Gurubai sighed. “We are not discussing this again.”

“Look.” She slammed her hand on the table. “If none of you are willing to make the first move, then just send me. Give me two thousand troops. Just twice the number I took to Khudla. That’ll be enough.”

“You and I both know why that’s not possible.”

“But that’s our only chance at staying alive—”

“Is it?” Gurubai asked. “Do you really believe that we can’t survive in the mountains? Or do you just want your chance to go after Yin Nezha?”

She could have slapped him. But she wasn’t stupid enough to take the bait.

“The Yins will not let us live free in this country,” she said. She knew how Vaisra operated. He identified his threats—past, current, and potential—and patiently isolated, captured, and destroyed them. He didn’t forgive past wrongs. He never failed to wrap up loose ends. And Rin, once his most precious weapon, was now his biggest loose end. “The Republic doesn’t want to split territory, they want to wipe us off the map. So pardon me for thinking it might be a good idea to strike first.”

“Vaisra is not coming for us.” The Monkey Warlord stood up. “He’s coming for you.”

The implication of that sat heavy in the air between them.

The door opened. All hands in the room twitched toward swords. A camp aide stepped in, breathless. “Sir—”

“Not now,” snapped the Monkey Warlord.

“No, sir—” The aide swallowed. “Sir, Ma Lien’s passed away.”

Rin exhaled slowly. There it was.

Gurubai stared at the aide, speechless.

Rin spoke up before anyone else could. “So there’s a vacancy.”

Liu Dai looked appalled. “Have some respect.”

She ignored that. “There’s a vacancy, and I’m the most qualified person to fill it.”

“You’re hardly in the chain of command,” Gurubai said.

She rolled her eyes. “The chain of command matters for real armies, not bandit camps squatting in the mountains hoping dirigibles won’t see us when they fly overhead.”

“Those men won’t obey you,” Gurubai said. “They hardly know you—”

For the first time Zhuden spoke. “We’re with the girl.”

Gurubai trailed off, staring at Zhuden in disbelief.

Rin suppressed a snicker.

“She’s right,” Zhuden said. “We’re dying up here. We need to march while we’ve got fight left in us. And if you won’t lead us, we’re going with her.”

“You don’t control the entire army,” Gurubai said. “You’ll be fifteen hundred men at the most.”

“Two thousand,” Souji said.

Rin shot him a startled look.

Souji shrugged. “The Iron Wolves are going south, too. Been itching for that fight for a while.”

“You said you didn’t care about the Southern Coalition,” Rin said.

“I said I didn’t care about the rest of the Empire,” Souji said. “This is different. Those are my people. And from what I’ve seen, you’re the only one with balls enough to go after them instead of sitting here, waiting to die.”

Rin could have shrieked with laughter. She looked around the table, chin out, daring anyone to object. Liu Dai shifted in his seat. Souji winked at her. Gurubai, utterly defeated, said nothing.

She could tell he knew what she had done. It was no secret. She’d admit it out loud if he asked. But he couldn’t prove it, and nobody would want to believe him. The hearts of at least a third of his men had turned against him.

This wasn’t news. This only made official whispers that had been circulating for a long, long time.

Zhuden nodded to her. “Your move, General Fang.”

She liked the sound of those words so much she couldn’t help but grin.

“Well, that’s settled.” She glanced around the table. “I’m taking the Third Division and the Iron Wolves to Rooster Province. We march at dawn.”

Chapter 4

“I want fresh troops when we get to the Beehive,” Rin said. “If we take the pace down to four-fifths our usual marching speed, we can still get there in twelve days. We’ll take detours here and here to avoid known Mugenese outposts. It adds distance, but I’d prefer to keep the element of surprise as long as we can. It’ll cut down their preparation time.”

She spoke with more confidence than she felt. She thought her voice sounded inordinately high and squeaky, though she could barely hear it, her blood was pumping so hard in her ears. Now that she’d finally gotten what she wanted, her giddiness had died away, replaced by a frightful mix of exhaustion and nerves.

Night had fallen on their first day of marching out of Ruijin. They’d stopped to make camp in the forest. A circle of soldiers—Kitay, Zhuden, Souji, and a smattering of officers—sat clustered in Rin’s tent, watching with rapt attention as she drew thick, inky lines across the maps before them.

Her hand kept shaking, scattering droplets across the parchment. It was so hard to write with her left hand. She felt as if she were taking an exam she hadn’t studied for. She should have been relishing this moment, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was a fraud.

You are a fraud. She had never led a proper campaign by herself before. Her brief stints as the commander of the Cike had always ended in disaster. She didn’t know how to manage logistics on this scale. And worst of all, she was currently describing an attack strategy that she wasn’t at all sure would work.

Altan’s laughter echoed in her mind.

Little fool, he said. Finally got yourself an army, and now you don’t know what to do with it.

She blinked and forced his specter to disappear.

“If all goes according to plan,” she continued, “Leiyang will be ours by the next moon.”

Leiyang was the biggest township in northern Rooster Province. She’d passed through there only once in her life, nearly five years ago when she’d made the long caravan trip north to start school at Sinegard. It was a central trading hub connected to dozens of smaller villages by two creeks and several wide roads so old they’d been paved in the days of the Red Emperor. Compared to any northern capital it was a shoddy, run-down market in the outskirts of nowhere, but back then Rin had found it the busiest market town she’d ever seen.

Kitay had dubbed the network around Leiyang the Beehive. Mugenese troops exercised some control over all villages in northern Rooster Province, but based on their troops’ patrol and travel patterns, Leiyang was the central node.

Something important lay in that township. Kitay thought it was likely a high-ranking general who, after his homeland’s demise, continued to wield regional authority. Or, as Rin feared, it was a weapons base that they didn’t know about. Leiyang could be sitting on cans of yellow gas. They had no way of knowing.

That was the root of their problem. Rin’s intelligence on Leiyang was terrible. She’d updated her maps with Souji’s detailed descriptions of the surrounding terrain, but everything else he knew had been outdated for months. A handful of Iron Wolves were escaped survivors from Leiyang, but their reports of Mugenese troop presence varied wildly. They’d been the opposite of helpful. Survivors almost always gave them bad information—either their terror made them exaggerate the threat, or they downplayed it in hopes they could entice a rescue force to help their village.