Then he smiled, and it was the most horrible sight she’d ever seen.
“Don’t you know better?” he asked. “He wants you all dead.”
He rose and advanced toward her. She scrambled to her feet and took a single, trembling step backward. Run, whispered a small voice in her mind. Run, you idiot. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t take her eyes off his face. She was rooted in place, simultaneously terrified and fascinated.
“Riga’s going to kill you when he finds you.” He laughed again, a high and unnerving sound. “Because of Hanelai. Because of what Hanelai did. He’ll kill you all.”
He gripped her by the shoulders and shook her hard. Rin felt an icy chill as she realized for the first time that she wasn’t safe here, physically was not safe, because she had no idea what Jiang could or would do to her.
Jiang leaned closer. He didn’t have a weapon. But Rin knew he’d never needed one.
“You’re all scum,” he sneered. “And I should have just done what he fucking wanted.”
Rin reached for the fire.
“Ziya, stop!”
Daji ran into the tent. Rin flinched back, heart pounding with relief. Jiang turned toward Daji, that horrible sneer still etched across his face. For a moment Rin thought that he would strike her, but Daji grabbed his arm before he could move and jammed a needle into his vein. He stood stock-still, swaying on his feet. His expression turned placid, and then he dropped to his knees.
“You,” he slurred. “You cunt. This is all your fault.”
“Go to sleep,” Daji said. “Just go to sleep.”
Jiang said something else, but it was slurred and nonsensical. One arm scrabbled for the floor—Rin thought he was reaching for the needle, and tensed for a fight—but then he tilted forward and collapsed to the ground.
“Get away from here.” Daji hustled Rin out of the tent into the cold night air. Rin stumbled along, too dazed to protest. Once they’d walked onto an icy ledge out of earshot of the main camp, Daji spun Rin around and shook her by the shoulders as if she were a disobedient child. “What were you thinking? Have you gone mad?”
“What was that?” Rin shrieked. She wiped frantically at her cheeks. Hot tears kept spilling down her face, but she couldn’t make them stop. “What is he?”
Daji shook her head and pressed her hand against her chest. It took Rin a moment to realize she wasn’t just posturing. Something was wrong.
“A flame,” Daji whispered urgently. Her lips had turned a dark, shocking violet. “Please.”
Rin lit a fire in her palm and held it out between them. “Here.”
Daji hunched over the warmth. She stayed like that for a long time, eyes closed, fingers twitching over the fire. Slowly the color came back to her face.
“You know what that was,” she said at last. “He’s getting his mind back.”
“But—” Rin swallowed, trying to wrap her mind around her racing questions, to configure them into an order that made sense. “But that’s not him. He’s not like that, surely he was never like that—”
“You didn’t know the real Jiang. You knew a shade of a man. You knew a fake, an imitation. That’s not Jiang, that never was.”
“And this is?” Rin shrieked. “He was going to kill me!”
“He’s adjusting.” Daji didn’t answer her question. “He’s just . . . confused, is all—”
“Confused? Haven’t you heard him? He’s afraid. He’s terrified of what’s happening to him, and he doesn’t want to become that person because he knows something—something you won’t tell me. We can’t do this to him.” Rin’s voice trembled. “We have to turn back.”
“No.” Daji violently shook her head. Her eyes glinted in the moonlight; with her disheveled hair and her hungry, desperate expression, she looked nearly as mad as Jiang. “There is no turning back. I’ve waited too long for this.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you want.”
“You don’t understand. I’ve had to watch him all these years, had to keep him confined to Sinegard knowing full well that I’d reduced him to a dithering idiot.” Daji’s voice trembled. “I took his mind from him. Now he has a chance to get it back. And I can’t take that from him. Not even if he’s happier like this.”
“But you can’t,” Rin said. “He’s so scared.”
“It doesn’t matter what this Jiang thinks. This Jiang isn’t real. The real Jiang needs to come back.” Daji looked like she was on the verge of tears. “I need him back.”
Then Rin saw the tears glistening on Daji’s cheeks. Daji, the Vipress, the former Empress of Nikan, was crying. The Vipress was fucking crying.
Rin was too upset for sympathy. No. No, Daji didn’t get to do this, didn’t get to stand here and whimper like she was innocent in the horrifying mental collapse they were witnessing, when Daji was the entire reason why Jiang was broken.
“Then you shouldn’t have Sealed him,” Rin said.
“You think I couldn’t feel what I’d done?” Daji’s eyes were red around the rims. “We are linked. You know what that’s like. I felt his confusion. I felt how lost he was, I felt him probing at the corners of his mind for something he didn’t know he’d lost, acutely so because I knew what he didn’t have access to.”
“Then why did you have to do it?” Rin asked miserably.
What was so terrible, so earth-wrenchingly terrible, that Daji would risk her own life and fracture Jiang’s soul to stop it?
They quarreled, Daji had once told her.
Over what?
Daji just shook her head. Her pale neck bobbed. “Never ask me this.”
“I have a right to know.”
“You have a right to nothing,” Daji said coldly. “They fought. I stopped them. That’s all there is—”
“Bullshit.” Rin’s voice rose as the flame grew, stretching dangerously, threateningly close to Daji’s skin. “There’s more, there’s something you’re not telling me, I deserve to know—”
“Runin.”
Daji’s eyes glinted a snakelike yellow. Rin’s limbs locked suddenly into place. She couldn’t wrench her gaze from Daji’s face. She understood immediately that this was a challenge—a battle of divine wills.
Do you dare?
Once Rin might have fought. She could have forced Daji into submission; she’d done it before. But she was so exhausted, stretched thin from day after day of pulling the Phoenix through Kitay’s aching mind. She couldn’t summon rage after what she’d just seen. She felt like a thin shard of frost, one touch from shattering apart.
Rin pulled her flame back into her hand.
Daji’s pupils turned back to their normal, lovely black. Rin sagged, released from their grip.
“If I were you, I would stop worrying.” Daji had stopped crying; the red around her eyes had faded away. Gone, too, was the fragile hitch in her voice, replaced by a cool, detached confidence. “Jiang’s episodes will get worse. But he will not die. He cannot die—you can trust me on that. But the more you try to prod into his mind, try to retrieve whatever you think you’ve lost, the more you’ll torture yourself. Let go of the man you remember. You’re never going to get him back.”