only. They might not trust each other, but they understood each other.
Along with the rest of the imperial party, they rode through the plaza of Palamas and into the palace quarter. After the raucous bustle of the rest of the city, quiet enfolded them there like a cloak. Phostis felt he was coming home. That had special meaning to him after what he'd gone through the past few months.
He'd always used his bedchamber in the imperial residence as a refuge from Krispos. Now that Olyvria shared it with him, he sometimes thought he never wanted to come out again. It wasn't that they spent all their time making love, delightful though that was. But he'd also found in her somebody he liked talking with more than anyone else he'd ever known.
He let himself tip over backward onto the bed like a falling tree. The thick goose down of the mattress absorbed his weight; it was like falling into a warm, dry snowbank. With him sprawled across the middle of the bed, Olyvria sat at its foot. She said, 'All of this—' She waved to show she meant not just the room, not just the palace, but also the service and the procession through the streets of the city. '—still feels unreal to me.'
'You'll have the rest of your days to get used to it,' Phostis answered. 'A lot of it is foolish and boring to go through: even Father thinks so. But ceremony is the glue that holds Videssos together, so he does go through with it, and then grumbles when no one outside the palaces can hear him.'
'That's hypocrisy,' Olyvria frowned: like Phostis. she still had some Thanasiot righteousness clinging to her.
'I've told him as much,' Phostis said. 'He just shrugs and says things would go worse if he didn't give the people what they expected of him.' Before he'd been kidnapped, he would have rolled his eyes at that. Now, after a small pause for thought, he admitted, 'There may be something to it.'
'I don't know.' Olyvria's frown deepened. 'How can you live with yourself after doing things you don't believe in year after year after year?'
'I didn't say Father doesn't believe in them. He does, for the sake of the Empire. I said he doesn't like them. It's not quite the same thing.'
'Close enough, for anyone who's not a theologian and used to splitting hairs.' But Olyvria changed the subject, which might have meant she yielded the point. 'I'm glad you made peace with your brother—or he with you, however you want to look at it.'
'So am I,' Phostis said. Not wanting to deceive Olyvria about his judgment of that peace, he added. 'Now we'll see how long it lasts.'
She took his meaning at once. 'Oh,' she said in a crestfallen voice. 'I'd thought you put more faith in it than that.'
'Hope, yes. Faith?' He shrugged, then repeated, 'We'll see how long it lasts. The good god willing, it'll hold forever. If it doesn't—'
'If it doesn't, you'll do what you have to do,' Olyvria said.
'Aye, what I have to do,' Phostis echoed. He'd come safe out of Etchmiadzin by that rule, but if you cared to, you could use it to justify anything. He sighed, then said, 'You know what the real trouble with Thanasiot doctrine is?'
'What?' Olyvria asked. 'The ecumenical patriarch could come up with a hundred without thinking.'
'Oxeites does quite a lot without thinking,' Phostis said. 'He's not good at it.'
Olyvria giggled, deliciously scandalized. 'But what's yours?' she asked.
'The real trouble with Thanasiot doctrine,' Phostis declared, as if pontificating before a synod, 'is that it makes the world and life out to be simpler than they are. Burn and wreck and starve and you've somehow made the world a better place? But what about the people who don't want to be burned out and who like to eat till they're fat? What about the Makuraners, who would pick up the pieces if Videssos fell apart—and who tried to make it fall apart? The gleaming path takes none of them into account. It just goes on along the track it thinks right, regardless of any complications.'
'That's all true enough,' Olyvria said.
'In fact,' Phostis went on, 'following the gleaming path is almost like getting caught up in a new love affair, where you just notice everything that's good and kind about the person you love, but none of the flaws.'
Olyvria gave him an unfathomable look. His analogy pleased him so much that he wondered what was troubling her until she asked, in rather a small voice, 'And what does that say about us?'
'It says—uh—' Feeling his mouth hanging foolishly open, Phostis shut it. He kept it shut while he did some hard thinking. At last, much less sure of himself than he had been a moment before, he answered, 'I think it says that we can't afford to take us for granted, or to think that, because we're happy now, we're always going to be happy unless we work to make that happen. The romances talk a lot about living happily ever after, but they don't say how it's done. We have to find that out for ourselves.'
'I wish you'd stop poking fun at the romances, seeing as we're living one,' Olyvria said, but she smiled to take any sting from her words. 'Other than that, though, you make good sense. You seem to have a way of doing that.'
'Thank you,' he said seriously. Then he reached out and poked her in the ribs. She squawked and whipped her head around, curls flying. He drew her to him and drowned the squawk in a kiss. When at last he had to breathe, he asked her softly, 'How are we doing now?'
'Now, well.' This time, she kissed him. 'As for the rest, ask me in twenty years.'
He glanced up, just for a moment, to make sure the door was barred. 'I will.'
Imperial crown heavy on his head. Krispos sat on the throne in the Grand Courtroom, awaiting the approach of the ambassador for Khatrish. In front of the throne stood Barsymes, Iakovitzes, and Zaidas. Krispos hoped the three of them would be enough to protect him from Tribo's pungent sarcasm.
The fuzzy-bearded envoy advanced down the long central aisle of the courtroom between ranks of courtiers who scorned him as both barbarian and heretic. He managed to give the impression that their scorn amused him, which only irked them the more.
