He turned to see her stretched out on a divan piled high with white cushions. The bright sunlight behind her highlighted the faint crow’s feet she didn’t bother to hide, the honey-bronze skin that told of a mix of bloodlines, the rich emerald of the dress she wore. It wasn’t in the Venetian style, but in the more flowing, easier manner of an earlier century.
Much earlier.
He supposed it didn’t matter.
There was no one to fool here.
“We’re nothing alike,” he said, marveling that she should think so. An ancient queen and current senator, at the height of vampire society. And he . . .
Well, it would be harder to get any lower, wouldn’t it?
She smiled and made no gesture he could see, but the small boy holding the peacock feather fan behind her suddenly scurried off.
Mircea watched him go, confused. There were other people around, privileged guests strolling along the extensive terrace, the sun gleaming off their fine silks and flashing off their heavy rings as they raised glasses or gestured. As if it cost them nothing to stand in the day.
They stayed down the railing somewhat, as if sensing the sphere of his client’s power, and choosing to remain beyond it. Or perhaps it wasn’t a choice; Mircea wasn’t sure. But they were certainly not beyond the range of vampire hearing.
Yet she sent the human child away?
“No one can hear us,” she told him. “Not unless I permit it.”
“Why would you care?” he asked, still confused.
“I have a reputation to maintain,” she said lightly, and moved over slightly so he could sit.
He did so just as the crowd sent up a massive shout. They paused to look through the railings at a much deteriorated scene. The blue team’s barge was already on its side, and slowly flipped over as they watched, like a breeching whale. Not that it caused the blues to surrender. Half of them had been on the orange barge in any case, and now the rest were climbing or jumping on as well, heedless of the ruin of their fine clothes, determined to eke out a victory.
Mircea’s client lay back against the chaise and studied him for a moment, dark eyes unreadable.
“I was so angry,” she told him abruptly. “When I found out what had been done to me. Despite the fact that it had been my salvation, despite the fact that I was facing death or dishonor otherwise . . . still. So angry.”
“You didn’t choose?” For some reason, that surprised him.
“I wasn’t asked,” she said dryly. “And when I awoke, I didn’t feel saved. I felt . . . betrayed.”
She smiled lazily at his expression. “Oh, did you think you were the only one? To have hopes and dreams and plans, and to find them suddenly gone? The only one to tell yourself, ‘but I would be dead otherwise, they would be gone in any case?’ The only one not to care. To discover that being saved from the grave is a hollow victory when the circumstances conspire nonetheless to deprive you of life—the one you loved and hated, the one you cursed and adored, the one you sacrificed for, risked everything for, the one you were owed?”
He stared at her, unable to speak. Not because she was right; he hadn’t believed he was the only one. Not even before he talked to Bezio. He might have foolishly believed he’d lost more than some others, but he had never been so self-centered as to believe he was the only one in pain.
But because he’d never before heard it expressed quite so well.
Yes, that was exactly the way he’d felt, had been feeling for two years now. Betrayed. As if he’d won the battle and died anyway.
“Do you know, I had never really thought about death?” she asked. “Strange, being steeped in a culture that so focused on it. But my palace didn’t face the ancient tombs and their contents, far away in the desert wastes, but the sea. It was built on a spar of land, serene and beautiful. And in the distance, mighty Alexandria, huge and busy and overflowing with life.”
“A port city,” Mircea said, trying to keep up. “You . . . must feel at home in Venice.”
She sent him a look. “Not a port, the port—the greatest in the world, in its day. In any day. The port that made empires . . . and destroyed them.”
The liquid dark eyes looked casually around the beautiful palazzo. And suddenly, Mircea saw it as she did: small and shabby, with its statues poor copies of Greek originals, its mosaics childishly unsophisticated, its people draped in trinkets that they thought great jewels. And dwarfed, in utterly every way, by the palace that rose out of another sea, gleaming before his eyes like a great pearl.
He blinked in shock, but it only grew more vivid. Its marble columns so large four men could not have stretched their arms around them, its terraces larger than this house, their sweeping expanse overlooking a port dotted with hundreds of ships. And a towering lighthouse rising above it all, huge and gleaming white, rightfully deserving of its place among the world’s wonders.
And then, abruptly, the image was gone. Leaving Mircea reeling on the chaise, thankful that he was sitting down. And wondering if the sun had addled his brains as his client raised her head.
And looked at the elegant man that bowed to her from across the terrace.
He seemed like someone who would have fit better into that strange vision than here, Mircea thought dizzily. His skin was burnished dark by the desert sun, contrasting with his flowing white robes unadorned with jewels. He didn’t need them, not if the purpose of jewels is to draw the eye. He did that all on his own.
Mircea felt his spine tense as the eyes of a hawk swept over him. But the senator merely inclined her head. Mircea wondered for a moment how she saw the man.
He didn’t have to wonder long.
“The African consul,” she murmured. “Hassani, they call him. Hails from Persia, but spent his formative years in Cairo.”
“Cairo?” It kept coming up, although Mircea knew it only as a distant trading partner for Venice. It sent swarthy men in turbans to buy Parmesan cheeses, luxury textiles, and furs, paid for with spices, fine woolen carpets, and some of the delicate glass objects that had so influenced the artisans on Murano. But it had never been of concern to him, not being a part of the Turk’s growing empire.
“Established by a group of uncivilized Bedouin as an army base,” she told him. “It was mud brick and camel dung until they stripped the great pyramids of their facing stones, to give it some stolen beauty. But as it is in Egypt, Hassani thinks it gives us a bond.”
“And what do you think?”
Those dark eyes met his, and to Mircea’s surprise, they were brimming with amusement. “I think he matches his city!”
Mircea must have looked as bemused as he felt, for she actually laughed.
He didn’t. He couldn’t believe someone would speak about a consul in such a way, much less dare to say it a dozen yards from where he was standing. But she didn’t look worried. She also didn’t look interested, her eyes sliding off the arresting figure to the golden bracelet she wore, one of several, this one with the winged figure of a woman.
“I never thought about death,” she continued, returning to her earlier theme. “Why should I? I had been told all my life that I was a goddess descended from Isis, my conception divine. Propaganda, of course, for the common people. But when you hear a lie so often, even you come to half believe it. And while young . . . well. Do any of the young believe that they will die?”
“I didn’t,” Mircea said hoarsely. Even in the midst of battle, even with his side badly losing, he hadn’t really believed it. And he’d been proven right. He had lived, and his men with him, despite all the odds.
Only to return to die by treachery at home.
“And then I became immortal,” she said lightly. “I became Isis reborn, in truth instead of fiction. But I did not wake to the power of a goddess, did I? Nor even to that of my old self. I awoke a slave, starving, desperate, dependent.”