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Nezha finds the papers in the war room.
Between negotiating with the Hesperians, arranging shipments of food, and figuring out what to do with the scattered refugees around the country, Nezha has had his hands full for the past couple of weeks. He’s grateful for the work, if only because it staves off thoughts of Rin. Her memory haunts him every night, and the palace feels like a tomb.
He swears that on some days, he can hear Rin’s laughter echoing off the walls, can see Kitay out of the corner of his eye, can smell the perfume that Venka had preferred. These moments distract Nezha and make him feel like he’s sinking beneath the waves, his body being dragged down by nostalgia and grief.
Fix this, Rin had said. That’s what he’s trying to do, but all he feels like he’s doing is making concessions to the Hesperians and slowly losing pieces of himself as the days go by. Every minor clause and amendment slipped in by General Tarquet to Nezha’s executive orders chip away at his patience and dignity.
When all of this gets too overwhelming, he roams the halls at night and tries not to think about the feeling of a bloody knife in his hand. On one of these nights, he somehow ends up in the old war room where he, Rin, and Kitay used to sit at the table with his father and Jinzha, helping to plan the Northern Campaign. And it’s there that he finds the notes.
He recognizes Kitay’s writing on them, though he can just barely make out the messily scrawled characters. It’s unusual for Kitay’s penmanship to be anything but neat and meticulous, since he was always such a stickler for proper notetaking.
He must’ve been drunk when he wrote them, Nezha thinks. It explains why there is no rhyme nor reason to the lines hastily put down onto paper. Nezha almost wants to laugh at the fact that even intoxicated, Kitay couldn’t bear to not keep track of whatever he was discussing with Rin and Venka.
Nezha reads each line carefully, straining to make out the characters. With shock, he realizes that these aren’t just random musings but actual goals and plans and wishes the three of them – Rin, Kitay, and Venka – had considered for the future.
Some of them are very logical: Make education mandatory. New officers’ school down south with focus on Strategy and Linguistics, no martial arts. Design and produce modern artillery. Build a dirigible division with canons.
Nezha had always thought that Rin was too short-sighted to think about these things, concerned as she was about the gods and her army of shamans. But if Kitay had written this down, then she had probably made some of these suggestions herself.
He reads through the rest of the nearly unintelligible suggestions, trying to parse out who had proposed what.
Kitay’s proposals are comically obvious. Mandatory copying of every ancient text. Standardized sets of abacuses with pea-size beads.
Venka’s are also quite evident. Ban heavy hair ornaments and ugly bureaucratic headwear. Castrate all rapists.
Secretly, he wouldn’t mind implementing the latter part into law, not after what Venka and so many other women had suffered at the hands of the Federation during the Third Poppy War. However, knowing that the Hesperians overlook any misconduct done by their own countrymen, Nezha doesn’t know how well they would take to the suggested punishment.
There are some other suggestions, too, that he thinks Venka made. Ban child marriages. Outlaw matchmaking for minors. It would make sense, considering that Venka had used Sinegard as a way to escape an arranged marriage set up by her parents.
In his reading, Nezha is desperate to find anything undoubtedly connected to Rin. Just one morsel to prove to him that she’d been here, had sat in this room with Kitay and Venka and had optimistically looked towards the future. He wants so badly to remember Rin not solely as a force of destruction but also as a girl who wanted more for her country.
He finds what he’s looking for, one meager line that is just as much an indictment of Nezha as it is of Nikan.
Make all academies tuition-free.
Who else would have wished for that? Certainly not Chen Kitay and Sring Venka, both born to the aristocracy and who, if they hadn’t been bound by duty, could’ve had their pickings of any academy all across Nikan. No, only someone who knew the misery of being powerless would be forward-thinking enough to even conjure up the idea in the first place.
Suddenly, Rin’s words in Khurdalain, back in the mess hall when they were newfound allies building something resembling a friendship, come back to him.
I was the war orphan from the south, and you were the rich kid from Sinegard, and you tormented me. You made Sinegard a living hell, Nezha.
Southern orphan and Sinegardian aristocrat. Nezha laughs bitterly, because she’d spelled it out for him clear as day back when they were still fighting on the same side against a common enemy.
He’s under no illusion that he and his father hadn’t deliberately ignored the southerners’ plight while they were busy fighting on the northern front of the civil war. They’d planned to win the war, after which they’d easily and effortlessly sweep out the Mugenese from the south in order to free the agricultural industry.
Of course, when you ignore arguably the more important half of your country, they’re going to resent you for it. And if someone comes along promising to change things and make you visible after centuries of suffering, why wouldn’t you follow them?
Nezha knows that Rin hadn’t had the experience to govern, but she wasn’t wrong about wanting to help the south, even if that help had actually harmed them more than aided them. His old friends’ vision for the future, though rooted in idealism, would have created a new world, perhaps even a better one.
It had been so close, too. They’d won the war, after all. Rin could’ve had her tuition-free academies, Kitay his dirigible fleet, and Venka her laws to better punish sexual assault. And Nezha could’ve helped them if only Rin had made some concessions.
Nezha pockets the papers, hoping to save them from being discarded, and mourns for the world that could have been.
-
One of his Hesperian advisors randomly brings it up in a meeting one day.
“What are we going to do with the Speerly’s brother?” He asks.
Nezha doesn’t realize what the advisor’s referring to for a moment, startled as he is about the abrupt switch in topic from urban infrastructure.
“Who?”
“The Speerly’s brother. The Fang boy.”
Kesegi.
Nezha recalls the day he’d mentioned Rin’s adopted brother to his father, recalls the moment they’d brought him to the palace in chains, Vaisra and everyone else gleeful to have this leverage against Rin. He’s reminded of his guilt for imprisoning the too-skinny, too-haunted boy and forcing him to write a letter to his sister.
Truthfully, Nezha hadn’t known what he expected the outcome to be. When weeks passed by and his spies in Rin’s camp confirmed that she’d ignored the offer for a ceasefire, more of Rin’s words from Khurdalain had come back to him.
I don’t love you. And I can kill anything.
Including her brother, Nezha had thought. He’d been the one to break the news to Kesegi that his sister wasn’t coming for him, had been the one to see Kesegi’s face shutter and to witness his silence until Nezha had gone to Tikany and never returned to Arlong. He’d assumed that his father and the Hesperians would discard themselves of Kesegi once they fully realized he was no longer the gleaming bargaining chip they’d all thought he was.
It’s with an electrifying jolt that Nezha realizes Kesegi is alive and still their prisoner.
“He has no connection to the southern troops, nor does he have any political power or… unnatural abilities,” Nezha says, cautious not to imply that shamanic powers are anything but an affront to the Divine Maker in front of the Hesperians. “Let me sort this out by myself. He’s just a war orphan now.”
Nezha had always been aware of the circularity of history and its cruelty in sparing no one, making every unnecessary death utterly meaningless in the end, but the irony of one Fang dying a war orphan and leaving behind another Fang as one isn’t lost on him. Rin had been shaped by war since her infancy, and Kesegi was the unlucky child to inherit her status.
When the meeting wraps up, Nezha finds himself not going to his rooms for rest, but to the prison cells in the basement of the former-Dragon Warlord’s palace, the only structure large enough in Arlong to house their provisional government until elections can take place. There, he nods to the guards and finds Fang Kesegi’s cell.
It’s dark in the underground prison, but Nezha can just make out Kesegi’s thin form and hungry face. Someone must’ve continued delivering food and water to Kesegi for him to still be alive, but it’s clear that whatever schedule that person’s been operating on is sporadic at best.
Kesegi looks at Nezha with tired eyes, eyes that have seen too much at such a young age. He’s just a child.
We were just children when the Federation invaded, Nezha thinks. Just children – utterly naïve and petty children, concerned only with their rivalries and memorizing verb tenses at Sinegard. The moment the Mugenese had broken through the East Gate, when Nezha had stabbed a man and locked eyes with Rin, they’d stopped being children.
“I didn’t think my father had kept you alive.” Nezha wants to slap himself for starting the conversation this way, but he can’t take back the words. There are a lot of things he can’t take back.
Kesegi doesn’t respond, just looks at Nezha with a face void of any expression.
Nezha sighs. “Believe me, I know we haven’t treated you well, but I don’t want you to think that I don’t care what happens to you. The war is over and there’s no need for a free government to keep hostages. I’m responsible for you, so–”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” Kesegi’s voice, hoarse from disuse, breaks through and interrupts Nezha mid-sentence. After a few seconds of no response from Nezha, Kesegi says, “Rin is dead. Isn’t she?”
For some reason, Nezha hesitates and considers lying to him. He wants to say No, of course she’s not dead. Nothing could kill your sister, but what would be the point? He’s already figured it out, and it’s too late to spare him any pain.
“Yes, she is,” Nezha says, the weight of the words finally settling on him. “I killed her.”
He sees the reality of Rin’s death sink into Kesegi as well, his eyes coming alive with anger.
“Get out!” Kesegi yells. He stands up, the chains around his bony wrists rattling. “Get the fuck out of here and never show your face to me again!”
With his mouth twisted in fury and his eyes sparking like flames, Kesegi has never looked more like Rin, despite them being unrelated to each other by blood. Nezha has the eerie feeling that he’s not looking at Kesegi right now, but that he’s seeing Rin. Even back at Sinegard, her anger had always simmered, and it had been explosive and all-consuming when it reached a boiling point. But, for all that Nezha had been scared of being caught in her flames, he’d also wanted nothing more than to be engulfed by them as well.
“I understand that you resent me–”
“Get. Out,” Kesegi screams, and his voice breaks as his anger gives into grief and he starts sobbing.
Nezha doesn’t know how to deal with this. Kesegi obviously needs time to properly mourn and having Rin’s killer in the room with him isn’t going to help with that. Quietly, Nezha leaves him to his privacy and goes back upstairs. Before he does, though, he stops by the guards and orders them to bring Kesegi two regular meals a day and to have a medic look him over.
He doesn’t return for a while. Instead, he attends more meetings with the Hesperians, builds himself a provisional cabinet, and writes correspondence into the early hours of the morning, his eyes burning from exhaustion.
There’s so much work to do, and Nezha is all alone in figuring out how to solve every problem that arises. For all of his efforts, it seems that whenever one issue is solved, two more are suddenly dropped onto his desk in the form of complaints from every province in Nikan. Everyone is unhappy, and Nezha takes all the blame.
In the moments when it gets too overwhelming, he takes out Kitay’s notes from his pocket and rereads each line, Rin’s command of Fix this a chant in his mind. He traces each character with his eyes and reminds himself that Rin and Kitay let themselves die so that Nikan would survive. No matter how burdensome the workload becomes, Nezha cannot waver.
When Nezha finally returns to Kesegi’s cell, he’s glad to see physical proof that he’s being fed. His face has lost its sharp corners and he no longer looks as if a wisp of a breeze could lift and carry him away like a leaf in the wind. Still, it doesn’t seem he’s getting much sleep at night, judging from the dark circles under his eyes.
“What do you want?” Kesegi mutters, irritated by Nezha’s presence.
“I said before that I’m responsible for you now. You’re a citizen of Nikan, and all citizens deserve to be free. So, I’m letting you go,” Nezha replies.
He doesn’t expect Kesegi to be overjoyed over being released from prison – after all, he was only ever a hostage meant to entice Rin – but he definitely doesn’t expect him to burst out in hysterical laughter.
“That’s it? You killed my sister and now that you don’t have any need for me, you let me go free?” He walks over as far as he can to the bars of his cell, his chains going taut as they reach their limit. “I have nowhere to go! My parents are dead, and so are all my neighbours back home. Rin was all I had left. So tell me, where am I supposed to go?”
“The Republic is funding orphanages and a foster care system. You can stay with a family until you’ve reached the age of majority. After that, you’ll be set up with a government stipend while you study or find a stable means of income–” Nezha rattles off the new legislation he’s recently passed, having fought an uphill battle with the Hesperians who thought it was too much trouble to take care of every war orphan and who cried They’ll get lazy if you give them handouts.
Kesegi interrupts him. “Oh, yes, because that turned out so well for Rin.”
“What?”
Kesegi crosses his arms. Or, he tries to.
“Are you honestly so stupid as to believe that Rin’s life was easy, being a war orphan nobody wanted but was accepted because the government gave adults money to look after her?” He looks down at his feet, contemplative. “In a way, I understand her. I understand why she never looked back at Tikany when she left for Sinegard, why she didn’t bother fighting for the south until she was threatened, why she didn’t offer herself up in exchange for my freedom. I don’t blame her for finding a way out.”
Rin had mentioned that she’d practically raised Kesegi. Nezha can’t possibly imagine what it must have been like for Kesegi, to have someone so important to him leave him time and time again. Yet, he still has the capacity to have empathy for that person. In a world that had tried so hard to snuff out humans’ compassion for one another, that’s worth its weight in gold.
“I’m sure Rin would want you to take the way out of here, too,” Nezha says, though it’s clearly the wrong thing to say when Kesegi’s head snaps up to reveal an expression of deep hatred.
“What do you know about what Rin would want? You hated her,” Kesegi accuses.
“I did hate her. I hated her because she terrified me. But we were also friends, once.”
Kesegi scoffs. “Friends don’t kill each other.”
“Sometimes they do,” Nezha says. “Sometimes your friends start to lose their sanity, and then the only way you can help them is by giving them a way out.”
“Don’t pretend that you cared about her.”
“I cared,” Nezha asserts.
“If you cared about her, you wouldn’t have let your father imprison her. If you cared about her, you would’ve chosen her side!”
“I cared.”
He doesn’t know what it is – the way his voice catches, the momentary slip of his calm mask briefly revealing his anguish, the way his hands clench into fists to prevent them from shaking – but something in Nezha’s demeanor makes Kesegi pause.
“You loved her,” he says slowly, observing Nezha, “didn’t you?”
Nezha swallows past the forming lump in his throat. He nods, unable to trust his voice right at this moment.
Rudely, Kesegi snorts. “Amazing. Rin left to escape being a child bride and landed herself with a sorry excuse of a prince.”
“I’m not a prince,” Nezha retorts, even as he thinks Child bride?
Nezha’s confusion must be visible, because Kesegi explains, “If Rin hadn’t dominated the Keju scores in Rooster Province, she would’ve immediately been married off to a man more than twice her age. She would’ve been a mother before the Federation invaded.”
Understanding strikes Nezha. Here, now, after everything they’d gone through and with Rin buried next to Kitay on Speer, Nezha finally understands.
Nikan had failed Rin. It had failed her from the moment Speer had been given up to end the Second Poppy War, and everything that came after had been a watershed of one of Nikan’s greatest shames. It had placed her in a system that had only inflicted cruelty onto her, with no path forward but to marry some old man with enough money to make sure she wouldn’t starve. It had forced her to study harder than any other child in Nikan for the Keju, the only other path towards a future, but every academy aside from Sinegard made each student pay hefty tuition, so Sinegard it was.
Nikan had placed a sword in Rin’s hand when she was barely an adult and told her to defend the very country that had wiped out her people. It had taken everything from her, and yet the country demanded more. Rin had been driven to opening her mind to a destructive god to save Nikan, had bled and drowned and almost gone insane, all to keep the country that had beaten her down over and over again intact.
Rin had done monstrous things, that much can’t be denied. She’d annihilated a country full of innocent civilians – mothers and children and grandparents – without remorse, burned down everything and everyone in her path indiscriminately. But is it such a surprise that after all this country had put her through, that destruction had turned inwards toward the very nation that had subjugated her?
Looking at it from this perspective, Nezha realizes his own role in all of this. His torment of Rin at Sinegard, his demand that she give everything to the Yins’ vision for a republic, his ultimate betrayal on that night in Arlong – all of those things had pushed her along the path to ruination. For that, Nezha is forever guilty.
“I can’t make up for what I’ve done,” Nezha says. “But let me help you. Once you’re out of here, you’ll never have to see me again. You can live the life that Rin would’ve wanted for you. Maybe you want to stay down here out of spite for me, but don’t spite Rin’s last sacrifice for this nation.”
After several long minutes, Kesegi finally agrees to be released. Getting him officially pardoned and sent to a temporary shelter for orphan refugees is a longer and more frustrating process than it should be, but once it’s done, Nezha feels like some weight has been lifted off of his shoulders.
When Nezha leaves Kesegi at the shelter, having personally escorted him there so that no one tried to harm the late Fang Runin’s brother out on the streets, Kesegi doesn’t offer him any words of gratitude, not that Nezha had been expecting them. Instead, he leaves him with just three parting words.
“Don’t forget her.”
“I won’t,” Nezha says, but Kesegi had already gone inside.
He returns to the palace and finds himself in the war room. He doesn’t take his former seat at the table, just stands in the middle of the room and watches out the window as the sun descends behind the mountains. His hand slips into his pocket, where he keeps Kitay’s notes, and takes them out. Unfolding the papers, he ignores all the other lines and finds the three that he’s looking for.
Ban child marriages. Outlaw matchmaking for minors. Make all academies tuition-free.
Kitay’s handwriting, Rin’s words.
There’s no undoing all the ways in which he’d wronged Rin, no undoing the damage Nikan had done to her. Nezha can’t change the past, but he can shape the future. Where Fang Runin had only had Sinegard as the light at the end of the tunnel, children like Fang Kesegi will have their picking of any academy they want to attend. They will not be forced to become soldiers because they don't want to starve. Nezha told Kesegi that he won’t forget Rin, and he’ll keep that promise. Even after he’s gone and Rin’s memory is nothing more than that of failed leader, her suffering will not have been for nothing. He can make sure that no child will ever have to become like Rin.
Nezha’s former friends had sat in this room and dreamed of a better future for Nikan. As he refolds the notes and puts them back into his pocket, he vows to make that future a reality for them.