Page 42 of Sword Dance

He’d had lovers in the army, on and off, but they had all been taken from him, one way or another, by battle or illness or promotion and transfer to different legions. He had twice almost been married—once in Pheme, a match that fell through when his father’s debts were revealed, and once in Zash, at what had been nearly the end of everything. It had been a long time since he thought in terms of having exactly what he wanted.

Varazda wasn’t anything that he had ever imagined wanting.

More than that, he didn’t even know what loving Varazda could mean. One couldn’t marry him, and he wasn’t a soldier. What his life in Boukos was like, Damiskos had no idea. Perhaps he already had someone to share it with; perhaps he didn’t want anyone.

These thoughts occupied Damiskos in the bath, so that when he emerged, clean and dressed for dinner, he was in something of a fog of misery. He nearly collided with Nione in the corridor outside the bath.

“Oh! I beg your pardon,” they both said at the same time.

He looked at her. She was trying to take control of her expression and smile at him, but it was clear she was seething with anger, almost in tears with it.

“What is it?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

She struggled with herself for a moment before unclenching her hands from her skirt and letting out a shaky breath. “It’s the students. I can’t stand them. I want them out of my house. I’m only putting up with them because Eurydemos is family and was disinherited and all that—I’m beginning to think I can’t even do that much longer.”

“Oh, Nione, I’m so sorry. And—I have to admit I’m … relieved.”

She stared at him for a moment, and then her eyes widened. “You thought maybe I’d been seduced by their … their poisonous twaddle?”

“I didn’t think you could have changed that much,” he said hastily. “But then, I suppose people sometimes do.”

“You’ve changed a lot,” she countered, but not unkindly. “You were always serious, but not always sad.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that except, eventually, “You’re right.”

She gestured him into a room on the other side of the hallway and closed the door behind them. It was one of the rooms being decorated, empty except for a rough bench spattered in paint and plaster. She dusted this off a little, and they sat down.

“No,” she said, “I haven’t taken up philosophy, or—or horrible notions about Phemian purity. Blessed Anaxe. Not at all. I just had the bad judgement to allow myself to fall in love with a philosopher’s student.”

He looked at the patterns sketched on the floor by the mosaicist, curling vegetation around the edge of the room, below the newly painted walls.

“Phaia?” he guessed.

“Yes. You’ve known that about me all along, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

She let out a breath of what sounded like relief. “Oh, Damiskos, I was so afraid you were another one here hoping to marry me. I know you’d make a wonderful husband for someone, but I’ve never wanted a man, and we would be miserable.”

“I thought you might have been afraid of that. I should have said something sooner.”

“Oh no, it’s too awkward a thing to say, isn’t it?”

He didn’t disagree. “So what happened with Phaia?”

“Well, she’s the real reason I invited the students here. I met her in the city when I visited Eurydemos at the Marble Porches, and she … she was very charming, and I liked her.”

“Of course.”

“I thought it would be really enchanting to have her here, with her fellow students, talking philosophy.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t as I’d imagined it, even in the beginning, and then … ” Her voice trailed off. “And I’m awfully worried about Aristokles, because—Damiskos, you weren’t to know this, but he was here on a secret mission.”

Damiskos looked up in surprise. “I did know that. I didn’t know you knew it. He told you?”

“No, the friend who asked me to invite him explained that it was important state business—to do with Eurydemos’s school in Boukos. They suspect his students of being involved in something criminal. I didn’t like the idea of inviting someone to spy on my kinsman while he was a guest in my house—it sounds almost blasphemous when I put it like that, and perhaps it was, but by the time the letter with the request arrived … ”

She stopped, pushed her hands back over her hair. “Eurydemos and his students had been here a week by then, and were talking about setting up a school in my house, as if they had a right to it, and … I wrote back saying Aristokles could come, and sent it on the postal ship on its return journey, the same day.

“Then of course I couldn’t tell the students to leave, because Aristokles had to do his job—but he was behaving so suspiciously. I actually had to encourage him to court me, Damiskos, so people would think that was what he was doing here. I didn’t actually tell him to do it, but I might as well have—the idea certainly came from me—and of course that quickly got out of hand.