The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  What was the cleverest way to say I don’t know?

  The Chuluu Korikh. She’d studied Old Nikara with Jima for long enough now that she could gloss this as stone mountain in the ancient dialect, but that didn’t give her any clues. None of Nikan’s major prisons were built under mountains; they were either out in the Baghra Desert or in the dungeons of the Empress’s palace.

  And Jiang hadn’t asked what the Chuluu Korikh was. He’d asked who was imprisoned there.

  What kind of prisoner couldn’t be held in the Baghra Desert?

  She pondered this until she had an unsatisfying answer to an unsatisfying question.

  “Unnatural criminals,” she said slowly, “who have committed unnatural crimes?”

  Jun snorted audibly. Jima and Yim looked uncomfortable.

  Jiang gave a minuscule shrug.

  “Fine,” he said. “That’s all I have.”

  Oral exams concluded by midmorning on the third day. The pupils were sent to lunch, which no one ate, and then herded to the rings for the commencement of the Tournament.

  Rin drew Han for her first opponent.

  When it was her turn to fight she climbed down the rope ladder and looked up. The masters stood in a row before the rails. Irjah gave her a slight nod, a tiny gesture that filled her with determination. Jun folded his arms over his chest. Jiang picked at his fingernails.

  Rin had not fought any of her classmates since her expulsion from Combat. She had not even watched them fight. The only person she had ever sparred against was Jiang, and she had no clue if he was a good approximation of how her classmates might fight.

  She was entering this Tournament blind.

  She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath, willing herself to at least appear calm.

  Han, on the other hand, looked very disconcerted. His eyes darted across her body and then back up to her face as if she were some wild animal he had never seen before, as if he didn’t know quite what to make of her.

  He’s scared, she realized.

  He must have heard the rumors that she had studied with Jiang. He didn’t know what to believe about her. Didn’t know what to expect.

  What was more, Rin was the underdog in this match. No one expected her to fight well. But Han had trained with Jun all year. Han was a Sinegardian. Han had to win, or he wouldn’t be able to face his peers after.

  Sunzi wrote that one must always identify and exploit the enemy’s weaknesses. Han’s weakness was psychological. The stakes were much, much higher for him, and that made him insecure. That made him beatable.

  “What, you’ve never seen a girl before?” Rin asked.

  Han blushed furiously.

  Good. She made him nervous. She grinned widely, baring teeth. “Lucky you,” she said. “You get to be my first.”

  “You don’t have a chance,” Han blustered. “You don’t know any martial arts.”

  She merely smiled and slouched back into Seejin’s fourth opening stance. She bent her back leg, preparing herself to spring, and raised her fists to guard her face.

  “Don’t I?”

  Han’s face clouded with doubt. He had recognized her posture as deliberate and practiced—not at all the stance of someone who had no martial arts training.

  Rin rushed him as soon as Sonnen signaled them to begin.

  Han played defensive from the start. He made the mistake of giving her the forward momentum, and he never recovered. From the outset, Rin controlled every part of the bout. She attacked, he reacted. She led him in the dance, she decided when to let him parry, and she decided where they would go. She fought methodically, purely from muscle memory. She was efficient. She played his moves against him and confused him.

  And Han’s attacks fell into such predictable patterns—if one of his kicks missed, he would back up and attempt it again, and again, until she forced him to change direction.

  Finally he let his guard down, let her get in close. She jammed her elbow hard into his nose. She felt a satisfying crack. Han dropped to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  Rin knew she hadn’t hurt him that badly. Jiang had punched her in the nose at least twice. Han was more stunned than injured. He could have gotten up. He didn’t.

  “Break,” ordered Sonnen.

  Rin wiped the sweat off her forehead and glanced up at the railing.

  There was silence above the ring. Her classmates looked like they had on the first day of class—startled and bewildered. Nezha looked dumbfounded.

  Then Kitay began to clap. He was the only one.

  She fought two more matches that day. They were both variations on her match with Han—pattern recognition, confusion, finishing blow. She won both of them.

  Over the span of a day Rin went from the underdog to a leading contender. All those months spent lugging that stupid pig around had given her better endurance than her classmates. Those long, frustrating hours with the Seejin forms had given her impeccable footwork.

  The rest of the class had learned their fundamentals from Jun. They moved the same way, sank into the same default patterns when nervous. But Rin didn’t. Her best advantage was her unpredictability. She fought like nothing they had been expecting, she threw them off rhythm, and so she continued to win.

  At the end of the first day, Rin and six others, including Nezha and Venka, advanced undefeated into elimination rounds. Kitay had ended the first day with a 2–1 record but advanced on good technique.

  The quarterfinals were scheduled for the second day. Sonnen drew up a randomized bracket and hung it on a scroll outside the main hall for all to see. The pairings placed Rin against Venka first thing in the morning.

  Venka had trained in martial arts for years, and it showed. She was all rapid strikes and slick, impeccable footwork. She fought with a savage viciousness. Her technique was precise to the centimeter, her timing perfect. She was just as fast as Rin, perhaps faster.

  The one advantage Rin had was that Venka had never fought with an injury.

  “She’s sparred plenty of times,” said Kitay. “But nobody is actually willing to hit her. Everyone’s always stopped before the punch lands. Even Nezha. I’ll bet you none of her home tutors were willing to hit her, either. They would have been fired immediately, if not thrown in jail.”

  “You’re kidding,” Rin said.

  “I know I’ve never hit her.”

  Rin rubbed a fist into her palm. “Maybe it’ll be good for her, then.”

  Still, injuring Venka was no easy task. More by sheer luck than anything, Rin managed to land a blow early on in the match. Venka, underestimating Rin’s speed, had brought her guard back up too slowly after an attempted left hook. Rin took the opening and whipped a backhand through at Venka’s nose.

  Bone broke under Rin’s fist with an audible crack.

  Venka immediately retreated. One hand flew to her face, groping around her swelling nose. She glanced down at her blood-covered fingers and then back up at Rin. Her nostrils flared. Her cheeks turned a ghastly white.

  “Problem?” Rin asked.

  The look Venka gave her was pure murder.

  “You shouldn’t even be here,” she snarled.

  “Tell that to your nose,” Rin said.

  Venka was visibly unhinged. Her pretty sneer was gone, her hair messy, her face bloodied, her eyes wild and unfocused. She was on edge, off rhythm. She attempted several more wild blows until Rin caught her with a solid roundhouse kick to the side of her head.

  Venka sprawled to the side and stayed on the ground. Her chest heaved rapidly up and down. Rin couldn’t tell if she was crying or panting.

  She didn’t really care.

  The applause as Rin emerged from the ring was scattered at best. The audience had been rooting for Venka. Venka was supposed to be in the finals.

  Rin didn’t care about that, either. She was used to this by now.

  And Venka wasn’t the victory she wanted.

  Nezha tore his way through the other side
of the bracket with ruthless efficiency. His fights were always scheduled in the other ring concurrently with Rin’s, and they invariably ended earlier. Rin never saw Nezha in action. She only saw his opponents carried out on stretchers.

  Alone among Nezha’s opponents, Kitay emerged from his bout unharmed. He had lasted a minute and a half before surrendering.

  There were rumors Nezha would be disqualified for intentional maiming, but Rin knew better than to hope. The faculty wanted to see the heir to the House of Yin in the finals. As far as Rin knew, Nezha could kill someone without repercussion. Jun, certainly, would allow it.

  No one was surprised when Rin and Nezha both won their semifinals rounds. Finals were postponed until after dinner so that the apprentices could also come and watch.

  Nezha disappeared somewhere halfway through dinner. He was likely getting private coaching from Jun. Rin briefly considered reporting it to get Nezha disqualified, but knew that would be a hollow victory. She wanted to see this through to the finish.

  She picked at her food. She knew she needed energy, but the thought of eating made her want to vomit.

  Halfway through the break, Raban approached her table. He was sweating hard, as if he had just run all the way up from the lower tier.

  She thought he was going to congratulate her on making it to finals, but all he said was “You should surrender.”

  “You’re joking,” Rin responded. “I’m going to win this thing.”

  “Look, Rin—you haven’t seen any of Nezha’s fights.”

  “I’ve been a little preoccupied with my own.”

  “Then you don’t know what he’s capable of. I just dealt with his semifinals opponent in the infirmary. Nohai.” Raban looked deeply rattled. “They’re not sure if he’s going to be able to walk again. Nezha shattered his kneecap.”

  “Seems like Nohai’s problem.” Rin didn’t want to hear about Nezha’s victories. She was feeling queasy enough as it was. The only way she could go through with the finals was if she convinced herself that Nezha was beatable.

  “I know he hates you,” Raban continued. “He could cripple you for life.”

  “He’s just a kid.” Rin scoffed with a confidence she didn’t feel.

  “You’re just a kid!” Raban sounded agitated. “I don’t care how good you think you are. Nezha’s got six inches and twenty pounds of muscle on you, and I swear he wants to kill you.”

  “He has weaknesses,” she said stubbornly. That had to be true. Didn’t it?

  “Does it matter? What does this Tournament mean to you anyway?” Raban asked. “There’s no way you’re getting culled now. Every master is going to submit a bid for you. Why do you have to win?”

  Raban was right. At this point Irjah would have no qualms about bidding for her. Rin’s position at Sinegard was safe.

  But it wasn’t about bids now, it was about pride. It was about power. If she surrendered to Nezha, he would hold it over her for the rest of their time at the Academy. No—he’d hold it over her for life.

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

  The basement hall was silent as Rin and Nezha climbed into the ring. The air was thick with anticipation, a voyeuristic bloodlust. Months of hateful rivalry were coming to a head, and everyone wanted to watch the fallout of their collision.

  Both Jun and Irjah wore deliberately neutral expressions, giving nothing away. Jiang was absent.

  Nezha and Rin bowed shortly, never taking their eyes off each other, and both immediately backed away.

  Nezha kept his gaze trained intently on Rin’s, almond eyes narrowed in a tight focus. His lips were pressed in concentration. There were no jeers, no taunts. Not even a snarl.

  Nezha was taking her seriously, Rin realized. He took her as an equal.

  For some reason, this made her fiercely proud. They stared at each other, daring each other to break eye contact first.

  “Begin,” said Sonnen.

  She leaped at him immediately. Her right leg lashed out again and again, forcing him back in retreat.

  Kitay had spent all of lunch helping her strategize. She knew Nezha could be blindingly fast. Once he got momentum, he wouldn’t stop until his opponent was incapacitated or dead.

  Rin needed to overwhelm him from the beginning. She needed to constantly put him on the defensive, because to be on the defensive against Nezha was certain defeat.

  The problem was that he was terribly strong. He didn’t possess the brute force of Kobin, or even Kureel, but he was so precise in his movements that it didn’t matter. He channeled his ki with a brilliant precision, built it up and then released it through the smallest pressure point to create the maximum impact.

  Unlike Venka, Nezha could absorb losses and continue. She bruised him once or twice. He adapted and hit her back. And his blows hurt.

  They were two minutes in. Rin had now lasted longer than any of Nezha’s previous opponents, and something had become clear to her: He wasn’t invincible. The techniques that had seemed impossibly difficult to her before now were transparently beatable. When Nezha kicked, his movements were wide and obvious like a boar’s. His kicks held terrifying power, but only if they landed.

  Rin made sure they never landed.

  There was no way she would let him maim her. But she was not here merely to survive. She was here to win.

  Exploding Dragon. Crouching Tiger. Extended Crane. She cycled through the movements in Seejin’s Frolics as they were needed. The movements she’d practiced so many times before, linked together one after another in that damned form, snapped automatically into play.

  But if Nezha was baffled by Rin’s fighting style, he didn’t show it. He remained calm and concentrated, attacking with methodical efficiency.

  They were now four minutes in. Rin felt her lungs seizing, trying to pump oxygen into her fatigued body. But she knew that if she was tired, so was Nezha.

  “He gets desperate when he’s tired,” Kitay had said. “And he’s the most dangerous when he’s desperate.”

  Nezha was getting desperate.

  There was no control to his ki anymore. He threw punch after punch in her direction. He didn’t care about the maiming rule. If he got her on the ground, he would kill her.

  Nezha swept a low kick at the back of her knees. Rin made a frantic call and let him connect, sinking backward, pretending she’d lost her balance. He moved in immediately, looming over her. She grounded herself against the floor and kicked up.

  She nailed him directly in his solar plexus with more force than she’d ever kicked with before—she could feel the air forced out of his lungs. She flipped up off the ground, and was astonished to find Nezha still reeling backward, gasping for air.

  She flung herself forward and punched wildly at his head.

  He dropped to the floor.

  Shocked murmurs swept through the audience.

  Rin circled Nezha, hoping he wouldn’t get up, but knowing he would. She wanted to end it. Slam her heel into the back of his head. But the masters cared about honor. If she hit Nezha while he was down, she’d be sent packing from Sinegard in minutes.

  Never mind that if he did the same, she doubted anyone would bat an eye.

  Four seconds passed. Nezha raised a shaking hand and slammed it into the ground. He dragged himself forward. His forehead was bleeding, dripping scarlet into his eyes. He blinked it away and glared up at her.

  His eyes screamed murder.

  “Continue,” said Sonnen.

  Rin circled Nezha warily. He crouched like an animal, like a wounded wolf rising on its haunches.

  The next time she threw a punch he grabbed her arm and pulled her in close. Her breath hitched. He raked his nails across her face and down to her collarbone.

  She jerked her arm out of his grasp and cycled backward in rapid retreat. She felt a sharp sting under her left eye, across her neck. Nezha had drawn blood.

  “Watch you
rself, Yin,” Sonnen warned.

  Both of them ignored him. Like a warning would make any difference, Rin thought. The next time Nezha lunged at her she pulled him to the floor with her. They rolled around in the dirt, each attempting to pin the other and failing.

  He punched madly in the air, flinging blows haphazardly at her face.

  She dodged the first one. He swung his fist back in reverse and caught her with a backhand that left her gasping. The lower half of her face went numb.

  He’d slapped her.

  He’d slapped her.

  A kick she could take. A knife hand strike she could absorb. But that slap had a savage intimacy. An undertone of superiority.

  Something in Rin broke.

  She couldn’t breathe. Black tinged the edges of her vision—black, and then scarlet. An awful rage filled her, consumed her thoughts entirely. She needed revenge like she needed to breathe. She wanted Nezha to hurt. She wanted Nezha punished.

  She lashed back, fingers curled into claws. He let go of her to jump back, but she followed him, redoubling her frenzied attacks. She wasn’t as fast as he was. He retaliated, and she was too slow to block, and he hit her on the thigh, on the arm, but her body wouldn’t register the damage. Pain was a message she was ignoring, to be felt later.

  No—pain led to success.

  He struck her face one, twice, thrice. He beat her like an animal and yet she kept fighting.

  “What is wrong with you?” he hissed.

  More important was what was wrong with him. Fear. She could see it in his eyes.

  He had her backed against the wall, hands around her neck, but she grabbed his shoulders, jammed her knee up into his rib cage, and rammed an elbow into the back of his head. He collapsed forward to the ground, wheezing. She flung herself down and ground her elbow into his lower back. Nezha cried out, arched his back in agony.

  Rin pinned Nezha’s left arm to the floor with her foot and held his neck down with her right elbow. When he struggled, she slammed her fist into the back of his head and ground his face against the dirt until it was clear that he wouldn’t get up.