The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,23

He might even sanction it. She would, if she were in his position. What did you do when one of your generals kept agitating to fight a war you knew you couldn’t win?

You cut your losses.

The cave smelled like sick, a stomach-turning mix of fumes from bitter herbal medicines and the odor of stale vomit. Ma Lien had been suffering from the bloody lung fever since before she’d left for Khudla. The timing was perfect. She’d struck a deal with Zhuden the morning she marched out—if Ma Lien was still ill by the time she returned, and the odds of his recovery seemed slim, then they would seize their chance.

Still, she hadn’t expected Ma Lien to disintegrate so quickly. He lay shriveled and desiccated against his sheets. He seemed to have shrunk to half his body weight. Crusted blood lined the edges of his lips. Every time he breathed, an awful rattle echoed through the cave.

Ma Lien was already half-gone. From the looks of it, what Rin was about to do couldn’t even properly be called murder. She was only hastening the inevitable.

“Hello, General.” She perched herself by the edge of his bed.

His eyes cracked open at the sound of her voice.

She’d been told the illness had taken his vocal cords. He bleeds when he tries to speak, Zhuden had said. And if he gets agitated, he starts choking on it. She felt a little thrill at the thought. He couldn’t mock her, couldn’t curse at her, couldn’t scream for help. She could taunt him as much as she liked. And all he could do was lie there and listen.

She should have just done the job and left. The smarter, pragmatic part of her was screaming at her to go—it was a risk to stay for so long, to speak where Gurubai’s spies might hear her.

But this encounter had been a long time coming. She wanted him to know every reason why he had to die. She wanted to relish this moment. She’d earned this.

She recalled vividly the way he’d shouted her down when she first suggested deploying troops to Rooster Province. He’d called her a savage, sentimental, dirt-skinned, warmongering bitch. He’d railed at Gurubai for letting a little girl into the war council in the first place. He’d suggested she’d be better off dead with the rest of her kind.

He probably didn’t remember saying that. Ma Lien was one of those loud, garrulous types. Always tossing insults out like the wind. Always assuming that his bodily strength and the loyalty of his men would insulate him from resentment.

“Do you remember what you said when I first asked for command?” Rin asked.

Spit bubbled by the side of Ma Lien’s mouth. She picked a bloodstained bed rag up from the floor and gently rubbed it away.

“You said I was a dumb bitch with no command experience and a genetic lack of rationality.” She chuckled. “Your words. You said I was an empty-headed little fool with more power than I knew what to do with. You said I should know my place. You said Speerlies weren’t meant to make decisions but to obey.”

Ma Lien mouthed something incoherent. She smoothed tendrils of his hair back from his mouth. He was sweating so hard he looked like he’d been drenched in oil. Poor man.

“I didn’t come south to be someone’s pet again,” she said. “You should have understood that about me.”

She’d laid her loyalty at the feet of two masters before. Each had betrayed her in turn. She’d trusted first Daji and then Vaisra, and they’d both sold her away without blinking. From now on Rin took charge of her own fate.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the vial.

Fat yellow scorpions infested the forests around Ruijin. The soldiers had learned to ward them away from the camp by burning lavender and setting traps, but they couldn’t wander ten feet into the trees without stumbling upon a nest. And a single nest was all it took to extract a vial’s worth of venom.

“I’m not sorry for this,” she said. “You shouldn’t have gotten in my way.”

She tipped the vial toward Ma Lien’s mouth. He thrashed, trying to cough the poison out, but she seized his jaw and forced it shut, pinching his nose between her fingers until the liquid seeped down into his throat. After a minute he stopped resisting. She let go.

“You’re not going to die immediately,” she said. “Scorpion venom paralyzes. Locks up all your muscles.”

She dabbed saliva and venom off