The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,19
a longbow. “Without warning, Nikan’s little brother to the east, its old tributary nation, turned its dagger on the very country that had given it civilization. The rest you know, surely.”
Niang raised her hand. “Why did relations sour between Nikan and Mugen? The Federation was a peaceful tributary in the days of the Red Emperor. What happened? What did they want from us?”
“Relations were never peaceful,” Yim corrected. “And are not to this day. Mugen has always wanted more, even when it was a tributary. The Federation is an ambitious, rapidly growing country with a bulging population on a tiny island. Imagine you’re a highly militaristic country with more people than your land can sustain, and nowhere to expand. Imagine that your rulers have propagated an ideology that they are gods, and that you have a divine right to extend your empire across the eastern hemisphere. Suddenly the sprawling landmass right across the Nariin Sea looks like a prime target, doesn’t it?”
He turned back to the map. “The First Poppy War was a disaster. The fractured Empire could never stand up against well-trained Federation troops, who had been drilling for decades for this enterprise. So here’s a puzzle for you. How did we win the Second Poppy War?”
A boy named Han raised his hand. “The Trifecta?”
Muted snickers sounded around the classroom. The Trifecta—the Vipress, the Dragon Emperor, and the Gatekeeper—were three heroic soldiers who had unified the Empire against the Federation. They were real—the woman known as the Vipress still sat on the throne at Sinegard—but their legendary martial arts abilities were the subject of children’s tales. Rin had grown up hearing stories about how the Trifecta had single-handedly flattened entire Federation battalions, leveraging storms and floods with their supernatural powers. But even she thought it sounded ridiculous in a lecture about history.
“Don’t laugh. The Trifecta were important—without their political machinations, we might never have rallied the Twelve Provinces,” said Yim. “But that’s not the answer I’m looking for.”
Rin raised her hand. She had memorized this answer from Tutor Feyrik’s history primers. “We razed the heartland. Pursued a strategy of slash and burn. When the Federation army marched too far inland, their supply lines ran out and they couldn’t feed their armies.”
Yim acknowledged this answer with a shrug. “Good answer, but false. That’s just propaganda they put in the countryside textbooks. The slash-and-burn strategy hurt the rural countryside more than it hurt Mugen. Anyone else?”
It was the wiry-haired boy in the front who got it right. “We won because we lost Speer.”
Yim nodded. “Stand up. Explain.”
The boy shoved his hair back and stood. “We won the war because losing Speer made Hesperia intervene. And, uh, Hesperia’s naval abilities were vastly superior to Mugen’s. They won the war over the ocean theater, and Nikan got looped into the subsequent peace treaty. The victory wasn’t really ours at all.”
“Correct,” Yim said.
The boy sat, looking immensely relieved.
“Nikan did not win the Second Poppy War,” Yim reiterated. “The Federation is gone because we were so pathetic that the great naval powers to the west felt bad for us. We did such a terrible job defending our country that it took genocide for Hesperia to intervene. While Nikara forces were tied up on the northern front, a fleet of Federation ships razed the Dead Island overnight. Every man, woman, and child on Speer was butchered, and their bodies burned. An entire race, gone in a day.”
Their class was silent. They had grown up hearing stories about the destruction of Speer, a tiny island that punctuated the ocean between the Nariin Sea and Omonod Bay like a teardrop, lying just beside Snake Province. It had been the Empire’s only remaining tributary state, conquered and annexed at the height of the Red Emperor’s reign. It held a fraught place in Nikan’s history, a glaring example of the massive failure of the disunited army under the Warlords’ regime.
Rin had always wondered whether the loss of Speer was purely an accident. If any other province had been destroyed the way Speer had, the Nikara Empire wouldn’t have stopped with a peace treaty. They would have fought until the Federation of Mugen was in pieces.
But the Speerlies weren’t really Nikara at all. Tall and brown-skinned, they were an island people who had always been ethnically separate from the Nikara mainlanders. They spoke their own language, wrote in their own script, and practiced their own religion. They had joined the Imperial Militia only at the Red Emperor’s sword point.