The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

When Rin awoke, her head was fuzzy, her mouth felt like it had been stuffed with silkworm cocoons, and a throbbing ache snaked from the scars in her back through every muscle in her lower body. She heard a roar so loud it seemed to envelop her, drowning out her thoughts, making her bones thrum with its reverberations.

Her gut dropped; the floor seemed to lurch. Was she in a dirigible?

Something cool and wet rubbed against her forehead. She forced her throbbing eyelids open. Daji’s face came gradually into focus. She was wiping Rin’s face with a washcloth.

“Finally,” Daji said. “I was starting to worry.”

Rin sat up and glanced around. Up close, the dirigible carriage was much larger than she’d always imagined. They sat alone in a room the size of a ship’s cabin, which had to be one of many, for none of the Republican soldiers were in sight. “Get away from me.”

“Oh, shush.” Daji rolled her eyes as she continued scrubbing grime from Rin’s cheeks. The washcloth had turned rust brown from dried blood. “I’ve just saved your life.”

“I’m not going . . .” Rin struggled to make sense of her thoughts, trying to remember why she was afraid. “The mountain. The mountain. I’m not going—”

“Eat.” Daji pressed a hard, stale bun into her hand. “You need your strength. You won’t survive immurement otherwise.”

Rin stared helplessly at her. She didn’t lift the bun; her fingers hardly had the strength to close around it. “Why are you doing this?”

“I am saving us both,” Daji said. “Maybe your incipient southern empire, too, if you’ll stop with the hysterics and listen.”

“The army—”

“Your army has abandoned you. Your loyal officers are in no position to help. You’ve been ousted by the Southern Coalition, and you can’t call the fire.” Daji smoothed Rin’s hair back behind her ears. “I am guaranteeing us safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh.”

“But why—”

“Because my strength now is not enough. We need an ally. A mutual friend, who to the best of my knowledge is currently whiling away eternity in a mountain.”

Rin blinked. She understood Daji’s words, but she didn’t understand what she meant; it took a moment of thoughts churning sluggishly through her mind before the pieces fell together.

Then she balked.

She hadn’t thought about Jiang for nearly a year. She hadn’t let herself; the memories hurt too much. He’d been not just her teacher but her master. She’d trusted him; he’d promised to keep her safe. And then, the moment her world descended into war, he’d simply abandoned her. He’d left her to seal himself in a fucking rock.

“He won’t come out,” Rin said hoarsely. “He’s too scared.”

Daji’s lip curled. “Is that what you think?”

“He wants to hide. He won’t leave. He’s—there’s something wrong—”

“His Seal is eroding,” Daji said fiercely. Her good eye glimmered. “I know. I’ve felt it, too. He’s getting stronger—he’s coming back to himself. I didn’t know what I was doing when I Sealed the three of us, but I’d always suspected—hoped—I hadn’t done it right. And I didn’t. The Seal was a broken, imperfect thing, and now it’s fading. Now I—we—get a second chance.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Rin shook her head weakly. “He won’t leave.”

“Oh, he’ll have to.” Daji resumed dabbing at Rin’s temples. “I need him.”

“But I needed him,” Rin said. She felt a sharp pang in her chest, a wrenching mix of frustration and despair that until now she’d been so good at suppressing. She wanted to kick something; she wanted to cry. How, after so much time, could old hurts sting so sharp?

“Perhaps you did.” Daji gave Rin a pitying look. “But Ziya’s not your anchor. He’s mine.”

The rest of the journey could have taken minutes or hours. Rin didn’t know; she passed it in a painful daze, slipping in and out of consciousness as her body ached from its myriad contusions. Daji lapsed into silence, cautious of eavesdroppers. At last the engine roar slowed to a whine, then stopped. Rin jolted fully awake as the carriage thudded against the ground at an angle and screeched as it dragged several feet to a halt. Then Republican soldiers came into her compartment, loaded her bound form onto a wooden stretcher, and carried her out into the icy mountain air.

She didn’t resist. Daji wanted her to play helpless.

She knew they had reached Snake Province. She recognized the shape of these mountains; she’d traveled this way before. But some part of her mind could not accept that they were really, truly, in the Kukhonin Mountains.

Less than a day had passed since Souji betrayed her in Tikany. They’d crossed half the country in the time since. But that couldn’t be right—this journey should have taken weeks. Rin had seen dirigibles fly, she knew how fast they moved, but this was absurd. This took her ingrained conceptions of time, space, and distance, and ripped them to shreds.

Was this how the Hesperians regularly traveled? She tried to imagine spatiality from their perspective. What would society be like if one could traverse the continent in mere days? If she could wake up one morning in Sinegard, and go to bed in Arlong that evening?

No wonder they acted as if they owned the world. To them it must seem so small.

“Which way?” asked a soldier.

“Up,” Daji said. “The entrance lies near the summit. There won’t be space up there to land a craft. We’ll have to climb.”

Rin was strapped down so tightly to the stretcher she could barely lift her head. She couldn’t see how much farther they had to march, but she suspected it would take hours. The only walking path to the entrance of the Chuluu Korikh grew treacherously narrow with altitude. There wouldn’t have been space to land anything as large as a dirigible more than a third of the way up.

At least she didn’t have to climb. As the soldiers hoisted her up the mountain, the rocking stretcher lulled her into a kind of half sleep. Her head felt light and fuzzy. She wasn’t sure if they had sedated her, or if her body was breaking down from wounds sustained earlier. She passed the march in a barely conscious fugue, just dazed enough that the bruises from Souji’s boot produced no more than a dull, nearly pleasant ache.

She didn’t realize they’d reached the Chuluu Korikh until she heard the scrape of the stone door sliding open.

“We need a light,” Daji said.

Rin heard a crackle as someone lit a torch.

Now, she thought. This was when Daji would turn on the soldiers, surely. She’d gotten what she wanted; she’d secured safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh, and now she only had to hypnotize them, lure them to the precipice, and push.

“Go on,” Daji said. “There’s nothing to fear here. Just statues.”

The soldiers bore Rin into the looming dark. An immense pressure slammed over her, like an invisible hand clamped over her nose and mouth.

Rin gasped, arching her back against the stretcher. She gulped down huge mouthfuls of air, but it was thin and insufficient, and did nothing to stop the black spots creeping in at the edges of her vision. She could breathe so hard she ruptured her lungs and it still wouldn’t be enough. The inside of the Chuluu Korikh was so grounded, so firmly material, a solid place with no possible crossover into the plane of spirit.

It felt worse than drowning.

Rin had barely tolerated the pressure the first time she’d come here with Altan. It was far worse now that she had lived and breathed for years with divinity just a glancing thought away. The Phoenix had become a part of her, a constant and reassuring presence in her mind. Even in Kitay’s absence, she’d still felt the barest thread of a connection to her god, but now even that was gone. Now she felt as if the weight of the mountain might shatter her from inside.

The soldier at the front rapped his knuckles against her forehead. “Ah, shut up.”

Rin hadn’t even realized she was screaming.

Someone stuffed a rag in her mouth. That made the suffocation worse. Rational thought fled. She forgot that this was all a feint, all part of Daji’s plan. How could Daji—Su Daji, who had lived with the voice of her god longer than Rin had been alive—withstand this? How could she walk calmly forward without screaming while Rin writhed, arrested in the last moment of drowning before death?

“All these were shamans?” The soldier bearing her legs whistled, a low sound that echoed through the mountain. “Great Tortoise. How long have they been here?”

“As long as this Empire has been alive,” Daji said. “And they’ll be here long after we’re dead.”

“They can’t die?”

“No. Their bodies are no longer mortal. They have become open conduits to the gods, and so they are trapped here so they don’t destroy the world.”

“Fucking hell.” The soldier clicked his tongue. “That’s rough.”

The soldiers halted and lowered Rin’s stretcher to the floor. The one at her head leaned above her; his teeth gleamed yellow in the torchlight. “This is your stop, Speerly.”

She stared past him at rows and rows of empty plinths, stretching farther into the mountain than Rin could see. Her mind was half-gone with fear. She flailed, helpless, as the soldiers unstrapped her from the stretcher and hauled her up toward the nearest pedestal.

Her eyes flashed to Daji, begging silently to no avail. Why isn’t she doing anything? Hadn’t this charade gone on long enough? Daji didn’t need Rin immured. She only needed safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh. She had no use for the Republican soldiers anymore; she should have already disposed of them.

But Daji was just standing there, eyes lidded, face calm, watching as the soldiers positioned Rin on the center of the plinth.

A horrible thought crossed Rin’s mind.

Daji hadn’t just been bluffing.

Daji needed safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh. She needed Master Jiang. But nothing about her plan required Rin.

Oh, gods.

She had to get out of here. She wouldn’t escape this—there was no way she could make it to the door and down the mountain ahead of them in her state, not with her legs bound so tightly. But she could get to the edge of the corridor. She could jump.

Anything was better than an eternity in the rock.

She stopped struggling and slouched against the soldiers’ arms, pretending she’d fainted. It worked. Their grip loosened, just barely enough for her to wrench her torso free. She ducked beneath their hands and lunged toward the ledge. Her legs were tied so tightly she could only manage a lurching shuffle, but she was so close—it was only mere feet, she could evade them just two paces—

But then she reached the edge and saw the yawning abyss, and her limbs turned to lead.

Jump.

She couldn’t.

It didn’t matter that she knew eternity in the Chuluu Korikh was worse than death. She still couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to die.

“Come on.” Strong arms wrapped around her midriff and dragged her back from the edge. “You’re not getting off that easy.”

The soldiers pulled her legs up so that between them they carried her like a sack of rice. Together, they flipped her up into a standing position and arranged her on the pedestal.

“Stop,” Rin shrieked, but her words came muffled and meaningless behind her gag. “Stop, please don’t—Daji! Daji! Tell them!”

Daji didn’t meet her eyes.

“Make sure her feet are in the center,” she said calmly, as if instructing servants on where to move a table. “Prop her up so that she’s standing straight. The stone will do the rest.”

Rin tried everything to escape—kicking, thrashing, writhing, and going limp. They didn’t let go. They were too strong and she was too weak—famished, injured, dehydrated.

She had no more outs. She was trapped, and she couldn’t even die.

“Now what?” one of them asked.

“Now the mountain does its work.” Daji began to chant in Ketreyid, and the rocks came alive.

Rin watched the base of the pedestal in horror. At first its movement seemed a trick of the torchlight, but then she felt the icy touch of stone around her ankles as the plinth crept up and consumed her, solidifying into an immobile coat over the surface of her skin. She had no time to struggle; in seconds, it was up to her knees. The soldier holding her upright let go of her arms and sprang away when the rock reached her waist. Her upper body was now free but it made no difference; much as she flailed she couldn’t break the stone’s hold against her legs. Moments later it reached her chest, arrested her elbows where she’d bent them, and crept up her neck. She tilted her head up, desperate to get her nose away from the rock. It didn’t matter. The stone crawled over her face. Closed over her eyes.

Then she saw nothing. Heard nothing. She did not feel the stone against her; it had become a part of her, a natural outer coating that rendered her completely still.

She couldn’t move.

She couldn’t move.

She strained against the rock but nothing budged even a fragment, and all that did was flood her nerves with such anxiety that she strained harder and harder while panic exploded inside her, intensifying second by second with no possible release.

She couldn’t breathe. And at first she was at least grateful for that—without air, surely she’d soon lose consciousness, and then this torture would end. She could feel her lungs bursting, burning. Soon she’d black out. Soon it’d be over.

But nothing happened.

She was drowning, forever drowning, but she couldn’t die.

She needed to scream and couldn’t. She wanted so badly to writhe and flail that her heart almost burst out of her chest and even that would have been better because then she would at least be dead, but instead she hung still in a never-ending moment stretching on into a definite eternity.

The knowledge that this could and would continue, for days upon seasons upon years, was torture beyond belief.

I should have jumped, she thought. I wish I were dead.

The thought repeated in her mind over and over, the only salve against her new and terrifying reality.

I wish I were dead.

I wish I were dead.

I wish—

The mere thought of oblivion became a fantasy. She imagined she really had jumped, imagined the short, euphoric fall and the satisfying crunch of her bones against the bottom of the pit, followed by a blissful nothing. She repeated the sequence so many times in her mind that for brief seconds at a time she fooled herself into thinking she’d really done it.

She could not sustain her panic forever. Eventually it ebbed away, replaced by a dull, empty helplessness. Her body at last resigned itself to the truth—she would not escape. She would not die. She would remain standing here, half-dead and half-alive, conscious and thinking for eternity.

She had nothing now except for her own mind.

Once upon a time Jiang had taught her to meditate, to empty her mind for hours at a time while her body settled into the peaceful daze of an empty vessel. That was, no doubt, how he had survived in here all this time, why he had ever entered this place willingly. Rin wished she had that skill. But she had never once achieved that inner stillness. Her mind rebelled against boredom. Her thoughts had to wander.

She had nothing else to do but probe through memories for entertainment. She pored over them, picked them apart and stretched them out and relished them, prolonging every last detail. She remembered Tikany. Remembered those delicious warm afternoons she spent in Tutor Feyrik’s room discussing every detail of the books he’d just lent her, stretching her arms to receive more. Remembered playing games with baby Kesegi in the yard, pretending to be every known beast in the Emperor’s Menagerie, roaring and hissing just to get him to laugh. Remembered quiet, stolen minutes in the dark, brief interludes when she was all alone, free of the shop and of Auntie Fang, able to breathe without fear.

When Tikany failed to satisfy she turned her mind to Sinegard—that harsh, intimidating place that, paradoxically, now contained her happiest memories. She remembered studying in the cool basement chambers of the Academy library with Kitay, watching him pushing spindly fingers through his worried hairline as he riffled through scroll after scroll. Remembered sparring in the early mornings with Jiang in the Lore garden, parrying his blows with a blindfold tied around her head.

She got very good at exploring the crevices of her mind, excavating memories that she didn’t know she still had. Memories she hadn’t let herself acknowledge until now for fear they would break her.

She remembered the first time she’d ever laid eyes on Nezha, and then all the times thereafter.

It hurt to see him. It hurt so much.

They’d been so innocent once. It was agony to recall the face he wore just a year ago: pretty and cocky and unbearable at once, alternately grinning with delight or wearing the absurd snarl of an agitated puppy. But she was trapped here for an eternity. Those memories were the only things she had now, and the pain was the only way she’d feel anything ever again.

She retraced their entire history from the moment she met him first at Sinegard to the moment she felt his blade sliding into the muscles of her back. She remembered how childishly handsome he used to be, how she’d been both drawn to and repulsed by that haughty, sculpted face. She remembered how Sinegard had transformed him from a spoiled, petty princeling to a hardened soldier in training. She remembered the first time they’d sparred against each other and the first time they’d fought side by side in battle—how their animosity and partnership had both felt like such a natural fit, like slipping on a lost glove, like finding her other half.

She remembered how much taller than her he’d grown, how when they embraced, her head fit neatly under his chin. She remembered how dark his eyes had looked under the moonlight that night by the docks. Right when she thought he’d kiss her. Right before he’d pressed a blade into her back.

It hurt so much to riffle through those memories. It was humiliating to remember how readily she’d believed his lies. She felt like such a fool, for trusting him, for loving him, for thinking any of those thousands of tiny moments they’d shared during her brief time in Vaisra’s army meant that he really, truly cared for her, when in truth Nezha had been manipulating her just like his father had.

She relived those interactions so many times that they began to lose all meaning. Their sting faded to a dull burn, and then nothing at all. She’d numbed herself to their significance. She’d grown bored of her own pain.

So she turned to the last thing that could still hurt her. She went looking for the Seal and found that it was still there, ready and waiting in the back of her mind, daring her to enter.

She wondered briefly why the Seal had not disappeared. It was the product of the goddess Nüwa’s magic, and there was no connection to the gods in the Chuluu Korikh. But perhaps when Daji had brought the magic into the world, the connection severed, the same way venom lingered after the snake had died.

Rin was grateful for it. Here was at least a single distraction from her own mind. Something she could play with, flirt with. For prisoners in solitary confinement, a knife was better entertainment than nothing.

What happened if she touched it now? She might never come back. Here, with nothing from reality to distract her, she might end up trapped in a poison-soaked lie forever.

But she had nothing else. No reality to come back to, save her own stale memories.

She leaned forward and fell through the gate.

“Hello,” said Altan. “How did we end up here?”

He was standing far too close. Only inches separated them.

“Stay back,” she said. “Don’t touch me.”

“And I thought you wanted to see me.” Ignoring her command he reached out, took her chin in his fingers, and tilted her head up. “What’s happened to you, darling?”

“I’ve been betrayed.”

“‘I’ve been betrayed,’” he mimicked. “Fuck that nonsense. You threw everything away. You had an army. You had Leiyang. You had the south in the palm of your hand and you fucked it all up, you mangy, dirt-skinned piece of shit—”

Why was she so afraid? She knew she had control. Altan was her imagination; Altan was dead. “Get back.”

He only moved closer.

She felt a flash of panic. Where were his chains? Why wouldn’t he obey?

He cast her a mocking smile. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“You’re not real. You only exist in my mind—”

“My darling, I am your mind. I’m you. I’m all you’ve got left. It’s just you and me now, and I’m not going anywhere. You don’t want peace. You want accountability. You want to know exactly what you’ve done and you don’t want to forget it. So let’s begin.” His fingers tightened around her chin. “Admit what you did.”

“I lost the south.”

He smacked a palm against her temple. She knew the blow wasn’t real, that everything she felt was a hallucination, but still it stung. She’d let it sting. This was her imagination, and she’d decided she deserved this punishment.

“You didn’t just lose the south. You gave it away. You had Nezha at your mercy. You had your blade pressed to his skin. All you had to do was bring your arm down and you would have won. You could have killed him. Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I know.” Another ringing blow, this time to her left temple. Rin’s head jerked to the side. Altan seized her throat and dug his fingernails into the skin around her larynx. The pain was excruciating. “Because you’re pathetic. You need to be someone’s dog. You need someone’s boots to lick.”

Rin’s blood ran cold—not with self-induced misery, but with true, uncontrolled fear. She didn’t know where this was going; she couldn’t predict what her mind would do next. She wanted to stop. She should have left the Seal alone.

“You’re weak,” Altan spat. “You’re a stupid, sentimental, sniveling brat who betrayed everyone around her because she couldn’t get over her schoolyard crush. Did you think he loved you? Do you think he ever loved you?”

He drew his fist back again. A tremor rippled through the Seal. Altan’s image wavered like a reflection on a lake dispelled by a stone. There came a second tremor. Altan disappeared. Then Rin understood this wasn’t a hallucination—something was slamming into the stone inches from her face.

The third time, she felt it, a shake that started in her nose and vibrated through her entire body. Her teeth rattled.

Her teeth rattled.

Movement. Which meant—

A fourth tremor. The stone shattered. Rin spilled off the plinth and tumbled hard onto the stone floor. Pain shot up her knees; it felt wonderful. She spat the rag out of her mouth. The air inside the mountain, stale and dank as it was, tasted delicious. The suffocation she’d felt earlier was gone; compared to immurement, the open air tasted like the difference between mild humidity and being underwater. For a long time she knelt with her head hanging between her shoulders and just breathed, marveling at how it felt when air rushed in and out of her lungs.

She flexed her fingers. Touched her face, felt her fingers on her cheeks. The bliss of those sensations, of the sheer freedom of movement, made her want to cry.

“Great Tortoise,” said a voice she hadn’t heard in a lifetime. “Someone clearly never learned to meditate.”

Rin’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the torchlight. Two silhouettes stood over her. To the left, Daji. And on the right was Jiang, covered from head to toe with gray dust, smiling widely in greeting as if they’d seen each other only yesterday.

“You’ve got dirt in your hair.” He reached down to unbind her legs. “My gods, it’s everywhere. We’re going to have to dunk you into a creek.”

Rin recoiled from his touch. “Get away from me.”

“You all right, kid?” His tone was so light. So casual.

She stared at him, amazed. He’d been gone for a year. It had felt like decades. How could he act as if everything were normal?

“Hello?” Jiang waved a hand in front of her face. “Are you just going to sit there?”

She found her voice. “You abandoned me.”

His smile dropped. “Ah, child.”

“You left me.” His wounded expression only made her angrier. It felt like a mockery. Jiang didn’t get to skirt this conversation like he skirted everything, dodging responsibility by feigning madness so well that they all believed it. He’d never been as crazy as everyone thought. She wouldn’t start falling for it now. “I needed you—Altan needed you—and all you did was, was—”

Jiang spoke so quietly she almost couldn’t hear him. “I couldn’t save Altan.”

Her voice broke. “But you could have saved me.”

He looked stricken. For once he had no quippy retort, no excuse or deflection.

She thought he might apologize.

But then he cocked his head to the side, mouth quirking back into a grin. “Why, and spoil all your fun?”

Once upon a time Jiang’s humor had been irritating at worst, a welcome salve in an otherwise dreadful environment at best. Once upon a time he’d been the only person who regularly made her laugh.

Now she saw red.

She didn’t think. She lashed out at him, fingers curling into a fist midway to his face. His hand flashed out of his sleeve. He caught her wrist, forced her arm away with more strength than she’d expected.

She always forgot how strong Jiang was. All that power, concealed inside a reedy, whimsical frame.

He held her fist suspended between them. “Will it make you feel better to hit me?”

“Yes.”

“Will it really?”

She glared at him for a moment, breathing heavily. Then she let her hand go limp.

“You ran away,” she said. It wasn’t a fair accusation. She knew that. But there was a part of her that had never stopped being his student. The part that was terrified and needed, still needed, his protection.

“You left.” She couldn’t keep her voice from breaking. “You left me alone.”

“Oh, Rin.” His voice turned gentle. “Do you think this place was anything like a refuge?”

Rin didn’t want to forgive. She wanted to stay angry. She’d been nursing this resentment for too long. She couldn’t just let this go; she felt like she’d been cheated of something she was owed.

But the horror of immurement was too immediate. She had just escaped her stone prison. And nothing, nothing, could make her enter it again. She’d fling herself off the ledge first.

“Then why did you do it?” she asked.

“To protect you,” he said. “To protect everyone around me. I’m sorry I couldn’t think of a better way how.”

She had no response to that. His words terrified her. If Jiang had seen this hell as the best of alternatives, then what had he been afraid of?

“I’m sorry, child.” Jiang stretched out his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I am so sorry.”

She turned away and shook her head, hugging her arms to her chest. She couldn’t forgive so easily. She needed time to let her anger burn down its wick. She couldn’t meet his eyes; she was glad the firelight was too dim for him to see her tears.

“So what’s changed?” she asked, wiping at her cheeks. “Your Seal has eroded. You’re not afraid of what will come through?”

“Oh, I am terrified,” Jiang said. “I have no idea what my freedom might cause. But suspending myself in time is no answer. This story must end, one way or another.”

“This story will end.” Daji had been watching their exchange in silence, her mouth twisted in an unreadable expression. Now, her cool voice sliced the air like a knife. “The way it was always meant to.”

Jiang put his hand on Rin’s shoulder. “Come, child. Let’s see how the world has broken while I was gone.”

Again, he offered her his hand. This time, she took it. Together they approached the open door, a circle of blinding light.

The sheer whiteness of the sun on snow was agony. But Rin relished the pain shooting through her eyes just as much as she delighted in the cold bite of wind on her face, stone and half-melted snow under her toes. She opened her mouth and took a deep breath of icy mountain air. In that moment, it was the loveliest thing she’d ever tasted.

“Be ready to march,” said Daji. “I can’t fly that airship. We’ll have to go by foot until we can find some horses.”

Rin glanced back at her and then blinked, startled.

The old hag from Tikany was gone. Entire decades had melted from Daji’s face. The lines around her eyes had disappeared, the skin around her gouged eye was smooth and unscarred, and the eyeball somehow, miraculously, healed.

Jiang, too, was more vividly alive than she’d ever seen him. He didn’t just look younger. That wasn’t new—Jiang had always had an ageless quality about him, like he’d been ripped from a place out of time. But now he seemed solid. Powerful. He had a different look in his eyes—less whimsical, less placidly amused, and more focused than she’d ever seen him.

This man had fought in the Poppy Wars. This man had nearly ruled the empire.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

Rin shook her head, blinking. “Nothing. I just—um, where are Nezha’s troops?”

Daji shrugged. “Dealt with them as soon as they got you in the mountain.”

Rin was indignant. “And you couldn’t have freed me a bit earlier?”

Daji cast her an icy smile. “I thought you should know how it felt.”

They made shelter that night under a small alcove near the base of the mountain. Humming, Jiang set about constructing a fire. Daji disappeared into the trees and, twenty minutes later, returned with a string of dead rats, which she then proceeded to skin with a dagger.

Rin slumped back against a tree trunk, trying to keep her eyes open. The absurdity of this scene would have amazed her if she had the energy. She was sitting at a campfire with two of the most powerful figures in Nikara history, figures that to most people existed only in shadow puppet plays, watching as they prepared dinner. Anyone else would have been slack-jawed in awe.

But Rin was too exhausted to even think. The climb downhill hadn’t been arduous, but the Chuluu Korikh had drained her; she felt like she’d barely survived tumbling down a waterfall. She had nearly drifted into sleep when Jiang poked her in the stomach with a stick.

She jumped. “What?”

He poked her again. “You’re being very quiet.”

She rubbed her side. “I just want to sit for a second. In peace. Can I do that?”

“Well, now you’re just being rude.”

She lifted a languid hand and whacked him on the shin.

He ignored that and sat down beside her. “We need to talk next moves.”

She sighed. “Then talk.”

“Now, Daji’s only caught me up on a little bit.” He rubbed his hands together and held them out over the flames. “It’s been a very distressing day for me.”

“Same,” Rin muttered.

“But the way I understand it, you’ve gone and split the country in half.”

“That wasn’t my fault.”

“Oh, I know. Yin Vaisra’s always been a bloodthirsty little gremlin.” Jiang winked at her. “So what shall we do now? Raze Arlong to the ground?”

She gaped at him for a moment, waiting for him to chuckle, before she realized he was being utterly serious. His gaze was earnest. She had no idea what this new Jiang was capable of, but she had to take his words at face value.

“We can’t do that,” she said. “We have to infiltrate them first. They’ve—they’ve got someone.”

“Who?”

Daji interjected from across the fire. “Her anchor.”

“She has an anchor?” Jiang arched an eyebrow. “Since when? You might have told me.”

“I only retrieved you from rock this afternoon,” Daji said.

“But that seems relevant—”

“Kitay,” Rin snapped. “Chen Kitay. He was in my class at Sinegard. Nezha took him from Tikany, and we need to get him back.”

“I remember him.” Jiang rubbed his chin. “Skinny kid? Big ears, hair like an overgrown forest? Too smart for his own good?”

“That’s the one.”

“Does the Republic know he’s your anchor?” Daji asked.

“No.” Aside from Chaghan, everyone who knew she had an anchor had died at Lake Boyang. “No one possibly could.”

“And they don’t have a reason to hurt him?” Daji pressed.

“Nezha wouldn’t do that,” Rin said. “They’re friends.”

“Friends don’t send dirigible bombers after friends,” said Jiang.

“The point is that Kitay is alive,” Rin said, exasperated. “And the first thing we need to do is get him back.”

Jiang and Daji exchanged a long, deliberating look.

“Please,” Rin said. “I’ll follow any plan you two want, but I need Kitay. Otherwise I’m useless.”

“We’ll get him back,” Jiang assured her. “Is there any chance we can get you an army?”

Daji snorted.

Rin sighed again. “My troops betrayed me to the Republic, and their leader probably wants me dead.”

“That’s not great,” Jiang said.

“No,” Rin agreed.

“Then who owns the resistance army?”

“The Southern Coalition.”

“Then that’s who we’ll deal with. Walk me through their politics.”

If he wasn’t going to let her sleep, Rin decided, then she might as well entertain him. “The Monkey Warlord Liu Gurubai controls the core of the army. Yang Souji commands the Iron Wolves. Ma Lien led the second-largest contingent, the bandit troops, before he died. Zhuden was his second-in-command. They were loyal to me for a bit, until . . . well. They thought they’d trade me for immunity.”

“And who is the leadership now?”

“Gurubai, definitely. And Souji.”

“I see.” Jiang pondered this for a moment, then said in a cheerful tone, “You’ll have to kill them all, of course.”

“Sorry, what?”

He lounged back against the trunk, stretched out his legs, and propped one ankle over the other. “Strike as soon as you can after you rendezvous with the coalition. Get them in their sleep. Sometimes it’s easier to take them out in battle, but that tends to leave a nasty public impression. Bad form, and all that.”

Rin stared at him in disbelief. She didn’t know what shocked her more—his suggestion, or the cavalier tone in which he said it. The Jiang she knew liked to blow bubbles in the creek with a reed for fun. This Jiang discussed murder as if relaying a recipe for porridge.

“What did you think would happen when you returned?” Daji asked.

“I don’t know, I thought maybe—maybe they’d realize they need me.” Rin hadn’t thought that far. She had some half-formed notion that she might be able to talk her way into their good graces, now that they’d learned she was right about the Republic.

But now that she considered it, they were just as likely to shoot her on sight.

“You are so bad at this,” Jiang said. “It’s cute.”

“You can’t fight a war on multiple fronts.” Daji slid a thin whittled branch through the skinned rats, then propped them over the crackling fire. “The moment you hear whispers of dissent in your own ranks, you flush it out. With all the force necessary.”

“Is that what you did?” Rin asked.

“Oh, yes,” Jiang said happily. “All the time. I handled the public murders, of course. Riga only had to utter the name, and I’d have the beasts rip them up from head to toe. The point was the spectacle, to dissuade anyone else from defection.” He nodded at Daji. “And this one took care of everything we wanted to keep quiet. Good times.”

“But they hated you,” Rin said.

She knew little of the Trifecta’s reign except from what Vaisra had told her, but she knew they’d been resented by almost everyone. The Trifecta had sustained political support through sheer violence. No one had loved them, but everyone had feared them. After Riga disappeared, the only reason why the Twelve Warlords never unseated Daji from the throne was because they hated one another just as much.

“Elites with entrenched interests will always hate you,” Daji said. “That’s inevitable. But the elites don’t matter, the masses do. What you have to do is shroud yourself in myth. Your enemies’ deaths become part of your legend. Eventually you become so far removed from reality that right and wrong don’t apply to you. Your identity becomes part and parcel of the idea of the nation itself. They’ll love you no matter what you do.”

“I feel like you’re underestimating the public,” Rin asked.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean—nobody becomes a legend overnight. People aren’t blind. I wouldn’t worship an icon like that.”

“Didn’t you worship Altan?” Daji asked.

Jiang whistled through his teeth. “Low blow.”

“Fuck you,” Rin said.

Daji just smiled. “People are attracted to power, darling. They can’t help themselves. Power seduces. Exert it, make a show of it, and they’ll follow you.”

“I can’t just bully people into getting what I want,” Rin said.

“Really?” Daji cocked her head. “How did you get command of Ma Lien’s troops, then?”

“I let him die,” Rin said.

“Rephrase,” Daji said.

“All right. I killed him.” That felt surprisingly good to say out loud. She said it again. “I killed him. And I don’t feel bad about it. He was a shitty leader, he was squandering his troops, he humiliated me, and I needed him out of the way—”

“And that’s not how you feel about the others?” Daji pressed.

Rin paused. How hard would it be to murder the entire southern leadership—Souji, Gurubai, and Liu Dai? She considered the details. What about their guards? Would she have to strike them all at once, in case they warned one another?

It scared her that this was no longer a question of whether to do it, but how.

“You can’t lead by committee,” Daji said. “The entire bloody history of this country is proof of that. You’ve seen the Warlord councils. You know they can’t get anything done on their own. Do you know how the succession wars kicked off? One of the Red Emperor’s favorite generals demanded that his rival give him a troupe of Hinterlander musicians captured in a raid on the borderlands. His rival sent him the musicians, but smashed all their instruments. The first general slaughtered the musicians in retaliation, and that kicked off nearly a century of warfare. That’s how petty multifactional government becomes. Save yourself the headaches, child. Kill your rivals on sight.”

“But that’s not . . .” Rin paused, trying to tease out the exact nature of her objection. Why was it so hard to make the argument? “They don’t deserve that. It’d be one thing if they were Republican officers, but they’re fighting for the south. It’s wrong to just—”

“Dear girl.” Daji sighed heavily. “Stop pretending to care about ethics, it’s embarrassing. At some point, you’ll have to convince yourself that you’re above right and wrong. Morality doesn’t apply to you.”

She turned the skewered rats over the fire, exposing their uncooked underbellies to the flames. “Get that in your head. You’ll have to get more decisive if you’re ever going to lead. You’re not a little girl anymore, and you’re not just a soldier, either. You’re in the running for the throne, and you’ve got a god on your side. You want full command of that army? This country? You take it.”

“And how,” Rin said tiredly, “do you propose to do that?”

Daji and Jiang exchanged a look.

Rin couldn’t read it, and she didn’t like it. It was a look loaded with decades of shared history, with secrets and allusions that she couldn’t begin to understand. Suddenly she felt like a little child sitting between them—a peasant girl among legends, a mortal among gods, woefully inexperienced and utterly out of place.

“Easily,” Daji said at last. “We’ll retrieve your anchor. And then we’ll go wake ours.”