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Rin picked at her food, no longer hungry.
“What will you do with the foreigners?” Kitay asked.
Rin had forgotten about the Hesperians until Kitay asked. She peered around the camp but couldn’t spot them. Then she saw a larger yurt a little off to the edge of the clearing, guarded heavily by Bekter and his riders.
“Perhaps we will kill them.” The Sorqan Sira shrugged. “They are holy men, and nothing good ever comes of the Hesperian religion.”
“Why do you say that?” Kitay asked.
“They believe in a singular and all-powerful deity, which means they cannot accept the truth of other gods. And when nations start to believe that other beliefs lead to damnation, violence becomes inevitable.” The Sorqan Sira cocked her head. “What do you think? Shall we shoot them? It’s kinder than leaving them to die of exposure.”
“Don’t kill them,” Rin said quickly. Tarcquet made her uncomfortable and Sister Petra made her want to put her hand through a wall, but Augus had never struck her as anything other than naive and well-intentioned. “Those kids are missionaries, not soldiers. They’re harmless.”
“Those weapons are not harmless,” said the Sorqan Sira.
“No,” Kitay said. “They are faster and deadlier than crossbows, and they are most deadly in inexperienced hands. I would not return their weapons.”
“Safe passage back will be difficult, then. We can spare only one steed for the two of you. They will have to walk through enemy territory.”
“Would you give them supplies to make rafts?” Rin asked.
The Sorqan Sira frowned, considering. “Can they find their own way back over the rivers?”
Rin hesitated. Her altruism extended only so far. She didn’t want to see Augus dead, but she wasn’t about to waste time shepherding children who never should have come along in the first place.
She turned to Kitay. “If they can make it to the Western Murui, they’re fine, right?”
He shrugged. “More or less. Tributaries get tricky. They could get lost. Could end up at Khurdalain.”
She could accept that risk. It did enough to alleviate her conscience. If Augus and his companions weren’t clever enough to make it back to Arlong, then that was their own fault. Augus had been kind to her once. She’d made sure the Ketreyids didn’t put an arrow in his head. She owed him nothing more than that.
Chaghan was alone when Rin found him, sitting at the edge of the river with his knees pulled up to his chest.
“Don’t they think you might run?” she asked.
He gave her a wry smile. “You know I don’t run very fast.”
She sat down beside him. “So what happens to you now?”
His face was unreadable. “The Sorqan Sira doesn’t trust us to watch over the Cike any longer. She’s taking us back north.”
“And what will happen to you there?”
His throat bobbed. “That depends.”
She knew he didn’t want her pity, so she didn’t burden him with it. She took a deep breath. “I wanted to say thank you.”
“For what?”
“You vouched for me.”
“I was just saving my own skin.”
“Of course.”
“I was also rather hoping that you wouldn’t die,” he admitted.
“Thanks for that.”
An awkward silence passed between them. She saw Chaghan’s eyes dart toward her several times, as if he was debating whether to broach the next subject.
“Say it,” she finally said.
“Do you really want me to?”
“Yes, if you’re going to be this awkward otherwise.”
“Fine,” he said. “Inside the Seal, what you saw—”
“It was Altan,” she said promptly. “Altan, alive. That’s what I saw. He was alive.”
Chaghan exhaled. “So you killed him?”
“I gave him what he wanted,” she said.
“I see.”
“I also saw him happy,” she said. “He was different. He wasn’t suffering. He’d never suffered. He was happy. That’s how I’ll remember him.”
Chaghan didn’t say anything for a long time. She knew he was trying not to cry in front of her; she could see the tears welling up in his eyes.
“Is that real?” she asked. “In another world, is that real? Or was the Seal just showing me what I wanted to see?”
“I don’t know,” Chaghan said. “Our world is a dream of the gods. Maybe they have other dreams. But all we have is this story unfolding, and in the script of this world, nothing’s going to bring Altan back to life.”
Rin leaned back. “I thought I knew how this world worked. How the cosmos worked. But I don’t know anything.”
“Most Nikara don’t,” Chaghan said, and he didn’t even try to mask his arrogance.
Rin snorted. “And you do?”
“We know what constitutes the nature of reality,” said Chaghan. “We’ve understood it for years. But your people are fragile and desperate fools. They don’t know what’s real and what’s false, so they’ll cling to their little truths, because it’s better than imagining that their world might not matter so much after all.”
It was starting to become clear to her now, why the Hinterlanders might view themselves as caretakers of the universe. Who else understood the nature of the cosmos like they did? Who even came close?
Perhaps Jiang had known, a long time ago when his mind was still his. But the man she’d known had been shattered, and the secrets he’d taught her were only fragments of the truth.
“I thought it was hubris, what you did,” she murmured. “But it’s kindness. The Hinterlanders maintain the illusion so you can let everyone else live in the lie.”
“Don’t call us that,” Chaghan said sharply. “Hinterlander is not a name. Only the Empire uses this word, because you assume everyone who lives on the steppe is the same. Naimads are not Ketreyids. Call us by our names.”
“I’m sorry.” She crossed her arms against her chest, shivering against the biting wind. “Can I ask you something else?”
“You’re going to ask me regardless.”
“Why do you hate me so much?”
“I don’t hate you,” he said automatically.
“Sure seemed like it. Seemed like it for a long time, even before Altan died.”
Finally he twisted around to face her. “I can’t look at you and not see him.”
She knew he would say that. She knew, and still it hurt. “You thought I couldn’t live up to him. And that’s—that’s fair, I never could. And—and if you were jealous, for some reason, I understand that, too, but you should just know that—”
“I wasn’t just jealous,” he said. “I was angry. At both of us. I was watching you make all the same mistakes Altan did, and I didn’t know how to stop it. I saw Altan confused and angry all those years, and I saw him walk down the path he chose like a blind child, and I thought precisely the same was happening to you.”
“But I know what I’m doing. I’m not blind like he was—”
