few men a little pain, do it in public, and it’ll all be all right.”
“Does it make it all right to you?” Rin asked.
Kitay shrugged. “They poisoned a fucking river.”
Nezha wrapped his arms around his knees. “Salkhi says you were in there for a while.”
Rin nodded. “We saw Niang. Meant to tell you that.”
Nezha blinked, surprised. “And how is she?”
“Dead,” said Kitay. He was still staring at the men on the posts.
Nezha watched him for a moment, then raised an eyebrow at Rin. She understood his question. She shook her head.
“I hadn’t thought about fighting our own classmates,” Nezha murmured after a pause. “Who else do we know in the north? Kureel, Arda . . .”
“My cousins,” Kitay said without turning around. “Han. Tobi. Most of the rest of our class, if they’re still alive.”
“I suppose it’s not easy going to war against friends,” Nezha said.
“Yes, it is,” Kitay said. “They have a choice. Niang made her choice. She just happened to be dead fucking wrong.”
Chapter 16
The guardsmen had stopped twitching by sunset.
Jinzha ordered their bodies burned as a final display. But there was far less retributive pleasure in watching corpses burn compared to hearing men scream, and eventually the smell of cooked meat grew so pungent on the beach that the soldiers started migrating back toward their ships.
“Well, that was fun.” Rin stood up and brushed the crumbs off her uniform. “Let’s go back.”
“You’re going to sleep already?” Kitay asked.
“I’m not staying here,” she said. “It reeks.”
“Not so fast,” Nezha said. “You’re off the Swallow. You’ve been reassigned to the Kingfisher.”
“Just her?” Kitay asked.
“No, all of you. Cike, too. Jinzha wants you for strategic consultation, and he thinks the Cike can do more damage from a warship. The Swallow’s not an attack boat.”
Rin glanced toward the Kingfisher, where Hesperian soldiers and Gray Company were clearly visible on deck.
“Yes, that’s intentional.” Nezha inferred the question from the exasperated look on her face. “They wanted to keep a closer eye on you.”
“I already let Petra prod me like an animal once a week,” Rin said. “I don’t want to see them when I’m trying to eat.”
Nezha held his hands up. “Jinzha’s orders. Nothing we can do.”
Rin suspected Captain Salkhi had also requested a transfer on grounds of disobedience. Salkhi had been deeply frustrated that the Cike had stormed the mission without her command, and Baji hadn’t helped things by pointing out that they wouldn’t have needed the rest of her troops regardless. Rin’s suspicion was confirmed when Jinzha took twenty minutes informing her and the Cike that they would follow his orders to the letter or find themselves tossed into the Murui.
“I don’t care that my father thinks the sun shines out of your ass,” he said. “You’ll act like soldiers or you’ll be punished as deserters.”
“Asshole,” Rin muttered as they left his office.
“He’s absolutely awful,” Kitay agreed. “It’s a rare person who makes Nezha look like the pleasant sibling.”
“I’m not saying I want him to drown in the Murui,” Ramsa said, “but I want him to drown in the Murui.”
With the fleet united, the Republic’s northern expedition began in earnest. Jinzha set a direct course that cut straight through Hare Province, which was agriculturally rich and comparatively weak. They would pick off the low-hanging fruit and solidify their supply base before taking on the full force of the Militia.
Hesperians aside, Rin found that traveling on the Kingfisher was a marked improvement from the Swallow. At least a hundred yards long from bow to stern, the Kingfisher was the only turtle boat in the fleet, with a closed top deck wrapped over by wood paneling and steel plates that made it nearly immune to cannon fire. The Kingfisher functioned as more or less a floating piece of armor, and for good reason—it carried Jinzha, Admiral Molkoi, almost all of the fleet’s senior strategists, and most of the Hesperian delegation.
Flanking the Kingfisher were a trio of sister galleys known as the Seahawks—warships with floating boards attached to the port and starboard sides shaped like a bird’s wings. Two were affectionately named the Lapwing and the Waxwing. The Griffon, commanded by Nezha, sailed directly behind the Kingfisher.
The other two galleys guarded the pride and battering ram of the fleet—two massive tower ships that someone with a bad sense of humor had named the Shrike and the Crake. They were monstrously large and top-heavy, outfitted with two mounted trebuchets and four rows of crossbows each.
The fleet proceeded up the Murui in a phalanx formation,