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 green-gold 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."
"How unfortunate. So Valerius had to die, that Leontes-and you- could rule?"
"I… thought that was it, yes."
He opened his mouth, closed it. "You thought?
Her mouth twisted again. She winced this time, brought a hand up towards her wounded face, then put it down without touching. "After the tunnel, it didn't seem important any more."
"I don't…"
"I could have killed him years ago. A foolish girl, I was. I thought the thing to do was take power, the way my father ought to have been given power. Leontes ruling, but only needing his soldiers" love and his piety to be content, my brothers and I…" She stopped.