The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Trilogy #2)

The storm passed with minimal damage. One skimmer capsized—the force of the winds had ripped it from its anchor. Three men drowned. But the crew managed to salvage most of its supplies, and the drowned men had been only foot soldiers, so Jinzha wrote it off as a minor setback.

The moment the skies cleared, he gave the order to continue upriver toward Ram Province. It was one step closer to the military center of the Empire and, as Kitay anticipated, the first territory that would present a fighting challenge.

The Ram Warlord had holed up inside Xiashang, his capital, instead of mounting a border defense. This was why the Republic encountered little other than local volunteer militias throughout their destructive trek north. The Ram Warlord had chosen to bide his time and wait for Jinzha’s troops to tire before fighting a defensive battle.

That should have been a losing strategy. The Republican Fleet was simply bigger than whatever force the Ram Warlord could have rounded up. They knew they could take Ram Province; it was only a matter of time.

The only wrinkle was that Xiashang had unexpectedly robust defenses. Thanks to Qara’s birds, the Republican forces had a good layout map of the capital’s defensive structures. Even the tower ships with their trebuchets would have a difficult time breaching those walls.

As such, Rin spent her next few evenings in the Kingfisher’s office, crammed around a table with Jinzha’s leadership coterie.

“The walls are the problem. You can’t blow through them.” Kitay pointed to a ring he’d drawn around the walls of the city. “They’re made of packed earth, three feet thick. You could try ramming them with cannonballs, but it’d just be a waste of good fire powder.”

“What about a siege?” Jinzha asked. “We could force a surrender if they think we’re willing to wait.”

“You’d be a fool,” said General Tarcquet.

Jinzha bristled visibly. The leadership exchanged awkward looks.

Tarcquet was always present at strategy councils, though he rarely spoke and never offered the assistance of his own troops. He’d made his role clear. He was there to judge their competence and quietly deride their mistakes, which made his input both irreproachable and grating.

“If this were my fleet I’d throw everything I have at those walls,” Tarcquet said. “If you can’t take a minor capital, you won’t take the Empire.”

“But this is not your fleet,” Jinzha said. “It’s mine.”

Tarcquet’s lip curled in contempt. “You are in command because your father thought you’d at least be smart enough to do whatever I told you.”

Jinzha looked furious, but Tarcquet held up a hand before he could respond. “You can’t pull off this bluff. They know you don’t have the supplies or the time. You’ll have to fold in weeks.”

Despite herself, Rin agreed with Tarcquet’s assessment. She’d studied this precise problem at Sinegard. Of all the successful defensive campaigns on military record, most were when cities had warded off invaders through protracted siege warfare. A siege turned a battle into a waiting game of who starved first. The Republican Fleet had the supplies to last for perhaps a month. It was unclear how long Xiashang could last. It would be foolish to wait and find out.

“They certainly don’t have enough food for the entire city,” Nezha said. “We made sure of that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kitay said. “The Ram Warlord and his people will be fine. They’ll just let the peasants starve; Tsung Ho has done that before.”

“Do we try negotiating?” Nezha asked.

“Won’t work—Tsung Ho hates Father,” Jinzha said. “And he has no incentive to cooperate, because he’ll just assume that under the Republican regime he’d be deposed sooner or later.”

“A siege might work,” said Admiral Molkoi. “Those walls are not so impenetrable. We’d just have to break them down at a choke point.”

“I wouldn’t,” Kitay said. “That’s what they’ll be preparing for. If you’re going to storm the city, you want the element of surprise. Some gimmick. Like a false peace proposal. But I don’t think they’d fall for that; Tsung Ho is too smart.”

A thought occurred to Rin. “What about Fuchai and Goujian?”

The men stared blankly at her.

“Fuchai and who?” Jinzha asked.

Only Kitay and Nezha looked like they understood. The tale of Fuchai and Goujian was a favorite story of Master Irjah’s. They’d all been assigned to write term papers about it during their second year.

“Fuchai and Goujian were two generals during the Era of Warring States,” Nezha explained. “Fuchai destroyed Goujian’s home state, and then made Goujian his personal servant to humiliate him. Goujian performed the most degrading tasks to make Fuchai believe he bore him no ill will. One time when Fuchai fell sick, Goujian volunteered to taste his stool to tell how bad his illness was. It worked—ten years later, Fuchai set Goujian free. The first thing Goujian did was hire a beautiful concubine and send her to Fuchai’s court in the guise of a gift.”

“The concubine, of course, killed Fuchai,” Kitay said.

Jinzha looked baffled. “You’re saying I send the Ram Warlord a beautiful concubine.”

“No,” Rin said. “I’m saying you should eat shit.”

Tarcquet barked out a laugh.

Jinzha reddened. “Excuse me?”

“The Ram Warlord thinks he holds all the cards,” Rin said. “So initiate a negotiation. Humiliate yourself, present yourself as weaker than you are, and make him underestimate your forces.”

“That won’t tear down his walls,” said Jinzha.

“But it will make him cocky. How does his behavior change if he’s not anticipating an attack? If he instead thinks you’re running away? Then we have an opening to exploit.” Rin cast about wildly in her head for ideas. “You could get someone behind those walls. Open the gates from the inside.”

“There’s no way you manage that,” Nezha said. “You’d need to get an entire platoon to fight through from the inside, and you can’t hide that many men in one ship.”

“I don’t need an entire platoon,” Rin said.

“No squadron is capable of that.”

She crossed her arms. “I can think of one.”

For once, Jinzha wasn’t looking at her with disdain.

“Who do we send to negotiate with the Ram Warlord, then?” he asked.

Rin and Nezha both answered at once. “Kitay.”

Kitay frowned. “Because I’m a good negotiator?”

“No.” Nezha clapped him on the shoulder. “Because you’ll be a really, really bad one.”

“I was under the impression that I was receiving your grand marshal.” The Ram Warlord lounged casually on his chair, tapping his fingers together as he appraised the Republican delegation with sharp, intelligent eyes.

“You’ll be meeting with me,” Kitay said. He spoke in a perfectly tremulous voice, obviously nervous and pretending not to be. “The Dragon Warlord is indisposed.”

The Republican delegation was deliberately shabby. Kitay was guarded only by two infantry soldiers from the Kingfisher. His life had to seem cheap. Jinzha hadn’t wanted to let Rin come, but she refused to stay behind while Kitay went to face the enemy.

Their delegations had met at a neutral stretch along the shore. The backdrop made the meeting seem more like a competitive fishing match than the site of a war negotiation. This move, Rin assumed, was designed to humiliate Kitay.

The Ram Warlord looked Kitay up and down and pursed his lips. “Vaisra can’t be bothered, so he sends a little puppy to negotiate for him.”

Kitay puffed himself up. “I’m not a puppy. I’m the son of Defense Minister Chen.”

“Yes, I wondered why you looked familiar. You’re a far cry from your old man, aren’t you?”

Kitay cleared his throat. “Jinzha sent me here with proposed terms for a truce.”

“A truce should be settled between leaders. Jinzha does not even afford me the respect that he ought a Warlord.”

“Jinzha has entrusted negotiations to me,” Kitay said stiffly.

The Ram Warlord’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, I understand. Injured then? Or dead?”

“Jinzha is fine.” Kitay let his voice tremble just a bit at the end. “He sends his regards.”

The Ram Warlord leaned forward in his chair, like a wolf examining his prey. “Really.”

Kitay cleared his throat again. “Jinzha instructed me to convey that the truce can only benefit you. We will take the north. It’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to join our forces. If you agree to our terms then we’ll leave Xiashang alone, so long as your men serve in our—”

The Ram Warlord cut him off. “I have no interest in joining Vaisra’s so-called republic. It’s just a ploy to put himself on the throne.”

“That’s paranoid,” Kitay said.

“Does Yin Vaisra seem like a man inclined to share power to you?”

“The Dragon Warlord intends to implement the representative democracy style of government practiced in the west. He knows the provincial system isn’t working—”

“Oh, but it’s working very well for us,” said the Ram Warlord. “The only dissenters are those poor suckers in the south, led by Vaisra himself. The rest of us see a system that’s granted us stability for two decades. There’s no need to disrupt that.”

“But it will be disrupted,” Kitay insisted. “You’ve seen the fault lines yourself. You’re weeks away from going to war with your neighbors over riverways, you have more refugees than you can deal with, and you’ve received no Imperial aid.”

“That, you’re wrong about,” said the Ram Warlord. “The Empress has been exceedingly generous to my province. Meanwhile, your embargo failed, your fields are poisoned, and you’re quickly running out of time.”

Rin shot Kitay a glance. His face betrayed nothing, but she knew, on the inside, he must be gloating.

As they spoke, a single merchant ship drifted toward Xiashang, marked with smugglers’ colors provided to them by Moag. It would claim to have run up from Monkey Province with illegal shipments of grain. Jinzha had packed soldiers into the hold and dressed the few sailors who would remain visible on deck as river traders.

If the Ram Warlord was expecting smuggler ships, then he might very well let it within the city gates.

“There’s a way out here that doesn’t end in your death,” Kitay said.

“Negotiations are a matter of leverage, little boy,” said the Ram Warlord. “And I don’t see your fleet.”

“Maybe your spies should look harder,” Kitay said. “Maybe we’ve hidden it.”

They had hidden it, deep inside a canyon crevice two miles downstream from Xiashang’s gates. Jinzha had sent a smaller fleet of skimmers manned by skeleton crews out toward a different tributary to make it appear that the Dragon Fleet was avoiding Xiashang entirely by sailing east toward Tiger Province instead. They’d done this very conspicuously in broad daylight. The Ram Warlord’s spies had to have seen.

The Ram Warlord shrugged. “Perhaps. Or perhaps you’ve taken the easy route down the Udomsap tributary instead.”

Rin fought to keep her expression neutral.

“The Udomsap isn’t so far from you,” said Kitay. “By river or by ground, you’re lying in Jinzha’s warpath.”

“Bold words from a little boy.” The Ram Warlord snorted.

“A little boy speaking for a great army,” Kitay said. “Sooner or later, we’ll come for you. And then you’ll regret it.”

The blustering was an act, but Rin suspected the frustration in his voice was real. Kitay was playing his part so well that Rin couldn’t help but feel a sudden urge to step in front of him, to protect him. Standing one-on-one before a Warlord, Kitay just looked like a boy: thin, scared, and far too young for his position.

“No. I don’t think we will.” The Ram Warlord reached over and ruffled Kitay’s hair. “I think you’re trapped. That storm hit you harder than you’ll admit. And you don’t have the troops to press on into the winter, and you’re running out of supplies, so you want me to throw open my gates and save your skins. Tell Jinzha he can take his truce and shove it up his butt.” He smiled, displaying teeth. “Run along down the river, now.”

“I admit this might have been a terrible idea,” said Kitay.

Rin’s spyglass was trained on Xiashang’s gates. She had a sick feeling in her stomach. The fleet had been waiting around the bend since dark. The sun had been up for hours. The gates were still closed.

“You don’t think he bought it,” Rin said.

“I was so sure he’d buy it,” said Kitay. “Men like that are so incredibly arrogant that they always need to think that they’ve outsmarted everyone else. But maybe he did.”

Rin didn’t want to entertain that thought.

Another hour passed. No movement. Kitay started walking in circles, chewing at his thumbnail so hard that it bled. “Someone should suggest a retreat.”

Rin lowered her spyglass. “You’d be sentencing my men to death.”

“It’s been half a day,” he said curtly. “Chances are they’re dead already.”

Jinzha, who had been pacing the length of the deck in agitation, motioned toward them. “It’s time to pursue other options. Those men are gone.”

Rin’s fists tightened. “Don’t you dare—”

“They could have captured them.” Kitay tried to calm her down. “He could be planning to use them as hostages.”

“We don’t have anyone important on that ship,” Jinzha said, which Rin thought was a rather cruel way of describing some of his best soldiers. “And knowing Tsung Ho, he’d just set it on fire.”

The sun crawled to high noon.

Rin fought the creep of despair. The later it got in the day, the worse their chances of storming the walls. They had already lost the element of surprise. The Ram Warlord surely knew they were coming by now, and he’d had half the day to prepare defenses.

But what other choice did the Republic have? The Cike were trapped behind those gates. Any later and their chances of survival dwindled to nothing. Waiting was useless. Escape would be humiliating.

Jinzha seemed to have been thinking the same. “They’re out of time. We attack.”

“That’s what they want, though!” Kitay protested. “This is the battle they want to have.”

“Then we’ll give them that fight.” Jinzha signaled Admiral Molkoi to give the order. For once, Rin was glad that he’d ignored Kitay.

The Republican Fleet surged forward, a symphony of war drums and churning paddle wheels.

Xiashang had prepared well to meet the charge. The Militia went on the offensive immediately. A wave of arrows greeted the Republican Fleet as soon as it crossed into range. For an instant it was impossible to hear anything over the sound of arrows thudding into wood, steel, and flesh. And it didn’t stop. The artillery assault kept coming in wave after wave from archers who seemed to have an endless supply of arrows.

The Republican archers returned fire, but they might have been shooting aimlessly at the sky. The defenders simply ducked down and let the bolts whiz overhead while Republican rockets exploded harmlessly against the massive city walls.

The Kingfisher was safe ensconced within its turtleshell armor, but the other Republican ships had been effectively reduced to sitting ducks. The tower ships floated uselessly in the water. Their trebuchet crews couldn’t launch any missiles—they couldn’t move without fear of being turned into pincushions.

The Lapwing, the Seahawk closest to the walls, sent a double-headed dragon missile screeching through the air only for a Ram archer to shoot it out of the sky. Upon impact it fell sizzling back toward the boat. The Lapwing’s crew scattered before the shower of missiles fell upon their own munitions supply. Rin heard one round of explosions, and then another—a chain reaction that engulfed the Seahawk ship in smoke and fire.

The Shrike, however, had managed to steer its towers to just beside the city gate. Rin squinted at the ship, trying to gauge its distance from the wall. The towers were just tall enough to clear the parapets, but as long as the wall was manned with archers, the tower was useless. Anyone who scaled the siege engine would just be picked off at the top.

Someone had to take those archers out.

Rin glared at the wall, frustrated, cursing the Seal. If she could call the Phoenix she could have just sent a torrent of flame over the barriers, could have cleared it out in under a minute.

But she didn’t have the fire. Which meant she had to get up there herself, and she needed explosives.

She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Ramsa!”

He was crouched ten meters away behind the mast. She screamed his name thrice to no avail. At last she threw a scrap of wood at his shoulder to get his attention.

He yelped. “What the hell?”

“I need a bomb!”

He opened his mouth to respond just as another set of missiles exploded against the turtle boat’s side. He shook his head and gestured frantically at his empty knapsack.

“Anything?” she mouthed.

He dug deep in his pocket, pulled out something round, and rolled it across the floor toward her. She picked it up. A pungent smell hit her nose.

“Is this a shit bomb?” she yelled.

Ramsa waved his hands helplessly. “It’s all I’ve got left!”

It would have to do. She shoved the bomb into her shirt. She’d worry about ignition when she got to the wall. Now she needed some way to climb up to the top. And a shield, something huge, heavy and large enough to cover her entire body . . .

Her eyes landed on the rowboats.

She turned to Kitay. “Pull a boat up.”

“What?”

She pointed to the siege tower. “Get me up in a boat!”

His eyes widened in understanding. He barked a series of orders to the soldiers behind him. They ran out to the mainmast, ducking beneath shields raised over their heads.

Rin jumped into a rowboat with two other soldiers. Kitay directed the men to fasten the ropes at the ends, typically meant to lower the rowboat into the water, onto the mast pulley. The rowboat teetered wildly when they started hoisting it up the mast. It hadn’t been secured well. Halfway up it threatened to flip over until they scrambled to redistribute their weight.

An arrow whistled past Rin’s head. The Ram archers had seen them.

“Hold on!” She twisted the ropes. The rowboat tilted nearly horizontal, a functional full-body shield. Rin crouched down, clinging fast to a seat so she wouldn’t tumble out. A crossbow bolt slid through the bottom of the boat and cut through the arm of the soldier to her left. He screamed and let go. A second later Rin heard him crunch on the deck.

She held her breath. The boat was almost to the top of the wall.

“Get ready.” She bent her knees and rocked the boat so that it would swing forward. Their first swing toward the wall fell short by a yard. Rin caught a brief, dizzying glimpse of the drop beneath her feet.

Another series of arrows studded the rowboat as they swung backward.

Their second swing got them close enough.

“Go!”

They jumped to the wall. Rin slipped on impact. Her knees skidded on solid rock but her feet kicked off into terrifying, empty space. She flung her arms forward and seized a groove cut in the wall. She strained to pull herself up just far enough that she could slam her elbow into the ridge and drag her torso over.

She tumbled gracelessly onto the walkway and staggered to her feet just as a Ram soldier swung a blade at her head. She blocked it with her trident, wrestled it in a circle, sent it spinning uselessly away, and then butted him in the side with the other end. He tumbled down the stairs and smashed into his comrades.

That gave her a temporary reprieve. She scanned the wall of archers. Ramsa’s shit bomb wouldn’t kill them, but it would distract them. She just needed a way to ignite it.

Again she cursed the Seal. She could have just lit it with a snap of her fingers; it would have been so easy.

She cast her eyes about for a lamp, a brazier, something . . . there. Five feet away sat a lump of burning coals in a brass pot. The Ram defenders must have been using it to light their own missiles.

She hefted the bomb in her hands, tossed it toward the pot, and prayed.

She heard a faint, dull pop.

She took a deep breath. Acrid, shit-flavored smoke spilled over the parapets, thick and blinding.

“We’re in trouble,” said the Republican soldier at her left.

She squinted through the smoke at a column of Ram reinforcements approaching fast from the lefthand walkway.

She looked frantically about the wall for a way to get down. She saw a stairwell to her left, but too many soldiers stood crowded at the base. The only other way down was across the other side of the wall, but the walkway didn’t go all the way around—a ridge of wall no thicker than her heel stood between her and the other stairwell.

No time to think. She jumped onto the outer edge of the wall, dug her heels in, and began running before she could teeter to either side. Every few steps she felt her balance jerk horrifically to one side. Somehow she righted herself and kept going.

She heard the twangs of several bows. Rather than duck, she took a flying leap toward the stairwell. She landed painfully on her side and skidded to a halt. Her shoulder and hip screamed in protest, but her arms and legs still worked. She crawled frantically down the stairs, arrows whizzing over her head.

Behind the gates was a war zone.

She’d stumbled into a crush of bodies, a clamor of steel. Blue uniforms dotted the crowd. Republican soldiers. Relief washed over her. They weren’t dead after all, just late.

“About time!”

Two wonderfully familiar tornadoes of destruction appeared before her. Suni picked up a Ram soldier as if he were a doll, hoisted him over his head, and flung him into the crowd. Baji slammed his rake down into someone’s neck, yanked it up, and twirled it in a circle to knock an incoming arrow out of the air.

“Nice,” Rin said.

He helped her to her feet. “What took you so long?”

Rin opened her mouth to respond just as someone tried to grapple her from behind. She jammed her elbow back by instinct and felt the rewarding crunch of a shattering nose. Her assailant’s grip loosened. She struggled free. “We were waiting for your signal!”

“We gave a signal! Sent a flare up ten minutes ago! Where’s the fucking army?”

Rin pointed to the wall. “There.”

A thud shook Xiashang’s gates. The Shrike had landed its siege tower.

Republican soldiers funneled over the wall like a swarm of ants. Bodies hurtled to the ground like tumbling bricks, while grappling hooks flew into the sky and embedded themselves at regular intervals along the wall.

She saw almost as many blue uniforms as green ones now. Slowly the press of Republican soldiers expanded through the center square.

“Get to the gates,” Rin told Baji.

“Way ahead of you.” Baji scattered the throng of soldiers guarding one suspension wheel with a well-aimed swing of his rake. Suni took the other wheel. Together they dug their heels into the ground and pushed. Republican soldiers formed a protective circle around them, fending off the press of defenders.

“Push!” someone screamed.

Rin didn’t have the chance to look behind her to see what was happening. The wave of steel was too blinding. Something sliced open her left cheek. Blood splattered across her face. It was in her eyes—she wiped at them with her sleeve, but that only made them sting worse.

She lashed blindly out with her trident. Steel crunched into bone, and her attacker dropped to the ground. Lucky blow. Rin fell back behind the Republican line and blinked furiously until her vision cleared.

She heard a screeching grind from the suspension wheels. She hazarded a glance over her shoulder. With a massive groan, the gates of Xiashang swung open.

Behind them was the fleet.

The tide had turned. Republican soldiers flooded the square, a deluge of so many blue uniforms that for a moment Rin lost sight of the Ram defenders entirely. Somewhere a horn blew, followed by a series of gong strikes that rang so loudly they drowned out any other sound.

Distress signals. But signals to whom? Rin clambered up onto a crate, trying to see above the melee.

She spotted movement in the southwest corridor. She squinted. A new platoon of soldiers, armed and battle-fresh, ran toward the square. The local backup militia? No—they were wearing blue uniforms, not green.

But that wasn’t the ocean blue of the Republican uniforms.

Rin almost dropped her trident. Those weren’t Nikara soldiers.

Those were Federation troops.

For a moment she thought, panicking, that the Federation was still at large, that they had taken this chance to launch a simultaneous invasion on Xiashang. But that made no sense. The Federation had already been behind the city gates. And they weren’t attacking the Xiashang city guard, they were only attacking troops clearly marked in Republican uniforms.

Realization hit like a punch to the gut.

The Ram Warlord had allied with the Federation.

The ground tilted beneath her feet. She saw smoke and fire. She saw bodies eaten by gas. She saw Altan, walking backward away from her on a pier—

“Get down!” Baji shouted.

Rin flung herself to the ground just as a spear hit the wall where her head had been.

She struggled to her feet. She couldn’t see an end to the column of Federation soldiers. How many were there? Did they equal Republican numbers?

What had seemed like an easy victory was about to turn into a bloodbath.

She raced up the stairway to get a better look at the city’s layout. Just past the town square she saw a three-story residence embedded in a massive, sculpture-dotted garden. That had to be the Ram Warlord’s private quarters. It was the largest building in Xiashang.

She knew the best way to end this.

“Baji!” She waved her trident to get his attention. When he looked up, she pointed toward the Ram Warlord’s mansion. “Cover me.”

He understood immediately. Together they forced their bloody way through the throng until they broke out on the other side of the square. Then they ran for the gardens.

The mansion was guarded by two stone lions, mouths open in wide, greedy caverns. The doors were bolted shut.

Good. That meant someone was hiding inside.

Rin aimed a savage kick at the handle, but the doors didn’t budge.

“Please,” said Baji. She got out of his way. He took three steps back and slammed his shoulder into the doors. Wood splintered. The doors crashed open.

Baji picked himself up off the ground and pointed behind her. “We’ve got trouble.”

Rin turned around to see a fresh wave of Federation soldiers running toward the mansion. Baji planted himself in the doorway, rake raised.

“You good?” Rin asked.

“You go. I’ve got this.”

She ran indoors. The halls were brightly lit but appeared entirely empty—which would have been the worst of outcomes, because that would mean the Ram Warlord’s family had already evacuated to somewhere safe. Rin stood still in the center of the hall, heart pounding, straining to listen for any sound of inhabitants.

Seconds later she heard a baby’s shrill wail.

Yes. She concentrated, trying to track the noise. She heard it again. This time the baby’s cry was stifled, like someone had clamped a sleeve over its mouth, but in the empty house it rang clear as a bell.

The sound came from the chambers to her left. Rin crept forward, shoes moving silently across the marble floor. At the end of the hall she saw a single silkscreen door. The baby’s cries were getting louder. She placed a hand on the door and pulled. Locked. She took a step back and kicked it down. The flimsy bamboo frame gave way with no trouble.

A crowd of at least fifteen women stared up at her, tears of terror streaming down their fat and puffy cheeks, clumped together like flightless birds fattened for the slaughter.

They were the Warlord’s wives, Rin guessed. His daughters. Their servant girls and nursemaids.

“Where is Tsung Ho?” she demanded.

They huddled closer together, mute and trembling.

Rin’s eyes fell on the baby. An old woman at the back of the room had it clutched in her hands. It was swaddled in red cloth. That meant it was a baby boy. A potential heir.

The Ram Warlord would not let that child die.

“Give him to me,” Rin said.

The woman frantically shook her head and pressed the child closer to her chest.

Rin leveled her trident at her. “This is not worth dying for.”

One of the girls dashed forward, flailing at her with a curtain pole. Rin ducked down and kicked out. Her foot connected with the girl’s midriff with a satisfying whumph. The girl collapsed on the ground, wailing in pain.

Rin put a foot on the girl’s sternum and pressed down, hard. The girl’s agonized whimpers gave her a savage, amused satisfaction. She felt a distinct lack of sympathy toward the women. They chose to be here. They were Federation allies, they knew what was happening, this was their fault, they should all be dead . . .

No. Stop. She took a deep breath. The red cleared from her eyes.

“Any of you try that again and I’ll gut you,” she said. “The baby. Now.”

Whimpering, the old woman relinquished the baby into her hands.

He immediately started to scream. Rin’s hands moved automatically to cup around his rear and the back of his head. Leftover instincts from days she’d spent carrying around her infant foster brother.

She had a sudden urge to coo to the baby and rock him until his sobbing ceased. She shut it down. She needed the baby to scream, and to scream loudly.

She backed out of the women’s quarters, waving her trident in front of her.

“You lot stay here,” she warned the women. “If any of you move, I will kill this child.”

The women nodded silently, tears streaking their powdered faces.

Rin backed out of the chamber and returned to the center of the main hall.

“Tsung Ho!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

Silence.

The baby quivered in her arms. His cries had diminished to distressed whimpers. Rin briefly considered pinching his arms to make him scream.

There was no need. The sight of her bloody trident was enough. He caught one glimpse of it, opened his mouth, and shrieked.

Rin shouted over the baby, “Tsung Ho! I’ll murder your son if you don’t come out.”

She heard him approaching long before he attacked.

Too slow. Too fucking slow. She spun around, dodged his blade, and slammed the butt of her trident into his stomach. He doubled over. She caught his blade inside the trident’s prongs and twisted it out of his hand. He dropped to all fours, scrambling for his weapon. She kicked it out of the way and jammed the hilt of her trident into the back of his head. He dropped to the floor.

“You traitor.” She aimed a savage strike at his kneecaps. He howled in pain. She hit them again. Then again.

The baby wailed louder. She walked to a corner, placed him delicately on the floor, then resumed her assault on his father. The Ram Warlord’s kneecaps were visibly broken. She moved on to his ribs.

“Please, mercy, please . . .” He curled into a pathetic bundle, arms wrapped over his head.

“When did you let the Mugenese into your gates?” she asked. “Before they burned Golyn Niis, or after?”

“We didn’t have a choice,” he whispered. He made a high keening noise as he drew his shattered knees to his chest. “They were lined up at our gates, we didn’t have any options—”

“You could have fought.”

“We would have died,” he gasped.

“Then you should have died.”

Rin slammed her trident butt against his head. He fell silent.

The baby continued to scream.

Jinzha was so pleased by their victory that he temporarily relaxed the army prohibition on alcohol. Jugs of fine sorghum wine, all plundered from the Ram Warlord’s mansion, were passed through the ranks. The soldiers camped out on the beach that night in an unusually good mood.

Jinzha and his council met by the shore to decide what to do with their prisoners. In addition to the captured Federation soldiers there were also the men of the Eighth Division—a larger Militia force than any conquered town they had dealt with so far. They were too big of a threat to let loose. Short of a mass execution, their options were to take an unwieldy number of prisoners—far too many to feed—or to let them go.

“Execute them,” Rin said immediately.

“More than a thousand men?” Jinzha shook his head. “We’re not monsters.”

“But they deserve it,” she said. “The Mugenese, at least. You know if the tables were turned, if the Federation had taken our men prisoners, they’d be dead already.”

She was so sure that it was a moot debate. But nobody nodded in agreement. She glanced around the circle, confused. Was the conclusion not clear? Why did they all look so uncomfortable?

“They’d be good at the wheels,” Admiral Molkoi said. “It’d give our men a break.”

“You’re joking,” Rin said. “You’d have to feed them, for starters—”

“So we’ll give them a subsistence diet,” said Molkoi.

“Our troops need that food!”

“Our troops have survived on less,” Molkoi said. “And it is best they don’t get used to the excess.”

Rin gawked at him. “You’ll put our troops on stricter rations so men who have committed treason can live?”

He shrugged. “They’re Nikara men. We won’t execute our own kind.”

“They stopped being Nikara the moment they let the Federation stroll into their homes,” she snapped. “They should be rounded up. And beheaded.”

None of the others would meet her eye.

“Nezha?” she asked.

He wouldn’t look at her. All he did was shake his head.

She flushed with anger. “These soldiers were collaborating with the Federation. Feeding them. Housing them. That’s treason. That should be punishable by death. Forget the soldiers—you should have the whole city punished!”

“Perhaps under Daji’s reign,” said Jinzha. “Not under the Republic. We can’t garner a reputation for brutality—”

“Because they helped them!” She was shouting now, and they were all staring at her, but she didn’t care. “The Federation! You don’t know what they did—just because you spent the war hiding in Arlong, you didn’t see what—”

Jinzha turned to Nezha. “Brother, put a muzzle on your Speerly, or—”

“I am not a dog!” Rin shrieked.

Sheer rage took over. She launched herself at Jinzha—and didn’t manage two steps before Admiral Molkoi tackled her to the ground so hard that for a moment the night stars blinked out of the sky, and it was all she could do to simply breathe.

“That’s enough,” Nezha said quietly. “She’s calmed down. Let her go.”

The pressure on her chest disappeared. Rin curled into a ball, choking miserably.

“Someone take her outside of camp,” Jinzha said. “Bind her, gag her, I don’t care. We’ll deal with this in the morning.”

“Yes, sir,” said Molkoi.

“She hasn’t eaten,” Nezha said.

“Then have someone bring her food or water if she asks,” Jinzha said. “Just get her out of my sight.”

Rin screamed.

No one could hear her—they’d banished her to a stretch of forest outside the camp perimeter—so she screamed louder, again and again, bashing her fists against a tree until blood ran down her knuckles while rage built up hotter and hotter in her chest. And for a moment she thought—hoped—that the crimson fury sparking in her vision might explode into flames, real flames, finally—

But nothing. No sparks lit her fingers; no divine laughter rippled through her thoughts. She could feel the Seal at the back of her mind, a pulsing, sickly thing, blurring and softening her anger every time it reached a peak. And that only doubled her rage, made her shriek louder in frustration, but it was a pointless tantrum because the fire remained out of her grasp; dancing, taunting her behind the barrier in her head.

Please, she thought. I need you, I need the fire, I need to burn . . .

The Phoenix remained silent.

She sank to her knees.

She could hear Altan laughing. That wasn’t the Seal, that was her own imagination, but she heard it as clearly as if he were standing right beside her.

“Look at you,” he said.

“Pathetic,” he said.

“It’s not coming back,” he said. “You’re lost, you’re done, you’re not a Speerly, you’re just a stupid little girl throwing a temper tantrum in the forest.”

Finally her voice and strength gave out and the anger ebbed pathetically, ineffectually, away. Then she was alone with the indifferent silence of the trees, with no company except for her own mind.

And Rin couldn’t stand that, so she decided to get as drunk as she possibly could.

She’d picked up a small jug of sorghum wine back at camp. She chugged it down in under a minute.

She wasn’t used to drinking. The masters at Sinegard had been strict—the smallest whiff of alcohol was grounds for expulsion. She still preferred the sickly sweetness of opium smoke to the burn of sorghum wine, but she liked how it seared her delightfully from the inside. It didn’t make the anger go away, but it reduced it to a dull throb, an aching pain rather than a sharp, fresh wound.

By the time Nezha came out for her she was utterly soused, and she wouldn’t have heard him approach if he hadn’t shouted for her every step he took.

“Rin? Are you there?”

She heard his voice around the other side of a tree. She blinked for a few seconds before she remembered how to push words out of her mouth. “Yes. Don’t come around.”

“What are you doing?”

He circled the tree. She hastily yanked her trousers back up with one hand. A dripping jug dangled from the other.

“Are you pissing in a jug?”

“I’m preparing a gift for your brother,” she said. “Think he’ll like it?”

“You can’t give the grand marshal of the Republican Army a jug of urine.”

“But it’s warm,” she mumbled. She shook it at him. Piss sloshed out the side.

Nezha hastily stepped away. “Please put that down.”

“You sure Jinzha doesn’t want it?”

“Rin.”

She sighed dramatically and complied.

He took her clean hand and led her to a patch of grass by the river, far away from the soiled jug. “You know you can’t lash out like that.”

She squared her shoulders. “And I have been appropriately disciplined.”

“It’s not about discipline. They’ll think you’re mad.”

“They already think I’m mad,” she retorted. “Savage, dumb little Speerly. Right? It’s in my nature.”

“That’s not what I . . . Come on, Rin.” Nezha shook his head. “Anyhow. I’ve, uh, got bad news.”

She yawned. “Did we lose the war? That was quick.”

“No. Jinzha’s demoted you.”

She blinked several times, uncomprehending. “What?”

“You’re unranked. You’re to serve as a foot soldier now. And you’re not in command of the Cike anymore.”

“So who is?”

“No one. There is no Cike. They’ve all been reassigned to other ships.”

He watched her carefully to gauge her reaction, but Rin just hiccupped.

“That’s all right. They hardly listened to me anyway.” She derived a kind of bitter satisfaction from saying this out loud. Her position as commander had always been a sham. To be fair, the Cike did listen to her when she had a plan, but she usually didn’t. Really, they’d effectively been running themselves.

“You know what your problem is?” Nezha asked. “You have no impulse control. Absolutely zero. None.”

“It’s terrible,” she agreed, and started to giggle. “Good thing I can’t call the fire, huh?”

He responded to that with such a long silence that eventually it began to embarrass her. She wished now that she hadn’t drunk so much. She couldn’t think properly through her helplessly muddled mind. She felt terribly foolish, crude, and ashamed.

She had to practice whispering her words before she could voice them out loud. “So what’s happening now?”

“Same thing as usual. They’re gathering up the civilians. The men will cast their votes tonight.”

She sat up. “They should not get a vote.”

“They’re Nikara. All Nikara get the option to join the Republic.”

“They helped the Federation!”

“Because they didn’t have a choice,” Nezha said. “Think about it. Put yourself in their position. You really think you would have done any better?”

“Yes,” she snapped. “I did. I was in their position. I was in worse—they had me strapped down to a bed, they were torturing me and torturing Altan in front of me and I was terrified, I wanted to die—”

“They were scared, too,” he said softly.

“Then they should have fought back.”

“Maybe they didn’t have the choice. They weren’t trained soldiers. They weren’t shamans. How else were they going to survive?”

“It’s not enough just to survive,” she hissed. “You have to fight for something, you can’t just—just live your life like a fucking coward.”

“Some people are just cowards. Some people just aren’t that strong.”

“Then they shouldn’t have votes,” she snarled.

The more she thought about it, the more ludicrous Vaisra’s proposed democracy seemed. How were the Nikara supposed to rule themselves? They hadn’t run their own country since before the days of the Red Emperor, and even drunk, she could figure out why—the Nikara were simply far too stupid, too selfish, and too cowardly.

“Democracy’s not going to work. Look at them.” She was gesturing at trees, not people, but it hardly made a difference to her. “They’re cows. Fools. They’re voting for the Republic because they’re scared—I’m sure they’d vote just as quickly to join the Federation.”

“Don’t be unfair,” Nezha said. “They’re just people: they’ve never studied warcraft.”

“So then they shouldn’t rule!” she shouted. “They need someone to tell them what to do, what to think—”

“And who’s that going to be? Daji?”

“Not Daji. But someone educated. Someone who’s passed the Keju, who’s graduated from Sinegard. Someone who’s been in the military. Someone who knows the value of a human life.”

“You’re describing yourself,” said Nezha.

“I’m not saying it would be me,” Rin said. “I’m just saying it shouldn’t be the people. Vaisra shouldn’t let them elect anyone. He should just rule.”

Nezha tilted his head to the side. “You want my father to make himself Emperor?”

A wave of nausea rocked her stomach before she could respond. There was no time to get up; she lurched forward onto her knees and heaved the contents of her stomach against the tree. Her face was too close to the ground. A good deal of vomit splashed back onto her cheek. She rubbed clumsily at it with her sleeve.

“You all right?” Nezha asked when she’d stopped dry-heaving.

“Yes.”

He rubbed his hand in circles on her back. “Good.”

She spat a gob of regurgitated wine onto the dirt. “Fuck off.”

Nezha lifted a clump of mud up from the riverbank. “Have you ever heard the story of how the goddess Nüwa created humanity?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell it to you.” Nezha molded the mud into a ball with his palms. “Once upon a time, after the birth of the world, Nüwa was lonely.”

“What about her husband, Fuxi?” Rin only knew the myths about Nüwa and Fuxi both.

“Absent spouse, I guess. Myth doesn’t mention him.”

“Of course.”

“Of course. Anyway, Nüwa gets lonely, decides to create some humans to populate the world to keep her company.” Nezha pressed his fingernails into the ball of mud. “The first few people she makes are incredibly detailed. Fine features, lovely clothes.”

Rin could see where this was going. “Those are the aristocrats.”

“Yes. The nobles, the emperors, the warriors, everyone who matters. Then she gets bored. It’s taking too long. So she takes a rope and starts flinging mud in all directions. Those become the hundred clans of Nikan.”

Rin swallowed. Her throat tasted like acid. “They don’t tell that story in the south.”

“And why do you think that is?” Nezha asked.

She turned that over in her mind for a moment. Then she laughed.

“My people are mud,” she said. “And you’re still going to let them run a country.”

“I don’t think they’re mud,” Nezha said. “I think they’re still unformed. Uneducated and uncultured. They don’t know better because they haven’t been given the chance. But the Republic will shape and refine them. Develop them into what they were meant to be.”

“That’s not how it works.” Rin took the clump of mud from Nezha’s hand. “They’re never going to become more than what they are. The north won’t let them.”

“That’s not true.”

“You think that. But I’ve seen how power works.” Rin crushed the clump in her fingers. “It’s not about who you are, it’s about how they see you. And once you’re mud in this country, you’re always mud.”