Rin’s stomach turned.
Tutor Feyrik reached out and yanked on one of Rin’s tight braids. “You’ll want to find someone to cut these off for you before you get to the Academy.”
Rin touched her hair protectively. “Sinegardian women don’t grow their hair out?”
“The women in Sinegard are so vain about their hair that they’ll imbibe raw eggs to maintain its gloss. This isn’t about aesthetics. I don’t want someone yanking you into the alleys. No one would hear from you until you turned up in a brothel months later.”
Rin looked reluctantly down at her braids. She was too dark-skinned and scrawny to be considered any great beauty, but she had always felt that her long, thick hair was one of her better assets. “Do I have to?”
“They’ll probably make you shear your hair at the Academy anyway,” said Tutor Feyrik. “And they’ll charge you for it. Sinegardian barbers aren’t cheap.” He rubbed his beard as he thought up more warnings. “Beware of fake currency. You can tell a silver’s not an imperial silver if it lands Red Emperor–side up ten throws in a row. If you see someone lying down with no visible injuries, don’t help them up. They’ll say you pushed them, take you to court, and sue you for the clothes off your back. And stay away from the gambling houses.” Tutor Feyrik’s tone turned sour. “Their people don’t mess around.”
Rin was starting to understand why he had left Sinegard.
But nothing Tutor Feyrik said could dampen her excitement. If anything, it made her even more impatient to arrive. She would not be an outsider in the capital. She would not be eating street food or living in the city slums. She did not have to fight for scraps or scrounge together coins for a meal. She had already secured a position for herself. She was a student of the most prestigious academy in all of the Empire. Surely that insulated her from the city’s dangers.
That night she cut off her braids by herself with a rusty knife she’d borrowed from one of the caravan guards. She jerked the blade as close to her ears as she dared, sawing back and forth until her hair gave way. It took longer than she had imagined. When she was done, she stared for a minute at the two thick ropes of hair that lay in her lap.
She had thought she might keep them, but now she could not see any sentimental value in doing so. They were just clumps of dead hair. She wouldn’t even be able to sell them for much up north—Sinegardian hair was famously thin and silky, and no one wanted the coarse tresses of a peasant from Tikany. Instead, she hurled them out the side of the wagon and watched them fall behind on the dusty road.
Their party arrived in the capital just as Rin was starting to go mad from boredom.
She could see Sinegard’s famous East Gate from miles off—an imposing gray wall topped by a three-tiered pagoda, emblazoned with a dedication to the Red Emperor: Eternal Strength, Eternal Harmony.
Ironic, Rin thought, for a country that had been at war more often than it had been at peace.
Just as they approached the rounded doors below, their caravan came to an abrupt halt.
Rin waited. Nothing happened.
After twenty minutes had passed, Tutor Feyrik leaned out of their wagon and caught the attention of a caravan guide. “What’s going on?”
“Federation contingent up ahead,” the guide said. “They’re here about some border dispute. They’re getting their weapons checked at the gate—it’ll be a few more minutes.”
Rin sat up straight. “Those are Federation soldiers?”
She’d never seen Mugenese soldiers in person—at the end of the Second Poppy War, all Mugenese nationals had been forced out of their occupied areas and either sent home or relocated to limited diplomatic and trading offices on the mainland. To those Nikara born after occupation, they were the specters of modern history—always lingering in the borderlands, an ever-present threat whose face was unknown.
Tutor Feyrik’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist before she could hop out of the wagon. “Get back here.”
“But I want to see!”
“No, you don’t.” He gripped her by the shoulders. “You never want to see Federation soldiers. If you cross them—if they even think you’ve looked at them funny—they can and will hurt you. They still have diplomatic immunity. They don’t give a shit. Do you understand?”
“We won the war,” she scoffed. “The occupation’s over.”
“We barely won the war.” He shoved her back into a sitting position. “And there’s a reason why all your instructors at Sinegard care only about winning the next one.”
Someone shouted a command at the front of the caravan. Rin felt a lurch; then the wagons began to move again. She leaned over the side of their wagon, trying to catch a glimpse up ahead, but all she could see was a blue uniform disappearing through the heavy doors.
And then, at last, they were through the gates.
The downtown marketplace was an assault on the senses. Rin had never seen so many people or things in one place at one time. She was quickly overwhelmed by the deafening clamor of buyers haggling with sellers over prices, the bright colors of flowery skeins of silk splayed out on grand display boards, and the cloyingly pungent odors of durian and peppercorn drifting up from vendors’ portable grills.
“The women here are so white,” Rin marveled. “Like the girls in wall paintings.”
The skin tones she observed from the caravan had moved up the color gradient the farther north they drove. She knew that the people of the northern provinces were industrialists and businessmen. They were citizens of class and means; they didn’t labor in the fields like Tikany’s farmers did. But she hadn’t expected the differences to be this pronounced.
“They’re pale as their corpses will be,” Tutor Feyrik said dismissively. “They’re terrified of the sun.” He grumbled in irritation as a pair of women with day parasols strolled past him, accidentally whacking him in the face.
Rin discovered quickly that Sinegard had the unique ability to make newcomers feel as unwelcome as possible.
Tutor Feyrik had been right—everyone in Sinegard wanted money. Vendors screamed at them persistently from all directions. Before Rin had even stepped off the wagon, a porter ran up to them and offered to carry their luggage—two pathetically light travel bags—for the small fee of eight imperial silvers.
Rin balked; that was almost a quarter of what they’d paid for a spot on the caravan.
“I’ll carry it,” she stammered, jerking her travel bag away from the porter’s clawing fingers. “Really, I don’t need—let go!”
They escaped the porter only to be assaulted by a crowd, each person offering a different menial service.
“Rickshaw? Do you need a rickshaw?”
“Little girl, are you lost?”
“No, we’re just trying to find the school—”
“I’ll take you there, very low fee, five ingots, only five ingots—”
“Get lost,” snapped Tutor Feyrik. “We don’t need your services.”
The hawkers slunk back into the marketplace.
Even the spoken language of the capital made Rin uncomfortable. Sinegardian Nikara was a grating dialect, brisk and curt no matter the content. Tutor Feyrik asked three different strangers for directions to the campus before one gave a response that he understood.