scream questions at him—Maniakes had heard that kind of restraint before, often enough to recognize it here.
To forestall her, at least for a bit, the Avtokrator said, «Zenonis, let me present you to my wife, the Empress Lysia, who is sister to the Sevastos Rhegorios.» There. There it was, all in a lump.
At first, she simply heard the words. Then she figured out what they meant. Rhegorios was Maniakes' cousin. Lysia was Rhegorios' sister. That meant… Zenonis took a deep breath. Maniakes braced himself for trouble—thought there would surely be trouble of one sort or another tonight. «I am allied with this family by marriage,» Zenonis said after a visible pause for thought. «I am allied with all of it.»
«Well said, by the good god!» Rhegorios exclaimed. Lysia took Zenonis' hands in hers. «We do welcome you to the family,» she said. «Whether you'll be so glad of us after a while may be another question, but we'll get to that.»
The cooks brought in bread and a roasted kid covered with powdered garlic and a sharp, pungent cheese. They also presented the diners with a bowl of golden mushrooms of a sort Maniakes had never seen before. When he remarked on them, one of the cooks said, «They don't grow far from Vryetion that I know of, your Majesty. We've sauteed them in white wine for you.»
They were delicious, with a flavor half nutty, half meaty. The kid was falling-off-the-bone tender, no easy trick with goat. And yet, however good the supper proved, Maniakes knew he was enjoying it less than he should have. He kept waiting for Zenonis to stop picking at the lovely food and start asking the unlovely questions he would have to answer.
She lasted longer than he'd thought she would. But, when he showed no signs of volunteering what she wanted to know, she took a long pull at her cup of wine and said, «Parsmanios lives, you tell me.» Maniakes nodded, taking advantage of a full mouth to say nothing. His new-met sister-in-law went on, «He is not here. You said he was not in Videssos the city.» She paused, like a barrister building a case in a law court. Maniakes nodded again. Zenonis asked the first of those blunt questions: «Where is he, then?»
«In Prista,» Maniakes answered, giving blunt for blunt.
But he was not blunt enough. «Where is that?» Zenonis said. «I never heard of it. Is it important? It must be. Is he your viceroy there?»
«No, he is not my viceroy there,» Maniakes said. «Prista is a little town on the northern shore of the Videssian Sea.» It was, in its way, an important place, for it let the Empire of Videssos keep an eye on the Khamorth tribes wandering the Pardrayan steppe. But that wasn't what Zenonis had meant, and he knew it.
«That's—at the edge of the world,» she exclaimed, and the Avtokrator nodded yet again. «Why is he there and not here or in the capital?»
Yes, that was the blunt question, sure enough. «Why, lady?» Maniakes echoed. He found no way to soften his reply: «Because he and one of my generals conspired to slay me by magic. The general got away; I still haven't caught up with him. But Parsmanios—»
«No.» Zenonis' lips shaped the word, but without sound. Then she said it again, aloud this time: «No.» She shook her head, as if brushing away a buzzing fly. «It's not possible. When Parsmanios was here in Vryetion with me after you became Avtokrator, your Majesty, he would talk about going to Videssos the city so he and you and your brother Tatoules could run things the way they—» Maniakes held up his hand. «I don't know where Tatoules is. He never came to Videssos the city, and no one knows what's happened to him. If I had to guess, I'd say the Makuraners captured him in the early days of their invasion, while Genesios was still Avtokrator. Most of my family was in exile on Kalavria then. To the boiler boys, he'd have been just another officer, just another prisoner. They probably worked him to death.»
«I am sorry,» Zenonis said; she'd already shown she had good manners. «I didn't know. Parsmanios didn't know, either, of course. He would go on and on about how you three brothers would set the Empire to rights and get rich doing it, too.»
«He was welcome to help me set the Empire to rights,» Maniakes said. «By the good god, it's needed setting to rights. He did help, some. But he wanted to be promoted without having earned it, just because he was my brother. When I told him no, he didn't like that.» Rhegorios wriggled in his seat, then held up his winecup. A servant hurried to fill it. Rhegorios hurried to empty it. The title Parsmanios had wanted was Sevastos, the title he owned. The Avtokrator had kept him in preference to his own brother. No wonder he felt a little uneasy here.
Zenonis said, «I can't believe he would turn on his own flesh and blood.»
«I couldn't believe it, either,» Maniakes answered. «Unfortunately, it happens to be true, and I nearly died from it. He always claimed he did it because he thought my marriage with Lysia was wrong and wicked. Maybe he was even telling the truth; I don't know. It doesn't matter. What he did matters, and that's all. Phos, I wish he hadn't done it.»
Zenonis' gaze flicked from him to Lysia and back again. Parsmanios' wife had spirit; Maniakes could tell she was going to challenge him. When she did, she picked her words with great care, but challenged nonetheless: «By the teachings of the holy temples, the two of you are within the prohibited degrees of kinship, and so—»
«No.» Maniakes made his voice flat. «We have a dispensation from Agathios, the most holy ecumenical patriarch. My father– Parsmanios' father—has accepted the wedding.» That was true, as far as it went. The elder Maniakes didn't like the wedding, but he accepted it. «Lysia's father has accepted it, too.» That was also true, with the same reservations. «None of them tried to overthrow me or take the throne for themselves.» Most important of all, that was true, too. «Neither did Rhegorios here.»
«Me?» Rhegorios' eyebrows shot upward. «I've seen what all the Avtokrator has to do. Looks too much like work for my taste.»
Lysia snorted. So did Maniakes. Rhegorios had a hard time keeping his own face straight. He enjoyed affecting the role of a useless, gilded fop. When he was younger, the affectation might have covered some truth. No more, though. Maniakes knew that, if he fell over dead tomorrow, his father and Rhegorios would keep the Empire running as smoothly as it could in these troubled times.
He also knew Rhegorios would do nothing to try to make him fall over dead, and everything in his power to keep him from falling over dead. There, in a sentence, was the difference between his cousin and the brother he'd had to exile.
«If the ecumenical patriarch says it is acceptable, then it is,» Zenonis said, as if stating a law of nature. If it was a law of nature, Maniakes wished more clerics and citizens were familiar with it. His sister-in-law bowed her head. «Thank you for sparing his life.»
«You're welcome,» Maniakes answered. He started to say something more, but stopped. He started again, and again left it unspoken. Whatever comments he might make about not having the stomach to spill a brother's blood would only cause him to seem smug and self-righteous, because Parsmanios had shown he had the stomach to try doing just that.
«What will you do with me?» Zenonis asked.
«I don't intend to do anything with you,» Maniakes answered. «And, in case you're still wondering, I don't intend to do anything to you, either. If you want to stay here in Vryetion, you may do that. If you want to come to Videssos the city, you may do that. If you want to go into exile with Parsmanios, you may do that, too. But think carefully before you choose that road. If you go to Prista, you will never come back.»
«I don't know what to do now,» Zenonis said. «These past few years, I've wondered whether my husband was alive. To find out he is, to be raised to the heights by that, and then to learn what he'd done and to plunge into the depths again… I don't know where I am now.» She looked down at her hands again.
Gently, Lysia said, «Alter this, you may not want anything to do with our clan any more. If you should decide to dissolve the marriage, the clerics will give you no trouble, not with your husband a proved traitor. None of us would hold it against you, I know that.» She glanced to Maniakes and Rhegorios for confirmation. Both quickly nodded. «I don't know,» Zenonis repeated.
«You don't have to decide right away,» Maniakes said. «Take your time to find what you think is best. The Makuraners aren't going to run us out of Vryetion again tomorrow, nor even the day after.» He sketched the sun- circle above his heart to make sure Phos was paying attention to his words.
«What's best for me may not be best for Maniakes—my Maniakes, I mean,» Zenonis said, thinking out loud. «And what's best for me may not be best for Parsmanios, either.» She looked up at Maniakes, half-nervous, half- defiant, as if daring him to make something of that.
Before he could reply at all, Rhegorios asked, «What was it like, living here under the Makuraners when you were the Avtokrator's sister-in-law?»
