In the woman who came a few days after, there was something burning beneath a chilly, patrician manner, and Gisel felt both the heat and the cold. It was an unsettling encounter. She had heard of the Daleinoi, of course: wealthiest family in the Empire. With a father and brother dead, another brother said to be hideously maimed and hidden away somewhere, and a third keeping cautiously distant from the City, Styliane Daleina, wife now to the Supreme Strategos, was the visible presence of her aristocratic family in Sarantium, and there was nothing harmless about her, Gisel decided very early in their conversation.
They were almost of an age, she judged, and life had taken away both their childhoods very early. Styliane's manner was unrevealing, her bearing and manner perfect, a veneer of exquisite politeness, betraying nothing of what might be her thoughts.
Until she chose to do so. Over dried figs and a small glass of warmed, sweetened wine, a desultory exchange about clothing styles in the west had turned into a sudden, very direct question about Gisel's throne and her flight and what she hoped to achieve by accepting the Emperor's invitation to come east.
"I am alive," Gisel had said mildly, meeting the appraising blue gaze of the other woman. "You will have heard of what happened in the sanctuary on the day of its consecration."
"It was unpleasant, I understand," had said Styliane Daleina casually, speaking of murder and treason. She gestured dismissively.'Is this, then, pleasant? This pretty cage?"
"My visitors are a source of very great consolation," Gisel had murmured, controlling anger ruthlessly. "Tell me, I have been urged to attend the theatre one night. Have you a suggestion?" She smiled, bland and young, manifestly thoughtless. A barbarian princess, barely two generations removed from the forests where the women painted their naked breasts with dyes.
More than one person, Gisel had thought, leaning forward to carefully select a fig, could preserve her privacy behind empty talk.
Styliane Daleina left soon after, with an observation at the door that people at court seemed to think the principal dancer and actress for the Green faction was the preeminent performer of the day. Gisel had thanked her, and promised to repay her courtesy with a visit one day. She actually thought she might: there was a certain kind of bitter pleasure in this sort of sparring. She wondered if it were possible to find bear grease in Sarantium.
There were other visitors. The Eastern Patriarch sent his principal secretary, an officious, sour-smelling cleric who asked prepared questions about western faith and then lectured her on Heladikos until he realized she wasn't listening. Some members of the small Batiaran community here-mostly merchants, mercenary soldiers, a few craftsmen-made a point of attending upon her until, at some point in the winter, they stopped coming, and Gisel concluded that Eudric or Kerdas, back home, had sent word, or even instructions. Agila was dead; they had learned that by now. He'd died in her father's resting place the morning of the consecration. With Pharos and Anissa, the only two people left in the world who might have been said to love her. She'd heard the tidings, dry-eyed, and hired another half a dozen mercenaries.
The visitors from the court continued for a time. A few of the men gave indications of wishing to seduce her: a triumph for them, doubtless.
She remained a virgin, regretting it occasionally. Boredom was one of the central problems of this new life. It wasn't even really a life. It was a waiting to see if life could continue, or begin again.
And this, unfortunately, was where the dutiful attempt to summon proper gratitude each morning in the chapel usually faltered as the invocations to holy Jad ended. She'd had an existence of real-if precarious- power back home. Reigning queen of a conquering people in the homeland of an empire. The High Patriarch in Rhodias deferred to her, as he had to her father. Here in Sarantium she was subjected to lectures from a lesser cleric. She was no more than a glittering object, a jewel of sorts for the Emperor and his court, without function or access to any role. She was, in the simplest reading of things, a possible excuse for an invasion of Batiara, and little more than that.
Those subtle people from the court who rode or were carried in curtained litters across the city to see her seemed to have gradually come to that same conclusion. It was a long way from the Imperial Precinct to her palace near the triple walls. Midway through the winter, the visits from the court had also begun to grow less frequent. It was not a surprise. At times it saddened her how little ever surprised her.
One of the would-be lovers-more determined than the others- continued to visit after the others had ceased to appear. Gisel allowed him, once, to kiss her palm, not her hand. The sensation had been mildly diverting, but after reflection she'd elected to be engaged the next time he came, and then the next. There hadn't been a third visit.
She'd had little choice, really. Her youth, beauty, whatever desire men might have for her, these were among the few remaining tools she had, having left a throne behind.
She wondered when Eudric or Kerdas would attempt to have her murdered. If Valerius would really try to stop it. On balance, she thought, she was of more use to the Emperor alive, but there were arguments the other way, and there was the Empress to consider.
Every such calculation she had to make by herself. She'd no one she trusted to advise her here. Not that she'd really had that back home, either. At times she found herself feeling furious and bereft when she thought of the grey-haired alchemist who had helped her in this flight but had then abandoned her to pursue his own affairs, whatever they might have been. She had last seen him on the wharf in Megarium, standing in the rain as her ship sailed away.
Gisel, having returned from the chapel to her home, was sitting in the pretty solarium over the quiet street. She noted that the rising sun was now over the roofs across the way. She rang a small bell by her chair and one of the very well trained women the Empress had sent to her appeared in the doorway. It was time to begin preparing to go out. It was wrong, in truth, to say that nothing ever surprised her. There had been unexpected developments.
In the wake of one of them, involving a dancer who happened to be the daughter of that same grey-haired man who had left her in Megarium, she'd accepted an invitation for this afternoon.
And that reminded her of the other man she had enlisted to her service back home, the red-haired mosaicist. Caius Crispus would be present today as well.
She had ascertained that he was in Sarantium shortly after her own arrival. She'd needed to know; he raised considerations of his own. She had entrusted him with a dangerously private message, arid had no idea if he'd delivered it, or even tried. She'd remembered him to be bitter, saturnine, unexpectedly clever. She'd needed to speak with him.
She hadn't invited him to visit-as far as the world knew, he had never met her, after all. Six men had died to preserve that illusion. She'd gone, instead, to observe the progress being made on the Emperor's new Sanctuary of Jad's Holy Wisdom. The Sanctuary wasn't yet open to the general public, but a visit was an entirely appropriate-even a pious-outing for a visiting monarch. No one could have possibly queried it. Once she'd entered, she'd decided, entirely on impulse, on an unusual approach to this matter.
Thinking back to the events of that morning in early winter, as her women now began preparing her bath, Gisel found herself smiling privately. Jad knew, she wasn't inclined to give way to impulse, and few enough things ever gave her occasion to be amused, but she hadn't conducted herself in that stupefying place with what might be considered decorous piety, and she had to admit she'd enjoyed herself.