“Liuprand the Droll. I might prefer your father yet. He never tried to make anybody laugh.”
The prince thinned his mouth. “Go on, Your All-Holiness.”
“Widsith’s men slaughtered the animal on the deck of a ship bound for this barbarian little place,” the Exarch said. “Since then, it has been butchered and cured, and kept in its preeminent barrel. You must have heard the cook say as much to you. I will not eat a bite of meat that was born on this island. I will not taint the vessel of God.”
“As you wish it.” The prince regarded the tray. “And you may haveyour meal in sacred isolation, but first I must invoke my rights as your sovereign.”
“My sovereign?” the Exarch repeated sourly. “My sovereign is the Dogaressa.”
“And the Dogaressa has sent you here to serve the royal family of Drepane.”
The prince had been standing halfway in the room, his knee holding the door ajar, and at this point he stepped inside fully, letting the door shut behind him. Now again the only light was from the incandescent altar, and from the gleam of one hundred and twenty candles gathered within the prince’s marvelously blue eyes.
The Exarch could have been staring directly into the lagoon of Seraph.
“What would you ask of me, then?” he barked. “Say it quickly.”
“Tomorrow you will climb down from your tower and bless my marriage.”
A marriage. Had a new Seraphine bride been smuggled to the island like the most precious plunder? Would she have hair the color of sun-drenched sand and carry the scents of rosewater and morning dew? The Exarch allowed himself to hope. He imagined breathing into the nape of a Seraphine woman’s neck, inhaling against the holy column of her throat.
“Tell me of her,” the Exarch said. “Your bride.”
“She is a noblewoman.”
“And?”
“And it is a profitable match,” the prince said.
Sitting so close to the candle flames, the Exarch’s meat had begun to sweat. “And? Can you lay no plaudits upon your betrothed? Do her manner and form not move you to poetry?”
“I am not Liuprand the Bard,” he replied. “You will be fetched at first light.”
The Exarch felt as though something was slipping away from him, something he was not even aware he had held at all until it was gone. Like water, pouring from the cracks in his wizened hands.
“Tell me her name,” the Exarch said. “Seraphine names are each themselves a psalm.”
The prince was silent for a long moment.
At last, he said, “My bride has no Seraphine name.”
“No,” the Exarch croaked, like some dull little frog. “It cannot be. No. God will not permit it.”
The prince said nothing, allowing the Exarch’s world to crumble down around him, allowing the Exarch to lie gasping in its ruins, choking on the ash of desolation, seizing with visions of a million matches, all burning to their ugly blackened ends.
“Iwill not permit it,” he said, speaking as a dead man.
But the prince’s mouth quivered into the slightest of smiles. “Do you not wish to partake in this civilizing mission? You will be the herald of Drepane’s new age.”
“She will poison you,” he rasped. “That viperess, that striga who will share your bed. She will suck the fine blood of Seraph and leave you a gray corpse. That is the aim of all women, all creatures, on this apostate island. You will allow yourself to be the vile serpent’s prey?”
He did not like this prince, this too-beautiful, too-canny prince. But he loved him, as a hungry man loves the last morsels of meat on the bone. He would worship at his feet, kiss him for the faint taste of morning dew on his mouth.
“You do not even know what you do not know,” the Exarch whispered. “I would cut out your eye to show you—how it is the precise color of Seraph’s waters. Liuprand the Last, they will call you. Worse than a Sluggard, leading your line to its demise. Do you not ponder your own condition? Do you not fear for the fate of your soul?”
“I ponder the condition of the island and the fate of all the souls upon it.”
A breath came out of the Exarch’s mouth. It was as cold as the murmur of a ghost.
