bygones be bygones. They’re coming now as friends.”
The Empire had a troubled history with the Republic of Hesperia. During the First Poppy War, the Hesperians had offered military and economic aid to the Federation of Mugen. Once the Mugenese had obliterated any notion of Nikara sovereignty, the Hesperians had populated the coastal regions with missionaries and religious schools, intent on wiping out the local superstitious religions.
For a short time, the Hesperian missionaries had even outlawed temple visits. If any shamanic cults still existed after the Red Emperor’s war on religion, the Hesperians drove them even further underground.
During the Second Poppy War, the Hesperians became the liberators. The Federation had committed too many atrocities for the Hesperians, who had always claimed that their occupation benefited the natives, to pretend neutrality was morally defensible. After Speer burned, the Hesperians sent their fleets to the Nariin Sea, joined forces with the Trifecta’s troops, pushed the Federation all the way back to their longbow island, and orchestrated a peace agreement with the newly reformed Nikara Empire in Sinegard.
Then the Trifecta seized dictatorial control of the country and threw the foreigners out by the ship. Whatever Hesperians remained were smugglers and missionaries, hiding in international ports like Ankhiluun and Khurdalain, preaching their word to anyone who bothered to entertain them.
When the Third Poppy War began, those last Hesperians had sailed away on rescue ships so fast that by the time Rin’s contingent had reached Khurdalain they might never have been there. As the war progressed, the Hesperians had been willful bystanders, watching aloof from across the great sea while Nikara citizens burned in their homes.
“They might have come a little earlier,” Rin quipped.
“There’s been a war ravishing the entire western continent for the past two decades,” said Nezha. “They’ve been a bit distracted.”
This was news to her. Until now, news of the western continent had been so utterly irrelevant to her it might not have existed. “Did they win?”
“You could say that. Millions are dead. Millions more are without home or country. But the Consortium states came out in power, so they consider that a victory. Although I don’t—”
Rin grabbed his arm. “They’re coming out.”
Doors had opened at the sides of each basket. One by one the Hesperians filed out onto the dock.
Rin recoiled at the sight of them.
Their skin was terribly pale—not the flawless porcelain-white shade that Sinegardians prized, but more like the tint of a freshly gutted fish. And their hair looked all the wrong colors—garish shades of copper, gold, and bronze, nothing like the rich black of Nikara hair. Everything about them—their coloring, their features, their proportions—simply seemed off.
They didn’t look like people; they looked like things out of horror stories. They might have been demon-possessed monsters conjured up for Nikara folk heroes to fight. And though Rin was too old for folktales, everything about these light-eyed creatures made her want to run.
“How’s your Hesperian?” Nezha asked.
“Rusty,” she admitted. “I hate that language.”
They had all been forced to study several years of diplomatic Hesperian at Sinegard. Rules of pronunciation were haphazard at best and its grammar system was so riddled with exceptions it might not exist at all.
None of Rin’s classmates had paid much attention to their Hesperian grammar lessons. They had all assumed that as the Federation was the primary threat, Mugini was more important to learn.
Rin supposed things would be very different now.
A column of Hesperian sailors, identical in their close-cropped hair and dark gray uniforms, walked out of the baskets and formed two neat lines in front of the crowd. Rin counted twenty of them.
She examined their faces but couldn’t tell one apart from the next. They all seemed to have the same lightly colored eyes, broad noses, and strong jaws. They were all men, and each held a strange-looking weapon across his chest. Rin couldn’t determine the weapon’s purpose. It looked like a series of tubes of different lengths, joined together near the back with something like a handle.
A final soldier emerged from the basket door. Rin assumed he was their general by his uniform, which bore multicolored ribbons on the left chest where the others’ were bare. He struck Rin immediately as dangerous. He stood at least half a head taller than Vaisra, he sported a chest as wide as Baji’s, and his weathered face was lined and intelligent.
Behind the general walked a row of hooded Hesperians clothed in gray cassocks.
“Who are they?” Rin asked Nezha. They couldn’t be soldiers; they wore no armor and held no