The Poppy War. R.F. Kuang

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ