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So why did she feel like she was on the verge of defeat?
Her troops were starving, her support base hated her, her ranks were plagued with spies she could not see, and Nezha was taunting her at every turn, twisting his knife where it hurt the most. Her regime, that frail edifice they’d built at Arlong, was crumbling in every corner and she didn’t have enough strength to hold it all together.
“General?”
She whipped around. “What?”
The aide looked terrified. His mouth worked several times, but no sound came out.
“Spit it out,” Rin snapped.
His wide eyes blinked. His throat bobbed. When at last he spoke, his voice was such a timid croak that Rin made him repeat himself twice before she finally heard him.
“It’s the fields, General. They’re burning.”
It took Rin several long seconds to register that she was not dreaming, that the red clouds in the distance, glowing so brightly against the moonless sky they seemed surreal, were not an illusion.
The opium fields were on fire.
The blaze grew as she watched, expanding outward at a terrifying rate. In seconds it could encompass the entirety of the fields. And all Rin could do was stand there, eyes wide, struggling to comprehend what she saw before her—the destruction of her only trump card.
Dimly she heard Kitay issuing orders, calling for evacuation from the shacks nearest the fields. From the corners of her eyes she saw a flurry of movement around her as troops sprang into action, forming lines from the wells to pass buckets of water to the fields.
She couldn’t move. Her feet felt rooted, trapped in place. And even if she could—what could she possibly do? One more bucket of water wouldn’t help. All the fucking buckets in Tikany wouldn’t help. The blaze had ripped through more than half the fields now; the water did little more than sizzle into steam that unfurled, joining the great clouds of smoke that now billowed over the horizon.
She couldn’t call her god to stop this. The Phoenix could only start fires. It couldn’t put them out.
She knew these fields hadn’t caught fire by accident. No, accidental wildfires spread outward from a single source, but this fire had several—at least three initial points of burn whose ranges gradually converged as the fire spread wider and wider.
Nezha had done this, too.
This was sabotage, and the perpetrators were long gone, disappeared into the dark.
You led them here, said Altan’s voice. You brought them in your caravan because you couldn’t root out the spies, and you showed them exactly where they needed to strike.
The wave of despair hit so wrenchingly deep that it almost felt funny. Because of course, of fucking course, at the end of the line, when everything whittled down to a single hope, she’d lose that, too. This wasn’t a surprise, this was just the culmination of a series of failures that had begun the moment she occupied Arlong, and then spiraled when she hadn’t noticed; a sudden, unpredicted reversal of the rolling ball of fortune that had won her the south.
She couldn’t stop this. She couldn’t fix this.
All she could do was watch. And some sick, desperate part of her wanted to watch, found some perverse glee in staring as the flowers withered and crumpled into ash, because she wanted to see how far the hopelessness would go, and because the destruction felt good—the wanton erasure of life and hope felt good, even if the hope going up in smoke was her own.
“You have to talk to the Republic,” Kitay said.
They were alone, just the two of them inside the office, all their aides and guards banished out of earshot. Everyone was clamoring for answers; they wanted orders and assurances, and Rin had nothing to give them. The burned fields were the final blow. Now Rin had no plan, no recourse, and nothing to offer her men. She and Kitay had to solve this, and they could not leave the room until they did.
But to her disbelief, the first suggestion he made was surrender.
The way he said it made it sound like a foregone conclusion. As if he knew this to be true, had known months ago, and was only now bothering to let her in on it.
“No,” she said. “Never.”
“Rin, come on—”
“This is what they want.”
“Of course it’s what they want! Nezha’s offering food aid. He’s been offering that from the start. We have to take it.”
“Are you working with them?” she demanded.
He recoiled. “No—what are you—”
“I knew it. I fucking knew it.” That explained everything—why he’d bogged her down with mindless, exhausting tasks at Arlong, why he’d kept detracting from the military front, why he’d kept willfully ignoring the clear threat of Nezha’s constant letters. “First Venka, now you? Is that what this is?”
“Rin, that’s—”
“Don’t call me crazy.”
“You are being crazy,” he snapped. “You’re acting like a maniac. Shut up for a moment and face the fucking facts.” She opened her mouth to retort but he shouted over her, hand splayed in front of her face as if she were a misbehaving child. “We’re dealing with famine—not something cyclical, not something we can weather out, but the worst famine in recent history. There’s no grain left in the entire fucking country because Daji poisoned half the south, the entire heartland was too busy fleeing for their lives to till the fields, our rivers are flooded, and we’ve had an unnaturally cold and dry winter that’s shortened the growing season for crops, which has made things doubly difficult for anyone who even tried planting.”
His breathing grew shaky as he spoke; his words spilled out at such a frantic rate that she could barely understand him. “No irrigation or flood control projects. No one’s been maintaining or supervising the granaries, so if any existed, they’ve been plundered empty by now. We’ve got no leverage, no backup options, no money, nothing—”
“So we fight for it,” she said. “We beat them, and then we take what we want—”
“That’s insane.”
“Insane? Insane is giving them what they want. We can’t stop here, we can’t just let everything go, we can’t let them win—”
“Shut up!” he shouted. “Can you even hear yourself?”
“Can you? You want to give up!”
“It’s not what I want,” he said. “It’s the only option that we have. People are starving. Our people. Those corpses on the roadside? Pretty soon that’s going to be the entire country, unless you learn to swallow your pride.”
She almost screamed.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.
She’d won. She’d fucking won, she’d razed Nezha’s city, she’d obliterated her enemies, she’d conquered the Nikara south, she’d won, so why, why were they talking like they’d already been defeated?
Suddenly her rage dissipated. She couldn’t be furious with Kitay; yelling at him wouldn’t change the facts.
“They can’t do this to me,” she said dully. “I was supposed to win.”
“You did win,” he said sadly. “This entire country is yours. Just please don’t throw it away with your pride.”
