way his eyebrows arched. The way his scars curled over his right cheek to resemble a poppy flower.
He was so much taller than she was. She had to crane her head to look up at him. When had he gotten so tall? At Sinegard they had been about the same height, nearly the same build, until their second year, when he’d started bulking up at a ridiculous pace. But then, at Sinegard they had just been children, stupid, naive, playing at war games that they had never seriously believed would become their reality.
Rin turned her gaze to the river. The Seagrim had moved inland, was traveling upstream on the Murui now. It moved upriver at a snail’s pace as the men at the paddle boards wheeled furiously to push the ship through the sludgy mud.
She squinted at the banks. She wasn’t sure if she was just hallucinating, but the closer they got, the more clearly she could make out little shapes moving in the distance, like ants crawling up logs.
“Are those people?” she asked.
They were. She could see them clearly now—men and women stooped beneath the sacks they carried over their shoulders, young children staggering barefoot along the riverside, and little babies strapped in bamboo baskets to their parents’ backs.
“Where are they going?”
Nezha looked faintly surprised that she had even asked. “They’re refugees.”
“From where?”
“Everywhere. Golyn Niis wasn’t the only city the Federation sacked. They destroyed the whole countryside. The entire time we were holding that pointless siege at Khurdalain they were marching southward, setting villages ablaze after they’d ripped them apart for supplies.”
Rin was still hung up on the first thing he’d said. “So Golyn Niis wasn’t . . .”
“No. Not even close.”
She couldn’t even fathom the death count this implied. How many people had lived in Golyn Niis? She multiplied that by the provinces and came up with a number nearing a million.
And now, all across the country, the Nikara refugees were shuffling back to their homes. The tide of bodies that had flowed from the war-ravaged cities to the barren northwest had started to turn.
“‘You asked how large my sorrow is,’” Nezha recited. Rin recognized the line—it was from a poem she’d studied a lifetime ago, a lament by an Emperor whose last words became exam material for future generations. “‘And I answered, like a river in spring flowing east.’”
As they floated up the Murui, crowds of people lined the banks with their arms outstretched, screaming at the Seagrim.
“Please, just up to the edge of the province . . .”
“Take my girls, leave me but take the girls . . .”
“You have space! You have space, damn you . . .”
Nezha tugged gently at Rin’s wrist. “Let’s go belowdecks.”
She shook her head. She wanted to see.
“Why can’t someone send boats?” she asked. “Why can’t we bring them home?”
“They’re not going home, Rin. They’re running.”
Dread pooled in her stomach. “How many are still out there?”
“The Mugenese?” Nezha sighed. “They’re not a single army. They’re individual brigades. They’re cold, hungry, frustrated, and they have nowhere to go. They’re thieves and bandits now.”
“How many?” she repeated.
“Enough.”
She made a fist. “I thought I brought peace.”
“You brought victory,” he said. “This is what happens after. The Warlords can hardly keep control over their home provinces. Food shortages. Rampant crime—and it’s not just the Federation bandits. The Nikara are at each other’s throats. Scarcity will do that to you.”
“So of course you think it’s a good time to fight another war.”
“Another war is inevitable. But maybe we can prevent the next big one. The Republic will have growing pains. But if we can fix the foundation—if we can institute structures that make the next invasion less likely and keep future generations safe—then we’ll have succeeded.”
Foundation. Growing pains. Future generations. Such abstract concepts, she thought; concepts that wouldn’t compute for the average peasant. Who cared who sat on the throne at Sinegard when vast stretches of the Empire were underwater?
The children’s cries suddenly seemed unbearable.
“Couldn’t we give them something?” she asked. “Money? Don’t you have stacks of silver?”
“So they could spend it where?” Nezha asked. “You could give them more ingots than you could count, but they’ve got nowhere to buy goods. There’s no supply.”
“Food, then?”
“We tried doing that. They just tear each other to pieces trying to get at it. It’s not a pretty sight.”
She rested her chin on her elbows. Behind them the flock of humans receded; ignored, irrelevant, betrayed.