‘Welcome to the palace, Caius Crispus,’ she said. ‘We are alone, as it happens. Ought I to fear you and summon guards?’
Fighting a particularly determined wave of nausea, Crispin propelled himself to a sitting position. An instant later he staggered upright, his heart pounding. He tried, much too quickly, to bow. He had to clutch urgently at a table top to keep himself from toppling. His vision swirled and his stomach did the same.
‘You are excused the more extreme rituals of ceremony,’ said the only living child of the late King Hildnc.
Gisel, queen of the Antae and of Batiara and his own most holy ruler under Jad, who paid a symbolic allegiance to the Sarantine Emperor and offered spiritual devotion to the High Patriarch and to no one else alive, looked gravely at him with wide-set eyes.
‘Very … extremely … kind of you. Your Majesty,’ Crispin mumbled. He was trying, with limited success, to make his eyes stop blurring and become useful in the candlelight. There seemed to be random objects swimming in the air. He was also having some difficulty breathing. He was alone in a room with the queen. He had never even seen her, except at a distance. Artisans, however successful or celebrated, did not hold nocturnal, private converse with their sovereign. Not in the world as Crispin knew it.
His head felt as if a small but insistent hammer inside it were trying to pound its way out. His confusion was extreme, disorienting. Had she captured him or rescued him? And why, in either case? He didn’t dare ask. Amid the perfumes he smelled flour again suddenly. That would be himself. From the sack. He looked down at his dinner tunic and made a sour face. The blue was streaked and smeared a greyish-white. Which meant that his hair and beard . ..
‘You were attended to, somewhat, while you slept, ‘said the queen, graciously enough. ‘I had my own physician summoned. He said bleeding was not immediately necessary. Would a glass of wine be of help?’
Crispin made a sound that he trusted to convey restrained, well-bred assent. She did not laugh again, or smile. It occurred to him that this was a woman not unused to observing the effects of violence upon men. A number of well-known incidents, unbidden, came into his head. Some were quite recent. The thought of them did nothing to ease him at all.
The queen made no movement, and a moment later Crispin realized that she had meant what she said quite literally. They were alone in this room. No servants, not even slaves. Which was simply astonishing. And he could hardly expect her to serve him wine. He looked around and, more by luck than any effective process of observation, encountered a flask and cups on the table by his elbow. He poured, carefully, and watered two cups, unsure whether that was a presumption. He was not conversant with the Antae court. Martinian had taken all their commissions from King Hildric and then his daughter, and had delivered the reports.
Crispin looked up. His eyesight seemed to be improving as the hammer subsided a little and the room elected to stabilize. He saw her shake her head at the cup he had poured for her. He set it down. Waited. Looked at her again.
The queen of Batiara was tall for a woman and unsettlingly young. Seen this closely, she had the straight Antae nose and her father’s strong cheekbones. The wide-set eyes were a much-celebrated blue, he knew, though he couldn’t see that clearly in the candlelight. Her hair was golden, bound up, of course, held by a golden circlet studded with rubies.
The Antae had worn bear grease in their hair when they’d first come to settle in the peninsula. This woman was not, manifestly, an exponent of such traditions. He imagined those rubies-he couldn’t help himself- set in his mosaic torch on the sanctuary dome. He imagined them gleaming by candlelight there.
The queen wore a golden sun disk about her throat, an image of Heladikos upon it. Her robe was blue silk, threaded with fine gold wire, and there was a purple band running down the left side, from high collar to ankle. Only royalty wore purple, in keeping with a tradition going back to the Rhodian Empire at its own beginnings six hundred years ago.