Then the Mugenese must have caught on, because someone inside started to scream.

Rin increased the heat to a roar loud enough to drown it out, yet somehow it pierced the wall of sound. It was a high squeal of pain. Maybe a woman’s, maybe a child’s. It almost sounded like a baby. But that didn’t mean anything—she knew how shrilly a grown man could scream.

She increased the force of her flame, made it roar so loudly that she couldn’t hear herself think. But still the scream penetrated the wall of fire.

She squeezed her eyes shut. She imagined herself falling backward into the Phoenix’s warmth, into that distant space where nothing mattered but rage. The thin wail wavered.

Burn, she thought, shut up and burn.

Chapter 2

“Well done,” Kitay said.

She threw her arms around him, pulled him tight against her, and lingered in his embrace for a long while. By now she should have become used to their brief separations, but leaving him behind felt harder and harder every time.

She tried to convince herself that it wasn’t solely because Kitay was the one source of her power. That it wasn’t just because of her selfish concern that if anything happened to him, she was useless.

No, she also felt responsible for him. Guilty, rather. Kitay’s mind was stretched like a rope between her and the Phoenix, and between the rage and hatred and shame, he felt everything. He kept her safe from madness, and she subjected him to madness in return. Nothing she ever did could repay that debt.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“I’m all right,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

“You’re lying.” Even in the dim light of dawn, Rin could see his legs were trembling. He was far from all right—he could barely stand. They had this same argument after every battle. Every time she came back and saw what she’d done to him, saw his pale, drawn face and knew that to him, it felt like torture. Every time he denied it.

She’d limit her use of flame if only he asked. He never asked.

“I’ll be fine,” he amended gently. He nodded over her shoulder. “And you’re drawing a bit of attention.”

Rin turned and saw Khudla’s survivors.

This had happened often enough that she knew what to expect.

First they wandered forward in little, tentative clumps. Curious whispering, terrified pointing. Then, when they realized that this new army was not Mugenese but Nikara, not Militia but something new entirely, and that Rin’s soldiers were not here to replace their oppressors, they grew braver.

Is she the Speerly? they asked. Are you the Speerly?

Are you one of us?

And then the whispers grew louder as the crowd swelled, bodies coalescing around her. They spoke her name, her race, her god. Her legend had already spread to this place; she could hear it rippling through the field.

They reached out to touch her.

Rin’s chest constricted. Her breathing quickened; her throat felt blocked.

Kitay’s hand tightened around her arm. He didn’t have to ask what was wrong; he knew.

“Are you—” he began.

“It’s fine,” she murmured. “It’s fine.”

These hands were not the enemy’s. She was not in danger. She knew that, but her body didn’t. She took a deep breath and composed her face. She had to play the part—had to look like not the scared girl she’d once been or the tired soldier that she was, but the leader they needed.

“You’re free,” she told them. Her voice quivered with exhaustion; she cleared her throat. “Go.”

A hush ran through the crowd when they saw that she spoke their language—not the abrasive Nikara of the north, but the slow, rolling dialect of the south.

They still regarded her with a kind of awed terror. But she knew this was the kind of fear that turned into love.

Rin raised her voice and spoke, this time without a tremor. “Go tell your families that they’ve been saved. Tell them the Mugenese can’t harm you any longer. And when they ask who broke your shackles, tell them the Southern Coalition is marching across the Empire with the Phoenix at its fore. Tell them we’re taking back our home.”

As the sun climbed through the sky, Rin commenced Khudla’s liberation.

This was supposed to be the fun part. It was supposed to feel good, telling grateful villagers that their erstwhile occupiers were smoldering piles of ash.

But Rin dreaded liberation. Combing through a half-destroyed village to find survivors only meant yet another survey of the extent of Federation cruelty. She’d rather face the battlefield again than confront that suffering. It didn’t matter that she’d already seen the worst at Golyn Niis, that she’d witnessed the worst things one could do to a human body dozens of times over. It never got easier.

She’d learned by now that the Mugenese implemented the same three measures every time they occupied a city, three directives so clean and textbook that she could have written a full treatise on how to subdue a population herself.

First, the Mugenese rounded up every Nikara man who resisted their occupation, marched them to the killing fields, and either shot or beheaded them. Beheading was more common; arrows were valuable resources and couldn’t always be retrieved intact. They didn’t kill all the local men, just those who had threatened to make trouble. They needed laborers.

Second, the Mugenese either repurposed or stripped away the village infrastructure. Anything sturdy they turned into soldiers’ barracks, and anything flimsy they tore apart for firewood. When the loose wood was gone, they scoured the homes for furniture, blankets, valuables, and ceramics with which to furnish their barracks. They were very efficient at turning villages into empty shells. Rin often found liberated villagers crowded in pigsties, cramped together knee to knee just to keep warm.

Third, the Mugenese co-opted the local leadership. After all, what did you do when you didn’t speak the local language? When you didn’t grasp the nuances of regional politics? You didn’t supplant the existing leadership structure—that would result in chaos. You grafted yourself onto it. You got the local bullies to do your dirty work for you.

Rin hated the Nikara collaborators. Their crimes, to her, seemed almost worse than those of the Federation. The Mugenese were at least targeting the enemy race—a natural instinct in wartime. But collaborators helped the Mugenese murder, mutilate, and violate their own kind. That was inconceivable. Unforgivable.

Rin and Kitay were always split on how to handle the captured collaborators. Kitay begged for lenience. They were desperate, he argued. They were trying to save their own skins. They might have saved some villagers’ skins. Sometimes compliance saves you pain. Compliance might have saved us at Golyn Niis.

Bullshit, Rin retorted. Compliance was cowardice. She had no respect for anyone who would rather die than fight. She wanted the collaborators to burn.

But the matter was out of their hands. The villagers invariably settled things themselves. Sometime in the next week, if not in the next day, they would drag the collaborators into the middle of the square, extract their confessions, and then flay, whip, beat, or stone them. Rin never had to intervene. The south delivered its own justice. The catharsis of violence hadn’t happened yet in Khudla—it was too early in the morning for a public execution, and the villagers were too starved and exhausted to form a mob—but Rin knew that soon enough, she would hear screaming.