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“I let him die,” Rin said.
“Rephrase,” Daji said.
“All right. I killed him.” That felt surprisingly good to say out loud. She said it again. “I killed him. And I don’t feel bad about it. He was a shitty leader, he was squandering his troops, he humiliated me, and I needed him out of the way—”
“And that’s not how you feel about the others?” Daji pressed.
Rin paused. How hard would it be to murder the entire southern leadership—Souji, Gurubai, and Liu Dai? She considered the details. What about their guards? Would she have to strike them all at once, in case they warned one another?
It scared her that this was no longer a question of whether to do it, but how.
“You can’t lead by committee,” Daji said. “The entire bloody history of this country is proof of that. You’ve seen the Warlord councils. You know they can’t get anything done on their own. Do you know how the succession wars kicked off? One of the Red Emperor’s favorite generals demanded that his rival give him a troupe of Hinterlander musicians captured in a raid on the borderlands. His rival sent him the musicians, but smashed all their instruments. The first general slaughtered the musicians in retaliation, and that kicked off nearly a century of warfare. That’s how petty multifactional government becomes. Save yourself the headaches, child. Kill your rivals on sight.”
“But that’s not . . .” Rin paused, trying to tease out the exact nature of her objection. Why was it so hard to make the argument? “They don’t deserve that. It’d be one thing if they were Republican officers, but they’re fighting for the south. It’s wrong to just—”
“Dear girl.” Daji sighed heavily. “Stop pretending to care about ethics, it’s embarrassing. At some point, you’ll have to convince yourself that you’re above right and wrong. Morality doesn’t apply to you.”
She turned the skewered rats over the fire, exposing their uncooked underbellies to the flames. “Get that in your head. You’ll have to get more decisive if you’re ever going to lead. You’re not a little girl anymore, and you’re not just a soldier, either. You’re in the running for the throne, and you’ve got a god on your side. You want full command of that army? This country? You take it.”
“And how,” Rin said tiredly, “do you propose to do that?”
Daji and Jiang exchanged a look.
Rin couldn’t read it, and she didn’t like it. It was a look loaded with decades of shared history, with secrets and allusions that she couldn’t begin to understand. Suddenly she felt like a little child sitting between them—a peasant girl among legends, a mortal among gods, woefully inexperienced and utterly out of place.
“Easily,” Daji said at last. “We’ll retrieve your anchor. And then we’ll go wake ours.”
Chapter 14
The next morning they set off for the heart of enemy territory. They’d decided the Republican wartime headquarters was the most likely candidate for Kitay’s location. Nezha and Vaisra had to be on the front lines, and if they were making use of Kitay as anyone in their position should, then he’d be right there with them.
The battlefront had moved far west in a very short period of time. They traversed through Snake Province and crossed over the northern tip of Dragon Province, and found the juncture of the Western Murui and Southern Murui in Hare Province, where they stole a raft and made a quick trip into Boar Province. Every passing mile where Rin did not find evidence of the Southern Coalition’s resistance felt like another punch to the gut.
It meant Nezha had already pushed them this far across the country. It might mean they’d already been obliterated.
They tried their best to avoid civilians on their journey. That wasn’t hard. This stretch of central Nikan was a war-stricken cesspool, much of which had lain straight in the paths of the destroyed Four Gorges Dam. The refugees who remained were scarce, and the few straggling souls they glimpsed tended to keep to themselves.
Rin stared at the banks as their raft floated through Boar Province, trying to imagine how this region would have looked barely a year ago. Whole villages, townships, and cities had thrived here once. Then the dam broke with no warning, and hundreds of thousands of villagers had either drowned or fled down south toward Arlong. When the survivors returned, they found their villages submerged still under floodwaters, ancestral lands that had housed generations lost to the river.
The region still hadn’t recovered. The fields where once sorghum and barley crops grew lay under a sheet of water three inches thick, now rank from decomposing corpses. Occasionally, Rin glimpsed signs of life on the banks—either small camps of tents or tiny hamlets of no more than six or seven thatched huts. Never anything larger. These were subsistence hideaways, not long-term settlements.
It would take a long time for this region to sprout cities again. The destruction of the dam hadn’t been the only source of devastation. The Murui was already a fickle river, prone to breaking its banks on unpredictably rainy years, and by destroying all vegetation cover, this great flood had destroyed the region’s natural defenses. And before that, on their warpath inland, Mugenese soldiers had slashed and burned so many fields that they had ensured local starvation for years. Back in Ruijin, Rin had heard stories of children playing in the fields who had dug up explosives buried long ago, of children accidentally wiping out half their villages because they’d opened gas canisters in curiosity.
How many of those canisters still lurked hidden in the fields? Who was going to volunteer to find out?
Every day since the end of the Third Poppy War, Rin had learned that her victory on Speer mattered less and less. War hadn’t ended when Emperor Ryohai perished on the longbow island. War hadn’t ended when Vaisra’s army defeated the Imperial Navy at the Red Cliffs.
She’d been so stupid to once think that if she ended the Federation then she’d ended the hurting. War didn’t end, not so cleanly—it just kept building up in little hurts that piled on one another until they exploded afresh into raw new wounds.
Only when they reached the heart of Boar Province did they find evidence of recent fighting.
No—not fighting. Destruction was the better word. Rin saw the wreckage of thatched houses that still lay clumped near their foundations, instead of scattered in the patterns of older ruins. She saw scorch marks that hadn’t yet been wiped away by wind and rain. Here and there, in ditches and along the stands, she saw bodies that hadn’t fully decomposed—rotting flesh lumped over bones that hadn’t yet been picked clean.
This proved the civil war wasn’t over. Rin had been right—Vaisra hadn’t rewarded the south for betraying her. He must have turned his dirigibles on the Southern Coalition the moment Rin and Daji left for the Chuluu Korikh. He’d chased them into Boar Province, and Boar Province must have put up a resistance. They had no reason to trust the Republic; their warlord had been unceremoniously decapitated at Arlong days after Daji’s defeat. They must have rallied to the Southern Coalition’s side.
From the looks of it, Vaisra had thrashed them for their impudence.
Rin whistled. “What happened here?”
