The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,49

come south. She could have stopped this.

Rin had long since accepted that charge. She knew this was her fault. She could have taken the Empress’s hand that day in Lusan, could have killed Vaisra’s rebellion in the cradle and led her troops straight down south. But instead she’d played at revolution, and all that won her was a scar snaking across her back and an aching stump where her hand should have been.

She hated how nakedly transparent Vaisra’s strategy had been from the start, and hated herself more for failing to see it. In retrospect it was so clear why the south had to burn, why Vaisra had withheld his aid even when the southern warlords came begging at his feet.

He could have easily stopped those massacres. He’d known the Hesperian fleet was coming to his aid; he could have dispatched half his army to answer the pleas of a dying nation. He’d deliberately crippled the south instead. He didn’t have to grapple with the southern Warlords for political authority if he just let the Mugenese do his dirty work for him. And then, when the smoke cleared, when the Empire lay in fractured shambles, he would have marched in with the Republican Army and burned out the Mugenese with dirigibles and arquebuses. By then southern autonomy would have seemed laughable—whatever survivors remained would have fallen on their knees and worshipped him as their savior.

What if he had told you? Altan—Rin’s hallucination of Altan—had asked her once. What if he’d made you fully complicit? Would you have switched your allegiance?

Rin didn’t know. She had despised the southerners back then. She’d hated her own people, had hated them the moment she saw them in the camps. She’d hated their darkness, their flat-tongued rural accents and fearful, dull-eyed stares. It was so easy to mistake sheer terror for stupidity, and she’d been desperate to think of them as stupid because she knew she wasn’t stupid, and she needed any reason to set herself apart.

Back then her self-loathing had run so deep that if Vaisra had simply told her every part of his plan, she might have taken his evil for brilliance and laughed. If he hadn’t traded her away, she might never have left his side.

Anger coiled in her gut. She tore the calendar down from the wall and crushed it in her fingers.

“I was a fool for Vaisra,” she said. “I shouldn’t have counted on his virtue. But he didn’t count on my survival.”

Once they’d deemed the general’s complex safe as a home base, Rin walked across town to the whorehouses. She didn’t want to; she was hungry and exhausted, her eyes and throat felt sore from suppressed tears, and all she wanted to do was curl up in a corner with her pipe.

But she was General Fang the Speerly, and she owed this to the survivors.

Venka was already there. She’d begun the difficult work of marshaling the women from the whorehouses. Puddles and overturned buckets covered the cold stone floors where the women had showered, next to thick, dark piles of lice-ridden locks shorn from newly bald heads.

Venka stood now at the center of the square courtyard, hands clasped behind her back like a drill sergeant. The women clustered around her in a sullen circle, blankets clutched around their skinny shoulders, their eyes dull and unfocused.

“You have to eat,” Venka said. “I’m not leaving you alone until I see you swallow.”

“I can’t.” The girl in front of Venka could have been anywhere from thirteen to thirty—her skin was stretched so tight over her fragile, birdlike bones that Rin couldn’t tell.

Venka grabbed the girl’s shoulder with one hand; with the other, she held a steamed bun up so close to the girl’s face that Rin thought she might start mashing it into her lips. “Eat.”

The girl pressed her mouth shut and squirmed in Venka’s grasp, whimpering.

“What’s wrong with you?” Venka shouted. “Eat! Take care of yourself!”

The girl wriggled free and backed away, eyes scrunched up in tears, shoulders hunched as if she expected a beating.

“Venka!” Rin hurried forward and pulled Venka back by the wrist. “What are you doing?”

“What the fuck do you think?” Venka’s cheeks were chalk-pale with fury. “Everyone else has eaten, but this little bitch thinks she’s too good for her food—”

One of the other women put an arm around the girl. “She’s still in shock. Let her be.”

“Shut up.” Venka shot the girl a scathing glare. “Do you want to die?”

After a long pause, the girl gave