The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  Reaching the eliminations in the Tournament was no guarantee of gaining a sponsor, and losing early was not a guarantee of expulsion. But those students who advanced further in the tournament had more chances to show the masters how well they fought. And the winner of the Tournament always received a bid.

  “Altan won his year,” Raban said. “Kureel won hers. You’ll notice they both landed the two most prestigious apprenticeships at Sinegard. There’s no actual prize for winning, but the masters like placing bets. Get your ass kicked, and no master will want to take you on.”

  “I want to pledge Medicine, but we’ve got to memorize so many extra texts on top of the readings we’ve done so far, and if I do I won’t have time study for History . . . Do you think I should pledge History? Do you think Yim likes me enough?” Niang flapped her hands in the air, agitated. “My brother said I shouldn’t rely on getting a Medicine apprenticeship; there are four of us taking Enro’s exam and she only ever picks three, so maybe I won’t get it . . .”

  “Enough, Niang,” Venka snapped. “You’ve been talking about this for days.”

  “What do you want to pledge?” Niang persisted.

  “Combat. And that’s the last time we’re talking about it,” Venka said shrilly. Rin suspected that if Niang said another word, Venka might scream.

  But Rin couldn’t blame Niang. Or Venka, really. The first-years gossiped obsessively about apprenticeships, and it was both understandable and grating. Rin had learned about the hierarchy of masters through eavesdropping on conversations in the mess hall: bids from Jun and Irjah were ideal for apprentices who wanted command positions in the Militia, Jima rarely chose apprentices unless they were nobility destined to become court diplomats, and Enro’s bid mattered only to the few of them who wanted to be military physicians.

  “Training under Irjah would be nice,” said Kitay. “Of course, Jun’s apprentices have their pick of divisions, but Irjah can get me into the Second.”

  “The Rat Province’s division?” Rin wrinkled her nose. “Why?”

  Kitay shrugged. “They’re Army Intelligence. I would love to serve in Army Intelligence.”

  Jun was out of the question for Rin, though she too hoped Irjah might take her. But she knew Irjah wouldn’t place a bid unless she proved she had the martial arts to back up her Strategy prowess. A strategist who couldn’t fight had no place in the Militia. How could she draw up battle plans if she’d never been on the front lines? If she didn’t know what real combat was like?

  For her, it all came down to the Tournament.

  As for the apprentices, it was apparently the most exciting thing to happen on campus all year. They began speculating wildly about who might win and who would beat whom—and they didn’t try very hard to keep the betting books secret from the first-years. Word spread quickly about who the front-runners were.

  Most of the money backed the Sinegardians. Venka and Han were solid contenders for the semifinals. Nohai, a massive kid from a fishing island in Snake Province, was widely backed to reach the quarterfinals. Kitay had his fair share of supporters, although this was largely because he had demonstrated a talent for dodging so well that most of his sparring opponents grew frustrated and got sloppy after several long minutes.

  Oddly, a number of apprentices put decent money on Rin. Once word got out that she had been training privately with Jiang, the apprentices took an inordinate degree of interest in her. It helped that she was nipping at Kitay’s heels in every other one of their classes.

  The clear front-runner in their year, however, was Nezha.

  “Jun says he’s the best to come through his class since Altan,” Kitay said, jabbing vehemently at his food. “Won’t shut up about him. You should have seen him take out Nohai yesterday. He’s a menace.”

  Nezha, who had been a pretty, slender child at the start of the year, had since packed on an absurd amount of muscle. He’d cut short his stupidly long hair in favor of a clipped military cut similar to Altan’s. Unlike the rest of them, he already looked like he belonged in a Militia uniform.

  He had also garnered a reputation for striking first and thinking later. He had injured eight sparring partners over the course of the term, all in increasingly severe “accidents.”

  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?

  As the date of the exams loomed closer, the library became oppressively silent. The only sound among the stacks was the furious scribbling of brushes on paper as the first-years tried to commit an entire year’s lessons to memory. Most study groups had disbanded, since any advantage given to a study partner was potentially a lost spot in the ranks.

  But Kitay, who didn’t need to study, obliged Rin purely out of boredom.

  “Sunzi’s Eighteenth Mandate.” Kitay didn’t bother looking at the texts. He had memorized the entirety of Principles of War on his first read-through. Rin would have killed for that talent.

  Rin squinted her eyes in concentration. She knew she looked stupid, but her head was swimming again, and squinting was the only way to make it stop. She felt very cold and hot all at once. She hadn’t slept in three days. All she wanted was to collapse on her bunk, but another hour of cramming was worth more than an hour of sleep.

  “It’s not one of the Seven Considerations . . . wait, is it? No, okay: always modify plans according to circumstances . . . ?”

  Kitay shook his head. “That’s the Seventeenth Mandate.”

  Rin cursed out loud and rubbed her fists against her forehead.

  “I wonder how you people do it,” Kitay mused. “You know, actually having to try to remember things. Your lives sound so difficult.”

  “I will murder you with this ink brush,” Rin grumbled.

  “Sunzi’s appendix is all about why soft ends make for bad weapons. Didn’t you do the extra reading?”

  “Quiet!” Venka snapped from the opposite desk.

  Kitay dipped his head out of Venka’s sight and cracked a grin at Rin. “Here’s a hint,” he whispered. “Menda in the temple.”

  Rin gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. Oh. Of course. “All warfare is based on deception.”

  In preparation for the Tournament, their entire class had taken Sunzi’s Eighteenth Mandate to heart. The pupils stopped using the open practice rooms during common hours. Anyone with an inherited art suddenly stopped bragging about it. Even Nezha had ceased to hold his nightly performances in the studio.

  “This happens every year,” Raban had said. “It’s a bit silly, to be honest. As if martial artists your age ever have anything worth stealing.”

  Silly or not, their class freaked out in earnest. Everyone was accused of having a hidden weapon up his or her sleeve; whoever had never displayed an inherited art was alleged to be harboring one in secret.

  Niang confided to Rin one night that Kitay was actually the heir to the long-forgotten Fist of the North Wind, an art that allowed the user to incapacitate opponents by touching a few choice pressure points.

  “I might have had a hand in spreading that story,” Kitay admitted when Rin asked him about it. “Sunzi would call it psychological warfare.”

  She snorted. “Sunzi would call it horseshit.”

  The first-years weren’t allowed to train after curfew, so the preparation period turned into a contest of who could find the most creative way of sneaking past the masters. The apprentices, of course, began vigilantly patrolling the campus after curfew to catch students who had stolen outside to train. Nohai reported that he’d stumbled across a sheet detailing points for such captures in the boys’ dormitory.

  “It’s almost like they’re enjoying this,” Rin muttered.

  “Of course they enjoy it,” said Kitay. “They get to watch us suffer through the same things they did. This time next year we’ll be equally obnoxious.”

  Displaying a stunning lack of sympathy, the apprentices had also tak
en advantage of the first-years’ anxiety to establish a flourishing market in “study aids.” Rin laughed when Niang returned to the dormitory with what Niang thought was willow bark aged a hundred years.

  “That’s a ginger root,” Rin said with a snicker. She weighed the wrinkled root in her hand. “I mean, I suppose it’s good in tea.”

  “How do you know?” Niang looked dismayed. “I paid twenty coppers for that!”

  “We dug up ginger roots all the time in our garden back at home,” Rin said. “Put them in the sun and you can sell them to old men looking for a virility cure. Does absolutely nothing, but it makes them feel better. We’d also sell wheat flour and call it rhino’s horn. I’ll bet you the apprentices have been selling barley flour, too.”

  Venka, whom Rin had seen stowing a vial of powder under her pillow a few nights before, coughed and looked away.

  The apprentices also sold information to first-years. Most sold bogus test answers; others offered lists of purported exam questions that seemed highly plausible but obviously wouldn’t be confirmed until after the Trials. Worst, though, were the apprentices who posed as sellers to root out the first-years who were willing to cheat.

  Menda, a boy from the Horse Province, had agreed to meet with an apprentice after hours in the temple on the fourth tier to purchase a list of Jima’s exam questions. Rin didn’t know how the apprentice had managed the timing, but Jima had been meditating in said temple that very night.

  Menda was noticeably absent from campus the next day.

  Meals became silent and reserved affairs. Everyone ate with a book held before his or her nose. If any students ventured to strike up a conversation, the rest of the table quickly and violently shushed them. In short, they made themselves miserable.

  “Sometimes I think this is as bad as the Speer Massacre,” Kitay said cheerfully. “And then I think—nah. Nothing is as bad as the casual genocide of an entire race! But this is pretty bad.”

  “Kitay, please shut up.”

  Rin continued to train alone in the garden. She never saw Jiang anymore, but that was just as well; masters were banned from training the students for the Tournament, although Rin suspected Nezha was still receiving instruction from Jun.

  One day she heard footsteps as she approached the garden gate. Someone was inside.

  At first she hoped it might be Jiang, but when she opened the door she saw a lean, graceful figure with indigo-black hair.

  It took her a moment to process what she’d stumbled upon.

  Altan. She’d interrupted Altan Trengsin in his practice.

  He wielded a three-pronged trident—no, he didn’t just wield it, he held it intimately, curved it through the air like a ribbon. It was both an extension of his arm and a dance partner.

  She should have turned to go, found somewhere else to train, but she couldn’t help her curiosity. She couldn’t look away. From a distance, he was extraordinarily beautiful. Up close, he was hypnotizing.

  He turned at the sound of her footsteps, saw her, and stopped.

  “I’m so sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t know you were—”

  “It’s a school garden,” he said neutrally. “Don’t leave on my account.”

  His voice was more somber than she had anticipated. She had imagined a harsh, barking tone to match his brutal movements in the ring, but Altan’s voice was surprisingly melodious, soft and deep.

  His pupils were oddly constricted. Rin couldn’t tell if it was simply the light in the garden, but his eyes didn’t seem red then. Rather, they looked brown, like hers.

  “I’ve never seen that form before,” Rin uttered.

  Altan raised an eyebrow. She immediately regretted opening her mouth. Why had she said that? Why did she exist? She wanted to crumble into ashes and scatter away into the air.

  But Altan just looked surprised, not irritated. “Stick around Jiang long enough, and you’ll learn plenty of arcane forms.” He shifted his weight to his back leg and brought his arms in a flowing motion around to the other side of his torso.

  Rin’s cheeks burned. She felt very clumsy and vast, like she was taking up space that belonged to Altan, even though she was on the other end of the garden. “Master Jiang didn’t say anyone else liked to come here.”

  “Jiang likes to forget about a lot of things.” He tilted his head at her. “You must be quite the student, if Jiang’s taken an interest in you.”

  Was that bitterness in his voice, or was she imagining things?

  She remembered then that Jiang had withdrawn his bid for Altan, right after Altan had declared he wanted to pledge Lore. She wondered what had happened, and if it still bothered Altan. She wondered if she’d annoyed him by bringing Jiang up.

  “I stole a book from the library,” she managed. “He thought that was funny.”

  Why was she still talking? Why was she still here?

  The corner of Altan’s mouth quirked up in a terribly attractive grin, which set her heart beating erratically. “What a rebel.”

  She flushed, but Altan just turned away and completed the form.

  “Don’t let me stop you from training,” he said.

  “No, I—I came here to think. But if you’re here—”

  “I’m sorry. I can leave.”

  “No, it’s okay.” She didn’t know what she was saying. “I was going to—I mean, I’ll just . . . bye.”

  She quickly backed out of the garden. Altan didn’t say anything else.

  Once she had closed the garden gates behind her, Rin buried her face in her hands and groaned.

  “Is there ever a place for meekness in battle?” Irjah asked. This was the seventh question he had posed to her.

  Rin was on a streak. Seven was the maximum number of questions any master could ask, and if she nailed this one, she would ace Irjah’s exam. And she knew the answer—it was lifted directly from Sunzi’s Twenty-Second Mandate.

  She lifted her chin and responded in a loud, clear voice. “Yes, but only for the purposes of deception. Sunzi writes that if your opponent is of choleric temper, you should seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak so that he grows arrogant. The good tactician plays with his enemy like a cat plays with a mouse. Feign weakness and immobility, and then pounce on him.”

  The seven masters each marked small notes into their scrolls. Rin bounced slightly on her heels, waiting for them to continue.

  “Good. No further questions.” Irjah nodded and gestured at his colleagues. “Master Yim?”

  Yim pushed his chair back and rose slowly. He consulted his scroll for a moment, and then gazed at Rin over the top of his spectacles. “Why did we win the Second Poppy War?”

  Rin sucked in a breath. She had not prepared for this question. It was so basic she’d thought she didn’t need to. Yim had asked it on the first day of class, and the answer was a logical fallacy. There was no “why,” because Nikan hadn’t won the Second Poppy War. The Republic of Hesperia had, and Nikan had simply ridden the foreigners’ coattails to a victory treaty.

  She considered answering the question directly, but then thought she might try a more original response. She had only one shot at an answer. She wanted to impress the masters.

  “Because we gave up Speer,” she said.

  Irjah jerked his head up from his scroll.

  Yim raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean because we lost Speer?”

  “No. I mean it was a strategic decision to sacrifice the island so that the Hesperian parliament might decide to intervene. I think the command in Sinegard knew the attack was going to happen and didn’t warn the Speerlies.”

  “I was at Speer,” Jun interrupted. “This is amusing historiography at best, slander at worst.”

  “No, you weren’t,” Rin said before she could stop herself.

  Jun looked amazed. “Excuse me?”

  All seven masters were watching her intently now. Rin remembered too late that Irjah had disliked this theory. And that Jun hated her.

  But it was too late
to stop. She weighed the costs in her head. The masters rewarded bravery and creativity. If she backed off, it would be a sign of uncertainty. She had begun digging this hole for herself. She might as well finish.

  She took a deep breath. “You can’t have been at Speer. I read the reports. None of the regular Militia were there the night the island was attacked. The first troops didn’t arrive until sunrise, after the Federation had left. After the Speerlies had all been killed.”

  Jun’s face darkened to the color of an overripe plum. “You dare accuse—”

  “She’s not accusing anyone of anything,” Jiang interrupted serenely. It was the first time he’d spoken since the start of her exam. Rin glanced at him in surprise, but Jiang just scratched his ear, not even looking at her. “She’s merely attempting a clever answer to an otherwise inane question. Honestly, Yim, this one has gotten pretty old.”

  Yim shrugged. “Fair enough. No further questions. Master Jiang?”

  All the masters twitched in irritation. From what Rin understood, Jiang was present only as a formality. He never gave an exam; he mostly just made fun of the students when they tripped over their answers.

  Jiang gazed levelly into Rin’s eyes.

  She swallowed, feeling the unsettling sensation of his searching gaze. It was like she was as transparent as a puddle of rainwater.

  “Who is imprisoned in the Chuluu Korikh?” he asked.

  She blinked. Not once in the four months that he had trained her had Jiang ever mentioned the Chuluu Korikh. Neither had Master Yim or Irjah, or even Jima. Chuluu Korikh wasn’t medical terminology, wasn’t a reference to a famous battle, wasn’t some linguistic term of art. It could be a deeply loaded phrase. It could also be gibberish.

  Either Jiang was posing a riddle, or he just wanted to throw her off.

  But she didn’t want to admit defeat. She didn’t want to look clueless in front of Irjah. Jiang had asked her a question, and Jiang never asked questions during the Trials. The masters were expecting an interesting answer now; she couldn’t disappoint them.