When I was a girl and the world broke, I thought I would always divide my life by that night in the mountains - the day before, the day after. Nothing would ever be the same. I remember the noise like thunder when the earthquake came, and the smell of blood and ashes in the air, and the way my skin felt gritty with the dust of the shattered palace, and the taste of fear and loss metallic on my tongue. I remember the surprise I felt to see the sun rise that morning. But the sun rose, as it always did, as it always would. And I lived, and the world I knew died.

I grew up in this new world, and I thought that nothing would ever hurt me again.

I was so young --- so very, very young.

But I learned quickly there are so many places for pain to hide in this earthly life we are given to live, outside of the blessed realm of Cahan, the Three Heavens where the Immortals dwell. I was loved by those who were born to love me - my mother, my children - and by those who chose to love me - my husband, and the sisters of my heart. And I lost or outlived them all, and now I am an old woman waiting in the starlight until the sun rises, once again, on a brand new day - waiting for the day that the sun will rise and I will see the dawn on the shores of that river which I must cross before I am together once more with the ones I have loved.

I have lived in three Imperial reigns. Mine was the time of love and fire, of pain, of loss, of joy, of grief, of laughter, of greed and arrogance and dreams and betrayals. Mine was the world of family, and of ancestors, and of the bond of jin-shei, the sisterhood of women which shaped the society I had been born into . I belonged in my world, and it belonged to me --- and yet it was but one tiny corner of Empire in which I too played my small part.

All women in Syai are given the gift of the secret vow, the promise that is everlasting, the bond that does not break. I shared my own life with a healer, an alchemist, a sage, a soldier, a gypsy, a rebel leader, a loving ghost and an Empress who dreamed of immortality and nearly destroyed us all. The years of sisterhood. The jin-shei years.

Excerpted from The Secrets of Jin-shei © Copyright 2012 by Alma Alexander. Reprinted with permission by HarperOne. All rights reserved.