Baek Miju grows up in a courtyard that smells of steel and rice liquor.

  The Baek compound sits a little too close to the palace for comfort, all tiled roofs and disciplined gravel. Her father commands the Seop king’s guards; every flag in the yard is a reminder. Swords hang in neat pairs on the walls. Spears stand in ordered rows like a forest that learned how to stand attention.

  Miju is six when she first knocks a brother flat.

  “Again,” Father says.

  She stands in the dust, hair half-loose from its knot, tunic stained, wooden practice sword in her hand. Opposite her, Baek Joryeon—second son, two years older, very proud of his nose—wipes blood from that nose and scowls.

  “You’re bigger,” she says. “You fall louder.”

  The guard captain’s mouth twitches. “Watch your stance,” he tells Joryeon, not her. “You let a child inside your guard, you deserve the bruise.”

  Miju bares her teeth in what might be a smile. Her five brothers circle the edge of the ring, muttering.

  “She swung too hard,” one complains.

  “She always swings too hard,” another adds.

  “She swings just right,” says a smaller voice from the veranda.

  Little Haneul sits there with her feet tucked under her, embroidery abandoned in her lap, eyes bright as stars over the wall. She is the only one younger than Miju—soft-faced, quick to laugh, forever humming the songs the washerwomen bring in.

  “See?” Haneul says. “She fights for all of us.”

  “One day I’ll fight for you,” Miju calls.

  “Don’t,” Haneul says cheerfully. “I like watching them fall down.”

  The boys groan; Father snorts. “Enough chatter. Again.”

  Miju lunges. Joryeon goes down. Again.

  They raise her like a son because they don’t know how not to. She rides as soon as her legs are long enough to grip a pony’s ribs. She learns to shoot, to drill, to read the neat columns of palace rosters, every guard’s name copied out in her careful hand. She eats at the family table but sweats with the men in the training yard.

  And still, every new tutor calls her “exceptional for a girl,” like a compliment wrapped in a cage.

  The kingdom of Seop is very clear about what girls are for.

  The law codes say it in orderly brush strokes. The street says it when a drunk merchant grabs a servant’s wrist and no one intervenes. The court says it when the king’s favorite jokes are at the expense of wives.

  Miju hears all of it. She files it away. She keeps winning in the yard.

  Her mother is the only person who can make Father put down a sword.

  Lady Baek moves through the house like someone carrying a full bowl in a crowded market: careful, unhurried, never spilling more than she can help. She has a soft voice and a spine like the palace wall. When servants quarrel, they go to her. When Father comes home with blood on his armor, he sits by her cushion and tells her exactly how many men died.

  Miju worships her with a child’s ferocity.

  “Don’t make that face,” Mother says one evening, when Miju glares down at her bowl because a visiting noble has just praised Father for “five vigorous sons” and forgotten the rest. “If you keep scowling at everyone, they’ll marry you to a mirror so you can fight yourself.”

  “They won’t marry me,” Miju mutters. “I’ll be captain after Father.”

  Mother smiles, sad and proud all at once. “You can be sharper than all your brothers put together,” she says, “and the law will still see a womb before it sees a sword.”

  “Then the law is stupid,” Miju says.

  “Yes,” Mother agrees. “But the law hits back.”

  Haneul, sitting between them, sighs. “You two are ruining the stew,” she says. “Can’t we talk about something that doesn’t make my stomach hurt?”

  “Like what?” Miju asks.

  “Like… the color of the new guard uniforms,” Haneul says. “They’re awful. They make everyone look like a boiled turnip.”

  Miju snorts soup through her nose. Mother laughs properly, head tipped back, for the last time in a long time.

  Haneul is fourteen the night she doesn’t come home.

  It’s nothing at first. She’s late from the market. Servants whisper that the alleys are clogged with tax riots; maybe she’s sheltering at a cousin’s house, maybe the cart broke.

  By midnight, Mother is pacing the courtyard tiles. Father says, “She’ll be dragged back by her ears,” with a brittle chuckle that fools nobody.

  By dawn, the guards find a bundle of torn silk in a drainage ditch outside the city wall.

  They bring Haneul home on a shutter.

  Miju stands in the doorway, bare feet cold on stone, and watches as they haul her sister’s body down. Haneul’s hair is matted. Her throat is purpled. Bruises bloom along her arms where fingers grabbed too hard. Her skirt, once bright, is dark and stiff.

  Mother’s sound is not human. It tears out of her chest and tears something in Miju’s with it.

  “Who?” Mother demands, voice jagged. “Who touched her? Who dragged her out? Which pig boy, which lordling?”

  The guards look everywhere but at the body. Nobody answers.

  Father dismisses them with a gesture. “Take her to the women’s hall,” he says. “Wash her. We’ll… we’ll do the rites tonight.”

  Mother rounds on him.

  “Rites?” She shoves his chest with both hands. “You command the king’s guards. You know every captain, every patrol. You know whose boots passed that ditch. Find him. Find them.”

  “The city was in chaos,” Father says. “A dozen patrols, a hundred men on the street. It could be anyone.”

  “Then question everyone,” Mother says. Her voice is climbing. “You would burn a village because a tax wagon went missing, but for your own daughter you shrug? She is fourteen. She—”

  “She was careless,” Father snaps. “She left the gates without escort when the city was restless. What did she expect, walking around with her hair uncovered and her smile on everything?”

  The words hit like slaps. Miju actually sways.

  Mother stares at him. “You are saying,” she breathes, “that it is her fault.”

  “I am saying the world is what it is,” Father snarls back.

  She slaps him.

  The sound cracks through the courtyard. Guards outside freeze. Miju stops breathing.

  Father goes very still.

  Slowly, he looks down at the red print on his cheek. When he lifts his head again, the man who used to tease Joryeon for tripping in the yard is gone. The commander of the king’s guard stands in his place, and his eyes are flat.

  “You forget yourself,” he says.

  “You forget you have a daughter,” Mother spits. “You forget that she is dead. You forget that your duty is to protect this house, not to explain why it’s acceptable to break it.”

  He hits her.

  A backhand, full-force, thick knuckles against her mouth. Her head snaps sideways. She collapses against the pillar, blood spattering the pale wood behind her.

  Miju lunges.

  She doesn’t think. She just moves, all training and bright rage. She grabs her father’s wrist, nails biting skin.

  “Stop—”

  His fist catches her in the ribs. Pain explodes; air vanishes. She folds around the blow and goes down hard, vision whitening at the edges.

  “Stay out of this,” he snarls. “This is between husband and wife.”

  Joryeon moves as if to interfere, thinks better of it, and looks away. Another brother mutters something about “women’s noise,” too low for anyone to respond.

  Father hauls Mother up by the front of her robe. “You will not shame this family with your wailing,” he hisses. “You will not accuse men who serve the king because your daughter did not know her place. You taught her wrong. This is what happens when women think they can walk like men.”

  He beats her methodically. Fists, boots, the butt of his practice spear when he calls for it.

  The servants disappear. Haneul’s body disappears into the women’s hall. Miju lies on the tiles, curled around her ribs, tasting blood, and memorizes every word.

  Later, when the house is quiet except for Mother’s muffled sobs, Miju limps into the chamber with a cloth and a bowl of water.

  “Don’t,” Mother says when Miju reaches for her face. “It will only hurt your hands.”

  Her lip is split. Her eye is a swelling bruise. Finger-shaped marks ring her neck.

  Miju sets the bowl down hard enough that it sloshes. “I’ll kill him,” she says. It comes out matter-of-fact. A statement of future logistics.

  Mother laughs, then winces. “Not yet,” she says. “You’re still shorter than him.”

  She catches Miju’s wrist, holds it, thumb pressing the pulse. Her grip is weak but her gaze is steady.

  “Listen to me,” she says. “If you want to live in this world, you have two choices. You can lie down. Or you can climb so high they break their necks trying to reach you.”

  Miju’s throat tightens. “I don’t want to be a woman,” she says. “I want to be a sword.”

  Mother smiles, small and fierce. “Then be the sharpest one,” she says. “Sharper than all your brothers, sharper than their friends. Sharper than the king himself. Get to the top of whatever heap of idiots they build, and stay there. Do not come down for tears. Do not come down for love. Because the moment you stand level with them, Miju, they will put their hands on you.”

  She strokes Miju’s cheek with two swollen fingers. “You are stronger than them already,” she whispers. “Now you must become more dangerous.”

  Miju nods.

  Years pass. They erode her mother like rain on stone.

  Illness takes what Father’s fists left. A cough that will not leave, a fever that eats the shine out of her hair, a tiredness that no rest soothes. Physicians come and go, bowing and prescribing and failing.

  Miju spends her nights between the training yard and her mother’s bedside.

  “Stop hovering,” Mother says once, when Miju catches her hand falling from the coverlet. “It makes dying take longer.”

  “That’s good,” Miju says. “I’m busy.”

  “Doing what?” Mother asks.

  “Climbing,” Miju answers.

  Mother smiles. “Good girl,” she says. “Don’t stop just because I fall off first.”

  She dies in spring, when the palace plum trees bloom. At the funeral, Father weeps as loudly as anyone.

  Three months later, he marries Miju off.

  The groom is a minor noble with a stomach like a wine jar and opinions about women like mold on rice. He pinches her chin at the betrothal feast, inspects her teeth, praises her “sturdy hips” in a voice loud enough for servants to hear.

  “You are fortunate,” Father tells her the night before the wedding. “He is not cruel. He only drinks. He says he will try not to hit you in the face. That is more than some women get.”

  Miju looks at him for a long time.

  “Indeed,” she says. “How generous the world is.”

  In her new house, she smiles and pours wine and learns quickly where the keys are kept.

  She reads account books when her husband snores. She listens in courtyards when guards complain about late pay and commanders who eat all the praise. She sits with servants at night, mending clothes, listening to their jokes about men who stagger home smelling of brothel incense and outrage.

  She visits her brothers and sees who is comfortable and who is restless. She listens to the wives sigh about “boys being boys” and watches the way their fingers twist in their sleeves when they say it.

  The city mutters. Taxes climb. Famine licks the villages at the edges of the kingdom. The king builds a new pavilion instead of grain silos.

  The first day of the revolution smells like smoke and ink.

  Palace proclamations burn in piles on every corner. Women tear them down and feed the flames, laughing with their teeth bared. Men shout slogans someone smarter than them wrote the night before.

  Miju walks through it all in a red coat spattered with dust, a sword at her hip and the badge of the king’s guard commander on her chest.

  Her father’s badge.

  He kneels in the square now, hands bound behind his back, five sons lined up beside him. Their heads are bare. Their faces are pale with fury, not fear.

  “You ungrateful whelp,” Joryeon snarls at her. “You shame the family. You shame Mother’s—”

  “Do not say her name,” Miju says, and he shuts his mouth with a click.

  The execution square in front of the palace gate is packed. Servants, merchants, soldiers, beggars. The front rows are mostly women, shoulders pressed together like a wall of cloth. Some hold cooking knives or broom handles. Most hold nothing but their breath.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  A freshly-built scaffold stands where the king’s herald used to announce tax hikes. There is no elaborate apparatus; Miju doesn’t trust machines she hasn’t overseen herself.

  A block. A man with a sword. That’s all.

  “Baek Hye-gyun,” the new clerk reads from the charge scroll, voice carrying over the square. “Commander of the Royal Guard. Charged with: dereliction of duty, assault against his own household, complicity in the deaths of common-born women…” The list goes on. Every line is a story she has catalogued in her head for years.

  Father snorts. “Complicity,” he says. “You make nonsense words to excuse your treachery.”

  Miju stands in front of him, sword-point resting lightly on the wood between them. “I use your own words,” she says. “The world is what it is. Men will be men. Remember?”

  He stares up at her like he’s seeing her for the first time. The girl who used to sprint across the yard, wooden sword aloft, has vanished somewhere between the scar at her temple and the cold in her eyes.

  “You think killing me will fix it?” he says. “You think you can change the law because you swing a blade and shout louder than the next fool?”

  “No,” Miju says. “Killing you fixes nothing.”

  He blinks, wrong-footed.

  “But,” she adds, “it makes an excellent first page.”

  A laugh ripples through the crowd—quick, harsh, mostly women.

  Third brother spits at the ground. “This is a farce,” he mutters. “Our sister staging a play for fishwives.”

  Miju hears him. “Yes,” she says. “The opening performance of a very long run.”

  She turns to the crowd. Her voice lifts.

  “This man,” she says, “is not on this block because his hand struck my mother’s face. If that were his only sin, the gods would punish him without my help.”

  Murmurs.

  “He is here,” she goes on, “because he commanded the king’s guard and treated half the city as acceptable casualties. Because he told fathers that daughters walking home from work alone were ‘asking for it.’ Because he ordered the gates shut when complaints came in from the weaving district about men who liked girls young.”

  She gestures with the sword at her brothers. “They are here because they helped him. Because they laughed when a dead girl’s body was dragged in.”

  Her brothers bristle, shout denials, call witnesses liars. The crowd hisses them down.

  Miju looks at the executioner.

  “I’ll do it,” she says.

  He hesitates only a second, then offers her the sword, hilt first. The blade is ceremonial, heavy, brass inlaid, used to knight men who did less work than she does before breakfast.

  Her father laughs. It’s not a kind sound. “You think this makes you a man?” he says.

  “No,” she replies. “That’s the point.”

  She raises the sword.

  For a heartbeat, she sees Haneul sitting on the veranda, feet swinging, clapping when Joryeon falls in the dust. She sees Mother’s split lip, the bruise around her throat, the hand on Miju’s wrist: climb.

  Then she brings the blade down.

  It is not pretty. Heads rarely are when parted from their bodies. Blood leaps, bright and arterial. The crowd flinches, then surges closer, as if pulled by some dark tide.

  Joryeon is next.

  He curses her. He calls her unfilial. He screams about ancestors and duty and the shame she brings on the Baek line.

  “You’ll thank me later,” she says, and ends his line with the same sword that once defended a king who never learned her name.

  When it’s done—when six male bodies lie headless on the scaffold and the boards run slick—Miju stands with the sword point resting on the wood again, chest rising and falling.

  Her arms ache. Her hands are steady.

  Up on the palace balcony, King Cha’e U Jin watches.

  He is not in royal robes anymore. The revolution stripped those away. He wears plain silk, the color of bad weather. His crown is gone. His hair hangs loose. His wrists are bound in front of him with a polite length of silk, as if the world is pretending this is temporary.

  He has been many things in his life: playboy, patron, judge, sovereign. Today he is just an old man watching the scaffolding of his world come down plank by plank.

  The first beams were the tax offices. The second, the prison gates. The third, the men he trusted to keep his secrets.

  Now Baek Hye-gyun’s headless body hits the straw, and King Cha’e U Jin finally understands that the scaffold is for him too.

  He calls down, voice cracking but still surprisingly loud.

  “Baek Miju,” he says. He does not call her by any title; he doesn’t know which one belongs to her now. “I… I have failed you.”

  She looks up. Their eyes meet across the square—her on blood-slick boards, him framed by carved wood.

  His voice breaks. “If I beg your forgiveness now, is it worth anything?”

  The crowd murmurs. Some jeer. Some watch in wary silence.

  Miju considers him.

  She lifts the king’s own sword and rests it on her shoulder, as casually as a butcher might rest his knife.

  “I will forgive you,” she says, voice carrying clear as a bell over the square, “after every single woman in Seop forgives you.”

  ...

  Baek Miju walks into the harbor like someone arriving late to a meeting she fully intends to dominate.

  Hwacha bolts still hiss and gutter in the stone. Smoke rolls in low curtains. Behind her, militia ranks move in perfect blocks: Baekjeon-kai in layered armor, muskets at the ready, hwacha crews trotting with their deadly carts, boots striking the stone in one heartbeat.

  Her banner snaps overhead.

  Tomoe sees it and goes very still.

  Miju’s gaze sweeps the harbor once. Banners and riders tangled with pirates. Broken junks listing in the shallows. Naci and Shan Xi and Lizi in a knot of steel at the quay’s edge.

  Then Baek Miju’s eyes find the admiral.

  “Kagawa Tomoe,” she calls, voice clear as a bell over the chaos. “You have been busy.”

  Tomoe turns to face her, naginata still wet. The marines near her shift, unsure whether to square off against the newcomers or pretend they are all still on the same side.

  Miju’s lip curls. “You set fire to our harbor batteries for a pirate,” she says. “You hand my Senate to the steppe on a plate. Tell me, Admiral—when did your oath to the Republic become optional?”

  “I—” Tomoe begins.

  She doesn’t get to finish.

  Horohan explodes into the gap between them, blade flashing, forcing Tomoe to pivot and parry or lose her head.

  “Later,” Horohan snarls. “If you’re confessing, do it to the ancestors.”

  Steel screams. Tomoe grunts, dragged back into the dance whether she likes it or not.

  Miju’s eyes leave her without regret; she has already filed Tomoe under “problem to solve.”

  She turns instead to the woman with the spear.

  “You,” she says. “Are you the Khan of Tepr?”

  Naci’s arm is slick with blood where Shan Xi’s sabre kissed it. Her breathing is fast, but her stance doesn’t waver. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing soot. “I am,” she says. “Naci, daughter of Gani. Who are you to ask?”

  Baek Miju smiles without warmth and makes a small, precise bow, like one officer to another before a duel.

  “Baek Miju,” she says. “First Consul of Seop, Protector of the Republic.”

  She straightens. “In another life,” she adds, “I might have invited you to tea.”

  Naci’s eyes narrow. “And in that other life,” she asks, “what stopped you?”

  Miju’s fingers brush the musket slung across her back, then the hilt of her katana. “I swore to my mother,” she says quietly, “that I would stand on top. Of everything. Or die climbing.”

  Naci huffs something that is almost a laugh, almost a growl. “In another world,” she says, “we could have been comrades.”

  “In any world,” Miju replies, “we are incompatible. I don’t share mountains.”

  She swings the musket forward in one smooth motion.

  For a heartbeat, the three women—Khan, pirate, consul—face each other in a small circle carved out of madness.

  Naci with her spear braced, musket she left three feet behind.

  Shan Xi, bloodied coat fluttering, sabre dripping, broken metal fan hanging from her belt like a mangled wing.

  Miju, musket in hand, katana at her hip, hwacha crews and militia ranks fanned behind her like a wall of sharpened paper.

  Then the circle breaks.

  Miju fires first.

  The shot cracks toward Naci’s chest, smoke blooming around the consul like a gray flower. Naci jerks her spear up; the ball slams into the shaft, splintering wood, glancing off to tear a red groove along her ribs instead of punching through her heart.

  Naci grunts, staggers one step—and Shan Xi is already moving, lunging in low, sabre flicking for the exposed side.

  Naci snarls and twists; steel skids off cuirass. She kicks out, catching Shan Xi’s knee. The pirate curses, hopping back, fan snapping up to knock aside a follow-through.

  Tomoe, dragged with Horohan’s blade still hunting her throat, veers their duel sideways toward the main knot. “We cannot fight three wars at once,” she snaps between strikes. “Captain, fall back!”

  “Not yet,” Shan Xi says brightly, parrying Naci’s spear with the sabre and knocking Horohan’s sword aside with the broken fan in the same motion. “I haven’t offended everyone.”

  Miju tosses the emptied musket aside; a militia man catches it on reflex, already fumbling powder back into the pan. She draws her katana, blade whispering from the scabbard.

  “Baekjeon-kai!” she calls. “Form wedge! Bayonets ready! Take the Tepr standard!”

  Her soldiers move like a single hinge; ranks peel off and drive toward Puripal’s cavalry, muskets lowered like teeth.

  The harbor dissolves into three overlapping storms.

  Tepr and Yohazatz riders crash into militia formations; pirates and Baekjeon marines tear at each other with knives and bayonets; Banners anchor the mess around Naci like iron stakes.

  In the middle of it, five fighters carve a private battlefield: Naci and Horohan, Shan Xi and Tomoe, Baek Miju.

  Tomoe slides between enemy blades like water, naginata drawing bright arcs. Horohan meets her again and again, sword and fists and boots.

  At one point Tomoe jams the butt of her naginata into the cobbles and vaults over Horohan’s low slash, using the shaft as a pivot, twisting in the air to kick Horohan square in the chest. Horohan goes down on her back, breath leaving her in a woof.

  She rolls as the naginata comes down, blade biting stone where her throat was.

  “Very pretty,” Horohan coughs. “Did they charge you extra for the spin?”

  “Form,” Tomoe says, yanking the weapon free. “Matters.”

  Miju threads through their orbit, katana and scorn carving her own path.

  A Banner with more courage than sense charges her, spear braced. She steps inside his thrust, parries once, twice, then slashes his arm open from wrist to elbow. Blood fans out. He drops his weapon, clutching the wound, shock written all over his face.

  Miju’s look is almost bored. “If you point the sharp end at me,” she tells him, “you should know what comes next.”

  She kicks him aside and wheels as Naci’s spear whistles in.

  The Khan drives the point for Miju’s throat. Miju drops, rolls under it, comes up so close their foreheads almost touch.

  “Your aim is good,” Miju says.

  “Your face is big,” Naci replies, and headbutts her.

  Miju sees a flash of white; blood runs from her nose. She laughs once, short and bright, and slashes. Naci jerks back. The katana’s edge carves a clean line along the Khan’s forearm, opening skin and leather in the same breath.

  Elsewhere, Puripal, Dukar and Borak slam their wedge into the militia flank.

  “Break their hinge!” Puripal shouts. “Hit the officers! Leave the boys!”

  Yohazatz lances punch through ranks. Militia go down screaming, formations buckling around the impact. Baekjeon drummers try to hold rhythm; their sticks slip on sweat.

  On a low rise of rubble, Temej stands with his bad arm hanging uselessly to his side, a spear in his good hand. A militia captain spots him, sees the limp arm, and smiles like lightning.

  He charges.

  Temej meets him with grim patience. Their first exchange is textbook—parry, thrust, sidestep. The captain presses his advantage, driving Temej back toward a toppled crane.

  Temej’s shoulder spasms; his bad arm betrays him with a jolt of white pain. His spear angle wobbles.

  The captain grins. “Got you,” he pants. He draws back for a killing stroke—

  And a polearm whistles out of nowhere, cracking across his helmet with the sound of a dropped anvil.

  The captain collapses bonelessly.

  Borak plants himself between Temej and the next wave, pole sweeping in a wide arc that sends three militia men sprawling at once. An eagle screams overhead, stooping to rake a sergeant’s cheek.

  “Little brother,” Borak says, not looking back. “Are you trying to get killed where Mother can’t see?”

  Temej wheezes, half-laugh, half-sob. “About time,” he says. “Idiot.”

  “I was busy,” Borak replies. “Killing everyone.”

  He jabs the pole backward without turning. It connects with someone’s gut; a man folds around it with a whoof. “Hold that wall,” Borak adds. “I’ll be offended if you die.”

  They shove back toward the center, where the true storm still boils.

  Naci, Horohan, Shan Xi, Tomoe, Miju.

  At one breathless instant, they all converge.

  Shan Xi flings herself sideways, sabre in one hand, broken fan in the other, battering Naci’s spear down while Tomoe’s naginata hooks for Horohan’s ankle. Miju comes in low, katana a silver blur aiming at Naci’s exposed flank.

  Horohan snarls and abandons her sword for a heartbeat, planting her hands on the shaft of the naginata to swing her legs up and around, boot catching Tomoe in the jaw. Tomoe staggers, teeth snapping shut on her tongue; blood fills her mouth.

  Naci corkscrews out of the tangle, ripping her spear free, and uses the momentum to swing the butt into Shan Xi’s already-injured thigh. Shan Xi gasps, drops to one knee—just long enough to flick the fan up and catch Horohan’s sword mid-swing, the metal ribs clanging dully as they bend.

  Everyone is inside everyone else’s guard. For a heartbeat it is a miracle none of them decapitate the wrong head.

  Then the knot explodes again into shrapnel.

  Shan Xi tumbles backward, laughing breathlessly. Tomoe shakes blood from her mouth and resets her grip. Horohan retrieves her sword with a grunt, flexing bruised fingers. Naci steps back into guard, chest heaving.

  Baek Miju lifts a hand. “Enough,” she says.

  She draws her second musket from the soldier behind her without looking. The man yields it like an offering.

  Naci’s eyes narrow. “You won’t hit me at this range,” she says.

  “I am not aiming at you,” Miju replies.

  She snaps the barrel toward Puripal.

  “NO—!” Dukar bellows, spurring his horse.

  The shot cracks.

  Puripal’s mount stumbles as the ball slams into its neck instead of his chest. Blood fountains. The horse screams and collapses, taking Puripal with it. He rolls clear by instinct, hitting the stones shoulder first, breath blasting out.

  Dukar is already there, vaulting from his saddle, spear up to guard, Notso snarling at his side.

  “Still alive?” Dukar demands.

  Puripal wheezes. “Apparently,” he says. “Your sister’s new girlfriend has bad aim.”

  “Give her a minute,” Dukar mutters.

  Miju has no time to try again. Lang’s Banners surge to plug the gap; Borak barrels into her militia line with a shout, pole swinging.

  Back at the center, Naci, Shan Xi and Miju fall on each other again.

  “You think you can build a world on top of my bones?” Miju snaps at Naci, katana slashing. “You’re just another rider who thinks her saddle is a throne. We’ve seen countless in the past. They all dissolve away.”

  Naci knocks the strike aside with the shaft of her spear.

  Shan Xi inserts herself between them like chaos incarnate. “Ladies, ladies,” she pants. “You’re both insufferable.”

  Her sabre flashes toward Miju’s side, fan whipping at Naci’s wrists.

  Tomoe steps in to ward Horohan away from Shan Xi’s blind spot, naginata a low blur. “Focus,” she snaps. “We cannot—”

  Something moves at the edge of all their attention.

  A Banner, nerves frayed, sights down the barrel at Miju’s back. She breathes once, twice, squeezes the trigger.

  The ball snaps toward the Consul.

  Miju feels it.

  Her hand moves on reflex, driven by years in the yard watching blades and arrows, by a life of refusing to be slower than anyone.

  Her katana comes up.

  Steel meets lead.

  The impact shrieks up her arms. The ball splits on the blade’s edge, shearing into two howling halves that trail twin lines through the air. One fragments into the masonry of the fort behind them. The other grazes Shan Xi’s cheek, carving a neat furrow along the bone.

  Shan Xi freezes.

  “Oh,” she says faintly, touching the blood with fascinated fingers. “That’s very impressive and I hate you for it.”

  Miju’s wrists throb. Her palms tingle. She doesn’t look away from Naci.

  “I expect you to die facing me,” Miju says.

  Dukar and Borak hit the melee like a second cavalry charge, on foot.

  Dukar slides between Naci and Miju on one side, spear whirling, catching the katana and forcing it up. Borak crashes into Shan Xi and Tomoe, his pole slamming down on the naginata so hard the shaft jars from Tomoe’s hands.

  “Hi,” Borak grunts. “You look important. Please fall over.”

  Tomoe steps into him instead, using the lost weapon’s momentum, shoulder-checking Borak in the chest. He oofs, staggers, then laughs.

  “I like you,” he says. “You’re terrible.”

  Dukar is at his side, sword wet, braid loose, eyes alight. “Sister,” he says to Naci. “Let’s break something expensive.”

  Naci flashes him a quick, feral grin. “Pick one,” she says.

  The next passes are chaos distilled.

  Miju finds herself fighting two siblings who have trained their whole lives not to leave each other alone. Naci presses high, spear jabbing for throat and shoulder and eyes, while Dukar works low, spear-butt and boot, hunting knees and ankles. Where one weapon is parried, the other slips in.

  “Left,” Naci calls.

  “Got it,” Dukar answers without looking, catching Miju’s counterstroke on the haft and shoving back.

  They are not graceful. They are relentless.

  Miju gives ground grudgingly, step by forced step. Her katana cuts a red line across Dukar’s bicep; he snarls, ignores the blood, drives her back with sheer weight.

  “You think this scares me?” Miju pants.

  On the other axis, Shan Xi and Tomoe find themselves pinned between Borak’s brute force and Horohan’s precision.

  Tomoe recovers her naginata with a boot and a spin, but Borak’s pole keeps knocking her perfect cuts just a hair off. Horohan’s sword hunts Shan Xi the way a hawk hunts a rabbit: patient, merciless, waiting for the stumble.

  Shan Xi is bleeding from shoulder, thigh, cheek. Her footwork is still quick but every jump lands a little heavier.

  “You’re slowing,” Horohan observes.

  “Getting sentimental,” Shan Xi replies, parrying a thrust with her fan, ribs heaving.

  Tomoe’s mouth tightens.

  A militia bolt whines past, close enough that they all feel the air of it. Tomoe flinches half a second too long.

  Borak sees it.

  His pole sweeps low, hooking behind her knee. He wrenches.

  Tomoe’s leg goes out from under her. She falls to one knee, naginata point digging into the stone to stop herself from hitting face-first.

  “Admiral!” Shan Xi snaps, lunging toward her.

  Horohan’s blade darts for Shan Xi’s exposed side. The pirate twists, fan catching it at an awkward angle. The metal ribs screech and finally give, snapping fully. Shards of fan clatter to the ground.

  Tomoe moves without thinking.

  She throws herself sideways, between Horohan’s sword and Shan Xi’s unguarded ribs.

  The blade takes her instead, sliding in under her arm, through armor that was never meant to stop a god-killer.

  Horohan feels resistance, then terrible ease.

  Both women freeze.

  Tomoe looks down at the sword sticking out of her, then up at Horohan, then past her to Shan Xi.

  “Oh,” she says softly. “Of course.”

  Shan Xi’s face empties. “Admiral Tomoe,” she says. Her voice cracks on the second syllable.

  Tomoe’s knees fold. Horohan yanks the blade free on reflex, blood following in a hot, thick sheet.

  Tomoe wobbles and somehow still manages to land on her feet, back braced against Borak’s pole.

  “Admiral,” Shan Xi says, stepping forward like a drunk.

  Tomoe’s hand fumbles for hers. Their fingers brush, bloody, callused.

  “Don’t waste it,” Tomoe murmurs. “Fall… correctly.”

  Her eyes unfocus. Her weight goes dead.

  Borak eases her to the ground because no one else seems able to move. Shan Xi sways, a sound building in her chest that has nowhere to go.

  Baek Miju sees Tomoe fall.

  She does not flinch. Her eyes flicker, once, with something like regret—hard to say, buried under battle-focus.

  “Traitors die first,” she says. “One mercy we still afford this world.”

  And then Naci and Dukar finally find their opening.

  Miju lunges for Naci’s throat, committed, katana sweeping in a brutal cut.

  Naci ducks inside the arc instead of pulling back, letting the blade slice a line along her scalp rather than take her face. Blood washes into her eye; she blinks through it.

  “Now!” she snaps.

  Dukar drives his spear forward; he angles it up under Miju’s sword arm, forcing her wrist high. The katana’s trajectory jerks. Instead of carving through Naci’s neck, it sings over her shoulder.

  Naci jams the butt of her spear into the joint of Miju’s elbow.

  Bone cracks.

  The katana jerks free of her hand, spinning away.

  Miju snarls and reaches for a dagger with her left, but Dukar is already there, his spear reversed. The butt slams down on her forearm with all his considerable weight behind it.

  There is a wet, ugly sound.

  Her right arm gives.

  For a moment, she stands there staring at it, as if the limb has betrayed her by existing wrong. Blood runs. Her hand hangs at an impossible angle.

  Dukar yanks his spear back, ready to finish it with a thrust through the throat.

  “Stop,” Naci says.

  He hesitates. “Naci—”

  “Stop,” she repeats, sharper. “I want her alive.”

  Baek Miju bares her teeth, breath coming ragged. “Soft,” she hisses. “You hesitate at the top.”

  Naci’s eyes burn. “You misunderstand,” she says.

  She lifts the spear-point to Miju’s throat, just enough to dimple the skin.

  Behind her, Borak and Horohan stand over Shan Xi’s crumpled form.

  Her sabre lies a few paces away. One leg bends under her at a wrong angle, the other twisted. Borak’s pole did most of the work; Horohan’s boot finished it, stamping down on her knee until something broke.

  Shan Xi is laughing silently, teeth red, breath coming in ragged pulls.

  Horohan lifts her sword again.

  Naci doesn’t turn, but her voice cracks like a whip. “Do not kill her,” she snaps. “Not yet. I promised her a pole and fire.”