Lord of Emperors. Guy Gavriel Kay

which meant someone was climbing.

      This was forbidden. It was utterly and absolutely forbidden to the apprentices and artisans. To everyone, in fact, including Artibasos, who had built this Sanctuary. A rule: when Crispin was up here, no one climbed his scaffolding. He had threatened mutilation, dismemberment, death. Vargos, who was proving to be as competent an assistant here as on the road, had been scrupulous in preserving Crispin’s sanctity aloft.

      Crispin looked down, more stunned by the breach than anything else, and saw that it was a woman—she had discarded a cloak for easier movement—who was ascending the scaffold rungs towards him. He saw Vargos among those far below on the marble tiles. His Inici friend spread his hands, helplessly. Crispin looked at the climber again. Then he blinked and caught his breath, gripping the low railing tightly with both hands.

      Once before he had looked down from this great height, just after arriving, when he’d been using his fingers like a blind man to map this dome where he intended to make the world, and had seen a woman far below, feeling her very presence as an irresistible pull: the force and draw of the world where men and women went about their lives.

      That time it had been an Empress.

      He had gone down to her. Not a woman to be resisted, even if she simply stood below, waiting. Had gone down to speak of dolphins and of other things, to rejoin and be reclaimed by the living world from the place where love lost to death had taken him.

      This time, staring in mute stupefaction at the climber’s steady, quite competent progress, Crispin tried to deal with who this was. Too astonished to call out or even know how to react, he simply waited, heart pounding, as his own queen came to him, high above the world, but in plain sight of all below.

      She reached the last rung, then the scaffold itself and— ignoring his hastily extended hand—stepped onto it, a little flushed, breathless, but visibly pleased with herself, bright-eyed and unafraid, to stand in this place of absolutely private speech on a precarious platform just under Artibasos’s dome. However many listening ears there might be in dangerous Sarantium, there were none here.

      Crispin knelt and lowered his head. He had last seen this young, beleaguered woman in her own palace, in his own city far to the west. Had kissed her foot in farewell and felt her hand brush his hair. Then he had left, having somehow promised to try to deliver a message to an Emperor. And he’d learned the morning after that she’d had six of her own guards killed—simply to preserve the secret of their encounter.

      On the scaffolding below the dome, Gisel of the Antae brushed his hair again with a light, slow hand. Kneeling, he trembled.

      ‘No flour this time,’ his queen murmured. ‘An improvement, artisan. Bur I prefer the beard, I think. Has the east claimed you so soon? Are you lost to us? You may stand, Caius Crispus, and tell what you have to tell.’

      ‘Your Majesty,’ Crispin stammered, rising, feeling himself flushing, terribly unsettled. The world, coming up to him, even here. ‘This is . . . this is not a safe place for you, at all!’

      Gisel smiled. ‘Are you so dangerous, artisan?’

      He wasn’t. She was. He wanted to say that. Her hair was golden, her gaze a deep, remembered blue—she had the same colouring, in fact, as another of the very dangerous women he knew here. But where Styliane Daleina was ice with an edge of malice, Gisel, the daughter of Hildric the Great, showed something wilder and sadder, both.

      He’d known she was here, of course. Everyone had heard of the arrival of the Antae queen. He’d wondered if she’d send for him. She hadn’t. She’d climbed up to find him, instead, graceful and assured as an experienced mosaicist. This was Hildric’s daughter. An Antae. Could hunt, shoot, ride, probably kill with a dagger secreted somewhere on her person. No delicate, sheltered court lady, this.

      She said, ‘We are waiting, artisan. We have come a long way to see you, after all.’

      He bowed his head. And told her, unvarnished and with nothing that mattered held back, of his conversation with Valerius and Alixana, when the small, brilliant figure that was the Empress of Sarantium had turned in a doorway to her inner chamber and asked—with seeming casualness—about the marriage proposal he undoubtedly carried from Varena.

      Gisel was disturbed, he realized. Was trying to hide that and might have done so from a less observant man. When he finished, she was silent awhile.

      ‘Did she sort it through or did he?’ she asked.

      Crispin thought about it. ‘Both of them, I believe. Together, or each on their own.’ He hesitated. ‘She is . . . an exceptional woman, Majesty.’

      Gisel’s blue gaze met his briefly, then flicked away. She was so young, he thought.

      ‘I wonder what would have happened,’ she murmured, ‘had I not had the guardsmen killed.’

      They’d be alive, Crispin wanted to say, but did not. He might have, a season ago, but was not quite the same angry, bitter man he’d been at the beginning of autumn. He’d had a journey, since.

      Another silence. She said, ‘You know why I am here? In Sarantium?’

      He nodded. It was all over the city. ‘You avoided an attempt on your life. In the sanctuary. I am horrified, Majesty.’

      ‘Of course you are,’ said his queen, and smiled, almost absently. For all the terrible nuances of what they were discussing and what had happened to her, an odd mood seemed to be playing about her, in the dance and drift of sunlight through the high windows all around the dome. He tried to fathom how she must feel, having fled from her throne and people, living here on sufferance, devoid of her own power. He couldn’t even imagine it.

      ‘I like it up here,’ the queen said suddenly. She went to the low railing and looked down, seemingly unfazed by how high they were. Crispin had known people to faint or collapse, clutching at the planks of the scaffold up here.

      There were other platforms, around the eastern perimeter of the dome, where men had begun setting tesserae on Crispin’s sketched pattern, to make a cityscape and the deep blue and green of the sea, but no one else was aloft just now. Gisel of the Antae looked at her own hands on the rail, then turned and held them up to him. ‘Could I be a mosaicist, do you think?’ She laughed. He listened for desperation, fear, but heard only genuine amusement.

      He said, ‘It is a craft only, unworthy of you, Majesty.’

      She looked around for a time without answering him. ‘No. This isn’t,’ she said finally. She gestured at Artibasos’s dome, at the beginnings of Crispin’s own vast mosaic upon it. ‘This isn’t unworthy of anyone. Are you pleased you came now, Caius Crispus? You didn’t want to, I recall.’

      And in response to the direct question, Crispin nodded his head, admitting it for the first time. ‘I didn’t want to, but this dome is a life’s gift for such as I.’

      She nodded. Her mood had changed, swiftly. ‘Good. We also are pleased you are here. We have few we may trust in this city. Are you one such?’

      She had been direct the first time, too. Crispin cleared his throat. She was so alone in Sarantium. The court would use her as a tool, and hard men back home would want her dead. He said, ‘In whatever ways I may help you, my lady, I shall.’

      ‘Good,’ she repeated. He saw her colour had heightened. Her eyes were bright. ‘I wonder. How shall we do this? Shall I order you to come now and kiss me, so that those below can see?’

      Crispin blinked, swallowed, ran a hand reflexively through his hair.

      ‘You do not improve your appearance when you do that, you know,’ the queen said. ‘Think, artisan. There has to be a reason for my coming up here to you. Will it help you with the women of this city to be known as a queen’s lover, or will it mark you as . . . untouchable?’ And she smiled.

      ‘I . . . I don’t have . . . My lady, I . . . ’

      ‘You don’t want to kiss me?’