The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,154

to do it. We just need to train them. We’ve set a campaign schedule of six months. I can get recruits in fighting form in two weeks.”

She looked around the table, waiting for someone to object.

Everything hinged on what happened next. Rin was testing the boundaries of her authority in the aftermath of a tectonic shift in power. This felt so different from the first time she’d vaulted herself into leadership, mere months ago when she’d addressed Ma Lien’s men with a dry mouth and quivering knees. Back then she’d been scared, grasping for straws, and disguising her utter lack of a strategy with feigned bravado.

Now she knew exactly what she needed to do. She just needed to force everyone onto the same page. She had a vision for the future—something horrifying, something grand. Could she speak it into reality?

“But back when . . .” Venka opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Rin, I’m just—you told me once that—”

“I understand the risks,” Rin said. “Back then I didn’t think they were worth it. But you saw what happened on that mountain. It’s clear now that they are. The Hesperians still have at least fourteen airships, and that gives them an advantage we can’t counter. Not without more of—well, me.”

There was another silence.

Then Cholang shook his head and sighed. “Look. If any of my men want to volunteer, I won’t stop them.”

“Thank you,” Rin said.

Good enough—that was as much of an endorsement as she was going to get. So long as Cholang didn’t try to stop her, she didn’t care how uncomfortable he looked.

She glanced to her right. “Kitay?”

She needed to hear him speak before she could continue. She wasn’t waiting for his permission—she’d never needed his permission for anything—but she wanted to hear his confirmation. She wanted someone else, someone whose mind worked far faster than hers ever would, to assess the forces at play and the lives at stake and say, Yes, these calculations are valid. This sacrifice is necessary. You aren’t mad. The world is.

For a long time Kitay stood still, staring at the table, fingers tapping erratically against the wooden surface. Then he looked up at her. No, he looked right through her. His mind was already somewhere else. He was already thinking past this conversation. “No more than several—”

“We won’t need more than a handful,” she assured him. “Three at most—just enough that we can spread an attack around multiple planes.”

“One for every cardinal direction,” he murmured. “Because the impact is exponential if . . .”

“Right,” she said. “I get a lot done. I’m not enough. But even one other shaman throws off defense formations like we couldn’t dream.”

“Fucking hell,” Venka said. “How long have you been thinking about this?”

Rin didn’t miss a beat. “Since Tikany.”

She still hadn’t fully won them over. She saw doubt lingering in their eyes—they might not have raised objections, but they still didn’t like it.

She felt a pulse of frustration. How could she make them see? They had long surpassed wars of steel and bodies clashing on mortal fields. War happened on the divine plane now—her gods versus the Hesperians’ Maker. What she’d seen on Mount Tianshan was a vision of the future, of how this would inevitably end. They couldn’t flinch away from that future. They had to fight the kind of war that moved mountains.

“The west does not conceive of this war as a material struggle,” she said. “This is about contesting interpretations of divinity. They imagine that because they obey the Divine Architect, they can crush us like ants. We’ve just proven them wrong. We’ll do it again.”

She leaned forward, pressing her palm against the table. “We have one chance right now—probably the only chance we’ll ever get—to seize this country back. The Republic is reeling, but they’re going to recover. We’ve got to hit them hard before then. And when we do, it can’t be a half-hearted assault. We need overkill. We need to scare Nezha’s allies so badly that they’ll scuttle back to their hemisphere and never dare to come back here again.”

No one objected. She knew they wouldn’t. The objections didn’t exist.

“What’s your plan for when they lose control?” Kitay asked quietly.

He’d said when. Not if. This wasn’t a hypothetical. They’d moved into the realm of logistics now, which meant she’d already won.

“They won’t,” she said. The next words she spoke felt like reopened scars, familiar and painful, words that bore the weight of all the guilt that she’d tried so long