a weeklong affair involving twelve-course banquets, firecrackers, and endless parades. On campaign, a single day would have to be enough.
The troops disembarked to camp out in the winter landscape, glad for the chance to escape the close quarters of the cabins.
“See if you can get that fire going,” Nezha told Kitay.
The three of them sat huddled together on the riverbank, rubbing their hands together while Kitay fumbled with a piece of flint to start a fire.
Somewhere Nezha had scrounged up a small packet of glutinous rice flour. He poured the flour out into a tin bowl, added some water from his canteen, and stirred it together with his fingers until it formed a small ball of dough.
Rin prodded at the measly fire. It fizzled and sputtered; the next gust of wind put it out entirely. She groaned and reached for the flint. They wouldn’t have boiling water for at least half an hour. “You know, you could just take that to the kitchen and have them cook it.”
“The kitchen isn’t supposed to know I have it,” said Nezha.
“I see,” Kitay said. “The general is stealing rations.”
“The general is rewarding his best soldiers with a New Year’s treat,” Nezha said.
Kitay rubbed his hands up and down his arms. “Oh, so it’s nepotism.”
“Shut up,” Nezha mumbled. He rubbed harder at the ball of dough, but it crumbled to bits in his fingers.
“You haven’t added enough water.” Rin grabbed the bowl from him and kneaded the dough with one hand, adding droplets of water with the other until she had a wet, round ball the size of her fist.
“I didn’t know you could cook,” Nezha said curiously.
“I used to all the time. No one else was going to feed Kesegi.”
“Kesegi?”
“My little brother.” The memory of his face rose up in Rin’s mind. She forced it back down. She hadn’t seen him in four years. She didn’t know if he was still alive, and she didn’t want to wonder.
“I didn’t know you had a little brother,” Nezha said.
“Not a real brother. I was adopted.”
No one asked her to elaborate, so she didn’t. She rolled the dough into a snakelike strip between both palms, then broke it up piece by piece into thumb-sized lumps.
Nezha watched her hands with the wide-eyed fascination of a boy who’d clearly never been in the kitchen. “Those balls are smaller than the tangyuan I remember.”
“That’s because we don’t have red bean paste or sesame to fill them with,” she said. “Any chance you scrounged up some sugar?”
“You have to add sugar?” Nezha asked.
Kitay laughed.
“We’ll eat them bland, then,” she said. “It’ll taste better in little pieces. More to chew.”
When the water finally came to a boil, Rin dropped the rice flour balls into the tin cauldron and stirred them with a stick, creating a clockwise current so that they wouldn’t stick to each other.
“Did you know that cauldrons are a military invention?” Kitay asked. “One of the Red Emperor’s generals came up with the idea of tin cookware. Can you imagine? Before that, they were stuck trying to build fires large enough for giant bamboo steamers.”
“A lot of innovations came from the military,” Nezha mused. “Messenger pigeons, for one. And there’s a good argument that most of the advances in blacksmithing and medicine were a product of the Era of Warring States.”
“That’s cute.” Rin peered into the cauldron. “Proves that war’s good for something, then.”
“It’s a good theory,” Nezha insisted. “The country was in chaos during the Era of Warring States, sure. But look at what it brought us—Sunzi’s Principles of War; Mengzi’s theories on governance. Everything we know now about philosophy, about warfare and statecraft, was developed during that era.”
“So what’s the tradeoff?” Rin asked. “Thousands of people have to die so that we can get better at killing each other in the future?”
“You know that’s not my argument.”
“It’s what it sounds like. It sounds like you’re saying that people have to die for progress.”
“It’s not progress they’re dying for,” Nezha said. “Progress is the side effect. And military innovation doesn’t just mean we get better at killing each other, it means we get better equipped to kill whoever decides to invade us next.”
“And who do you think is going to invade us next?” Rin asked. “The Hinterlanders?”
“Don’t rule them out.”
“They’d have to stop killing each other off, first.”
The tribes of the northern Hinterlands had been at constant war since any of them could remember. In the days of the Red Emperor, the students of Sinegard had been trained