The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)

by R.F. Kuang

Well, fuck the heavenly order of things. If getting married to a gross old man was her preordained role on this earth, then Rin was determined to rewrite it.

She woke up chanting classical analects, which terrified Kesegi, who thought she had been possessed by ghosts. And in a way, she had been—she dreamed of ancient poems by long-dead voices and woke up shaking from nightmares where she’d gotten them wrong.

She had bribed a teacher. She had stolen opium. She had burned herself, lied to her foster parents, abandoned her responsibilities at the store, and broken a marriage deal. And she was going to Sinegard.

“Of course they don’t,” said Tutor Feyrik. “You’re a war orphan. You’re a southerner. You weren’t supposed to pass the Keju. 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 if anyone can survive here, it’s you. Don’t forget what you did to get here.”

“Power dictates acceptability,” Kitay mused. “If the capital had been built in Tikany, I’m sure we’d be running around dark as wood bark.”

But it was so clear why. Nezha was a Sinegardian noble, the son of a Warlord, and she was a country girl with no connections and no status. Expelling Nezha would have been troublesome and politically contentious. He mattered. She did not.

No—they couldn’t just do this to her. They might think they could sweep her away like rubbish, but she didn’t have to lie down and take it. She had come from nothing. She wasn’t going back to nothing.

“So you’re not dying, sweetheart, your body is just shedding your uterine lining.” Rin’s jaw had been hanging open for a solid minute. “What the fuck?”

Me fr

Someone walked inside and paused in front of her. “You’re insane,” said Venka. Rin glared up at her, blood dripping from her mouth, and smiled.

She had now been painfully reminded that her place here was not permanent.

But if the Keju had taught her anything, it was that pain was the price of success. And she hadn’t burned herself in a long time.

She threw herself into her studies. Classes became like warfare, each interaction a battle. With every raised hand and every homework assignment, she competed against Nezha and Venka and every other Sinegardian. She had to prove that she deserved to be kept on, that she merited further training.

She began to burn herself again. She found release in the pain; it was comforting, familiar. It was a trade-off she was well used to. Success required sacrifice. Sacrifice meant pain. Pain meant success.

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

She realized, too, that she felt about praise the way that addicts felt about opium. Each time she received a fresh infusion of flattery, she could think only about how to get more of it. Achievement was a high. Failure was worse than withdrawal. Good test scores brought only momentary relief and temporary pride—she basked in her grace period of several hours before she began to panic about her next test. She craved praise so deeply that she felt it in her bones. And just like an addict, she did whatever she could to get it.

She had been grasping at straws when she had started to speak, but the moment she said it, her answer sounded startlingly plausible to her.

You know, you are astoundingly bright.”

Rin was going to have to teach herself.

“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.”

“You darling child,” he said, spinning toward her. “You brilliant child.” Rin’s face split into a grin. Fuck it, she thought, and leaped up to embrace him. He picked her up and swung her through the air, around and around among the kaleidoscopically colorful mushrooms.

But of course Jun had never punished him—not as severely as he deserved, anyhow. Why would something so mundane as rules apply to the son of the Dragon Warlord?

“Because I can,” she said. “Because he thought he could get rid of me. Because I want to break his stupid face.”

But she was not here merely to survive. She was here to win.

Pain was a message she was ignoring, to be felt later. No—pain led to success.

She could choose between Strategy and Lore. She pledged Lore.

“I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”

“Because then I might think they’re human. And they’re not human. We’re talking about the people who gave opium to toddlers the last time they invaded. The people who massacred Speer.” “Maybe they’re more human than we realize,” said Kitay. “Has anyone ever stopped to ask what the Federation want? Why is it that they must fight us?”

“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.”

“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.”

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.

In that moment she realized that all this time she had been playing at being a soldier, playing at bravery. But now, on the eve of the battle, she could not pretend anymore.

War was not a game, where one fought for honor and admiration, where masters would keep her from sustaining any real harm. War was a nightmare.

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

It wasn’t as if she could read his mind. She had simply spent so much time observing him that she knew exactly how he was going to attack. They were like a well-oiled machine. They were a spontaneously coordinated dance. They weren’t two parts of a whole, not quite, but they came close. If they hadn’t spent so much time hating each other, Rin thought, they might have trained together. Backs to each other, swords at the enemy, they fought with savage desperation.

Nezha nodded curtly in response to her unspoken question. Together? Together.

“Jiang Ziya,” said the general. “So you live after all.” “Do I know you?” Jiang asked.

It’s not a fever, Rin wanted to say, it’s a god.

“Hi,” said Altan Trengsin. “What was that about losers and rejects?”

My only god is science. Combine six parts sulfur, six parts saltpeter, and one part birthwort herb, and you’ve got fire powder. Formulaic. Dependable. Doesn’t change. I understand the appeal, I really do, but I like having my mind to myself.”

Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics.

She didn’t want to be possessed. She wanted to remain free. But the cognitive dissonance clashed in her head. Three sets of countervailing orders competed for priority in her mind—Jiang’s mandate to empty her mind, Altan’s insistence that she hone her anger as a razor blade, and her own fear of letting the fire rip through her again, because once it began she didn’t know how to stop it. But she couldn’t just stand there.

It was utter carnage. It was beautiful.

“I think Tearza was wise. And I think that she was a bad ruler. Shamans should know when to resist the power of the gods. That is wisdom. But rulers should do everything in their power to save their country. That is responsibility. If you hold the fate of the country in your hands, if you have accepted your obligation to your people, then your life ceases to be your own. Once you accept the title of ruler, your choices are made for you.

But Rin was looking past the flag at a face in the ranks—a boy, a beautiful boy with the palest skin and lovely almond eyes, walking on his own two legs as if his spine had never been severed. As if he had never been impaled on a general’s halberd. As if he could sense her gaze, Nezha looked up. Their eyes met under the moonlight. Rin’s heart leaped. The Dragon Warlord had responded to the call. The Seventh Division was here. “That’s not a trap,” she said.

“You can’t kill me,” Altan hissed. “You love me.” “I don’t love you,” Rin said. “And I can kill anything.”

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.

He doesn’t get to do this to you, said a voice in Rin’s head. He doesn’t get to terrorize you. She had not come this far to crouch like this in fear. Not to Altan. Not to anyone. She stood up, even as she reached somewhere inside herself—somewhere spiteful and dark and horrible—and opened the channel to the entity she already knew was waiting for her summons.

Altan’s fire drew as its source an unending hate. It was a deep, slow burn. She could almost taste it, the venomous intent, the ancient misery, and it horrified her. How could one person hate so much? What had happened to him?

Her expression was as unhinged as it had been that day when they fought in the ring. “I don’t need your pity. I need you to kill them for me. You have to kill them for me,” Venka hissed. “Swear it. Swear on your blood that you will burn them.” “Venka, I can’t . . .” “I know you can.” Venka’s voice climbed in pitch. “I heard what they said about you. You have to burn them. Whatever it takes. Swear it on your life. Swear it. Swear it for me.” Her eyes were like shattered glass. It took all of Rin’s courage to meet her gaze. “I swear.”