The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,40

of cloth tied around their foreheads. But an hour before they were due to move out, the squadron leaders started reporting they didn’t have enough excess cloth. Their soldiers were already marching in threadbare uniforms; they didn’t have any spares to cut up. Zhuden asked Rin if they should start ripping strips from their trouser legs.

“Forget that,” Rin grumbled. “Let’s just send them out.”

“You can’t,” Souji said. “You made a promise.”

“It’s idiotic! Who’s going to care about uniforms at nighttime?”

“The Mugenese might care,” Kitay said. “Killing their labor source doesn’t work in a symbiotic relationship. It’s a small measure, but it’s the least you can do. It’s the difference between ten lives and a thousand.”

In the end they had their troops smear their faces with bright red mud from a nearby pond. It left crimson patches on their clothes wherever they touched, and it caked onto their skin in dry, rusty streaks that didn’t rub off without water.

“We look stupid.” Rin surveyed the ranks. “We look like children playing past our dinnertime.”

“No, we look like a clay army.” Souji dragged two fingers across his cheek, leaving a thick, clearly visible streak. “The Red Emperor’s very finest, baked fresh from southern dirt.”

Thirty minutes until sunset, Rin crouched low amid the sorghum stalks. The smell of oil hung heavy in the air—the two thousand men behind her held dripping torches, ready to light at her signal.

The Southern Coalition’s soldiers had been trained to fight in the darkness as they had at Khudla. It hurt their visibility, yes, but the psychological advantage was significant. Troops under ambush in pitch-black night reacted with panic, confusion, and cowardice.

But tonight, Rin wanted the battlefield well lit. The Mugenese might fall back on the civilians in the chaotic dark. She needed to draw them out into the grain fields, which meant she needed to show them precisely where their enemy lay.

Are you ready, little warrior?

The Phoenix crooned in the back of her mind, eager, waiting. Rin let the old rage leak in, familiar and warming as a hearth fire, let it seep into her limbs while visions of destruction played in her head.

Oh, how she’d craved this fight.

I’m ready.

“Rin!”

She whipped around. Souji pushed his way through the sorghum stalks, red-faced and panting for breath.

Her stomach dropped. He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be on the eastern flank with his Iron Wolves, poised and ready to attack.

“What are you doing?” she hissed.

“Hold up.” He doubled over, wheezing. “Don’t give the signal. Something’s wrong.”

“What are you talking about? We’re ready, it’s time—”

“No. Look.” He rummaged in his pockets, pulled out a spyglass, and tossed it toward her. “Look carefully.”

She raised it to her eye at the township walls. She struggled to make anything out in the dark. “I don’t see anything.”

“Move to the west. Just over the fields.”

Rin moved the lens. What she saw didn’t make any sense.

Mugenese soldiers clustered around the township walls. More poured out with every passing second. They knew about the ambush. Something—or someone—had tipped them off.

But they weren’t charging forward. Their blades weren’t pointed outward. They weren’t even arranging themselves into defensive formations of the kind Rin would have expected from an army under attack.

No—their weapons were pointed at the city gates. They weren’t preventing the attackers from coming in, they were keeping the residents from coming out.

Then Rin understood their strategy.

They weren’t going to fight a fair fight. They weren’t planning to engage the Southern Coalition at all.

They’d simply taken all Leiyang hostage.

Rin grabbed the arm of the nearest field officer and hissed, “Find Kitay.”

He sprinted back toward the camp.

“Fuck.” Rin slammed a fist against her knee. “Fuck—how?”

“I don’t know.” For the first time, the confident swagger was wiped from Souji’s face. He looked terrified. “I’ve no idea, I don’t know what we’re going to do—”

What had given them away? They’d prepared this ambush with twice their usual caution. The patrols couldn’t possibly have seen them; they’d worked around the guard schedule with clockwork precision. Had someone seen her and Souji leaving the township? That was possible, but then how would the Mugenese have known when the ambush was scheduled? And how did they know it would come from the north?

It didn’t matter how. Even if there were spies within her ranks, she couldn’t solve that now; she had a more pressing problem to deal with.

The Mugenese were holding Leiyang’s civilians at knifepoint.

A small contingent of Mugenese soldiers started moving toward the ambush line. One of them waved a