After she left, Zezili reached across the table and picked up the coin. The figure looked nothing like the empress Zezili knew – the bronze-skinned, cant-legged woman with the big yellow eyes and wasp-like waist. The Book of Rhea said that Empress Casanlyn’s line had crossed into Dorinah from Rhea’s seat a very long time ago when Rhea’s world and their own came together. Her people came bearing great gifts of fertility and abundance to the people of Dorinah. Zezili always thought the Empress was the remnant of some eastern race, but now she wondered if her empress was from another world altogether that had failed to cross over completely during the last rise of Oma. On the other side, they had no bronze-skinned god leading their country. Empress Casanlyn’s people had never crossed over to that world. Never tried to take over. Never toed a hole in Dorinah big enough to hide in. They had only Monshara’s mother, and she had lost.

“But she is my empress,” Zezili muttered, and left the coin on the table. She bought another piece of paper from the bar matron and began writing a letter to Empress Casanlyn.

The dajian camps in Janifa lay on the other side of the country, on the coast. A week of hard travel brought Zezili’s angry, spitting legionnaires to within shouting distance of the eastern sea. Her women were wearying of blood, and she could feel their frustration. They bickered more. Got into bloody fights among themselves. Brute slaughter was bad for morale. Only the most sadistic took any pleasure from this game. The rest were ready to go home. She began to consider rotating out these women with a fresh group pulled from the primary legion.

The farther east they went, the hillier the way became. They passed through hills tiered with rice paddies, little dajians working up to their shins in the shallow water. They passed fields of ragged brown sunflower stalks, and spent two days in the coastal town of Jovonyn, where a late-autumn masque was held. Jasoi danced drunkenly with Monshara all night, and Zezili pretended not to notice Jasoi coming out of Monshara’s tent the next day. Zezili found the mardana men of Jovonyn intriguing and spent a night herself entwined with the young bodies of three boys who could not have been a day over sixteen. What they lacked in experience they made up for in stamina.

They climbed steep hills, and Monshara asked to stop for a day and explore colorful caverns and the great ruins of the city that had been razed by the Saiduans a thousand years before. Zezili watched her picking through the remnants of old temples and fountains and other, stranger structures. A good deal of twisted glass littered the streets. Monshara and the four legionnaires Zezili sent with her came back with cuts on their hands and faces.