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And then, when they’d been lulled into complacency, when they’d become convinced that perhaps those dirty, stupid, inferior Nikara didn’t pose such a great threat after all—that was when she would strike.
Rin’s next task was to occupy the palace.
The place was in shambles. The grand painted doors had been left hanging ajar, hallways strewn with shattered vases that had fallen out of hastily packed wagons. The vast hall in the palace center had been stripped of almost all its furnishings; only the wall tapestries remained, too heavy and unwieldy to pull down and carry away.
The Yin family portrait hung at the far end of the chamber. Rin stood beneath it for a moment, gazing at the faces of the family that had imagined they might rule the Empire.
Whoever had woven this had rendered the Yins with impressive accuracy. Standing together, their similarities were even more pronounced. They all had the same high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, and sculpted, angular jaws. None of them smiled—not even the children, who gazed over the empty hall with identically haughty, contemptuous expressions.
At first Rin mistook Jinzha for Nezha, but then realized that the youths standing to their father’s right must be the firstborn twins—Jinzha and Muzha. Nezha was by himself, somber and forlorn, to his father’s left. This tapestry must have been completed years ago—he was represented here as a small child, barely rising to his father’s waist. To the far right stood Lady Yin Saikhara, cradling a baby in her arms. That had to be Mingzha—Nezha’s dead baby brother, the one lost to the Dragon.
What a beautiful family, destroyed in only the span of a year. Jinzha was captured and ground into dumpling stuffing at Lake Boyang. The charred remnants of Vaisra’s body lay indistinguishable from the burned wreckage of his fleet. Muzha had reportedly drowned in the Dragon’s attack on Arlong. And Nezha was broken and defeated, a slave to his Hesperian masters.
Rin wished, with a pulse of vicious hatred, she could have ended the lineage herself.
But the Lady Saikhara had escaped her justice. She’d flung herself off the highest tower of the palace when she saw the banners of southern troops marching into the city. Her fragile bones smashed like porcelain against the execution grounds outside the palace, and she joined a long tradition of noblewomen who had died along with their dynasties.
Rin learned from reports that Arlong’s residents had come to hate Saikhara in the final days. It was no great secret that the House of Yin had profited greatly from the civil war, even as it impoverished entire populations just on its border. Nezha’s sister, Muzha, had become rich acting as the go-between for Hesperian traders and the powerful merchant cronies that crowded the Republican court.
When Lady Saikhara had come back from her grand publicity tour in Hesperia, it had been revealed that she and Muzha had dumped huge swaths of Nikara goods into waiting Hesperian markets while everyone else was hoarding food and buying in a panic from rapidly inflating markets.
Popular opinion had called for Nezha to sanction his mother and sister, but he did nothing except remove them from his cabinet. So Nezha’s moniker had gone from the Young Marshal to the Filial Fool, while his mother was titled the Whore of the West. In the past week, the streets had been calling so loudly for her punishment that if the Southern Army hadn’t stormed Arlong’s gates then she might very well have been torn apart by the mobs regardless.
“You’d think she would have gotten out with the Hesperians,” Kitay said as they stood on the second-floor balcony, watching as servants scrubbed Saikhara’s blood from the steps. Her body lay several feet away, wrapped unceremoniously in a spare canvas sheet. Rin planned to weigh it down with rocks and toss it into the harbor for the fish. “I thought they loved her.”
“I think they left her behind,” Rin said. “I think they had to save their own skins.”
They would have done it. The Hesperians, facing an overwhelming tide of public hatred, wouldn’t have dared trying to ferret the despised Saikhara out of the city.
It didn’t matter that Lady Saikhara spoke fluent Hesperian, that she worshipped their Maker, or that she’d been masquerading as a Hesperian woman for half her life. In the end she was still Nikara, still one of the inferior race, and the Hesperians only looked out for their own.
The adjacent hallways were crammed with riches that put those in Jinzhou to shame. Rin had walked through those corridors a dozen times before, always on her way to Vaisra’s office, though she’d never dared to pause and peruse. Back then, their mere proximity had filled her with awe; those artifacts were shining evidence of a historical elite that she had, somehow, been invited to join.
Walking through the hallways felt very different now that she knew everything displayed on the walls belonged to her.
“Look.” Kitay stopped before a very old, very shiny helmet. “It says this belonged to the Red Emperor.”
“There’s no way.”
“Read the placard.”
The helmet did look old enough. Rin could see little jade stones embedded into the forehead. She reached into the case, plucked the helmet out, and tried it on. It was uncomfortably cold, obstructively heavy. Quickly she pulled it off. “I don’t know how anyone managed to fight wearing this.”
“It’s ceremonial, probably,” Kitay said. “I doubt he actually wore it into battle. This place is loaded with his stuff—look, there’s his breastplate, and that’s his old tea set.”
His fingers hovered over the relics, as if he was too awed to touch them. But Rin, glancing about the hall, was struck with a deep sense of pity. The Red Emperor was the greatest man in Nikara history, a man so famous that every child in the Empire knew his name by the time they could speak. The myths about him could and did fill up entire bookshelves. He’d united the country for the very first time; he’d brought fire and bloodshed on a scale the land had never witnessed before; and he’d built cities that remained intellectual, cultural, and commercial centers of the Empire.
And now, a millennium later, all that remained were his helmet, his breastplate, and a tea set.
His dynasty had not even survived a generation. Upon his death his sons had immediately fallen upon each other, and after the centuries of bloodshed that followed, the Empire was split under a provincial system that the Red Emperor had not designed nor intended. His bloodline was lost, his heirs extinguished within the first twenty years of the civil war they started. If his line persisted, no one recognized it.
He was king for a day. For a brief moment, he stood in the center of the universe. And for what?
He should have married Tearza, Rin thought. He was a fool to make the shamans his enemies. He should have leashed them to his regime. He should have put a Speerly on the throne, and then his Empire would have lasted for an eternity. By now their heirs would have conquered the world.
“This one has your name on it,” Kitay called from farther down the hall.
“What?”
“Look.” He pointed. It was the sword—the twin of the one she’d lost in the water during the battle at the Red Cliffs, the second one crafted from Altan’s melted-down trident.
They’d kept it as a trophy. Speerly mineral, read the placard, last wielded by Fang Runin.
Rin drew the sword out of its case and blew the dust off the blade. She’d thought it had sunk to the bottom of the river forever.
