The Burning God (The Poppy War, #3)

by R.F. Kuang

“Things got a lot easier after that,” Jiang said. “I used to snatch them out of the sky like mosquitoes. Riga and I made it a game. Record time was four crafts in five seconds.” He said this so casually that Rin couldn’t help but stare. Immediately, like a gnat had buzzed into his ear, he shook his head quickly and looked away.

Whoever had emerged from the Chuluu Korikh was not the man she’d known at Sinegard. The Master Jiang at Sinegard had no recollection of the Second Poppy War. But this Jiang made constant offhand references about it and then backpedaled quickly, as if he were dipping his toes in an ocean of memory just to see if he’d like it, then cringing away because the water was too cold.

The memory lapses weren’t the things about Jiang that bothered her. Ever since they’d left the Chuluu Korikh, she had been watching him, following his movements and vocal patterns to track the differences. He was refreshingly familiar and jarringly different all at once, often within the span of the same sentence. She couldn’t predict the switches in the timbre of his voice, the sudden sharpness of his gaze. Som...

What confused her even more were the times when Jiang slipped almost fully back into his former skin, when he acted so much like the teacher she’d once known that every day, for brief pockets of time, she almost forgot that anything had changed.

He would tease her about her hair, which was shorn so messily near her temples that she looked like she’d been raised in the wild.

about Nezha (“Well, there’s no accounting for taste”).

Jiang reached out to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. “Darling, people pay you less attention when you don’t leave a trail of bodies in your wake.” Daji rolled her eyes.

They collided over his cot. He rose halfway to meet her, but she knocked him right back down, arms wrapped tightly around his skinny frame. She had to hold him, feel the weight of him, know that he was real and solid and there. The void in her chest, that aching sense of absence she’d felt since Tikany, finally melted away. She felt like herself again. She felt whole.

“No more bone smashing for us.” He snorted. “Thank the gods.”

She wanted this familiarity with him back, too. Never mind that thirty seconds ago she’d been ready to kill him. His voice, his very presence, made her heart ache—she

“No, you seem to like captivity.” “I like knowing that the words out of my mouth won’t cause the deaths of people I’ve become quite fond of. It’s this thing called ethics. You might try it sometime.”

it. “I never did. Why couldn’t she understand that?” “Well, you did put a blade in her back.” “I didn’t want things to be like this.” “Oh, gods, let’s not go down this road again.” “We’d let her have the south if she’d just come to the table. Gods know we’re grateful she got rid of the Mugenese for us. And she’s a good soldier. The very best. We’d happily have her back on our side; we’d make her a general in a heartbeat—” “You seem to have mistaken me for a dullard,” Kitay said. “It’s a tragedy we’re on different sides, Kitay. You know that. We would have been so good united, all three of us.” “We were united. And we were good. Your father had other plans.”

Nezha could never have broken him. No, whispered the little voice in her head that sounded too much like Altan. The only person capable of breaking him is you.

It wasn’t as good as killing Nezha, but it felt close. For a wild, untethered moment, she considered dragging her bloody finger along the wall and drawing him a flower.

“Jinzha?” Jiang frowned, digging his little finger into his ear. “The older Yin brat?” “Yes,” Daji said. “I think I taught him at Sinegard. Utter asshole. Whatever happened to him?” “He got plucky,” Daji said. “I turned him to mincemeat and sent him back to Vaisra in a dumpling basket.” Jiang arched an eyebrow. “Darling, fucking what?”

Jiang would have an answer. Jiang, who was so sure that the Pantheon lay at the center of the universe, had warned her once against treating the material world like a thing to be mechanized, dominated, and militarized. He’d believed firmly that the Hesperian and Mugenese societies had long ago forgotten their essential oneness with universal being, and were spiritually lost as a result.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “Probably.” His mouth worked for several seconds before he got the words out. “But—the stories—I mean, the Dragon Emperor’s dead.” “The Dragon Emperor’s sleeping,” Rin said. “And he’s been asleep for a very long time. But the Seal is eroding. Jiang’s remembering who he was, what he once could do, which means Riga is about to wake up. And once he does, once we’ve reunited the Trifecta, then we’ll show Hesperia what true divinity looks like.”

This couldn’t undo the past. It couldn’t bring Suni, Baji, or Ramsa back, couldn’t erase all the tortures she’d suffered at his commands. Couldn’t erase the scar on her back or restore her missing hand. But it felt good. The point of revenge wasn’t to heal. The point was that the exhilaration, however temporary, drowned out the hurt.

“These people deserve better than you.” “I’m exactly what they deserve,” she said. “They don’t want peace, they want revenge. I’m it.”

Souji pulled out his sword. To Rin’s surprise, the Iron Wolves didn’t follow suit. They weren’t crowded close behind Souji like loyal followers would be. No—if they were loyal, they would have already joined him in the charge. Instead they hung back, waiting. Rin read the looks in their eyes—identical expressions of calculating uncertainty—and took a wild gamble. “Disarm him,” she ordered. They obeyed immediately.

She patted his head. “You can beg now, if you like.” He spat a gob of saliva onto her front. She slammed the toe of her boot into his stomach. He sagged to the side. “Drop him,” Rin ordered. The Iron Wolves let Souji crumple to the ground. She kept kicking.

Daji, who had done this sort of thing quite often, had emphasized the importance of performative execution. Don’t just let them fear, she’d said. Let them know.

It felt good to have Venka back by her side. Funny how people changed, Rin thought. She would never have dreamed that Venka—Sring Venka, the pretty, pampered Sinegardian turned lean, ferocious warrior—would become such a source of comfort. Once not so long ago they’d hated each other with the particular intensity only schoolgirls could summon. Rin used to grit her teeth every time she heard Venka’s high, petulant voice, used to fantasize about gouging Venka’s eyes out with her fingernails. They would have brawled like wildcats in the school courtyard if they hadn’t been so afraid of expulsion. None of that mattered anymore. They weren’t stupid little girls anymore. They weren’t students anymore. War had transformed them both into wholly unimaginable creatures, and their relationship had transformed with them. They had never commented on how it had happened.

her. “You called me Altan.” “Oh, really?” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m sorry, that was terribly rude. I know you used to follow him around with those shining puppy eyes.”

“And you asked me to kill you.” She couldn’t tell if his laugh sounded nervous, or if that was the way Jiang had always laughed—high, unsettling, and foolish. “My goodness, Runin.” He reached out to pat her on the shoulder. “Surely I taught you better than to fret over the little things.”

Even more rarely did he look at her at all; more often he spoke to the snow, muttering with a hushed urgency, as if she were a chronicler present to record a history quickly slipping away from his grasp.

He’s not an innocent, Rin reminded herself. He was as much a monster as she and Daji were. He’d slaughtered the Sorqan Sira’s daughter and half the Ketreyid clan with a smile on his face,

For the first time in a long time, he seemed like the man Rin had known at Sinegard. “Hanelai.” He drew the name out slowly, every syllable a sigh. “She was my mistake.”

“Jiang, who am I?” But the moment had passed. Jiang stared down at her, his pale eyes vacant. The man who had the answers was gone. “Fuck!” Rin screamed.

“Holy fuck.” Despite herself, she burst out laughing. “It’s you.” “Hello,” said Chaghan. “Could I steal you for a chat?”

The scream i just scrumpt

“So I can’t stop. And one day I’ll go out too far. And I’m not going to come back.”

“Of course. You lead the Ketreyids now, then?” “Please, Rin.” He shot her a thin-lipped smile. “I lead the Hundred Clans. For the first time in a century we are united, and I speak here on their behalf.”

“Tonight,” he agreed, leaning down to give her a tight, brief hug. His lips brushed against her ear. “Don’t fuck this up.” “Can’t promise anything.” Rin gave him a wry chuckle. She had to laugh, to mask her apprehension with callous humor, otherwise she’d splinter from the fear. “It’s only a day, dearest, don’t miss me too much.” He didn’t laugh. “Come back down,” he said, his expression suddenly grim. His fingers clenched tight around hers. “Listen, Rin. I don’t care what else happens up there. But you come back to me.”

The entire balance of the world had just changed. She saw the forces reversing in her mind. For so long she’d been fighting a mad, hopeless, desperate war. And now it looked so very, very winnable. Ever so faintly in the back of her mind, though muted and strained by the spiritual back door that ran through Kitay’s mind, she heard the Phoenix laughing, too—the low, harsh cackle of a deity who had finally gotten everything it had wanted.

“Fuck you all,” she whispered at the coiling smoke that dissipated up into the reforming mist. She made a rude gesture with her hand. “That’s for Speer.”

“You missed me!” she screamed at the mountainside, at the spot where plumes furled up from the last dirigible’s wreckage. “You fucking missed!” Of course no one answered. Her voice, thin and reedy, faded without echo into the frigid air. But she screamed it again, and then again, and then again. It felt so good to say that she’d survived, that she’d fucking finally come out on top, that she didn’t even care that she was screaming to corpses.

“They’re the north, though,” Venka said. “Part of their ideology is hating you lot. They won’t bow to peasants.” “Then it’s a good thing we’re sending Sring Venka,” Kitay said. “You porcelain-faced Sinegardian princess, you.” Venka snickered. “Fine.”

She glanced to her right. “Kitay?” She needed to hear him speak before she could continue. She wasn’t waiting for his permission—she’d never needed his permission for anything—but she wanted to hear his confirmation.

objections, but they still didn’t like it. She felt a pulse of frustration. How could she make them see? They had long surpassed wars of steel and bodies clashing on mortal fields. War happened on the divine plane now—her gods versus the Hesperians’ Maker. What she’d seen on Mount Tianshan was a vision of the future, of how this would inevitably end. They couldn’t flinch away from that future. They had to fight the kind of war that moved mountains.

“The west does not conceive of this war as a material struggle,” she said. “This is about contesting interpretations of divinity. They imagine that because they obey the Divine Architect, they can crush us like ants. We’ve just proven them wrong. We’ll do it again.” She leaned forward, pressing her palm against the table. “We have one chance right now—probably the only chance we’ll ever get—to seize this country back. The Republic is reeling, but they’re going to recover. We’ve got to hit them hard before then. And when we do, it can’t be a half-hearted assault. We need overkill.

We need to scare Nezha’s allies so badly that they’ll scuttle back to their hemisphere and never d...

asked quietly. He’d said when. Not if. This wasn’t a hypothetical. They’d moved into the realm of logistics now, which meant she’d already won. “They won’t,” she said. The next words she spoke felt like reopened scars, familiar and painful, words that bore the weight of all the guilt that she’d tried so long to suppress. Words belonging to a legacy that now, she knew, she had no choice but to face. “Because we’ll be Cike. And the first rule of the Cike is that we cull.”

Rip all my cike

The world looked different when Rin walked out of Cholang’s hut.

But Rin didn’t see weakness here.

She saw an army rebuilding. A nation in the making.

create the original working circumstances.” She froze. “What did you say?” “I said, I’ve only got to poke around until—” He broke off and gave her an odd look. “You all right?” “Yes,” she said, dazed. Kitay’s words echoed in her mind like ringing gongs. The original working circumstances. Great Tortoise, was it that easy? “Fuck,” she said. “Kitay, I’ve got it.”

“I want them helpless like I was,” Pipaji burst out. “I want to stand over their faces and spit venom into their eyes. I want them to wither at my touch.” “Why?” “Because they touched me,” Pipaji said. “And it made me want to die.” “Good.” Rin held the bowl of poppy seeds out toward her. “Now let’s try this again.”

Pipaji’s lips moved very quickly, uttering a stream of syllables that formed no language Rin could recognize. The tips of her fingers had turned a rotted purple beneath the dirt. When her eyes fluttered open, all Rin saw beneath her lashes were dark pools, black all the way through. Finally. Rin felt a pulse of fierce, vicious pride, accompanied by the faintest pang of fear. What kind of deity had Pipaji called back from across the void? Was it stronger than she was?

“Are you going to jump?” Rin asked. Pipaji’s narrow chest heaved. “No.” “Then get up.” Rin stood and extended Pipaji her hand. But Pipaji remained on the ground, shoulders shaking violently, her face contorted again into sobs. “Stop crying. Look at me.” Rin leaned down and grabbed Pipaji by the chin. She didn’t know what compelled her to do it. She’d never acted like this before.

“Do you want to quit?”