Kasia found herself leaning against the wall as she listened. Her legs felt oddly weak. Two of the soldiers had died, the little Soriyyan and Ferix from Amoria: men she had come to know. All six of the attackers had been killed, whoever they had been. Crispin was all right. Carullus had been wounded. The two of them had only just come in, at dawn. They had been seen going up the stairs, hadn’t stopped to talk.
No, the soldiers said, there had been no one else with them.
She hadn’t heard them in the hallway. Or perhaps she had, and that- not the bells-had drawn her from dream, or had shaped her dream. A faceless man beside a waterfall. Carullus’s men, grim and scowling, went past her to their shared room to get their weapons. They would carry them everywhere now, she understood. Deaths altered things.
Kasia paused on the stairway, shaken and uncertain. Vargos would be at chapel by now; there was no one to be with downstairs. It came to her that an enemy might already be upstairs, but Crispin had not sounded . . . alarmed. It occurred to her that she ought to tell someone, or check on him herself, risking embarrassment. Someone had tried to kill him last night. Had killed two men. She took a deep breath. The stone of the wall was rough against her shoulder. He had not sounded alarmed. And the other voice had been a woman’s.
She turned back and went to Carullus’s room. They’d said he’d been wounded. Resolutely, she knocked there. He called out tiredly. She spoke her name. The door opened.
Small things change a life. Change lives.
Crispin twisted violently to one side, away from the levelled knife. He jammed a hand hard against the post at the foot of the bed to stay upright.
‘Ah,’ said the woman in the shuttered half-light of his bedroom. ‘It ‘s you, Rhodian. Good. I feared for my virtue.’
She laid down the knife. After, he would remember thinking it was not the weapon she needed to wield. At the time he was speechless.
‘So,’ said Styliane Daleina, sitting at ease upon his bed, ‘I am told the little actress let down her hair for you in her chambers. Did she go to her knees the way they say she used to on stage, and take you in her mouth?’
She smiled, utterly composed.
Crispin felt himself go white as he stared at her. It took him a moment to find his voice. ‘You appear to have been misinformed. There were no actresses in the Blues’ compound when I arrived there,’ he said very carefully. He knew what she’d meant. He was not going to acknowledge it. ‘And I was in the kitchen only, no one’s private chambers. What are you doing in mine?’ He ought to have called her ‘my lady.’
She had changed her clothing. The court garb was gone. She was wearing a dark blue robe with a hood, thrown back now to frame her golden hair, which was still pinned, though without ornament now. She would have had the hood up, he imagined, to pass unknown through the streets, to enter here. Had she bribed someone? She would have had to. Wouldn’t she?
She didn’t answer his spoken question. Not with words, at any rate. She looked up at him for a long moment from the bed, then stood. A very tall woman, blue-eyed, fair-haired, a scent about her: Crispin thought of flowers, a mountain meadow, an undercurrent of intoxication, poppies. His heart was racing: danger and-rising swiftly and against his will-desire. The expression on her face was thoughtful, appraising. Without hurrying, she lifted one hand and traced a finger along his shaven jaw. She touched his ear, circled it. Then she rose up on tiptoe and kissed him on the mouth.
He didn’t move. He could have withdrawn, he thought afterwards, could have stepped back. He was no innocent, had known-fatigued as he was-that measuring look in her eyes as she stood up in the shadow and light of the room. He hadn’t stepped back. He did refrain from responding, though, as best he could, even when her tongue …