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“Happy New Year,” Kitay said. “May the gods send you blessings and good fortune.”
“Health, wealth, and happiness. May your enemies rot and surrender quickly before we have to kill more of them.” Rin stood up.
“Where are you going?” Nezha asked.
“Gotta go take a piss.”
She wandered toward the woods, looking for a large enough tree to hide behind. By now she’d spent so much time with Kitay that she wouldn’t have minded squatting down right in front of him. But for some reason, she felt far less comfortable stripping in front of Nezha.
Her ankle twisted beneath her. She spun around, failed to catch her balance, and fell flat on her rear. She spread her hands to catch her fall. Her fingers landed on something soft and rubbery. Confused, she glanced down and brushed the snow away from the surface.
She saw a child’s face buried in snow.
His—she thought it was a boy, though she couldn’t quite tell—eyes were wide open, large and blank, with long lashes fringed with snow, embedded in dark shadows on a thin, pale face.
Rin rose unsteadily to her feet. She picked up a branch and brushed the rest of the snow off the child’s body. She uncovered another face. And then another.
It finally sank in that this was not natural, that she ought to be afraid, and then she opened her mouth and screamed.
Nezha ordered a squadron to walk through the surrounding square mile with torches held low to the ground until the ice and snow had melted enough that they could see what had happened.
The snow peeled away to reveal an entire village of people, frozen perfectly where they lay. Most still had their eyes open. Rin saw no blood. The villagers didn’t appear to have died from anything except for the cold, and perhaps starvation. Everywhere she found evidence of fires, hastily constructed, long fizzled out.
No one had given her a torch. She was still shaken from the experience, and every sudden movement made her jump, so it was best that she didn’t hold on to anything potentially dangerous. But she refused to go back to camp alone, either, so she stood by the edge of the forest, watching blankly as the soldiers brushed snow off yet another family of corpses. Their bodies were curled in a heap together, the mother’s and father’s bodies wrapped protectively around their two children.
“Are you all right?” Nezha asked her. His hand wandered hesitantly toward her shoulder, as if he wasn’t sure whether to touch her or not.
She brushed it away. “I’m fine. I’ve seen bodies before.”
Yet she couldn’t take her eyes off of them. They looked like a set of dolls lying in the snow, perfectly fine except for the fact that they weren’t moving.
Most of the adults still had large bundles fastened to their backs. Rin saw porcelain dishes, silk dresses, and kitchen utensils spilling out of those bags. The villagers seemed to have packed their entire homes up with them.
“Where were they going?” she wondered.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Kitay said. “They were running.”
“From what?”
Kitay said it, because no one else seemed able to. “Us.”
“But they didn’t have anything to fear.” Nezha looked deeply uncomfortable. “We would have treated them the way we’ve treated every other village. They would have gotten a vote.”
“That’s not what their leaders would have told them,” said Kitay. “They would have imagined we were coming to kill them.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Nezha said.
“Is it?” Kitay asked. “Imagine it. You hear the rebel army is coming. Your magistrates are your most reliable sources of information, and they tell you that the rebels will kill your men, rape your women, and enslave your children, because that’s what you’re always supposed to say about the enemy. You don’t know any better, so you pack up everything you can and flee.”
Rin could imagine the rest. These villagers would have run from the Republic just as they had once run from the Federation. But winter had come earlier that year than they’d predicted, and they didn’t get to the lowland valleys in time. They couldn’t find anything to eat. At some point it was too much work to stay alive. So they decided with the rest of the families that this was as good a place as any to end it, and together they lay down and embraced each other, and perhaps it didn’t feel so terrible near the end.
Perhaps it felt just like going to sleep.
Through the entire campaign, she had never once paused to consider just how many people they had killed or displaced. The numbers added up so quickly. Several thousand from famine—maybe several hundred thousand—and then all the soldiers they’d cut down every time, multiplied across villages.
They were fighting a very different war now, she realized. They were not the liberators but the aggressors. They were the ones to fear.
“War’s different when you’re not struggling for survival.” Kitay must have been thinking the same thing she was. He stood still, hands clutching his torch, eyes fixed on the bodies at his feet. “Victories don’t feel the same.”
“Do you think it’s worth it?” Rin asked him quietly so that Nezha couldn’t hear.
“Frankly, I don’t care.”
“I’m being serious.”
He considered for a moment. “I’m glad that someone’s fighting Daji.”
“But the stakes—”
“I wouldn’t think too long about the stakes.” Kitay glanced at Nezha, who was still staring at the bodies, eyes wide and disturbed. “You won’t like the answers you come up with.”
That evening the snowstorms started up again and did not relent for another week. It confirmed what everyone had been afraid of. Winter had arrived early that year, and with a vengeance. Soon enough the tributaries would freeze and the Republican Fleet would be stuck in the north unless they turned back. Their options were dwindling.
Rin paced the Kingfisher for days, growing more agitated with every passing minute. She needed to move, fight, attack. She didn’t like sitting still. Too easy to fall prey to her own thoughts. Too easy to see the faces in the snow.
Once during a late-night stroll she stumbled across the leadership leaving Jinzha’s office. None of them looked happy. Jinzha stormed past her without saying a word; he might not have even noticed her. Nezha lingered behind with Kitay, who wore the peeved, tight-lipped expression that Rin had learned meant that he hadn’t gotten his way.
“Don’t tell me,” Rin said. “We’re moving forward.”
“We’re not just moving forward. He wants us to bypass Baraya entirely and take Boyang.” Kitay slammed a fist against the wall. “Boyang! Is he mad?”
“Military outpost on the border of Rat Province and Tiger Province,” Nezha explained to Rin. “It’s not a terrible idea. The Militia used Boyang as a fortress during the first and second invasions. It’ll have built-in defenses, make it easier to last out the winter. We can break the siege at Baraya from there.”
“But won’t someone already be there?” Rin asked. If the Militia was garrisoned anywhere, it had to be in Tiger or Rat Province. Any farther north and they’d be fighting in Sinegard for the heart of Imperial territory.
