She thickened the flame, made it burn as hot as she was capable, until she couldn’t see the body anymore, just thick, roiling waves of orange under shimmering air. She didn’t want to preserve the assassin’s body. She knew who had sent him: either Nezha or the Gray Company or the two acting in tandem. There was no mystery to solve here; she’d learn nothing from interrogation. It might have been prudent to try, but in that moment, all she wanted was to watch something burn.

Chapter 33

The next morning the Southern Army departed for Tikany.

Rin couldn’t rule from Dragon Province. That should have been evident from the start—it wasn’t her hometown, she didn’t know the city’s inner workings, and she had no local supporters. In Arlong, she was a foreign upstart working against centuries of anti-southern discrimination. Venka’s death was just the final straw—proof that if Rin wanted to cement her rule, she had to do it from home.

A small crowd of civilians gathered in the valley to watch as the columns marched past. Rin couldn’t tell from their grim expressions if they were sending the Southern Army off with respect, if they were simply glad to see their backs, or if they were scared she was carrying off all their food.

She’d left behind a minimal force—just three hundred troops, the most she was willing to spare—to maintain occupation of the city. They’d likely fail. Arlong might collapse under the strain of its myriad resource shortages; its civilians might emigrate en masse, or they might overthrow the southern troops in internal revolt. It didn’t matter. Arlong was no great loss. One day the city would be well and properly hers, purged of dissenters, stripped of its treasures, and transformed into a tame, obedient resource hub for her regime.

But first, she had to reclaim the south.

Rin kept her mind trained on Tikany, on going home, and tried not to think about how much their departure stank of failure.

She and Kitay spent much of the journey in silence. There was little to talk about. By the fourth day, they’d exhausted all discussion of what resources they had, what troop numbers they were now working with, what kind of foundation they’d have to build in Tikany to train a fighting force capable of taking on the west. Anything else at this point lapsed into useless conjecture.

They couldn’t talk about Venka. They’d tried, but no words came out when they opened their mouths, nothing but a heavy, reproachful silence. Kitay thought Venka’s death exonerated her. Rin was still convinced Venka might have been the informant, but any number of alternatives were possible. Venka was not the only one with access to the information Nezha kept hinting at. Some junior officer could easily have been passing intelligence to the Republic throughout their march. The scrolls had stopped appearing since Venka’s death, but that might have simply been because they’d left Arlong. Venka remained an open question, a traitor and ally both at once, which was the only way Rin could bear to remember her.

She didn’t want to know the truth. She didn’t want to even wonder. She simply couldn’t think about Venka for too long because then her chest throbbed from a twisting, invisible knife, and her lungs seized like she was being held underwater. Venka’s confused, reproachful face kept resurfacing in her mind, but if she let it linger, then she started to drown, and the only way to make those feelings stop was to burn instead.

It was much easier to focus on the rage. Through all her confused grief, the one thought that burned clear was that this fight was not over. Hesperia wanted her dead; Hesperia was coming for her.

She no longer dreamed of Nezha’s death. That grudge seemed so petty now, and the thought of his broken body brought her no satisfaction. She’d had the chance to break him, and she hadn’t taken it.

No, Nezha wasn’t the enemy, just one of its many puppets. Rin had realized now that her war wasn’t civil, it was global. And if she wanted peace—true, lasting peace—then she had to bring down the west.

Two weeks out, the road to Tikany became a mosaic of human suffering.

Rin didn’t know what she’d expected when she passed into the south. Perhaps not the joyful shouts of the liberated—she wasn’t that naive. She knew she’d assumed responsibility for a broken country, wrecked in every way by years of constant warfare. She knew mass displacement, crop failure, famine, and banditry were problems that she’d have to deal with eventually, but she’d slotted them to the back of her mind, deprioritized against the far more urgent problem of the impending Hesperian attack.

They were far harder to ignore when they stared her in the face.

The Southern Army had just crossed over the border to Rooster Province when supplicants began coming out to meet them on the roadside. It seemed word had spread through the village networks about Rin’s return, and as the marching column wound into the southern heartland, large crowds started appearing on every stretch of the road.

But Rin found no welcome parties on her journey. Instead she was witness to the consequences of her civil war.

Her first encounter with starvation shocked her. She had seen bodies in almost every state of destruction—burned, dismembered, dissected, bloated. But she had never in her life witnessed famine this severe. The bodies that approached her wagon—living bodies, she realized in shock—were stretched and distorted, more like a child’s confused sketch of human anatomy than any human bodies she’d ever encountered. Their hands and feet were swollen like grapefruits, bloated extremities hanging implausibly from stick-thin limbs. Many of them appeared unable to walk; instead they crawled and rolled toward Rin’s wagon in a slow, horrific advance that made Rin burn with shame.

“Stop,” she ordered the driver.

Warily he regarded the approaching crowd. “General . . .”

“I said stop.”

He reined the horses to a halt. Rin climbed out of the wagon.

The starving civilians began to cluster toward her. She felt a momentary thrill of fear—there were so many of them, and their faces were so unnaturally hollow, so caked with dirt that they looked like monsters—but quickly pushed it away. These weren’t monsters, these were her people. They’d suffered because of her war. They needed her help.

“Here,” she said, pulling a piece of hard jerky from her pocket.

In retrospect she should have realized how stupid it was to offer food to a horde of starving people when clearly she didn’t have enough to go around.

She wasn’t thinking. She’d seen miserable, gnawing hunger, and she’d wanted to alleviate it. She didn’t expect that they’d begin stampeding, pulling one another to the ground, bare feet crushing frail limbs as they surged forth. In an instant, dozens of hands reached toward her, and she was so startled she dropped the jerky and stumbled back.

They fell on the food like sharks.

Terrified, and ashamed by her terror, Rin clambered back on the wagon.

Without asking, the driver urged the horses forward. The wagon lurched into a speedy pace. The starving bodies did not follow.

Heart pounding, Rin hugged her knees to her chest and swallowed down the urge to vomit.

She felt Kitay’s eyes on her. She couldn’t bear to meet them. But he was merciful, and said nothing. When they stopped for dinner that night, the food tasted like ashes.