He went up the black spiral stairway to his little chamber. When he opened the door, his mouth fell open in astonishment: Olyvria waited inside. He was not too surprised, however, to shut the door behind him as fast as he could. 'What are you doing here?' he demanded. 'Do you want to get us both caught?'
She grinned at him. 'What could be safer?' she whispered back. 'Everyone in the keep was down in the courtyard listening to my father.'
Phostis wanted to rush to her and take her in his arms, but that brought him up short. 'Yes, and do you know what your father said?' he whispered, and went on to explain exactly what Livanios had announced.
'Oh, no,' Olyvria said, still in a tiny voice. 'He wants you dead, then. I prayed he wouldn't.'
'That's what I think, too,' Phostis agreed bitterly. 'But what can I do about it?'
'I don't know.' Olyvria reached out to him. He hurried over to her. Her touch made him, if not forget everything else, then at least reckon it unimportant for as long as he held her. But he remembered how careful they had to be even while her thighs clasped his flanks; what should have been sighs of delight came from both of them as tiny hisses.
As they'd grown used to doing, they set their clothes to rights as fast as they could when they were through. Not for them the pleasure of lying lazily by each other afterward. 'How will we get you out of here?' Phostis whispered. Before Olyvria could say anything, he found the answer for himself: 'I'll go downstairs. Whoever's out there—probably Syagrios— will follow me. Once we're gone, you can come down, too.'
Olyvria nodded. 'Yes, that's very good. It should work: few of the rooms in this hallway have people in them, so I'm not likely to be seen till I'm safely down.' She looked at him with some of her old calculation. He liked the soft looks he usually got from her these days better. But she said, 'You wouldn't have found a plan so fast when we first brought you here.'
'Maybe not,' he admitted. 'I've had to take care of a good many things I wasn't in the habit of doing for myself.' He touched the very tip of her breast through her tunic, just for a moment. 'Some of them I like better than others.'
'You don't mean I'm your first?' That thought almost startled her into raising her voice; he made an alarmed gesture. But she was already shaking her head. 'No, I couldn't have been.'
'No, of course not,' he said. 'You're the first who matters, though.'
She leaned forward and brushed her lips against his. 'That's a sweet thing to say. It must not have been easy for you, growing up as you did.'
He shrugged. He supposed the problem was that he just thought too much. Evripos and especially Katakolon seemed to have had no trouble enjoying themselves immensely. But all that was by the way. He got to his feet. 'I'll leave you now. Listen to make sure everything's quiet before you come out.' He took a step toward the door, stopped, then turned back to Olyvria. 'I love you.'
Her arched eyebrows lifted. 'You hadn't said that before. I love you—but then you know I must, or I wouldn't be here in spite of my father.'
'Yes.' Phostis thought he knew that, but he'd been raised to see plots, so sometimes he found them even when they weren't there. Here, though, he had to—and wanted to—take the chance.
He stepped into the hallway. Sure enough, there sat Syagrios. The ruffian leered at him. 'So you found out you can't hide in there, did you? Now what are you going to do, head down and celebrate that you got turned into a soldier?'
'As a matter of fact, yes,' Phostis answered. He had the somber satisfaction of seeing Syagrios' jaw sag. After lighting a taper to keep from killing himself on the dark stairway, he headed down toward the ground floor of the keep. Syagrios muttered under his breath but followed. Phostis had all he could do to keep from whistling on the stairs: letting Syagrios know he'd put one over on him wouldn't do.
Outside the southern end of the great double wall that warded the landward side of Videssos the city lay a broad stretch of meadow on which the Empire's cavalry practiced their maneuvers. Fresh new grass poked through the mud and the dead grayish remains of last year's growth as Krispos came out to watch his soldiers exercise.
'Don't be too hard on them too soon, your Majesty,' Sarkis urged. 'They're still ragged from being cooped up through the winter.'
'I know that—we have done this business a few times before,' Krispos answered, amiably enough. 'But we'll go on campaign as soon as weather and supplies allow, and if they're still ragged then, it will cost lives and maybe battles.'
'They won't be.' Sarkis put grim promise into his voice. Krispos smiled; he'd hoped to hear that note.
A company rode hard toward upright bales of hay that simulated an enemy. They drew up eighty or ninety yards away, plied the targets with arrows as rapidly as they could draw bow, and then, at an officer's command, yanked out their swords and charged the imaginary foe with fierce and sanguinary roars.
The iron blades glittering in the bright sun made a fine martial spectacle. Nonetheless, Krispos turned to Sarkis and remarked, 'This whole business of war would be a lot easier if the Thanasioi didn't fight back any harder than those bales.'
Sarkis' doughy face twitched in a grin. 'Isn't it the truth, your Majesty? Every general wants every campaign to be a walkover, but you can make yourself a reputation that will live forever if you get one of those in a lifetime. The trouble is, you see, the chap on the other side wants his walkover, too, and doesn't much care to cooperate in yours. Rude and inconsiderate of him, if you ask me.'
'At the very least,' Krispos agreed. After the company of archers reassembled well beyond the hay bales, another unit approached and pelted the targets with javelins. Farther away, a regiment split in two to get in some more realistic mounted swordwork. They tried not to hurt one another in practices like that, but Krispos knew the healers would have some extra work tonight.
'Their spirits seem as high as you could hope for,' Sarkis said judiciously. 'No hesitation about going out for another crack at the heretics, anyhow.' He used the word with no irony whatever, though his own beliefs were anything but orthodox.
Krispos didn't twit him about it, not today. After some thought, he'd figured out the difference between the
