The Poppy War

Jiang stops coming to Lore class and avoids Rin. She regrets their estrangement but is preoccupied by the impending Trials, particularly Jun’s two-day Combat Tournament. She knows Irjah’s apprentice bid depends on her performance in Jun’s Tournament. She continues to go to the Lore Garden to practice combat. One day, she comes across Altan practicing with a three-pronged trident. Altan knows that Rin practiced with Jiang. After tripping over her words, Rin excuses herself, embarrassed.

The next section begins in the middle of Rin’s Trial. She aces Irjah’s exam. She gives her true opinion on Speer in Yim’s exam. Jiang asks a question he’d never mentioned in training: “Who is imprisoned in Chuluu Korikh?” (141). Rin, at a loss, guesses: “Unnatural criminals [...] who have committed unnatural crimes” (142). In Jun’s Tournament, Rin and Nezha each tear through their opponents, until they are set to face off in the finals.

Raban tells Rin to surrender. Nezha is fighting dirty, and one of his previous opponents is permanently unable to walk. Rin refuses, wanting revenge for his treatment of her all year. Rin and Nezha’s fight draws out. Nezha hits her repeatedly, causing Rin to burn with rage. She pins him; when the referee calls for a break, Rin is reeling and feverish, burning with an irrational desire to disintegrate everything around her. She finds Jiang in the Lore Garden and begs for help. He utters a strange language over Rin and touches her with an icy hand. She faints.

When she wakes, Rin feels normal. Jiang is at her bedside. Rin begs him to keep helping her. Jiang compares her to Altan: “You’re too reckless. You hold grudges, you cultivate your rage and let it explode, and you’re careless about what you’re taught” (155). He reveals that he didn’t reject Altan; Daji hadn’t let Jiang teach him. She’d wanted another Speerly warrior and had given Altan to Irjah so he could hone “his rage like a weapon, instead of teaching him to control it” (156). Since Daji doesn’t know about Rin, Jiang agrees to take her on. Rin gets bids from Strategy and Lore, and she pledges Lore.

The students get four days off for the Summer Festival. Kitay invites Rin to stay at his estate. They ride to Kitay’s house in the Jade District in a horse-drawn carriage, and Rin experiences an upper-class lifestyle for the first time. They watch a shadow puppet show retelling the Trifecta’s actions in the Second Poppy War. Forty-five years ago, three children were orphaned by the Federation’s raids. They walked to the peak of Mount Tianshan, where the gods reside: one pledged to the Dragon Lord and became the Warrior with massive strength; another pledged to the Snail Goddess and became the Vipress with bewitching powers; the last pledged to the Great Tortoise and became the Gatekeeper, who could unlock and command the menagerie of the gods. The three gathered Nikan’s Twelve Warlords. The Vipress poisoned them and the Warrior, later called the Dragon Emperor, compelled them to submit and pay homage to him, thus uniting the country.

Kitay is disgusted by the “Nikara politics” in the story. He says that the Federation overtook Nikan because of the Warlords’ infighting; his father, Daji’s advisor, thinks the same thing is happening again. Rin believes the Trifecta were shamans, but Kitay doesn’t think the theory is credible. Rin insists that strange powers exist; she is aware of the gaps in their understanding about the world.

The festival culminates in a parade featuring giant puppets and a procession of noble families. Rin watches the Phoenix puppet with great interest. She and Kitay notice that Nezha’s father, the Dragon Warlord, is absent from the rest of the statuesque House of Yin. Rin sees Daji for the first time and is mesmerized: “She would have torn apart kingdoms for this woman. […] This was her ruler. This was whom she was meant to serve” (180).

After the Festival, Rin returns to school for her second year at the Academy. Jiang reveals that during her fight she accidentally called a god. He gradually reconfigures Rin’s perception of what “real” is: Jiang can do things no ordinary human can, like call up a gale or make shadows “twist and screech” (185). He often sends her on cryptic missions to the library, with guiding questions such as “why do we have gods?” (186). He asks her to craft connections between disciplines rather than separate them like the rest of the school does.

The next spring, Jiang takes Rin up a mountain for a lesson on “plants,” which turn out to be psychedelics. He says that while opium and heroin are highly destructive to the mind and body, poppy seeds allow shamans to alter their consciousness and commune with the gods. Rin believes they can spread the word about the truth of shamanism, but Jiang enters a melancholy mood: “[Lore] is a joke […] I have searched for years for an apprentice, and only you have ever understood the truth of the world” (197). Over the next weeks, Rin grows frustrated that Jiang won’t give her psychedelics. He says that despite her aptitude for Lore, she is careless. He had four previous Lore students become irrational after accessing the gods’ Pantheon.

Toward the end of their second year, tension with the Federation escalates and Rin’s cohort begins to fracture along “provincial and political lines” (204). Though the Federation’s Emperor Ryohai has not declared formal war, students depart to their home provinces to fight. Jiang avoids all questions about Mugen, saying he doesn’t remember his role in the Second Poppy War.

At the end of the school year, Jiang sends Rin to a nearby mountain to meditate for “as long as it takes” (207). She meditates for weeks until her “consciousness had expanded to encompass the totality of life on the planet” (209). She sees a Speerly woman who warns Rin not to take the power the Phoenix will offer her. Jiang is thrilled by her enlightenment. Rin doesn’t tell him about the Speerly woman or the Phoenix.