The Poppy War recap

Fang Runin, a war orphan in Nikan's poor south, escapes an arranged marriage by placing first in the empire-wide Keju examination and winning a place at Sinegard, the country's elite military academy. Despised there for her origins, she is taken as apprentice by the eccentric master of Lore and discovers that the old gods are real and can be called by anyone willing to pay for it with their mind. When the Federation of Mugen invades, Rin is commissioned into the Cike, the empire's unit of shamans, under Altan Trengsin, the last Speerly. The campaign goes badly: the port of Khurdalain falls, and the city of Golyn Niis is found already massacred. Altan's attempt to free the shamans sealed inside the Chuluu Korikh looses an uncontrollable one and ends with him and Rin captured and taken to Speer, where he dies freeing her. Learning that the Empress sold Speer and its people to the Federation to end the previous war, Rin calls her god and destroys the Federation's home islands and everyone on them, ending the war and beginning something worse.

Fang Runin, called Rin, is a war orphan in the southern town of Tikany, raised as unpaid labour by the Fang family, whose shop is a front for opium smuggling. When her guardians arrange to marry her to a much older man, she gambles everything on the Keju, the empire-wide examination whose top scorers are admitted to Nikan's academies. Studying under a local tutor to the point of self-harm, she places first in her province and wins a place at Sinegard, the elite military academy in the capital. She arrives to find a school of wealthy northerners who treat her dark skin, southern accent and poverty as proof she does not belong. She makes one friend, Chen Kitay, the defence minister's son, and one enemy, Yin Nezha, son of the Dragon Warlord, who humiliates her from her first day. Ranked at the bottom of her class and warned that failing the year means expulsion, Rin sets out to make herself impossible to dismiss.

Rin survives her first year at Sinegard by working harder than anyone else, and by making a permanent decision about her own body: she has a herbalist destroy her womb so that adolescence cannot interfere with her training. Physically outmatched in Combat class and close to being cut from the academy, she is saved when Jiang, the master of Lore, takes her as his apprentice, the first he has accepted in years. Lore is a subject the rest of the faculty regards as worthless. Jiang sets her to meditation, herblore and the old stories of the sixty-four gods, refuses to explain what any of it leads to, and insists that restraint matters more than power. Rin begins to suspect that the gods in those stories are real and reachable, and that Jiang knows exactly how to reach them. Alongside this she studies strategy with Kitay, keeps losing to Nezha, and watches Altan Trengsin, the academy's best student and the last living Speerly, from a distance.

At the academy's end-of-year Tournament, Rin faces Nezha in front of the whole school and the visiting warlords. Losing badly, she reaches for the god Jiang warned her never to touch, and fire answers: she burns Nezha severely and wins the match. Jiang is appalled rather than impressed and tells her that what she has done is not a skill but an opening she may not be able to close. The victory ends her standing as the school's joke and begins her real education, as Jiang finally explains shamanism: the gods can be reached through meditation and drugs, and every shaman pays for the power with their mind. Before the argument between master and student can be settled, the Federation of Mugen, the island empire that has occupied Nikan twice before, attacks. A third Poppy War begins, the academy is emptied, and the students are commissioned and sent to the front.

Rin is assigned not to a regular division but to the Cike, the empire's unit of shamans - assassins the Militia regards as monsters and uses as disposable. Its commander is Altan Trengsin. Its members each answer to a different god: Chaghan, a Hinterlander who can leave his body and steady other shamans' minds; his twin Qara, who sees through birds; Ramsa, a teenage explosives-maker; Baji and Suni, who channel a boar and a monkey and are dangerous to stand beside. Jiang refuses to take any part in the war and disappears, leaving Rin without a teacher and without the control he insisted she needed. The Cike are sent to Khurdalain, a northern port city where the Federation has landed and where the defence is divided between rival Nikara commanders who will not cooperate with one another.

The defence of Khurdalain becomes a grinding stalemate: the city's commanders quarrel, the Federation lands more troops, and the Cike are used for sabotage and assassination rather than open battle. Rin is reunited with Nezha and Kitay, who are serving with a regular division, and the old academy rivalry gives way to something closer to alliance. Rin's fire remains unreliable and she has no one left to teach her; Altan uses her anyway, and she begins to model herself on him - his discipline, his anger, and the opium he uses to reach his god. Chaghan warns her that Altan is not the example she takes him for. The Cike's operations do real damage without changing the shape of the campaign, and the Federation's hold on the coast steadily tightens.

Khurdalain falls. The Federation breaks the city's defences, the feud between the Nikara commanders proves fatal, and the survivors are forced into retreat. In the fighting Nezha is gravely wounded and lost, and Rin believes him dead. The Cike lose members, and Altan's judgement narrows to a single question: how to hurt the Federation badly enough to end the war outright. Orders from the Empress reach him rarely and mean less each time. Rin, who has spent the campaign learning that her god will give her anything the moment she stops resisting it, follows him inland as the unit turns south toward Golyn Niis, the imperial city where the bulk of the Nikara army has fallen back and where Kitay was posted.

The Cike reach Golyn Niis and find that the city has already fallen. The Federation army has killed its population, soldiers and civilians together, on a scale that leaves nothing to defend and nobody to evacuate. Searching the ruins, Rin finds Kitay alive among the dead, physically unhurt and badly damaged by what he witnessed. The atrocity ends any argument within the Cike about restraint. Altan concludes that conventional war is already lost and that the only force left to Nikan is shamanic, and he sets out for the Chuluu Korikh, the stone mountain where shamans who lost themselves to their gods are sealed alive rather than executed, intending to free them and turn them on the Federation. Rin, whose control over what she opened at Sinegard has been slipping all campaign, does not argue with him.

The attempt to raise an army from the Chuluu Korikh fails at once. The first shaman released, Feylen, a former Cike member long since wholly taken over by the wind god, is beyond anyone's command; he escapes into the world as a greater danger than the one he was meant to solve, and the mountain is sealed again with nothing gained. The Cike are scattered, and Altan and Rin are taken by the Federation and shipped to Speer, the burnt island the Federation has used for twenty years as a research station. There Rin learns what was done to the Speerlies who were not killed in the last war, and that Altan was one of the children the Federation's doctors kept and studied. Held, drugged and cut off from her god, she is left with the certainty that nobody is coming for them.

Altan frees Rin and the surviving Cike from the Federation's compound on Speer and stays behind: he calls his god one last time, burns the facility and the researchers in it, and dies in the fire he raises. Rin also learns why Speer was destroyed in the previous war - Empress Su Daji sold the island and its people to the Federation to buy the peace that ended it, and Nikan's rulers have lied about it ever since. Left standing on the ruins of her own people's home, with command of the Cike and nothing restraining her, Rin bargains with the Phoenix and asks it to end the Federation entirely. The god answers: the island nation of Mugen is destroyed and its population, soldiers and civilians together, is killed. The war ends because there is no longer an enemy to fight it. Rin survives what she has done without repenting it, takes command of the Cike, and turns her attention to the Empress who betrayed Speer.

Altan Trengsin dies on Speer, burning the Federation's research station and its staff to free Rin and the captured Cike. Before he does, Rin learns the truth the Empire has hidden for twenty years: Speer was not destroyed by the Federation alone but handed over by Empress Su Daji as the price of ending the last war, and the Speerlies who were not killed were kept as experimental subjects, Altan among them as a child. Standing on the ruins of her own people's island with command of the Cike and nobody left to restrain her, Rin bargains with the Phoenix and asks it to destroy the Federation. It does: the home islands of Mugen and the population on them, soldiers and civilians alike, are annihilated, and the war ends because there is no longer an enemy to fight. Rin does not repent it. She takes over the Cike as its commander, with Chaghan, Qara, Ramsa, Baji and Suni following her out of habit rather than belief. Jiang is still missing, having refused the war outright. Nezha was lost at Khurdalain and is presumed dead. The Empire is intact and the Empress is still on the throne, and Rin has decided she will kill her. The book closes with Rin the author of a genocide, dependent on opium to reach her god, and increasingly unable to tell her own will from the Phoenix's.