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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Intellectually, Lanthe had always been alright with the idea of dying. Her parents would still have their gentle daughters and strong sons. Her little village would still sit safely in its nest of hills and trees. As long as she could die protecting that, she could die content. She returned to that sense of peace and purpose every time she lay into a charge or faced one.

This was the first time it didn’t work.

There was red at the bandits’ hooves as they galloped toward the gap, churning up not just dust but the flaking dried blood of Yao who should never have been this far east. And casting her mind back to green Heba didn’t bring Lanthe serenity, just a sickening surge of worry. The Yao attack had changed everything, casting a red shadow on the map of Lanthe’s mind. War with Yao would mean that Lanthe’s village near the border was no longer safe. Her family was not longer safe. If she died now, she would die uncertain of Ro’s future. And this was an unacceptable thought.

Use this, Lanthe, the commander in her said firmly. It was what she would have told a frightened soldier as the bandit horde descended. Ro’s enemies thought they fought as they did for an inhuman lack of fear, but the foreigners misjudged. The true Ro felt everything with superhuman intensity—fear, rage, sadness, anxiety—and turned it to fire. So, Lanthe let fear burn wild in the pit of her stomach as she cocked her pistol and prepared to take her only shot.

If you’re afraid to die, Lanthe, then fight like you mean to live!

Eighty foot soldiers against two hundred horsemen might seem like impossible odds, but men of Ro had prevailed against impossible odds before. Why not Lanthe’s men? Why not Yansey?

She had just reoriented herself with this new determination and taken aim between a set of barbarian brown godmarks when the world pitched off course again.

A shout went up among the bandits… not a war cry. A cry of alarm. The charge toward Yansey faltered just outside shooting range, horses skidding to a halt and running up against each other in snorting, whinnying disarray.

“Yera!” a commanding voice pierced the chaos among the bandits as two hundred horses turned in a swell of dust, showing their tails to Yansey. “Yera!” And that word was close enough to Ro that Lanthe understood it perfectly: retreat!

“They’re… pulling back?” Tairo said in astonishment.

“They’re fleeing,” said Githya.

He was right. The bandits who had successfully reoriented their horses were in full gallop along the river away from Yansey.

The soldier in the fortress watchtower was shouting again, but the thunder of hooves was so loud that Lanthe couldn’t hear the words until the third time he repeated them.

“Not bandits! Ro!”

“What?” Lanthe shouted, hardly daring to hope that it was true.

“The horsemen from the east aren’t bandits!” With the hoofbeats fading, the soldier’s voice at last registered clearly, brimming with relief. “They’re ours, Captain! They’re Ro!”

“How?” Tairo said, turning to Lanthe.

She just shook her head, baffled. “Suya, hold the line,” she ordered, just in case their bell-ringer was mistaken.

“Tairo, Githya, with me,” she said, standing and making for the watchtower. “Everyone else, hold position!”

Lanthe saw the dust rising toward the sun in foreboding clouds before she reached the top of the stairs. That volume didn’t herald a hundred horses or even several hundred. No, the riders approaching now had to number over a thousand. Reaching the top of the tower, she saw that her estimate, as improbable as it seemed, had been right. The force cutting its way across the plain was a standard battalion of one thousand one hundred and twenty riders. And she immediately forgave the young soldier for thinking they were bandits. The dust made it difficult to distinguish blue from brown and the battalion flew no banners.

It was only as she squinted that she registered those perfect lines, ridiculously straight even for Ro formations, and the blue capes of officers. Foremost among them was a familiarly imposing figure on a horse black as ink.

“God in Heaven…” Lanthe marveled in recognition, “those aren’t just any Ro!”

“Sir?” Githya said.

“That’s my father’s battalion!” Tairo exclaimed, matching Lanthe’s shock.

“Captain, forgive me!” The soldier who had sounded the alarm looked mortified. “I didn’t know until they got closer. They didn’t have their banners flying. I don’t know why.”

“I think I do,” Lanthe said as she watched the blue battalion sweep onward, not toward Yansey, but past it, toward the bandits.

Lanthe’s bell-ringer had assumed, based on the absence of banners, that he was looking at more herdsmen. The bandits must have assumed the same… until it was too late. Now, even in full retreat, they weren’t going to outpace the Ro bearing down on them. Not against the confining curve of the river. The bandits and the men of Yansey had been preparing for a scrap between mongrels. Here was the tiger.

From Yansey’s walls, Lanthe watched General Chang’s battalion drive the bandits against the river and rip through them with terrifying efficiency. If Githya flinched, he had covered the expression by the time Lanthe cast a glance in his direction—but it was hard not to flinch at such a painfully one-sided affair, even when it didn’t call up unpleasant memories of the past. The battle below was the sort that one didn’t need to watch to know the outcome but commanded attention by its sheer brutality. There was nothing quite like hearing a force of powerful warriors start to scream. And even these wolves, who encroached on Ro’s border without fear, screamed before the tiger.

Terror of this intensity had a smell. It rolled from the river bend to break on the wall like smoke from a fire, piercing the throat and stinging the eyes with the threat of tears. The true Ro didn’t weep for his enemies, of course, but he did remember that they were human. It was how he knew their weaknesses.

As the bandits cried out below, Lanthe remembered that Githya’s father and five brothers had died in the same battle that had resulted in his capture and conscription. He had told Lanthe one evening over one too many drinks. Soberer than the rest of their companions, Lanthe had opened her mouth to say she was sorry, then closed it. Bandits raided villages of innocent civilians like her own family. Their deaths were not a thing to be sorry for.

Instead, she had said gruffly, “I’m glad you didn’t follow... glad you’re here with us.”

Githya had nodded, godmarks flushed from drink, his eyes watery and unfocused, more vulnerable than Lanthe had ever seen him.

“Are you?” she had asked after a moment. “Glad to be here still… with us?”

Githya had looked into the fire, distant, for so long Lanthe thought he might not answer. Finally, he had said, “Most days, Lieutenant.”

If there were days Githya regretted outliving his kin, they had to be days like this, when the army that had adopted him slaughtered herdsmen like the ones who had raised him.

“Go back down, Githya,” Lanthe ordered, so that he wouldn’t have to watch the final butchery. “Tell the men we’re safe.” His new family was safe today. Let him focus on that and not the past.

“Sir,” Githya said, a note of gratitude beneath the gruffness, and withdrew from her side.

The sharpest eye couldn’t discern faces at this distance, but General Chang was recognizable by his movement alone. Near-on fifty years old and there still wasn’t a man in the Ten Kingdoms who could fight in a melee like he did. In the sun, the whir of his glaive cast a corona around his mount as the horse wheeled deftly with each crescent stroke. Lanthe could lean in and lose her heart in the trajectory of that steel. The soldier in her still wanted to, but the commander in her stood tall and took stock of the whole field. That was when she realized that General Chang’s glaive was not the only weapon carving through bandits with superhuman power.

Tairo recognized the second Chang on the field just as Lanthe did, and his face lit like the moon recognizing the sun. “Tenro!”

It wasn’t just Tairo’s father who had come to their rescue. His brother was here too, a blue-caped demigod astride a powerful mare, the lightning strokes of his glaive rapidly splattering her white flanks red.

The bandits who tried to fight were quickly overcome by superior skill and numbers. Those who jumped into the Seizang River were shot as they tried to swim for the opposite bank, threading the water with their blood and littering its surface with their floating corpses. All told, the slaughter took only minutes, leaving a grotesque plot of mangled men and horses in the crook of the river.

“I don’t understand,” Tairo said as General Chang’s battalion circled the site of the carnage, rounding up riderless horses and spearing any bandit who still moved. “How did he get here so fast?”

Again, Lanthe could only shake her head. “You’ll have to ask him. Doesn’t look like he’ll be long.” The moment the words were out of her mouth, a new thought occurred to her. “Shit.”

“What?”

“We have so many rocks to move.”

Yansey’s men worked with speed that would have pleased the most demanding garrison lord, but they had only cleared a space wide enough for a few horses by the time General Chang reached the gap. A rather ridiculous way to welcome the country’s greatest commander, but it would have to do. All of Yansey snapped into place at the general’s approach, forming lines of crisp salutes on either side of the place where the fortress gates should have been. Lanthe, Tairo, Githya, and Suya had just taken up position at the end of the right-hand line when the general’s black horse stepped into the fort.

General Chang Shuro was always depicted in full armor, his blue cape pristine, his helmet and uniform clasps ornate with bronze tigers and crescent moons, his glaive gleaming like a mirror. But the man himself never shone quite as brightly as he did fresh from a melee, drenched in blood. Battle left some men giddy and strange, some haggard and empty, some disheveled. There was something godlike about the way Chang Shuro seemed to absorb what left other men weak and turn it to a steel-cold calm.

A fresh head hung by its hair from his saddle, open neck drizzling blood into Yansey… the leader of the bandits. Lanthe never could have picked a commander out among that seething confusion of tribesmen. But General Chang had a time-honed talent for identifying the head of the monster and severing it, no matter how many claws and teeth got in his way.

He had entered the fort with only a small contingent of officers—Tenro and a few Post Marshals Lanthe didn’t recognize—since the full battalion was too big for Yansey to accommodate without careful planning. Another general would have handed his bloodied glaive to the nearest soldier, who would have run off to clean it, honored to have the privilege. General Chang believed an officer should maintain his own weapons and dismounted without handing off any of his equipment. The moment his boots hit the ground, the soldiers of Yansey went mechanically to their knees. Lanthe dropped with them on muscle memory, palms pressed to the dirt.

It wasn’t until the general’s feet stopped before her that she remembered that this was not strictly protocol. A fort’s highest-ranking officer was supposed to stay on his feet to greet the arriving commander. As General Chang’s firstborn son, Tairo had stayed on his feet. And maybe that was more appropriate. Tairo was the rightful captain of Yansey. Maybe Chang would just greet his son and—

“On your feet, Captain,” the general’s voice rumbled high above her. “Embrace me.”

Lanthe just stared at the general’s blood-flecked boots, unable to move.

“He’s talking to you, Lanthe,” Tenro supplied after a moment.

Lanthe jolted to her feet, godmarks hot with embarrassment, and extended her hand as if in a dream. General Chang’s right arm met hers hard, making everything abruptly real. Lanthe’s forearm was well-muscled from years of wielding a glaive and hauling cannons. The general’s hand wrapped around it, armguard and all, in the moment before he hauled her into a hug. Like everything General Chang did, the embrace was brutally earnest, nearly caving Lanthe’s ribcage through several layers of armor, before he released her.

“Thank you for keeping Ro’s fort, Captain.” He clasped Lanthe’s shoulder before turning to pull Tairo into the same manly embrace—a little too manly, judging by the way Tairo’s mouth opened in pain. This time, however, he managed to swallow the ‘ouch’ and save his dignity.

As Lanthe stood, faintly dazed and smudged with bandits’ blood from the hug, she found Tenro grinning at her. Chang Tenro was his twin’s antithesis in every way that mattered. Where Tairo was unsettlingly beautiful, Tenro was plain. Where Tairo was willowy, Tenro was robust. Where Tairo was anxious and non-confrontational, Tenro was blunt and self-assured. They were both tall, Lanthe supposed, but that was about all they had in common.

Though Tenro’s rank now far outstripped Lanthe’s, they had once been peers in training, and he approached her as casually as he did his brother.

“Good to see you, Luyang Lanthe. Thanks for looking after my brother. And hey…” He punched her in the shoulder so hard it took all her balance and core strength not to topple over. “Nice cape.”

“Thank—” Lanthe had to pause and swallow to cover the fact that the friendly punch had taken the wind from her lungs—and maybe bruised her heart. “Thanks. You too, Guardlord.”

She hadn’t missed Tenro’s long cape and bronze pauldrons, marking him as a Guard Marshal, with command of five thousand six-hundred soldiers. Long overdue, given all his accomplishments. The general couldn’t hold him back on his brother’s account forever.

“Mine’s only temporary,” Lanthe added.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Tenro said with a smile.

“What do you m—”

“Tenro,” General Chang interrupted. “Get Luyang Lanthe caught up. I need to speak to Tairo in private.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Captain Luyang?”

Lanthe straightened. “Yes, sir?”

“Don’t go far. I’ll need to meet with you next.”

“Oh, Lanthe.” Tenro scooped her into a one-armed hug as they turned from the steps. “How long has it been?”

“Nearly a year, my lord.”

Every time Lanthe saw Tenro, he seemed bigger, broader, a little further removed from the wiry fourteen-year-old who, when she had met him, had already been a formidable fighter. Cut from his dying mother’s womb moments after Tairo, he was technically Chang Shuro’s second son. It disgraced a first son to have his younger brother outrank him, no matter how close their age. So, for years, General Chang had remedied the imbalance by giving Tairo important positions at unimportant locations like Yansey while Tenro served as a lieutenant in his father’s camp, handling hundreds of troops at some of the most critical locations in the kingdom. But Ro prized military prowess over all else, and even propriety could only hold a talented soldier back for so long. And Heaven, Tenro filled out the long-overdue guardlord’s uniform magnificently, promising to one day bear every bit of his father’s gravity.

The general’s son was under no obligation to greet Lanthe’s lieutenants. Like Lanthe, they were far beneath him. He greeted them anyway, congratulating Githya and then Suya on their role in defeating the Yao—with a level of specificity that made it clear that he had received a full report and listened intently to the whole thing.

“How did you know, sir?” Suya asked even as Lanthe lit up.

“Ensai?” She turned hopefully to Tenro. “He’s alright?”

“Yes. A little sick from dehydration, but well enough to kill a lot of bandits just now. He told us all about your run-in with the graphemancer. Now, come.” Tenro nodded to where the general’s remaining officers were dismounting. “You should meet the new post marshals.”

“New?” Lanthe looked to the three postlords who had ridden into Yansey in the general’s wake, all young for their rank with long blue godmarks.

“Yes,” Tenro said in audible displeasure, “Heaven help us.”

These were lords’ sons who had gone straight from their extensive military training into their high ranks as part of King Josan’s new initiative to entwine Ro’s aristocracy with the military as it had been in the glory days. It was an initiative General Chang had vehemently opposed, believing all soldiers should prove their mettle on the field before commanding anyone. But in the end, of course, the king had had his way.

While all three of these new postlords were dusty from the long ride, none were very bloody, suggesting that they had hung back from the fighting… behavior Chang Shuro would never have allowed from his own sons.

In addition to their extensive tutoring in swordplay and military history, Tairo and Tenro had both been in the mud with rank and file soldiers since they were old enough to enlist. Both had entered the military at fourteen, the same year as Lanthe. She probably wouldn’t have caught the general’s eye among his hundred new recruits that month except that she had been the smallest. She remembered his sharp gaze brushing over her position and then abruptly flicking back to where she stood, barely reaching the shoulders of the burly farm boys on either side of her.

Her heart had dropped through her stomach.

He knows, she had thought. He knows I’m not a boy.

Years later, the general would confess that what had drawn his eye hadn’t been anything as specific as skinny wrists, the shape of her jaw, or the smoothness of her throat. It had been her size. And Lanthe had been even smaller then, not quite full-grown, lacking the muscle she had later put on through training and better nutrition.

“You, soldier!” General Chang had pointed her out and she had braced herself. Here was where he revealed her for what she was and threw her out of his army. Here ended her ill-advised adventure into a life that didn’t belong to her. Instead, he said, “To the far end of the line. Quickly.”

Heart pounding, Lanthe scrambled to the end of the line of recruits, where she found two boys her own age. She didn’t know yet that they were the general’s sons. All she knew was that both had the long, thin godmarks of nobles and that the slighter of the two was the most beautiful person she had ever seen. As pretty as any lord’s wife or concubine—prettier, she supposed, since his eyelashes and cheekbones cut that breathtaking picture without the help of makeup.

“Pair off!” the general ordered and Lanthe moved opposite the distractingly pretty noble.

A year or so after that day, Lanthe had looked back on this rearrangement of trainees and thought it a rare act of mercy from the general—though whether it had been mercy on her or Tairo, she hadn’t been sure. It was possible that General Chang had gone easy on this malnourished, effeminate peasant boy by pairing him with someone gentle and tentative, instead of some beast of a farmer’s son who would break him in half. It was equally possible that he had wanted to spare Tairo a modicum of dignity by pairing him with someone who wouldn’t immediately put him in the dirt. And, had Lanthe known at the time that Tairo was the general’s son, she wouldn’t have.

On Chang’s call of “Fight!” Tairo had assumed an elegant martial arts stance Lanthe had never seen before. Realizing she faced someone with a level of training she couldn’t fathom, she had experienced a heartbeat of total panic. She would be incapacitated before the fight began, she would be deemed too weak to serve and be sent back home, where she had never fit, where she was no use to anyone, and then—then—

She moved without thinking.

Several years on, the general had confessed that this pairing had been no mercy. “I saw a hardness in you, Luyang,” he had said, “all the tension, and fire, and hunger Tairo lacked. On his first day of training, I wanted him to know that all his advanced forms wouldn’t save him from a determined foe. I wanted him knocked down by the smallest farmer’s son in the line.”

And Lanthe had not disappointed.

In a snap like flint on steel, all her fear had turned to fire at the fuse of a cannon. She was small but so was most ammunition. She blasted into Tairo, her shoulder ramming hard into his gut before he could begin to defend. While she hadn’t had a day of formal training, Lanthe had been wrestling her brothers since she could walk and Tairo was neither as big as Lantao nor as strong as Lanhai. The messy tackle sent both lordling and farm girl crashing to the dirt of the training yard.

“Well, now,” the general said when he turned to find Tairo on his back beneath the smallest of his new recruits. “Size and training aren’t the most important things on the field, are they, Tairo? What is most important on the field?”

The pretty boy opened his mouth, but he was winded and no words came out.

“Decision, Father,” answered the other noble boy—the plainer one—unbothered by the blood running from his nose to stain his teeth. Despite the blow to the face, he had handily pinned his much bigger opponent.

“Tenro,” the general said with a note of admonishment, “I was speaking to your brother.”

Brother? Lanthe digested the word in horror. And the bloodied boy had called General Chang ‘Father’… Still straddling the pretty boy, Lanthe realized that she had just tackled the general’s son to the ground—and slammed his head back against it a few times for good measure.

“All the training in the world isn’t going to matter if your opponent strikes first,” General Chang said as Lanthe hurriedly pulled herself off the young lord and backed away from him. She froze in terror when the general’s cool gaze turned to her. “What’s your name, soldier?”

“L-Luyang, sir,” she had managed to stammer, quaking, fully expecting him to cut her down for disgracing his son in front of so many people. “Luyang Lanthe.”

“Luyang Lanthe,” Chang smiled, “hit him again.”

“Sir?” she squeaked.

“My son has the training to stop you. If he doesn’t use it, make him pay.” Chang Shuro stepped back and, when Lanthe didn’t move, said more sharply, “You heard me, soldier. Hit him until he stops you or stops moving.”

That was how General Chang had brought his sons up through the military, with grueling slowness, making sure they never missed an opportunity for hardship and humility. Lanthe could see why Tenro might resent these younger lords’ sons who had slipped into positions of command without ever taking their beatings.

“Luyang, let me introduce Postlord Ning Dasei, Postlord Yan Tsaral, and Postlord Eng Binan.” Of the three, Eng was the only one with blood on his glaive. “Gentlemen, this is Captain Luyang Lanthe.”

“Acting captain,” Lanthe said.

“You speak very freely with the general’s son,” Postlord Eng said with poisonous inflection.

“I—” I meant no disrespect, Lanthe started to say, but Tenro cut in sharply.

“Yes, he does. It’s how men talk to each other when they’ve served together for many years.”

Lanthe looked to Tenro, startled. The insult had been barely backhanded—dangerously close to a straight punch to the teeth. And, yes, Tenro outranked these men, but their fathers were still important lords in the king’s court.

If Lanthe had been surprised at the insult, she was outright shocked when Tenro introduced her officers and asked the three postlords to greet them like equals. Dasei and Tsaral did so with little more than a moment’s discomfort. Again, it was Eng who couldn’t help biting back at his superior. When Githya took Eng’s arm, the postlord took in the ex-convict’s missing ear and brown-touched godmarks—then looked down at their clasped hands as though just realizing he had touched horse shit.

“Oh.” His lip curled in a sneer. “I didn’t realize…”

“Didn’t realize what?” The edge in Tenro’s voice heralded violence, in Lanthe’s experience. An outburst that ended in broken bones.

Perhaps not sensing the danger—or believing himself immune to it—Eng answered, “That mongrels and criminals were allowed to hold rank at these nowhere forts.”

Lanthe’s ire rose on Githya’s behalf, but it was nothing to the dark swell of wrath in Tenro’s squared shoulders.

Shit, she thought, wondering if she should try to get in between Tenro and Eng before the idiot postlord lost half his teeth. But Tenro had grown in more than stature. Instead of rising to a roar, his voice dropped. 

“This military was built on peasants and mongrels.” That malevolent quiet, so like his father’s calmest threats, made the hair stand on the back of Lanthe’s neck. “You might learn to keep up with them on the field before disrespecting them in my camp.”

Tsaral and Dasei shrank, appropriately cowed, but Eng—who, in fairness, had at least bloodied his glaive—only seethed, silent but plainly not subdued.

An awful silence passed in which the arrogant postlord met Tenro’s eyes and Lanthe made up her mind not to get involved. If a guardlord wanted to rough up a postlord under his command, it wasn’t a captain’s place to get in the way. Lanthe just hoped her body wouldn’t surge to intervene of its own accord the second Tenro’s fist twitched toward Eng’s sneering face. She hated seeing Tenro pick unnecessary fights—even though she understood that some insatiable part of him just couldn’t help it.

Here too, however, Tenro seemed to have grown. He held Eng Binan’s gaze until the stubborn postlord came to his senses and silently backed down, breaking eye contact.

“You three have a camp to oversee, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” Tsaral and Dasei withdrew and, when Tsaral anxiously nudged his arm, Eng followed.

Lanthe couldn’t shake her discomfort as Tenro motioned her away from the other officers to speak to her in private. She might not know much of court politics, but she knew that the Eng were an important family, close to the king himself. If Tenro wanted to pick a fight with a son of their house, she wanted to trust his judgment; she would just prefer not to be anywhere near it.

“Don’t mind Eng,” Tenro said, noting her distress. “He has a good military education. He just doesn’t know how to treat people.”

“He’s a lord’s son, sir,” Lanthe said. “He can treat people how he wants.”

Tenro made a noise of annoyance. “Please, Luyang! You know that’s not true. Maybe in his coddled life at his family’s estate. Not out here.”

One of General Chang’s first lessons to his sons had been that it mattered what their peers and subordinates thought of them. 

“Fear is invaluable when it comes to your enemies,” he had said once, “but when it comes to your own men, fear will not overpower trust nor outlast devotion.”

But if it mattered what a peasant captain thought of a postlord, then it mattered what a postlord thought of a guardlord. Lanthe chewed on her concern, looking for a way to phrase her thoughts that Tenro wouldn’t immediately strike down. Before she found the words, he had cheerfully changed the subject.

“I like this, Lanthe.” He gestured to the makeshift wall across the breach. “Like the one we used against the Chorun in our second campaign up north.”

“That was the idea, sir… though I don’t know how well it would have worked without the snow. Sorry it complicated your triumphant arrival.”

Tenro shrugged his vast shoulders. “We weren’t going to try to squeeze the whole battalion in here anyway. Our men are making camp outside the walls.”

“So, you were planning to travel here before we sent for help?” It was the only way they could have reached Yansey so fast.

Tenro nodded. “We left the Angtei border camp two weeks ago on orders from the king. This battalion is bound for the Yao-Bayin border under my command. Father hasn’t told me why we needed to stop here, but it probably has something to do with the king’s secret plan."

“Secret plan?”

“Like I said, I’m not privy to the details, but having heard your messenger’s report, I’m assuming it has to do with the Yao and the reappearance of the graphemancers. I’m sure Father will discuss all of it with you.”

As Tenro had predicted, it wasn’t an hour later that Tairo came down the steps from the war room looking faintly ill and said, “You’re in, Captain.”

Lanthe found General Chang seated behind the war room desk. From the stationery spread before him, it seemed that father and son had reviewed Lady Arza’s letters while the general cleaned his glaive and gun. The weapons now sat off to the side, restored to their celestial cleanliness. The only blood left in the chamber was the sunset slicing red across the map of the Ten Kingdoms.

“I understand congratulations are in order, Captain.”

“Acting captain, sir,” Lanthe said, “and only at your son’s request. I look forward to being replaced by someone more qualified.”

“Why?” Chang asked lightly.

“Because… it’s your son’s rightful rank, sir. I apologize—I couldn’t talk him into it, but I thought you might?”

“On the contrary”—General Chang stood and crossed to look out the window on Yansey’s decimated wall—“I’ve never been prouder of Tairo.”

Lanthe’s gaze jerked up to meet the general’s in a rather insubordinate look of surprise. She wasn’t sure she had ever heard Chang Shuro say that he was proud of Tairo. “You don’t want him to be captain, sir?” He was already so far behind Tenro in rank. Why humiliate him—or allow him to humiliate himself—further?

“Part of being a man and a soldier is understanding where you fit. Not every man fits a position of command. A few years ago, Tairo would not have been able to accept that. He would have tried to be his brother—to be me—and probably have gotten you all killed in the process. You and I know he’s not built for military leadership, but this is the first he seems to know it. That’s all a reasonable father can ask, isn’t it? That his son learn to be a man—the man he is, not the man he or anyone else wishes he was.”

The general turned from the window to look at Lanthe, his gaze flicking from the tips of her boots to the top of her head, before settling on her face. “And it seems that you’re learning to be… whatever it is you are, Luyang Lanthe.” There was something fond, almost wistful, in his voice. “I don’t think demoting you will be necessary or possible.”

“What do you mean ‘possible’, sir?” Any rearranging of personnel on this level should be possible for General Chang. All he had to do was say the word.

“You bested a graphemancer in battle. You know there are few in myth or history who have done that?”

“I was lucky, sir,” Lanthe said truthfully. “I had the right people with me.”

“Elaborate, Captain Luyang. I’ve heard your messenger’s account and now Tairo’s, but I want to hear it from your mind and mouth. What happened at this fort one week ago?”

So, Lanthe explained her thought process after she had assumed command and how she had implemented it. “I only cut the mage down after he was fatally shot. The kill was down to Suya’s marksmanship and Dalin’s memory of his mother’s lessons in Yao script. I couldn’t have done what they did.” Lanthe couldn’t read, nor could she shoot with a weapon as heavy as the dragon musket.

“But you were the one who brought their skills together into an effective unit,” General Chang said. “That, my child, is what it means to be a leader.”

Lanthe bowed her head, eyes fixed on the sunset-stained floor at the general’s feet.

“And you have that look about you,” he sighed, “when you want to be thankful and can’t.”

Nine years. Almost a decade now, General Chang had known her. She supposed it was no surprise he could read her better than her own parents ever had.

“Apologies, sir.” 

“It’s simpler just being a soldier, isn’t it?” General Chang said in sympathy. “Lighter?”

“Yes, sir.”

The past week had taken more out of Lanthe than any week in her decade of service. She didn’t think she ever wanted to feel this particular sort of fear again—the fear of knowing that if she didn’t pull everything together perfectly, all her men would die. That she would be failing Ro on a deep and damaging level that no foot soldier ever could.

“That’s good,” the general said firmly. “That cape is heavy because you know what it means, Luyang Lanthe. A man who bears leadership lightly is no leader at all. Now, I didn’t just call you in here to ask how you killed the Yao graphemancer—although I’m glad I did and I will be pilfering your strategy to train my own troops.” He smiled. “I’ve barely discussed this with anyone yet, but I have a plan to put into motion against the Yao. Since all of our problems with our western neighbor seem to trace back to their new princess, I’ve been tasked with removing her.”

“But…” Lanthe half glanced back over her shoulder to where the general’s battalion—or rather Tenro’s battalion—was camped beyond the walls. It would take far more than a thousand men to mount an invasion of Yao.

“Without an army,” he added, seeming to read Lanthe’s train of thought. “King Josan doesn’t want to slow our eastward expansion by pulling troops for an open war with Yao. Tenro’s battalion and a few others are all he is willing to spare—and their role is only to prevent further Yao incursions on our borders, not to invade.”

“How do we remove a ruler without an invading army, my lord?”

“Well,” the general sighed, “that’s why I accompanied Tenro west and had planned for us to stop at Yansey before I knew it had been attacked. This is a mission for Tairo.”

“Tairo?” Lanthe repeated before decorum could stop her tongue or the total surprise in her voice.

The general went on without rebuking her. “I am going to send an operative in to seduce the princess and remove her as a threat.”

Lanthe blinked, certain she had heard wrong. “Seduce? As in… with the intention of assassinating her?”

“If need be.”

“I don’t understand.” Lanthe chose her words carefully. It wasn’t right for her to question the general, but… “This plan seems…” underhanded, deceitful, disgraceful… “not at all like one of yours.”

“Ah,” Chang smiled a little ruefully. “I can’t con you, can I? This was the king’s idea, his order.”

“But—”

“Which is why it must be executed promptly and to perfection,” he said firmly.

Ashamed, Lanthe bit down on the rest of her questions: You couldn’t convince him to take a more honorable approach? Didn’t you talk to him? Of course, General Chang had spoken to him, but no one could overrule the king once his orders were given. Not even the man who had made his rule possible.

“So, you’re going to have Tairo seduce her?” Your own son? Lanthe didn’t add, even as her gut curled in disgust.

“I trust no one else.”

“You think Tairo would…” slip a knife into a woman’s back?

Lanthe couldn’t even say it, the thought repulsed her so deeply. She had never liked stories of concubine spies who deceived their way into a powerful man’s bed only to slit his throat, and she liked this reversed version even less. But Yao was situated so dangerously close to her hometown of Heba… Notions of honor and honesty started to fall apart at the thought of her town on fire. If this was truly a matter of neutralizing the threat of Yao, then it had to be done. It was just hard to imagine Tairo being the one to do it.

“With respect, sir, is this not a job for a spy?” she asked, “Someone with training in deception?”

“Spies can be bought. Tairo can’t.”

“Aren’t you…” Aren’t you worried about him? was too forward a question. “The princess has won over so many men… educated men, who should have known better.”

“That part doesn’t worry me. You know Tairo. Ladies fall for him, not the other way around.”

Now that Lanthe thought on it, the general was right. For all the women Tairo had casually charmed to pieces, she never really remembered him being charmed in turn. But Yelhwa seemed to be an exception to the laws and conventions that bound most women and Lanthe frowned as a new thought occurred to her.

“What about her writing, my lord? Princess Yelhwa won most of her allies over at a distance, through letters.”

“So she did,” the general said with a pleased air, as though he had hoped Lanthe would raise the point. “That’s where you come in.”

“Me?”

“If Princess Yelhwa’s letters are a trick of graphemancy, you’ve already figured your way past a graphemancer’s defenses once. If they’re just pretty prose, well…” Lanthe was illiterate. “If Tairo fails, you will finish the job.”

Lanthe’s heart stopped beating.

“General… I… I don’t think I’m at all qualified for—”

“I’m not asking what you think, Luyang.”

“Sorry, my lord,” she said around the knot of anxiety and rage clenching helplessly in her throat. “I should not have spoken out of turn.”

Lanthe had never known General Chang to express distress—or even annoyance. A shadow of both crackled through his expression before he put a hand to his eyes and crushed his fingers together at the bridge of his nose. “No… I should not have been sharp with you, Luyang. It does matter what you think. You have a rare combination of qualities, Luyang: a mind for strategy, an affinity for disguise, and my absolute trust. This is why I need you with my son when he goes to Yao. I need you to carry him when he falls”—not ‘if’, Lanthe noted, ‘when’—“and bring him back to me. Can you do this, Luyang? Will you?”

“Yes, sir,” Lanthe said, surprised to find that she was being entirely sincere. Not just because a farm girl had no business denying a general. Because, as much as she hated the idea of going with Tairo into Yao, the idea of letting him go alone—of leaving the fate of her friend and all of Ro to chance—was far worse.

“You’re a principled person, Luyang. I know that. So, when I ask this of you, I…” Chang couldn’t apologize, Lanthe realized. To do so would be to disrespect the king’s judgment.

“There is no principle higher than serving Ro,” she quoted one of the army’s training mantras. “If you’ve chosen me to do this for our kingdom, then of course, I will do it, sir. You know I will."

Something in the general’s bearing relaxed, though a shadow still hung on his smile as he said, “Then I’ll discuss the details of the plan with you and Tairo in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In the meantime, I understand that you’ve taken Yao prisoners and successfully extracted information from them—some that even King Josan hasn’t received from his informants. Tairo has given me the full report.” He gestured to a stack of notes that Lanthe couldn’t read. “I wanted to ask what you intend to do with your Yao prisoners now.”

“It’s not my place to decide,” Lanthe said immediately.

“You were the high-ranking officer at this fortress when they were taken prisoner. Anything that was captured from the enemy belongs to you.”

“Then it belongs to you, sir,” Lanthe said.

The general sighed, though he didn’t seem impatient. “Tairo reports that you’ve come to know your prisoners on decent terms, which is rare for us Ro. So, even if you do give me charge of them, the first thing I will ask is your informed opinion. What should be done with them? What is their best use?”

Lanthe studied a seam on the wooden desk for a moment, considering.

“If you need them tortured, I’m happy to take them off your hands,” General Chang said. “I know you dislike that type of cruelty.”

Lanthe shook her head. “I think I have most of the information they can give.”

General Chang raised his eyebrows, impressed.

“They made it easy for me,” Lanthe hurried to say.

“Because you knew where to apply pressure,” Chang said. Fear is invaluable when it comes to your enemies. “Is that the end of their utility then?”

“No, sir.” The seam on the desk bled red sunlight like an open wound, a gash drawn across a defenseless woman’s throat… or a protective line between Yao and Lanthe’s village. “I think we can use them for one more thing.”

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