The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

Safely ensconced in a heavily guarded house behind the barracks, Rin slept better that night than any night she could remember in years. She didn’t need laudanum to knock herself unconscious. She didn’t wake up multiple times in the night, sweaty and shivering, straining to hear a dirigible attack she’d only imagined. She didn’t see Altan, didn’t see the Cike, didn’t see Speer. The moment she lay down she slid into a deep, dreamless sleep, and didn’t awake until warm rays of sunlight crept over her face.

She was twenty-one years old and it was the first night she could remember that she could close her eyes without fearing for her life.

In the morning she stood up, combed the tangles out of her hair with her fingers, and stared at herself in front of the mirror. She worked at the muscles in her face until she looked composed. Assured. Ready. Leaders couldn’t display doubt. When she walked out that door, she was their general.

And then what? asked Altan’s voice. Their Empress? Their President? Their Queen? Rin didn’t know. She and Kitay had never discussed what kind of regime they might replace the Republic with. This whole time, they had—rather naively, she now realized—assumed that once they won, life in the Empire could go back to normal.

But there was no normal. In the span of a year they had smashed apart everything that was normal. Now there were no Warlords, no Empresses, and no Presidents. Just a great, big, beautiful, and shattered country, held together by common awe of a single god.

She was just General Fang for now, she decided. She didn’t have a kingdom to rule yet. Not until the Hesperians had been decisively defeated.

She walked out of the house. Five guards stood waiting outside her door, ready to escort her across the city. When they reached the palace, she had to stop and remind herself that she wasn’t dreaming. Ever since the start of the campaign from Ruijin, she’d spent so long thinking about what would happen if she were in charge that it seemed unreal that she was truly standing here, about to seize the levers of power.

Never mind that she had been in here only yesterday, pulling artifacts off the walls like she owned the place—because she did own the place. Yesterday was about a takeover, about eradicating the last traces of Republican authority. Today was the first day of the rest of Nikara history.

“You good?” Kitay asked.

“Yeah,” she breathed. “Just—trying not to forget this.”

She stepped over the threshold. Blood rushed to her head. She felt buoyant, weightless. The scales of everything had shifted. The decrees she wrote in that palace would ripple across the country. The rules she conceived would become law.

Overnight, she had become as close to a god as a mortal could be.

I’ve reached behind the canvas, she thought. And now I hold the brush.

Rin ran her administration not from the grand, empty great hall—that room was too cavernous, too intimidating—but from Vaisra’s smaller war office, which was furnished with only a single spare table and several uncomfortable hard-backed chairs. She couldn’t have sat on the palace throne—it was too grand, too dauntingly official. She wasn’t ready to play the role of Empress yet. But she felt comfortable in this cramped, undecorated chamber. She’d fought campaigns from this room before; it felt like the most natural thing in the world to do so again. Sitting at this table with Kitay to her right and Venka to her left, she didn’t feel like such an imposter. This was just a much nicer version of her tent.

This is not right, said a small voice in the back of her mind. This is insane.

But what in the past two years had not been insane? She had leveled a country. She’d destroyed the Trifecta. She’d commanded an army. She’d become, for all intents and purposes, a living god.

If she could do that, why could she not run a country?

The first thing on their agenda that morning was deciding what to do about Nezha. Rin’s scouts reported that he’d fled the country along with his closest officers and advisers, all packed into every last merchant skimmer and fishing dinghy that the Republic could scrounge together.

“Where have they gone?” Rin asked. “Ankhiluun? Moag won’t put him up.”

Kitay lowered the last page of the dispatch. “A little farther east.”

“Not the longbow island,” she said. “The air there is still poison.”

He gave her an odd look. “Rin, he’s on Speer.”

She couldn’t stop herself; she flinched.

So Nezha had taken refuge on the Dead Island.

It made sense. He couldn’t go all the way to Hesperia; that was as good as a surrender. But he must have known that he wasn’t safe anywhere on the mainland. If he wanted to stay alive, he needed to put an ocean between them.

“That’s cute,” she said with as much calm as she could manage. She saw them both watching her; she couldn’t let them think she was rattled. Nezha had certainly chosen Speer to aggravate her. She could just hear the taunts in his voice. You might have everything, but I have your home. I have the last piece of territory that you don’t control.

And she did feel a flicker of irritation, a sharp jolt of humiliation in her back where once he’d twisted a blade. But that was all she felt—annoyance. No fear, no panic. Escaping to Speer was an annoying move, but it was also the ultimate sign of weakness. Nezha had no cards left. He’d lost his capital and his fleet. He ruled a Republic in name only, and he’d been relegated to a cursed, desiccated island where nothing lived and where hardly anything grew. All he could do was taunt.

Moreover, according to dispatches, he’d lost the faith of his allies. The Hesperians didn’t listen to him anymore. The Consortium had chosen to cut their losses.

“He’s not received any reinforcements since Arlong fell,” Venka read. “And the Hesperians stripped his authority to command ground troops. He’s only got Nikara infantry at his disposal now, and a third of those numbers deserted after Arlong.” She glanced up from the report. “Incredible. You think the Consortium’s finished?”

“Perhaps for now—” Kitay began, at the same moment that Rin said, “Absolutely not.”

“They’ve withdrawn all their forces,” Kitay said.

“They’ll come back,” Rin said.

“Perhaps in a few months,” Kitay said. “But I think they’ve suffered more losses than they—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rin said. “They’ll be back as soon as they possibly can. Could be days, could be weeks. But they’re going to hit back, hard, and we’ve got to be prepared. I told you what Petra said. They don’t merely think we’re just—just obstacles to trade. We’re not inconveniences to them. They think we’re an existential threat. And they won’t stop until we’re dust.”

She looked around the table. “We’re not done fighting. You all understand this, don’t you? They didn’t request an armistice. They haven’t sent diplomats. We don’t have a peace, we’ve only got a reprieve, and we don’t know how long it’ll last. We can’t just sit around and wait for it. We’ve got to strike first.”

If Rin had her way, the rest of the day would have been occupied with military remobilization. She wanted to open the ranks for enlistment. She wanted to set up training camps in the fields to plunder Arlong for Hesperian military technology and get her troops learning how to use it.

But her first priority had to be civil reconstruction. For armies were fueled by cities, and the city was on the verge of falling apart.

They upturned Arlong in a flurry of restoration. Work teams deployed to the beaches to run rescue operations on the settlements the Dragon had flooded. Triage centers opened across the city to treat civilians who had been injured in the battle and subsequent occupation. Lines formed before the public kitchens and stretched around the canals, intimidating crowds composed of thousands upon thousands of people whom she was now responsible for feeding.

Governance required a wholly different set of skills from commanding an army, very few of which Rin possessed. She didn’t know the first thing about civil administration, yet suddenly a million mundane tasks demanded her immediate attention. Relocation for civilians whose homes were underwater. Law enforcement against looting and pillaging. Finding caretakers for children whose parents were dead or missing. It was going to be a gargantuan task just to restore the city to a minimal level of functionality, and its difficulty was compounded by the fact that the public officers normally responsible for keeping the city running were either dead, imprisoned, or had fled with Nezha to Speer.

Rin was astonished they got anything done. She certainly couldn’t have gotten through that first morning without Kitay, who seemed undaunted by the impossibility of their mission, who calmly summoned staff and designated responsibilities like he knew exactly where everything was and what needed to be done.

Still, that morning did not quite seem real. It felt like a dream. It was absurd, the fact that the three of them were running a city. Her mind kept ricocheting between the wildly arrogant conviction that this was fine, they were managing, and doing a better job of it than any of Arlong’s corrupt leadership ever had; and the crippling fear that they weren’t qualified for this at all because they were just soldiers, just kids who hadn’t even graduated from Sinegard, and so wholly unprepared for the task of ruling that the city was going to collapse around them any minute. Despite Kitay’s astounding competency, their problems only kept stacking up. The moment they resolved one issue, they received reports of a dozen more. It felt as if they were trying to plug a dam with their fingertips while water kept bursting forth around them. If they strayed off focus for even one minute, Rin feared, they’d drown.

By midmorning she wanted to curl up and cry, I don’t want this, I can’t do this; wanted to hand off her responsibilities to an adult.

But you waged this war, Altan reminded her. You wanted to be in charge. And now you are. Don’t fuck it up.

But every time she got her thoughts back in order, she remembered that it wasn’t just Arlong at stake—it was the country.

And Arlong’s problems paled in comparison to what was going on across Nikan. The Republic had been holding together worse than she’d thought. Grain deficiencies plagued every province. The livestock trade was nearly nonexistent; it had been wrecked by the Mugenese invasion, and the following civil war had afforded it no space to recover. Fish, a staple in the southeast, was in short supply since Daji had poisoned the rivers a year ago. Rates of infectious diseases were skyrocketing. Almost every part of the country was suffering epidemics of typhus, malaria, dysentery, and—in a remote village in Rat Province—unprecedented cases of leprosy. These diseases affected rural populations on a cyclical schedule, but the tumult of war had uprooted entire communities and forced masses of people—many of whom had never been in contact with one another before—into smaller, cramped spaces. Infections had exploded as a result. Hesperian medicine had helped, to some extent. That wasn’t available anymore.

Then there were the normal by-products of war. Mass displacement. Rampant banditry. Trade routes were no longer safe; entire economies had ceased to function. The normal flow of goods, that crucial circulation that kept the Empire running, had broken down and would require months, if not years, to restore.

Rin wouldn’t have known about half of these issues if she hadn’t learned about them from Nezha’s private papers—a stack of neat, startlingly comprehensive accounts of every plea for government assistance over the last six months, kept fastidiously in elegant, oddly feminine handwriting. Despite herself, Rin found them immensely helpful. She spent hours poring over the scrolls, marking down his reflections and suggested solutions. They displayed the thoughts of someone trained for statesmanship since he could read. A distressing number of his proposals were better than anything she or Kitay could have thought of.

“I can’t believe he left all this behind,” she said. “They’re not that heavy. He could have done a lot more harm by taking them with him. You think they’re sabotage?”

Kitay looked unconvinced. “Maybe.”

No, they both knew that wasn’t true. The notes were too detailed, too clearly compiled over months of difficult rule, to be staged overnight. And too many of Nezha’s warnings—the importance of dam reconstruction, of vigilant canal traffic management—had turned out to be salient.

“Or,” Kitay ventured, “he’s trying to help you out. Or at least, he’s trying to keep the city’s disasters to a minimum.”

Rin hated that explanation. She didn’t want to credit Nezha with that generosity. It painted a different picture of Nezha—not as the vicious, opportunistic bootlicker to the Hesperians that she’d been rallying against this entire campaign, but as a leader genuinely trying his best. It made her think of the tired boy in the cell. The frightened boy in the river.

It made it so much harder to fixate on planning his death.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said curtly. “Nezha couldn’t hold on to his city, let alone a country. These are our problems now. Pass me that page.”

They were deep into the afternoon before they broke for a midday meal, and only then because Kitay’s stomach began rumbling so loudly the distraction became unbearable. Rin had been so absorbed in Nezha’s documents, she’d forgotten she was hungry until a junior officer set plates of steamed scallion buns, boiled fish with chilis, and braised cabbage before them. Then she was ravenous.

“Hold on,” Kitay said, just as Rin reached for a bun. “Who cooked this?”

“Palace staff,” said the officer who’d brought it in.

“They’re still working the kitchens?” Venka asked.

“You said to keep all palace staff in their positions if they wished to defect,” said the officer. “We’re quite sure the food is safe. We had guards watching when they prepared it.”

Rin stared at the array of dishes, amazed. It hadn’t really hit her, not until then, that she ruled Nikan. She ruled Nikan, which meant all the privileges along with the responsibilities. She had an entire palace staff waiting on her. She’d never have to cook her own meals again.

But Kitay didn’t look quite as delighted. Just as she lifted a morsel of fish to her mouth, he slapped the chopsticks from her hand. “Don’t eat that.”

“But he said—”

“I don’t care what he said.” He dropped his voice so the officer couldn’t overhear. “You don’t know who cooked this. You don’t know how it got here. And we certainly didn’t request lunch, which means either this kitchen staff had a remarkably quick change of heart, or someone had a vested interested in feeding us.”

“General?” The officer shifted from foot to foot. “Is there something you—”

“Bring us an animal,” Kitay told him.

“Sir?”

“A dog, ideally, or a cat. The first pet you can find should do. Be quick.”

The officer returned twenty-five minutes later with a small, fluffy white creature with perky ears, head drooping under the weight of an ornate collar of gold and jade. This breed, Rin thought, must have been very popular with Nikara aristocracy; it resembled very much the pups she’d once seen at Kitay’s estate.

Kitay seemed to have noticed this, too; he winced as the officers set the dog on the floor.

“The servants said this used to belong to the Lady Saikhara,” said the guard. “They call it Binbin.”

“Good gods,” Venka muttered. “Don’t tell us its name.”

It was over quickly. The dog set eagerly at the boiled fish, but it had barely swallowed two bites before it stepped back and began to whine piteously.

Kitay started forward, but Rin held him back. “It could bite.”

They remained in their seats, watching as the dog slumped to the floor, sides heaving. Its stubby front paws scrabbled at its bloated stomach, as if trying to scratch out some parasite gnawing at its innards. Gradually its movements grew weak, then listless. It whimpered once and fell silent. It seemed to take an eternity for it to stop twitching.

Rin felt a violent wave of nausea. She was no longer remotely hungry.

“Arrest the kitchen staff,” Kitay ordered calmly. “Detain them in separate rooms and keep them isolated until we’ve time to interrogate them.”

“Yes, sir.”

The officer left. The door slammed shut. Kitay turned to Venka. “It could’ve been—”

“I know,” Venka said curtly. “I’m on it.”

She stood up, plucked her bow off the table, and left the room—presumably to see whether the officer would carry out his orders or flee.

She and Kitay sat in stunned silence. Kitay’s temporary calm had evaporated—he was staring at the dishes, blinking very rapidly, mouth half-open as if unsure what to say. Rin, too, felt lost in a fog of panic. The betrayal had been so sudden, so unexpected, her overriding thought was fury at her sheer stupidity, for accepting food from the kitchens without even stopping to think.

Someone was trying to kill her. Someone was trying to kill her in the most obvious way possible, and they’d almost succeeded.

She realized then that she could never feel safe in her own office again.

The door creaked open.

Rin jumped. “What is it?”

It was a messenger. He hesitated, taking in their distressed faces, and then tentatively lifted a scroll in Rin’s direction. “There’s, ah, a missive.”

“From who?” Kitay asked.

“It’s sealed with the House of—”

“Bring it here,” Rin said curtly. “Then get out.”

The moment the door swung closed, she ripped the scroll open with her teeth. She didn’t know why her heart was hammering so loudly, why she still felt a surge of fearful anticipation even though Nezha had lost, had fled, had retreated so far out into the ocean that he couldn’t possibly threaten her here.

Calm down, she told herself. This is nothing. He has nothing. Just a formality from a defeated foe.

Hello, Rin. Hope you’re enjoying the palace. Did you take my old rooms?

You’ll have realized by now, I think, that this country is in deep shit. Let me guess, Kitay’s been going through agricultural reports all morning. He’s probably losing his mind over the inconsistencies. Here’s a hint—the smarter magistrates always underreport their crop yields to get more subsidies. Or they might really just be starving. Hard to know, huh?

“That patronizing shit,” Rin muttered.

“Hold on.” Kitay was already on the second page. He skimmed the bottom, blinked, and then handed it to her. “Keep reading.”

The kitchen staff are good, but you’ll find that several are quite loyal to my family. I hope you didn’t eat the lunch.

Rin’s mouth went dry. He couldn’t know that. How did he know that?

Don’t punish them all. It’ll either be the head cook, Hairui, or his assistant. The others don’t have a backbone. I mean, knowing you, you’ve probably had them all thrown in prison. But at least let Minmin and Little Xing back in the kitchens. They make excellent steamed buns. And you like those, don’t you?

She lowered the letter. She suddenly found it hard to breathe; the walls seemed to constrict around her, the air deprived of oxygen.

Someone’s spying on us.

“Nezha’s not on Speer,” she said. “He’s here.”

“He can’t be,” Kitay said. “Our scouts saw him leaving—”

“That means nothing. He could have snuck back. He controls the fucking water, Kitay, you don’t think he could have traveled up the river in one night? He’s watching us—”

“There’s no place for him to go,” Kitay said. “That’d be suicide. Come on, Rin—what, do you think he’s crouched in a shack somewhere in the city? Peeking out at you from behind corners?”

“He knows about the granaries.” Her pitch shot up several octaves. “He knows about the fucking cooks! Pray tell, Kitay, how the fuck would he know that unless he—”

“Because it’s the easiest guess in the world,” Kitay said. “And he knows about the granaries because those were the same problems that he’s been dealing with for months. Up until we arrived, feeding this country was his problem. He doesn’t have eyes over your shoulder, he’s just trying to rattle you. Don’t let him win.”

Rin shot him an incredulous look. “I think you’re giving quite a lot of credit to his capabilities for conjecture.”

“And I think you’re massively overestimating how much Nezha wants to die,” Kitay said. “He’s not hiding in the city. That’s certain suicide. He’s got scouts, yes, but we’re in his fucking capital—of course people are going to report to him.”

“Then he’ll know—”

“So he’ll know. We’ve just got to operate assuming Nezha has a good idea of what we’re planning. That’s inevitable with regimes in power—you can’t keep your operations secret for long, there are too many people involved. In the end, it won’t matter. We’ve got too many advantages. You just can’t squander them by freaking the fuck out.”

She forced herself to take several deep, shaky breaths. Gradually, her pulse slowed. The darkness creeping at the edges of her vision faded away. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to organize her thoughts, trying to take stock of the problem.

She knew she had enemies in Arlong. She’d known that from the start. She’d had no choice but to ask many of the former administrative personnel to stay on in their roles, simply because she had no qualified staff who could fill their positions. She didn’t know how to run a country, so she’d had to employ Republicans who did. They’d all nominally defected to her regime, of course, but how many of them were secretly plotting against her? How many was Nezha still in correspondence with? How many tiny traps had he left in his wake?

Her breathing quickened. The panic returned; her vision ebbed black. She felt a low, creeping dread, a prickling under her skin as if a million ants were crawling over her body.

It didn’t go away. It persisted throughout the afternoon, even after they’d interrogated the kitchen staff and executed the cook in charge. It intensified into a flurry of symptoms: a debilitating fatigue; a throbbing headache that developed as her eyes grew strained, darting around for shadows where they didn’t exist.

The palace didn’t seem such an empty playground anymore. It seemed a house of infinite darkness, crowded with thousands of enemies that she couldn’t see or anticipate.

“I know,” Kitay said, every time she voiced her fears. “I’m scared, too. But that’s ruling, Rin. There’s always someone who doesn’t want you on the throne. But we’ve just got to keep going. We can’t let go of the reins. There’s no one else.”

The days stretched on. Slowly, incredibly, the business of city administration stopped feeling like a fever dream and started feeling more like a familiar duty as they fell into a routine—they woke an hour before sunrise, sifted through intelligence reports during the early hours of the morning, spent the afternoon checking in on reconstruction projects they’d set underway, and put out fires as they arose throughout the day.

They hadn’t brought Arlong back to normal. Not even close. Most of the civilian population was still displaced, camping out in makeshift shacks on the same grounds where once Vaisra had corralled all the southern refugees. Food shortages were a persistent problem. The communal kitchens always ran out of food long before everyone in the line was served. There simply weren’t enough rations, and Rin didn’t have a clue where they could extract more on short notice. Their best hope was to wait for Moag’s missives and hope she could convert boatloads of Nikara antiques into smuggled Hesperian grain.

But somehow, as days turned into weeks, their hold on the city seemed to stabilize. The civil administration, comprising southern soldiers with no experience and Republican officials who had to be guarded at all times, became semifunctional and self-sustaining. Some semblance of order had been restored to the city. Fights and riots no longer broke out on the streets. All Republican soldiers who hadn’t fled had either stopped trying to cause trouble or had been caught and locked in prison. Arlong had not quite welcomed the south with open arms, but it seemed to have reluctantly accepted its new government.

Those seemed like tentative signs of progress. Or that was, at least, the lie Rin and Kitay told themselves, to avoid facing the crushing pressure of the fact that they were children, unprepared and unqualified, juggling a towering edifice that could collapse at any minute.

Rin, Kitay, and Venka always holed up in the war room long past sunset. As the moon crept across the sky, they went from slouching at the table to sitting on the floor to lying by the hearth, swigging at bottles of sorghum wine recovered from Vaisra’s private cellars, all pretense of work forgotten.

All three of them had started drinking religiously. It felt like a compulsion; by the end of the day, alcohol seemed as necessary as eating or drinking water. It was the only thing that took the edge off the debilitating stress that pounded their temples. In those hours, they lurched to the opposite of anxiety. They became temporary, private megalomaniacs. They fantasized about everything they would change about the Empire once they’d gotten it into their order. The future was full of sandcastles, flimsy prospects to be destroyed and rebuilt at will.

“We’ll ban child marriage,” Rin declared. “We’ll make matchmaking illegal until all parties are at least sixteen. We’ll make education mandatory. And we’ll need an officers’ school, obviously—”

“You’re going to reinstate Sinegard?” Venka asked.

“Not at Sinegard,” Kitay said. “That place has too much history. We’ll build a new school, somewhere down south. And we’ll revamp the whole curriculum—more emphasis on Strategy and Linguistics, less focus on Combat . . .”

“You can’t get rid of Combat,” Venka said.

“We can get rid of Combat the way Jun taught it,” Rin said. “Martial arts don’t belong on the battlefield, they belong on an opera stage. We have to teach a curriculum geared for modern warfare. Artillery—arquebuses, cannons, the whole gamut.”

“I want a dirigible division,” Venka said.

“We’ll get you one,” Kitay vowed.

“I want a dozen. All equipped with state-of-the-art cannons.”

“Whatever you like.”

As the night drew on, their ideas always went from bold to wishful to simply absurd. Kitay wanted to issue a standardized set of abacuses because pea-size beads, apparently, made better clacking noises. Venka wanted to ban intricate, heavy hair ornaments required by women of aristocracy on the grounds that they strained the neck, as well as the black, double-flapped headwear favored by northern bureaucrats on the grounds that they were ugly.

Those last few proposals were trivial, so obviously not worth their time. But it still thrilled them, tossing out ideas as if they had the power to speak them into being. And then remembering that they did, they fucking did, because they owned this country now and everyone had to do what they said.

“I want free tuition at all the scholars’ academies,” Rin said.

“I want the punishment for forced sexual intercourse to be castration,” Venka said.

“I want multiple copies made of every ancient text in the archives that will be disseminated to each of the top universities to prevent knowledge decay,” Kitay said.

And they could have it all. Because fuck it—they were in charge now; absurd as it was, they sat on the throne at Arlong, and what they said was law.

“I am the force of creation,” Rin murmured as she stared at the ceiling and watched it spin. Vaisra’s sorghum wine burned sweet and sour on her tongue; she wanted to swig more of it, just to feel her insides blaze. “I am the end and the beginning. The world is a painting and I hold the brush. I am a god.”

But morning always came and, along with the stabbing headaches of the previous night’s indulgences, returned the exhaustion, exasperation, and mounting despair that came with trying to repair a country that had spent the majority of its history at war.

Every bit of progress they made in Arlong, it seemed, was constantly being undone by bad news from the rest of the country. Bandit attacks were rampant. Epidemics were getting worse. Power vacuums had sprung up throughout the southeastern provinces Rin’s army had conquered, and since she didn’t have enough troops to deploy nationwide to cement her regime, a dozen pockets of local rebellion were forming that she’d later have to put down.

The biggest emergency was food. They were arguing about food in the war room. Dwindling grain was the subject of every missive they received from outlying cities, was the cause of almost every riot Rin’s troops had to quell. Until now Arlong had been fed by regular shipments of Hesperian supplies, and now those were gone.

Even Kitay couldn’t find a solution. No amount of juggling resources, diplomacy, or clever reorganization could mask the fact that the grain stores simply were not there.

Moag, who had been Rin’s best option, sent back a brief letter quashing their hopes.

No can do, little Speerly, she wrote. Can’t get you that much grain in such a short time frame. And Arlong’s treasures aren’t trading for much on the market right now. First of all, they’re hard to get past the embargo when they’re so obviously Nikara; second, Yin family artifacts have gone down quite a bit in value. I’m sure you can see why. Keep looking, I’m sure you’ll find something they want.

The perverse upside to the impending famine was that enlistment numbers shot up, since army recruits were the only ones guaranteed to receive two full rations a day. But then, of course, once this became widespread knowledge, fights and protests started breaking out around the barracks over this perceived injustice.

This, Rin thought, was a dreadfully apt metaphor for her frustrations with the city. For why shouldn’t the army receive priority? The strength of their defenses was critical, now more than ever—why couldn’t anyone else see that?

Every endless meeting, every redundant conversation they had about how to feed the city felt much more frustrating because Rin couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all a mere distraction. That she was wasting her time trying to restore a broken country back to functionality, when what clearly should have been prioritized was driving her victory home.

She was so close to the end, she could nearly taste it.

One more campaign. One more battle. Then she’d be the only one left, sitting on her throne in the south, set up to remake this broken country to her liking.

But this wasn’t about her personal ambitions. This was about the threat, the ever-looming threat that no one else seemed to realize was so much more frightening than famine.

The Hesperians were coming back.

Why wouldn’t they? And why wouldn’t they strike now, when they knew Rin’s incipient regime was on such shaky ground? If Rin led the Hesperians, she would call for additional airships and launch a counterstrike as soon as she could, before the Nikara could rebuild their army.

Rin didn’t have artillery forces capable of taking down dirigibles. She had only half of her original numbers, now that Cholang and his troops had retreated home to Dog Province. She had no other offensive shamans; the Trifecta were gone, Dulin and Pipaji were dead. She didn’t have anything but fire with which to stop the west, and she didn’t know if she alone was enough.

In her dreams she saw the dirigibles again, a buzzing horde that blotted out the sky, more than she could count. They descended in full force on Nikara shores, circling the air above her. She saw the faces of their pilots: uniformly pale, demonic blue eyes laughing at her as they trained their cannons in her direction.

And before she could lift her arms to the sky, they opened fire. The world erupted in scattered dirt and orange flame, and for all her bravado, all she could do was kneel on the ground, wrap her arms around her head, and hope that death came quickly.

“Rin.” Kitay shook her by the shoulders. “Wake up.”

She tasted blood in her mouth. Had she bitten her tongue? She turned to the side, spat, and winced at the crimson splatter on her sheets.

“What?” she asked, suddenly afraid. “Was there—”

“Nothing’s happened,” he said. He pulled down his lip. Angry scars dotted the inside of his mouth. “But you’re hurting me.”

“Gods.” She felt a twist of guilt. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Kitay rubbed at his cheek and yawned. “Just—try to go back to sleep.”

It struck her then how incredibly tired he looked, how shrunken and diminished, so wholly different from the confident, authoritative persona he acquired during the daytime.

That scared her. It seemed like physical evidence that everything was, after all, a farce. That they were pretenders to the throne, playing at competency, while their victory slipped from their fingers.

The Empire was fracturing. Their people were starving. The Hesperians were going to return, and they had nothing with which to stop them.

She reached for his fingers. “Kitay.”

He squeezed her hand in his. He looked so young. He looked so scared. “I know.”

Worst of all, the letters did not stop.

They were relentless. Nezha, apparently, was trying to wage psychological warfare through a sheer barrage of scrolls. They appeared outside her quarters. They found their way into her intelligence reports. They kept showing up with her meals. Rin had changed the kitchen staff so many times that the quality of food was now decidedly poor, but each day at noon a scroll invariably appeared tucked underneath her porridge bowl.

One morning a letter showed up on her pillow, and Rin immediately launched a manhunt in an attempt to find the messenger. But a thorough search of the entire barracks revealed no leads. Eventually she stopped trying to root out suspected couriers—that would have required replacing nearly her entire staff—and started venting by ripping up and burning Nezha’s scrolls instead.

But only after she read them. She always had to read them first. She really should have just burned them without looking—she knew that reading them just meant she was playing into his game. But she couldn’t help it. She had to know what he knew.

She could never quite pin down their tone. Sometimes they were mocking and patronizing—he knew she had no aptitude for governance, and he was clearly relishing this fact. But sometimes they were genuinely helpful.

Lao Ho’s a good man to supervise regional taxation if you haven’t thrown him in prison yet. And tell Kitay that as much as he wants to reorganize the labeling system for the old annals in the library, we’ve kept them that way for a reason. The first numerals stand for relative importance, not scroll size. Don’t let him get confused.

He alternated constantly between writing taunts and delivering pieces of accurate, important information. Rin couldn’t grasp what was going on in his mind. Was he just playing games? If so, it was working—the taunts redoubled her frustrations, made her furious that their mistakes were so visible they were obvious all the way across the strait; the pieces of advice were even more torturous, because she never knew whether to take them at face value, and spent so much time second-guessing his tips, trying to discover his underlying motives, that she got less done than if she’d never read them at all.

He always ended his letters with the same offer. Come to the negotiating table. The Hesperians always produce grain at a surplus—they’ve got machines doing the planting for them. They have food aid to spare. Just make a few concessions and you’ve got it.

It never sounded the slightest bit more attractive. The more missives she received, the more condescending they became.

Keep your grain, she wanted to write back. I’d rather choke than let you feed me. I’d rather starve to death than take anything from your hands.

But she bit down the impulse. If she sent Nezha any response, then he’d know she’d been reading his letters.

But he must have known anyways. Every missive was terrifyingly omniscient. He identified so clearly the same issues they were struggling with that he might have been standing over their shoulders in the war room. She knew he was trying to make her paranoid, but it worked. She didn’t feel safe in her own room anymore. She couldn’t get any rest—she and Kitay had to start sleeping in shifts again, guarding each other in the same bed, otherwise she was too overcome with anxiety to even close her eyes. She could hardly focus anywhere she went; her eyes were too busy darting about, watching for spies or assassins. She started spending each day holed up in the war room because it was the only place where she felt safe, with the only window three floors up, and its single door guarded by a dozen handpicked soldiers.

“You need to stop reading those,” Venka said.

Rin was staring at the latest missive, glaring at the characters until they felt seared into her eyelids, as if she could decipher Nezha’s intent if she stared at them long enough.

“Put that down, Rin. He’s just fucking with you.”

“No, he’s not.” Rin pointed. “Look. He knows we tried getting contraband grain from Moag. He knows—”

“Of course he knows,” Venka said. “That’s an obvious guess; what else are we going to try? You’re only letting him win when you read those. He’s just messing with you because he’s exiled on an island in bum-fuck nowhere and can’t do anything except squeal for attention—”

“Squeal for attention.” Rin lowered the scroll. “That’s an interesting phrase.”

There was an awkward silence. Kitay glanced up from a stack of trade reports, brows lifted.

Venka blinked. “Sorry?”

For a moment Rin just stared at her, expression blank, while her mind spun to catch up to the conclusion she’d just formed.

No cards left to play. She’d just read those words in Nezha’s handwriting—they’d caught her eye because it had been such a specific phrasing. I’m sure you think I’m just squealing for attention, but take a look at the ledgers and you’ll know I’m right. It hadn’t been in any of Nezha’s previous letters; she would have remembered it. And Venka hadn’t yet read the one she was holding in her hand, unless—

Unless.

The room seemed to dim. Rin narrowed her eyes. “How did you know that Nezha was going to make a stand at Xuzhou?”

Venka’s throat pulsed. “What do you mean?”

“Answer the question.”

“We intercepted their messengers, I told you—”

“You’re very good at that,” Rin said.

She saw the muscles in Venka’s face working, as if she couldn’t decide whether to smile and accept the compliment. She looked scared. Did that mean she was lying? It had to—what other reason did she have to be afraid?

“Answer this.” Rin stood up. “How do you think Nezha knew we were trying to reach the Trifecta?”

Venka’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “I don’t understand.”

“I think you do.” Rin took a step toward her. Her ears were ringing. Her voice dropped low. “Do you know how many people knew about that plan? Five. Me, Kitay, Master Jiang, the Vipress, and you.”

Venka stepped back. “I don’t know what—”

“Rin,” Kitay interrupted. “Don’t do this. Let’s talk—”

Rin ignored him. “I have another question.” She wouldn’t give Venka a chance to collect her thoughts, to spin together a cover. She wanted to launch all her suspicions at once, to build a mounting case from every angle until Venka cracked from the pressure. “Why didn’t you tell us Nezha was going to bomb Tikany?”

Venka shot her an incredulous look. “How the fuck would I have known about that?”

“You made us think that we were safe once we’d taken the Beehive,” Rin said. “You told me Nezha was nowhere close to launching a southern strike. You said he was ill.”

“Because he was!” Venka’s voice rose several octaves in pitch. “Everyone was gossiping about it, I wouldn’t make that up—”

Kitay grasped Rin’s elbow. “That’s enough—”

Rin shook her arm from his grasp. “And yet two weeks later he was in Tikany, miraculously cured. Answer this, Venka: Why did they leave you alive in the Anvil? The Southern Army was under siege for months, but you came out just fine. Why?”

Venka’s cheeks went a pale, furious white. “This is bullshit.”

“Answer the question.”

“You think I’m a spy? Me?”

“Why did you leave Arlong that night?” Rin pressed.

Venka threw her hands up. “What night?”

“In Arlong. The night we escaped. We all had reasons to go, we were all running for our lives, except you. No one was coming after you. So why did you leave?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Venka snapped. “I left for you.”

“And why would you do that?” Rin pressed. This was all so obvious now; the pieces fit so well. Venka’s sudden change of heart, the implausibility of her motivations—the contradictions were so glaring, she was amazed she hadn’t seen it before. “You never liked me. You hated me at Sinegard; you thought I was dirt-skinned trash. You think all the south are dirt-skinned trash. What changed your mind?”

“This is fucking unbelievable,” Venka spat.

“No, what’s unbelievable is a Sinegardian aristocrat deciding to throw her lot in with southern rebels. How long has it been? Were you reporting to Nezha from the start?”

Kitay slammed a fist against the desk. “Rin, shut the fuck up.”

Rin was so startled by his vehemence that, despite herself, she fell silent.

“You’re exhausted.” Kitay grabbed the scroll from her hand and began ferociously ripping it to tiny, then tinier shreds. “You’re not reading these anymore. You’re giving Nezha exactly what he wants—”

“Or it could be I’ve just found his mole,” Rin said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped.

“You read that scroll, Kitay, you saw those words—”

“It’s a fucking turn of phrase—” Venka started.

“It’s a turn of phrase that only you used.” Rin jabbed a finger at her. “Because you wrote these, didn’t you? You’ve been drafting them all this time, laughing at us, watching us sweat—”

“You’re fucking crazy,” Venka said.

“Oh, I’m sure that’s what you want me to think,” Rin snarled. “You and Nezha both—”

Something shifted suddenly in Venka’s face. “Get down.”

Then she flung herself at Rin, arms reaching for her waist as if to pin her to the ground.

Rin hadn’t processed what she’d heard. She saw Venka advancing and her vision went red, locked into the fight response that had so far kept her alive, and instead of twisting and ducking to the ground, she grabbed Venka by the shoulders and brought her knee up against her thigh instead.

Afterward, she’d torture herself wondering whether it was her fault. She’d run through the list of all the things she should have done. Should have realized Venka’s last words were a warning, not a threat. Should have noticed Venka was unarmed, and that her hands weren’t going for Rin’s head and neck, the way they would have if Venka truly meant to hurt her. Should have seen that Venka’s face was contorted in fear, not anger.

Should have understood that Venka was trying to save her life.

But in that moment, she was so convinced that Venka was the traitor, that Venka was attacking her, that she didn’t notice the crossbow bolt in Venka’s neck until they’d both collapsed to the floor. Until after she’d already burned ridges into Venka’s shoulders. Until she realized that Venka was twitching, but she wasn’t getting up.

Too late, she noticed the figure in the window.

Another bolt shrieked through the air. Rin watched its path, helpless and terrified, but it missed Kitay by a yard. He dove under the table; the bolt buried its head in the doorframe.

Rin flung her palm at the window. Flames roared; the glass exploded. Through the blaze, she saw the dark-clothed figure tumbling through the air.

She wriggled out from under Venka’s body and ran toward the window. The assassin lay in a crumpled heap three floors below. He wasn’t stirring. Rin didn’t care. She pointed down, and a stream of flame shot toward the ground, licking hungrily around the corpse.

She thickened the flame, made it burn as hot as she was capable, until she couldn’t see the body anymore, just thick, roiling waves of orange under shimmering air. She didn’t want to preserve the assassin’s body. She knew who had sent him: either Nezha or the Gray Company or the two acting in tandem. There was no mystery to solve here; she’d learn nothing from interrogation. It might have been prudent to try, but in that moment, all she wanted was to watch something burn.