She slipped off her drawers. She did not get out of her gown, but hiked it up so she could lower herself onto Krispos. She moved slowly, to keep the bed from creaking. Even so, he knew he would explode too soon to please her. Nothing he could do about that, though, he thought through building ecstasy.
Suddenly Dara froze, stifling a gasp that had nothing to do with passion. Krispos heard sandals in the hallway. Tyrovitzes walked past the door. Dara started to slide away, but the movement made the bedframe start to groan. She froze again. Krispos could not move at all, but felt himself shrinking inside her as fear overpowered lust.
The eunuch did not even glance in, but kept walking. Dara and Krispos stayed motionless until he came back, crunching on an apple. Once more, he paid no attention to the dark doorway. The sound of his footsteps and his chewing faded.
When everything was quiet again, Dara did get off the bed. She covered Krispos once more. Linen rustled against her skin as she slid her drawers up her legs. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "That was a bad idea." She slipped away. This time, she did not return.
Too late, Krispos was aroused again, with nothing whatever he could do about it. A bad idea indeed, he thought, more than a little annoyed. It had left everyone unsatisfied.
Summer wore on. One morning, Krispos woke up on his stomach. For a moment, he thought nothing of it. Then he realized he had rolled over in his sleep. He tried to roll back again and succeeded after an effort that left him panting.
Not long after that, his speech returned, first as a hoarse whisper, then, little by little, tones that sounded more as he remembered he should. As control slowly returned to his arms and legs he sat up in bed and then, wobbly as any toddler, stood on his own two feet.
That made Anthimos notice him again. "Splendid," the Avtokrator said. "Good to see you on the mend. I look forward to having you serve me again."
"I look forward to it, too, your Majesty," Krispos said, and found himself meaning it. After months of forced inactivity, he would have looked forward to a long, hot stint in the fields. No, he thought; maybe to a short stint. He did look forward to returning to the imperial bedchamber, both when Anthimos was occupying it and even more when he wasn't.
He found himself weak and clumsy as a pup. He began to exercise. At first, the least labor was plenty to wear him out. His strength slowly returned. A few weeks before the fall rains came, he went back to work. He bought handsome presents for the chamberlains who had cared for him so well and so long.
"This was not necessary," Barsymes said as he unwrapped a heavy gold chain. "The relief of having you on duty once more and no longer needing to try to keep up with his Majesty at those feasts of his ..." The eunuch shook his head. But his long face, usually sour, wore a small, grudging smile. Krispos decided he had spent his money wisely.
He soon reconnected himself to the tendrils of the grapevine. He hardly needed to, for the first piece of news that came in was on everyone's lips: not only had Harvas Black-Robe's Halogai smashed the Kubratoi again, they had seized Pliskavos, the capital and the only real city Kubrat boasted. "By sorcery, I hear they took it," Longinos said, lowering his voice at the word and sketching the sun-sign over his heart.
The bare mention of magic was enough to make Krispos shudder. All the same, he shook his head. "Sorcery doesn't work well in battle," he said. "Everyone is too keyed up for it to stick, or so I've been told."
"And I," Longinos agreed. "But I also know that my sources in the north do not lie." The palace eunuchs heard everything, and usually knew truth from rumor. Krispos scratched his head and worried a little. He sent a note to Iakovitzes. If anyone really knew what was happening north of the Paristrian mountains, the little noble was the man.
The next day, one of Iakovitzes' retainers brought an answering note: "Everything's gone to the ice up there. Harvas is a worse murderer than any of the khagans ever dreamed of being. Maybe he is a wizard, too. I can't think of any other way for him to have won so quickly and easily."
Krispos worried a little more, but only for a couple of days. Then he found something more important to worry about. A messenger sailed into Videssos the city from the westlands with word that Petronas was on his way home.
That news dismayed Anthimos, too. "He'll be impossible," the Emperor said, pacing back and forth the next morning while Krispos tried to dress him. "Impossible, I tell you. He's fought Makuran all summer long and he hasn't gained two towns worth having. He'll be humiliated and he'll take it out on me."
On you? Krispos thought. But he held his tongue. Since he recovered enough to talk, he'd told no one the Sevastokrator was to blame for his collapse. He had no proof save Mavros' word, and Mavros was with Petronas in the west. But he exercised harder than ever and began working with his sword again.
Petronas' imminent return made Anthimos start an incessant round of revels, as if he feared he would never get another chance once his uncle was back. Krispos' lingering weakness gave him the perfect excuse not to accompany his master to his carousings. As he'd hoped, the silver bell in his chamber sometimes rang even when the Avtokrator was away from the imperial residence.
After that dangerous fiasco while he'd been recovering, Dara took fewer chances. Her summonses most often came well after midnight, when the rest of the household could be counted on to be asleep. Sometimes, though, she called him openly in the early evening, just for the sake of talk. He did not mind; on the contrary. He'd learned from Tanilis that talk was intercourse, too.
"What do you think it will be like, having Petronas back again?" Dara said on one of those early visits, a few days before the Sevastokrator was due.
"Perhaps I'm not the one to ask," Krispos answered cautiously. "You know he and I didn't agree about his campaign. I ill say that the Empire doesn't seem to have fallen apart while he was gone." That was as far as he was willing to go. He did not know how the Empress felt about Petronas.
He found out. "I wish the Makurani had slain him," she said. "He's done everything he could to keep Anthimos first a boy and then a voluptuary, so he can go on holding all the power in the Empire in his own fists."
Since that was inarguably true, and since Petronas had got Krispos the post of vestiarios the better to control the Emperor, he kept quiet.
Sighing, Dara went on, "I hoped that with Petronas away from the city, Anthimos might come into his own and act as an Avtokrator should. But he hasn't, has he?" She sadly shook her head. "I suppose I shouldn't have expected it. By now he is as his uncle made him."
"He's afraid of the Sevastokrator, too," Krispos said. "That's one of the reasons he let Petronas go fight in the westlands, for fear he'd have used his army here in the city if he were thwarted."
"I knew that," Dara said. "I didn't know anyone else did. I think he was right to be afraid. If Petronas seized the throne, what would become of Anthimos, or me—or you, come to that?"
"Nothing good," Krispos answered. Dara was not made for convent life—the best she could hope for—and Anthimos even less for the monastery. Krispos knew he himself would not be lucky enough to have a monastic cell saved for him. He continued, "But Anthimos has the power to override anything the Sevastokrator does, if only he can find the will to use it."
"If only." A world of cynical doubt lay behind Dara's words.
"But he almost did, this past spring," Krispos said, not thinking until later how odd it was for him to be defending his lover's husband to her. "Then Petronas came up with using Harvas' brigands against Kubrat, and that gave Anthimos an excuse for backing down, so he did. But I don't think he would have, otherwise."