Krispos the Emperor

eyes sparkled. 'Now I shan't have to fret about what to cook for supper any more,' she said. Her voice was gay and eager; she looked forward to the world to come. Her family laughed with her. Even Phostis found himself smiling, for her manifest happiness communicated itself to him no matter how much trouble he had sharing it.

The couple's son took the plate, knife, and wine cups. 'The good god willing, these will inspire us to join you soon,' he said.

'I hope they do,' Laonikos said. He got up from the table and hugged the young man. In a moment, the whole family was embracing.

'We bless thee, Phos, lord with the great and good mind—' the priest began. Everyone joined him in prayer once more.

Phostis thought the blue-robe had intruded himself on the family's celebration. He thought his own presence an intrusion, too. Turning to Olyvria, he whispered, 'We really ought to go.'

'Yes, I suppose you're right,' she murmured back.

'Phos bless you, friends, and may we see you along his gleaming path,' Laonikos called to them as they made their way out the door. Phostis put up his hood and pulled his cloak tight around him to shield against the storm.

'Well,' Olyvria said when they'd gone a few yards down the street, 'what did you think of that?'

'Very much what you did,' Phostis answered. 'Terrifying and beautiful at the same time.'

'Huh!' Syagrios said. 'Where's the beauty in turning into a bag of bones?' It was the same thought Phostis had worried at before, if more pungently put.

Olyvria let out an indignant sniff. Before she could speak, Phostis said, 'Seeing faith so fully realized is beautiful, even for someone like me. My own faith, I fear, is not so deep. I cling to life on earth, which is why seeing someone choose to leave it frightens me.'

'We'll all leave it sooner or later, so why choose to hurry?' Syagrios said.

'For a proper Thanasiot,' Olyvria said, emphasizing proper, 'the world is corrupt from its creation, and to be shunned and abandoned as soon as possible.'

Syagrios remained unmoved. 'Somebody has to take care of all the bloody sods leavin' the world, or else they'll leave it faster'n they have in mind, thanks to his old man's soldiers.' He jerked a thumb at Phostis. 'So I'm not a sheep. I'm a sheepdog. You don't have sheepdogs, my lady, wolves get fat.'

The argument was ugly but potent. Olyvria bit her lip and looked to Phostis. He felt he was called to save her from some dreadful fate, even though she and Syagrios were in truth on the same side. He flung the best rhetorical brickbat he could find: 'Saving others from sin doesn't excuse sins of your own.'

'Boy, you can talk about sin when you find out what it is,' Syagrios said scornfully. 'You're as milkfed now as when you came out from between your mother's legs. And how do you think you got in there to come out, eh, if there'd been no heavy breathing awhile before?'

Phostis had thought about that, as uneasily as most people when making similar contemplations. He started to shoot back that his parents had been honestly married when he was conceived, but he wasn't even sure of that. And rumor in the palace quarter said—whispered, when he was suspected of being in earshot—Krispos and Dara had been lovers while the previous Avtokrator—and Dara's previous husband—Anthimos still held the throne. Glaring at Syagrios wasn't the response Phostis would have liked to make, but seemed the best one available.

As wet will not stick to a duck's oiled feather, so glares slid off Syagrios. He threw back his head and laughed raucously at Phostis' discomfiture. Then he spun on his heel and swaggered away through the slush, as if to say Phostis wouldn't know what to do with a chance to sin if one fell into his lap.

'Cursed ruffian,' Phostis growled—but softly, so Syagrios would not hear. 'By the good god, he knows enough of sin to spend eternity in the ice; the gleaming path should be ashamed to call him its own.'

'He's not a Thanasiot, not really, though he'll quarrel over the workings of the faith like any Videssian.' Olyvria's voice was troubled, as if she did not care for the admission she was about to make. 'He's much more a creature of my father's.'

'Why does that not surprise me?' Phostis freighted the words with as much irony as they would bear. Only after they had passed his lips did he wish he'd held them in. Railing at Livanios would not help him with Olyvria

She sounded defensive as she answered, 'Surely Krispos' also has men to do his bidding, no matter what it may be.'

'Oh, he does,' Phostis said. 'But he doesn't wrap himself in piety while he's about it.' In some surprise, he listened to himself defending his father. This wasn't the first time he'd had good things to say about Krispos since he'd ended up in Etchmiadzin. He hadn't had many when he was back in the imperial capital under Krispos' eye— and his thumb.

Olyvria said, 'My father seeks to liberate Videssos so the gleaming path may become a reality for everyone. Do you deny it's a worthy goal?'

He seeks power, like any other ambitious man, Phostis thought. Before he could say it aloud, he started to laugh. Olyvria's eyes raked him. 'I wasn't laughing at you,' he assured her quickly. 'It's just that we sound like a couple of little squabbling children: 'My father can do this.' 'Well, my father can do that.''

'Oh.' She smiled back, her good humor restored. 'So we do. What would you rather talk about than what our fathers can do?'

The challenging way she threw the question at him reminded him of the first time he'd seen her, in the tunnel under Videssos the city. If he was to become a proper Thanasiot, as Olyvria had put it in her argument with Syagrios, he ought to have forgotten that, or at most remembered it as a test he'd passed. But he'd discovered before he ever heard of Thanasios that he did not have a temper approaching the monastic. He did not remember just the test; he remembered her.

And so he did not answer in words. Instead, he reached out and slipped an arm around her waist. If she'd pulled back, he was ready to apologize profusely. He was even ready to produce a convincing stammer. But she didn't pull back. Instead, she let him draw her to him.