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At night, the stars stood bright and close overhead, clustered in diamond swarms against the velvety darkness. Despite the chill, I liked to walk the decks, gazing at them, wondering if such beauty had been created to a purpose. Beauty inspires love; so it is said, in Terre d’Ange. Was it done that we might find this world worthy of loving? Mayhap it was so. I was no priestess, no philosopher, to find the answers to the world’s riddles in the stars. I only know that they were beautiful and stirred my soul. I was glad I could still be moved by beauty.

By the third day, the heat of noon had grown oppressive as the sun beat down on the wooden decks. Like many of the southerners, I took to my cabin during the worst heat of the day; enclosed or no, ’twas better to be in shade than sun, and our cabin had a portal that admitted a breeze.

I was drowsing on my narrow cot, clad only in a thin linen shift, when the knock came at the door, and I thought it must be Joscelin, unwontedly formal. As always, he had spent a good portion of our first days aft, in the stern of the ship where the clutch and roil of seasickness that gripped his belly would be less troublesome.

“Yes?” I said, opening the door a crack.

It was Kaneka. I had guessed wrongly. “You will want to see this,” she said, her expression undecipherable.

I opened the door wide and stared.

There, squirming in her grip, was Imriel de la Courcel.

Sixty-Four

“How?”

I folded my arms and glared at him, looking as imposing as I could. Imriel’s gaze darted, seeking allies and not finding them. Joscelin, leaning against the door of the cabin, was as grim and stoic as only a seasick Cassiline can be, and Kaneka … Kaneka was trying not to laugh, but I do not think Imri knew it. He’d not learned that much, not yet.

“There was a boy,” he said defiantly. “At the inn. An Akkadian boy, one of the servants. He wanted to see Terre d’Ange, where the men look like sons of the gods, and the women, the women look like … like you. I got him to take my place.”

I raised my eyebrows. “
How
?”

“He took my cloak,” Imriel muttered. “In the service alley, before the stairs. And I gave him my dagger for it, the one the Lugal gave me. We traded places, when everyone was watching the trunks being brought down. I made as if to sulk, and told Lord Amaury not to bother me, so he would not notice when we changed.”

“And how long,” I asked, “do you suppose
that
endured aboard the ship?”

“Long enough.” He set his chin. “I told him to pretend he was sick, and wanted only to sleep, and to keep his face turned away from the light.”

“You arranged this under Lord Amaury’s nose?” I said in patent disbelief.

“Lord Amaury,” Imriel said stubbornly, “does not speak Akkadian.”

I looked at Joscelin. “Would you be so good as to fetch the captain?”

The Menekhetan captain came at once and informed us apologetically in heavily accented Hellene that there was no question of turning back to Tyre. The Lugal of Khebbel-im-Akkad had commissioned this ship to sail directly to Iskandria, and sail it would. Yes, he understood the development was unforeseen, but the ship’s passage was paid, so the boy’s presence was no imposition. Ah, yes, he understood the boy was a personage of some import in his own country, but this was a Menekhetan ship, and relations with Khebbel-im-Akkad were ever delicate. Without direct orders from the Lugal himself, he dared not second-guess his wishes. Surely, we could book passage upon arrival if we wished to return to Tyre, for the journey was not overlong.

“Well,” I said, defeated, when he had left. “That’s what we’ll have to do, then.”

Kaneka cleared her throat. “Little one …”

“What is it?” I didn’t like her tone.

“It is not long, no, but… if you delay a month, no more, by the time you reach the south, the rains will come. And then no one may travel.”

I clutched my hair, feeling kinship with Amaury Trente. “Elua! Imri, why did you do this?”

His face was a study in teary mutiny. “
You
said-you talked about friends, and honor, and the precept of Blessed Elua!
Love as thou wilt
.” He spat the words like a curse. “Why am
I
not allowed to choose?”

I sat down on my cot and looked to Joscelin for aid.

“Fedabin.” He bowed to Kaneka, crossing his forearms with care, speaking in the halting zenyan which was our only common tongue. “How dangerous
is
this trip, anyway?”

“To find the Melehakim?” Kaneka shrugged. “Dangerous, lord. There is a river greater than the Euphrate, and deserts that kill. There are crocodiles and lions, and scavengers in between-hyenas, jackals, even the blood-flies that drive strong men to madness. And there are tribes, many tribes, in Jebe-Barkal, some of them hostile. But,” she added, a glint in her eye, “none of them will seek to kill a boy due to an accident of birth. Besides, he could always remain in Debeho, if you willed it. He would be warded well enough in my village.”

Joscelin looked at me. I looked back at him. “You can’t be serious,” I said.

“Phèdre.” He sounded eminently reasonable. “Think of it. At least he’d be safe from assassination attempts. And … Name of Elua, the boy has a point! Is he
never
to be allowed a choice?”

“You weren’t,” I murmured. “I wasn’t. Not at ten.”

“And look where it brought us. Still, neither of us had to endure Daršanga.”

Some choices must be made swiftly, lest the enormity of them overwhelm the chooser. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eye-sockets. “All right,” I said. “All right, all right,
all right
! Imriel.” I
lifted my head. “If we let you stay-if we sanction this-do you swear to me that you will obey us? Joscelin and me both-yes, and Kaneka, too-every word, every whim, as if Blessed Elua himself had crossed the boundary of Terre d’Ange-that-lies-beyond to give voice to a new sacrament?”

Imriel was nodding with every word I spoke, not listening, agreeing to it all. “I swear,” he said breathlessly. “I swear, I vow, I promise, Phèdre, every word!”

I spent the remainder of our voyage composing the letter to Amaury Trente.

It was a foolhardy decision, and one I daresay I wouldn’t have made half a year ago. Still, great distance and great events have a way of changing one’s perspective. As mad as our quest might be, it was nothing to what Imriel had undergone in Daršanga, and Kaneka was right; no one in Jebe-Barkal wanted him dead. Once he set foot on Terre d’Ange, he would always, always have enemies, the shadow of his mother’s vast treachery hanging over him, every move watched and scrutinized.

Even so.

“I can’t believe you sided with him,” I said to Joscelin that night. Imriel was sleeping in Kaneka’s cabin, which held a spare cot. After three days of scavenging for scraps and sleeping wedged in a dark corner of the hold, he was grateful for it. If she hadn’t caught him at the water-barrel, he might have held out till Iskandria. “Amaury will be like to kill us. And Ysandre … I don’t want to think of it.”

Joscelin shrugged. “You’re the one thought you saw an assassin aboard his ship.”

“Thought!” I lowered my voice. “Even I admitted it was probably my imagination playing on my fears. It’s not like you, that’s all. Honor, duty, loyalty-all those Cassiline virtues, that should demand we send him
back
.”

“I’m tired.” Lying on his side, he regarded me across the cabin. “Phèdre, all my life, I’ve had to make that choice, over and over. I’m tired of it.”

Daršanga, I thought, had changed him, too; it had changed us all. “Then love is reason enough? Because he willed it?”

“I don’t know. Blessed Elua says it is. Imriel followed you-us-out of love. I know that much is true; there’s no other reason for it.” Joscelin rolled onto his back and gazed at the ceiling. “Phèdre, did you tell him how his mother escaped from Troyes-le-Mont?”

A chill ran the length of my spine. “No,” I whispered.

Incredible as it seems, I had not thought, until then, how very similar were the means, even down to the concealing cloak. In Troyes-le-Mont, Melisande had traded places with her cousin Persia and walked out of captivity under the very noses of the men set to guard her. And her son had played nearly the self-same trick. It would not go unremarked, not by the men who’d been duped by it, who were doubtless on their way back to Tyre even as we spoke, taut and furious, holding in custody a disappointed Akkadian serving-lad.

“He did it for love,” Joscelin said softly. “That’s the difference. And I don’t have it in my heart to betray him for it. Phèdre … this boy could be dangerous. Or he could be something else. I can’t forgive Melisande. But I can forgive her son.”

“Someone should,” I murmured. “It might as well be us.”

“Why not?” He laughed, the sound blending with the rhythmic ripple of waves against the ship’s hull. “One way or another, it seems it usually is.”

And so our journey passed. In the morning and the evenings, his seasickness faded, Joscelin performed his Cassiline exercises on the foredeck of the ship, sweating under the bright sun as he sought to regain his old balance, the steel daggers weaving intricate patterns-slowly, so slowly. After the first day of his discovery, Imriel joined him, using a pair of wooden practice-blades whittled for him by a bored sailor. With infinite patience, both for his own infirmity and Imri’s ineptness, Joscelin taught him the rudiments of it.

I watched them both, stirred by emotions I could not name. In days long gone by, when first he had come to Delaunay’s service, I used to watch so, standing upon the terrace while he did his exercises in the garden, and wondered at the Cassiline’s patience when he began teaching Alcuin, my near-brother Alcuin, with his milk-white hair and his gentle smile.

In those days, I had despised Joscelin.

Now …

I loved him; I loved him still. And when his grin flashed, quick to forgive an error; when he pushed himself tirelessly, silhouetted against the sparkling sea; when Imriel’s laugh rang out, surprised and delighted-I loved him all the more, until my heart ached with it, too vast for the confines of my body.

Yet we had not even kissed.

Too many shadows lay between us, and all of them born in Drujan. I am an
anguissette
; I have been so all of my life. Like Joscelin, I had made my way with balance; between the left side and the right, between pleasure and pain, between love and all that it was not. Somewhere, in Daršanga, I had gone too far. And something in me had shattered, as surely as his bones.

I did not know how to find my way back.

And so I watched them and was gladdened, taking secondhand pleasure where I might, in the clean sea and wind, the leap of blood resurgent in wasted muscles and the arc of steel cleaving sky, the sound of a boy’s laughter. And I composed, in my head, my letter to Lord Amaury Trente, striving to explain why I believed
this
was in accordance with the will of Blessed Elua.

Thus did we arrive in Iskandria.

I hadn’t expected Nesmut.

“Gracious lady!” His voice rang the considerable length of the quai, his sandaled feet slapping the pavings as he pelted toward us, all dignity forgotten. “Gracious lord! You are
alive
!”

“Nesmut.” I laughed, my heart rebounding with unwonted joy. “Are you free to take on an old client? There are more of us, this time.”

After much negotiation, at once light-hearted and solemn, Nesmut contracted carriages and porters and led us to our lodgings-not Metriche’s, these, but a purely Menekhetan establishment, pleasant and modest. The women of the
zenana
were not like to complain. It was palatial, after Daršanga. And I did not want us to be easily found.

I obtained parchment and a pen and ink, and spent the better part of a day writing the letters I’d composed-the one to Amaury, and a good many others. When I had finished, I sent a message, via Nesmut, to Ptolemy Dikaios. The lad’s status had risen in the world, that such a message might be sent and delivered without question. He preened with it, which I begrudged him not in the least.

Pharaoh’s summons came almost immediately. As I had requested, it was a discreet meeting and not a formal one. This would all, I thought ruefully, be a great deal easier without Imriel. But the decision was made, and I would do what I could to ensure it done safely.

Ptolemy Dikaios received me in the private reception-hall where we had struck our bargain, and under the impassive eyes of his fan-bearers I gave him a letter from the Lugal which detailed the events that had befallen and requested his aid in seeing the freed Menekhetans restored to their families or housed with honor. He read it without need of a translator and regarded me thoughtfully when he was done, reclining on a couch.

“Bold deeds, Phèdre nó Delaunay, and worthy of honor. Why then do you ask to meet in secret, and not trumpet this victory to your Ambassador de Penfars, to Lord Mesilim-Amurri, the Akkadian consul? I am certain they would wish to arrange for a triumphal procession, if they knew.”

“There is a complication, my lord Pharaoh,” I said.

His heavy lids flickered. “Indeed? What is it?”

I told him about Imriel.

When I had finished, he laughed. “And what would you have me do about it? By all rights, I should send for de Penfars right now and remand the boy to his custody! It would win me favor with the D’Angeline Queen.”

“It would,” I said, “until I told her about your alliance with Melisande Shahrizai.”

“There is that.” Pharaoh rubbed his chin. “What do you propose?”

“We will be gone in several days’ time, my lord. If, at that time, I sent various letters to you by messenger, you might see them enacted and dispersed. That, from the Lugal, regarding the survivors of the
zenana
,” I nodded at the letter he held, and produced three more, “this, to be sent to Lord Amaury Trente in Tyre, and this, to be given to Ambassador de Penfars, who will send it by courier to Queen Ysandre. Both detail my suspicions, and give the reason for my actions, asserting that you had no knowledge of my presence and that I relied on your integrity as a ruler to see the missives delivered.”