The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Trilogy #2)

“I’ve outlined a number of tactics in this.” Kitay handed Rin a small pamphlet. “Captain Dalain will have her own ideas, but based on historical record, these have worked the best, I think.”

Rin flipped through the pages. “Did you rip these out of a book?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t have time to copy it all down, so I just annotated.”

She squinted to read his scrawling handwriting in the margins. “Logging?”

“It’s a lot of time and manpower, I know, but you don’t have many other good options.” He tugged anxiously at his bangs. “It’ll be more of an annoyance to them than anything, but it does save us a few hours.”

“You’ve scratched out the guerrilla tactics,” she observed.

“They won’t do you much good. Besides, you shouldn’t be trying to destroy the fleet, or even parts of it.”

Rin frowned. That was exactly what she had been planning to do. “Don’t tell me you think it’s too dangerous.”

“No, I think you simply can’t. You don’t understand just how big the fleet is. You can’t burn them all before they catch on to you, not with your range of fire. Don’t try anything clever.”

“But—”

“When you take risks, you’re gambling with my life, too,” Kitay said sternly. “No stupid shit, Rin, I mean it. Keep to the directive. Just slow them down. Buy us some time.”

Vaisra had ordered two platoons to sail up the Murui and obstruct the Imperial Navy’s progress. They were racing against the clock, scrambling for extra time so that they could continue fortifying Arlong and wait for Tsolin’s fleet on the northern shore to race back down the coastline. If they could delay the Imperial Navy for at least a few days, if Arlong could muster its defenses in time, and if Tsolin’s ships could beat Daji’s back to the capital, then they might have a fighting chance against the Empire.

It was a lot of ifs.

But it was all they had.

Rin had immediately volunteered the Cike for the task of delaying the fleet. She couldn’t stand being around the refugees anymore, and she wanted to get Baji and Suni well away from the Hesperians before their restlessness manifested in disaster.

She wished she could bring Kitay with her. But he was too valuable to send out on what was most likely a suicide mission for anyone who wasn’t a shaman, and Vaisra wanted him behind city walls to rig up defense fortifications.

And while Rin was glad that Kitay would be out of harm’s way, she hated that they were about to be separated for days without a means of communication.

If danger came, she wouldn’t be able to protect him.

Kitay read the look on her face. “I’ll be all right. You know that.”

“But if anything happens—”

“You’re the one going into a war zone,” he pointed out.

“Everywhere is a war zone.” She folded the manual shut and stuffed it into her shirt pocket. “I’m scared for you. For both of us. I can’t help that.”

“You haven’t got time to be scared.” He squeezed her arm. “Just keep us alive, won’t you?”

Rin made one last stop by the forge before she left Arlong.

“What can I do for you?” The blacksmith shouted at her over the furnace. The flames had been burning nonstop for days, mass-producing swords, crossbow bolts, and armor.

She handed him her trident. “What do you make of this metal?”

He ran his fingers over the hilt and felt around the prongs to test their edges. “It’s fine stuff. But I don’t do many battle tridents. You don’t want me to mess around with this too much, I’d ruin the balance. But I can sharpen the prongs if you need.”

“I don’t want to sharpen it,” she said. “I want you to melt it down.”

“Hmm.” He tested the trident’s balance over his palm. “Speerly-built?”

“Yes.”

He raised an eyebrow. “And you’re sure you want this reforged? I can’t find anything wrong with it.”

“It’s ruined for me,” she said. “Destroy it completely.”

“This is a very unique weapon. You won’t get a trident like this again.”

Rin shrugged. “That’s fine.”

He still looked unsure. “Speerly craft is impossible to replicate. No one’s alive now who knows how they made their weapons. I’ll do my best, but you might just end up with a fisherman’s tool.”

“I don’t want a trident,” she said. “I want a sword.”

Two skimmers departed from the Red Cliffs that morning. The Harrier, led by Nezha, raced upriver to hold the city of Shayang, situated on a crucial, narrow bend in the upper river delta. Shayang’s inhabitants had long since evacuated down to the capital, but the city itself used to be a military base—Nezha needed only garrison the old cannon forts.

Rin’s crew, headed by Captain Dalain, a lean, handsome woman, followed at a slower pace, paddling at a crawl in what was supposed to have been Jinzha’s warship.

It wasn’t close to finished. They hadn’t even named it. Jinzha was supposed to choose a name when construction was done, and now no one could bring themselves to do it in his stead. The bulkheads of the upper deck hadn’t been put in, the bottom decks were sparse and unfurnished, and cannons hadn’t been fitted to the sides.

But none of that mattered, because the paddle wheels were functional. The ship had basic maneuverability. They didn’t need to sail it into enemy territory, they just had to get it twenty miles up the river.

Kitay’s pamphlet turned out to be brilliant. He’d sketched a series of little tricks to create maximal delays. Once they anchored Jinzha’s warship, the Cike and Captain Dalain’s crew spread out over a span of ten miles, and with incredible efficiency, implemented each one of them.

They erected a series of dams using a combination of logs and sandbags. Realistically these would buy them only half a day or so, but they would still tire out the soldiers forced to dive into deep water to clear them away.

Upriver from those, they planted wooden stakes in the river to tear holes in the bottom of enemy ships. Kitay, with Ramsa’s enthusiastic support, had wanted to plant the same sort of water mines that the Empire had used on them, but they’d run out of time before he could figure out how to dry the intestines properly.

They stretched multiple iron cables across the river, usually right after bends. If the Wolf Meat General was smart, he would just send soldiers out to disassemble the posts instead of trying to hack through the cables. But the posts were hidden well behind reeds and the cables were invisible underwater, so they might cause a destructive backlog if the fleet rammed into them unawares.

They set up a number of garrisons at three-mile intervals of the Murui. Each would be manned by ten to fifteen soldiers armed with crossbows, cannons, and missiles.

Those soldiers were most likely going to die. But they might manage to pick off a handful of Militia troops, or at best damage a ship or two before the Wolf Meat General blew them apart. And in terms of bodies and time, the tradeoff was worth it.

Near the northern border of the Dragon Province, right before the Murui forked into the Golyn, they sank Jinzha’s warship into the water.

“That’s a pity,” said Ramsa as they evacuated their equipment onto land. “I heard it was supposed to be the greatest warship ever built in the Empire’s history.”

“It was Jinzha’s ship,” Rin said. “Jinzha’s dead.”

The warship had been a conquest vessel built for a massive invasion of northern territory. There would be no such invasion now. The Republic was fighting for its last chance at survival. Jinzha’s warship would serve best by sitting heavy in the Murui’s deep waters and obstructing the Imperial Fleet for as long as it could.

They smashed in the paddles and hacked apart the masts before they disembarked, just to make sure the warship was destroyed beyond the point of any possibility that the Imperial Fleet might repurpose it to sail on Arlong.

Then they rowed small lifeboats to the shore and prepared for a hasty march inland.

Ramsa had laced the two bottom decks with several hundred pounds of explosives, all rigged to destroy the warship’s fundamental structures. The fuses were linked together for a chain reaction. All they needed now was a light.

“Everyone good?” Rin called.

From what she could see, the soldiers had all cleared the beach. Most them had already set off at a run toward the forest as ordered.

Captain Dalain gave her a nod. “Do it.”

Rin raised her arms and sent a thin ribbon of fire dancing across the river.

The flame disappeared onto the warship, where the fuse had been laid just where Rin’s range ran out. She didn’t wait to check if it caught.

Ten yards past the tree line, she heard a series of muffled booms, followed by a long silence. She stumbled to a halt and looked over her shoulder. The warship wasn’t sinking.

“Was that it?” she asked. “I thought it’d be louder.”

Ramsa looked similarly confused. “Maybe the fuses weren’t linked properly? But I was sure—”

The next round of blasts threw them off their feet. Rin hit the dirt, hands clamped over her ears, eyes squeezed shut as her very bones vibrated. Ramsa collapsed beside her, shaking madly. She couldn’t tell if he was laughing or trembling.

When at last the eruptions faded, she hauled herself to her feet and dragged Ramsa up to higher ground. They turned around. Just over the tree line, they could just see the Republican flag flying high, shrouded by billowing black smoke.

“Tiger’s tits,” whispered Ramsa.

For a long, tense moment it seemed like the warship might stay afloat. The sails remained perfectly upright, as if suspended from the heavens by a string. Rin and Ramsa stood side by side, fingers laced together, watching the smoke expand outward to envelop the sky.

At last the sound of splintering wood echoed through the still air as the support beams collapsed one by one. The middle mast disappeared suddenly, as if the ship had folded in on itself, devouring its own insides. Then with a creaking groan, the warship turned on its side and sank into the black water.

They made camp that night to the sound of more explosions, though these were coming from at least seven miles away. The Imperial Navy had reached the border town at Shayang. The noise was impossible to escape. The bombing went on through the night. Rin heard so many rounds of cannon fire that she could not imagine anything still remained of Shayang except for smoke and rubble.

“Are you all right?” Baji asked.

The crew was supposed to be grabbing a few hours’ sleep before their journey downriver, but Rin could barely even close her eyes. She sat upright, hugging her knees, unable to look away from the flashing lights in the night sky.

“Hey. Calm down.” Baji put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re shaking. What’s wrong?”

She nodded in Shayang’s direction. “Nezha’s over there.”

“And you’re afraid for him?”

She whispered without thinking. “I’m always afraid for him.”

“Ah. I get it.” Baji gave her a curious look. “You’re in love.”

“Don’t be disgusting. Just because you think the whole world is tits and—”

“No need to get defensive, kiddo. He’s a good-looking fellow.”

“We’re done talking.”

Baji snickered. “Fine. Don’t engage. Just answer this. Would you be here without him?”

“What, camping out by the Murui?”

“Fighting this war,” he clarified. “Serving under his father.”

“I serve the Republic,” she said.

“Whatever you say,” he said, but she could see from the look in his eyes that he hardly believed her.

“Why are you still here, then?” she asked. “If you’re so skeptical. I mean—you’ve got no allegiance to the Republic, and gods know the Cike barely still exists. Why haven’t you just run?”

Baji looked somber for a moment. He never looked this serious; he always had such an outsize personality, an endless series of dirty jokes and lewd comments. Rin had never bothered to consider that that might be a front.

“I did think about that for a minute,” he said after a pause. “Suni and I both. Before you got back we thought seriously about splitting.”

“But?”

“But then we’d have nothing to do. I’m sure you can understand, Rin. Our gods want blood. That’s all we can think about. And it doesn’t matter that when we’re not high, we’ve nominally got our minds back. You know that’s not how it works. To anyone else a peaceful life would be heaven right now, but for us it’d just be torture.”

“I understand,” she said quietly.

She knew it would never end for Baji, either; that constant urge to destroy. If he didn’t kill enemy combatants then he would start taking it out on civilians and do whatever he’d done to get himself into Baghra in the first place. That was the contract the Cike had signed with their gods. It ended only in madness or death.

“I have to be on a battlefield,” Baji said. He swallowed. “Wherever I can find one. There’s nothing else to it.”

Another explosion rocked the night so hard that even from seven miles away they could feel the ground shake beneath them. Rin drew her knees closer to her chest and trembled.

“You can’t do anything about that,” Baji told her after it had passed. “You’ll just have to trust that Nezha knows how to do his job.”

“Tiger’s fucking tits,” Ramsa shouted. He was standing farther uphill, squinting through his spyglass. “Are you guys seeing this?”

Rin stood up. “What is it?”

Ramsa motioned frantically for them to join him at the top of the hill. He handed Rin his spyglass and pointed. “Look there. Right between those two trees.”

Rin squinted through the lens. Her gut dropped. “That’s not possible.”

“Well, it’s not a fucking illusion,” Ramsa said.

“What isn’t?” Baji demanded.

Wordlessly, Rin handed him the spyglass. She didn’t need it. Now that she knew what to look for, even her naked eye could see the outline of the Imperial Navy winding slowly through the trees.

She felt like she was watching a mountain range move.

“That thing’s not a ship,” Baji said.

“No,” Ramsa said, awed. “That’s a fortress.”

The centerpiece of the Imperial Navy was a monstrous structure: a square, three-decked fortress that looked as if the entire siege barrier at Xiashang had come detached from the ground to slowly float down the river.

How many troops could that fortress hold? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

“How does that thing stay afloat?” Baji demanded. “It can’t have any mobility.”

“They don’t need mobility,” Rin said. “The rest of the fleet exists to guard it. They just need to get that fortress close enough to the city. Then they’ll swarm it.”

Ramsa said what they were all thinking. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

“Cheer up,” said Baji. “Maybe they’ll take prisoners.”

We can’t fight them. Rin’s chest constricted with sharp and suffocating dread. Their entire mission seemed so pointless now. Logs and dams might stall the Militia for a few hours, but a fleet that powerful could eventually barrel its way through anything.

“Question,” Ramsa said. He was peering through his spyglass again. “What do Tsolin’s flags look like?”

“What?”

“Have they got green snakes on them?”

“Yes—”

A terrible suspicion hit her. She seized the spyglass from him, but she already knew what she would see. The ships trailing at the rearguard bore the unmistakable coiled insignia of the Snake Province.

“What’s going on?” Baji asked.

Rin couldn’t speak.

It wasn’t just a handful of ships that belonged to Tsolin. She’d seen six by her count now. Which meant one of two things—either Tsolin had skirmished and lost early to the Imperial Navy, and his ships had been repurposed for Imperial use, or Tsolin had defected.

“I will take your silence to mean the worst,” Baji said.

Captain Dalain ordered an immediate retreat back to Arlong. The soldiers dismantled their camp in minutes. Paddling downstream, they could be back to warn Arlong within a day, but Rin didn’t know if advance warning would even make a difference. The addition of Tsolin’s ships meant the Imperial Navy had nearly doubled in size. It didn’t matter how good Arlong’s defenses were. They couldn’t possibly fight off a fleet that big.

Cannon fire from Shayang continued throughout the night, then stopped abruptly just before dawn. At sunrise they saw a series of smoke signals from Nezha’s soldiers unfurling in the distant sky.

“Shayang’s gone,” Dalain interpreted. “The Harrier’s grounded, but the survivors are falling back to Arlong.”

“Should we go to their aid?” someone asked.

Dalain paused. “No. Row faster.”

Rin pulled her oar through the muddy water, trying not to imagine the worst. Nezha might be fine. Shayang hadn’t been a suicide mission—Nezha had been instructed to hold the fort for as long as he could before escaping into the forest. And if he were seriously injured, the Murui would come to his aid. His god wouldn’t desert him. She had to believe that.

Around noon, they heard a distant round of cannon fire once more.

“That’ll be the warship,” Ramsa said. “They’re trying to blow their way through.”

“Good,” Rin said.

Sinking the warship had perhaps been Kitay’s best idea. The Imperial Fleet couldn’t simply blast it to bits—the bulk of the structure lay underwater, where cannon fire couldn’t touch it. Exploding the top layers would only make it harder to extract the sunken bottom from the Murui.

Half an hour later, the cannon fire stopped. The Militia must have caught on. Now they would have to send in divers with hooks to trawl and clear the river. That might take them two days, three at the most.

But after that, they would resume their slow but relentless journey to Arlong. And without Tsolin, there was nothing left to stop them.

“We know,” Kitay said upon Rin’s return. He’d rushed out to greet her at the harbor. He looked utterly disheveled; his hair stood up in every direction as if he’d spent the last few hours pacing and tugging at his bangs. “Found out two hours ago.”

“But why?” she cried. “And when?”

Kitay shrugged helplessly. “All I know is we’re fucked. Come on.”

She followed him at a run to the palace. Inside the main stateroom, Eriden and a handful of officers stood clustered around a map that was no longer even close to accurate, because it had simply erased Tsolin’s ships from the board.

But the Republic hadn’t just lost ships. This wasn’t a neutral setback. It would have been better if Tsolin had simply retreated, or if he had been killed. But this defection meant that the entire fleet they had relied on now augmented Daji’s forces.

Captain Eriden replaced the pieces meant to represent Tsolin’s fleet with red ones and stood back from the table. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”

No one had anything to say. The numbers differential was almost laughable. Rin imagined a glistening snake coiling its body around a small rodent, squeezing until the light dimmed from its eyes.

“That’s a lot of red,” she muttered.

“No shit,” Kitay said.

“Where’s Vaisra?” she asked.

Kitay drew her to the side and murmured into her ear so Eriden wouldn’t hear. “Alone in his office, probably hurling vases at the wall. He asked not to be disturbed.” He pointed to a scroll lying on the edge of the table. “Tsolin sent that letter this morning. That’s when we found out.”

Rin picked the scroll up and unrolled it. She already knew its contents, but she needed to read Tsolin’s words herself out of some morbid curiosity, the same way she couldn’t help taking a closer look at decomposing animal carcasses.

This is not the future I wished for either of us.

Tsolin wrote in a thin, lovely script. Each stroke tapered carefully to a fine point, an effortless calligraphic style that took years to master. This wasn’t a letter written in haste. This was a letter written laboriously by a man who still cared about decorum.

All across the page Rin saw characters crossed out and rewritten where water had blotted the ink. Tsolin had wept as he wrote.

You must recognize that a ruler’s first obligation is to his people. I chose the path that would lead to the least bloodshed. Perhaps this has stifled a democratic transition. I know the vision you dreamed of for this nation and I know I may have destroyed it. But my first obligation is not to the unborn people of this country’s future, but the people who are suffering now, who pass their days in fear because of the war that you have brought to their doorstep.

I defect for them. This is how I will protect them. I weep for you, my student. I weep for your Republic. I weep for my wife and children. You will die thinking I have abandoned you all. But I do not hesitate to say that I value the lives of my people far more than I have ever valued you.