He understood something. The queen of the Antae, battling for her life, had made something else as clear as it could be: she would not let the secrecy of his message be endangered in any way, even by her own most trusted guards. Six men dead. Nothing muted there at all.
He didn't know how he felt. Or no, he realized that he did know: he felt like a too-small ship setting out from harbour far too late in the year, undermanned, with winter winds swirling all around it.
But he was going to Sarantium. After all.
Earlier, in the depths of the night, in that room in the palace, feeling a stillness descend upon him, Crispin had said to the woman in the carved ivory seat, "I am honoured by your trust, Majesty. I would not want another war here, either among the Antae or a Sarantine invasion. We have endured our share of dying. I will carry your message and try to give it to the Emperor, if I survive my own deception. It is folly, what I am about to do, but everything we do is folly, is it not?"
"No," she said, unexpectedly. "But I do not expect to be the one who persuades you of that." She gestured to one of the doors. "There is a man on the other side who will escort you home. You will not see me again, for reasons you understand. You may kiss my foot, if you feel sufficiently well."
He knelt before her. Touched the slender foot in its golden sandal. Kissed the top of it. As he did, he felt long fingers brush through his hair to the place on his skull where the blow had fallen. He shivered. "You have my gratitude," he heard. "Whatever befalls."
The hand was withdrawn. He stood, bowed again, went out through the indicated portal, and was escorted home by a tongueless, smooth-shaven giant of a man through the windy night streets of his city. He was aware of desire lingering as he walked in blackness away from the palace, from the chamber. He was astonished by it.
In that exquisite, small receiving room, a young woman sat alone for a time after he left. It was rare for her to be entirely solitary, and the sensation was not disagreeable. Events had moved swiftly since one of her sources of privy knowledge had mentioned the spoken-aloud details of a summons conveyed by the Imperial Post to an artisan working at her father's resting place. She'd had little time to ponder nuances, only to realize that this was an unexpected, slender chance-and seize it.
Now there were deaths to attend to, regrettably. This game was lost before it began if it were known to Agila or Eudric or any of the others hovering around her throne that the artisan had had private converse with her in the night before journeying east. The man escorting the mosaic worker now was the only one she fully trusted. For one thing, he could not speak. For another, he had been hers since she was five years old. She would give him further orders for tonight when he returned. It would not be the first time he had killed for her.
The queen of the Antae offered, at length, a small, quiet prayer, asking forgiveness, among other things. She prayed to holy Jad, to his son the Charioteer who had died bringing fire to mortal men, and then-to be as sure as one could ever be sure-to the gods and goddesses her people had worshipped when they were a wild cluster of tribes in the hard lands north and east, first in the mountains, and then by the oak forests of Sauradia, before coming down into fertile Batiara and accepting Jad of the Sun, conquering heirs to an Empire's homeland.
She nursed few illusions. The man, Caius Crispus, had surprised her a little, but he was an artisan only, and of an angry, despairing humour. Arrogant, as the Rhodians still were so much of the time. Not a truly reliable vessel for so desperate an enterprise. This was almost certainly doomed to failure, but there was little she could do but try. She had let him come near to her, kiss her foot. Had brushed his flour-smeared red hair with fingers deliberately slow. perhaps longing was the gateway to this man's loyalty? She didn't think so, but she didn't know, and she could only use what few tools, or weapons, she had or was given.
Gisel of the Antae did not expect to see the wildflowers return in spring, or watch the midsummer bonfires burn upon the hills. She was nineteen years old, but queens were not, in truth, allowed to be so young.
CHAPTER II
When Crispin was a boy and free for a day in the way that only boys in summer can be free he had walked outside the city walls one morning and, after throwing stones in a stream for a time, had passed by a walled orchard universally reported among the young Varenans to belong to a spirit-haunted country house where unholy things happened after dark.
The sun was shining. In an effusion of youthful bravado, Crispin had climbed the rough stone wall, leaped across into a tree, sat down on a stout branch among the leaves and begun eating apples. He was heart-poundingly proud of himself and wondering how he'd prove he'd done this to his sure-to-be-sceptical friends. He decided to carve his initials-a newly learned skill-on the tree trunk, and dare the others to come see them. He received, a moment later, the deepest fright of his young life. It used to wake him at night sometimes, the memory having turned into a dream he'd have even as an adult, a husband, a father. In fact, he had managed to persuade himself that it mostly had been a dream, spun out of overly vivid childhood anxieties, the blazing midday heat, almost-ripe apples eaten too quickly. It had to have been a child's fantasy, breeding ground of nightmare.
Birds did not talk.
More particularly, they did not discuss with each other from tree to tree, in the identically bored tones and timbre of an over bred Rhodian aristocrat, which eye of a trespassing boy should be pecked out and consumed first, or how the emptied eye sockets might then offer easy access to slithery morsels of brain matter within.
Caius Crispus, eight years old and blessed or cursed with an intensely visual imagination, had not lingered to further investigate this remarkable phenomenon of nature. There seemed to be several birds in animated colloquy about him, half hidden in the leaves and branches. He dropped three apples, spat out the half-chewed pulp of another, and leaped wildly back to the wall, scraping an elbow raw, bruising a shin, and then doing himself further damage when he landed badly on the baked summer grass by the path.
As he sprinted back, not quite screaming, towards Varena, he heard sardonic crowing laughter behind him. Or he did in his dreams, after, at any rate.
Twenty-five years later, walking the same road south of the city, Crispin was thinking about the power of memories, the way they had of coming back so fiercely and unexpectedly. A scent could do it, the sound of rushing water, the sight of a stone wall beside a path.
He was remembering that day in the tree, and the recollection of terror took him a little further back, to the image of his mother's face when the reserves of the urban militia returned from that same year's spring campaign against the Inicii and his father was not with them.
Horius Crispus the mason had been a vivid, well-liked man, respected and successful in his craft and business. His only surviving son struggled, however, to shape a clear mental picture, after all these years, of the man who had gone marching north to the border and beyond into Ferrieres, red-bearded, smiling, easy-striding. He'd been too young when the militia's deputy commander had come to their door with his father's nondescript shield and sword.
He could remember a beard that scratched when he kissed his father's cheek, blue eyes-his own eyes, people said-and the big, capable hands, scarred and always scratched. A big voice, too, that went soft within the house, near Crispin or his small, scented mother. He had these. fragments, these elements, but when he tried to pull them together in his mind to create a whole it somehow slipped away, the way the man had slipped away too soon.