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This, Rin thought, was a dreadfully apt metaphor for her frustrations with the city. For why shouldn’t the army receive priority? The strength of their defenses was critical, now more than ever—why couldn’t anyone else see that?
Every endless meeting, every redundant conversation they had about how to feed the city felt much more frustrating because Rin couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all a mere distraction. That she was wasting her time trying to restore a broken country back to functionality, when what clearly should have been prioritized was driving her victory home.
She was so close to the end, she could nearly taste it.
One more campaign. One more battle. Then she’d be the only one left, sitting on her throne in the south, set up to remake this broken country to her liking.
But this wasn’t about her personal ambitions. This was about the threat, the ever-looming threat that no one else seemed to realize was so much more frightening than famine.
The Hesperians were coming back.
Why wouldn’t they? And why wouldn’t they strike now, when they knew Rin’s incipient regime was on such shaky ground? If Rin led the Hesperians, she would call for additional airships and launch a counterstrike as soon as she could, before the Nikara could rebuild their army.
Rin didn’t have artillery forces capable of taking down dirigibles. She had only half of her original numbers, now that Cholang and his troops had retreated home to Dog Province. She had no other offensive shamans; the Trifecta were gone, Dulin and Pipaji were dead. She didn’t have anything but fire with which to stop the west, and she didn’t know if she alone was enough.
In her dreams she saw the dirigibles again, a buzzing horde that blotted out the sky, more than she could count. They descended in full force on Nikara shores, circling the air above her. She saw the faces of their pilots: uniformly pale, demonic blue eyes laughing at her as they trained their cannons in her direction.
And before she could lift her arms to the sky, they opened fire. The world erupted in scattered dirt and orange flame, and for all her bravado, all she could do was kneel on the ground, wrap her arms around her head, and hope that death came quickly.
“Rin.” Kitay shook her by the shoulders. “Wake up.”
She tasted blood in her mouth. Had she bitten her tongue? She turned to the side, spat, and winced at the crimson splatter on her sheets.
“What?” she asked, suddenly afraid. “Was there—”
“Nothing’s happened,” he said. He pulled down his lip. Angry scars dotted the inside of his mouth. “But you’re hurting me.”
“Gods.” She felt a twist of guilt. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” Kitay rubbed at his cheek and yawned. “Just—try to go back to sleep.”
It struck her then how incredibly tired he looked, how shrunken and diminished, so wholly different from the confident, authoritative persona he acquired during the daytime.
That scared her. It seemed like physical evidence that everything was, after all, a farce. That they were pretenders to the throne, playing at competency, while their victory slipped from their fingers.
The Empire was fracturing. Their people were starving. The Hesperians were going to return, and they had nothing with which to stop them.
She reached for his fingers. “Kitay.”
He squeezed her hand in his. He looked so young. He looked so scared. “I know.”
Worst of all, the letters did not stop.
They were relentless. Nezha, apparently, was trying to wage psychological warfare through a sheer barrage of scrolls. They appeared outside her quarters. They found their way into her intelligence reports. They kept showing up with her meals. Rin had changed the kitchen staff so many times that the quality of food was now decidedly poor, but each day at noon a scroll invariably appeared tucked underneath her porridge bowl.
One morning a letter showed up on her pillow, and Rin immediately launched a manhunt in an attempt to find the messenger. But a thorough search of the entire barracks revealed no leads. Eventually she stopped trying to root out suspected couriers—that would have required replacing nearly her entire staff—and started venting by ripping up and burning Nezha’s scrolls instead.
But only after she read them. She always had to read them first. She really should have just burned them without looking—she knew that reading them just meant she was playing into his game. But she couldn’t help it. She had to know what he knew.
She could never quite pin down their tone. Sometimes they were mocking and patronizing—he knew she had no aptitude for governance, and he was clearly relishing this fact. But sometimes they were genuinely helpful.
Lao Ho’s a good man to supervise regional taxation if you haven’t thrown him in prison yet. And tell Kitay that as much as he wants to reorganize the labeling system for the old annals in the library, we’ve kept them that way for a reason. The first numerals stand for relative importance, not scroll size. Don’t let him get confused.
He alternated constantly between writing taunts and delivering pieces of accurate, important information. Rin couldn’t grasp what was going on in his mind. Was he just playing games? If so, it was working—the taunts redoubled her frustrations, made her furious that their mistakes were so visible they were obvious all the way across the strait; the pieces of advice were even more torturous, because she never knew whether to take them at face value, and spent so much time second-guessing his tips, trying to discover his underlying motives, that she got less done than if she’d never read them at all.
He always ended his letters with the same offer. Come to the negotiating table. The Hesperians always produce grain at a surplus—they’ve got machines doing the planting for them. They have food aid to spare. Just make a few concessions and you’ve got it.
It never sounded the slightest bit more attractive. The more missives she received, the more condescending they became.
Keep your grain, she wanted to write back. I’d rather choke than let you feed me. I’d rather starve to death than take anything from your hands.
But she bit down the impulse. If she sent Nezha any response, then he’d know she’d been reading his letters.
But he must have known anyways. Every missive was terrifyingly omniscient. He identified so clearly the same issues they were struggling with that he might have been standing over their shoulders in the war room. She knew he was trying to make her paranoid, but it worked. She didn’t feel safe in her own room anymore. She couldn’t get any rest—she and Kitay had to start sleeping in shifts again, guarding each other in the same bed, otherwise she was too overcome with anxiety to even close her eyes. She could hardly focus anywhere she went; her eyes were too busy darting about, watching for spies or assassins. She started spending each day holed up in the war room because it was the only place where she felt safe, with the only window three floors up, and its single door guarded by a dozen handpicked soldiers.
“You need to stop reading those,” Venka said.
Rin was staring at the latest missive, glaring at the characters until they felt seared into her eyelids, as if she could decipher Nezha’s intent if she stared at them long enough.
“Put that down, Rin. He’s just fucking with you.”
“No, he’s not.” Rin pointed. “Look. He knows we tried getting contraband grain from Moag. He knows—”
