Mari had no recollection of their departure. Her earliest memory was some months later, staying in a shabby inn in the nearby country of Antiev. Stasia and Mari had played fetch with a stray canine missing an eye. She’d bawled hysterically when they left that lodging a week later, and she’d not been able to say goodbye to the pup. The one thing she knew for certain was that it’d been only the three of them, Stasia, Mari, and Thorda. No one else. Whatever family she might have had remained behind in Miquo, or perished.

“Do you miss it?” she asked. “Miquo, I mean?”

“Of course I miss it. How could I not?”

Mari hesitated. This was a thought she’d long feared to share, for how could it not be a betrayal to everything her sister and father had worked for?

“Do you… do you wish we had stayed behind? That we never left Miquo?”

“You’ve seen what becomes of a conquered populace,” Stasia said. “The reeducation centers. The forceful conversions and mandated prayers. The harder a nation fights back, the crueler the Uplifted Church becomes, and none fought back harder than Miquo. Life was rough as a Miquoan refugee, but we had money, and Father’s reputation. It was worse at home, I’m certain of it. Better we fought. Better we gave aid to places in need.”

“Places that fell nonetheless,” she said, surprised by the bitterness in her own voice. She thought Stasia might snap at her, or berate her, but her sister instead surprised her with a moment of thoughtfulness.

“I’ve held those same fears,” Stasia admitted. “It’s hard to believe we’re helping, when every rebellion we raise up dies beneath an imperial heel. But we only need to succeed once. The empire is too big, too unwieldy. The moment its foundation cracks, the rebellions we seeded will sprout again. The Uplifted Church sows hatred to unite people behind a faith few truly believe in, and that needed hatred will be their undoing. Peace may not come in my lifetime, but I believe victory one day will. The God-Incarnate is no god. He’s a man. A wretched man with too long a life.”

The final few boats pulled into the dock, last-minute fishermen and merchants from elsewhere on Thanet bringing goods from their villages to trade in the expansive city on the cliffs. The five imperial galleons settled into position, reestablishing the nightly blockade. That a blockade was still in place years after the initial invasion was unusual, but then again, so many things were, on their distant island. Small things, but the more Mari thought about them, the more they struck her. The talk of what had been done to Miquo upon its conquering only made the oddities that much clearer, and she finally broke the comfortable silence to voice these thoughts to her sister.