The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,4

nation. Yin Vaisra, the former Dragon Warlord and newly elected President of the Nikara Republic, could have dealt conclusively with them months ago, but he’d let them roam free to undercut his own allies in a long-term ploy to strengthen his grasp on the crumbling Nikara Empire. Now those scattered platoons had organized into several large independent bands terrorizing the south. For all intents and purposes, the Nikara and the Mugenese remained at war. Even without support from the longbow island, the Mugenese had essentially colonized the south in a matter of months. And Rin had let them, obsessed as she’d been with Vaisra’s insurrection while the real war was being fought at home.

She’d failed the south once. She wouldn’t do it again.

“Kazuo says the ships are still coming,” spoke a voice in Mugini. It was a boy’s voice, thin and reedy.

“Kazuo is a fucking idiot,” said his companion.

Rin and Kitay crouched hidden behind the tall grass. They’d crept close enough to the Mugenese camp that they could hear patrolmen gossiping idly, their hushed voices traveling far over still night air. Still, Rin’s Mugini was rusty from more than a year of disuse, and she had to strain her ears to understand what they were saying.

“This language is like insect chitter,” Nezha had once complained, back when they’d been stupid young children crammed into a classroom at Sinegard, when they had yet to realize that the war they were training to fight wasn’t hypothetical.

Nezha had hated Mugini lessons, Rin remembered. He hadn’t been able to comprehend the language when spoken at its standard rapid clip, so he’d spent class each day mocking it, making his fellow students laugh with gibberish that sounded so much like real sentences.

“Click click click,” he’d said, and made scuttling noises between his teeth. “Like little bugs.”

Like crickets, Rin thought. They’d started calling the Mugenese that in the countryside. Rin didn’t know if it was a new slur or an old insult recycled from a time before her birth. She wouldn’t have been surprised by the latter. History moved in circles—she’d learned that very well by now.

“Kazuo said that ships have started coming into the ports in Tiger Province,” said the first voice she’d heard, the boy’s voice. “They’re docking in the shadows, ferrying us back handful by handful—”

The second patrolman snorted. “That’s bullshit. We’d know by now if they had.”

There was a brief silence. Someone stirred in the grass. The patrolmen were lying down, Rin realized. Perhaps they were star-gazing. That was stupid of them, wildly irresponsible. But they sounded so very young; they sounded not like soldiers but like children. Did they simply not know any better?

“The moon is different here,” the first patrolman said wistfully.

Rin recognized that phrase. She’d learned it at Sinegard—it was an old Mugini expression, some aphorism derived from a myth about a ferryman who loved a woman who lived on a distant star, who built her a bridge between two worlds so that they could finally embrace.

The moon is different here. He meant he wanted to go home.

The Mugenese were always talking about going home. She heard about it every time she eavesdropped on them. They spoke about home like it still existed, like the longbow island was some beautiful paradise where they could easily return if only the ships would come to harbor. They spoke about their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers who awaited them on their shores, spared somehow from the scorching pyroclastic flows.

“You’d better get used to this moon,” said the second patrolman.

The more they spoke, the younger they sounded. Rin pictured their faces in her head; their voices brought to mind gangly limbs and fuzzy upper lips. They couldn’t be older than her—they had to be just over twenty, possibly younger.

She remembered fighting a boy her age during the siege at Khurdalain, what seemed like an eternity ago. Remembered his wide moonlike face and soft hands. Remembered how his eyes bulged when she ran her blade through his stomach.

He must have been so scared. He might have been as scared as she was.

She felt Kitay stiffen beside her.

“They don’t want to be here, either.” He’d told her this weeks ago. He’d been interrogating some of their Mugenese prisoners, and he’d come away far more sympathetic to them than she was comfortable with. “They’re just kids. A quarter of them are younger than we are, and they didn’t sign up for this war. Most of them were pulled from their homes and thrown into vicious training