The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,125

and he doesn’t want to become that person because he knows something—something you won’t tell me. We can’t do this to him.” Rin’s voice trembled. “We have to turn back.”

“No.” Daji violently shook her head. Her eyes glinted in the moonlight; with her disheveled hair and her hungry, desperate expression, she looked nearly as mad as Jiang. “There is no turning back. I’ve waited too long for this.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you want.”

“You don’t understand. I’ve had to watch him all these years, had to keep him confined to Sinegard knowing full well that I’d reduced him to a dithering idiot.” Daji’s voice trembled. “I took his mind from him. Now he has a chance to get it back. And I can’t take that from him. Not even if he’s happier like this.”

“But you can’t,” Rin said. “He’s so scared.”

“It doesn’t matter what this Jiang thinks. This Jiang isn’t real. The real Jiang needs to come back.” Daji looked like she was on the verge of tears. “I need him back.”

Then Rin saw the tears glistening on Daji’s cheeks. Daji, the Vipress, the former Empress of Nikan, was crying. The Vipress was fucking crying.

Rin was too upset for sympathy. No. No, Daji didn’t get to do this, didn’t get to stand here and whimper like she was innocent in the horrifying mental collapse they were witnessing, when Daji was the entire reason why Jiang was broken.

“Then you shouldn’t have Sealed him,” Rin said.

“You think I couldn’t feel what I’d done?” Daji’s eyes were red around the rims. “We are linked. You know what that’s like. I felt his confusion. I felt how lost he was, I felt him probing at the corners of his mind for something he didn’t know he’d lost, acutely so because I knew what he didn’t have access to.”

“Then why did you have to do it?” Rin asked miserably.

What was so terrible, so earth-wrenchingly terrible, that Daji would risk her own life and fracture Jiang’s soul to stop it?

They quarreled, Daji had once told her.

Over what?

Daji just shook her head. Her pale neck bobbed. “Never ask me this.”

“I have a right to know.”

“You have a right to nothing,” Daji said coldly. “They fought. I stopped them. That’s all there is—”

“Bullshit.” Rin’s voice rose as the flame grew, stretching dangerously, threateningly close to Daji’s skin. “There’s more, there’s something you’re not telling me, I deserve to know—”

“Runin.”

Daji’s eyes glinted a snakelike yellow. Rin’s limbs locked suddenly into place. She couldn’t wrench her gaze from Daji’s face. She understood immediately that this was a challenge—a battle of divine wills.

Do you dare?

Once Rin might have fought. She could have forced Daji into submission; she’d done it before. But she was so exhausted, stretched thin from day after day of pulling the Phoenix through Kitay’s aching mind. She couldn’t summon rage after what she’d just seen. She felt like a thin shard of frost, one touch from shattering apart.

Rin pulled her flame back into her hand.

Daji’s pupils turned back to their normal, lovely black. Rin sagged, released from their grip.

“If I were you, I would stop worrying.” Daji had stopped crying; the red around her eyes had faded away. Gone, too, was the fragile hitch in her voice, replaced by a cool, detached confidence. “Jiang’s episodes will get worse. But he will not die. He cannot die—you can trust me on that. But the more you try to prod into his mind, try to retrieve whatever you think you’ve lost, the more you’ll torture yourself. Let go of the man you remember. You’re never going to get him back.”

They returned together to Jiang’s tent. Rin sat down next to where Jiang lay and watched him, her heart twisting with pity. He looked so miserable, even in dreamless, morphine-induced sleep. His features were pressed into a worried frown, his fingers clenching his blankets as if he were hanging on to the edge of a cliff.

This wasn’t the last time she’d see him suffer like this, she realized. He was going to get worse and worse the closer they got to the mountain. He’d deteriorate until he finally snapped, and a victor emerged between the personalities battling in his mind.

Could she do this to him?

It would be easier if the Jiang who had been Sealed were truly derivative, if he were truly a pale shade of the other, genuine personality. But the Jiang she’d known at Sinegard was a full person in his own right, a person with wants and