They sat in silence for a long time. Finally, Lilia asked, “Why did you come back for me? You left me to die, Taigan.”

“I wanted your opinion on the battle at Roasandara, the one fought two thousand years ago,” he said.

Laughter bubbled up. Lilia choked on it. She laughed so hard, she doubled over. Tears streamed down her face.

Taigan said, “Should I pound your back? Are you dying?”

His serious tone made Lilia laugh harder. She remembered being broken at the bottom of the ravine, the karoi pecking her apart, piece by piece. She thought of the dead child severed by the gate, the burning legionnaires, the burst mirror, and how she had killed her own mother.

“If you wanted my opinion on a battle,” she said, “you should have turned around sooner.”

“No,” Taigan said. “I came back for you at just the right time.”

Chapter 51

51

Zezili was getting happily drunk when the world exploded.

She supposed she should have expected who it would be shaking her awake the next morning while she slept off the drink and violence of the night before in the cold, crooked roots of a tree stump.

She rubbed her gummy eyes and saw Monshara standing above her. “You’re predictable, at least,” Monshara said. “You want to go in chains back to your Empress, or take a dog and walk in on your own two feet?”

Zezili gazed up at the rotten sky of Monshara’s world. “It was worth it,” she said.

“We’ll see,” Monshara said.

By the time Zezili was delivered back to her own world, put back into her proper clothes, and escorted back to Daorian by Monshara and two of her omajistas, Daorian was already wreathed in red, the color of mourning. Great red banners flanked the tower gates, the spires of the distant keep. The city people had put out red kerchiefs in their windows, hung them from the snow-heavy awnings of their shops. Zezili wondered who died. Then wondered if it was supposed to be her.

People knew her by her armor, the plaited skirt knotted with the hair of dajians, the image of Rhea holding a sword over a dead bear etched into the breastplate, outlined in flaking silver. Her helm had no plume, ending instead in a curve of metal like a snake’s tail. The people came out to see her, muttered about her on their doorsteps, pointed. Some saw her and hid. Two old women made a ward against evil as she passed. It told Zezili something of the Empress’s silent ambiguity regarding her station that they did not spit at Zezili or curse her. It helped that Monshara hadn’t bound her.

It was a small kindness, Zezili supposed.

The city waited on the Empress’s judgment.