She had the calm, grim air of a person about to pass the news that a beloved auntie had died. “Take a look for yourself. That’s the best way to explain.”

Jovis raised his eyebrows but I shrugged, pointed the glass in the direction of the construct encampment and put my eye to the lens.

I nearly dropped the spyglass.

I’d expected the human-looking constructs; after all, my foster brother had been one, I’d met Nisong’s envoy and I’d taken apart the ones at Hualin Or. I knew my father had experimented with people’s bodies. But the majority of her army was made of what looked like people.

“Are there people in her army?”

Urame spoke by my ear. “In a manner of speaking. Keep looking.”

I focused on a group of them. They stood by a campfire but barely moved. There was something strange about the tilt of their bodies. Most wore tattered clothing, much of it stained with blood.

“We’ve been getting reports – they wouldn’t have made it to you yet. But the isles on the edge of the Empire, the ones she’s taken, have suffered more than just defeat and death and burned villages.”

Some of the people had wounds that looked to still be open.

“She has been holding her own Tithing Festival. She has been taking shards.”

The memory of Shiyen’s I’d just seen floated to the forefront of my mind. She wasn’t only killing villagers and taking shards.

She was filling her army with constructs of the dead.

I handed the spyglass back to Urame. “I’m going out there under a flag of truce. I’ve got something else to offer her.”

“Not the throne?” Urame said, her face pale. “We’ve had tyrants enough.”

“No,” I interrupted her. “Never that. Can you ready a wagon?”

She seemed to remember then all the niceties of hosting. “You must be tired after your long journey. And you haven’t eaten.”

My stomach growled as though in response. “Just pack me something I can eat by hand. This is too important to wait.”

Urame gestured to one of the servants behind her, and they leapt to obey. “I wish we had met under different circumstances, Eminence,” she said. “I have the feeling our stories are not too dissimilar. No one knew who I was before I became governor either.”

That fleeting sense of kinship made me ache for more. I wished we could sit down over tea together, to talk about our pasts, to find the threads that made us the same. But I was the Emperor and I didn’t have a past I could speak of. “Someday circumstances will be different,” was all I said.