Lilia worked silently, like a shadow. She did not lose her stomach until the day they were brought to a woman who had been carried to Emlee’s doorstep. She had a swatch of dirty, bloodied bandaging up one leg and wrapped about her torso. She stank of dead flesh.

Emlee reached forward to take off the bandaging. Lilia saw something moving beneath it. When Emlee drew the bandages clear, she revealed the woman’s gaping wound: a shiver of writhing maggots seethed inside the rotting flesh. The smell of death thickened the room.

Lilia’s skin crawled. She stumbled out of the tent and vomited her breakfast into the latrine gutter. She crouched with her head down for several minutes until her stomach stopped heaving.

Then she went back to Emlee and knelt beside the woman.

“Found her in a ditch at the rear of the camp,” Emlee said. “They only throw the traitors there.”

“Traitors?”

“Dajians who worked for the Empress,” Emlee said.

“Why would the Empress send them here?”

“Because they betrayed her,” Emlee said.

“Wait. So they are traitors to the Empress, not to us?”

“Us?” Emlee frowned. “Child, those who betray the Empress also betray us. We’re her people.”

“But you’re… you, all of you–”

“You’re a temple Dhai,” Emlee said. “You wouldn’t understand. But you will.”

Lilia gazed across the comatose woman to the open door and the camp beyond. She found something to replace her numb despair then. It was rage. Rage at all of this, at this world, at a place that could create all of this sorrow and madness, at a place that could throw her and these people away like filth.

She bent over her patient and gently pulled the woman’s matted, dirty hair from her face. Lilia’s fingers froze.

She knew the woman’s face.

It was Gian.

Chapter 40

40

“I said I would tell you when it was time,” Maralah said. “It’s time.”

“The Dhai are keeping information from us,” the Patron said.

“And we’re keeping information from them,” Maralah said. “They have yet to ask if we’re fighting Dhai.”

Maralah, Driaa, and Kadaan stood with the Patron at the top of the keep, in what had become their makeshift war room. The space wasn’t meant for it. Best Maralah could surmise, it had once been a luxurious retreat for some very old Patron’s favorite wife. Silver and gold gilded passages from the Lord’s Book of Unmaking graced the ceiling. The passages were a selection of love poetry to Oma written by a sixth-century scholar included in one of the appendices of the Book.

The chamber also had a breathtaking view of the surrounding countryside. Maralah suspected that before it was tarted up, its original purpose was a military one. Village elders always told her that time was a circle and everything came back around again. It was strange to see how literal that had become.