Zezili reined her dog within the courtyard of the keep. Monshara and her omajistas slid off their bears. A kennel girl darted out from the warmth of the kennels and took the reins of Zezili’s dog without looking Zezili in the face.

Zezili reached up a hand to her dog’s ears and rubbed at the base of them. She pressed her cheek to his and pretended he was Dakar. She had lost her husband and her dog. She had betrayed her Empress. It was the end of all things.

The dog licked her face with his hot tongue. She pulled away only to find that she had gripped the hair of his collar in both hands. She slowly uncurled her fingers. She turned away and walked up the loop of the outdoor stair and into the foyer of the hold. She glanced back at Monshara. “I can get the rest of the way myself,” she said.

Monshara swept her hand forward. “You should have listened to me,” she said.

“I don’t listen to anybody,” Zezili said. “Not anymore.”

Saofi, the Empress’s secretary, was waiting for Zezili outside the audience chamber. She played with the eyeglass at the end of her chatelaine.

“She’s been expecting you,” Saofi said.

“You have too, no doubt,” Zezili said.

“Your fate and mine are linked,” Saofi said. “So yes, I have an interest in this outcome.”

At first, Zezili wasn’t sure what she meant. But of course, everyone knew about the purging of the dajian camps by now. The privately-owned dajians knew it was only a matter of time before the bloody swords came for them, too. And for me, Zezili thought. Us.

Saofi went inside the audience chamber to announce Zezili. Zezili felt oddly calm. She had been courting this day for some time.

The secretary reappeared. Her expression was blank. “She’ll see you,” Saofi said. Saofi gripped the outer handle and leaned back with all her weight, pulling the door wide.

A chandelier of crystal shards and flame flies hung from the ceiling. A purple carpet stretched the length of the hall to the raised dais at its end. Atop the dais sat the silver throne of eighteen hundred years of Dorinah rule, the throne usurped from the first Patron of Saiduan’s fiftieth son, constructed in the far north of that country two thousand years before by silversmiths whose like Zezili had never encountered.