He didn't hear the reply, of course.

"Styliane never pleasured him, in the event you were wondering. She's corrupt in her own ways, but she never did that."

Crispin was wondering how much was known about a certain recent night, and then decided not to think about it. They were on the southern side of the island, facing Deapolis across the water. Her Excubitors had accompanied them through the trees, past a second clearing with another set of huts and houses. These were empty. There had been other prisoners here once, evidently. Not now. Lecanus Daleinus had the isle to himself, with his handful of guards.

It was past midday now, by the sun. They would be racing again in the Hippodrome soon, if they hadn't started already, the day turning steadily towards an announcement of war. Crispin understood that the Empress was simply allowing an interval to pass before she went back to that house in the clearing to see if anything had changed.

It wouldn't have, he knew. What he didn't know was whether to say anything about it. There were so many betrayals embedded here: of Zoticus, of Shirin and her bird, and of his own privacy, his gift, his secret. Linon. At the same time, those last silent words of the eastern creature were still with him, with the undeniable signal of danger in them.

He had little appetite when they sat down to their meal, picked in a desultory fashion at the fish-cakes and the olives. Drank his wine. Had asked for it to be well watered. The Empress was largely silent, had been from the time they'd left the clearing. She had walked off by herself, in fact, when they'd first reached this strand, becoming a small, purple-cloaked dot in the distance along the stony beachfront here, two of her soldiers following at a distance. Crispin had sat down on a grassy place between trees and stones, watching the changing light on the sea. Green, blue, blue-green, grey.

Eventually she had come back, gestured for him not to rise, and had taken her place, gracefully, on a square of silk unfolded for her. The food had been spread on another cloth in this quiet place that ought to have been soothing in its beauty, a benign embodiment of the quickening spring.

Crispin said, after a time, "You watched them together, I gather. Styliane and… her brother."

The Empress wasn't eating either. She nodded. "Of course. I had to. How else would I have learned how and what to say, playing her?" She looked at him.

So obvious, seen in that way. An actress, learning her part. Crispin looked back out to sea. Deapolis showed clearly across the water. He could see more ships in the harbour there. A fleet for an army, sailing west, to his home. He had warned his mother, and Martinian and Carissa. It meant nothing. What could they do? There was a dull fear within him; the memory of the bird in that dark cabin a part of that now.

He said, "And you do this… you come here, because…"

"Because Valerius won't let him be killed. I thought of doing it, despite that. Killing him. But it matters a great deal to the Emperor. The visible hand of mercy, since the family… suffered so much when those… unknown people burned Flavius. So I come here, and do this… performance, and learn nothing. If I am to believe him, Lecanus is broken and vile and purposeless." She paused. "I can't stop coming."

"Why won't he kill him? There has to be so much hatred. I know they think the Emperor… ordered it. The burning." Not a question he'd ever imagined himself asking anyone, let alone the Empress of Sarantium. And not with this terrible inward sense that perhaps the killing of this man ought to have been done by now. Perhaps even in mercy. He thought, wistfully, of a scaffold in the air, shining pieces of glass and stone, memory, his girls.

Sorrow was easier than this. The thought came to him suddenly. A hard truth.

Alixana was silent for a long time. He waited. Caught the drift of her scent. That gave him pause for a moment, then he decided that Lecanus couldn't have known about the personal nature of that perfume. He'd been here too long. And then he realized that that wasn't it either: the man's nose was gone. The Empress would have realized that. Crispin shuddered. She saw it. Looked away.

She said, "You can have no idea what it was like here in the time when Apius was dying."

"I'm certain of that," Crispin said.

"He had his own nephews blinded and imprisoned here." Her voice was flat, lifeless. He had never heard her like this. "There was no heir. Flavius Daleinus was behaving, for months before Apius died, as an Emperor-in-waiting. Receiving courtiers at his estate and even his city home, on a chair in a receiving room on a crimson carpet. Some of them knelt before him."

Crispin said nothing.

"Petrus… believed Daleinus would be entirely, dangerously wrong as Emperor. For many reasons." She looked at him, the dark eyes searching his. And he understood what was unsettling him so: he had no idea how to react when she spoke, or looked, as a woman, a person, and not as an Imperial power beyond comprehension.

He said, "So he helped put his uncle on the throne instead. I know this. Everyone does."

She refused to look away. "Everyone does. And Flavius Daleinus died in Sarantine Fire on the street outside his house. He was… wearing porphyry. He was on his way to the Senate, Crispin."

The clothing had all burned away, Carullus had told him, but there had been rumours of the purple trim. Crispin, sitting on an island strand these long years after, had no doubt of the truth of what the Empress was saying.

He took a breath and said, "I am lost here, my lady. I don't understand what I am doing here, why I am hearing this. I am supposed to call you thrice-exalted, kneel in obeisance."

She smiled a little then, for the first time. "Indeed, artisan. I had almost forgotten. You haven't done either in a while, have you?"

"I have no idea how to… act here."

She shrugged, her expression still amused, something else in her voice, however. "Why should you know? I am being capricious and unfair, telling hidden things, enforcing the illusion of intimacy. But I can have you killed and buried here if I say but a word to the soldiers. Why should you assume you might know how to conduct yourself?"

She reached over and chose a pitted olive. "You can't know this, either, of course, but that ruined figure we just saw was the best of them all. Clever and brave, a splendid, handsome man. He went east himself, many times, with the spice caravans, past Bassania, to learn whatever he could. I regret what the fire did to him more than what happened to his father. He should have died, not lived to become-this thing."

Crispin swallowed again. "Why the fire? Why that way?"

Alixana’s gaze was steady. His awareness was of her courage… and simultaneously of the fact that she might be showing him courage, leading him to see it in her, for her own purposes. He was adrift and afraid, continuously aware of how many layers and contours of meaning there were with this woman. He shivered. Even before she answered, he was sorry he'd asked.

She said, "Empires need symbols. New Emperors need powerful ones. A moment when all changes, when the god speaks with a clear voice. On the day Valerius I was acclaimed in the Hippodrome, Flavius Daleinus wore purple in the street, walked out to claim the Golden Throne as if by right. He died appallingly, as if by a bolt from Jad, a striking down from above for such presumption, never to be forgotten." Her eyes never left his own. "It would not have been the same had he been stabbed by some soldier in an alleyway."

Crispin found that he could not look away from her. The exact, worldly intelligence within her beauty. He opened his mouth, found he could not speak. And seeing that, she smiled. "You are about to say again," said the Empress Alixana, "that you are only an artisan, that you want nothing to do with any of this. Am I right, Caius Crispus?"