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“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.
