“Tiger’s fucking tits,” Kitay said.
“I know,” Rin said.
“And you just dumped him in the harbor?”
“Weighed him down with rocks first. I picked a pretty deep stretch by the docks; no one’s going to find him—”
“Holy shit.” Kitay ran a hand through his bangs and yanked as he paced around the library. “You’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”
“It might be all right.” Rin tried to convince herself as she said it, but she still felt terribly light-headed. She’d come to Kitay because he was the one person she trusted to figure out what to do, but now both of them were panicking. “Look, no one saw me—”
“How do you know?” he asked shrilly. “No one caught you dragging a Hesperian corpse halfway across the city? No one was looking out their windows? You’d be willing to stake your life on the fact that not a single person saw?”
“I didn’t drag it, I dumped it in a sampan and rowed out to shore.”
“Oh, that solves everything—”
“Kitay. Listen.” She took a deep breath, trying to get her mind to slow down enough to work properly. “It’s been over an hour. If they’d seen, don’t you think I’d be dead by now?”
“Tarcquet could be biding his time,” Kitay said. “Waiting until morning to set an army on you.”
“He wouldn’t wait.” Rin was certain of that. The Hesperians didn’t fuck around. If Tarcquet found out that a shaman, of all people, had killed one of his men, then her body would already be riddled with bullet holes. He wouldn’t have given her the chance to escape.
The more time that passed, the more she hoped—believed—that Tarcquet didn’t know. Vaisra didn’t know. They might never know. Rin wasn’t telling anyone, and the refugee girl would certainly keep her mouth shut.
Kitay rubbed his palms against his temples. “When did this happen?”
“I told you. Just over an hour ago, when I was walking Kesegi back to the barriers from the old warehouses.”
“What on earth were you doing by the warehouses?”
“Southern Warlords ambushed me. Wanted to talk. They’re thinking of defecting back to their home provinces to deal with the Federation armies and they wanted me to come along, and they had this insane theory about the Hesperians, and—”
“What did you say?”
“Of course I refused. That’d be a death sentence.”
“Well, at least you didn’t commit treason.” Kitay managed a shaky laugh. “And then, what, you just wandered back to the barracks and murdered a Hesperian on the way?”
“You didn’t see what he was doing.”
He threw his hands up. “Does it fucking matter?”
“He was on a girl,” she said angrily. “He had her by her neck and he wouldn’t stop—”
“So you decided to scorch any possible chance we have of surviving the Red Cliffs?”
“The Hesperians aren’t fucking coming, Kitay.”
“They’re still here, aren’t they? If they really didn’t care they’d have packed up and gone. Did that ever cross your mind? When your back is to the wall there’s a massive difference between zero and one percent but no, you’d rather guarantee it’s zero—”
Her cheeks burned. “I didn’t think—”
“Of course not,” Kitay snapped. His knuckles had gone white. “You never think, do you? You always just pick whatever fights you want, whenever you want, and fuck the consequences—”
Rin raised her voice. “Would you rather I had let him rape her?”
Kitay fell silent.
“No,” he said after a long pause. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—I didn’t mean that.”
“I didn’t think so.”
He pressed his face into his hands. “Gods, I’m just scared. And you didn’t have to kill him, you could have—”
“I know,” she said. She felt drained. All the adrenaline had gone out of her at once, and now she only wanted to collapse. “I know, I wasn’t thinking, I saw it happening and I just—”
“It’s my life on the line now, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.” He sighed. “I don’t think— You didn’t have— Fine. It’s fine. I understand.”
“I really don’t think anyone saw.”
“Fine.” He took a deep breath. “Are you going to go back to the barracks?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
They sat together on the floor for a long while in silence. He rested his head against her shoulder. She clutched at his hands. Neither of them could sleep. They were both watching the library windows, waiting to see Hesperian troops lined up at the door, to hear the fall of heavy boots in the hallway. Rin couldn’t help but feel a twinge of relief at every additional moment that passed.
It meant the Hesperians weren’t coming. It meant that, for now, she was safe.
But what happened when the Hesperians woke up in the morning and discovered a missing soldier? What happened when they started to search? They wouldn’t find him for days at least, she’d made sure of that, but the sheer fact that a soldier was missing might derail Hesperian negotiations regardless.
If the fallout didn’t land on Rin, then would they punish the entire Republic?
The southern Warlords’ words rose unbidden to her mind. You shouldn’t fight for an alliance with people who think we’re barely human.
“Tell me what the southern Warlords said,” Kitay said, startling her.
She sat up. “About what?”
“The Hesperians. What’s this theory?”
“Just the usual. They don’t trust them, they think they’ll bring a second coming of the occupation, and . . . Oh.” She frowned. “They also think that the Hesperians let the Mugenese invade on purpose. They think Vaisra knew the Federation was going to launch an invasion, and that the Hesperians knew, too, but neither of them acted because they wanted the empire weakened and ripe for the taking.”
Kitay blinked. “Really.”
“I know. That’s crazy.”
“No,” he said. “That makes sense.”
“You can’t be serious. That would be awful.”
“But it tracks with everything we know, doesn’t it?” Kitay gave a short laugh that bordered on manic. “I’d been thinking it from the start, actually, but I thought, ‘Nah, no one could be that insane. Or evil.’ But think about the Republic’s ships. Think about how long it took to build that entire fleet. Vaisra’s been planning his civil war for years—that’s obvious. But he never launched an attack until now. Why?”
“Maybe he wasn’t ready,” she said.
“Or maybe he needed the country weakened if he was ever going to wage a successful war against the Vipress. Needed us shattered so he could pick up the pieces.”
“He needed someone else to attack first,” she said slowly.
He nodded. “And the Federation was the best pawn for that task. I bet he laughed when they marched on Sinegard. I bet he’d been wanting that war for years.”
Rin wanted to say no, say of course Vaisra wouldn’t let innocent people die, but she knew that wasn’t true. She knew Vaisra was more than happy to wipe entire provinces off his map as long as it meant he kept his Republic.
Gods, as long as he kept his city.
Which meant Hesperian passivity during the Second Poppy War had not been some political mistake, or a delay in communications, but entirely deliberate. Which meant that Vaisra had known the Federation would kill hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and he’d let it happen.
When she thought about it now, it should have been so easy to realize that they’d been manipulated. They had been trapped in a geopolitical chess game that had been years, perhaps decades in the making.
And she hadn’t simply been fooled. She’d been deliberately blind to the clues around her, and she’d sat back and let everything happen.
She’d been stupidly, passively asleep for such a long time. She’d spent so much effort fighting in the trenches for Vaisra’s Republic that she’d barely considered what might happen after.
If they won, what price would the Hesperians demand for their aid? Would Petra’s experiments escalate once Vaisra no longer needed Rin on the battlefield?
It seemed so foolish now to imagine that as long as Vaisra vouched for her, she was safe from those arquebuses. Months ago she’d been lost and afraid, desperate to find an anchor, and that had primed her to trust him. But she’d also seen, over and over again by now, how easily Vaisra manipulated those around him like shadow puppets.
How quickly would he trade her away?
“Oh, Kitay.” She exhaled slowly. She suddenly felt very, very afraid. “What are we going to do?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
She thought through the possibilities out loud. “We have no good options. If we defect to the south, we’re dead.”
“And if you leave Arlong, then the Hesperians will hunt you down.”
“But if we stay loyal to the Republic, we’re just building a cage for ourselves.”
“And none of that even matters if we don’t survive the day after tomorrow.”
They stared at each other. Rin heard a heartbeat echoing against the silence; hers or Kitay’s, she didn’t know.
“Tiger’s tits,” she said. “We’re going to die. None of this even matters because Feylen is going to wreck us under the Red Cliffs and we’re all going to die.”
“Not necessarily.” Kitay stood up abruptly. “Come with me.”
She blinked up at him. “What?”
“You’ll see. I’ve been meaning to show you something ever since you got back.” He clasped her hands and pulled her to her feet. “I just haven’t had the chance. Follow me.”
Somehow they ended up in the armory. Rin wasn’t entirely sure they were supposed to be there, because Kitay had kicked through the lock to get in, but at this point she didn’t care.
He led her to a back storage room, pulled a bundle wrapped in a canvas sheet out from a corner, and dropped it on the table. “This is for you.”
She peeled the sheet back. “A pile of leather. Thank you. I love it.”
“Just unfold it,” he said.
She held up the contraption, a confusing combination of riding straps, iron rods, and long sheets of leather. She peered at it from all angles but couldn’t make sense of what she was looking at. “What is this?”
“You know how none of us have been able to defeat Feylen?” Kitay asked.
“Because he keeps flinging us into cliff walls? Yes, Kitay, I remember that.”
“Listen.” He had a manic glint in his eye. “What if he couldn’t? What if you could fight him on his turf? Well, turf doesn’t really apply, but you know what I mean.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve got far more control of that fire now, yes?” he asked. “Could probably call it without thinking?”
“Sure,” she said slowly. The fire felt like a natural extension of her now; she could extend it farther, burn hotter. But she was still confused. “You already know that. What does that have to do with anything?”
“How hot can you make it?” he pressed.
She frowned. “Isn’t all fire the same temperature?”
“Actually, no. You get different sorts of flames on different surfaces. There’s a difference between a candle flame and a blacksmith’s fire, for instance. I’m not an expert, but—”
“Why does that matter?” she interrupted. “I couldn’t get close enough to burn Feylen anyway, and I don’t have that kind of reach.”
He shook his head impatiently. “But what if you could?”
“We’re not all geniuses like you,” she snapped. “Just tell me what you’re going on about.”
He grinned. “Remember the signal lanterns before Boyang? The ones that would have exploded?”
“Of course, but—”
“Do you want to know how they work?”
She sighed and resigned herself to giving him free rein to talk as much as he wanted. “No, but I think you’re about to tell me.”
“Hot air rises,” he said gleefully. “Cool air sinks. The balloons trap the hot air in a small space and it lifts up the entire apparatus.”
She considered this for a moment. She was starting to understand where he was going, but she wasn’t sure if she liked the conclusion. “I weigh a lot more than a paper balloon.”
“It’s about the ratio,” Kitay insisted. “For instance, heavier birds need larger wings.”
“But even the largest bird is tiny compared to—”
“So you’d need even bigger wings. And you’ll need a hotter fire. But you have the strongest heat source in existence, so all we had to do was get you an apparatus to turn that into flying power. The wings, if you will.”
She blinked at him, and then looked down at the pile of leather and metal. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“Not in the slightest,” he said happily. “Do you want to try it on?”
She gingerly unfolded the apparatus. It was surprisingly light, the leather smooth under her hands. She wondered where Kitay had found the material. She held it up, marveling at the neat stitching.
“You did this all in a week?”
“Yeah. I’d been thinking about it for a while, though. Ramsa came up with the idea.”
“Ramsa did?”
He nodded. “Half of munitions is aerodynamics. He’s spent a long time figuring out how to make things fly right.”
Rin was somewhat wary of gambling her life on the designs of a boy whose greatest passion in life was watching things explode, but she supposed that at this point she had very few options.
With Kitay’s help, she fastened the strap over her chest as tightly as she could manage. The iron rods shifted uncomfortably against her back, but otherwise the wings were surprisingly flexible, greased to rotate smoothly with every movement of her arms.
“You know, Altan used to give himself wings,” she said.
“He did? Could he fly?”
“I doubt it. They were made of fire. I think he just did it to look pretty.”
“Well, I think I can give you some functional ones.” He tightened the straps around her shoulders. “Everything fit okay?”
She lifted her arms, feeling somewhat like an overgrown bat. The leather wings looked pretty, but they seemed far too thin to sustain her body weight. The interlacing rods that kept the apparatus together also looked so terribly fragile she was sure she could snap them in half over her knee. “You sure that’s going to be enough to keep me up?”
“I didn’t want to add too much to your weight. The rods are as slender as they’ll go. Any heavier and you’ll sink.”
“They could also break and send me plummeting to my death,” she pointed out.
“Have a little faith in me.”
“It’s gonna hurt you if I crash.”
“I know.” He sounded far too giddy for her comfort. “Shall we go try this out?”
They found an open clearing up on the cliffs, well out of range of anything that was remotely flammable. Kitay had wanted to test his invention by pushing Rin off a ledge, but reluctantly agreed to let her try levitating over level ground first.
The sun was just beginning to rise over the Red Cliffs, and Rin would have found it exceptionally lovely if she weren’t so terrified that she could hear her heartbeat slamming in her eardrums.
She stepped out into the middle of the clearing, arms raised stiffly over her sides. She felt both exceedingly scared and stupid.
“Well, go on.” Kitay backed up several paces. “Give it a try.”
She gave the wings an awkward flap. “So I just . . . light up?”
“I think so. Try to keep it localized to your arms. You want the heat trapped in the air pockets under the wings, not dispersed in the air.”
“All right.” She willed the flame to dance up her palms and into her neck and shoulders. Her upper body felt deliciously warm, but almost immediately her wings began to smoke and sizzle.
“Kitay?” she called, alarmed.
“That’s just the binding agent,” said Kitay. “It’ll be fine, it’ll just burn off—”
Her voice rose several pitches. “It’s fine if the binding agent burns off?”
“That’s just the excess substance. The rest should hold—I think.” He didn’t sound convincing in the least. “I mean, we tested the solvent at the forge, so in theory . . .”
“Right,” she said slowly. Her knees were shaking. Her head felt terribly light. “Why do I let you do this?”
“Because if you die, I die,” he said. “Can you make those flames a little larger?”
She closed her eyes. Her leather wings lifted at her sides, expanding from the hot air.
Then she felt it—a heavy pressure yanking on her upper body, like a giant had reached down and jerked her up by the arms.
“Shit,” she breathed. She looked down. Her feet had risen off the ground. “Shit. Shit!”
“Go higher!” Kitay called.
Great Tortoise. She was rising higher, without even trying—no, she was practically shooting upward. She kicked her legs, wobbling in the air. She had no lateral directional control, and she couldn’t figure out how to slow her ascent, but holy gods, she was flying.
Kitay shouted something at her, but she couldn’t hear him over the rush of the flames surrounding her.
“What?” she yelled back.
Kitay flapped his arms and ran in a zigzag motion.
Did he want her to fly sideways? She puzzled over the mechanics of it. She could decrease the heat on one side. As soon as she tried it she nearly flipped over and ended up hanging awkwardly in midair with her hip level with her head. She hastily righted herself.
She couldn’t drift laterally, then. But how did birds change direction? She tried to remember. They didn’t move straight to one side, they tilted their wings. They didn’t drift, they swooped.
She beat her wings down several times and rose several feet into the air. Then she adjusted the curve of her arms so that the wings beat to the side, not downward, and tried again.
Immediately she careened to the left. The swift change in direction was terribly disorienting. Her stomach heaved; her flames flickered madly. For a moment she lost sight of the ground, and didn’t right herself until she was mere feet away from the dirt.
She jerked herself out of the dive, gasping. This was going to take some practice.
She flapped her wings to regain altitude. She shot up faster than she’d anticipated. She flapped them again. Then again.
How far could she go? Kitay was still shouting something from the ground, but she was too far up to understand him. She rose higher and higher with each steady beat of her wings. The ground became dizzyingly far away, but she had eyes only for the great expanse of sky above her.
How far could the fire take her?
She couldn’t help but laugh as she soared, a high, desperate, frantic laugh of relief. She rose so high that she could no longer make out Kitay’s face, until Arlong turned into little splotches of green and blue, until she had even passed through a layer of clouds.
Then she stopped.
She hung alone in an expanse of blue.
A calm washed over her then, a calm that she couldn’t ever remember feeling. There was nothing up here she could kill. Nothing she could hurt. She had her mind to herself. She had the world to herself.
She floated in the air, suspended at the point between heaven and earth.
The Red Cliffs looked so beautiful from up here.
Her mind wandered to the last minister of the Red Emperor, who had etched those ancient words into the cliffside. He’d written a scream to the heavens, an open plea to future generations, a message for the Hesperians who would one day sail into that harbor and bomb it.
What had he wanted to tell them?
Nothing lasts.
Nezha and Kitay had both been wrong. There was another way to interpret those carvings. If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed. The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.
Nothing lasts.
This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.
She, the Last Speerly, called the greatest power of all.
And the Hesperians, no matter how hard they tried, could never take this from her.
Landing was the tricky part.
Her first instinct was to simply extinguish the fire. But then she dropped like a rock, plummeting at a breakneck speed for several heart-stopping moments until she managed to get her wings spread and a fire lit beneath them. That made her come to a lurching halt so rough she was shocked the wings didn’t rip right off her arms.
She drifted back up, heart hammering.
She’d have to glide down somehow. She thought through the movements in her head—she’d decrease the heat, little by little, until she was close enough to the ground.
It almost worked. She hadn’t counted on how fast her velocity would increase. Suddenly she was thirty feet from the ground and hurtling far too quickly toward Kitay.
“Move!” she shouted, but he didn’t budge. He just reached his hands out, grabbed her wrists, and swung her about until they collapsed in a tangled, laughing heap of leather and silk and limbs.
“I was right,” he said. “I’m always right.”
“Well, don’t be so smug about it.”
He groaned happily and rubbed his arms. “So how was it?”
“Incredible.” She flung her arms around him and hugged him tight. “You genius. You wonderful, wonderful genius.”
Kitay leaned back, arms raised. “Careful, you’ll break the wings.”
She twisted her head around to check them and marveled at the thin, careful craftsmanship that held the apparatus together. “I can’t believe you did this in a week.”
“I had some time on my hands,” said Kitay. “Wasn’t out there trying to stop a fleet or anything.”
“I love you,” she said.
Kitay gave her a tired smile. “I know.”
“We still don’t know what we’re going to do after—” she started, but he shook his head.
“I know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about the Hesperians. For once, I haven’t the faintest idea, and I hate it. But we’ll figure our way out of it. We’ve figured our way out of this, we’re going to survive the Red Cliffs, we’re going to survive Vaisra, and we’ll keep surviving until we’re safe and the world can’t touch us. One enemy at a time. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” she said.
Once her legs had stopped shaking, he helped her strip out of her gear. Then they climbed back down the cliff, still light-headed and giddy with victory, laughing so hard that their sides hurt.
Because yes, the fleet was still coming, and yes, they might very well die the next morning, but in that instant it didn’t matter, because fuck it, she could fly.
“You’ll need some air support,” Kitay said after a while.
“Air support?”
“You’ll be a very conspicuous, very obvious target. You’ll want someone fending off the people shooting at you. They throw rocks, we throw them back. A line of archers would be nice.”
Rin snorted. Arlong’s defenses were spread thin as things were. “They’re not going to give us a line of archers.”
“Yeah, probably not.” He shot her a sideways look, considering. “Should we try Eriden before the last council starts? See if he’ll lend us at least one of his men?”
“No,” she said. “I have a better idea.”
Rin found Venka the first place she looked—training in the archery yard, furiously decimating straw targets. Rin stood in the corner for a moment, watching her from behind a post.
Venka hadn’t fully learned yet to compensate for her stiff arms, which seemed to spasm uncontrollably and to bend only with effort. They must have hurt badly—her face tightened every time she reached for her quiver.
She hadn’t taken her left arm brace off. She’d just locked her upper wrist into place instead. She was shooting while overcorrecting for a hyperextended arm, Rin realized. But for the amount of control she had left, Venka had a stunning degree of accuracy. Her speed was also absurd. By Rin’s count she could shoot twenty arrows a minute, maybe more.
Venka was no Qara, but she’d do.
“Nice go,” Rin called at the end of a fifteen-arrow streak.
Venka doubled over, panting. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
In response, Rin crossed the archery range and handed Venka a silk-wrapped parcel.
Venka glared at it suspiciously, then placed her bow on the ground so she could accept. “What’s this?”
“A present.”
Venka’s lip curled. “Is it someone’s head?”
Rin laughed. “Just open it.”
Venka unwrapped the silk. After a moment she looked up, eyes hard, flinty and suspicious. “Where did you get this?”
“Picked it up in the north,” Rin said. “It’s Ketreyid-made. You like it?”
Before they’d returned to Arlong, she and Kitay had bundled all the weapons they could scavenge onto the raft. Most of them had been short knives and hunting bows that neither of them could use.
“This is a silkworm thorn bow,” Venka declared. “Do you know how rare this is?”
Rin wouldn’t have known silkworm thorn from driftwood, but she took that as a good sign. “I thought you’d like it better than those bamboo creations.”
Venka turned the bow over in her hands, then held it up to her eyes to examine the bowstring. Her arms shook. She glanced down at her trembling elbows, openly disgusted. “You don’t want to waste a silkworm thorn bow on me.”
“It’s not a waste. I saw you shoot.”
“That?” Venka snorted. “That’s nowhere close to before.”
“The bow will help. Silkworm thorn’s lighter, I think. But we can also get you a crossbow, if it’ll help with distance.”
Venka squinted at her. “What exactly are you saying?”
“I need air support.”
“Air . . . ?”
“Kitay’s built a contraption to help me fly,” Rin said bluntly.
“Oh, gods.” Venka laughed. “Of course he has.”
“He’s Chen Kitay.”
“Indeed he is. Does it work?”
“Shockingly, yes. But I need backup. I need someone with very good aim.”
She was absolutely sure Venka would say yes. She could read longing all over Venka’s face. She was looking at the bow the way some might a lover.
“They won’t let me fight,” she said finally. “Not even from the parapets.”
“So fight for me,” Rin said. “The Cike’s not in the army and the Republic can’t tell me who I can recruit. And we’re down a few men.”
“I heard.” A smile cracked across Venka’s face. Rin hadn’t seen her look so genuinely happy in a long, long time. Venka held the bow tight to her chest, caressing the carved grip. “Well, then. I’m at your service, Commander.”