text: Zezili fought death. She thought, for a time, that she had won. But her body still failed her.
  
  Zezili's face and hands and torso swelled. The wounds inflicted by the Empress's cats oozed a thick yellowish pus. A fever shook her body and left her sweaty and delirious. Zezili remembered the Empress picking up Zezili's bloody severed thumb and painting her own white lips with it. The doctors said Zezili raved for three days and screamed that the Empress had eaten her whole.
  
  Zezili's sisters clustered around her body, warbling in sticky voices as tangled as Zezili's dreams. The room smelled of shit and morbid flesh. When she roused herself for a few stolen moments, her youngest sister, Sorana, said they believed they sat at her death bed.
  
  Her sisters had gathered to watch her die.
  
  Taodalain, the last of her sisters to hover at her side once living seemed a possibility, asked if Zezili wanted her to read the letter the Empress had sent to her bedside.
  
  Half of Zezili's face was bandaged, one eye shredded or swollen shut, she did not know which. She kept her hands beneath the heavy folds of her bedding. Even bandaged, she did not want to see what had become of the hands that once held her sword.
  
  She nodded to hear the letter.
  
  Taodalain read:
  
  Zezahlia, my dearest;
  
  As of the thirty-eighth of Seara, I have released you from sworn service. I allow you to choose, upon this unbinding, to retire to your estate until the end of those days my cats have left you, or – upon your renewal – I grant you leave to return to me, to renew your oath to Dorinah, and let us see what we can make of you.
  
  Tordin is next, my love. It's your campaign if you'll take it.
  
  Forever I am,
  
  Empress Casanlyn Aurnaisa of Dorinah—
  
  "Et cetera, et cetera," Taodalain said. "She is kind. She offers you a way out of service."
  
  Zezili closed her good eye, and slept.
  
  It was three weeks before the doctors allowed Zezili out of bed. By then she had seen what remained of her right hand. The doctors had stitched the thumb back on and covered it in leeches. They coaxed the wound closed with organic salve and the help of some backwoods tirajista of middling talent, but she could not move the injured digit. She could barely feel it. The swelling was so bad her hand looked like nothing so much as a discolored hunk of meat. The first joint of her index finger was missing, and the nail and most of the flesh had been ripped from her middle finger. The other wounds she did not look at.
  
  Her house keeper, Daolyn, and Taodalain removed her from the public infirmary in Daorian to her estate. She rode for hours in the back of a dog-pulled cart. Zezili asked where Dakar, her loyal dog, was, and Daolyn reminded her he had been slain in the dajian camp at the pass into Dhai.
  
  "And my husband?" Zezili asked. "Where is Anavha?"
  
  "We have heard nothing of him," Daolyn said. "His family has declared him dead."
  
  Zezili cried, then – the first time she had cried since her mauling. It was all gone. Everything was ash. What use was saving the world when you had nothing?
  
  The journey was painful. Zezili saw her estate from a strange vantage, lying prone on her stretcher. She gazed up at the tiles of the roof and turned her bruised head to look in through the round gate. A stir of shadowy dajians shifted quietly about the grounds.
  
  Daolyn washed and dressed her wounds. The Empress sent a doctor from Daorian each week to prod at her. It was another kindness, Taodalain reminded her. The Empress could have left her to some rural surgeon.
  
  When Zezili could sit up without blacking out, she hobbled to her wardrobe. She pushed open the door with her good hand. Daolyn had left a coat draped over the door, shrouding her view of the long mirror on the inside. She saw her bandaged hand, the end of her torso, but her face and chest were obscured. She took hold of the end of her tunic, and tugged at it awkwardly. She stretched and strained and shrugged her shoulders until the tunic came free. The exercise left her panting, shaky.
  
  Stripped to the waist, she reached forward and pulled the long coat from the mirror.
  
  The coat trembled down the glass.
  
  Zezili gazed at an alien face, the rent visage of a stranger.
  
  The right side of her face was a morass of bluish-red swelling, distorted, the right eye like a dark wound. Four long red gashes quartered the face. The longest mark ran from the inside of the eye to the jaw, catching flesh again along the shoulder. A series of slashes had loosened the skin from muscle and bone. That side of the face would sag and weep, and heal into a twisted parody of a face. Her torso was worse. Two cats' bites had left punctures along her stomach, and on her upper arm. Another had gnawed meat from the top of her rib cage, tore and twisted at the breast, left behind a pool of scarring tissue. The partner of the claw that rent her face had taken her along the chest, scoring deep lines from the ruined left breast to her navel. There were lighter scratches, bites, claw punctures, but by now those had all but healed, and left their own shiny scars.
  
  She had been eaten by a god. She had pulled herself from its belly. Now she had to find out what it left of her.
  
  Zezili shuffled to the doorway. "Daolyn!" she called. "Bring me my sword."
  
  Daolyn did. Zezili picked up the sword in her left hand. She moved through defense positions, slowly, agonizingly slow. Had her sword always been so heavy?
  
  She went through the forms again, until sweat poured from her face and her wounds throbbed, threatening to spill open. She lay back in bed, resting with her sword beside her, and called Daolyn for tea.
  
  After tea, she stood. Brought up the sword again.
  
  It was three days of this haphazard dialogue with her new body before Zezili stepped into the cold courtyard and ran through forms on the bare stones. She had the dajians lay out her armor in her room so she could see it each morning as she rose. Before bed, she spent time examining the helm and breastplate. The cats had gnawed at the leather straps and relieved her of her armor before they ravaged her. She called in the armorer from Dryan and had her hammer out the dents and repair and polish the scratches until it shone. That week, the doctor's visit consisted of the woman's barely concealed horror at the idea that Zezili had had the wherewithal to be out of bed and walking, let alone training.
  
  "Pardon, Syre," the doctor said, "but you have come back from death itself. Your body needs–"
  
  "My body needs to live," Zezili said. "I am in service to the Empress of Dorinah. She owns this body, and a dead thing in bed is of no use to her."
  
  The doctor closed her mouth.
  
  Soon the swelling of Zezili's wounds abated, which left no error in the reading of her reflection. The scarred right side of the face was hers, a face torn through by the mark of a cat. But in profile, from her left side, there was no visible damage.
  
  She tried on her helm for the first time after the mauling. She fastened the chin strap. The scored cheek was still painful, though whether it was a real or remembered pain, she did not know. Instead of hiding the scars, the helm seemed to make them stand out all the clearer, the one sunken eye, the twisted, shiny flesh. She looked fierce, frightening – like the face of a Saiduan sentinel.
  
  Daolyn snipped away the last of her hair, and swept it away.
  
  "I will need a new coat," Zezili said. "Long. Purple. Stitched in silver. A white under tunic. Dark trousers. Bold. Stark. A feminine cut."
  
  "Of course," Daolyn said.
  
  "I will also need a new mount. Some strong, fit dog. Two or three years old."
  
  "Yes, Syre," Daolyn said.
  
  Zezili continued her exercises. She took her new mount out on rides inside the grounds of the estate. As yet, she avoided the roads. It was not time to be seen. Her sisters sent her letters detailing the gossip about her in Daorian, Janifa, Ryn. It was said that Zezili had been devoured by a cat. Others said the Empress had marked Zezili herself, gouging out both her eyes and tossing her out of her service. They said that her missing cousin Tanasai's body had been found, or said Zezili had eaten it. It was likely, they said, that if Syre Zezili were still alive, she would not live out the year.
  
  Zezili let the rumors boil. She had indeed parted with her cousin Tanasai's body some weeks past, before spring broke. Daolyn had called Taodalain to the estate in the wake of Zezili's illness, and the two of them had carted the body to Lake Morta, weighted it down, hacked a hole in the ice, and watched Tanasai sink to the bottom of the lake.
  
  It was the Empress, finally, who broke Zezili's fugue.
  
  "An invitation," Daolyn said, handing her the familiar purple paper.
  
  Zezili sat in her study and opened it. It was an invitation to a banquet in Daorian with the other legion commanders, to plan the upcoming campaign against Tordin.
  
  A sliver of moonlight cut through the room from the parting in the heavy curtains, and fell across the wardrobe, shimmering in the mirror visible just inside the door. It reminded Zezili of another type of mirror, and another type of invasion; one slowed, but not stopped.
  
  A powerless former general could do nothing in the face of such an enemy. The most trusted of the Empress's tools could do much, though– a hardened, bitter general could even be used to topple the Empress's reign. But only if Zezili could succeed in banishing the thought of her true intent from her own mind, and do what the Empress bid. Zezili could bide her time. She had died once already. She wasn't afraid of dying again, if she could destroy the Empress with her last breath.
  
  Zezili went to the desk. She penned a missive to the Empress with her good left hand.
  
  She wrote:
  
  I am yours.
  
  She signed and sealed the letter.