She touched her cheeks and felt wetness there. So she could cry.

Coral was the one who dared to disturb her first. “The fire – should we put it out? The governor is still inside.”

Nisong had planned a quick death for the governor. No need for him to suffer. But the roiling, ugly feeling that lay in the pit of her belly boiled over. She licked her lips and tasted copper. Shell’s lifeless fingers slipped from hers. “No. Let him burn.”

Leaf knelt next to her and closed Shell’s eyes with shaking fingers. The war constructs gathered around her. All the guards were now dead, one halfway down the street where he’d fled. Good.

Grass swept past her and returned with two more constructs to help her carry Shell’s body. “We’ll give him rites,” she said, her voice gruff. “Tonight. At the beach. I’ll have someone find juniper.”

Nisong clenched her fists. “He shouldn’t have died here.”

“No, he shouldn’t have.” Grass patted her shoulder. “But he’s gone just the same. I’m sorry. We all are.”

Leaf rose. “The governor was right – the Empire will come when they hear what we’ve done. We don’t have enough constructs to fend them off.” He held his hands out in front of him as though they were a scale. “We cannot rally more to our cause without going to another island. If we go to another island, we have to fight, which reduces our numbers.”

If you killed the leader, you incapacitated everyone else.

“Find volunteers,” Nisong told Grass. “Constructs that look like us. Constructs that can fight. We send them to kill the Emperor. We send them to rally other constructs on the other islands. To sow chaos.”

Grass nodded and left.

Coral was rubbing Nisong’s back, soothing her. She sighed. “We should burn the other bodies too. Some of the villagers resisted.”

“Not with Shell,” Frond said. “He deserves his own pyre.”

“Of course he does.” Coral sounded offended at the thought. “But they’re bodies. We can’t just leave them out to rot.”

The words triggered something in Nisong. The smell of smoke faded, replaced with the scent of sandalwood. She wasn’t outside the governor’s home anymore; she was in the dark bowels of a palace, her hands stained with blood. A warm gust of breath tickled at her ear.

“Working late again?”

“Shiyen,” she said, a smile on her lips. “If I didn’t, what would get done? There are too many problems to solve and only one of you.”

He put a hand to the swell of her belly. “There will be another Sukai soon.”

“And years before she’ll be old enough to learn.”

“She?”

“Just a guess.”

He kissed the juncture of neck and shoulder, and she shivered. “Come to bed,” he said.