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Jinzha’s throat bobbed. Rin watched the anger pass through his expression; saw Jinzha shove down the impulse to react. Tarcquet held all the leverage. Tarcquet could not be reproached.
Rin derived some small satisfaction from that. It felt good to see Jinzha humiliated, treated with the same condescension with which he’d always treated her.
“Am I understood?” Tarcquet asked.
Jinzha glared up at him.
Tarcquet cocked his head. “Say ‘yes, sir’ or ‘no, sir.’”
Jinzha had murder written across his face. “Yes, sir.”
Tensions ran high for several days afterward. A pair of Hesperian soldiers began following the missionaries around wherever they went, and the Nikara kept their wary distance. But unless one of theirs was in danger, Tarcquet’s soldiers did not fire their weapons.
Tarcquet continued his constant assessment of Jinzha’s campaign. Rin saw him every now and then on deck, obnoxiously marking notes into a small book while he surveyed the fleet moving up the river. And Rin wondered what he thought of them—their unresponsive gods, their weapons that seemed so primitive, and their bloody, desperate war.
Two months into the campaign, they sailed at last into Rat Province. Here their string of victories came to an end.
Rat Province’s Second Division was the intelligence branch of the Militia, and its espionage officers were the best in the Twelve Provinces. By now, it had also had several months of warning time to put together a better defensive strategy than Hare or Ram Provinces had been able to mount.
The Republic arrived to find villages already abandoned, granaries emptied, and fields scorched. The Rat Warlord had either recalled his civilians to metropolitan centers farther upriver or sent them fleeing to other provinces. Jinzha’s soldiers found clothing, furniture, and children’s toys scattered across the grassy roads. Whatever couldn’t be taken was ruined. In village after village they found burned, useless seed grain and rotting piles of livestock carcasses.
The Rat Warlord wasn’t trying to mount a defense of his borders. He had simply retreated to Baraya, his heavily barricaded capital city. He planned to starve the fleet out. And Baraya had a better chance of success than Xiashang had—its gates were thicker, its residents better prepared, and it was more than a mile inland, which neutralized the attack capabilities of the Shrike and the Crake.
“We should just stop here and turn back.” Kitay paced his office floor, frustrated. “Ride out the winter. We’ll starve otherwise.”
But Jinzha had become increasingly irascible, less and less willing to listen to his advisers and more adamant that they had to storm forward.
“He wants to move on Baraya?” Rin asked.
“He wants to press north as fast as we can.” Kitay tugged anxiously at his hair. “It’s a terrible idea. But he won’t listen to me.”
“Then who’s he listening to?”
“Any of the leadership who agree with him. Molkoi especially. He’s in the old guard—I told Vaisra that was a bad idea, but who listens to me? Nezha’s on my side, but of course Jinzha won’t listen to his little brother, it’d mean losing face. This could throw away all of our gains so far. You know, there’s a good chance we’ll all just starve to death up north. That’d be hilarious, wouldn’t it?”
But, as Jinzha announced to the Kingfisher, they absolutely would not starve. They would take Rat Province. They would blow open the gates to the capital city of Baraya, and win themselves enough supplies to last out the winter.
Easy orders to give. Harder to implement, especially when they reached a stretch of the Murui so steep that Jinzha had no choice but to order his troops to move the ships over land. The flooded riverbanks earlier had made it possible for them to sail directly over lowland roads. But now they were forced to disembark and roll the ships over logs to reach the next waterway wide enough to accommodate the warships.
It took an entire day of straining against ropes to simply pull the massive tower ships onto dry land, and much longer to cut down enough trees to roll them across the bumpy terrain. One week bled into two weeks of backbreaking, mindless, numbing labor. The only advantage of this was that Rin was so exhausted that she didn’t have the time to be bored.
Patrol shifts were slightly more exciting. These were a chance to get away from the din of ships rolling over logs and explore the surrounding land. Thick forests obscured all visibility past a mile, and Jinzha sent out daily parties to root through the trees for any sightings of the Militia.
Rin found these relaxing, until word got back to the base that the noon patrol had caught sight of a Militia scouting party.
“And you just let them go?” Jinzha demanded. “Are you stupid?”
The men on patrol were from the Griffon, and Nezha hastily interceded on their behalf. “They weren’t worth the fight, brother. Our men were outnumbered.”
“But they had the advantage of surprise,” Jinzha snapped. “Instead, the entire Militia now knows our precise location. Send your men back out. No one sleeps until I have proof every last scout is dead.”
Nezha bowed his head. “Yes, brother.”
“And take Salkhi’s men with you. Yours clearly can’t be trusted to get the job done.”
The next day, Salkhi and Nezha’s joint expedition returned to the Kingfisher with a string of severed heads and empty Militia uniforms.
That appeased Jinzha, but ultimately it made no difference. First the Militia scouts returned in larger and larger numbers. Then the attacks began en masse. The Militia soldiers hid in the mountains. They never launched a frontal assault, but maintained a constant stream of arrow fire, picking off soldiers unawares.
The Republican troops fared badly against these scattered, unpredictable attacks. Panic swept through the camp, destroying morale, and Rin understood why. The Republican Army felt out of place on land. They were used to fighting from their ships. They were most comfortable in water, where they had a quick escape route.
They had no escape routes now.
Chapter 19
Snow started falling the day that they finally returned to the river. At first it drifted down in fat, lazy flakes. But within hours it had transformed into a blinding blizzard, with winds so fierce that the troops could hardly see five feet in front of them. Jinzha was forced to keep his fleet grounded by the edge of the river while his soldiers holed up in their ships to wait out the storm.
“I’ve always been amazed by snow.” Rin traced shapes into the porthole condensation as she stared out at the endless, hypnotizing flurry outside. “Every winter, it’s a surprise. I can never believe it’s real.”
“They don’t have snow down south?” Kitay asked.
“No. Tikany gets so dry that your lips bleed when you try to smile, but never cold enough for the snow to fall. Before I came north, I’d only heard about it in stories. I thought it was a beautiful idea. Little flecks of the cold.”
“And how did you find the snow at Sinegard?”
A howl of wind drowned out Rin’s response. She pulled down the porthole cover. “Fucking miserable.”
The blizzard let up by the next morning. Outside, the forest had been transformed, like some giant had drenched the trees in white paint.
