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Kitay seemed to have noticed this, too; he winced as the officers set the dog on the floor.
“The servants said this used to belong to the Lady Saikhara,” said the guard. “They call it Binbin.”
“Good gods,” Venka muttered. “Don’t tell us its name.”
It was over quickly. The dog set eagerly at the boiled fish, but it had barely swallowed two bites before it stepped back and began to whine piteously.
Kitay started forward, but Rin held him back. “It could bite.”
They remained in their seats, watching as the dog slumped to the floor, sides heaving. Its stubby front paws scrabbled at its bloated stomach, as if trying to scratch out some parasite gnawing at its innards. Gradually its movements grew weak, then listless. It whimpered once and fell silent. It seemed to take an eternity for it to stop twitching.
Rin felt a violent wave of nausea. She was no longer remotely hungry.
“Arrest the kitchen staff,” Kitay ordered calmly. “Detain them in separate rooms and keep them isolated until we’ve time to interrogate them.”
“Yes, sir.”
The officer left. The door slammed shut. Kitay turned to Venka. “It could’ve been—”
“I know,” Venka said curtly. “I’m on it.”
She stood up, plucked her bow off the table, and left the room—presumably to see whether the officer would carry out his orders or flee.
She and Kitay sat in stunned silence. Kitay’s temporary calm had evaporated—he was staring at the dishes, blinking very rapidly, mouth half-open as if unsure what to say. Rin, too, felt lost in a fog of panic. The betrayal had been so sudden, so unexpected, her overriding thought was fury at her sheer stupidity, for accepting food from the kitchens without even stopping to think.
Someone was trying to kill her. Someone was trying to kill her in the most obvious way possible, and they’d almost succeeded.
She realized then that she could never feel safe in her own office again.
The door creaked open.
Rin jumped. “What is it?”
It was a messenger. He hesitated, taking in their distressed faces, and then tentatively lifted a scroll in Rin’s direction. “There’s, ah, a missive.”
“From who?” Kitay asked.
“It’s sealed with the House of—”
“Bring it here,” Rin said curtly. “Then get out.”
The moment the door swung closed, she ripped the scroll open with her teeth. She didn’t know why her heart was hammering so loudly, why she still felt a surge of fearful anticipation even though Nezha had lost, had fled, had retreated so far out into the ocean that he couldn’t possibly threaten her here.
Calm down, she told herself. This is nothing. He has nothing. Just a formality from a defeated foe.
Hello, Rin. Hope you’re enjoying the palace. Did you take my old rooms?
You’ll have realized by now, I think, that this country is in deep shit. Let me guess, Kitay’s been going through agricultural reports all morning. He’s probably losing his mind over the inconsistencies. Here’s a hint—the smarter magistrates always underreport their crop yields to get more subsidies. Or they might really just be starving. Hard to know, huh?
“That patronizing shit,” Rin muttered.
“Hold on.” Kitay was already on the second page. He skimmed the bottom, blinked, and then handed it to her. “Keep reading.”
The kitchen staff are good, but you’ll find that several are quite loyal to my family. I hope you didn’t eat the lunch.
Rin’s mouth went dry. He couldn’t know that. How did he know that?
Don’t punish them all. It’ll either be the head cook, Hairui, or his assistant. The others don’t have a backbone. I mean, knowing you, you’ve probably had them all thrown in prison. But at least let Minmin and Little Xing back in the kitchens. They make excellent steamed buns. And you like those, don’t you?
She lowered the letter. She suddenly found it hard to breathe; the walls seemed to constrict around her, the air deprived of oxygen.
Someone’s spying on us.
“Nezha’s not on Speer,” she said. “He’s here.”
“He can’t be,” Kitay said. “Our scouts saw him leaving—”
“That means nothing. He could have snuck back. He controls the fucking water, Kitay, you don’t think he could have traveled up the river in one night? He’s watching us—”
“There’s no place for him to go,” Kitay said. “That’d be suicide. Come on, Rin—what, do you think he’s crouched in a shack somewhere in the city? Peeking out at you from behind corners?”
“He knows about the granaries.” Her pitch shot up several octaves. “He knows about the fucking cooks! Pray tell, Kitay, how the fuck would he know that unless he—”
“Because it’s the easiest guess in the world,” Kitay said. “And he knows about the granaries because those were the same problems that he’s been dealing with for months. Up until we arrived, feeding this country was his problem. He doesn’t have eyes over your shoulder, he’s just trying to rattle you. Don’t let him win.”
Rin shot him an incredulous look. “I think you’re giving quite a lot of credit to his capabilities for conjecture.”
“And I think you’re massively overestimating how much Nezha wants to die,” Kitay said. “He’s not hiding in the city. That’s certain suicide. He’s got scouts, yes, but we’re in his fucking capital—of course people are going to report to him.”
“Then he’ll know—”
“So he’ll know. We’ve just got to operate assuming Nezha has a good idea of what we’re planning. That’s inevitable with regimes in power—you can’t keep your operations secret for long, there are too many people involved. In the end, it won’t matter. We’ve got too many advantages. You just can’t squander them by freaking the fuck out.”
She forced herself to take several deep, shaky breaths. Gradually, her pulse slowed. The darkness creeping at the edges of her vision faded away. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to organize her thoughts, trying to take stock of the problem.
She knew she had enemies in Arlong. She’d known that from the start. She’d had no choice but to ask many of the former administrative personnel to stay on in their roles, simply because she had no qualified staff who could fill their positions. She didn’t know how to run a country, so she’d had to employ Republicans who did. They’d all nominally defected to her regime, of course, but how many of them were secretly plotting against her? How many was Nezha still in correspondence with? How many tiny traps had he left in his wake?
Her breathing quickened. The panic returned; her vision ebbed black. She felt a low, creeping dread, a prickling under her skin as if a million ants were crawling over her body.
It didn’t go away. It persisted throughout the afternoon, even after they’d interrogated the kitchen staff and executed the cook in charge. It intensified into a flurry of symptoms: a debilitating fatigue; a throbbing headache that developed as her eyes grew strained, darting around for shadows where they didn’t exist.
