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Like rabbits, the joke goes. Like hares.
Niang has eight siblings, brothers and sisters, and her parents love her, and she is sneered at for this by the Sinegardian elite. And that's fair, she thinks.
Until she doesn't, really, just blazes light and heat and eyes raw with tears. But that comes later.
At Sinegard, she's a follower. It comes so natural to her. Youngest of her siblings, round cheeked like a child and more than a little childish every other way.
But she understands the way things work, still, even if she doesn't understand everything else yet. So she tries: to help Rin, to pretend those gaps aren't there. It's easier to step over a ridge if you don't look down, and Niang does her best: suspended by her fingertips and reaching for the other side. She wants to help.
Her family fixes things. Puts them back together. Not anything quite as broad, wide as all that, but she has always known that the first step to fixing anything is understanding the parts of it.
Her family are physicians. It's not the same as being a medic; holds a different kind of weight to it than pledged Medicine at Sinegard Academy, but still. You don't bandage a rotting wound and send it on its way, so Niang digs out pieces of herself and holds them out to her classmates and prays that it's enough. That what Sinegard wants — relations fostered across the country — is enough.
She wants to help so badly.
She loves her classmates, not that they make it easy for her. Rin's single-minded focus, Venka's casual cruelty and Nezha's thoughtless dismissal. Kitay's kind arrogance, earned or not. At the end of it, she loves them like siblings, and she hopes it's enough.
It's not, of course, but she doesn't really understand that until she understands Rin, and that comes so briefly, in such a fleeting snatch it might well never have at all.
Raban dies, and most of their class dies, and Rin is a Speerly wreathed in smoke, the one that brought down the wall, and nothing she knows is true anymore.
She always knew they'd go to war, soon, but somehow she'd never thought. And now.
And— how could she? How could she, make those choices over and over and— Niang means nothing to her, less than nothing, but how could she?
Her palms are still softer than Venka's, than Rin's. But they've been bloodied so many more times.
Raban's hands are warm over hers. Okay, he says.
I can't, Niang gasps, and she recognises distantly that she's panicking, that it's been nothing but a low simmering panic since the month started. But she can't stop. All of it is heavy, like a wet cloth pressed tight over her mouth, and it's suffocating all of a sudden.
The rest of it, the parts that make her ask inane questions over and over she bothers her classmates with, Venka's teeth ground so tight they might crack. But here in the library, just her and Raban with his hands over hers, she can't.
Later they'll sit like this too, before the army invades. Raban a line of solemnity before they go their separate ways, Niang to prepare for the endless bodies and Raban to his army.
Somehow it never came to her, the idea that he would be one of those bodies. Or— well, he's not, because there's only room later for the bodies that have half a chance and Raban is cold and gone before the walls even come down.
Okay, Raban says, unflappable. He's her anchor in this world she should be part of and never manages to be.
Niang takes a breath in somehow, shallow in her throat. She takes another. And then she starts to take the pieces apart, in her mind, and she feels a little less sick at the end of it, somehow.
She hears about Mugen, and thinks oh. And then fierce, like the red of a splash of blood: her brothers.
The problem is that her classmates at Sinegard never ever got it. And she loved them like siblings, but it wasn't enough, and now her brothers are choked ash.
The pieces of it come together slower, and Niang is so—
But it's Rin, and somehow she's still trying. She hates, but she's trying.
And then Vaisra, and Arlong, and the blighted grain. And then her people are starving. And then her warlord to his generals: that fucking poison gas.
Niang's didn't pledge Combat and she didn't pledge Strategy. But she pledged Medicine, and here is what she knows.
Three hundred fourteen ways a person can die. Almost as many ways to prevent, to treat, to cure. The most and least important truth of her life: to fix something you must know how it broke.
She went to war, and a dozen more. Three hundred fifty ways to kill a person.
She's still Sinegard trained. She's still a soldier, not the physician her parents and siblings were. She didn't pledge Combat or Strategy, but the first thing Enro taught them was precision, and the first thing her family did was how the parts of it make a whole.
The gas makes her hands unrecognisable— soft palms red and covered in welts, her fingers hurting endlessly. It's what makes it sink in: the lives on the other end of this. The endless waste, carcasses of pigs and belly-up fish.
But then: the blighted grain. Vaisra, and they had just fought a war. How could they keep going?
When she poisons the river, Daji knows about it. She knows. Nobody ever stops her, and it feels like despair.