The Poppy War. R.F. Kuang

a student managed to pin him down to ask about his course, Jiang made a loud farting noise with his mouth and elbow and skirted away.

      Rin alone continued to frequent the Lore garden, but only because it was a convenient place to train. Now that first-years avoided the garden out of spite, it was the one place where she was guaranteed to be alone.

      She was grateful that no one could see her fumbling through the Seejin text. She had picked up the fundamentals with little trouble, but discovered that even just the second form was devilishly hard to put together.

      Seejin was fond of rapidly twisting footwork. Here the diagrams failed her. The models’ feet in the drawings were positioned in completely different angles from picture to picture. Seejin wrote that if a fighter could extricate himself from any awkward placement, no matter how close he was to falling, he would have achieved perfect balance and therefore the advantage in most combat positions.

      It sounded good in theory. In practice, it meant a lot of falling over.

      Seejin recommended pupils practice the first form on an elevated surface, preferably a thick tree branch or the top of a wall. Against her better judgment, Rin climbed to the middle of the large willow tree overhanging the garden and positioned her feet hesitantly against the bark.

      Despite Jiang’s absence throughout the semester, the garden remained impeccably well kept. It was a kaleidoscope of garishly bright colors, similar in color scheme to the decorations outside Tikany’s whorehouses. Despite the cold, the violet and scarlet poppy flowers had remained in full blossom, their leaves trimmed in tidy rows. The cacti, which were twice the size they had been at the start of term, had been moved into a new set of clay pots painted in eerie patterns of black and burnt orange. Underneath the shelves, the luminescent mushrooms still pulsed with a faintly disturbing glow, like tiny fairy lamps.

      Rin imagined that an opium addict could pass entire days in here. She wondered if that was what Jiang did.

      Poised precariously on the willow tree, struggling to stand up straight against the harsh wind, Rin held the book in one hand, mumbling instructions out loud while she positioned her feet accordingly.

      “Right foot out, pointing straight forward. Left foot back, perpendicular to the straight line of the right foot. Shift weight forward, lift left foot …”

      She could see why Seejin thought this might be good balance practice. She also saw why Seejin strongly recommended against attempting the exercise alone. She wobbled perilously several times, and regained her balance only after a few heart-stopping seconds of frantic windmilling. Calm down. Focus. Right foot up, bring it around …

      Master Jiang walked around the corner, loudly whistling “The Gatekeeper’s Touches.”

      Rin’s right foot slid out from beneath her. She teetered off the edge of the branch, dropped the book, and would have plummeted to the stone floor if her left ankle hadn’t snagged in the crook of two dividing branches.

      She jolted to a halt with her face inches from the ground and gasped out loud in relief.

      Jiang stared down silently at her. She gazed back, head thundering while the blood rushed down into her temples. The last notes of his song dwindled and faded away in the howling wind.

      “Hello there,” he said finally. His voice matched his demeanor: placid, disengaged, and idyllically curious. In any other context, it might have been soothing.

      Rin struggled ungracefully to haul herself upward.

      “Are you all right?” he asked.

      “I’m stuck,” she mumbled.

      “Mmm. Appears so.”

      He clearly wasn’t going to help her down. Rin wriggled her ankle out of the branch, tumbled to the floor, and landed in a painful heap at Jiang’s feet. Cheeks burning, she clambered to her feet and brushed the snow off her uniform.

      “Elegant,” Jiang remarked.

      He tilted his head very far to the left, studying her intently as if she were a particularly fascinating specimen. Up close, Jiang looked even more bizarre than Rin had first thought. His face was a riddle; it was neither lined with age nor flushed with youth but rather invulnerable to time, like a smooth stone. His eyes were a pale blue color she had never seen on anyone in the Empire.

      “Bit daring, aren’t you?” He sounded like he was suppressing laughter. “Do you often dangle from trees?”

      “You startled me, sir.”

      “Hmmph.” He puffed air through his cheeks like a little child. “You’re Irjah’s pet pupil, aren’t you?”

      Her cheeks flushed. “I—I mean, I don’t …”

      “You are.” He scratched his chin and scooped her book off the ground, riffling through its pages with a mild curiosity. “Dusky little peasant prodigy, you. He can’t stop raving about you.”

      She shuffled her feet, wondering where this was going. Had that been a compliment? Was she supposed to thank him? She tucked a lock of hair back behind her ear. “Um.”

      “Oh, don’t pretend to be bashful. You love it.” Jiang glanced casually down at the book and gazed back up at her. “What are you doing with a Seejin text?”

      “I found it in the archives.”

      “Oh. I take that back. You’re not daring. You’re just stupid.”

      When Rin looked confused, Jiang explained: “Jun explicitly forbade Seejin until at least your second year.”

      She hadn’t heard this rule. No wonder the apprentice hadn’t let her sign the book out of the archives. “Jun expelled me from his class. I wasn’t informed.”

      “Jun expelled you,” Jiang repeated slowly. She couldn’t tell if he was amused or not. “What on earth did you do to him?”

      “Um. Tackled another student during sparring, sort of. He started it,” she added quickly. “The other student, I mean.”

      Jiang looked impressed. “Stupid and hotheaded.”

      His eyes wandered over to the plants on the shelf behind her. He walked around her, lifted a poppy flower up to his nose, and sniffed experimentally. He made a face. He dug around in the deep pockets of his robes, fished out a pair of shears, then clipped the stem and tossed the broken end into a pile in the corner of a garden.

      Rin began to inch toward the gate. Perhaps if she left now, Jiang would forget about the book. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t be in here—”

      “Oh, you’re not sorry. You’re just annoyed I interrupted your training session, and you’re hoping I’ll leave without mentioning your stolen book.” Jiang snipped another stem off the poppy plant. “You’re a plucky one, you know that? Got banned from Jun’s class, so you thought you’d teach yourself Seejin.”

      He made several syncopated wheezing noises. It took Rin a moment to realize he was laughing.

      “What’s so funny?” she demanded. “Sir, if you’re going to report me, I just want to say—”

      “Oh, I’m not going to report you. What fun would that be?” He was still chuckling. “Were you really trying to learn Seejin from a book? Do you have a death wish?”

      “It’s not that hard,” she said defensively. “I just followed the pictures.”

      He turned back toward her; his expression was one of amused disbelief. He opened the book, riffled through the pages with a practiced hand, and then stopped on the page detailing the first form. He brandished the book at her. “That one. Do that.”

      Rin obliged.

      It was a tricky form, full of shifting movements and ball change steps. She squeezed her eyes shut as she moved. She couldn’t concentrate in full sight of those luminous mushrooms, those bizarrely