He turned his head then and looked up at her, his eyes wide. "Hers? Then… it's the Empress's perfume?"

Kasia nodded. "Shirin said I should feel like royalty tonight." She managed a smile. "I think it is safe. Unless you've invited guests."

Their guests had left them some time ago at the front door, departing with bawdy jests and a ragged soldiers" chorus of one particularly obscene song.

Carullus, newly appointed chiliarch of the Second Calysian Cavalry, chuckled briefly, then fell silent.

"I can't imagine wanting anyone else to be with me," he said quietly. And then, "And you don't need Alixana's scent to be royal here."

Kasia made a wry face, an expression from her past, at home. She seemed to be recovering those aspects of herself, slowly. "You are a flatterer, soldier. Did that work on the girls in taverns?"

She had been a girl in a tavern.

He shook his head, still serious, intent. "Never said it. Never had a wife."

Her expression changed, but he was looking into the fire again and couldn't see it. She looked down at him. At this soldier, this husband. A big man, black hair, broad shoulders, thick hands, a burly chest. And she abruptly realized, wondering at it, that he was afraid of her, of hurting or distressing her.

Something twisted, oddly, within Kasia then as the firelight danced. There had been a pool of water once, far in the north. She would go there to be alone. Erimitsu: the clever one. Too sharp, disdainful. Before the plague and then an autumn road with her mother standing among falling leaves watching them lead her away, roped to the other girls.

The gods of the north, those windswept open spaces, or Jad, or the zubir of the southern Aldwood-someone or something had led her to this room. There seemed to be shelter here. A fire, walls. A man sitting-quietly on the floor at her feet. A place out of the wind, for once.

It was a gift, it was a gift. The twist in her heart tightened as she looked down. A gift. Her hand, in turn, tightened on his shoulder, moved to brush his hair.

"You do now," she said. "You have a wife now. Will you not take her to bed?"

"Oh, Jad!" he said, releasing his breath in a rush, as if he'd been holding it for a long time.

She actually laughed. Another gift.

Mardoch of the First Amorian Infantry, summoned north from the borderlands to Deapolis with his company-none of the officers would say for certain why, though everyone had guesses-was half convinced he'd been poisoned by something he'd eaten in one of the cauponae they'd sampled tonight. Wretched luck. His very first leave in the City, after six months in the Emperor's army, and he was sick as a Bassanid dog, with the older men laughing at him.

A few of the others had waited the first two times he'd been forced to stop and heave his guts in a shop doorway, but when his belly churned again and he slowly recovered to stand precariously upright, wiping his wet chin, shivering against a wall in the butt-freezing wind, he discovered that the bastards had gone on without him this time. He listened, heard singing voices somewhere ahead, and pushed off from the wall to follow.

He was far from sober, in addition to the extreme disarray of his internal organs. He soon lost track of the singing and he had no real idea where he was. He decided he'd head back towards the water-they'd been going that way in any case-and find either another caupona or their inn or a girl. The white moon had to be east, which gave him a direction. He didn't feel as sick any more, either, which was a blessing of bright Heladikos, ever the soldier's friend.

It was cold, though, and the downward-sloping way seemed longer and the lanes more twisty than earlier in the evening. It was strangely difficult to keep going in the proper direction. He kept seeing those eerie flames as he went, appearing, disappearing. You weren't supposed to talk about them, but they were unsettling, in the extreme. Made him jump, they did. Mardoch kept walking, cursing under his breath.

When a litter he hadn't seen or heard pulled up beside him and a clipped, aristocratic voice from inside asked if a citizen could assist a brave soldier of the Empire, he was entirely happy to accede.

He achieved a salute, then climbed inside as one of the big bearers pulled the curtain back for him. Mardoch settled himself on plump cushions, aware of his own unsavoury smell, suddenly. The man inside was even bigger than the litter-bearer-stupefyingly so, in fact. He was huge. It was very dark when the curtain fell back, and there was a sweetish scent, some perfume that threatened to churn Mardoch's stomach again.

"You are heading for the waterfront, I assume?" the patrician asked.

" "Course I am," Mardoch snorted. "Where else'll a soldier find a whore he can afford? Begging your lordship's pardon."

"Best to be careful of the women there," the man said. His voice was distinctive, curiously high-pitched, very precise.

"Everyone says that." Mardoch shrugged. It was warm here, the pillows were astonishingly soft. He could almost sleep. In the dark it was hard to make out the details of the man's face. The bulk of him was what registered.

"Everyone is wise. Will you take wine?"

Two days later, when muster was taken in Deapolis among the First Amorians, Mardoch of Sarnica would be among three men reported missing and routinely declared a deserter. It did happen when the young country soldiers went into the City and were exposed to what it offered in the way of temptation. They were all warned, of course, before being allowed to go on leave. Recaptured men could be blinded or maimed for desertion, depending on their officers. For a first offence and a voluntary return, you would probably just be whipped. But with rumours of war growing and the frenzy of building in the shipyards in Deapolis and on the other side of the strait, past the small forested islands, the soldiers knew that those who didn't return on their own might expect much worse when they were tracked down. Men were killed for deserting in wartime.

Within another day or two some of the rumours would become more specific. The eastern army was losing half its pay, it was said. Then someone heard they'd lose all of it. Some business about farmland granted to compensate. Farmland at the edge of the desert? No one found it amusing. Those plans were said to be for those who stayed behind in the east. The rest of them were going to war — in those boats being slapped together much too quickly for an infantryman's comfort. That was why they'd been ordered to Deapolis. To sail that long way west, far from home, to Batiara, to fight the Antae or the Inicii — those savage, godless tribes that ate their enemies" cooked flesh and drank their hot blood, or gouged knife slits in bellies and raped soldiers in there before gelding and skinning them and hanging them from oak trees by their hair.

Two of the three missing soldiers would come back to the company on that second day, white-faced and apprehensive, badly the worse for drinking binges. They would take their lashes, be routinely salved by the company physician with wine in the wounds and down their throats. Mardoch of Sarnica didn't return, was never found, in fact. A lucky bastard, some of his companions would decide, looking anxiously at the boats being built.

"Will you take wine?" Mardoch heard the light, clipped voice ask him in the shadowed warmth of the enclosed litter. The movement of the bearers was steady, soothing.

Silly question to ask a soldier. Of course he'd take wine. The cup was heavy, had jewels set into it. The wine was dark and good. The other man watched him as Mardoch drained the cup.

When he held it out for more, the enormous patrician shook his head slowly in the close, scented darkness. "That will be sufficient, I think," the man said. Mardoch blinked. He had a blurred, confused sense that a hand was lying on his thigh, and it wasn't his own. "Fuck off," he thought he said.