‘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 the 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?’
‘We all do that,’ said Valerius. ‘It is all we have at such times, isn’t it? Ceremony?’
Gisel looked at him. Their eyes met. She thought suddenly of the cheiromancers and the weary clerics and an old alchemist in a graveyard outside the city walls. Rituals and prayers, when they raised the mound of the dead.
‘You should know,’ the Emperor went on, his voice still mild, ‘that Eudric in Varena, who calls himself regent now, by the way, has offered an oath of fealty to us and— something new—to begin paying a formal tribute, twice annually. In addition, he has invited us to place advisers in his court, both religious and military.’
Details, a great many of them. Gisel closed her eyes. You should know. She hadn’t, of course. She was half a world away from her throne and had spent a winter waiting to be seen here in the palace, to have a role to play, to justify her flight. Eudric had won, then. She had always thought he would.
‘His conditions,’ the Emperor continued, ‘were the predictable ones: that we recognize him as king, and accomplish a single death.’
She opened her eyes and looked at him again, unflinching. This was familiar territory, easier for her than they might guess. There had been wagers back home that she would die before winter. They had tried to kill her in the sanctuary. Two people she loved had been slain there, for her.
She was her father’s daughter. Gisel lifted her chin and said hardily, ‘Indeed, my lord Emperor? Sarantine Fire? Or just a knife in the night for me? A small price to pay for such resounding glory, isn’t it? A fealty oath! Tribute, advisers? Religious and military? Great Jad be praised! The poets will sing and the years resound with the splendour of it. How could you refuse such glory?’
A rigid silence followed. Valerius’s expression changed, only a little, but watching the grey eyes Gisel understood how people might fear this man. She could hear the crackle of the fire in the stillness.
It was Alixana, predictably, who dared speak. ‘You are bested, love,’ she said lightly. ‘She is too clever for you. Now I understand why you won’t cast me aside to marry her, or even properly receive her at court.’
Someone made a choking sound. Gisel swallowed, hard.
Valerius turned to his wife.
He said nothing, but his expression changed yet again, became odd now, strangely intimate. And a moment later it was Alixana who coloured a little and then looked down.
‘I see,’ she said quietly. ‘I hadn’t actually thought . . . ’ She cleared her throat, fingered the necklace she wore. ‘That wasn’t . . . necessary,’ she murmured, still looking down. ‘I am not so fragile as that. My lord.’
Gisel had no idea what this meant, suspected no one else did. An intensely private exchange in a public space. She looked from one to the other again and then—quite suddenly—she did understand. Was sure of it.
Things were not what she had taken them to be.
She hadn’t been invited to the Imperial Precinct before tonight, not because of negotiations with the usurpers in Varena or any rigidities of protocol, but because the Emperor Valerius was shielding his wife from Gisel’s youthful presence and what—in purely formal terms—it meant, or could mean.
They all knew there was a way to simplify this reconquest of the Empire’s homeland. She wasn’t the only one who had seen it, sending an artisan on the long journey here with a private message. The logic, the sense, of a marriage was overwhelming. And the husband had been overriding the Emperor. Amazingly.
Which meant, if she was right in this sudden line of thought, that she had been admitted here now, tonight, only because . . . because a different decision had now been made.
Spring was coming. Was here, in fact. She took a breath.
‘You are invading us, aren’t you?’ she said flatly.
Valerius of Sarantium turned from his wife to look at Gisel. His expression grave as a cleric’s again, thoughtful as an academician, he said simply, ‘Yes, in fact, we are. In your name and the god’s. I trust you will approve?’
He wasn’t really asking, of course. He was telling her. And not just her. Gisel heard, almost felt a ripple pass through the small, luxurious room as men shifted where they stood or sat. The Strategos’s nostrils actually flared, like a racehorse’s hearing the trumpet. He had surmised, anticipated, but had not known. Until now. She understood. This was the moment of telling that Valerius had just chosen, moving with the moment, the mood, her own arrival here. Or perhaps this entire evening of music among intimates on the trembling brink of springtime had been arranged to achieve this instant, with none of the others knowing, not even his wife. A man who pulled hidden strings, made others dance for his needs, or die.
She looked at Alixana and found the other woman’s steady gaze waiting for hers. Gisel, gazing into those depths, imagining what those dark eyes could do to a man or a certain kind of woman, understood something else, entirely unexpected: improbable
as it was, she had an ally here, someone else who also wanted to find a way to guide them all around this invasion and what it portended. Not that it seemed to matter.
‘The Emperor is to be congratulated,’ a third woman’s voice interjected, Styliane’s tone cool as the night wind outside. ‘It seems his taxation officers have been more diligent than rumour suggests. It is a miracle of the god and his regent upon earth that adequate funds for an invasion are in the treasury after all.’
The ensuing pause was brittle. Styliane, Gisel thought, had to have extraordinary confidence in her situation to speak in this way, in this company. But she would, wouldn’t she? By birth and marriage—and disposition.
Valerius turned to look at her and his expression, remarkably, was amused again. ‘An Emperor receives the aid he deserves, Saranios once said. I don’t know what that suggests about me and my servants, but there are ways of funding a war. We’ve decided to rescind pay for the eastern army this year. No point bribing Bassania for a peace and paying soldiers to keep it.’
Leontes looked startled. He cleared his throat. ‘This has been decided, my lord?’ He had obviously not been consulted.
‘A fiscal matter, Strategos. I do wish to meet with you tomorrow to discuss the possibility of offering the soldiers land in the east to settle. We have discussed this in the past, and the Chancellor has now proposed we do it.’
Leontes was too experienced to further betray his surprise. ‘Of course, my lord. I will be here at sunrise. Though I regret that I have been made a liar over something I said this afternoon at the wedding. I promoted the bridegroom and posted him east. Now he loses not only his promised increase in salary but all his income.’
Valerius shrugged. ‘Re-post him. Take the fellow west with you. A small matter, surely.’
Leontes shook his head. ‘I suppose it is. But I never take newly married men to a campaign.’
‘Commendable, Leontes,’ said the Empress. ‘But I’m sure you can make exceptions.’
‘Bad for an army, exalted lady.’
‘So is obduracy, surely,’ said his own wife, from her seat near the Empress. She set down her wine cup. ‘My dear, really. You obviously think the fellow is competent. Appoint him to your private staff, pay him yourself as you pay the others, post him east to Eubulus as your observer for a year—or until you think it is all right for him to be called west and killed in war.’
The crisp precision of this in a woman, Gisel thought, looking from face to face to face, must surely be galling to the men assembled. Then she reconsidered, looking at the Empress. They might be accustomed to such things here—unlike her own court, where a woman speaking with authority could be marked for murder.
On the other hand, Gisel had reigned in Varena, in her own name. Neither of these women did. It mattered. It did represent a difference. And as if to underscore that, Styliane Daleina spoke again. ‘Forgive me, my lords, this presumption. I was ever too inclined to speak my mind.’ There was no real contrition in her tone, however.
‘A trait of your father’s,’ the Emperor said quietly. ‘It . . . need not be a failing.’
Need not be, Gisel thought. The room seemed laden and layered with intricacies of past and present and what was to come. Nuances coiling and spreading like incense, subtle and insistent.
Styliane rose and made a graceful obeisance. ‘Thank you, my lord. I will ask your permission and the Empress’s to withdraw. If matters of war and policy are to be discussed, it is proper that I take my leave.’
It was, of course. No one spoke to gainsay her. Gisel wondered if she’d expected someone to do so. Her husband? If so, she would be disappointed. Leontes did escort his wife towards the door but turned back to the room as she went out. He looked at the Emperor, and smiled.
The two men had known each other, Gisel remembered hearing, from before the day when the first Valerius had been placed upon the throne. Leontes would have been very young then.
‘My dear lord,’ the Strategos said, unable to keep his voice entirely steady, ‘may I ask that all those here be cautioned that this information is to go no further yet? I can make use of the advantage of time.’
‘Oh, my dear,’ said the wife at the Emperor’s side, ‘they will have been preparing for you since long before this child fled her throne. Ask her, if you really need to.’
Gisel ignored that, both the child and the fled, and saw that Valerius was looking at her, and she realized belatedly that he was actually waiting for an answer to the question he’d asked of her. I trust you will approve?
Formality, a courtesy, she thought. Such things mattered to him, it seemed. Worth knowing. He would always be courteous, this man on the Golden Throne. Even as he did exactly what he chose to do and accepted— or courted—any consequences that might fall to others.
‘Do I approve?’ she repeated. ‘My lord, of course I do,’ she lied. ‘Why else did I sail to Sarantium?’
She sank low in obeisance again, mainly to hide her face now and what was in her eyes. She was seeing the burial mound again, not this elegant, lamplit palace room, was remembering civil war and famine, the festering aftermath of plague, was savagely lamenting the absence of a single living soul she could trust. Wishing, almost, that she had died in Varena, after all, and not lived to hear this question asked of her as she stood utterly alone in a foreign land where her answer—truth or lie—carried no weight or meaning in the world.
‘I really do not feel well,’ said Pertennius of Eubulus, spacing his words with care.
They were in a modest room on the upper floor of the secretary’s home. Pertennius lay prostrate on a dark green couch, one hand over his eyes, the other on his stomach. Crispin, at a small window, stood looking down on the empty street. The stars were out, a wind was blowing. There was a fire lit on the hearth. On a desk against the wall between couch and window was an assortment of documents, books, writing implements, papers of different colours and textures.
Scattered among these—Crispin had seen them as soon as he’d entered the room—were his own early sketches for the dome and wall of the Great Sanctuary.
He had wondered how they came to be here, and then remembered that Leontes’s secretary was also the official historian of Valerius’s building projects. In an unsettling way, Crispin’s work was part of his mandate.
Why a bison? Pertennius had said, standing unsteadily in the street outside his door. Why so much of you on the dome?
Both, as it happened, shrewd questions. Crispin, no admirer of the dry-as-dust secretary, had come inside and up the stairs. Challenged, intrigued, both? Probably a waste of time, he realized, glancing over at the recumbent secretary. Pertennius looked genuinely ill. If he’d liked the man more, he might have been sympathetic.
‘Too much wine of an afternoon can do that to you,’ he said mildly. ‘Especially if one doesn’t normally drink.’
‘I don’t,’ said Pertennius. There was a silence. ‘She likes you,’ the secretary added. ‘More than me.’
Crispin turned away from the window. Pertennius had opened his eyes and was looking at Crispin. His gaze and tone were both quite neutral: a historian noting a fact, not a rival making complaint.
Crispin wasn’t deceived. Not about this. He shook his head, leaning back against the wall by the window. ‘Shirin? She likes me, yes, as a link to her father. Not as anything more.’ He wasn’t actually certain that was true, but he thought it was, most of the time. Think of her fingers slipping your tunic up from behind and then sliding back down along your skin. Abruptly, Crispin shook his head again, for a different reason this time. He hesitated, then said, ‘Shall I tell you what I think?’
Pertennius waited. A listening sort of man, privy to much: in his profession, by his nature. He really didn’t look well.
Crispin suddenly wished he hadn’t come up here. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to be having. With an inward shrug and a flicker of irritation that he was being placed in this situation—or had placed himself i
n it—he said, ‘I think Shirin is tired of being beset by men every time she steps out-of-doors. It makes for a difficult life, though some women might think they want it.’
Pertennius nodded slowly, his head heavy on his shoulders. He closed his eyes, struggled to open them again.
‘Mortals seek fame,’ he said sententiously, ‘unaware of all it means. She needs a . . . protector. Someone to keep them away.’
There was truth to all of this, of course. Crispin decided not to say that a secretary and historian was unlikely to prove sufficient deterrent as an acknowledged lover to achieve that protection. Instead, he murmured, temporizing, ‘You know there are those who have commissioned love spells from the cheiromancers.’
Pertennius made a sour face. ‘Foh!’ he said. ‘Magic. It is unholy.’
‘And it doesn’t work,’ Crispin added.
‘You know this?’ the other man asked. His eyes were briefly clear.
Aware, suddenly, of a need for caution, Crispin said, ‘We are taught by the clerics that it doesn’t, friend.’ Irritated again, he added, ‘In any case, have you ever seen Shirin wandering the streets before dawn against her will and desire, her hair unbound, compelled to where some man waits in his open doorway?’
‘Oh, Jad!’ said Pertennius, with feeling. He groaned. Illness and desire, an unholy mix.
Crispin suppressed a smile. Looked out the partly open window again. The air was cool. The street below was empty and silent. He decided to leave, considered asking for an escort. It was not particularly safe to cross the City at night alone and his own house was a distance away.
He said, ‘You’d do well to get some sleep. We can talk another—’
‘Do you know that they worship bison in Sauradia?’ said Pertennius abruptly. ‘It is in Metractes’s History of the Rhodian Wars.’