And, of course, Altan. Her visions always came back to Altan. Sometimes he was burning on the pier; sometimes he was strapped to an operating table, groaning in pain, and sometimes he wasn’t injured at all, but those visions hurt the most, because then he would be talking to her—

Her cheek still burned from the force of Vaisra’s blow, but in her visions it was Altan who struck her, smiling cruelly as she stared stupidly up at him.

“You hit me,” she said.

“I had to,” he answered. “Someone had to. You deserved it.”

Did she deserve it? She didn’t know. The only version of the truth that mattered was Altan’s, and in her visions, Altan thought she deserved to die.

“You’re a failure,” he said.

“You can’t come close to what I did,” he said.

“It should have been you,” he said.

And under everything, the unspoken command: Avenge me, avenge me, avenge me . . .

Sometimes, fleetingly, the visions became a terribly twisted fantasy where Altan was not hurting her. A version where he loved her instead, and his strikes were caresses. But they were fundamentally irreconcilable because Altan’s nature was the same as the fire that had devoured him: if he didn’t burn everyone around him, then he wasn’t himself.

Sleep came finally through sheer exhaustion, but then only in short, fitful bursts; every time she nodded off she awoke screaming, and it was only by biting her knuckles and pressing herself into the corner that she could remain quiet throughout the night.

“Fuck you, Vaisra,” she whispered. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

But she couldn’t hate Vaisra, not really. It may have just been the sheer exhaustion; she was so racked with fear, grief, and rage that it was a trial to feel anything more. But she knew she needed this. She’d known for months she was killing herself and that she didn’t have the self-control to stop, that the only person who might have stopped her was dead.

She needed someone who was capable of controlling her like no one since Altan could. She hated to admit it, but she knew that in Vaisra she might have found a savior.

Daytime was worse. Sunlight was a constant hammer on Rin’s skull. But if she stayed cooped up in her quarters any longer, she would lose her mind, so Nezha accompanied her outside, keeping a tight grip on her arm while they walked along the top deck.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

It was a stupid question, asked more to break the silence than anything, because it should have been obvious how she was doing: she hadn’t slept, she was trembling uncontrollably from both exhaustion and withdrawal, and eventually, she hoped, she would reach the point where she simply fell unconscious.

“Talk to me,” she said.

“About what?”

“Anything. Literally anything else.”

So he started telling her court stories in a low murmur that wouldn’t give her a headache; trivial tales of gossip about who was fucking this Warlord’s wife, who had really fathered that Warlord’s son.

Rin watched him while he spoke. If she focused on the most minute details of his face, it distracted her from the pain, just for a little bit. The way his left eye opened just slightly wider than his right now. The way his eyebrows arched. The way his scars curled over his right cheek to resemble a poppy flower.

He was so much taller than she was. She had to crane her head to look up at him. When had he gotten so tall? At Sinegard they had been about the same height, nearly the same build, until their second year, when he’d started bulking up at a ridiculous pace. But then, at Sinegard they had just been children, stupid, naive, playing at war games that they had never seriously believed would become their reality.

Rin turned her gaze to the river. The Seagrim had moved inland, was traveling upstream on the Murui now. It moved upriver at a snail’s pace as the men at the paddle boards wheeled furiously to push the ship through the sludgy mud.

She squinted at the banks. She wasn’t sure if she was just hallucinating, but the closer they got, the more clearly she could make out little shapes moving in the distance, like ants crawling up logs.

“Are those people?” she asked.

They were. She could see them clearly now—men and women stooped beneath the sacks they carried over their shoulders, young children staggering barefoot along the riverside, and little babies strapped in bamboo baskets to their parents’ backs.

“Where are they going?”

Nezha looked faintly surprised that she had even asked. “They’re refugees.”

“From where?”

“Everywhere. Golyn Niis wasn’t the only city the Federation sacked. They destroyed the whole countryside. The entire time we were holding that pointless siege at Khurdalain they were marching southward, setting villages ablaze after they’d ripped them apart for supplies.”

Rin was still hung up on the first thing he’d said. “So Golyn Niis wasn’t . . .”

“No. Not even close.”

She couldn’t even fathom the death count this implied. How many people had lived in Golyn Niis? She multiplied that by the provinces and came up with a number nearing a million.

And now, all across the country, the Nikara refugees were shuffling back to their homes. The tide of bodies that had flowed from the war-ravaged cities to the barren northwest had started to turn.

“‘You asked how large my sorrow is,’” Nezha recited. Rin recognized the line—it was from a poem she’d studied a lifetime ago, a lament by an Emperor whose last words became exam material for future generations. “‘And I answered, like a river in spring flowing east.’”

As they floated up the Murui, crowds of people lined the banks with their arms outstretched, screaming at the Seagrim.

“Please, just up to the edge of the province . . .”

“Take my girls, leave me but take the girls . . .”

“You have space! You have space, damn you . . .”

Nezha tugged gently at Rin’s wrist. “Let’s go belowdecks.”

She shook her head. She wanted to see.

“Why can’t someone send boats?” she asked. “Why can’t we bring them home?”

“They’re not going home, Rin. They’re running.”

Dread pooled in her stomach. “How many are still out there?”

“The Mugenese?” Nezha sighed. “They’re not a single army. They’re individual brigades. They’re cold, hungry, frustrated, and they have nowhere to go. They’re thieves and bandits now.”

“How many?” she repeated.

“Enough.”

She made a fist. “I thought I brought peace.”

“You brought victory,” he said. “This is what happens after. The Warlords can hardly keep control over their home provinces. Food shortages. Rampant crime—and it’s not just the Federation bandits. The Nikara are at each other’s throats. Scarcity will do that to you.”

“So of course you think it’s a good time to fight another war.”

“Another war is inevitable. But maybe we can prevent the next big one. The Republic will have growing pains. But if we can fix the foundation—if we can institute structures that make the next invasion less likely and keep future generations safe—then we’ll have succeeded.”