He brought a spoonful of steamed shanyu to his mouth and nibbled at the edge. Then his eyes widened and he stopped bothering with the spoon, gulping the rest down like Rin might snatch it away from him at any moment.
“Take it slow,” she cautioned. “There’s plenty more. Stop if your stomach starts to cramp.”
He didn’t speak again until he’d nearly finished the bowl. He paused and sucked in a deep breath, eyelids fluttering. “I’d forgotten how salt tasted.”
“Me too.”
“You know how desperate we got?” He lowered the bowl. “We scraped the white deposits off tombstones and boiled it down because it resembled the taste. Tombs.” His hands trembled. “My father’s tomb.”
“Don’t think about that,” Rin said quietly. “Just enjoy this.”
She let him eat in silence for a while. At last he placed his empty bowl on the ground and sighed, both hands clutching his stomach. Then he twisted around to face her. “Why are you here?”
“I want you to tell me what happened,” she said.
He seemed to shrink. “You mean at the—”
“Yes. Please. If you remember. As much as you can.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to hear it.”
He was silent for a long time, his gaze fixed on something far away.
“I thought I had died,” he said at last. “When they struck me it hurt so much that everything turned black, and I thought that’s what death was. I remember feeling glad that at least it was over. I didn’t have to be scared anymore. But then I—”
He broke off. His entire body was shaking.
“You can stop,” Rin said, suddenly ashamed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made you.”
But Dulin shook his head and kept going. “But then I woke up in the field, and I saw the sun shining over me, and I realized I’d survived. But they were piling the bodies on top of me then, and I didn’t want them to realize I was alive. So I lay still. They kept stacking the bodies, one after the other, until I could barely breathe. And then they packed on the dirt.”
A pang of pain shot through Rin’s palm, and she realized her fingernails had dug grooves into her skin. She forced them to relax before they drew blood.
“They never saw you?” she asked.
“They weren’t looking. They’re not thorough. They don’t care. They just wanted it over with.”
The unspoken implication, of course, was that Dulin might not have been the only one. Rather, it was more likely there had been other victims, injured but not dead, who toppled into an early grave and were slowly suffocated by dirt and the weight of bodies.
Rin exhaled slowly.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Altan was appeased. This was her answer. This justified everything she’d done. This was the face of her enemy.
Kitay could spout on and on about ethics. She didn’t care. She needed revenge. She wanted her army.
Dulin’s shoulders started to heave. He was sobbing.
Rin reached out and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “Hey. You’re all right—it’s all right.”
“It’s not. I shouldn’t be the only one, I should be dead—”
“Don’t say that.”
His face contorted. “But it shouldn’t have been me.”
“I used to hate myself for living, too,” she said. “I didn’t think it was fair that I’d survived. That others had died in my place.”
“It’s not fair,” Dulin whispered. “I should be in the ground with them.”
“And there will be days you’ll wish you were.” Rin didn’t understand why she needed so urgently to comfort this boy, this stranger, only that she wished someone had told her the same thing months before. “It doesn’t go away. It never will. But when it hurts, lean into it. It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave.”
Life returned to Tikany that night.
Rin had retreated early to the general’s complex, intent on falling asleep the moment her face hit her mattress. But then a knock came at the door, and she opened it to find not the sentry or messenger she’d expected but a circle of women, eyes tilted sheepishly down, nudging one another as if daring someone else to be the first to speak.
“What is it?” Rin asked warily.
“Come with us,” said the woman at the front.
Rin blinked at them, puzzled. “Where?”
The woman’s face broke into a smile. “To dance.”
Then Rin remembered that despite everything, this day had been a liberation, and liberations deserved to be celebrated.
So she followed them into the town center, where a crowd of hundreds had formed, holding bamboo torches and floating lanterns up against the moonless night. Drums beat incessantly, accompanying lilting flute melodies that seemed to come from everywhere, while firecrackers went off every few seconds like musical punctuation.
Dancers whirled in the center of the square. There were dozens of them, mostly young girls, all moving without choreography or order. None of this had been rehearsed. It couldn’t possibly have been. Each dancer moved from memory, pulling together fragments of performances from earlier times, moving for the sheer joy of being alive and free.
It should have been an utter mess. It was the most beautiful thing Rin had ever seen.
The women entreated Rin to join. But she refused, preferring to sit down on an overturned barrel and watch. She’d never joined the dances when she’d lived here. Those dances were for rich girls, joyful girls, girls whose marriages were events to be celebrated and not feared. They weren’t for war orphans. Rin had only ever watched. She wanted desperately to join them now, but she was afraid she wouldn’t know how to move.
The drums sped up. The dancers became a hypnotic vision, ankles and arms moving faster and faster until they seemed a blur in the firelight, moving to a tempo that felt in tune with Rin’s own pulse. She blinked, and for a moment she saw a different dance, heard a different song. She saw brown bodies dancing by the campfire, singing words that she’d heard a long time ago in a language that she couldn’t speak but could almost remember.
She’d been seeing this vision since the first time she’d met the Phoenix. She knew this vision ended in death.
But this time the dancing bodies did not turn into skeletons, but instead remained furiously, resolutely, alive. Here we are, they said. Watch us thrive. We’ve escaped the past, and we own the future.
“Hey.”
Rin blinked, and the vision disappeared. Souji stood before her, holding two mugs of millet wine. He held one out to her. “Mind if I sit?”
She shifted to make room for him. They clinked their mugs and drank. Rin sloshed the millet wine around her tongue, savoring the heady, sour tang.
“I’m surprised you haven’t disappeared into an alley with one of them.” Rin nodded to the dancers. Women seemed attracted to Souji like moths to a flame; Rin had seen him disappear into his tent with at least eight different companions since they’d left Ruijin.
“Still trying to pick,” Souji said. “Where’s your better half?”