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She jumped. “What?”
He poked her again. “You’re being very quiet.”
She rubbed her side. “I just want to sit for a second. In peace. Can I do that?”
“Well, now you’re just being rude.”
She lifted a languid hand and whacked him on the shin.
He ignored that and sat down beside her. “We need to talk next moves.”
She sighed. “Then talk.”
“Now, Daji’s only caught me up on a little bit.” He rubbed his hands together and held them out over the flames. “It’s been a very distressing day for me.”
“Same,” Rin muttered.
“But the way I understand it, you’ve gone and split the country in half.”
“That wasn’t my fault.”
“Oh, I know. Yin Vaisra’s always been a bloodthirsty little gremlin.” Jiang winked at her. “So what shall we do now? Raze Arlong to the ground?”
She gaped at him for a moment, waiting for him to chuckle, before she realized he was being utterly serious. His gaze was earnest. She had no idea what this new Jiang was capable of, but she had to take his words at face value.
“We can’t do that,” she said. “We have to infiltrate them first. They’ve—they’ve got someone.”
“Who?”
Daji interjected from across the fire. “Her anchor.”
“She has an anchor?” Jiang arched an eyebrow. “Since when? You might have told me.”
“I only retrieved you from rock this afternoon,” Daji said.
“But that seems relevant—”
“Kitay,” Rin snapped. “Chen Kitay. He was in my class at Sinegard. Nezha took him from Tikany, and we need to get him back.”
“I remember him.” Jiang rubbed his chin. “Skinny kid? Big ears, hair like an overgrown forest? Too smart for his own good?”
“That’s the one.”
“Does the Republic know he’s your anchor?” Daji asked.
“No.” Aside from Chaghan, everyone who knew she had an anchor had died at Lake Boyang. “No one possibly could.”
“And they don’t have a reason to hurt him?” Daji pressed.
“Nezha wouldn’t do that,” Rin said. “They’re friends.”
“Friends don’t send dirigible bombers after friends,” said Jiang.
“The point is that Kitay is alive,” Rin said, exasperated. “And the first thing we need to do is get him back.”
Jiang and Daji exchanged a long, deliberating look.
“Please,” Rin said. “I’ll follow any plan you two want, but I need Kitay. Otherwise I’m useless.”
“We’ll get him back,” Jiang assured her. “Is there any chance we can get you an army?”
Daji snorted.
Rin sighed again. “My troops betrayed me to the Republic, and their leader probably wants me dead.”
“That’s not great,” Jiang said.
“No,” Rin agreed.
“Then who owns the resistance army?”
“The Southern Coalition.”
“Then that’s who we’ll deal with. Walk me through their politics.”
If he wasn’t going to let her sleep, Rin decided, then she might as well entertain him. “The Monkey Warlord Liu Gurubai controls the core of the army. Yang Souji commands the Iron Wolves. Ma Lien led the second-largest contingent, the bandit troops, before he died. Zhuden was his second-in-command. They were loyal to me for a bit, until . . . well. They thought they’d trade me for immunity.”
“And who is the leadership now?”
“Gurubai, definitely. And Souji.”
“I see.” Jiang pondered this for a moment, then said in a cheerful tone, “You’ll have to kill them all, of course.”
“Sorry, what?”
He lounged back against the trunk, stretched out his legs, and propped one ankle over the other. “Strike as soon as you can after you rendezvous with the coalition. Get them in their sleep. Sometimes it’s easier to take them out in battle, but that tends to leave a nasty public impression. Bad form, and all that.”
Rin stared at him in disbelief. She didn’t know what shocked her more—his suggestion, or the cavalier tone in which he said it. The Jiang she knew liked to blow bubbles in the creek with a reed for fun. This Jiang discussed murder as if relaying a recipe for porridge.
“What did you think would happen when you returned?” Daji asked.
“I don’t know, I thought maybe—maybe they’d realize they need me.” Rin hadn’t thought that far. She had some half-formed notion that she might be able to talk her way into their good graces, now that they’d learned she was right about the Republic.
But now that she considered it, they were just as likely to shoot her on sight.
“You are so bad at this,” Jiang said. “It’s cute.”
“You can’t fight a war on multiple fronts.” Daji slid a thin whittled branch through the skinned rats, then propped them over the crackling fire. “The moment you hear whispers of dissent in your own ranks, you flush it out. With all the force necessary.”
“Is that what you did?” Rin asked.
“Oh, yes,” Jiang said happily. “All the time. I handled the public murders, of course. Riga only had to utter the name, and I’d have the beasts rip them up from head to toe. The point was the spectacle, to dissuade anyone else from defection.” He nodded at Daji. “And this one took care of everything we wanted to keep quiet. Good times.”
“But they hated you,” Rin said.
She knew little of the Trifecta’s reign except from what Vaisra had told her, but she knew they’d been resented by almost everyone. The Trifecta had sustained political support through sheer violence. No one had loved them, but everyone had feared them. After Riga disappeared, the only reason why the Twelve Warlords never unseated Daji from the throne was because they hated one another just as much.
“Elites with entrenched interests will always hate you,” Daji said. “That’s inevitable. But the elites don’t matter, the masses do. What you have to do is shroud yourself in myth. Your enemies’ deaths become part of your legend. Eventually you become so far removed from reality that right and wrong don’t apply to you. Your identity becomes part and parcel of the idea of the nation itself. They’ll love you no matter what you do.”
“I feel like you’re underestimating the public,” Rin asked.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean—nobody becomes a legend overnight. People aren’t blind. I wouldn’t worship an icon like that.”
“Didn’t you worship Altan?” Daji asked.
Jiang whistled through his teeth. “Low blow.”
“Fuck you,” Rin said.
Daji just smiled. “People are attracted to power, darling. They can’t help themselves. Power seduces. Exert it, make a show of it, and they’ll follow you.”
“I can’t just bully people into getting what I want,” Rin said.
“Really?” Daji cocked her head. “How did you get command of Ma Lien’s troops, then?”
