The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,52

Kitay said. “They’re too far decomposed, look—”

“They still have their clothes. Jewelry. Hair. Teeth. They’ll find them.”

They kept digging. No matter how many faces they uncovered, the shallow graves seemed to stretch on without end.

“Are you looking for someone?” Kitay asked after a while.

“No,” Rin said.

She meant it. She had briefly considered searching for Tutor Feyrik. She’d tried to think of the distinct markers that might identify him. His height and build were too average. She could have searched for his beard, perhaps—but there were hundreds of old men in Tikany with beards just like his. His clothes had always been nondescript; perhaps he might have his lucky gambling dice in his front pocket, but Rin couldn’t bear the thought of walking down the lines, ramming her hand down every bearded corpse’s pocket to verify someone had already died.

She was never going to see Tutor Feyrik again. She already knew that.

Hours later, Rin at last called for a stop. They’d been digging for three hours. The sun drooped low in the sky; soon, it would be too dark to tell whether their shovel blades were hitting soil or flesh.

“Back to the village,” she rasped. She desperately needed a drink of water. “We’ll return tomorrow when the sun’s come up—”

“Hold on,” called a soldier farther down the path. “Something’s moving over here.”

At first Rin thought the slight movement she saw was a trick of light glinting against buried metal, or perhaps a lone vulture pecking at carrion. Then she drew closer and saw it was a hand—a scrawny hand forced through a gap in the pile of bodies, waving ever so faintly.

Her troops hastened to drag the corpses out of the way. Six bodies removed finally revealed the owner of the hand—a thin, coughing boy covered entirely in dried blood.

He was still conscious when they pulled him out of the grave. He blinked up at them, dazed. Then his eyes closed, and his head slumped to the side.

Rin sent a runner into the township for a physician. Meanwhile, they laid the boy out on the grass and wiped away the blood and dirt caked to his skin as best they could using water from their canteens. Rin watched the boy’s chest throughout—it was bloody and discolored, caked over with dried blood and bruises, but still it rose and fell in a steady, determined rhythm.

When a physician arrived and cleaned the boy’s torso with alcohol, they learned that the source of the blood wasn’t deep—the wound was just a cut about two inches deep into his left shoulder. Enough to agonize but not to kill. The dirt had acted as a poultice, stemming a tide of blood that would have killed him otherwise.

“Hold him tight,” said the physician. He uncorked a bottle of rice wine and tipped it over the wound.

The boy jerked awake, hissing in pain. His eyes fluttered open and locked on Rin’s.

“You’re okay,” she said as she pinned his arms against the ground. “You’re alive. Be brave.”

His eyes bulged. A vein pulsed in his clenched jaw as he writhed under their hands, but never once did he scream.

He couldn’t have survived out here for more than a few days. The infection, and lack of water, would have killed him if it had been any longer than that. That meant the killing fields were fresh. The Mugenese had slaughtered them just days before the Southern Army arrived.

Rin tried to figure out what that meant.

Why would you mass-slaughter a town just before another army arrived?

To make Rin’s victory shallow? To spit venom at an army they knew they couldn’t beat? To leave one last, cruel message?

No. Gods, no, please, that could not be the truth.

But she couldn’t think of any other rationale. Blood rushed to her temples as she watched the boy’s eyes roll into the back of his head. She was afraid to stand; she thought she, too, might faint.

You did this, taunted the burial fields. You made us kill them. We would have left this town alone unless you came, but you did, and so all this is your fault.

Rin sent her soldiers back to the township ahead of her. She hung back, waiting for the sun to set. She wanted a few minutes of silence. She wanted to stand alone with the graves.

“There’s nothing left alive here,” Kitay said. “Let’s go.”

“You go,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

He paused in his steps. “Will this make you feel better?”

He didn’t elaborate, but she knew what he meant. “Don’t