of the liberated—she wasn’t that naive. She knew she’d assumed responsibility for a broken country, wrecked in every way by years of constant warfare. She knew mass displacement, crop failure, famine, and banditry were problems that she’d have to deal with eventually, but she’d slotted them to the back of her mind, deprioritized against the far more urgent problem of the impending Hesperian attack.
They were far harder to ignore when they stared her in the face.
The Southern Army had just crossed over the border to Rooster Province when supplicants began coming out to meet them on the roadside. It seemed word had spread through the village networks about Rin’s return, and as the marching column wound into the southern heartland, large crowds started appearing on every stretch of the road.
But Rin found no welcome parties on her journey. Instead she was witness to the consequences of her civil war.
Her first encounter with starvation shocked her. She had seen bodies in almost every state of destruction—burned, dismembered, dissected, bloated. But she had never in her life witnessed famine this severe. The bodies that approached her wagon—living bodies, she realized in shock—were stretched and distorted, more like a child’s confused sketch of human anatomy than any human bodies she’d ever encountered. Their hands and feet were swollen like grapefruits, bloated extremities hanging implausibly from stick-thin limbs. Many of them appeared unable to walk; instead they crawled and rolled toward Rin’s wagon in a slow, horrific advance that made Rin burn with shame.
“Stop,” she ordered the driver.
Warily he regarded the approaching crowd. “General . . .”
“I said stop.”
He reined the horses to a halt. Rin climbed out of the wagon.
The starving civilians began to cluster toward her. She felt a momentary thrill of fear—there were so many of them, and their faces were so unnaturally hollow, so caked with dirt that they looked like monsters—but quickly pushed it away. These weren’t monsters, these were her people. They’d suffered because of her war. They needed her help.
“Here,” she said, pulling a piece of hard jerky from her pocket.
In retrospect she should have realized how stupid it was to offer food to a horde of starving people when clearly she didn’t have enough to go around.
She wasn’t thinking. She’d seen miserable, gnawing hunger, and she’d wanted to alleviate it. She didn’t expect that they’d begin stampeding, pulling one another to the ground, bare feet crushing frail limbs as they surged forth. In an instant, dozens of hands reached toward her, and she was so startled she dropped the jerky and stumbled back.
They fell on the food like sharks.
Terrified, and ashamed by her terror, Rin clambered back on the wagon.
Without asking, the driver urged the horses forward. The wagon lurched into a speedy pace. The starving bodies did not follow.
Heart pounding, Rin hugged her knees to her chest and swallowed down the urge to vomit.
She felt Kitay’s eyes on her. She couldn’t bear to meet them. But he was merciful, and said nothing. When they stopped for dinner that night, the food tasted like ashes.
The roadside parties became a daily sight as they drew closer to Tikany. It didn’t matter that the wagons never stopped, never distributed rations to pleading hands because their own supplies were running so short. They had just enough bags of grain and rice to keep the army alive for three more months; they could spare nothing out of charity. The soldiers learned to march with their eyes trained forward as if they hadn’t seen and hadn’t heard. But still the crowds persisted, arms stretched out, murmuring pleas in breathy whispers because they didn’t have the energy to shout.
The children were the hardest to look at because their bodies were the most distorted. Their bellies were so swollen they looked pregnant, while every other part of them had shriveled to the width of reeds. Their heads bobbled on their thin necks like wooden toys Rin used to see at market. The only other parts of them that did not shrink were their eyes. Their beseeching, sorrowful eyes protruded from shrunken skulls, as if, with their limbs whittled away, they had been reduced to those desperate gazes.
Gradually, through interview after interview with those starving civilians who could still muster the energy to talk, Rin and Kitay learned the full picture of how bad famine had grown in the south.
It wasn’t just a lean year. There simply wasn’t any food at all. Fresh meat had been the first to disappear, then spices and salts.
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