Kasia read his expression in the darkness. They were standing very close. ‘She said it was a last gift,’ she whispered shyly.
He could see it. Shirin was like that. Kasia would be as royalty for this night. A rush of affection for this girl swept over him now. ‘Jad love you and your own gods defend you,’ he whispered fiercely. ‘You were not saved from the grove for sorrow.’
He had no way of knowing if that was true, but he wanted it to be. She bit her lip, looking up at him, but said nothing, only nodded her head. Crispin stepped back. Pardos and Vargos were standing by. It had turned cold now.
He stopped by Shirin, eyebrows raised. ‘A risky gift?’ he asked.
She knew what he meant. ‘Not for one night,’ she said softly. ‘In a bridal chamber. Let her be an Empress. Let him hold one.’
As those who hold you do? he thought suddenly, but did not say. It might have been in his face, though, for Shirin abruptly looked away, nonplussed. He walked over to Pardos. They watched bride and groom pause on their threshold, amid jests and cheering.
‘Let’s go,’ said Crispin.
‘Wait!’ said the bird.
He looked back. Shirin, hooded and cloaked now in the darkness, stepped forward again and laid a gloved hand on his arm. She said, beseechingly, and to be heard, ‘I have a last favour to ask. Will you escort a dear friend home? He’s not quite … himself, and it isn’t fair to take the soldiers from their celebrating now, is it?’
Crispin glanced beyond her. Swaying unsteadily, with a wide, entirely uncharacteristic smile spread across his face and eyes glazed like an enamel icon of some holy figure, was Pertennius of Eubulus.
‘But of course,’ Crispin said evenly. Shirin smiled. Her composure had returned, very quickly. She was a dancer, an actress, trained.
‘She says you are not to take any sexual advantage of the poor man in his disordered state.’ Even the accursed bird seemed amused again. Crispin gritted his teeth, said nothing. Carullus and Kasia disappeared within, to a last lewd chorus from the musicians and the soldiers.
‘No, no, no, no!’ said the secretary, stepping forward too quickly from behind Shirin. ‘Dear woman! I’m well, I’m entirely well! In fact I shall … escort you home myself! Honoured! Honoured to—’
Vargos, who was nearest, managed to catch the man before he toppled in the process of demonstrating the excellence of his state.
Crispin sighed. The fellow did need an escort, and Shirin was right about the soldiers, who were collectively as far gone in drink as the secretary and loudly proclaiming intentions of further celebration in honour of the newest chiliarch in the Sarantine army.
He sent Vargos with Pardos back to his own home and began walking—slowly, of necessity—with the secretary towards Pertennius’s chambers, next to the Strategos’s city residence. He didn’t need directions: in addition to having the use of an entire wing of one of the palaces in the Imperial Precinct, Leontes owned the largest house in Sarantium. It happened to be nowhere close to Crispin’s own home and mostly uphill from where they were; Shirin had known that, of course. It occurred to him that she really had bested him in their encounters today. He should probably be more irked by that than he was. He was still touched by her gesture with the perfume, though.
Looking back over his shoulder, carrying his own torch, he saw that the Greens’ dancer would not lack for escorts on her own short journey home.
It was cold. He hadn’t thought to take a cloak, of course, in that mad rush to change and make the ceremony in time.
‘Fucking Jad,’ he said under his breath.
Pertennius giggled, almost fell. ‘Fucking!’ he agreed and then giggled again, as if he’d startled himself. Crispin snorted; controlled men could be amusing when in drink.
He steadied the secretary with a hand on his elbow. They trudged on, close as cousins, as brothers, clad in white under the white moon. At intervals, out of the corner of his eye, Crispin saw tongues of flame flicker and vanish along the streets. You always saw those at night in Sarantium; no one even commented on it after they’d spent any time in the City.
A little later, as they passed behind the Sanctuary and turned up the wide street that would bring them to the secretary’s rooms, they saw a sumptuous litter appear in front of them, its curtains closed. They both knew where they were, however, and who, almost certainly, would be inside.
Neither man commented, though Pertennius took a sudden deep breath of the cold night air and straightened his shoulders, walking a few steps alone with an exaggerated gravity, before stumbling again and accepting Crispin’s guiding hand. They passed a watchman of the Urban Prefecture and nodded gravely to him: two inebriated men, out later than was safe, but well dressed, suited to this neighbourhood. Ahead, they saw the litter turn into a torchlit courtyard as servants swung open the gates and then closed them quickly.
The blue moon was up now above the houses, a crescent. A faint white line of flame appeared to run right across a laneway where it met the wide street and then it disappeared.
‘Must come in!’ Pertennius of Eubulus said as they went past the massive stone house and the barred gates where the litter had been admitted and came to his door. ‘A chance to converse. Away from the street crowd, the soldiers. Actors. Uneducated rabble.’
‘Oh, no,’ Crispin demurred. He achieved a smile. There was something sourly amusing about the man taking that tone in his current state. ‘We both need sleep, friend.’ He was feeling his own wine now, and other things. A restlessness of spring. Night. A wedding. The presence of the past. This wasn’t the person he wanted to be with now. He didn’t know who was.
‘Must!’ the secretary insisted. ‘Talk to you. My own task. Write about the Emperor’s buildings, the Sanctuary. Your work. Questions! Why a bison? Those women? On the dome? Why so much of … of you, Rhodian?’ The gaze, in moonlight, was direct for a disconcerting instant, could almost have been called lucid.
Crispin blinked. More here than he’d expected, from the man, from the moment. After a long hesitation, and with a mental shrug, he went to the door with Leontes’s secretary and entered when a servant admitted them. Pertennius stumbled on his own threshold, but then led him heavily up a flight of stairs. Crispin heard the door being closed below.
Behind them in the night streets of the City, flames appeared and disappeared as they always did, seen or unseen, unlit by any taper or spark, unfathomable as the moonlit sea or the desires of men and women between their birth and dying.
CHAPTER V
The first thing Gisel came to understand, as she and the Strategos and his exquisitely haughty wife entered the presence of the Emperor and Empress of Sarantium, was that they were expected.
She was not supposed to realize that, she knew. They wanted her to believe that Leontes’s impulsive action in inviting her had taken Valerius and Alixana by surprise here. She was to labour under this misapprehension, feel emboldened, make mistakes. But she had lived in a court all her life and whatever these arrogant easterners might believe about the Antae in Batiara, there were as many similarities as there were differences between her own palace complex in Varena and the Imperial Precinct here.
Weighing alternatives quickly as the musician lowered his instrument and the Emperor and a very small gathering of companions turned to her, Gisel elected to offer a full, formal salutation, brushing the floor with her forehead. Valerius—smooth-cheeked, bland, genial of expression— looked at Leontes and then back to Gisel as she rose. His mouth curved in a hesitant welcome. Alixana, in a low-backed ivory chair, dressed in deep red and adorned with jewellery, offered an entirely gracious smile.
And it was the ease of this on both their parts, the effortless deception done together, that made Gisel suddenly afraid, as if the walls of this warm room had given way to reveal the vast, cold sea beyond.
She had sent an artisan here half a year ago with an offer of marriage for this man. The woman, the Empress, knew of it. The artisan had told her about that.
They had both anticipated—or deduced it—Caius Crispus said, before he had even spoken with them. She believed him. Seeing them now, the Emperor feigning surprise, Alixana offering the illusion of full welcome, she believed him implicitly.
‘Forgive us, thrice-exalted, this unplanned intrusion,’ said Leontes briskly. ‘It is royalty I bring you, the queen of the Antae. It is past time, in my view, she was here among us. I will accept any fault attached to this.’
His manner was blunt and direct. No trace of the suave, courtly pacing and tone he’d revealed in the dancer’s home. But he had to know this was no surprise, didn’t he? Or was she wrong about that? Gisel stole a quick glance at Styliane Daleina: nothing to be read in those features.
The Emperor gestured in a distracted way, and servants hastened to offer seats to the two women. Styliane smiled a little to herself, holding a private amusement close, as she crossed the room and accepted a cup of wine and a chair.
Gisel also sat down. She was looking at the Empress. Doing so, she felt a faint but very real horror at her own folly of the year before. She had proposed that this woman—old, childless, surely worn out and tiresome by now—might be expendable.
Folly was not, really, an adequate word. Alixana of Sarantium, polished and smooth as a pearl, glittered with light where it reflected from her jewels and found her dark eyes. There was amusement there too, but of a very different sort from what could be seen in the Strategos’s wife.
‘No intrusion, Leontes,’ she murmured now, speaking first. Her voice was low, honeyed, calm. ‘You honour us, of course, all three of you. You have come from a wedding, I see. Will you take wine and share some further music here and then tell us about it?’
‘Please,’ said Valerius II earnestly, Emperor of half the world. ‘Regard yourselves as invited and honoured guests!’
They were perfect, the two of them. Gisel made her decision.
Ignoring an offered cup, she rose smoothly from her seat, clasped her hands before her and murmured, ‘The Emperor and Empress are far too good. They even allow me the flattering illusion that this visit was unanticipated. As if anything that transpires in great Sarantium could possibly pass unnoticed by their all-seeing eyes. I am deeply grateful for this courtesy.’
She saw the thin, aged Chancellor Gesius look suddenly thoughtful where he sat warming himself near the fire. There were only five other guests here, all superbly dressed and barbered men, and the balding, plump musician. Leontes looked irate suddenly, even though he’d surely have had to be the one who’d warned Valerius they were coming. Styliane was smiling again, behind her wine cup and her rings.
Valerius and Alixana laughed aloud. Both of them.
‘And so we learn our lesson,’ the Emperor said, a hand rubbing at his soft chin. ‘Like impish children caught out by their tutor. Rhodias is older than Sarantium, the west came long before the east, and the queen of the Antae, who was daughter to a king before she ruled in her own name, was always likely to be aware of courtly practices.’
‘You are clever and beautiful, child,’ said Alixana. ‘A daughter such as I might wish to have had.’
Gisel drew a breath. There could not possibly be anything sincere in this, but the woman had just casually drawn attention to their ages, her own childlessness, Gisel’s appearance.
‘Daughters are seldom in demand at a court,’ she murmured, thinking as quickly as she could. ‘We are only tools for marriage most of the time. A complication in other ways, unless there are also sons to smooth a succession.’ If Alixana could be direct, so could she. There was an undeniable ripple of excitement within her: she had been here almost half a year, doing nothing, suspended like an insect in Trakesian amber. What she did now might end in death, but she realized she was prepared to court that.
This time it was Gesius who smiled briefly, she saw. She was conscious of his measuring gaze upon her.
‘We are aware, of course, of your difficulties at home,’ said Valerius. ‘Indeed, we have spent a winter pondering ways of addressing them.’
There was little point, really, in not responding to this, either.
‘We have spent a winter,’ Gisel murmured, ‘doing the same thing. It might have been appropriate to do so together? We did accept an invitation to come here in order to do that.’
‘Indeed? Is that so? It is my understanding,’ said a man dressed in figured silk of a deep green, ‘that our invitation and an Imperial ship were what saved your life, queen of the Antae.’ His tone, eastern, patrician, was just barely acceptable in this company. The Master of Offices paused, then added, ‘You do have a savage history in your tribe, after all.’
This she would not countenance. East and the fallen west again? The glorious Sarantine heirs of Rhodias, the primitive barbarians from the northern forests? Not still, not here. Gisel turned her gaze to him.
‘Somewhat,’ she said coldly. ‘We are a warlike, conquering people. Of course succession here in Sarantium always proceeds in a more orderly fashion. No deaths ever attend upon a change of Emperors, do they?’
She knew what she was saying. There was a little silence. Gisel became aware that glances were being cast—quickly, and then away—towards Styliane Daleina, who had seated herself behind the Empress. She made a point of not looking that way.
The Chancellor gave a dry cough behind his hand. Another of the seated men glanced quickly at him and then gestured briefly. The musician, with alacrity and evident relief, made a hasty obeisance and left the room with his instrument. No one paid him the least attention. Gisel was still glaring at the Master of Offices.
The Emperor said, in a thoughtful voice, ‘The queen is correct, of course, Faustinus. Indeed, even my uncle’s ascension was accompanied by some violence. Styliane’s own dear father was killed.’
So much cleverness here. This was not a man, Gisel thought, to allow a nuance to slip by, if he could make it his own. She understood this, as it happened: her father had been much the same. It gave her some confidence, though her heart was racing. These were dangerous, subtle people, but she was the daughter of one herself. Perhaps she was one herself? They could kill her, and they might, but they could not strip her of pride and all legacies. She was aware of a bitter irony, however: she was defending her people against an allegation that they were murderous, barbaric, when she herself had been the intended victim of an assassination—in a holy, consecrated place.
‘Times of change are seldom without their casualties,’ said the Chancellor softly, his first words. His voice was thin as paper, very clear.
‘The same must be said of war,’ said Gisel, her tone blunt. She would not let this become an evening discussion of philosophers. She had sailed here for a reason, and it was not merely to save her life, whatever anyone might think or say. Leontes was looking at her, his expression betraying surprise.
‘Truly so,’ said Alixana, nodding her head slowly. ‘One man burns and dies or thousands upon thousands do. We make our choices, don’t we?’
One man burns and dies. Gisel looked quickly at Styliane this time. Nothing to be seen. She knew the story, everyone did. Sarantine Fire in a morning street.
Valerius was shaking his head. ‘Choices, yes, my love, but they are not arbitrary ones if we are honourable. We serve the god, as we understand him.’
‘Indeed, my lord,’ said Leontes crisply, as if trying to draw a sword through the seductive softness of the Empress’s voice. ‘A war in the name of holy Jad is not as other wars.’ He glanced at Gisel again. ‘Nor can it be said that the Antae are unfamiliar with invasions.’
Of course they weren’t. She’d implied as much herself. Her people had conquered the Batiaran peninsula, sacking Rhodias, burning it. Which made it difficult to argue against the idea of an invading army, or ask for mercy. She wasn’t doing that. She was trying to steer this towards a truth she knew: if they invaded—and even if this tall, golden general succeeded in the beginning—they would not hold. They would never hold against the Antae, with t
he Inicii on the borders and Bassania creating another war front as it grasped the implications of a reunited Empire. No, the reclaiming of Rhodias could happen in only one way. And she, in her youth, in her person, a life that could end with a cup of poisoned wine or a silent, secret blade, was that way.
She had such a narrow, twisting path to try to walk here. Leontes, the handsome, pious soldier gazing at her now, was the one who would bring ruin to her country if the Emperor gave him word. In the name of holy Jad, he’d said. Did that make the dead less dead? She could ask them that, but it wasn’t the question that mattered now.
‘Why have you not spoken with me before?’ she said, fighting a sudden, rising panic, looking at Valerius again, the calm, soft-faced man she had invited to marry her. She still had difficulty meeting the gaze of the Empress, though Alixana—of all of them—had been the most welcoming. Nothing here could be taken for what it seemed to be, she kept telling herself. If there was any truth to cling to, it was that.
‘We were in negotiation with the usurpers,’ Valerius said with brutal frankness. He uses directness as a tool, she thought.
‘Ah,’ she said, hiding discomfiture as best she could. ‘Were you? How very … prudent.’
Valerius shrugged. ‘An obvious course. It was winter. No armies travel, but couriers do. Foolish not to learn as much as we could about them. And they would have known if we had received you formally here, of course. So we didn’t. We did have you watched, guarded against assassination all winter. You must be aware of that. They have spies here—just as you did.’
She ignored that last. ‘They wouldn’t have known if we had met like this,’ she said. Her heart was still pounding.
‘We assumed,’ said the Empress gently, ‘that you would refuse to be received in any way but as a visiting queen. Which was—and is—your right.’
Gisel shook her head. ‘Should I insist on ceremony when people die?’
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