Kasia, not far away, was in the company of two or three of the younger Green dancers, with Vargos hovering protectively nearby. The dancers were likely to be tormenting her about the night to come; it was part of the wedding tradition. It was also a teasing that would be appallingly inappropriate for this particular bride. It occurred to Crispin that he ought to go over and salute her properly himself.

'She now says to say she will offer you pleasures you have only imagined if you'll only come over here," said the dancer's bird abruptly in his head. Then added, I hate when she does this.

Crispin laughed aloud, occasioning curious glances from those following the debate beside him. Turning the sound into a cough, he looked across the room again. Shirin's mouth was fixed in a rigid smile. Her eyes met his over the shoulder of the lean, sallow secretary and there was black murder in them: nothing that promised delight at all, of the flesh or the spirit. Crispin realized, belatedly, that Pertennius must be very drunk. That, too, diverted him. Leontes's secretary was normally the most controlled of men.

Even so, Shirin could cope, he decided. This was all very amusing, in fact. He lifted a hand in a wave and smiled affably at the dancer before turning back again to the chariot-racers" conversation.

He and Zoticus's daughter had achieved an understanding, built around his ability to hear the bird and the story he'd told her about Linon. She had asked him, that chilly afternoon in autumn-it seemed a long time ago-if what he'd done with his bird meant that she should release Danis in the same way. He had been unable to answer that. There had ensued a silence, one that Crispin understood, then he had heard the bird murmur, inwardly, 'If I weary of this I will tell you. It is a promise. If that happens, take me back.

Crispin had shivered, thinking of the glade where Linon's surrendered soul had saved their lives in the mist of the half-world. Taking one of the alchemist's birds back to the Aldwood was not a simple matter, but he hadn't spoken of that then, or since.

Not even when a letter came from Martinian to Shirin and she sent word to Crispin in the Sanctuary and he came and read it. It seemed that Zoticus had left instructions with his old friend: if he were not home from an unexpected autumn journey by midwinter, or had not sent tidings, Martinian was to act as if he were dead and divide the alchemist's estate according to directions given. The servants were attended to; there were various personal bequests; some named objects and documents were burned.

The house near Varena and all that lay within it undestroyed were left to his daughter Shirin, to use or deal with as she saw best.

"Why did he do that? What in Jad's impossible name," the girl had exclaimed to Crispin in her own sitting room, the bird lying on the chest by the fire, "am I to do with a house in Batiara?"

She'd been bewildered and upset. She had never met her father in her life, Crispin knew. Nor was she his only child.

"Sell it," he'd said. "Martinian will do it for you. He's the most honest man in the world."

"Why did he leave it to me?" she'd asked.

Crispin had shrugged. "I didn't know him at all, girl."

"Why do they think he's dead? Where did he go?"

And that answer he thought he did have. It wasn't a difficult puzzle, which didn't make the solution easier to live with. Martinian had written that Zoticus had taken a very sudden, late-season trip to Sauradia. Crispin had earlier written to the alchemist about Linon, a cryptic retelling of what had happened in the glade.

Zoticus would have understood the implications: far more of them than Crispin had. He was quite certain, in fact, where Shirin's father had gone.

And reasonably sure what would have happened when he got there.

He hadn't told this to the girl. Instead, he'd carried some difficult thoughts out into the wintry cold and a slanting rain, and had had a great deal to drink later that night in The Spina and then a quieter tavern, his assigned guards following him about, protecting the Emperor's so-valued mosaic artisan from all possible harm. Worldly harm. There were other kinds. The wine didn't do what he needed it to do. The memory of the zubir, the dark, huge presence of it in his life, seemed destined not to leave him.

Shirin herself was a balancing spirit. He'd come to think of her that way as the winter deepened. An image of laughter, movements quick as hummingbirds, with a cleverness equally quick and a generosity one might not have expected in a woman so celebrated. She couldn't even walk out-of-doors in the City without hired guards of her own to fend off admirers.

It appeared-and he hadn't known this until today-that the dancer had formed a relationship of sorts with Gisel, the young Antae queen. He had no idea when that had begun. They certainly hadn't told him. The women he knew here were… complicated.

There had been a moment earlier this afternoon when Crispin had been excruciatingly aware that there were four women in the room who had entangled him in intimacies recently: a queen, a dancer, a married aristocrat… and the one he'd saved from slavery, who was a bride today.

Only Kasia had touched him, he had thought, with what he knew to be tenderness, on a windy, black, dream-haunted night in Sauradia. The memory made him uncomfortable. He could still hear the shutter banging in the wind outside, still see Ilandra in his dream, the zubir between them, and then gone. He had been awake and crying out and Kasia had been beside his bed in the cold room, speaking to him.

He looked over at her, newly married to his closest friend here, and then glanced quickly away when he saw that her eyes had been resting on him.

And that, too, was an echo of a different exchange of glances earlier this afternoon, with someone else.

In the moment when Leontes the Golden had been speaking to Carullus, and an assembly of wedding guests had hung upon his words as upon holy text, Crispin had been unable not to look at another recent bride.

His reward, Styliane had called herself last autumn, in the half-light of Crispin's room at an inn. Crispin, listening to Leontes now, had understood something, remembering the Strategos's direct words and manner in the Attenine Palace the night of his own first appearance there. Leontes spoke to the court like a blunt soldier, and to soldiers and citizens with the grace of a courtier, and it worked, it worked very well.

As the unflawed mingling of charm and pious honesty captured and held this mixed gathering like some fortress under siege, Crispin had found Styliane Daleina staring back at him, as if she'd been waiting to gather in his gaze.

She had lifted her shoulders a little, gracefully, as if to say without the need for words, Do you see now? I live with this perfection, as an ornament. And Crispin had been able to hold those blue eyes for only a moment and had then turned away.

Gisel, his queen, had not lingered long enough to even notice his presence here, let alone resume the charade of intimacy between them. He had visited her twice during the winter-as bidden-at the small palace they'd given her near the walls, and each time the queen's manner had been regally detached, matter-of-fact. No thoughts or surmises about their country and invasion had been exchanged. She had not yet seen the Emperor in private. Or the Empress. It chafed her, he could see, living here with few tidings from home and no way of doing or achieving anything.

Crispin had tried, and failed, to imagine the shape and tenor of an encounter between the Empress Alixana and the young queen who had sent him here with a secret message in autumn half a year ago.

In Shirin's reception hall, with the world poised on the brink of springtime now, his thoughts turned back to the bride. He could remember his first sight of her in the front hallway of Morax's inn. They are going to kill me tomorrow. Will you take me away?