“Do you remember what you said when I first asked for command?” Rin asked.
Spit bubbled by the side of Ma Lien’s mouth. She picked a bloodstained bed rag up from the floor and gently rubbed it away.
“You said I was a dumb bitch with no command experience and a genetic lack of rationality.” She chuckled. “Your words. You said I was an empty-headed little fool with more power than I knew what to do with. You said I should know my place. You said Speerlies weren’t meant to make decisions but to obey.”
Ma Lien mouthed something incoherent. She smoothed tendrils of his hair back from his mouth. He was sweating so hard he looked like he’d been drenched in oil. Poor man.
“I didn’t come south to be someone’s pet again,” she said. “You should have understood that about me.”
She’d laid her loyalty at the feet of two masters before. Each had betrayed her in turn. She’d trusted first Daji and then Vaisra, and they’d both sold her away without blinking. From now on Rin took charge of her own fate.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out the vial.
Fat yellow scorpions infested the forests around Ruijin. The soldiers had learned to ward them away from the camp by burning lavender and setting traps, but they couldn’t wander ten feet into the trees without stumbling upon a nest. And a single nest was all it took to extract a vial’s worth of venom.
“I’m not sorry for this,” she said. “You shouldn’t have gotten in my way.”
She tipped the vial toward Ma Lien’s mouth. He thrashed, trying to cough the poison out, but she seized his jaw and forced it shut, pinching his nose between her fingers until the liquid seeped down into his throat. After a minute he stopped resisting. She let go.
“You’re not going to die immediately,” she said. “Scorpion venom paralyzes. Locks up all your muscles.”
She dabbed saliva and venom off his chin with the bed rag. “In a while, it’ll feel a little hard to breathe. You’ll try to call for help, but you’ll find your jaw won’t move. I’m sure your wife will come in to check on you, but she knows there’s nothing she can do. She knows what I’m doing right now. She’s probably imagining it all in her head. But maybe she’ll love you enough to see you through to the end. Or, if she really loves you, she’ll slit your throat.”
She stood up. An odd thrill rushed through her head. Her knees shook. She felt giddy, shot through with a bizarre and unexpected energy.
This wasn’t her first kill. But this was her first deliberate, premeditated murder. This was the first person she’d killed not out of desperation but with cool, malicious intent.
It felt—
It felt good.
She didn’t need her pipe to show this to Altan; she heard his laughter as loudly as if he were standing right next to her. She felt divine. She felt like she could leap across mountains if she wanted to. Her hand couldn’t stop shaking. The vial dropped from her fingers and shattered against the floor.
Heart pounding, blood pumping with a euphoria that confused her, she left the cave.
“I want to lead two contingents into Rooster Province,” Rin said. “Souji says they’ve clustered there because the flat terrain is easier to navigate. We’ve been shoring up for a fight on the wrong front. They’re not going to push up into the mountains here because they don’t need to. They’re just going to expand farther south.”
The leadership of the Southern Coalition sat assembled around a table in the Monkey Warlord’s headquarters. Gurubai, the natural leader, sat at the front. Liu Dai, a former county official and Gurubai’s longtime ally, sat on his right. Zhuden was seated to Liu Dai’s right as Ma Lien’s substitute, but an empty chair remained at the table out of respect. Souji sat in the back left corner, arms crossed, smirking, as if he’d already called this charade for what it was.
“If we strike quickly,” Rin continued, “that is, if we take the main nodes before they’ve gotten the chance to regroup, we could end this whole thing in one drive.”
“Just this morning you wanted to turn north to face Vaisra,” Gurubai said. “Now you want to drive south. You can’t fight a war on two fronts, Rin. Which is it?”
“We’ve got to go south just so we can get the strength to muster a defense against the Hesperians,” Rin said. “If we win the south, we get warm bodies. Food stores. Access to river routes, armories, and who knows what else we’ve been relinquishing to the Mugenese. Our armies will swell by thousands, and we’ll have the supply lines to support them. But if we don’t clear out the Mugenese first, then we’ll be trapped inside the mountains—”
“We’re safe inside the mountains,” Liu Dai interrupted. “No one has invaded Ruijin in centuries, the terrain is too hostile—”
“There’s no food here,” Rin said. “The wells are drying up. This won’t last forever.”
“We understand that,” Gurubai said. “But you’re asking too much of this army. Half these boys only picked up a sword for the first time two months ago. You need to give them time.”
“Vaisra won’t give them time,” Rin snapped. “The moment he’s done with Jun, he will bury us.”
She’d already lost them. She could tell from their bored, skeptical expressions. She knew this was pointless; this was just another iteration of the same argument they’d rehashed a dozen times now. They were at a stalemate—she had the fire, but they had everything else. And they were seasoned, war-hardened men who, despite everything they publicly proclaimed, couldn’t be less happy about sharing power with a girl half their age.
Rin knew that. She was just constitutionally unable to keep silent.
“Rooster Province is finished,” Gurubai said. “The Mugenese have overrun the place like ants. Our strategy now should be survival. We can keep the Monkey Province. They cannot survive in the mountains. Don’t throw this away, Rin.”
He spoke like he’d come to this conclusion long ago. A sudden suspicion struck Rin.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew they’d taken Rooster Province.”
Gurubai exchanged a glance with Liu Dai. “Runin . . .”
“You’ve known that all along.” Her voice rose in pitch. Her cheeks were burning. This wasn’t just his standard patronization, this was appalling condescension. The fucking nerve. “You knew this entire time and you didn’t tell me.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference—”
“Did they all know?” She gestured around the room. Little sparks of flame burst forth from her fingers; she couldn’t help it. The coalition members cringed back, but that gave her no pleasure. She was far too embarrassed.
What else hadn’t they told her?
Gurubai cleared his throat. “Given your impulses, we didn’t think it prudent—”
“Fuck you!” she exclaimed. “I’m a member of this council, I’ve been winning your battles for you, I deserve to—”
“The fact remains that you are impulsive and reckless, as evidenced by your repeated demands for command—”
“I deserve full command! That’s what I was promised!”