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She remembered that stool. She’d perched there so many nights as a child, listening to Tutor Feyrik talk about places she never thought she would see. She’d sat there the night before the exam, sobbing into her hands while he gently patted her shoulders and murmured that she’d be all right. A girl like you? You’ll always be all right.
He might still be alive. He might have fled early, at the first warnings of danger; he might be in one of the refugee camps up north. If she tried hard enough, she could maintain the delusion that he was somewhere out there, safe and happy, simply out of her orbit. She tried to find comfort in that thought, but the uncertainty of not knowing, perhaps never knowing, only hurt more.
She tasted salt on her lips, and realized her face was wet with tears.
Abruptly, violently, she wiped them away.
Why do you need to find him? She heard the question in Altan’s voice. Why does it fucking matter?
She’d hardly thought about Tutor Feyrik in years. She’d cut him out of her mind the same way she’d alienated herself from her sixteen years in Tikany, a snakeskin shed so she could reinvent herself from war orphan to student and soldier. She clung to his memory now out of some pathetic, cowardly nostalgia. He was only a relic—a reminder from an easier time when she was a little girl trying to memorize the Classics, and he was a kind teacher who’d shown her her only way out.
She was searching for a life she’d never have again. And Rin knew far too well by now that nostalgia could kill her.
“Find anything?” Kitay asked when she returned.
“No,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”
Rin chose to make her headquarters in the Mugenese general’s complex, partly because she felt like it was her right as liberator and partly because it was the safest place in the encampment. Before they moved in, she and Souji scoured each room, checking for any lurking assassins.
They encountered nothing but messy rooms still littered with dirty dishes, uniforms, and spare weapons. It was like the Mugenese had vanished into thin air, leaving all their belongings behind. Even the main office looked as if the general had simply stepped into the next room for a cup of tea.
Rin rooted through the general’s desk, pulling out stacks of memos, maps, and letters. In one drawer she found sheaves of paper, all charcoal sketches of the same woman. This general had apparently considered himself an artist. The sketches weren’t half bad—the general had rather painstakingly tried to capture his lover’s eyes, to the neglect of other anatomical accuracies. The same Mugenese characters accompanied each sketch—hudie, meaning “butterfly” in Nikara; she’d forgotten its Mugenese pronunciation. It was likely not a proper name but an endearment.
He was lonely, she thought. How had he felt when he learned the fate of the longbow island? When he learned that no ships were ever sailing back across the Nariin Sea?
She found a note written on a folded sheet of paper wedged in between the last two sketches. The Mugenese script was not so different from Nikara—it borrowed heavily from Nikara characters, though their pronunciations were entirely different—but it took her several minutes of parsing through messy, scrawled ink to decipher what it said.
If it means I have a traitorous heart then yes, I wish our Emperor had not summoned you for duty, for he has ripped you from my arms.
The entirety of the eastern continent—no, the riches of this universe—means nothing to me in your absence.
I pray every day for the seas to bring your return.
Your butterfly.
It was an extract torn out of a longer letter. Rin couldn’t find the rest.
She felt oddly guilty as she leafed through the general’s things. Absurdly enough, she felt like an intruder. She’d spent so much time figuring out how to kill the Mugenese that the very idea that they could be people, with private lives and loves and hopes and dreams, made her feel vaguely nauseated.
“Look at those walls,” Souji said.
Rin followed his gaze. The general had kept a detailed wall calendar, filled in neat, tiny handwriting. It was far more legible than the letter. She flipped to the very first page. “They arrived here just three months ago.”
“That’s just when they started keeping the calendar,” Souji said. “Trust me, they’ve been in the south far longer than that.”
His unspoken accusation lingered in the air between them. Three months ago she could have come south. She could have stopped this.
Rin had long since accepted that charge. She knew this was her fault. She could have taken the Empress’s hand that day in Lusan, could have killed Vaisra’s rebellion in the cradle and led her troops straight down south. But instead she’d played at revolution, and all that won her was a scar snaking across her back and an aching stump where her hand should have been.
She hated how nakedly transparent Vaisra’s strategy had been from the start, and hated herself more for failing to see it. In retrospect it was so clear why the south had to burn, why Vaisra had withheld his aid even when the southern warlords came begging at his feet.
He could have easily stopped those massacres. He’d known the Hesperian fleet was coming to his aid; he could have dispatched half his army to answer the pleas of a dying nation. He’d deliberately crippled the south instead. He didn’t have to grapple with the southern Warlords for political authority if he just let the Mugenese do his dirty work for him. And then, when the smoke cleared, when the Empire lay in fractured shambles, he would have marched in with the Republican Army and burned out the Mugenese with dirigibles and arquebuses. By then southern autonomy would have seemed laughable—whatever survivors remained would have fallen on their knees and worshipped him as their savior.
What if he had told you? Altan—Rin’s hallucination of Altan—had asked her once. What if he’d made you fully complicit? Would you have switched your allegiance?
Rin didn’t know. She had despised the southerners back then. She’d hated her own people, had hated them the moment she saw them in the camps. She’d hated their darkness, their flat-tongued rural accents and fearful, dull-eyed stares. It was so easy to mistake sheer terror for stupidity, and she’d been desperate to think of them as stupid because she knew she wasn’t stupid, and she needed any reason to set herself apart.
Back then her self-loathing had run so deep that if Vaisra had simply told her every part of his plan, she might have taken his evil for brilliance and laughed. If he hadn’t traded her away, she might never have left his side.
Anger coiled in her gut. She tore the calendar down from the wall and crushed it in her fingers.
“I was a fool for Vaisra,” she said. “I shouldn’t have counted on his virtue. But he didn’t count on my survival.”
Once they’d deemed the general’s complex safe as a home base, Rin walked across town to the whorehouses. She didn’t want to; she was hungry and exhausted, her eyes and throat felt sore from suppressed tears, and all she wanted to do was curl up in a corner with her pipe.
But she was General Fang the Speerly, and she owed this to the survivors.
Venka was already there. She’d begun the difficult work of marshaling the women from the whorehouses. Puddles and overturned buckets covered the cold stone floors where the women had showered, next to thick, dark piles of lice-ridden locks shorn from newly bald heads.
