The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,34

could have made him as old as her grandfather, but he carried himself with his back straight and chin up, a warrior with decades of fight left in his body.

“Chief Lien.” Souji stood up, cupped his hands, and bowed deeply at the waist. Rin hastily followed suit.

“Sit,” Chief Lien grumbled. “This hut isn’t big enough for all this commotion.”

Rin and Souji returned to their stools. Chief Lien merely shoved his out of the way and sat down cross-legged on the dirt floor, which made Rin feel suddenly very childish, squatting as she was.

Chief Lien folded his arms across his chest. “So you’re the ones who’ve been causing trouble up north.”

“Guilty.” Souji beamed. “Next up is—”

“Stop it,” Chief Lien said. “I don’t care what’s next. Take your army, leave here, and don’t come back.”

Souji trailed off, looking hurt. Rin would have found that funny if she weren’t also confused.

“They think our men are doing it,” Chief Lien said. “They made the elders line up in the square the morning after the first patrolmen went missing and said they’d shoot them one by one until the culprits confessed. No one stepped forward, so they beat my mother within an inch of her life. That was over a week ago. She’s not recovered. She’ll be lucky if she makes it through tonight.”

“We have a physician,” Souji said. “We’ll bring him to you, or we can just carry her out to our camps. We’ve got men in those fields, we can move on the crickets tonight—”

“No,” Chief Lien said firmly. “You will turn around and disappear. We know how this story ends, and we can’t suffer the consequences. Compliance is the only thing keeping us alive—”

“Compliance?” Souji had warned Rin to keep quiet and let him do the talking, but she couldn’t help but interject. “That’s your word for slavery? You like walking the streets with your head down, cringing when they approach you, licking their boots to win their goodwill?”

“Our township still has all our men,” said Chief Lien.

“Then you have soldiers,” Rin said. “And you should be fighting.”

Chief Lien merely regarded her through his lined, tired eyes.

In the passing silence, Rin noticed for the first time a series of ropy scars etched across his arms. Others snaked up the side of his neck. Those weren’t the kind of scars you got from a whip. Those were from knives.

His gaze made her feel so tiny.

Finally he asked, “Did you know that they take young girls with the darkest skin they can find and burn them alive?”

She flinched. “What?”

But then the explanation rose to her mind, slow and dreadful, just as Chief Lien spelled it out aloud. “The Mugenese tell stories about you. They know what happened to the longbow island. They know it was a dark-skinned girl with red eyes. And they know you’re near.”

Of course they know. They’d massacred the Speerlies twenty years ago; surely the myth of the dark-skinned, red-eyed race who called fire still circulated in their younger generations. And certainly they’d heard whispers in the south. The Mugenese troops who could understand Nikara would have picked up on whispered stories of the goddess incarnate, the reason why they could never go home. They would have tortured to discover the details. They would have learned very quickly who they needed to target.

But they couldn’t find her, so they’d targeted anyone who might possibly look like her instead.

Guilt twisted in her stomach like a knife.

She heard the sudden noise of steel scraping against steel. She jumped and turned. The little girl, still sitting in the corner of the hut, had started fiddling with their weapons.

Chief Lien turned to look over his shoulder. “Don’t touch that.”

“She’s all right,” Souji said easily. “She ought to learn how to handle steel. You like that knife?”

“Yes,” said the girl, testing the blade’s balance on one finger.

“Keep it. You’ll need it.”

The girl peered up at them. “Are you soldiers?”

“Yes,” Souji said.

“Then why don’t you have uniforms?”

“Because we don’t have any money.” Souji gave her a toothy smile. “Would you like to sew us some uniforms?”

The girl ignored this question. “The Mugenese have uniforms.”

“That’s true.”

“So do they have more money than you?”

“Not if we and your baba have anything to do with it.” Souji turned back to Chief Lien. “Please, Chief. Just hear us out.”

Chief Lien shook his head. “I won’t risk the reprisals.”

“There won’t be reprisals—”

“How can you guarantee that?”

“Because everything they say about me is true,” Rin interrupted. Little arcs of flame danced around her