Rin gave him a thin smile and wished fervently she could force a flaming fist down his throat.

When she’d hurtled out of Arlong on a Black Lily ship with her hand a bloody mess, she’d thought that the Monkey Warlord might be different from the series of horrible men she’d hitherto thrown in her lot with. That he’d keep his promises. That he’d treat her not as a weapon but as an ally. That he’d put her in charge.

She’d been so wrong.

She’d underestimated Gurubai. He was brilliant; he’d been the sole survivor of Vaisra’s violent purge at Arlong for a reason. He understood power politics in a way she never would, because he’d spent his entire life practicing it. Gurubai understood what made men pledge their support, what won him trust and love. He was used now, after two decades, to calling all the shots. And he did not relinquish power.

“I thought we had agreed,” she said lightly, “if the Khudla experiment worked out—”

“Oh, it worked out. You can keep that contingent. Officers Shen and Lin were quite happy with your performance.”

“I don’t want a single contingent, I want the army.”

“Let’s not pretend you could handle that.”

“I just liberated an entire village with minimal casualties—”

“Your supreme talent for burning things down does not qualify you to be a commander.” Gurubai drew out the last syllable of each word as if she wouldn’t have understood him otherwise. “You’re still learning to manage communication and logistics. Don’t rush it, child. Give yourself the space to learn. This isn’t Sinegard, where we throw children into war with no preparation. We’ll find you something better to do in time.”

The condescension in his voice made her fist curl. Her eyes focused on the veins in his neck. They protruded so visibly; it would be so easy to slice them open.

If only. Speerly or no, if she hurt Liu Gurubai, she wouldn’t make it out of Ruijin alive.

Kitay kicked her lightly under the table. Don’t.

She grimaced at him. I know.

If Rin was a Speerly outsider and Kitay a Sinegardian elite, then the Monkey Warlord was the true product of the south, a rough-hewn man with shoulders broadened from years of labor, whose gleaming, intelligent eyes were set deep in a face lined like the forest.

Rin had left the south at the first chance she got. The Monkey Warlord had fought and suffered in the south his entire life. He’d watched his grandmother begging for rice in the streets during the Lunar New Year. He’d walked miles to tend water buffalo for a single copper a day. He’d fought in the ragged provincial brigades that rallied to the Trifecta’s cause during the Second Poppy War. He hadn’t become a warlord through inheritance or sheer ambition; he’d simply moved slowly up through the line of succession as the soldiers around him died. He’d been drafted into an army at thirteen years old for the promise of a single silver coin a month, and he’d stayed in the army for the rest of his life.

His younger brothers had both died fighting the Federation. His clan, once a sprawling village family, had withered away from opium addiction. He’d survived the worst of the past century, and so survival became his greatest skill. He’d become a soldier out of necessity, and that made him a leader whose legitimacy was nigh unquestionable.

Most importantly, he belonged. These mountains were part of his blood. Anyone could see it in the tired way he carried his shoulders, the hard glint in his eyes.

Rin may have been a figurehead of power, but Liu Gurubai symbolized the very identity of the south. If she hurt him, Monkey Province would tear her to pieces.

So for now, she compromised.

“I hear there have been developments in the north.” She changed the subject, forcing her tone to stay neutral. “Anything you want to show me?”

“Several updates.” If Gurubai was surprised by her sudden acquiescence, he didn’t show it. He slid a sheaf of letters across the table. “Your friend wrote back. These arrived yesterday.”

Rin snatched up the first page and started poring hungrily down the lines, passing the pages to Kitay once she was done. News from the north always trickled in by little bursts—weeks passed with nothing, and then they received sudden gluts of information. The Southern Coalition had only a handful of spies in the Republic, and most of them were Moag’s girls; the few pale-skinned Black Lilies who had been shipped to Arlong with carefully disguised accents to work in teahouses and gambling dens.

Venka had gone north, too. With her pale, pretty face and flawless Sinegardian diction, she blended in perfectly among the aristocrats of the formal capital. At first Rin had been worried she’d be recognized—she was the missing daughter of the former finance minister; she couldn’t be more high-profile—but based on Venka’s reports, she’d completely transformed with only a wig and several gobs of cosmetics.

No one pays much attention to my face, Venka had written shortly after she arrived. The dolls of Sinegard, it turns out, are shockingly interchangeable.

Her report now contained nothing surprising. Vaisra’s still battling it out in the north. Warlords and their successors dropping dead like flies. They can’t hold out for long, they’re overstretched. Vaisra’s turned the siege cities into death zones. It’ll all be over soon.

That wasn’t news, only a slow intensification of what they’d known for weeks. Vaisra’s Hesperians were ravaging the countryside in their dirigibles, leaving craters and bombed-out hellscapes in their wake.

“Any mention of a southern turn?” Rin asked Gurubai.

“None yet. What you’re holding is everything we have.”

“Then we’re being ignored,” she said.

“We’re getting lucky,” Kitay amended. “It’s only a matter of time.”

The Dragon Warlord Yin Vaisra’s great democracy, the one he’d sacked cities and turned the Murui crimson for, had never come into existence. He’d never meant it to. Days after he defeated the Imperial Navy at Arlong, he’d assassinated the Boar Warlord and Rooster Warlord, and then declared himself the sole President of the Nikara Republic.

But he didn’t yet have a country to rule. Many former Militia officers, not least of whom included the Empress’s former favorite soldier, General Jun Loran, had escaped the purge at Arlong and fled north to Tiger Province. Now the combined forces of the Militia’s remnants were almost proving to be a challenge for the Hesperians.

Almost. With each new report that reached Ruijin, the Republic appeared to have extended its reach farther and farther north. That meant Rin was sitting on borrowed time. The Southern Coalition was only one rebellion among many. For the time being Vaisra had his hands tied up with Jun’s insurgency, not to mention a country chock-full of bandit gangs that had sprung up in local power vacuums immediately after the war’s end. But he wouldn’t stay busy for long. Jun couldn’t hope to beat Vaisra’s forces, not with Hesperian dirigibles at Vaisra’s back. Not when thousands of Hesperian soldiers with arquebuses were pumping bullets into Jun’s armies.

Rin was grateful that Jun had bought them such a long reprieve. But sooner or later, Vaisra would turn his attention to the south. He’d have to, so long as Rin was alive. A reckoning was inevitable. And when it came, she wanted to be on the offensive.