Free Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay Page A

dignitaries and courtiers from the Imperial Precinct in that first interval of time. Some came out of sheer curiosity, Gisel knew: she was a novelty, a diversion in winter. A barbarian queen in flight from her people. They might have been disappointed to be received with style and grace by a reserved, silk-clad young woman who showed no sign at all of using bear grease in her yellow hair.
    A smaller number made the long trip through the crowded city for more thoughtful reasons, assessing her and what role she might play in the shifting alignments of a complex court. The aged, clear-eyed Chancellor Gesius had had himself carried through the streets to her bearing gifts in his litter: silk for a garment and an ivory comb. They spoke of her father, with whom Gesius had evidently corresponded for years, and then of theatre-he urged her to attend-and finally of the regrettable effect of the damp weather on his fingers and knee joints. Gisel almost allowed herself to like him, but was too experienced to permit herself such a response.
    The Master of Offices, a younger, stiff-faced man named Faustinus, arrived the next morning, apparently in response to Gesius's visit, as though the two men tracked each other's doings. They probably did. The court of Valerius II would not be different in this regard from Gisel's father's or her own. Faustinus drank an herbal tea and asked a number of self-evidently harmless questions about how her court had been administered. He was a functionary, these things occupied his attention. He was also ambitious, she judged, but only in the way that officious men are who fear losing the patterns of their established lives. Nothing burned in him.
    In the woman who came a few days after, there
was
something burning beneath a chilly, patrician manner, and Gisel felt both the heat and the cold. It was an unsettling encounter. She had heard of the Daleinoi, of course: wealthiest family in the Empire. With a father and brother dead, another brother said to be hideously maimed and hidden away somewhere, and a third keeping cautiously distant from the City, Styliane Daleina, wife now to the Supreme Strategos, was the visible presence of her aristocratic family in Sarantium, and there was nothing harmless about her, Gisel decided very early in their conversation.
    They were almost of an age, she judged, and life had taken away both their childhoods very early. Styliane's manner was unrevealing, her bearing and manner perfect, a veneer of exquisite politeness, betraying nothing of what might be her thoughts.
    Until she chose to do so. Over dried figs and a small glass of warmed, sweetened wine, a desultory exchange about clothing styles in the west had turned into a sudden, very direct question about Gisel's throne and her flight and what she hoped to achieve by accepting the Emperor's invitation to come east.
    "I am alive," Gisel had said mildly, meeting the appraising blue gaze of the other woman. "You will have heard of what happened in the sanctuary on the day of its consecration."
    "It was unpleasant, I understand," had said Styliane Daleina casually, speaking of murder and treason. She gestured dismissively.'Is this, then, pleasant? This pretty cage?"
    "My visitors are a source of very great consolation," Gisel had murmured, controlling anger ruthlessly. "Tell me, I have been urged to attend the theatre one night. Have you a suggestion?" She smiled, bland and young, manifestly thoughtless. A barbarian princess, barely two generations removed from the forests where the women painted their naked breasts with dyes.
    More than one person, Gisel had thought, leaning forward to carefully select a fig, could preserve her privacy behind empty talk.
    Styliane Daleina left soon after, with an observation at the door that people at court seemed to think the principal dancer and actress for the Green faction was the preeminent performer of the day. Gisel had thanked her, and promised to repay her courtesy with a visit one