The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  “Yes, sir.” Nezha rose to his feet, tossed his staff at the weapons rack, and stalked off.

  Jun then turned his attention to Rin. Blood dripped down her face, streaming from her nose, trickling down her forehead. She wiped clumsily at her chin, too nervous to meet Jun’s eyes.

  He loomed above her. “You. Get up.”

  She struggled to her feet. Her knee screamed in protest.

  “Get that pathetic look off your face. You won’t receive any sympathy from me.”

  She didn’t expect his sympathy. But neither was she expecting what came next.

  “That was the most miserable display I’ve seen from a student since I left the Militia,” Jun said. “Your fundamentals are horrific. You move like a paraplegic. What did I just witness? Have you been asleep for the past month?”

  He moved too fast. I couldn’t keep up. I don’t have years of training like he does. Even as the words came to her mind, they sounded like the pathetic excuses they were. She opened her mouth and closed it, too stunned to respond.

  “I hate students like you,” Jun continued relentlessly. The sounds of staves clashing against one another had long died away. The entire class was listening. “You skip into Sinegard from your little village, thinking that this is it—you’ve made it, you’re going to make Mommy and Daddy proud. Maybe you were the smartest kid in your village. Maybe you were the best test taker your tutor has ever seen! But guess what? It takes more than memorizing a few Classics to be a martial artist.

  “Every year we get someone like you, some country bumpkin who thinks that just because they were good at taking some test, they deserve my time and attention. Understand this, southerner. The exam proves nothing. Discipline and competence—those are the only things that matter at this school. That boy”—Jun jerked his thumb in the direction Nezha had gone—“may be an ass, but he has the makings of a commander in him. You, on the other hand, are just peasant trash.”

  The entire class was staring at her now. Kitay’s eyes were wide with sympathy. Even Venka looked stunned.

  Rin’s ears rang, drowning out Jun’s words. She felt so small. She felt as if she might crumble into dust. Don’t let me cry. Her eyes throbbed from the pressure of forcing back her tears. Please don’t let me cry.

  “I do not tolerate troublemakers in my class,” Jun said. “I do not have the happy privilege to expel you, but as Combat Master I can do this: From now on you are banned from the practice facilities. You do not touch the weapons rack. You do not train in the studio during off-hours. You do not set foot in here while I am teaching a class. You do not ask older students to teach you. I don’t need you causing any more trouble in my studio. Now get out of my sight.”

  Chapter 5

  Rin stumbled out the courtyard door. Jun’s words echoed over and over in her head. She was suddenly dizzy; her legs wobbled and her vision went temporarily black. She slid down against the stone wall, hugging her knees to her chest while blood pumped furiously in her ears.

  Then the pressure in her chest bubbled up and she cried for the first time since orientation, sobbing with her face pressed into her hands so that no one could hear.

  She cried from the pain. She cried from the embarrassment. But mostly she cried because those two long years of studying for the Keju hadn’t meant a thing. She was years behind her peers at Sinegard. She had no martial arts experience, much less an inherited art—even one that looked as stupid as Nezha’s. She hadn’t trained since childhood, like Venka. She wasn’t brilliant, didn’t have an eidetic memory like Kitay.

  And the worst thing was, now she had no way to make up for it. Without Jun’s tutelage, frustrating though it was, Rin knew she didn’t have a chance of making it past the Trials. No master would choose to take on an apprentice who couldn’t fight. Sinegard was primarily a military academy. If she couldn’t hold her own on the battlefield, then what was the point?

  Jun’s punishment was as good as an expulsion. She was done. It was over. She’d be back in Tikany within a year.

  But Nezha attacked first.

  The more she considered this, the faster her despair crystallized into anger. Nezha had tried to kill her. She had acted only in self-defense. Why had she been thrown out of the class, when Nezha had gotten off with little more than a slap on the wrist?

  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.

  The courtyard doors opened as class let out. Her classmates hurried past her, pretending they didn’t see her. Only Kitay hung behind.

  “Jun will come around,” he said.

  Rin took his proffered hand and stood up in silence. She wiped at her face with her sleeve and sniffed.

  “I mean it,” Kitay said. He placed a hand on her shoulder. “He only suspended Nezha for a week.”

  She shrugged his hand off violently, still wiping furiously at her eyes. “That’s because Nezha was born with a gold ingot in his mouth. Nezha got off because his father’s got half the faculty here by their balls. Nezha’s from Sinegard, so Nezha’s special, Nezha belongs here.”

  “Come on, you belong here too, you passed the Keju—”

  “The Keju doesn’t mean anything,” Rin said scathingly. “The Keju is a ruse to keep uneducated peasants right where they’ve always been. You slip past the Keju, they’ll find a way to expel you anyway. The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”

  “Rin, that’s not true.”

  “It is!” She slammed her fist against the wall. “But they’re not going to get rid of me like this. Not this easily. I won’t let them. I won’t.”

  She swayed suddenly. Her vision pulsed black and then cleared.

  “Great Tortoise,” said Kitay. “Are you all right?”

  She whirled on him. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re sweating.”

  Sweating? She wasn’t sweating. “I’m fine,” she said. Her voice sounded inordinately loud; it rang in her ears. Was she shouting?

  “Rin, calm down.”

  “I’m calm! I’m extremely calm!”

  She was far from fucking calm. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to scream at someone. Anger pulsed through her like a wave of heat.

  Then her stomach erupted with a pain like she had been stabbed. She gasped sharply and clutched at her midriff. She felt as if someone were sliding a jagged stone through her innards.

  Kitay grasped at her shoulders. “Rin? Rin?”

  She felt the sudden urge to vomit. Had Nezha’s blows given her internal damage?

  Oh, fantastic, she thought. Now you’re humiliated and injured, too. Wait until they watch you limp into class; Nezha’s going to love that.

  She shoved Kitay away. “I don’t need— Leave me alone!”

  “But you’re—”

  “I’m fine!”

  Rin awoke that night to a deeply confusing sticky sensation.

  Her sleeping pants felt cold, the way her pants had felt when she’d been little and peed in her sleep. But her legs were too sticky to be covered in urine. Heart pounding, she scrambled out of her bunk and lit a lamp with shaking fingers.

  She glanced down at herself and almost shrieked out loud. The soft candlelight illuminated pools of crimson everywhere. She was covered in an enormous amount of blood.

  She fought to still her panic, to force her drowsy mind to think rationally. She felt no acute pain, only a deep discomfort and great irritation. She hadn’t been stabbed. She hadn’t somehow ejected all of her inner organs. A fresh flow of blo
od trickled down her leg that moment, and she traced it to the source with soaked fingers.

  Then she was just confused.

  Going back to sleep was out of the question. She wiped herself off with the parts of the sheet that weren’t soaked in blood, jammed a piece of cloth between her legs, and ran out of the dormitory to get to the infirmary before the rest of the campus woke.

  Rin reached the infirmary in a sweaty, bloody mess, halfway to a nervous breakdown. The physician on call took one look at her and called his female assistant over. “One of those situations,” he said.

  “Of course.” The assistant looked like she was trying hard not to laugh. Rin did not see anything remotely funny about the situation.

  The assistant took Rin behind a curtain, handed her a change of clothes and a towel, and then sat her down with a detailed diagram of the female body.

  It was a testament, perhaps, to the lack of sexual education in Tikany that Rin didn’t learn about menstruation until that morning. Over the next fifteen minutes, the physician’s assistant explained in detail the changes going on in Rin’s body, pointing to various places on the diagram and making some very vivid gestures with her hands.

  “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?”

  She returned to the bunks with a deeply uncomfortable girdle strapped under her pants and a sock filled with heated uncooked rice grains. She placed the sock on her lower torso to dull the aching pain, but the cramping was so bad that she couldn’t crawl out of bed before classes started.

  “Do you want me to get someone?” Niang asked.

  “No,” Rin mumbled. “I’m fine. Just go.”

  She lay in bed for the entire day, despairing at all the class she was missing.

  I’ll be all right. She chanted it over and over to herself so that she wouldn’t panic. One missed day couldn’t hurt. Pupils got sick all the time. Kitay would lend her his notes if she asked. Surely she could catch up.

  But this was going to happen every month. Every gods-damned month her uterus would tear itself to pieces, send flashes of rage through her entire body, and make her bloated, clumsy, light-headed, and worst of all, weak. No wonder women rarely remained at Sinegard.

  She needed to fix this problem.

  If only it weren’t so deeply embarrassing. She needed help. Venka seemed like someone who would have already begun menstruating. But Rin would have died rather than ask her how she’d managed it. Instead, she mumbled her questions to Kureel one night after she was sure Niang and Venka had gone to sleep.

  Kureel laughed out loud in the darkness. “Just wear the girdle to class. You’ll be fine. You get used to the cramping.”

  “But how often do I have to change it? What if it leaks in class? What if it gets on my uniform? What if someone sees?”

  “Calm down,” said Kureel. “The first time is hard, but you’ll adapt to it. Keep track of your cycle, then you’ll know when it’s coming on.”

  This wasn’t what Rin wanted to hear. “There’s no way to just stop it forever?”

  “Not unless you cut out your womb,” Kureel scoffed, then paused at the look on Rin’s face. “I was kidding. That’s not actually possible.”

  “It’s possible.” Arda, who was a Medicine apprentice, interrupted them quietly. “There’s a procedure they offer at the infirmary. At your age, it wouldn’t even require open surgery. They’ll give you a concoction. It’ll stop the process pretty much indefinitely.”

  “Seriously?” Hope flared in Rin’s chest. She looked between the two apprentices. “Well, what’s stopping you from taking it?”

  They both looked at her incredulously.

  “It destroys your womb,” Arda said finally. “Basically kills one of your inner organs. You won’t be able to have children after.”

  “And it hurts like a bitch,” Kureel said. “It’s not worth it.”

  But I don’t want children, Rin thought. I want to stay here.

  If that procedure could stop her menstruating, if it could help her remain at Sinegard, it was worth it.

  Once her bleeding stopped, Rin went back to the infirmary and told the physician what she wanted. He did not argue with her; in fact, he seemed pleased.

  “I’ve been trying to convince the girls here to do this for years,” he said. “None of them listen. Small wonder so few of you make it past your first year. They should make this mandatory.”

  He made her wait while he disappeared into the back room, mixing together the requisite medicines. Ten minutes later he returned with a steaming cup.

  “Drink this.”

  Rin took the cup. It was dark porcelain, so she couldn’t tell the color of the liquid inside. She wondered if she should feel anything. This was significant, wasn’t it? There would be no children for her. No one would agree to marry her after this. Shouldn’t that matter?

  No. No, of course not. If she’d wanted to grow fat with squealing brats, she would have stayed in Tikany. She had come to Sinegard to escape that future. Why hesitate now?

  She searched herself for any twinge of regret. Nothing. She felt absolutely nothing, just as she had felt nothing the day she left Tikany, watching the dusty town recede forever into the distance.

  “It’ll hurt,” the physician warned. “Much worse than it hurt when you were menstruating. Your womb will self-destruct over the next few hours. After this, it will stop fulfilling its function. When your body has matured fully, you can get a surgery to have your womb removed altogether, but this should solve your problem in the interim. You’ll be out of class for at least a week after this. But afterward, you’ll be free forever. Now, I’m required to ask you one more time if you’re certain this is what you want.”

  “I’m certain.” Rin didn’t want to think it over any more. She held her breath and lifted the mug to her mouth, wincing at the taste.

  The physician had added honey to mask the bitterness, but the sweetness only made it more horrible. It tasted the way that opium smelled. She had to swallow many times before she drained the entire mug. When she finished, her stomach felt numb and weirdly sated, bloated and rubbery. After a few minutes an odd prickling feeling tingled at the base of her torso, like someone was poking her with tiny needles from inside.

  “Get back to your room before it starts to hurt,” the physician advised. “I’ll tell the masters you’re ill. The nurse will check on you tonight. You won’t want to eat, but I’ll have one of your classmates bring you some food just in case.”

  Rin thanked him and ran with a wobbling gait back to her quarters, clutching her abdomen. The prickling had turned into an acute pain spreading across her lower stomach. She felt as if she had swallowed a knife and it was twisting in a slow circle inside her.

  Somehow she made it back to her bed.

  Pain is just a message, she told herself. She could choose to ignore it. She could . . . she could . . .

  It was terrible. She whimpered aloud.

  She did not sleep so much as lie in a fevered daze. She turned deliriously on the sheets, dreaming of unborn, misshapen infants, of Tobi digging his five claws into her stomach.

  “Rin. Rin?”

  Someone hovered over her. It was Niang, bearing a wooden bowl.

  “I brought you some winter melon soup.” Niang knelt down beside Rin and held the bowl to her face.

  Rin took one whiff of the soup. Her stomach seized painfully.

  “I’m good,” she said weakly.

  “There’s also this sedative.” Niang pushed a cup toward her. “The physician said it’s safe for you to take it now if you want to, but you don’t have to.”

  “Are you joking? Give me that.” Rin grabbed the cup and guzzled it down. Immediately her head began to swim. The room became delightfully fuzzy. The stabbing in her abdomen disappeared. Then something rose up in the back of her throat. Rin lunged to the side
of the bed and vomited into the basin she had set there. Blood splattered the porcelain.

  She glanced down at the basin with a deranged satisfaction. Better to get the blood out this way, she thought, all at once, rather than slowly, every month, for years.

  While she continued to retch, she heard the door to the dormitory open.

  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.

  Rin spent four delirious days in bed before she could return to class. When she did drag herself out of bed, against both Niang’s and the physician’s recommendations, she found she was hopelessly behind.

  She had missed an entire unit on Mugini verb conjugations in Linguistics, the chapter on the demise of the Red Emperor in History, Sunzi’s analysis of geographical forecasting in Strategy, and the finer points of setting a splint in Medicine. She expected no lenience from the masters and received none.

  The masters treated her like missing class was her fault, and it was. She had no excuses; she could only accept the consequences.

  She flubbed questions every time a master called on her. She scored at the bottom of every exam. She didn’t complain. For the entire week, she endured the masters’ condescension in silence.

  Oddly, she didn’t feel discouraged, but rather as if a veil had been lifted. Her first few weeks at Sinegard had been like a dream. Dazzled by the magnificence of the city and the Academy, she had allowed herself to drift.

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

  The Keju had meant nothing. The Keju had tested her ability to recite poems like a parrot. Why had she ever imagined that might have prepared her for a school like Sinegard?

  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 had grown content at the Academy. She had grown lazy. She had lost sight of what was at stake. She had needed to be reminded that she was nothing—that she could be sent back home at a moment’s notice. That as miserable she was at Sinegard, what awaited her in Tikany was much, much worse.