Arlong. These fields were going to save her country.
She sank to her knees, pressed a palm to her forehead, and laughed.
“I don’t understand.” Kitay joined her by her side. “Who . . .”
“They listened,” she murmured. “They knew.”
She seized him by the hand and led him toward the flat, humble outline of the village on the horizon.
A crowd was forming near the gates. They’d seen her coming; they’d come out to welcome her.
“I’m here,” she told them. And then, because they could not have possibly heard her from this distance, she sent a flare into the air: a massive, undulating phoenix, wings unfolding slowly against the shimmering blue sky, to prove that she was back.
Tikany, against all odds, had survived. Despite the famine and firebombs, many of its residents had stayed, largely because there was nowhere else for them to go. Over months it had become the center of its own beehive as residents from smaller, decimated villages came with their homes and livelihoods loaded up on carts to settle in one of the lean-to shacks that now formed the bulk of the township. Famine had not hit Tikany as hard as it had other parts of the Empire—during their occupation, the Mugenese had stockpiled an astonishing amount of rice, which Tikany’s survivors had judiciously rationed out over the months.
Rin learned from the de facto village leadership that the decision to plant opium had been made in the wake of Nezha’s firebombing. Grain did not grow well in Rooster Province, but opium flowers did, and poppy in these quantities, in a country where everyone needed respite from pain, was worth its weight in gold.
They’d known she’d come back. They’d known she would need leverage. Tikany, the least likely of places, had kept its faith, had invested its future in Rin’s victory.
Now she stood facing the assembled villagers in the town square, the several thousand thin faces who had handed her the keys to the final stage of her war, and she loved them so much that she could cry.
“This war is ours to win,” she said.
She gazed over the sea of faces, gauging their reaction. Her throat felt dry. She coughed, but a lump remained, sitting heavy on her prepared words.
“The Young Marshal has fled, of all places, to the Dead Island,” she said. “He knows he isn’t safe anywhere on Nikara soil. The Consortium have lost their faith in the Republic, and they are inches from pulling away entirely. All we need is to make our final drive. We just—we just need to last a little longer.”
She swallowed involuntarily, then coughed. Her words floated, awkward and hesitant, over dry air.
She was nervous. Why was she so nervous? This was nothing new; she had rallied gathered ranks before. She’d screamed invectives against Vaisra and the Republic while thousands cheered. She’d whipped a crowd up to such frenzy once that they’d torn a man apart, and the words had come so easily then.
But the air in Tikany felt different, not charged with the exhilarating thrill of battle, of hate, but dead with exhaustion.
She blinked. This couldn’t be right. She was in her hometown, speaking to troops who had followed her to hell and back and villagers who had turned the fields scarlet for her. For her. They thought her divine. They adored her. She’d razed the Mugenese for them; she’d conquered Arlong for them.
But then why did she feel like a fraud?
She coughed again. Tried to inject some force into her words. “This war—”
Someone in the crowd shouted over her. “I thought we won the war.”
She broke off, stunned.
No one had ever interrupted her before.
Her eyes roved over the square. She couldn’t find the source of the voice. It could have belonged to any one of these faces; they all looked equally unsympathetic, equally resentful.
They looked like they agreed.
She felt a hot burst of impatience. Did they not understand the threat? Hadn’t they been here when Nezha dropped a hundred tons of explosives on unarmed, celebrating civilians?
“There is no armistice,” she said. “The Hesperians are still trying to kill me. They watch from the skies, waiting to see us fail, hoping for an opportunity to take us down in one fell swoop. What happens next is the great test of the Nikara nation. If we seize this chance, then we seize our future. The Hesperians are weak, they’re unprepared, and they’re reeling from what we did at Arlong. I just need you behind me for this final stretch—”
“Fuck the Hesperians!” Another
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