Clermont castle, Octomber 1428
Morning was grey at the shutters, and he was out of bed with an ease that still didn't feel like his. Theodora's side of the bed was cool, the pillow still showing the shape her head had left. A woman he did not know stood at the far end of the chamber with a basin of water and a folded cloth over her arm, and when she saw he was on his feet she set the basin down on the table and waited.
"Despotissa is at chapel," she said, when he did not speak.
"Thank you."
She bowed and went out, and as the door closed behind her the name surfaced in his mind: Eudokia. That was how it had gone all of yesterday. The names and the facts arrived a breath behind the people and objects that summoned them, the way a word comes to you when you have stopped searching for it. Alexios, when the tray had come. Theodora, when he woke. Clermont, when he looked out of the window. Patras, when he read the letter. Less ground to make up each time, by a small fraction.
Yesterday he had kept to the room. He had let them send for the physician and then, when the man was bowed in and frowning over him, told him he had slept badly and would lie abed until supper. The physician had nodded, recommended a cup of herbs and a day without visitors, and gone out looking relieved to have been given a simple instruction. He had eaten the bread Alexios brought, picked at the cheese, and let the household believe its master was out of sorts with a low fever. It had bought him a day. It would not buy him a second; Theodora had already said, politely, that if he were no better by morning she would send for the physician again, and the physician was a man with opinions and a tongue.
Most of the afternoon he had spent with the psalter from the chest by the window, turning its pages the way he would have turned them in the shop and holding it under the light longer than any prayer required. In the shop a book like that would have sat under glass. Here it had been folded in linen at the bottom of a chest, between a leather strap and a pair of winter gloves.
He swung his legs clear of the covers and stood. The right knee took its weight more carefully than the left; the small ways this body was not symmetrical kept showing themselves. He went to the basin. The water was cold enough to wake the skin at the temples, and he splashed some into his hair as well because the cold steadied things at the back of the head. The blade beside the basin was a thin iron thing, sharpened more than cared for, and he put it down and used the cloth. The stubble could keep a day.
He looked at his left hand where he had set it on the edge of the basin. The thin scar across the knuckles was gone — the one Jason and Nick had talked him into earning at that reenactment weekend, a lark he had grumbled about for a month and never quite admitted he'd enjoyed. The skin here was smooth, and a harder callus sat where a sword's grip had worn into the ring finger. Jason would be on the train into the city about now, eight hours behind him and an ocean away, if any of that was still a direction he could reach. He had called on Sunday. I'm swamped, Dad. Soon. He set the cloth down on the rim of the basin, and the water rocked once and went still.
The smell of wet wool came off the cloak folded over the bench. Nick at the apartment window on a rainy evening, his younger son with a mug of cocoa leaving a ring on the sill he always meant to wipe and never had, two chairs turned the same way while the rain stitched the glass. He would be asleep now, on the coast, in a bed Michael had helped him move into a building whose hallway he had never seen past the front door. He pressed the heel of his hand against the edge of the table until the wood gave back a clean hard line against the bone.
Ellen came through with that particular laugh of hers, head thrown back, curls shaking, and he let her stay for a breath and then put her away because there was nothing he could do with her today. They had been divorced four years. Their last conversation had ended with catch up soon, the shape of it, both of them hearing it for what it was and neither saying so. He turned back to the basin and poured water from the pitcher over the blade and cloth and let them sit.
Alexios came with the clothes. He let the boy work. The night before he had watched him lay the layers out and tried to fix which order they went in; now, with him standing in the middle of the room, the hands and shoulders took over without being asked, lifting where the boy wanted them lifted, turning when the belt wanted turning. The outer tunic was heavy brocade and sat badly across the collarbone until Alexios adjusted it at the shoulder. He wound the belt twice and set the buckle to the left. The motion came back the way a song does when you hear the first two notes.
"Sphrantzes has asked for a word, Despot."
"Where?"
"The old treasury room, by the chapel passage."
He nodded, and Alexios bowed and went.
For a moment he stood with his palm to the window ledge. The light in the courtyard below was the colour of wet stone. A man was splitting wood against a block with the slow rhythm men use when they are not trying to finish quickly. Two dogs crossed the yard, nosed at a cart, moved on. Somewhere a bell gave a single stroke and stopped.
Theodore's letter lay on the table where he had put it yesterday. He read it through once more, folded it along the same creases, and slid it inside the breast of the tunic. The corridor outside the bedchamber smelled of damp wool and of a hearth that had been burning somewhere all night. A man in half-armour straightened from his post at the gallery corner and bowed as he passed. He let the body carry him. It took the dip it had given him at the window and turned him left at the chapel passage. The treasury door was heavy, iron-studded, propped half-open. He pushed it the rest of the way.
George Sphrantzes stood at a long table with a stack of papers in front of him and a cup of wine he had not drunk from. A lean man of about thirty, dark hair brushed back and neatly cut, a short beard kept close, the sort of face that listened before it spoke. Constantine's closest advisor and, from what the flashes kept offering him in the way of half-finished impressions, a close friend as well — which meant the man was his now too, whether he was ready for that or not. Sphrantzes looked up, came around the table, and bowed, not the full knee-to-stone courtier's bow, but a friend's bow with court manners laid over it.
"Despot."
"George."
His eyes held on Michael's face a half-beat longer than they needed to. There was relief there, and behind the relief something steadier that took his measure. He made himself meet it.
"You look better than you did yesterday," George said. "I take it the fever has passed."
"It has."
"Good." He did not move from where he stood. "Before the council, there are matters I would rather not first air in a hall."
"I thought there might be." He closed the door behind him. "Sit, George. You've been up since first bell, I'd wager."
George gave a small smile and sat. Michael took the chair across from him, reached inside the tunic, and laid Theodore's letter on the table between them, unfolded, the neat sharp hand turned toward him.
"Read it."
George looked at the letter, then at him, then took it up. His mouth did not move as he read. When he came to the end he set it back down and pressed the crease flat with two fingers.
"He does not approve."
"No."
"Plainly said." He sat back. "Did you write to him in the terms we discussed?"
"I wrote." He had no idea in what terms they had discussed it. He kept his voice even and let the rest fall away. "It was not enough. He wants Patras left alone until what we've taken is held properly. He thinks the household here isn't steady yet, and he says as much."
George nodded, slowly. He ran a finger along the edge of the letter, then took his hand back and folded it over the other in his lap.
"And your brother Thomas?"
"Thomas hasn't written since the last letter went out. He will, when he hears what Theodore says. I expect I'll have his answer in a fortnight, in a rather warmer tone."
A breath of air came in under the shutter. The candle on the table bent and came straight again. George picked up the cup he had not drunk from, looked into it, and set it down again without drinking.
"What will you say to him?"
He had turned it over half the night. Every time he opened the question, it shut on the same answer. He had no appetite for war. He did not yet know what world he had woken into, what a despot truly had at his back, what a siege in this age cost in men and bread, or what the roads between here and Patras looked like in March. A man who does not know the ground under his own feet has no business marching an army across it.
"I'll tell him he has to wait," he said. "Theodore's against. And I've come around to thinking Theodore has the right of it."
George went very still. His face thinned, a particular kind of stillness that was short of surprise. He did not speak for a breath or two.
"You have come around?"
"I have."
He lifted the cup and took a small swallow, and Michael had the sense he had wanted something to do with his hands.
"I would be lying," George said, "if I told you I was sorry to hear it."
"Say what you think, George."
He set the cup down. His voice stayed level. "Patras is a wound we could take, yes. The Latin archbishop has held that city against us for years now, and the port would be worth its weight in whatever you like to name. But the household here has been yours for less than two months. The men inside these walls haven't finished deciding what they think of you. Half the landholders in Elis still write Carlo Tocco's name when they mean the lord of Glarentza, and catch themselves afterwards. Put a siege in the field in the spring with that at your back, and if anything goes wrong, you come home to a country that isn't yours anymore. Theodore sees it. I have seen it." He stopped. "I have been trying to find a way to say so for a month."
"You might have said it a month ago."
"I might have. You were not in a mood to be said to."
That was fair. Fair for any man in love with a plan, whichever one of them that man was.
"Well, say it now and be done."
"I am done." He gave a small, dry smile. "I am relieved, Constantine. I will say that much. I was not looking forward to spring."
"Neither was I, in the end."
George looked at him for a second longer than he needed to, and Michael thought he was about to ask why the change — and thought he framed the question and set it aside. He gave a single nod instead, the way a man does when a matter is put in a drawer where it can be found again later.
"There will be Thomas to manage," he said.
"Yes."
"Do you want me to write to Kalavryta?"
"No. I'll write him myself. If the letter goes through you, he'll decide you talked me out of it, and the next fortnight will be unpleasant for both of us."
"Probably wise."
He drew his stack of papers toward him and tapped the edge of it straight against the wood. The gesture set them back into the business of the day. Michael liked that about him. He could not have said why.
"The council, then," he said.
"The council." George glanced once at the door and back. "The first of the lords came in last night. The rest are on the roads now and should be through the gate by midday. Seven in all. Two are Tocco's old men who came over with the dowry lands and are not yet certain how much of their old life they get to keep, so they will be quiet and watchful and speak only if spoken to. The rest are your own. I have set a map of Clermont's walls in the east hall, with the scouts' last report of the raids along the north road laid beside it. That is what they expect you to speak to first."
"Fortifications."
Fortifications. The outer rampart been neglected too long, and Clermont's where the villages run when the north road goes bad. Some want stone and mortar. Others want the men sent to the passes instead, and that's about their own lands, not the wall. You'll hear both, loud."
"And what do you want, George?"
He looked at him over the papers. "I want the wall mended. Men die in the passes in ones and twos, and the raid gets through anyway. Mend the wall once, it holds for ten years."
Michael nodded. "Before I decide, I'll walk the rampart myself today. The village below it too, and the road to Glarentza while it's still light out. Council sits tomorrow, after mass."
"I will tell the hall, and have horses ready within the hour." He gathered the papers and stood, and with his hand on the latch he stopped and turned back. "Despot."
"Yes."
"It is good to have you on your feet."
"Thank you, George."
He went out. Michael sat a moment longer with his palm flat on the table and looked at Theodore's letter, and then he folded it and put it away. Outside the door a servant began ringing the small bell that told the household the hour had turned. The sound went along the gallery and down into the courtyard, clear and thin in the cold air.