The Poppy War. R.F. Kuang

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.

       He looks at you and licks his lips. He brings you to the bed. He forces a hand between your legs. You scream, but no one hears you.

      She would stay. She would stay at Sinegard even if it killed her.

      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 had needed failure to remind her that she wasn’t like the Sinegardians—she hadn’t grown up speaking casual Hesperian, wasn’t familiar with the command structure of the Imperial Militia, didn’t know the political relationships between the Twelve Warlords like the back of her hand. The Sinegardians had this knowledge ingrained from childhood. She would have to develop it.

      Every waking hour that she didn’t spend in class, she spent in the archives. She read the assigned texts out loud to herself; wrapping her tongue around the unfamiliar Sinegardian dialect until she had eradicated all hints of her southern drawl.

      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.

      She stopped sleeping. She sat in the front row so that there was no way she could doze off. Her head ached constantly. She always wanted to vomit. She stopped eating.

      She made herself miserable. But then, all of her options led to misery. She could run away. She could get on a boat and escape to another city. She could run drugs for another opium smuggler. She could, if it came down to it, return to Tikany, marry, and hope no one found out that she couldn’t have children until it was too late.

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

      One month later, Rin tested at the top of one of Jima’s frequent Linguistics exams. She beat Nezha’s score by two points. When Jima announced the top five scores, Rin jerked upright, happily shocked.

      She had spent the entire night cramming Hesperian verb tenses, which were infinitely confusing. Modern Hesperian was a language that followed neither rhyme nor reason. Its rules were close to pure randomness, its pronunciation guides haphazard and riddled with exceptions.

      She couldn’t reason through Hesperian, so she memorized it, the way she memorized everything she didn’t understand.

      “Good,” Jima said crisply when she handed Rin’s exam scroll back to her.

      Rin was startled at how good “good” made her feel.

      She found that she was fueled by praise from her masters. Praise meant that she had finally, finally received validation that she was not nothing. She could be brilliant, could be worth someone’s attention. She adored praise—craved it, needed it, and realized she found relief only when she finally had it.

      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.

      In the following weeks, Rin clawed her way up from the bottom of the ranks to become one of the top students in each class. She competed regularly with Nezha and Venka for the highest marks in nearly every subject. In Linguistics, she was second now only to Kitay.

      She particularly enjoyed Strategy.

      Gray-whiskered Master Irjah was the first teacher she’d ever had who didn’t rely principally on rote memorization as a learning method. He made the students solve logical syllogisms. He made them define concepts they had taken for granted, concepts like advantage and victory and war. He forced them to be precise and accurate in their answers. He rejected responses that were phrased vaguely or could have multiple interpretations. He stretched their minds, shattered their preconceptions of logic, and then pieced them back together.

      He gave praise only sparingly, but when he did, he made sure that everyone in the class heard. Rin craved his approval more than anything.

      Now that they had finished analyzing Sunzi’s Principles of War, Irjah spent the second half of class lobbing hypothetical military situations at them, challenging them to think their way out of various quagmires. Sometimes these simulations involved only questions of logistics (“Calculate how much time and how many supplies you need to move a force of this size across this strait”). Other times he drew up maps for them, indicating with symbols how many troops they had to work with, and forced them to come up with a battle plan.

      “You are stuck behind this river,” said Irjah. “Your troops stand in a prime position for a ranged assault, but your main column has run out of arrows. What do you do?”

      Most of their class suggested raids on the enemy’s weapons carriages. Venka wanted to abandon the ranged idea entirely and pursue a direct frontal assault. Nezha suggested they commission the nearby farmers to mass-produce arrows in one night.

      “Gather scarecrows from the nearby farmers,” said Kitay.

      Nezha snorted. “What?”

      “Let him talk,” said Irjah.

      “Dress them in spare uniforms, stick them in a boat, and send them downriver,” Kitay continued, ignoring him. “This area is a mountainous region notorious for heavy precipitation. We can assume it has rained recently, so there should be fog. That makes it difficult for the enemy forces to see the river clearly. Their archers will mistake the scarecrows for soldiers, and shoot until they resemble pincushions. We will then send our men downstream and have them collect the arrows. We use our enemy’s arrows to kill our enemies.”

      Kitay won that one.

      Another day Irjah presented them with a map of the Wudang mountain region marked with two red crosses to indicate two Federation battalions surrounding the Nikara army from both ends of the valley.

      “You’re trapped in this valley. The villagers have mostly evacuated, but the Federation general holds a school full of children hostage. He says he will set the children free if your battalion surrenders. You have no guarantee he will honor the terms. How do you respond?”

      They stared at the map for many minutes. Their troops had no advantage, no easy way out.

      Even Kitay was puzzled. “Try an assault on the left flank?” he suggested. “Evacuate the children while they’re preoccupied with a small guerrilla force?”

      “They’re on higher ground,” said Irjah. “They’ll shoot you down before you get the chance to draw your weapons.”

      “Light the valley on fire,” Venka tried. “Distract them with the smoke?”

      “Good way to burn yourselves to death.” Irjah snorted. “Remember, you do not have the high ground.”

      Rin