The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

The next morning the Southern Army departed for Tikany.

Rin couldn’t rule from Dragon Province. That should have been evident from the start—it wasn’t her hometown, she didn’t know the city’s inner workings, and she had no local supporters. In Arlong, she was a foreign upstart working against centuries of anti-southern discrimination. Venka’s death was just the final straw—proof that if Rin wanted to cement her rule, she had to do it from home.

A small crowd of civilians gathered in the valley to watch as the columns marched past. Rin couldn’t tell from their grim expressions if they were sending the Southern Army off with respect, if they were simply glad to see their backs, or if they were scared she was carrying off all their food.

She’d left behind a minimal force—just three hundred troops, the most she was willing to spare—to maintain occupation of the city. They’d likely fail. Arlong might collapse under the strain of its myriad resource shortages; its civilians might emigrate en masse, or they might overthrow the southern troops in internal revolt. It didn’t matter. Arlong was no great loss. One day the city would be well and properly hers, purged of dissenters, stripped of its treasures, and transformed into a tame, obedient resource hub for her regime.

But first, she had to reclaim the south.

Rin kept her mind trained on Tikany, on going home, and tried not to think about how much their departure stank of failure.

She and Kitay spent much of the journey in silence. There was little to talk about. By the fourth day, they’d exhausted all discussion of what resources they had, what troop numbers they were now working with, what kind of foundation they’d have to build in Tikany to train a fighting force capable of taking on the west. Anything else at this point lapsed into useless conjecture.

They couldn’t talk about Venka. They’d tried, but no words came out when they opened their mouths, nothing but a heavy, reproachful silence. Kitay thought Venka’s death exonerated her. Rin was still convinced Venka might have been the informant, but any number of alternatives were possible. Venka was not the only one with access to the information Nezha kept hinting at. Some junior officer could easily have been passing intelligence to the Republic throughout their march. The scrolls had stopped appearing since Venka’s death, but that might have simply been because they’d left Arlong. Venka remained an open question, a traitor and ally both at once, which was the only way Rin could bear to remember her.

She didn’t want to know the truth. She didn’t want to even wonder. She simply couldn’t think about Venka for too long because then her chest throbbed from a twisting, invisible knife, and her lungs seized like she was being held underwater. Venka’s confused, reproachful face kept resurfacing in her mind, but if she let it linger, then she started to drown, and the only way to make those feelings stop was to burn instead.

It was much easier to focus on the rage. Through all her confused grief, the one thought that burned clear was that this fight was not over. Hesperia wanted her dead; Hesperia was coming for her.

She no longer dreamed of Nezha’s death. That grudge seemed so petty now, and the thought of his broken body brought her no satisfaction. She’d had the chance to break him, and she hadn’t taken it.

No, Nezha wasn’t the enemy, just one of its many puppets. Rin had realized now that her war wasn’t civil, it was global. And if she wanted peace—true, lasting peace—then she had to bring down the west.

Two weeks out, the road to Tikany became a mosaic of human suffering.

Rin didn’t know what she’d expected when she passed into the south. Perhaps not the joyful shouts of the liberated—she wasn’t that naive. She knew she’d assumed responsibility for a broken country, wrecked in every way by years of constant warfare. She knew mass displacement, crop failure, famine, and banditry were problems that she’d have to deal with eventually, but she’d slotted them to the back of her mind, deprioritized against the far more urgent problem of the impending Hesperian attack.

They were far harder to ignore when they stared her in the face.

The Southern Army had just crossed over the border to Rooster Province when supplicants began coming out to meet them on the roadside. It seemed word had spread through the village networks about Rin’s return, and as the marching column wound into the southern heartland, large crowds started appearing on every stretch of the road.

But Rin found no welcome parties on her journey. Instead she was witness to the consequences of her civil war.

Her first encounter with starvation shocked her. She had seen bodies in almost every state of destruction—burned, dismembered, dissected, bloated. But she had never in her life witnessed famine this severe. The bodies that approached her wagon—living bodies, she realized in shock—were stretched and distorted, more like a child’s confused sketch of human anatomy than any human bodies she’d ever encountered. Their hands and feet were swollen like grapefruits, bloated extremities hanging implausibly from stick-thin limbs. Many of them appeared unable to walk; instead they crawled and rolled toward Rin’s wagon in a slow, horrific advance that made Rin burn with shame.

“Stop,” she ordered the driver.

Warily he regarded the approaching crowd. “General . . .”

“I said stop.”

He reined the horses to a halt. Rin climbed out of the wagon.

The starving civilians began to cluster toward her. She felt a momentary thrill of fear—there were so many of them, and their faces were so unnaturally hollow, so caked with dirt that they looked like monsters—but quickly pushed it away. These weren’t monsters, these were her people. They’d suffered because of her war. They needed her help.

“Here,” she said, pulling a piece of hard jerky from her pocket.

In retrospect she should have realized how stupid it was to offer food to a horde of starving people when clearly she didn’t have enough to go around.

She wasn’t thinking. She’d seen miserable, gnawing hunger, and she’d wanted to alleviate it. She didn’t expect that they’d begin stampeding, pulling one another to the ground, bare feet crushing frail limbs as they surged forth. In an instant, dozens of hands reached toward her, and she was so startled she dropped the jerky and stumbled back.

They fell on the food like sharks.

Terrified, and ashamed by her terror, Rin clambered back on the wagon.

Without asking, the driver urged the horses forward. The wagon lurched into a speedy pace. The starving bodies did not follow.

Heart pounding, Rin hugged her knees to her chest and swallowed down the urge to vomit.

She felt Kitay’s eyes on her. She couldn’t bear to meet them. But he was merciful, and said nothing. When they stopped for dinner that night, the food tasted like ashes.

The roadside parties became a daily sight as they drew closer to Tikany. It didn’t matter that the wagons never stopped, never distributed rations to pleading hands because their own supplies were running so short. They had just enough bags of grain and rice to keep the army alive for three more months; they could spare nothing out of charity. The soldiers learned to march with their eyes trained forward as if they hadn’t seen and hadn’t heard. But still the crowds persisted, arms stretched out, murmuring pleas in breathy whispers because they didn’t have the energy to shout.

The children were the hardest to look at because their bodies were the most distorted. Their bellies were so swollen they looked pregnant, while every other part of them had shriveled to the width of reeds. Their heads bobbled on their thin necks like wooden toys Rin used to see at market. The only other parts of them that did not shrink were their eyes. Their beseeching, sorrowful eyes protruded from shrunken skulls, as if, with their limbs whittled away, they had been reduced to those desperate gazes.

Gradually, through interview after interview with those starving civilians who could still muster the energy to talk, Rin and Kitay learned the full picture of how bad famine had grown in the south.

It wasn’t just a lean year. There simply wasn’t any food at all. Fresh meat had been the first to disappear, then spices and salts. The grain lasted several months, and then the starving villagers had turned to any sort of nutrients at all—chaff, tree bark, insects, carrion, roots, and wild grasses. Some had resorted to scooping the green scum off pond surfaces for the protein in algae. Some were cultivating plankton in vats of their own urine.

The worst part was that she couldn’t chalk this up to enemy cruelty. Those grotesque bodies weren’t the product of torture. The famine wasn’t the fault of Federation troops—they had slashed and burned on their march south, but not at the scale necessary to cause starvation this bad. This hadn’t been caused by the Republicans or the Hesperians. This was just the shitty, shitty result of ongoing civil war, of what happened when the whole country was upended in lost labor and mass migration because nowhere was safe.

Everyone was just trying their best to stay alive, which meant no one planted crops. Six months later, no one had a shred to eat.

And Rin had nothing to give them.

She could tell from their resentful glares that they knew she was holding resources back. She made herself look away. It wasn’t hard to steel her gaze against misery; it didn’t take any special emotional fortitude. All it took was repeated, hopeless exposure.

She’d witnessed this kind of desperation before. She remembered sailing slowly up the Murui River to Lusan on Vaisra’s warship, the Seagrim, observing from the railings as crowds of displaced refugees stood on soggy banks where their flooded villages once lay, watching the Dragon Warlord—the rich, powerful, affluent Dragon Warlord—sail by without tossing them so much as a silver. She’d been astounded by Vaisra’s callousness back then.

Yet Nezha had defended it. Silver won’t help them, he’d told her. There’s nothing they can buy with it. The best thing we can do for those refugees is to keep our eyes on Lusan and kill the woman who brokered the war that put them there.

Back then that logic had seemed so cold and distant, so clinical compared to the real evidence of suffering before her face.

But now, as Rin occupied the position Vaisra once held, she understood his reasoning. Deep-seated problems couldn’t be fixed with temporary solutions. She couldn’t let every skeletal child distract her when the final cause of their suffering was so obvious, was still lurking out there.

She consoled herself and her troops by reminding them that wouldn’t go on for much longer. She’d fix this, soon; she’d fix everything soon. She reminded herself of that every time she saw another hollow, bony face, which was the only way she could face the dying southerners and not empty out everything in their supply wagons on the spot.

They only had to hold on for a little longer.

This became a mantra, the only thing capable of strengthening her resolve. Only a little longer, and she’d finish this war. She’d subdue the west. And then they’d have all the sacks of golden, glorious grain they wanted. They’d have so much to eat they would fucking choke.

“Rin.” Kitay nudged her shoulder.

She stirred. “Hmm?”

It was midday but she’d fallen asleep, lulled by the rhythmic bouncing of the wagon. They’d been marching for four weeks, now into the final stretch, and the bleak monotony, silent hours, and restricted diet had her eyes fluttering shut whenever she wasn’t on watch duty.

“Look.” He pointed. “Out there.”

She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and squinted.

Rows and rows of scarlet emerged on the horizon. She thought it a trick of the light at first, but then they drew closer and it became apparent that the brilliant red sheen that covered the fields was not a reflection of the setting sun but a rich hue that came from the blossoms themselves.

Poppy flowers were blooming all around Tikany.

Her mouth fell open. “What the—”

“Shit,” Kitay said. “Holy shit.”

She jumped out of the wagon and began to sprint.

She reached the fields in minutes. The flowers stood taller than any flowers she’d ever seen; they nearly came up to her waist. She took a flower in her hand, closed her eyes, inhaled deeply.

A heady thrill flooded her senses.

She still had this. Nothing else mattered. Venka’s betrayal, her enemies in Arlong, the violence dissolving the country—none of that mattered. Everything else could crumble and she still had this, because this Moag could trade. Moag had told her, months ago, that this was exactly the kind of liquid gold she needed to acquire Hesperian resources.

These fields were worth ten times as much as all the treasures in Arlong. These fields were going to save her country.

She sank to her knees, pressed a palm to her forehead, and laughed.

“I don’t understand.” Kitay joined her by her side. “Who . . .”

“They listened,” she murmured. “They knew.”

She seized him by the hand and led him toward the flat, humble outline of the village on the horizon.

A crowd was forming near the gates. They’d seen her coming; they’d come out to welcome her.

“I’m here,” she told them. And then, because they could not have possibly heard her from this distance, she sent a flare into the air: a massive, undulating phoenix, wings unfolding slowly against the shimmering blue sky, to prove that she was back.

Tikany, against all odds, had survived. Despite the famine and firebombs, many of its residents had stayed, largely because there was nowhere else for them to go. Over months it had become the center of its own beehive as residents from smaller, decimated villages came with their homes and livelihoods loaded up on carts to settle in one of the lean-to shacks that now formed the bulk of the township. Famine had not hit Tikany as hard as it had other parts of the Empire—during their occupation, the Mugenese had stockpiled an astonishing amount of rice, which Tikany’s survivors had judiciously rationed out over the months.

Rin learned from the de facto village leadership that the decision to plant opium had been made in the wake of Nezha’s firebombing. Grain did not grow well in Rooster Province, but opium flowers did, and poppy in these quantities, in a country where everyone needed respite from pain, was worth its weight in gold.

They’d known she’d come back. They’d known she would need leverage. Tikany, the least likely of places, had kept its faith, had invested its future in Rin’s victory.

Now she stood facing the assembled villagers in the town square, the several thousand thin faces who had handed her the keys to the final stage of her war, and she loved them so much that she could cry.

“This war is ours to win,” she said.

She gazed over the sea of faces, gauging their reaction. Her throat felt dry. She coughed, but a lump remained, sitting heavy on her prepared words.

“The Young Marshal has fled, of all places, to the Dead Island,” she said. “He knows he isn’t safe anywhere on Nikara soil. The Consortium have lost their faith in the Republic, and they are inches from pulling away entirely. All we need is to make our final drive. We just—we just need to last a little longer.”

She swallowed involuntarily, then coughed. Her words floated, awkward and hesitant, over dry air.

She was nervous. Why was she so nervous? This was nothing new; she had rallied gathered ranks before. She’d screamed invectives against Vaisra and the Republic while thousands cheered. She’d whipped a crowd up to such frenzy once that they’d torn a man apart, and the words had come so easily then.

But the air in Tikany felt different, not charged with the exhilarating thrill of battle, of hate, but dead with exhaustion.

She blinked. This couldn’t be right. She was in her hometown, speaking to troops who had followed her to hell and back and villagers who had turned the fields scarlet for her. For her. They thought her divine. They adored her. She’d razed the Mugenese for them; she’d conquered Arlong for them.

But then why did she feel like a fraud?

She coughed again. Tried to inject some force into her words. “This war—”

Someone in the crowd shouted over her. “I thought we won the war.”

She broke off, stunned.

No one had ever interrupted her before.

Her eyes roved over the square. She couldn’t find the source of the voice. It could have belonged to any one of these faces; they all looked equally unsympathetic, equally resentful.

They looked like they agreed.

She felt a hot burst of impatience. Did they not understand the threat? Hadn’t they been here when Nezha dropped a hundred tons of explosives on unarmed, celebrating civilians?

“There is no armistice,” she said. “The Hesperians are still trying to kill me. They watch from the skies, waiting to see us fail, hoping for an opportunity to take us down in one fell swoop. What happens next is the great test of the Nikara nation. If we seize this chance, then we seize our future. The Hesperians are weak, they’re unprepared, and they’re reeling from what we did at Arlong. I just need you behind me for this final stretch—”

“Fuck the Hesperians!” Another shout, a different voice. “Feed us first!”

A good leader, Rin knew, did not respond to the crowd. A leader was above hecklers—answering shouted questions only granted them legitimacy they did not deserve.

She cast about for the sentence where she’d left off, trying to resume her train of thought. “This opium will fuel—”

She never finished her sentence. A din erupted from the back of the crowd. At first she thought it was another bout of heckling, but then she heard the clang of steel, and then a second round of shouting that escalated and spread.

“Get down.” Kitay grasped her wrist to pull her down from the stage. She resisted just for a moment, bewildered as she faced the crowd, but they weren’t paying attention to her anymore. They’d all turned toward the source of the commotion, which rippled out like ink dropped in water, an unfurling cloud of chaos that dragged in everyone in the vicinity.

He yanked harder. “You need to get out of here.”

“Hold on.” Her palm was hot, ready to funnel flame, though she had no clue what she meant to do. Who did she aim at? The crowd? Her own people? “I can—”

“There’s nothing you can do.” He hustled her away from the riot. People were screaming now. Rin glanced over her shoulder and saw weapons flashing through the air, bodies falling, spear shafts and sword hilts smashing against unprotected flesh. “Not now.”

“What the fuck is wrong with them?” Rin demanded.

They’d retreated to the general’s headquarters, where she’d be safe and out of sight, out of earshot while her troops finished reimposing order in the square. Her shock had worn off. Now she was simply pissed, furious that her own people would act like such a brainless, petulant mob.

“They’re exhausted,” Kitay said quietly. “They’re hungry. They thought this war was over, and that you’d come home to bring them the spoils. They didn’t think you were going to drag them into another one.”

“Why does everyone think this war is over?” Rin’s fingers clawed in frustration. “Am I the only one with eyes?”

Was this how mothers felt when their children threw tantrums? The sheer fucking ingratitude. She had walked through hell and back for them, and they had the nerve to stand there, to complain and demand things that she couldn’t spare.

“The Hesperians were right,” she snapped. “They’re fucking sheep. All of them.”

No wonder Petra thought the Nikara were inferior. Rin saw it now. No wonder the Trifecta had ruled like they did, with abundant blood and ruthless iron. How else did you stoke the masses, except through fear?

How could the Nikara be so shortsighted? Their stomachs weren’t the only things at stake. They were on the edge of something so much greater than a full dinner if they’d just think, if they’d just rally for one more push. But they didn’t understand. How could she make them understand?

“They’re not sheep. They’re ordinary people, Rin, and they’re tired of suffering. They just want this to be over.”

“So do I! I’m offering them that chance! What do they want us to do?” she demanded. “Hang up our swords, throw down our shields, and wait for them to kill us in our beds? Tell me, Kitay, are they honestly so stupid they think the Hesperians will just turn around and leave us alone?”

“Try to understand,” he said gently. “It’s hard to prioritize the enemy that you can’t see.”

She scoffed. “If that’s how they feel, then they don’t deserve to live.”

She shouldn’t have said that. She knew as soon as the words left her mouth that she was wrong. She’d spoken not in anger, but from panic, from icy, gut-twisting fear.

Everything was falling apart.

Tikany was supposed to be the bastion of her resistance, the base from which she launched her final assault on the west. Symbolically, geographically, Tikany and its people were hers. She’d been raised on this dirt. She’d returned and liberated her hometown. She’d defended them first from the Mugenese, and then from the Republic. Now, when she most needed their support, they wanted to fucking riot.

Either they fear you, or they love you, Daji had told her. But the one thing you can’t stomach is for them to disrespect you. Then you’ve got nothing. Then you’ve lost.

No. No. She pressed her palm against her temple, trying to slow her breathing. This was only a setback; she hadn’t lost yet. She tried to remind herself of the assets she still held—she had Moag; she had the opium fields; she had a massive reserve of troops from across the Empire, even if they still needed training. She had the financial resources of the entire country; she just needed to extract them. And she had a god, for fuck’s sake, the most powerful god left in the Nikara Empire.

So why did she feel like she was on the verge of defeat?

Her troops were starving, her support base hated her, her ranks were plagued with spies she could not see, and Nezha was taunting her at every turn, twisting his knife where it hurt the most. Her regime, that frail edifice they’d built at Arlong, was crumbling in every corner and she didn’t have enough strength to hold it all together.

“General?”

She whipped around. “What?”

The aide looked terrified. His mouth worked several times, but no sound came out.

“Spit it out,” Rin snapped.

His wide eyes blinked. His throat bobbed. When at last he spoke, his voice was such a timid croak that Rin made him repeat himself twice before she finally heard him.

“It’s the fields, General. They’re burning.”

It took Rin several long seconds to register that she was not dreaming, that the red clouds in the distance, glowing so brightly against the moonless sky they seemed surreal, were not an illusion.

The opium fields were on fire.

The blaze grew as she watched, expanding outward at a terrifying rate. In seconds it could encompass the entirety of the fields. And all Rin could do was stand there, eyes wide, struggling to comprehend what she saw before her—the destruction of her only trump card.

Dimly she heard Kitay issuing orders, calling for evacuation from the shacks nearest the fields. From the corners of her eyes she saw a flurry of movement around her as troops sprang into action, forming lines from the wells to pass buckets of water to the fields.

She couldn’t move. Her feet felt rooted, trapped in place. And even if she could—what could she possibly do? One more bucket of water wouldn’t help. All the fucking buckets in Tikany wouldn’t help. The blaze had ripped through more than half the fields now; the water did little more than sizzle into steam that unfurled, joining the great clouds of smoke that now billowed over the horizon.

She couldn’t call her god to stop this. The Phoenix could only start fires. It couldn’t put them out.

She knew these fields hadn’t caught fire by accident. No, accidental wildfires spread outward from a single source, but this fire had several—at least three initial points of burn whose ranges gradually converged as the fire spread wider and wider.

Nezha had done this, too.

This was sabotage, and the perpetrators were long gone, disappeared into the dark.

You led them here, said Altan’s voice. You brought them in your caravan because you couldn’t root out the spies, and you showed them exactly where they needed to strike.

The wave of despair hit so wrenchingly deep that it almost felt funny. Because of course, of fucking course, at the end of the line, when everything whittled down to a single hope, she’d lose that, too. This wasn’t a surprise, this was just the culmination of a series of failures that had begun the moment she occupied Arlong, and then spiraled when she hadn’t noticed; a sudden, unpredicted reversal of the rolling ball of fortune that had won her the south.

She couldn’t stop this. She couldn’t fix this.

All she could do was watch. And some sick, desperate part of her wanted to watch, found some perverse glee in staring as the flowers withered and crumpled into ash, because she wanted to see how far the hopelessness would go, and because the destruction felt good—the wanton erasure of life and hope felt good, even if the hope going up in smoke was her own.

“You have to talk to the Republic,” Kitay said.

They were alone, just the two of them inside the office, all their aides and guards banished out of earshot. Everyone was clamoring for answers; they wanted orders and assurances, and Rin had nothing to give them. The burned fields were the final blow. Now Rin had no plan, no recourse, and nothing to offer her men. She and Kitay had to solve this, and they could not leave the room until they did.

But to her disbelief, the first suggestion he made was surrender.

The way he said it made it sound like a foregone conclusion. As if he knew this to be true, had known months ago, and was only now bothering to let her in on it.

“No,” she said. “Never.”

“Rin, come on—”

“This is what they want.”

“Of course it’s what they want! Nezha’s offering food aid. He’s been offering that from the start. We have to take it.”

“Are you working with them?” she demanded.

He recoiled. “No—what are you—”

“I knew it. I fucking knew it.” That explained everything—why he’d bogged her down with mindless, exhausting tasks at Arlong, why he’d kept detracting from the military front, why he’d kept willfully ignoring the clear threat of Nezha’s constant letters. “First Venka, now you? Is that what this is?”

“Rin, that’s—”

“Don’t call me crazy.”

“You are being crazy,” he snapped. “You’re acting like a maniac. Shut up for a moment and face the fucking facts.” She opened her mouth to retort but he shouted over her, hand splayed in front of her face as if she were a misbehaving child. “We’re dealing with famine—not something cyclical, not something we can weather out, but the worst famine in recent history. There’s no grain left in the entire fucking country because Daji poisoned half the south, the entire heartland was too busy fleeing for their lives to till the fields, our rivers are flooded, and we’ve had an unnaturally cold and dry winter that’s shortened the growing season for crops, which has made things doubly difficult for anyone who even tried planting.”

His breathing grew shaky as he spoke; his words spilled out at such a frantic rate that she could barely understand him. “No irrigation or flood control projects. No one’s been maintaining or supervising the granaries, so if any existed, they’ve been plundered empty by now. We’ve got no leverage, no backup options, no money, nothing—”

“So we fight for it,” she said. “We beat them, and then we take what we want—”

“That’s insane.”

“Insane? Insane is giving them what they want. We can’t stop here, we can’t just let everything go, we can’t let them win—”

“Shut up!” he shouted. “Can you even hear yourself?”

“Can you? You want to give up!”

“It’s not what I want,” he said. “It’s the only option that we have. People are starving. Our people. Those corpses on the roadside? Pretty soon that’s going to be the entire country, unless you learn to swallow your pride.”

She almost screamed.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

She’d won. She’d fucking won, she’d razed Nezha’s city, she’d obliterated her enemies, she’d conquered the Nikara south, she’d won, so why, why were they talking like they’d already been defeated?

Suddenly her rage dissipated. She couldn’t be furious with Kitay; yelling at him wouldn’t change the facts.

“They can’t do this to me,” she said dully. “I was supposed to win.”

“You did win,” he said sadly. “This entire country is yours. Just please don’t throw it away with your pride.”

“But we were going to rebuild this world,” she said. The words sounded plaintive as she said them, a childish fantasy, but that was how she felt, that was what she really believed—because otherwise, what the fuck was this all for? “We were going to be free. We were going to make them free—”

“And you can still do that,” he insisted. “Look at what we’ve done. Where we are. We’ve built an entire nation, Rin. We don’t have to let it collapse.”

“But they’re going to come after us—”

“I promise you they won’t.” He took her face in his hands. “Look at me. Nezha’s defeated. There’s no fight left in him. What he wants is what we all want, which is to stop killing our own people.

“We’re about to have the world we fought for. Can’t you see it? It’s so close, it’s just over the horizon. We’ll have an independent south, we’ll have a world free from war, and all you have to do is say the word.”

But that wasn’t the world she’d fought for, Rin thought. The world she’d fought for was one where she, and only she, was in charge.

“We told them they were free,” she said miserably. “We won. We won. And you want us to go back to the foreigners and bow.”

“Cooperation isn’t bowing.”

She scoffed. “It’s close enough.”

“It’s a long march to liberation,” he said. “And it’s not so easy as burning our enemies. We won our war, Rin. We were the righteous river of blood. But ideological purity is a battle cry, it’s not the stable foundation for a unified country. A nation means nothing if it can’t provide for the people in it. You have to act for their sake. Sometimes you’ve got to bend the knee, Rin. Sometimes, at least, you’ve got to pretend.”

No, that’s where he was wrong. Rin could not bow. Tearza bowed. Hanelai bowed. And look what that got them: quick, brutal deaths and complete erasure from a history that should have been theirs to write. Their fault was that they were weak, they trusted the men they loved, and they didn’t have the guts to do what was necessary.

Tearza should have killed the Red Emperor. Hanelai should have murdered Jiang when she’d had the chance. But they couldn’t hurt the people they loved.

But Rin could kill anything.

She could unshackle this country. She could succeed where everyone else had failed, because she alone was willing to pay the price.

She’d thought Kitay understood the necessary sacrifice, too. She’d thought that he, if anyone, knew what victory required.

But if she was wrong—if he was too weak to see this revolution through—then she’d have to do it alone.

“Rin?”

She blinked at him. “What?”

“Tell me you see it, too.” He squeezed her shoulders. “Please, Rin. Tell me you get it.”

He sounded so desperate.

She looked into his eyes, and she couldn’t recognize the person she saw there.

This was not Kitay. This was someone weak, gullible, and corrupted.

She’d lost him. When had he become her enemy? She hadn’t seen it happening, yet now it was obvious. He might have been turned against her at Arabak. He might have been planning his eventual betrayal ever since they’d left Arlong. He might have been working against her this entire time, holding her back, stopping her from burning as brightly as she could. He might have been on Nezha’s side all along.

The only thing she knew for certain was that Kitay was no longer hers. And if she couldn’t win him back, then she’d have to do the rest of this by herself.

“Please, Rin,” he urged. “Please.”

She hesitated, carefully weighing her words before she answered.

She had to be clever about this. She couldn’t let him know that she’d seen through him.

What was a plausible lie? She couldn’t simply agree. He’d know she was faking it; she’d never conceded a point so easily.

She had to feign vulnerability. She had to make him believe this was a hard choice for her—that she’d broken, just like he wanted her to.

“I’m just . . .” She let her voice tremble. She widened her eyes, so that Kitay would think she was terrified rather than capricious. Kitay would believe that. Kitay had always wanted to see the best in people, damn him, and that meant he would fucking fall for anything. “I’m scared I can’t come back from this.”

He pulled her close against him. She managed not to flinch against his embrace.

“You can come back. I’ll bring you back. We’re in this together, we’re linked . . .”

She started to cry. That, she didn’t have to fake.

“All right,” she whispered. “All right.”

“Thank you.”

He squeezed her tight. She returned his embrace, pressing her head against his chest while her mind raced, wondering where she went from here.

If she couldn’t count on her people and she couldn’t count on Kitay, then she’d have to finish things herself. She had the only ally she needed—a god that could bury countries. And if Kitay tried to deny her that, then she’d just have to break him.

She knew she could do it. She’d always known she could, since the day they knelt before the Sorqan Sira and melded their souls together. She could have erased him then. She almost had; she was just that much stronger. She’d held herself back because she loved him.

And she still loved him. She’d never stop. But that didn’t matter.

You’ve abandoned me, she thought as he wept with relief into her shoulder. You thought you could fool me, but I know your soul. And if you’re not with me, you’ll burn, too.