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that, but the women at court are too idle to make it themselves and too proud to admit their need of it. And that being so, they can hardly order their servants to make it for them. On the other hand, a visit to their old friend Antonina, a hint dropped, a gift given….”
    A sly look came into her eyes as she continued. “Does your mistress ever use it, I wonder? After all, it inflames ebbing passions. Perhaps that betrothed of hers has a wandering eye? Has he ever made any obscene suggestions to you, Vesta?”
    Vesta clenched her fists and began to wish she could poison Antonina to protect her mistress, or at the very least still the cold voice asking questions she had been ordered not to answer.

Chapter Six
    Duri ng the night a thunderstorm broke the oppressive heat.
    John and Cornelia were startled awake by the crack of a lightning bolt. The strike was near enough to rattle the lamp on the bedside table and the water clock in the corner. John leapt up in time to force the shutters closed against a gust of wind. Then the skies opened. He and Cornelia lay awake, watching flashes of light flicker through gaps between shutters and window frame and listening to rain lash at the brick facade of the house.
    John could imagine sheets of water racing along the streets, wisps of straw, rotting vegetables, animal droppings, and other debris swirling and eddying into corners and soaking baked mud to a soft, clinging consistency. As the air cooled, he and Cornelia drew closer together.
    Around dawn John rolled reluctantly away from her warmth. Pulling on a light tunic, he went to the window and opened the shutters. Crows strutted around the square dragging long shadows behind them, pausing to peck at morsels washed there by the night’s downpour. Their eyes glistened like the wet cobbles.
    “I count nine,” John told Cornelia, as he turned away from the window. “Nine for the Deofil’s own self.”
    “Deofil?” Cornelia sat up in bed.
    “It’s the way they say ‘devil’ in parts of Bretania.”
    Cornelia ran a hand through her tousled hair and gave John a quizzical look. “Those crows are predicting the devil?”
    “It’s not much of a trick. Constantinople has always been full of them.”
    “That’s why we should move to that estate in Greece, the one you plan to retire to. I wish you were leaving the city with me today for good. Maybe the crows are telling you it’s time go.” She had let the sheet fall away and sat worrying at a knot in her hair. She smiled at him to show that her remarks had been meant teasingly.
    A shaft of morning light draped itself from her shoulder, across her breasts, and settled against the rumpled sheets under her thighs. John felt a momentary tightness in his chest, no different than he had felt seeing her in the light of dawn decades earlier when he was a young mercenary.
    He tried not to dwell on that other life.
    Cornelia said, “You remember after we had news that Europa was pregnant we walked in the garden and you saw four crows and told me that our grandchild would be a boy, because the rhyme said four was for a boy?”
    “We shall soon know if the crows are accurate.”
    “The day Theodora died I saw a single crow sitting on the fountain in our garden. One for sorrow, you said. But how many people were sorry Theodora was gone? I wasn’t.”
    “Perhaps the prediction was not for you. Perhaps the crow was meant to be seen by someone else. By Peter.”
    “What? Would Peter feel sorrow over Theodora?”
    “Maybe he is destined to overcook tomorrow’s diner. That would make him unhappy.”
    Cornelia had finished with her hair but she made no effort to get off the bed. “What a funny rhyme for you to carry around in your head, here in the capital so far from its home. It seems out of place.”
    “Like the head it is carried in,” John said. A secret Mithran serving a Christian emperor, the son of a Greek farmer, former mercenary, former slave, a man who had traversed the