specifically ordered that they be treated well, and no one wanted to attack for fear of causing irreparable injury.
“Please,” Augus whispered.
Rin faltered. She wanted to dart forward and pull his attacker off. But the Republican soldiers were holding back, waiting for orders. She couldn’t jump alone into the fray; they’d tear her apart.
She stood, trident raised, watching as Augus’s face turned a grotesque blue.
“Out of the way!” Tarcquet and his guard pushed through the commotion, arquebuses raised.
Tarcquet took one look at the prisoners and shouted an order. A round of shots rang through the air. Eight men dropped to the ground. The air curdled with the familiar smell of fire powder. The missionaries broke free, gasping for breath.
“What is this?” Jinzha forced his way through the crowd. “What’s happened?”
“General Jinzha.” Tarcquet signaled to his men, who lowered their weapons. “Good of you to show up.”
Jinzha surveyed the bodies on the floor. “You’ve cost me good labor.”
Tarcquet cocked his arquebus. “I would improve your brig security.”
“Our brig security is fine.” Jinzha looked white-faced with fury. “Your missionaries weren’t supposed to be down there.”
Augus rose to his feet, coughing. He reached for Jinzha’s arm. “Prisoners deserve mercy, too. You can’t just—”
“Fuck your mercy.” Jinzha pushed Augus away. “You’re on my ship. You’ll obey orders, or you can take a swim in the river.”
“Don’t speak to my people like that.” Tarcquet stepped in between them. The difference between him and Jinzha was almost laughable—Jinzha was tall by Nikara standards, but Tarcquet towered over him. “Perhaps your father didn’t make it clear. We are diplomats on your ship. If you want the Consortium to even consider funding your pathetic war, you will treat every Hesperian here like royalty.”
Jinzha’s throat bobbed. Rin watched the anger pass through his expression; saw Jinzha shove down the impulse to react. Tarcquet held all the leverage. Tarcquet could not be reproached.
Rin derived some small satisfaction from that. It felt good to see Jinzha humiliated, treated with the same condescension with which he’d always treated her.
“Am I understood?” Tarcquet asked.
Jinzha glared up at him.
Tarcquet cocked his head. “Say ‘yes, sir’ or ‘no, sir.’”
Jinzha had murder written across his face. “Yes, sir.”
Tensions ran high for several days afterward. A pair of Hesperian soldiers began following the missionaries around wherever they went, and the Nikara kept their wary distance. But unless one of theirs was in danger, Tarcquet’s soldiers did not fire their weapons.
Tarcquet continued his constant assessment of Jinzha’s campaign. Rin saw him every now and then on deck, obnoxiously marking notes into a small book while he surveyed the fleet moving up the river. And Rin wondered what he thought of them—their unresponsive gods, their weapons that seemed so primitive, and their bloody, desperate war.
Two months into the campaign, they sailed at last into Rat Province. Here their string of victories came to an end.
Rat Province’s Second Division was the intelligence branch of the Militia, and its espionage officers were the best in the Twelve Provinces. By now, it had also had several months of warning time to put together a better defensive strategy than Hare or Ram Provinces had been able to mount.
The Republic arrived to find villages already abandoned, granaries emptied, and fields scorched. The Rat Warlord had either recalled his civilians to metropolitan centers farther upriver or sent them fleeing to other provinces. Jinzha’s soldiers found clothing, furniture, and children’s toys scattered across the grassy roads. Whatever couldn’t be taken was ruined. In village after village they found burned, useless seed grain and rotting piles of livestock carcasses.
The Rat Warlord wasn’t trying to mount a defense of his borders. He had simply retreated to Baraya, his heavily barricaded capital city. He planned to starve the fleet out. And Baraya had a better chance of success than Xiashang had—its gates were thicker, its residents better prepared, and it was more than a mile inland, which neutralized the attack capabilities of the Shrike and the Crake.
“We should just stop here and turn back.” Kitay paced his office floor, frustrated. “Ride out the winter. We’ll starve otherwise.”
But Jinzha had become increasingly irascible, less and less willing to listen to his advisers and more adamant that they had to storm forward.
“He wants to move on Baraya?” Rin asked.
“He wants to press north as fast as we can.” Kitay tugged anxiously at his hair. “It’s a terrible idea. But he won’t listen to me.”
“Then who’s he listening to?”
“Any of the leadership who agree with him. Molkoi especially. He’s in the old guard—I