessary sacrifice. The future of the entire country hinged on the Southern Coalition. What difference did a few lives make?

“Well, this clarifies some things,” Souji muttered as he pushed through the undergrowth.

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t hide in the mountains if you’re a liberating force.”

“No?”

“If you’re trying to take back territory, you inhabit the villages you’ve freed. You expand your base. You set up defenses to make sure the Mugenese don’t come back again. But you’re just predatory extractors. You’ll liberate places, but only for the tribute.”

“I didn’t hear you complaining when I freed you from that cellar.”

“Whatever you say, Princess.” Souji’s voice took on a judging, mocking tone. “You aren’t the salvation of the south. You’re just hiding out here until the whole thing blows over.”

Several scathing responses leaped to mind. Rin bit them back.

The trouble was that he was right. The Southern Coalition had been too passive, too slow to initiate the wider campaign the rest of the country clearly needed, and she hated it.

The coalition leadership’s priority at Ruijin was still sheer survival, which meant ensconcing themselves in the mountains and biding their time while Vaisra’s Republic battled for control of the north. But they were barely even surviving. This wouldn’t last forever. Ruijin kept them safe for now, for the same reasons it was slowly becoming their tomb.

Not if Rin got her way. Not if they sent every soldier in their army south.

“That’s about to change.” She jammed her hiking pole into the rocky path and hauled herself up a steep incline. “You’ll see.”

“You’re lost,” Souji accused.

“I’m not lost.”

She was helplessly lost. She knew they were close, but she had no idea where to go from here. Three months and dozens of expeditions later, Rin still couldn’t find the precise entrance to Ruijin. It was a hideout designed to stay invisible. She had to send an intricate flare spiraling high into the air and wait until two sentries emerged from the undergrowth to guide them onto a path that, previously invisible, now seemed obvious. Rin followed along, ignoring Souji’s smirk.

Half an hour’s hike later, the camp emerged from the trees like an optical illusion; everything was camouflaged so artfully that Rin sometimes thought if she blinked, it might all disappear.

Just past the wall of bamboo stakes surrounding the camp, an excited crowd had gathered around something on the ground.

“What’s this about?” Rin asked the closest sentry.

“They finally killed that tiger,” he told her.

“Really?”

“Found the corpse this morning. We’re going to skin it, but nobody can agree on who gets the pelt.”

The tiger had been plaguing the camp since before Rin’s troops had left for Khudla. Its growling haunted the soldiers on patrol duty. Dried fish kept disappearing nightly from the food stores. After the tiger dragged an infant out of its tent and left its mauled, half-eaten body by the creek, the Monkey Warlord had ordered a hunting expedition. But the hunters came back empty-handed and exhausted, limbs scratched up by thorns.

“How’d they manage it?” Kitay asked.

“We poisoned a horse,” said the sentry. “It was already dying from a peptic ulcer, else we wouldn’t have spared the animal. Injected opium and strychnine into the carcass and left it out for the tiger to find. We found the bastard this morning. Stiff as a board.”

“You see,” Rin told Kitay. “It’s a good plan.”

“This has nothing to do with your plan.”

“Opium kills tigers. Literal and metaphorical.”

“It’s lost this country two wars,” he said. “I don’t mean to call you stupid, because I love you, but that plan is so stupid.”

“We have the arable land! Moag’s happy to buy it up; if we just planted it in a few regions we’d get all the silver we need—”

“And an army full of addicts. Let’s not kid ourselves, Rin. Is that what you want?”

Rin opened her mouth to respond, but something over Kitay’s shoulder caught her eye.

A tall man stood a little way off from the crowd, arms crossed as he watched her. Waiting. He was Du Zhuden—the right-hand man of the bandit leader Ma Lien. He raised an eyebrow when he saw her glancing his way, and she nodded in response. He jerked his head toward the forest, turned, and disappeared into the trees.

Rin touched Kitay on the arm. “I’ll be back.”

He’d seen Zhuden, too. He sighed. “You’re still going through with this?”

“I don’t see any other option.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Me neither,” he said at last. “But be careful. The monkey’s men are watching.”

Rin met Zhuden at their usual spot—a crooked rowan tree a mile outside the camp, at the juncture of a small creek burbling just loudly enough to conceal their voices from eavesdroppers.

“You found Yang Souji?” Zhuden’s eyes darted warily around as he spoke. The Monkey Warlord had spies everywhere in Ruijin; Rin would not have been surprised if someone had followed her out of camp.

She nodded. “Took a little convincing, but he’s here.”

“What’s he like?”

“Arrogant. Annoying.” She grimaced, thinking of Souji’s smug, leering grin.

“So he’s just like you?”

“Very funny,” she drawled. “He’s competent, though. Knows the terrain well. Has strong local contacts—he might be better keyed into the intelligence network here than we are. And he comes with five hundred experienced soldiers. They’d die for him.”

“Well done,” Zhuden said. “We’ll just have to make sure they start dying for you.”

Rin shot him a grin.

Zhuden wasn’t native to Monkey Province. He was a war orphan from Rat Province who had wound up in Ma Lien’s band from the usual combination of homelessness, desperation, and a callous willingness to do whatever it took to get ahead. Most importantly, unlike the rest of the southern leadership, he wasn’t a mere survivalist.

He, too, thought they were dying slowly in Ruijin. He wanted to expand farther south. And, like Rin, he’d decided on drastic measures to shake things up.

“How’s Ma Lien doing?” Rin asked.

“Getting worse,” Zhuden said. “Honestly, he might just croak on his own, given time, but we still don’t want to risk the off chance that he gets better. You’ll want to act soon.” He passed her a single vial filled with a viscous piss-yellow fluid. “Careful you don’t break that.”

She pinched it by the neck and gingerly dropped it into her front pocket. “Did you extract this yourself?”

“Yep. Can’t say I enjoyed it.”

She patted her pocket. “Thank you.”

“Are you going now?” he asked.

“Tonight,” she said. “I’m due to meet with Gurubai right now. I’ll try one last time to convince him.”

They both knew that meeting would come to nothing. She’d been having the same argument with the Monkey Warlord for weeks. She wanted to march out of Ruijin. He wanted to remain in the mountains, and his allies in the leadership of the Southern Coalition agreed. They outnumbered her three votes to one.

Rin was about to flip those numbers.

But not just yet. No need to act in haste; she’d show her hand too early. One thing at a time. She’d give the Monkey Warlord one last chance first, make him think she’d come back cooperative and complacent. She had learned, since her days at Sinegard, to rein in her impulses. The best plans were a secret until their execution. The hidden knife cut the deepest.

“Welcome back,” said the Monkey Warlord.

Liu Gurubai had set up his headquarters in one of the few old architectural beauties in Ruijin that still stood, a square stone temple with three walls eaten over by moss. He’d chosen it for security, not comfort. The insides were sparsely furnished, with only a stove dug into the corner wall, two rugs, and a simple council table in the center of the cold, drafty room.

Rin and Kitay sat down across him, resembling two students arriving at their tutor’s home for a lesson.

“I brought presents,” said Rin.

“Oh, I saw,” Gurubai said. “Couldn’t help but leave a little mark, could you?”

“I thought they should know who’s commanding them.”

“Well, I assumed Souji would.” Gurubai raised an eyebrow. “Unless you were planning on decapitating him?”

Rin gave him a thin smile and wished fervently she could force a flaming fist down his throat.

When she’d hurtled out of Arlong on a Black Lily ship with her hand a bloody mess, she’d thought that the Monkey Warlord might be different from the series of horrible men she’d hitherto thrown in her lot with. That he’d keep his promises. That he’d treat her not as a weapon but as an ally. That he’d put her in charge.

She’d been so wrong.

She’d underestimated Gurubai. He was brilliant; he’d been the sole survivor of Vaisra’s violent purge at Arlong for a reason. He understood power politics in a way she never would, because he’d spent his entire life practicing it. Gurubai understood what made men pledge their support, what won him trust and love. He was used now, after two decades, to calling all the shots. And he did not relinquish power.

“I thought we had agreed,” she said lightly, “if the Khudla experiment worked out—”

“Oh, it worked out. You can keep that contingent. Officers Shen and Lin were quite happy with your performance.”

“I don’t want a single contingent, I want the army.”

“Let’s not pretend you could handle that.”

“I just liberated an entire village with minimal casualties—”

“Your supreme talent for burning things down does not qualify you to be a commander.” Gurubai drew out the last syllable of each word as if she wouldn’t have understood him otherwise. “You’re still learning to manage communication and logistics. Don’t rush it, child. Give yourself the space to learn. This isn’t Sinegard, where we throw children into war with no preparation. We’ll find you something better to do in time.”

The condescension in his voice made her fist curl. Her eyes focused on the veins in his neck. They protruded so visibly; it would be so easy to slice them open.

If only. Speerly or no, if she hurt Liu Gurubai, she wouldn’t make it out of Ruijin alive.

Kitay kicked her lightly under the table. Don’t.

She grimaced at him. I know.

If Rin was a Speerly outsider and Kitay a Sinegardian elite, then the Monkey Warlord was the true product of the south, a rough-hewn man with shoulders broadened from years of labor, whose gleaming, intelligent eyes were set deep in a face lined like the forest.

Rin had left the south at the first chance she got. The Monkey Warlord had fought and suffered in the south his entire life. He’d watched his grandmother begging for rice in the streets during the Lunar New Year. He’d walked miles to tend water buffalo for a single copper a day. He’d fought in the ragged provincial brigades that rallied to the Trifecta’s cause during the Second Poppy War. He hadn’t become a warlord through inheritance or sheer ambition; he’d simply moved slowly up through the line of succession as the soldiers around him died. He’d been drafted into an army at thirteen years old for the promise of a single silver coin a month, and he’d stayed in the army for the rest of his life.

His younger brothers had both died fighting the Federation. His clan, once a sprawling village family, had withered away from opium addiction. He’d survived the worst of the past century, and so survival became his greatest skill. He’d become a soldier out of necessity, and that made him a leader whose legitimacy was nigh unquestionable.

Most importantly, he belonged. These mountains were part of his blood. Anyone could see it in the tired way he carried his shoulders, the hard glint in his eyes.

Rin may have been a figurehead of power, but Liu Gurubai symbolized the very identity of the south. If she hurt him, Monkey Province would tear her to pieces.

So for now, she compromised.

“I hear there have been developments in the north.” She changed the subject, forcing her tone to stay neutral. “Anything you want to show me?”

“Several updates.” If Gurubai was surprised by her sudden acquiescence, he didn’t show it. He slid a sheaf of letters across the table. “Your friend wrote back. These arrived yesterday.”

Rin snatched up the first page and started poring hungrily down the lines, passing the pages to Kitay once she was done. News from the north always trickled in by little bursts—weeks passed with nothing, and then they received sudden gluts of information. The Southern Coalition had only a handful of spies in the Republic, and most of them were Moag’s girls; the few pale-skinned Black Lilies who had been shipped to Arlong with carefully disguised accents to work in teahouses and gambling dens.

Venka had gone north, too. With her pale, pretty face and flawless Sinegardian diction, she blended in perfectly among the aristocrats of the formal capital. At first Rin had been worried she’d be recognized—she was the missing daughter of the former finance minister; she couldn’t be more high-profile—but based on Venka’s reports, she’d completely transformed with only a wig and several gobs of cosmetics.

No one pays much attention to my face, Venka had written shortly after she arrived. The dolls of Sinegard, it turns out, are shockingly interchangeable.

Her report now contained nothing surprising. Vaisra’s still battling it out in the north. Warlords and their successors dropping dead like flies. They can’t hold out for long, they’re overstretched. Vaisra’s turned the siege cities into death zones. It’ll all be over soon.

That wasn’t news, only a slow intensification of what they’d known for weeks. Vaisra’s Hesperians were ravaging the countryside in their dirigibles, leaving craters and bombed-out hellscapes in their wake.

“Any mention of a southern turn?” Rin asked Gurubai.

“None yet. What you’re holding is everything we have.”

“Then we’re being ignored,” she said.

“We’re getting lucky,” Kitay amended. “It’s only a matter of time.”

The Dragon Warlord Yin Vaisra’s great democracy, the one he’d sacked cities and turned the Murui crimson for, had never come into existence. He’d never meant it to. Days after he defeated the Imperial Navy at Arlong, he’d assassinated the Boar Warlord and Rooster Warlord, and then declared himself the sole President of the Nikara Republic.

But he didn’t yet have a country to rule. Many former Militia officers, not least of whom included the Empress’s former favorite soldier, General Jun Loran, had escaped the purge at Arlong and fled north to Tiger Province. Now the combined forces of the Militia’s remnants were almost proving to be a challenge for the Hesperians.

Almost. With each new report that reached Ruijin, the Republic appeared to have extended its reach farther and farther north. That meant Rin was sitting on borrowed time. The Southern Coalition was only one rebellion among many. For the time being Vaisra had his hands tied up with Jun’s insurgency, not to mention a country chock-full of bandit gangs that had sprung up in local power vacuums immediately after the war’s end. But he wouldn’t stay busy for long. Jun couldn’t hope to beat Vaisra’s forces, not with Hesperian dirigibles at Vaisra’s back. Not when thousands of Hesperian soldiers with arquebuses were pumping bullets into Jun’s armies.

Rin was grateful that Jun had bought them such a long reprieve. But sooner or later, Vaisra would turn his attention to the south. He’d have to, so long as Rin was alive. A reckoning was inevitable. And when it came, she wanted to be on the offensive.

“You know my feelings on this,” she told Gurubai.

“Yes, Runin, I do.” He regarded her like an exhausted parent might a troublesome child. “And again, I’m telling you—”

“We’re dying up here. If we don’t take the offensive now, then Nezha will. We need to catch him by surprise, and right now is—”

“I’m not the only one you have to convince. None of the Southern Coalition want to overextend themselves. These mountains are their home. And when the wolves come, you protect what’s behind your walls.”

“It’s only home for some of you.”

He shrugged. “You’re free to leave whenever you like.”

He could make that bluff. He knew she had nowhere else to turn.

Her nostrils flared. “We need to at least discuss this, Gurubai—”

“Then we’ll discuss it at council.” His tone made it very clear that their audience was finished. “You can make your case again to the others, if you’re so inclined. Although to be quite honest, it’s become a bit repetitive.”

“I’m going to keep saying it until someone listens,” Rin snapped.

“Whatever you like,” Gurubai said. “You do so love to be difficult.”

Kitay kicked her beneath the table again just as they stood up to leave.

“I know,” Rin muttered. “I know.”

Some little part of her heart sank as she walked out the door. She wished Gurubai had said yes. She was trying to cooperate. She hated to be the lone contrarian; she did want to work with the coalition. This all would have been so much easier if he’d said yes.

But if he wasn’t going to budge, then she’d have to force his hand.

Dinner was a rapid affair. Rin and Kitay emptied their bowls in seconds. Not because they were hungry—it was just easier to ignore the mold sprouting on the greens and the tiny maggots squirming around the rice if they wolfed it down without thinking. The fare in the mess halls became worse and worse every time she returned to Ruijin, and the cooks had gone from keeping insects out of the vats to encouraging them on the grounds that the carcasses contained badly needed nutrients. Ant porridge was now a dish Rin ate regularly, though she always had to suppress her gag reflex before she could take the first bite.

The only staple that hadn’t started to rot was shanyu root—the starchy white yam that stuck like glue in her throat every time she swallowed. Shanyu tubers, having proved remarkably resistant to frost, grew everywhere on the mountainside. For a time Rin had been quite fond of them; they were filling, easy to steam, and had the slightly sweet taste of fresh-baked bread.

That was months ago. She’d since grown so sick of the taste of raw shanyu, dried shanyu, steamed shanyu, and mashed shanyu that the smell was enough to induce nausea. Still, it was the only fresh food with nutrients she could get her hands on. She forced it down as well.

When she was finished, she stood up and prepared to go pay a visit to the bandit chief Ma Lien.

Kitay moved to follow, but she shook her head. “I can do this alone. You don’t need to see this.”

He didn’t argue the point. She knew he didn’t want to come. “Fine. You’ve got the medicine?”

“In my front pocket.”

“And you’re sure that—”

“Please don’t.” She cut him off. “We’ve had this debate a thousand times. Can you think of a better option?”

He sighed. “Just do it quickly. Don’t linger.”

“Why on earth would I linger?”

“Rin.”

“All right.” She clapped him on the shoulder and strode toward the forest.

Ma Lien’s quarters were built into the cave wall near Ruijin’s northern perimeter. It should have been near impossible for Rin to get this close to his private residence without at least three blades at her neck, but in recent days Ma Lien’s guards had reevaluated their loyalties. When they saw Rin approach, they nodded silently and let her pass through. None of them would meet her eyes.

Ma Lien’s wife and daughter sat outside the cave entrance. They stood up when they saw her, their eyes wide with fear and desperation.

They already know, Rin thought. They’d heard the whispers. Or someone in the ranks—perhaps even Zhuden—had already told them what was about to happen in an effort to save their lives.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

Ma Lien’s wife seized Rin’s wrist just as she entered the cave.

“Please,” she begged. “Don’t.”

“Necessity calls.” Rin shrugged her hand away. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“You can spare him, he’ll do what you say, you don’t have to—”

“He won’t,” Rin said. “And I do. I hope you’ve said goodbye.”

They knew what would happen next. Ma Lien’s men knew. And Rin suspected that, on some level, the Monkey Warlord had to know, too. He might even sanction it. She would, if she were in his position. What did you do when one of your generals kept agitating to fight a war you knew you couldn’t win?

You cut your losses.

The cave smelled like sick, a stomach-turning mix of fumes from bitter herbal medicines and the odor of stale vomit. Ma Lien had been suffering from the bloody lung fever since before she’d left for Khudla. The timing was perfect. She’d struck a deal with Zhuden the morning she marched out—if Ma Lien was still ill by the time she returned, and the odds of his recovery seemed slim, then they would seize their chance.

Still, she hadn’t expected Ma Lien to disintegrate so quickly. He lay shriveled and desiccated against his sheets. He seemed to have shrunk to half his body weight. Crusted blood lined the edges of his lips. Every time he breathed, an awful rattle echoed through the cave.

Ma Lien was already half-gone. From the looks of it, what Rin was about to do couldn’t even properly be called murder. She was only hastening the inevitable.

“Hello, General.” She perched herself by the edge of his bed.

His eyes cracked open at the sound of her voice.

She’d been told the illness had taken his vocal cords. He bleeds when he tries to speak, Zhuden had said. And if he gets agitated, he starts choking on it. She felt a little thrill at the thought. He couldn’t mock her, couldn’t curse at her, couldn’t scream for help. She could taunt him as much as she liked. And all he could do was lie there and listen.

She should have just done the job and left. The smarter, pragmatic part of her was screaming at her to go—it was a risk to stay for so long, to speak where Gurubai’s spies might hear her.

But this encounter had been a long time coming. She wanted him to know every reason why he had to die. She wanted to relish this moment. She’d earned this.

She recalled vividly the way he’d shouted her down when she first suggested deploying troops to Rooster Province. He’d called her a savage, sentimental, dirt-skinned, warmongering bitch. He’d railed at Gurubai for letting a little girl into the war council in the first place. He’d suggested she’d be better off dead with the rest of her kind.

He probably didn’t remember saying that. Ma Lien was one of those loud, garrulous types. Always tossing insults out like the wind. Always assuming that his bodily strength and the loyalty of his men would insulate him from resentment.

“Do you remember what you said when I first asked for command?” Rin asked.

Spit bubbled by the side of Ma Lien’s mouth. She picked a bloodstained bed rag up from the floor and gently rubbed it away.

“You said I was a dumb bitch with no command experience and a genetic lack of rationality.” She chuckled. “Your words. You said I was an empty-headed little fool with more power than I knew what to do with. You said I should know my place. You said Speerlies weren’t meant to make decisions but to obey.”

Ma Lien mouthed something incoherent. She smoothed tendrils of his hair back from his mouth. He was sweating so hard he looked like he’d been drenched in oil. Poor man.

“I didn’t come south to be someone’s pet again,” she said. “You should have understood that about me.”

She’d laid her loyalty at the feet of two masters before. Each had betrayed her in turn. She’d trusted first Daji and then Vaisra, and they’d both sold her away without blinking. From now on Rin took charge of her own fate.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the vial.

Fat yellow scorpions infested the forests around Ruijin. The soldiers had learned to ward them away from the camp by burning lavender and setting traps, but they couldn’t wander ten feet into the trees without stumbling upon a nest. And a single nest was all it took to extract a vial’s worth of venom.

“I’m not sorry for this,” she said. “You shouldn’t have gotten in my way.”

She tipped the vial toward Ma Lien’s mouth. He thrashed, trying to cough the poison out, but she seized his jaw and forced it shut, pinching his nose between her fingers until the liquid seeped down into his throat. After a minute he stopped resisting. She let go.

“You’re not going to die immediately,” she said. “Scorpion venom paralyzes. Locks up all your muscles.”

She dabbed saliva and venom off his chin with the bed rag. “In a while, it’ll feel a little hard to breathe. You’ll try to call for help, but you’ll find your jaw won’t move. I’m sure your wife will come in to check on you, but she knows there’s nothing she can do. She knows what I’m doing right now. She’s probably imagining it all in her head. But maybe she’ll love you enough to see you through to the end. Or, if she really loves you, she’ll slit your throat.”

She stood up. An odd thrill rushed through her head. Her knees shook. She felt giddy, shot through with a bizarre and unexpected energy.

This wasn’t her first kill. But this was her first deliberate, premeditated murder. This was the first person she’d killed not out of desperation but with cool, malicious intent.

It felt—

It felt good.

She didn’t need her pipe to show this to Altan; she heard his laughter as loudly as if he were standing right next to her. She felt divine. She felt like she could leap across mountains if she wanted to. Her hand couldn’t stop shaking. The vial dropped from her fingers and shattered against the floor.

Heart pounding, blood pumping with a euphoria that confused her, she left the cave.

“I want to lead two contingents into Rooster Province,” Rin said. “Souji says they’ve clustered there because the flat terrain is easier to navigate. We’ve been shoring up for a fight on the wrong front. They’re not going to push up into the mountains here because they don’t need to. They’re just going to expand farther south.”

The leadership of the Southern Coalition sat assembled around a table in the Monkey Warlord’s headquarters. Gurubai, the natural leader, sat at the front. Liu Dai, a former county official and Gurubai’s longtime ally, sat on his right. Zhuden was seated to Liu Dai’s right as Ma Lien’s substitute, but an empty chair remained at the table out of respect. Souji sat in the back left corner, arms crossed, smirking, as if he’d already called this charade for what it was.

“If we strike quickly,” Rin continued, “that is, if we take the main nodes before they’ve gotten the chance to regroup, we could end this whole thing in one drive.”

“Just this morning you wanted to turn north to face Vaisra,” Gurubai said. “Now you want to drive south. You can’t fight a war on two fronts, Rin. Which is it?”

“We’ve got to go south just so we can get the strength to muster a defense against the Hesperians,” Rin said. “If we win the south, we get warm bodies. Food stores. Access to river routes, armories, and who knows what else we’ve been relinquishing to the Mugenese. Our armies will swell by thousands, and we’ll have the supply lines to support them. But if we don’t clear out the Mugenese first, then we’ll be trapped inside the mountains—”

“We’re safe inside the mountains,” Liu Dai interrupted. “No one has invaded Ruijin in centuries, the terrain is too hostile—”

“There’s no food here,” Rin said. “The wells are drying up. This won’t last forever.”

“We understand that,” Gurubai said. “But you’re asking too much of this army. Half these boys only picked up a sword for the first time two months ago. You need to give them time.”

“Vaisra won’t give them time,” Rin snapped. “The moment he’s done with Jun, he will bury us.”

She’d already lost them. She could tell from their bored, skeptical expressions. She knew this was pointless; this was just another iteration of the same argument they’d rehashed a dozen times now. They were at a stalemate—she had the fire, but they had everything else. And they were seasoned, war-hardened men who, despite everything they publicly proclaimed, couldn’t be less happy about sharing power with a girl half their age.

Rin knew that. She was just constitutionally unable to keep silent.

“Rooster Province is finished,” Gurubai said. “The Mugenese have overrun the place like ants. Our strategy now should be survival. We can keep the Monkey Province. They cannot survive in the mountains. Don’t throw this away, Rin.”

He spoke like he’d come to this conclusion long ago. A sudden suspicion struck Rin.

“You knew,” she said. “You knew they’d taken Rooster Province.”

Gurubai exchanged a glance with Liu Dai. “Runin …”

“You’ve known that all along.” Her voice rose in pitch. Her cheeks were burning. This wasn’t just his standard patronization, this was appalling condescension. The fucking nerve. “You knew this entire time and you didn’t tell me.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference—”

“Did they all know?” She gestured around the room. Little sparks of flame burst forth from her fingers; she couldn’t help it. The coalition members cringed back, but that gave her no pleasure. She was far too embarrassed.

What else hadn’t they told her?

Gurubai cleared his throat. “Given your impulses, we didn’t think it prudent—”

“Fuck you!” she exclaimed. “I’m a member of this council, I’ve been winning your battles for you, I deserve to—”

“The fact remains that you are impulsive and reckless, as evidenced by your repeated demands for command—”

“I deserve full command! That’s what I was promised!”

Gurubai sighed. “We are not discussing this again.”

“Look.” She slammed her hand on the table. “If none of you are willing to make the first move, then just send me. Give me two thousand troops. Just twice the number I took to Khudla. That’ll be enough.”

“You and I both know why that’s not possible.”

“But that’s our only chance at staying alive—”

“Is it?” Gurubai asked. “Do you really believe that we can’t survive in the mountains? Or do you just want your chance to go after Yin Nezha?”

She could have slapped him. But she wasn’t stupid enough to take the bait.

“The Yins will not let us live free in this country,” she said. She knew how Vaisra operated. He identified his threats—past, current, and potential—and patiently isolated, captured, and destroyed them. He didn’t forgive past wrongs. He never failed to wrap up loose ends. And Rin, once his most precious weapon, was now his biggest loose end. “The Republic doesn’t want to split territory, they want to wipe us off the map. So pardon me for thinking it might be a good idea to strike first.”

“Vaisra is not coming for us.” The Monkey Warlord stood up. “He’s coming for you.”

The implication of that sat heavy in the air between them.

The door opened. All hands in the room twitched toward swords. A camp aide stepped in, breathless. “Sir—”

“Not now,” snapped the Monkey Warlord.

“No, sir—” The aide swallowed. “Sir, Ma Lien’s passed away.”

Rin exhaled slowly. There it was.

Gurubai stared at the aide, speechless.

Rin spoke up before anyone else could. “So there’s a vacancy.”

Liu Dai looked appalled. “Have some respect.”

She ignored that. “There’s a vacancy, and I’m the most qualified person to fill it.”

“You’re hardly in the chain of command,” Gurubai said.

She rolled her eyes. “The chain of command matters for real armies, not bandit camps squatting in the mountains hoping dirigibles won’t see us when they fly overhead.”

“Those men won’t obey you,” Gurubai said. “They hardly know you—”

For the first time Zhuden spoke. “We’re with the girl.”

Gurubai trailed off, staring at Zhuden in disbelief.

Rin suppressed a snicker.

“She’s right,” Zhuden said. “We’re dying up here. We need to march while we’ve got fight left in us. And if you won’t lead us, we’re going with her.”

“You don’t control the entire army,” Gurubai said. “You’ll be fifteen hundred men at the most.”

“Two thousand,” Souji said.

Rin shot him a startled look.

Souji shrugged. “The Iron Wolves are going south, too. Been itching for that fight for a while.”

“You said you didn’t care about the Southern Coalition,” Rin said.

“I said I didn’t care about the rest of the Empire,” Souji said. “This is different. Those are my people. And from what I’ve seen, you’re the only one with balls enough to go after them instead of sitting here, waiting to die.”

Rin could have shrieked with laughter. She looked around the table, chin out, daring anyone to object. Liu Dai shifted in his seat. Souji winked at her. Gurubai, utterly defeated, said nothing.

She could tell he knew what she had done. It was no secret. She’d admit it out loud if he asked. But he couldn’t prove it, and nobody would want to believe him. The hearts of at least a third of his men had turned against him.

This wasn’t news. This only made official whispers that had been circulating for a long, long time.

Zhuden nodded to her. “Your move, General Fang.”

She liked the sound of those words so much she couldn’t help but grin.

“Well, that’s settled.” She glanced around the table. “I’m taking the Third Division and the Iron Wolves to Rooster Province. We march at dawn.”

CHAPTER 4

“I want fresh troops when we get to the Beehive,” Rin said. “If we take the pace down to four-fifths our usual marching speed, we can still get there in twelve days. We’ll take detours here and here to avoid known Mugenese outposts. It adds distance, but I’d prefer to keep the element of surprise as long as we can. It’ll cut down their preparation time.”

She spoke with more confidence than she felt. She thought her voice sounded inordinately high and squeaky, though she could barely hear it, her blood was pumping so hard in her ears. Now that she’d finally gotten what she wanted, her giddiness had died away, replaced by a frightful mix of exhaustion and nerves.

Night had fallen on their first day of marching out of Ruijin. They’d stopped to make camp in the forest. A circle of soldiers—Kitay, Zhuden, Souji, and a smattering of officers—sat clustered in Rin’s tent, watching with rapt attention as she drew thick, inky lines across the maps before them.

Her hand kept shaking, scattering droplets across the parchment. It was so hard to write with her left hand. She felt as if she were taking an exam she hadn’t studied for. She should have been relishing this moment, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was a fraud.

You are a fraud. She had never led a proper campaign by herself before. Her brief stints as the commander of the Cike had always ended in disaster. She didn’t know how to manage logistics on this scale. And worst of all, she was currently describing an attack strategy that she wasn’t at all sure would work.

Altan’s laughter echoed in her mind.

Little fool, he said. Finally got yourself an army, and now you don’t know what to do with it.

She blinked and forced his specter to disappear.

“If all goes according to plan,” she continued, “Leiyang will be ours by the next moon.”

Leiyang was the biggest township in northern Rooster Province. She’d passed through there only once in her life, nearly five years ago when she’d made the long caravan trip north to start school at Sinegard. It was a central trading hub connected to dozens of smaller villages by two creeks and several wide roads so old they’d been paved in the days of the Red Emperor. Compared to any northern capital it was a shoddy, run-down market in the outskirts of nowhere, but back then Rin had found it the busiest market town she’d ever seen.

Kitay had dubbed the network around Leiyang the Beehive. Mugenese troops exercised some control over all villages in northern Rooster Province, but based on their troops’ patrol and travel patterns, Leiyang was the central node.

Something important lay in that township. Kitay thought it was likely a high-ranking general who, after his homeland’s demise, continued to wield regional authority. Or, as Rin feared, it was a weapons base that they didn’t know about. Leiyang could be sitting on cans of yellow gas. They had no way of knowing.

That was the root of their problem. Rin’s intelligence on Leiyang was terrible. She’d updated her maps with Souji’s detailed descriptions of the surrounding terrain, but everything else he knew had been outdated for months. A handful of Iron Wolves were escaped survivors from Leiyang, but their reports of Mugenese troop presence varied wildly. They’d been the opposite of helpful. Survivors almost always gave them bad information—either their terror made them exaggerate the threat, or they downplayed it in hopes they could entice a rescue force to help their village.

Rin had sent scouts ahead, but those scouts would have to be exceedingly cautious. Anything that tipped the Mugenese off to an impending ambush would spell disaster. That meant she could speculate as much as they liked, but she wouldn’t know the full power of the fighting force at Leiyang until just before the battle began.

“How are you going to draw them out from behind the gates?” Zhuden asked. “We don’t want to hit too close to civilians.”

Well, that’s obvious. Rin couldn’t tell if he was being condescending or simply careful. It had suddenly become very hard not to read everything like a challenge to her authority.

“We’ll give as much advance warning as we can without betraying our location. Souji has some local connections. But really we’ll just have to adapt to contingencies,” she added, knowing full well that was a bunch of babble that meant nothing.

She didn’t have a better answer. Zhuden’s question got to the critical strategic puzzle that, despite hours spent racking her brains with Kitay, she still hadn’t cracked.

The problem was that the Mugenese troops near Leiyang were not clustered in one area, where a well-coordinated ambush could have herded them into a singular burning ground, but spread out over an entire village network.

Rin needed to figure out a way to draw the Mugenese out onto an open battlefield. In Khudla it had been easy to minimize civilian casualties—the majority of Mugenese troops had lived in camps separate from the village itself. But all the Iron Wolves she’d questioned had reported that the Mugenese at Leiyang had integrated fully into the township. They’d formed some strange occupational system of predatory symbiosis. That made distinguishing targets from innocents much, much harder.

“We can’t make those calls now without more intelligence,” Rin said. “Our priority for now is to get as close as we can to Leiyang without any patrols seeing us coming. We don’t want a citywide hostage situation.” She glanced up. “Everyone clear?”

They nodded.

“Good,” she said. “Zhuden, post some men to first watch.”

“Yes, General.” Zhuden stood up.

The other officers filed out behind him. But Souji remained cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against his outstretched arms. A single stalk of grain hung annoyingly out the side of his mouth like a judgmental, wagging finger.

Rin shot him a wary look. “Is something the matter?”

“Your plans are all wrong,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, should have spoken up earlier. Just didn’t want you to lose face.”

She scowled. “If you’re here just to whine—”

“No, listen.” Souji straightened up, leaned forward, and tapped his finger at the little star that indicated Leiyang on the map. “For starters, you can’t take your army through these back roads. They’ll have sentries posted across every path, not just the main roads, and you know you don’t have the numbers to survive a prepared defense.”

“There’s no other route except those back roads,” Kitay said.

“Well, you’re just not being very creative, then.”

Irritation flickered across Kitay’s face. “You can’t drag supply carts through thick forest, there’s no way—”

“Do you two just refuse to listen to anyone who’s got advice to offer?” Souji spat the grain stalk out of his mouth. It landed on the map, smudging Rin’s carefully drawn routes. “I’m just trying to help, you know.”

“And we’re Sinegard-trained strategists who know what we’re doing,” Rin snapped. “So if you haven’t got anything more helpful to say than ‘your plans are all wrong,’ then—”

“You know that the Monkey Warlord wants you to fail, right?” Souji interrupted.

“Excuse me?”

“The Southern Coalition don’t like you at all. Gurubai, Liu Dai, the whole cohort. They talk about you every time you’re not in the room. Fuck, I’d just gotten there, and they were already trying to turn me against you. It’s a boys’ club, Princess, and you’re the odd one out.”

Rin kept her voice carefully neutral. “And what did they say about me?”

“That you’re a little fool who thinks three years at Sinegard and a few months in the Militia can replace decades in the field,” Souji said calmly. “That you wouldn’t be worth keeping around if it weren’t for your nice little party trick. And that you’ll probably die at Leiyang because you’re too stupid to know what you’re up against, but then they’ll at least be rid of one nuisance.”

Rin couldn’t stop the heat rising in her cheeks. “That’s nothing new.”

“Look, Speerly.” Souji leaned forward. “I’m on your side. But Gurubai’s right about some things. You don’t know how to command, and you are inexperienced, especially in this kind of warfare. But I know how to fight these battles. And if my men are being dragged into them, then you’re going to fucking listen.”

“You’re not giving me orders,” Rin said.

“If you go in there according to those plans, then you’ll die.”

“Look, asshole—”

“Hold on.” Kitay held up a hand. “Rin, just—listen to him for a second.”

“But he’s—”

“He’s been here longer than we have. If he’s got information, we need to hear it.” Kitay nodded to Souji. “Go on.”

“Thank you.” Souji cleared his throat like a master about to deliver a lecture. “You’re both going about all this wrong. You can’t keep fighting like this is a war between two proper armies—open field combat, and all that. This isn’t the same. This is about liberation, and liberation means small-scale tactics and deception.”

“And those worked so well for you in Khudla,” Rin muttered.

“Got overwhelmed at Khudla,” Souji admitted. “Like I said. We couldn’t win on the battlefield. We didn’t have the numbers, and we should have resorted to smaller tactics. You’d better learn from my mistakes.”

“So what are you proposing?” Rin’s voice had lost its edge. She was listening now.

“Go through the forest,” Souji said. “I’ll get your precious supply carts through. There are hidden pathways all over that area and I have men who can find them. Then establish contact with Leiyang’s resistance leadership before you move in. Right now you don’t have the numbers.”

“Numbers?” Rin repeated. “I can—”

“You can burn a whole squadron down yourself, Speerly, I’m well aware. But you’re only useful in your radius, and your radius by definition can’t be too close to civilians. You need people to run interference. Keep the Mugenese off the very people you’re trying to save. Right now you don’t have the numbers for that, which is why I suspect you keep wincing every time you glance at your maps.”

Souji, Rin realized reluctantly, was extraordinarily astute.

“And you’ve got a magic fix for that?” she asked.

“It’s not magic. I’ve been to those villages. They’ve got underground resistance bands. Strong men, willing to fight. They just need someone to push them over the edge.”

“You’re talking a handful of peasants with pitchforks,” Kitay said.

“I’m talking an extra hundred men wherever we go.”

“Bullshit,” Rin said.

“I’m from this region,” Souji said. “I have contacts. I can win Leiyang for you, if you’ll both just trust me. Can you manage that?”

He extended his hand toward her.

Rin and Kitay exchanged a doubtful glance.

“This isn’t a trap,” Souji said, exasperated. “Come on, you two. I’m just as eager to go home as you are.”

Rin paused, then reached out to grasp his hand.

The tent flap swung open the moment their palms touched. A sentry stepped inside. “Mugenese patrol,” he said breathlessly. “Two miles out.”

“Everyone hide,” Souji said. “There’s tree cover for half a mile on both sides, have the men pack up and go.”

“No—what?” Rin scrambled to her feet, fumbling to gather up the maps. “I’m the one giving orders here—”

He shot her an exasperated look. “So order them to hide.”

“Fuck that,” she said. “We fight.”

The Mugenese had a single patrol group. They had an army. How was this a debate?

But before she could shout the order, Souji stuck his head out the tent flap, jammed two fingers in his mouth, and whistled thrice in succession so loudly Rin felt like knives had been driven through her ears.

The response astonished her. At once, the Iron Wolves got up and began packing their gear. In under two minutes they had rolled up their tents, bagged up their equipment, and disappeared completely from the campsite into the forest. They left no trace behind—their campfires were leveled, their litter cleaned. They’d even filled in the holes their tent pegs made in the dirt. No casual observer would ever guess this had once been a campsite.

Rin didn’t know if she was furious or impressed.

“Still going to fight?” Souji inquired.

“You little shit.”

“Better come with.”

“Please, I’ve got a god—”

“And all it takes is one arrow to shut you up, Princess. No one’s covering for you now. I’d follow along.”

Cheeks flaming, Rin ordered Zhuden’s men to clear their campsites and retreat into the trees.

They ran, pushing through branches that left thousands of tiny cuts in their exposed skin, before they stopped and hoisted themselves up into the trees. Rin had never felt so humiliated as she crouched, perched beside Souji, peeking through the leaves to track the incoming patrol.

Was Souji’s plan to just wait the Mugenese out? He couldn’t possibly intend to attack—it’d be suicide. This didn’t check any of the prerequisites for an ambush they’d been hardwired for in Strategy class—they didn’t have fixed artillery stations, they didn’t have clear lines of communication or signal visibility between the ranks. By retreating into the forest they’d only scattered and disorganized their numbers, while Rin was now trapped in a fighting zone where her flames would easily grow out of control.

Several minutes later Rin saw the Mugenese patrol moving down the main road.

“We could have taken them in the clearing,” she hissed at Souji. “Why—”

He clamped a hand over her mouth. “Look.”

The patrol came thundering into clear view. Rin counted about twenty of them. They rode on sleek warhorses, no doubt fed with grain stolen from starving villagers, moving slowly as they examined the abandoned campsite.

“Come on,” Souji muttered. “Move along.”

No way, Rin thought. Her men were efficient, but not that efficient. Ten minutes wasn’t enough to evacuate a campsite without leaving a single trace behind.

Sure enough, it took only a minute before the Mugenese captain shouted something and pointed at the ground. Rin didn’t know what he’d seen—a footprint, a peg hole, a discarded belt—but it didn’t matter. They’d been made.

“Now watch.” Souji stuck his fingers into his mouth again and whistled, this time twice in succession.

The Iron Wolves loosed a round of arrows into the clearing.

They aimed true. Half the Mugenese patrollers dropped from the horses. The other half bolted and made to run, but another round of arrows hissed through the air, burrowing into throats, temples, mouths, and eyes. The last three patrollers raced farther down the road, only to be felled by a final group of archers stationed nearly a mile from where Rin hid.

“And that’s the last of them.” Souji dropped from the tree and extended a hand to help her down. “Was that so bad?”

“That was unnecessary.” Rin batted Souji’s hand away and climbed down herself. Her left arm buckled from the strain; she let go, dropped the last few inches, and nearly fell flat on her bum. Hastily she recovered. “We could have taken them head-on, we didn’t have to hide—”

“How many troops do you think they had?” Souji inquired.

“Twenty. Thirty, maybe, I didn’t—”

“And how many do you think we shot?”

“Well, all of them, but—”

“And how many casualties do we have?”

“None,” she muttered.

“And do the Mugenese back in the Beehive know we’re coming?”

“No.”

“So there you go,” he said smugly. “Tell me that was unnecessary.”

She wanted to slap that look off his face. “Hiding was unnecessary. We could have just taken them—”

“And what, given them an extra day to muster defenses? The very first thing that Mugenese patrol teams do when they sense a fight coming is send back a designated survivor to report it.”

She frowned. “I didn’t know that.”

“Course you didn’t. You would have burned most of them where they stood, fine. But you can’t outrun a horse. None of us have steeds faster than what they’re riding. You slip up a single time, and you’ve given up all advantage of surprise.”

“But that’s absurd,” she said. “We’re not going to keep ourselves concealed all the way until we reach Leiyang.”

“Fair enough. But we should try to keep our numbers concealed at least until we attack our next targets. Tiny strategic adjustments like this matter. Don’t think about absolutes, think about the details. Every day, every hour that you can maintain an information asymmetry, you do it. It means the difference between two casualties and twenty.”

“Got it,” she said, chastened.

She wasn’t too stubborn to admit when she’d been wrong. It stung to realize that she had been thinking about strategies in terms of absolutes. She’d gotten so used to it—the details had never seemed to matter much when her strategies boiled down to extermination by fire.

Cheeks burning, she brushed the leaves off her pants, and then uttered the words she knew Souji was waiting to hear. “You win, okay? You’re right.”

He grinned, vindicated. “I’ve been doing this for years, Princess. You may as well pay attention.”

They made camp two miles south of where they’d seen the patrol, under tree cover so thick the leaves would dissipate the smoke from their campfires before it could furl higher into the air. Even so, Rin set strict limits—no more than one fire to every seven men, and all evidence would have to be tamped down and thoroughly concealed with leaves and dirt before they picked up again to march in the morning.

Dinner was measly, baked cornmeal wotou and unseasoned rice gruel. The Monkey Warlord hadn’t let Rin take anything but the stalest provision sacks out of Ruijin, arguing that if she failed on this expedition then she at least shouldn’t starve Ruijin at the same time. Rin hadn’t pressed the point; she didn’t want to push her luck.

But the Iron Wolves were eating suspiciously well. Rin didn’t know where they’d found the ingredients, but the steam wafting from their bubbling cauldrons smelled good. Had they stolen extra rations from Ruijin? She wouldn’t put it past Souji; he was enough of an asshole.

“If it’s bothering you then just go ask them,” Kitay said.

“That’s stupid,” Rin muttered. “I’m not going to make a fuss—”

But Souji was already walking toward them, carrying stacked bamboo steamers in both hands. His eyes alighted on their rations. His lip curled. “Looks appetizing.”

Rin curled her fingers possessively around her wotou. “It’s enough.”

Souji sat down across from them and set the steamers on the ground. “You haven’t learned to forage for yourselves?”

“Of course we can, there’s just nothing edible on this stretch—”

“Really?” Souji lifted the steamer lids. “Look. Bamboo shoots. Freshly killed partridges. Cook all this up with a little salt and vinegar, and you have a three-course meal.”

“But there’s none of that around here,” Kitay said.

“Right, we picked it up on the march. There was a bamboo grove right at the base of Ruijin, didn’t you see it? Lots of baby saplings. Whenever you see something edible, you put it in your sack. First rule of march, no?”

The smell of partridge meat was making Rin salivate. She eyed the steamers with envy. “And how’d you catch the birds?”

“Simple. You can rig up a trap with next to nothing as long as you’ve got some cornmeal for bait. We can set some overnight and wake up to crackling partridge wings. I can teach you how.”

Rin pointed to something yellow and mushy buried under the bamboo shoots. “What’s that?”

“Bajiao bananas.”

“Do they taste good?”

“You’ve never eaten these before?” Souji gave her an incredulous look. “They grow everywhere in these parts.”

“We thought they might be poisonous,” Kitay admitted. “They gave some men at Ruijin a bad stomachache, so we’ve stayed clear of them since.”

“Ah, no, that’s just when they’re not ripe. If you can’t tell from the color—darkish brown, you see?—you can peel it open and tell from the smell. If it’s sour, put it back. None of your men knew about that?”

“None at our camp.”

“Incredible,” Souji said. “I suppose after a few centuries you start to forget the little things.”

Rin pointed to a bowl of what looked like black, crispy, oversize beans. “What’s that?”

“Bees,” Souji said casually. “They’re very tasty when you fry them up. You’ve just got to make sure you take all the stingers out.”

She stared. “I can’t tell if you’re kidding or not.”

“I’m not kidding.” He picked one up and showed her the husk. “See? The legs are the best part. They soak up all the oil.” He popped it into his mouth and chewed loudly. “Incredible. You want?”

“I’m good,” she muttered.

“You’re from the south. Thought you could eat anything.”

“We never ate bugs in Tikany.”

He laughed. “Tikany’s hardly the poorest village in the south. Makes sense that you’ve never known famine.”

She had to admit that was true. She’d gone hungry on plenty of nights, both in Tikany and at the Academy in Sinegard, but that was because of food withheld and not the sheer lack of it. Even after the Third Poppy War kicked off in earnest, when villagers across the Empire grew so desperate they resorted to eating wood bark, Rin had been able to rely on at least two square meals from army rations every day.

Of course. When things got bad, soldiers were fed first, and everyone else was left to die. Rin had been living so long on the extractive capabilities of the empire she fought for, she’d never learned to forage for herself.

“That wasn’t an insult. Just being frank.” Souji held the bowl of bees out toward her. “Want to try?”

They smelled terribly good. Rin’s stomach let loose an embarrassingly loud growl.

“Eat up.” Souji chuckled. “We’ve got rations to spare.”

They continued their march at dawn, trailing by the edge of the road, always ready to bolt back into the trees at the first signal from the scouts ahead. They quickened their pace slightly from the day before. Rin had wanted to make straight for the Beehive, but Souji had drawn a zigzag pattern on her map instead, creating a circuitous route that took them all around local power bases but avoided the center until the very end.

“But then they’ll know we’re coming,” Rin said. “Isn’t the whole point to keep the element of surprise until Leiyang?”

Souji shook his head. “No, they’ll know we’re out here in five days at most. We can’t keep our approach a secret for that much longer, so we may as well get some good hits in when we can.”

“Then what is the point of all these measures?”

“Think, Princess. They know we’re coming. That’s all they know. They don’t know how many we are. We could be a band of ten. We could be an army of a million. They’ve got absolutely no clue what to be on the guard for, and the threat of the unknown hamstrings defense preparations. Preserve that.”

Of course Rin had learned at Sinegard to strategize accounting for the enemy’s state of mind. But she’d always thought of it as a matter of dominant strategies. What, given the circumstances, was their best option? And how should she prepare for their best option? The issues Souji obsessed over—fear, apprehension, anxiety, irrationality—were details she’d never much considered. But now, in this war of uncertainty and unbalanced forces, they seemed paramount.

So whenever the Southern Coalition encountered Mugenese soldiers, they either hid in the trees and watched them march past if they appeared not to have noticed anything, or pulled the same kind of lure tactic the Iron Wolves had used the first day. And whenever they came past occupied hamlets, they employed much the same sort of strategy—cautious baiting accompanied by strikes of limited force, just enough to achieve limited tactical objectives without ever escalating into a real battle.

Over eight days and numerous engagements, Rin witnessed the full range of Souji’s favorite tactics. They revolved almost entirely around deception, and they were brilliant. The Iron Wolves were fond of waylaying small groups of Mugenese soldiers, always at night and never twice in the same spot. When the Mugenese returned with larger bands, the guerrillas were long gone. They feigned beggars, farmers, and village drunkards to draw Mugenese attacks. They deliberately created false campsites to agitate Mugenese patrols. Souji’s favorite ploy was to send a group of Iron Wolves, all young women, out to fields near Mugenese encampments wearing the most brightly colored, provocative clothing that village women had access to. They were, without fail, assaulted. But girls with fire rockets and knives were harder to take down than the Mugenese soldiers’ usual prey.

“You’re fond of pretending to be weaklings,” Rin observed. “Does that always work?”

“Almost every time. The Mugenese are terribly attracted to easy targets.”

“And they never catch on?”

“Not as far as I’ve noticed. See, they’re bullies. Weakness is what they want to see. They’re so convinced that we’re just base, cowardly animals, they won’t stop to question it. They don’t want to believe we can fight back, so they won’t.”

“But we’re not really fighting back,” Rin said. “We’re only annoying them.”

Souji knew that she wasn’t thrilled with this tentative campaign—this sort of half fighting, of provoking from the shadows instead of facing the enemy head-on. It defied every strategic principle she’d ever been taught. She’d been taught to win, and to win conclusively to preempt a later counterattack. Souji, on the other hand, flirted with victory but never took the spoils. He left chess pieces open all over the board, like a dog might bury bones to savor later.

But Souji insisted she was still thinking about war the wrong way.

“You don’t have a conventional army,” he said. “You can’t move into Leiyang and mow them down like you did when you fought for the Republic.”

“Yes, I could,” she said.

“You’re good nine times out of ten, Princess. Then a stray arrow or javelin finds its way into your temple, and your luck’s run out. Don’t take chances. Err on the side of caution.”

“But I hate this constant running—”

“It’s not running. That’s what you don’t get. This is disruption. Think about how your calculations change if you’re on the receiving end. You change your patrol pattern to keep up with the random attacks, but you can’t anticipate when they’ll happen. Your nerves get frayed. You can’t rest or sleep because you’re not sure what’s coming next.”

“So your plan is to annoy them to death,” Kitay said.

“Bad morale is a big weapon,” Souji said. “Don’t underestimate it.”

“I’m not,” Rin said. “But it feels like we’re just constantly retreating.”

“The entire point is that only you have the ability to retreat. They don’t; they’re stuck in the places they’ve occupied because they can’t give them up. Try to wrap your head around this, you two. Your default model of warfare won’t work for you anymore. At Sinegard you’re taught to lead large forces into major battles. But you don’t have that anymore. What you can do is strike against isolated forces, multiple times, and delay their reinforcements. You have to deploy small operational units who have the latitude to make their own calls. And you want to delay head-on battles on the open field for as long as you possibly can.”

“This is all bonkers.” Kitay had the wide-eyed, slightly panicked look on his face he got when his mind was chewing frantically through new concepts. Rin could almost hear the whirring in his brain. “This cuts against everything the Classics ever said about warfare.”

“Not really,” Souji said. “What did Sunzi say was the fundamental theorem of war?”

“Subjugate the enemy without fighting,” Kitay said automatically. “But that doesn’t apply to—”

Souji cut him off. “And what does that mean?”

“It means you pacify an enemy with sheer, overwhelming superiority,” Rin said impatiently. “If not in numbers, then in technology or position. You make him realize his inferiority so he surrenders without fighting. Saves your troops a battle, and keeps the battlefields clean. The only problem is that they aren’t inferior on any plane. So that’s not going to work.”

“But that’s not what Sunzi means.” Souji looked frustratingly smug, like a teacher waiting for a very slow student to arrive at the right answer.

Kitay had lost his patience. “What, was half the text written in invisible ink?”

Souji raised his hands. “Look, I went to Sinegard, too. I know the way your minds work. But they trained you for conventional warfare, and this is not that.”

“Then kindly explain what this is,” Kitay said.

“You can’t concentrate superior force all at once, so you need to do it in little parts. Mobile operations. Night movements. Deception, surprise, all that fun stuff—the stuff we’ve been doing—that’s how you focus your optimal alignment, or whatever bogus word Sunzi calls it.” Souji made a pincer motion with his hands. “You’re like ants swarming an injured rat. You whittle it down with little bites. You never engage in a full-fledged battlefield encounter, you just fucking exhaust them.

“Sinegard’s problem was that it was teaching you to fight an ancient enemy. They saw everything through the Red Emperor’s eyes. But that method of warfare doesn’t work anymore. It didn’t even work against the Mugenese when you had the armies. And what’s more, Sinegard assumed that the enemy would be a conquering force from the outside.” Souji grinned. “They weren’t in the business of teaching rebels.”

Despite her initial skepticism, Rin had to admit that Souji’s tactics worked. And they kept working. The closer they got to Leiyang, the more supplies and intelligence they acquired, all without evidence that the Mugenese at Leiyang knew what was coming. Souji planned his attacks so that even Mugenese survivors wouldn’t be able to report more than ten or twenty sighted troops at once; the full size of their army remained well concealed. And if Rin ever called the fire, she made sure she left no witnesses.

But their luck had to be running out. Souji’s small-scale tactics worked for tiny targets—hamlets where the Mugenese guard numbered no more than fifty men. But Leiyang was one of the largest townships in the province. More and more reports corroborated the fact that their numbers were in the thousands.

You couldn’t fool an army of thousands with skirts and firecrackers. Sooner or later, they’d have to stand face-to-face with their enemy and fight.

CHAPTER 5

On the twelfth day of their march, after an eternity of navigating winding, treacherous forest footpaths, they reached a vast plain filled with red stalks of sorghum. Against the otherwise overgrown wilderness, the sparse and dying trees that littered the roadside, those neatly cultivated fields stood out like a red flag of warning.

Armies only maintained fields once they’d settled down for permanent occupation. They’d reached the edge of the Beehive.

Rin’s men wanted to move on Leiyang that night. They’d marched at a leisurely pace for the last two days; the forest routes didn’t permit them to go any faster. They had energy, pent up and raging. They wanted blood.

Souji was the only holdout. “You’ve got to contact the local leadership first.”

Rin humored him. “Fine. Where are they?”

“Well.” Souji scratched his ear. “On the inside.”

“Are you mad?”

“The civilians suffer the most from your little liberations,” Souji said. “Or did you not count the casualties at Khudla?”

“Listen, we freed Khudla—”

“And burned a temple full of civilians to death,” Souji said. “Don’t think I didn’t know about that. We need to give them advance warning.”

“That’s too risky,” Kitay said. “We don’t know how many collaborators they have. If the wrong person sees you, they’ll crack down on the civilians regardless.”

“No one’s going to report us,” Souji said. “I know these people. Their loyalty runs thicker than blood.”

Rin gave him a skeptical look. “You’d be willing to stake the lives of everyone in this army on that?”

“I’m staking the lives of everyone in that township on it,” Souji said. “I’ve gotten you this far, Speerly. Trust me just a little longer.”

So Rin found herself walking with Souji into the center of the Beehive, dressed in peasant rags, without her sword and without reinforcements. Souji had identified a lapse in the northern patrol, a thirty-second pocket of time between revolving guards that allowed them to sneak past the fields and over the city gates unnoticed.

What Rin saw inside Leiyang astonished her.

She’d never before encountered a Mugenese-occupied township where corpses weren’t stacked in rotting, haphazard piles around every corner. Where the residents weren’t utterly, uniformly, brutally crushed into submission.

But here in Leiyang, the Mugenese had embarked on something more like occupational state-building. And this, somehow, was scarier.

The civilians here were thin, haggard, clearly downtrodden, but alive—and not just alive, but free. They weren’t locked up in holding pens, nor were they crouching inside their homes in fear. Civilians—visibly Nikara civilians—strode around the township so casually that if Rin didn’t know better she wouldn’t have guessed there was a Mugenese presence at all. As they snuck deeper into the township, Rin saw a band of men—laborers with farming implements that could easily be used as weapons—walking toward the fields without so much as a single armed guard. Closer to the town center, there were long queues looping around an unbelievable sight—a rationing station, where Mugenese troops doled out daily portions of barley grain to civilians waiting patiently with copper bowls.

She could barely form the question. “How—?”

“Collaboration,” Souji said. “It’s how most of us have been getting along. The Mugenese figured out pretty quickly that their original depopulation policy was only going to work if they were getting supplies from the island. Island’s gone, and there’s no point to clearing out space anymore. What’s more, they need someone to do their cooking and cleaning.”

So the soldiers without a home had formed a sick symbiosis with their intended victims. The Mugenese had merged with the Nikara into a society that, if not necessarily nonviolent, at least looked stable and sustainable.

Rin found evidence of wary coexistence everywhere she looked. She saw Mugenese soldiers eating at Nikara food stands. She saw Mugenese patrolmen escorting a group of Nikara farmers back through the city gates. No blades were drawn; no hands were bound. This looked routine. She even saw a Mugenese soldier fondly stroke the head of a Nikara child as they passed each other on the street.

Her stomach churned.

She didn’t know what to do with this. She was so used to absolute destruction, a complete binary of the extremities of war, that she couldn’t work her mind around this bizarre middle ground. How did it feel to live with a sword hanging over your head? How did it feel to look these men in the eyes, day by day, knowing full well what they were capable of?

Rin followed closely behind Souji as they moved through the streets, her eyes darting nervously about with every turn. No one had reported, or even seemed to care about, their presence. Occasionally someone narrowed their eyes at Souji in questioning recognition, but no one so much as breathed a word.

Souji didn’t stop walking until they’d reached the far edge of the township, where he pointed to a small, thatched-roof hut half-hidden behind a cluster of trees. “The chief of Leiyang is a man named Lien Wen. His daughter-in-law came from the same village as my mother. He’s expecting us.”

Rin frowned. “How?”

“I told you.” Souji shrugged. “I know these people.”

A skinny, plain-faced girl about seven years old sat outside the door, hand-grinding sorghum grain in a small stone bowl. She scrambled to her feet when they approached and, without a word, gestured for them to follow her inside the hut.

Souji nudged Rin forward. “Go on.”

For the home of a township chief, Lien Wen’s was not particularly luxurious. The interior would barely have fit ten men standing shoulder to shoulder. A square tea table occupied the center, surrounded by three-legged stools. Rin squatted down on the nearest stool. The uneven, scratched-up legs wobbled every time she shifted position. That was oddly calming—this kind of poverty felt familiar.

“Weapons over there. Father’s orders.” The girl pointed at a cracked vase in the corner.

Rin’s fingers twitched toward the knives hidden inside her shirt. “But—”

“Of course.” Souji shot Rin a stern look. “Whatever Chief Lien asks.”

Rin reluctantly dropped the blades into the vase.

The girl disappeared for several seconds, returned with a plate of coarse-grain steamed buns, and set it down on the tea table.

“Dinner,” she said, then retreated to the corner.

The starchy grain smelled terribly good. Rin hadn’t seen proper steamed buns in ages; in Ruijin, they’d long ago run out of yeast. She reached out for a bun, but Souji slapped her hand away.

“Don’t,” he muttered. “That’s more than she eats in a week.”

“Then why—”

“Leave it. They’ll save it for later if you don’t touch it, but if you touch it and put it down then they’ll insist you take it with you when you leave.”

Stomach growling, Rin returned her hand to her lap.

“I didn’t think you’d come back.”

A tall, broad-shouldered man filled the doorframe. Rin found his age impossible to place—his lined eyes and white whiskers could have made him as old as her grandfather, but he carried himself with his back straight and chin up, a warrior with decades of fight left in his body.

“Chief Lien.” Souji stood up, cupped his hands, and bowed deeply at the waist. Rin hastily followed suit.

“Sit,” Chief Lien grumbled. “This hut isn’t big enough for all this commotion.”

Rin and Souji returned to their stools. Chief Lien merely shoved his out of the way and sat down cross-legged on the dirt floor, which made Rin feel suddenly very childish, squatting as she was.

Chief Lien folded his arms across his chest. “So you’re the ones who’ve been causing trouble up north.”

“Guilty.” Souji beamed. “Next up is—”

“Stop it,” Chief Lien said. “I don’t care what’s next. Take your army, leave here, and don’t come back.”

Souji trailed off, looking hurt. Rin would have found that funny if she weren’t also confused.

“They think our men are doing it,” Chief Lien said. “They made the elders line up in the square the morning after the first patrolmen went missing and said they’d shoot them one by one until the culprits confessed. No one stepped forward, so they beat my mother within an inch of her life. That was over a week ago. She’s not recovered. She’ll be lucky if she makes it through tonight.”

“We have a physician,” Souji said. “We’ll bring him to you, or we can just carry her out to our camps. We’ve got men in those fields, we can move on the crickets tonight—”

“No,” Chief Lien said firmly. “You will turn around and disappear. We know how this story ends, and we can’t suffer the consequences. Compliance is the only thing keeping us alive—”

“Compliance?” Souji had warned Rin to keep quiet and let him do the talking, but she couldn’t help but interject. “That’s your word for slavery? You like walking the streets with your head down, cringing when they approach you, licking their boots to win their goodwill?”

“Our township still has all our men,” said Chief Lien.

“Then you have soldiers,” Rin said. “And you should be fighting.”

Chief Lien merely regarded her through his lined, tired eyes.

In the passing silence, Rin noticed for the first time a series of ropy scars etched across his arms. Others snaked up the side of his neck. Those weren’t the kind of scars you got from a whip. Those were from knives.

His gaze made her feel so tiny.

Finally he asked, “Did you know that they take young girls with the darkest skin they can find and burn them alive?”

She flinched. “What?”

But then the explanation rose to her mind, slow and dreadful, just as Chief Lien spelled it out aloud. “The Mugenese tell stories about you. They know what happened to the longbow island. They know it was a dark-skinned girl with red eyes. And they know you’re near.”

Of course they know. They’d massacred the Speerlies twenty years ago; surely the myth of the dark-skinned, red-eyed race who called fire still circulated in their younger generations. And certainly they’d heard whispers in the south. The Mugenese troops who could understand Nikara would have picked up on whispered stories of the goddess incarnate, the reason why they could never go home. They would have tortured to discover the details. They would have learned very quickly who they needed to target.

But they couldn’t find her, so they’d targeted anyone who might possibly look like her instead.

Guilt twisted in her stomach like a knife.

She heard the sudden noise of steel scraping against steel. She jumped and turned. The little girl, still sitting in the corner of the hut, had started fiddling with their weapons.

Chief Lien turned to look over his shoulder. “Don’t touch that.”

“She’s all right,” Souji said easily. “She ought to learn how to handle steel. You like that knife?”

“Yes,” said the girl, testing the blade’s balance on one finger.

“Keep it. You’ll need it.”

The girl peered up at them. “Are you soldiers?”

“Yes,” Souji said.

“Then why don’t you have uniforms?”

“Because we don’t have any money.” Souji gave her a toothy smile. “Would you like to sew us some uniforms?”

The girl ignored this question. “The Mugenese have uniforms.”

“That’s true.”

“So do they have more money than you?”

“Not if we and your baba have anything to do with it.” Souji turned back to Chief Lien. “Please, Chief. Just hear us out.”

Chief Lien shook his head. “I won’t risk the reprisals.”

“There won’t be reprisals—”

“How can you guarantee that?”

“Because everything they say about me is true,” Rin interrupted. Little arcs of flame danced around her arms and shoulders, just enough to cast long shadows across her face. To make her look utterly inhuman.

She saw a faint look of surprise flicker across Chief Lien’s face. She knew, despite the rumors, that until now he hadn’t really believed what she was. She could understand that. It was hard to believe in the gods, to truly believe, until they stared you in the face.

She’d made believers of the Mugenese. She’d make him believe, too.

“They’re killing those girls because they’re afraid,” she said. “They should be. I sank the longbow island. I can destroy everything around me in a fifty-yard radius. When we attack it won’t be like the previous attempts. There will be no chance of defeat and no reprisals, because I cannot lose. I have a god. I only need you to bring the civilians out of range. We’ll do the rest.”

Chief Lien’s jaw had lost its stubborn set. She’d won him over, she knew. She saw it in his eyes—for the first time, he was considering something other than compliance. He was thinking about how freedom might taste.

“You can ambush them at the northern border,” he said at last. “Not many civilians live up there, and we can evacuate the ones who do. The reeds would be tall enough to conceal you—you could fit about five hundred men in those fields alone. They won’t know you’re here until you choose to reveal yourselves.”

“Understood,” Souji said. “Thank you.”

“You’ll only have a bit of time to get in position. They send troops with dogs and staves every few hours to track anyone who might be hiding in the fields.”

“Combing their hair for lice,” said the girl. “That’s what they call it.”

“We’ll have to be clever lice, then,” Souji said. Relief shone clear on his face. This wasn’t a negotiation anymore; now it was just about logistics. “And do you know how many men they have?”

“About three thousand,” Chief Lien said.

“That’s very precise,” Rin said. “How do you know?”

“They commission their grains from us. We know how much they eat.”

“And you can calculate that by the grain?”

“It’s simple multiplication,” Chief Lien said. “We’re not stupid.”

Rin sat back, impressed. “All right. Three thousand, then.”

“We can draw them two hundred yards out of the township if we split half our forces around and drive them into the fields,” Souji said. “That’s out of Rin’s range—”

“No,” said Chief Lien. “Four hundred.”

“That might not be possible,” Rin said.

“Make it possible,” Chief Lien said. “You keep your fight away from this township.”

“I understand,” Rin said. Her voice turned hard. “You want your liberation without suffering the consequences.”

Chief Lien stood up. The message was clear; this audience was over. “If you lose, they will come for us. And you know what they can do.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rin said. “We won’t lose.”

Chief Lien said nothing. His eyes followed them silently, judging, as they left the hut. In the corner, his daughter hummed and continued to scrape steel against steel.

“That went well,” Rin muttered.

“Sure did.” Souji was beaming.

“What are you so happy about? He’s made this ten times harder than it had to be, and he hasn’t given us anything in return—”

“That’s not true. He gave us permission.”

“Permission? Who the fuck needs permission—”

“You always need permission.” Souji stopped walking. The grin slid off his face. “Every time you bring a fight to a village, you put every innocent civilian’s life in danger. It’s your obligation to warn them.”

“Look, if every army behaved like that, then—”

“Listen. You’re not fighting a campaign for this land, you’re fighting for the people. And if you learn to trust them, they’ll be your best weapons. They’ll be your eyes and ears on the ground. They’ll be natural extensions of your army. But you never, ever endanger them against their will. Do you understand?”

He glared at her until she nodded.

“Good,” he said, and strode briskly toward the gate. Chastened, she followed.

Someone stood awaiting them in the shadows.

Rin pulled a flame into her hand, but Souji grabbed her elbow. “Don’t. It’s a friendly.”

The man at the gate was, indeed, Nikara. He had to be—his clothes, ratty and faded, hung from his gaunt frame. None of the Mugenese soldiers were starving.

He was quite young—hardly more than a boy. He seemed terribly excited to see them. He took one look at Rin, and his entire face lit up. “Are you the Speerly?”

Something about him struck her as familiar—his thick eyebrows, his broad shoulders. He carried himself like a born leader, confident and resolute.

“You’re Chief Lien’s son,” Rin said. “Aren’t you?”

“Guilty,” he said. “Lien Qinen. It’s good to meet you.”

“Come here, you bastard.” Souji grasped Qinen’s arm and pulled him into a tight embrace. “Does your father know you’re here?”

“Father thinks I’m still hiding out in the woods.” Qinen turned to Rin. “So are you the Speerly? You’re smaller than I expected.”

She bristled at that. “Oh, am I?”

He held out his hands. “No, no, I wasn’t—I—wow.” He blinked several times. “Sorry. I’ve just heard so much about you, I was expecting—I didn’t know what to expect. It’s good to meet you.”

He wasn’t being rude, Rin realized. He was nervous. Her expression softened. “Yes, I’m the Speerly. And you’re here because—”

“I’m your ally.” Qinen reached out quickly to shake her hand. His palms were slick with sweat. He gawked at her, mouth hanging slightly agape, as if he’d just watched her descend from the heavens on a staircase of clouds. Then he blinked and cleared his throat. “We’re going to help you fight. I’ve got men prepared to come out for you, just say the word and we’ll—”

“You’ll do nothing,” Souji said. “You know what your father demanded.”

Qinen’s face twisted in contempt. “My father’s a coward.”

“He’s just trying to keep you alive,” Souji said.

“Alive?” Qinen scowled. “He’s sentenced us to a living hell. He thinks compliance means lenience, but he doesn’t listen to reports from villages all around us. He doesn’t know what they do to the women. Or he doesn’t care.” His fists tightened. “Thirty miles from here, a village tried to hide girls in nearby mines, and when the Mugenese found out, they sealed off the exits and let them suffocate over three days. When they finally let the villagers retrieve the corpses, they found the girls dead with their fingers cracked and bleeding from trying to claw their way out. But Father doesn’t understand. He’s been—I mean, since my brother died, he’s …” His throat bobbed. “He’s wrong. We aren’t safe here; we’ll never be. Let us fight beside you. If we die, then at least let us die like men.”

This isn’t about permission, Rin realized. Souji was wrong. Qinen was going to fight whether they agreed to let him or not. This was about validation. After everything Qinen had seen, he needed absolution for the guilt of remaining alive, and he could get that only by putting his life on the line. She knew that feeling.

“You and your friends aren’t soldiers,” Souji said quietly.

“We can be,” Qinen said. “Did you think we’d just lie down and wait to be rescued? I’m glad to see you, brother, but we would have started this fight without you. You’ll need us. We’ve been laying down our own preparations, we’ve already set your stage—”

“What?” Souji shot him a sharp glance. “What have you been doing?”

“Everything my father’s been too scared to try.” Qinen lifted his chin with pride. “We’ve taken down their patrol routes to the minute. They’re all written down in a code they can’t read. We’ve sent round signals so the villagers know exactly when to run or hide. We’ve made sure every household has a weapon. Knives made from stakes, or farming implements we’ve snuck out of the sheds one at a time. We’re ready for this fight.”

“If they found out they’d kill you,” Souji said.

“We’re braver than that,” Qinen scoffed. “You saw my baby sister?”

“The girl in the hut?” Rin asked.

He nodded. “She’s with us, too. The Mugenese have her working in the mess hall—that’s where they force the children to work—so she slips a handful of water hemlock into a few bowls every time. It doesn’t do much. Just induces some vomiting and diarrhea—but it weakens them, and no one ever suspects it’s her.”

Watching Qinen’s face—his earnest, furious, desperate face—Rin couldn’t help but feel a mix of admiration and pity. His courage amazed her. These civilians were poking the dragon’s nest, risking their lives every day, preparing for a rebellion that they must have known they wouldn’t win.

What did they really think they could accomplish? They were farmers and children. Their little acts of resistance might infuriate the Mugenese, but wouldn’t drive them away.

Maybe, Rin thought, under these circumstances, that kind of resistance—no matter how futile—was the only way to live.

“We can help you,” Qinen insisted. “Just tell us where to be and when.”

The ruthless side of her wanted to say yes. She could use Qinen. It was so easy to go through cannon fodder. Even the most inexperienced commander could buy seconds, even minutes, by throwing bodies at the enemy.

But she couldn’t forget the look in Chief Lien’s eyes.

She’d learned, now, what it meant to bring the war to the south.

She read the expression on Souji’s face. Don’t you dare.

And she knew that if she said the wrong thing now, then she’d lose the support of both Chief Lien and the Iron Wolves.

“Souji’s right.” She reached out to touch Qinen lightly on the arm. “This isn’t your fight.”

“The hell it isn’t,” Qinen snapped. “This is my home.”

“I know.” She tried to sound like she meant what she was saying. “And the best thing you can do is keep your countrymen safe when we attack.”

Qinen looked crestfallen. “But that’s nothing.”

“You’re wrong,” said Souji. “That’s everything.”

Night had fallen by the time Rin and Souji rejoined the camp. They’d planned their attack for the following sunset. They had considered striking right then, under cover of darkness, and before any news had leaked of their arrival. But they’d decided to hold off until the next evening; Chief Lien needed time to orchestrate the villagers’ evacuation, and the Southern Army needed time to scope out the terrain, to position their troops optimally within the fields. The general staff spent the next few hours huddled around maps, marking out lines of entry.

It was far past midnight when at last they disbanded to rest. When Rin returned to her tent, she found a slim scroll placed neatly at the top of her travel pack.

She reached out, paused, and then withdrew her hand. This wasn’t right. Nobody at camp was receiving personal parcels. The Southern Coalition owned only one carrier pigeon, and it was trained to take a one-way message to Ankhiluun. Every instinct screamed that this was a trap. The scroll’s exterior could be laced with venom—countless Nikara generals of old had tried that trick before.

She leaned over the scroll with a small flame bobbing in her palm, carefully illuminating its every angle. She couldn’t see anything dangerous—no thin needles, no dark sheen on the parchment edge. Still, she used her teeth to pull her sleeve over her fingers before she picked the scroll up and unrolled it. Then she nearly dropped it.

The wax seal bore the dragon insignia of the House of Yin.

She exhaled slowly, trying to slow her racing heart. This had to be a joke—someone had pulled a deeply unfunny prank, and she would make sure they suffered for it.

The note inside was scrawled in a wobbly, childish font; the characters were so smudged and messy she had to squint to read it.

Hello, Rin,

They told me to write this in my own hand, but I don’t see how it could have made a difference seeing as I could barely write when you left, so you wouldn’t have recognized it anyway.

“This isn’t funny,” she muttered to herself.

But she knew this wasn’t a joke. Nobody at camp could have done this. Nobody knew.

This is Kesegi, if you hadn’t pieced that together. I’ve been in the New City prisons for a while and it was my fault, I got stupid and bragged to some people that you were my sister and I knew you, and then the talk trickled up to the guards so now here I am.

I’m sorry I did this to you. I really am.

Your friend says to tell you that this doesn’t have to be difficult. He said to tell you I walk free if you’ll come to the New City yourself, but if you bring an army then they’ll behead me above the city gates. He says that this doesn’t have to end in bloodshed, and that he only wants to speak. He says he doesn’t want a war. He’s prepared to grant clemency to every one of your allies. He only wants you.

Although to be honest—

The rest of the message had been scratched out with thick inky lines.

Rin snatched the scroll up and ran outside her tent.

She accosted the first sentry she saw. “Who delivered this?”

He gave her a blank stare. “Delivered what?”

She waved the scroll at him. “This was inside my travel pack. Did anyone deliver this to you?”

“N-No—”

“Did you see anyone going through my things?”

“No, but my watch has only just started, you’d have to ask Ginsen, he was here for three hours before that, and he should be—General, are you all right?”

Rin couldn’t stop trembling.

Nezha knew where she was. Nezha knew where she slept.

“General?” the sentry asked again. “Is everything all right?”

She crumpled the scroll in her fist. “Get me Kitay.”

“Shit.” Kitay lowered the letter.

“I know,” Rin said.

“Is this real?”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, is there any chance this is a forgery? That this isn’t really Kesegi?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve no idea.”

She couldn’t tell if that was really Kesegi’s handwriting. Frankly, she wasn’t even sure Kesegi knew how to read; her foster brother had rarely attended school. She couldn’t tell if the letter sounded like him, either. Certainly she could imagine the words in his voice, could picture him sitting at a writing desk, wrists shackled, his thin face trembling as Nezha dictated the words to him one by one. But how could she know for sure? She’d barely spoken to Kesegi in years.

“And what if it’s not?” Kitay asked.

“I don’t think we should respond,” Rin said in the calmest tone she could muster. “Either way.”

She’d worked through the possibilities in the minutes it had taken Kitay to arrive. She’d weighed the cost of her foster brother’s life, and she’d decided she could afford to lose him.

Kesegi wasn’t a general, wasn’t even a soldier. Nezha couldn’t torture him for information. Kesegi knew nothing of importance about either the Southern Coalition or Rin. Everything he knew of Rin was the biography of a little girl that she’d killed long ago at Sinegard, a naive Tikany shopgirl who existed only in suppressed memories.

“Rin.” Kitay put a hand on her arm. “Do you want to go after him?”

She hated how he was looking at her, eyes wide with pity, as if she were on the verge of tears. It made her feel so fragile.

But that’s just what Nezha wants. She refused to let this shake her. Nezha had manipulated her with sentiment before. The Cike had died for her sentiment.

“The problem is not Kesegi,” she said. “It’s Nezha’s troop placements. It’s his fucking reach—I mean, he put a letter in my fucking tent, Kitay. We’re just supposed to ignore that?”

“Rin, if you need to—”

“We need to discuss whether Nezha’s forces are in the south.” She had to keep talking; they had to move the conversation on to something else, because she was afraid of how her chest would feel if they didn’t. “Which I don’t think is possible—Venka says he’s leading his father’s troops in Tiger Province. But if they’re in the south, they’ve hidden so well that not a single one of our scouts has seen any troops, dirigibles, or supply wagons.”

“I don’t think he’s in the south,” Kitay said. “I think he’s just fucking with you. He’s gathering information; he just wants to see how you’ll respond.”

“He won’t get a response. We’re not going to take the bait.”

“We can discuss that.”

“This isn’t a discussion,” she snapped. “This letter is a forgery. And Nezha’s terms are absurd.”

Her fingers clenched around the scroll. The remainder of the message had been written in Nezha’s smooth, elegant calligraphy.

Hello, Rin,

It’s about time we talked.

You and I both know this war benefits no one. Our country has cracked apart. Our homeland has been ravaged, by war, by environmental catastrophe, by mindless evil. Nikan now faces her greatest test. And the Hesperians are watching us, waiting to see if we might stand strong or become another slave society for them to exploit.

I understand why you hate them. I am not blind to their intentions, and I will not let them turn our Republic into their mining ground. I will not see this land ruled by foreign hands. I know you don’t want that, either.

Please, Rin. Come to reason. I need you at my side.

The terms he listed were simple and unacceptable. A truce, full-scale demobilization and disarmament, and Kesegi returned safely in exchange for Rin. The Southern Coalition would be allowed to walk free, or join the Republican Army if they wished. Nezha hadn’t specified what would happen to Rin. She suspected it involved hourly doses of laudanum and an operating table.

“I’m not crazy, right?” she asked. “This is clearly a trap?”

“I’m not sure,” Kitay said. “I think there’s a world where Nezha does want you alive. He’s not stupid, he knows you’d be useful to him. He might try to talk you around—”

“The Hesperians are never going to let me walk free.”

“If you take Nezha at face value, then it looks like he’s trying to defy the Hesperians.”

She snorted. “You really think he’d do that?”

“I don’t know. The Yins … the House of Yin is far more comfortable working with foreigners than any Nikara leaders ever have been. It’s the reason why they’re rolling in silver. They might be fine with remaining stewards for the blue-eyed devils. But Nezha …”

“Nezha’s a shaman.”

“Yes.”

“And you think the Hesperians know.”

“I think Nezha knows that he cannot exist in a Hesperian-dominated world,” Kitay said. “It’s a world that labels him an abomination. Their vision of order demands his death and yours.”

Was that what Nezha was trying to imply? That he’d changed his mind about shamans? That if she joined him at his side, he might break the alliance his father had forged?

“But I’ve had this argument with Nezha,” she said. “And he thinks they’re right. That we are abominations, and that we’re better off dead. Only he can’t die.”

“So then we’re back to square one. We have no idea what this letter implies. And we have no reason to trust Nezha.”

Rin sighed. “So what’s our move, then?”

“I think we start with deciding what to do about your brother.”

“My foster brother,” she corrected. “And I’ve told you, we’re doing nothing.”

“Why don’t you even want to talk about this?”

“Because he’s just my brother.” She gave him a helpless look. “And I am the last great hope of the south. How do you think history will judge me if I throw away its fate for one person?”

Kitay opened his mouth, paused, and closed it. Rin knew his mind was racing; he was trying to come up with a way to save Kesegi, a way to foil Nezha, or a justification why one life might be worth more than thousands.

They didn’t exist. She knew that. She loved him for trying.

“Please,” she said. “Please just let this go.”

She was grateful he did not argue.

“Then we have a battle to win.” He handed the scroll back to her. “And I think we can both agree that showing this to anyone else gets us nothing.”

Rin understood his implication. The Southern Coalition could never know about this. Not Souji, not Zhuden, and certainly not Gurubai. The offer was admittedly attractive—even she found it tempting, might even have sacrificed herself for it if she weren’t so sure that what lay at the other end were lies.

If this got out, the factional infighting would explode. The Monkey Warlord had taught her that much about southern politics. This had to remain her secret.

“Of course,” she said.

She drew a ball of flame into her palm under the scroll. For a moment Nezha’s words burned bright, searing red. The parchment edges blackened, crinkled, then curled in on themselves like the legs of a dying spider.

Rin spent the next few hours attempting to catch short bursts of fitful sleep. She didn’t know why she tried; she could never sleep before battle. At last she gave up and passed the last hours until dawn pacing around the camp, watching for the sun to rise. She couldn’t bear sitting still with her thoughts. She couldn’t keep torturing herself with the possibilities—whether Kesegi was alive, whether Nezha was telling the truth, whether she should have responded to the letter rather than ignore it.

She needed a distraction. She needed this battle.

She felt good about their positions. They’d arranged their troops in a four-point formation. One squadron, the one she led, would spearhead the attack and tie the Mugenese soldiers down at the front near the sorghum fields, while two smaller squadrons would circle around the Mugenese flanks, hemming them inside a triangle to form a wedge between the village and the battlefield. Souji’s Iron Wolves, the fourth squadron, would drive holes through the enemy lines in the back, preventing a rout toward the civilians’ evacuation zone.

Preparations proceeded smoothly as the day wore on. Thanks to the Liens, they were operating with far more information than she’d ever been used to on the battlefield. She knew exactly where the Mugenese slept. When they ate. Where and when they patrolled. It was almost like a textbook case of an ambush, a test question on an exam she would have taken at Sinegard.

As the sun began its downward slope, Rin went over final instructions before she dispatched her squadron commanders to their spots. Their plans had come together with clockwork efficiency. They avoided the patrols they knew were coming. Their map directions lined up perfectly with the actual terrain. All squadron commanders fully understood their signals and timetables.

The only hiccup was their uniforms.

Chief Lien had requested they wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from civilians. Rin had protested that they didn’t have any.

“Tough,” Chief Lien said. “Find some, or your ambush is off.”

They’d compromised at headbands—thin strips of cloth tied around their foreheads. But an hour before they were due to move out, the squadron leaders started reporting they didn’t have enough excess cloth. Their soldiers were already marching in threadbare uniforms; they didn’t have any spares to cut up. Zhuden asked Rin if they should start ripping strips from their trouser legs.

“Forget that,” Rin grumbled. “Let’s just send them out.”

“You can’t,” Souji said. “You made a promise.”

“It’s idiotic! Who’s going to care about uniforms at nighttime?”

“The Mugenese might care,” Kitay said. “Killing their labor source doesn’t work in a symbiotic relationship. It’s a small measure, but it’s the least you can do. It’s the difference between ten lives and a thousand.”

In the end they had their troops smear their faces with bright red mud from a nearby pond. It left crimson patches on their clothes wherever they touched, and it caked onto their skin in dry, rusty streaks that didn’t rub off without water.

“We look stupid.” Rin surveyed the ranks. “We look like children playing past our dinnertime.”

“No, we look like a clay army.” Souji dragged two fingers across his cheek, leaving a thick, clearly visible streak. “The Red Emperor’s very finest, baked fresh from southern dirt.”

Thirty minutes until sunset, Rin crouched low amid the sorghum stalks. The smell of oil hung heavy in the air—the two thousand men behind her held dripping torches, ready to light at her signal.

The Southern Coalition’s soldiers had been trained to fight in the darkness as they had at Khudla. It hurt their visibility, yes, but the psychological advantage was significant. Troops under ambush in pitch-black night reacted with panic, confusion, and cowardice.

But tonight, Rin wanted the battlefield well lit. The Mugenese might fall back on the civilians in the chaotic dark. She needed to draw them out into the grain fields, which meant she needed to show them precisely where their enemy lay.

Are you ready, little warrior?

The Phoenix crooned in the back of her mind, eager, waiting. Rin let the old rage leak in, familiar and warming as a hearth fire, let it seep into her limbs while visions of destruction played in her head.

Oh, how she’d craved this fight.

I’m ready.

“Rin!”

She whipped around. Souji pushed his way through the sorghum stalks, red-faced and panting for breath.

Her stomach dropped. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be on the eastern flank with his Iron Wolves, poised and ready to attack.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“Hold up.” He doubled over, wheezing. “Don’t give the signal. Something’s wrong.”

“What are you talking about? We’re ready, it’s time—”

“No. Look.” He rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a spyglass, and tossed it toward her. “Look carefully.”

She raised it to her eye at the township walls. She struggled to make anything out in the dark. “I don’t see anything.”

“Move to the west. Just over the fields.”

Rin moved the lens. What she saw didn’t make any sense.

Mugenese soldiers clustered around the township walls. More poured out with every passing second. They knew about the ambush. Something—or someone—had tipped them off.

But they weren’t charging forward. Their blades weren’t pointed outward. They weren’t even arranging themselves into defensive formations of the kind Rin would have expected from an army under attack.

No—their weapons were pointed at the city gates. They weren’t preventing the attackers from coming in, they were keeping the residents from coming out.

Then Rin understood their strategy.

They weren’t going to fight a fair fight. They weren’t planning to engage the Southern Coalition at all.

They’d simply taken all Leiyang hostage.

Rin grabbed the arm of the nearest field officer and hissed, “Find Kitay.”

He sprinted back toward the camp.

“Fuck.” Rin slammed a fist against her knee. “Fuck—how?”

“I don’t know.” For the first time, the confident swagger was wiped from Souji’s face. He looked terrified. “I’ve no idea, I don’t know what we’re going to do—”

What had given them away? They’d prepared this ambush with twice their usual caution. The patrols couldn’t possibly have seen them; they’d worked around the guard schedule with clockwork precision. Had someone seen her and Souji leaving the township? That was possible, but then how would the Mugenese have known when the ambush was scheduled? And how did they know it would come from the north?

It didn’t matter how. Even if there were spies within her ranks, she couldn’t solve that now; she had a more pressing problem to deal with.

The Mugenese were holding Leiyang’s civilians at knifepoint.

A small contingent of Mugenese soldiers started moving toward the ambush line. One of them waved a red flag. They wanted to negotiate.

Rin worked frantically through all the possible ways this could end, and couldn’t come up with one where both the civilians and the Southern Army were safe. The Mugenese would have to secure a guarantee that Rin’s troops would never come back.

They were going to demand a blood sacrifice. Most likely they’d massacre Rin’s troops, one for every civilian kept alive.

Rin didn’t know if she could pay that price.

“What’s going on?”

Kitay, at last. Rin turned toward him, trying not to slip into a panicked babble as she started to explain what was happening, but the moment she twisted around she saw Souji’s expression morph into horror as he lifted a finger, pointing, toward the village.

A second later, she heard an arrow shriek through the air.

The Mugenese flag-bearer dropped to the ground.

Instinctively she whipped her head around, searching the ranks for a raised bow, a twanging bowstring—who’d done it, which absolute idiot had—

“My gods,” Souji murmured. His eyes were still fixed on the village.

Rin turned back around and thought she was hallucinating. What else explained that great column moving out of the township gates, a crowd nearly the size of an army?

She raised the spyglass back to her eye.

Qinen. It had to be. He’d mobilized his resistance band—no, from the looks of it, he’d mobilized the entire township. The column wasn’t just the fighting men of Leiyang; they were the women, elders, and even some of the children. They held torches, plows, field hoes, kitchen knives, and clubs clearly made from legs torn from chairs.

They charged.

They knew their lives were the price of this battle. Rin’s attack couldn’t proceed so long as they were held hostage. They’d known the Mugenese would force her to choose.

They’d made this decision for her.

The Mugenese archers turned toward the township to commence the massacre. Their commander signaled an order.

Civilian bodies fell from the front of the column in a clean sweep. But the villagers kept marching over their dead, pressing inexorably forward like ants bursting forth. Another round of arrows. Another line of bodies. The villagers kept marching.

The Mugenese soldiers couldn’t shoot quickly enough to keep them at bay. This was a clash of steel and bodies now, an utterly mismatched comedy of a melee. Federation soldiers cut the villagers down as quickly as they came. They knocked the weapons out of their hands, pierced them easily in their necks and chests because their victims had never been trained to parry.

The villagers kept marching.

The bodies piled up on the field. Rin watched, horrified, as a blade went clean through an old woman’s shoulder. But the woman lifted her trembling hands and clenched the wrist of her attacker, held him still long enough for an arrow to find his forehead.

The villagers kept marching.

Souji’s hand landed on her shoulder. His voice came out a strangled rasp. “What are you waiting for?”

She reached into the back of her mind, through the channel of Kitay’s soul, to the god who lay patiently waiting.

Avenge this, she ordered.

Whatever you ask, said the Phoenix.

And Rin strode forward through the sorghum fields to rip the world open with fire. She killed indiscriminately. She turned them all to ash, civilians and enemies alike. Leiyang’s civilians welcomed her flames with smiles.

This was their choice. Their sacrifice.

Her troops surged forth around her, blades glinting in the fiery night. They’d broken formation, but formation didn’t matter anymore, only bodies, blood, and steel.

This is how we win the south, she thought as her surroundings dissolved into a blurry wave of heat. That made it easier to keep going. She couldn’t see faces, couldn’t see the pain. All she saw were shapes. Not with our blades, but our bodies.

They would take back the south with sheer numbers. The Mugenese and the Republic were strong, but the south was many. And if southerners were dirt like all the legends said, then they would crush their enemies with the overwhelming force of the earth until they could only dream of breathing. They would bury them with their bodies. They would drown them in their blood.

CHAPTER 6

After that, it was just cleanup.

Rin walked dazedly through the sorghum fields, razed now to a level sheet of dark gray ash. Smoke curled out of her clothes in lazy, indolent spirals. She hadn’t touched opium since they’d set out on this march. But she was high now on a familiar euphoria, an exhilarating buzz that started in her fingertips and thrummed through her chest to her heart.

In Tikany, summer season was always overrun with ants. The vicious red creatures were driven into a frenzy by the dry heat, attacking whatever small children and animals crossed their paths. One bite alone raised a welt; a dozen could be fatal. The villagers retaliated with acid, using long poles to tip jars onto the anthills from a distance. Rin remembered how as a child she would crouch by the ground with empty jars in hand, squinting as destroyed civilizations frothed and burned under the sunlight.

She’d always lingered too long. She liked to listen to the acid hissing as it burrowed into the ants’ deepest tunnels. Liked to see the ants pouring frantically out the top, fleeing straight into the pools of acid she’d laid carefully in a ring around the nest. Liked to watch their little legs wiggle as they frothed and dissolved.

She felt a similar kind of pleasure now, the sadistic glee of watching lives evaporate and knowing she’d done it. Of knowing she had that power.

What is wrong with me?

She felt the same bizarre, confused elation that’d come over her when she’d poisoned Ma Lien. This time she didn’t push it away. She drank it in. Her power was derived from rage, and what she felt now was the other side of the coin—vengeance fulfilled.

Leiyang hadn’t been completely lost. When Rin’s soldiers searched the ruins for any civilians with breath left in their lungs, they found that the rate of survival was surprisingly high. The Mugenese attackers had been careless, acting from a frenzied panic rather than a calculated cruelty. They’d slammed steel haphazardly into any exposed flesh they saw instead of aiming for vital organs as they should have.

Leiyang the township was dead. Chief Lien’s people couldn’t live here any longer. Their numbers were too few; their homes and belongings were destroyed. They’d have to march south with Rin’s army to seek new homes, would have to see their numbers cannibalized into whatever villages would take them.

But Leiyang’s survivors were free. That, at least, was worth it.

Qinen, by some miracle, had made it out alive. Rin went to see him the moment she heard he was conscious.

The Southern Coalition’s handful of physicians had set up a triage center in a butchery, one of the few structures in Leiyang’s city center that hadn’t burned to the ground. They’d sanitized the structurally intact interior to the best of their ability, but couldn’t scourge the taint of burned pig intestines. By the end of the day the air was thick with the hot, tangy smell of blood, human and animal alike.

Rin found Qinen lying on a sheet outdoors, where the physicians had sent every patient not under immediate surgery. He looked awful. The burns that covered the right side of his body had twisted the skin on his face so badly that he could only speak in a hoarse, garbled whisper. His eyes were open but swollen, his right eye covered by a filmy white layer. Rin wasn’t sure that he could see her until his face broke into an awful, painful smile.

“I’m sorry—” she started, but he reached out and seized her wrist with a force that surprised her.

“I told you,” he rasped. “I told you we’d fight.”

Qinen’s band of resistance fighters hadn’t been acting alone. Similar organizations had existed all throughout the Beehive. This Rin discovered when, one by one, the villages clustered around Leiyang began to liberate themselves with startling speed.

Without the central leadership at Leiyang, the remaining ranks of Mugenese soldiers were isolated, cut off from all communications, resources, or reinforcements. Villagers armed with knives and plows now stood a fighting chance. Reports began flooding in about the villagers all throughout Rooster Province rising up, taking up arms, and purging their villages of their former rulers.

After Rin sent squadrons of Zhuden’s troops throughout the Beehive to speed up the process, the battle for the surrounding area took no more than two weeks. Some Mugenese troops put up a fight and went down in explosions of fire, yellow gas, steel, and blood. Others took their chances and surrendered, begging for exile or leniency, and were invariably executed by village committees.

When Rin toured the Beehive, she found herself witness to a wave of violence sweeping across the province.

In some hamlets, the civilians had already decapitated their Mugenese guards and strung their heads upside down along the town gates like a welcoming display of holiday lanterns. In other villages, Rin arrived while the executions were ongoing. These were drawn out over a period of days, a twisted parade whose centerpiece entertainment was an orgy of violence.

The sheer creativity astounded her. The liberated southerners marched the Mugenese naked in chains along the streets while onlookers reached out with knives to slice their flesh. They forced the Mugenese to kneel for hours on broken bricks with millstones hung around their necks. They buried the Mugenese alive, dismembered them, shot them, throttled them, and threw their bodies into dirty, rotting piles.

The victims were not limited to Mugenese troops. The victorious liberators’ harshest punishments fell on the collaborators—the magistrates, merchants, and delegates who had succumbed to Federation rule. In one village three miles south of Leiyang, Rin stumbled upon a public ceremony where three men were tied to posts, naked and gagged with rags to muffle their screams. In the corner, two women held long knives over a barrel fire. The blades glowed a vicious orange.

Rin could guess this would end in castration.

She turned to Souji. “Do you know what those men did?”

“Sure,” he said. “Traded girls.”

“They—what?”

He spelled it out for her. “They struck a deal to stop the Mugenese from grabbing women off the street. Every day they’d take a few women—usually the poor ones, or the orphans, who had no one to fight for them—and deliver them to the Mugenese general headquarters. Then they’d go back at sunrise, retrieve the girls, clean them up best they could, and send them home. It kept the younger girls and the pregnant women safe, though I don’t think the women they picked were too happy.” He watched, unflinching, as a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen ascended the stage and poured a vat of boiling oil over the men’s heads. “They said it was for the good of the village. Guess not everyone agreed.”

Loud sizzles mixed with the screams. Rin’s stomach grumbled, tricked into thinking she’d smelled freshly cooked meat. She hugged her arms over her chest and looked away, suppressing the urge to vomit.

Souji chuckled. “What’s wrong, Princess?”

“I just …” Rin wasn’t sure how to articulate her unease, much less distinguish it from obvious hypocrisy. “Isn’t this a bit much?”

“‘A bit much’?” He scoffed. “Really? This from you?”

“It’s different when …” She trailed off. How exactly was it different? What right did she have to judge? Why did she feel shame and disgust now, when the pain she regularly inflicted on the battlefield was a thousand times worse? “It’s different when it’s civilians doing it. It … it feels wrong.”

“How did it feel when you called the Phoenix at Speer?”

She flinched. “What does that matter?”

“It was good, wasn’t it?” His lip curled. “Oh, it was horrific, I’m sure, must have left a mental scar the size of a crater. But it was also the best thing you’d ever felt, wasn’t it? It felt like you’d put the universe back in place. Like you were balancing the scales. Didn’t it?”

He pointed to the men on the stage. They weren’t screaming anymore. Only one was still twitching. “You don’t know what these men have done. They might look like innocent Nikara faces, but you weren’t here during occupation, and you don’t know the pain they caused. The south doesn’t burn its own unless there’s a reason. You have no idea what these villagers are healing from. So don’t take this from them.”

His voice grew louder. “You don’t fix hurts by pretending they never happened. You treat them like infected wounds. You dig deep with a burning knife and gouge out the rotten flesh and then, maybe, you have a chance to heal.”

So when the south reclaimed itself in a sea of blood, Rin didn’t stop it. She could only watch as the tide of peasant violence rose to a fever pitch that she wasn’t sure she could control, even if she’d wanted to. Nobody would admit out loud how satisfying this was—the villagers had to pretend that this was a ritual of necessity and not of indulgence—but Rin saw the hungry gleams in their eyes as they drank in the screams.

This was catharsis. They needed to spill blood like they needed to breathe. Of course she understood that impulse; at night, alone with her pipe, she showed those bloody scenes over and over again to Altan so that her mind could find some semblance of peace while he could drink them hungrily in. The south needed retribution to keep going. How could she deprive them?

Only Kitay kept agitating to put an end to the riots. He could allow for the death penalty but he wanted order; he wanted public trials that weren’t a sham and sentences more moderate than execution.

“Some of those people are innocent,” he said. “Some of them were just trying to stay alive.”

“Bullshit,” Souji said. “They made their choice.”

“Do you understand the choices they got?” Kitay pointed across the courtyard to where a man had been hanging upside down by his ankles for the past three days. “He served as one of their translators for seven months. Why? Because the Mugenese captured his wife and daughter and told him he could serve, or he could watch them be buried alive. Then they started torturing his daughter in front of him to drive home the point. What do you think he picked?”

Souji was utterly unmoved. “He helped them kill other Nikara.”

“Everyone helped them kill other Nikara,” Kitay insisted. “Ideological purity is well and fine, but some people were just trying to survive.”

“You know, the Mugenese gave my sister a choice,” Souji said. “Said she could be one of their double agents and rat on her fellow villagers, or they’d rape and kill her. You know what she picked?”

Kitay’s cheeks flushed red. “I’m not saying—”

“Did you know the Mugenese liked to play games to fill their kill quota?” Souji inquired.

“I know,” Kitay said. “At Golyn Niis—”

“I know what they did at Golyn Niis.” Souji’s voice was like steel. “Want to know what they did here? They’d drive mobs of villagers up to the roofs of the tallest buildings they could find. Then they’d tear down the stairs, set the bottom floors on fire, and stand back in a circle to watch while they screamed. That’s what those collaborators had a hand in. Tell me we’re supposed to forgive that.”

“Kitay,” Rin said quietly. “Drop it.”

He didn’t. “But they’re not just targeting the Mugenese and their collaborators.”

“Kitay, please—”

“They’re targeting everyone who’s ever been remotely suspected of collaboration,” Kitay hissed. “This isn’t justice, it’s a killing frenzy, and whispers and pointed fingers are ending lives. You can’t tell who’s truly guilty and who’s fallen on the bad side of their neighbors. It’s not justice, it’s chaos.”

“So what?” Souji shrugged. “Hunt a rat, you’re going to smash some dishes. This is a revolution. It’s not a fucking tea party.”

They marched in silent exhaustion on the road back to Leiyang. The thrill of victory had long since died off. Two weeks of screams and torture, no matter who the victims were, had left them all somewhat haggard and pale.

They were half a day’s march out when a hooded rider appeared on the road. Rin’s officers rushed forward, spears leveled, shouting for the rider to stop. The rider halted, raising their hands to indicate the lack of weapon.

“Get down!” Zhuden insisted. “Who are you?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Venka threw the hood off her face and dismounted from her horse. She strode forth, batting spear points away with one hand as if swatting at a cloud of gnats. “What the fuck, Rin? Call off these fools.”

“Venka!” Rin darted forward and embraced Venka, but quickly let go; the stench was too much to bear. Venka smelled like a tannery on fire. “Great Tortoise, when’s the last time you had a bath?”

“Cut me a fucking break,” Venka said. “I’ve been fleeing for my life.”

“You had time to put on fresh face paint,” Kitay pointed out.

“Everyone was doing it in Sinegard. I had some left in my bag. Easier to access than soap, all right?”

Rin could only laugh. What else did they expect? Sring Venka was a prim, spoiled Sinegardian princess turned lethal soldier turned brittle survivor; of course she’d walk into a war zone with red paint on her lips simply because she felt like it.

“Anyway, it took you long enough to get back,” Venka griped. “I’ve been pacing this patch of road since yesterday. They told me you were based in Leiyang.”

“We were,” Rin said. “Are. Left to do some cleaning up.”

“What happened?” Kitay asked. “Thought you were just fine in the Republic.”

Venka gave a dramatic sigh. “Broke my cover. It was the stupidest thing. There I was, an utterly invisible servant girl in a magistrate’s household, and then the lady of the house started thinking I was trying to seduce her husband and dragged me out into the street.”

“Were you—?” Kitay began.

Venka shot him a scathing look. “Of course not. It’s not my fault that the stupid man couldn’t keep his eyes off my ass.”

Kitay looked flustered. “I was just going to ask if you were recognized.”

“Oh. No, but it was a near thing. His wife had me fired, then she went around telling all the other households not to hire me. That brought a bit too much attention. So I looted the armory in the middle of the night, sweet-talked the stable boy into lending me a horse, and made my way down south.” She recounted all this with such brazen flippancy she might have been chatting about Sinegard’s latest fashions. “At Ruijin they said you’d gone south, so I followed the trail of bodies. Didn’t take me long to track you down.”

“We’ve, ah, split with Ruijin,” Rin said.

“So I figured.” Venka nodded to the waiting troops. “How’d you wrestle an army from Gurubai?”

“Created a vacancy.” Rin glanced over her shoulder at her troops. Souji and the other officers were paused in the middle of the road, watching them curiously.

“She’s an ally,” Rin told them. “Carry on.”

The column resumed its march toward Leiyang. Rin kept her voice low as she spoke to Venka, glancing around to make sure Souji did not overhear.

“Listen, has Nezha started sending anyone south?”

Venka arched an eyebrow. “Not the last I heard. Why?”

“Are you sure?”

“Supposedly he’s still cooped up in the palace. Rumor has it he’s not doing so well, actually; he’s been out of commission for a few weeks.”

“What?” Rin asked sharply. Her heart was suddenly beating very quickly. “What does that mean?”

Kitay shot her a curious look. She ignored it. “Was he injured?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Venka said. “He hasn’t been out on the field in weeks. Vaisra recalled him from Tiger Province last month. He’s spent a lot of time with the Hesperians, negotiating with their delegates, and I think the prevailing rumor was that he’s fallen ill. He looks weak, he’s got shadows under his eyes, or so they say. It’s hard to tell what’s gossip and what’s fact, since no one I knew had actually gotten a good look at him, but it seems serious.”

Rin felt a stupid, instinctive stab of worry, the residue of concern. She quashed it. “You think he’s going to die?”

“Not sure,” Venka said. “They say he’s got all the best Hesperian doctors working on him, though that might be doing more harm than good. I doubt he’ll be leading troops out anytime soon.”

Did that mean she was safe? Had Nezha just been fucking around with her? His illness did not negate the fact that he had spies in her camp, that he knew where she laid her head every night. But if Venka was right, and if Nezha and his father were indeed still preoccupied with the north, they might not have to worry about an impending ambush for the time being.

This reprieve might not last for long. But she’d take every extra day she had.

“What’s the matter?” Venka asked. “You spooked about something?”

Rin exchanged a glance with Kitay. They’d come to an unspoken agreement—they wouldn’t tell Venka about the letter. The fewer people who knew, the better.

“Nothing,” Rin said. “Just—just wanted to make sure we’re not getting blindsided.”

“Trust me.” Venka snorted. “I don’t think he’s even in a fit state to walk.”

They rode for a few moments in silence. Rin could see the silhouette of Leiyang emerging from the horizon; from here on it was only flat roads.

“So what in the sixty-four gods has been happening here?” Venka asked after a while. “I passed a few villages on my way up here. They’ve all gone completely mad.”

“Throes of victory,” Rin said. “Growing pains.”

“They’re skinning people alive,” Venka said.

“Because they traded little girls for food rations.”

“Oh. Fair enough.” Venka flicked an invisible speck of dust from her wrist. “I hope they castrated them, too.”

Later that afternoon, as Rin headed to the fields to supervise basic training, she was accosted by a wizened old woman dragging two skinny girls along by their wrists.

“We heard you were taking girls,” she said. “Will they do?”

Rin was so startled by her pushy irreverence that rather than directing the woman to the enlistment stand, she paused and looked. She was puzzled by what she saw. The girls were thin and scrawny, certainly no older than fifteen, and they cowered behind the old woman as if terrified of being seen. They couldn’t possibly be volunteers—every other woman who had enlisted in the Southern Army had done so proudly and of her own volition.

“You’re taking girls,” the old woman prompted.

Rin hesitated. “Yes, but—”

“They’re sisters. You can have them for two silvers.”

Rin blinked. “Pardon?”

“One silver?” the woman suggested impatiently.

“I’m not paying you anything.” Rin’s brow furrowed. “That’s not what—”

“They’re good girls,” said the woman. “Quick. Obedient. And neither are virgins—”

“Virgins?” Rin repeated. “What do you think we’re doing here?”

The woman looked at her as if she were mad. “They said you were taking girls. For the army.”

Then the pieces fell together. Rin’s gut twisted. “We aren’t hiring prostitutes.”

The woman was undaunted. “One silver.”

“Get out of here,” Rin snapped. “Or I’ll have you thrown in jail.”

The woman spat a gob of saliva at Rin’s feet and stormed off, tugging the girls behind her.

“Hold it,” Rin said. “Leave them.”

The woman paused, looking for a moment like she might protest. So Rin let a stream of fire, ever so delicate, slip through her fingers and dance around her wrist. “I wasn’t asking.”

Hastily, the woman left without another word.

Rin turned to the girls. They had barely moved this whole time. Neither would meet her eyes. They stood still, arms hanging loose by their sides, heads lowered deferentially like house servants waiting for commands.

Rin had the oddest temptation to pinch their arms, check their muscles, turn up their chins, and open their mouths to see if their teeth were good. What is wrong with me?

She asked, for want of anything better to say, “Do you want to be soldiers?”

The older girl shot Rin a fleeting glance, then gave a dull shrug. The other didn’t react at all; her eyes remained fixed on an empty patch of air before her.

Rin tried something else. “What are your names?”

“Pipaji,” said the older girl.

The younger girl’s eyes dropped to the ground.

“What’s wrong with her?” Rin asked.

“She doesn’t speak,” snapped Pipaji. Rin saw a sudden flash of anger in her eyes—a sharp defensiveness, and she understood then that Pipaji had spent her entire life shielding her sister from other people.

“I understand,” Rin said. “You speak for her. What’s her name?”

The hostility eased somewhat from Pipaji’s face. “Jiuto.”

“Jiuto and Pipaji,” Rin said. “Do you have a family name?”

Silence.

“Where are you from?”

Pipaji gave her a sullen look. “Not here.”

“I see. They took your home, too, huh?”

Pipaji gave a listless shrug, as if she found this question incredibly stupid.

“Listen,” Rin said. Her patience was running out. She wanted to be on the field with her troops, not coaxing words from sullen little girls. “I haven’t got time for this. You’re free of that woman, so you can do whatever you like. You can join this army if you want—”

“Do we get food?” Pipaji interrupted.

“Yes. Twice a day.”

Pipaji considered this for a moment, then nodded. “Okay.”

Her tone made it clear she had no further questions. Rin watched them both for a moment, then shrugged and pointed. “Good. Barracks are over there.”

CHAPTER 7

Two weeks later they reached Tikany.

Rin had been prepared to fight for her hometown. But when her troops approached Tikany’s earthen walls, the fields were quiet. The trenches lay empty; the gates hung wide open, with no sentries in sight. This wasn’t the deceptive stillness of a waiting ambush but the listless silence of a place abandoned. Whatever Mugenese troops had once terrorized Tikany had already fled. Rin passed completely unobstructed through the northern gates into a place she hadn’t seen since she’d left it nearly five years ago.

She didn’t recognize it.

Not because she’d forgotten. As much as she’d once wanted to, she’d never erase the texture of this place from her mind—not the clouds of red dust that blew through the streets on windy days, covering everything with a fine sheen of crimson; not the abandoned shrines and temples around every corner, remnants of more superstitious days; not the rickety wooden buildings emerging from dirt like angry, resilient scars. She knew Tikany’s streets like she knew the back of her hand; knew its alleys, hidden tunnels, and opium drop-off sites; knew the best hiding corners wherein to take refuge when Auntie Fang’s temper bubbled over into violence.

But Tikany had changed. The whole place felt empty, hollowed, like someone had gouged its intestines out with a knife and devoured them, leaving behind a fragile, traumatized shell. Tikany had never been one of the Empire’s great cities, but it had held life. It had been, like so many of the southern cities, a locus of small autonomy, carved defiantly into the hard soil.

The Federation had turned it into a city of the dead.

Most of the ramshackle buildings were gone, long since burned down or dismantled. The Mugenese had turned what was left into a spare military camp. The library, the outdoor opera stage, and schoolhouse—the only places in Tikany that had ever brought Rin any happiness—were skeletal structures that showed signs of deliberate deconstruction. Rin guessed the Mugenese had stripped down their walls for firewood.

In the pleasure district, the whorehouses alone remained standing.

“Take twelve troops—women, if possible—and scour every one of those buildings for survivors,” Rin told the closest officer. “Hurry.”

She knew by now what they would likely find. She knew she should have gone herself. She wasn’t brave enough for it.

She kept walking. Closer to the township center, near the magistrate’s hall and public ceremonies office, she found evidence of the public executions. Stage floorboards painted brown with months-old stains. Whips tossed onto careless piles under the spot where once, a lifetime ago, she’d read her Keju test score and realized she was going to Sinegard.

What she didn’t see were corpses. In Golyn Niis, they’d been stacked up on every street corner. Tikany’s streets were empty.

But that made sense. When your goal was occupation, you always cleaned up your corpses. Otherwise they stank.

“Great Tortoise.” Souji whistled under his breath as he strode beside her, hands in his pockets, peering about the devastation like a child perusing a holiday market. “They really did a number on this place.”

“Shut up,” Rin said.

“What’s the matter? Did they tear down your favorite teahouse?”

“I said shut up.”

She hated the thought of crying in front of him, yet she could barely breathe for the weight crushing her chest. Her head felt terribly light; her temples throbbed. She dug her nails into her palm to ward off the tears.

She’d seen large-scale devastation like this only once before, and it had almost broken her. But this was worse than Golyn Niis, because at least in Golyn Niis, most everyone was dead. She would almost have rather seen corpses than the survivors she saw now, crawling out from whatever safe houses remained standing, blinking at her with the dazed confusion of animals who had spent too long living in the dark.

“Are they gone?” they asked her. “Are we freed?”

“You’re freed,” she said. “They’re gone. Forever.”

They registered these words with fearful, doubtful looks, as if they expected the Mugenese to return any moment and smite them for their temerity. Then they grew braver. More and more of them emerged from huts, shacks, and hiding holes, more than Rin had dared hope remained alive. Whispers arced through the ghost town, and gradually the survivors began to fill the square, crowding around the soldiers, homing in on Rin.

“Are you …?” they asked.

“I am,” she said. She let them touch her so that they knew she was real. She let them see her flames, spiraling high in delicate patterns, silently conveying the words she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud.

It’s me. I’m back. I’m sorry.

“They need to wash,” Kitay said. “Almost everyone here’s got a lice problem; we need to contain it before it spreads to our troops. And they need a good meal, we should get the rations in order—”

“Can you handle it?” she asked. Her voice rang oddly in her ears when she spoke, as if coming from the other side of a thick wooden door. “I want—I need to keep walking.”

He touched her arm. “Rin—”

“I’m all right,” she said.

“You don’t have to do this alone.”

“But I do. You can’t understand.” She stepped away from him. Kitay knew every part of her soul, but he couldn’t share this with her. This was about roots, about dirt. He wasn’t from here; he couldn’t know how it felt. “You—you take care of the survivors. Let me go. Please.”

He squeezed her hand and nodded. “Just be careful.”

Rin broke away from the crowd, disappeared down a side alley while no one was watching, and then walked alone across town to her old neighborhood.

She didn’t bother going to the Fang residence. There was nothing for her there. She knew Uncle Fang was dead. She knew Auntie Fang and Kesegi had most likely died in Arlong. And aside from Kesegi, her memories of that house contained nothing but misery.

She went straight to Tutor Feyrik’s house.

His quarters were empty. She couldn’t find a single trace of him in any of the bare rooms; he might never have lived there at all. The books were gone, every last one. Even the bookshelves were missing. All that remained was a little stool, which she suspected the Mugenese had left alone because it was carved from stone and not wood.

She remembered that stool. She’d perched there so many nights as a child, listening to Tutor Feyrik talk about places she never thought she would see. She’d sat there the night before the exam, sobbing into her hands while he gently patted her shoulders and murmured that she’d be all right. A girl like you? You’ll always be all right.

He might still be alive. He might have fled early, at the first warnings of danger; he might be in one of the refugee camps up north. If she tried hard enough, she could maintain the delusion that he was somewhere out there, safe and happy, simply out of her orbit. She tried to find comfort in that thought, but the uncertainty of not knowing, perhaps never knowing, only hurt more.

She tasted salt on her lips, and realized her face was wet with tears.

Abruptly, violently, she wiped them away.

Why do you need to find him? She heard the question in Altan’s voice. Why does it fucking matter?

She’d hardly thought about Tutor Feyrik in years. She’d cut him out of her mind the same way she’d alienated herself from her sixteen years in Tikany, a snakeskin shed so she could reinvent herself from war orphan to student and soldier. She clung to his memory now out of some pathetic, cowardly nostalgia. He was only a relic—a reminder from an easier time when she was a little girl trying to memorize the Classics, and he was a kind teacher who’d shown her her only way out.

She was searching for a life she’d never have again. And Rin knew far too well by now that nostalgia could kill her.

“Find anything?” Kitay asked when she returned.

“No,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”

Rin chose to make her headquarters in the Mugenese general’s complex, partly because she felt like it was her right as liberator and partly because it was the safest place in the encampment. Before they moved in, she and Souji scoured each room, checking for any lurking assassins.

They encountered nothing but messy rooms still littered with dirty dishes, uniforms, and spare weapons. It was like the Mugenese had vanished into thin air, leaving all their belongings behind. Even the main office looked as if the general had simply stepped into the next room for a cup of tea.

Rin rooted through the general’s desk, pulling out stacks of memos, maps, and letters. In one drawer she found sheaves of paper, all charcoal sketches of the same woman. This general had apparently considered himself an artist. The sketches weren’t half bad—the general had rather painstakingly tried to capture his lover’s eyes, to the neglect of other anatomical accuracies. The same Mugenese characters accompanied each sketch—hudie, meaning “butterfly” in Nikara; she’d forgotten its Mugenese pronunciation. It was likely not a proper name but an endearment.

He was lonely, she thought. How had he felt when he learned the fate of the longbow island? When he learned that no ships were ever sailing back across the Nariin Sea?

She found a note written on a folded sheet of paper wedged in between the last two sketches. The Mugenese script was not so different from Nikara—it borrowed heavily from Nikara characters, though their pronunciations were entirely different—but it took her several minutes of parsing through messy, scrawled ink to decipher what it said.

If it means I have a traitorous heart then yes, I wish our Emperor had not summoned you for duty, for he has ripped you from my arms.

The entirety of the eastern continent—no, the riches of this universe—means nothing to me in your absence.

I pray every day for the seas to bring your return.

Your butterfly.

It was an extract torn out of a longer letter. Rin couldn’t find the rest.

She felt oddly guilty as she leafed through the general’s things. Absurdly enough, she felt like an intruder. She’d spent so much time figuring out how to kill the Mugenese that the very idea that they could be people, with private lives and loves and hopes and dreams, made her feel vaguely nauseated.

“Look at those walls,” Souji said.

Rin followed his gaze. The general had kept a detailed wall calendar, filled in neat, tiny handwriting. It was far more legible than the letter. She flipped to the very first page. “They arrived here just three months ago.”

“That’s just when they started keeping the calendar,” Souji said. “Trust me, they’ve been in the south far longer than that.”

His unspoken accusation lingered in the air between them. Three months ago she could have come south. She could have stopped this.

Rin had long since accepted that charge. She knew this was her fault. She could have taken the Empress’s hand that day in Lusan, could have killed Vaisra’s rebellion in the cradle and led her troops straight down south. But instead she’d played at revolution, and all that won her was a scar snaking across her back and an aching stump where her hand should have been.

She hated how nakedly transparent Vaisra’s strategy had been from the start, and hated herself more for failing to see it. In retrospect it was so clear why the south had to burn, why Vaisra had withheld his aid even when the southern warlords came begging at his feet.

He could have easily stopped those massacres. He’d known the Hesperian fleet was coming to his aid; he could have dispatched half his army to answer the pleas of a dying nation. He’d deliberately crippled the south instead. He didn’t have to grapple with the southern Warlords for political authority if he just let the Mugenese do his dirty work for him. And then, when the smoke cleared, when the Empire lay in fractured shambles, he would have marched in with the Republican Army and burned out the Mugenese with dirigibles and arquebuses. By then southern autonomy would have seemed laughable—whatever survivors remained would have fallen on their knees and worshipped him as their savior.

What if he had told you? Altan—Rin’s hallucination of Altan—had asked her once. What if he’d made you fully complicit? Would you have switched your allegiance?

Rin didn’t know. She had despised the southerners back then. She’d hated her own people, had hated them the moment she saw them in the camps. She’d hated their darkness, their flat-tongued rural accents and fearful, dull-eyed stares. It was so easy to mistake sheer terror for stupidity, and she’d been desperate to think of them as stupid because she knew she wasn’t stupid, and she needed any reason to set herself apart.

Back then her self-loathing had run so deep that if Vaisra had simply told her every part of his plan, she might have taken his evil for brilliance and laughed. If he hadn’t traded her away, she might never have left his side.

Anger coiled in her gut. She tore the calendar down from the wall and crushed it in her fingers.

“I was a fool for Vaisra,” she said. “I shouldn’t have counted on his virtue. But he didn’t count on my survival.”

Once they’d deemed the general’s complex safe as a home base, Rin walked across town to the whorehouses. She didn’t want to; she was hungry and exhausted, her eyes and throat felt sore from suppressed tears, and all she wanted to do was curl up in a corner with her pipe.

But she was General Fang the Speerly, and she owed this to the survivors.

Venka was already there. She’d begun the difficult work of marshaling the women from the whorehouses. Puddles and overturned buckets covered the cold stone floors where the women had showered, next to thick, dark piles of lice-ridden locks shorn from newly bald heads.

Venka stood now at the center of the square courtyard, hands clasped behind her back like a drill sergeant. The women clustered around her in a sullen circle, blankets clutched around their skinny shoulders, their eyes dull and unfocused.

“You have to eat,” Venka said. “I’m not leaving you alone until I see you swallow.”

“I can’t.” The girl in front of Venka could have been anywhere from thirteen to thirty—her skin was stretched so tight over her fragile, birdlike bones that Rin couldn’t tell.

Venka grabbed the girl’s shoulder with one hand; with the other, she held a steamed bun up so close to the girl’s face that Rin thought she might start mashing it into her lips. “Eat.”

The girl pressed her mouth shut and squirmed in Venka’s grasp, whimpering.

“What’s wrong with you?” Venka shouted. “Eat! Take care of yourself!”

The girl wriggled free and backed away, eyes scrunched up in tears, shoulders hunched as if she expected a beating.

“Venka!” Rin hurried forward and pulled Venka back by the wrist. “What are you doing?”

“What the fuck do you think?” Venka’s cheeks were chalk-pale with fury. “Everyone else has eaten, but this little bitch thinks she’s too good for her food—”

One of the other women put an arm around the girl. “She’s still in shock. Let her be.”

“Shut up.” Venka shot the girl a scathing glare. “Do you want to die?”

After a long pause, the girl gave a timid shake of her head.

“So eat.” Venka flung the bun at her. It bounced off her chest and landed on the dirt. “Right now you’re the luckiest fucking girl in the world. You’re alive. You have food. You’re saved from the brink of starvation. All you have to do is put that bun in your fucking mouth.”

The girl began to cry.

“Stop that,” Venka ordered. “Don’t be pathetic.”

“You don’t understand,” choked the girl. “I don’t—you can’t—”

“I do understand,” Venka said flatly. “Same thing happened to me at Golyn Niis.”

The girl lifted her eyes. “Then you’re a whore, too. And we should both be dead.”

Venka drew her arm back and slapped the girl hard across the face.

“Venka, stop.” Rin seized Venka’s arm and pulled her out of the courtyard. Venka didn’t resist; rather, she stumbled along willingly as if in a daze.

She wasn’t angry, Rin realized. If anything, Venka seemed about to collapse.

This wasn’t about the food.

Rin knew, deep down, that Venka hadn’t turned her back on her home province and joined the Southern Coalition—a rebellion formed of people with skin several shades darker than hers—out of any real loyalty to their cause. She’d done it because of what had happened at Golyn Niis. Because the Dragon Warlord Yin Vaisra had knowingly let those atrocities at Golyn Niis happen, had let them happen across the entire south, and hadn’t lifted a finger to stop them.

Venka had taken it upon herself to fight those battles. But as she and Rin had both discovered, the battles were easy. Destroying was easy. The hard part was the aftermath.

“Are you all right?” Rin asked quietly.

Venka’s voice trembled. “I’m just trying to make this easier.”

“I know,” Rin said. “But not everyone is as strong as you.”

“They’d better learn to be, or they’ll be dead in a few weeks.”

“They’ll survive. The Mugenese are gone.”

“Oh, you think it just ends like that?” Venka gave a brittle laugh. “You think it’s all over? Once they’re gone?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“They’re never gone. Do you understand? They still come for you in your sleep. Only this time they’re dream-wraiths, not real, and there’s no escape from them because they’re living in your own mind.”

“Venka, I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

Venka continued like she hadn’t heard. “Do you know that after Golyn Niis, the other two survivors from that pleasure house drank lye? Do you want to guess how many of these girls are going to hang themselves? They have no space to be weak, Rin. They don’t have time to be in shock. That can’t be an option. That’s how they die.”

“I understand that,” Rin said. “But you can’t take your shit out on them. You’re here to protect. You’re a soldier. Act like it.”

Venka’s eyes widened. For a moment Rin thought Venka might slap her, too. But the moment passed, and Venka’s shoulders slumped, like all the fight had drained out of her at once.

“Fine. Put them under someone else’s charge, then. I’m finished here.” She pointed to the whorehouses. “And burn that place to the ground.”

“We can’t,” Rin said. “They’re some of the only walled structures still standing. Until we can rebuild some shelters—”

“Burn it,” Venka snarled. “Or I’ll get some oil and do it myself. Now, I’m not very good at arson. So you can set a controlled fire, or deal with an inferno. You pick.”

A scout’s arrival saved Rin the burden of a response.

“We found it,” he reported. “Looks like there was only one.”

Rin’s stomach twisted. Not this. Not now. She wasn’t ready; after the whorehouses, she just wanted to shrink into a ball somewhere and hide. “Where was it?”

“About half a mile south of the city border. It’s muddy out there; you’ll want to lace on some thicker boots. Lieutenant Chen told me to tell you he’s already on the way. Shall I take you?”

Rin hesitated. “Venka …”

“Count me out. I don’t want to see that.” Venka turned on her heel and called over her shoulder as she stalked off, “I want the whorehouses in ashes by dawn, or I’ll assume it’s my job.”

Rin wanted to chase after her. She wanted to pull Venka back by the wrist, hug her tight, and hold her close until they were able to sob, until their sobs subsided. But Venka would interpret that as pity, and Venka detested pity more than anything. She read pity as an insult—as confirmation that, after all this time, everyone still thought her fragile and broken, on the verge of falling apart. Rin couldn’t do that to her.

She’d burn the whorehouses, she decided. The survivors could survive a few nights in the open air. She had fire enough to keep them warm.

“General?” the scout asked quietly.

Rin blinked. She’d been staring after Venka’s retreating figure. “Give me a moment. I’ll meet you at the east gate.”

She returned to the general’s complex to change her boots and ask around the barracks until someone lent her a spare shovel. Then she followed the scout to the killing fields.

The walk was shorter than she expected.

She knew the site from a quarter-mile off. She knew it from the smell, the rancid odor of decay under a thin sheen of dust; from the fat insects scurrying into the ground and the carrion birds that perched casually on white bone fragments sticking out of the ground. She knew it from the discolored and displaced soil, and the traces of hair and clothes strewn across the dirt where the Mugenese had hardly bothered to bury them.

She stopped ten feet before she reached the graves. She needed to breathe before she could bring herself to go any farther.

“Let someone else do this.” Kitay put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re allowed to go back.”

“I’m not,” she said. “And I can’t. This has to be me.”

It had to be her because this was her fault. She was obligated to look. She needed to afford the dead at least that modicum of respect.

She wanted to bury it all, to pile mounds of soil over this shallow grave, tamp it tightly against the ground with shovels, and then roll wagons over it to flatten this site so that it might fade back into the landscape until one day they could pretend it had never existed.

But they had to identify the bodies. So many southerners were currently trapped in that horrifying limbo of uncertainty with no way to know if their loved ones were dead, and that uncertainty could hurt more than grief. Once they found the bodies, at least they could mourn.

And then, because burial rituals were so important in the south, the bodies needed to be cleaned. In peacetime, funerals in Tikany were daylong affairs. Hordes of mourners—sometimes including hired professionals to inflate the ranks, if the deceased’s family could afford it—moaned and wailed as they followed the coffin out of town to carefully prepared ancestral plots. The souls of the dead needed to be properly coaxed into their graves so they would rest instead of haunting the living; this demanded regular offerings of burned paper goods and incense to soothe them into the world beyond.

Rin had an idea of what the afterlife looked like now. She knew it was not some cute parallel ghost city where burned paper offerings might be translated into real treasures. But still, to leave a loved one’s body to rot in the open was shameful.

She’d thrown away most of her Rooster heritage. She’d lost her dialect and her mannerisms; since her first year at school, she’d dressed and spoken like a Sinegardian elite. She didn’t believe in southern superstition, and she wasn’t going to start pretending now.

But death was sacred. Death demanded respect.

Kitay had taken on the gray-green pallor of someone about to vomit.

She reached for his shovel. “You don’t need to stay if you can’t. These aren’t your people.”

“We’re bound.” He pulled his shovel back from her grasp and gave her a wan, exhausted smile. “Your pain will always be mine.”

Together they began to dig.

It wasn’t difficult. The Mugenese had covered their handiwork with only a thin layer of soil, barely enough to conceal the tangled mass of limbs underneath. Whenever Rin had uncovered enough dirt to reveal the top layer of a corpse, she stopped and moved on, not wanting to break apart the already soft, decomposing bodies.

“In the north, we burn our dead,” Kitay said after an hour. He reached up to wipe the sweat off his forehead, leaving behind a streak of mud. “It’s cleaner.”

“So we’re vulgar,” Rin said. “So what?”

She didn’t have the energy to defend what they were doing. Earthen burial was the oldest of southern rituals. The Roosters were people of the earth, and their bodies and souls belonged in the ground—ancestral land that was marked, possessed, inhabited by generations stretching back as long as the history of the province. So what if that made them the Empire’s mud-skinned refuse? The earth was permanent, unforgiving. The earth would rise up and swallow its invaders whole.

“They won’t be able to recognize half these bodies,” Kitay said. “They’re too far decomposed, look—”

“They still have their clothes. Jewelry. Hair. Teeth. They’ll find them.”

They kept digging. No matter how many faces they uncovered, the shallow graves seemed to stretch on without end.

“Are you looking for someone?” Kitay asked after a while.

“No,” Rin said.

She meant it. She had briefly considered searching for Tutor Feyrik. She’d tried to think of the distinct markers that might identify him. His height and build were too average. She could have searched for his beard, perhaps—but there were hundreds of old men in Tikany with beards just like his. His clothes had always been nondescript; perhaps he might have his lucky gambling dice in his front pocket, but Rin couldn’t bear the thought of walking down the lines, ramming her hand down every bearded corpse’s pocket to verify someone had already died.

She was never going to see Tutor Feyrik again. She already knew that.

Hours later, Rin at last called for a stop. They’d been digging for three hours. The sun drooped low in the sky; soon, it would be too dark to tell whether their shovel blades were hitting soil or flesh.

“Back to the village,” she rasped. She desperately needed a drink of water. “We’ll return tomorrow when the sun’s come up—”

“Hold on,” called a soldier farther down the path. “Something’s moving over here.”

At first Rin thought the slight movement she saw was a trick of light glinting against buried metal, or perhaps a lone vulture pecking at carrion. Then she drew closer and saw it was a hand—a scrawny hand forced through a gap in the pile of bodies, waving ever so faintly.

Her troops hastened to drag the corpses out of the way. Six bodies removed finally revealed the owner of the hand—a thin, coughing boy covered entirely in dried blood.

He was still conscious when they pulled him out of the grave. He blinked up at them, dazed. Then his eyes closed, and his head slumped to the side.

Rin sent a runner into the township for a physician. Meanwhile, they laid the boy out on the grass and wiped away the blood and dirt caked to his skin as best they could using water from their canteens. Rin watched the boy’s chest throughout—it was bloody and discolored, caked over with dried blood and bruises, but still it rose and fell in a steady, determined rhythm.

When a physician arrived and cleaned the boy’s torso with alcohol, they learned that the source of the blood wasn’t deep—the wound was just a cut about two inches deep into his left shoulder. Enough to agonize but not to kill. The dirt had acted as a poultice, stemming a tide of blood that would have killed him otherwise.

“Hold him tight,” said the physician. He uncorked a bottle of rice wine and tipped it over the wound.

The boy jerked awake, hissing in pain. His eyes fluttered open and locked on Rin’s.

“You’re okay,” she said as she pinned his arms against the ground. “You’re alive. Be brave.”

His eyes bulged. A vein pulsed in his clenched jaw as he writhed under their hands, but never once did he scream.

He couldn’t have survived out here for more than a few days. The infection, and lack of water, would have killed him if it had been any longer than that. That meant the killing fields were fresh. The Mugenese had slaughtered them just days before the Southern Army arrived.

Rin tried to figure out what that meant.

Why would you mass-slaughter a town just before another army arrived?

To make Rin’s victory shallow? To spit venom at an army they knew they couldn’t beat? To leave one last, cruel message?

No. Gods, no, please, that could not be the truth.

But she couldn’t think of any other rationale. Blood rushed to her temples as she watched the boy’s eyes roll into the back of his head. She was afraid to stand; she thought she, too, might faint.

You did this, taunted the burial fields. You made us kill them. We would have left this town alone unless you came, but you did, and so all this is your fault.

Rin sent her soldiers back to the township ahead of her. She hung back, waiting for the sun to set. She wanted a few minutes of silence. She wanted to stand alone with the graves.

“There’s nothing left alive here,” Kitay said. “Let’s go.”

“You go,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He paused in his steps. “Will this make you feel better?”

He didn’t elaborate, but she knew what he meant. “Don’t suggest that.”

“But I’m right,” he pressed. “It makes it easier.”

She couldn’t deny that. He knew what she couldn’t admit out loud; he could read her mind like an open book.

“Please,” she said. “Just let me have this. Please just go.”

He knew better than to argue. He nodded, squeezed her hand, and left with the others.

Kitay was right. He knew what kind of absolution she sought from the killing fields. He knew that she needed to stay because if she seared the sight of what the Mugenese had done into her eyes, if she breathed the scent of half-rotted corpses, if she reminded herself why she had a reason to hate and keep hating, then it became easier to come to terms with what she had done to the longbow island.

It didn’t matter how shrill the screams of dying Mugenese boys sounded in her dreams. They were still monsters, heartless things who deserved everything she had ever done and would ever do to them.

That had to be her truth, or she would shatter.

She didn’t know how long she stood there. But when she finally moved to return to camp, the sun had disappeared entirely, and the uncovered graves had seared such a deep impression in her mind that every detail would remain forever. The arrangement of bones. How they curved and arched around one another. How they shone under the last rays of the dying sun.

You won’t forget, assured Altan. I won’t let you.

She pressed her eyes shut, took a deep breath, then turned back toward the village.

She made it two steps before she froze. Something gave her pause. She squinted at the trees. Yes—there it was, the flash of motion that had caught her eye the first time. Someone was running into the forest.

Rin dug her heels into the ground and gave chase.

“Hold it!”

She crashed through the trees, arms backlit with flame, casting hot light on the darkness all around her.

Then she stumbled to a halt. Her target had stopped—it wasn’t a soldier or spy but a little girl, crouched at the bottom of a shallow ravine, arms wrapped around her legs and head ducked down while her lips moved like she was counting numbers.

Someone had taught her to do this. Someone had drilled her in it. Rin had been taught the very same lesson as a little girl—if they are chasing you, if you cannot outrun them, find somewhere to hide and count until they’ve gone away.

“Hey.” She approached slowly, arms out, the fingers of her left hand splayed out in what she hoped was a nonthreatening gesture. “It’s okay.”

The girl shook her head and continued counting, eyes squeezed shut like if she couldn’t see Rin, then she might disappear.

“I’m not Mugenese.” Rin dragged her vowels out, trying to replicate an accent she’d long ago lost. “I’m a Rooster. One of you.”

The girl’s eyes opened. Slowly she lifted her head.

Rin stepped closer. “Are you alone?”

The girl shook her head.

“How many are you?”

“Three,” whispered the girl.

Rin saw another pair of eyes in the darkness, wide and terrified. They ducked behind a tree as soon as they caught her looking back at them.

She quickly pulled a larger ring of fire into the air around her, just enough to illuminate the clearing. It revealed two emaciated little girls staring up at her with naked fascination. Their eyes looked huge on their hollow faces.

“What are you doing?” Footsteps crashed through the thicket. Rin spun around. A third figure—the girls’ mother, or an older sister, she couldn’t tell—dashed into the clearing and reached for the girls’ wrists, dragging them away from Rin.

“Are you mad?” The woman shook the taller girl by the shoulders. “What were you thinking?”

“She was dressed in fire,” said the girl.

“What?”

The girl hadn’t stopped staring at Rin. “I wanted to look.”

“You’re in no danger,” Rin said quickly. “I’m Nikara, I’m from Tikany. I’m a Rooster. I’m here to protect you.”

But she already knew she didn’t have to explain. The woman’s eyes had widened in recognition, and she seemed to have realized, for the first time, that the flames lighting the clearing came not from a torch but from Rin’s skin.

The woman spoke in a whisper. “You’re the Speerly.”

“Yes.”

Her mouth worked for a few seconds before words came out. “Then are you—have they—”

“Yes,” Rin said. “They’re gone.”

“Truly?”

“Yes. They’re all dead. You’re safe.”

She saw no joy on the woman’s face, only a stark, stunned disbelief. Upon a closer look the woman wasn’t as old as Rin had thought. She was emaciated and terribly filthy, but beneath a thick layer of grime was the face of someone not so much older than herself.

“What are you doing in the forest?” Rin asked her.

“We ran,” said the woman. “As soon as we heard the Mugenese were coming. I’d heard what they do to Nikara women. I wasn’t going to—I mean, they weren’t—”

“They’re your sisters?”

“No,” said the woman. “Just two girls who lived in my alley. I tried to get more to come with me. They wouldn’t leave.”

“You were wise to go,” Rin said. “How have you survived all this time?”

The woman hesitated. Rin could read the lie assembling behind her eyes. The woman had an answer, she just wasn’t sure if she should speak it.

The smallest girl piped up. “The lady in the hut.”

The woman’s face tightened, which meant the girl had told the truth.

“What lady?” Rin asked.

“She protects us,” said the girl. “She knows things. She tells us when to hide and which roots we can eat and where to lay traps for birds. She said that as long as we obeyed her, then we would be safe.”

“Then she should have taken you far away from this place,” said Rin.

“She can’t. She won’t leave here.”

Rin felt a sudden, scorching suspicion of who this lady was.

“And why can’t she leave?” she asked.

“Shush,” the woman told the girl, but the girl kept speaking.

“Because she says she lost her daughter in the Dragon King’s palace, and she’s waiting for her to come back.”

Rin’s mouth filled with the taste of blood. Her knees buckled.

What is she doing here?

The woman put a tentative hand on Rin’s elbow. “Are—are you all right?”

“She’s here,” Rin murmured. The words felt thick and coppery on her tongue. “Take me to her.”

She had to go. She had no choice. She was a fly caught in a web; she was a hypnotized mouse crawling straight into a viper’s jaws. She could not walk away now, not until she knew what Su Daji wanted.

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