The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War #2) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,207

compromised.

Rin eyed the web of fuses lining the opposite cliff wall. If she couldn’t kill Feylen with fire, then she’d bury him under the mountain.

She only had to get him close enough to the rocks.

“I know you’re still in there.” She drifted closer to Feylen. She needed to distract him, if only for a few seconds’ reprieve. “I know you can hear me.”

He took the bait. The winds calmed.

“I don’t care how powerful your god is. You still own this body, Feylen, and you can take it back.”

Feylen stared wordlessly at her, unmoving, but she saw no dimming of the blue, no twitch of recognition in his eyes. His expression was an inscrutable wall, behind which she had no idea if the real Feylen was still alive.

She still had to try.

“I saw Altan in the afterlife,” she said. A lie, but one shrouded in the truth, or at least her version of it. “He wanted me to pass something on to you. Do you want to know what he said?”

Cerulean flickered to black. Rin saw it—she hadn’t imagined it, it wasn’t a trick of the light, she knew she’d seen it. She continued to fly forward. Feylen was afraid now; she could read it all over his face. He drifted backward every time she drew closer.

They were so close to the cliff wall.

She was mere feet away from him. “He wanted me to tell you he’s sorry.”

The winds ceased entirely. A silence descended over the channel. In the still air Rin could hear everything—every haggard breath Feylen took, every round of cannon fire from the ships, every wretched scream from below.

Then Feylen laughed. He laughed so hard that corresponding pulses of wind shot through the air, alternating blasts so fierce that she had to flap frantically to stay afloat.

“This was your plan?” he screeched. “You thought he would care?”

“You do care.” Rin kept her voice calm, level. Feylen was in there. She’d seen him. “I saw you, you remember us. You’re Cike.”

“You mean nothing to us.” Feylen sneered. “We could destroy your world—”

“Then you would have done it. But you’re still bound, aren’t you? She’s bound you. You gods have no power except what we give you. You came through that gate to take your orders. And I’m ordering you to go back.”

Feylen roared. “Who are you to presume?”

“I’m your commander,” she said. “I cull.”

She shot her fire not at him, but the cliff wall. Feylen shrieked with laughter as the flames streamed harmlessly past him.

He hadn’t seen the fuses. He didn’t know.

Rin flapped frantically backward, trying to put as much distance between herself and the cliff as she could.

For a long, torturous instant, nothing happened.

And then the mountain moved.

Mountains weren’t supposed to shift like that. The natural world wasn’t supposed to reshape itself so completely in seconds. But this was real; this was an act of men, not gods. This was Kitay and Ramsa’s handiwork come to fruition. Rin could only stare as the entire top ledge of the cliff slipped down like roofing tiles cascading to the ground.

A shrieking howl pierced through the cascade of tumbling rock. Feylen was whipping up a tornado. But even those last, desperate gusts of wind could not stop thousands of tons of exploded rock jerked downward with the inevitable force of gravity.

When their rumbling stopped, nothing moved beneath them.

Rin sagged in the air, chest heaving. The fire still burned through her arms, but she couldn’t sustain it for long, she was so exhausted. She was struggling just to breathe.

The blood-soaked channel beneath her could have been a meadow of flowers. She imagined that the crimson waves were fields of poppy blossoms, and the moving bodies were just little ants scurrying pointlessly about.

She thought it looked so beautiful.

Could they be winning? If winning meant killing as many people as they could, then yes. She couldn’t tell which side had control over the river, only that it was awash with blood, and that broken ships were dashed against the cliff sides. Feylen had been killing indiscriminately, destroying Republican and Imperial ships alike. She wondered how high the casualty rate had climbed.

She turned toward the valley.

The destruction there was enormous. The palace was on fire, which meant the Militia troops had long ago slashed their way through the refugee camps. The troops would have cut the southerners down like reeds.

Drown in the channel, or burn in the city. Rin had the hysterical urge to laugh, but breathing hurt too much.

She realized suddenly she was losing