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“Right,” she said. “I get a lot done. I’m not enough. But even one other shaman throws off defense formations like we couldn’t dream.”
“Fucking hell,” Venka said. “How long have you been thinking about this?”
Rin didn’t miss a beat. “Since Tikany.”
She still hadn’t fully won them over. She saw doubt lingering in their eyes—they might not have raised objections, but they still didn’t like it.
She felt a pulse of frustration. How could she make them see? They had long surpassed wars of steel and bodies clashing on mortal fields. War happened on the divine plane now—her gods versus the Hesperians’ Maker. What she’d seen on Mount Tianshan was a vision of the future, of how this would inevitably end. They couldn’t flinch away from that future. They had to fight the kind of war that moved mountains.
“The west does not conceive of this war as a material struggle,” she said. “This is about contesting interpretations of divinity. They imagine that because they obey the Divine Architect, they can crush us like ants. We’ve just proven them wrong. We’ll do it again.”
She leaned forward, pressing her palm against the table. “We have one chance right now—probably the only chance we’ll ever get—to seize this country back. The Republic is reeling, but they’re going to recover. We’ve got to hit them hard before then. And when we do, it can’t be a half-hearted assault. We need overkill. We need to scare Nezha’s allies so badly that they’ll scuttle back to their hemisphere and never dare to come back here again.”
No one objected. She knew they wouldn’t. The objections didn’t exist.
“What’s your plan for when they lose control?” Kitay asked quietly.
He’d said when. Not if. This wasn’t a hypothetical. They’d moved into the realm of logistics now, which meant she’d already won.
“They won’t,” she said. The next words she spoke felt like reopened scars, familiar and painful, words that bore the weight of all the guilt that she’d tried so long to suppress. Words belonging to a legacy that now, she knew, she had no choice but to face. “Because we’ll be Cike. And the first rule of the Cike is that we cull.”
The world looked different when Rin walked out of Cholang’s hut.
She saw the same haphazard army camp that she’d encountered walking in. She passed the same flimsy fires flickering under harsh steppe winds; the same clusters of underweight soldiers and civilians with too little to eat, drink, or wear; the same thin, worn, and hungry eyes.
But Rin didn’t see weakness here.
She saw an army rebuilding. A nation in the making. Gods, it excited her. Did they understand what they were about to become?
“Look,” Kitay said. “They’re telling myths about you already.”
Rin followed his gaze. A handful of younger soldiers had erected a stage in the center of the camp by pushing two tables together. A white sheet stretched taut between two poles, behind which a small lamp burned, throwing distorted silhouettes onto the blank canvas.
She paused to watch.
The sight of the canvas brought back memories so sweet they hurt: four days of summer among the hot, sticky crowds of Sinegard; the cool relief of the marble flooring in Kitay’s family’s estate; five-course banquet meals of rich foods she’d never tasted before and hadn’t touched since. This puppet show wasn’t a fraction as professional as the performance she’d seen during the Summer Festival in Sinegard, which had involved puppets that moved so smoothly, their rods and strings so invisible that Rin almost believed there were little creatures dancing on the other side. These puppeteers were quite visible behind the stage, wearing shabby, hastily stitched props on their hands that vaguely resembled people.
Rin didn’t realize that the formless blue figure in front was Nezha until the play began.
“I am the Young Marshal!” The puppeteer adopted the nasal, reedy voice of a petulant child. “My father said we were supposed to win this war!”
“You’ve led our fleet to disaster!” The other actor spoke in guttural, broken Nikara, signifying a Hesperian soldier. “You idiot boy! Why would you fire on the Trifecta?”
“I didn’t know they could fire back!”
The following scenes were equally bad, line after line of crude, stupid humor. But in the aftermath of Tianshan, crude humor was what the southerners wanted. They reveled in Nezha’s humiliation. It made their impending fight seem winnable.
“Come on.” Kitay resumed walking. “It’s just more of the same.”
“What else are they saying?” Rin asked.
“Who cares?”
“I don’t care what they say about Nezha. What are they saying about me?”
“Ah.”
He knew what she was really asking. What do they know?
“No one knows you turned on the Trifecta,” he said after a pause. “They know you went to Mount Tianshan to seek help, and that the shamans inside sacrificed themselves to save us from the dirigible fleet. That’s all they know.”
“So they think the Trifecta died heroes.”
“Wouldn’t you assume the same?” Kitay raised an eyebrow at her. “Are you going to correct them?”
She considered that for a moment, and found herself in the curious position of determining a nation’s historical narrative.
Did she let the Trifecta’s legacy survive?
She could ruin them. She ought to ruin them, for what they had done to her.
But the hero narrative was halfway true. One of the Trifecta had died for honor. One, at least, deserved to be remembered as a good man. And that made a lovely myth—the shamans of a previous era of Nikara greatness had given up their lives to ensure a dawn of a new one.
Rin had ended the Trifecta. She could afford them dignity in death, if that was what she chose. She loved that she had the power to choose.
“No,” she decided. “Let them linger on in legend.”
She could be generous to the Trifecta’s ghosts. They could become legends—legends were all they would ever be. For all of Riga, Jiang, and Daji’s dreams of glory, their story had ended in the Heavenly Temple. She could allow them to occupy this little prelude in history. She had the far more delightful task of shaping the future. And when she was finished, no one would even remember the Trifecta’s names.
Rin had another audience that night before she slept.
She set out alone to meet Chaghan in his camp. The Ketreyids were packing up. Their campfires were stamped out and the evidence buried; their yurts and blankets were rolled up and lashed onto their horses.
“You’re not sticking around?” she asked.
“I did what I came here to do.” Chaghan didn’t ask her what had happened on the mountain. He clearly already knew; he’d greeted her with an impressed grin and a shake of his head. “Well done, Speerly. That was clever.”
“Thank you,” she said, pleased in spite of herself. Chaghan had never paid her a compliment before. For nearly the entirety of their relationship, since the day they’d first met at Khurdalain, he had treated her like some wayward child incapable of rational decisions.
