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“Just grab your things,” she said. “And tell the others. They want you to report in ten.”
In a matter of weeks the last strongholds of Hare and Ram Provinces capitulated to the Republic. Their Warlords were sent back to Arlong in chains to grovel before Vaisra for their lives. Their cities, townships, and villages were all subjected to plebiscites.
When the civilians elected to join the Republic—and they invariably voted to join, for the alternative was that all men over the age of fifteen would be put to death—they became a part of Vaisra’s sprawling war machine. The women were put to work sewing Republican uniforms and spinning linens for the infirmaries. The men were either recruited as infantry or sent south to work in Arlong’s shipyards. A seventh of their food stores were confiscated to contribute to the northern campaign’s swelling supply lines, and Republican patrols stayed behind to ensure regular shipments of grain upriver.
Nezha bragged constantly that this was perhaps the most successful military campaign in Nikara history. Kitay told him to stop getting high on his own hubris, but Rin could not deny their astonishing string of victories.
The daily demands of the campaign were so grueling, however, that she rarely got the chance to revel in their wins. The cities, townships, and villages began to blur together in her mind. Rin stopped thinking in terms of night and day, and started thinking in battle timetables. The days bled into one another, a string of extraordinarily demanding predawn combat assignments and snatched hours of deep and dreamless sleep.
The only benefit was that she managed to temporarily lose herself in the sheer physical activity. Her demotion didn’t affect her as much as she’d thought it would. Most days she was too tired to even remember it had happened.
But she was also secretly relieved that she did not have to think anymore about what to do with her men. That the burden of leadership, which she’d never adequately met, had been lifted entirely from her shoulders. All she had to do was worry about carrying out her own orders, and that she did splendidly.
Her orders were doubling, too. Jinzha might have begun to appreciate her ability, or he might have simply disliked her so much he wanted her dead without having to take the blame, but he began to put her on the front lines of every ground operation. This was typically not a coveted position, but she relished it.
After all, she was terribly good at war. She had trained for this. Maybe she couldn’t call the fire anymore, but she could still fight, and landing her trident into the right joint of flesh felt just as good as incinerating everything around her.
She gained a reputation on the Kingfisher as an eminently capable soldier, and despite herself she started to bask in it. It awakened an old streak of competitiveness that she had not felt since Sinegard, when the only thing getting her through months of grueling and miserable study had been the sheer delight of having her talents recognized by someone.
Was this how Altan had felt? The Nikara had honed him as a weapon, had put him to military uses since he was a small child, but still they’d lauded him. Had that kept him happy?
Of course she wasn’t happy, not quite. But she had found some sort of contentment, the satisfaction that came from being a tool that served its purpose quite well.
The campaigns were like drugs in their own right. Rin felt wonderful when she fought. In the heat of battle, human life could be reduced to the barest mechanics of existence—arms and legs, mobility and vulnerability, vital points to be identified, isolated, and destroyed. She found an odd pleasure in that. Her body knew what to do, which meant she could turn her mind off.
If the Cike were unhappy, she didn’t know. She didn’t speak to them anymore. She barely saw them after they were reassigned. But she found it harder and harder to care because she was losing the capacity to think about much at all.
In time, sooner than she’d expected, she even stopped longing for the fire that she’d lost. Sometimes the urge crept up on her on the eve of battle and she rubbed her fingers together, wishing that she could make them spark, fantasizing about how quickly her troops could win battles if she could call down a column of fire to scorch out the defensive line.
She still felt the Phoenix’s absence like a hole carved out of her chest. The ache never quite went away. But the desperation and frustration ebbed. She stopped waking up in the morning and wanting to scream when she remembered what had been taken from her.
She’d long since stopped trying to break down the Seal. Its dark, pulsing presence no longer pained her daily like a festering wound. In the small moments when she did permit herself to linger on it, she wondered if it had begun to take her memories.
Master Jiang had seemed to know absolutely nothing about who he had been twenty years ago. Would the same happen to her?
Already some of her earlier memories were starting to feel fuzzy. She used to remember intricately the faces of every member of her foster family in Tikany. Now they seemed like blurs. But she couldn’t tell if the Seal had eaten those memories away, or if they had simply corroded over time.
That didn’t worry her as much as it should have. She couldn’t pretend that if the Seal stole her past from her little by little—if she forgot Altan, forgot what she’d done on Speer, and let her guilt wash away into a white nothingness until, like Jiang, she was just an affable, absentminded fool—some part of her wouldn’t be relieved.
When Rin wasn’t sleeping or fighting, she was sitting with Kitay in his cramped office. She was no longer invited to Jinzha’s councils, but she learned everything from Kitay secondhand. He, in turn, enjoyed bouncing his ideas off of her. Talking through the multitudes of possibilities out loud gave relief to the frantic activity inside his mind.
He alone didn’t share the Republic’s delight over their incredible series of victories.
“I’m concerned,” he admitted. “And confused. Hasn’t this whole campaign felt too easy to you? It’s like they’re not even trying.”
“They are trying. They’re just not very good at it.” Rin was still buzzing from the high of battle. It felt very good to excel, even if excellence meant cutting down poorly trained local soldiers, and Kitay’s moodiness irritated her.
“You know the battles you’re fighting are too easy.”
She made a face. “You could give us a little bit of credit.”
“Do you want praise for beating up untrained, unarmed villagers? Good job, then. Very well done. The superiorly armed navy crushes a pathetic peasant resistance. What a shocking turn of events. That doesn’t mean you’re taking this Empire on a silver platter.”
“It could just mean that our navy is superior,” she said. “What, you think Daji’s giving up the north on purpose? That doesn’t get her anything.”
“She’s not giving it up. They’re building a shipyard, we’ve known that since the beginning—”
“And if their navy were any use, we would have seen it. Maybe we’re actually just winning this war. It wouldn’t kill you to admit it.”
But Kitay shook his head. “You’re talking about Su Daji. This is the woman who managed to unite all twelve provinces for the first time since the death of the Red Emperor.”
“She had help.”
“But she’s had no help since. If the Empire were going to fracture, you’d think it would have already. Don’t get cocky, Rin. We’re playing a game of wikki against a woman who’s had decades of practice against far more fearsome opponents. I’ve said this to Jinzha, too. There’s a counteroffensive coming soon, and the longer we wait for it, the worse it’s going to be.”
