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He dragged her farther back into the shadow. “He’s not the one we’re trying to save.”
She saw a flash of fire powder. The Hesperian guards had fired.
Ramsa stood up. Somehow the first round of shots had missed him. He’d managed to get the fuse to light. He laughed in delight, holding his bombs over his head.
The second round of fire tore him apart.
Time dilated terribly. Rin saw everything happen in slow, deliberate, and intricate detail. One bullet smashed through Ramsa’s jaw and came out the other side in a spray of red. One burrowed through his neck. One embedded itself in his chest. Ramsa stumbled back. The bombs fell out of his hands and hit the ground.
Rin thought she could see the barest hint of a flame at the point of ignition. Then a ball of fire expanded out like a blooming flower, and then the blast radius consumed the courtyard.
“Ramsa . . .” She sagged against Kitay’s shoulder, arms stretched toward the blast site. Her mouth worked and she pushed air through her throat, but she didn’t hear her own voice until a long moment after she spoke. “Ramsa, no—”
Kitay jerked her upright. “He’s bought us an escape window. Let’s go.”
The sampan that awaited them behind the canal bend was hidden so well in the shadows that Rin thought for a few terrifying seconds that it wasn’t there at all. Then the boatman steered the craft out from under the willow leaves, stopped before them, and extended his hand. He wore a Hesperian military uniform, but his face was hidden under a Nikara archer’s helmet.
“Sorry we couldn’t get to you earlier.” The boatman was a her. Venka lifted up her helmet for a brief moment and winked. “Get in.”
Rin, too exhausted to feel bewildered, stumbled hastily into the sampan. Kitay jumped in after her and tossed the side rope overboard.
“Where’d you get that uniform?” he asked. “Nice touch.”
“Went corpse-hunting.” Venka kicked the boat away from shore and steered them swiftly down the canal.
Rin collapsed onto a seat, but Venka nudged her with her foot. “Down on the floor. Cover yourself with that tarp.”
She crouched down in the space between seats. Kitay helped drag the tarp over her head.
“How did you know to find us?” Rin asked.
“Father tipped me off,” Venka said. “I knew something weird was happening on the tower, I just wasn’t able to place what. The moment I caught the gist of what was going on I ran and found Kitay before Vaisra’s men could, but we couldn’t figure out where they were keeping you until Kitay tried that thing with his skin. Neat trick, by the way.”
“You realize you’ve just declared treason on your country,” Rin said.
“Seems like the least of our concerns,” Venka said.
“You can still go back,” Kitay said. “I’m serious, Venka. Your whole family is here, you’ve got no business running away with us. I can take the sampan from here, you can hop off—”
“No,” she said curtly.
“Think hard about this,” he insisted. “You’ve still got plausible deniability. You can leave now; no one knows you’re on this boat. But you come with us and you can never go back.”
“Pity,” Venka said dismissively. She turned to Rin. Her voice took on a hard edge. “I heard what you did to that Hesperian soldier.”
“Yeah,” Rin said. “So?”
“So well done. I hope it hurt.”
“It looked like it did.”
Venka nodded in silence. Neither of them had anything else to say about it.
“Any luck with the others?” Venka asked Kitay after a pause.
He shook his head. “Wasn’t time. The only one I could reach was Gurubai. He should be with the ship now if he got past the guards—”
“Gurubai?” Rin repeated. “What are you talking about?”
“Vaisra’s going after the southern Warlords,” Kitay explained. “He’s won his Empire. Now he’s consolidating his power. He started with you, and now he’s just cleaning up the others. I tried to give them some warning, but couldn’t reach them in time.”
“They’re dead?”
“Not all of them. They’ve got Charouk in the cells. Don’t know if they’ll execute him or let him languish, but they’ll certainly never set him free. The Rooster Warlord put up a fight, so they shot him when the riots started—”
“Riots? What the hell is going on?”
“The camps have turned into a war zone,” Venka said. “They’d doubled the guard all around the refugee district—said it was for safety, but the moment the troops came in for the Warlords they all knew what was happening. The southern troops started the revolt. We’ve been hearing fire powder going off all night—I think Vaisra set the Hesperians loose on them.”
Rin struggled to take all of this in. The world, it seemed, had turned upside down in the span of several hours. “They’re just killing them? Civilians too?”
“That’s likely.”
“Then what about Kesegi?” Rin asked. “Did he get out?”
Venka frowned. “Who?”
“I—no one.” Rin swallowed. “Never mind.”
“Think about it this way,” Venka said brightly. “At least it’s bought you a distraction.”
Rin retreated back under the tarp and lay still, counting her breaths to distract herself from the mess that was her hand. She wanted to look at it, survey the damage in her mangled fingers, but she couldn’t bring herself to unwrap the bloody cloth. She knew there would be no salvaging that hand. She’d seen the cracked bones.
“Venka?” Kitay’s voice, urgent.
“What?”
“I thought you covered your bases.”
“I did.”
Rin sat up. They’d moved faster than she thought—the palace was a distant sight, and they were already sailing past the shipyard. She twisted around to see what Venka and Kitay were staring at.
Nezha stood alone at the end of the pier.
Rin scrambled upright, her good hand flung outward. She was still reeling from the laudanum, but she could just elicit the smallest whispers of flame in her palm, could probably jerk out a larger torrent if she focused—
Kitay tackled her back down under the tarp. “Get down!”
“I’ll kill him.” Fire burst out from her palm and her lips. “I’ll kill him—”
“No, you won’t.” He moved to pin her wrists down.
Without thinking she pummeled at Kitay with both fists, trying to break free. Then her injured hand whacked against the side of the boat, and the pain was so horrendous that for a moment everything went white. Kitay clamped a hand over her mouth before she could scream. She collapsed into his arms. He held her against him and rocked her back and forth while she muffled her shrieks into his shoulder.
Venka fired two arrows in rapid succession across the harbor. They both missed by a yard. Nezha jerked his head to the side when they whistled past him, but otherwise stood his ground. He didn’t move the entire time the sampan crossed the shipyard toward the dark cover of cliff shadows on the other side of the channel.
