The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Trilogy #2)

“There’s another way,” said the Sorqan Sira.

“Shut up,” Rin said.

She’d come so close. She’d almost had the fire back, she’d tasted it, only to have it wrenched out of her grasp. She wanted to lash out at something, she just didn’t know who or what, and the sheer pressure made her feel like she might explode. “You said you’d fixed it.”

“The Seal is neutralized,” said the Sorqan Sira. “It cannot corrupt you any longer. But the venom ran deep, and it still blocks your access to the world of spirit—”

“Fuck all you know.”

“Rin, don’t,” Kitay warned.

She ignored him. She knew this wasn’t the Sorqan Sira’s fault, but still she wanted to hurt, to cut. “Your people don’t know shit. No wonder the Trifecta killed you off, no wonder you lost to three fucking teenagers—”

A shrieking noise slammed into her mind. She fell to her knees, but the noise kept reverberating, growing louder and louder until it solidified into words that vibrated in her bones.

You dare reproach me? The Sorqan Sira loomed over Rin like a giant, standing tall as a mountain while everything else in the clearing shrank. I am the Mother of the Ketreyids. I rule the north of the Baghra, where the scorpions are fat with poison and the great-mawed sandworms lie in the red sands, ready to swallow camels whole. I have tamed a land created to wither humans away until they are polished bone. Do not think to defy me.

Rin couldn’t speak for the pain. The shriek intensified for several torturous seconds before finally ebbing away. She rolled onto her back and sucked in air in great, heaving gulps.

Kitay helped her sit up. “This is why we are polite to our allies.”

“I will await your apology,” said the Sorqan Sira.

“I’m sorry,” Rin muttered. “I just—I thought I had it back.”

She’d numbed herself to her loss during the campaign. She hadn’t realized how desperately she still wanted the fire back until she touched it again, just for a moment, and everything had come rushing back; the thrill, the blaze, the sheer roaring power.

“Do not presume that all is lost,” said the Sorqan Sira. “You will never access the Phoenix on your own unless Daji removes the Seal. That she will never do.”

“Then it’s all over,” Rin said.

“No. Not if another soul calls the Phoenix for you. A soul that is bound to your own.” The Sorqan Sira looked pointedly at Kitay.

He blinked, confused.

“No,” Rin said immediately. “I don’t—I don’t care what you can do, no—”

“Let her speak,” Kitay said.

“No, you don’t understand the risk—”

“Yes, he does,” said the Sorqan Sira.

“But he doesn’t know anything about the gods!” Rin cried.

“He doesn’t now. Once you’ve been twinned, he will know everything.”

“Twinned?” Kitay repeated.

“Do you understand the nature of Chaghan and Qara’s bond?” the Sorqan Sira asked.

Kitay shook his head.

“They’re spiritually linked,” Rin said flatly. “Cut him, and she feels the pain. Kill him and she dies.”

Horror flitted across Kitay’s face. He tried to mask it, but she saw.

“The anchor bond connects your souls across the psychospiritual plane,” said the Sorqan Sira. “You can still call the Phoenix if you do it through the boy. He will be your conduit. The divine power will flow straight through him and into you.”

“I’m going to become a shaman?” Kitay asked.

“No. You will only lend your mind to one. She will call the god through you.” The Sorqan Sira tilted her head, considering the both of them. “You are good friends, yes?”

“Yes,” Kitay said.

“Good. The anchor takes best on two souls that are already familiar. It’s stronger. More stable. Can you bear a little pain?”

“Yes,” Kitay said again.

“Then we should perform the bonding ritual as soon as we can.”

“Absolutely not,” Rin said.

“I’ll do it,” Kitay said firmly. “Just tell me how.”

“No, I’m not letting you—”

“I’m not asking your permission, Rin. We don’t have another choice.”

“But you could die!”

He barked out a laugh. “We’re soldiers. We’re always about to die.”

Rin stared at him in disbelief. How could he sound so cavalier? Did he not understand the risk?

Kitay had survived Sinegard. Golyn Niis. Boyang. He’d suffered enough pain for a lifetime. She wasn’t putting him through this, too. She’d never be able to forgive herself.

“You have no idea what it’s like,” she said. “You’ve never spoken to the gods, you—”

He shook his head. “No, you don’t get to talk like that. You don’t get to keep this world from me, like I’m too stupid or too weak for it—”

“I don’t think you’re weak.”

“Then why—”

“Because you don’t know anything about this world, and you never should.” She didn’t care if the Phoenix tormented her, but Kitay . . . Kitay was pure. He was the best person she had ever known. Kitay shouldn’t know how it felt to call a god of vengeance. Kitay was the last thing in the world that was still fundamentally kind and good, and she’d die before she corrupted that. “You have no idea how it feels. The gods will break you.”

“Do you want the fire back?” Kitay asked.

“What?”

“Do you want the fire back? If you can call the Phoenix again, will you use it to win us this war?”

“Yes,” she said. “I want it more than anything. But I can’t ask you to do this for me.”

“Then you don’t have to ask.” He turned to the Sorqan Sira. “Anchor us. Just tell me what I have to do.”

The Sorqan Sira was looking at Kitay with an expression that almost amounted to respect. A thin smile spread across her face. “As you wish.”

“It’s not so bad,” Chaghan said. “You take the agaric. You kill the sacrifice. Then the Sorqan Sira binds you, and your souls are linked together forever after. You don’t need to do much but exist, really.”

“Why a living sacrifice?” Kitay asked.

“Because there’s power in a soul released from the material world,” Qara said. “The Sorqan Sira will use that power to forge your bond.”

Chaghan and Qara had been enlisted to prepare Rin and Kitay for the ritual, which involved a tedious process of painting a line of characters down their bare arms, running from their shoulders to the tips of their middle fingers. The characters had to be written at precisely the same time, each stroke synchronous with its pair.

The twins worked with remarkable coordination, which Rin would have appreciated more if she weren’t so upset.

“Stop moving,” Chaghan said. “You’re making the ink bleed.”

“Then write faster,” she snapped.

“That would be nice,” Kitay said amiably. “I need to pee.”

Chaghan dipped his brush into an inkwell and shook away the excess drops. “Ruin one more character and we’ll have to start over.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Rin grumbled. “Why don’t you just take another hour? With luck the war will be over before you’re done!”

Chaghan lowered his brush. “We didn’t have a choice in this. You know that.”

“I know you’re a little bitch,” she said.

“You have no other choice.”

“Fuck you.”

It was a petty exchange, and it didn’t make Rin feel nearly as good as she thought it would. It only exhausted her. Because Chaghan was right—the twins had to comply with the Sorqan Sira or they would certainly have been killed, and if they hadn’t, Rin would still have no way out.

“It’ll be all right,” Qara said gently. “An anchor makes you stronger. More stable.”

Rin scoffed. “How? It just seems like a good way to lose two soldiers for every one.”

“Because it makes you resilient to the gods. Every time you call them down, you are like a lantern, drifting away from your body. Drift too far, and the gods root themselves in your physical form instead. That’s when you lose your mind.”

“Is that what happened to this Feylen?” Kitay asked.

“Yes,” said Qara. “He went out too far, got lost, and the god planted itself inside.”

“Interesting,” Kitay said. “And the anchor absolutely prevents that?”

He sounded far too excited about the procedure. He drank the twins’ words in with a hungry expression, cataloging every new sliver of information into his prodigious memory. Rin could almost see the gears turning in his mind.

That scared her. She didn’t want him entranced with this world. She wanted him to run far, far away.

“It’s not perfect, but it makes it much harder to lose your mind,” Chaghan said. “The gods can’t uproot you with an anchor. You can drift as far as you want into the world of spirit, and you’ll always have a way to come back.”

“You’re saying I’ll stop Rin from going crazy,” Kitay said.

“She’s already crazy,” Chaghan said.

“Fair enough,” Kitay said.

The twins worked in silence for a long while. Rin sat up straight, eyes closed, breathing steadily as she felt the wet brush tip move against her bare skin.

What if the anchor did make her stronger? She couldn’t help feeling a thrill of hope at the thought. What would it be like to call the Phoenix without fear of losing her mind to the rage? She might summon fire whenever she wanted, for as long as she wanted. She might control it the way Altan had.

But was it worth it? The sacrifice seemed so immense—not just for Kitay, but for her. To link her life to his would be such an unpredictable, terrifying liability. She would never be safe unless Kitay was, too.

Unless she could protect him. Unless she could guarantee that Kitay was never in danger.

At last Chaghan put his brush down. “You’re finished.”

Rin stretched and examined her arms. Swirling black script covered her skin, made of words that almost resembled a language that she could understand. “That’s it?”

“Not yet.” Chaghan passed them a fistful of red-capped toadstools. “Eat these.”

Kitay prodded a toadstool with his finger. “What are these?”

“Fly agaric. You can find it near birch and fir trees.”

“What’s it for?”

“To open up the crack between the worlds,” Qara said.

Kitay looked confused.

“Tell him what it’s really for,” Rin said.

Qara smiled. “To get you incredibly high. Much more elegant than poppy seeds. Faster, too.”

Kitay turned the mushroom over in his hand. “Looks poisonous.”

“They’re psychedelics,” Chaghan said. “They’re all poisonous. The whole point is to deliver you right to the doorstep of the afterworld.”

Rin popped the mushrooms in her mouth and chewed. They were tough and tasteless, and she had to work her teeth for several minutes before they were tender enough to go down. She had the unpleasant sensation that she was chewing through a lump of flesh every time her teeth cut into the fibrous chunks.

Chaghan passed Kitay a wooden cup. “If you don’t want to eat the mushroom you can drink the agaric instead.”

Kitay sniffed it, took a sip, and gagged. “What’s in this?”

“Horse urine,” Chaghan said cheerfully. “We feed the mushrooms to the horses, and you get the drug after it passes. Goes down easier.”

“Your people are disgusting,” Kitay muttered. He pinched his nose, tossed the contents of the cup back into his throat, and gagged.

Rin swallowed. Dry lumps of mushroom pushed painfully down her throat.

“What happens to you when your anchor dies?” she asked.

“You die,” Chaghan said. “Your souls are bound, which means they depart this earth together. One pulls the other along.”

“That’s not strictly true,” Qara said. “It’s a choice. You can choose to depart this earth together. Or you may break the bond.”

“You can?” Rin asked. “How?”

Qara exchanged a look with Chaghan. “With your last word. If both partners are willing.”

Kitay frowned. “I don’t understand. Why is this a liability, then?”

“Because once you have an anchor, they become a part of your soul. Your very existence. They know your thoughts. They feel what you feel. They are the only ones who completely and fully understand you. Most would die rather than give that up.”

“And you’d both have to be in the same place when one of you died,” said Chaghan. “Most people aren’t.”

“But you can break it,” Rin said.

“You could,” Chaghan said. “Though I doubt the Sorqan Sira will teach you how.”

Of course not. Rin knew the Sorqan Sira would want Kitay as insurance—not only to ensure that her weapon against Daji kept working, but as a failsafe in case she ever decided to put Rin down.

“Did Altan have an anchor?” she asked. Altan had possessed an eerie amount of control for a Speerly.

“No. The Speerlies didn’t know how to do it. Altan was . . . whatever Altan was doing, that was inhuman. Near the end, he was staying sane off of sheer willpower alone.” Chaghan swallowed. “I offered many times. He always said no.”

“But you already have an anchor,” said Rin. “You can have more than one?”

“Not at the same time. A pairwise bond is optimal. A triangular bond is deeply unstable, because unpredictability in reciprocation means that any defection on one end affects the other two in ways that you cannot protect against.”

“But?” Kitay pressed.

“But it can also amplify your abilities. Make you stronger than any shaman has the right to be.”

“Like the Trifecta,” Rin realized. “They’re bonded to each other. That’s why they’re so powerful.”

It made so much sense now—why Daji had not killed Jiang if they were enemies. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t, without killing herself.

She sat up with a start. “So that means . . .”

“Yes,” said Chaghan. “As long as Daji is alive, the Dragon Emperor and the Gatekeeper are both still alive. It’s possible their bond was dissolved, but I doubt it. Daji’s power is far too stable. The other two are out there, somewhere. But my guess is that they can’t be doing too well, because the rest of the country thinks they’re dead.”

You will destroy one another. One will die, one will rule, and one will sleep for eternity.

Kitay voiced the question on Rin’s mind. “Then what happened to them? Why did they go missing?”

Chaghan shrugged. “You’d have to ask the other two. Have you finished drinking?”

Kitay drained the cup and winced. “Ugh. Yes.”

“Good. Now eat the mushrooms.”

Kitay blinked. “What?”

“There’s no agaric in that cup,” Chaghan said.

“Oh, you asshole,” Rin said.

“I don’t understand,” Kitay said.

Chaghan gave him a thin smile. “I just wanted to see if you’d drink horse piss.”

The Sorqan Sira waited outside before a roaring fire. The flames seemed alive to Rin; the tendrils jumped too high, reached too far, like little hands trying to pull her into the blaze. If she let her gaze linger, the smoke, turned purple by the Sorqan Sira’s powders, started taking on the faces of the dead. Master Irjah. Aratsha. Captain Salkhi. Altan.

“Are you ready?” asked the Sorqan Sira.

Rin blinked the faces away.

She knelt across from Kitay on the frigid dirt. Despite the cold, they were permitted to wear only trousers and undershirts that exposed their bare arms. The inky characters trailing down their skin shone in the firelight.

She was terrified. He didn’t look afraid at all.

“I’m ready,” he said. His voice was steady.

“Ready,” she echoed.

Between them lay two long, serrated knives and a sacrifice.

Rin didn’t know how the Ketreyids had managed to trap an adult deer, massive and healthy, without any visible wounds, in just a matter of hours. Its legs were bound tightly together. Rin suspected that the animal had been sedated, because it lay quite still on the dirt, eyes half-open as if it were resigned to its fate.

The effect of the agaric had begun to set in. Everything seemed terribly bright. When objects moved in her field of vision, they left behind trails like streaks of paint that sparked and swirled before they faded away.

She focused with difficulty on the deer’s neck.

She and Kitay were to make two cuts, one on either side of the animal, so that neither could bear full responsibility for its death. Alone, each wound would be insufficient to kill. The deer might drag itself away, cover the cut in mud and somehow survive. But wounds on both sides meant certain death.

Rin picked her knife off the ground and gripped it tightly in her hands.

“Repeat after me,” said the Sorqan Sira, and uttered a slow stream of Ketreyid words. The foreign syllables sounded clunky and awkward in Rin’s mouth. She knew their meaning only because the twins had explained them to her.

We will live as one. We will fight as one.

And we will kill as one.

“The sacrifice,” said the Sorqan Sira.

They brought their knives down.

Rin found it harder than she’d expected. Not because she was unused to killing—cutting through flesh was as easy to her now as breathing. It was the fur that offered resistance. She clenched her teeth and pushed harder. The knife sank into the deer’s side.

The deer arched its neck and screamed.

Rin’s knife hadn’t gone in deep enough. She had to widen the cut. Her hands shook madly; the handle was loose between her fingers.

But Kitay dragged his knife across the deer’s side with one clean, steady stroke.

Blood pooled, fast and dark, around their knees. The deer stopped writhing. Its head drooped to the ground.

Through the haze of the agaric, Rin saw the moment the deer’s life left its body—a golden, shimmering aura that lingered over the corpse like an ethereal copy of its physical form before drifting upward like smoke. She tilted her head up, watched it floating higher and higher toward the heavens.

“Follow it,” said the Sorqan Sira.

She did. It seemed such a simple matter. Under the agaric’s influence her soul was lighter than air itself. Her mind ascended, her material body became a distant memory, and she flew up into the vast and dark void that was the cosmos.

She found herself standing on the periphery of a great circle, its circumference etched with glowing Hexagrams—characters that together spelled the nature of the universe, the sixty-four deities that constituted all that was and would ever be.

The circle tilted and became a pool, inside which swam two massive carp, one white, one black, each with a large dot of the opposite color on its flank. They drifted lazily, chasing each other in a slow-moving, eternal circle.

She saw Kitay on the other side of the circle. He was naked. It was not a physical nakedness; he was made more of light than he was of body—but every thought, every memory, and every feeling he’d ever had shone out toward her. Nothing was hidden.

She was similarly naked before him. All of her secrets, her insecurities, her guilt, and her rage had been laid bare. He saw her cruelest, most brutal desires. He saw parts of her that she didn’t even understand herself. The part that was terrified of being alone and terrified of being the last. The part that realized it loved pain, adored it, could find release only in pain.

And she could see him. She saw the way that concepts were stored in his mind, great repositories of knowledge linked together to be called up at a moment’s notice. She saw the anxiety that came with being the only person he knew who was this smart. She saw how scared he was, trapped and isolated in his own mind, watching his world break down around him because of irrationalities that he could not fix.

And she understood his sadness. The grief; the loss of a father, but more than just that—the loss of an empire, the loss of loyalty, of duty, his sole meaning for existence—

She saw his fury.

How had it taken her this long to understand? She wasn’t the only one fueled by anger. But where her rage was explosive, immediate and devastating, Kitay’s burned with a silent determination; it festered and rotted and lingered, and the strength of his hate stunned her.

We’re the same.

Kitay wanted vengeance and blood. Under that frail veneer of control was an ongoing scream of rage that originated in confusion and culminated in an overwhelming urge for destruction, if only so he could tear the world down and rebuild it in a way that made sense.

The circle glowed between them. The black carp and white carp began to circle faster and faster until the darkness and brightness were indistinct; not gray, not melded into each other but yet the same entity—two sides of the same coin, necessary complements balancing each other like the Pantheon was balanced.

The circle spun and they spun with it—faster and faster, until the Hexagrams blurred and melded into a glowing hoop. For a moment Rin was lost in the convergence—up became down, right became left, all distinctions were broken . . .

Then she felt the power, and it was magnificent.

She felt like she had when Shiro injected her veins with heroin. It was the same rush, the same dizzying flood of energy. But this time her spirit did not drift farther and farther from the material world. This time she knew where her body was, could return to it in seconds if she wanted. She was halfway between the spirit world and the material world. She could perceive both, affect both.

She had not gone up to meet her god; her god had been drawn down into her. She felt the Phoenix all about her, the rage and fire, so deliciously warm that it tickled as it coursed over her.

She was so delighted that she wanted to laugh.

But Kitay was moaning. He had been for some time now, but she was so entranced with the power that she’d hardly noticed.

“It’s not taking.” The Sorqan Sira intruded sharply on Rin’s reverie. “Stop it, you’re overpowering him.”

Rin opened her eyes and saw Kitay curled into a ball, whimpering on the ground. He jerked his head back and uttered a long, keening scream.

Her sight blurred and shifted. One moment she was looking at Kitay and the next she couldn’t see him at all. All she could see was fire, vast expanses of fire over which only she had control . . .

“You’re erasing him,” hissed the Sorqan Sira. “Pull yourself back.”

But why? She’d never felt so good before. She never wanted this sensation to stop.

“You are going to kill him.” The Sorqan Sira’s fingers dug into her shoulder. “And then nothing will save you.”

Dimly, Rin understood. She was hurting Kitay, she had to stop, but how? The fire was so alluring, it reduced her rational mind to just a whisper. She heard the Phoenix’s laughter echoing around her mind, growing louder and stronger with every passing moment.

“Rin,” Kitay gasped. “Please.”

That brought her back.

Her grasp of the material world was fading. Before it disappeared entirely she snatched up her knife and stabbed down into her leg.

Spots of white exploded in her vision. The pain chased the fire away, induced a stark clarity back to her mind. The Phoenix fell silent. The void was still.

She saw Kitay across the spirit plane—kneeling, but alive, present, and whole.

She opened her eyes to dirt. Slowly she pulled herself into a sitting position, wiped the soil off the side of her face. She saw Kitay looking around in a daze, blinking as if he were seeing the world for the first time.

She reached for his hand. “Are you all right?”

He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I—I’m fine, I think, I just . . . Give me a moment.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Welcome to my world.”

“I feel like I’m living in a dream.” He examined the back of his hand, turned it over in the fading sunlight as if he didn’t trust the evidence of his own body. “I suppose—I saw the physical proof of your gods. I knew this power existed. But everything I know about the world—”

“The world you knew doesn’t exist,” she said softly.

“No shit.” Kitay’s hands clenched the dirt and grass like he was afraid the ground might disappear under his fingertips.

“Try it,” said the Sorqan Sira.

Rin didn’t have to ask what she meant.

She stood upon shaky legs and turned to face away from Kitay. She opened her palms. She felt the fire inside her chest, a warm presence waiting to pour out the moment she called it.

She summoned it forward. A warm flame appeared in her hands—a tame, quiet little thing.

She tensed, waiting for the pull, the urge to draw out more, more. But she felt nothing. The Phoenix was still there. She knew it was screaming for her. But it couldn’t get through. A wall had been built in her mind, a psychic structure that repelled and muted the god to just a faint whisper.

Fuck you, said the Phoenix, but even now it sounded amused. Fuck you, little Speerly.

She shouted with delight. She hadn’t just recovered, she had tamed a god. The anchor bond had set her free.

She watched, trembling, as fire accumulated on her palms. She called it higher. Made it leap through the air in arcs like fish jumping from the ocean. She could command it as completely as Altan had been able to. No. She was better than Altan had ever been, because she was sober, she was stable, and she was free.

The fear of madness was gone, but not the impossible power. The power remained, a deep well from which she could draw when she chose.

And now she could choose.

She saw Kitay watching her. His eyes were wide, his expression equal parts fear and awe.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. “Can you feel it?”

He didn’t answer. He touched a hand to his temple, his gaze fixed so hard on the flames that she could see them reflected bright in his eyes, and he laughed.

That night the Ketreyids fed them a bone broth—scorching hot, musky, tangy, and salty all at once. Rin guzzled it as fast as she could. It scalded the back of her throat, but she didn’t care. She’d been subsisting on dried fish and rice gruel for so long that she’d forgotten how good proper food could taste.

Qara passed her a mug. “Drink more water. You’re getting dehydrated.”

“Thanks.” Rin was still sweating despite the cold onset of night. Little droplets beaded all over her skin, soaking straight through her clothing.

Across the fire, Kitay and Chaghan were engaged in an animated discussion which, as far as Rin could tell, involved the metaphysical nature of the cosmos. Chaghan drew diagrams in the dirt with a stick while Kitay watched, nodding enthusiastically.

Rin turned to Qara. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Qara said.

Rin shot Kitay a glance. He wasn’t paying her any attention. He’d seized the stick from Chaghan and was scrawling a very complicated mathematical equation below the diagrams.

Rin lowered her voice. “How long have you and your brother been anchored?”

“For our entire lives,” Qara said. “We were ten days old when we performed the ritual. I can’t remember life without him.”

“And the bond has always . . . it’s always been equal? One of you doesn’t diminish the other?”

Qara raised an eyebrow. “Do you think I’ve been diminished?”

“I don’t know. You always seem so . . .” Rin trailed off. She didn’t know how to phrase it. Qara had always been a mystery to her. She was the moon to her brother’s sun. Chaghan was such an overbearing personality. He loved the spotlight, loved to lecture everyone around him in the most condescending way possible. But Qara had always preferred the shadows and the silent company of her birds. Rin had never heard her express an opinion that wasn’t her brother’s.

“You think Chaghan dominates me,” Qara said.

Rin blushed. “No, I just—”

“You’re worried you’ll overpower Kitay,” Qara said. “You think your rage will become too much for him and that he’ll become only a shade of you. You think that’s what has happened to us.”

“I’m scared,” Rin said. “I almost killed him. And if that—that imbalance, or whatever, is a risk, I want to know. I don’t want to strip him of his ability to challenge me.”

Qara nodded slowly. She sat silently for a long while, frowning.

“My brother doesn’t dominate me,” she said at last. “At least, not in a way I could ever possibly know. But I’ve never challenged him.”

“Then how—”

“Our wills have been united since we were children. We desire the same things. When he speaks, he voices both our thoughts. We are two halves of the same person. If I seem withdrawn to you, it is because Chaghan’s presence in the mortal world frees me to dwell among the spirit world. I prefer animal souls to mortals, to whom I’ve never had much to say. That doesn’t mean I’m diminished.”

“But Kitay’s not like you,” Rin said. “Our wills aren’t aligned. If anything, we disagree more often than not. And I don’t want to . . . erase him.”

Qara’s expression softened. “Do you love him?”

“Yes,” Rin said immediately. “More than anyone else in the world.”

“Then you don’t need to worry,” Qara said. “If you love him, then you can trust yourself to protect him.”

Rin hoped that was true.

“Hey,” Kitay said. “What’s so interesting over there?”

“Nothing,” Rin said. “Just gossip. Have you cracked the nature of the cosmos?”

“Not yet.” Kitay tossed his stick onto the dirt. “But give me a year or two. I’m getting close.”

Qara stood up. “Come. We should get some sleep.”

Sometime during the day the Ketreyids had built several more yurts, clustered together in a circle. The yurt designated for Rin and her companions was at the very center. The message was clear. They were still under Ketreyid watch until the Sorqan Sira chose to release them.

The yurt felt far too cramped for four people. Rin curled up on her side, knees drawn up to her chest, although all she wanted to do was sprawl out, let all of her limbs loose. She felt suffocated. She wanted open air—open sands, wide water. She took a deep breath, trying to stave off the same panic that had crept up on her during the sweat.

“What’s the matter?” Qara asked.

“I think I’d rather sleep outside.”

“You’ll freeze outside. Don’t be stupid.”

Rin propped herself up on her side. “You look comfortable.”

Qara smiled. “Yurts remind me of home.”

“How long has it been since you’ve been back?” Rin asked.

Qara thought for a moment. “They sent us down south when we turned eleven. So it has been a decade, now.”

“Do you ever wish you could go home?”

“Sometimes,” Qara said. “But there’s not much at home. Not for us, anyway. It’s better to be a foreigner in the Empire than a Naimad on the steppe.”

Rin supposed that was to be expected when one’s tribe was responsible for training a handful of traitorous murderers.

“So—what, no one talks to you back home?” she asked.

“Back home we are slaves,” Chaghan said flatly. “The Ketreyids still blame our mother for the Trifecta. They will never accept us back into the fold. We’ll pay penance for that forever.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them. Rin had more questions, she just didn’t know how to ask them.

If she were in a different mood, she would have yelled at the twins for their deception. They’d been spies for all of these years, watching the Cike to determine whether or not they would hold stable. Whether they did a good enough job culling their own, immuring the maddest among them in the Chuluu Korikh.

What if the twins had decided that the Cike had grown too dangerous? Would they have simply killed them off? Certainly the Ketreyids felt as if they had the right. They looked down on Nikara shamans with the same supercilious arrogance as the Hesperians, and Rin hated that.

But she held her tongue. Chaghan and Qara had suffered enough.

And she, if anyone, knew what it was like to be an outcast in her own country.

“These yurts.” Kitay put his palms on the walls; his outspread arms reached across a third of the diameter of the hut. “They’re all this small?”

“We build them even smaller on the steppe,” Qara said. “You’re from the south; you’ve never seen real winds.”

“I’m from Sinegard,” Kitay said.

“That’s not the true north. Everything below the sand dunes counts as the south to us. On the steppe, the night gusts can rip the flesh off your face if they don’t freeze you to death first. We stay in yurts because the steppe will kill you otherwise.”

No one had a response to that. A peaceful quiet fell over the yurt. Kitay and the twins were asleep in moments; Rin could tell by the sound of their steady, even breathing.

She lay awake with her trident clutched close to her chest, staring at the open roof above her, that perfect circle that revealed the night sky. She felt like a little rodent burrowing down in its hole, trying to pretend that if it lay low enough, then the world outside wouldn’t bother it.

Maybe the Ketreyids stayed in their yurts to hide from the winds. Or maybe, she thought, with stars this bright, if you believed that above you lay the cosmos, then you had to construct a yurt to provide some temporary feeling of materiality. Otherwise, under the weight of swirling divinity, you might feel you had no significance at all.