text: Lilia had smelled the sea for much of her childhood, but never set foot in it. The great rocky spur of land she grew up on had no safe path to the sea, so she had settled for viewing it from afar. As she came over the low rise of scrubland and saw the vast gates of Asona Harbor, she realized she was not likely to set foot in it now, either. The gates were easily the same height as the walls of Liona, maybe higher. She told herself that was all right. Revenge did not require a dip in the sea.
  
  Lilia, Gian and Taigan had left the refugees ensconced safely at Kuallina and kept on northward to the harbor where they were met by Alhina and two of her male relatives, both smart looking men who did not go so far as to carry weapons, but who held themselves like people who would not be afraid to stand between Alhina and an aggressor. Alhina was a short, plump woman with a kind young face that put Lilia in mind of Kalinda Lasa, which made Lilia feel far more kindly toward her than she probably should have. The day was cool, and, as they trekked along the road, Lilia saw that spring had indeed come to Dhai in full force now. Many plants stayed green during the winter, but those that went dormant had begun to unfurl, revealing new green shoots and tender leaves and spines.
  
  Now they drew up their mounts short. Ahead of them, a sea of floxflass covered the road.
  
  "Curse this spring," Alhina said. She took a long drink from a flask at her hip.
  
  Lilia glanced at Taigan. "I'll race you," she said.
  
  "I will win," Taigan said.
  
  Lilia urged her bear into a sprint across the floxflass field, and raised her fist high as she called on Oma. All around, her, the field of floxflass burned, sending sickly-sweet smoke into the air. Taigan galloped past her, murmuring words of encouragement in Saiduan to her bear. The sanisi gained the lead, and where she pointed her fingers out across the teeming sea of floxflass, the little tendrils burst into flame.
  
  They dashed madly together for nearly a mile, burning and urging their bears on. At the end of the floxflass sea, Lilia reined in her bear and turned to look back at the scorched path, and she laughed.
  
  Taigan pulled up beside her, grinning. "You are so easily amused," Taigan said.
  
  "I cleaned pots my whole life," Lilia said.
  
  "Fair point."
  
  Lilia gazed up into the great trees standing in matted clumps amid the farmland all around them. "The trees were grander," she said.
  
  "More dangerous."
  
  "Grander," Lilia said. "I'll race you back!" She galloped back to meet their party.
  
  Alhina and her male escorts looked at her askance when she arrived, she and her bear covered in char from the floxflass, but that just made Lilia grin harder. As she fell back into the procession with them, she coughed. It turned into a wheezing hack.
  
  Gian moved her mount closer. "Do you need your mahuan?"
  
  Lilia shook her head. She'd had a fit the night before, too, without it being triggered by the usual things – frights, too much exercise. She suspected she was more exhausted than she felt. Sometimes, after holding Oma beneath her skin for hours, she felt invincible. The letdown when she finally released it was starting to become more pronounced.
  
  Taigan finally caught up to her, and fell in beside her. "Take it anyhow," Taigan said.
  
  "You aren't my mother."
  
  "Stop acting like a child who needs one, then," Taigan said. "You natter like a bird."
  
  "You fuss like a hen."
  
  "You wheeze like a dying wren."
  
  "You scheme like a raven."
  
  Taigan puffed out her chest. "Thank you."
  
  Lilia motioned to Gian for the powder. Gian added it to a small water bladder and handed it over. It took several minutes more of silent riding before the powder began to take effect. The constriction eased. All this power, and what did it get her? It didn't fix her labored breathing. And it wouldn't fix her leg or her hand, unless she chopped them off and had Taigan regrow them. Power over everything, the whole world, but not herself.
  
  "The world has a bad sense of humor," Lilia said.
  
  "I often think the same," Taigan said.
  
  "Your body doesn't fail you."
  
  Taigan laughed. "My body does what it pleases."
  
  Lilia continued to drink and watched the harbor gates as they approached. The road here should have been bustling with traffic to and from the harbor. Numerous public houses lined the roads, mostly eateries and way houses. She saw two tea houses with broad green awnings. The floxflass on the road must have grown up overnight. No stretch of road this vital would have been left unattended longer than that.
  
  "Does your family live on the docks?" Lilia asked Alhina. She was not much good at small talk, but suspected talking about much of anything related to herself would become problematic quickly.
  
  "Usually," Alhina said. She took another nip from her flask. "But we've moved to the gates. There are storage and living quarters inside the gatehouses, and all along the inside."
  
  "How far do the gates go? To the cliffs?" Gian asked.
  
  "Yes, they span the entirety of the harbor. Faith Ahya and Hahko anticipated raids from Saiduan and Dorinah. It was among the first structures they built."
  
  Taigan said, "And you're running patrols along the cliffs?"
  
  "Of course," Alhina said. "We have six squads patrolling the west where the wall ends and the black cliffs begin, and two more in the east, which is less ground to cover. It's not as far from here to the mountains, going east."
  
  "Jistas with them?" Taigan asked.
  
  "Each squad is eight militia, with three jistas. A coterie."
  
  "One of each type?" Gian asked. "Is that what that means?"
  
  "Yes," Lilia said, glad to show she knew something.
  
  "Let's get up onto the top of the wall," Taigan said. "I'm eager to see how this looks from another vantage."
  
  Lilia gazed at the massive, twisted wall in the distance, blocking off the view from the sea. She was very interested as well, but for a different reason.
  
  She wanted to see the people she intended to destroy.
  
  Taigan came up the steps onto the great harbor wall just behind Lilia. The warm wind from the Haraeo Sea hit Taigan square in the face. She smelled the changing season in the wind. It was the same wind that had blown across Saiduan. She tasted salt and something bitter, and memorable – the acidic tang of the red tide, the kelp the Tai Mora had brought with them to assault living walls. She came up to the heavy rail with Lilia, and put her hands on the massive tirajista-trained wood. It was not dead. She saw greenery winding up the outside of it.
  
  "What's at the core of this wall?" Taigan asked. "It's all living, like this?"
  
  "The gates are," Alhina said. "I think the wall was trained over a stone core."
  
  "Dead stone?"
  
  "Is there another kind?"
  
  "Sometimes," Taigan said. She ignored the girl's dubious look.
  
  Two great piers jutted out over the water for a thousand feet into the surging sea, a necessary thing for a harbor when the pull of the moons resulted in extreme tides that swept the water out for miles. She had heard of families swept away by the force of the tides in little coastal towns in Saiduan. Whole villages were sometimes swallowed when the fractious heavens changed the ebb and flow of the tides.
  
  For all the Dhai's cowardice and unreadiness for war, they did have two very good defenses. What concerned her was that they relied on them so completely, to the detriment of their army, the construction of their cities, even the ways they organized themselves. Without a hierarchical structure to amass and order armies, they would be little better than a mob with pointed sticks and a few uncoordinated parajistas blowing around clouds before being wrapped in the breath of some jista on the other side. The Tai Mora would be coordinated… like their ships.
  
  She stared out at the ships clotting the harbor. They barricaded the bowl of the blue bay. It was nothing like the number she'd seen at Aaraduan. These were fifty across and three deep, hardly a massive force. But Dhai had no navy, and only one harbor. That made fifty more than enough. What puzzled her was that the Tai Mora had not yet deployed anything against the gates. What were they waiting for? She saw bubbling red mist along the front line, and suspected they already had sufficient omajista barricades up to protect themselves from a gifted attack.
  
  "Have they parleyed with your Kai?" Taigan asked.
  
  "They sent an emissary," Alhina said. "That's why the Kai went to the temple first."
  
  "Is that usual?" Lilia asked Taigan, "for them to talk first?"
  
  "They did with us. In the beginning."
  
  "They stopped?"
  
  Taigan snorted. "They wanted us to deliver tribute in bodies. If we were going to give them bodies, bird, we'd make them fight for them."
  
  "The Kai will not give them bodies," Lilia said.
  
  "Then we best prepare," Taigan said. "You see the omajista barricade?"
  
  "I see it."
  
  Alhina stepped to the rail and squinted out at the ships. "What sorts of jistas do they have out there?"
  
  "All of them," Taigan said. "If they've come at you the way they did us, they'll have eight coteries on every ship."
  
  "Twenty-four jistas on every ship?" Lilia said, as if Taigan had told her she could lay eggs.
  
  "You'll need to empty out the senior Oras from every temple," Taigan said, "and deploy them here. You think your Kai will give leave for that? You think they'll obey if he does?"
  
  "Why wouldn't they?" Lilia said.
  
  "Under the Kai? After fighting a civil war?"
  
  "It wasn't like that at all," Alhina said. "I was here. You weren't."
  
  "People died," Taigan said. "I thought you took that seriously. We certainly take death seriously in Saiduan."
  
  "We are not like Saiduan."
  
  "I'm sure you take great comfort in saying that," Taigan said. "The reality is that if that man has any hint of illegitimacy about him, if even one senior leader does not respect him, you are lost. You may be lost regardless, but it will certainly happen much faster."
  
  "Let's speak to the Kai about it," Lilia said.
  
  "In my experience, young men with power don't take kindly to advice."
  
  "This is Dhai."
  
  "Men are the same everywhere."
  
  "It's a good thing there are a lot of women here, then."
  
  Taigan grimaced. Dhai pronouns were cumbersome things; too many to remember, and trying to use their ungendered pronoun was uncomfortable. Ataisa was not ungendered, it was a gender in and of itself. Stripping away gendered markers in every conversation still grated. There were three types of people as far as Taigan was concerned, and what she defaulted to in any one anecdote depended upon which anecdote it was. Dhai people never understood the nuance.
  
  "Let me take you to my cousin Mohrai," Alhina said. "We can address this with her."
  
  Taigan waved at them. "You go. I want to watch the boats."
  
  "For what?" Lilia said.
  
  "For myself."
  
  Taigan leaned out over the rail after they left. She gazed at row after row of ships. What bothered her was why they had come to Dhai at all. Why not selectively murder the few key people who were the doubles of those on the other side, and simply turn Saiduan into their new home? Why come down to Grania at all? What was there to gain here? People called Taigan monstrous, often, and she had done terrible things. She recalled smashing open the face of the woman who trained her, and flaying men alive for cheating her. She had destroyed people in every way they could be destroyed, but she always did it with purpose. These people were, if nothing else, calculated in the way they attacked. So why now?
  
  She heard a scuffle behind her, and looked back to see Lilia limping toward her.
  
  "Bored already?" Taigan asked.
  
  "Mohrai is busy. I sent Gian down to eat while we wait for Mohrai."
  
  "I'm sure she depleted much of her stores on the way here," Taigan said.
  
  "It's like she's storing up for winter," Lilia said.
  
  "Perhaps she's the smartest of us all."
  
  Lilia came to the parapet. Put her arms on the wall. "I was thinking, Taigan."
  
  "Always dangerous."
  
  "If they wanted to destroy us, we'd be dead now. They've come for something here, haven't they? Something they don't want to burn down or risk being lost."
  
  Taigan smirked at that. Yes, this was the same little girl who played strategy games in the woods, after all. She wished she'd had time to make her some great general, an asset to Saiduan. Now she wasn't sure what she was doing with this girl. Perhaps prolonging the inevitable. Soon Maralah would do more than just send notes that Taigan refused to answer. Soon, she would use the ward. She would call Taigan back, and there was nothing she could do to stop that when the time came.
  
  "Oh! Taigan!" Lilia held up her arms, and Taigan saw little creatures scurrying up her shoulders and nuzzling her neck. They were baby tree gliders. Taigan saw their nest now, burrowed into the living wall. Lilia laughed at snatched at the little creatures, trying to pat their tiny heads, but they were fast, furiously fast.
  
  Taigan regarded her a long moment while dozen of baby tree gliders scurried across her shoulders and then back down her arms. Several leapt from her head and rushed back into the nest. She still had two of them perched in her palm. She cooed at them.
  
  "They're so beautiful," Lilia said. "See how cute they are?" She pressed her face closer to her final two friends, and they leapt from her palm and ran back to the nest with the others. She laughed again, a sound so lovely Taigan forgot for a moment she was ugly and so very broken in so many ways.
  
  "How long did it take you to figure that out?" Taigan asked. "About the Tai Mora."
  
  Lilia's smile faded, but did not disappear. Taigan suspected she enjoyed her strategy for revenge almost as much as the tree gliders. "I considered it on the way here. But when I saw the boats… I knew."
  
  "Not a fool bird," Taigan said.
  
  "You think the Kai knows?"
  
  "I think the Kai still believes he can talk his way out of this."
  
  "Surely not."
  
  "You watch him. Remember he'll do whatever it takes to avoid bloodshed. If you know that about him, you know his weakness."
  
  "He didn't order us killed or turned back," Lilia said. "He could have."
  
  "He wants to preserve who you are."
  
  "He wants to save this idea he has of himself." Lilia's jaw firmed. "But the ideas we have of ourselves are foolish. He'll learn that."
  
  "Indeed he will."
  
  Taigan wondered, for the first time, if she was helping to make a savior or a monster.
  
  She had such a plain, serious face. Taigan still worried about Gian's influence. A handsome woman like Gian, raised a dajian, would be drawn to power like a moth to claw lilies. Taigan suspected Gian had fucked the wrong person in Dorinah, or perhaps the right one, and it had all gone bad. But a Dhai this young wouldn't see a path to power through fucking. The older ones, perhaps, used sex and kinship to form strong ties. But not like Dorinahs did. Not like the Saiduan.
  
  Such a peculiar little country, Dhai. It would be a shame to see it burn.