He remembered these words as well. She'd said the same thing the first time, in Varena. There was such an odd sense to this night encounter. The distance travelled, in half a year.

He shook his head. "I feel I need my wits about me."

"Don't you, usually?"

He shrugged. "I was thinking about the usurpers myself. What is to happen? Or may one ask, Majesty?"

It mattered, of course. He was going back, his mother was there, his house, his friends.

"It depends on them. On Eudric, mostly. I have formally invited him to become Governor of the new Sarantine province of Batiara, in the name of the Emperor Valerius III."

Crispin stared, then collected himself and looked down. This was an Empress. One didn't gape at her like a fish.

"You would reward the man who…"

"Tried to kill me?"

He nodded.

She smiled. "Which of the Antae nobility did not wish me dead last year, Caius Crispus? They all did. Even the Rhodians knew that. What man might I choose if I eliminated all of those? Best to empower the one who won, is it not? An indication of capability. And he will live… in some fear, I believe."

He found himself staring again. Couldn't help himself. She was twenty years old, he guessed, perhaps not even that. As calculating and precise as a… as a monarch. Hildric's daughter. They lived, these people, in a different world. Valerius had been like this, he thought suddenly.

He was thinking very quickly, actually. "And the Patriarch in Rhodias?"

"Good for you," said the Empress. "He has messages of his own, arriving on the same ship. The schisms of Jad are to be resolved if he agrees. The Eastern Patriarch will accept his preeminence again."

"In exchange for…?"

"Pronouncements supporting the reunion of the Empire, Sarantium as the Imperial Seat, and endorsement of a number of specific matters of doctrine, as proposed by the Emperor."

It was all so neat, unfolding at such speed.

And his anger was hard to check. "Such matters to include the representation of Jad in chapels and sanctuaries, of course."

"Of course," she murmured, unruffled. "It matters a great deal to the Emperor, that one."

"I know," he said.

"I know that you know," she replied.

There was a silence.

"I expect questions of government to be sorted through more easily than issues of faith. I have told Leontes as much."

Crispin said nothing.

After a moment she added, "I was in the Great Sanctuary again this morning. I took that passageway you showed me. I wanted to see the work on the dome again."

"Before they start scraping it off, you mean?"

"Yes," she said, undisturbed. "Before that. I told you when we passed through at night-I have a clearer understanding, now, of matters we discussed at our first meeting."

He waited.

"You lamented your tools. Remember? I told you they were the best we had. That there had been a plague and a war."

"I remember."

Gisel smiled a little. "What I told you was the truth. What you told me was more true: I have seen what can be done by a master with proper equipment to deploy. Working on my father's chapel, I had you hampered like a strategos on a battlefield with only farmers and labourers to command."

His father had been like that. Had died like that.

"With deference, my lady, I am uneasy with the comparison."

"I know," she said. "Think about it later, however. I was pleased with it myself, when it came to me this morning."

She was being entirely gracious, complimenting him, granting a private audience merely to bid him farewell. He had no cause at all to be surly here. Gisel's rise to this throne might save his homeland and hers from destruction.

He nodded. Rubbed at his smooth chin. "I shall have leisure to do so, I imagine, on board ship, Majesty."

"Tomorrow?" she asked.

"The next day after."

He was to realize later (leisure on board ship) that she had known this, had been guiding a conversation.

"Ah. So you are still resolving business affairs."

"Yes, Majesty. Though I believe I am done."

"You have been paid all outstanding sums? We would want that properly dealt with."

"I have, my lady. The Chancellor was good enough to attend to that himself."

She looked at him. "He owes you his life. We are… also aware of our debt to you, of course."

He shook his head. "You were my queen. Are my queen. I did nothing that-"

"You did what was needful for us, at personal risk, twice." She hesitated. "I shall not dwell over-long on the other matter-" He was aware she had switched to the personal voice. "But I am still of the west, and take pride in what we can show them here. It is a regret for me that… circumstances have required the undoing of your work here."

He lowered his eyes. What was there to say? It was a death.

"It has also occurred to me, with what else I have learned these past days, that there is one more person you might desire to see before you sail."

Crispin looked up.

Gisel of the Antae, Gisel of Sarantium, gazed back at him with those blue eyes.

"She can't see you, however," she said.

There were dolphins again. He'd wondered if he would see them, and was aware that there was something mortally foolish and vain in that doubting: as if the creatures of the sea would appear or not appear in consequence of whatever men and women did in cities, on the land.

Looked at another way (though it was a heresy), there were a great many souls to be carried these days, in and about Sarantium.

He was on a small, sleek Imperial craft, passage gained merely by showing Gisel's slim dagger with the image of her father in ivory for a handle. A gift, she'd declared it, handing it to him, a way to remember her. Though she'd also said she expected to be in Varena before too many years had passed. If all fell out as it should, there would be ceremonies in Rhodias.

A note had gone before him, alerting the crew that the one bearing the image of the Empress's father could sail to a place otherwise forbidden.

He had been there before.

Styliane was not in the prison cells under the palaces. Someone with a keener sense of irony and punishment-Gesius, most likely, who had lived through so much violence in his days, and survived all of it-had chosen a different place for her to live out the life the new Emperor had granted her, as a mercy to one he had wed and a sign to the people of his benevolence.

And one really didn't have to look further than Leontes on the Golden Throne and Styliane on the isle, Crispin thought, watching the dolphins beside the ship again, to find a sufficiency of ironies.

They docked, were tied, a plank was run out and down for him. The only visitor, only person disembarking here.

Memories and images. He looked, almost against his will, and saw where Alixana had dropped her cloak on the stones and walked away. He'd been dreaming of that place, moonlit.

Two Excubitors met the ship. One of those on board came down the plank and spoke quietly to them. They led him, wordlessly, along the path through the trees. Birds were singing. The sun slanted through the leafy canopy.

They came to the clearing where men had died on the day Valerius was killed. No one spoke. Crispin became aware, try as he might to quell it, that his principal feeling was dread.

He wished he hadn't come. Couldn't have said with any certainty why he had. His escorts stopped, one of them gestured towards the largest of the houses here. He didn't need the indication.

The same house in which her brother had been. Of course.

A difference, however. Windows open on all sides, barred, but unshuttered, to let in the morning light. He wondered. Went forward. There were guards here. Three of them. They looked past him at his escorts and evidently received some signal. Crispin didn't look back to see. The door was unlocked by one of them.