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“Focus on us,” Rin said urgently. “On your sister—”
“I can’t.” Pipaji’s hands, still wrapped around Jiuto’s shoulders, started to twitch. They curved into claws, scratching at the air. “She’s in there, she’s . . .”
“Get her away,” Rin ordered Lianhua.
Lianhua understood immediately. She wrapped her arms around Jiuto’s waist and pulled. Jiuto struggled, wailing, but Lianhua didn’t let go. She dragged Jiuto away from the beach and up toward the forest, until finally Jiuto’s wails faded into the distance.
“Stay with me,” Rin told Pipaji. “Pipaji, listen to my voice—”
Pipaji didn’t respond.
Rin didn’t know what to do. She wanted to wrap her arms around Pipaji and comfort her, but she was afraid to touch. A great purple cloud blossomed around Pipaji’s collarbones, stretching up to her neck, turning her entire visage a bright, smooth violet. Pipaji’s back arched. She choked wordlessly, struggling against some invisible force.
Rin skirted backward, suddenly terrified.
Pipaji turned her head toward Rin. The movement looked horrifically unnatural, as if her limbs were being yanked this way and that by unseen puppet strings.
“Please,” she said. Her eyes flickered the faintest brown. “While I’m here.”
Rin held her gaze, stricken.
Death or the Chuluu Korikh. Five simple, devastating words. Rin had known them from the start. There were only two possible fates for the Cike: death or immurement. A commander made sure it was the first. A commander culls.
“I need you to focus.” Rin spoke with a calm she did not feel. She could not relinquish her responsibility; she had to do this. At this point, it was a mercy. “You still have to fight it. You can’t poison me.”
“I won’t,” Pipaji whispered.
“Thank you.” Rin reached out, cupped the side of Pipaji’s head with her left hand, pressed one knee against Pipaji’s shoulder for leverage, and wrenched.
The crack was louder than she’d expected. Rin shook out her fingers, focusing on the pain so she wouldn’t have to look at Pipaji’s glassy eyes. She’d never broken a neck before. She’d been taught the method in theory; she’d practiced plenty of times on dummies at Sinegard. But until now, she hadn’t realized how much force it really took to make a spine snap.
Then it was over.
Rin entered the city on foot. No one announced her presence; no musicians or dancers followed in her wake. Barely anyone noticed her; the city was too consumed with its own collapse. In her exhaustion, all she perceived was a great flurry of movement; of burned and bloody bodies carried into the city on stretchers; of crowds streaming out of Arlong’s gates dragging along sacks spilling with clothing, heirlooms, and silver; of bodies packed in teetering hordes atop the remnants of Arlong’s fleet, escaping in the few ships that hadn’t been sunk in the Dragon’s wrath.
Vaguely she understood that she had won.
Arlong was destroyed. The Hesperians had fled. Nezha and his government had made a hasty retreat out the channel. Rin learned these facts over the next hour, had them repeated to her over and over again by ecstatic officers, but she was drifting about in a fugue state, so tired and confused that she thought they were joking.
For how could this be called a victory?
She knew what victory felt like. Victory was when she scoured enemy troops from the field with a divine blaze, and her men rallied around her, screaming as they took back what was rightfully theirs. Victory felt deserved. Just.
But this felt like cheating—like her opponent had tripped and she’d been declared the winner by accident, which made this outcome a slippery, precarious thing, a victory that could be torn away at any time for any reason.
“I don’t understand,” she kept saying to Kitay. “What happened?”
“It’s over,” he told her. “The city’s ours.”
“But how?”
He responded patiently, the same way he had all afternoon. “The Dragon destroyed the city. And then you banished the Dragon.”
“But I didn’t do that.” She gazed out at the flooded canals. “I didn’t do anything.”
All she’d done was poke a beast she couldn’t handle. All she’d done was lie flat on her ass, scared out of her wits, while Nezha and a Hesperian pilot fought a battle of lightning that she didn’t understand. She’d meddled in forces she couldn’t control. She’d nearly sunk the entire city, nearly drowned every person in this valley, all because she’d thought she could wake the Dragon and win.
“Maybe he’s seen what they’re like,” Kitay guessed, after she’d told him all that transpired in the river. It made absolutely no sense that Nezha would have just given up, had just retreated when he could have killed Rin and stopped the Dragon in one fell swoop. “The Hesperians, I mean. And maybe he doesn’t want to let go of the only forces that can stop them.”
“Seems like a belated realization,” Rin muttered.
“Maybe it was self-preservation. Maybe things were getting worse.”
“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “What do you think he’ll do now?”
“I don’t know. But we’ve got a more pressing issue at hand.” Kitay nodded to the palace gates. “We just deposed the ruler of half this country. Now you’ve got to present yourself as his replacement.”
There were troops to address. Speeches to make. A city to occupy, and a country to claim.
Rin shuddered with exhaustion. She didn’t feel like a ruler; she barely felt like the victor. She couldn’t think of anything she wanted less right now than to face a crowd and pretend.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Give me today. There’s something I have to do.”
In Tikany there was a little graveyard hidden deep in the forest, concealed so well behind thickets of poplar trees and bamboo groves that the men never found it by accident. But every woman in Tikany knew its location. They’d visited it with their mothers, their mothers-in-law, their grandmothers, or their sisters. Or they’d made the trip alone, pale-faced and crying while they hugged their wretched loads to their chests.
It was the graveyard of babies. Infant girls smothered in ash at birth because their fathers only wanted sons. Little boys who’d died too early and left their mothers grief-stricken and terrified of being replaced by younger, more fertile wives. The messy products of miscarriages and late-term abortions.
Arlong, Rin assumed, had an equivalent. Every city needed a place to hide the shameful deaths of its children.
Venka knew where it was. “Half a mile past the evacuation cliffs,” she said. “Turn north when you can see the channel. There’s a footpath in the grass. Takes a while to see it, but once you’ve got it in sight, it’ll take you all the way.”
“Will you come with me?” Rin asked.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Venka said. “I’m never going back there again.”
So at sunset, Rin wrapped the jar containing Pipaji’s ashes inside several layers of linen, shoved it in a bag, and set out for the cliffs with a shovel strapped to her back.
