“A historical precedent,” Nira replied, “that is just going to bugger you right up your pretty puckered arse. Yer history is all about men, your ritual is about men. Unless you’re plannin’ to strap on a terra-cotta cock and go back to Annur thwackin’ people in the face with it—which I don’t recommend—ya need to tip the whole board full of history directly into the piss bucket and start over. You need people to see you, not the man you’re not.”

Adare shifted to try to relieve the chafing in her thighs, the ache in her lower back. “But the authenticity,” she said, “comes from those rituals. It comes from history. Otherwise, what makes the Emperor the Emperor?”

Oshi turned, something about the question having snared his attention. “Ants,” he said, “have an empress.” He smiled broadly, encouragingly. “The little soldiers—they all serve her.”

“Unhelpful, you dolt,” Nira snapped. “Ants do what they do because it’s built into ’em. They can’t not follow the empress.” She turned back to Adare. “People, though . . . people’ll follow anyone, anything. I wandered through a village once, a long while back, where the folk were led by a ’Kent-kissing tree; asked it questions, thought they heard answers in the creaking branches and the rustling leaves.”

“Annurians aren’t savages . . .” Adare began, but Nira cut her off with a hoot.

“Savages, is it? That tree was one a’ the best kings I ever saw.” She gestured to the dark boughs of the pines. “A tree doesn’t start wars. Tree doesn’t raise taxes to build palaces. A tree doesn’t kill the people who refuse to bow down.” A sad note had crept into her voice, and her eyes had slipped away from Adare, first to the woods, then to Oshi where he swayed in his saddle, light as a bundle of old cloth. “Could do a lot worse than a tree,” she concluded quietly.

“Well, I’m not a tree,” Adare said. “And I need the people to accept me as Emperor. I didn’t have time for a coronation before leaving Annur, didn’t have time for the hundred little ceremonies before and after, which means that right now I’m . . . nothing. I’m not even the Minister of Finance anymore; il Tornja filled the role with someone else after I disappeared for Olon. The Sons of Flame think I’m Intarra’s prophet, or her saint, but a saint’s a far cry from an emperor. A saint doesn’t actually rule.”

Nira fixed her with that shrewd gaze once more, all traces of her previous melancholy gone. “Ya know how ya get to run an empire, girl?”

Adare shook her head in frustration. “That’s what I’ve been asking.”

The old woman poked her in the chest with the stick. “You run it.”

“Meaning what?”