The Poppy War (The Poppy War Trilogy #1)

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 blood 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.

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 raised her hand. “Cut around the second army and get onto the dam. Break the dam. Flood the valley. Let everyone inside drown.”

Her classmates turned to stare at her in horror.

“Leave the children,” she added. “There’s no way to save them.”

Nezha laughed out loud. “We’re trying to win this simulation, idiot.”

Irjah motioned for Nezha to be silent. “Runin. Please elaborate.”

“It’s not a victory either way,” said Rin. “But if the costs are so high, I would throw all my tiles in. This way they die, and we lose half our troops but no more. Sunzi writes that no battle takes place in isolation. This is just one small move in the grand scheme of the war. The numbers you’ve given us indicate that these Federation battalions are massive. I’m guessing they constitute a large percentage of the entire Federation army. So if we give up some of our own troops, we lessen their advantage in all subsequent battles.”

“You’d rather kill your own people than let the opponent’s army walk away?” Irjah asked.

“Killing isn’t the same as letting die,” Rin objected.

“They’re casualties nonetheless.”

Rin shook her head. “You don’t let an enemy walk away if they’ll certainly be a threat to you later. You get rid of them. If they’re that far inland, they know the lay of almost the entire country. They have a geographical advantage. This is our one chance to take out the enemy’s greatest fighting force.”

“Sunzi said to always give the enemy a way out,” Irjah said.

Rin privately thought that this was one of Sunzi’s stupider principles, but hastily pulled together a counterargument. “But Sunzi didn’t mean to let them take that way out. The enemy just has to think the situation is less dire than it is, so they don’t grow desperate and do stupid and mutually destructive things.” Rin pondered for a moment. “I suppose they could try to swim.”

“She’s talking about decimating entire villages!” Venka protested. “You can’t just break a dam like that. Dams take years to rebuild. The entire river delta will flood, not just that valley. You’re talking about famine. Dysentery. You’ll mess with the agriculture of the entire region, create a whole host of problems that mean decades of suffering down the line—”

“Problems that can be solved,” Rin maintained stubbornly. “What was your solution, to let the Federation walk free into the heartland? Fat lot of good the agricultural regions will do you when your whole country’s been occupied. You would offer up the whole country to them on a platter.”

“Enough, enough.” Irjah slammed the table to silence them. “Nobody wins this one. You’re dismissed for today. Runin, I want to have a word. My office.”

“Where did you come by this solution?” Irjah held up a booklet.

Rin recognized her scrawling handwriting at the top.

Last week Irjah had assigned them to write essay responses to another simulated quagmire—a counterfactual scenario where the Militia had lost popular support for a war of resistance against the Federation. They couldn’t rely on peasants to supply soldiers with food or animal feed, could not use peasant homes as lodging without forceful entry. In fact, outbreaks of rebellion in rural areas added several layers of complication to coordinating troop movements.

Rin’s solution had been to burn down one of the minor island villages.

The twist was that the island in question belonged to the Empire.

“The first day of Yim’s class we talked about how losing Speer ended the Second Poppy War,” she said.

Irjah frowned. “You based this essay on the Speerly Massacre?”

She nodded. “Losing Speer during the Second Poppy War pushed Hesperia over the edge—made them uncomfortable enough that they didn’t want Mugen expanding farther into the continent. I thought the destruction of another minor island might do the same for the Nikara population, convince them that the real enemy was Mugen. Remind them what the threat was.”

“Surely Militia troops attacking a province of the Empire would send the wrong message,” Irjah objected.

“They wouldn’t know it was Militia troops,” she said. “We would pose as a Federation squadron. I suppose I should have been clearer about that in the essay. Better still if Mugen just went ahead and attacked the island for us, but you can’t leave these things to chance.”

He nodded slowly as he perused her essay. “Crude. Crude, but clever. Do you think that’s what happened?”

It took her a moment to understand his question. “In this simulation, or during the Poppy Wars?”

“The Poppy Wars.” Irjah tilted his head, watching her carefully.

“I’m not entirely sure that’s not what happened,” Rin said. “There’s some evidence that the attack on Speer was allowed to succeed.”

Irjah’s expression betrayed nothing, but his fingers tapped thoughtfully against his wooden desk. “Explain.”

“I find it very difficult to believe that the strongest fighting force in the Militia could have been annihilated so easily. That, and the island was suspiciously poorly defended.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Well, I’m not certain, but it seems as if—I mean, maybe someone on the inside—a Nikara general, or someone else who was privy to certain information—knew about the attack on Speer but didn’t alert anyone.”

“Now why would we have wanted to lose Speer?” Irjah asked quietly.

She took a moment to formulate a coherent argument. “Maybe they knew Hesperia wouldn’t stand for it. Maybe they wanted to generate popular support to distract from the Red Junk movement. Maybe because we needed a sacrifice, and Speer was expendable in a way other regions weren’t. We couldn’t let any Nikara die. But Speerlies? Why not?”

She had been grasping at straws when she had started to speak, but the moment she said it, her answer sounded startlingly plausible to her.

Irjah looked deeply uncomfortable. “You must understand that this is a very awkward part of Nikan’s history,” he said. “The way that the Speerlies were treated was . . . regrettable. They were used and exploited by the Empire for centuries. Their warriors were regarded as little more than vicious dogs. Savages. Until Altan came to study at Sinegard, I don’t believe anyone really thought the Speerlies were capable of sophisticated thought. Nikan does not like to speak of Speer, and for good reason.”

“Yes, sir. It was just a theory.”

“Anyhow.” Irjah leaned back in his chair. “That isn’t all I wanted to discuss. Your strategy in the valley worked for the purposes of the exercise, but no competent ruler would ever give those orders. Do you know why?”

She contemplated in silence for a minute. “I confused tactics with grand strategy,” she said finally.

Irjah nodded. “Elaborate.”

“The tactic would have worked. We might have even won the war. But no ruler would have chosen that option, because the country would have fallen apart afterward. My tactic doesn’t grant the possibility of peace.”

“Why is that?” Irjah pressed.

“Venka was right about destroying the agricultural heartland. Nikan would suffer famine for years. Rebellions like the Red Junk Opera would spring up everywhere. People would think it was the Empress’s fault that they were starving. If we used my strategy, what would happen next is probably a civil war.”

“Good,” said Irjah. He raised his eyebrows. “Very good. You know, you are astoundingly bright.”

Rin tried to conceal her delight, though she felt a flutter of warmth spread across her body.

“Should you perform well in the Trials,” Irjah continued, “you might do well as a Strategy apprentice.”

Under any other circumstances his words would have thrilled her. Rin managed a resigned smile. “I’m not sure I’ll make it that far, sir.”

His brow crinkled. “Why’s that?”

“Master Jun kicked me out of his class. I probably won’t pass the Trials.”

“How on earth did that happen?” Irjah demanded.

She recounted her last, disastrous class with Jun without bothering to edit the story. “He let Nezha off with a suspension, but told me not to come back.”

“Ah.” Irjah frowned. “Jun didn’t punish you because you were brawling. Tobi and Altan did far worse than that their first year. He punished you because he’s a purist about the school—he thinks any student who isn’t descended from a Warlord isn’t worth his time. But never mind what Jun thinks. You’re clever, you’ll pick up whatever techniques they covered this month without much trouble.”

Rin shook her head. “It won’t make much difference. He’s not letting me back in.”

“What?” Irjah looked outraged. “That’s absurd. Does Jima know?”

“Jima can’t intervene in a Combat matter. Or won’t. I’ve asked.” Rin stood up. “Thanks for your time, sir. If I make it past the Trials, I’d be honored to study with you.”

“You’ll find a way,” Irjah said. His eyes twinkled. “Sunzi would.”

Rin hadn’t been completely forthcoming with Irjah. He was right—she would find a way.

Starting with the fact that she hadn’t given up on martial arts.

Jun had banned her from his class, but he hadn’t banned her from the library. The stacks at Sinegard contained a wealth of martial arts instruction tomes, the largest collection in all the Empire. Rin had within reach the secrets of most inherited arts, excepting those tightly guarded techniques like the House of Yin’s.

In the course of her research Rin discovered that existing martial arts literature was hugely comprehensive and dauntingly complex. She learned that martial arts revolved largely around lineage: different forms belonged to different families, similar techniques taught and improved upon by pupils who had shared the same master. More often than not, schools became torn by rivalries or schisms, so techniques splintered and developed independently of others.

The history was deeply enjoyable, almost more entertaining than novels. But practicing the techniques turned out to be devilishly hard. Most tomes were too dense to serve as useful manuals. A majority assumed that the student was reading the book along with a master who could demonstrate the techniques in real life. Others expounded for pages about a certain school’s breathing techniques and philosophy of fighting, but only sporadically mentioned things like kicking and punching.

“I don’t want to read about the balance in the universe,” Rin grumbled, tossing aside what seemed like the hundredth text she’d tried. “I want to know how to beat people up.”

She attempted asking the apprentices for help.

“Sorry,” Kureel said without meeting her eyes. “Jun said that teaching first-years outside of the practice rooms was against the rules.”

Rin doubted this was a real rule, but she should have known better than to ask one of Jun’s apprentices.

Asking Arda was also not an option; she spent all her time in the infirmary with Enro and never returned to the bunks before midnight.

Rin was going to have to teach herself.

A month and a half in, she finally found a gold mine of information in the texts of Ha Seejin, quartermaster under the Red Emperor. Seejin’s manuals were wonderfully illustrated, filled with detailed descriptions and clearly labeled diagrams.

Rin perused the pages gleefully. This was it. This was what she needed.

“You can’t take this one out,” said the apprentice at the front desk.

“Why not?”

“It’s from the restricted shelves,” said the apprentice, as if this were obvious. “First-years don’t get access to those.”

“Oh. Sorry. I’ll take it back.”

Rin walked to the back end of the library. She glanced furtively about to make sure no one was watching. She stuffed the tome down her shirt. Then she turned around and walked back out.

Alone in the courtyard, book in hand, Rin learned. She learned to shape the air with her fists, to imagine a great spinning ball in her arms to guide the shape of her movements. She learned to root her legs against the ground so she couldn’t be tipped over, not even by opponents twice her weight. She learned to form fists with her thumb on the outside, to always keep her guard up around her face, and to shift her balance quickly and smoothly.

She became very good at punching stationary objects.

She attended the matches at the rings regularly. She arrived in the basement early and secured a place by the railing so that she didn’t miss a single kick or throw. She hoped that by watching the apprentices fight, she could absorb their techniques.

This actually helped—to some extent. By closely examining the apprentices’ movements, Rin learned to identify the right place and time for various techniques. When to kick, when to dodge, when to roll madly on the floor to avoid—wait, no, that was an accident, Jeeha had simply tripped. Rin didn’t have muscle memory of sparring against another person, so she had to hold these contingencies in her head. But vicarious sparring was better than nothing.

She also attended the matches to watch Altan.

She would have been lying to herself if she didn’t admit that she derived great aesthetic pleasure from staring at him. With his lithe, muscled form and chiseled jawline, Altan was undeniably handsome.

But he was also the paragon of good technique. Altan did everything that the Seejin text recommended. He never let his guard down, never allowed an opening, never let his attention slip. He never telegraphed his next move, didn’t bounce erratically or go flat on his heels to advertise to his opponent when he was going to kick. He always attacked from angles, never from the front.

Rin had initially conceived of Altan as simply a good, strong fighter. Now she could see that he was, in every sense, a genius. His fighting technique was a study in trigonometry, a beautiful composition of trajectories and rebounded forces. He won consistently because he had perfect control of distance and torque. He had the mathematics of fighting down to a science.

He fought more often than not. Throughout the semester his challengers only grew in number—it seemed every single one of Jun’s apprentices wanted to have a go at him.

Rin watched Altan fight twenty-three matches before the end of the fall. He never lost.