She let just the faintest trickle of fire seep from under her fingers. Souji’s eyes bulged. She dug her fingertips farther into his skin.
“You’re coming back with me to Ruijin. The Iron Wolves now fight under my command. You’ll keep your position as their leader, but you’ll make the hierarchy clear to your men. And if you try to mutiny, I’ll pick this up where I left off. Understand?”
Souji’s throat bobbed. He pawed feebly at her arm.
She tightened her grip. “You’re my bitch now, Souji. You do anything I ask without complaint. You’ll lick the dirt off my boots if I want. Is that clear?”
He nodded, patting frantically at her wrist.
She didn’t budge. Blisters formed and popped under his chin. “I didn’t hear an answer.”
“Yes,” he croaked.
“Yes, what?” She relaxed her grip just enough to let him speak.
“Yes, I’m your bitch. I’ll do what you want. Anything. Just—please—”
She released him and let him stand. Little tendrils of smoke wafted out from his neck. Visible beneath his collar was a first-degree burn, a pale red imprint of her skinny fingers.
It would heal quickly, but that scar would never disappear. Souji might cover it with his collar and hide it from his men, but it would be clear as day to him every time he so much as glanced at his reflection.
“Why don’t you go put a poultice on that?” she asked. “Wouldn’t want it infected.”
He backed away from her. “You’re insane.”
“Everyone vying for this country is insane,” she said. “But none of them have skin as dark as ours. I’m the least terrible option you’ve got.”
Souji stared at her for a long time. Rin couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t tell if his eyes glinted with rage or humiliation. She curled her fist and tensed, ready for another round.
To her surprise, he began to laugh. “All right. You win, you fucking bitch.”
“Don’t call me a bitch.”
“You win, General.” He held his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender. “I’ll march back with you. Where are we going? Dalian? Heirjiang?”
“I told you,” she said. “Ruijin.”
He raised a brow. “Why Ruijin?”
“It’s built into the mountains. Keeps us safe from almost everything. Why not?”
“I just assumed you’d be somewhere farther south. Near Rooster Province, if your goal is liberation.”
“What are you talking about? The occupied areas are clustered at the Monkey border.”
“No, they aren’t. Most of them are bunched down south in Rooster Province.”
“Where, the capital?” Rin frowned. None of this tracked with her intelligence.
“No, somewhere farther down south,” Souji said. “A few weeks’ march from the ocean. A cluster of tiny villages, you won’t know it.”
“Tikany,” she said automatically.
A little township no one had ever heard of. A dusty, arid place with no riches and no special culture; nothing except a docile population still addicted to opium from the second invasion. A place where Rin had once hoped she would never in her life return.
“Yeah.” Souji arched an eyebrow. “That’s one of them. Why, do you know the place?”
He said something else after that, but she didn’t hear it.
Tikany. The Mugenese were still in Tikany.
We’re fools, she thought. We’ve been fighting on the wrong front this entire time.
“Tell your men to pack up,” she said. “We head out for Ruijin in two hours.”
Chapter 3
That evening they began their march back to the base camp of the Southern Coalition. Ruijin lay within the backwoods of the Monkey Province, a poor and calcified land racked by years of banditry, warlord campaigns, famines, and epidemics. It had been the capital of the Monkey Province in antiquity, a lush city famed for its stone shrines built elegantly into the topiary of surrounding bamboo groves. Now it comprised ruins of its former splendor, half eroded by rain and half devoured by the forest.
That made it an excellent place to hide. For centuries, the people of Monkey Province prided themselves on their ability to blend into the mountains during troubled times. They built houses on stilts or up in the trees to keep safe from tigers. They paved winding paths through the dark forest invisible to the untrained eye. In all the stories of old, the Monkeys were stereotyped as backward mountain people—cowards who hid away in trees and caves while the wars of the world passed them by. But those were the same traits that kept them alive.
“Where are we going?” Souji grumbled a week into a continuously uphill hike, during which they’d encountered nothing but endless bumpy paths through hilly forest. “There’s nothing up here.”
“That’s what you think.” Rin bent low to check the scores against the base of a poplar tree—a clue that they were still on the right path—and motioned for the column to follow.
The way up the pass was easier than she had remembered it. The sheen had melted off the edges of the ice. She could see plenty of green beneath sheets of snow that hadn’t been visible when she’d set out two weeks ago. Against all odds, the Southern Coalition had made it to spring.
Winter in the Monkey Province had been a frigid, arid ordeal for the Southern Coalition. It didn’t snow, it hailed. The cold, dry air robbed their breaths from under their noses. The ground turned into a hard, brittle thing. Nothing grew. They’d come so close to starving, and likely would have if an ambushed Mugenese enclave ten miles away hadn’t turned out to possess a shocking amount of food stores.
The soldiers hadn’t distributed their spoils. Rin couldn’t forget the faces of the villagers who’d come out from hiding, thin and exhausted, their relief quickly turning to horror when they realized their liberators were here simply to cart their grain away.
She pushed the memory from her mind. That was a necessary sacrifice. The future of the entire country hinged on the Southern Coalition. What difference did a few lives make?
“Well, this clarifies some things,” Souji muttered as he pushed through the undergrowth.
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t hide in the mountains if you’re a liberating force.”
“No?”
“If you’re trying to take back territory, you inhabit the villages you’ve freed. You expand your base. You set up defenses to make sure the Mugenese don’t come back again. But you’re just predatory extractors. You’ll liberate places, but only for the tribute.”
“I didn’t hear you complaining when I freed you from that cellar.”
“Whatever you say, Princess.” Souji’s voice took on a judging, mocking tone. “You aren’t the salvation of the south. You’re just hiding out here until the whole thing blows over.”
Several scathing responses leaped to mind. Rin bit them back.
The trouble was that he was right. The Southern Coalition had been too passive, too slow to initiate the wider campaign the rest of the country clearly needed, and she hated it.
The coalition leadership’s priority at Ruijin was still sheer survival, which meant ensconcing themselves in the mountains and biding their time while Vaisra’s Republic battled for control of the north. But they were barely even surviving. This wouldn’t last forever. Ruijin kept them safe for now, for the same reasons it was slowly becoming their tomb.