The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

The soil inside the cavern was too stiff to dig a grave, so Rin and Kitay piled Gurubai’s and Souji’s remains together onto a messy pyramid in the center of the caverns, soaked them with oil, and stood back to watch them burn.

It took nearly half an hour for the corpses to disintegrate. Rin wanted to speed the process with her own flames, but Kitay wouldn’t let her; he demanded they sit vigil before the pyre while the southerners marched on without them. Rin found this a colossal waste of time, but Kitay couldn’t be dissuaded. He thought they owed this to their victims, that otherwise Rin would come off like a callous murderer instead of a proper leader.

Twenty minutes in, he clearly regretted it. His cheeks had gone ashen; he looked like he wanted to vomit.

“You know what I’ll never get over?” he asked.

“What?” she asked.

“It smells so much like pork. It makes me hungry. I mean—I couldn’t eat now if I tried to, but I can’t stop my mouth from watering. Is that disgusting?”

“It’s not disgusting,” Rin said, privately relieved. “I thought it was just me.”

But she could eat right now, even sitting before the corpses. She hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon, and she was starving. She had a ration of dried shanyu roots in her pocket, but it felt wrong to chew on it while the air still crackled with the scent of roasted meat. Only when the corpses had shriveled into pitch-black lumps and the air smelled of charcoal instead of flesh did she feel comfortable enough to pull the rations out. She chewed slowly on the coin-shaped root slivers, working her tongue around the starchy chunks until her saliva softened them enough to swallow, while the last remains of Souji and Gurubai puttered into bones and ash.

Then she rose and joined her army in their march.

After they emerged out the other side of the mining tunnels, they continued along the forest with the mountain to their rear. She told the southerners they were moving north to rendezvous with the Dog Warlord and his rebels to form the last organized holdout against the Republic left in the Empire. They would fare better with their numbers combined. She wasn’t lying. She did intend to seek the Dog Warlord’s aid. If the rumors were true that he had swords and bodies, she’d be a fool to ignore them.

But she didn’t tell anyone but Kitay about their plan to climb Mount Tianshan. She’d learned now that she always had to assume someone in her ranks was spying for the Republic. The Monkey Warlord’s coup had proved that point. The last thing she wanted was for the Hesperians to raid Mount Tianshan before she reached it.

She also withheld the truth for a more fundamental reason. She needed her soldiers to believe that they mattered. That their blood and sweat were the only things that could turn the wheels of history. She intended to win this war with shamans, yes, but she couldn’t keep her hold on the country without the people’s hearts. For that she needed them to believe that they wrote the script of the universe. Not the gods.

The skies above were clear and silent. Nezha and his airships had held off for now, and perhaps indefinitely. Rin didn’t know how long their grace period would last, but she wasn’t going to sit and wait it out.

Her nerves were on edge as they moved along the foothills. Her troops were too exposed and vulnerable, and they moved at a frustratingly slow pace. It wasn’t due to poor discipline. Her soldiers, already weakened by months under siege, were weighed down with wagons carrying weapons arsenals, medical equipment, and their scant remaining food supplies. And the relentless rain, which had started that afternoon as a drizzle and quickly turned into thick, heavy sheets, turned their roads into nothing but mud for miles.

“We won’t make ten miles today at this rate,” Kitay said. “We’ve got to offload.”

So Rin gave the order to dump as many supplies as they could bear to lose. Food and medicine were invaluable, but almost everything else had to go. Everyone chose two changes of clothes and discarded the rest, largely light summer tunics that would offer no shelter from the mountain snow. They also got rid of many of their weapons and ammunition—they simply didn’t have the men to keep lugging along the mounted crossbows, chests of fire powder, and spare armor that they’d dragged all this way from Ruijin.

Rin hated this. They all hated it. The sight of so much sheer waste was unbearable; it hurt to watch the weapons piled up in stacks ready to be burned just so that the Republic couldn’t find and repurpose them.

“When the final battles commence, it won’t come down to swords and halberds,” Daji told Rin. “The fate of this nation depends on how quickly we get to Mount Tianshan. The rest is inconsequential.”

Their marching rate sped up considerably after they had shed their supplies. But shortly thereafter, the rain shifted from a heavy shower into a violent and torrential downpour that showed no signs of ceasing throughout the afternoon. The mud became a nightmare. On parts of the road, they waded through black sludge up to their ankles. Their flimsy cotton and straw shoes couldn’t keep it out; none of them were dressed for such a wet climate.

Rin’s mind spiraled into panic as she considered the consequences. Mud like this wasn’t just a nuisance, it was a serious threat to her army’s health. Few of them had boots; likely they were all going to get infections. Then their toes would rot and fall off, and they’d have to sit down by the roadside to die because they couldn’t keep walking. And if they escaped foot infections, they might still contract gangrene from wounds they’d sustained when the blockade broke, because there weren’t near enough medical supplies to go around. Or they might simply starve, because she had no idea how they were going to forage at such high altitudes, or—

Her breath quickened. Her vision dimmed. She felt so dizzy she had to stop walking for a moment and breathe, her one good hand pressed against her pulsing chest.

The magnitude of this journey was starting to sink in. Now that the adrenaline of the morning had worn off, now that she wasn’t reeling from a heady mixture of insane confidence and drunk exhilaration, she was beginning to understand the stakes of the path she’d charted for the southerners.

And it was very likely that they were all going to die.

Huge losses were inevitable. Their survival was uncertain. If they ventured on, they might write themselves out of history just as completely as if they had never existed.

But if they stayed where they were, they died. If they parleyed for surrender, they died. If they took their chances now against Nezha, three shamans and a weakened army against the combined military might of the Republic and the west, they died. But if they made it to Mount Tianshan, if they could wake the Dragon Emperor, then the playing field would become very, very different.

This could be the end of their story or the beginning of a glorious chapter. And Rin had no choice now but to drag them across the mountain range by her teeth.

It was the weather, not the dirigibles, that quickly proved to be their greatest obstacle. They’d ascended the Baolei range in the middle of the late summer thaw, and that meant raging river torrents, roads slippery with mud, and rain showers that went on for days at a time. At several crossings the mud reached up to their waists, and they could proceed only after cutting down log strips of bamboo and building a makeshift bridge so that the supply wagons, at least, would not sink beneath the surface.

At night they sought shelter in caves if they could find them, for those offered a shield against the rain and ever-present threat of air raids. But, as Rin quickly discovered, they provided no protection against insects and vermin—bulging nests of spiders, little snakes huddled together in horrific, writhing balls, and sharp-toothed rats nearly the size of house cats. The route they’d chosen was so rarely traveled by humans that the pests seemed to have doubled their numbers to compensate. One evening Rin had just put a bedroll down when a scorpion the length of her hand skittered up to her, tail poised, stinger wafting back and forth in the air.

She froze, too scared to scream.

An arrow thudded into the dirt just inches before the scorpion. It skittered backward and vanished into a crack in the cave wall.

Venka lowered her bow. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” Rin exhaled. Her head felt dizzyingly light. “Great fucking Tortoise.”

“Burn some lavender and tung oil.” Venka pulled a pouch out of her pocket and handed it to Rin. “Then rub the residue on your skin. They hate the smell.”

Rin burned the mixture in her palm and rubbed it around her neck. “When did you figure that out?”

“The tunnels by the Anvil were crawling with those things,” Venka said. “Didn’t learn about it until after a couple soldiers woke up swollen and choking, and then we started sleeping in shifts and clearing out the walls with incense every evening. Sorry about that one. Someone should have warned you.”

“Thanks regardless.” Rin offered her hand to Venka. Venka scraped the residual ointment from Rin’s skin and dabbed it around her collarbones. Then she set her mat next to Rin’s, sat down, and pressed her palms against her temples.

“It’s been a fucking week,” she groaned.

Rin joined her on the bedroll. “Yeah.”

For a moment they sat beside each other in silence, breathing slowly, watching the cracks in the wall for the scorpion’s return. The cave was cramped and bone-achingly cold, so they pressed tight against each other, misty breaths intermingling in the icy air.

It felt good to have Venka back by her side. Funny how people changed, Rin thought. She would never have dreamed that Venka—Sring Venka, the pretty, pampered Sinegardian turned lean, ferocious warrior—would become such a source of comfort.

Once not so long ago they’d hated each other with the particular intensity only schoolgirls could summon. Rin used to grit her teeth every time she heard Venka’s high, petulant voice, used to fantasize about gouging Venka’s eyes out with her fingernails. They would have brawled like wildcats in the school courtyard if they hadn’t been so afraid of expulsion.

None of that mattered anymore. They weren’t stupid little girls anymore. They weren’t students anymore. War had transformed them both into wholly unimaginable creatures, and their relationship had transformed with them. They had never commented on how it had happened. They didn’t need to. Theirs was a bond forged from necessity, hurt, and a shared, intimate understanding of hell.

“Tell me the truth,” Venka murmured. “Where the fuck are we going?”

“Dog Province,” Rin yawned. She was already half-asleep; after a full day of climbing, her limbs felt heavier than lead. “Thought I made that clear.”

“But that’s just a fiction, isn’t it?” Venka pressed. “The Dog Warlord’s army isn’t really there, is it?”

Rin paused, considering.

Telling Venka the truth was risky, yes. It was risky now to share secrets with anyone who didn’t strictly need to know. But Venka was, startlingly, one of the most loyal people she knew. Venka had readily turned her back on her family to follow a group of southerners in revolt against her home province. She’d never once looked back. Venka could be rude and brittle, but she didn’t have a capricious bone in her body. She was blunt and honest, often to the point of cruelty, and she demanded honesty in return.

“I’m not a fucking spy,” Venka said, when Rin’s silence dragged on for too long.

“I know,” Rin said quickly. “It’s just—you’re right.” Her eyes darted around the cave, making sure no one was listening. “I have no clue what’s in Dog Province.”

Venka raised her eyebrows. “Sorry?”

“That’s the truth. I don’t know if they have an army. They could be legion. Enough to push the Republic back. Or they could all have defected, or have died. My intelligence is based on Kitay’s, and his is based on offhand comments Nezha made weeks ago.”

“Then what’s up north?” Venka demanded. “Where are you going? I don’t care what you tell everyone else, Rin, but you have to tell me.” She examined Rin’s face for a moment. “You’re going to wake the third, aren’t you?”

Rin blinked, surprised. “How did you guess?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Venka asked. “You’ve dragged back Master Jiang and the Empress. The Gatekeeper and the Vipress. There’s only one missing, and no one ever confirmed that he’s dead. So where is he? Somewhere in the Baolei range, I’m assuming?”

“The Wudang Mountains,” Rin answered automatically, disconcerted by Venka’s matter-of-fact tone. “We have to get through Dog Province first. But how are—I mean, that’s fine with you? You don’t think that’s insane?”

“I’ve seen stranger things in the past week,” Venka said. “You wield fire like it’s a sword. Jiang—I mean, Master fucking Jiang, the grand idiot of Sinegard, just ripped an entire fleet from the sky. I don’t know what’s insane anymore. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t,” Rin said. “I’ve no idea.”

She was being honest. She didn’t have the faintest clue what the Dragon Emperor could do. Daji and Jiang had been frustratingly cagey on the topic. Daji, when asked, gave only the vaguest descriptions—he’s powerful, he’s legendary, he’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. Meanwhile, half the time Jiang acted as if he’d never heard the name Riga. The only thing Rin had to go on was that both of them seemed so very sure that the Dragon Emperor, once awakened, could flatten the Republic.

“All I know is that he scares Jiang,” she told Venka. “And whatever scares him ought to terrify the world.”

Their misery intensified in the following days, because at last they’d reached an altitude high enough that everything was paved with ice.

Rin was initially undaunted. She’d had some half-baked idea that she might be able to ease their journey with the sheer force of flame. It worked at first. She became a human torch. She melted the slippery roads until they were walkable sludge, boiled water to drink, lit campfires by pointing, and kept the train warm by walking among the ranks.

But after two days of this continuous flame, a numbing exhaustion set in, and she found it harder and harder to reach for a force that drained her and tortured Kitay.

“I’m sorry,” she said every time she found him shaking atop a wagon, ghostly pale, fingers pressed into his temples so hard they left little grooves.

“I’m fine,” he said every time.

But she knew he was lying. She couldn’t keep pushing him like this; it would destroy them both. She started calling the fire only several hours a day, and then only to clear the roads ahead. The troops now had only their dwindling supply of torches to rely on for heat. Frostbite and hypothermia eroded their ranks. Soldiers stopped waking up after they’d gone to sleep.

Jiang, meanwhile, was deteriorating at a terrifying rate.

This march was killing him. There was no other way to describe it. He’d grown gaunt and pale, and he wasn’t eating. He couldn’t walk on his own anymore; they had to drag him along on a wagon. He hadn’t regained his lucidity, either. Sometimes he was mercifully placid, affable, and easy to order about like a child. More often he turned in on himself, gripped by some terrible visions that the rest of them couldn’t see, lashing out whenever anyone tried to help him. Then he became dangerous. Then the shadows started to creep.

Under Daji’s advice they often kept him in a sedated state, plying him with laudanum tea until he sank back against the corners of the wagon in a stupor. It made Rin sick to see his eyes dulled and uncomprehending, drool leaking out the side of his mouth, but she couldn’t think of any better options. They needed to keep him stable until they got to Mount Tianshan.

She didn’t know what Jiang was capable of when unhinged.

But they couldn’t sedate him constantly without doing permanent damage to his mind. He still needed regular stretches of sobriety, and these were so painful and humiliating that Rin couldn’t bring herself to watch.

One night Jiang woke the camp with such tortured screaming that Rin dashed immediately out of the tent where she slept and rushed to his side.

“Master?” She clenched his hand. “What’s wrong?”

His eyes flew open. He regarded her with his wide, pale eyes, and for a moment, he seemed almost calm.

“Hanelai?”

Rin reeled.

She’d heard that name before. Just once, just briefly, but she’d never forget it. She remembered kneeling on the freezing forest floor, her ankle throbbing, while Chaghan’s aunt, the Sorqan Sira, gripped her face in her hands and spoke a name that made the surrounding Ketreyids bristle. She looks like Hanelai.

“Master . . .” She swallowed. “Who—”

“I know where we’re going.” Jiang’s arm trembled violently. She tightened her grasp, but that only seemed to increase his agitation. “And I don’t—we can’t—don’t make me wake him.”

“Do you mean Riga?” she asked cautiously. She wasn’t prepared for the way he flinched at the name.

He gave her a look of sheer, abject terror. “He is evil incarnate.”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded. “He’s your anchor, why won’t—”

“Listen to me.” Jiang reached out with his other hand and gripped her arm above the elbow. “I know what she wants to do. She’s lying to you. You cannot go.”

His nails dug painfully into her flesh. Rin squirmed, but Jiang’s grip was like iron.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

He didn’t let go. He stared at her, eyes wild and intense like she had never seen them. Something was lost behind them. Something was broken, suppressed, desperately trying to claw its way out.

“You don’t understand what you’re about to do,” Jiang said urgently. “Don’t climb that mountain. Kill me first. Kill her.”

His grip tightened. Rin’s eyes watered from the pain, but she didn’t wrench her arm away; she was too afraid of startling him. “Master, please . . .”

“End this before it begins,” he hissed.

Rin didn’t know what to do or say. Where on earth was Daji? Only she knew how to keep Jiang calm; only she could whisper the right combination of words to stop his raving.

“What’s on Mount Tianshan?” she asked. “Why are you afraid of Riga? Who is Hanelai?”

Jiang relaxed his fingers. His eyes widened just the slightest bit, and Rin thought she saw some fragment of rationality and recognition dawning on his face. He opened his mouth. But just when she thought he was on the verge of an answer, he threw his head back and laughed.

I should leave, Rin thought, suddenly terrified. She should never have approached him. She should have just left him to his screaming until it died away on its own. She should leave now, walk away, and when morning came, Jiang would be calm again and everything would be normal and they’d never speak of this again.

She knew he was trying to tell her something. There was a hidden truth here, something awful and terrible, but she didn’t want to know. She just wanted to run away and cry.

“Altan,” Jiang said suddenly.

Rin froze, crouched halfway between sitting down and standing up.

“I’m sorry.” Jiang stared her in the eyes; he was addressing her. “I’m so sorry. I could have protected you. But they—”

“Stop.” Rin shook her head. “Please, Master, stop—”

“You don’t understand.” Jiang reached out for her wrist. “They hurt me and they said they’d hurt you worse so I had to let you go, don’t you understand—”

“Shut up!” Rin screamed.

Jiang recoiled as if she had hit him. His entire body started to shake so hard she was afraid he might actually shatter like a porcelain vase, but then, abruptly, he went still. He wasn’t breathing; his chest did not rise or fall. For a long time he sat with his head bent and his eyes closed. When at last he opened them, they were a bright, terrible white.

“You should not be here.”

Rin didn’t know who was speaking through his mouth, but that wasn’t Jiang.

Then he smiled, and it was the most horrible sight she’d ever seen.

“Don’t you know better?” he asked. “He wants you all dead.”

He rose and advanced toward her. She scrambled to her feet and took a single, trembling step backward. Run, whispered a small voice in her mind. Run, you idiot. But she couldn’t move, couldn’t take her eyes off his face. She was rooted in place, simultaneously terrified and fascinated.

“Riga’s going to kill you when he finds you.” He laughed again, a high and unnerving sound. “Because of Hanelai. Because of what Hanelai did. He’ll kill you all.”

He gripped her by the shoulders and shook her hard. Rin felt an icy chill as she realized for the first time that she wasn’t safe here, physically was not safe, because she had no idea what Jiang could or would do to her.

Jiang leaned closer. He didn’t have a weapon. But Rin knew he’d never needed one.

“You’re all scum,” he sneered. “And I should have just done what he fucking wanted.”

Rin reached for the fire.

“Ziya, stop!”

Daji ran into the tent. Rin flinched back, heart pounding with relief. Jiang turned toward Daji, that horrible sneer still etched across his face. For a moment Rin thought that he would strike her, but Daji grabbed his arm before he could move and jammed a needle into his vein. He stood stock-still, swaying on his feet. His expression turned placid, and then he dropped to his knees.

“You,” he slurred. “You cunt. This is all your fault.”

“Go to sleep,” Daji said. “Just go to sleep.”

Jiang said something else, but it was slurred and nonsensical. One arm scrabbled for the floor—Rin thought he was reaching for the needle, and tensed for a fight—but then he tilted forward and collapsed to the ground.

“Get away from here.” Daji hustled Rin out of the tent into the cold night air. Rin stumbled along, too dazed to protest. Once they’d walked onto an icy ledge out of earshot of the main camp, Daji spun Rin around and shook her by the shoulders as if she were a disobedient child. “What were you thinking? Have you gone mad?”

“What was that?” Rin shrieked. She wiped frantically at her cheeks. Hot tears kept spilling down her face, but she couldn’t make them stop. “What is he?”

Daji shook her head and pressed her hand against her chest. It took Rin a moment to realize she wasn’t just posturing. Something was wrong.

“A flame,” Daji whispered urgently. Her lips had turned a dark, shocking violet. “Please.”

Rin lit a fire in her palm and held it out between them. “Here.”

Daji hunched over the warmth. She stayed like that for a long time, eyes closed, fingers twitching over the fire. Slowly the color came back to her face.

“You know what that was,” she said at last. “He’s getting his mind back.”

“But—” Rin swallowed, trying to wrap her mind around her racing questions, to configure them into an order that made sense. “But that’s not him. He’s not like that, surely he was never like that—”

“You didn’t know the real Jiang. You knew a shade of a man. You knew a fake, an imitation. That’s not Jiang, that never was.”

“And this is?” Rin shrieked. “He was going to kill me!”

“He’s adjusting.” Daji didn’t answer her question. “He’s just . . . confused, is all—”

“Confused? Haven’t you heard him? He’s afraid. He’s terrified of what’s happening to him, and he doesn’t want to become that person because he knows something—something you won’t tell me. We can’t do this to him.” Rin’s voice trembled. “We have to turn back.”

“No.” Daji violently shook her head. Her eyes glinted in the moonlight; with her disheveled hair and her hungry, desperate expression, she looked nearly as mad as Jiang. “There is no turning back. I’ve waited too long for this.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you want.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve had to watch him all these years, had to keep him confined to Sinegard knowing full well that I’d reduced him to a dithering idiot.” Daji’s voice trembled. “I took his mind from him. Now he has a chance to get it back. And I can’t take that from him. Not even if he’s happier like this.”

“But you can’t,” Rin said. “He’s so scared.”

“It doesn’t matter what this Jiang thinks. This Jiang isn’t real. The real Jiang needs to come back.” Daji looked like she was on the verge of tears. “I need him back.”

Then Rin saw the tears glistening on Daji’s cheeks. Daji, the Vipress, the former Empress of Nikan, was crying. The Vipress was fucking crying.

Rin was too upset for sympathy. No. No, Daji didn’t get to do this, didn’t get to stand here and whimper like she was innocent in the horrifying mental collapse they were witnessing, when Daji was the entire reason why Jiang was broken.

“Then you shouldn’t have Sealed him,” Rin said.

“You think I couldn’t feel what I’d done?” Daji’s eyes were red around the rims. “We are linked. You know what that’s like. I felt his confusion. I felt how lost he was, I felt him probing at the corners of his mind for something he didn’t know he’d lost, acutely so because I knew what he didn’t have access to.”

“Then why did you have to do it?” Rin asked miserably.

What was so terrible, so earth-wrenchingly terrible, that Daji would risk her own life and fracture Jiang’s soul to stop it?

They quarreled, Daji had once told her.

Over what?

Daji just shook her head. Her pale neck bobbed. “Never ask me this.”

“I have a right to know.”

“You have a right to nothing,” Daji said coldly. “They fought. I stopped them. That’s all there is—”

“Bullshit.” Rin’s voice rose as the flame grew, stretching dangerously, threateningly close to Daji’s skin. “There’s more, there’s something you’re not telling me, I deserve to know—”

“Runin.”

Daji’s eyes glinted a snakelike yellow. Rin’s limbs locked suddenly into place. She couldn’t wrench her gaze from Daji’s face. She understood immediately that this was a challenge—a battle of divine wills.

Do you dare?

Once Rin might have fought. She could have forced Daji into submission; she’d done it before. But she was so exhausted, stretched thin from day after day of pulling the Phoenix through Kitay’s aching mind. She couldn’t summon rage after what she’d just seen. She felt like a thin shard of frost, one touch from shattering apart.

Rin pulled her flame back into her hand.

Daji’s pupils turned back to their normal, lovely black. Rin sagged, released from their grip.

“If I were you, I would stop worrying.” Daji had stopped crying; the red around her eyes had faded away. Gone, too, was the fragile hitch in her voice, replaced by a cool, detached confidence. “Jiang’s episodes will get worse. But he will not die. He cannot die—you can trust me on that. But the more you try to prod into his mind, try to retrieve whatever you think you’ve lost, the more you’ll torture yourself. Let go of the man you remember. You’re never going to get him back.”

They returned together to Jiang’s tent. Rin sat down next to where Jiang lay and watched him, her heart twisting with pity. He looked so miserable, even in dreamless, morphine-induced sleep. His features were pressed into a worried frown, his fingers clenching his blankets as if he were hanging on to the edge of a cliff.

This wasn’t the last time she’d see him suffer like this, she realized. He was going to get worse and worse the closer they got to the mountain. He’d deteriorate until he finally snapped, and a victor emerged between the personalities battling in his mind.

Could she do this to him?

It would be easier if the Jiang who had been Sealed were truly derivative, if he were truly a pale shade of the other, genuine personality. But the Jiang she’d known at Sinegard was a full person in his own right, a person with wants and memories and desires.

That Jiang was so scared of who he used to be—who he was about to become. He’d found a refuge in his partitioned mind. How could she take that from him?

She tried to imagine how Jiang’s Seal must have felt all those years he’d lived at Sinegard. What if she were blocked not only from the Pantheon but from her own memories? What if she were held captive behind a wall in her mind, screeching in silent anguish as a bumbling idiot took control of her limbs and tongue?

If she were him, of course she’d want to be free.

But what if someone could erase all memories of what she’d done?

No more guilt. No more nightmares. She wouldn’t have flaring pockets in her memory like gaping wounds that hurt to touch. She wouldn’t hear screams when she tried to sleep. She wouldn’t see bodies burning every time she closed her eyes.

Maybe that was the coward’s asylum. But she’d want it, too.

The next morning, Jiang had regained some degree of lucidity. Sleep, however forced, had helped—the shadows disappeared from under his eyes, and his face lost its rictus of dread, settling back into a placid calm.

“Hello, Master,” she said when he awoke. “How are you feeling?”

He yawned. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

She decided to push her luck. “You had a bad night.”

“Did I?”

His amused indifference annoyed her. “You called me Altan.”

“Oh, really?” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m sorry, that was terribly rude. I know you used to follow him around with those shining puppy eyes.”

She brushed that off. Shut up, spoke a little voice in her mind. Stop talking, walk away. But she wasn’t done. She wanted to push him, to see how much he remembered. “And you asked me to kill you.”

She couldn’t tell if his laugh sounded nervous, or if that was the way Jiang had always laughed—high, unsettling, and foolish.

“My goodness, Runin.” He reached out to pat her on the shoulder. “Surely I taught you better than to fret over the little things.”

Jiang’s advice had been flippant. But as their altitude increased and the air grew thinner, Rin lost the mental energy to think about anything except the daily exigencies of the march. Her flames barely made the mountain pathways tolerable; the ice refroze almost as quickly as she melted it. At night, when the temperatures dropped dangerously low, the soldiers started sleeping only in one-hour shifts to prevent anyone from succumbing to the numb, beckoning dark.

At least the environment, not the Republic, formed the bulk of their problems. The first few days on the march Rin had kept her eyes trained on the pale gray sky, expecting dark shapes to materialize from the clouds any moment. But the fleet never came. Kitay floated a number of theories for why they weren’t being pursued—the Hesperians were low on fuel, the misty mountain terrain made blind flying dangerous, or the fleet had been so badly damaged at the Anvil that the Hesperians wouldn’t sanction sending out the remaining ships in pursuit of an enemy that could summon shadows from nothing.

“They’ve just seen what we can do,” he told the officers, his tone so obviously full of artificial confidence. “They know it’s suicide to come after us. They might be tracing where we are. But they won’t risk an attack.”

Rin hoped to the gods he was right.

Another week passed and the skies remained empty, but that didn’t come close to putting her at ease. So what if Nezha chose to let them live for another day? He might change his mind tomorrow. He might cave under internal pressure for a quick victory. They couldn’t be hard to pick out against the terrain—he might decide that following them through the mountains wasn’t worth it, that the drain on fuel and resources was too great a cost to justify ferreting out whatever hotbed of shamanism he might find.

She was well aware that with every step she took, she moved under the threat of immediate extermination. The Republic was capable of inflicting mass death in seconds. They could end this at any time. But all she could do was forge ahead and hope that it would be far too late by the time Nezha realized he should have killed her long ago.