The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Trilogy #2)

“Wake up.”

Someone pinched her arm, hard. Rin bolted upright. Her right hand reached to a belt that wasn’t there for a knife that was in the other room, and her left hand slammed blindly sideways into—

“Fuck!” Chaghan shouted.

She focused with difficulty on his face. He backed up, hands held out before her to show that he held no weapons, just a washcloth.

Rin’s fingers moved frantically over her neck and wrists. She knew she wasn’t tied down, she knew, but still she had to check.

Chaghan rubbed ruefully at his rapidly bruising cheek.

Rin didn’t apologize for hitting him. He knew better than that. All of them knew better than that. They knew not to touch her without asking. Not to approach her from behind. Not to make sudden movements or sounds around her unless they wanted to end up a stick of charcoal floating to the bottom of Omonod Bay.

“How long have I been out?” She gagged. Her mouth tasted like something had died in it; her tongue was as dry as if she had spent hours licking at a wooden board.

“Couple of days,” Chaghan said. “Good job getting out of bed.”

“Days?”

He shrugged. “Messed up the dosage, I think. At least it didn’t kill you.”

Rin rubbed at dry eyes. Bits of hardened mucus came off the sides of her eyes in clumps. She caught a glimpse of her face in her bedside mirror. Her pupils weren’t red—they took a while to adjust back every time she’d been on any kind of opiates—but the whites of her eyes were bloodshot, full of angry veins thick and sprawling like cobwebs.

Memories seeped slowly into the forefront of her mind, fighting through the fog of laudanum to sort themselves out. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to separate what had happened from what she’d dreamed. A sick feeling pooled in her gut as slowly, her thoughts formed into questions. “Where’s Unegen . . . ?”

“You burned over half his body. Nearly killed him.” Chaghan’s clipped tone spared her no sympathy. “We couldn’t bring him with us, so Enki stayed behind to look after him. And they’re, ah, not coming back.”

Rin blinked several times, trying to make the world around her less blurry. Her head swam, disorienting her terribly every time she moved. “What? Why?”

“Because they’ve left the Cike.”

That took several seconds to sink in.

“But—but they can’t.” Panic rose in her chest, thick and constricting. Enki was their only physician, and Unegen their best spy. Without them the Cike were reduced to six.

She couldn’t kill the Empress with six people.

“You really can’t blame them,” Chaghan said.

“But they’re sworn!”

“They swore to Tyr. They were sworn to Altan. They have no obligation to an incompetent like you.” Chaghan cocked his head. “I suppose I don’t have to tell you that Daji got away.”

Rin glared at him. “I thought you were on my side.”

“I said I’d help you kill Su Daji,” he said. “I didn’t say I’d hold your hand while you threatened the lives of everyone on this ship.”

“But the others—” A sudden fear seized her. “They’re still with me, aren’t they? They’re loyal?”

“It’s nothing to do with loyalty,” he said. “They are terrified.”

“Of me?”

“You really can’t see past yourself, can you?” Chaghan’s lip curled. “They’re terrified of themselves. It’s very lonely to be a shaman in this Empire, especially when you don’t know when you’re going to lose your mind.”

“I know. I understand that.”

“You don’t understand anything. They aren’t afraid of going mad. They know they will. They know that soon they will become like Feylen. Prisoners inside their own bodies. And when that day comes, they want to be around the only other people who could put an end to it. That’s why they’re still here.”

The Cike culls the Cike, Altan had once told her. The Cike takes care of its own.

That meant they defended one another. It also meant they protected the world from one another. The Cike were like children playing at acrobatics, perched precariously against one another, relying on the rest to stop them from hurtling into the abyss.

“Your duty as commander is to protect them,” Chaghan said. “They are with you because they are scared, and they don’t know where else they can go. But you’re endangering them with every stupid decision you make and your utter lack of control.”

Rin moaned, clutching her head between her hands. Every word was like a knife to her eardrums. She knew she’d fucked up, but Chaghan seemed to take inordinate delight in rubbing it in. “Just leave me alone.”

“No. Get out of bed and stop being such a brat.”

“Chaghan, please—”

“You’re a fucking mess.”

“I know that.”

“Yes, you’ve known that since Speer, but you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. You’re trying to fix everything with opium and it’s destroying you.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I just—it’s always there, it’s screaming in my mind—”

“Then control it.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” He made a noise of disgust. “Altan did.”

“But I’m not Altan.” She couldn’t hold back her tears. “Is that what you wanted to tell me? I’m not as strong as him, I’m not as smart as him, I can’t do what he could do—”

He laughed harshly. “Oh, that much is clear.”

“You take command then. You act like you’re in charge already, why don’t you just take the post? I don’t fucking care.”

“Because Altan named you commander,” he said simply. “And between us, at least I know how to respect his legacy.”

That shut her up.

He leaned forward. “That burden’s on you. So you will learn to control yourself, and you will start protecting them.”

“But what if that’s not possible?” she asked.

His pale eyes didn’t blink. “Frankly? Then you should kill yourself.”

Rin had no idea how to respond to that.

“If you think you can’t beat it, then you should die,” Chaghan said. “Because it will corrode you. It will turn your body into a conduit, and it will burn down everything until it’s not just civilians, not just Unegen, but everyone around you, everything you’ve ever loved or cared about.

“And once you’ve turned your world to ash, you’ll wish you could die.”

She found the others in the mess once she finally recovered the physical coordination to make her way down the passageway without tripping.

“What is this?” Ramsa spat something onto the table. “Bird droppings?”

“Goji berries,” Baji said. “You don’t like them in porridge?”

“They’ve got mold on them.”

“Everything’s got mold on them.”

“But I thought we were getting new supplies,” Ramsa whined.

“With what money?” Suni asked.

“We are the Cike!” Ramsa exclaimed. “We could have stolen something!”

“Well, it’s not like—” Baji broke off as he saw Rin standing in the doorway. Ramsa and Suni followed his gaze. They fell silent.

She stared back at them, utterly lost for words. She’d thought she knew what she was going to say to them. Now she only wanted to cry.

“Rise and shine,” Ramsa said finally. He kicked a chair out for her. “Hungry? You look horrific.”

She blinked at him. Her words came out in a hoarse whisper. “I just wanted to say . . .”

“Don’t,” said Baji.

“But I just—”

“Don’t,” Baji said. “I know it’s hard. You’ll get it eventually. Altan did.”

Suni nodded in silent agreement.

Rin’s urge to cry grew stronger.

“Have a seat,” Ramsa said gently. “Eat something.”

She shuffled to the counter and tried clumsily to fill a bowl. Porridge slopped out of the ladle onto the deck. She walked toward the table, but the floor kept shifting under her feet. She collapsed into the chair, breathing hard.

No one commented.

She glanced out the porthole. They were moving startlingly fast over choppy waters. The shoreline was nowhere in sight. A wave rolled under the planks, and she stifled the attendant swell of nausea.

“Did we at least get Yang Yuanfu?” she asked after a pause.

Baji nodded. “Suni took him out during the commotion. Bashed his head against the wall and flung his body into the ocean while his guards were too busy with Daji to fend us off. I guess the diversion tactic worked after all. We were going to tell you, but you were, ah, incapacitated.”

“High out of your mind,” Ramsa supplied. “Giggling at the floor.”

“I get it,” Rin said. “And we’re heading back to Ankhiluun now?”

“As fast as we can. We’ve got the entire Imperial Guard chasing us, but I doubt they’ll follow us into Moag’s territory.”

“Makes sense,” Rin murmured. She worked her spoon through the porridge. Ramsa was right about the mold. The greenish-black blotches were so large that they almost rendered the entire thing inedible. Her stomach roiled. She pushed the bowl away.

The others sat around the table, fidgeting, blinking, and making eye contact with everything except her.

“I heard Enki and Unegen left,” she said.

The statement was met with blank stares and shrugs.

She took a deep breath. “So I suppose—what I wanted to say was—”

Baji interrupted before she could continue. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“But you—”

“I don’t like being lied to. And I especially hate being sold. Daji has what’s coming for her. I’m seeing this through to the end, little Speerly. You don’t have to worry about desertion from me.”

Rin glanced around the table. “Then what about the rest of you?”

“Altan deserved better than he got,” Suni said simply, as if that much sufficed.

“But you don’t have to stay here.” Rin turned to Ramsa. Young, innocent, tiny, brilliant, and dangerous Ramsa. She wanted to make sure he’d remain with her, and knew it’d be selfish to ask. “I mean, you shouldn’t.”

Ramsa scraped at the bottom of his bowl. He seemed thoroughly disinterested in the conversation. “I think going anywhere else would get a little boring.”

“But you’re just a kid.”

“Fuck off.” He dug around his mouth with his little finger, picking at something stuck behind his back molars. “You’ve got to understand that we’re killers. You spend your life doing one thing, it’s very hard to stop.”

“That, and our only other option is the prison at Baghra,” Baji said.

Ramsa nodded. “I hated Baghra.”

Rin remembered that none of the Cike had good track records with Nikara law enforcement. Or with civilized society, for that matter.

Aratsha hailed from a tiny village in Snake Province where the villagers worshipped a local river god that purportedly protected them from floods. Aratsha, a novice initiate to the river god’s cult, became the first shaman in generations who succeeded in doing what his predecessors had claimed. He drowned two little girls by accident in the process. He was about to be stoned to death by the same villagers who praised his fraudulent teachers when Tyr, the Cike’s former commander, recruited him to the Night Castle.

Ramsa came from a family of alchemists who’d produced fire powder for the Militia until an accidental explosion near the palace had killed his parents, cost him an eye, and landed him in the notorious prison at Baghra for alleged conspiracy to assassinate the Empress, until Tyr pulled him out of his cell to engineer weapons for the Cike instead.

Rin didn’t know much about Baji or Suni. She knew they had both been students at Sinegard once, members of Lore classes of years past. She knew they’d been expelled when things went terribly wrong. She knew they’d both spent time at Baghra. Neither of them would volunteer much else.

The twins Chaghan and Qara were equally mysterious. They weren’t from the Empire. They spoke Nikara with a lilting Hinterlander accent. But when asked about home, they offered only the vaguest utterances. Home is very far away. Home is at the Night Castle.

Rin understood what they were trying to say. They, like the others, simply had no other place to go.

“What’s the matter?” Baji asked. “Sounds like you want us gone.”

“It’s not that,” Rin said. “I just—I can’t make it go away. I’m scared.”

“Of what?”

“I’m scared I’ll hurt you. Adlaga won’t be the end. I can’t make the Phoenix go away and I can’t make it stop and—”

“Because you’re new to this,” Baji interrupted. He sounded so kind. How could he be so kind? “We’ve all been there. They want to use your body all the time. And you think you’re on the brink of madness, you think that this moment is going to be when you finally snap, but it’s not.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it gets easier every time. Eventually you learn to exist on the precipice of insanity.”

“But I can’t promise I won’t—”

“You won’t. And we’ll go after Daji again. And we’ll keep doing it, over and over, as many times as it takes, until she’s dead. Tyr didn’t give up on us. We’re not giving up on you. This is why the Cike exists.”

She stared at him, stricken. She didn’t deserve this, whatever this was. It wasn’t friendship. She didn’t deserve that. It wasn’t loyalty, either. She deserved that even less. But it was camaraderie, a bond formed by a common betrayal. The Empress had sold them to the Federation for a silver and a song, and none of them could rest until the rivers ran red with Daji’s blood.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Then just shut up and stop being a little bitch about it.” Ramsa pushed her bowl back in front of her. “Eat your porridge. Mold is nutritious.”

Night fell over Omonod Bay. The Petrel spirited down the coast under the cover of darkness, buoyed by a shamanic force so powerful that within hours it had lost its Imperial pursuers. The Cike spread out—Qara and Chaghan to their cabin, where they spent almost all of their time, secluded from the others; Suni and Ramsa onto the front deck for night watch, and Baji to his hammock in the main sleeping quarters.

Rin locked herself inside her cabin to wage a mental battle with a god.

She didn’t have much time. The laudanum had nearly worn off. She wedged a chair under the doorknob, sat down on the floor, squeezed her head between her knees, and waited to hear the voice of a god.

She waited to return to the state in which the Phoenix wanted utter command and shouted down her thoughts until she obeyed.

This time she would shout back.

She placed a small hunting knife beside her knee. She pressed her eyes shut. She felt the last of the laudanum pass through her bloodstream, and the numb, foggy cloud left her mind. She felt the curdling clench in her stomach and gut that never disappeared. She felt, along with the terrifying possibility of sobriety, awareness.

She always came back to the same moment, months ago, when she’d been on her hands and knees in that temple on the Isle of Speer. The Phoenix relished that moment because to the god it was the height of destructive power. And it kept bringing her back because it wanted her to believe that the only way to reconcile herself with that horror was to finish the job.

It wanted her to burn up this ship. To kill everyone around her. Then to find her way to land, and start burning that down, too; like a small flame igniting the corner of a sheet of paper, she was to make her way inland and burn down everything in her path until nothing was left except a blank slate of ash.

And then she would be clean.

She heard a symphony of screams, voices both collective and individual, Speerly or Mugini voices—it never mattered because wordless agony didn’t have a language.

She could not bear how they were numbers and not numbers all at once, and the line kept blurring and it was awful because as long as they were numbers it wasn’t so bad but if they were lives, then the multiplication was unbearable—

Then the screaming solidified into Altan.

His face splintered apart along cracks of skin turned charcoal, eyes burning orange, black tears opening streaks across his face, fire tearing him open from the inside—and she couldn’t do anything about it.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I tried . . .”

“It should have been you,” he said. His lips blistered, crackled, fell away to reveal bone. “You should have died. You should have gone up in flames.” His face became ash became a skull, pressed against hers; bony fingers around her neck. “It should have been you.”

Then she couldn’t tell if her thoughts were his or her own, only that they were so loud they drowned out everything in her mind.

I want you to hurt.

I want you to die.

I want you to burn.

“No!” She slammed her blade into her thigh. The pain was only a temporary respite, a blinding whiteness that drove out everything in her mind, and then the fire would be back.

She’d failed.

And she’d failed last time, too, and the time before that. She’d failed every time she tried. At this point she didn’t know why she did it, except to torture herself with the knowledge that she could not control the fire raging in her mind.

The cut joined a line of open wounds on her arms and legs that she’d sliced open weeks before—and kept sliced open—because even though it was only temporary, pain was still the only option other than opium that she could think of.

And then she couldn’t think anymore.

The motions were automatic now, and it all came so easily—rolling the opium nugget between her palms, the spark of the first flicker of flame, and then the smell of crystallized candy concealing something rotten.

The nice thing about opium was that once she’d inhaled it, everything stopped mattering; and for hours at a time, carved out into her world, she could stop dealing with the responsibility of existence.

She sucked in.

The flames receded. The memories disappeared. The world stopped hurting her, and even the frustration of surrender faded to a dull nothing. And the only thing that remained was the sweet, sweet smoke.