Venka was right—once she knew what she was looking for, the hidden path was clear as day. Nothing marked the graves, but the tall grass grew in curious whorls, twisting and spiraling as if avoiding the once-loved bones in the soil beneath.
Rin surveyed the clearing. How many bodies had been buried here, over how many decades? How far did she have to walk until her fingers wouldn’t lodge into tiny bones when she pushed them into the dirt?
Her fingers kept trembling. She glanced around, made sure that she was alone, then sat down and pulled a pipe out of her pocket. She didn’t take enough opium to knock herself unconscious—just enough to get her hand steady so she could firmly grip the shovel.
“It’s not easy, is it?”
She saw Altan in the corner of her gaze, following her down the rows of unmarked graves. His shape lingered only if she looked elsewhere; if she focused where she thought he stood, he disappeared.
“They were like children,” she said. “I didn’t—I didn’t want . . .”
“You never want to hurt them.” Altan sounded gentler than she’d ever heard him—gentler than she’d ever permitted his memory to be. “But you have to. You have to put them through hell, because that’s the only way anyone else will survive.”
“I would have spared them if I could have.”
For once, he didn’t jeer. He just sounded sad. “Me too.”
Finally she found a spot where the soil looked undisturbed and the grass grew straight. She put the linen-wrapped jar on the ground, clenched the shovel tight, and began to dig while Altan watched silently from the shade. Several long minutes trickled by. Despite the evening chill, sweat beaded on the back of her neck. The ground was rocky and stiff, and the shovel kept wobbling out of her grasp. Eventually she found a perilous equilibrium, using her hand to guide the shovel and her foot to wedge it farther into the ground.
“I think I understand you now,” she said after a long silence.
“Oh?” Altan cocked his head. “What do you understand?”
“Why you pushed me so hard. Why you hurt me. I wasn’t a person to you, I was a weapon, and you needed me to work.”
“You can still love your weapons,” Altan said. “You can beat them into shape and then watch them destroy themselves and know that it was all fully necessary, but that doesn’t mean you can’t love them, too.”
She didn’t need to dig quite so long or so hard—nobody was ever going to come disturb these graves—but something about the difficult, repetitive motion soothed her, even as the ache in her shoulder grew worse and worse. It felt like penance.
At last, when the hole stretched so deep that the dying sunlight couldn’t hit the bottom, when the soil went from brown and rocky to a soft and sludgy clay, she stopped and carefully lowered Pipaji’s ashes into the grave.
She wished she could have buried Dulin, too. But she’d scoured the channel for hours, and she hadn’t even been able to find a shred of his uniform.
“Does it ever get easier?” she asked.
“What? Sending people to their deaths?” Altan sighed. “You wish. It’ll never stop hurting. They’ll think that you don’t care. That you’re a ruthless monster in single-minded pursuit of victory. But you do care. You love your shamans like your own family, and a knife twists in your heart every time you watch one of them die. But you have to do it. You’ve got to make the choices no one else can. It’s death or the Chuluu Korikh. Commanders cull.”
“I didn’t want it to be me,” she said. “I’m not strong enough.”
“No.”
“It should have been you.”
“It should have been me,” he agreed. “But you’re the one who got out. So see this through to the end, kid. That’s the least you owe to the dead.”
Kitay stood waiting for her at the bottom of the cliffs, holding a bundle of incense sticks in one hand and a jug of sorghum wine in the other.
“What’s all this?” she asked.
“Qingmingjie,” he said. “We have to keep vigil.”
Qingmingjie. The Tomb-Sweeping Festival. The night when the hungry ghosts of the restless dead walked the world of the living and demanded their due. She’d seen others celebrating it in Tikany, but she’d never participated in the rituals herself. She’d never had anyone to mourn.
“That’s not for two weeks,” she said.
“That’s not the point. We have to keep vigil.”
“Do we have to?”
“Thousands of people died to win you this war. It wasn’t just your shamans. It was soldiers whose names you never even learned. You’re going to honor them. You’re going to keep vigil.”
She was so tired she almost simply walked away.
What did ritual matter? The dead couldn’t hurt her. She wanted to be finished with them; she’d done enough penance today.
But then she saw the look on Kitay’s face and knew she could not refuse him this. She followed him quietly down to the valley.
The field of corpses was so quiet at night that she might never have known a battle had been fought on these grounds. Mere hours ago it was a site of shouting, of detonations, of clashing steel and smoke. And now the show was over, the puppet strings were cut, and everyone lay in silent repose.
“It’s so odd,” she murmured. “I wasn’t even here.”
She hadn’t commanded this battle. She hadn’t witnessed how it had played out, didn’t know which side breached first, didn’t know how it would have gone if the Dragon had not raised the Murui. She’d been occupied with an entirely different fight, too busy in the realm of gods and lightning to remember that a conventional battle was even happening, until its aftermath was laid out before her eyes.
“What now?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.” Kitay lifted the incense sticks half-heartedly, as if he’d just realized what an inconsequential gesture this was. They couldn’t begin to count the bodies in the valley. All the incense in the world could not repay this sacrifice.
“In Tikany we burn paper,” she said. “Paper money. Paper houses. Sometimes paper wives, if they were young men who died before they were married.” She broke off. She didn’t have a point. She was babbling, afraid of the silence.
“I don’t think it’s the paper that’s important,” Kitay said. “I think we just need to . . .”
His voice trailed away. His eyes widened, focused on something just over her shoulder. Too late she heard it as well, the crunch of footsteps over burned grass and bone.
When she turned, she saw only one silhouette against the dark.
Nezha had come alone. Unarmed.
He always looked so different in the moonlight. His skin shone paler, his features looked softer, resembling less the harsh visage of his father and more the lovely fragility of his mother. He looked younger. He looked like the boy she’d known at school.
Rin wondered briefly if he’d come back to die.
Kitay broke the silence. “We brought wine.”
Nezha held out a hand. Kitay passed him the bottle as he approached. Nezha didn’t bother to sniff for poison; he just tossed back a mouthful and swallowed hard.