She blinked. ‘Take no such thing. Leontes will do whatever Valerius tells him. He will invade you as he invaded the Majriti deserts or the northern steppes, or laid siege to Bassanid cities east.’
‘And all the while his new, beloved bride will be acting to subvert him?’
She hesitated for the first time. ‘His new prize is the phrase you want, Rhodian. Open your eyes and ears, there are things you ought to learn before Petrus the Trakesian and his little dancer co-opt you to their service.’
Contempt lay undisguised in the aristocratic voice. She would have had no choice, Crispin imagined, in the matter of her wedding. The Strategos was young, though, triumphant, celebrated, an undeniably handsome man. Crispin looked at the woman in the room with him and had a sense of having entered black waters, with unimaginably complex currents trying to suck him down. He said, ‘I am only a mosaicist, my lady. I was brought here to assist with images on sanctuary walls and a dome.’
‘Tell me,’ said Styliane Daleina, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘about the queen of the Antae. Did she offer her body in exchange for your service too? Are you Jaded now because of that? Am I too late to be of any appeal? You reject me as lesser goods? Shall I weep?’
The dark waters swirled. This had to be a bluff, a guess. That late-night secret encounter could not be so widely known. A memory came to Crispin: another hand in his hair as he knelt to kiss an offered foot. A different woman, even younger than this one, as familiar with corridors of power and intrigue. Or perhaps . . . not so. West to the east. Could Varena ever be as subtle as Sarantium? Could any place on earth?
He shook his head. ‘I am not familiar with the thoughts or the . . . favours of the ruling ones of our world. This encounter is unique in my experience of life, my lady.’ It was a lie, and yet, as he looked at her through slatted interstices, the lines of shadow and light, it wasn’t, at all.
The smile again, assured, unsettling. She seemed able to move, he thought, from the intrigues of empires to those of bedrooms without a pause. ‘How nice,’ she said. ‘I like being unique. You do know it shames a lady, however, to offer herself and be refused? I told you, I lie where pleasure leads me, not need. ‘She paused. ‘Or rather, where a different sort of need draws me.’
Crispin swallowed. He didn’t believe her, but her knee within the blue, simple robe lingered a hand’s-breadth from his own. He clung desperately to his anger, a sense of being used. ‘It shames a man of pride to be seen as a piece in a game.’
Her eyebrows arched swiftly and the tone changed-again. ‘But you are, you foolish man. Of course you are. Pride has nothing to do with it. Everyone at this court is proud, everyone is a piece in a game. In many games at once-some of murder and some of desire-though there is only one game that matters, in the end, and all the others are parts of it.’
Which was an answer to his thought, he supposed. Her knee touched his. Deliberately. There were no accidental things with this woman, he was sure of it. Some of desire.
‘Why should you imagine yourself to be different?’ Styliane Daleina added, quietly.
‘Because I will myself to be so,’ he said, surprising himself.
There was a silence. Then, ‘You grow interesting, Rhodian, I must concede, but this is almost certainly a self-deception. I suspect the actress has enchanted you already and you don’t even know it. I shall weep, I suppose.’ Her expression had changed, but was nowhere near to tears. She stood abruptly, crossed in three strides to the door, turned there.
Crispin also rose. Now that she’d withdrawn he felt a chaos of emotions: apprehension, regret, curiosity, an unnerving measure of desire. He’d been a stranger to that last for so long. As he watched, she drew up her hood again, hiding the spilled gold of her hair.