Night had fallen by the time Rin and Souji rejoined the camp. They’d planned their attack for the following sunset. They had considered striking right then, under cover of darkness, and before any news had leaked of their arrival. But they’d decided to hold off until the next evening; Chief Lien needed time to orchestrate the villagers’ evacuation, and the Southern Army needed time to scope out the terrain, to position their troops optimally within the fields. The general staff spent the next few hours huddled around maps, marking out lines of entry.

It was far past midnight when at last they disbanded to rest. When Rin returned to her tent, she found a slim scroll placed neatly at the top of her travel pack.

She reached out, paused, and then withdrew her hand. This wasn’t right. Nobody at camp was receiving personal parcels. The Southern Coalition owned only one carrier pigeon, and it was trained to take a one-way message to Ankhiluun. Every instinct screamed that this was a trap. The scroll’s exterior could be laced with venom—countless Nikara generals of old had tried that trick before.

She leaned over the scroll with a small flame bobbing in her palm, carefully illuminating its every angle. She couldn’t see anything dangerous—no thin needles, no dark sheen on the parchment edge. Still, she used her teeth to pull her sleeve over her fingers before she picked the scroll up and unrolled it. Then she nearly dropped it.

The wax seal bore the dragon insignia of the House of Yin.

She exhaled slowly, trying to slow her racing heart. This had to be a joke—someone had pulled a deeply unfunny prank, and she would make sure they suffered for it.

The note inside was scrawled in a wobbly, childish font; the characters were so smudged and messy she had to squint to read it.

Hello, Rin,

They told me to write this in my own hand, but I don’t see how it could have made a difference seeing as I could barely write when you left, so you wouldn’t have recognized it anyway.

“This isn’t funny,” she muttered to herself.

But she knew this wasn’t a joke. Nobody at camp could have done this. Nobody knew.

This is Kesegi, if you hadn’t pieced that together. I’ve been in the New City prisons for a while and it was my fault, I got stupid and bragged to some people that you were my sister and I knew you, and then the talk trickled up to the guards so now here I am.

I’m sorry I did this to you. I really am.

Your friend says to tell you that this doesn’t have to be difficult. He said to tell you I walk free if you’ll come to the New City yourself, but if you bring an army then they’ll behead me above the city gates. He says that this doesn’t have to end in bloodshed, and that he only wants to speak. He says he doesn’t want a war. He’s prepared to grant clemency to every one of your allies. He only wants you.

Although to be honest—

The rest of the message had been scratched out with thick inky lines.

Rin snatched the scroll up and ran outside her tent.

She accosted the first sentry she saw. “Who delivered this?”

He gave her a blank stare. “Delivered what?”

She waved the scroll at him. “This was inside my travel pack. Did anyone deliver this to you?”

“N-No—”

“Did you see anyone going through my things?”

“No, but my watch has only just started, you’d have to ask Ginsen, he was here for three hours before that, and he should be—General, are you all right?”

Rin couldn’t stop trembling.

Nezha knew where she was. Nezha knew where she slept.

“General?” the sentry asked again. “Is everything all right?”

She crumpled the scroll in her fist. “Get me Kitay.”

“Shit.” Kitay lowered the letter.

“I know,” Rin said.

“Is this real?”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, is there any chance this is a forgery? That this isn’t really Kesegi?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve no idea.”

She couldn’t tell if that was really Kesegi’s handwriting. Frankly, she wasn’t even sure Kesegi knew how to read; her foster brother had rarely attended school. She couldn’t tell if the letter sounded like him, either. Certainly she could imagine the words in his voice, could picture him sitting at a writing desk, wrists shackled, his thin face trembling as Nezha dictated the words to him one by one. But how could she know for sure? She’d barely spoken to Kesegi in years.

“And what if it’s not?” Kitay asked.

“I don’t think we should respond,” Rin said in the calmest tone she could muster. “Either way.”

She’d worked through the possibilities in the minutes it had taken Kitay to arrive. She’d weighed the cost of her foster brother’s life, and she’d decided she could afford to lose him.

Kesegi wasn’t a general, wasn’t even a soldier. Nezha couldn’t torture him for information. Kesegi knew nothing of importance about either the Southern Coalition or Rin. Everything he knew of Rin was the biography of a little girl that she’d killed long ago at Sinegard, a naive Tikany shopgirl who existed only in suppressed memories.

“Rin.” Kitay put a hand on her arm. “Do you want to go after him?”

She hated how he was looking at her, eyes wide with pity, as if she were on the verge of tears. It made her feel so fragile.

But that’s just what Nezha wants. She refused to let this shake her. Nezha had manipulated her with sentiment before. The Cike had died for her sentiment.

“The problem is not Kesegi,” she said. “It’s Nezha’s troop placements. It’s his fucking reach—I mean, he put a letter in my fucking tent, Kitay. We’re just supposed to ignore that?”

“Rin, if you need to—”

“We need to discuss whether Nezha’s forces are in the south.” She had to keep talking; they had to move the conversation on to something else, because she was afraid of how her chest would feel if they didn’t. “Which I don’t think is possible—Venka says he’s leading his father’s troops in Tiger Province. But if they’re in the south, they’ve hidden so well that not a single one of our scouts has seen any troops, dirigibles, or supply wagons.”

“I don’t think he’s in the south,” Kitay said. “I think he’s just fucking with you. He’s gathering information; he just wants to see how you’ll respond.”

“He won’t get a response. We’re not going to take the bait.”

“We can discuss that.”

“This isn’t a discussion,” she snapped. “This letter is a forgery. And Nezha’s terms are absurd.”

Her fingers clenched around the scroll. The remainder of the message had been written in Nezha’s smooth, elegant calligraphy.

Hello, Rin,

It’s about time we talked.

You and I both know this war benefits no one. Our country has cracked apart. Our homeland has been ravaged, by war, by environmental catastrophe, by mindless evil. Nikan now faces her greatest test. And the Hesperians are watching us, waiting to see if we might stand strong or become another slave society for them to exploit.