text: Nasaka did not believe in losing. She never had. It was why, when Kai Javia's second child died just days after birth, Nasaka made the decision to give up her own child to Javia and her Catori – Nasaka's brother Rishin. Javia's elder daughter Kirana, a favorite for the seat, was in poor health. Kirana had been sickly from the moment she was born, and they needed another child to ensure the line of the Kai remained unbroken, at least in the eyes of the people. Tir and his family in Garika were already making noise about Javia being unfit to rule. But Javia was, Nasaka thought, more malleable than Etena. Etena knew too much about the coming invasion. So even if it caused some strife, Nasaka convinced Javia to have Etena exiled.
  
  So many people. So many pieces. And for what? To preserve the peace of Dhai. To ensure the existence of a country built on principles the rest of the world thought were unreasonable. But if you were committed to an ideal, you gave everything for it, and Nasaka had, time and again. She preserved Dhai at all costs, even when it meant turning her back on the very ideals she supported. Someone needed to make the hard choices. Someone needed to do the killing, the manipulating, the threatening, to save the others from those things. She was obligated to wear that mantle, and she wore it proudly, if heavily, every day of her life.
  
  She wore it now, as she looked across the advancing Tai Mora armies stretching across the plateau. She had manufactured this. She was part of this. But it was because of her that any would survive. If Ahkio had gotten his way… Ahkio…
  
  She pressed her fists to her eyes. Etena dead, Ahkio cut to pieces and dumped down the latrine, Mohrai overwhelmed in Kuallina; that left just one final player for the seat of the Kai that she had to eliminate before the new Kirana called her debt repaid, and allowed Nasaka and the few she had chosen to live in the new Dhai she had planned.
  
  Nasaka cleared her eyes and took a long breath. She already had several people out looking for Meyna. How had she escaped the temple when Nasaka burned her way up from the basements, Nasaka was uncertain, but she would be dealt with.
  
  A creaking sound came from behind her. Odd, as Pasinu would have announced herself. She turned—
  
  And a knife plunged into her left breast.
  
  Nasaka gasped, so shocked at the surge of pain she reeled backwards.
  
  "My daughter," Meyna said.
  
  Nasaka's lips moved in a litany. Meyna stabbed her again.
  
  Nasaka fell hard. She saw her own blood flowing across the floor, fast as that from a gutted pig. She had seen one once, in the woodland, when they fed the blood of a boar to the thorn fence. The blood was thick and black.
  
  "You nearly killed me, my daughter, you horror!"
  
  Blood flecked Nasaka's lips. She gurgled and grinned, and her chest heaved. Trying to call Sina, but the pain came again and again, breaking her concentration, the knife stabbing and stabbing, throwing bloody flecks across Meyna's face.
  
  Meyna had not run. She had hidden here, in Nasaka's study, for just this moment. Nasaka admired it. It was something she would have done.
  
  "Formidable woman," Nasaka said. "Should have been Kai."
  
  Meyna's hand came down fiercely, thwack, thwack, thwack.
  
  Nasaka tasted copper. Meyna was sobbing and yelling. Nasaka could not make sense of the words she spoke; gibberish, rants, anger… The world began to bleed to black.
  
  Nasaka lay on her side as Meyna withdrew. She heard noise in the hall. Shouting as the army arrived, and Nasaka's supporters uncovered and eradicated the small groups of resistors. Meyna breathed heavily. Tears and sweat soaked her face and her tunic. She wiped her bloody, drool-smeared chin with her trembling hand.
  
  Meyna hissed at her. Hers was the last face Nasaka saw, and the last words she ever heard.
  
  "Curse you," Meyna said, "and everything you built."