She stood up. Smiled. He felt helpless before the layers of meaning in that smile.
‘You just did,’ she murmured. And bending before he could rise, she kissed him chastely on the cheek. ‘Goodbye, Crispin. A safe voyage. I’ll expect you to write me soon. About properties, perhaps? That sort of thing.’
That sort of thing.
He stood up. Cleared his throat. A woman desirable as moonlight when the night was dark.
‘You, um, you kissed me better the first time we met.’
‘I know,’ she said sweetly. ‘Might have been a mistake.’
And she smiled again and went to the door and opened it herself and went out. He stood rooted to the spot.
‘Go to bed,’ said Danis. ‘We’ll have the servants let us out. A good journey, she says to say.’
‘Thank you,’ he sent, before remembering they couldn’t make out his thoughts. He wished, suddenly, he could make out his own.
He didn’t go to bed. There would have been no point. Stayed awake a long time, sitting in a chair by the window. Saw her wineglass and the flask on a tray but didn’t take them, didn’t drink. He’d made himself a promise about that, earlier tonight, in the street.
He was grateful for clear-headedness in the morning. A message—more than half expected—was waiting for him when he came down the stairs, delivered at sunrise. He ate, went to chapel on impulse, with Vargos and Pardos, then to the baths, had himself shaved, paid some visits in the Blues’ compound and elsewhere. Was aware, as the day progressed, of the movement of the sun overhead. This day, this night, one more, then gone.
Some goodbyes not yet done. One more coming at darkfall.
In the palace.
‘I HAD CONSIDERED a flour sack,’ said the Empress of Sarantium, ‘for memory’s sake.’
‘I am grateful, my lady, that you left it as a thought.’ Gisel smiled. She had risen from a small desk, where
she’d been opening sealed correspondence and reports with a small knife. Leontes was north and east with the army, but the Empire was still to be run, guided through changes. She and Gesius, he thought, would be doing so.
She crossed the room, took another seat. She was still holding the small paper knife. It had an ivory handle, carved in the shape of a face, he saw. She noticed his gaze. Smiled. ‘My father gave me this when I was very young. The face is his, actually. It comes off, if you twist.’ She did so. Held the ivory in one hand, the suddenly hiltless blade in the other. ‘I wore this against my skin when I boarded ship to sail here, had it hidden when we landed.’
He looked at her.
‘I didn’t know, you see, what they intended to do with me. At the . . . very last, sometimes, we can only control how we end.’
Crispin cleared his throat, looked around the room. They were almost alone, one woman servant with them here in the Traversite Palace, Gisel’s rooms, that had been Alixana’s. She hadn’t had time to change them yet. Other priorities. The rose was gone, he saw.
Alixana had wanted dolphins here. Had taken him to see them in the straits.
Gesius the Chancellor, smiling and benign, had been waiting to escort him to Gisel himself when Crispin presented himself at the Bronze Gates. Had done so, and withdrawn. There was no hidden meaning to this after-dark invitation, Crispin realized: they worked late in the Imperial Precinct, especially in wartime and with a diplomatic campaign already unfolding for Batiara. He’d been invited to see the Empress when she had a moment to grant him in a crowded day. A countryman sailing home, bidding farewell. There was no secrecy now, no abduction in the dark, no private message that could kill him if revealed.
That was past. He had journeyed here, she had journeyed even farther. He was going back. He wondered what he’d find in Varena, in the place where wagers on her life had been drunkenly made in taverns for a year.
Men had won those wagers, lost them. And those of the Antae lords who had sought to murder her and rule in her stead . . . what would become of them now?
‘If you’d been a little quicker in your planning,’ Gisel said, ‘you might have taken an Imperial ship. It left two days ago, with my messages for Eudric and Kerdas.’
He looked at her. Again the eerie sense that this woman could read his thoughts. He wondered if she was like that with everyone. Wondered how any man could have been foolish enough to wager against her. She had glanced away just now, was gesturing to her woman to bring him wine. It was carried across the room on a golden tray inlaid with precious stones around the rim. The riches of Sarantium, the unimaginable wealth here. He poured for himself, added water.
‘A careful man, I see,’ said the Empress Gisel. She smiled, deliberately.
He remembered these words as well. She’d said the same thing the first time, in Varena. There was such an odd sense to this night encounter. The distance travelled, in half a year.
He shook his head. ‘I feel I need my wits about me.’
‘Don’t you, usually?’
He shrugged. ‘I was thinking about the usurpers myself. What is to happen? Or may one ask, Majesty?’
It mattered, of course. He was going back, his mother was there, his house, his friends.
‘It depends on them. On Eudric, mostly. I have formally invited him to become Governor of the new Sarantine province of Batiara, in the name of the Emperor Valerius III.’
Crispin stared, then collected himself and looked down. This was an Empress. One didn’t gape at her like a fish.
‘You would reward the man who . . .’
‘Tried to kill me?’
He nodded.
She smiled. ‘Which of the Antae nobility did not wish me dead last year, Caius Crispus? They all did. Even the Rhodians knew that. What man might I choose if I eliminated all of those? Best to empower the one who won, is it not? An indication of capability. And he will live . . . in some fear, I believe.’
He found himself staring again. Couldn’t help himself. She was twenty years old, he guessed, perhaps not even that. As calculating and precise as a . . . as a monarch. Hildric’s daughter. They lived, these people, in a different world. Valerius had been like this, he thought suddenly.
He was thinking very quickly, actually. ‘And the Patriarch in Rhodias?’
‘Good for you,’ said the Empress. ‘He has messages of his own, arriving on the same ship. The schisms of Jad are to be resolved if he agrees. The Eastern Patriarch will accept his preeminence again.’
‘In exchange for . . . ?’
‘Pronouncements supporting the reunion of the Empire, Sarantium as the Imperial Seat, and endorsement of a number of specific matters of doctrine, as proposed by the Emperor.’
It was all so neat, unfolding at such speed.
And his anger was hard to check. ‘Such matters to include the representation of Jad in chapels and sanctuaries, of course.’
‘Of course,’ she murmured, unruffled. ‘It matters a great deal to the Emperor, that one.’
‘I know,’ he said.
‘I know that you know,’ she replied.
There was a silence.
‘I expect questions of government to be sorted through more easily than issues of faith. I have told Leontes as much.’
Crispin said nothing.
After a moment she added, ‘I was in the Great Sanctuary again this morning. I took that passageway you showed me. I wanted to see the work on the dome again.’
‘Before they start scraping it off, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ she said, undisturbed. ‘Before that. I told you when we passed through at night—I have a clearer understanding, now, of matters we discussed at our first meeting.’
He waited.
‘You lamented your tools. Remember? I told you they were the best we had. That there had been a plague and a war.’
‘I remember.’
Gisel smiled a little. ‘What I told you was the truth. What you told me was more true: I have seen what can be done by a master with proper equipment to deploy. Working on
my father’s chapel, I had you hampered like a strategos on a battlefield with only farmers and labourers to command.’
His father had been like that. Had died like that.
‘With deference, my lady, I am uneasy with the comparison.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Think about it later, however. I was pleased with it myself, when it came to me this morning.’
She was being entirely gracious, complimenting him, granting a private audience merely to bid him farewell. He had no cause at all to be surly here. Gisel’s rise to this throne might save his homeland and hers from destruction.
He nodded. Rubbed at his smooth chin. ‘I shall have leisure to do so, I imagine, on board ship, Majesty.’
‘Tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘The next day after.’
He was to realize later (leisure on board ship) that she had known this, had been guiding a conversation.
‘Ah. So you are still resolving business affairs.’
‘Yes, Majesty. Though I believe I am done.’
‘You have been paid all outstanding sums? We would want that properly dealt with.’
‘I have, my lady. The Chancellor was good enough to attend to that himself.’
She looked at him. ‘He owes you his life. We are . . . also aware of our debt to you, of course.’
He shook his head. ‘You were my queen. Are my queen. I did nothing that—’
‘You did what was needful for us, at personal risk, twice.’ She hesitated. ‘I shall not dwell over-long on the other matter—’ He was aware she had switched to the personal voice. ‘But I am still of the west, and take pride in what we can show them here. It is a regret for me that . . . circumstances have required the undoing of your work here.’
He lowered his eyes. What was there to say? It was a death.
‘It has also occurred to me, with what else I have learned these past days, that there is one more person you might desire to see before you sail.’
Crispin looked up.
Gisel of the Antae, Gisel of Sarantium, gazed back at him with those blue eyes.
‘She can’t see you, however,’ she said.
THERE WERE DOLPHINS again. He’d wondered if he would see them, and was aware that there was something mortally foolish and vain in that doubting: as if the creatures of the sea would appear or not appear in consequence of whatever men and women did in cities, on the land.
Looked at another way (though it was a heresy), there were a great many souls to be carried these days, in and about Sarantium.
He was on a small, sleek Imperial craft, passage gained merely by showing Gisel’s slim dagger with the image of her father in ivory for a handle. A gift, she’d declared it, handing it to him, a way to remember her. Though she’d also said she expected to be in Varena before too many years had passed. If all fell out as it should, there would be ceremonies in Rhodias.
A note had gone before him, alerting the crew that the one bearing the image of the Empress’s father could sail to a place otherwise forbidden.
He had been there before.
Styliane was not in the prison cells under the palaces. Someone with a keener sense of irony and punishment— Gesius, most likely, who had lived through so much violence in his days, and survived all of it—had chosen a different place for her to live out the life the new Emperor had granted her, as a mercy to one he had wed and a sign to the people of his benevolence.
And one really didn’t have to look further than Leontes on the Golden Throne and Styliane on the isle, Crispin thought, watching the dolphins beside the ship again, to find a sufficiency of ironies.
They docked, were tied, a plank was run out and down for him. The only visitor, only person disembarking here.
Memories and images. He looked, almost against his will, and saw where Alixana had dropped her cloak on the stones and walked away. He’d been dreaming of that place, moonlit.
Two Excubitors met the ship. One of those on board came down the plank and spoke quietly to them. They led him, wordlessly, along the path through the trees. Birds were singing. The sun slanted through the leafy canopy.
They came to the clearing where men had died on the day Valerius was killed. No one spoke. Crispin became aware, try as he might to quell it, that his principal feeling was dread.
He wished he hadn’t come. Couldn’t have said with any certainty why he had. His escorts stopped, one of them gestured towards the largest of the houses here. He didn’t need the indication.
The same house in which her brother had been. Of course.
A difference, however. Windows open on all sides, barred, but unshuttered, to let in the morning light. He wondered. Went forward. There were guards here. Three of them. They looked past him at his escorts and evidently received some signal. Crispin didn’t look back to see. The door was unlocked by one of them.
No words, at all. He wondered if they’d been forbidden to talk, to avoid any chance of being seduced, corrupted. He walked in. The door closed behind him. He heard the key turn. They were taking no chances at all. They would know what this prisoner had done.
This prisoner sat quietly in a chair by the far wall, her profile to him, unmoving. No visible response to the arrival of someone. Crispin looked at her, and dread slipped away, to be replaced by a myriad of other things he couldn’t even begin to sort out.
She said, ‘I told you I am not eating.’
She hadn’t turned her head, hadn’t seen him.
Couldn’t see him. Even from where he stood, across the room, Crispin realized that her eyes were gone, gouged out. Black sockets where the brightness he remembered had been. He pictured, fighting it, an underground room, implements, a burning fire, torches, large men with fat, skilled thumbs approaching her.
One more person you might desire to see, Gisel had said.
‘I don’t blame you at all,’ he said. ‘I imagine the food is dreadful.’
She started. There was pity in that, that a woman so flawlessly composed, so impossible to disconcert, should be made to react like this, merely by an unexpected voice.
He tried to imagine being blind. Colour and light gone, shadings, hues, the wealth and play of them. Nothing worse in the world. Death better, he thought.
‘Rhodian,’ she said. ‘Come to see what it is like to bed a blind woman now? Jaded appetites?’
‘No,’ he said, keeping calm. ‘No appetite at all, like you, it seems. Come to say goodbye. I leave for home tomorrow.’
‘Finished so soon?’ Her tone changed.
She didn’t turn her head. They had shorn off almost all her golden hair. With another woman it might have marred her appearance. With Styliane it only revealed the perfection of cheek and bone below the still-bruised and hollowed eye socket. They hadn’t marked her, he thought. Only the blinding.
Only the blinding. And this prison on the isle where her brother had lived his days in darkness, burned and burning within, without any light allowed to enter.
And here was, as much as anything, a mark of the nature of the woman, Crispin thought, of her pride: light flooding the room, useless to her, offered only to whoever might enter. Only the silent guards would come, day by day—but there was no hiding for Styliane Daleina, no shielding herself in darkness. If you dealt with her, you had to accept what there was to see. It had always been so.
‘You have finished your work already?’ she repeated.
‘I haven’t,’ he said quietly. Not bitter now. Not here, seeing this. ‘You warned me, long ago.’
‘Ah. That. Already? I didn’t think it would be . . .’
‘So swift?’
‘So swift. He told you it was a heresy, your dome.’
‘Yes. Did it himself, I’ll grant.’
She turned to him.
And he saw that they had marked her, after all. The left side of her face was branded with the symbol of a murderer: a crude blade cut into a circle meant to stand for the god’s sun. The wound was crusted with blood, her face inflamed
around it. She needed a physician, he thought, doubted they’d made arrangements for one. A cheek scarred into ugliness, with fire.
Again, someone with a dark awareness of irony. Or, perhaps, just a person in a locked and soundproof room under the earth, utterly impervious to such things, only following the duly prescribed protocols of justice in the Imperial Precinct of Sarantium.
He must have made a sound. She smiled, an expression he remembered, wry and knowing. It hurt to see it, here. ‘You are heart-struck by my enduring beauty?’
Crispin swallowed hard. Took a deep breath. ‘In truth,’ he said, ‘I am. I could wish it were not so.’
That silenced her a moment.
‘That is honest, at least,’ she said. ‘I recall that you liked him. Both of them.’
‘That would have been a presumption for an artisan. I admired him greatly.’ He paused. ‘Both of them.’
‘And Valerius was your patron, of course, surety of all your work. Which will now be lost. Poor Rhodian. Do you hate me?’
‘I could wish I did,’ he said finally. So much light in the room. The breeze cool, fragrant with wood-smells. Birdsong in the trees, all around the clearing. The greengold leaves. Born now, green in summer, dying in the fall. Do you hate me?
‘Is he marching north?’ she asked. ‘Against Bassania?’
A lifetime in the halls and rooms of power. A mind that could not stop working.
‘He is.’
‘And . . . Gisel is to negotiate with Varena?’
‘She is.’
Gisel, he thought, was exactly the same in this. They did live in a different world, these people. Same sun and moons and stars, but a different world.
Her mouth twisted wryly again. ‘I would have done the same, you realize? I told you the night we first spoke that there were those of us who thought the invasion misguided.’
‘Alixana was one of them,’ he said.
She ignored that, effortlessly.
‘He had to be killed before the fleet sailed. If you stop to think, you will see it. Leontes had to be in the City. He wouldn’t have turned back, once he’d sailed.’