text: So this was Saradyn. Not a tall man, but broad, like a tree eclipsed by its fellows that made up for height with girth, crowding out all those around it. Blood rushed down Zezili's face. She told herself that head wounds were all bluster. She wasn't vomiting or confused, not any more than usual, but she bled all that first night, trussed up on the other side of the fire from Saradyn, self-styled king of Tordin, and his most intimate familiars. They were all men, which she supposed shouldn't have surprised her, but she had never in her life been the only woman in a group, and it unsettled her. She was very obviously out of place, and it wasn't just because hers were the only bound hands.
  
  She saw the Rosh girl occasionally the first few days, but she noticed the girl didn't come out of the tavern that Saradyn and his lackeys pulled her into at the end of the week. Why hadn't they just killed her back there on the field? Who was she to them? Zezili did not speak Tordinian, and it put her at a distinct disadvantage. The tall man with the big nose had known who she was, but Saradyn hadn't seemed to until they had a rapid-fire conversation over her body. She wasn't sure what that meant. It crossed her mind that Big Nose may have been the same one to take Anavha, or at least the one in Saradyn's inner circle to recognize who Anavha was and keep him alive for ransom.
  
  But if she, too, was their prisoner, they'd get no ransom from her. Best case, they hoped to sell her back to the Empress, then have her buy out Anavha too. As the blood caked on her face that night, she feared they would find the Empress less than receptive to that offer. A second failure meant death, and though Storm and the rest of the force still had a head start on getting where she wanted them to go, Zezili's fate was not tied to theirs any longer. She was on her own.
  
  It was a week back to wherever it was they ended up – some no-nothing little town not much bigger than the one they'd just come from. The town stank, like they were still shitting in pots and throwing them into alleys. Plumbing seemed to be a thing of legend. The only evidence of its existence – in the past, at least – was a large, cracked fountain they passed just off the main road. It sprouted up from the center of a tiled floor of what once may have been some grand estate, but now lay in ruins, slowly devoured by the woods. The trees here were big, mostly ever pines, and instead of burning out the vegetation on either side of the roads they lined them in big concrete blocks slathered in lye that ate through the concrete as surely as it did the vegetation that tried to survive there.
  
  Everything she saw gave the impression the Tordinians were rats, maggots living on the bones of some collapsed civilization. History told her that was truth – the Empress's cousin, Penelodyn, had ruled northern Tordin for almost a hundred years, bringing civilization to great swaths of the locals. But they'd rebelled and tossed her out and this is where it left them – worshipping some mad king and shitting in buckets.
  
  Two big male soldiers hauled her into the rickety main hold of the shitty little town. The hold was mostly wood, built on the massive stone base of some far older building. She wasn't much up to resisting by then. She sweated and shook with fever. Her wrist hadn't been tended to, and it was bruised black and swollen. But the fever came from some other wound, something open – either the throbbing, oozing lump on her head or the blazing score on her back. She hadn't even noticed the wound in her back until hours after the end of the battle. Some ax had caught her there. It wasn't deep – her armor had resisted most of the blow – but nine days without even a wash and it was a burning brand on her shoulder now, like someone had set a hot stone on it.
  
  They dropped her in a cell in the basement – cold, no windows – and shut the door. The darkness was total.
  
  How long she was there, alone in the dark, she didn't know. The fever took her under. She dreamed of little black dogs with paws as big as their faces. They opened great mouths and ate their own feet. Anavha was there, writhing under her, squealing that she was hurting him, and just as she was about to reach her own release, reveling in her power, her absolute control of this beautiful body, the eye of Rhea glared down at her, filling her whole vision.
  
  The eye filled her cell with light.
  
  Zezili shielded her eyes. The pain left her body. She felt the blazing gaze of Rhea on her. It saw all of her worst acts: her slaughter of countless dajians, the genocide of an entire people, heaped on her willing shoulders. And the others – the dajians in her own care who she maimed and murdered; the husband she abused; the women she sent on fool's errands she knew would end in death, just to avoid the troubling politics of discharging them.
  
  "But I did it in your name!" Zezili said. "For the will of the Empress! I am yours. I am hers. I am–"
  
  Rhea knew what she was.
  
  She belonged to herself. She had made her own life, forged in fire, on the bloody backs of others. No choice, though, no choice. If she was not stepping on another's back, someone else would step on hers. She had not made the world, but she had to live in it.
  
  She had thrived only because she had given up her humanity.
  
  The light went out.
  
  Zezili gasped and opened her eyes. A plump man stood next to her, dressed in some white garment. He hushed her. She was tied to a table.
  
  "What is this?" she said.
  
  "For your own protection," he said. His head was shaved bald – his eyebrows, too.
  
  A fire blazed in a hearth. The room was lined in clay jars, and stank of incense and cardamom and other spices she could not discern.
  
  "Where on Rhea's tit am I?" Zezili snarled.
  
  "Just doing a bit of cleaning up," the man said in heavily accented Dorinah. He picked up a very large saw, the length of his forearm.
  
  Zezili's gut roiled. She looked at her left hand, her good fucking hand, the bloated, blackened flesh. "Set the bone, you fool!" she said.
  
  "I'm sorry," he said, "it's gone to rot."
  
  Zezili jerked in her restraints. Four big men came up from behind her. Held her down. She tried to bite them. Her fever had broken, and she was exhausted, weaker than she should be.
  
  The Empress and her cats. Saradyn and his men with saws.
  
  "Where is my husband!" she yelled. "Where is he? When I get out of this shit I will murder every last one of you. Every one. I'll impale you with this bloody fucking stump. I will impale the fuck out of you, cut off your fucking cocks, shove them down your cowardly throats. You'll suffocate on your own testicles, you fucking–"
  
  Her tirade made the plump man tremble.
  
  Then a voice from the doorway, in Tordinian, said something like an order, and again, in Dorinah, "They'll do it."
  
  It was the lean man who'd spoken of Anavha, the one with the beak of a nose. "They'd take your tongue, too," he said, "but Saradyn needs that, he says."
  
  "I don't know who the fuck you are, but I'll take your fucking cock too," Zezili said. She was frothing. Spit flecked her mouth.
  
  "You're welcome to what I have of one," he said. "My name is Natanial Thorne. I expect you'll remember it."
  
  The saw bit into her wrist.
  
  Zezili howled.