haven’t got enough clothes, blankets, medicine, grain, or anything else.”
“Up until now the southerners were producing the grain.” Rin felt obligated to point that out.
“And now they’ve run from home, so no one is producing food,” Venka said. “Doesn’t really help us. Hey, what’s this?”
She reached gingerly into the water and drew a barrel out onto the dock. She set it on the ground. Out tumbled what at first looked like a soggy bundle of clothing. “Gross.”
“What is it?” Rin stepped closer to get a better look and immediately regretted it.
“It’s dead, look.” Venka held the baby out to show Rin the infant’s sickly yellow skin, the bumpy evidence of relentless mosquito attacks, and the red rashes that covered half its body. Venka slapped its cheeks. No response. She held it over the river as if to throw it back in.
The infant started to whimper.
An ugly expression twisted across Venka’s face. She looked so suddenly, murderously hateful that Rin was sure she was about to hurl the infant headfirst into the harbor.
“Give it to me,” Rin said quickly. She pulled the infant from Venka’s arms. A sour smell hit her nose. She gagged so hard she nearly dropped the infant, but got a grip on herself.
The baby was swaddled in clothes large enough to fit an adult. That meant someone had loved it. They wouldn’t have parted with the clothes otherwise—it was now the dead of winter, and even in the warm south, the nights got cold enough that refugees traveling without shelter could easily freeze to death.
Someone had wanted this baby to survive. Rin owed it a fighting chance.
She strode hastily to the end of the dock and handed the bundle off to the first soldier she saw. “Here.”
The soldier stumbled under the sudden weight. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“I don’t know, just see to it that it’s cared for,” Rin said. “Take it to the infirmary, if they’ll let you.”
The soldier gripped the infant tightly in his arms and set off at a run. Rin returned to the river and resumed dragging her spear halfheartedly through the water.
She wanted very badly to smoke. She couldn’t get the taste of corpses out of her mouth.
Venka broke the silence first. “What are you looking at me like that for?”
She looked defensive. Furious. But that was Venka’s default reaction to everything; she’d rather die than admit vulnerability. Rin suspected Venka was thinking about the child that she’d lost, and she wasn’t sure what to say, only that she felt terribly sorry for her.
“You knew it was alive,” Rin said finally.
“Yes,” Venka snapped. “So what?”
“And you were going to kill it.”
Venka swallowed hard and jabbed her spear back into the water. “That thing doesn’t have a future. I was doing it a favor.”
Wartime Arlong was an ugly thing. Despair settled over the capital like a shroud as the threat of armies closing in from both the north and the south grew closer every day.
Food was strictly rationed, even for citizens of Dragon Province. Every man, woman, and child who wasn’t in the Republican Army was conscripted for labor. Most were sent to work in the forges or the shipyards. Even small children were put to task cutting linen strips for the infirmary.
Sympathy was the greatest scarcity. The southern refugees, crammed behind their barrier, were uniformly despised by soldiers and civilians alike. Food and supplies were offered begrudgingly, if at all. Rin discovered that if soldiers weren’t positioned to guard the supply deliveries, they would never reach the camps.
The refugees latched on to any potentially sympathetic advocates they could. Once word of Rin’s connection to the Fangs spread, she became an involuntarily appointed, unofficial champion of refugee interests in Arlong. Every time she was near the district she was accosted by refugees, all pleading for a thousand different things that she couldn’t obtain—more food, more medicine, more materials for cooking fires and tents.
She hated the position they’d thrown her into because it led only to frustration from both sides. The Republican leadership grew irritated because she kept making impossible requests for basic human necessities, and the refugees started resenting her because she could never deliver.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Rin complained bitterly to Kitay. “Vaisra’s the one who always said we had to treat prisoners well. And this is how we treat our own people?”
“It’s because the refugees have no strategic advantage to them whatsoever, unless you count the mild inconvenience that their stacked-up bodies might present Daji’s army,” Kitay said.