Free Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay

when it was delivered to her house. It seemed the bride was living with her.
    After some thought, and a morning's sketching, Pappio decided to make the bowl green, with inset pieces of bright yellow glass like meadow flowers in the spring that was coming at last.
    His heart quickened as he began to work, but it wasn't the labour or the craft that was exciting him, or even the image of a woman now. It was something else entirely. If spring was nearly upon them, Pappio was thinking, humming a processional march to himself, then so were the chariots, so were the chariots, so were the chariots again.
    Every morning, during the sunrise invocations in the elegant chapel she had elected to frequent, the young queen of the Antae went through an exercise of tabulating, as on a secretary's slate in her mind, the things for which she ought to be grateful. Seen in a certain light, there were many of them.
    She had escaped an attempt on her life, survived a late-season sailing to Sarantium, and then the first stages of settling in this city-a process more overwhelming than she wanted to admit. It had taken much from her to preserve an appropriately haughty manner when they had first come within sight of the harbour and walls. Even though she had known Sarantium could overawe, and had been preparing for it, Gisel learned, when the sun rose that morning behind the Imperial City, that sometimes there was no real way to prepare oneself.
    She was grateful for her father's training and the self-discipline her life had demanded: she didn't think anyone had seen how daunted she was.
    And there was more for which thanks ought to be given, to holy Jad or whatever pagan deities one chose to remember from the Antae forests. She had entirely respectable housing in a small palace near the triple walls, courtesy of the Emperor and Empress. She'd acted quickly enough on arrival to secure adequate funds of her own, by demanding loans to the crown from Batiaran merchants trading here in the east. Despite the irregularity of her sudden arrival, unannounced, on an Imperial ship, with only a small cadre of her guards and women, none of the Batiarans had dared gainsay their queen's regal, matter-of-fact request. If she'd waited, Gisel knew, it might have been different. Once those back in Varena- those doubtless claiming or battling for her throne by now-learned where she was, they would send their own instructions east. Money might be harder to come by. More importantly, she expected they'd try to kill her then.
    She was too experienced in these affairs-of royalty and survival- to have been foolish enough to wait. Once she'd acquired her funds, she'd hired a dozen Karchite mercenaries as personal guards and dressed them in crimson and white, the colours of her grandfather's war banner.
    Her father had always liked Karchites for guards. If you kept them sober when on duty and allowed them to disappear into cauponae when not, they tended to be fiercely loyal. She'd also accepted the Empress Alixana's offer of three more ladies-in-waiting and a chef and steward from the Imperial Precinct. She was setting up a household; amenities and a reasonable staff were necessary. Gisel knew perfectly well that there would be spies among these, but that, too, was something with which she was familiar. There were ways of avoiding them, or misleading them.
    She'd been received at court not long after arriving and welcomed with entirely proper courtesy and respect. She had seen and exchanged formal greetings with the grey-eyed, round-faced Emperor and the small, exquisite, childless dancer who had become his Empress. They had all been precisely and appropriately polite, though no private encounters or exchanges with either Valerius or Alixana had followed. She hadn't been sure whether to expect these or not. It depended on the Emperor's larger plans. Once, affairs had waited on
her
plans. Not any more.
    She
had
received, in her own small city palace, a regular stream of