The room swam in her vision, heat burning up her cheeks. “Majesty, I am Byzantine, from Nicea, but I have learned as much as I could of all forms of medicine.” She almost added, “from my father,” and realized just in time that that might be a fatal error. She bit her tongue, hoping the pain would remind her of her lapse.

“Born in Nicea?” he asked.

“No, Majesty, Thessalonica.”

His eyes widened fractionally. “So was I. If I wanted a priest, I’d send for one. I have hundreds at my beck and call, all of them more than willing to tell me my sins.” He smiled bleakly and winced. “And give me due penance, I’m sure.” He pulled his tunic apart at the neck, showing the red, blistered weals across his chest. “What is wrong with me?”

She saw the anxiety in his eyes and the sweat beading his brow.

She studied the rash, memorizing the pattern of it, the frequency of the blisters, and the degree to which they were raised. “Please cover yourself again, in case you get chilled,” she requested. “May I touch your brow to gauge your fever?”

“Do it,” he responded.

She did so and was unhappy with how hot he seemed. “Does the rash burn?”

“Don’t they all?” he said tersely.

“No, Majesty. Sometimes they only itch, sometimes they ache, others are very painful, like lots of little stings. Does your head ache? Have you any difficulty in breathing? Does your throat hurt?” She wanted to ask him also if his belly hurt, if he had vomited or suffered diarrhea or constipation, but how could she ask an emperor such things? Perhaps she could ask Nicephoras later.

He answered all her questions, mostly in the affirmative. She asked for permission to withdraw and spoke privately with Nicephoras.

“What is it?” he asked her with deep concern. “Is he poisoned?”

She realized with a jolt of horror how realistic was that suspicion. She had never considered what it must be like to live forever in the shadow of envy and hate such that you never know which of your servants, or even your family, might wish you dead passionately enough to connive at bringing it about.

“I don’t know yet,” she said aloud to Nicephoras. “Wash gently wherever the rash has come. Make sure the water is clean. I will prepare medicines, and unguents to relieve the pain.”

She took a bold step. Timidity would cause even greater fear. “Then I will learn what it is, and prepare an antidote,” she said. A hideous thought flashed through her mind that it could be Zoe herself who might have poisoned him. She was highly skilled in beauty preparations; her own superbly preserved appearance was testimony to that. Possibly she knew poison just as well.

“Nicephoras!” she called as he moved away.

He turned, waiting for her to speak, his dark eyes anxious.

“Use new oils, ones that you have purchased yourself,” she warned. “Nothing that is a gift from anyone at all. Purify the water. Give him nothing to eat that you have not prepared, and has not already been tasted.”

“I will,” he promised, and then added wryly, “and for my own safety, I will have a companion watch my every move, and we will both touch and taste everything.” His features were powerful, though they had no beauty, except for his mouth. But when he smiled, even ruefully as now, it lit his entire face.

Anna realized with a shiver one small shadow of what she had stepped into.

When she returned to the palace the following day, she saw Nicephoras first. He looked anxious, and he made no pretense at conversation.

“He is no worse,” he said immediately they were alone. “But he still finds eating painful, and the rash has not subsided. Is it poison?”

“There is accidental poison, as well as intentional,” she prevaricated. “Some foods spoil, or are poisonous if unripe, or if they are touched by things unclean. One may cut an apricot with a knife, one side of which has been smeared with poison, the other not. Eat one half-”

“I see,” he interrupted. “I must be more careful.” He caught her flash of understanding. “For my own sake,” he added with an ironic curl of his lip.

“Do you fear anyone in particular?” she asked.

“There are factions all over the city,” he replied. “Mostly those who feel passionately against the union with Rome; or who are exploiting those who do. You’ve seen the riots yourself.”

She felt the sweat prickle her skin, acutely conscious of Constantine’s part in the unrest and now her knowledge of it. “Yes.”

“And of course there are always those who have their own ambitions to the throne,” he added, his voice lower. “Our history is full of usurpation and overthrow. And there are those who harbor desires of revenge for what they see as past wrongs.”

“Past wrongs?” She swallowed hard. This was getting painfully close to Justinian, and if she was honest, to herself. “You mean personal enmity?” she said softly.

“There are those who feel that John Lascaris should have remained emperor, regardless of his youth, inexperience, and profoundly contemplative nature.” His face creased with pain for that old, terrible mutilation. “There was a man in the city until recently-Justinian Lascaris,” he said quietly. “Presumably a kinsman. He came to the palace several times. The emperor spoke with him out of our hearing, and I don’t know what about. But he was involved in the murder of Bessarion Comnenos, and he is now exiled in Palestine.”

“Could he have returned and done this?” Her voice shook, and she did not know what to do to control her hands. She pushed them half under her robes, twisting the cloth.

“No.” The idea brought a flicker of bleak humor to his eyes. “He is locked in a monastery in Sinai. He will never leave it.”

“Why did he collude in killing Bessarion Comnenos?” She had to ask, in spite of the danger to herself and her fear of the answer.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Bessarion was one of many who hated the union with Rome, and he was gathering a considerable following.”

“And was this Justinian Lascaris for union with Rome, then?” Surely that could not be?

“No.” Nicephoras smiled with a surprising softness. “He was profoundly against it. Justinian’s arguments were less theological, but more telling than Bessarion’s.”

“Then it couldn’t have been a religious disagreement,” she said, grasping at straws of hope.

“No. The enmity, if it was such, seems to have been born of his friendship with Antoninus, who appears to have been the one actually to have killed Bessarion.”

“Why would he? Was he not a soldier, a very practical man?” She felt she must explain herself. “I have treated men, soldiers, who knew him.”

He looked at her directly. “There was a suggestion that Antoninus and Bessarion’s wife were lovers.”

“Helena Comnena? She’s very beautiful…”

“Do you think so?” He seemed interested, even puzzled. “I find her empty, like a painting whose colors are flat. There is no passion in her, and little ability to know the pain of high dreams one cannot grasp.”

“Did Antoninus see that in her? Why else would he kill Bessarion?”

“I don’t know,” Nicephoras admitted. “I keep coming back to the union with Rome and his passion against it, his attempt to stir up the people to resist. Which leads me nowhere, because both Justinian and Antoninus were against it also.”

She sensed a complexity of emotions in him and wondered what Nicephoras’s own feelings were about the union.

“Does Bessarion still have followers alive?” She dragged his attention back to the present issue. “Not just admirers, but people who would continue his cause?”

“Justinian and Antoninus are gone,” he replied with an edge of sadness. “I think the others have drifted back to their own concerns, other loyalties. Bessarion was a dreamer, like Bishop Constantine, imagining Byzantium can be saved by faith rather than diplomacy. We have never relied on great armies or navies. We have always pitted our enemies against each other, and stood apart from their battles ourselves. But that takes skill, willingness to compromise, and above all the nerve to hold on and wait.”