Altan took her hand and pointed it out toward the ocean. “The Federation of Mugen lies just across the narrow strait. If you climb the Kukhoni range, you can just glimpse it. And if you take a ship south of there, down close by Golyn Niis and into Snake Province, you’ll get to Speer.”
She couldn’t possibly see it from where they stood, but still she stared out over the shimmering water, imagining a small, lonely island in the South Nikan Sea. Speer had spent decades in isolation before the great continental powers tore the island apart in the struggle between them.
“What’s it like?”
“Speer? Speer was beautiful.” Altan’s voice was soft, wistful. “They call it the Dead Island now, but all I can remember of it is green. On one side of the island you could see the shore of the Nikara Empire; on the other was boundless water, a limitless horizon. We would take boats out and sail into that ocean without knowing what we would find; journeys into the endless dark to seek out the other side of the world. The Speerlies divided the night sky into sixty-four houses of constellations, one for each god. And as long as you could find the southern star of the Phoenix, you could always find your way back to Speer.”
Rin wondered what the Dead Island was like now. When Mugen destroyed Speer, had they destroyed the villages as well? Or did the huts and lodges still stand, ghost towns waiting for inhabitants who would never return?
“Why did you leave?” she asked.
She realized then that she knew very little about Altan. His survival was a mystery to her, just as her very existence was a mystery to everyone else.
He must have been very young when he came to Nikan, a refugee of the war that killed his people. He couldn’t have been older than four or five. Who had spirited him off that island? Why only him?
And why her?
But Altan didn’t answer. He stared silently at the darkening sky for a long moment and then turned back toward the path.
“Come on,” he said, and reached for her arm. “We’re going to fall behind.”
Officer Yenjen raised a Nikara flag outside the city walls, and then ordered his squadron to take cover behind the trees until they received a response. After a half hour’s wait, a slight girl, dressed head to toe in black, peeked out from the city gate. She motioned frantically for the party to hurry up and get inside, then quickly shut the gate once they were through.
“Your division is waiting in the old fishing district. That’s north of here. Follow the main road,” she instructed Officer Yenjen. Then she turned and saluted her commander. “Trengsin.”
“Qara.”
“That’s our Speerly?”
“That’s her.”
Qara tilted her head as she sized Rin up. She was a tiny woman—girl, really—reaching only to Rin’s shoulder. Her hair hung past her waist in a thick, dark braid. Her features were oddly elongated, not quite Nikara but not quite anything that Rin could put her finger on.
A massive hunting falcon sat perched on her left shoulder, tilting its head at Rin with a disdainful expression. Its eyes and Qara’s were an identical shade of gold.
“How are our people?”
“Fine,” said Qara. “Well. Mostly fine.”
“When’s your brother back?”
Qara’s falcon stretched its head up and then hunched back down, feathers raised as if unsettled. Qara reached up and stroked the bird’s neck.
“When he’s back,” she said.
Yenjen and his squadron had already disappeared down the winding alleys of the city. Qara motioned for Rin and Altan to follow her up a set of stairs adjacent to the city walls.
“Where is she from?” Rin muttered to Altan.
“She’s a Hinterlander,” Altan said, and grabbed her arm just as she stumbled against the rickety stairs. “Don’t trip.”
Qara led them up a high walkway that spanned over the first few blocks of Khurdalain. Once at the top, Rin turned and got her first good look at the port city.
Khurdalain could have been a foreign city uprooted at the foundations and dropped straight onto the other side of the world. It was a chimera of multiple architectural styles, a bizarre amalgamation of building types from different countries spanning continents. Rin saw churches of the kind she’d seen only sketches of in history textbooks, the proof of former Bolonian occupation. She saw buildings with spiraling columns, buildings with elegant monochrome towers with deep grooves etched in their sides instead of the sloping pagodas native to Sinegard. Sinegard was the beacon of the Nikara Empire, but Khurdalain was Nikan’s window to the rest of the world.
