Gunpowder Magnolia

Please note that the chapter below is an early draft. Names and world-building details subject to change. Early chapters are available on my Patreon.

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Lanthe had seen death by fire many times.

General Chang had once ordered oil poured downriver beneath enemy boats, then ignited the pool with a flaming arrow. Another time, Lanthe’s unit had barricaded a group of bandits inside a large farmhouse and set it on fire. During Lanthe’s third campaign, the Angtei had rained flaming arrows into a gunpowder store, exploding it and setting the surrounding camp aflame.

Lanthe had tried to pull a fellow soldier from the fire only for his uniform shirt and then his skin to tear away, burning up in her hands. She had never learned the man’s name—he had been one of many immolated beyond identification that night—but she had a burn scar on her right hand to remember him by. Tairo charitably told Lanthe she would be a better shot if she hadn’t fried so many nerves in her right index finger grabbing onto that burning soldier.

All those run-ins with fire had made their way into Lanthe’s nightmares at her weaker moments, but even in the nightmares, she understood the forces at work. If she wasn’t ready for the screams or the smell or the sight of blackening skin curling back from flesh, she at least understood what was happening.

The fire from Yelhwa’s fingers was different.

There was something primally terrifying about watching fire spring from nothing to engulf nine men. No oil, flint, powder, or any Earthly preamble. Just words and the will of a madwoman.

Lanthe had never known a clear night to fill with the choking smoke of burning flesh so instantaneously—one breath to the next—like a hand closing on Lanthe’s throat. The screams were as short as they were terrible.

Heat blew Yelhwa’s long hair back over her shoulders as the last of the flames trailed from her outstretched fingers. There was a mad look in her eyes that Lanthe had never seen there before. Not hunger. Not pride. Yelhwa let her arm drop, then swept a displaced strand of hair behind her ear.

“Your Excellency—” Ingna started.

“What the hell was that?” Lanthe demanded.

Yelhwa lifted her chin, imperious in the firelight. “I’ll take that as a thank you.”

“Get clear, Lady Ingna.” Climbing to her feet, Lanthe hauled Ingna up with the girl’s arm across her shoulders.

“Wh-what?” Ingna coughed and stumbled on her bad ankle as Lanthe dragged her toward the princess.

“We’re too close to the fire.”

“Relax, Mage Slayer,” Yelhwa said with a note of impatience. “There’s so little wind down here. It’s not as though the fire is going going to jump anywhere.”

Watching the frenzied sparks swirl toward the trees that clutched the cliff above, Lanthe wasn’t so certain. But spreading fire wasn’t her immediate concern. With the flames burning down, a few of the charred men stirred and groaned.

“Finish them, Luyang.”

“What?” Lanthe said as she deposited Ingna what she hoped was a safe distance away.

“I’m not Ro,” Yelhwa said. “I don’t relish the suffering of my enemies. Finish them with your glaive.”

“Right.” Lanthe considered the burned men wheezing and groaning in agony, then turned back at the princess. “I’m not doing that.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Do you know what gunpowder does when you expose it to that kind of heat?” The Medyan would have their extra powder charges secured in cylindrical containers further protected inside leather pouches, but as soon as those metal tubes reached a certain temperature—

BANG! BANG! One explosion set off another, sending rocks and blackened limbs in all directions.

“See?” Lanthe said as a charred foot thudded to the ravine floor between herself and the princess. “That would have been me.”

“Well.” Yelhwa held herself a little straighter, refusing to acknowledge the mistake. “I suppose then it’s good that the problem took care of itself.”

“Nothing about this is good, Princess.” Lanthe gestured angrily to the smoking pile of corpse fragments. “We need to get out of here now.”

“I give the orders, Luyang, and next time I do, I expect you to obey without making me repeat myself. Understood?”

“No.” Lanthe said, ignoring Ingna’s sharp gasp at her side.

“No, you don’t understand?” Yelhwa raised an eyebrow, scathingly condescending in her tone. “Or—”

“No, I’m not taking orders from you.”

“Captain Luyang!” Ingna squeaked, as horrified as she had been by any of the carnage. “You can’t say that!”

“You created this situation, your Excellency, and you are making it worse.”

“I just saved your life,” Yelhwa said, indignant.

“You just marked us for death!” Lanthe pointed toward the sparks and smoke climbing skyward to obscure the moon. “You see that? You just gave away our position to any Medyan within ten miles of here! Whatever enemies remain in these hills are about to converge on this place, knowing that a graphemancer is here.”

“Oh… well…” It was plain from Yelhwa’s momentary frown that she hadn’t thought of that. Idiot. “Then, we should get moving.”

“Should we, Princess? What a brilliant idea! Except that Lady Ingna here can’t walk, let alone climb that slope.”

“I’m so sorry, your Excellency,” Ingna said, mortified.

“No one is angry with you, Ingna,” Yelhwa snapped and turned to Lanthe. “Surely, you can carry her and still make good time?”

“Not on this terrain.”

“Hmm. I thought Ro were supposed to rise to any physical challenge.”

Lanthe bristled—less because she was insulted and more because the jab was so utterly childish. Lanthe pointed out the devastatingly obvious gaps in Yelhwa’s thinking, and the princess fired back by insulting Lanthe’s masculinity—or Ro-ness. Like they were children.

“Ask the strongest man in your army or any other whether he wants to risk a fall from that height”—Lanthe nodded to the slope—“with a delicate girl on his back.”

“Well, then…” Yelhwa frowned in thought. “We make for higher ground as fast as we can and prepare to make a stand if anyone approaches.”

“Make for higher ground how, your Excellency?” Lanthe demanded. “Which way? Because that way leads us deeper into the ravine”—Lanthe pointed her glaive the way she and Ingna had come—“and that way, you just turned into a burning minefield.”

As if to punctuate Lanthe’s words, another BANG sent stone and smoking flesh flying.

“Right.” Yelhwa looked faintly relieved. “Well, that part is easily remedied.”

“How do you remedy that?” Lanthe asked, but the princess raised her hand and started to write.

Her fingers flicked through the air in a web of complex characters—and water burst from the air above the dead Medyan. The effect was like the spray when a cannonball hit the surface of a river—or a wave shattered into a thousand drops on rock—only without the wave, without the cannonball, without the river. Water from nothing. Like the fire before it.

The supernatural rain fell on the burnt bodies like a blanket in a great hiss and a rush of steam nearly as thick as the smoke. In an instant, the last little flames were extinguished. The sparks went out.

“It’s still hot,” Lanthe said. “We should wait…”

She paused when she realized that Yelhwa was finishing a new set of characters—and Heavens, they were so complicated. So many strokes in a matter of seconds. Faster than Lanthe could ever load a gun.

This time, when Yelhwa extended her hand, the sheen of water on the dead Medyan turned to frost. As if to mock the way greenery sprouted from a burial ground, icy flowers bloomed on the charred bodies and cast vine-like swirls on blackened gun barrels.

“Now, let’s be on our way.” Yelhwa strode into the sparkling field of dead men like it was her personal garden, confidently expecting Lanthe to fall in behind her like a lady in waiting.

And, struck dumb, Lanthe did.

Cold had slowed the stench of death, but it was still there, choking Lanthe as she crossed the blackened earth with Ingna on her back. The young lady gagged and put a sleeve to her mouth to filter the air.

As frost crunched beneath Lanthe’s boots, she looked down in horror at the frozen chunks of flesh that had been men moments ago. It was hard to reconcile the inhuman horror with the delicate hand at Yelhwa’s side. Lanthe would have had to pay in sweat, blood, torn muscles—and ultimately her life, if she was being honest about her odds—to kill these men. But this was another game to the Princess of Yao. Like her poetry tiles.

Legends claimed that the graphemancers of Old Yao had been able to command any force of the natural world with enough skill. Until Lanthe walked this garden of death, those claims had been just that: legends, frivolous teahouse stories embellished to the point of nonsense by entertainers. Everything in Lanthe’s military career thus far had told her that stories were just stories. Men were just men. Gods lived in Heaven. They didn’t walk the Earth—and they shouldn’t.

Life shouldn’t be so cheap to any being.

“We should start by finding better cover,” Yelhwa said, then, when Lanthe didn’t respond, turned to her. “What? Nothing snide and insubordinate to say, Mage Slayer?”

Grudgingly, Lanthe shook her head. “Thanks to your tactical genius, that is the only option we have.”

“A ‘yes, your Excellency’ will suffice,” Yelhwa said tightly.

Her fists kept clenching and unclenching at her sides as they proceeded out of the ravine. Something was wrong with her—aside from the obvious casual mass slaughter; Lanthe had come to understand callous killing as a part of Yelhwa’s daily routine. Something else was off. Her bearing was tenser than usual, yet, somehow, not as sharp.

Suddenly wary, Lanthe didn’t demure, but she did tamp down on her anger. She couldn’t say yet what was different about Yelhwa, but Lanthe likely wasn’t going to help anything by rising to match her childish posturing. Instead, she turned the conversation to practicality.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea how and why these Medyan are here, your Excellency?”

Yelhwa made a noise that was no less irritated than she had sounded earlier, but for the moment, at least, her anger didn’t seem to be directed at Lanthe. “I can’t say how they got here—only that someone will pay dearly for it.”

“Is it…” Lanthe didn’t want to reference General Inshu’s treason in front of Ingna; even if Yelhwa didn’t mind the young lady knowing, Lanthe would rather she not learn that her princess had knowingly executed her old family friend for another man’s crimes. “Is it the someone I’m imagining?”

“That’s the question.” Yelhwa frowned ahead. “Are his connections comprehensive enough to smuggle hostile troops over the border? I didn’t think so, but I intend to know by the end of the night.”

“So, you think these men could have been hired?” Lanthe asked.

Did it make sense for someone—Yao or otherwise—to contract Medyan killers outfitted with Medyan weapons and military uniforms? Who would that benefit? A Yao native trying to throw suspicion from himself or an uncharacteristically cowardly Ro not wanting to embroil his own kingdom in open war? But Ro had already sent Lanthe and Tairo… and surely General Inshu had more covert native Yao assassins at his disposal. The Weasel’s preferred weapons seemed to be whispers in narrow corridors. Surely, he wasn’t the sort to hire a hundred men with firearms when one operative would do just as well with a knife or a vial of poison?

“No one needed to hire these men,” Yelhwa said. “Although I am surprised that your King Josan hasn’t beaten them to the mark as far as killing me.”

Lanthe paused, mid-step, and nearly stumbled over a root. “What?”

“That’s what I thought you and Chang Tairo were when you arrived, you know?” Yelhwa cast a sidelong look at Lanthe in the moonlight. “Assassins from King Josan. Now, whether you are or not, I think that Medyan shared my assumption that warlike Ro would make the first move against me. If Medyan are here, it’s because they expected Josan of Ro to take action—overt or covert—more quickly and are displeased with his response.”

Lanthe swallowed and did her best not to let confusion or distress show on her face.

Was Yelhwa telling the truth? Were Lanthe and Tairo moving too slow for their king? General Chang had firmly told Lanthe to do what she thought was best for Ro, but, at the same time, he had strongly implied that his own wishes were not quite in line with King Josan’s. In letting her instincts govern this mission, was Lanthe making an enemy of her own divine sovereign? The thought was too stomach-turning to contemplate. Thank Heaven there were nearer threats to consider. Lanthe forced the unthinkable to the back of her mind and turned her attention to pressing the princess for more information.

“Since when does my country cooperate with Medyan in war? Our kingdoms don’t have a strong relationship. There’s only the gun trade.”

“Only the gun trade, Luyang?” Yelhwa raised that scathing eyebrow at Lanthe. “In kingdoms without graphemancy, what do you think the future of warfare will look like?”

If you envision a gunpowder future, you might have at least trained your lady archers accordingly, Lanthe thought but kept the thought behind her teeth.

Lanthe had never attempted to understand trade or politics on the scale of kingdoms; it had never been her place nor her job. She would have to ask Tairo about Medyan when they found him—if they found him; Lanthe had been carefully not thinking about that while there was no new information to act on. But maybe the princess had some.

“What was the situation when you left the road, your Excellency?” Lanthe asked, pulling the conversation back to subject matter she could understand.

“The contingency plan for an attack was always that General Runkai and his guard would hold their ground and protect the non-combatant ladies, leading the enemy to assume that one of those ladies must be me. The rest of us—those who could spell or shoot—would scatter into the surrounding areas to divide the enemy.”

“By ‘those who can spell,’ you mean graphemancers?” Lanthe said, unfamiliar with the terminology.

“Obviously.”

“How many graphemancers are—or were—there among you, Princess?”

“Seven, including myself. Suzu, Mina, Pinan, Yurei, Yinrei, and Wensu.”

“So, five at most remaining,” Lanthe said.

It was Yelhwa’s turn to stop sharply. “What?”

“You’re down to five, Princess. Mina and Pinan are dead.”

Yelhwa set her jaw, pretending not to react. “Well—” She had to stop and clear her throat when her voice caught. “Five of my graphemancers are still more than a match for however many Medyan are here.”

“Are they?” Lanthe didn’t mean the question as a challenge; a real commander wouldn’t have taken it as one. But Yelhwa’s eyes flashed.

“I don’t need you questioning me, barbarian.”

The soft “ha” that came out of Lanthe was unintentional.

Yelhwa whirled on Lanthe as though she had just spat on her shoes. “Something more to say?”

“I’m not the one who just burned nine men to death and then stopped to fix my hair.” The words burst out before Lanthe could stop them. “And I think that if someone had thought to question you earlier, we might not have ended up in this incredibly stupid situation.”

“Well, I’ll have you know—”

“Shh.” Lanthe held up a hand.

“Excuse me?”

“Listen.”

Feet were crunching through the darkness to their right. At least fifteen men. Maybe more.

“What did I tell you about the smoke signal?” Lanthe hissed. “Cover!”

Lanthe scrambled behind a horse-sized boulder jutting up among the trees and slung a shaking Ingna to the ground. Yelhwa’s fingers were already forming characters as she slid alongside them to rest her back against the boulder.

“Wait!” Lanthe whispered. “No fire, your Excellency. No lightning.”

“Why not? There’s space.” And it was true that the Medyan had caught them in a place where the trees were small and far between.

“Not enough,” Lanthe said. “These woods are dry, and I wouldn’t count on your little water tricks to control a forest fire in this heat.”

“Then you have a better idea, Ro? You want to fight twenty Medyan hand-to-hand?”

“The mage at Yansey—Peilen—used a shockwave,” Lanthe said. “Can’t you do that?” It wouldn’t sound too different from cannon fire, and it wouldn’t visually mark out their position to hostiles elsewhere in the forest.

“Sunsai’s mages didn’t use the shockwave except to breach walls. It has a low fatality rate.”

“You can afford the trade-off,” Lanthe said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“You have me.”

Yelhwa considered Lanthe for a moment as footsteps crunched closer. It seemed to be curiosity more than confidence that made her concede. “Fine. But when you die, I’m burning them all.”

“If I die, you’re welcome to, your Excellency.”

Lanthe readied her glaive as Yelhwa began a spell on her left and Ingna crushed close against her right shoulder. Heaven, those flowery oils and perfumes smelled interesting mixed with smoke and feminine sweat. Not bad, Lanthe decided. Just interesting.

“Do you know your optimal shockwave range, your Excellency?” Lanthe whispered as an exchange of Medyan voices drew closer to their hiding place.

“You need to stop asking me stupid questions.” Yelhwa had the shockwave spell ready, characters glowing before her fingertips.

“They’ll fire as soon as they see a head come up,” Lanthe said, thinking of Lady Seng’s ill-timed attempt to fire on the Medyan earlier. “You’ll need to be quick.”

“I’m always quick,” Yelhwa said in annoyance. “And what makes you think I’m going to stick my head up?” Her left hand was sketching a new spell, slower than the first and far more complex.

“What does that say?” Lanthe asked.

Yelhwa didn’t answer, but Ingna read the characters aloud in tremulous awe. “Heaven’s steel and still water… be unto force as a mirror unto light… forty-five degrees and—”

“Silence,” Yelhwa said tersely, “I need to listen.”

Eyes fixed in concentration, Yelhwa lifted her left hand before her and, with it, the glowing set of characters. When her hand had extended above the top of the boulder, she flexed her fingers once in a movement that seemed to stick the spell in place. When she lowered her left hand, the characters stayed where they were. Meanwhile, the shockwave spell stayed ready at the fingers of her right hand.

“Hey,” a voice said in Medyan—disturbingly close—and the speaker seemed to call attention to the light above the boulder.

Immediately, several gunshots rang overhead. Ingna started violently against Lanthe, but of course, there was nothing to hit except intangible light and the far side of the boulder.

“Advance,” another Medyan said, “with caution.”

Yelhwa took a slow breath deep into her chest, her sharp eyes focused on a meaningless point in the darkness before her, and Lanthe knew that look of concentration. The princess was counting footsteps, gauging her optimal firing distance. The Medyan were almost on top of them when Yelhwa extended her right hand—not toward her enemies but toward the characters already hanging in the air above her.

The light of the shockwave spell seemed to bounce off the other set of characters. Yelhwa’s left-hand spell reflected the shockwave—as a mirror unto light—blasting it backwards over the boulder at its target. Lanthe’s mouth opened in shock. The graphemancy she had witnessed had given her no notion that such a thing was possible. But there was no time to stand and marvel.

The moment she heard the shockwave connect, crunching bone, Lanthe surged into the kind of motion she could understand. She was over the boulder before the Medyan soldiers had even thudded to the ground.

The shockwave had knocked the nearest trees flat and taken branches off those further back. The human forms were many—nearly twenty at a glance—but the active threats were considerably fewer. A “low fatality rate” to Sunsai evidently meant fifty percent. It seemed that the ten or so Medyan closest to the boulder had died on impact—heads shattered, ribs caved in. The remaining ten had gone to the ground among the flattened trees.

Lanthe burst into their ranks before any had a chance to rise.

Normally, she would never have bet on herself in a ten-to-one fight; that wasn’t a reasonable bet, even if you were General Chang. But her opponents were all down, ears ringing, disoriented, some of them with broken bones. The nearest three were so injured—limbs shattered, fighting to heave breath into collapsed chests—that Lanthe’s glaive was a mercy. She worried, as she slit the third one’s throat that she had wasted time finishing them.

She killed the first two as they tried to rise—one with the spear-end of her glaive through the heart, the next with a crescent sweep through the neck. She spun through the beheading stroke to slash through a Medyan who had just struggled to his knees. The powerful stroke opened him from the right clavicle to the left hip. He fell as four of his fellows staggered to their feet in Lanthe’s immediate vicinity.

It appeared that the Medyan who had advanced with their guns drawn had lost the weapons on impact. Those who still had their pistols on their belts were too slow and shaken to load them, instead drawing knives and swords. Lanthe had counted on this and prepared to meet her multiple opponents.

As they closed on her from four points, she channeled Tenro and twirled her glaive in a few lightning circles around her body, the final stroke blowing a burst of dead leaves up around her. She didn’t expect to hit anyone; she didn’t quite have Tenro’s superhuman ability to fight with the spear-end and crescent-end of his glaive simultaneously, but the display of speed and the threat of blades made all four Medyan pull up short.

Lanthe took careful note of who reeled back and who held at the fringe of her striking range, waiting for an opening to attack. Two flinched back like fools. Two held their nerve like real soldiers. That was workable.

Pulling her glaive to a standard attack position, Lanthe made a show of fixing her attention on one of the fools and took a step toward him. As she had hoped, one of the braver Medyan took the opening and came at her from behind with his sword raised. Instead of advancing in the next step, Lanthe jolted her center of gravity onto her back foot, tightened her core, and rammed the butt end of her glaive back. The pointed end went through the man’s gut before his sword ever reached her.

Unfortunately, the next real soldier had a better eye for opportunity. Taking advantage of the fact that Lanthe’s glaive was temporarily immobile, he charged. Lanthe yanked her weapon free of the dying man in a single motion, but she was a split second too slow. The burly man had already surged past her ideal striking range, too close for her to use the blades on either end of the glaive. She registered his long dagger just in time to ram the shaft of her glaive into his arm, knocking the would-be stab to the ribs wide.

Still riding his forward momentum, he swung at Lanthe’s head with an unsettlingly huge arm—too long for Lanthe to backstep out of range. Instead, she ducked under the punch, dropping her center of gravity low between her thighs, grabbed the man by the shoulder of his uniform, and let his momentum flip him over her back onto the ground.

He crashed down with thunderous force as another swordsman rushed Lanthe. She stomped on the giant’s neck, crashing his head into the rocky ravine floor as she turned into her next stroke, severing her next opponent’s sword arm. As that man fell to the ground, shrieking in agony and spraying blood from his stump, Lanthe twirled the glaive over and put him out of his misery with a clean thrust. As the spear-end of her weapon squelched through his eye socket, she registered the swish of a ramrod down a steel barrel.

Ten paces away, the last coward shakily finished loading his gun and started to take aim. Letting go of her glaive, Lanthe had her pistol out of its holster and the handle cocked back in the time it took the Medyan’s finger to find the trigger.

BANG!

The twin guns fired simultaneously.

As the Medyan’s poor shot clipped Lanthe’s sleeve, her bullet struck him dead in the chest—bless that long barrel!—jolting him where he stood. At this range, no armor could stand up to a bullet, and the man keeled over dead. Nine down, one to go.

Beneath Lanthe’s foot, the giant Medyan was groaning through the fog of half-consciousness. Keeping her boot firmly on his neck, she holstered the pistol and drew her sword to finish the job.

“Wait!” Yelhwa’s voice cut through the fevered hum of battle high. Lanthe looked up to find the princess striding through the field of corpses and fallen trees as Ingna peeked timidly from behind the boulder. “Leave that one alive.”

Lanthe glanced down at the stirring Medyan, who probably weighed as much as herself and Yelhwa combined—all of it muscle.

“This one, Princess?” Lanthe said between hard-won breaths as the pause allowed exertion to catch up with her. “Really?”

“Did I ask for your input, Luyang? Restrain him and sit him up.”

“Alternatively, you could give away our position again, and I could catch you a smaller one?”

Lanthe was only half-joking. She was still feeling the twinge of throwing the man in her whole body. He did not seem like a good candidate to hold against his will with only a pair of skinny noblewomen as back-up.

“You just butchered ten men with a bladed stick and a single shot,” Yelhwa said. “I’m sure you can handle him. I need to speak to him.”

Killing a man was vastly different from holding him still, but Yelhwa obviously didn’t care.

“As you wish, ma’am,” Lanthe sighed and dropped her knee to the back of the man’s neck as she scrambled to remove the weapons from his belt and unfasten it.

When the belt came free, she used it to lash the dazed man’s hands behind his back. She worked quickly, knowing that if he came back to himself before she finished, he had more than enough strength to tear free and do serious damage.

As Lanthe sat the Medyan up, he seemed to regain his bearings. He jerked against the belt with disturbing ferocity. Failing to break through the thick leather, he surged toward the princess with a growl. Lanthe jerked him back on his knees with her arm locked around his ridiculously thick neck. From here, she could choke him into unconsciousness, no matter how big he was.

He snarled something in his language. Ro and Medyan didn’t have many words in common, but Lanthe could tell that it was foul.

“Lovely to meet you too,” Yelhwa said and then continued in Medyan; of course, she spoke perfect Medyan. Tairo said that most rulers studied their neighbors’ languages, even if they never achieved fluency, and language was clearly Yelhwa’s strong suit.

The man spat more profanities in response, and Yelhwa returned with something that had the tone and cadence of a question.

Complex characters flashed from her fingertips, and Lanthe understood the Ro-like words: “This is going to hurt.”

Yelhwa put a glowing spell to the man’s upper arm, where there was no armor, only a sleeve. The characters burned through the fabric in an instant and sank into flesh like a brand. A wall of muscle shook against Lanthe as the Medyan huffed and growled through clenched teeth. He held out for a moment before the pain became too much, and his growl turned to a scream.

“Keep him quiet,” Yelhwa said coldly.

Lanthe already had a hand over the man’s mouth, fingers and thumb squeezing at the jaw joints so he couldn’t bite. She tightened her arm slightly around his throat and smothered his screams.

“Now,” Yelhwa removed the characters from the man’s skin, and Lanthe was starting to get a handle on her carefully enunciated Medyan. “I will ask again. How…” Lanthe didn’t understand the rest of the words except ‘Yao.’ Yelhwa was clearly demanding what Lanthe was keen to know: how had so many Medyan gotten this far into Yao?

As the man’s breathing slowed, Lanthe loosened her grip enough for him to speak if he chose.

He said, “Choke on my cock, demon whore.”

“Poetic,” Yelhwa made a show of sounding unbothered, but the tight muscle in her jaw and the fidget of her lethal hands said otherwise. “Wrong answer.”

She thrust the characters to the man’s arm again, and Lanthe scrambled to quiet the fresh wave of screams.

As the Medyan howled warm saliva into Lanthe’s hand, Yelhwa’s face twisted into a snarl—as though she were struggling not to scream against the heat herself. She had locked inexperience up behind aggression—like so many men did—but it was plain that she was not accustomed to inflicting this kind of pain. She had no idea what she was doing, no plan beyond the fire in her hands.

“Your Excellency…” Lanthe started, sensing that she needed to intercede but not quite knowing how to do it.

“Luyang, what part of a man do you cut off to inflict maximum pain?”

“I wouldn’t, your Excellency.”

“I didn’t ask you!” Yelhwa’s eyes had gone feral.

And Lanthe, at last, identified the destabilizing change in Yelhwa that was not quite pride and not quite anger. It was fear.

Yelhwa’s closest companions were either dead or scattered through the woods, and here she couldn’t even get this Medyan to tell her why. This man’s defiance was the topmost item in a pile of things that had gone devastatingly wrong for a woman who was used to exercising total control. Her rage was understandable, but General Fen‘s rage had been understandable when his son died—and it had ended in thousands of his soldiers dead at the Angtei border. Rage had no place in command.

Lanthe tried to speak calmly. “Unless you have the precision of a surgeon, cutting into him will end in him bleeding out before we get anything out of him. Your Excellency, please. Take a step back and breathe slowly. Your plan isn’t working the way you want, but that just means you need to recalibrate. Do not cut him if you want information.”

“You dare to condescend to me!” Yelhwa’s voice rose in anger—loud enough that Lanthe worried how it might carry through the hills. “You are not in command of this situation!”

“Neither are you unless you find a way to calm down.”

“I will not be spoken to this way!”

This was not the masterful tactician and scholar of war who had matched wits with Lanthe in Kaisia. This was a frightened girl like Ingna; she needed someone to take her by the shoulders, get her breathing slowly, seeing clearly, and back to herself. Except that this frightened girl had the pride of an emperor and the ability to shoot lightning.

Knowing where this frayed ranting came from and knowing where it led, Lanthe finally knew what she had to do.

“I apologize, your Excellency. I mean no disrespect.”

When Lanthe tightened her arm around the Medyan’s throat, it was not without fear. She had no faith that this new, unstable Yelhwa would not strike her dead. But if someone didn’t take control of the situation, it ended in death for them all.

“What are you doing?” Yelhwa demanded as the prisoner began convulsing from lack of air. “I said I wanted him alive.”

“I’m not killing him,” Lanthe grunted through the effort of holding onto such a large victim.

A slap cracked across Lanthe’s face. She didn’t react. Just quietly maintained her hold.

“Stop!” Yelhwa ordered. Another slap, harder than the first, and some residual heat from Yelhwa’s spell stung Lanthe’s cheek. “I command you!”

But the Medyan’s struggles had faded, his body going limp against Lanthe. When she was certain he was unconscious, she let him slide to the ground.

Yelhwa looked at Lanthe with lightning wrath in her eyes. “I told you—”

“He’s not dead.” Lanthe had been careful. “He’ll wake soon. Before he does, you will calm down and stop acting like a child.”

The flash of rage was too raw and fast for even Yelhwa’s quick spellwork. Her hand shot upward to draw the sword across her back.

There was a split second in which Lanthe could have drawn her own sword in defense. But there was rarely any de-escalation from the crash of steel on steel. If Lanthe met Yelhwa at the edge of a blade, the princess’s rage could only quicken and grow. There would be no resolution except for someone to die—so Lanthe made another unthinkable decision.

She slapped the supreme commander of Yao.

It wasn’t a particularly hard blow. Even with a closed fist, it wouldn’t have done much damage, but Lanthe got the feeling the princess had never been slapped.

Yelhwa gasped, but the loudest gasp was from Ingna, who shouted, “Captain Luyang!” from somewhere behind Lanthe.

The moment of shock had loosened Yelhwa’s grip on her lacquer sword handle, and Lanthe took the opportunity to seize her by the upper arms. Lanthe’s hold effectively tore Yelhwa’s grip from the sword handle and immobilized her. Yelhwa jerked against Lanthe, and surprisingly powerful muscle squirmed beneath silk in Lanthe’s grip, but in terms of raw strength, there was no contest.

The princess’s fingers were still free and, therefore, capable of forming spells. But this close, Lanthe could throw her to the ground or slam her against a tree before she finished one. Yelhwa seemed to realize this and went still in Lanthe’s grip.

“Listen to me,” Lanthe said. “You’re smarter than this. You have better self-control than this.” It was the voice Lanthe used with panicking soldiers, but of course, the silken terror between her hands was no peasant foot soldier. And Lanthe had to fight for her usual measured tone. “It’s not enough to move pieces around your Sen board in the comfort of your gardens. You have to apply the same sharp thinking out here, where the world isn’t broken into clear identical units, and real lives are in the balance.”

As she said the words, Lanthe realized that she had misjudged Yelhwa’s problem earlier; it wasn’t that Yelhwa mistakenly saw these hills as a Sen board and the people in them as game pieces. It was that she wanted to—and couldn’t. She had tried to proceed through the chaos dispassionately as she did in a game of Sen and had been unprepared for the mess of unfamiliar terrain and unpredictable human error.

It wasn’t the first time Yelhwa had made this kind of miscalculation either, Lanthe realized. The first had been at Yansey. She had assumed that her graphemancer would secure the fortress—the more powerful piece would displace the weaker—without accounting for the human intelligence behind Ro’s walls.

“Just because this isn’t as clean as a Sen board doesn’t mean you lack the capacity to navigate it,” Lanthe said. “You just need to recalibrate, your Excellency. Find the calm and the genius you had when we met in the palace.”

Yelhwa’s hair had spilled sideways across her face with the slap. And Lanthe was thankful for the dark curtain between them. She got the feeling that meeting Yelhwa’s eyes at that moment would be like putting a spark to the pan; the world would blow to pieces.

“You’re going to get yourself under control—because you have the capacity and because you must. You have a hundred people somewhere in these hills depending on you and a kingdom beyond that.”

Yelhwa still did not lift her head or move. The bowstring-tight stillness was almost unsettling. Lanthe swallowed before continuing.

“We’re going to walk away from each other, your Excellency. Ten paces. Take to the count of fifty—or as long as you need to order your thoughts. Then, I will meet the supreme commander of Yao. If part of that plan involves trying to kill me, so be it.” She refrained from adding see how that goes, and took her hands off the supreme commander of Yao.

The line of Yelhwa’s shoulders was tense. For a moment, Lanthe thought she was going to go for her sword again. But she just turned her back and started away.

Heart pounding, Lanthe did the same, counting her steps—two, three, four. She didn’t retrieve her glaive from her last victim’s body as she passed; she didn’t want to give the princess any more cause to attack. Seven, eight, nine, ten. Lanthe ended facing the boulder, and Yelhwa had not put a lightning bolt in her back. She let out a slow breath and looked up to find Ingna gaping at her.

The little noblewoman had limped out from behind the boulder, using a particularly large fallen tree to support herself. She hadn’t quite made it to where Lanthe and Yelhwa had argued over the disastrous interrogation, but she was surely close enough to have heard every word.

“Y-you… h-how did you do that?” the girl whispered, caught somewhere between horror and awe. “No one speaks to the princess that way!”

Lanthe just shook her head because, honestly, she had never been one to talk back to nobles. And it wasn’t as though Yelhwa was any less dangerous or terrifying than any of Lanthe’s noble commanding officers; quite the contrary.

“I told you,” Lanthe said finally. “I’m not Yao. I don’t answer to your supreme commander.”

The explanation was oversimplified. Being in Yao wasn’t what had changed Lanthe; at least, it wasn’t the only thing.

General Chang didn’t send me here to be a game piece, she thought. He sent me to play.

Light feet shuffled back through the leaves, and Ingna and Lanthe both turned toward Yelhwa as the princess approached. Tension stretched the air thin for a moment. But Yelhwa didn’t sketch characters or go for her sword. Lanthe had figured as much. If Yelhwa had really wanted to hurt Lanthe, she knew perfectly well that the best way to do so was from a distance, with graphemancy. And more importantly, she knew perfectly well that her chances in these woods were better if she kept Lanthe alive.

“Your Excellency…” Lanthe cleared her throat as Ingna’s wide eyes darted from her to the princess and back. “Was that… did you actually count to fifty?”

“I count fast,” Yelhwa said tersely and then studied Lanthe with discomforting interest. “You’re nervous,” she observed.

“You seemed very ready to kill me a moment ago, your Excellency.”

Yelhwa frowned—and there was another emotion Lanthe had never seen cross her flawless features. Shame. Of course, Yelhwa drew her shoulders back and quickly pulled her expression back to dignified neutrality. “Kill you?” she said. “But you’ve yet to bore me.”

“Right,” Lanthe almost laughed in a mixture of relief and exasperation. “So, you have a plan?”

“In the long term, the plan is what it was before the attack: we make for the Spearshaft Ravine. We just need to regroup with the remaining Yao first.”

“Are there remaining Yao?”

“There will be,” Yelhwa said. “I was unseated, but the rest will have stayed on horseback and made it to the flatter, rider-friendly ground before the ravine. I don’t care how many guns Medyan brought with them; they won’t outfight mounted Yao.”

Lanthe wasn’t certain but didn’t say so. “And in the short term?” she asked.

“In the short term, we wake that idiot up,” Yelhwa nodded down at the unconscious Medyan at their feet. “This time, I’ll ask the questions, and you hold the knife since you seem to know so much about interrogation.”

“I don’t, your Excellency. Not… this kind of interrogation, anyway. Not torture.”

Yelhwa cocked her head in question. “I thought brutes were supposed to be good at that sort of thing.” The rudeness was defensive. Yelhwa was asking a genuine question.

“Your Excellency, when we met, you told me a quote from one of your military books: men lie under threat of death and pain. That’s why I asked you to count to fifty. To give you time to think on what you already know from your books. What is the best way to apply pressure here?”

Yelhwa folded her arms. “You’re taking the tone of a tutor.”

“Not intentionally, your Excellency,” Lanthe said honestly. “I couldn’t—I’ve never had a tutor.”

“Well, that’s what they sound like, and that’s the look they get in their eyes when they’re steering you to an answer they politely want you to think you came up with yourself.” She gestured at Lanthe’s face. “You were the one who told me not to act like a child. If you already have an answer in mind, give it to me without preamble, as you would a commander. Can you do that, Luyang?”

A smile pulled unexpectedly at the corner of Lanthe’s mouth. It made no sense for her to be proud of the princess of Yao, but she allowed the smile to take her anyway.

“Yes, ma’am. I can do that.”

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I hope you enjoyed this chapter of Gunpowder Magnolia! You can get early chapters + more serialized content from the world of Altima on my Patreon.