The Dragon Republic

And, of course, Altan. Her visions always came back to Altan. Sometimes he was burning on the pier; sometimes he was strapped to an operating table, groaning in pain, and sometimes he wasn’t injured at all, but those visions hurt the most, because then he would be talking to her—

Her cheek still burned from the force of Vaisra’s blow, but in her visions it was Altan who struck her, smiling cruelly as she stared stupidly up at him.

“You hit me,” she said.

“I had to,” he answered. “Someone had to. You deserved it.”

Did she deserve it? She didn’t know. The only version of the truth that mattered was Altan’s, and in her visions, Altan thought she deserved to die.

“You’re a failure,” he said.

“You can’t come close to what I did,” he said.

“It should have been you,” he said.

And under everything, the unspoken command: Avenge me, avenge me, avenge me …

Sometimes, fleetingly, the visions became a terribly twisted fantasy where Altan was not hurting her. A version where he loved her instead, and his strikes were caresses. But they were fundamentally irreconcilable because Altan’s nature was the same as the fire that had devoured him: if he didn’t burn everyone around him, then he wasn’t himself.

Sleep came finally through sheer exhaustion, but then only in short, fitful bursts; every time she nodded off she awoke screaming, and it was only by biting her knuckles and pressing herself into the corner that she could remain quiet throughout the night.

“Fuck you, Vaisra,” she whispered. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

But she couldn’t hate Vaisra, not really. It may have just been the sheer exhaustion; she was so racked with fear, grief, and rage that it was a trial to feel anything more. But she knew she needed this. She’d known for months she was killing herself and that she didn’t have the self-control to stop, that the only person who might have stopped her was dead.

She needed someone who was capable of controlling her like no one since Altan could. She hated to admit it, but she knew that in Vaisra she might have found a savior.

Daytime was worse. Sunlight was a constant hammer on Rin’s skull. But if she stayed cooped up in her quarters any longer, she would lose her mind, so Nezha accompanied her outside, keeping a tight grip on her arm while they walked along the top deck.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

It was a stupid question, asked more to break the silence than anything, because it should have been obvious how she was doing: she hadn’t slept, she was trembling uncontrollably from both exhaustion and withdrawal, and eventually, she hoped, she would reach the point where she simply fell unconscious.

“Talk to me,” she said.

“About what?”

“Anything. Literally anything else.”

So he started telling her court stories in a low murmur that wouldn’t give her a headache; trivial tales of gossip about who was fucking this Warlord’s wife, who had really fathered that Warlord’s son.

Rin watched him while he spoke. If she focused on the most minute details of his face, it distracted her from the pain, just for a little bit. The way his left eye opened just slightly wider than his right now. The 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.

“You want to hear a joke?” Nezha asked.

She shrugged.

“A Hesperian missionary once said the state of the average Nikara peasant is that of a man standing in a pond with water coming up to his chin,” said Nezha. “The slightest ripple is enough to put him underwater.”

Staring out over the Murui, Rin didn’t find that the least bit funny.

That night she decided to drown herself.

It wasn’t a premeditated decision so much as it was an act of sheer desperation. The pain had gotten so bad that she banged on the door to her room, begging for help, and then when the guards opened it she ducked past their arms and ran up the stairs and out the hatch to the main deck.

Guards ran after her, shouting for reinforcements, but she doubled her pace, bare heels slamming against the wood. Splinters lanced little shreds of pain through her skin—but that was good pain because it distracted her from her screaming mind, if only for half a second.

The railing of the prow came up to her chest. She gripped the edge and attempted to pull herself up, but her arms were weak—surprisingly weak, she didn’t remember getting that weak—and she sagged against the side. She tried again, hoisted herself far enough that her upper body draped over the edge. She hung there facedown for a moment, staring at the dark waves trailing alongside the Seagrim.

A pair of arms grasped her around the waist. She kicked and flailed, but they only tightened as they dragged her back down. She twisted her neck around.

“Suni?”

He walked backward from the prow, carrying her by the waist like a little child.

“Let go,” she panted. “Let me go!”

He put her down. She tried to break away but he grabbed her wrists, twisted her arms behind her back, and forced her down into a sitting position.

“Breathe,” he ordered. “Just breathe.”

She obeyed. The pain didn’t subside. The screaming didn’t quiet. She began to shake, but Suni didn’t let go of her arms. “If you just keep breathing, I’ll tell you a story.”

“I don’t want to hear a fucking story,” she said, gasping.

“Don’t want. Don’t think. Just breathe.” Suni’s voice was quiet, soothing. “Have you heard the story of the Monkey King and the moon?”

“No,” she whimpered.

“Then listen carefully.” He relaxed his grip ever so slightly, just enough that her arms stopped hurting. “Once upon a time, the Monkey King caught his first glimpse of the Moon Goddess.”

Rin shut her eyes and tried to focus on Suni’s voice. She’d never heard Suni talk this much. He was always so quiet, drawn into himself, as if he were unused to being in full occupation of his own mind that he wanted to relish the experience as much as possible. She’d forgotten how gentle he could sound.

He continued. “The Moon Goddess had just ascended to the heavens, and she was still drifting so close to Earth that you could see her face on the surface. She was such a lovely thing.”

Some old memory stirred in the back of her mind. She did know this story after all. They told it to children in Rooster Province during the Lunar Festival, every autumn when children ate moon cakes and solved riddles written on rice paper and floated lanterns in the sky.

“Then he fell in love,” she whispered.

“That’s right. The Monkey King was struck with the most terrible passion. He had to possess her, he thought, or he might die. So he sent his best soldiers to retrieve her from the ocean. But they failed, for the moon lived not in the ocean but in the sky, and they drowned.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why did they drown? Why did the moon kill them? Because they weren’t climbing to the sky to find her, they were diving into the water toward her reflection. But it was a fucking illusion they were grasping, not the real thing.” Suni’s voice hardened. It didn’t rise above a whisper, but he might as well have been shouting. “You spend your whole life chasing after some illusion you think is real, only to realize you’re a damned fool, and that if you reach any further, you’ll drown.”

He let go of her arms.

Rin turned around to face him. “Suni …”

“Altan liked that story,” he said. “I first heard it from him. He told it whenever he needed to calm me down. Said it would help if I thought of the Monkey King as just another person, someone gullible and foolish, and not a god.”

“The Monkey King is a dick,” she said.

“And the Moon Goddess is a bitch,” he said. “She sat there in the sky and watched the monkeys drowning over her. What does that say about her?”

That made her laugh. For a moment they both looked up at the moon. It was half-full, hiding behind a wispy dark cloud. Rin could imagine she was a woman, coy and devious, waiting to entice foolish men to their deaths.

She placed her hand over Suni’s. His hand was massive, rougher than wood bark, mottled with calluses. Her mind spun with a thousand unanswered questions.

Who made you like this?

And, more importantly, Do you regret it?

“You don’t have to suffer alone, you know.” Suni gave her one of his rare, slow smiles. “You’re not the only one.”

She would have smiled back, but then a wave of sickness hit her gut and she jerked her head down. Vomit splattered the deck.

Suni rubbed circles on her back while she spat blood-speckled phlegm on the planks. When she was done, he smoothed her vomit-covered hair out of her eyes as she sucked in air in great, racking sobs.

“You’re so strong,” he said. “Whatever you’re seeing, whatever you’re feeling, it’s not as strong as you are.”

But she didn’t want to be strong. Because if she were strong then she would be sober, and if she were sober she would have to consider the consequences of her actions. Then she’d have to look into the chasm. Then the Federation of Mugen would stop being an amorphous blur, and her victims would stop being meaningless numbers. Then she would recognize one death, what it meant, and then another, and then another and another and—

And if she wanted to recognize it, then she would have to be something, feel something other than anger, but she was afraid that if she stopped being angry then she might shatter.

She started to cry.

Suni smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “Just breathe,” he murmured. “Breathe for me. Can you do that? Breathe five times.”

One. Two. Three.

He continued to rub her back. “You just have to make it through the next five seconds. Then the next five. Then on and on.”

Four. Five.

And then another five. And those five, oddly enough, were just the littlest bit more bearable than the last.

“There you go,” Suni said after maybe a dozen counts to five. His voice was so low it was hardly a whisper. “There, look, you’ve done it.”

She breathed, and counted, and wondered how Suni knew exactly what to say.

She wondered if he had done this before with Altan.

“She’ll be all right,” Suni said.

Rin looked up to see who he was talking to, and saw Vaisra standing in the shadows.

It couldn’t have taken him long to respond to the soldiers’ calls. Had he been there the entire time, watching without speaking?

“I heard you came out to get some air,” he said.

She wiped vomit off her cheek with the back of her hand. Vaisra’s gaze flickered to her stained clothing and back to her face. She couldn’t read his expression.

“I’ll be okay,” she whispered.

“Will you?”

“I’ll take care of her,” Suni said.

A brief pause. Vaisra gave Suni a curt nod.

After another moment Suni helped her up and walked her back to her cabin. He kept one arm around her shoulders, warm, solid, comforting. The ship rocked against a particularly violent wave, and she staggered into his side.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be sorry,” Suni said. “And don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

Five days later the Seagrim sailed over a submerged town. At first when Rin saw the tops of buildings emerging from the river she thought they were driftwood, or rocks. Then they got close enough that she could see the curving roofs of drowned pagodas, thatched houses lying under the surface. An entire village peeked up at her through river silt.

Then she saw the bodies—half-eaten, bloated and discolored, all with empty sockets because the glutinous eyes had already been nibbled away. They blocked up the river, decomposing at such a rate that the crew had to sweep away the maggots that threatened to climb on board.

Sailors lined up at the prow to shift bodies aside with long poles to make way for the ship. The corpses started piling up on the river’s sides. Every few hours sailors had to climb down and drag them into a pile before the Seagrim could move—a duty the crew drew lots for with dread.

“What happened here?” Rin asked. “Did the Murui run its banks?”

“No. Dam breach.” Nezha looked pale with fury. “Daji had the dam destroyed to flood the Murui river valley.”

That wasn’t Daji. Rin knew whose handiwork this was.

But did no one else know?

“Did it work?” she asked.

“Sure. It took out the Federation contingents in the north. Holed them up long enough for the northern Divisions to make mincemeat out of them. But then the floodwaters caught several hundred villages, which makes several thousand people who don’t have homes now.” Nezha made a fist. “How does a ruler do this? To her own people?”

“How do you know it was her?” Rin asked cautiously.

“Who else could it be? Something that big had to be an order from above. Right?”

“Of course,” she murmured. “Who else would it be?”

Rin found the twins sitting together at the stern of the ship. They were perched on the railing, staring down at the wreckage trailing behind them. When they saw Rin approaching, they both jumped down and turned around, regarding her warily, as if they knew exactly why she had come.

“So how does it feel?” Rin asked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chaghan said.

“You did it, too,” she said gleefully. “It wasn’t just me.”

“Go back to sleep,” he said.

“Thousands of people!” she crowed. “Drowned like ants! Are you proud?”

Qara turned her head away, but Chaghan lifted his chin indignantly. “I did what Altan ordered.”

That made her screech with laughter. “Me too! I was just acting on orders! He said I had to get vengeance for the Speerlies, and so I did, so it’s not my fault, because Altan said—”

“Shut up,” Chaghan snapped. “Listen—Vaisra thinks that Daji ordered the opening of those dikes.”

She was still giggling. “So does Nezha.”

He looked alarmed. “What did you tell him?”

“Nothing, obviously. I’m not stupid.”

“You can’t tell anyone the truth,” Qara cut in. “Nobody in the Dragon Republic can know.”

Of course Rin understood that. She knew how dangerous it would be to give the Dragon Army a reason to turn on the Cike. But in that moment all she could think of was how terribly funny it was that she wasn’t the only one with mass murder on her hands.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell. I’ll be the only monster. Just me.”

The twins looked stricken, but she couldn’t stop laughing. She wondered how it had felt, the moment before the wave hit. The civilians might have been making dinner, playing outside, putting their children to bed, telling stories, making love, before a crushing force of water swept over their homes, destroyed their villages, and snuffed out their lives.

This was what the balance of power looked like now. People like her waved a hand and millions were crushed within the confines of some elemental disaster, flung off the chessboard of the world like irrelevant pieces. People like her—shamans, all of them—were like children stomping around over entire cities as if they were mud castles, glass houses, fungible entities that could be targeted and demolished.

On the seventh morning after they’d left Ankhiluun, the pain receded.

She woke up without a fever. No headache. She took a hesitant step toward the door and was pleasantly surprised at how steady her feet felt on the floor, how the world didn’t whirl and shift around her. She opened the door, wandered out onto the upper deck, and was stunned by how good the river spray felt on her face.

Her senses felt sharper. Colors seemed brighter. She could smell things she hadn’t before. The world seemed to exist with a vibrancy that she hadn’t been aware of.

And then she realized that she had her mind to herself.

The Phoenix wasn’t gone. She felt the god lingering still at the forefront of her mind, whispering tales of destruction, trying to control her desires.

But this time she knew what she wanted.

And she wanted control.

She’d been victim to the god’s urges because she’d been keeping her own mind weak, dousing away the flame with a temporary and unsustainable solution. But now her head was clear, her mind was present—and when the Phoenix screamed, she could shut it down.

She requested to see Vaisra. He sent for her within minutes.

He was alone in his office when she arrived.

“You’re not afraid of me?” she asked.

“I trust you,” he said.

“You shouldn’t.”

“Then I trust you more than you trust yourself.” He was acting like an entirely different person. The harsh persona was gone. His voice sounded so gentle, so encouraging that she was suddenly reminded of Tutor Feyrik.

She hadn’t thought about Tutor Feyrik in a long time. She hadn’t felt safe in a long time.

Vaisra leaned back in his chair. “Go on, then. Try calling the fire for me. Just a little bit.”

She opened her hand and focused her eyes on her palm. She recalled the rage, felt the heat of it coil in the pit of her stomach. But this time it didn’t come all at once in an uncontrollable torrent, but manifested as a slow, angry burn.

A small burst of flame erupted in her palm. And it was just the burst; no more, no less, though she could increase its size, or if she wanted to, force it even smaller.

She closed her eyes, breathing slowly; cautiously she raised the flame higher and higher, a single ribbon of fire swaying over her hand like a reed, until Vaisra commanded her, “Stop.”

She closed her fist. The fire went out.

Only afterward did she realize how fast her heart was beating.

“Are you all right?” Vaisra asked.

She managed a nod.

A smile spread over his face. He looked more than pleased. He looked proud. “Do it again. Make it bigger. Brighter. Shape it for me.”

She reeled. “I can’t. I don’t have that much control.”

“You can. Don’t think about the Phoenix. Look at me.”

She met his eyes. His gaze was an anchor.

A fire sparked out of her fist. She shaped it with trembling hands until it took on the image of a dragon, coils undulating in the space between her and Vaisra, making the air shimmer with the heat of the blaze.

More, said the Phoenix. Bigger. Higher.

Its screams pushed at the edge of her mind. She tried to shut it down.

The fire didn’t recede.

She started to shake. “No, I can’t—I can’t, you have to get out—”

“Don’t think about it,” Vaisra whispered. “Look at me.”

Slowly, so faintly she was afraid she was imagining it, the red behind her eyelids subsided.

The fire disappeared. She collapsed to her knees.

“Good girl,” Vaisra said softly.

She wrapped her arms around herself, rocked back and forth on the floor, and tried to remember how to breathe.

“May I show you something?” Vaisra asked.

She looked up. He crossed the room to a cabinet, opened a drawer, and pulled out a cloth-covered parcel. She flinched when he jerked the cloth off, but all she saw underneath was the dull sheen of metal.