The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,207

found a spot where the soil looked undisturbed and the grass grew straight. She put the linen-wrapped jar on the ground, clenched the shovel tight, and began to dig while Altan watched silently from the shade. Several long minutes trickled by. Despite the evening chill, sweat beaded on the back of her neck. The ground was rocky and stiff, and the shovel kept wobbling out of her grasp. Eventually she found a perilous equilibrium, using her hand to guide the shovel and her foot to wedge it farther into the ground.

“I think I understand you now,” she said after a long silence.

“Oh?” Altan cocked his head. “What do you understand?”

“Why you pushed me so hard. Why you hurt me. I wasn’t a person to you, I was a weapon, and you needed me to work.”

“You can still love your weapons,” Altan said. “You can beat them into shape and then watch them destroy themselves and know that it was all fully necessary, but that doesn’t mean you can’t love them, too.”

She didn’t need to dig quite so long or so hard—nobody was ever going to come disturb these graves—but something about the difficult, repetitive motion soothed her, even as the ache in her shoulder grew worse and worse. It felt like penance.

At last, when the hole stretched so deep that the dying sunlight couldn’t hit the bottom, when the soil went from brown and rocky to a soft and sludgy clay, she stopped and carefully lowered Pipaji’s ashes into the grave.

She wished she could have buried Dulin, too. But she’d scoured the channel for hours, and she hadn’t even been able to find a shred of his uniform.

“Does it ever get easier?” she asked.

“What? Sending people to their deaths?” Altan sighed. “You wish. It’ll never stop hurting. They’ll think that you don’t care. That you’re a ruthless monster in single-minded pursuit of victory. But you do care. You love your shamans like your own family, and a knife twists in your heart every time you watch one of them die. But you have to do it. You’ve got to make the choices no one else can. It’s death or the Chuluu Korikh. Commanders cull.”

“I didn’t want it to be me,” she said. “I’m not strong enough.”

“No.”

“It should have been you.”

“It should have been me,” he agreed. “But you’re the one who got out. So see this through to the end, kid. That’s the least you owe to the dead.”

Kitay stood waiting for her at the bottom of the cliffs, holding a bundle of incense sticks in one hand and a jug of sorghum wine in the other.

“What’s all this?” she asked.

“Qingmingjie,” he said. “We have to keep vigil.”

Qingmingjie. The Tomb-Sweeping Festival. The night when the hungry ghosts of the restless dead walked the world of the living and demanded their due. She’d seen others celebrating it in Tikany, but she’d never participated in the rituals herself. She’d never had anyone to mourn.

“That’s not for two weeks,” she said.

“That’s not the point. We have to keep vigil.”

“Do we have to?”

“Thousands of people died to win you this war. It wasn’t just your shamans. It was soldiers whose names you never even learned. You’re going to honor them. You’re going to keep vigil.”

She was so tired she almost simply walked away.

What did ritual matter? The dead couldn’t hurt her. She wanted to be finished with them; she’d done enough penance today.

But then she saw the look on Kitay’s face and knew she could not refuse him this. She followed him quietly down to the valley.

The field of corpses was so quiet at night that she might never have known a battle had been fought on these grounds. Mere hours ago it was a site of shouting, of detonations, of clashing steel and smoke. And now the show was over, the puppet strings were cut, and everyone lay in silent repose.

“It’s so odd,” she murmured. “I wasn’t even here.”

She hadn’t commanded this battle. She hadn’t witnessed how it had played out, didn’t know which side breached first, didn’t know how it would have gone if the Dragon had not raised the Murui. She’d been occupied with an entirely different fight, too busy in the realm of gods and lightning to remember that a conventional battle was even happening, until its aftermath was laid out before her eyes.

“What now?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.” Kitay lifted the incense sticks half-heartedly, as if he’d just realized what an inconsequential gesture this was. They couldn’t begin to