The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Trilogy #2)

When Rin returned to her private quarters, she locked the door carefully from the inside, sliding all four bolts into place, and propped a chair against the door for good measure. Then she lay back on her bed. She closed her eyes and tried to relax, to make herself internalize a brief sense of security. She was safe. She was with allies. No one was coming for her.

Sleep didn’t come. Something was missing.

It took her a moment to realize what it was. She was searching for that rocking feeling of the bed shifting over water, and it wasn’t there. The Seagrim was such a massive warship that its decks mimicked solid land. For once, she was on stable ground.

This was what she wanted, wasn’t it? She had a place to be and a place to go. She wasn’t drifting anymore, wasn’t desperately scrambling to put together plans she knew would likely fail.

She stared up at the ceiling, trying to will her racing heartbeat to slow down. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong—a deep-seated discomfort that wasn’t just the absence of rolling waves.

It began with a prickling feeling in her fingertips. Then a flush of heat started in her palms and crept up her arms to her chest. The headache began a minute after that, searing flashes of pain that made her grind her teeth.

And then fire started burning at the back of her eyelids.

She saw Speer and she saw the Federation. She saw ashes and bones blurred and melted into one, one lone figure striding toward her, slender and handsome, trident in hand.

“You stupid cunt,” Altan whispered. He reached forward. His hands made a necklace around her throat.

Her eyes flew open. She sat up and breathed in and out, deep and slow and desperate breaths, trying to quell her sudden swell of panic.

Then she realized what was wrong.

She had no access to opium on this ship.

No. Calm. Stay calm.

Once upon a time at Sinegard, back when Master Jiang had been trying to help her shut her mind to the Phoenix, he’d taught her techniques to clear her thoughts and disappear into a void that imitated nonexistence. He’d taught her how to think like she was dead.

She had shunned his lessons then. She tried to recall them now. She forced her mind through the mantras he’d made her repeat for hours. Nothingness. I am nothing. I do not exist. I feel nothing, I regret nothing . . . I am sand, I am dust, I am ash.

It didn’t work. Surges of panic kept breaking the calm. The prickling in her fingers intensified into twisting knives. She was on fire, every part of her burned excruciatingly, and Altan’s voice echoed from everywhere.

It should have been you.

She ran to the door, kicked the chair away, undid the locks, and ran barefoot out into the passageway. Stabs of pain pricked the backs of her eyes, made her vision spark and flash.

She squinted, struggling to see in the dim light. Nezha had said his cabin was at the end of the passage . . . so this one, it had to be . . . She banged frantically against the door until it opened and he appeared in the gap.

“Rin? What are you—”

She grabbed his shirt. “Where’s your physician?”

His eyebrows flew up. “Are you hurt?”

“Where?”

“First deck, third door to the right, but—”

She didn’t wait for him to finish before she started sprinting toward the stairs. She heard him running after her but she didn’t care; all that mattered was that she get some opium, or laudanum, or whatever was on board.

But the physician wouldn’t let her into his office. He blocked the entrance with his body, one hand against the doorframe, the other clenched on the door handle.

“Dragon Warlord’s orders.” He sounded like he’d been expecting her. “I’m not to give you anything.”

“But I need—the pain, I can’t stand it, I need—”

He started to close the door. “You’ll have to do without.”

She jammed her foot in the door. “Just a little,” she begged. She didn’t care how pathetic she sounded, she just needed something. Anything. “Please.”

“I have my orders,” he said. “Nothing I can do.”

“Damn it!” she screamed. The physician flinched and slammed the door shut, but she was already running in the opposite direction, feet pounding as she neared the stairs.

She had to get to the top deck, away from everyone. She could feel the pricks of malicious memory pressing like shards of glass into her mind; bits and pieces of suppressed recollections that swam vividly before her eyes—corpses at Golyn Niis, corpses in the research facility, corpses at Speer, and the soldiers, all with Shiro’s face, jeering and pointing and laughing, and that made her so furious, made the rage build and build—

“Rin!”

Nezha had caught up with her. His hand grasped her shoulder. “What the hell—”

She whirled around. “Where’s your father?”

“I think he’s meeting with his admirals,” he stammered. “But I wouldn’t—”

She pushed past him. Nezha reached for her arm, but she ducked away and raced through the passageway and down the stairs to Vaisra’s office. She jiggled the handles—locked—then kicked furiously at the doors until they swung open from inside.

Vaisra didn’t look remotely surprised to see her.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “we’ll need some privacy, please.”

The men inside vacated their seats without a word. None of them looked at her. Vaisra pulled the doors shut, locked them, and turned around. “What can I do for you?”

“You told the physician not to give me opium,” Rin said.

“That is correct.”

Her voice trembled. “Look, asshole, I need my—”

“Oh, no, Runin.” Vaisra lifted a finger and wagged it, as if chiding a small child. “I should have mentioned. A last condition of your enlistment. I do not tolerate opium addicts in my army.”

“I’m not an addict, I just . . .” A fresh wave of pain racked her head and she broke off, wincing.

“You’re no good to me high. I need you alert. I need someone capable of infiltrating the Autumn Palace and killing the Empress, not some opium-riddled sack of shit.”

“You don’t get it,” she said. “If you don’t drug me, I will incinerate everyone on this ship.”

He shrugged. “Then we’ll throw you overboard.”

She could only stare at him. This made no sense to her. How could he remain so infuriatingly calm? Why wasn’t he caving in, cowering in terror? This wasn’t how it was supposed to work—she was supposed to threaten him and he was supposed to do what she wanted, that was always how it worked—

Why hadn’t she scared him?

Desperate, she resorted to begging. “You don’t know how much this hurts. It’s in my mind—the god is always in my mind, and it hurts . . .”

“It’s not the god.” Vaisra stood up and crossed the room toward her. “It’s the anger. And it’s your fear. You’ve seen battle for the first time, and your nerves can’t shut down. You’re frightened all the time. You think everyone’s out to get you, and you want them to be out to get you because then that’ll give you an excuse to hurt them. That’s not a Speerly problem, it’s a universal experience of soldiers. And you can’t cure it with opium. There’s no running from it.”

“Then what—”

He put his hands on her shoulders. “You face it. You accept that it’s your reality now. You fight it.”

Couldn’t he understand that she’d tried? Did he think it was easy? “No,” she said. “I need—”

He cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

Rin’s tongue felt terribly heavy in her mouth. Sweat broke out over her body; she could see it beading on her hands.

He raised his voice. “Are you contradicting my orders?”

She took a shuddering breath. “I—I can’t. Fight it.”

“Ah, Runin. You don’t understand. You’re my soldier now. You follow orders. I tell you to jump, you ask how high.”

“But I can’t,” she repeated, frustrated.

Vaisra lifted his left hand, briefly examined his knuckles, and then slammed the back of his hand across her face.

She stumbled backward, more from the shock than the force. Her face registered no pain, only an intense sting, like she’d walked straight into a bolt of lightning. She touched a finger to her lip. It came away bloody.

“You hit me,” she said, dazed.

He grasped her chin tightly in his fingers and forced her to look up at him. She was too stunned to feel any rage. She wasn’t angry, she was only afraid. No one dared to touch her like this. No one had for a long time.

No one since Altan.

“I’ve broken in Speerlies before.” Vaisra traced a thumb across her cheek. “You’re not the first. Sallow skin. Sunken eyes. You’re smoking your life away. Anyone could smell it on you. Do you know why the Speerlies died young? It wasn’t their penchant for constant warfare, and it wasn’t their god. They were smoking themselves to death. Right now I wouldn’t give you six months.”

He dug his nails into her skin so hard that she gasped. “That ends now. You’re cut off. You can smoke yourself to death after you’ve done what I need you for. But only after.”

Rin stared at him in shock. The pain was starting to seep in, first a little sting and then a great throbbing bruise across her entire face. A sob rose up in her throat. “But it hurts so much . . .”

“Oh, Runin. Poor little Runin.” He smoothed her hair out of her eyes and leaned in close. “Fuck your pain. What you’re dealing with is nothing that a little discipline can’t solve. You’re capable of blocking out the Phoenix. Your mind can build up its own defenses, and you just haven’t done it because you’re using the opium as a safe way out.”

“Because I need—”

“You need discipline.” Vaisra forced her head up farther. “You must concentrate. Fortify your mind. I know you hear the screaming. Learn to live with it. Altan did.”

Rin could taste blood staining her teeth when she spoke. “I’m not Altan.”

“Then learn to be,” he said.

So Rin suffered alone in her quarters, with the door bolted shut, guarded from the outside by three soldiers, at her own request.

She couldn’t bear lying on her bed. The sheets scratched at her skin and exacerbated the terrible prickling that had spread across her body. She wound up curled on the floor with her head between her knees, rocking back and forth, biting her knuckles to keep from screaming. Her whole body cramped and shivered, racked with wave after wave of what felt like someone stamping slowly on each of her internal organs.

The ship’s physician had refused to give her any sedatives on the grounds that she would just trade her opium addiction for a milder substance, so she had nothing to silence her mind, nothing to quell the visions that flashed through her eyes every time she closed them, a combination of the Phoenix’s never-ending visual tour of horrors and her own opioid-driven hallucinations.

And, of course, Altan. Her visions always came back to Altan. Sometimes he was burning on the pier; sometimes he was strapped to an operating table, groaning in pain, and sometimes he wasn’t injured at all, but those visions hurt the most, because then he would be talking to her—

Her cheek still burned from the force of Vaisra’s blow, but in her visions it was Altan who struck her, smiling cruelly as she stared stupidly up at him.

“You hit me,” she said.

“I had to,” he answered. “Someone had to. You deserved it.”

Did she deserve it? She didn’t know. The only version of the truth that mattered was Altan’s, and in her visions, Altan thought she deserved to die.

“You’re a failure,” he said.

“You can’t come close to what I did,” he said.

“It should have been you,” he said.

And under everything, the unspoken command: Avenge me, avenge me, avenge me . . .

Sometimes, fleetingly, the visions became a terribly twisted fantasy where Altan was not hurting her. A version where he loved her instead, and his strikes were caresses. But they were fundamentally irreconcilable because Altan’s nature was the same as the fire that had devoured him: if he didn’t burn everyone around him, then he wasn’t himself.

Sleep came finally through sheer exhaustion, but then only in short, fitful bursts; every time she nodded off she awoke screaming, and it was only by biting her knuckles and pressing herself into the corner that she could remain quiet throughout the night.

“Fuck you, Vaisra,” she whispered. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

But she couldn’t hate Vaisra, not really. It may have just been the sheer exhaustion; she was so racked with fear, grief, and rage that it was a trial to feel anything more. But she knew she needed this. She’d known for months she was killing herself and that she didn’t have the self-control to stop, that the only person who might have stopped her was dead.

She needed someone who was capable of controlling her like no one since Altan could. She hated to admit it, but she knew that in Vaisra she might have found a savior.

Daytime was worse. Sunlight was a constant hammer on Rin’s skull. But if she stayed cooped up in her quarters any longer, she would lose her mind, so Nezha accompanied her outside, keeping a tight grip on her arm while they walked along the top deck.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

It was a stupid question, asked more to break the silence than anything, because it should have been obvious how she was doing: she hadn’t slept, she was trembling uncontrollably from both exhaustion and withdrawal, and eventually, she hoped, she would reach the point where she simply fell unconscious.

“Talk to me,” she said.

“About what?”

“Anything. Literally anything else.”

So he started telling her court stories in a low murmur that wouldn’t give her a headache; trivial tales of gossip about who was fucking this Warlord’s wife, who had really fathered that Warlord’s son.

Rin watched him while he spoke. If she focused on the most minute details of his face, it distracted her from the pain, just for a little bit. The way his left eye opened just slightly wider than his right now. The way his eyebrows arched. The way his scars curled over his right cheek to resemble a poppy flower.

He was so much taller than she was. She had to crane her head to look up at him. When had he gotten so tall? At Sinegard they had been about the same height, nearly the same build, until their second year, when he’d started bulking up at a ridiculous pace. But then, at Sinegard they had just been children, stupid, naive, playing at war games that they had never seriously believed would become their reality.

Rin turned her gaze to the river. The Seagrim had moved inland, was traveling upstream on the Murui now. It moved upriver at a snail’s pace as the men at the paddle boards wheeled furiously to push the ship through the sludgy mud.

She squinted at the banks. She wasn’t sure if she was just hallucinating, but the closer they got, the more clearly she could make out little shapes moving in the distance, like ants crawling up logs.

“Are those people?” she asked.

They were. She could see them clearly now—men and women stooped beneath the sacks they carried over their shoulders, young children staggering barefoot along the riverside, and little babies strapped in bamboo baskets to their parents’ backs.

“Where are they going?”

Nezha looked faintly surprised that she had even asked. “They’re refugees.”

“From where?”

“Everywhere. Golyn Niis wasn’t the only city the Federation sacked. They destroyed the whole countryside. The entire time we were holding that pointless siege at Khurdalain they were marching southward, setting villages ablaze after they’d ripped them apart for supplies.”

Rin was still hung up on the first thing he’d said. “So Golyn Niis wasn’t . . .”

“No. Not even close.”

She couldn’t even fathom the death count this implied. How many people had lived in Golyn Niis? She multiplied that by the provinces and came up with a number nearing a million.

And now, all across the country, the Nikara refugees were shuffling back to their homes. The tide of bodies that had flowed from the war-ravaged cities to the barren northwest had started to turn.

“‘You asked how large my sorrow is,’” Nezha recited. Rin recognized the line—it was from a poem she’d studied a lifetime ago, a lament by an Emperor whose last words became exam material for future generations. “‘And I answered, like a river in spring flowing east.’”

As they floated up the Murui, crowds of people lined the banks with their arms outstretched, screaming at the Seagrim.

“Please, just up to the edge of the province . . .”

“Take my girls, leave me but take the girls . . .”

“You have space! You have space, damn you . . .”

Nezha tugged gently at Rin’s wrist. “Let’s go belowdecks.”

She shook her head. She wanted to see.

“Why can’t someone send boats?” she asked. “Why can’t we bring them home?”

“They’re not going home, Rin. They’re running.”

Dread pooled in her stomach. “How many are still out there?”

“The Mugenese?” Nezha sighed. “They’re not a single army. They’re individual brigades. They’re cold, hungry, frustrated, and they have nowhere to go. They’re thieves and bandits now.”

“How many?” she repeated.

“Enough.”

She made a fist. “I thought I brought peace.”

“You brought victory,” he said. “This is what happens after. The Warlords can hardly keep control over their home provinces. Food shortages. Rampant crime—and it’s not just the Federation bandits. The Nikara are at each other’s throats. Scarcity will do that to you.”

“So of course you think it’s a good time to fight another war.”

“Another war is inevitable. But maybe we can prevent the next big one. The Republic will have growing pains. But if we can fix the foundation—if we can institute structures that make the next invasion less likely and keep future generations safe—then we’ll have succeeded.”

Foundation. Growing pains. Future generations. Such abstract concepts, she thought; concepts that wouldn’t compute for the average peasant. Who cared who sat on the throne at Sinegard when vast stretches of the Empire were underwater?

The children’s cries suddenly seemed unbearable.

“Couldn’t we give them something?” she asked. “Money? Don’t you have stacks of silver?”

“So they could spend it where?” Nezha asked. “You could give them more ingots than you could count, but they’ve got nowhere to buy goods. There’s no supply.”

“Food, then?”

“We tried doing that. They just tear each other to pieces trying to get at it. It’s not a pretty sight.”

She rested her chin on her elbows. Behind them the flock of humans receded; ignored, irrelevant, betrayed.

“You want to hear a joke?” Nezha asked.

She shrugged.

“A Hesperian missionary once said the state of the average Nikara peasant is that of a man standing in a pond with water coming up to his chin,” said Nezha. “The slightest ripple is enough to put him underwater.”

Staring out over the Murui, Rin didn’t find that the least bit funny.

That night she decided to drown herself.

It wasn’t a premeditated decision so much as it was an act of sheer desperation. The pain had gotten so bad that she banged on the door to her room, begging for help, and then when the guards opened it she ducked past their arms and ran up the stairs and out the hatch to the main deck.

Guards ran after her, shouting for reinforcements, but she doubled her pace, bare heels slamming against the wood. Splinters lanced little shreds of pain through her skin—but that was good pain because it distracted her from her screaming mind, if only for half a second.

The railing of the prow came up to her chest. She gripped the edge and attempted to pull herself up, but her arms were weak—surprisingly weak, she didn’t remember getting that weak—and she sagged against the side. She tried again, hoisted herself far enough that her upper body draped over the edge. She hung there facedown for a moment, staring at the dark waves trailing alongside the Seagrim.

A pair of arms grasped her around the waist. She kicked and flailed, but they only tightened as they dragged her back down. She twisted her neck around.

“Suni?”

He walked backward from the prow, carrying her by the waist like a little child.

“Let go,” she panted. “Let me go!”

He put her down. She tried to break away but he grabbed her wrists, twisted her arms behind her back, and forced her down into a sitting position.

“Breathe,” he ordered. “Just breathe.”

She obeyed. The pain didn’t subside. The screaming didn’t quiet. She began to shake, but Suni didn’t let go of her arms. “If you just keep breathing, I’ll tell you a story.”

“I don’t want to hear a fucking story,” she said, gasping.

“Don’t want. Don’t think. Just breathe.” Suni’s voice was quiet, soothing. “Have you heard the story of the Monkey King and the moon?”

“No,” she whimpered.

“Then listen carefully.” He relaxed his grip ever so slightly, just enough that her arms stopped hurting. “Once upon a time, the Monkey King caught his first glimpse of the Moon Goddess.”

Rin shut her eyes and tried to focus on Suni’s voice. She’d never heard Suni talk this much. He was always so quiet, drawn into himself, as if he were unused to being in full occupation of his own mind that he wanted to relish the experience as much as possible. She’d forgotten how gentle he could sound.

He continued. “The Moon Goddess had just ascended to the heavens, and she was still drifting so close to Earth that you could see her face on the surface. She was such a lovely thing.”

Some old memory stirred in the back of her mind. She did know this story after all. They told it to children in Rooster Province during the Lunar Festival, every autumn when children ate moon cakes and solved riddles written on rice paper and floated lanterns in the sky.

“Then he fell in love,” she whispered.

“That’s right. The Monkey King was struck with the most terrible passion. He had to possess her, he thought, or he might die. So he sent his best soldiers to retrieve her from the ocean. But they failed, for the moon lived not in the ocean but in the sky, and they drowned.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why did they drown? Why did the moon kill them? Because they weren’t climbing to the sky to find her, they were diving into the water toward her reflection. But it was a fucking illusion they were grasping, not the real thing.” Suni’s voice hardened. It didn’t rise above a whisper, but he might as well have been shouting. “You spend your whole life chasing after some illusion you think is real, only to realize you’re a damned fool, and that if you reach any further, you’ll drown.”

He let go of her arms.

Rin turned around to face him. “Suni . . .”

“Altan liked that story,” he said. “I first heard it from him. He told it whenever he needed to calm me down. Said it would help if I thought of the Monkey King as just another person, someone gullible and foolish, and not a god.”

“The Monkey King is a dick,” she said.

“And the Moon Goddess is a bitch,” he said. “She sat there in the sky and watched the monkeys drowning over her. What does that say about her?”

That made her laugh. For a moment they both looked up at the moon. It was half-full, hiding behind a wispy dark cloud. Rin could imagine she was a woman, coy and devious, waiting to entice foolish men to their deaths.

She placed her hand over Suni’s. His hand was massive, rougher than wood bark, mottled with calluses. Her mind spun with a thousand unanswered questions.

Who made you like this?

And, more importantly, Do you regret it?

“You don’t have to suffer alone, you know.” Suni gave her one of his rare, slow smiles. “You’re not the only one.”

She would have smiled back, but then a wave of sickness hit her gut and she jerked her head down. Vomit splattered the deck.

Suni rubbed circles on her back while she spat blood-speckled phlegm on the planks. When she was done, he smoothed her vomit-covered hair out of her eyes as she sucked in air in great, racking sobs.

“You’re so strong,” he said. “Whatever you’re seeing, whatever you’re feeling, it’s not as strong as you are.”

But she didn’t want to be strong. Because if she were strong then she would be sober, and if she were sober she would have to consider the consequences of her actions. Then she’d have to look into the chasm. Then the Federation of Mugen would stop being an amorphous blur, and her victims would stop being meaningless numbers. Then she would recognize one death, what it meant, and then another, and then another and another and—

And if she wanted to recognize it, then she would have to be something, feel something other than anger, but she was afraid that if she stopped being angry then she might shatter.

She started to cry.

Suni smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “Just breathe,” he murmured. “Breathe for me. Can you do that? Breathe five times.”

One. Two. Three.

He continued to rub her back. “You just have to make it through the next five seconds. Then the next five. Then on and on.”

Four. Five.

And then another five. And those five, oddly enough, were just the littlest bit more bearable than the last.

“There you go,” Suni said after maybe a dozen counts to five. His voice was so low it was hardly a whisper. “There, look, you’ve done it.”

She breathed, and counted, and wondered how Suni knew exactly what to say.

She wondered if he had done this before with Altan.

“She’ll be all right,” Suni said.

Rin looked up to see who he was talking to, and saw Vaisra standing in the shadows.

It couldn’t have taken him long to respond to the soldiers’ calls. Had he been there the entire time, watching without speaking?

“I heard you came out to get some air,” he said.

She wiped vomit off her cheek with the back of her hand. Vaisra’s gaze flickered to her stained clothing and back to her face. She couldn’t read his expression.

“I’ll be okay,” she whispered.

“Will you?”

“I’ll take care of her,” Suni said.

A brief pause. Vaisra gave Suni a curt nod.

After another moment Suni helped her up and walked her back to her cabin. He kept one arm around her shoulders, warm, solid, comforting. The ship rocked against a particularly violent wave, and she staggered into his side.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Suni said. “And don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

Five days later the Seagrim sailed over a submerged town. At first when Rin saw the tops of buildings emerging from the river she thought they were driftwood, or rocks. Then they got close enough that she could see the curving roofs of drowned pagodas, thatched houses lying under the surface. An entire village peeked up at her through river silt.

Then she saw the bodies—half-eaten, bloated and discolored, all with empty sockets because the glutinous eyes had already been nibbled away. They blocked up the river, decomposing at such a rate that the crew had to sweep away the maggots that threatened to climb on board.

Sailors lined up at the prow to shift bodies aside with long poles to make way for the ship. The corpses started piling up on the river’s sides. Every few hours sailors had to climb down and drag them into a pile before the Seagrim could move—a duty the crew drew lots for with dread.

“What happened here?” Rin asked. “Did the Murui run its banks?”

“No. Dam breach.” Nezha looked pale with fury. “Daji had the dam destroyed to flood the Murui river valley.”

That wasn’t Daji. Rin knew whose handiwork this was.

But did no one else know?

“Did it work?” she asked.

“Sure. It took out the Federation contingents in the north. Holed them up long enough for the northern Divisions to make mincemeat out of them. But then the floodwaters caught several hundred villages, which makes several thousand people who don’t have homes now.” Nezha made a fist. “How does a ruler do this? To her own people?”

“How do you know it was her?” Rin asked cautiously.

“Who else could it be? Something that big had to be an order from above. Right?”

“Of course,” she murmured. “Who else would it be?”

Rin found the twins sitting together at the stern of the ship. They were perched on the railing, staring down at the wreckage trailing behind them. When they saw Rin approaching, they both jumped down and turned around, regarding her warily, as if they knew exactly why she had come.

“So how does it feel?” Rin asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chaghan said.

“You did it, too,” she said gleefully. “It wasn’t just me.”

“Go back to sleep,” he said.

“Thousands of people!” she crowed. “Drowned like ants! Are you proud?”

Qara turned her head away, but Chaghan lifted his chin indignantly. “I did what Altan ordered.”

That made her screech with laughter. “Me too! I was just acting on orders! He said I had to get vengeance for the Speerlies, and so I did, so it’s not my fault, because Altan said—”

“Shut up,” Chaghan snapped. “Listen—Vaisra thinks that Daji ordered the opening of those dikes.”

She was still giggling. “So does Nezha.”

He looked alarmed. “What did you tell him?”

“Nothing, obviously. I’m not stupid.”

“You can’t tell anyone the truth,” Qara cut in. “Nobody in the Dragon Republic can know.”

Of course Rin understood that. She knew how dangerous it would be to give the Dragon Army a reason to turn on the Cike. But in that moment all she could think of was how terribly funny it was that she wasn’t the only one with mass murder on her hands.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell. I’ll be the only monster. Just me.”

The twins looked stricken, but she couldn’t stop laughing. She wondered how it had felt, the moment before the wave hit. The civilians might have been making dinner, playing outside, putting their children to bed, telling stories, making love, before a crushing force of water swept over their homes, destroyed their villages, and snuffed out their lives.

This was what the balance of power looked like now. People like her waved a hand and millions were crushed within the confines of some elemental disaster, flung off the chessboard of the world like irrelevant pieces. People like her—shamans, all of them—were like children stomping around over entire cities as if they were mud castles, glass houses, fungible entities that could be targeted and demolished.

On the seventh morning after they’d left Ankhiluun, the pain receded.

She woke up without a fever. No headache. She took a hesitant step toward the door and was pleasantly surprised at how steady her feet felt on the floor, how the world didn’t whirl and shift around her. She opened the door, wandered out onto the upper deck, and was stunned by how good the river spray felt on her face.

Her senses felt sharper. Colors seemed brighter. She could smell things she hadn’t before. The world seemed to exist with a vibrancy that she hadn’t been aware of.

And then she realized that she had her mind to herself.

The Phoenix wasn’t gone. She felt the god lingering still at the forefront of her mind, whispering tales of destruction, trying to control her desires.

But this time she knew what she wanted.

And she wanted control.

She’d been victim to the god’s urges because she’d been keeping her own mind weak, dousing away the flame with a temporary and unsustainable solution. But now her head was clear, her mind was present—and when the Phoenix screamed, she could shut it down.

She requested to see Vaisra. He sent for her within minutes.

He was alone in his office when she arrived.

“You’re not afraid of me?” she asked.

“I trust you,” he said.

“You shouldn’t.”

“Then I trust you more than you trust yourself.” He was acting like an entirely different person. The harsh persona was gone. His voice sounded so gentle, so encouraging that she was suddenly reminded of Tutor Feyrik.

She hadn’t thought about Tutor Feyrik in a long time.

She hadn’t felt safe in a long time.

Vaisra leaned back in his chair. “Go on, then. Try calling the fire for me. Just a little bit.”

She opened her hand and focused her eyes on her palm. She recalled the rage, felt the heat of it coil in the pit of her stomach. But this time it didn’t come all at once in an uncontrollable torrent, but manifested as a slow, angry burn.

A small burst of flame erupted in her palm. And it was just the burst; no more, no less, though she could increase its size, or if she wanted to, force it even smaller.

She closed her eyes, breathing slowly; cautiously she raised the flame higher and higher, a single ribbon of fire swaying over her hand like a reed, until Vaisra commanded her, “Stop.”

She closed her fist. The fire went out.

Only afterward did she realize how fast her heart was beating.

“Are you all right?” Vaisra asked.

She managed a nod.

A smile spread over his face. He looked more than pleased. He looked proud. “Do it again. Make it bigger. Brighter. Shape it for me.”

She reeled. “I can’t. I don’t have that much control.”

“You can. Don’t think about the Phoenix. Look at me.”

She met his eyes. His gaze was an anchor.

A fire sparked out of her fist. She shaped it with trembling hands until it took on the image of a dragon, coils undulating in the space between her and Vaisra, making the air shimmer with the heat of the blaze.

More, said the Phoenix. Bigger. Higher.

Its screams pushed at the edge of her mind. She tried to shut it down.

The fire didn’t recede.

She started to shake. “No, I can’t—I can’t, you have to get out—”

“Don’t think about it,” Vaisra whispered. “Look at me.”

Slowly, so faintly she was afraid she was imagining it, the red behind her eyelids subsided.

The fire disappeared. She collapsed to her knees.

“Good girl,” Vaisra said softly.

She wrapped her arms around herself, rocked back and forth on the floor, and tried to remember how to breathe.

“May I show you something?” Vaisra asked.

She looked up. He crossed the room to a cabinet, opened a drawer, and pulled out a cloth-covered parcel. She flinched when he jerked the cloth off, but all she saw underneath was the dull sheen of metal.

“What is it?” she asked.

But she already knew. She would recognize this weapon anywhere. She had spent hours gazing upon that steel, the metal etched with evidence of countless battles. It was metal all the way through, even at the hilt, which would normally be made of wood, because Speerlies needed weapons that wouldn’t burn through when they held them.

Rin felt a sudden light-headedness that had nothing to do with opium withdrawal and everything to do with the sudden and terribly vivid memory of Altan Trengsin walking down the pier to his death.

A harsh sob rose in her throat. “Where did you get that?”

“My men recovered it from the Chuluu Korikh.” Vaisra bent down and held the trident out before her. “I thought you might want to have it.”

She blinked at him, uncomprehending. “You—why were you there?”

“You’ve got to stop thinking I know less than I do. We were looking for Altan. He would have been, ah, useful.”

She snorted through her tears. “You think Altan would have joined you?”

“I think Altan wanted any opportunity to rebuild this Empire.”

“Then you don’t know anything about him.”

“I knew his people,” Vaisra said. “I led the soldiers that liberated him from the research facility, and I helped train him when he was old enough to fight. Altan would have fought for this Republic.”

She shook her head. “No, Altan just wanted to make things burn.”

She reached out, grasped the trident, and hefted it in her hands. It felt awkward in her fingers, too heavy at the front and oddly light near the back. Altan had been much taller than she, and the weapon seemed too long for her to wield comfortably.

It couldn’t function like a sword. It was no good for lateral blows. This trident had to be wielded surgically. Killing strikes only.

She held it away from her. “I shouldn’t have this.”

“Why not?”

She barely got the words out, she was crying so hard. “Because I’m not him.”

Because I should have died, and he should be alive and standing here.

“No, you’re not.” Vaisra continued to stroke her hair with one hand, though he’d already smoothed it behind her ears. The other hand closed over her fingers, pressing them harder around the cool metal. “You’ll be better.”

When Rin was sure she could stomach solid food without vomiting, she joined Nezha abovedeck for her first actual meal in more than a week.

“Don’t choke.” Nezha sounded amused.

She was too busy ripping apart a steamed bun to respond. She didn’t know if the food on deck was ridiculously good, or if she was just so famished that it tasted like the best thing she’d ever eaten.

“It’s a pretty day,” he said while she swallowed.

She made a muffled noise in agreement. The first few days she hadn’t been able to bear standing outside in the direct sunlight. Now that her eyes no longer burned, she could look out over the bright water without wincing.

“Kitay’s still sulking?” she asked.

“He’ll come around,” Nezha said. “He’s always been stubborn.”

“That’s putting it lightly.”

“Have a little sympathy. Kitay never wanted to be a soldier. He spent half his time wishing he’d gone to Yuelu Mountain, not Sinegard. He’s an academic at heart, not a fighter.”

Rin remembered. All Kitay had ever wanted to do was be a scholar, go to the academy at Yuelu Mountain, and study science, or astronomy, or whatever struck his fancy at the moment. But he was the only son of the defense minister to the Empress, so his fate had been carved out before he was even born.

“That’s sad,” she murmured. “You shouldn’t have to be a soldier unless you want to.”

Nezha rested his chin on his hand. “Did you want to?”

She hesitated.

Yes. No. She hadn’t thought there was anything else for her. She hadn’t thought it mattered if she wanted to.

“I used to be scared of war,” she finally said. “Then I realized I was very good at it. And I’m not sure I’d be good at anything else.”

Nezha nodded silently, gazing out at the river, pulling mindlessly at his steamed bun without eating it.

“How’s your . . . uh . . .” Nezha gestured toward his temples.

“Good. I’m good.”

For the first time she felt as if she had a handle on her anger. She could think. She could breathe. The Phoenix was still there, looming in the back of her mind, ready to burst into flame if she called it—but only if she called it.

She looked down to discover the steamed bun was gone. Her fingers were clutching nothing. Her stomach reacted to this by growling.

“Here,” Nezha said. He handed her his somewhat mangled bun. “Have mine.”

“You’re not hungry?”

“I don’t have much of an appetite right now. And you look emaciated.”

“I’m not taking your food.”

“Eat,” he insisted.

She took a bite. It slid thickly down her throat and settled in her stomach with a wonderful heaviness. She hadn’t been so full for such a long time.

“How’s your face?” Nezha asked.

She touched her cheek. Sharp twinges of pain lanced through her lower face whenever she spoke. The bruise had blossomed while the opium seeped out of her system, as if one had to trade off with the other.

“It feels like it’s just getting worse,” she said.

“Nah. You’ll be fine. Father doesn’t hit hard enough to injure.”

They sat awhile in silence. Rin watched fish jumping out of the water, leaping and flailing as if begging to be caught.

“And your face?” she asked. “Does it still hurt?”

In certain lights Nezha’s scars looked like angry red lines someone had carved all over his face. In other lights they looked like a delicately painted crosshatch of brush ink.

“It hurt for a long time. Now I just can’t feel anything.”

“What if I touched you?” She was struck by the urge to run her thumb over his scars. To caress them.

“I wouldn’t feel that, either.” Nezha’s fingers drifted to his cheek. “I suppose it scares people, though. Father makes me wear the mask whenever I’m around civilians.”

“I thought you were just being vain.”

Nezha smiled but didn’t laugh. “That too.”

Rin ripped large chunks from the steamed bun and barely chewed before swallowing.

Nezha reached out and touched her hair. “That’s a good look on you. Nice to see your eyes again.”

She’d shorn her hair close to her head. Not until she’d seen her discarded locks on the floor had she realized how disgusting it had become; the scraggly tendrils had grown out greasy and tangled, a nesting site for lice. Her hair was shorter than Nezha’s now, close-cropped and clean. It made her feel like a student again.

“Has Kitay eaten anything?” she asked.

Nezha shifted uncomfortably. “No. Still hiding in his room. We don’t keep it locked, but he won’t come out.”

She frowned. “If he’s that furious, then why don’t you let him go?”

“Because we’d rather have him on our side.”

“Then why not just use him as leverage against his father? Trade him as a hostage?”

“Because Kitay’s a resource,” Nezha said frankly. “You know the way his mind works. It’s not a secret. He knows most things and he remembers everything. He has a better grasp on strategy than anyone should. My father likes to keep his best pieces around for as long as he can. Besides, his father was at Sinegard before they abandoned it. There’s no guarantee he’s alive.”

“Oh” was all she could say. She looked down and realized that she had finished Nezha’s bun, too.

He laughed. “You think you can handle something more than bread?”

She nodded. He signaled for a servant, who disappeared into the cabin and reemerged a few minutes later with a bowl that smelled so good that a disgusting amount of saliva filled Rin’s mouth.

“This is a delicacy near the coast,” Nezha said. “We call it the wawa fish.”

“Why?” she asked through a full mouth.

Nezha turned it over with his chopsticks, deftly separating the white flesh from the spine. “Because of the way it shrieks. Flails in the water crying like a baby with a rash. Sometimes the cooks boil them to death just for fun. Didn’t you hear it in the galley?”

Rin’s stomach turned. “I thought there might be a baby on board.”

“Aren’t they hilarious?” Nezha picked up a slice and put it in her bowl. “Try it. Father loves them.”