The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

Pipaji was dying.

Her condition deteriorated rapidly in the half hour it took for Rin to drag her toward her main forces in the city and flag down soldiers to find and fetch Lianhua. By the time Rin had her laid out on a dry tarp on the beach, her pulse had grown so faint that Rin almost thought she’d already died, until she lifted Pipaji’s eyelids and saw her twitching eyeballs flickering dangerously between brown and black.

She’d tried giving the girl opium. She always kept a packet in her back pocket, and she’d started carrying double ever since she began sending the shamans into battle. It didn’t work. Pipaji obediently inhaled the smoke, but her whimpering didn’t stop, and the purple veins protruding grotesquely from her skin only grew thicker.

The god was taking control.

Great Tortoise. Rin stared down at Pipaji’s white face, trying not to panic. Shamans who lost their minds to the gods couldn’t be killed. They were trapped inside bodies turned divine, sentenced to live until the world stopped turning.

Rin couldn’t sentence Pipaji to that.

But that meant she had to kill her, while her eyes were still flickering back to brown, while she still clung to a shred of mortality.

Rin reached a shaking hand toward Pipaji’s throat.

“I have opium!” Lianhua shouted as she rushed down the beach. She halted over Pipaji, panting. “Do you—”

“I’ve tried it,” Rin said. “Didn’t work. She’s losing it, she’s on the edge—the pain’s not helping, she’s hurt on the inside, Nezha did something to her and I can’t see but I think there’s bleeding on the inside and I need you to—don’t touch.”

Lianhua, now kneeling over Pipaji, jerked her hands back.

“Touch her over her clothes,” Rin said. “And watch the sand. Be careful. She’s not in control.”

Lianhua nodded. To her great credit she didn’t seem afraid, just focused. She exhaled, closed her eyes, and spread her fingers over Pipaji’s torso. A soft glow illuminated Pipaji’s drenched uniform.

Pipaji’s eyelids fluttered. Rin held her breath.

Maybe this wasn’t the end. Maybe the pain was the only problem; maybe she’d come back to them.

“Pipaji? Pipaji!”

Rin glanced up and cursed under her breath. The little sister—Jiuto—was racing down the beach, screaming.

Who had let her out here? Rin could have throttled someone.

“Get back.” As Jiuto approached, Rin whipped out an arm to bar her from her sister. Jiuto was tiny, but she was scared and hysterical; she wriggled ferociously from Rin’s grasp and dropped to her knees beside her sister.

“Don’t—” Rin shouted.

But Jiuto had already pushed Lianhua aside. She flung herself over her sister, sobbing. “Pipaji!”

Just as Rin and Lianhua reached to drag Jiuto away, Pipaji lifted her head. “Don’t.”

Her eyes shot open. They were their normal, lovely brown.

Rin hesitated, left hand clutching the neck of Jiuto’s shirt.

“It’s okay.” Pipaji reached her arms up, stroking her sister’s hair. “Jiuto, calm down. I’m okay.”

Jiuto’s sobs instantly subsided to frightened hiccups. Pipaji rubbed her hand in circles against her sister’s back, whispering a stream of comfort into her ear.

Rin shot Lianhua a glance. “Is she—”

Lianhua sat frozen, hands outstretched. “I’m not sure. I fixed the rib, but the rest—I mean, there’s something . . .”

Pipaji met Rin’s gaze over Jiuto’s shoulder. Her face was pinched in discomfort. “They’re so loud.”

Rin’s heart sank. “Who’s being loud?”

“They’re screaming,” Pipaji murmured. Her eyes darkened. “They’re so . . . oh.”

“Focus on us,” Rin said urgently. “On your sister—”

“I can’t.” Pipaji’s hands, still wrapped around Jiuto’s shoulders, started to twitch. They curved into claws, scratching at the air. “She’s in there, she’s . . .”

“Get her away,” Rin ordered Lianhua.

Lianhua understood immediately. She wrapped her arms around Jiuto’s waist and pulled. Jiuto struggled, wailing, but Lianhua didn’t let go. She dragged Jiuto away from the beach and up toward the forest, until finally Jiuto’s wails faded into the distance.

“Stay with me,” Rin told Pipaji. “Pipaji, listen to my voice—”

Pipaji didn’t respond.

Rin didn’t know what to do. She wanted to wrap her arms around Pipaji and comfort her, but she was afraid to touch. A great purple cloud blossomed around Pipaji’s collarbones, stretching up to her neck, turning her entire visage a bright, smooth violet. Pipaji’s back arched. She choked wordlessly, struggling against some invisible force.

Rin skirted backward, suddenly terrified.

Pipaji turned her head toward Rin. The movement looked horrifically unnatural, as if her limbs were being yanked this way and that by unseen puppet strings.

“Please,” she said. Her eyes flickered the faintest brown. “While I’m here.”

Rin held her gaze, stricken.

Death or the Chuluu Korikh. Five simple, devastating words. Rin had known them from the start. There were only two possible fates for the Cike: death or immurement. A commander made sure it was the first. A commander culls.

“I need you to focus.” Rin spoke with a calm she did not feel. She could not relinquish her responsibility; she had to do this. At this point, it was a mercy. “You still have to fight it. You can’t poison me.”

“I won’t,” Pipaji whispered.

“Thank you.” Rin reached out, cupped the side of Pipaji’s head with her left hand, pressed one knee against Pipaji’s shoulder for leverage, and wrenched.

The crack was louder than she’d expected. Rin shook out her fingers, focusing on the pain so she wouldn’t have to look at Pipaji’s glassy eyes. She’d never broken a neck before. She’d been taught the method in theory; she’d practiced plenty of times on dummies at Sinegard. But until now, she hadn’t realized how much force it really took to make a spine snap.

Then it was over.

Rin entered the city on foot. No one announced her presence; no musicians or dancers followed in her wake. Barely anyone noticed her; the city was too consumed with its own collapse. In her exhaustion, all she perceived was a great flurry of movement; of burned and bloody bodies carried into the city on stretchers; of crowds streaming out of Arlong’s gates dragging along sacks spilling with clothing, heirlooms, and silver; of bodies packed in teetering hordes atop the remnants of Arlong’s fleet, escaping in the few ships that hadn’t been sunk in the Dragon’s wrath.

Vaguely she understood that she had won.

Arlong was destroyed. The Hesperians had fled. Nezha and his government had made a hasty retreat out the channel. Rin learned these facts over the next hour, had them repeated to her over and over again by ecstatic officers, but she was drifting about in a fugue state, so tired and confused that she thought they were joking.

For how could this be called a victory?

She knew what victory felt like. Victory was when she scoured enemy troops from the field with a divine blaze, and her men rallied around her, screaming as they took back what was rightfully theirs. Victory felt deserved. Just.

But this felt like cheating—like her opponent had tripped and she’d been declared the winner by accident, which made this outcome a slippery, precarious thing, a victory that could be torn away at any time for any reason.

“I don’t understand,” she kept saying to Kitay. “What happened?”

“It’s over,” he told her. “The city’s ours.”

“But how?”

He responded patiently, the same way he had all afternoon. “The Dragon destroyed the city. And then you banished the Dragon.”

“But I didn’t do that.” She gazed out at the flooded canals. “I didn’t do anything.”

All she’d done was poke a beast she couldn’t handle. All she’d done was lie flat on her ass, scared out of her wits, while Nezha and a Hesperian pilot fought a battle of lightning that she didn’t understand. She’d meddled in forces she couldn’t control. She’d nearly sunk the entire city, nearly drowned every person in this valley, all because she’d thought she could wake the Dragon and win.

“Maybe he’s seen what they’re like,” Kitay guessed, after she’d told him all that transpired in the river. It made absolutely no sense that Nezha would have just given up, had just retreated when he could have killed Rin and stopped the Dragon in one fell swoop. “The Hesperians, I mean. And maybe he doesn’t want to let go of the only forces that can stop them.”

“Seems like a belated realization,” Rin muttered.

“Maybe it was self-preservation. Maybe things were getting worse.”

“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “What do you think he’ll do now?”

“I don’t know. But we’ve got a more pressing issue at hand.” Kitay nodded to the palace gates. “We just deposed the ruler of half this country. Now you’ve got to present yourself as his replacement.”

There were troops to address. Speeches to make. A city to occupy, and a country to claim.

Rin shuddered with exhaustion. She didn’t feel like a ruler; she barely felt like the victor. She couldn’t think of anything she wanted less right now than to face a crowd and pretend.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Give me today. There’s something I have to do.”

In Tikany there was a little graveyard hidden deep in the forest, concealed so well behind thickets of poplar trees and bamboo groves that the men never found it by accident. But every woman in Tikany knew its location. They’d visited it with their mothers, their mothers-in-law, their grandmothers, or their sisters. Or they’d made the trip alone, pale-faced and crying while they hugged their wretched loads to their chests.

It was the graveyard of babies. Infant girls smothered in ash at birth because their fathers only wanted sons. Little boys who’d died too early and left their mothers grief-stricken and terrified of being replaced by younger, more fertile wives. The messy products of miscarriages and late-term abortions.

Arlong, Rin assumed, had an equivalent. Every city needed a place to hide the shameful deaths of its children.

Venka knew where it was. “Half a mile past the evacuation cliffs,” she said. “Turn north when you can see the channel. There’s a footpath in the grass. Takes a while to see it, but once you’ve got it in sight, it’ll take you all the way.”

“Will you come with me?” Rin asked.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Venka said. “I’m never going back there again.”

So at sunset, Rin wrapped the jar containing Pipaji’s ashes inside several layers of linen, shoved it in a bag, and set out for the cliffs with a shovel strapped to her back.

Venka was right—once she knew what she was looking for, the hidden path was clear as day. Nothing marked the graves, but the tall grass grew in curious whorls, twisting and spiraling as if avoiding the once-loved bones in the soil beneath.

Rin surveyed the clearing. How many bodies had been buried here, over how many decades? How far did she have to walk until her fingers wouldn’t lodge into tiny bones when she pushed them into the dirt?

Her fingers kept trembling. She glanced around, made sure that she was alone, then sat down and pulled a pipe out of her pocket. She didn’t take enough opium to knock herself unconscious—just enough to get her hand steady so she could firmly grip the shovel.

“It’s not easy, is it?”

She saw Altan in the corner of her gaze, following her down the rows of unmarked graves. His shape lingered only if she looked elsewhere; if she focused where she thought he stood, he disappeared.

“They were like children,” she said. “I didn’t—I didn’t want . . .”

“You never want to hurt them.” Altan sounded gentler than she’d ever heard him—gentler than she’d ever permitted his memory to be. “But you have to. You have to put them through hell, because that’s the only way anyone else will survive.”

“I would have spared them if I could have.”

For once, he didn’t jeer. He just sounded sad. “Me too.”

Finally she found a spot where the soil looked undisturbed and the grass grew straight. She put the linen-wrapped jar on the ground, clenched the shovel tight, and began to dig while Altan watched silently from the shade. Several long minutes trickled by. Despite the evening chill, sweat beaded on the back of her neck. The ground was rocky and stiff, and the shovel kept wobbling out of her grasp. Eventually she found a perilous equilibrium, using her hand to guide the shovel and her foot to wedge it farther into the ground.

“I think I understand you now,” she said after a long silence.

“Oh?” Altan cocked his head. “What do you understand?”

“Why you pushed me so hard. Why you hurt me. I wasn’t a person to you, I was a weapon, and you needed me to work.”

“You can still love your weapons,” Altan said. “You can beat them into shape and then watch them destroy themselves and know that it was all fully necessary, but that doesn’t mean you can’t love them, too.”

She didn’t need to dig quite so long or so hard—nobody was ever going to come disturb these graves—but something about the difficult, repetitive motion soothed her, even as the ache in her shoulder grew worse and worse. It felt like penance.

At last, when the hole stretched so deep that the dying sunlight couldn’t hit the bottom, when the soil went from brown and rocky to a soft and sludgy clay, she stopped and carefully lowered Pipaji’s ashes into the grave.

She wished she could have buried Dulin, too. But she’d scoured the channel for hours, and she hadn’t even been able to find a shred of his uniform.

“Does it ever get easier?” she asked.

“What? Sending people to their deaths?” Altan sighed. “You wish. It’ll never stop hurting. They’ll think that you don’t care. That you’re a ruthless monster in single-minded pursuit of victory. But you do care. You love your shamans like your own family, and a knife twists in your heart every time you watch one of them die. But you have to do it. You’ve got to make the choices no one else can. It’s death or the Chuluu Korikh. Commanders cull.”

“I didn’t want it to be me,” she said. “I’m not strong enough.”

“No.”

“It should have been you.”

“It should have been me,” he agreed. “But you’re the one who got out. So see this through to the end, kid. That’s the least you owe to the dead.”

Kitay stood waiting for her at the bottom of the cliffs, holding a bundle of incense sticks in one hand and a jug of sorghum wine in the other.

“What’s all this?” she asked.

“Qingmingjie,” he said. “We have to keep vigil.”

Qingmingjie. The Tomb-Sweeping Festival. The night when the hungry ghosts of the restless dead walked the world of the living and demanded their due. She’d seen others celebrating it in Tikany, but she’d never participated in the rituals herself. She’d never had anyone to mourn.

“That’s not for two weeks,” she said.

“That’s not the point. We have to keep vigil.”

“Do we have to?”

“Thousands of people died to win you this war. It wasn’t just your shamans. It was soldiers whose names you never even learned. You’re going to honor them. You’re going to keep vigil.”

She was so tired she almost simply walked away.

What did ritual matter? The dead couldn’t hurt her. She wanted to be finished with them; she’d done enough penance today.

But then she saw the look on Kitay’s face and knew she could not refuse him this. She followed him quietly down to the valley.

The field of corpses was so quiet at night that she might never have known a battle had been fought on these grounds. Mere hours ago it was a site of shouting, of detonations, of clashing steel and smoke. And now the show was over, the puppet strings were cut, and everyone lay in silent repose.

“It’s so odd,” she murmured. “I wasn’t even here.”

She hadn’t commanded this battle. She hadn’t witnessed how it had played out, didn’t know which side breached first, didn’t know how it would have gone if the Dragon had not raised the Murui. She’d been occupied with an entirely different fight, too busy in the realm of gods and lightning to remember that a conventional battle was even happening, until its aftermath was laid out before her eyes.

“What now?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.” Kitay lifted the incense sticks half-heartedly, as if he’d just realized what an inconsequential gesture this was. They couldn’t begin to count the bodies in the valley. All the incense in the world could not repay this sacrifice.

“In Tikany we burn paper,” she said. “Paper money. Paper houses. Sometimes paper wives, if they were young men who died before they were married.” She broke off. She didn’t have a point. She was babbling, afraid of the silence.

“I don’t think it’s the paper that’s important,” Kitay said. “I think we just need to . . .”

His voice trailed away. His eyes widened, focused on something just over her shoulder. Too late she heard it as well, the crunch of footsteps over burned grass and bone.

When she turned, she saw only one silhouette against the dark.

Nezha had come alone. Unarmed.

He always looked so different in the moonlight. His skin shone paler, his features looked softer, resembling less the harsh visage of his father and more the lovely fragility of his mother. He looked younger. He looked like the boy she’d known at school.

Rin wondered briefly if he’d come back to die.

Kitay broke the silence. “We brought wine.”

Nezha held out a hand. Kitay passed him the bottle as he approached. Nezha didn’t bother to sniff for poison; he just tossed back a mouthful and swallowed hard.

That gesture confirmed the spell—the suspension of reality all three of them wanted. The unwritten rules hung in the air, reinforced by every passing moment that blood wasn’t spilled. No one would lift a weapon. No one would fight or flee. Just this night, just this moment, they had entered a liminal space where their past and their future did not matter, where they could be the children they used to be.

Nezha held out a bundle of incense. “Do you have a light?”

Somehow they found themselves sitting in a silent triangle, shrouded in thick, scented smoke. The wine bottle lay between them, empty. Nezha had drunk almost all of it, Kitay the rest. Kitay had been the first to reach out with his fingers, and then all three of them were holding hands, Nezha and Rin on either side of Kitay, and it felt and looked absolutely, terribly wrong and still Rin never wanted to let go.

Was this how Daji, Jiang, and Riga had once felt? What were they like at the height of their empire? Did they love one another so fiercely, so desperately?

They must have. No matter how much they despised one another later, so much that they’d precipitated their own deaths, they must have loved one another once.

She tilted her face up at the low crimson moon. The dead were supposed to talk to the living on Qingmingjie. They were supposed to come through the moon like it was a door, transfixed by the fragrance of incense and the sound of firecrackers. But when she gazed out over the battlefield, all she saw were corpses.

She wondered what she would say if she could reach her dead.

She would tell Pipaji and Dulin that they had done well.

She would tell Suni, Baji, and Ramsa that she was sorry.

She would tell Altan that he was right.

She would tell Master Jiang thank you.

And she would promise them all that she would make their sacrifice worth it. Because that was what the dead were for her—necessary sacrifices, chess pieces lost to advance her position, tradeoffs that, if she were given the chance, she would make all over again.

She didn’t know how long they sat there. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. It felt like a moment carved out of time, a refuge from the inexorable progress of history.

“I wish things had been different,” Nezha said.

Rin and Kitay both tensed. He was breaking the rules. They couldn’t maintain this fragile fantasy, this indulgence of nostalgia, if he broke the rules.

“They could have been different.” Kitay’s voice was hard. “But you had to go and be a fucking prick.”

“Your Republic is dead,” Rin said. “And if we see you tomorrow, then so are you.”

No one had anything to say after that.

There would be no truce or negotiation tonight. Tonight was a borrowed grace, innocent of the future. They sat in miserable and desperate silence, wishing and regretting while the bloody moon traced its ponderous path across the sky. When the sun came up, Rin and Kitay got up, shook the ache from their bones, and trudged back toward the city. Nezha walked in the other direction. They didn’t care to watch where he went.

They marched back to Arlong, eyes fixed forward on the half-drowned city whose ruins shone in the glimmering light of dawn.

They’d won their war. Now they had a country to rule.