The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,206

how?”

He responded patiently, the same way he had all afternoon. “The Dragon destroyed the city. And then you banished the Dragon.”

“But I didn’t do that.” She gazed out at the flooded canals. “I didn’t do anything.”

All she’d done was poke a beast she couldn’t handle. All she’d done was lie flat on her ass, scared out of her wits, while Nezha and a Hesperian pilot fought a battle of lightning that she didn’t understand. She’d meddled in forces she couldn’t control. She’d nearly sunk the entire city, nearly drowned every person in this valley, all because she’d thought she could wake the Dragon and win.

“Maybe he’s seen what they’re like,” Kitay guessed, after she’d told him all that transpired in the river. It made absolutely no sense that Nezha would have just given up, had just retreated when he could have killed Rin and stopped the Dragon in one fell swoop. “The Hesperians, I mean. And maybe he doesn’t want to let go of the only forces that can stop them.”

“Seems like a belated realization,” Rin muttered.

“Maybe it was self-preservation. Maybe things were getting worse.”

“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced. “What do you think he’ll do now?”

“I don’t know. But we’ve got a more pressing issue at hand.” Kitay nodded to the palace gates. “We just deposed the ruler of half this country. Now you’ve got to present yourself as his replacement.”

There were troops to address. Speeches to make. A city to occupy, and a country to claim.

Rin shuddered with exhaustion. She didn’t feel like a ruler; she barely felt like the victor. She couldn’t think of anything she wanted less right now than to face a crowd and pretend.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Give me today. There’s something I have to do.”

In Tikany there was a little graveyard hidden deep in the forest, concealed so well behind thickets of poplar trees and bamboo groves that the men never found it by accident. But every woman in Tikany knew its location. They’d visited it with their mothers, their mothers-in-law, their grandmothers, or their sisters. Or they’d made the trip alone, pale-faced and crying while they hugged their wretched loads to their chests.

It was the graveyard of babies. Infant girls smothered in ash at birth because their fathers only wanted sons. Little boys who’d died too early and left their mothers grief-stricken and terrified of being replaced by younger, more fertile wives. The messy products of miscarriages and late-term abortions.

Arlong, Rin assumed, had an equivalent. Every city needed a place to hide the shameful deaths of its children.

Venka knew where it was. “Half a mile past the evacuation cliffs,” she said. “Turn north when you can see the channel. There’s a footpath in the grass. Takes a while to see it, but once you’ve got it in sight, it’ll take you all the way.”

“Will you come with me?” Rin asked.

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Venka said. “I’m never going back there again.”

So at sunset, Rin wrapped the jar containing Pipaji’s ashes inside several layers of linen, shoved it in a bag, and set out for the cliffs with a shovel strapped to her back.

Venka was right—once she knew what she was looking for, the hidden path was clear as day. Nothing marked the graves, but the tall grass grew in curious whorls, twisting and spiraling as if avoiding the once-loved bones in the soil beneath.

Rin surveyed the clearing. How many bodies had been buried here, over how many decades? How far did she have to walk until her fingers wouldn’t lodge into tiny bones when she pushed them into the dirt?

Her fingers kept trembling. She glanced around, made sure that she was alone, then sat down and pulled a pipe out of her pocket. She didn’t take enough opium to knock herself unconscious—just enough to get her hand steady so she could firmly grip the shovel.

“It’s not easy, is it?”

She saw Altan in the corner of her gaze, following her down the rows of unmarked graves. His shape lingered only if she looked elsewhere; if she focused where she thought he stood, he disappeared.

“They were like children,” she said. “I didn’t—I didn’t want . . .”

“You never want to hurt them.” Altan sounded gentler than she’d ever heard him—gentler than she’d ever permitted his memory to be. “But you have to. You have to put them through hell, because that’s the only way anyone else will survive.”

“I would have spared them if I could have.”

For once, he didn’t jeer. He just sounded sad. “Me too.”

Finally she