She stared at him in disbelief.

The sheer hypocrisy. He’d disowned her easily enough at Lusan, had treated her like an animal. Now he wanted to claim they were one and the same?

“The south would rise for you,” Gurubai insisted. “Do you have any idea how much power you hold? You are the last Speerly. The entire continent knows your name. If you raised your sword, tens of thousands would follow. They’d fight for you. You’d be their goddess.”

“I’d also be a traitor to my closest friends,” she said. They were asking her to abandon Kitay. Nezha. “Don’t try to flatter me. It won’t work.”

“Your friends?” Gurubai scoffed. “Who, Yin Nezha? Chen Kitay? Northerners who would spit on your very existence? Are you so desperate to be like them that you’ll ignore everything else at stake?”

She bristled. “I don’t want to be like them.”

“Yes, you do,” he sneered. “That’s all you want, even if you don’t realize it. But you’re southern mud in the end. You can butcher the way you talk, you can turn away from the stench of the refugee camps and pretend that you don’t smell, too, but they are never going to think you’re one of them.”

That did it. Rin’s sympathy evaporated.

Did they really believe they could sway her with provincial ties? Rooster Province had never done anything for her. For the first sixteen years of her life, Tikany had tried to grind her into the dirt. She’d lost her ties to the south the moment she’d left for Sinegard.

She’d escaped the Fangs. She’d carved out a place for herself in Arlong. She was one of Vaisra’s best soldiers. She wouldn’t go back now. She couldn’t.

For her, the south had only ever meant abuse and misery. She owed it nothing. Certainly not a suicide mission. If the Warlords wanted to throw their lives away, they could do that by themselves.

She saw the way Kesegi was looking at her—stricken, disappointed—and she willed herself not to care.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I’m not one of you. I’m a Speerly. And I know where my loyalties lie.”

“If you stay here you’ll die for nothing,” Gurubai said. “We all will.”

“Then go back,” she sneered. “Take your troops. Go home. I won’t stop you.”

They didn’t move. Their faces—stricken, ashen—confirmed she’d called their bluff. They couldn’t run. Alone in their provinces, they didn’t have a chance. They might—might, though Rin strongly doubted they had the numbers—be able to fight off the Mugenese troops on their own. But if Arlong fell, it was only a matter of time until Daji came for them, too.

Without her support, their hands were tied. The southern Warlords were trapped.

Gurubai’s hand moved to the sword at his waist. “Will you tell Vaisra?”

Her lip curled. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Will you tell Vaisra?” he repeated.

Rin gave him an incredulous smile. Was he really going to fight her? Was he really even going to try?

She couldn’t help relishing this. For once she held all the power; for once, she held their fates in her hands and not the other way around.

She could have killed them right there and been done with it. Vaisra might have even praised her for the demonstration of loyalty.

But it was the eve of battle. The Militia was creeping to their doorstep. The refugees needed some sort of leadership if they were going to survive—certainly no one else was looking out for them. And if she murdered the Warlords now, the resulting chaos would hurt the Republic. The southern armies’ numbers weren’t great enough to win the battle, but their defection was more than enough to guarantee defeat, and that wasn’t something Rin wanted on her hands.

She loved that this was her decision—that she could disguise this cruel calculation as mercy.

“Go to sleep,” she said softly, as if speaking to children. “We’ve a battle to fight.”

She escorted Kesegi back to the refugee quarters over his protests. She took him the long way around the city, trying to keep as much distance from the barracks as possible. For ten minutes they walked in stony silence. Every time Rin looked at Kesegi he stared angrily forward, pretending he hadn’t seen her.

“You’re angry with me,” she said.

He didn’t respond.

“I can’t give them what they want. You know that.”

“No, I don’t,” he said curtly.

“Kesegi—”

“And I don’t know you anymore.”

She had to admit that was true. Kesegi had said farewell to a sister and found a soldier in her place. But she didn’t know him anymore, either. The Kesegi she’d left had been just a tiny child. This Kesegi was a tall, sullen, and angry boy who had seen too much suffering and didn’t know who to blame for it.

They resumed walking in silence. Rin was tempted to turn around and head back, but she didn’t want Kesegi caught alone on the wrong side of the barrier. The night patrol had lately taken to flogging refugees who wandered out of bounds to set an example.

Finally Kesegi said, “You could have written.”

“What?”

“I kept waiting for you to write. Why didn’t you?”

Rin didn’t have a good response to that.

Why hadn’t she written? The Masters had permitted it. All of her classmates had regularly written home. She remembered watching Niang send eight separate letters to each of her siblings every week, and being amazed that anyone had so much to say about their grueling coursework.

But the thought of writing the Fangs had never even crossed her mind. Once she reached Sinegard, she’d locked her memories of Tikany tightly away in the back of her mind and willed herself to forget.

“You were so young,” she said after a pause. “I guess I didn’t think you’d remember me.”

“Bullshit,” Kesegi said. “You’re my sister. How could I not remember you?”

“I don’t know. I just . . . I thought it’d be easier if we made a clean break with each other. I mean, it’s not like I was ever coming home once I got out—”

His voice hardened. “And you didn’t ever think I wanted to get out, too?”

She felt a wave of irritation. How had this suddenly become her fault? “You could have if you wanted to. You could have studied—”

“When? When you left it was just me and the shop; and after Father started getting worse, I had to do everything around the house. And Mother isn’t kind, Rin. You knew that—I begged you to not leave me with her—but you left anyway. Off in Sinegard on your adventures—”

“They weren’t adventures,” she said coldly.

“But you were in Sinegard,” he said plaintively, with the voice of a child who had only heard stories of the former capital, who still thought it was a land of riches and marvels. “And I was stuck in Tikany, hiding from Mother every chance I got. And then the war started and all we did every single day was huddle terrified in underground shelters and hope that the Federation hadn’t come to our town yet, and if they did, then they might not kill us immediately.”

She stopped walking. “Kesegi.”