The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Trilogy #2)

“Makes the barracks look nice, huh?” Ramsa asked.

Rin didn’t know what to say.

The refugee district was an ocean of people crammed into endless rows of tents stretching toward the valley. The crowds had been kept out of the city proper, hemmed in behind hastily constructed barriers of shipping planks and driftwood.

It looked as if a giant had drawn a line in the sand with one finger and pushed everyone to one side. Republican soldiers wielding halberds paced back and forth in front of the barrier, though Rin wasn’t sure who they were guarding—the refugees or the citizens.

“The refugees aren’t allowed past that barrier,” Baji explained. “The, uh, citizens didn’t want them crowding the streets.”

“What happens if they cross?” Rin asked.

“Nothing too terrible. Guards toss them back to the other side. It happened more often at the beginning, but a few beatings taught everyone their lesson.”

They walked a few more paces. A horrible stench hit Rin’s nose—the smell of too many unwashed bodies packed together for far too long. “How long have they been there?”

“At least a month,” Baji said. “I’m told they started flooding in as soon as we moved on Rat Province, but it only got worse once we came back.”

Rin could not believe that anyone had been living in these camps for that long. She saw clouds of flies everywhere she looked. The buzzing was unbearable.

“They’re still trickling in,” Ramsa said. “They come in waves, usually at night. They keep trying to sneak past the borders.”

“And they’re all from Hare and Rat Provinces?” she asked.

“What are you talking about? These are southern refugees.”

She blinked at him. “I thought the Militia hadn’t moved south.”

Ramsa exchanged a glance with Baji. “They’re not fleeing the Militia. They’re fleeing the Federation.”

“What?”

Baji scratched the back of his head. “Well, yes. It’s not like the Mugenese soldiers all just laid down their weapons.”

“I know, but I thought . . .” Rin trailed off. She felt dizzy. She’d known Federation troops remained on the mainland, but she’d thought they were contained to isolated units. Rogue soldiers, scattered squadrons. Roving mercenaries, forming predatory coalitions with provincial cities if they were large enough, but not enough to displace the entire south.

“How many are there?” she asked.

“Enough,” Baji said. “Enough that they constitute an entirely separate army. They’re fighting for the Militia, Rin. We don’t know how; we don’t know what deal she brokered with them. But soon enough we’ll be fighting a war on two fronts, not one.”

“Which regions?” she demanded.

“They’re everywhere.” Ramsa listed the provinces off on his fingers. “Monkey. Snake. Rooster.”

Rin flinched. Rooster?

“Are you all right?” Ramsa asked.

But she was already running.

She knew immediately these were her people. She knew them by their tawny skin that was almost as dark as hers. She knew them by the way they talked—the soft country drawl that made her feel nostalgic and uncomfortable at the same time.

That was the tongue she had grown up speaking—the flat, rustic dialect that she couldn’t speak without cringing now, because she’d spent years at school beating it out of herself.

She hadn’t heard anyone speak the Rooster dialect in so long.

She thought, stupidly, that they might recognize her. But the Rooster refugees shrank away when they saw her. Their faces grew closed and sullen when she met their eyes. They crawled back into their tents if she approached.

It took her a moment to realize that they weren’t afraid of her, they were afraid of her uniform.

They were afraid of Republican soldiers.

“You.” Rin pointed to a woman about her height. “Do you have a spare set of clothes?”

The woman blinked at her, uncomprehending.

Rin tried again, slipping clumsily into her old dialect like it was an ill-fitting pair of shoes. “Do you have another, uh, shirt? Pants?”

The woman gave a terrified nod.

“Give them to me.”

The woman crawled into her tent. She reappeared with a bundle of clothing—a faded blouse that might have once been dyed with a poppy flower pattern, and wide slacks with deep pockets.

Rin felt a sharp pang in her chest as she held the blouse out in front of her. She hadn’t seen clothes like this in a long time. They were made for fieldworkers. Even the poor of Sinegard would have laughed at them.

Stripping off her Republican uniform worked. The Roosters stopped avoiding her when they saw her. Instead, she became effectively invisible as she navigated through the sea of tightly packed bodies. She shouted to get attention as she moved down the rows of tents.

“Tutor Feyrik! I’m looking for a Tutor Feyrik! Has anyone seen him?”

Responses came in reluctant whispers and indifferent mutters. No. No. Leave us alone. No. These refugees were so used to hearing desperate cries for lost ones that they’d closed their ears to them. Someone knew a Tutor Fu, but he wasn’t from Tikany. Someone else knew a Feyrik, but he was a cobbler, not a teacher. Rin found it pointless trying to describe him; there were hundreds of men who could have fit his description—with every row she passed she saw old men with gray beards who turned out not to be Tutor Feyrik after all.

She pushed down a swell of despair. It had been stupid to hope in the first place. She’d known she’d never see him again; she’d resigned herself to that fact long ago.

But she couldn’t help it. She still had to try.

She tried broadening her search. “Is anyone here from Tikany?”

Blank looks. She moved faster and faster through the camp, breaking into a run. “Tikany? Please? Anyone?”

Then at last she heard one voice through the crowd—one that was laced not with casual indifference but with sheer disbelief.

“Rin?”

She stumbled to a halt. When she turned around she saw a spindly boy, no more than fourteen, with a mop of brown hair and large, downward-sloping eyes. He stood with a sodden shirt dangling from one hand and a bandage clutched in the other.

“Kesegi?”

He nodded wordlessly.

Then she was sixteen years old again herself, crying as she held him, rocking him so hard they almost fell to the dirt. He hugged her back, wrapping his long and scrawny limbs all the way around her like he used to.

When had he gotten so tall? Rin marveled at the change. Once, he’d barely come up to her waist. Now he was taller than she by about an inch. But the rest of him was far too skinny, close to starved; he looked like he’d been stretched more than he had grown.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“Mother’s here with me. Father’s dead.”

“The Federation . . . ?”

“No. It was the opium in the end.” He gave a false laugh. “Funny, really. He heard they were coming, and he ate an entire pan of nuggets. Mother found him just as we were packing up to leave. He’d been dead for hours.” He gave her an awkward smile. A smile. He’d lost his father, and he was trying to make her feel better about it. “We just thought he was sleeping.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice came out flat. She couldn’t help it. Her relationship with Uncle Fang had been one between master and servant, and she couldn’t conjure up anything that remotely resembled grief.

“Tutor Feyrik?” she asked.

Kesegi shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw him in the crowd when we left, I think, but I haven’t seen him since.”

His voice cracked when he spoke. She realized that he was trying to imitate a deeper voice than he possessed. He stood up overly straight, too, to appear taller than he was. He was trying to pass himself off as an adult.

“So you’ve come back.”

Rin’s blood froze. She’d been walking blindly without a destination, assuming Kesegi had been doing the same, but of course they’d been walking back to his tent.

Kesegi stopped. “Mother. Look who I found.”

Auntie Fang gave Rin a thin smile. “Well, look at that. It’s the war hero. You’ve grown.”

Rin wouldn’t have recognized her if Kesegi hadn’t introduced her. Auntie Fang looked twenty years older, with the complexion of a wrinkled walnut. She had always been so red-faced, perpetually furious, burdened with a foster child she didn’t want and a husband addicted to opium. She used to terrify Rin. But now she seemed shriveled dry, as if the fight had been drained from her completely.

“Come to gloat?” Auntie Fang asked. “Go on, look. There’s not much to see.”

“Gloat?” Rin repeated, baffled. “No, I . . .”

“Then what is it?” Auntie Fang asked. “Well, don’t just stand there.”

How was it that even now Auntie Fang could still make her feel so stupid and worthless? Under her withering glare Rin felt like a little girl again, hiding in the shed to avoid a beating.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she managed. “I just—I wanted to see if—”

“If we were still alive?” Auntie Fang put bony hands on narrow hips. “Well, here we are. No thanks to you soldiers—no, you were too busy drowning up north. It’s Vaisra’s fault we’re here at all.”

“Watch your tone,” Rin snapped.

It shocked her when Auntie Fang cringed backward like she was expecting to be hit.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that.” Auntie Fang adopted a wheedling, wide-eyed expression that looked grotesque on her leathery face. “The hunger’s just getting to me. Can’t you get us some food, Rin? You’re a soldier, I bet they’ve even made you a commander, you’re so important, surely you could call in some favors.”

“They’re not feeding you?” Rin asked.

Auntie Fang laughed. “Not unless you’re talking about the Lady of Arlong walking around handing out tiny bowls of rice to the skinniest children she can find while the blue-eyed devils follow her around to document how wonderful she is.”

“We don’t get anything,” Kesegi said. “Not clothes, not blankets, not medicine. Most of us forage for our own food—we were eating fish for a while, but they’d all been poisoned with something, and we got sick. They didn’t warn us about that.”

Rin found that impossible to believe. “They haven’t opened any kitchens for you?”

“They have, but those kitchens feed perhaps a hundred mouths before they close.” Kesegi shrugged his bony shoulders. “Look around. Someone starves to death every day in this camp. Can’t you see?”

“But I thought—surely, Vaisra would—”

“Vaisra?” Auntie Fang snorted. “You’re on a first-name basis, are you?”

“No—I mean, yes, but—”

“Then you can talk to him!” Auntie Fang’s beady eyes glittered. “Tell him we’re starving. If he can’t feed all of us, just have them deliver food to me and Kesegi. We won’t tell anyone.”

“But that’s not how it works,” Rin stammered. “I mean—I can’t just—”

“Do it, you ungrateful cunt,” Auntie Fang snarled. “You owe us.”

“I owe you?” Rin repeated in disbelief.

“I took you into our home. I raised you for sixteen years.”

“You would have sold me into marriage!”

“And then you would have had a better life than any of us.” Auntie Fang pointed a skinny, accusing finger at Rin’s chest. “You would never have lacked for anything. All you had to do was spread your legs every once in a while, and you would have had anything you wanted to eat, anything you wanted to wear. But that wasn’t enough for you—you wanted to be special, to be important, to run off to Sinegard and join the Militia on its merry adventures.”

“You think this war has been fun for me?” Rin shouted. “I watched my friends die! I almost died!”

“We’ve all nearly died,” Auntie Fang scoffed. “Please. You’re not special.”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Rin said.

“Oh, I know.” Auntie Fang swept into a low bow. “You’re so important. So respected. Do you want us to grovel at your feet, is that it? Heard your old bitch of an aunt was in the camps, so you couldn’t pass up the chance to rub it in her face?”

“Mother, stop,” Kesegi said quietly.

“That’s not why I came,” Rin said.

Auntie Fang’s mouth twisted into a sneer. “Then why did you come?”

Rin didn’t have an answer for her.

She didn’t know what she’d expected to find. Not home, not belonging, not Tutor Feyrik—and not this.

This was a mistake. She shouldn’t have come at all. She’d cut her ties to Tikany a long time ago. She should have kept it that way.

She backed away quickly, shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” she tried to say, but the words stuck in her throat.

She couldn’t look either of them in the eyes. She didn’t want to be here anymore, she didn’t want to feel like this anymore. She backed out onto the main path and broke into a quick walk. She wanted to run away, but couldn’t out of pride.

“Rin!” Kesegi shouted. He dashed out after her. “Wait.”

She halted in her tracks. Please say something to make me stay. Please.

“Yes?”

“If you can’t get us food, can you ask them for some blankets?” he asked. “Just one? It gets so cold at night.”

She forced herself to smile. “Of course.”

Over the next week a torrent of people poured into Arlong on foot, in rickety carts, or on rafts hastily constructed of anything that could float. The river became a slow-moving eddy of bodies packed against each other so tightly that the famous blue waters of the Dragon Province disappeared under the weight of human desperation.

Republican soldiers checked the new arrivals for weapons and valuables before corralling them in neat lines to whichever quarters of the refugee district still had space.

The refugees met with very little kindness. Republican soldiers, Dragons especially, were terribly condescending, shouting at the southerners when they couldn’t understand the rapid Arlong dialect.

Rin spent hours each day walking the docks with Venka. She was glad to have escaped processing duty, which involved standing guard over miserable lines while clerks marked the refugees’ arrivals and issued them temporary residence papers. That was probably more important than what she and Venka were doing, which was fishing out the refuse from the segments of the Murui near the refugee chokepoints, but Rin couldn’t bear to be around the large crowds of brown skin and accusing eyes.

“We’re going to have to cut them off at some point,” Venka remarked as she lifted an empty jug from the water. “They can’t possibly all fit here.”

“Only because the refugee district is tiny,” Rin said. “If they opened up the city barriers, or if they funneled them into the mountainside, there would be plenty of space.”

“Plenty of space, maybe. But we haven’t got enough clothes, blankets, medicine, grain, or anything else.”

“Up until now the southerners were producing the grain.” Rin felt obligated to point that out.

“And now they’ve run from home, so no one is producing food,” Venka said. “Doesn’t really help us. Hey, what’s this?”

She reached gingerly into the water and drew a barrel out onto the dock. She set it on the ground. Out tumbled what at first looked like a soggy bundle of clothing. “Gross.”

“What is it?” Rin stepped closer to get a better look and immediately regretted it.

“It’s dead, look.” Venka held the baby out to show Rin the infant’s sickly yellow skin, the bumpy evidence of relentless mosquito attacks, and the red rashes that covered half its body. Venka slapped its cheeks. No response. She held it over the river as if to throw it back in.

The infant started to whimper.

An ugly expression twisted across Venka’s face. She looked so suddenly, murderously hateful that Rin was sure she was about to hurl the infant headfirst into the harbor.

“Give it to me,” Rin said quickly. She pulled the infant from Venka’s arms. A sour smell hit her nose. She gagged so hard she nearly dropped the infant, but got a grip on herself.

The baby was swaddled in clothes large enough to fit an adult. That meant someone had loved it. They wouldn’t have parted with the clothes otherwise—it was now the dead of winter, and even in the warm south, the nights got cold enough that refugees traveling without shelter could easily freeze to death.

Someone had wanted this baby to survive. Rin owed it a fighting chance.

She strode hastily to the end of the dock and handed the bundle off to the first soldier she saw. “Here.”

The soldier stumbled under the sudden weight. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“I don’t know, just see to it that it’s cared for,” Rin said. “Take it to the infirmary, if they’ll let you.”

The soldier gripped the infant tightly in his arms and set off at a run. Rin returned to the river and resumed dragging her spear halfheartedly through the water.

She wanted very badly to smoke. She couldn’t get the taste of corpses out of her mouth.

Venka broke the silence first. “What are you looking at me like that for?”

She looked defensive. Furious. But that was Venka’s default reaction to everything; she’d rather die than admit vulnerability. Rin suspected Venka was thinking about the child that she’d lost, and she wasn’t sure what to say, only that she felt terribly sorry for her.

“You knew it was alive,” Rin said finally.

“Yes,” Venka snapped. “So what?”

“And you were going to kill it.”

Venka swallowed hard and jabbed her spear back into the water. “That thing doesn’t have a future. I was doing it a favor.”

Wartime Arlong was an ugly thing. Despair settled over the capital like a shroud as the threat of armies closing in from both the north and the south grew closer every day.

Food was strictly rationed, even for citizens of Dragon Province. Every man, woman, and child who wasn’t in the Republican Army was conscripted for labor. Most were sent to work in the forges or the shipyards. Even small children were put to task cutting linen strips for the infirmary.

Sympathy was the greatest scarcity. The southern refugees, crammed behind their barrier, were uniformly despised by soldiers and civilians alike. Food and supplies were offered begrudgingly, if at all. Rin discovered that if soldiers weren’t positioned to guard the supply deliveries, they would never reach the camps.

The refugees latched on to any potentially sympathetic advocates they could. Once word of Rin’s connection to the Fangs spread, she became an involuntarily appointed, unofficial champion of refugee interests in Arlong. Every time she was near the district she was accosted by refugees, all pleading for a thousand different things that she couldn’t obtain—more food, more medicine, more materials for cooking fires and tents.

She hated the position they’d thrown her into because it led only to frustration from both sides. The Republican leadership grew irritated because she kept making impossible requests for basic human necessities, and the refugees started resenting her because she could never deliver.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Rin complained bitterly to Kitay. “Vaisra’s the one who always said we had to treat prisoners well. And this is how we treat our own people?”

“It’s because the refugees have no strategic advantage to them whatsoever, unless you count the mild inconvenience that their stacked-up bodies might present Daji’s army,” Kitay said. “If I may be blunt.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

“I’m just reporting what they’re all thinking. Don’t kill the messenger.”

Rin should have been angrier, but she understood, too, just how pervasive that mind-set was. To most Dragons, the southerners barely registered as Nikara. She could see through a northerner’s eyes the stereotypical Rooster—a cross-eyed, buck-toothed, swarthy idiot speaking a garbled tongue.

It shamed and embarrassed her terribly, because she used to be exactly like that.

She’d tried to erase those parts of herself long ago. At fourteen she’d been lucky enough to study under a tutor who spoke near-standard Sinegardian. And she’d gone to Sinegard young enough that her bad habits were quickly and brutally knocked out of her. She’d adapted to fit in. She’d erased her identity to survive.

And it humiliated her that the southerners were now seeking her out, that they had the audacity to wander close to her, because they made her more like them by sheer proximity.

She’d long since tried to kill her association with Rooster Province, a place that had given her few happy memories. She’d almost succeeded. But the refugees wouldn’t let her forget.

Every time she came close to the camps, she saw angry, accusing stares. They all knew who she was now. They made a point of letting her know.

They’d stopped shouting invectives at her. They’d long since passed the point of rage; now they lived in resentful despair. But she could read their silent faces so clearly.

You’re one of us, they said. You were supposed to protect us. You’ve failed.

Three weeks after Rin’s return to Arlong, the Empress sent a direct message to the Republic.

About a mile from the Red Cliffs, the Dragon Province border patrol had captured a man who claimed to have been sent from the capital. The messenger carried only an ornamented bamboo basket across his back and a small Imperial seal to verify his identity.

The messenger insisted he would not speak unless Vaisra received him in the throne room with the full audience of his generals, the Warlords, and General Tarcquet. Eriden’s guards stripped him down and checked his clothes and baskets for explosives or poisonous gas, but found nothing.

“Just dumplings,” the messenger said cheerfully.

Reluctantly they let him through.

“I bear a message from the Empress Su Daji,” he announced to the room. His lower lip flopped grotesquely when he spoke. It seemed infected with something; the left side was thick with red, pus-filled blisters. His words were barely understandable through his thick Rat accent.

Rin’s eyes narrowed as she watched him approach the throne. He wasn’t a Sinegardian diplomat or a Militia representative. He didn’t carry himself like a court official. He had to be a common soldier, if even that. But why would Daji leave diplomacy up to someone who could barely even speak?

Unless the messenger wasn’t here for any real negotiations. Unless Daji didn’t need someone who could think quickly or speak smoothly. Unless Daji only wanted someone who would take the most delight in antagonizing Vaisra. Someone who had a grudge against the Republic and wouldn’t mind dying for it.

Which meant this was not a truce. This was a one-sided message.

Rin tensed. There was no way the messenger could harm Vaisra, not with the ranks of Eriden’s men blocking his way to the throne. But still she gripped her trident tight, eyes tracking the man’s every movement.

“Speak your piece,” Vaisra ordered.

The messenger grinned broadly. “I come to deliver tidings of Yin Jinzha.”

Lady Saikhara stood up. Rin could see her trembling. “What has she done with my son?”

The messenger sank to his knees, placed his basket on the marble floor, and lifted the lid. A pungent smell wafted through the hall.

Rin craned her head, expecting to see Jinzha’s dismembered corpse.

But the basket was filled with dumplings, each fried to golden perfection and pressed in the pattern of a lotus flower. They had clearly gone bad after weeks of travel—Rin could see dark mold crawling around their edges—but their shape was still intact. They had been meticulously decorated, brushed with lotus seed paste and inked over with five crimson characters.

The Dragon devours his sons.

“The Empress enjoins you to enjoy a dumpling of the rarest meat,” said the messenger. “She expects you might recognize the flavor.”

Lady Saikhara shrieked and slumped across the floor.

Vaisra met Rin’s eyes and jerked a hand across his neck.

She understood. She hefted her trident and charged toward the messenger.

He reeled backward just slightly, but otherwise made no effort to defend himself. He didn’t even lift his arms. He just sat there, smiling with satisfaction.

She buried her trident into his chest.

It wasn’t a clean blow. She’d been too shocked, distracted by the dumplings to aim properly. The prongs slid through his rib cage but didn’t pierce his heart.

She yanked them back out.

The messenger gurgled a laugh. Blood bubbled through his crooked teeth, staining the pristine marble floor.

“You will die. You will all die,” he said. “And the Empress will dance upon your graves.”

Rin stabbed again and this time aimed true.

Nezha rushed to his mother and lifted her in his arms. “She’s fainted,” he said. “Someone, help—”

“There’s something else,” General Hu said while palace attendants gathered around Saikhara. He pulled a scroll out of the basket with remarkably steady hands and brushed the crumbs off the side. “It’s a letter.”

Vaisra hadn’t moved from his throne. “Read it.”

General Hu broke the seal and unrolled the scroll. “I am coming for you.”

Lady Saikhara sat up and gave a low moan.

“Get her out of here,” Vaisra snapped to Nezha. “Hu. Read.”

General Hu continued. “My generals sail down the Murui River as you dawdle in your castle. You have nowhere to flee. You have nowhere to hide. Our fleet is larger. Our men are more numerous. You will die at the base of the Red Cliffs like your ancestors, and your corpses will feed the fish of the Murui.”

The hall fell silent.

Vaisra seemed frozen to his chair. His expression betrayed nothing. No grief, no fear. He could have been made of ice.

General Hu rolled the scroll back up and cleared his throat. “That’s all it says.”

Within a fortnight Vaisra’s scouts—exhausted, horses ridden half to death—returned from the border and confirmed the worst. The Imperial Fleet, repaired and augmented since Boyang, had begun its winding journey south carrying what seemed like the entire Militia.

Daji intended to end this war in Arlong.

“They’ve spotted the ships from the Yerin and Murin beacons,” reported a scout.

“How are they already this close?” General Hu asked, alarmed. “Why weren’t we told earlier?”

“They haven’t reached Murin yet,” the scout explained. “The fleet is simply massive. We could see it through the mountains.”

“How many ships?”

“A few more than they had at Boyang.”

“The good news is that the larger warships will get stuck wherever the Murui narrows,” Captain Eriden said. “They’ll have to roll them on logs to move over land. We have two, maybe two and a half weeks yet.” He reached over to the map and tapped a point on Hare Province’s northwestern border. “I’m guessing they’ll be here by now. Should we send men up, try to stall them at the narrow bends?”

Vaisra shook his head. “No. This doesn’t alter our grand strategy. They want us to split our defenses, but we won’t take the bait. We concentrate on fortifying Arlong, or we lose the south altogether.”

Rin stared down at the map, at the angry red dots representing both Imperial and Federation troops. The Republic was wedged in on both sides—the Empire from the north, the Federation from the south. It was hard not to panic as she imagined Daji’s combined forces closing in around them like an iron fist.

“Deprioritize the northern coastline. Bring Tsolin’s fleet back to the capital.” Vaisra sounded impossibly calm, and Rin was grateful for it. “I want scouts with messenger pigeons positioned at mile intervals along the Murui. Every time that fleet moves, I want to know. Send messengers to Rooster and Monkey. Recall their local platoons.”

“You can’t do that,” Gurubai said. “They’re still dealing with the Federation remnants.”

“I don’t care about the Federation,” Vaisra said. “I care about Arlong. If everything we’ve heard about this fleet is true, then this war is over unless we can hold our base. We need all of our men in one place.”

“You’re leaving entire villages to die,” Takha said. “Entire provinces.”

“Then they will die.”

“Are you joking?” demanded Charouk. “You think we’re just going to stand here while you renege on your promises? You said that if we defected, you would help us eradicate the Mugenese—”

“And I will,” Vaisra said impatiently. “Can’t you see? We beat Daji and we win back the south, too. Once their backer is gone, the Mugenese will surrender—”

“Or they will understand that the civil war has weakened us, and they’ll pick off the pieces no matter what happens,” Charouk countered.

“That won’t happen. Once we’ve won Hesperian support—”

“‘Hesperian support,’” Charouk scoffed. “Don’t be a child. Tarcquet and his men have been loitering in the city for quite some time now, and that fleet isn’t showing up on the horizon.”

“They will come if we crush the Militia,” Vaisra said. “And we cannot do that if we’re wasting time fighting a war on two fronts.”

“Forget this,” said Gurubai. “We should take our troops and return home now.”

“Go right ahead,” Vaisra said calmly. “You wouldn’t last a week. You need Dragon troops and you know that, or you’d have never come in the first place. None of you can hold your home provinces, not with the numbers you have. Otherwise you would have gone back a long time ago.”

There was a short silence. Rin could tell from Gurubai’s expression that Vaisra was right. He’d called their bluff.

They had no choice now but to follow his lead.

“But what happens after you win Arlong?” Nezha asked suddenly.

All heads turned in his direction.

Nezha lifted his chin. “We unite the country just to let the Mugenese tear it apart again? That’s not a democracy, Father, that’s a suicide pact. You’re ignoring a massive threat just because it’s not Dragon lives at stake—”

“Enough,” Vaisra said, but Nezha spoke over him.

“Daji invited the Federation here in the first place. You don’t need to finish us off.”

Father and son glared at each other over the table.

“Your brother would never have defied me like this,” Vaisra said quietly.

“No, Jinzha was rash and reckless and never listened to his best strategists, and now he’s dead,” said Nezha. “So what are you going to do, Father? Act out of some petty sense of revenge, or do something to help the people in your Republic?”

Vaisra slammed his hands on the table. “Silence. You will not contradict me—”

“You’re just throwing your allies to the wolves! Does no one realize how horrific this is?” Nezha demanded. “General Hu? Rin?”

“I . . .” Rin’s tongue was lead in her mouth.

All eyes were suddenly, terrifyingly on her.

Vaisra folded his arms over his chest as he watched her, eyebrows raised as if to say, Go on.

“They’re invading your home,” Nezha said.

Rin flinched. What did he expect her to say to that? Did he think that just because she was from the south, she would contradict Vaisra’s orders?

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The Dragon Warlord is right—we split our forces and we’re dead.”

“Come on,” Nezha said impatiently. “Of all people, you should—”

“Should what?” she sneered. “I should hate the Federation the most? I do, but I also know that dispatching troops south plays right into Daji’s hands. Would you rather we simply deliver Arlong to her?”

“You’re unbelievable,” Nezha said.

She gave him her best imitation of Vaisra’s level stare. “I’m just doing my job, Nezha. You might try doing yours.”