The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

Rin’s journey by airship to the Chuluu Korikh had made the world seem so small. But their trek through the Baolei range felt infinite, and the mountains, which before now she had only ever known as little marks on a map, seemed to encompass a territory greater than the Empire itself. Exhausting weeks stretched into grueling, monotonous months and somehow, when the march had gone on for so long it seemed there had never been a time when they weren’t climbing, the daily horrors they faced became routine.

They learned to scale tricky, narrow passages with rope and knives in lieu of ice picks. They learned to pour warm water over their genitals when they relieved themselves because otherwise the freezing temperatures would give them frostbite. They learned to drink boiled chili water constantly because that was the only thing that would keep them warm, which meant they spent half their nights crouching to relieve their diarrhea.

They learned how frightening snow blindness could be when their eyes grew red and itchy and their vision blinked out for hours at a time. They learned to focus on the dull gray of the paths beneath their feet instead of the snow that surrounded them. At noon, when the sun glinted so glaringly off the white peaks that it gave them headaches, they stopped and sat in their shaded tents until the brightness had dimmed.

They adapted in these ways and more. They had decided that if the best of Hesperian technology couldn’t kill them, then the mountains certainly wouldn’t, so they learned dozens of ways to stay alive in a terrain intent on burying them.

Jiang didn’t recover, but his condition didn’t become noticeably worse. Most days he sat obediently on the wagon, whittling sculptures of deformed animals out of half-frozen bark with a dull, worn knife because Rin and Daji didn’t trust him with sharper objects.

His ramblings continued. They had spiraled past his usual nonsensical babbles. Every time Rin visited him, he launched into invectives involving people and events she had never heard of. Over and over, he addressed her as either Altan or Hanelai. Rarely did he call her by her name. Even more rarely did he look at her at all; more often he spoke to the snow, muttering with a hushed urgency, as if she were a chronicler present to record a history quickly slipping away from his grasp.

Daji remained tight-lipped when Rin pressed her about anything regarding the circumstances that led to Jiang’s Seal. But, as if in exchange, she acquiesced to answering questions about Jiang’s other utterances. Each night when they made camp, she sat with Rin and Kitay, recounting histories that Rin could never have found in the libraries of Sinegard. These discussions took the form of direct interrogations. Rin fired questions at Daji, one after the other, and Daji responded to everything that she could, often in great detail, as if by jabbering on about minor anecdotes, she could distract Rin from the important questions.

Rin knew what Daji was doing. She knew she was being deceived about something. But she took what she could get. Access to Daji was like an open scroll containing all the hidden secrets of Nikara history. She would be foolish not to play along.

“Why does Riga look so much like the House of Yin?” she asked.

“Because he’s one of them,” Daji said. “That should have been obvious. His father was Yin Zexu, the younger brother to the Dragon Warlord.”

“Vaisra’s brother?”

“No, Vaisra’s uncle. The Dragon Warlord back then was Yin Vara. Vaisra’s father.”

So Nezha was Riga’s nephew. Rin wondered if their power was passed through blood, like the Speerly affinity for the Phoenix. But the Yins had such different relationships to the Dragon. Riga was a true shaman, one who had been to the Pantheon and become imbued with a power freely given and freely received. Nezha was a slave to some perverted, corrupted thing, a creature that should never have existed in the material world.

“Zexu should have been the Warlord all along,” Daji said. “He was a born leader. Decisive, ruthless, and capable. Vara was the eldest, but he was a child. Meek, terrified of confrontation. Always bowing to the men he feared, bending because he was so afraid to break. A few years into the occupation, the Hesperians decided they wanted to transport shipments of Mugenese opium into the harbor at the Red Cliffs. Vara agreed, and sent his younger brother out to guide the Hesperian cargo ships through the channel. Instead Zexu rigged the harbor with explosives and sank the Mugenese fleet.”

“I like Zexu,” Rin said.

“He was dead by the time I first heard his name,” Daji said. “But Riga told me so much about him. He always admired his father. He was terribly hotheaded and impulsive. Never could stand an insult. You’d have gotten along splendidly, but only if you didn’t kill each other first.”

“I’m guessing the Hesperians had him shot,” Rin said.

“They very much would have liked to,” Daji said. “But open war hadn’t broken out yet, and they didn’t want to provoke it by killing a member of an elite family. Vara had Zexu exiled to the occupied zone in northern Horse Province instead. Sent his whole family away and cut him out of the lineage records. That’s why you’ll never find a portrait of him in the palace at Arlong. Riga was an orphan by the time we met. The Mugenese had worked his father to death in a labor camp, and the gods know what happened to his poor mother. When I first saw him, Riga was a pathetic thing, just skin and bones, scraping to tomorrow by stealing food out of trash heaps.”

“So you met as children,” Kitay said.

“We all grew up in the occupied north. Jiang and I might have been natives. Or children of refugees.” Daji shrugged. “Now it’s impossible to remember. We all lost our parents early on, before they could tell us what provinces we were from. Perhaps that’s why we were so bent on unification. We were from nowhere, so we wanted to rule everywhere.”

It felt bizarre to picture the Trifecta as young children. In Rin’s mind, they had sprung fully formed into the world, powerful and godly. She’d rarely considered that there was a time when they were mere mortals just like she had once been. Young. Terrified. Weak.

They’d grown up during the bleakest period of Nikara history. Rin had known a country at relative peace before the third war, but the Trifecta had been born into misery. They’d grown up knowing nothing but oppression, humiliation, and suffering.

Small wonder they’d committed the atrocities they did. Small wonder they’d found them completely justified.

“How did you get out?” Rin asked.

“The Mugenese cared about grown soldiers, not children. No one noticed us. The hardest part, in fact, was getting me past the mistresses at the whorehouse.” Some unrecognizable emotion flickered across Daji’s face, a twist of her lip and a quirk of her eyebrow that quickly disappeared. “We didn’t know where we were going, only that we wanted to get out. Once we crossed the border, we wandered for days on the steppe and nearly starved to death before the Ketreyids found us. They took us in. They trained us.”

“And then you killed them,” Rin said.

“Yes.” Daji sighed. “That was unfortunate.”

“They still hate you for it,” Rin said, just to see how Daji might react. “They want you dead. You know that, right? They’re just figuring out a way to get it done.”

“Let them hate.” Daji shrugged. “Back then our entire strategy was founded on crushing dissent. Wherever we could find it. In times like that, you couldn’t let sleeping threats lie. I’m sorry Tseveri died. I know Jiang loved her. But I don’t regret a thing.”

Daji, it turned out, had done a terrible number of things worth regretting. Rin pried for details about all of them. She made her talk about the lies she had told. The rivals she had killed. The innocents she had sacrificed in the bloody calculus of strategy. Over talks that spanned days, and then weeks, Daji colored in a picture of a Trifecta who were so much more ruthless and capable than Rin had ever imagined.

But it wasn’t enough. Daji always spoke only of the amusing stories, the minor details. She never spoke of the day she had Sealed her anchors. And unless prompted, she never spoke of Riga himself. She would answer any of Rin’s questions about his past, but she only ever gave the barest, vaguest details about his abilities or his character.

“What was he like?” Rin asked.

“Glorious. Beautiful.”

Rin made a noise of exasperation. “You’re talking about a painting, not a man.”

“There is no other way to describe him. He was magnificent. Everything you could want from a leader and more.”

Rin found that deeply unsatisfying, but knew that line of questioning would only yield the same answers. “Then why did you put him to sleep?”

“You know why.”

Rin tried to catch her off guard. “Then why are you afraid of him?”

Daji’s voice retained its careful, icy calm. “I’m not afraid of him.”

“That’s bullshit. Both of you are.”

“I am not—”

“Jiang is, at least. He screams Riga’s name in his sleep. He flinches every time I mention him. And he seems convinced we’re dragging him up the mountain to his death. Why?”

“We loved Riga,” Daji said, unfazed. “And if we ever feared him, it was because he was great, and great rulers always inspire fear in the hearts of the weak.”

Frustrated, Rin changed tack once again. “Who is Hanelai?”

For once, Daji looked startled. “Where did you hear that name?”

“Answer the question.”

Daji arched an eyebrow, betraying nothing. “You first.”

“The Sorqan Sira said once that I resembled Hanelai. Did you know her?”

Something shifted in Daji’s expression. Rin couldn’t quite read it—amusement? Relief? She seemed less on edge than she’d been just a moment ago, but Rin didn’t know what had changed. “Hanelai doesn’t matter to you. Hanelai’s dead.”

“Who was she?” Rin pressed. “A Speerly? Did you know her?”

“Yes,” Daji said. “I knew her. And yes, she was a Speerly. A general, in fact. She fought alongside us in the Second Poppy War. She was an admirable woman. Very brave, and very stupid.”

“Stupid? Why—”

“Because she defied Riga.” Daji stood up, clearly finished. “Nobody defied Riga if they were smart.”

The conversation stopped there. Rin tried many times again to broach the subject, but Daji refused to reveal anything more. She never spoke a word about what, precisely, Riga could do. Never a word about what Riga had done to Jiang, or the night that Jiang lost his mind, or how someone so supposedly great and powerful could possibly have missed the attack on Speer. Those gaps alone were enough for Rin to piece together the vaguest of theories, though she hated where it went.

She didn’t want it to be true. The implications hurt too much.

She knew Daji was lying to her about something, but part of her didn’t want to know. She wanted to just keep marching in a state of suspended disbelief, to keep assuming this war would be ended once they woke the Dragon Emperor. But the past kept prodding her mind like a tongue at an open sore, and the agony of not knowing, of being kept in the dark, grew too great to bear.

Finally, Rin decided to get her answers from Jiang instead.

That would be tricky. She’d have to get him alone. Daji was constantly at Jiang’s side, day and night. They slept, marched, and ate together. In camp, they often sat with their heads pressed together, murmuring things that Rin could only guess at. Every time Rin attempted to speak to Jiang, Daji was present, hovering just within earshot.

She had to incapacitate Daji, if only for several hours.

“Can you get me a strong dose of laudanum?” she asked Kitay. “Discreetly?”

He gave her a concerned look. “Why?”

“Not for me,” she said hastily. “For the Vipress.”

Understanding dawned on his face. “You’re playing a dangerous game there.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I have to know.”

Daji proved shockingly easy to drug. She may have been vigilant as a hawk, but the demands of the march exhausted her just as much as they did everyone else. She still had to sleep. Rin only had to creep into Daji’s tent and clamp a laudanum-soaked towel over her mouth for half a minute until her face went utterly slack. She snapped her fingers next to Daji’s ears several times to check that she was fully unconscious. Daji didn’t budge.

Then she shook Jiang awake.

He was trapped in another one of his nightmares. Sweat beaded on his temples as he twitched in his sleep, muttering invocations in a gibberish that sounded like a mixture of Mugini and Ketreyid.

Rin pinched his arm, then clamped a palm over his mouth. His eyes shot open.

“Don’t scream,” she said. “I just want to talk. Nod if you understand.”

Miraculously, the fear withdrew from his face. To her great relief, he nodded.

He rose to a sitting position. His pale eyes moved about the tent and landed on Daji’s limp form. His lips curled in amusement, as if he’d guessed exactly what Rin had done. “She’s not dead, is she?”

“Only asleep.” Rin stood up and gestured to the door. “Come on. Outside.”

Obediently, he followed. Once they were out near the ledge, where the howling winds would drown out anything they said from eavesdroppers, she turned to Jiang and demanded, “Who is Hanelai?”

His face went slack.

“Who is Hanelai?” Rin repeated fiercely.

She knew from experience she might only get a minute or two of lucidity from him, so she needed to make the best use of that short window. She had spent that entire day with Kitay figuring out what to ask first. It was like trying to survey new territory in pitch darkness; there was simply too much they didn’t know.

In the end, they had decided on Hanelai. Hanelai, aside from Altan, was the name Jiang called Rin most often whenever he forgot who she was. He uttered that name constantly, either in sleep or during his daily fitful hallucinations. She was a person he clearly associated with pain, fear, and dread. Hanelai linked the Trifecta with the Speerlies. Whatever Jiang was hiding from them, Hanelai was the key.

Her suspicions were right. Jiang shuddered at the word.

“Don’t do this,” he said.

“Do what?”

“Please don’t make me remember.” His eyes were like a child’s, huge with fear.

He’s not an innocent, Rin reminded herself. He was as much a monster as she and Daji were. He’d slaughtered the Sorqan Sira’s daughter and half the Ketreyid clan with a smile on his face, even if he pretended not to remember.

“You don’t get to forget,” Rin said. “Whatever you did, you don’t deserve to forget. Tell me about Hanelai.”

“You don’t understand.” He shook his head frantically. “The more you press, the closer he comes, the other one—”

“He’s going to come back regardless,” she snapped. “You’re just a front. You’re an illusion you’ve constructed because you’re too scared to face up to what you did. But you can’t keep hiding, Master. If there’s any shred of courage left in you, then you’ll tell me. You owe that to me. You owe that to her.”

She spat those last few words so forcefully that Jiang flinched.

She had been grasping at straws, throwing phrases out to see what stuck. She didn’t know what Hanelai meant to Jiang. She hadn’t known how he would react. But to her surprise, it seemed to work. Jiang didn’t run away. He didn’t shut down, the way he had so often before, when his eyes went glassy and his mind retreated back inside itself. He stared at her for a long time, looking not afraid, not confused, but thoughtful.

For the first time in a long time, he seemed like the man Rin had known at Sinegard.

“Hanelai.” He drew the name out slowly, every syllable a sigh. “She was my mistake.”

“What happened?” Rin asked. “Did you kill her?”

“I . . .” Jiang swallowed. The next words spilled out of him fast and quiet, as if he were spitting out a poison he’d been holding under his tongue. “I didn’t want—that’s not what I chose. Riga decided without me, and Daji didn’t tell me until it was too late, but I tried to warn her—”

“Hold on,” Rin said, overwhelmed. “Warn her about what?”

“I should have stopped Hanelai.” He kept talking as if he hadn’t heard. This wasn’t a conversation anymore; he wasn’t speaking to her, he was speaking to himself, unleashing a torrent of words like he was afraid if he didn’t speak now then he’d never have the chance again. “She shouldn’t have told him. She wanted help, but she was never going to get it, and I knew that. She should have left, if it hadn’t been for the children—”

“Children?” Rin repeated. What children? What was Jiang talking about? This story had just become so much more complex and terrifying. Her mind spun, trying to fit together a narrative that made sense of it all, but everything it suggested horrified her. “Children like Altan? Like me?”

“Altan?” Jiang blinked. “No, no—poor boy, he never made it out—”

“Made it out of where?” Rin grasped Jiang by the collar, trying to catch the truth before it fled. “Jiang, who am I?”

But the moment had passed. Jiang stared down at her, his pale eyes vacant. The man who had the answers was gone.

“Fuck!” Rin screamed. Sparks flew out of her fist, singeing the front of Jiang’s tunic.

He flinched back. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. “I can’t—don’t hurt me.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She couldn’t bear seeing him cower like this, a fully grown man acting like a child. She wanted to vomit from the shame.

She grabbed his arm and dragged him back toward his tent. He obeyed her instructions without a word, crawling meekly onto his blanket without even a glance at Daji’s sprawled form.

Before Rin left she made him swallow a cup of laudanum tea. His sleep would be peaceful, dreamless. And tomorrow, if Jiang tried to tell anyone what had happened, she could easily pretend whatever he said was just his usual babbling nonsense.

“That’s all he said?” Kitay asked for what felt like the hundredth time. “‘If it hadn’t been for the children’?”

“It’s all I could get.” Rin dragged one heavy foot before the other and pushed herself up the incline. They’d only been marching for an hour since sunrise, but she was already so exhausted she didn’t know how she’d make it through the day. She hadn’t been able to sleep, not with Jiang’s words echoing over and over in her mind. They made no more sense now than they had when he’d first uttered them; her thousand unanswered questions had only sprouted a thousand more. “He didn’t say whose, he didn’t say where—”

“I mean, it’s got to be the Speerly children,” Kitay said. “Right? With Hanelai involved, there’s no one else.”

He’d said that already. They’d been running up against the same wall all morning, but that was the only conclusion they could deduce with any degree of certainty. Jiang had done something to Hanelai and the Speerly children, and he was still rotting with guilt over it.

But what?

“This is pointless,” Kitay declared after a silence. “There are too many unknowns. We can’t piece together a story through conjecture. We’ve no clue what happened twenty years ago.”

“Unless we do that again,” Rin said.

He shot her a sideways look. “Are you going to do that again?”

“Rin.” Before Rin could respond, Venka pushed her way up to the front of the column, her face flushed red. This was rare. Typically Venka marched near the back of the line, overseeing the rear to keep an eye out for stragglers and deserters. “There’s a problem.”

Rin motioned for the troops to halt. “What’s happened?”

“It’s two girls.” Venka had a strange expression on her face. “The soldiers are—ah, I mean, they’re—”

“Have they touched them?” Rin asked sharply. She’d made her policy on sexual assault very clear. The first time two soldiers were caught cornering a young woman alone at midnight, she and Venka had castrated the soldiers and left them to bleed out in the dirt with their cocks shoved in their mouths. It hadn’t happened again.

“It’s not that,” Venka said quickly. “But they’ve ganged up on them. They want punishment.”

Rin furrowed her brow. “For what?”

Venka looked deeply uncomfortable. “For violating the bodies.”

Hastily, Rin followed Venka down the column.

The first thing she saw when they broke through the gathered crowd was a corpse. She recognized the face of one of the Monkey Warlord’s former officers. His body was splayed in the snow, arms and legs stretched wide as if he’d been prepared for a dissection. His midsection looked as if a bear had taken two large bites from his flesh—one around his chest, and one near his stomach.

Then Rin saw the girls, both kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs. Their hands were bloody. So were their mouths and chins.

Rin’s stomach churned as she realized what had happened.

“They should burn,” snarled a soldier—another one of Gurubai’s men. He stood over the taller girl, one hand on his sword as if ready to behead her right then and there.

“Did they kill him?” Rin asked quickly.

“He was dead.” The taller girl jerked her head up, eyes flashing with defiance. “He was already dead, he was sick, we didn’t—”

“Shut up, you little whore.” The soldier jammed his boot into the small of her back. The girl’s mouth snapped shut and her eyes widened with pain, but she didn’t whimper.

“Unbind them,” Rin said.

The soldiers didn’t move.

“What is this, a trial?” Rin raised her voice, trying to imbue it with that same ring that had come so easily in the cavern. “Justice is mine to deal, not yours. Unbind them and leave them be.”

Sullenly they obeyed, then dispersed back to the marching column. Rin knelt down in front of the girls. She hadn’t recognized them at first, but now she saw they were the girls she’d recruited at the Beehive—the pale, pretty waif and her shy, freckled sister. Their faces were gaunt and shrunken, but she recognized that hard, flinty look in their eyes.

“Pipaji?” At last their names came to mind. “Jiuto?”

They gave no indication that they had heard. Pipaji rubbed at Jiuto’s arms, soothing her sister’s whimpers with hushed whispers.

“You ate him,” Rin said, because she wasn’t sure what else to say. This was too bizarre, too unexpected. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do next.

“I told you he was already dead.” If Pipaji was scared, she did a remarkable job of hiding it. “He wasn’t breathing when we found him.”

Beside her, Jiuto sucked at her fingertips.

Rin stared at them, astonished. “You can’t do that. That’s not—I mean, that’s a violation. That’s disgusting.”

“It’s food.” Pipaji gave her a very bored look—the sort of gaunt, indifferent stare that only starvation produced. Go ahead, said her eyes. Kill me. I won’t even feel it.

Rin noticed then that the corpse was not so brutally savaged as it had first appeared. The bloodstained snow only made it seem that way. The girls had only made two neat incisions. One over the heart, and one over the liver. They’d gone straight for organs that would provide the most sustenance, which meant they’d harvested meat from bodies before. They were well practiced at this by now—this was just the first time they’d been caught.

But what was Rin supposed to do about it? Force them to starve? She couldn’t tell them to subsist on rations. There wasn’t enough of anything to go around. Rin had sufficient rations because of course she did; she was the general, the Speerly, the one person in this column who could not be allowed to go hungry. Meanwhile Pipaji and Jiuto were no one of importance, not even trained soldiers. They were expendable.

Could she punish these girls for wanting to survive?

“Take everything you want and put it in a bag,” she said finally. She could barely believe the words coming out of her mouth, but in that instant, they seemed like the only appropriate things to say. “Wrap it in leaves so that the blood doesn’t leak. Eat only when no one is looking. If they catch you again, they’ll tear you apart, and I won’t be able to help you. Do you understand?”

Pipaji’s tongue darted out to lick the blood off the corner of her bottom lip.

“Do you understand?” Rin repeated.

“Whatever you say,” Pipaji muttered. She gave Jiuto a nod. Without another word, they knelt back over the body and resumed deftly pulling the organs out of the carcass.

Pipaji and Jiuto were not the only ones who resorted to eating human flesh. They were just the first. The longer the march stretched on, the more it became apparent that their food supplies were not going to last. The army was subsisting on one ration of dried salted mayau and one cup of rice gruel a day. They foraged the best they could—some of the soldiers had even started swallowing tree bark to stifle their pangs of hunger—but at this altitude, vegetation was scarce and there was no wildlife in sight.

So Rin wasn’t surprised when rumors circulated of corpses—usually victims of frostbite or starvation—divvied up and eaten raw, roasted, or parceled out for the road.

“Say nothing,” Kitay advised her. “If you sanction it, you’ll horrify them. If you denounce it, they’ll resent you. But if you keep quiet, you get plausible deniability.”

Rin couldn’t see what other choice she had. She’d known this march would be hard, but their prospects looked bleaker with each passing day. Morale, which had been so blazingly strong at the start of their journey, began to wilt. Whispers of dissent and complaints about Rin riddled the column. She doesn’t know where she’s going. Sinegard-trained, and she can’t find her way through a damned mountain. She’s led us up here to die. Order collapsed along the column. Troops routinely ignored, or didn’t hear, her commands. It took nearly an hour to rouse the camp into marching in the mornings. At first, the deserters numbered in handfuls, and then dozens.

Venka suggested sending search parties to chase them down, but Rin couldn’t see the point. What good would that do? The deserters had sentenced themselves to death—alone, they would freeze or starve in days. Their numbers made no difference to her ultimate victory or defeat.

All that mattered was Mount Tianshan. Their future was laid out in stark black and white now—either they woke Riga, or they died.

The days began blurring together. There was no difference between one instance of monotonous suffering and the next. Rin, fatigued beyond belief, started feeling a profound sense of detachment. She felt like an observer, not a participant, like she was watching a shadow puppet show about a beautiful and suicidal struggle, something that had already happened in the past and been enshrined in myth.

They weren’t humans, they were stories; they were paintings winding their way across wall scrolls. The terrain transformed around them as they marched, became brighter, sharper, and lovelier, as if warping to match the mythic status of their journey. The snow gleamed a purer white. The mist grew thicker, and the mountains it shrouded seemed less solid, more blurred at the edges. The sky turned a paler shade of blue, not the cheery hue of a bright summer’s day but the faded shade of water paint swept absently onto canvas with a thick rabbit-hair brush.

They saw crimson birds whose tails swept thrice the length of their bodies. They saw human faces etched into tree bark, not carved but organically grown—calm, beatific expressions that watched them go with no urgency or resentment. They saw pale white deer who stood utterly still when they approached, calm enough for Rin to run her hand over their soft ears. They tried hunting them for food, to no avail—the deer fled at the sight of steel. And Rin felt secretly relieved, because it didn’t feel right to devour anything that beautiful.

Rin didn’t know if they were hallucinations brought on by feverish fatigue. But if they were, then they were group hallucinations—shared visions of a lovely, mythical, incipient nation in becoming.

For it was wonderful to remember that this land could still be so breathtakingly beautiful, that there was more sewn into the heart of the Twelve Provinces than blood and steel and dirt. That centuries of warfare later, this country was still a canvas for the gods, that their celestial essence still seeped through the cracks between worlds.

Perhaps this was why the Hesperians so badly wanted to make Nikan their own. Rin could only picture their country by extrapolating from their abandoned colonial quarters, but she envisioned it as a dull place, gray and drab as the cloaks they wore, and maybe that was why they had to erect their garish cities of flashing lights and screaming noises: to deny the fact that their world was fundamentally without divinity.

Maybe that was what had driven the Federation, too. Why else would you murder children and hold a country hostage except for the promise of learning to speak to gods? The great empires of the waking world were driven so mad by what they had forgotten that they decided to slaughter the only people who could still dream.

That was what kept Rin going when her feet had gone so numb from the cold she could barely feel them as she dragged them through the snow, when her temples throbbed so badly from the glaring white that bright red flashes darted through her vision—the idea that survival was promised, victory was foreordained, because the truth of the universe was on their side. Because only the chaotic, incomprehensible Pantheon could explain the vast and eerie beauty of this land, which was something the Hesperians, with their obsessive, desperate clinging to order, could never understand.

So Rin marched because she knew that, at the end of their journey, divine salvation was waiting. She marched because every step brought her closer to the gods.

She marched until one morning Kitay abruptly stopped a few steps ahead of her. She tensed, heart already racing with dread, but when he turned around, she saw he was smiling.

He pointed, and she followed his gaze down the path to a single blue orchid pushing tentatively through the snow.

She exhaled and choked down the urge to cry.

Orchids couldn’t grow at the altitudes at which they’d been marching. They could only grow in the lower elevations, in the valleys and foothills.

They’d crossed into Dog Province. They’d begun their descent. From here on out, they were marching down.