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After Altan, she should have known better.
She glanced around the room. She was alone. She didn’t want to be alone—if she was a prisoner then she needed to at least know what was coming for her. Minutes passed and no one entered the room, so she screamed. Then she screamed again and kept screaming, on and on until her throat burned.
The door slammed open. Lady Yin Saikhara walked into the room. She carried a whip in her right hand.
Fuck, Rin thought sluggishly, just before the whip lashed across her left shoulder to the right side of her hip. For a moment Rin lay frozen, the crack ringing in her ears. Then the pain sank in, so fierce and white-hot that it brought her to her knees. The whip came down again. Right shoulder this time. Rin couldn’t bite back her screams.
Saikhara lowered the whip. Rin could just see the barest tremble in her hands, but otherwise the Lady of Arlong stood stiff, imperious, pale with that raw hate that Rin had never understood.
“You were supposed to tell them,” Saikhara said. Her hair was loose and disheveled, her voice a tremulous snarl. “You were supposed to help them fix him.”
Rin crawled toward the far corner of the room, trying to get out of Saikhara’s striking range. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You creature of Chaos,” Saikhara hissed. “You snake-tongued deceiver, you pawn of the greatest evil, this is all your fault . . .”
Rin realized for the first time that the Lady of Arlong might not be entirely sane.
She raised her hands over her head and crouched against the back corner in case Saikhara decided to bring the whip down again. “What do you think is my fault?”
Saikhara’s eyes looked wide and unfocused; she spoke staring at a point a yard to Rin’s left. “They were going to fix him. Vaisra promised. But they came back from the campaign and they said they’ve come no closer to knowing the truth, and you’re still here, you dirty little thing—”
“Wait,” Rin said. Puzzle pieces fitted slowly together in her mind; she couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen this connection before. “Fix who?”
Saikhara only glared.
“Did they say they’d fix Nezha?” Rin demanded. “Did the Hesperians say they could cure his dragon mark?”
Saikhara blinked. A mask froze over her features, the same mask her son and husband were so adept at.
But she didn’t have to say anything. Rin understood the truth now; it was lying so obviously before her.
“You promised,” Saikhara had hissed at Vaisra. “You swore to me. You said you’d make this right, that if I brought them back they’d find a way to fix him.”
Sister Petra had promised Saikhara a cure for her son’s affliction—this was the entire reason Saikhara had fought so hard to bring the Gray Company to the Empire. Which meant Vaisra and Saikhara had both known Nezha was a shaman all this time.
But they hadn’t traded him to the Hesperians.
No, they’d only jeopardized every other shaman in the empire. They’d handed her to Petra to repeat what Shiro had put her through, just for some hope of saving their boy.
“I don’t know what you think they’ll learn,” Rin said quietly. “But hurting me can’t fix your son.”
No, Nezha was likely going to suffer the dragon’s curse until he died. That curse had to be beyond Hesperian knowledge. That thought gave her some small, vicious satisfaction.
“Chaos deceives masterfully.” Saikhara moved her hand rapidly over her chest, forming symbols with her fingers that Rin had never seen. “It conceals its true nature and imitates order to subvert it. I know I cannot elicit the truth from you. I am only a novice initiate. But the Gray Company will have their turn.”
Rin watched her warily, paying close attention to the whip. “Then what do you want?”
Saikhara pointed toward the window. “I’m here to watch.”
Rin followed her gaze, confused.
“Go ahead,” Saikhara said. She looked oddly, viciously triumphant. “Enjoy the show.”
Rin stumbled toward the window and peered outside.
She saw that she was being held in a third-story room of the palace, facing the center courtyard. Underneath, a crowd of troops—Republican and Hesperian both—had assembled in a semicircle around a raised dais. Two blindfolded prisoners walked slowly up the stairs, arms tied behind their backs, flanked on both sides by Hesperian soldiers.
The prisoners stopped at the edge of the dais. The soldiers prodded them with their arquebuses until they stepped forward to stand at the center. The one on the left tilted his head up to the sun.
Even with the blindfold, Rin recognized that dark, handsome face.
Baji stood straight, unyielding.
Beside him, Suni hunched down between his shoulders as if he could make himself a smaller target. He looked terrified.
Rin twisted around. “What is this?”
Saikhara’s gaze was fixed on the window, eyes narrowed, mouth pressed in the thinnest of lines. “Watch.”
Someone struck a gong. The crowd parted. Rin watched, veins icy with dread, as Vaisra ascended the dais and took a position several feet in front of Suni and Baji. He raised his arms. He shouted something that Rin couldn’t make out over the crowd. All she heard was the soldiers roaring in approval.
“Once upon a time, the Red Emperor had all the monks in his realm put to death.” Saikhara spoke quietly behind her. “Why do you think he did it?”
Four Hesperian soldiers lined up in front of Baji, arquebuses leveled at his torso.
“What are you doing?” Rin screamed. “Stop!”
But of course Vaisra couldn’t hear her down there, not over the shouting. She strained helplessly against her chains, screeching, but all she could do was watch as he lifted his hand.
Four staggered shots punctuated the air. Baji’s body jerked from side to side in a horrible dance with each bullet, until the last one caught him dead center in the chest. For a long, bizarre minute he remained standing, teetering back and forth, like his body couldn’t decide which way to fall. Then he collapsed to his knees, head bent, before a last round of gunfire knocked him to the floor.
“So much for your gods,” Saikhara said.
Below, the soldiers reloaded their arquebuses and fired a second round of bullets into Suni.
Slowly Rin turned around.
Rage filled her mind, a visceral urge not just to defeat but to destroy, to incinerate Saikhara so thoroughly that not even her bones would remain, and to do it slowly, to make the agony last as long as possible.
She reached for her god. At first there was no response, only an opium-dulled nothing. Then she heard the Phoenix’s reply—a distant shriek, ever so faint.
That was enough. She felt the heat in her palms. She had the fire back.
She almost laughed. After all the opium she had smoked, her tolerance had become much, much higher than the Yins had imagined.
“Your false gods have been discovered,” Saikhara said softly. “Chaos will die.”
“You know nothing of the gods,” Rin whispered.
“I know enough.” Saikhara raised the whip again. Rin moved faster. She turned her palms toward Saikhara and fire burst out—just a small stream, not even a tenth of her full range, but it was enough to set Saikhara’s robes aflame.
