The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)

by R.F. Kuang

Success required sacrifice. Sacrifice meant pain. Pain meant success.

She made herself miserable. But then, all of her options led to misery. She could run away. She could get on a boat and escape to another city. She could run drugs for another opium smuggler. She could, if it came down to it, return to Tikany, marry, and hope no one found out that she couldn’t have children until it was too late. But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.

She could be brilliant, could be worth someone’s attention. She adored praise—craved it, needed it, and realized she found relief only when she finally had it.

“I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.”

Jiang moved through the world like he didn’t belong there. He acted as if he came from a country of near-humans, people who acted almost exactly like Nikara but not quite, and his behavior was that of a confused visitor who had stopped bothering with trying to imitate those around him. He didn’t belong—not simply in Sinegard, but in the very idea of a physical earth. He acted like the rules of nature did not apply to him. Perhaps they didn’t.

“All warfare is based on deception.”

“You’re too reckless. You hold grudges, you cultivate your rage and let it explode, and you’re careless about what you’re taught. Training you would be a mistake.”

Youth, Rin thought, was an amplification of beauty. It was a filter; it could mask what one was lacking, enhance even the most average features. But beauty without youth was dangerous. The Empress’s beauty did not require the soft fullness of young lips, the rosy red of young cheeks, the tenderness of young skin. This beauty cut deep, like a sharpened crystal. This beauty was immortal.

She would only remember those eyes, deep pools of black, eyes that made her feel as if she were suffocating, just like Master Jiang’s did, but if this was drowning then Rin didn’t want air, didn’t need it so long as she could keep gazing into those glittering obsidian wells.

“It serves to sever you from the material world,” Jiang answered. “How do you expect to reach the spirit realm when you’re obsessing over the things in front of you?

learned how breath moved through her body as if through an empty house. Learned how to stack her vertebrae one by one on top of each other so her spine formed a perfectly straight line, an unobstructed channel. But her still body became heavy, and as it became heavy it became easier and easier to discard it, and to drift upward, weightless, into that place she could glimpse only from behind closed eyelids.

On the thirteenth day she had a horrible sensation of being trapped, as if buried within stone, as if covered in mud. She was so light, so weightless, but she had nowhere to go; she rebounded around inside this bizarre vessel called a body like a caught firefly.

On the fifteenth day she became convinced that her consciousness had expanded to encompass the totality of life on the planet—the germination of the smallest flower to the eventual death of the largest tree. She saw an endless process of energy transfer, growing and dying, and she was part of every stage of it. She saw bursts of color and animals that probably didn’t exist. She did not see visions, precisely, because visions would have been far more vivid and concrete. But nor were the apparitions merely thoughts. They were like dreams, an uncertain plane of realness somewhere in between, and it was only by washing out every other thought from her mind that she could perceive them clearly.

To commune with the gods was to walk the dream world, the world of spirit. It was to relinquish that which she was and become one with the fundamental state of things. The space in limbo where matter and actions were not yet determined, the fluctuating darkness where the physical world had not yet been dreamed into existence.

“We don’t die so much as we return to the void. We dissolve. We lose our ego. We change from being just one thing to becoming everything. Most of us, at least.”

She pulled the dark hood off her head and shook out a mass of long, shimmering hair. Hair like obsidian. Skin of a mineral whiteness that shone like the moon itself. Lips like freshly spilled blood. The Empress Su Daji was on this ship.

“What does it matter? They’re coming, and we’re staying, and at the end of the day whoever is alive is the side that wins. War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”

Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.

Fear bubbled in the back of her throat, so thick and tangible that she almost choked on it. Fear made her fingers tremble violently so that she almost dropped her sword. Fear made her forget how to breathe. She had to force air into her lungs, close her eyes, and count to herself as she inhaled and exhaled. Fear made her dizzy and nauseated, made her want to vomit over the side of the wall. It’s just a physiological reaction, she told herself. It’s just in your mind. You can control it. You can make it go away.

War was a nightmare. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream and hide behind someone, behind one of the soldiers, wanted to whimper, I am scared, I want to wake up from this dream, please save me.

Her voice was like a plucked string on a table harp, sharp and penetrating and beautiful all at once.

“The easiest shortcut to the state is anger. Build on your anger. Don’t ever let go of that anger. Rage gives you power. Caution does not.”

He was so beautiful then, standing right in the space of the road where a beam of moonlight fell across his face, illuminating one side and casting long shadows on the other. He looked like glazed porcelain, preserved glass. He was a sculptor’s approximation of a person, not human himself. He can’t be real, she thought. A boy made of flesh and bone could not be so painfully lovely, so free of any blemish or flaw.

The onset was immediate and crushing, like a dark wave of ocean water had suddenly slammed on top of her. Her nervous system broke down completely; she lost the ability to sit up and crumpled at Chaghan’s feet.

“When they were cutting my squadron down, I looked into the eyes of one of them. I thought I could make him recognize me as a fellow man. As a person, not just an opponent. And he stared back at me, and I realized I couldn’t connect with him at all. There was nothing human in those eyes.”

He didn’t seem to hear her at first. Rin crossed the room and slowly knelt down next to him. The smell was nauseatingly familiar: opium nuggets, sweet like rotted fruit. It gave her memories of Tikany, of living corpses wasting away in drug dens. Finally, Altan looked in her direction. His face twisted into a droll, uninterested smile, and even in the ruins of Golyn Niis, even in this city of corpses, Rin thought that the sight of Altan then was the most terrible thing she’d ever seen.

She understood, now, why Altan needed opium. Small wonder he was addicted. Smoking the pipe had to be the only time that he was not consumed with his misery, with scars that would never heal. The haze induced by the smoke was the only time that he could feel nothing, the only time that he could forget.

Altan blew out a long stream of smoke. He didn’t look like a human so much as he did a simple vessel for the fumes, an inanimate extension of the pipe.

“Beautiful,” he marveled in a low voice. The fire reflected in his hungry eyes, and for a moment made him seem as if he, too, possessed the scarlet eyes of the Speerlies. “Shiro!” Altan roared. The doctor did not move as Altan advanced. Rather he lowered his crossbow, held his arms out to Altan as if welcoming a son into his embrace. Altan grabbed his tormentor by the face. And squeezed. Flames poured from his hands, white-hot flames, surrounding the doctor’s head like a crown. First Altan’s hands left fingerprints of black against around Shiro’s temples, and then the heat burned through bone and Altan’s fingers bored holes through Shiro’s skull. Shiro’s eyes bulged. His arms twitched madly. He dropped the crossbow. Altan pressed Shiro’s skull between his hands. Shiro’s head split open with a wet crack.

The stars became torches, and the torches became fire, and she thought she saw her god.

Then Rin felt herself jerked back by a force infinitely greater than she was; her head flung back, arms stretched out to the sides. She had become a conduit. An open door without a gatekeeper. The power came not from her but from the terrible source on the other side; she was merely the portal that let it into this world. She erupted in a column of flame.

I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible.