Rhegorios looked as if he wished he'd kept his mouth shut. «If you must know,» he said, «she's that Phosia I was telling you about, Broios' daughter.»
«The larcenous merchant?» Now Maniakes did laugh. «If it hadn't been for you, I'd never have known he had a daughter.»
«I make a point of investigating these things.» Rhegorios did his best to sound dignified. His best was none too good. «The lord with the great and good mind be praised, she takes after her mother in almost everything—certainly in looks.»
«Well, all right. All I can say is, she'd better.» Thinking of Broios still irked Maniakes. «She doesn't want to slide a knife between your ribs because I had her father's backside kicked in public?»
«Hasn't shown any signs of it,» Rhegorios said.
«Well, good enough, then.» Maniakes reached out and gave his cousin an indulgent poke in the shoulder. «Enjoy yourself while we're in Serrhes, and you can find yourself another friend, or another cartload of friends, when we get back to Videssos the city.»
By everything Maniakes knew of his cousin, that should have made Rhegorios laugh and come back with a gibe of his own. Instead, the Sevastos said, «I may have my father talk with Broios when we get back to the city.»
If Maniakes had been startled before, he gaped now. «What?» he said again. «I've never heard you talk like that before.» He wondered if his cousin had taken their earlier conversation to heart and resolved to marry. Then he wondered if this Phosia, or maybe Broios himself, had prevailed upon their wizard to work love magic on—or maybe against—Rhegorios. He would have found that easier to believe had such sorcery been easier to use. Passion made magic unreliable.
«Maybe it's time, that's all,» Rhegorios said. His wry grin was very much his own. «And maybe, too, it's just that I'm fascinated by the idea of a girl who says no. I don't see that every day, I'll tell you.»
«Mm, I believe you,» Maniakes said. His cousin was handsome, good-natured, and the man of second-highest rank in the Empire of Videssos. The first two would have been plenty by themselves to find him lots of female friends. The prospect of the riches and power his position added didn't hurt his persuasiveness, either.
«I think she's what I want,» Rhegorios said.
Maniakes wondered if she was what he wanted precisely because she hadn't let him have her. Was her reluctance altogether her own? The Avtokrator doubted Broios was clever enough to come up with such a scheme. He knew nothing about the merchant's wife, though. Not trusting his own judgment, he asked, «Have you told Lysia about this?»
«Some if it,» Rhegorios answered. «Not the whole.»
«I think you should do that,» Maniakes said. «She will have a clearer view about Phosia and her family than either one of us. She's not assotted with the girl, as you are.» He ignored his cousin's indignant look. «And she's—not quite—so worried about the Empire as a whole as I am.»
«By the good god, though, she's my sister,» Rhegorios said. «How can I talk about matters between man and woman with my sister? It wouldn't be decent.»
«For one thing, I daresay she has more sense than either one of us,» Maniakes replied. «And, for another, if you can't talk about these things with her, with whom can you talk of them? I know what you were thinking of doing, I'll wager, and never mind this yattering about having Uncle Symvatios talk with Broios: go ahead and marry this girl and then tell me about it afterward, when I couldn't do anything. Am I right or am I wrong?»
Rhegorios tried for dignified silence. Since he wasn't long on dignity under most circumstances, nor, for that matter, on silence, Maniakes concluded he'd read his cousin rightly.
«We'll be heading back to Serrhes soon—as you guessed, cousin of mine,» the Avtokrator said. «It'll have to do as our frontier outpost for now. And while we're waiting there to hear from Abivard, we won't have anything better to do than sort through this whole business. Doesn't that put your mind at ease?»
«No,» Rhegorios snarled. «You're taking all the fun out of it. The way you're treating it, it's a piece of imperial business first and a romance afterward.»
Maniakes stared again. «Cousin of mine, everything we do is imperial business first and whatever else it is afterward.»
«Oh, really?» Rhegorios at his most polite was Rhegorios at his most dangerous. «Then how, cousin of mine your Majesty brother-in-law of mine, did you happen to end up wed to your own first cousin? If you tell me that was good imperial business, by Phos, I'll eat my helmet. And if you get to have what you want for no better reason than that you want it, why don't I?»
Maniakes opened his mouth, then shut it again in a hurry on realizing he had no good answer. After a bit of thought, he tried again: «The one thing I can always be sure of with Lysia is that she'll never betray me. Can you say the same about this woman here?»
«No,» Rhegorios admitted. «But can you say you wouldn't have fallen in love with Lysia if you weren't so sure of that?»
«Right now, I can't say anything about might-have-beens,» Maniakes answered. «All I can say is that when we get back to Serrhes, we'll see what we have there, I expect.»
After a while out in the semidesert that marked the Empire's western frontier, Serrhes seemed almost as great a metropolis as Videssos the city, a telling measure of how barren that western country really was. Maniakes did not invite Broios and Phosia and her mother to dine with him right away. Instead, he did some quiet poking around.
So did Lysia, who said, «What your men don't hear, my serving women will, in the marketplace or from a shopkeeper or from a shopkeeper's wife.»
«That's fine,» Maniakes said. «You're right, of course; women do hear any number of things men miss.» He grinned. «Some of those things, some of the time, might even be true.»
Lysia glared at him, showing more anger than she probably felt.
«You know I'll remember that,» she said. «You know I'll make you pay for it one of these days, too. So why did you say it?»
«If I give you something you can sharpen your knives on,» he said, as innocently as he could, «you won't have to go out looking for something on your own.» The dirty look he got for that was more sincere than the earlier one. He went on, «You never have said much about what you think of your brother's choice. Does that mean what I'm afraid it means?»
Lysia shook her head. «No, not really. It means I paid no attention to this Phosia when we were here before.» Now she sank a barb of her own, aimed not so much at Maniakes in particular as at his half of the human race: «A pretty face is less likely to distract me.»
«Less likely to distract you than what?» he asked, and then held up a hasty hand. «Don't answer that. I don't think I want to know.» By the dangerous gleam that had come into his wife's eye, he knew he'd changed course in the nick of time.
Sure enough, gossip about Phosia, about Broios, and about Broios' wife—whose name was Zosime—began pouring in. A lot of it had to do with the way Broios ran his business. Vetranios had been able to cheat him, but he'd evidently managed to be on the giving as opposed to the receiving end of that a good many times himself. Maniakes didn't quite know how much weight to give such reports. A lot of merchants thought first of themselves and then, if at all, of those with whom they dealt. He couldn't gauge whether Broios was typical of the breed or typical of the breed at its worst.
His men and Lysia's serving women also brought in a lot of reports claiming Broios had been hand in glove with the Makuraners while they held Serrhes. Again, he had trouble deciding what those meant. If Broios hadn't cooperated with the occupiers to a certain degree, he wouldn't have been able to stay afloat. No one said he'd betrayed any of his fellows, and the Avtokrator had consistently forgiven those who'd done nothing worse than get on with their lives regardless of who ruled the westlands. But did that mean he wanted such people in his family? That was a different question.