She slammed the hilt of the trident down into the ground. “You think I’d lost my mind?”

Nezha rapidly backtracked. “No, I mean, I thought—I saw how you were hurting. That looked like torture. I thought you might be a little relieved.”

“It’s not a relief to be useless,” she said.

She twirled the trident over her head, whipped it around to generate momentum. It wasn’t a staff—and she should know better than to wield it with staff techniques—but she was angry now, she wasn’t thinking, and her muscles settled into familiar but wrong patterns.

It showed. Nezha may as well have been sparring with a toddler. He sent the trident spinning out of her hands in seconds.

“I told you,” he said. “No flexibility.”

She snatched the trident up off the ground. “Still has longer reach than your sword.”

“So what happens if I get in close?” Nezha twisted his blade between the trident’s gaps and closed the distance between them. She tried to fend him off, but he was right—he was out of the trident’s reach.

He raised a dagger to her chin with his other hand. She kicked savagely at his shin. He buckled to the ground.

“Bitch,” he said.

“You deserved it.”

“Fuck you.” He rocked back and forth on the grass, clutching his leg. “Help me up.”

“Let’s take a break.” She dropped the trident and sat down on the grass beside him. Her lung capacity hadn’t returned. She was still tiring too quickly; she couldn’t last more than two hours sparring, much less a full day in the field.

Nezha hadn’t even broken a sweat. “You’re much better with a sword. Please tell me you know that.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“That thing is useless! It’s too heavy for you! But I’ve seen you with a sword, and—”

“I’ll get used to it.”

“I just think that you shouldn’t make life-or-death choices based on sentimentality.”

She glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He ripped a handful of grass from the ground. “Forget it.”

“No, say it.”

“Fine. You won’t trade because it’s his weapon, isn’t it?”

Rin’s stomach twisted. “That’s idiotic.”

“Oh, come on. You’re always talking about Altan like he was some great hero. But he wasn’t. I saw him at Khurdalain, and I saw the way he spoke to people—”

“And how did he speak to people?” she asked sharply.

“Like they were objects, and he owned them, and they didn’t matter to him apart from how they could serve.” His tone turned vicious. “Altan was a shitty person and a shittier commander, and he would have let me die, and you know that, and here you are, running around with his trident, babbling on about revenge for someone you should hate.”

The trident suddenly felt terribly heavy in Rin’s hands.

“That’s not fair.” She heard a faint buzzing in her ears. “He’s dead— You can’t— That’s not fair.”

“I know,” Nezha said softly. The anger had left him as quickly as it had come. He sounded exhausted. He sat, shoulders slouched, mindlessly shredding blades of grass with his fingers. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I know how much you cared about him.”

“I’m not talking about Altan,” she said. “Not with you. Not now. Not ever.”

“All right,” he said. He gave her a look that she didn’t understand, a look that might have been equal parts pity and disappointment, and that made her desperately uncomfortable. “All right.”

Three days later the council finally came to a joint decision. At least, Vaisra and Tsolin came up with a solution short of immediate military action, and then argued the others into submission.

“We’re going to starve them out,” Vaisra announced. “The south is the agricultural breadbasket of the Empire. If the northern provinces won’t secede, then we’ll simply stop feeding them.”

Takha balked. “You’re asking us to reduce our exports by at least a third.”

“So you’ll bleed income for a year or two,” said Vaisra. “And then your prices will jack up in the next year. The north is in no position to become agriculturally self-sufficient now. If you make this one-time sacrifice, that’s likely the end of tariffs, too. Beggars have no leverage.”

“What about the coastal routes?” Charouk asked.

Rin had to admit that was a fair point. The Western Murui and Golyn River weren’t the only rivers that crossed into the northern provinces. Those provinces could easily smuggle food up the coastline by sending merchants down in the guise of southerners to buy up food stores. They had more than enough silver.

“Moag will cover them,” said Vaisra.

Charouk looked amazed. “You’re trusting the Pirate Queen?”

“It’s in her best interest,” Vaisra said. “For every blockade runner’s ship she seizes, her fleet gets seventy percent of the profits. She’d be a fool to double-cross us.”

“The north has other grain supplies, though,” Gurubai pointed out. “Hare Province has arable land, for instance—”

“No, they don’t.” Jinzha looked smug. “Last year the Hare Province suffered a blight and ran out of seed grain. We sold them several boxes of high-yielding seed.”

“I remember,” said Tsolin. “If you were trying to curry favor, it didn’t work.”

Jinzha grinned nastily. “We weren’t. We sold them damaged seeds, which lulled them into consuming their emergency stores. If we cut off their external supply, a famine should hit in about six months.”

For once, the Warlords seemed impressed. Rin saw reluctant nods around the table.

Only Kitay looked unhappy.

“Six months?” he echoed. “I thought we were trying to move out in the next month.”

“They won’t have felt the blockade by then,” said Jinzha.

“It doesn’t matter! It’s only the threat of the blockade that matters, you don’t need them to actually starve—”

“Why not?” Jinzha asked.

Kitay looked horrified. “Because then you’d be punishing thousands of innocent people. And because that’s not what you told me when you asked me to do the figures—”

“It doesn’t matter what you were told,” Jinzha said. “Know your place.”

Kitay kept talking. “Why starve them slowly? Why wait at all? If we mount an offensive right now, we can end this war before winter sets in. Any later and we’ll be trapped up north when the rivers freeze.”

General Hu laughed. “The boy presumes to know how to fight a campaign better than we do.”

Kitay looked livid. “I actually read Sunzi, so yes.”

“You’re not the only Sinegard student at the table,” said General Hu.

“Sure, but I got in during an era when acceptance actually took brains, so your opinion doesn’t count.”

“Vaisra!” General Hu shouted. “Discipline this boy!”