The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,226

window. The assassin lay in a crumpled heap three floors below. He wasn’t stirring. Rin didn’t care. She pointed down, and a stream of flame shot toward the ground, licking hungrily around the corpse.

She thickened the flame, made it burn as hot as she was capable, until she couldn’t see the body anymore, just thick, roiling waves of orange under shimmering air. She didn’t want to preserve the assassin’s body. She knew who had sent him: either Nezha or the Gray Company or the two acting in tandem. There was no mystery to solve here; she’d learn nothing from interrogation. It might have been prudent to try, but in that moment, all she wanted was to watch something burn.

Chapter 33

The next morning the Southern Army departed for Tikany.

Rin couldn’t rule from Dragon Province. That should have been evident from the start—it wasn’t her hometown, she didn’t know the city’s inner workings, and she had no local supporters. In Arlong, she was a foreign upstart working against centuries of anti-southern discrimination. Venka’s death was just the final straw—proof that if Rin wanted to cement her rule, she had to do it from home.

A small crowd of civilians gathered in the valley to watch as the columns marched past. Rin couldn’t tell from their grim expressions if they were sending the Southern Army off with respect, if they were simply glad to see their backs, or if they were scared she was carrying off all their food.

She’d left behind a minimal force—just three hundred troops, the most she was willing to spare—to maintain occupation of the city. They’d likely fail. Arlong might collapse under the strain of its myriad resource shortages; its civilians might emigrate en masse, or they might overthrow the southern troops in internal revolt. It didn’t matter. Arlong was no great loss. One day the city would be well and properly hers, purged of dissenters, stripped of its treasures, and transformed into a tame, obedient resource hub for her regime.

But first, she had to reclaim the south.

Rin kept her mind trained on Tikany, on going home, and tried not to think about how much their departure stank of failure.

She and Kitay spent much of the journey in silence. There was little to talk about. By the fourth day, they’d exhausted all discussion of what resources they had, what troop numbers they were now working with, what kind of foundation they’d have to build in Tikany to train a fighting force capable of taking on the west. Anything else at this point lapsed into useless conjecture.

They couldn’t talk about Venka. They’d tried, but no words came out when they opened their mouths, nothing but a heavy, reproachful silence. Kitay thought Venka’s death exonerated her. Rin was still convinced Venka might have been the informant, but any number of alternatives were possible. Venka was not the only one with access to the information Nezha kept hinting at. Some junior officer could easily have been passing intelligence to the Republic throughout their march. The scrolls had stopped appearing since Venka’s death, but that might have simply been because they’d left Arlong. Venka remained an open question, a traitor and ally both at once, which was the only way Rin could bear to remember her.

She didn’t want to know the truth. She didn’t want to even wonder. She simply couldn’t think about Venka for too long because then her chest throbbed from a twisting, invisible knife, and her lungs seized like she was being held underwater. Venka’s confused, reproachful face kept resurfacing in her mind, but if she let it linger, then she started to drown, and the only way to make those feelings stop was to burn instead.

It was much easier to focus on the rage. Through all her confused grief, the one thought that burned clear was that this fight was not over. Hesperia wanted her dead; Hesperia was coming for her.

She no longer dreamed of Nezha’s death. That grudge seemed so petty now, and the thought of his broken body brought her no satisfaction. She’d had the chance to break him, and she hadn’t taken it.

No, Nezha wasn’t the enemy, just one of its many puppets. Rin had realized now that her war wasn’t civil, it was global. And if she wanted peace—true, lasting peace—then she had to bring down the west.

Two weeks out, the road to Tikany became a mosaic of human suffering.

Rin didn’t know what she’d expected when she passed into the south. Perhaps not the joyful shouts