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In the eastern districts stood the spiraling towers of the old Hinterlander invaders from the north. To the west, blocklike compounds stood wedged narrowly next to one another, a holdover from Federation occupation during the Poppy Wars. It was a tableau of a country with many rulers, represented in a single city.
She had made it all the way across the country to a place she had spent years dreaming of, only to discover a hostile, confusing city that despised southerners. She had no home in
Tikany or Sinegard. Everywhere she traveled, everywhere she escaped to, she was just a war orphan who was not supposed to be there.
“You’re a war orphan. You’re a southerner. You weren’t supposed to pass the Keju. The Warlords like to claim that the Keju makes Nikan a meritocracy, but the system is designed to keep the poor and illiterate in their place. You’re offending them with your very presence.”
They’ll make you an outsider, because you’re not like them. That’s okay. Don’t let any of that discourage you. No matter what they say, you deserve to be here.
“Power dictates acceptability,” Kitay mused. “If the capital had been built in Tikany, I’m sure we’d be running around dark as wood bark.”
“The Keju is a ruse to keep uneducated peasants right where they’ve always been. You slip past the Keju, they’ll find a way to expel you anyway. The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”
Success required sacrifice. Sacrifice meant pain. Pain meant success.
But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.
Sunzi wrote that one must always identify and exploit the enemy’s weaknesses.
Youth, Rin thought, was an amplification of beauty. It was a filter; it could mask what one was lacking, enhance even the most average features. But beauty without youth was dangerous. The Empress’s beauty did not require the soft fullness of young lips, the rosy red of young cheeks, the tenderness of young skin. This beauty cut deep, like a sharpened crystal. This beauty was immortal.
“Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”
“I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”
Some truths could be learned through memorization, like history textbooks or grammar lessons. Some had to be ingrained slowly, had to become true because they were an inevitable part of the pattern of all things.
Her map of the world, her understanding of reality, had shifted.
“I understand the truth of things,” she murmured. “I know what it means to exist.” He smiled. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” She understood, then, that Jiang was very far from mad. He might, in fact, be the sanest person she had ever met.
“What does it matter? They’re coming, and we’re staying, and at the end of the day whoever is alive is the side that wins. War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”
