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A crowd of at least fifteen women stared up at her, tears of terror streaming down their fat and puffy cheeks, clumped together like flightless birds fattened for the slaughter.
They were the Warlord’s wives, Rin guessed. His daughters. Their servant girls and nursemaids.
“Where is Tsung Ho?” she demanded.
They huddled closer together, mute and trembling.
Rin’s eyes fell on the baby. An old woman at the back of the room had it clutched in her hands. It was swaddled in red cloth. That meant it was a baby boy. A potential heir.
The Ram Warlord would not let that child die.
“Give him to me,” Rin said.
The woman frantically shook her head and pressed the child closer to her chest.
Rin leveled her trident at her. “This is not worth dying for.”
One of the girls dashed forward, flailing at her with a curtain pole. Rin ducked down and kicked out. Her foot connected with the girl’s midriff with a satisfying whumph. The girl collapsed on the ground, wailing in pain.
Rin put a foot on the girl’s sternum and pressed down, hard. The girl’s agonized whimpers gave her a savage, amused satisfaction. She felt a distinct lack of sympathy toward the women. They chose to be here. They were Federation allies, they knew what was happening, this was their fault, they should all be dead . . .
No. Stop. She took a deep breath. The red cleared from her eyes.
“Any of you try that again and I’ll gut you,” she said. “The baby. Now.”
Whimpering, the old woman relinquished the baby into her hands.
He immediately started to scream. Rin’s hands moved automatically to cup around his rear and the back of his head. Leftover instincts from days she’d spent carrying around her infant foster brother.
She had a sudden urge to coo to the baby and rock him until his sobbing ceased. She shut it down. She needed the baby to scream, and to scream loudly.
She backed out of the women’s quarters, waving her trident in front of her.
“You lot stay here,” she warned the women. “If any of you move, I will kill this child.”
The women nodded silently, tears streaking their powdered faces.
Rin backed out of the chamber and returned to the center of the main hall.
“Tsung Ho!” she shouted. “Where are you?”
Silence.
The baby quivered in her arms. His cries had diminished to distressed whimpers. Rin briefly considered pinching his arms to make him scream.
There was no need. The sight of her bloody trident was enough. He caught one glimpse of it, opened his mouth, and shrieked.
Rin shouted over the baby, “Tsung Ho! I’ll murder your son if you don’t come out.”
She heard him approaching long before he attacked.
Too slow. Too fucking slow. She spun around, dodged his blade, and slammed the butt of her trident into his stomach. He doubled over. She caught his blade inside the trident’s prongs and twisted it out of his hand. He dropped to all fours, scrambling for his weapon. She kicked it out of the way and jammed the hilt of her trident into the back of his head. He dropped to the floor.
“You traitor.” She aimed a savage strike at his kneecaps. He howled in pain. She hit them again. Then again.
The baby wailed louder. She walked to a corner, placed him delicately on the floor, then resumed her assault on his father. The Ram Warlord’s kneecaps were visibly broken. She moved on to his ribs.
“Please, mercy, please . . .” He curled into a pathetic bundle, arms wrapped over his head.
“When did you let the Mugenese into your gates?” she asked. “Before they burned Golyn Niis, or after?”
“We didn’t have a choice,” he whispered. He made a high keening noise as he drew his shattered knees to his chest. “They were lined up at our gates, we didn’t have any options—”
“You could have fought.”
“We would have died,” he gasped.
“Then you should have died.”
Rin slammed her trident butt against his head. He fell silent.
The baby continued to scream.
Jinzha was so pleased by their victory that he temporarily relaxed the army prohibition on alcohol. Jugs of fine sorghum wine, all plundered from the Ram Warlord’s mansion, were passed through the ranks. The soldiers camped out on the beach that night in an unusually good mood.
Jinzha and his council met by the shore to decide what to do with their prisoners. In addition to the captured Federation soldiers there were also the men of the Eighth Division—a larger Militia force than any conquered town they had dealt with so far. They were too big of a threat to let loose. Short of a mass execution, their options were to take an unwieldy number of prisoners—far too many to feed—or to let them go.
“Execute them,” Rin said immediately.
“More than a thousand men?” Jinzha shook his head. “We’re not monsters.”
“But they deserve it,” she said. “The Mugenese, at least. You know if the tables were turned, if the Federation had taken our men prisoners, they’d be dead already.”
She was so sure that it was a moot debate. But nobody nodded in agreement. She glanced around the circle, confused. Was the conclusion not clear? Why did they all look so uncomfortable?
“They’d be good at the wheels,” Admiral Molkoi said. “It’d give our men a break.”
“You’re joking,” Rin said. “You’d have to feed them, for starters—”
“So we’ll give them a subsistence diet,” said Molkoi.
“Our troops need that food!”
“Our troops have survived on less,” Molkoi said. “And it is best they don’t get used to the excess.”
Rin gawked at him. “You’ll put our troops on stricter rations so men who have committed treason can live?”
He shrugged. “They’re Nikara men. We won’t execute our own kind.”
“They stopped being Nikara the moment they let the Federation stroll into their homes,” she snapped. “They should be rounded up. And beheaded.”
None of the others would meet her eye.
“Nezha?” she asked.
He wouldn’t look at her. All he did was shake his head.
She flushed with anger. “These soldiers were collaborating with the Federation. Feeding them. Housing them. That’s treason. That should be punishable by death. Forget the soldiers—you should have the whole city punished!”
“Perhaps under Daji’s reign,” said Jinzha. “Not under the Republic. We can’t garner a reputation for brutality—”
“Because they helped them!” She was shouting now, and they were all staring at her, but she didn’t care. “The Federation! You don’t know what they did—just because you spent the war hiding in Arlong, you didn’t see what—”
Jinzha turned to Nezha. “Brother, put a muzzle on your Speerly, or—”
“I am not a dog!” Rin shrieked.
Sheer rage took over. She launched herself at Jinzha—and didn’t manage two steps before Admiral Molkoi tackled her to the ground so hard that for a moment the night stars blinked out of the sky, and it was all she could do to simply breathe.
“That’s enough,” Nezha said quietly. “She’s calmed down. Let her go.”
