you, after all."
He bowed his head. And told her, unvarnished and with nothing that mattered held back, of his conversation with Valerius and Alixana, when the small, brilliant figure that was the Empress of Sarantium had turned in a doorway to her inner chamber and asked-with seeming casualness-about the marriage proposal he undoubtedly carried from Varena.
Gisel was disturbed, he realized. Was trying to hide that and might have done so from a less observant man. When he finished, she was silent awhile.
"Did she sort it through or did he?" she asked.
Crispin thought about it. "Both of them, I believe. Together, or each on their own." He hesitated. "She is… an exceptional woman, Majesty." Gisel's blue gaze met his briefly, then flicked away. She was so young, he thought.
"I wonder what would have happened," she murmured, "had I not had the guardsmen killed."
They'd be alive, Crispin wanted to say, but did not. He might have, a season ago, but was not quite the same angry, bitter man he'd been at the beginning of autumn. He'd had a journey, since.
Another silence. She said, "You know why I am here? In Sarantium?" He nodded. It was all over the city. "You avoided an attempt on your life. In the sanctuary. I am horrified, Majesty."
Of course you are," said his queen, and smiled, almost absently. For all the terrible nuances of what they were discussing and what had happened to her, an odd mood seemed to be playing about her, in the dance and drift of sunlight through the high windows all around the dome. He tried to fathom how she must feel, having fled from her throne and people, living here on sufferance, devoid of her own power. He couldn't even imagine it.
"I like it up here," the queen said suddenly. She went to the low railing and looked down, seemingly unfazed by how high they were. Crispin had known people to faint or collapse, clutching at the planks of the scaffold up here.
There were other platforms, around the eastern perimeter of the dome, where men had begun setting tesserae on Crispin's sketched pattern, to make a cityscape and the deep blue and green of the sea, but no one else was aloft just now. Gisel of the Antae looked at her own hands on the rail, then turned and held them up to him. "Could I be a mosaicist, do you think?" She laughed. He listened for desperation, fear, but heard only genuine amusement.
He said, "It is a craft only, unworthy of you, Majesty."
She looked around for a time without answering him. "No. This isn't," she said finally. She gestured at Artibasos's dome, at the beginnings of Crispin's own vast mosaic upon it. "This isn't unworthy of anyone. Are you pleased you came now, Caius Crispus? You didn't want to, I recall."
And in response to the direct question, Crispin nodded his head, admitting it for the first time. "I didn't want to, but this dome is a life's gift for such as I."
She nodded. Her mood had changed, swiftly. "Good. We also are pleased you are here. We have few we may trust in this city. Are you one such?"
She had been direct the first time, too. Crispin cleared his throat. She was so alone in Sarantium. The court would use her as a tool, and hard men back home would want her dead. He said, "In whatever ways I may help you, my lady, I shall."
"Good," she repeated. He saw her colour had heightened. Her eyes were bright. "I wonder. How shall we do this? Shall I order you to come now and kiss me, so that those below can see?"
Crispin blinked, swallowed, ran a hand reflexively through his hair.
"You do not improve your appearance when you do that, you know," the queen said. "Think, artisan. There has to be a reason for my coming up here to you. Will it help you with the women of this city to be known as a queen's lover, or will it mark you as… untouchable?'And she smiled.
"I… I don't have… My lady, I…"
"You don't want to kiss me?" she asked. A mood so bright it was a danger in itself. She stood very still, waiting for him.
He was entirely unnerved. He took a deep breath, then a step forward.
And she laughed. "On further thought, it isn't necessary, is it? My hand will do, artisan. You may kiss my hand."
She lifted it to him. He took it in his own and raised it to his lips, and just as he did so she turned her hand in his and it was her palm, soft and warm, that he kissed.
"1 wonder," said the queen of the Antae, "if anyone could see me do that." And she smiled again.
Crispin was breathing hard. He straightened. She remained very near and, bringing up both her hands, she smoothed his disordered hair.
"We will leave you," she said, astonishingly composed, the too-bright manner gone as swiftly as it had come, though her colour remained high. "You may call upon us now, of course. Everyone will assume they know why. As it happens, we wish to go to the theatre."
"Majesty," Crispin said, struggling to regain a measure of calm. "You are the queen of the Antae, of Batiara, an honoured guest of the Emperor… an artisan cannot possibly escort you to the theatre. You will have to sit in the Imperial Box. Must be seen there. There are protocols.
She frowned, as if struck only now by the thought. "Do you know, I believe you are correct. I shall have to send a note to the Chancellor then. But in that case, I may have come up here to no purpose, Caius Crispus." She looked up at him. "You must take care to provide us with a reason." And she turned away.
He was so deeply shaken that she was five rungs down the ladder before he even moved, offering her no assistance at all.
It didn't matter. She went down to the marble floor as easily as she'd come up. It occurred to him, watching her descend towards a score of unabashedly curious people staring up, that if he was marked now as her lover, or even her confidant, then his mother and his friends might be endangered back home when word of this went west. Gisel had escaped a determined assassination attempt. There were men who wanted her throne, which meant ensuring she did not take it back. Those linked to her in any way would be suspect. Of what, it hardly mattered.
The Antae were not fastidious about such things.
And that truth, Crispin decided, staring down, applied as much to the woman nearing the ground now. She might be young, and terribly vulnerable here, but she'd survived a year on her throne among men who wished her dead or subjected to their will, and had managed to elude them when they did try to kill her. And she was her father's daughter. Gisel of the Antae would do whatever she had to do, he thought, to achieve her purposes, until and unless someone did end her life. Consequences for others wouldn't even cross her mind.
He thought of the Emperor Valerius, moving mortal lives this way and that like pieces on a gameboard. Did power shape this way of thinking, or was it only those who already thought this way who could achieve earthly power?
It came to Crispin, watching the queen reach the marble floor to accept bows and her cloak, that he'd been offered intimacy by three women in this city, and each occasion had been an act of contrivance and dissembling. Not one of them had touched him with any tenderness or care, or even a true desire.
Or, perhaps, that last wasn't entirely so. When he returned home later in the day to the house the Chancellor's people had by now arranged for him, Crispin found a note waiting. Tidings took little time to travel in this city-or certain kinds of tidings did. The note, when unfolded, was not signed, and he'd never seen the round, smooth handwriting before, but the paper was astonishingly fine, luxurious. Reading the words, he realized no signature was needed, or possible.
You told me, Styliane Daleina had written, that you were a stranger to the private rooms of royalty.
Nothing more. No added reproach, no direct suggestion that he'd deceived her, no irony or provocation. The stated fact. And the fact that she'd stated it.