Lord of Emperors (70 page)

She looked at him.

'Do
you want me to come west?"

"Sometimes I do, yes," he admitted, to himself as much as to her. It was a relief to say it.

He saw her take a breath. "Well, that's a start," she murmured. "Helps with the anger, too. You might be able to take me to bed for other reasons now."

He laughed. "Oh, my dear," he said. "Don't you think I-"

"I know. Don't. Don't say it. You couldn't think about… any of this when you came, for reasons I know. And now you can't for… new reasons, that I also know. What do you want to ask of me, then?"

She wore a soft cap of dark green, a ruby in it. Her cloak lay beside her on the bed. Her gown was silk, green as the cap, with gold. Her earrings were gold and rings flashed on her fingers. He thought, looking at her, claiming this image, that he'd never be gifted enough at his craft to capture how she appeared just then, even sitting still as she was.

Speaking carefully, he said, "Don't… sell the farmhouse yet. Perhaps you'll need to… visit your property in the western province. If it becomes a province."

"It will. The Empress Gisel, I have decided, knows what she wants and how to get it."

His own thought, actually. He didn't say it. The Empress wasn't the point just now. He discovered that his heart was beating rapidly. He said, "You might even… invest there, depending how events unfold? Martinian's shrewd about such things, if you want advice."

She smiled at him. "Depending how events unfold?"

"Gisel's… arrangements."

"Gisel's," she murmured. And waited again.

He took a breath. A mistake, perhaps; her scent was inescapably present. "Shirin, there is no way you
should
leave Sarantium and you know it."

"Yes?" she said, encouragingly.

"But let me go home and find out what I… well, let me… Ah, well if you
do
marry someone here, by choice, I'd be…Jad's blood, woman, what do you
want
me to say?"

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.