“He always said that what we did – the Tithing Festival, the constructs – it led to less suffering than would occur than if we didn’t. He said he could live with it, if I could.” She shook her head. “Do you really think I care that much about reliving a past life? I’m not here to recreate the life I see in glimpses. Let that past Shiyen stay dead. Let that past life stay dead.”

“Then what do you want?”

Her teeth flashed somewhere between a grin and a grimace. “I want you to suffer. I want all of you to suffer the way I have. The way those I love have. You never cared about us until we made ourselves heard in blood and fire. To you we were just made things to be disposed of. We were your mistakes, to be crumpled and burned like so many ink blotted pages. Give me your Empire or give me your deaths.”

Now. I sprinted forward, my hand outstretched, the power from Thrana and the cloudtree berry mingling in my veins.

For a moment, I thought I would make it.

And then the shambling constructs closed in around her, my hand meeting only rags and torn flesh.

“I don’t think so.” Nisong met my gaze, and I read only determination in her expression. “This ends only one of two ways. You have until tomorrow morning to surrender.”

39

Jovis

Gaelung Island

I thought once that age had made me wise; instead it made me foolish. I stopped paying attention to the smaller things. I stopped understanding the needs and feelings of mortals. Even after my friendship with Ylan, when I thought I understood, I didn’t.

I went to see what he’d wrought from my gifts. I waited too long, perhaps, trusted too much.

He’d made swords. Seven of them. I knew he would make weapons, so it wasn’t this that surprised me. He was evasive, trying to guide me away. At last, I pried his arm from mine and drew back the bindings to look at what he’d carved on their hilts.

“Die.”

When I turned to protest – we had agreed on something to limit the Alanga, not kill them – he held a blade to my throat.

—Notes from Jovis’s translation of Dione’s journal

Lin didn’t say much on the ride back, and I bit my tongue for as long as I could. “So… when do we go into battle?” I asked finally. “Death and glory and all that.”

She sighed and looked at me. “This isn’t a joke.”

“Oh, believe me, Eminence, I know this is far, far from a joke. We’re asking for a beating.”

“We can do it,” she said. “Her constructs are barely functional. I should know.”