The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,78

don’t want that brilliant little mind of yours to shatter, you’ll do as I say.”

The only time Rin felt fully grounded was during her other classes. These were proceeding at twice the rate as they had her first year, and though Rin barely managed to keep up given the absurd course load Jiang had already assigned her, it was nice to study things that made sense for a change.

Rin had always felt like an outsider among her classmates, but as the year carried on, she began to feel as if she inhabited an entirely separate world from them. She was steadily growing further and further away from the world where things functioned as they should, where reality was not constantly in flux, where she thought she knew the shape and nature of things instead of being constantly reminded that really she knew nothing at all.

“Seriously,” Kitay asked over lunch one day. “What are you learning?”

Kitay, like everyone else in her class, thought that Lore was a course in religious history, a smorgasbord of anthropology and folk mythology. She hadn’t bothered to correct them. Easier to spread a believable lie than to convince them of the truth.

“That none of my beliefs about the world were true,” Rin answered dreamily. “That reality is malleable. That hidden connections exist in every living object. That the whole of the world is merely a thought, a butterfly’s dream.”

“Rin?”

“Yes?”

“Your elbow is in my porridge.”

She blinked. “Oh. Sorry.”

Kitay slid his bowl farther away from her arm. “They talk about you, you know. The other apprentices.”

Rin folded her arms. “And what do they say?”

He paused. “You can probably catch the drift. It’s not, uh, good.”

Had she expected anything else? She rolled her eyes. “They don’t like me. Big surprise.”

“It’s not that,” Kitay said. “They’re scared of you.”

“Because I won the Tournament?”

“Because you stormed in here from a rural township no one’s ever heard of, then threw away one of the school’s most prestigious bids to study with the academy madman. They can’t figure you out. They don’t know what you’re trying to do.” Kitay cocked his head at her. “What are you trying to do?”

She hesitated. She knew that look on Kitay’s face. He’d been wearing it more often of late, as her own studies grew more and more distant from topics that she could easily explain to a layman. Kitay hated not having full access to information, and she hated keeping things from him. But how was she supposed to articulate the point of studying Lore to him, when often she could barely justify it to herself?

“Something happened to me that day in the ring,” she said finally. “I’m trying to figure out what.”

She’d braced herself to deal with Kitay’s clinical skepticism, but he only nodded. “And you think Jiang has the answers?”

She exhaled. “If he doesn’t, nobody does.”

“You’ve heard the rumors, though—”

“The madmen. The dropouts. The prisoners at Baghra,” she said. Everyone had their own horror story about Jiang’s previous apprentices. “I know. Trust me, I know.”

Kitay gave her a long, searching look. Finally he nodded toward her untouched bowl of porridge. She’d been cramming for one of Jima’s exams; she’d forgotten to eat.

“Just take care of yourself,” he said.

Second-years were granted eligibility to fight in the ring.

Now that Altan had graduated, the star of the matches turned out to be Nezha, who was rapidly becoming an even more formidable fighter under Jun’s brutal training. Within a month he was challenging students two or three years his senior; by their second spring he was the undefeated champion of the rings.

Rin had been eager to enter the matches, but one conversation with Jiang had put an end to her aspirations.

“You don’t fight,” he said one day as they were balancing on posts above the stream.

She immediately splashed into the water.

“What?” she sputtered once she climbed out.

“The matches are only for apprentices whose masters have consented.”

“Then consent!”

Jiang dipped a toe into the water and pulled it back out gingerly. “Nah.”

“But I want to fight!”

“Interesting, but irrelevant.”

“But—”

“No buts. I’m your master. You don’t question my orders, you obey them.”

“I’ll obey orders that make sense to me,” she retorted as she teetered wildly on a post.

Jiang snorted. “The matches aren’t about winning, they’re about demonstrating new techniques. What are you going to do, light up in front of the entire student body?”

She didn’t push the point further.

Aside from the matches, which Rin attended regularly, she rarely saw her roommates; Niang was always working overtime with Enro, and Venka spent her