Could she punish these girls for wanting to survive?
“Take everything you want and put it in a bag,” she said finally. She could barely believe the words coming out of her mouth, but in that instant, they seemed like the only appropriate things to say. “Wrap it in leaves so that the blood doesn’t leak. Eat only when no one is looking. If they catch you again, they’ll tear you apart, and I won’t be able to help you. Do you understand?”
Pipaji’s tongue darted out to lick the blood off the corner of her bottom lip.
“Do you understand?” Rin repeated.
“Whatever you say,” Pipaji muttered. She gave Jiuto a nod. Without another word, they knelt back over the body and resumed deftly pulling the organs out of the carcass.
Pipaji and Jiuto were not the only ones who resorted to eating human flesh. They were just the first. The longer the march stretched on, the more it became apparent that their food supplies were not going to last. The army was subsisting on one ration of dried salted mayau and one cup of rice gruel a day. They foraged the best they could—some of the soldiers had even started swallowing tree bark to stifle their pangs of hunger—but at this altitude, vegetation was scarce and there was no wildlife in sight.
So Rin wasn’t surprised when rumors circulated of corpses—usually victims of frostbite or starvation—divvied up and eaten raw, roasted, or parceled out for the road.
“Say nothing,” Kitay advised her. “If you sanction it, you’ll horrify them. If you denounce it, they’ll resent you. But if you keep quiet, you get plausible deniability.”
Rin couldn’t see what other choice she had. She’d known this march would be hard, but their prospects looked bleaker with each passing day. Morale, which had been so blazingly strong at the start of their journey, began to wilt. Whispers of dissent and complaints about Rin riddled the column. She doesn’t know where she’s going. Sinegard-trained, and she can’t find her way through a damned mountain. She’s led us up here to die. Order collapsed along the column. Troops routinely ignored, or didn’t hear, her commands. It took nearly an hour to rouse the camp into marching in the mornings. At first, the deserters numbered in handfuls, and then dozens.
Venka suggested sending search parties to chase them down, but Rin couldn’t see the point. What good would that do? The deserters had sentenced themselves to death—alone, they would freeze or starve in days. Their numbers made no difference to her ultimate victory or defeat.
All that mattered was Mount Tianshan. Their future was laid out in stark black and white now—either they woke Riga, or they died.
The days began blurring together. There was no difference between one instance of monotonous suffering and the next. Rin, fatigued beyond belief, started feeling a profound sense of detachment. She felt like an observer, not a participant, like she was watching a shadow puppet show about a beautiful and suicidal struggle, something that had already happened in the past and been enshrined in myth.
They weren’t humans, they were stories; they were paintings winding their way across wall scrolls. The terrain transformed around them as they marched, became brighter, sharper, and lovelier, as if warping to match the mythic status of their journey. The snow gleamed a purer white. The mist grew thicker, and the mountains it shrouded seemed less solid, more blurred at the edges. The sky turned a paler shade of blue, not the cheery hue of a bright summer’s day but the faded shade of water paint swept absently onto canvas with a thick rabbit-hair brush.
They saw crimson birds whose tails swept thrice the length of their bodies. They saw human faces etched into tree bark, not carved but organically grown—calm, beatific expressions that watched them go with no urgency or resentment. They saw pale white deer who stood utterly still when they approached, calm enough for Rin to run her hand over their soft ears. They tried hunting them for food, to no avail—the deer fled at the sight of steel. And Rin felt secretly relieved, because it didn’t feel right to devour anything that beautiful.
Rin didn’t know if they were hallucinations brought on by feverish fatigue. But if they were, then they were group hallucinations—shared visions of a lovely, mythical, incipient nation in becoming.
For it was wonderful to remember that this land could still be so breathtakingly beautiful, that there was more sewn into the heart of the Twelve Provinces than blood and steel and dirt. That centuries of warfare later, this country was still a canvas for the gods, that their celestial essence still seeped through the cracks between worlds.
Perhaps this was why the Hesperians so badly wanted to make Nikan their own. Rin could only picture their country by extrapolating from their abandoned colonial quarters, but she envisioned it as a dull place, gray and drab as the cloaks they wore, and maybe that was why they had to erect their garish cities of flashing lights and screaming noises: to deny the fact that their world was fundamentally without divinity.
Maybe that was what had driven the Federation, too. Why else would you murder children and hold a country hostage except for the promise of learning to speak to gods? The great empires of the waking world were driven so mad by what they had forgotten that they decided to slaughter the only people who could still dream.
That was what kept Rin going when her feet had gone so numb from the cold she could barely feel them as she dragged them through the snow, when her temples throbbed so badly from the glaring white that bright red flashes darted through her vision—the idea that survival was promised, victory was foreordained, because the truth of the universe was on their side. Because only the chaotic, incomprehensible Pantheon could explain the vast and eerie beauty of this land, which was something the Hesperians, with their obsessive, desperate clinging to order, could never understand.
So Rin marched because she knew that, at the end of their journey, divine salvation was waiting. She marched because every step brought her closer to the gods.
She marched until one morning Kitay abruptly stopped a few steps ahead of her. She tensed, heart already racing with dread, but when he turned around, she saw he was smiling.
He pointed, and she followed his gaze down the path to a single blue orchid pushing tentatively through the snow.
She exhaled and choked down the urge to cry.
Orchids couldn’t grow at the altitudes at which they’d been marching. They could only grow in the lower elevations, in the valleys and foothills.
They’d crossed into Dog Province. They’d begun their descent. From here on out, they were marching down.
Chapter 20
Of all twelve provinces, Dog Province was the true wasteland of the Empire.
Rat Province was dirt poor, Monkey Province was an agriculturally barren backwater, and Boar Province was a lawless plain crawling with bandits. But Dog Province was remote, mountainous, and so sparsely populated that the yaks outnumbered the people—the only reason, perhaps, that it had not yet been invaded by the Republic.
When Rin and her troops descended the mountains over the border into the Scarigon Plateau, they saw no sign of human civilization.
She supposed it had been a foolish hope, that the Dog Warlord and his army might be waiting for them with open arms at the foothills of the Baolei Mountains. That rendezvous had always been an empty dream, a lie she’d told the southerners from the outset of the march to give them a reason to keep going. It had just been so long since they’d escaped from the Anvil that she’d started to believe it herself.