Anna looked at her. The awkwardness of Eirene’s movement was no more than that of many other women her age. Time and intelligence had lent a distinction to her features that they would not have had in youth. Had Eirene not allowed herself to see it?

She both loved and hated Gregory. The look in her eyes, the tension in her hands, gave her away. She believed she could not be loved, not with passion or laughter or tenderness, not with that desperate hunger for her to love in return that made passion a mutual thing.

Later, as Anna stood in the main room receiving payment from Demetrios for the herbs, she was conscious of Helena in a pale tunic trimmed with gold, her hair elaborately dressed. Without intending to, Anna compared her with Zoe, and Helena was still the loser.

“Thank you,” Anna said as Demetrios gave her the coins. “I shall return in a day or two. I believe she will continue to recover, and by then it may be time to change the treatment a little.” She did not add that she was concerned not to dose Eirene too heavily with the intoxicant she had used, in case she became dependent upon its artificial sense of well-being. She intended to use it only as long as it was necessary to face Gregory’s return.

“Don’t change it,” Demetrios said hastily, his face puckered with concern. “It is working well.”

Anna left and walked to her next patient and the one after. It was late and she was tired when she turned aside to climb the steps to her favorite place overlooking the sea.

This place drew her because of its silence. The wind and the gulls were no disturbance to the flight of thought. She was not yet ready to answer Leo’s solicitous questions as to her welfare or see in Simonis’s eyes the slow dying of hope that they would one day prove Justinian’s innocence.

Anna stood on the small, level surface at the top of the path, the wind fluttering the leaves above her. Slowly the color bled away on the horizon and dusk filled the air.

She was annoyed when she heard footsteps on the path below her. Deliberately she turned her back and faced the east and the blurred coast of Nicea, already dark.

She heard her name. It was Giuliano’s voice. It took her a moment to compose herself before she greeted him. “Are you back here for the doge again?” she asked.

He smiled. “He thinks so. Actually I am back for the sunset, and the conversation.” He was flippant, but there was a rueful honesty there for a second. “Home is never quite the same when you go back.” He walked the last few paces and stood beside her.

“Everything is smaller,” she agreed lightly. She must not allow her burning emotions to show. She was glad to have her back to the last of the light.

He looked at her, and something of the tension in his face smoothed away. The smile became wider, easier. “The cafés on the waterfront here haven’t changed. Neither have the arguments. That’s another kind of home.”

“We Greeks are always arguing,” she told him. “We can’t be bothered with subjects about which there is only one valid opinion.”

“I noticed,” he said wryly. There was still enough light reflected up from the water to see the sheen on his skin, the faint pucker around his eyes. “But the emperor has sworn his loyalty to Rome. Doesn’t that end some of your freedom to argue?”

“Not as much as an invasion would,” she said dryly. “There’ll be another crusade, sooner or later.”

“Sooner,” he said, a sudden tightness in his voice.

“Have you come to warn us?”

He looked down at his hands resting on the rough wood that formed a kind of railing. “There’s no point. You know as much of its coming as anyone does.”

“We’ll still argue about God, and what He wants of us.” She changed the subject. “Someone asked me the other day, and I realized I had never seriously considered it.”

He frowned. “I think the Church would say that nothing we could do would be of much value to Him, but He requires obedience, and I suppose praise.”

“Do you like to be praised?” she asked.

“Occasionally. But I’m not God.” The smile flickered across his face.

“Neither am I,” she agreed seriously. “And I like to be praised only if I have done something well, and I know the person speaking is sincere. But once is enough. I would hate it all the time. Just words? Endless ‘you are wonderful,’ ‘you are marvelous’…”

“No, of course not.” He turned around, his back half to the sea, his face toward her. “That would be ridiculous, and… unbelievably shallow.”

“And obedience?” she went on. “Do you like it if people do what you tell them to, never because they have thought of it themselves? Not because they care, and want to do it? Without growth, without learning, wouldn’t eternity be… boring?”

“I never thought of the possibility of heaven being a bore,” he said, half laughing now. “But after a hundred thousand years, yes, terrible. In fact, maybe that’s hell…”

“No,” she said. “Hell is having had heaven and then let it slip from your grasp.”

He put his hands up to his face and pushed the heels of his palms hard against the skin. “Oh God, you are being serious.”

She felt self-conscious. “Should I not be? I’m sorry…”

“No!” He looked at her. “You should be! Now I know what I missed most when I was away from Byzantium.”

For a moment, tears filled her eyes and her vision swam. Then she took one hand in the other and twisted her fingers until the pain reminded her of reality, limits, the things she could have, and those she could not. “Maybe there’s more than one hell,” she suggested. “Maybe one of them is to repeat the same thing over and over again until you finally realize that you are dead, in every sense that matters. You have ceased to grow.”

“I’m tempted to joke that that is pure Byzantine, and probably heretical,” Giuliano answered. “But I have an awful feeling that you are right.”

OF COURSE, HELENA HAD TOLD ZOE OF GREGORY VATATZES’S return from Alexandria. She had stood to the middle of the glorious room overlooking the sea and said it quite casually, as if it were of no more meaning than the price of some new luxury in the market: entertaining, but of no matter. How much did Helena know, or worse than that, was there something Zoe did not know?

She stared at the great gold cross. Poor Eirene. She had sought refuge in her intelligence and her anger, instead of using both to win what she wanted.

And Gregory was on his way back at last. He would arrive any day now. Zoe remembered him as vividly as if he had gone only a week ago, not more years than she wanted to count. Would his hair be gray? But he would still be as tall, towering even over her.

Perhaps it was as well they had not married. The edge of danger might have gone; they could have become bored with each other.

Arsenios had been his cousin in the elder branch of the family. He had kept the money and the gorgeous stolen icons, sharing nothing, so his sin had not tainted Gregory. In fact, Gregory had hated Arsenios for it. If he hadn’t, Zoe could never have loved him.

But he was still Arsenios’s cousin, and he would be concerned by his death, and of course the ruin of his daughter, and the death of his son, which Zoe had so brilliantly contrived. Would he deduce what had happened and how she had brought it about? He had always been as clever as she, or very nearly.

She shivered, although the air from the open window was still warm. Would he look for revenge? He had had no love for Arsenios, but family meant something, pride of blood.

She dressed in dark blue one day, crimson and topaz the next, used oils and unguents, perfumes, had Thomais brush her hair until it gleamed, the sheen bronze and then gold as she moved, like the warp and weft of silk.