Rin peered down at the map. The Autumn Palace was hopelessly large, arranged like a maze within a conch shell, a spiraling complex of narrow corridors and dead ends, with twisting hallways and tunnels constructed in every direction.
The escape routes were marked with green lines. She narrowed her eyes, muttering to herself. A few more minutes and she’d have them memorized. She’d always been good at memorizing things, and now that she was off opium she was finding it easier and easier to focus on mental tasks.
She cringed at the thought of giving that up, even for an hour.
“You make this sound so easy,” she said. “Why hasn’t anyone tried to kill Daji before?”
“She’s the Empress,” said Vaisra, as if that were explanation enough.
“She’s one woman whose sole talent is being very pretty,” Rin said. “I don’t understand.”
“Because you’re too young,” Eriden said. “You weren’t alive when the Trifecta were at the peak of their power. You don’t know the fear. You couldn’t trust anyone around you, even your own family. If you whispered a word of treason against Emperor Riga, then the Vipress and the Gatekeeper would be sure to have you destroyed. Not just imprisoned—obliterated.”
Vaisra nodded. “In those years, entire families were ruined, executed, or exiled, and their lineages wiped from history. Daji oversaw this all without blinking an eye. There is a reason why the Warlords still bow down before her, and it’s not just because she is pretty.”
Something about Vaisra’s expression gave Rin pause. Then she realized it was the first time she had ever seen him look scared.
She wondered what Daji had done to him.
Someone knocked on the door just then. She jumped in her seat.
“Come in,” Vaisra called.
A junior officer poked his head in. “Nezha sent me to alert you. We’ve arrived.”
Near the end of his reign, the Red Emperor built the Autumn Palace in the northern city of Lusan. It was never meant to be a capital or an administrative center; it was too far removed from the central provinces to properly govern. It served merely as a resort for his favorite concubines and their children, an escape for the days when Sinegard became so scorching hot that their skin threatened to darken within seconds of stepping outside.
Under the Empress Su Daji’s regime, Lusan had been a place for court officials to harbor their wives and families safely away from the dangers at court, until it turned into the interim capital after Sinegard and then Golyn Niis were razed to the ground.
As the Seagrim sailed toward the city, the Murui narrowed to a thinner and thinner stream, which forced them to move at a slower and slower pace until they weren’t sailing so much as crawling toward the Autumn Palace.
Rin could see the city walls from miles off. Lusan seemed to be lit from within by some unearthly afternoon glow. Everything was somehow golden; it was like the rest of the Empire had dulled to shades of black, white, and bloody red during the war, and Lusan had soaked up all the surrounding color, shining brighter than anything she had seen in months.
Close to the city walls Rin saw a woman walking down the riverbank with buckets of dye and heavy rolls of cloth strapped to her back. Rin knew the cloth was silk from the way it glimmered when it was unrolled, so soft that she could almost imagine the butterfly-wing texture on the backs of her fingers.
How could Lusan have silk? The rest of the country was garbed in unwashed, threadbare scraps. All along the Murui, Rin had seen naked children and babies wrapped in lily pads in some effort to preserve their dignity.
Farther downriver, fishing sampans glided up and down the winding waterways. Each boat carried several large birds—white creatures with massive beaks—hooked to the boats on strings.
Nezha had to explain to Rin what the birds were for. “They’ve got a string around their necks, see? The bird swallows the fish; the farmer pulls the fish out of the bird’s neck. The bird goes in again, always hungry, always too dumb to realize that everything it catches goes into the fish basket and that all it’ll ever get are slops.”
Rin made a face. “That seems inefficient. Why not just use a net?”
“It is inefficient,” Nezha agreed. “But they’re not fishing for staples, they’re hunting for delicacies. Sweetfish.”
“Why?”
He shrugged.
Rin already knew the answer. Why not hunt for delicacies? Lusan was clearly untouched by the refugee crisis that had swept the rest