The Burning God recap

Maimed and cast out, Rin returns to Nikan's south and turns its militias into an army, clearing the stranded Mugenese occupation and then marching north against the Dragon Republic, which now governs the country in partnership with the Hesperians and which Nezha commands in the field. Betrayed by the southern commander whose peasant regiments carried her, Rin is driven back and gambles on the Chuluu Korikh, where she finds her old master Jiang and the truth about him: Jiang, the deposed empress Daji and the Dragon Emperor Yin Riga are the Trifecta, the three shamans who made the Empire. Rin frees Riga as a weapon and he proves ungovernable; he is killed, and the Trifecta ends with him. Rin then breaks the Republic in the field, but by then she cannot stop, and means to burn everything that will not submit. Kitay, bound to her, and Nezha, who has fought her the whole war, conclude that she has to be stopped; Rin reaches the same conclusion herself and chooses to die, leaving Nezha the ruined country.

Previously: Rin, a war orphan from Nikan's south, won a place at the Sinegard military academy, was apprenticed to the master of Lore, and learned that the old gods are real and can be reached by shamans at the cost of their sanity. Commissioned into the Cike during the Federation's invasion, she served under Altan Trengsin, the last Speerly, through the fall of Khurdalain and the massacre of Golyn Niis. After Altan died freeing her from a Federation research station on Speer, and after she learned that Empress Su Daji had sold Speer to the Federation to end the previous war, Rin called the Phoenix and destroyed the Federation's home islands and their entire population. A year later her attempt to kill Daji failed and cost her access to her god. Recruited by Warlord Yin Vaisra, she fought for his Hesperian-backed Dragon Republic; the campaign was broken at the Red Cliffs by the loosed wind shaman Feylen. Bound at last to an anchor - Kitay, whose life is now tied to hers - she recovered her fire and won the battle of Arlong, and was betrayed immediately: the Hesperians' price for recognising the Republic was Rin herself. She escaped maimed, losing her left hand, taking Kitay, Venka, the last of the Cike and the captive Daji with her, and went south to raise an army from the people both sides had always spent.

Rin reaches the south with Kitay, Venka, the last of the Cike and the deposed empress Daji, and finds the region occupied. Federation soldiers stranded in Nikan when their homeland was destroyed have entrenched themselves across the southern countryside, and the Southern Coalition - an alliance of local militias under warlords the Empire never armed - has been fighting them alone and without supply. Rin offers the Coalition the one thing it lacks: a shaman. In Tikany, the town she grew up in, she finds the household that raised her and a place hollowed out by occupation and by the war she helped end. The southerners, told for generations that they are worth nothing, take to her as something out of their own stories, which is more useful to her than the warlords' cooperation and considerably harder to control.

Rin turns the Coalition's militias into an army and takes over its direction, with Kitay running supply and Souji delivering the peasant recruits who make up its strength. The Mugenese occupation of the south is broken; Rin's methods are total and she does not take prisoners. With the south cleared she turns north against the Dragon Republic, which now governs most of Nikan from Arlong in partnership with the Hesperians, whose ships, guns and airships sit in Nikara harbours. Nezha commands the Republic's armies in the field. The war between them is fought over the same river provinces already ruined twice, and Rin's advantage - a shaman who can burn an army in an afternoon - is answered by a Republic with a shaman of its own and a foreign ally with better machines.

The northern campaign becomes a contest Rin can win in the field and cannot finish. The Republic gives ground, the Hesperians commit more openly, and their airships make her fire less decisive than it was. Daji, travelling with the army, begins trading what she knows for her usefulness: the Empire was not inherited but made, by three shamans who drove the Federation out two generations ago and then divided the country between them, and the empress Rin has spent years hating is only one of the three. What became of the other two, and what Rin's own master had to do with them, is the price Daji sets on her cooperation. Meanwhile the army grows past Rin's ability to feed it, the countryside she is liberating is starving, and Kitay's figures say she is losing the war she appears to be winning.

Rin's position collapses from the inside. Souji, whose peasant regiments are the bulk of her strength, has been dealing with the Republic behind her, and the betrayal costs her a battle, most of an army, and several of the people who have followed her since the Cike. Nezha's forces and the Hesperians take the initiative, and Rin is driven back with a fraction of what she commanded. What is left of her campaign depends on finding power the Republic cannot match, and the only candidates are the shamans still sealed alive inside the Chuluu Korikh - the mountain that produced Feylen the last time anyone opened it. Daji, it becomes clear, has been steering her toward exactly that from the day they left Arlong.

Rin, Kitay and Daji reach the Chuluu Korikh and open it. Inside is Jiang, Rin's master from Sinegard, sealed in the stone for years and barely coherent, and with him the truth about who he is. Jiang, Daji and a third shaman, Yin Riga, are the Trifecta: the three who drove the Federation out two generations ago and built the Nikara Empire on the strength of it. Riga ruled it as the Dragon Emperor, Daji held the throne after him, and Jiang sealed himself away, so that the eccentric gardener Rin knew at Sinegard was a man who had deliberately unmade his own memory. Riga is inside the mountain too, sealed there by Jiang, and both of the others want him back. Rin, needing a weapon the Republic cannot answer, agrees to release him.

Freeing Riga is a catastrophe. The Dragon Emperor is exactly what the histories describe - overwhelming, magnetic and without any limit at all - and he intends to take the country back and use everyone in it, Rin included, as material. Daji cannot refuse him and Jiang can barely resist him. Riga's return threatens the Republic as much as it threatens Rin, and Rin and Nezha end up briefly on the same side against him. Riga is killed and the Trifecta ends with him, at a cost that leaves the survivors of the three broken. Rin comes out of it with her god, her army and no living authority over her whatsoever. The war with the Republic resumes at once, and the Hesperians, having watched what Nikara shamans do to one another, have concluded that the country must be administered rather than allied with.

Rin wins her war and cannot stop fighting it. With Riga gone she breaks the Republic's armies in the field and comes within reach of ruling what is left of Nikan - and by then her intentions have run past the war itself, to the Hesperian foothold, to the provinces that resisted her, and to anything else that will not submit. Kitay, who as her anchor feels every decision she makes, concludes that she will not stop and that nobody outside her can make her; Nezha reaches the same conclusion from the other side, and the two of them act together. Confronted with what they have done and with what remains of the country she fought for, Rin agrees with them. She chooses her own death, and dies by the fire she spent the whole war learning to command. Nezha is left to hold together a country stripped by two invasions and a civil war, under the shadow of a foreign power it cannot expel, and the south's revolution ends with the woman who led it dead by her own decision.

Rin ends the war on the winning side of it. Riga is dead, the Trifecta is finished, the Dragon Republic's armies are broken, and the southern army she raised has effectively taken Nikan. What she does not have is any reason to stop. Her plans run past the Hesperian foothold to the provinces that opposed her, and she is entirely capable of carrying them out. Kitay, bound to her as her anchor and so unable to be absent from any decision she makes, concludes that she will never stop and that nothing outside her can stop her; Nezha, who has fought her since they were schoolchildren, reaches the same conclusion from the other side. The two act together against her. When Rin understands what they have done, she agrees with the reasoning: she chooses her own death rather than be stopped by anyone else, and dies by the fire she spent the whole war learning to command. Nezha is left to govern what remains - a country invaded twice and burned repeatedly, its population devastated, its independence conditional on foreigners it can no longer expel. The uprising Rin led destroyed the old order and cost her her life, and the book closes on that cost stated plainly rather than settled.