The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,208

count the bodies in the valley. All the incense in the world could not repay this sacrifice.

“In Tikany we burn paper,” she said. “Paper money. Paper houses. Sometimes paper wives, if they were young men who died before they were married.” She broke off. She didn’t have a point. She was babbling, afraid of the silence.

“I don’t think it’s the paper that’s important,” Kitay said. “I think we just need to . . .”

His voice trailed away. His eyes widened, focused on something just over her shoulder. Too late she heard it as well, the crunch of footsteps over burned grass and bone.

When she turned, she saw only one silhouette against the dark.

Nezha had come alone. Unarmed.

He always looked so different in the moonlight. His skin shone paler, his features looked softer, resembling less the harsh visage of his father and more the lovely fragility of his mother. He looked younger. He looked like the boy she’d known at school.

Rin wondered briefly if he’d come back to die.

Kitay broke the silence. “We brought wine.”

Nezha held out a hand. Kitay passed him the bottle as he approached. Nezha didn’t bother to sniff for poison; he just tossed back a mouthful and swallowed hard.

That gesture confirmed the spell—the suspension of reality all three of them wanted. The unwritten rules hung in the air, reinforced by every passing moment that blood wasn’t spilled. No one would lift a weapon. No one would fight or flee. Just this night, just this moment, they had entered a liminal space where their past and their future did not matter, where they could be the children they used to be.

Nezha held out a bundle of incense. “Do you have a light?”

Somehow they found themselves sitting in a silent triangle, shrouded in thick, scented smoke. The wine bottle lay between them, empty. Nezha had drunk almost all of it, Kitay the rest. Kitay had been the first to reach out with his fingers, and then all three of them were holding hands, Nezha and Rin on either side of Kitay, and it felt and looked absolutely, terribly wrong and still Rin never wanted to let go.

Was this how Daji, Jiang, and Riga had once felt? What were they like at the height of their empire? Did they love one another so fiercely, so desperately?

They must have. No matter how much they despised one another later, so much that they’d precipitated their own deaths, they must have loved one another once.

She tilted her face up at the low crimson moon. The dead were supposed to talk to the living on Qingmingjie. They were supposed to come through the moon like it was a door, transfixed by the fragrance of incense and the sound of firecrackers. But when she gazed out over the battlefield, all she saw were corpses.

She wondered what she would say if she could reach her dead.

She would tell Pipaji and Dulin that they had done well.

She would tell Suni, Baji, and Ramsa that she was sorry.

She would tell Altan that he was right.

She would tell Master Jiang thank you.

And she would promise them all that she would make their sacrifice worth it. Because that was what the dead were for her—necessary sacrifices, chess pieces lost to advance her position, tradeoffs that, if she were given the chance, she would make all over again.

She didn’t know how long they sat there. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. It felt like a moment carved out of time, a refuge from the inexorable progress of history.

“I wish things had been different,” Nezha said.

Rin and Kitay both tensed. He was breaking the rules. They couldn’t maintain this fragile fantasy, this indulgence of nostalgia, if he broke the rules.

“They could have been different.” Kitay’s voice was hard. “But you had to go and be a fucking prick.”

“Your Republic is dead,” Rin said. “And if we see you tomorrow, then so are you.”

No one had anything to say after that.

There would be no truce or negotiation tonight. Tonight was a borrowed grace, innocent of the future. They sat in miserable and desperate silence, wishing and regretting while the bloody moon traced its ponderous path across the sky. When the sun came up, Rin and Kitay got up, shook the ache from their bones, and trudged back toward the city. Nezha walked in the other direction. They didn’t care to watch where he went.

They marched back to Arlong, eyes fixed forward on the half-drowned city whose ruins shone in