The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)

by R.F. Kuang

Everything about Auntie Fang was raw: her expression, an open display of impatience and irritation; her fingers, red from hours of cleaning and laundering; her voice, hoarse from screaming at Rin; at her son, Kesegi; at her hired smugglers; at Uncle Fang, lying inert in his smoke-filled room.

The Nikara Empire had proven itself historically unconquerable. But it was also unstable and disunited, and the current spell of peace held no promise of durability. If there was one thing Rin had learned about her country’s history, it was that the only permanent thing about the Nikara Empire was war.

Sinegard the city was smothering, confusing, and frightening. But Sinegard Academy was beautiful beyond description.

The Warlords like to claim that the Keju makes Nikan a meritocracy, but the system is designed to keep the poor and illiterate in their place. You’re offending them with your very presence.”

But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.

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.

The national quest to modernize and mobilize entails a faith in one’s ability to control world order, and when that happens, you lose your connection with the gods. When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.

Once an empire has become convinced of its worldview, anything that evidences the contrary must be erased.

“The point of every lesson does not have to be to destroy,” he said. “I taught you Lore to help you find balance. I taught you so that you would understand how the universe is more than what we perceive. I didn’t teach you so that you could weaponize it.”

Fear was impossible to eradicate. But so was the will to survive.

She didn’t have the poppy seed, but she didn’t need to call the Phoenix in this moment. She had the torch and she had the pain, and that was enough.

She understood, now, why Chaghan and Qara had to be two halves of a whole. Qara was grounded, material, fully made of earth. To call them anchor twins was a misnomer—she alone was the anchor to her ethereal brother, who belonged more in the realm of spirit than he did in a world of flesh and blood.

You think calling the gods is like summoning a dog from the yard into the house. But you can’t conceive of the dream world as a physical place. The gods are painters. Your material world is a canvas. And this Divinatory is an angle from which we can see the colors on the palette. This isn’t really a place, it’s a perspective. But you’re interpreting it as a room because your human mind can’t process anything else.”

He took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly, like an opium smoker, like a man who had just filled his lungs with a drug.

Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant.

Altan had orders now, a mission, a singular purpose. He didn’t have to hold back anymore. He had been let off his leash. Altan was going to take his anger to a final, terrible conclusion.

But now, she had seen and suffered too much. The Empire didn’t need someone reasonable. It needed someone mad enough to try to save it.

The death of one soldier was a tragedy, because she could imagine the pain he felt at the very end: the hopes he had, the finest details like the way he put on his uniform, whether he had a family, whether he had kids whom he told he would see right after he came back from the war. His life was an entire world constructed around him, and the passing of that was a tragedy. But she could not possibly multiply that by thousands. That kind of thinking did not compute. The scale was unimaginable. So she didn’t bother to try. The part of her that was capable of considering that no longer worked. Those weren’t lives.

“They were monsters!” Rin shrieked. “They were not human!” Kitay opened his mouth. No sound came out. He closed it. When he finally spoke again, it sounded as if he was close to tears. “Have you ever considered,” he said slowly, “that that was exactly what they thought of us?”

He held out his hand. She grasped it, and the drowned land and the ash-choked sky bore witness to the pact between Seer and Speerly.

She was no victim of destiny. She was the last Speerly, commander of the Cike, and a shaman who called the gods to do her bidding. And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.