The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,221
she had enemies in Arlong. She’d known that from the start. She’d had no choice but to ask many of the former administrative personnel to stay on in their roles, simply because she had no qualified staff who could fill their positions. She didn’t know how to run a country, so she’d had to employ Republicans who did. They’d all nominally defected to her regime, of course, but how many of them were secretly plotting against her? How many was Nezha still in correspondence with? How many tiny traps had he left in his wake?
Her breathing quickened. The panic returned; her vision ebbed black. She felt a low, creeping dread, a prickling under her skin as if a million ants were crawling over her body.
It didn’t go away. It persisted throughout the afternoon, even after they’d interrogated the kitchen staff and executed the cook in charge. It intensified into a flurry of symptoms: a debilitating fatigue; a throbbing headache that developed as her eyes grew strained, darting around for shadows where they didn’t exist.
The palace didn’t seem such an empty playground anymore. It seemed a house of infinite darkness, crowded with thousands of enemies that she couldn’t see or anticipate.
“I know,” Kitay said, every time she voiced her fears. “I’m scared, too. But that’s ruling, Rin. There’s always someone who doesn’t want you on the throne. But we’ve just got to keep going. We can’t let go of the reins. There’s no one else.”
The days stretched on. Slowly, incredibly, the business of city administration stopped feeling like a fever dream and started feeling more like a familiar duty as they fell into a routine—they woke an hour before sunrise, sifted through intelligence reports during the early hours of the morning, spent the afternoon checking in on reconstruction projects they’d set underway, and put out fires as they arose throughout the day.
They hadn’t brought Arlong back to normal. Not even close. Most of the civilian population was still displaced, camping out in makeshift shacks on the same grounds where once Vaisra had corralled all the southern refugees. Food shortages were a persistent problem. The communal kitchens always ran out of food long before everyone in the line was served. There simply weren’t enough rations, and Rin didn’t have a clue where they could extract more on short notice. Their best hope was to wait for Moag’s missives and hope she could convert boatloads of Nikara antiques into smuggled Hesperian grain.
But somehow, as days turned into weeks, their hold on the city seemed to stabilize. The civil administration, comprising southern soldiers with no experience and Republican officials who had to be guarded at all times, became semifunctional and self-sustaining. Some semblance of order had been restored to the city. Fights and riots no longer broke out on the streets. All Republican soldiers who hadn’t fled had either stopped trying to cause trouble or had been caught and locked in prison. Arlong had not quite welcomed the south with open arms, but it seemed to have reluctantly accepted its new government.
Those seemed like tentative signs of progress. Or that was, at least, the lie Rin and Kitay told themselves, to avoid facing the crushing pressure of the fact that they were children, unprepared and unqualified, juggling a towering edifice that could collapse at any minute.
Rin, Kitay, and Venka always holed up in the war room long past sunset. As the moon crept across the sky, they went from slouching at the table to sitting on the floor to lying by the hearth, swigging at bottles of sorghum wine recovered from Vaisra’s private cellars, all pretense of work forgotten.
All three of them had started drinking religiously. It felt like a compulsion; by the end of the day, alcohol seemed as necessary as eating or drinking water. It was the only thing that took the edge off the debilitating stress that pounded their temples. In those hours, they lurched to the opposite of anxiety. They became temporary, private megalomaniacs. They fantasized about everything they would change about the Empire once they’d gotten it into their order. The future was full of sandcastles, flimsy prospects to be destroyed and rebuilt at will.
“We’ll ban child marriage,” Rin declared. “We’ll make matchmaking illegal until all parties are at least sixteen. We’ll make education mandatory. And we’ll need an officers’ school, obviously—”
“You’re going to reinstate Sinegard?” Venka asked.
“Not at Sinegard,” Kitay said. “That place has too much history. We’ll build a new school, somewhere down south. And we’ll revamp