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The palace didn’t seem such an empty playground anymore. It seemed a house of infinite darkness, crowded with thousands of enemies that she couldn’t see or anticipate.
“I know,” Kitay said, every time she voiced her fears. “I’m scared, too. But that’s ruling, Rin. There’s always someone who doesn’t want you on the throne. But we’ve just got to keep going. We can’t let go of the reins. There’s no one else.”
The days stretched on. Slowly, incredibly, the business of city administration stopped feeling like a fever dream and started feeling more like a familiar duty as they fell into a routine—they woke an hour before sunrise, sifted through intelligence reports during the early hours of the morning, spent the afternoon checking in on reconstruction projects they’d set underway, and put out fires as they arose throughout the day.
They hadn’t brought Arlong back to normal. Not even close. Most of the civilian population was still displaced, camping out in makeshift shacks on the same grounds where once Vaisra had corralled all the southern refugees. Food shortages were a persistent problem. The communal kitchens always ran out of food long before everyone in the line was served. There simply weren’t enough rations, and Rin didn’t have a clue where they could extract more on short notice. Their best hope was to wait for Moag’s missives and hope she could convert boatloads of Nikara antiques into smuggled Hesperian grain.
But somehow, as days turned into weeks, their hold on the city seemed to stabilize. The civil administration, comprising southern soldiers with no experience and Republican officials who had to be guarded at all times, became semifunctional and self-sustaining. Some semblance of order had been restored to the city. Fights and riots no longer broke out on the streets. All Republican soldiers who hadn’t fled had either stopped trying to cause trouble or had been caught and locked in prison. Arlong had not quite welcomed the south with open arms, but it seemed to have reluctantly accepted its new government.
Those seemed like tentative signs of progress. Or that was, at least, the lie Rin and Kitay told themselves, to avoid facing the crushing pressure of the fact that they were children, unprepared and unqualified, juggling a towering edifice that could collapse at any minute.
Rin, Kitay, and Venka always holed up in the war room long past sunset. As the moon crept across the sky, they went from slouching at the table to sitting on the floor to lying by the hearth, swigging at bottles of sorghum wine recovered from Vaisra’s private cellars, all pretense of work forgotten.
All three of them had started drinking religiously. It felt like a compulsion; by the end of the day, alcohol seemed as necessary as eating or drinking water. It was the only thing that took the edge off the debilitating stress that pounded their temples. In those hours, they lurched to the opposite of anxiety. They became temporary, private megalomaniacs. They fantasized about everything they would change about the Empire once they’d gotten it into their order. The future was full of sandcastles, flimsy prospects to be destroyed and rebuilt at will.
“We’ll ban child marriage,” Rin declared. “We’ll make matchmaking illegal until all parties are at least sixteen. We’ll make education mandatory. And we’ll need an officers’ school, obviously—”
“You’re going to reinstate Sinegard?” Venka asked.
“Not at Sinegard,” Kitay said. “That place has too much history. We’ll build a new school, somewhere down south. And we’ll revamp the whole curriculum—more emphasis on Strategy and Linguistics, less focus on Combat . . .”
“You can’t get rid of Combat,” Venka said.
“We can get rid of Combat the way Jun taught it,” Rin said. “Martial arts don’t belong on the battlefield, they belong on an opera stage. We have to teach a curriculum geared for modern warfare. Artillery—arquebuses, cannons, the whole gamut.”
“I want a dirigible division,” Venka said.
“We’ll get you one,” Kitay vowed.
“I want a dozen. All equipped with state-of-the-art cannons.”
“Whatever you like.”
As the night drew on, their ideas always went from bold to wishful to simply absurd. Kitay wanted to issue a standardized set of abacuses because pea-size beads, apparently, made better clacking noises. Venka wanted to ban intricate, heavy hair ornaments required by women of aristocracy on the grounds that they strained the neck, as well as the black, double-flapped headwear favored by northern bureaucrats on the grounds that they were ugly.
Those last few proposals were trivial, so obviously not worth their time. But it still thrilled them, tossing out ideas as if they had the power to speak them into being. And then remembering that they did, they fucking did, because they owned this country now and everyone had to do what they said.
“I want free tuition at all the scholars’ academies,” Rin said.
“I want the punishment for forced sexual intercourse to be castration,” Venka said.
“I want multiple copies made of every ancient text in the archives that will be disseminated to each of the top universities to prevent knowledge decay,” Kitay said.
And they could have it all. Because fuck it—they were in charge now; absurd as it was, they sat on the throne at Arlong, and what they said was law.
“I am the force of creation,” Rin murmured as she stared at the ceiling and watched it spin. Vaisra’s sorghum wine burned sweet and sour on her tongue; she wanted to swig more of it, just to feel her insides blaze. “I am the end and the beginning. The world is a painting and I hold the brush. I am a god.”
But morning always came and, along with the stabbing headaches of the previous night’s indulgences, returned the exhaustion, exasperation, and mounting despair that came with trying to repair a country that had spent the majority of its history at war.
Every bit of progress they made in Arlong, it seemed, was constantly being undone by bad news from the rest of the country. Bandit attacks were rampant. Epidemics were getting worse. Power vacuums had sprung up throughout the southeastern provinces Rin’s army had conquered, and since she didn’t have enough troops to deploy nationwide to cement her regime, a dozen pockets of local rebellion were forming that she’d later have to put down.
The biggest emergency was food. They were arguing about food in the war room. Dwindling grain was the subject of every missive they received from outlying cities, was the cause of almost every riot Rin’s troops had to quell. Until now Arlong had been fed by regular shipments of Hesperian supplies, and now those were gone.
Even Kitay couldn’t find a solution. No amount of juggling resources, diplomacy, or clever reorganization could mask the fact that the grain stores simply were not there.
Moag, who had been Rin’s best option, sent back a brief letter quashing their hopes.
No can do, little Speerly, she wrote. Can’t get you that much grain in such a short time frame. And Arlong’s treasures aren’t trading for much on the market right now. First of all, they’re hard to get past the embargo when they’re so obviously Nikara; second, Yin family artifacts have gone down quite a bit in value. I’m sure you can see why. Keep looking, I’m sure you’ll find something they want.
The perverse upside to the impending famine was that enlistment numbers shot up, since army recruits were the only ones guaranteed to receive two full rations a day. But then, of course, once this became widespread knowledge, fights and protests started breaking out around the barracks over this perceived injustice.
