Gunpowder Magnolia

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

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Lanthe had known she would be a soldier long before she volunteered for the king’s army. Maybe that was an odd thing for a farm girl to know so early in her life, but the moment of decision was still clear as spring water in her memory all these years later. She had stopped to rest in the hills overlooking her town, knowing that with Lanhai working the field, Lantao working the shop, and Lanwei working the loom, no one would miss her. The village of Heba had seemed so small beneath her dangling feet. She had raised her hands to frame it like the perfect picture—somehow more perfect without her in it—and longed to make her hands a shield.

In the present, Dalin’s blood had turned sticky on her palms, and Lanthe shook with the sickly feeling that she was failing. The red of war was oozing between her fingers into Kailong Bay, through her parents’ fields, up to the door of their house, where her mother and sister sat, weaving.

Lanthe experienced emotion differently on the field, as an activated powder charge, her mind a steel barrel, directing it where it needed to go. Now that the time for steel had passed, the powder spilled from her, unignited—and wouldn’t stop spilling. Tears ran through the dust on her face and dropped to Dalin's cheeks.

Most soldiers lived as Lanthe did, as shields to protect what was behind them. Their deaths were bitter but bright things. Steel in the sun, offered willingly for home and kingdom. There was no brightness when boys like Dalin died, only the wistful agony of a story cut short. Here was a young man who should have gotten the chance to go back to civilian life and one day teach his own children the calligraphy his mother had taught him. You didn’t grieve a broken spear that had served its purpose. But a broken calligraphy brush…

Lanthe ran a hand down Dalin’s face, closing his dead eyes and marring those noble features with finger-streaks of blood. The logical part of her knew that bringing the scholars' son down to the field had been an absolute necessity. And, given his performance in training, it was unlikely he would have survived the final carnage, even with the proper arms in hand. 

But all that hard rationality had fallen away like shed armor in the aftermath of battle. And the tears were still running down her cheeks long after Dalin’s blood had dried in the dust at her knees.

“Captain Luyang.” A hand touched her shoulder and the world shifted stiffly back into motion. “We’re waiting on your orders.”

“Right…” Lanthe eased back, letting Dalin’s head off her lap.

The sun was full in the sky now, blinding on the surface of the Seizang River, as if intent on scorching the last thread of water from this ever more arid fringe of Ro. Clouds of flies hummed feverishly over a red and blue patchwork of corpses between the river and Yansey's decimated gates.

“Are you injured, Captain?” asked the soldier. It was Wyling, the accountant’s son, a bandage wrapped around his head.

“No,” just exhausted, “and I’m not the captain.”

“Well, sir…” Wyling looked unsure what to say. “About that…”

All at once, Lanthe’s hand was fisted in his uniform, jerking him forward. “Lord Tairo is still alive?” At the painful stab of fear, she was incalculably glad she had already spent all her tears. If Tairo hadn’t made it—

“He’s fine, sir. He just… he’s asked to see you.”

Lanthe let out a breath. “Good.” Releasing Wyling, Lanthe put a palm to his chest in apology.

“Sir, you’re bleeding.”

Lanthe glanced down at her arm where a Yao spear had torn through her quilted armor and the uniform beneath to draw blood. “Ah. So I am.”

It was frankly astounding that she had survived the attack with only this scratch to show for it. Throwing herself at the mage alone had been throwing herself at all-but-certain death. Of course, she hadn’t been thinking of it in terms of personal cost when she started running. There was only the target and what had to be done to protect the kingdom at her back.

The sword wasn’t Lanthe’s preferred weapon and it was a poor defense against a spear in the open field. Suya and Ensai had been at her side soon after the mage fell, but they had still been under-armed and vastly outnumbered. Lanthe would have called it a miracle: three swords standing for over a minute against so many spears. But General Chang said that there were no miracles on the field, just very tight plans and very well-trained soldiers. Lanthe’s plan hadn’t been tight, so Heaven bless Githya and all Yansey’s pikemen for their brute strength. Few other forces could have broken through the lines of Yao so decisively.

“I’ll get Duswe to have a look at your arm, sir,” Wyling offered but Lanthe shook her head.

Duswe, the son of an apothecary, was the now closest thing Yansey had to a medic and his skills were certainly better applied elsewhere.

“It’s just a flesh wound,” Lanthe said. “Make sure Duswe sees to the men who need it first.” For the moment, she just wanted to see Tairo.

Lanthe had to pick her way over bodies and rubble where the front gates had been. She thought about trying to rub the tear tracks from her face but decided against it. The true Ro was as passionate in his grief as he was in his brutality. It was how you knew a man was human, with human will and fury. As long as she held herself with dignity, she expected no one would begrudge a lieutenant tears for one of his men. What she hadn’t expected was the way the first soldiers leapt to their feet at her approach.

She had seen soldiers do the same for General Chang. Never for Captain Arza. Certainly, never for her.

“Luyang!” one man cried out. “Mage Slayer!”

Mage Slayer? That was a bit dramatic, Lanthe thought. Anyone could cut down an old man with a bullet wound in his chest. She almost cracked a smile before realizing that more men were standing for her, absolutely serious. Some who probably shouldn’t have been trying to stand at all hauled themselves up to salute, right forearms parallel to the ground, fists before their hearts. Even Juryo, with an arrow still protruding from his side, managed it, holding onto his neighbor for support.

“Luyang! Mage Slayer!”

There looked to be no more than sixty Ro left who could still stand and shout. Outside of a battle cry, Lanthe had never known the voices of sixty men to rattle the air this way—like the intent was to be heard in Heaven.

“Luyang! Mage Slayer!”

Faintly shaken, Lanthe held up a hand for quiet, and the soldiers obliged, as they would for a general. She was used to making her deepened voice carry over gunfire and the clash of swords. Here in a courteous silence, her lungs suddenly felt woefully insufficient.

She cleared her throat.

“Please… everyone, give a prayer to Dalin, who deciphered the mage’s magic for us before giving his life to Ro. Give a prayer to the gunners and pikemen whose sacrifice held the Yao long enough for him to do it. We owe this victory to them.” Unsheathing her sword, Lanthe held the hilt toward the sky, the blade pointed earthward—for those whose souls who had ascended to Heaven as their bodies fell. “To the fallen!”

Forty swords answered, raised skyward. “To the fallen!”

“And all they defended!” The words felt strange on Lanthe’s lips; they belonged to a commander, after all, but they came easily.

“And all they defended!” answered the men of Yansey, matching her fury.

“May it stand a thousand years!”

“And ten thousand more!”

Down the line of saluting soldiers, Lanthe spotted Chang Tairo, his broken arm splinted, his uniform splattered with his enemies’ blood. And a surge of pride colored her relief. Even one-handed and shaken with impact, the lordling was damn good with a sword.

“Our work isn’t done,” Lanthe told the men inside the fortress as they sheathed their swords. “We don’t know whether Yao has more troops on the way. For now, all of you who aren’t tending the wounded should be helping collect the dead.”

“Yes, sir!” the soldiers hurried to obey, leaving Tairo standing alone.

General Chang’s first son was tall, pretty, and aristocratic to the tips of his toes. Even hardened from training, covered in blood, and festooned with clinging bits of hay from the fall, he couldn't quite shake the willowy elegance of a noble. He was Lanthe’s antithesis in all things, and they had been inseparable since their first month of training. As Lanthe closed the distance between them, they fell into an awkward but earnest hug, Tairo doing his best to keep his injured arm out of the way.

“I’m so glad you’re alright!” she said into his shoulder, which was as high as her head reached.

“You’re not angry with me?”

“I know who you are, Chang Tairo.”

She hadn’t meant it as an insult but Tairo hung his head anyway, looking ashamed.

Months ago, Lanthe had stopped short of telling the general how fruitless it would be to give Tairo a command position at a wayside fort. You know it won’t change him, she had wanted to say. You know it won’t turn him into his brother, but she had held her tongue out of respect. Maybe if she had been a little less respectful, they would both be riding with General Chang against the Angtei a hundred miles from here. Not left in this situation neither of them were equipped to handle.

“He died, didn’t he?” Tairo’s voice was empty. “The boy you took onto the field with you?”

Lanthe nodded.

“I can read Yao.”

“Well…” Lanthe hadn’t intended to bring that up. “Then you lied to me. You told me your Yao was awful.” It was thin consolation; they both knew that Tairo excelled at any language he studied.

“It should have been me.”

“Your father…” Your father told me to look out for you, was what she had started to say, but hearing that would only deepen the shame. “He’ll be happy that you’re safe.”

“He’d be happier to have a real man for a first son.”

“Fine, well, I’m happy that you’re safe.” Hoping to distract Tairo from his weakness, Lanthe gave in to hers and hugged him again.

“Hey—ow!”

“I didn’t touch it,” she said in exasperation.

“I know,” Tairo said as Lanthe pulled away on the pretext of giving Tairo’s uninjured shoulder a brotherly clasp. “Everything hurts.”

“That’s what you get for being regular-sized. If you were short like me, you’d have bounced off that hay bale, no problem.” Lanthe was actually deeply bruised from the fall—she could feel the swelling all the way up her right thigh and hip—but she still suspected that being on the lighter side had saved her from more serious injury.

“Captain?” a voice said and Lanthe turned to find now-third-in-command, Githya, saluting them both. “Forgive the interruption but what are your orders for the Yao corpses? Should we burn them with our own? Or are we leaving them where they fell?”

No answer. After a confused silence, Lanthe looked to Tairo, who said, “Captain Luyang?”

“Cap—but I’m not…?” She trailed off. Outside the walls, Wyling had called her captain too, but Tairo was next in the chain of command. Why were he and Githya both looking at her as if expecting orders? “Um…” She turned back to Githya, opting to phrase her thoughts as a suggestion. “I think it’s best if we burn them. Our enemies are due warrior’s rites too. And we don’t want the bodies to fester in this heat. That makes sense, yes?” She looked up at Tairo, who nodded.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Very good, sir,” Githya said. “I’ll order all the bodies gathered then?”

“Yes, please,” Lanthe said. “Cap—or—Lord Tairo, can we talk in private?”

“Of course,” Tairo said.

In Yansey’s modest war room, Captain Arza’s maps still sprawled across the table, held in place under lacquered wood weights. Painted stone company and battalion pieces were placed across the map, representing the most recent intelligence reports. Blue for Ro, red for Yao, yellow for Angtei, plain gray for unaffiliated rebels and bandits. The few red pieces on the map stood along the Ro-Yao border to the west, safely on the Yao side of the line. The nearest enemy pieces were yellow, the Angtei horde facing General Chang’s blue battalion pieces at the eastern border. This Seizang River border, which Ro shared only with the unclaimed barbarian territory, was not supposed to have enemy troops anywhere near it—Yao or Angtei.

A fort like Yansey, at this largely unthreatened border, would normally serve primarily as a training site for newer recruits like Dalin, fresh off their capital-standard firearms training. It was incredibly lucky that experienced fighters like Captain Arza, Githya, Ensai, Suya—and Lanthe herself—had been here to meet the Yao. And she suspected that they were only here to give Chang Tairo a chance to command real soldiers.

“So, what is this, Lord Tairo?” she said as soon as the war room doors had thudded closed behind them. “What’s going on?”

“You think I have any idea?” With his good arm, Tairo gestured helplessly at the former captain’s map. “No one saw this attack coming.”

“I wasn’t talking about the attack,” Lanthe said. Obviously, they would get to that in a moment, but Yansey couldn’t move forward without a commander. “Why are people calling me Captain? Why are you calling me Captain?”

“Because you are,” Tairo said as though this were quite obvious. “I stepped down.”

“You can’t just abdicate your responsibility.”

Tairo gave a one-shouldered shrug. “No one objected. Why would they?”

“Because hierarchy exists for a reason, Tairo!”

“I know.” Looking down, Tairo nudged one of the spare Ro pieces into another at the edge of Arza’s map. “In this case, the reason was that the great Lord General Chang needed a title for his idiot son that didn’t carry any real responsibility.”

“Tairo, that’s not—” Lanthe started but cut off when he glared at her.

“Don’t,” he growled. “Don’t do that, Lanthe. I may not be my brother—or you—but I’m not stupid. Father put me in a position where an experienced captain could look after me and you could pick up my slack when I inexplicably managed to mess things up anyway.”

Lanthe bit down on her protests, knowing that lying to Tairo's face wouldn't spare his feelings. It would only shame him.

His voice gentled. “The victory this morning was yours… “ His tone was not bitter but earnest. “So, command should be yours.”

“That’s not how it works, Lord Tairo. And look, you might doubt yourself, but you have a responsibility to these men now.”

“I am being responsible to them,” Tairo said. “I’m giving them a leader they’d proudly follow to their deaths. That’s not me, Lanthe. It never will be. If the Yao come again, I won’t be able to hold this fort with sixty-some men—or whatever we have left.”

“And you think I will?”

“You might."

“So, you’re ceding your rightful rank to a peasant for a one in ten thousand chance I won’t get us all killed?”

“I don’t think you’re understanding the numbers here, Lanthe. What you pulled off this morning was a one in hundred thousand.”

“Let’s not be dramatic—”

“I’m not,” Tairo insisted. “No non-magic soldier has killed a graphemancer on the battlefield since Weitan the Indomitable.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Lanthe confessed, willing to bet Tairo had just made him up.

“That’s because he lived over four hundred years ago. What you just did is the stuff of legends. It might not mean anything to you, but it means something to me. And it means something to the men out there.”

“That’s nice,” Lanthe said. “It’s no basis for—”

“Weitan got a quarter of a kingdom and a princess’s hand in marriage for his feats. I don’t think anyone will begrudge you command of a half-exploded fort, alright?” Tairo was plainly getting impatient. “And, tell me honestly, Lanthe, if a band of barbarians or another company of Yao showed up this evening, would you follow your command or mine?”

Lanthe didn’t answer, just looked down.

“That’s what I thought.”

“I’m a peasant,” she felt she should point out. It wasn’t against the law for commoners to ascend to the rank of captain but the title was usually reserved for nobility.

“So was Weitan the Indomitable.” Tairo whipped a Ro battalion piece at her and she caught it. “As a lord’s son, I’m telling you that the fort is yours now, peasant.”

Lanthe sighed and clutched the battalion piece to her chest, its corners digging into her palm. “Fine. Then that’s Captain Peasant to you.”

“There he is!” Tairo’s sooty face split into that smile that had melted hearts from Josai to the Seizang. “Now, Captain Peasant, what’s the plan?”

“The plan?” Lanthe placed her fists on the table and leaned into them to look over Captain Arza’s plainly lacking map. “Hard to have one when we don’t know what under Heaven we’re dealing with. Isn’t that Yao magic—graphtomancy?—supposed to be gone from the world?”

“Graphemancy,” Tairo said with a smile, “and yes. It was last recorded about four hundred years ago. How do you figure the Yao came up with a new graphemancer after all this time?”

“Don’t look at me, Lordling. I learned most of my history from you.”

Tairo sighed, looking at his feet. “I’m sorry I’m no help. I should have been with you on the field. Maybe I’d have been able to discern something—”

“Help me now,” Lanthe said, grinding her fists into the table to cover her frustration. “Help me think. And don’t call me sir.” She and Tairo might have been close for years but there was still something viscerally wrong about a lord’s son addressing her as a superior.

“I suppose…” Tairo looked down at Arza’s map, black eyes tracing the border between Ro and Yao. “Our kingdom lost a lot of texts during the Great Unification. Yao has an unbroken literary tradition going back further than ours. It’s possible that some scholars held onto the art and nurtured it in secret.”

“For four hundred years?” Lanthe said.

“It’s possible."

“If you say so.” Tairo was the one with firsthand experience of aristocracy in the Ten Kingdoms; she’d take his word for it. “But would any of that help explain why the Yao are attacking us now? And at this fort, of all places? I thought King Kaisin had a good relationship with his Excellency, King Josan… I thought he had a good relationship with your father.”

“He did—does—but he’s been bedridden and unable to rule for over a year.”

“Right,” Lanthe remembered. “He has his daughter running the kingdom for him. Princess Yel-something?”

“Yelhwa.”

Rulership in the Ten Kingdoms rarely ran down to a woman, but King Kaisin had apparently taken ill with no living parents, brothers, uncles, sons, or nephews to serve in his place.

“Alright,” Lanthe said, “so, what do we know about Kaisin Yelhwa of Yao?”

“We know she’s beautiful.”

“That’s not a character trait.”

“Isn’t it?” Tairo gestured to his own legendarily handsome face.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Honestly,” Tairo said more seriously, “I haven’t heard much about her. I think most of the Ro nobility assumed she’d be married to the next king of Yao too soon for it to matter.”

“And you haven’t heard your father talk about this—Yelhwa’s rule? Yao attacks from the south? The return of graphemancers? Any of this?”

A bitter breath that was not quite a laugh left Tairo. “He’d talk about a new threat with you before he’d talk to me.”

Lanthe pressed her lips together and opted not to respond to that. “I guess, it’s been months since either of us has seen him. A lot can shift in that time.”

“And he’s been preoccupied with Angtei this past year.”

“Mm…” Lanthe grunted her agreement, then frowned as a thought occurred to her. “Captain Arza knew something.”

“What?”

“He knew that man was a mage the moment he saw those white robes. Isn’t that odd?”

“He was dressed like a classical graphemancer,” Tairo said, “right down to the red sash.”

“I know,” Lanthe said. “I’ve seen paintings before. But it’s one thing to dress up like a historical figure for dramatic effect and something else to tap into magic that isn’t supposed to exist anymore. Foreigners use disguises all the time to distract and confuse. But Captain Arza knew right away that we were dealing with the real thing. How?”

Both of them looked to the late captain’s desk, where he would have kept correspondence with the rest of Ro. Of course, only Tairo would be able to read them. He had already crossed to the desk and pulled open the letter drawer.

“With your permission?” he looked up at Lanthe.

“Of course.” She gestured impatiently. “Go ahead.”

“Alright…” Tairo rifled for a moment. “There are a lot of letters here.”

“Read everything,” Lanthe said. “I’ll go look at an alternative source of answers.”

“What alternative source, sir?”

“I don’t know if you noticed but we took some prisoners.”

“Prisoners?” Tairo said in shock.

“I know, I know,” Lanthe said. “No survivors.” It was Ro tradition to eradicate enemy forces at the end of a battle. But General Chang said that there were times to bend tradition for the good of the kingdom.

“Why?” Tairo asked.

“Because this attack was too strange. It’s like your father says; he who owns the information owns the field. We still hold Yansey, but as far as I’m concerned, this isn’t a victory until we understand why the Yao attacked and where in the Ten Kingdoms that graphemancer came from. If this intel is all wrong”—she gestured to Arza’s map—“then Yao has the upper hand. Not just on us here at Yansey but possibly on all of Ro. We’re not letting that stand.”

“Alright…” Tairo tilted his head, thinking. “I don’t think we have anyone here with experience in torture.”

“We don’t.” Thank Heaven. Lanthe had seen General Chang’s interrogators at work and knew she didn’t have the stomach for what they did. “I’m going to handle it.”

“You…? By yourself?”

“Unless you’d rather switch with me, Lord Lieutenant?”

“No. Point taken, Captain,” Tairo said. “With your permission, I’d like to get some of this blood off me before I go rifling through Lord Arza’s important documents.”

“Of course.” It still felt off giving a noble ‘permission’ to do anything, but they both knew that reversing their positions would do Yansey no favors.

“You also have a bit of blood… everywhere.”

“Good.” She tugged her uniform straight and lifted her chin. “I’m not tall, so I’ll need to be frightening somehow.”

In her two years as a sergeant and one as a lieutenant, Lanthe had learned that she got the best out of new troops by being firm and clear but never cruel. Hopefully, prisoners would be similar—if a little more challenging. If her approach proved too challenging, she could always send in a burly pikeman to throw the prisoners around and demand answers. But she would prefer their trust to their fear… if she could get it.

Yansey’s jail was a creaky structure adjoining the stables against the inside of the western wall. It smelled of horse when Lanthe approached.

“As you were,” she said when the guards at the door snapped into a salute. “Ensai, you have the keys?”

“Yes, sir.”

“With me, then. I need to have a word with the prisoners.”

“Sir.” Ensai opened the door for Lanthe and then followed her into the packed dirt corridor between cells. The ten Yao prisoners sat in the largest cell chained together—five and five—at the hands and feet.

The western warriors were curious creatures up close. Instead of shaving their hair back on the sides as the Ro did, they left it long to flow in the wind and catch on whatever it pleased during battle. Their pretty red silk uniforms and lacquered breastplates were probably fine for riding fast over warm plains, but they weren’t practical protection from bullets. Lanthe had heard that the Yao were the best mounted archers in the Ten Kingdoms, but their performance with spears today had not impressed her.

Even depleted by rubble and arrows, Githya’s formation had torn through theirs in minutes. And even after losing her glaive, Lanthe had matched three of their disorganized spearmen with her sword and killed them—which was just shameful. In a mounted clash, perhaps things would have been different, but on the ground the Yao were clearly no match for the Ro. Lanthe stepped into the cell without fear.

“Wait outside,” she told Ensai, and he drew back.

Lanthe had seen prisoners of war spit at interrogators and try to bite their fingers off. This group didn’t look ready for that kind of fight. More than anything, they looked tired, and Lanthe opted to close the barred door behind her. She figured it projected confidence—try something if you dare; I’ll take all ten of you—without putting her in much danger. Ensai could open the unlocked door and be inside in an instant if there was trouble. And if a few unarmed Yao could kill Lanthe in that space of time, she really didn’t deserve to call herself Ro, did she?

A few of the Yao had looked up when she entered, chains shifting against the stone. Dalin had been the only soldier in Yansey fluent in Yao. A gunman named Hailu had known a little but he had been killed in the mage’s first shockwave. With Tairo off the table as well, Lanthe would have to push through the fifty percent mutual intelligibility between Yao and Ro. At least, the Kailong dialect Lanthe had grown up speaking was closer to Yao than the northern Ro that was standard in the military.

“Gentlemen.” She dragged a stool from the corner of the cell and sat facing the prisoners. “I’m Captain Luyang Lanthe. I hope my men have treated you decently.”

“You are captain?” one man asked in slow Western Ro. He had a black eye that Lanthe hoped he had gotten before his capture and not after.

“As of this morning, yes,” she said.

“I am lieutenant.” He put a manacled hand to his chest, which Lanthe now saw bore a Yao crest trimmed with gold, distinct from the simple red and white of the others. “I am high rank of us here.”

“You got a name, Lieutenant?”

“Do not address him so familiarly, Ro,” a younger prisoner piped up, glaring at Lanthe. “That is High Lord Hyonang Yinzo.”

“I beg your pardon?” Lord? What was a lord of Yao doing on the front lines at a nowhere fortress on the wrong border of Ro? Lanthe had thought that Yao didn’t send its high officials into battle at all, a custom the Ro had always roundly mocked.

“It’s true,” another Yao chimed in. “This is the son of Lord Hyonang Yanlo, grandson of Hyonang Ailo, great-grandson of General Hyonang Haswe.”

“Really?” Lanthe kept her expression impassive, wondering if the names were supposed to mean something to her. Perhaps they would if she was better versed in history and court politics.

“I can prove it.” The alleged lord stuck a hand into the sleeve of his uniform.

Lanthe quietly prepared for a weapon, confident that she could step out of range before he got the chance to use it. But after fishing for a moment, Hyonang Yinzo came up with a polished block of bone, which he offered up on an open palm.

Plucking the ornament from his hand, Lanthe turned it over to find fine Yao characters etched into one end. It was a family seal—presumably bearing the Hyonang name—rendered with artistry no humble craftsman could mimic. And thank goodness Lanthe had spent so many years with literate boys from good families; she knew a finely-crafted seal when she saw one, even if she couldn’t read the characters.

“I see.” She slid the seal into the breast pocket of her uniform to show Tairo later. Even the most convincing counterfeit wouldn’t get past his discerning eye. For the moment, she gained nothing by being suspicious or hostile.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Lord Hyonang Yinzo.” She averted her eyes in acknowledgement. “I’ll say, we don’t get many nobles of any kingdom out here.” She didn’t bother trying to mask her peasant’s accent. She wouldn’t succeed in sounding more educated, only less genuine. “Tell me, what brings a man of your stature to the thick of battle at our humble fort?”

“Tell him nothing!” the youngest prisoner growled through bloodied teeth.

“Silence!” Hyonang Yinzo commanded. “Your idiocy has cost Yao enough.”

Lanthe glanced from one man to the other but didn’t comment on the outburst. There was tension here—perhaps something she could exploit. But she had a feeling it would play out without her prodding.

“So, Lord Lieutenant Hyonang, If I recall, you’re the one who made the decision to surrender when the battle was lost?”

“I did,” Hyonang Yinzo said, looking defiant for the first time.

The Yao might not have the Ro’s reputation in battle but they were at least known to fight to the last man. A surrender, even when all was lost, was unusual. In Hyonang’s position, Lanthe would be gnashing teeth to defend her pride as well. But in the glances the Yao exchanged, she got the feeling there was something more complex at work than simple cowardice.

“You will not make me ashamed, Captain Luyang,” Hyonang spat.

“No,” Lanthe agreed calmly, “I don’t think I will. I don’t think I want to.”

As her gaze passed over the row of tense expressions, she noted that Hyonang Yinzo had shifted forward and to the side ever so slightly. Not toward Lanthe so much as between her and his fellow prisoners. He cared about these men, cared whether they lived or died. Lanthe could use that. Hopefully without drawing any blood.

Honesty felt like a good place to start.

“When your ship anchored this morning, I was the second lieutenant in this fort,” she said. “Our captain was killed and our first lieutenant incapacitated in the shockwave that destroyed the wall. When I realized the chain of command had run down to me, my first thought was ‘God in Heaven, what am I going to do?” She met Hyonang’s anxious gaze and held it. “How am I going to keep all of us alive?’ So, I have only respect for your decision Lord Hyonang. Had I been on the other side of the battle today, I would have done as you did.”

Well, that last part wasn’t the truth. For a Ro, surrender was worse than death. Lanthe would never inflict that on her comrades, but Hyonang didn’t need to know that.

“You did well by these men,” she said. “You must care about them very much.”

At those words, Lord Hyonang went predictably tense. That was alright. Lanthe hardly expected trust to be instantaneous. But if she was leading the way to honesty, she had to push ahead to her honest point.

“I have some questions about this attack. If you can be honest with me and answer them, all ten of you will have food and medical attention.”

“And if we’re not interested in being honest with you?” It was the young man on the end of the line.

“Quiet, Ailun!” Lord Hyonang snapped and Lanthe read equal parts rage and anxiety in his eyes.

“We have no use for your mercy, Ro!”

“Stop talking, you stupid boy!”

“No! I won’t stand by while my father descends deeper into treason!”

Father. Looking between the men’s faces, Lanthe could indeed see the resemblance. They had the same fine jaw, long red-brown godmarks, and sharply pointed hairline.

“Forgive my son, Luyang of Ro,” Hyonang said quickly. “He is raving mad, blinded by sorcery.”

“Sorcery?” Lanthe probed, fully aware that she was setting sparks near foreign material. She needed to see the reaction it got—from Hyonang the Elder and the Younger. “Like the graphemancy I saw on the field this morning?”

Hyonang Yinzo scoffed. “Graphemancy is the least of the sickness afflicting the Yao court.”

Lanthe tilted her head, eyes narrowing in curiosity. Perhaps Princess Yelhwa of Yao wasn’t the harmless, pretty thing Ro had assumed.

“I understand that your king is ailing and his daughter is ruling in his place until she marries. Is there something wrong with the new order?”

Anger colored Hyonang Yinzo’s godmarks and he opened his mouth but his son interrupted again. “Traitor! Tell him nothing!”

“I told you to keep your mouth shut! You are unwell. You—”

Before Lord Hyonang could finish, his son lunged for him.

Lanthe was faster. Not wanting to draw her sword on an unarmed man, she pivoted to her feet, stool in hand. As the lordling lurched forward, dragging his neighbor with him, she brought the stool crashing down. Rickety wood split across the Yao’s shoulders and he went down hard.

“Captain Luyang!”

The splinters hadn’t finished clattering to the floor when three Ro were inside the cell, weapons drawn.

The young lord, dazed from the impact, didn’t resist as Ensai kicked him onto his back and pressed the blade of a glaive to his throat.

“We’ll kill this dog, Captain!”

“No!” Lanthe said, “Hold!” but the sound was lost as Lord Hyonang moved to protect his son.

Without glancing in his direction, Ensai punched the Yao lord in the mouth, knocking him back to the floor.

“I said hold!” Lanthe bellowed, at last stilling the chaos inside the cell.

“Apologies, Captain.”

“Separate them.” She pointed to Lord Hyonang Yinzo—“This one in his own cell”—then to the son—“this one in another. The rest of them can stay here. Give all of them food, water, blankets, and any medical help they need.”

“All?” Ensai said with an uneasy look at the lord’s son beneath his boot.

“That’s what I said. None of them are to be harmed.”

Lanthe considered moving Lord Hyonang Yinzo out of the cells and into one of the compound’s spare officers’ rooms as a gesture of goodwill, but she canceled the thought. If she wanted his men to retain a sense of solidarity with him—and she did—they all had to be prisoners together.

She moved Lord Hyonang to the cell across from his fellows, so they could see one another but a patrolling guard prevented conversation. His son, she moved to a cell further down the row. The others couldn’t see him or hear him well, but they could at least be assured he wasn’t screaming from torture.

The spear wound on Lanthe’s arm had started to itch as the blood dried to a crust on her uniform. She stopped to wash and bandage the injury before checking back in the war room with Tairo.

“Anything new, Lord Lieutenant?”

Tairo shook his head. “There’s nothing in Captain Arza’s letters about unusual Yao movements or mages. At least, not in the military correspondence. I haven’t touched his letters from home. I’m sorry. What about you, Captain? Did the prisoners yield anything useful?”

“No,” Lanthe said, “but give it time.”

She could get somewhere with those Yao. They just needed a night to stew on their worries while Lanthe took care of her own. There were bodies to identify, injuries to treat, rocks to clear, inventories to take, messages to send. With so many of their original unit gone, tasks had to be reassigned and hands stretched thin. Lanthe herself spent the rest of the day hauling rubble, one great rock at a time, while Tairo oversaw inventory.

The sole remaining horse at Yansey was Tairo’s powerful gray mare, Cloud; Captain Arza’s bay had died when the graphemancer’s shockwave had sent rubble crashing through the stable roof. Lanthe had Ensai take Cloud and ride east in the direction of the Ro encampments on the Angtei border. Normally, a vulnerable fortress would send several low-ranking soldiers out with messages and keep their most valuable fighters close but, with just one horse, Lanthe didn’t have that luxury. Ensai was the best fighter left in Yansey, peerless with the glaive, sword, bow, and pistol. If any solitary rider was going to survive the bandit-infested gauntlet between here and the Angtei border, it would be him.

Tairo had stroked Cloud’s neck and spoken to her softly, plainly pained to see her go.

“You know I can’t send you,” Lanthe had said, apologetic.

“You don’t think I’d make it.”

The answer was yes, obviously. Instead, Lanthe said, “I need you here.”

“To do what?” Tairo asked, taking Cloud’s reins to lead her from the stable. “I’ve already read through Captain Arza’s correspondence twice and come up with nothing."

“Compile inventory,” Lanthe said, “and write up a report.” It was beneath Tairo’s station but with Dalin gone, he was the best scribe on hand. “No one else has your education.”

After Ensai had departed for General Chang’s camp, Lanthe allowed the Yao out of their cells to see their dead burned. Even Hyonang Ailun behaved himself, standing solemnly alongside his countrymen as Lord Hyonang Yinzo said the traditional prayers before the pyre—which wasn’t really a pyre at all.

Realizing that they did not have the lumber to set a fire beneath so many bodies, Lanthe had ordered the Yao ship dragged ashore downwind of the fort. With two-hundred and forty-two bodies piled on the deck—the fifty-two Ro in careful repose, the one-hundred and ninety Yao in a less loving heap—the Ro set the vessel aflame.

“I still think we should have sent the thing downriver, Captain.” Githya frowned up at the column of smoke, as he and Lanthe hauled a hunk of wall across the ground by ropes.

“We had to do right by our dead. A soldier’s ashes should rest on his native soil.”

“Then we coulda waited until reinforcements showed up to take the dead back to their families. That smoke’ll be visible for fifty miles around. Anyone out in the wastes is gonna know there was a slaughter here, mass death, corpses to pick over. We’re a beacon for scum and vultures.”

“Spoken from your experience as a vulture?” Lanthe grunted.

“What of it, Captain?” the ex-convict said as they heaved the rock another grating few inches through the dust.

“I respect your expertise,” Lanthe said with a wry smile, “but that was a calculated risk.” She nodded to the fire climbing red cloth to eat through the white crane on the ship’s mainsail.

“Calculated how, sir?”

“Have you seen disease take a camp, Lieutenant Githya?” 

His silence said ‘no.’ 

“Right,” she said. “You’d prefer bandits.”

“We don’t have the men or ammunition to fend off a mounted horde.”

“No,” Lanthe agreed as they finally hauled their load onto the X scratched into the dirt. “That’s what the rocks are for.”

Lanthe was having the largest pieces of the wall distributed throughout the breach in such a way that a mounted charge would founder and break on them. Any horsemen who tried to storm the fort would have to dismount, putting them on even footing with Yansey’s few but formidable pikemen. It was a thin defensive plan but it was all they had until there was time to rebuild the wall.

“And tell me again why we had to let the damn Yao have funeral rites?”

“That,” Lanthe sighed, “was another calculated risk. Now, that’s enough chatter, Lieutenant.” She unslung the rope and rolled shoulders burning with strain. “Let’s get another rock.”

Lanthe and her men finished hauling rocks long after dusk, by the light of the burning ship. Despite the exhaustion permeating her body, she didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to keep her eyes open all night, watching the breach. But her voice of reason pointed out that these men needed a captain whose mind had rested the night more than they needed an extra pair of eyes on watch.

So, after assigning men to guard duty and taking the inventory Tairo had written up for her, Lanthe dragged herself up the stairs to the officers’ chambers. Protocol dictated that she move from her quarters into the captain’s following his death. She couldn’t do it and instead returned to the room that had been her home since she had come to Yansey.

Inside, she sank into a chair behind a desk she had never used and spread the inventory report before her. With her peasant's education, Lanthe couldn’t read the books of poems, history, and philosophy that occupied the minds of great generals. But Ro had a long history of peasant warriors and their military script was simplified to a degree that the lowest farmer could learn it with minimal instruction. As she looked over the report, Lanthe found that Tairo had been kind enough to dumb his lordly writing down to her level.

By lamplight, she confirmed her most pressing worry. If the Yao launched another attack—even a very modest one—Yansey would not have the bullets or manpower to repel them. Ro battle fury often won them victory against daunting odds, but it was a poor tactician who banked on miracles.

Lanthe held the inventory numbers in her head, rolling them around, as she paced the room: ninety-eight men, only seventy-two without incapacitating injuries, fifty arrows, twenty-one bullets. If she slept with the numbers in her head, Heaven willing, she would wake with a plan in mind.

Shuttering the chamber windows, Lanthe unbuttoned her quilted collar and rolled her neck. Over the years, she had become an expert at finding moments, behind trees, tent flaps, or under cover of darkness, to change or relieve herself. In her early years as a soldier, she had told her comrades that she had unsightly pox scars. This had ceased to be a lie after pox had swept through General Chang’s camp one year leaving many dead and many more disfigured. Ironically, this was just before she had been promoted from sergeant to lieutenant, affording her private quarters.

It was still strange to have this time alone, to be with just herself… to be a woman.

By lamplight, Lanthe stripped off her armor and unwound the bandages around her chest. The binding would never have worked on a well-endowed woman, but Lanthe’s breasts were modest and malleable enough that she could strap them down without pain. Shedding the binding felt similar to taking off one’s boots after a long day and freely flexing the toes—which, incidentally, Lanthe did too.

Falling on her back on the bed, Lanthe massaged her breasts and felt some of the tension seep out of her chest and upper back. But the relief didn’t reach the center of her, didn’t unwind the knots that sat deeper than muscle. Even as her body sank into the bed, her mind wouldn’t stop racing into battle, rearranging rocks, rearranging men, running every possible attack scenario.

Even if that dreaded second attack didn’t come, tomorrow would be no easier. Lanthe would still be captain. She still had prisoners to interrogate, men to look after, a fort to repair… When she closed her eyes, all she could see was that hideous gap in the wall, indefensible with their numbers… Her parents’ village was not an hour’s walk from Kailong Bay, where Ro met Yao. If the current ruler of Yao had a grudge against Ro and battle mages who could blow through a wall as thick as Yansey’s, how safe was Lanthe’s family? How safe was any little village sitting too close to the border?

Captain Arza had taken a dish of wine each night to ease the tensions of leadership, but Lanthe did not take alcohol well. It dizzied her, turned her stomach, and the last thing Yansey needed was a queasy wreck for a captain. So, in the dark, Lanthe slid a hand into her trousers and took advantage of this one other privilege that came with private quarters.

She never pictured a man.

A man meant marriage and the confining walls of a house. No more rain of arrows on shields. No more glaive burning against her callouses. And if Lanthe wasn’t a glaive and shield for Ro, then what was she? When war came to Ro’s doorstep, what was she supposed to do from behind a loom? Sit and wait for the arrows to take everything good from the world?

Any way she tried to picture it, that male form over her turned to a trap, weakness, helplessness. Try as she might—and she had tried many nights—Lanthe couldn’t milk a drop of pleasure from the image.

Instead, her mind abstracted the sensation of her fingers. She imagined a wave, like the ones that plunged against the shores of Kailong Bay at the juncture between kingdoms. Wild and beyond all human power. The motion started as a pulse deep in the ocean, her fingers massaging methodically. Then it grew, picking up speed as it raced for the land, mounting to a towering inevitability. Her hips rolled, calloused fingers working faster, as the wave crested, curled with the arch of her back—then crashed.

Lanthe breathed out the rush, going to pieces like water on rock. The last of the wave splayed across the sand in shimmering, shuddering bubbles and washed the tension from her body. At last, the ocean eased back, leaving the sand smooth and calm in its wake. Loosening all over, Lanthe withdrew her fingers and slid away on that calm, following the receding wave into the dark.

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