The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,232

said. “Never.”

“Rin, come on—”

“This is what they want.”

“Of course it’s what they want! Nezha’s offering food aid. He’s been offering that from the start. We have to take it.”

“Are you working with them?” she demanded.

He recoiled. “No—what are you—”

“I knew it. I fucking knew it.” That explained everything—why he’d bogged her down with mindless, exhausting tasks at Arlong, why he’d kept detracting from the military front, why he’d kept willfully ignoring the clear threat of Nezha’s constant letters. “First Venka, now you? Is that what this is?”

“Rin, that’s—”

“Don’t call me crazy.”

“You are being crazy,” he snapped. “You’re acting like a maniac. Shut up for a moment and face the fucking facts.” She opened her mouth to retort but he shouted over her, hand splayed in front of her face as if she were a misbehaving child. “We’re dealing with famine—not something cyclical, not something we can weather out, but the worst famine in recent history. There’s no grain left in the entire fucking country because Daji poisoned half the south, the entire heartland was too busy fleeing for their lives to till the fields, our rivers are flooded, and we’ve had an unnaturally cold and dry winter that’s shortened the growing season for crops, which has made things doubly difficult for anyone who even tried planting.”

His breathing grew shaky as he spoke; his words spilled out at such a frantic rate that she could barely understand him. “No irrigation or flood control projects. No one’s been maintaining or supervising the granaries, so if any existed, they’ve been plundered empty by now. We’ve got no leverage, no backup options, no money, nothing—”

“So we fight for it,” she said. “We beat them, and then we take what we want—”

“That’s insane.”

“Insane? Insane is giving them what they want. We can’t stop here, we can’t just let everything go, we can’t let them win—”

“Shut up!” he shouted. “Can you even hear yourself?”

“Can you? You want to give up!”

“It’s not what I want,” he said. “It’s the only option that we have. People are starving. Our people. Those corpses on the roadside? Pretty soon that’s going to be the entire country, unless you learn to swallow your pride.”

She almost screamed.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to work.

She’d won. She’d fucking won, she’d razed Nezha’s city, she’d obliterated her enemies, she’d conquered the Nikara south, she’d won, so why, why were they talking like they’d already been defeated?

Suddenly her rage dissipated. She couldn’t be furious with Kitay; yelling at him wouldn’t change the facts.

“They can’t do this to me,” she said dully. “I was supposed to win.”

“You did win,” he said sadly. “This entire country is yours. Just please don’t throw it away with your pride.”

“But we were going to rebuild this world,” she said. The words sounded plaintive as she said them, a childish fantasy, but that was how she felt, that was what she really believed—because otherwise, what the fuck was this all for? “We were going to be free. We were going to make them free—”

“And you can still do that,” he insisted. “Look at what we’ve done. Where we are. We’ve built an entire nation, Rin. We don’t have to let it collapse.”

“But they’re going to come after us—”

“I promise you they won’t.” He took her face in his hands. “Look at me. Nezha’s defeated. There’s no fight left in him. What he wants is what we all want, which is to stop killing our own people.

“We’re about to have the world we fought for. Can’t you see it? It’s so close, it’s just over the horizon. We’ll have an independent south, we’ll have a world free from war, and all you have to do is say the word.”

But that wasn’t the world she’d fought for, Rin thought. The world she’d fought for was one where she, and only she, was in charge.

“We told them they were free,” she said miserably. “We won. We won. And you want us to go back to the foreigners and bow.”

“Cooperation isn’t bowing.”

She scoffed. “It’s close enough.”

“It’s a long march to liberation,” he said. “And it’s not so easy as burning our enemies. We won our war, Rin. We were the righteous river of blood. But ideological purity is a battle cry, it’s not the stable foundation for a unified country. A nation means nothing if it can’t provide for the people in it. You have to act for their sake. Sometimes you’ve got to bend the knee, Rin. Sometimes, at least, you’ve got to pretend.”

No,