She could. She was Antae. Had been in the saddle since girlhood.
Not so long ago.
She made him repeat the plan, adding details, going step by step. She changed some things, interpolated others. Had to, he couldn’t know the palace routines well enough. She added a female complaint as a further excuse for her withdrawal before the consecration. There were ancient fears about a woman’s blood among the Antae. No one would intrude.
She had Pharos pour wine for the alchemist and let him sit while she considered, finally, who might pose as herself. A terrible question. Who could do it? Who would? Neither she nor the grey-bearded man sipping at his wine said so, but each of them knew it was almost certain that woman would die.
There was only one name, really, in the end. Gisel had thought she might weep, then, thinking of Anissa who had nursed her, but she did not. Then Zoticus, looking at Pharos, had murmured, ‘He, too, will have to stay behind, to guard the woman disguised as you. Even I know he never leaves you.’
It was Pharos who had reported the triple-headed plot to her. He looked at the other man now from by the doorway, shook his head once, decisively, and moved to stand next to Gisel. The shelter at her side. Shield. All her life. She looked up at him, turned back to the alchemist, opened her mouth to protest, and then closed it, as around a pain, without speaking.
It was true, what the old man said. It was agonizingly true. Pharos never left her, or the doorway to her chambers if she was within. He had to be seen in the palace and then the sanctuary while she fled, in order that she could flee. She lifted one hand then and laid it upon the muscled forearm of the mute, shaven-haired giant who had killed for her and would die for her, would let his soul be lost for her, if need be. Tears did come then, but she turned her head aside, wiped them away. A luxury, not allowed.
She had not been, it seemed, born into the world for peace or joy or any sure power-or even to keep those very few who loved her by her side.
And so it was that the queen of the Antae was nearly alone when she walked forth in disguise on the second night of Dykania, out from the palace and through her city, past bonfires in the squares and moving torchlight and out the open gates amid a riotous, drunken crowd and then, two mornings later, under grey skies with a threat of rain, leaving behind the only land she had ever known for the seas of late autumn and the world, sailing east.
The alchemist who had come to her summons and had devised her escape had been waiting in Mylasia. Before leaving her chambers ten days ago he had requested passage to Sauradia on the Imperial ship. Transactions of his own, he had explained. Business left unfinished long ago.
He doubted she would ever know how deeply she had touched him.
Child-queen, alone and preternaturally serious, mistrustful of shadows, of words, of the very wind. And what man could blame her for it? Besieged and threatened on all sides, wagers taken openly in her city as to the season of her death. And yet wise enough-alone of all in that palace, it seemed-to understand how the Antae’s tribal feuds had to be altered now in a greater world or they would revert to being only a tribe again, driven from the peninsula they’d claimed, hacking each other to pieces, scrabbling for forage space among the other barbarian federations. He stood now on a slip in the harbour of Megarium, cloaked against the slant, cold rain, and watched the Sarantine ship move back out through the water, bearing the queen of the Antae to a world that would-some truths were hard-almost certainly prove too dangerous and duplicitous even for her own fierce intelligence.
She would get there, he thought; he had taken the measure of that ship and its captain. He had travelled in his day, knew roads and the sea. A commercial ship, wide, clumsy, deep-bellied, would have been at gravest risk this late in the year. A commercial ship would not have sailed. But this was a craft sent especially for a queen.