The Red Emperor’s guards hadn’t patrolled the mountains of Nikan in a long time. To travel alone over the Empire’s vast roads was a good way to get robbed, murdered, or eaten. Sometimes all three—and sometimes not in that order.
“Your fare is going toward more than a seat on the wagon,” the caravan leader said as he pocketed their coins. “It’s paying for your bodyguards. Our men are the best in their business. If we run into the Opera, we’ll scare them right off.”
The Red Junk Opera was a religious cult of bandits and outlaws famous for their attempts on the Empress’s life after the Second Poppy War. It had faded to myth by now, but remained vividly alive in the Nikara imagination.
“The Opera?” Tutor Feyrik scratched his beard absentmindedly. “I haven’t heard that name for years. They’re still out and about?”
“They’ve quieted down in the last decade, but I’ve heard a few rumors about sightings in the Kukhonin range. If our luck holds, though, we won’t see hide or hair of them.” The caravan leader slapped his belt. “I would go load up your things. I want to head out before this day gets any hotter.”
Their caravan spent three weeks on the road, crawling north at what seemed to Rin an infuriatingly slow pace. Tutor Feyrik spent the trip regaling her with tales of his adventures in Sinegard decades ago, but his dazzling descriptions of the city only made her wild with impatience.
“The capital is nestled at the base of the Wudang range. The palace and the academy are both built into the mountainside, but the rest of the city lies in the valley below. Sometimes, on misty days, you’ll look over the edge and it’ll seem like you’re standing higher than the clouds themselves. The capital’s market alone is larger than all of Tikany. You could lose yourself in that market … you will see musicians playing on gourd pipes, street vendors who can fry pancake batter in the shape of your name, master calligraphers who will paint fans before your eyes for just two coppers.
“Speaking of. We’ll want to exchange these at some point.” Tutor Feyrik patted the pocket where he kept the last of their travel money.
“They don’t take taels and coppers in the north?” Rin asked.
Tutor Feyrik chuckled. “You really have never left Tikany, have you? There are probably twenty kinds of currency being circulated in this Empire—tortoise shells, cowry shells, gold, silver, copper ingots … all the provinces have their own currencies because they don’t trust the imperial bureaucracy with monetary supply, and the bigger provinces have two or three. The only thing everyone takes is standard Sinegardian silver coins.”
“How many can we get with this?” Rin asked.
“Not many,” Tutor Feyrik said. “But exchange rates will get worse the closer we get to the city. We’d best do it before we’re out of Rooster Province.”
Tutor Feyrik was also full of warnings about the capital. “Keep your money in your front pocket at all times. The thieves in Sinegard are daring and desperate. I once caught a child with his hand in my pocket. He fought for my coin, even after I’d caught him in the act. Everyone will try to sell you things. When you hear solicitors, keep your eyes forward and pretend you haven’t heard them, or they’ll hound you the entire way down the street. They’re paid to bother you. Stay away from cheap liquor. If a man is offering sorghum wine for less than an ingot for a jug, it’s not real alcohol.”
Rin was appalled. “How could you fake alcohol?”
“By mixing sorghum wine with methanol.”
“Methanol?”
“Wood spirits. It’s poisonous stuff; in large doses it’ll make you go blind.” Tutor Feyrik rubbed his beard. “While you’re at it, stay away from the street vendors’ soy sauce, too. Some places use human hair to simulate the acids in soy sauce at a lower cost. I hear hair has also found its way into bread and noodle dough. Hmm … for that matter, you’re best off staying away from street food entirely. They sell you breakfast pancakes for two coppers apiece, but they fry them in gutter oil.”
“Gutter oil?”
“Oil that’s been scooped off the street. The big restaurants toss their cooking oil into the gutter. The street food vendors siphon it up and reuse it.”
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