about this?»
«Some if it,» Rhegorios answered. «Not the whole.»
«I think you should do that,» Maniakes said. «She will have a clearer view about Phosia and her family than either one of us. She's not assotted with the girl, as you are.» He ignored his cousin's indignant look. «And she's— not quite—so worried about the Empire as a whole as I am.»
«By the good god, though, she's my sister,» Rhegorios said. «How can I talk about matters between man and woman with my sister? It wouldn't be decent.»
«For one thing, I daresay she has more sense than either one of us,» Maniakes replied. «And, for another, if you can't talk about these things with her, with whom can you talk of them? I know what you were thinking of doing, I'll wager, and never mind this yattering about having Uncle Symvatios talk with Broios: go ahead and marry this girl and then tell me about it afterward, when I couldn't do anything. Am I right or am I wrong?»
Rhegorios tried for dignified silence. Since he wasn't long on dignity under most circumstances, nor, for that matter, on silence, Maniakes concluded he'd read his cousin rightly.
«We'll be heading back to Serrhes soon—as you guessed, cousin of mine,» the Avtokrator said. «It'll have to do as our frontier outpost for now. And while we're waiting there to hear from Abivard, we won't have anything better to do than sort through this whole business. Doesn't that put your mind at ease?»
«No,» Rhegorios snarled. «You're taking all the fun out of it. The way you're treating it, it's a piece of imperial business first and a romance afterward.»
Maniakes stared again. «Cousin of mine, everything we do is imperial business first and whatever else it is afterward.»
«Oh, really?» Rhegorios at his most polite was Rhegorios at his most dangerous. «Then how, cousin of mine your Majesty brother-in-law of mine, did you happen to end up wed to your own first cousin? If you tell me that was good imperial business, by Phos, I'll eat my helmet. And if you get to have what you want for no better reason than that you want it, why don't I?»
Maniakes opened his mouth, then shut it again in a hurry on realizing he had no good answer. After a bit of thought, he tried again: «The one thing I can always be sure of with Lysia is that she'll never betray me. Can you say the same about this woman here?»
«No,» Rhegorios admitted. «But can you say you wouldn't have fallen in love with Lysia if you weren't so sure of that?»
«Right now, I can't say anything about might-have-beens,» Maniakes answered. «All I can say is that when we get back to Serrhes, we'll see what we have there, I expect.»
After a while out in the semidesert that marked the Empire's western frontier, Serrhes seemed almost as great a metropolis as Videssos the city, a telling measure of how barren that western country really was. Maniakes did not invite Broios and Phosia and her mother to dine with him right away. Instead, he did some quiet poking around.
So did Lysia, who said, «What your men don't hear, my serving women will, in the marketplace or from a shopkeeper or from a shopkeeper's wife.»
«That's fine,» Maniakes said. «You're right, of course; women do hear any number of things men miss.» He grinned. «Some of those things, some of the time, might even be true.»
Lysia glared at him, showing more anger than she probably felt.
«You know I'll remember that,» she said. «You know I'll make you pay for it one of these days, too. So why did you say it?»
«If I give you something you can sharpen your knives on,» he said, as innocently as he could, «you won't have to go out looking for something on your own.» The dirty look he got for that was more sincere than the earlier one. He went on, «You never have said much about what you think of your brother's choice. Does that mean what I'm afraid it means?»
Lysia shook her head. «No, not really. It means I paid no attention to this Phosia when we were here before.» Now she sank a barb of her own, aimed not so much at Maniakes in particular as at his half of the human race: «A pretty face is less likely to distract me.»
«Less likely to distract you than what?» he asked, and then held up a hasty hand. «Don't answer that. I don't think I want to know.» By the dangerous gleam that had come into his wife's eye, he knew he'd changed course in the nick of time.
Sure enough, gossip about Phosia, about Broios, and about Broios' wife—whose name was Zosime—began pouring in. A lot of it had to do with the way Broios ran his business. Vetranios had been able to cheat him, but he'd evidently managed to be on the giving as opposed to the receiving end of that a good many times himself. Maniakes didn't quite know how much weight to give such reports. A lot of merchants thought first of themselves and then, if at all, of those with whom they dealt. He couldn't gauge whether Broios was typical of the breed or typical of the breed at its worst.
His men and Lysia's serving women also brought in a lot of reports claiming Broios had been hand in glove with the Makuraners while they held Serrhes. Again, he had trouble deciding what those meant. If Broios hadn't cooperated with the occupiers to a certain degree, he wouldn't have been able to stay afloat. No one said he'd betrayed any of his fellows, and the Avtokrator had consistently forgiven those who'd done nothing worse than get on with their lives regardless of who ruled the westlands. But did that mean he wanted such people in his family? That was a different question.
No one seemed to say anything bad about Phosia. People who disliked her father thought she was nice enough. People who liked her father—there were some—thought she was… nice enough.
Everyone agreed her mother talked too much. «If that's a vicious sin, Skotos' ice will be even more crowded than the gloomiest priests claim,» Lysia said.
«True enough,» Maniakes said. «Er, true.» His wife laughed at him for editing his own remarks.
Once he was back in Serrhes, he naturally started judging cases again. His first stay in the city had scratched the surface of what had gone on in better than a decade of Makuraner rule, but had not done much more than that. As he lingered in the westlands waiting for word from Abivard, he had time to look at cases he had not considered before. And, seeing him do that, others who had not presented matters to him in his earlier stay now hauled them out, dusted them off, and brought them to his notice.
Enough new cases and accusations and suits came before him to make him hand some of them over to Rhegorios. His cousin, instead of making his usual protests about doing anything resembling work, accepted the assignment with an alacrity Maniakes found surprising. After a little thought, it wasn't so surprising any more. When Rhegorios was fighting his way through the intricacies of a case involving fine points of both Videssian and Makuraner law, he wasn't thinking about Phosia.
His decisions were good, too: as thoughtful as the ones Maniakes handed down. As day followed day, the Avtokrator grew more and more pleased with the Sevastos. Rhegorios had been a good second man in the Empire even when he grumbled about having to do his job. Now that he was doing it without the grumbling, he was as fine a second man as anyone could have wanted.
As day followed day, he also grew more confident in his decisions and made ever more of them on his own, without checking with Maniakes till after the fact. Thus he startled the Avtokrator when he came in one afternoon and said, «Your Majesty, a matter has come to my notice that I think you should handle in my place.»
«It will have to wait a bit,» Maniakes said. «I'm in the middle of an argument here myself.» He nodded at the petitioner standing before him. «As soon as I'm done, I'll deal with whatever perplexes you. You ought to know, though, that I think you're up to fixing it, whatever it happens to be.»
«Your Majesty, it would be better in your hands,» Rhegorios said with unwonted firmness. Maniakes shrugged and spread those hands, palms up, in token of puzzled acquiescence.
Having disposed of the petitioner—and having annoyed him by denying his request for land that had belonged to a monastery till the Makuraners razed it to the ground and slaughtered most of the monks—Maniakes sent a secretary to Rhegorios to let him know he could bring his unusual case, whatever it was, up into the chamber the Avtokrator was using.
As soon as the Sevastos and the man who had come before him walked into the room, Maniakes understood. Broios walked up to the high-backed chair Maniakes was using as a throne and prostrated himself before his sovereign. «Rise,» the Avtokrator said, at the same time sending his cousin an apologetic look. Had he been assorted of Broios' daughter, he wouldn't have wanted to deal with a case involving the merchant, either. He
