"Do you have the key?" the Emperor snaps. The nearer man shakes his head. "She took it. My lord."

My lord. Holiest Jad. He may yet live.

Tertius Daleinus twists suddenly and sidles forward against the tunnel wall to cross to his brother. Valerius lets him go. He is not a soldier, but this is his life now, and Aliana's, and a vision of a world, a legacy, in the shaping. He seizes the woman, Styliane, by the upper arm before she can move past him, and he takes his small knife in his other hand and puts it to her back. It has an edge that can scarcely break skin; they will not know that.

But Styliane, who does not struggle at all, who has not even tried to avoid his grip, looks at him even as he holds her, and the Emperor sees a triumph in her gaze, not far from madness: he thinks again of those women on the hill slopes of myth.

Hears her say with a frightening calm, "You are mistaken yet again if you believe my brother will refrain from burning you in order to save me. And equally mistaken in thinking that I care, so long as you burn as my father did. Go ahead, brother. End it."

Valerius is shaken to the core, struck dumb. Knows truth when he hears it; she is not dissembling. End it. In a sudden stillness of the soul he hears, then, a faint, far sound like a tolling bell struck once.

He had thought, had always believed, intelligence could overmaster hatred, given time, tutelage. It is not so, he sees now, too late. Aliana was right. Gesius was right. Styliane, brilliant as a diamond, might welcome power, and wield it with Leontes, but it is not her need, not the key to the woman. The key, beneath the ice of her, is fire.

The blind man, uncannily precise in where he aims the siphon, moves his gash of a mouth in what Valerius understands to be a smile. He says, "Such… a waste, alas. Such skin. Must I… dear sister? Then so be it."

And the Emperor understands that he will do it, sees an unholy, avid hunger in the gross face of the Calysian beside the maimed Daleinus, and with a sudden furious motion-awkward, for he is not a man of action- he snatches at the waist purse of the woman and pushes her forward hard so she stumbles and crashes into her blind brother and they both fall. No fire. Yet.

Backing up, he hears the two guards retreating behind him and understands that he has turned them, they are with him. He would pray now, but there is no time. At all. 'Move!" he snaps. "Get the siphon!"

Both guards spring past him. Lysippus, never a coward, and having cast his dice with the Daleinoi here, goes for his sword. The Emperor, watching, backing up quickly now, fumbles in the cloth purse, finds a heavy key, knows it. Does pray then, in thanks. Styliane is already up, pulling at Lecanus.

The first Excubitor, upon them, levels his blade. Lysippus steps forward, slashes, is parried. Lecanus is still on his knees, mouthing wild, incoherent words. He reaches for the trigger of the flame.

And it is then, just then, even as he sees this, that the Emperor of Sarantium, Valerius II, Jad's beloved and most holy regent upon earth, thrice-exalted shepherd of his people, feels something white and searing and final plunge into him from behind as he backs towards the door, towards safety and the light. He falls, and falls, his mouth opening, no sound, the key in his hand.

It is not recorded by anyone, for it never is nor ever can be, whether he hears, as he dies, an implacable, vast, infinite voice saying to him and to him alone in that corridor under palaces and gardens and the City and the world, 'Uncrown, the Lord of Emperors awaits you now.

Nor is it known if dolphins come for his soul when it leaves, as it does leave then, unhoused, for its long journey. It is known, but only by one person in the god's world, that his last thought as a living man is of his wife, her name, and this is so because she hears it. And hearing-somehow hearing him-understands that he is going, going from her, is gone, that it is over, ended, done, after all, the brilliant dance that had begun long ago when he was Petrus and she was Aliana of the Blues and so young, and the afternoon sun is bright above her and all of them, in a cloudless springtime sky over Sarantium.

She cut off most of her hair in the small boat, being rowed back from the isle.

If she was wrong about what Daleinus's departure and the murdered guards meant, shorn hair could be covered, would grow back. She didn't think she was wrong, even then, on the water. There was a blackness in the world, under the bright sun, above the blue waves.

She had only Mariscus's knife with which to cut; it was difficult in the boat. She hacked raggedly, dropped tresses in the sea. Offerings. Her eyes were dry. When the hair was chopped she leaned over the side and used the salt water to scrub the cream and paint and scented oils from her face and blur the scent of her perfume. Her earrings and rings she put in a pocket of her robe (money would be needed). Then she took one of the rings back out and gave it to Mariscus, rowing her.

"You may have a choice to make," she said to him, "when we reach the harbour. You are forgiven, whatever you do. This is my thanks to you for this task, and for all that has gone before."

He swallowed hard. His hand shook as he took it from her. The ring was worth more than he could earn in a lifetime in the Imperial Guard.

She told him to discard his leather armour and Excubitor's over-tunic and sword. He did so. They went overboard. He had not spoken the whole of the way, rowing hard, sweating in the light, fear in his eyes. The ring went into his boot. The boots were expensive for a fisherman, but they would not be together long. She would have to hope no one noticed.

She used his knife again to cut off the lower portion of her robe, did it unevenly, tore it in places. People would see stains and rips, not the fineness of a fabric. She took off her leather sandals, tossed them, too, over the side. Looked at her bare feet: painted toenails. Decided they would be all right. Women of the street painted themselves, not just ladies of the court. She did immerse her hands in the water again, rubbing and roughening them. She pushed off the last of her rings, one she never removed, let it drop down through the sea. There were tales of sea people whose rulers had wed the sea in this way.

She was doing something else.

She spent the last of the journey back to harbour biting and chipping at her fingernails, smeared the torn robe with dirt and salt water from the bottom of the boat, and then her cheeks again. Her hands and complexion, left as they were, would give her away before anything else.

There were other small boats in the water around them by then so she had to be discreet. Fishermen, ferrymen, small craft carrying goods to and from Deapolis in and among the looming shapes of the fleet that was to sail west to war. The announcement planned for today, though none out here knew that. The Emperor in the Hippodrome kathisma after the last race, with all the great ones of the realm. She had timed her morning's outing on the water to be there in time, of course.

Not now. Now what she sensed ahead of her was an aura of death, an ending. She had said in the palace two years ago, when Sarantium was burning in the Victory Riot, that she would rather die in the vestments of Empire than flee and live any lesser life.

It had been true then. Now, something different was true. An even colder, harder truth. If they killed Petrus today, if the Daleinoi did this, she would live long enough herself to see them dead, somehow. After? After would take care of itself, as was needful. There were endings and there were endings.

She could not have known, even self-conscious and aware of her own appearance as she had always been, how she appeared in that moment to the soldier in the boat with her, rowing to Sarantium.