Meanwhile, she had survivors to find. She was looking for prisoners. The Federation always took captives—political dissidents, soldiers too willful to control but too useful to let die, or hostages they hoped might dissuade their incoming attackers. Sometimes the bodies were freshly dead—either from one last act of vengeance by desperate Mugenese soldiers under siege, or suffocated by smoke from Rin’s flames.
More often, however, she found them alive. You couldn’t kill hostages if you ever meant to use them.
Kitay led soldiers to search in the eastern edge of the village through the Mugenese-occupied buildings that had escaped the brunt of the destruction. He had a particular talent for finding survivors. He’d once hidden for weeks behind a bricked-up wall at Golyn Niis, cringing and hugging his knees while Federation soldiers dragged Nikara soldiers from their hiding spots and shot them on the streets. He knew how to look for the signs—tarps or stacked debris that seemed out of place, faint footprints in the dust, echoes of shallow breathing in frightened silence.
Rin alone took on the burned wreckage.
She dreaded this task: pulling charred boards aside to find bodies broken and bleeding but still breathing. Too many times they were beyond saving. Half the time she’d caused the destruction herself. Once flames started burning, they were difficult to put out.
Still, she had to try.
“Is anyone here?” she called repeatedly. “Make a noise. Any noise. I’m listening.”
She went through every cellar, every abandoned lot and well; shouted out for survivors many times and made sure she listened hard to the echoing silence. It would be a horrible fate to be chained up, slowly starving or suffocating to death because your village had been liberated but the survivors forgot about you. Her eyes watered as she stumbled through a smoky grain cellar. She doubted she’d find anything—already she’d stumbled over two corpses—but she waited a moment before she left. Just in case.
Her patience rewarded her.
“In the back,” called a voice.
Rin pulled a flame into her hand, illuminating the far wall of the cellar. She couldn’t see anything but empty grain sacks. She stepped closer.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“Souji.” She heard the clink of chains. “Likely the man you’re looking for.”
She decided she wasn’t dealing with an ambush. She knew that flat-tongued, rustic accent. The best Mugenese spies couldn’t imitate it; they’d all trained only to speak the curt Sinegardian dialect.
She crossed to the other end of the cellar, stopped, and amplified her torchlight.
Her first goal at Khudla had been liberation. Her second goal was to locate Yang Souji, the famed rebel leader and local hero who had until recently been fending off the Mugenese in southern Monkey Province. The closer she’d marched to Khudla, the more myths and rumors she’d heard about him. Yang Souji had eyes that could see for ten thousand miles. He could speak to animals; he knew when the Mugenese were coming because the birds always warned him. His skin was invulnerable to all kinds of metal—swords, arrowheads, axes, spears.
The man chained to the floor was none of those things. He looked surprisingly young—he couldn’t be more than a few years older than she was. A scraggly beard had sprouted over his neck and chin, some indication of how long he’d been chained up, but he sat up straight with his shoulders rolled back, and his eyes shone bright in the firelight.
Despite herself, Rin found him surprisingly handsome.
“So you’re the Speerly,” he said. “I thought you’d be taller.”
“And I thought you’d be older,” she said.
“Then we’re both a disappointment.” He jangled his chains at her. “Took you long enough. Did you really need all night?”
She knelt down and began working at the locks. “Not even a thank-you?”
“You’re going to do that one-handed?” he asked skeptically.
She fumbled with the pin. “Look, if you’re going to—”
“Give me that.” He plucked the pin from her fingers. “Just hold the lock up where I can see it and give me some light—there you go.”
As she watched him work at the lock with remarkable dexterity, she couldn’t help but feel a flicker of jealousy. It still stung, how the simplest things—picking locks, getting dressed, filling her canteen—had become so damnably difficult overnight.
She’d lost her hand to such a stupid turn of events. If they’d only had a key back then. If they’d just been able to steal a motherfucking key.
Her stump itched. She clenched her teeth and willed herself not to scratch it.
Souji undid the lock in less than a minute. He shook his hands free and sighed, cradling his wrists. He bent over toward the chains around his ankles. “That’s better. Can you give me some more light?”
She moved the flame closer to the lock, careful not to singe his skin.
She noticed the middle finger on his right hand was missing its top joint. It didn’t look like an accident—the middle finger on his left hand was missing a joint as well.
“What’s wrong with your hands?” she asked.
“My mother’s first two children died in infancy,” he explained. “She thought that the gods were stealing them because they were so lovely. So when I entered the world she gnawed the first joint off both my middle fingers.” He wiggled his left hand at her. “Made me a bit less attractive.”
Rin snorted. “The gods don’t want fingers.”
“So what do they want?”
“Pain,” she said. “Pain, and your sanity.”
Souji popped the lock, shook the chains away, and clambered to his feet. “I suppose you would know.”
After all likely survivors had been rescued from the wreckage, Rin’s troops fell on the battlefield like vultures.
The first time the newly minted soldiers of the Southern Coalition had scavenged for supplies in the wake of a battle, they’d been reluctant to touch the corpses. They’d been superstitious, scared of angering vengeful ghosts of the unburied dead who couldn’t return home. Now they raided bodies with hardened disregard, stripping them of anything of value. They looked for weapons, leather, clean linens—Mugenese uniforms were blue, but could be easily dyed—and, prized above all, shoes.
The Southern Coalition’s troops suffered terribly from shoddy footwear. They fought in straw sandals, and cotton if they could obtain it, but those cotton shoes were more like slippers, sewn weeks before the battle by wives, mothers, and sisters. Most were fighting in footwear of plaited straw that broke midmarch, fell apart in sticky mud, and offered no protection against the cold.
The Mugenese, however, had sailed over the Nariin Sea wearing leather boots—fine, solid, warm, and waterproof. Rin’s soldiers had become very adept at untying the laces, yanking boots off stiffening feet, and tossing them into wheelbarrows to be redistributed later according to size.
While Rin’s soldiers combed through the fields, Souji led her toward the former village headman’s office, which the Mugenese had repurposed into a headquarters. He provided running commentary on the ruins as they walked, like a disgruntled host apologetic that his home had been found in such a mess.