Chapter 12 #2
Tsolin didn’t answer. He simply sat down, pulled the maps toward him, and began to examine the attack lines with the weary, practiced air of a man who had spent his entire life fighting wars.
As the days dragged on, despite the northern offensive’s ongoing delay, Arlong itself continued to mobilize for war like a tightening spring.
War preparations were integrated into almost every facet of civilian life.
Steely-eyed children worked the furnaces at the armory and carried messages back and forth across the city.
Their mothers produced immaculately stitched uniforms at an astonishing rate.
In the mess hall, grandmothers stirred congee in giant vats while their grandchildren ferried bowls around to the soldiers.
Another week passed. The Warlords continued to shout at each other in the council room. Rin couldn’t bear the constant waiting, so she took out her adrenaline with Nezha.
Sparring was a welcome exercise. The skirmish at Lusan had made it abundantly clear to her that she had been relying far too much on calling the fire. Her reflexes had flagged, her muscles had atrophied, and her stamina was pathetic.
So at least once every day, she and Nezha picked up their weapons and hiked up to empty clearings far up on the cliffs.
She lost herself in the sheer, mindless physicality of their bouts.
When they were sparring, her mind couldn’t languish on any one thought for too long.
She was too busy calculating angles, maneuvering steel on steel.
The immediacy of the fight was its own kind of drug, one that could numb her to anything else she might accidentally feel.
Altan couldn’t torture her if she couldn’t think.
Blow by blow, bruise by bruise, she relearned the muscle memory that she had lost, and she relished it. Here she could channel the adrenaline and fear that kept her vibrating with anxiety on a daily basis.
The first few days left her wrecked and aching. The next few were better. She filled in her uniform. She lost her hollow, skeletal appearance. This was the only reason she was grateful for the council’s slow deliberation—it gave her time to become the soldier she used to be.
Nezha was not a lenient sparring partner, and she didn’t want him to be. The first time he held back out of fear of hurting her, she swept out a leg and knocked him to the ground.
He propped himself up on his stomach. “If you wanted to go for a tumble, you could have just asked.”
“Don’t be disgusting,” she said.
Once she stopped losing hand-to-hand bouts in under thirty seconds, they moved on to padded weapons.
“I don’t understand why you insist on using that thing,” he said after he disarmed her of her trident for the third time. “It’s clumsy as hell. Father’s been telling me to get you to switch to a sword.”
She knew what Vaisra wanted. She was tired of that argument.
“Reach matters more than maneuverability.” She wedged her foot under the trident and kicked it up into her hands.
Nezha came at her from the right. “Reach?”
She parried. “When you summon fire, there’s no one who’s going to get close to you.”
He hung back. “Not to state the obvious, but you can’t really do that anymore.”
She scowled at him. “I’ll fix it.”
“Suppose you don’t?”
“Suppose you stop underestimating me?”
She didn’t want to tell him that she’d been trying. That every night she climbed up to this same clearing where no one would see her, took a dose of Chaghan’s stupid blue powder, approached the Seal, and tried to burn the ghost of Altan out of her mind.
It never worked. She could never bring herself to hurt him, not that wonderful version of Altan that she’d never known. When she tried to fight him, he grew angry. And then he reminded her why she’d always been terrified of him.
The worst part was that Altan seemed to be getting stronger every time.
His eyes burned more vividly in the dark, his laughter rang louder, and several nights he’d nearly choked the breath from her before she got her senses back.
It didn’t matter that he was only a vision.
Her fear made him more present than anything else.
“Look alive.” Rin jabbed at Nezha’s side, hoping to catch him off guard, but he whipped his blade out and parried just in time.
They sparred for a few more seconds, but she was quickly losing heart. Her trident suddenly seemed twice as heavy in her arms; she felt like she was fighting at a third her normal speed. Her footwork was sloppy, without form or technique, and her swings grew increasingly haphazard and unguarded.
“It’s not the worst thing,” Nezha said. He batted a wild blow away from his head. “Aren’t you glad?”
She stiffened. “Why would I be glad?”
“I mean, I just thought . . .” He touched a hand to his temple. “Isn’t it at least nice to have your mind back to yourself?”
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.”