She stopped ten feet before she reached the graves. She needed to breathe before she could bring herself to go any farther.
“Let someone else do this.” Kitay put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re allowed to go back.”
“I’m not,” she said. “And I can’t. This has to be me.”
It had to be her because this was her fault. She was obligated to look. She needed to afford the dead at least that modicum of respect.
She wanted to bury it all, to pile mounds of soil over this shallow grave, tamp it tightly against the ground with shovels, and then roll wagons over it to flatten this site so that it might fade back into the landscape until one day they could pretend it had never existed.
But they had to identify the bodies. So many southerners were currently trapped in that horrifying limbo of uncertainty with no way to know if their loved ones were dead, and that uncertainty could hurt more than grief. Once they found the bodies, at least they could mourn.
And then, because burial rituals were so important in the south, the bodies needed to be cleaned. In peacetime, funerals in Tikany were daylong affairs. Hordes of mourners—sometimes including hired professionals to inflate the ranks, if the deceased’s family could afford it—moaned and wailed as they followed the coffin out of town to carefully prepared ancestral plots. The souls of the dead needed to be properly coaxed into their graves so they would rest instead of haunting the living; this demanded regular offerings of burned paper goods and incense to soothe them into the world beyond.
Rin had an idea of what the afterlife looked like now. She knew it was not some cute parallel ghost city where burned paper offerings might be translated into real treasures. But still, to leave a loved one’s body to rot in the open was shameful.
She’d thrown away most of her Rooster heritage. She’d lost her dialect and her mannerisms; since her first year at school, she’d dressed and spoken like a Sinegardian elite. She didn’t believe in southern superstition, and she wasn’t going to start pretending now.
But death was sacred. Death demanded respect.
Kitay had taken on the gray-green pallor of someone about to vomit.
She reached for his shovel. “You don’t need to stay if you can’t. These aren’t your people.”
“We’re bound.” He pulled his shovel back from her grasp and gave her a wan, exhausted smile. “Your pain will always be mine.”
Together they began to dig.
It wasn’t difficult. The Mugenese had covered their handiwork with only a thin layer of soil, barely enough to conceal the tangled mass of limbs underneath. Whenever Rin had uncovered enough dirt to reveal the top layer of a corpse, she stopped and moved on, not wanting to break apart the already soft, decomposing bodies.
“In the north, we burn our dead,” Kitay said after an hour. He reached up to wipe the sweat off his forehead, leaving behind a streak of mud. “It’s cleaner.”
“So we’re vulgar,” Rin said. “So what?”
She didn’t have the energy to defend what they were doing. Earthen burial was the oldest of southern rituals. The Roosters were people of the earth, and their bodies and souls belonged in the ground—ancestral land that was marked, possessed, inhabited by generations stretching back as long as the history of the province. So what if that made them the Empire’s mud-skinned refuse? The earth was permanent, unforgiving. The earth would rise up and swallow its invaders whole.
“They won’t be able to recognize half these bodies,” 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.