Navy, and his ships had been repurposed for Imperial use, or Tsolin had defected.
“I will take your silence to mean the worst,” Baji said.
Captain Dalain ordered an immediate retreat back to Arlong. The soldiers dismantled their camp in minutes. Paddling downstream, they could be back to warn Arlong within a day, but Rin didn’t know if advance warning would even make a difference. The addition of Tsolin’s ships meant the Imperial Navy had nearly doubled in size. It didn’t matter how good Arlong’s defenses were. They couldn’t possibly fight off a fleet that big.
Cannon fire from Shayang continued throughout the night, then stopped abruptly just before dawn. At sunrise they saw a series of smoke signals from Nezha’s soldiers unfurling in the distant sky.
“Shayang’s gone,” Dalain interpreted. “The Harrier’s grounded, but the survivors are falling back to Arlong.”
“Should we go to their aid?” someone asked.
Dalain paused. “No. Row faster.”
Rin pulled her oar through the muddy water, trying not to imagine the worst. Nezha might be fine. Shayang hadn’t been a suicide mission—Nezha had been instructed to hold the fort for as long as he could before escaping into the forest. And if he were seriously injured, the Murui would come to his aid. His god wouldn’t desert him. She had to believe that.
Around noon, they heard a distant round of cannon fire once more.
“That’ll be the warship,” Ramsa said. “They’re trying to blow their way through.”
“Good,” Rin said.
Sinking the warship had perhaps been Kitay’s best idea. The Imperial Fleet couldn’t simply blast it to bits—the bulk of the structure lay underwater, where cannon fire couldn’t touch it. Exploding the top layers would only make it harder to extract the sunken bottom from the Murui.
Half an hour later, the cannon fire stopped. The Militia must have caught on. Now they would have to send in divers with hooks to trawl and clear the river. That might take them two days, three at the most.
But after that, they would resume their slow but relentless journey to Arlong. And without Tsolin, there was nothing left to stop them.
“We know,” Kitay said upon Rin’s return. He’d rushed out to greet her at the harbor. He looked utterly disheveled; his hair stood up in every direction as if he’d spent the last few hours pacing and tugging at his bangs. “Found out two hours ago.”
“But why?” she cried. “And when?”
Kitay shrugged helplessly. “All I know is we’re fucked. Come on.”
She followed him at a run to the palace. Inside the main stateroom, Eriden and a handful of officers stood clustered around a map that was no longer even close to accurate, because it had simply erased Tsolin’s ships from the board.
But the Republic hadn’t just lost ships. This wasn’t a neutral setback. It would have been better if Tsolin had simply retreated, or if he had been killed. But this defection meant that the entire fleet they had relied on now augmented Daji’s forces.
Captain Eriden replaced the pieces meant to represent Tsolin’s fleet with red ones and stood back from the table. “That’s what we’re dealing with.”
No one had anything to say. The numbers differential was almost laughable. Rin imagined a glistening snake coiling its body around a small rodent, squeezing until the light dimmed from its eyes.
“That’s a lot of red,” she muttered.
“No shit,” Kitay said.
“Where’s Vaisra?” she asked.
Kitay drew her to the side and murmured into her ear so Eriden wouldn’t hear. “Alone in his office, probably hurling vases at the wall. He asked not to be disturbed.” He pointed to a scroll lying on the edge of the table. “Tsolin sent that letter this morning. That’s when we found out.”
Rin picked the scroll up and unrolled it. She already knew its contents, but she needed to read Tsolin’s words herself out of some morbid curiosity, the same way she couldn’t help taking a closer look at decomposing animal carcasses.
This is not the future I wished for either of us.
Tsolin wrote in a thin, lovely script. Each stroke tapered carefully to a fine point, an effortless calligraphic style that took years to master. This wasn’t a letter written in haste. This was a letter written laboriously by a man who still cared about decorum.
All across the page Rin saw characters crossed out and rewritten where water had blotted the ink. Tsolin had wept as he wrote.
You must recognize that a ruler’s first obligation is to his people. I chose the path that would lead to the least bloodshed. Perhaps this has stifled a