The Burning God, page 58
part #3 of The Poppy War Series
There was an awkward silence. Kitay glanced up from a stack of trade reports, brows lifted.
Venka blinked. “Sorry?”
For a moment Rin just stared at her, expression blank, while her mind spun to catch up to the conclusion she’d just formed.
No cards left to play. She’d just read those words in Nezha’s handwriting—they’d caught her eye because it had been such a specific phrasing. I’m sure you think I’m just squealing for attention, but take a look at the ledgers and you’ll know I’m right. It hadn’t been in any of Nezha’s previous letters; she would have remembered it. And Venka hadn’t yet read the one she was holding in her hand, unless—
Unless.
The room seemed to dim. Rin narrowed her eyes. “How did you know that Nezha was going to make a stand at Xuzhou?”
Venka’s throat pulsed. “What do you mean?”
“Answer the question.”
“We intercepted their messengers, I told you—”
“You’re very good at that,” Rin said.
She saw the muscles in Venka’s face working, as if she couldn’t decide whether to smile and accept the compliment. She looked scared. Did that mean she was lying? It had to—what other reason did she have to be afraid?
“Answer this.” Rin stood up. “How do you think Nezha knew we were trying to reach the Trifecta?”
Venka’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. “I don’t understand.”
“I think you do.” Rin took a step toward her. Her ears were ringing. Her voice dropped low. “Do you know how many people knew about that plan? Five. Me, Kitay, Master Jiang, the Vipress, and you.”
Venka stepped back. “I don’t know what—”
“Rin,” Kitay interrupted. “Don’t do this. Let’s talk—”
Rin ignored him. “I have another question.” She wouldn’t give Venka a chance to collect her thoughts, to spin together a cover. She wanted to launch all her suspicions at once, to build a mounting case from every angle until Venka cracked from the pressure. “Why didn’t you tell us Nezha was going to bomb Tikany?”
Venka shot her an incredulous look. “How the fuck would I have known about that?”
“You made us think that we were safe once we’d taken the Beehive,” Rin said. “You told me Nezha was nowhere close to launching a southern strike. You said he was ill.”
“Because he was!” Venka’s voice rose several octaves in pitch. “Everyone was gossiping about it, I wouldn’t make that up—”
Kitay grasped Rin’s elbow. “That’s enough—”
Rin shook her arm from his grasp. “And yet two weeks later he was in Tikany, miraculously cured. Answer this, Venka: Why did they leave you alive in the Anvil? The Southern Army was under siege for months, but you came out just fine. Why?”
Venka’s cheeks went a pale, furious white. “This is bullshit.”
“Answer the question.”
“You think I’m a spy? Me?”
“Why did you leave Arlong that night?” Rin pressed.
Venka threw her hands up. “What night?”
“In Arlong. The night we escaped. We all had reasons to go, we were all running for our lives, except you. No one was coming after you. So why did you leave?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Venka snapped. “I left for you.”
“And why would you do that?” Rin pressed. This was all so obvious now; the pieces fit so well. Venka’s sudden change of heart, the implausibility of her motivations—the contradictions were so glaring, she was amazed she hadn’t seen it before. “You never liked me. You hated me at Sinegard; you thought I was dirt-skinned trash. You think all the south are dirt-skinned trash. What changed your mind?”
“This is fucking unbelievable,” Venka spat.
“No, what’s unbelievable is a Sinegardian aristocrat deciding to throw her lot in with southern rebels. How long has it been? Were you reporting to Nezha from the start?”
Kitay slammed a fist against the desk. “Rin, shut the fuck up.”
Rin was so startled by his vehemence that, despite herself, she fell silent.
“You’re exhausted.” Kitay grabbed the scroll from her hand and began ferociously ripping it to tiny, then tinier shreds. “You’re not reading these anymore. You’re giving Nezha exactly what he wants—”
“Or it could be I’ve just found his mole,” Rin said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he snapped.
“You read that scroll, Kitay, you saw those words—”
“It’s a fucking turn of phrase—” Venka started.
“It’s a turn of phrase that only you used.” Rin jabbed a finger at her. “Because you wrote these, didn’t you? You’ve been drafting them all this time, laughing at us, watching us sweat—”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Venka said.
“Oh, I’m sure that’s what you want me to think,” Rin snarled. “You and Nezha both—”
Something shifted suddenly in Venka’s face. “Get down.”
Then she flung herself at Rin, arms reaching for her waist as if to pin her to the ground.
Rin hadn’t processed what she’d heard. She saw Venka advancing and her vision went red, locked into the fight response that had so far kept her alive, and instead of twisting and ducking to the ground, she grabbed Venka by the shoulders and brought her knee up against her thigh instead.
Afterward, she’d torture herself wondering whether it was her fault. She’d run through the list of all the things she should have done. Should have realized Venka’s last words were a warning, not a threat. Should have noticed Venka was unarmed, and that her hands weren’t going for Rin’s head and neck, the way they would have if Venka truly meant to hurt her. Should have seen that Venka’s face was contorted in fear, not anger.
Should have understood that Venka was trying to save her life.
But in that moment, she was so convinced that Venka was the traitor, that Venka was attacking her, that she didn’t notice the crossbow bolt in Venka’s neck until they’d both collapsed to the floor. Until after she’d already burned ridges into Venka’s shoulders. Until she realized that Venka was twitching, but she wasn’t getting up.
Too late, she noticed the figure in the window.
Another bolt shrieked through the air. Rin watched its path, helpless and terrified, but it missed Kitay by a yard. He dove under the table; the bolt buried its head in the doorframe.
Rin flung her palm at the window. Flames roared; the glass exploded. Through the blaze, she saw the dark-clothed figure tumbling through the air.
She wriggled out from under Venka’s body and ran toward the window. The assassin lay in a crumpled heap three floors below. He wasn’t stirring. Rin didn’t care. She pointed down, and a stream of flame shot toward the ground, licking hungrily around the corpse.
She thickened the flame, made it burn as hot as she was capable, until she couldn’t see the body anymore, just thick, roiling waves of orange under shimmering air. She didn’t want to preserve the assassin’s body. She knew who had sent him: either Nezha or the Gray Company or the two acting in tandem. There was no mystery to solve here; she’d learn nothing from interrogation. It might have been prudent to try, but in that moment, all she wanted was to watch something burn.
Chapter 33
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.
