Lord of Emperors. Guy Gavriel Kay

seen the bloodstained bandage wrapped around one shoulder and across his chest, and then she’d seen and suddenly understood—she was the clever one, wasn’t she?—the look in his eyes as he saw that it was she.

      He wasn’t the man who had saved her from Morax’s inn and then from death in the forest, who had offered her a glimpse one dark night of what men might be like when they hadn’t bought you, but he could be—she had thought, lying beside Carullus, after, in his bed— the one who saved her from the life that followed being saved. The old stories never talked about that part, did they?

      She’d thought, as she watched the sun rise higher that morning, and heard his breathing settle as he fell into needed sleep beside her like a child, that she might become his mistress. There were worse things in the world.

      But only a little while after, even before winter began, with the midnight Ceremony of Unconquered Jad, he’d asked her to marry him.

      When she’d accepted, smiling through tears he could not have properly understood, Carullus had vowed with an uplifted hand, swearing by the sexual organs of the god, that he wouldn’t touch her again until their wedding night.

      A promise he’d made long ago, he explained. He’d told her (more than once) about his mother and father, his childhood in Trakesia in a place not so different from her own village; he’d told of Karchite raids, his older brother’s death, his own journey south to join the army of the Emperor. He talked, Carullus, quite a lot, but amusingly, and she knew now that the unexpected kindness she’d sensed in this burly, profane soldier was real. Kasia thought of her own mother, how she’d have wept to learn that her child was alive and entering into a protected life so unimaginably far away, in every respect, from their village and farm.

      There was no way to send a message. The Imperial Post of Valerius II did not include farms near Karch on its customary routes. For all her mother knew, Kasia was dead by now.

      For all Kasia knew, her mother and sister were.

      Her new life was here, or wherever Carullus, as a tribune of the Fourth Sauradian, was posted, and Kasia— in white, with a bride’s crimson girdling her waist on her wedding day—knew that she owed lifelong thanks to all the gods she could ever name for this.

      ‘Thank you,’ she said to Shirin, who had just told her she looked beautiful, and was still gazing at her and smiling. The chef, an intense little man, seemed to be trying not to smile. His mouth kept twitching upwards. He had sauce on his forehead. On impulse, Kasia used her fingers to wipe it away. He did smile then and extended his apron. She dried her fingers on it. She wondered if Crispin would be with Carullus when her husband-to-be came to bring her to the chapel, and what he might say, and what she would say, and how strange people were, that even the fairest day should not be without its sorrow.

      Rustem hadn’t been paying attention to where they were going, or who was around them, and he would blame himself for that later, even though it hadn’t been his responsibility to look to their safety. That was why Nishik, querulous and dour, had been assigned to a travelling physician, after all.

      But as they’d crossed the choppy strait from straggling Deapolis on the southeastern coast towards the huge, roiling port of Sarantium on the other side, negotiating past a small, densely wooded island and then bobbing ships and the trailing nets of fishing boats, with the City’s domes and towers piled up and up behind and hearth-smoke rising from innumerable houses and inns and shops all the way to the walls beyond, Rustem had found himself more overwhelmed than he’d expected to be, and then distracted by thoughts of his family.

      He was a traveller, had been farther east, for example, than anyone he knew, but Sarantium, even after two devastating plagues, was the largest, wealthiest city in the world: a truth known but never fully apprehended before this day. Jarita would have been thrilled and perhaps even aroused, he mused, standing on the ferry, watching the golden domes come nearer. If his newfound understanding of her was correct, Katyun would have been terrified.

      He had shown his papers and Nishik’s false ones and dealt with the Imperial Customs Office on the wharf in Deapolis before boarding. Getting to the wharf had been a process in itself: there were an extraordinary number of soldiers quartered there and the sounds of ship construction were everywhere. They couldn’t have hidden anything if they’d wanted to.

      The customs transaction had been costly but not unpleasant: it was a time of peace, and Sarantium’s wealth was largely derived from trade and travel. The customs agents of the Emperor knew that perfectly well. A discreet, reasonable sum to assuage the rigours of their painstaking labour was all that proved necessary to expedite the entry of a Bassanid physician and his manservant and mule— which had proved on examination not to be carrying silk or spice or any other tariffed or illicit goods.

      As they disembarked in Valerius’s city, Rustem took care to ensure that no birds were aloft on his left side and to set his right foot down first on the dock, just as he had boarded the ferry with his left boot first. It was noisy here, too. More soldiers, more ships and hammering and shouts. They asked directions of the ferryman and made their way along a wooden quay, Nishik leading the mule, both men wrapped in cloaks against a sharp spring breeze. They crossed a broad street, waiting for carts to rumble past, and came into a narrower lane, passing an unsavoury assortment of the usual waterfront sailors and whores and beggars and soldiers on leave.

      Rustem had been vaguely aware of all this as they went, and of how ports seemed to be the same from here to Ispahani, but he had mostly been thinking about his son as they’d moved away from the docks, leaving the noises behind them. Shaski would have been wide-eyed and open-mouthed, taking all this in the way parched ground absorbs rain. The boy had that sort of quality, he decided—he’d been thinking of him more than a man ought to dwell on his small child at home—an ability to take things in and then try to make them his own, to know when and how to use them.

      How else explain the uncanny moment when a seven-year-old boy had come after his father into a garden carrying the implement that ended up saving the life of the King of Kings? And making the fortune of their family? Rustem shook his head, remembering it on a morning in Sarantium, walking with his soldier-servant towards the forum they’d been directed to and the inn beside it where they would stay if there were rooms to be had.

      He was under instructions not to establish any direct link with the Bassanid envoy here, only the expected, routine note sent to report his arrival. Rustem was a physician searching for medical treatises and knowledge. That was all. He would seek out other physicians—he’d been given names in Sarnica and had set out with some of his own. He would make his contacts, attend lectures, give some perhaps. Buy manuscripts or pay scribes to copy them. Stay until summer. Observe what he could.

      Observe all he could, in fact, and not just about the healing profession and its treatises. There were things they wished to know, in Kabadh.

      Rustem of Kerakek was a man who ought not to attract any attention at all in a time of harmony between the Emperor and the King of Kings (a peace bought expensively by Valerius) with only the occasional border or trade incident to mar a smooth surface.

      That ought to have been so, at any rate.

      The outrageously clothed and barbered young man who wove his way unsteadily towards Rustem from a tavern doorway as he and Nishik ascended a steep, unfortunately quiet laneway, heading for the Mezaros Forum, seemed oblivious to such carefully thought out considerations.

      This seemed equally true of the three friends similarly dressed and adorned who followed behind him. All four were dressed in Bassanid-style robes for some reason, but with crudely designed golden jewellery in their ears and about their necks and with their hair worn untidily long down their backs.

      Rustem stopped, having little option. The four youths barred their way and the laneway was narrow. The leader swayed a little to one side then straightened himself with an effort. ‘Green or Blue?’ he rasped, wine fumes on his breath. ‘Answer or be beaten like a dry whore!’

      This question had something to do with horses. Rustem knew that much, but had no idea what answer would be best. ‘I beg your indulgence,’