The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

“Your men couldn’t be in better hands. Jinzha studied warcraft at Sinegard, he commanded troops in the Third Poppy War—”

  “As did we all,” said Gurubai. “Why not give one of our generals the job? Or why not one of us?”

  “Because you three are too important to spare.”

  Even Rin couldn’t help but cringe at that naked flattery. The southern Warlords exchanged wry looks. Gurubai made a show of rolling his eyes.

  “All right, then because the men of the Dragon Province are not prepared to fight under anyone else,” Vaisra said. “Believe it or not, I am trying to find the solution that best protects you.”

  “And yet it’s our troops you want on the front lines,” said Charouk.

  “Dragon Province is committing more troops than any of you, asshat,” Rin snapped. She couldn’t help it. She knew Vaisra had wanted her to simply observe, but she couldn’t stand watching this mess of passivity and petty infighting. The Warlords were acting like children, squabbling as if someone else would win their war for them if they only procrastinated long enough.

  Everyone stared at her as if she’d suddenly grown wings. When Vaisra didn’t cut her off, she kept going. “It’s been three fucking days. Why the fuck are we arguing about division makeup? The Empire is weak now. We need to send a force up north now.”

  “Then how about we just send you?” asked Takha. “You sank the longbow island, didn’t you?”

  Rin didn’t miss a beat. “You want me to kill off half the country? My powers don’t discriminate.”

  Takha looked to Vaisra. “What is she even doing here?”

  “I’m the commander of the Cike,” Rin said. “And I’m standing right in front of you.”

  “You’re a little girl with no command experience and hardly a year of combat under your belt,” Gurubai said. “Do not presume to tell us how to fight a war.”

  “I won the last war. You wouldn’t even be standing here without me.”

  Vaisra placed a hand on her shoulder. “Runin, hush.”

  “But he—”

  “Silence,” he said sternly. “This discussion is beyond you. Let the generals talk.”

  Rin swallowed her protest.

  The door creaked open. A palace aide poked his head in through the gap. “The Snake Warlord is here to see you, sir.”

  “Let him in,” Vaisra said.

  The aide stepped inside to hold the door open.

  Ang Tsolin walked inside, unaccompanied and unarmed. Jinzha moved to his right to let Tsolin stand next to his father. Nezha shot Rin a smug look, as if to say I told you so.

  Vaisra looked equally vindicated. “I’m glad to see you join us, Master.”

  Tsolin scowled. “You didn’t have to sail through my fleet.”

  “Going the other way would have taken longer.”

  “They came for my family first.”

  “I assume you had the foresight to extricate them in time.”

  Tsolin folded his arms. “My wife and children will arrive tomorrow morning. I want them set up with your most secure accommodations. If I catch so much as a whiff of a spy in their quarters, I will turn over my entire fleet to the Empire’s use.”

  Vaisra dipped his head. “Whatever you ask.”

  “Good.” Tsolin bent forward to examine the maps. “These are all wrong.”

  “How so?” Jinzha asked.

  “The Horse Province hasn’t remained inactive. They’re gathering their troops to the Yinshan base.” Tsolin pointed to a spot just above Hare Province. “And Tiger Province is bringing their fleet toward the Autumn Palace. They’re closing off your attack routes. You don’t have much time.”

  “Then tell me what I ought to do,” Vaisra said. Rin was amazed at how his tone could shift—once commanding, but now deferential and meek, a student seeking a teacher’s aid.

  Tsolin gave him a wary look. “Good men are dead because of you. I hope you know.”

  “Then they died for a good cause,” Vaisra said. “I suspect you know that, too.”

  Tsolin didn’t answer. He simply sat down, pulled the maps toward him, and began to examine the attack lines with the weary, practiced air of a man who had spent his entire life fighting wars.

  As the days dragged on, despite the northern offensive’s ongoing delay, Arlong itself continued to mobilize for war like a tightening spring. War preparations were integrated into almost every facet of civilian life. Steely-eyed children worked the furnaces at the armory and carried messages back and forth across the city. Their mothers produced immaculately stitched uniforms at an astonishing rate. In the mess hall, grandmothers stirred congee in giant vats while their grandchildren ferried bowls around to the soldiers.

  Another week passed. The Warlords continued to shout at each other in the council room. Rin couldn’t bear the constant waiting, so she took out her adrenaline with Nezha.

  Sparring was a welcome exercise. The skirmish at Lusan had made it abundantly clear to her that she had been relying far too much on calling the fire. Her reflexes had flagged, her muscles had atrophied, and her stamina was pathetic.

  So at least once every day, she and Nezha picked up their weapons and hiked up to empty clearings far up on the cliffs. She lost herself in the sheer, mindless physicality of their bouts. When they were sparring, her mind couldn’t languish on any one thought for too long. She was too busy calculating angles, maneuvering steel on steel. The immediacy of the fight was its own kind of drug, one that could numb her to anything else she might accidentally feel.

  Altan couldn’t torture her if she couldn’t think.

  Blow by blow, bruise by bruise, she relearned the muscle memory that she had lost, and she relished it. Here she could channel the adrenaline and fear that kept her vibrating with anxiety on a daily basis.

  The first few days left her wrecked and aching. The next few were better. She filled in her uniform. She lost her hollow, skeletal appearance. This was the only reason she was grateful for the council’s slow deliberation—it gave her time to become the soldier she used to be.

  Nezha was not a lenient sparring partner, and she didn’t want him to be. The first time he held back out of fear of hurting her, she swept out a leg and knocked him to the ground.

  He propped himself up on his stomach. “If you wanted to go for a tumble, you could have just asked.”

  “Don’t be disgusting,” she said.

  Once she stopped losing hand-to-hand bouts in under thirty seconds, they moved on to padded weapons.

  “I don’t understand why you insist on using that thing,” he said after he disarmed her of her trident for the third time. “It’s clumsy as hell. Father’s been telling me to get you to switch to a sword.”

  She knew what Vaisra wanted. She was tired of that argument.

  “Reach matters more than maneuverability.” She wedged her foot under the trident and kicked it up into her hands.

  Nezha came at her from the right. “Reach?”

  She parried. “When you summon fire, there’s no one who’s going to get close to you.”

  He hung back. “Not to state the obvious, but you can’t really do that anymore.”

  She scowled at him. “I’ll fix it.”

  “Suppose you don’t?”

  “Suppose you stop underestimating me?”

  She didn’t want to tell him that she’d been trying. That every night she climbed up to this same clearing where no one would see her, took a dose of Chaghan’s stupid blue powder, approached the Seal, and tried to burn the ghost of Altan out of her mind.

  It never worked. She could never bring herself to hurt him, not that wonderful version of Altan that she’d never known. When she tried to fight him, he grew angry. And then he reminded her why she’d always been terrified of him.

  The worst part was that Altan seemed to be getting stronger every time. His eyes burned more vividly in the dark, his laughter rang louder, and several nights he’d nearly choked the breath from her before she got her senses back. I
t didn’t matter that he was only a vision. Her fear made him more present than anything else.

  “Look alive.” Rin jabbed at Nezha’s side, hoping to catch him off guard, but he whipped his blade out and parried just in time.

  They sparred for a few more seconds, but she was quickly losing heart. Her trident suddenly seemed twice as heavy in her arms; she felt like she was fighting at a third her normal speed. Her footwork was sloppy, without form or technique, and her swings grew increasingly haphazard and unguarded.

  “It’s not the worst thing,” Nezha said. He batted a wild blow away from his head. “Aren’t you glad?”

  She stiffened. “Why would I be glad?”

  “I mean, I just thought . . .” He touched a hand to his temple. “Isn’t it at least nice to have your mind back to yourself?”

  She slammed the hilt of the trident down into the ground. “You think I’d lost my mind?”

  Nezha rapidly backtracked. “No, I mean, I thought—I saw how you were hurting. That looked like torture. I thought you might be a little relieved.”

  “It’s not a relief to be useless,” she said.

  She twirled the trident over her head, whipped it around to generate momentum. It wasn’t a staff—and she should know better than to wield it with staff techniques—but she was angry now, she wasn’t thinking, and her muscles settled into familiar but wrong patterns.

  It showed. Nezha may as well have been sparring with a toddler. He sent the trident spinning out of her hands in seconds.

  “I told you,” he said. “No flexibility.”

  She snatched the trident up off the ground. “Still has longer reach than your sword.”

  “So what happens if I get in close?” Nezha twisted his blade between the trident’s gaps and closed the distance between them. She tried to fend him off, but he was right—he was out of the trident’s reach.

  He raised a dagger to her chin with his other hand. She kicked savagely at his shin. He buckled to the ground.

  “Bitch,” he said.

  “You deserved it.”

  “Fuck you.” He rocked back and forth on the grass, clutching his leg. “Help me up.”

  “Let’s take a break.” She dropped the trident and sat down on the grass beside him. Her lung capacity hadn’t returned. She was still tiring too quickly; she couldn’t last more than two hours sparring, much less a full day in the field.

  Nezha hadn’t even broken a sweat. “You’re much better with a sword. Please tell me you know that.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “That thing is useless! It’s too heavy for you! But I’ve seen you with a sword, and—”

  “I’ll get used to it.”

  “I just think that you shouldn’t make life-or-death choices based on sentimentality.”

  She glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He ripped a handful of grass from the ground. “Forget it.”

  “No, say it.”

  “Fine. You won’t trade because it’s his weapon, isn’t it?”

  Rin’s stomach twisted. “That’s idiotic.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re always talking about Altan like he was some great hero. But he wasn’t. I saw him at Khurdalain, and I saw the way he spoke to people—”

  “And how did he speak to people?” she asked sharply.

  “Like they were objects, and he owned them, and they didn’t matter to him apart from how they could serve.” His tone turned vicious. “Altan was a shitty person and a shittier commander, and he would have let me die, and you know that, and here you are, running around with his trident, babbling on about revenge for someone you should hate.”

  The trident suddenly felt terribly heavy in Rin’s hands.

  “That’s not fair.” She heard a faint buzzing in her ears. “He’s dead— You can’t— That’s not fair.”

  “I know,” Nezha said softly. The anger had left him as quickly as it had come. He sounded exhausted. He sat, shoulders slouched, mindlessly shredding blades of grass with his fingers. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I know how much you cared about him.”

  “I’m not talking about Altan,” she said. “Not with you. Not now. Not ever.”

  “All right,” he said. He gave her a look that she didn’t understand, a look that might have been equal parts pity and disappointment, and that made her desperately uncomfortable. “All right.”

  Three days later the council finally came to a joint decision. At least, Vaisra and Tsolin came up with a solution short of immediate military action, and then argued the others into submission.

  “We’re going to starve them out,” Vaisra announced. “The south is the agricultural breadbasket of the Empire. If the northern provinces won’t secede, then we’ll simply stop feeding them.”

  Takha balked. “You’re asking us to reduce our exports by at least a third.”

  “So you’ll bleed income for a year or two,” said Vaisra. “And then your prices will jack up in the next year. The north is in no position to become agriculturally self-sufficient now. If you make this one-time sacrifice, that’s likely the end of tariffs, too. Beggars have no leverage.”

  “What about the coastal routes?” Charouk asked.

  Rin had to admit that was a fair point. The Western Murui and Golyn River weren’t the only rivers that crossed into the northern provinces. Those provinces could easily smuggle food up the coastline by sending merchants down in the guise of southerners to buy up food stores. They had more than enough silver.

  “Moag will cover them,” said Vaisra.

  Charouk looked amazed. “You’re trusting the Pirate Queen?”

  “It’s in her best interest,” Vaisra said. “For every blockade runner’s ship she seizes, her fleet gets seventy percent of the profits. She’d be a fool to double-cross us.”

  “The north has other grain supplies, though,” Gurubai pointed out. “Hare Province has arable land, for instance—”

  “No, they don’t.” Jinzha looked smug. “Last year the Hare Province suffered a blight and ran out of seed grain. We sold them several boxes of high-yielding seed.”

  “I remember,” said Tsolin. “If you were trying to curry favor, it didn’t work.”

  Jinzha grinned nastily. “We weren’t. We sold them damaged seeds, which lulled them into consuming their emergency stores. If we cut off their external supply, a famine should hit in about six months.”

  For once, the Warlords seemed impressed. Rin saw reluctant nods around the table.

  Only Kitay looked unhappy.

  “Six months?” he echoed. “I thought we were trying to move out in the next month.”

  “They won’t have felt the blockade by then,” said Jinzha.

  “It doesn’t matter! It’s only the threat of the blockade that matters, you don’t need them to actually starve—”

  “Why not?” Jinzha asked.

  Kitay looked horrified. “Because then you’d be punishing thousands of innocent people. And because that’s not what you told me when you asked me to do the figures—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you were told,” Jinzha said. “Know your place.”

  Kitay kept talking. “Why starve them slowly? Why wait at all? If we mount an offensive right now, we can end this war before winter sets in. Any later and we’ll be trapped up north when the rivers freeze.”

  General Hu laughed. “The boy presumes to know how to fight a campaign better than we do.”

  Kitay looked livid. “I actually read Sunzi, so yes.”

  “You’re not the only Sinegard student at the table,” said General Hu.

  “Sure, but I got in during an era when acceptance actually took brains, so your opinion doesn’t count.”

  “Vaisra!” General Hu shouted. “Discipline this boy!”

  “‘Discipline this boy,’” Kitay mimicked. “‘Shut up the only person who has a halfway viable strategy, because my ego can’t take the heat.’”

  “Enough,�
� Vaisra said. “You’re out of line.”

  “This plan is out of line,” Kitay retorted.

  “You’re dismissed,” Vaisra said. “Stay out of sight until you’re sent for.”

  For a brief, terrifying moment Rin thought Kitay might start mocking Vaisra, too, but he just threw his papers down onto the table, knocking over inkwells, and stalked toward the door.

  “Keep throwing fits like that and Father won’t have you at his councils anymore,” Nezha said.

  He and Rin had both followed Kitay out, which Rin thought was a rather dangerous move on Nezha’s part, but Kitay was too angry to be grateful for the gesture.

  “Keep ignoring me and we won’t have a palace to hold councils in,” Kitay snapped. “A blockade? A fucking blockade?”

  “It’s our best option for now,” Nezha said. “We don’t have the military capability to sail north alone, but we could just wait them out.”

  “But that could take years!” Kitay shouted. “And what happens in the meantime? You just let people die?”

  “Threats have to be credible to work,” Nezha said.

  Kitay shot him a disdainful look. “You try dealing with a country with a famine crisis, then. You don’t unite a country by starving innocent people to death.”

  “They’re not going to starve—”

  “No? They’re going to eat wood bark? Leaves? Cow dung? I can think of a million strategies better than murder.”

  “Try being diplomatic, then,” Nezha snapped. “You can’t disrespect the old guard.”

  “Why not? The old guard has no clue what they’re doing!” Kitay shouted. “They got their positions because they’re good at factional maneuvering! They graduated from Sinegard, sure, but that was when the entire curriculum was just emergency basic training. They don’t have a thorough grounding in military science or technology, and they’ve never bothered to learn, because they know they’ll never lose their jobs!”

  “I think you’re underestimating some rather qualified men,” Nezha said drily.

  “No, your father is in a double bind,” Kitay said. “No, wait, I’ve got it, here’s what it is—the men he can trust aren’t competent, but the men who are competent, he must keep on a taut leash, because they might calculate to defect.”