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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.
Chapter 24
A fresh blanket of snow had fallen while they slept. It made the sun shine brighter, the air bite colder. Rin limped outside and stretched her aching muscles, squinting against the harsh light.
The Ketreyids were eating in shifts. Six riders at a time sat by the fire, wolfing down their food while the others stood guard by the periphery.
“Eat your fill.” The Sorqan Sira ladled out two steaming bowls of stew and handed them to Rin and Kitay. “You have a hard ride before you. We’ll pack you a bag of dried meat and some yak’s milk, but eat as much as you can now.”
Rin took the proffered bowl. The stew smelled terribly good. She huddled on the ground and pressed next to Kitay for warmth, bony elbows touching bony hips. Little details about him seemed to stand out in stark relief. She had never noticed before just how long and thin his fingers were, or how he always smelled faintly of ink and dust, or how his wiry hair curled just so at the tips.
She’d known him for more than four years by now, but every time she looked at him, she discovered something new.
“So that’s it?” Kitay asked the Sorqan Sira. “You’re letting us go? No strings attached?”
“The terms are met,” she replied. “We have no reason to harm you now.”
“So what am I to you?” Rin asked. “A pet on a long leash?”
“You are my gamble. A trained wolf set loose.”
“To kill an enemy that you can’t face,” Rin said.
The Sorqan Sira smiled, displaying teeth. “Be glad that we still have some use for you.”
Rin didn’t like her phrasing. “What happens if I succeed, and you no longer have use for me?”
“Then we’ll let you keep your lives as a token of our gratitude.”
“And what happens if you decide I’m a threat again?”
“Then we’ll find you again.” The Sorqan Sira nodded to Kitay. “And this time, his life will be on the line.”
Rin had no doubt the Sorqan Sira would put an arrow through Kitay’s heart without hesitation.
“You still don’t trust me,” she said. “You’re playing a long game with us, and the anchor bond was your insurance.”
The Sorqan Sira sighed. “I am afraid, child. And I have the right to be. The last time we taught Nikara shamans how to anchor themselves, they turned on us.”
“But I’m nothing like them.”
“You are far too much like them. You have the same eyes. Angry. Desperate. You’ve seen too much. You hate too much. Those three were younger than you when they came to us, more timid and afraid, and still they slaughtered thousands of innocents. You are older than they were, and you’ve done far worse.”
“That’s not the same,” Rin said. “The Federation—”
“Deserved it?” asked the Sorqan Sira. “Every single one? Even the women? The children?”
Rin flushed. “But I’m not—I didn’t do it because I liked it. I’m not like them.”
Not like that vision of a younger Jiang, who laughed when he killed, who seemed to delight in being drenched in blood. Not like Daji.
“That’s what they thought about themselves, too,” said the Sorqan Sira. “But the gods corrupted them, just as they will corrupt you. The gods manifest your worst and cruelest instincts. You think you are in control, but your mind erodes by the second. To call the gods is to gamble with madness.”
“It’s better than doing nothing.” Rin knew that she was already walking a fine line, that she ought to keep her mouth shut, but the Ketreyids’ constant high-minded pacifistic lecturing infuriated her. “I’d rather go mad than hide behind the Baghra Desert and pretend that atrocities aren’t happening when I could have done something about them.”
The Sorqan Sira chuckled. “You think that we did nothing? Is that what they taught you?”
“I know that millions died during the first two Poppy Wars. And I know that your people never crossed down south to stop it.”
“How many people do you think Vaisra’s war has killed?” the Sorqan Sira asked.
“Fewer than would have died otherwise,” Rin said.
The Sorqan Sira didn’t answer. She just let the silence stretch on and on until Rin’s answer began to seem ridiculous.
