The wind at the north gate cut like a clean blade.
But I wasn't upset with it.
I wanted the edges. I wanted it to punish everyone and everything. In fact. That was the plan.
I hadn't worn the crown or bothered with my hair, and I sure as fuck wasn't wearing the dresses that the servants kept trying to put me in. Instead, I was wearing a simple black dress that wouldn't show the blood and boots that were made for kicking ass.
If the city expected an Empress in lacquered pins and pearls that was wringing her hands over the fact that my son was gone, it could look somewhere else.
I was not a painting.
I was a reckoning.
We'd spent two nights and a day laying the board for a march that would turn Baiguang's fields into ledgers of ash.
Bridges had been marked, their grain stores counted, fords measured by the depth of a horse's knee, names of men who thought they were small enough to survive written on a list that would shorten their lives.
