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History moved in circles—she’d learned that very well by now.
Rin didn’t have the patience to separate the guilty from the innocent.
There was no point to subtlety when everyone knew what she was.
Hate was a funny thing. It gnawed at her insides like poison. It made every muscle in her body tense, made her veins boil so hot she thought her head might split in half, and yet it fueled everything she did. Hate was its own kind of fire and if you had nothing else, it kept you warm.
Sinegard and Altan had taught her to compartmentalize and detach. Learn to look and see not a man but a body. The soul is not there. The body is simply a composite of different targets, and all of them burn so bright.
History only remembered the princes—the Red Emperor’s sons.
Maybe that was just how murder became possible. You took away someone’s humanity, and then you killed them.
It never got easier.
She had no respect for anyone who would rather die than fight.
It still stung, how the simplest things—picking locks, getting dressed, filling her canteen—had become so damnably difficult overnight.
Rin snorted. “The gods don’t want fingers.” “So what do they want?” “Pain,” she said. “Pain, and your sanity.”
“Pain,” she said. “Pain, and your sanity.”
The only way to live with your transgressions, Rin had learned, was to lock them away in your mind and leave them in the abyss.
She’d learned now to divide her mind into clean, convenient compartments.
Souji’s not the type to go around tripping off cliffs.”
“Churches never killed anyone.” “They prop up regime ideologies that do.”
skinned Speerly bitch that wiped a country off the map. And sometimes when I get a little too angry, I snap.”
What difference did a few lives make?
And if southerners were dirt like all the legends said, then they would crush their enemies with the overwhelming force of the earth until they could only dream of breathing. They would bury them with their bodies. They would drown them in their blood.
“I’m not living my whole life like a beast on a leash.”
It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave.”
He swung his mug toward the dancers. “That’s what you’re fighting for.”
Even in Tikany, a place where religion had long been diminished to children’s bedtime stories, the magistrates lit incense offerings to the dragon lords of the river during drought years to induce heavy showers.
And what a valuable prisoner he was,
She didn’t have the fire. She didn’t have the fire.
They find regular weekly worship a waste of time and resent being corralled to chapel.
It didn’t matter that she knew eternity in the Chuluu Korikh was worse than death. She still couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to die.
She relived those interactions so many times that they began to lose all meaning.
You want to know exactly what you’ve done and you don’t want to forget it. So let’s begin.” His fingers tightened around her chin. “Admit what you did.”
“You’re a stupid, sentimental, sniveling brat who betrayed everyone around her because she couldn’t get over her schoolyard crush. Did you think he loved you? Do you think he ever loved you?”
Jiang didn’t get to skirt this conversation like he skirted everything, dodging responsibility by feigning madness so well that they all believed it.
This story must end, one way or another.”
The Jiang she knew liked to blow bubbles in the creek with a reed for fun.
This Jiang discussed murder as if relaying a recipe for porridge.
War didn’t end, not so cleanly—it just kept building up in little hurts that piled on one another until they exploded afresh into raw new wounds.
“It’s like seeing a warped reflection in a mirror. Sometimes we are the same and sometimes we are not; sometimes he moves with me, and sometimes he acts of his own volition. Sometimes I catch glimpses of his past, but it’s like I’m watching from far away like a helpless observer, and that—”
Was it because Jiang was now freed from the Chuluu Korikh? Did Daji’s powers amplify when her anchors grew stronger? And if so, then what would happen when they woke Riga?
“But they have their own cities,” Rin said. “What do they want here?”
We are inferior, until we speak, dress, act, and worship just like them.”
