sweet. "He doesn't come anymore. I fear he was involved in something dangerous. He spoke of Michael Palaeologus, and a union with Rome, and how he wanted to save the city without either the bloodshed of war or the corruption of betrayal, but it would be almost infinitely difficult." John Lascaris frowned, the lines puckering his forehead and deepening the other lines of pain in his face. "Something happened to him, didn't it?"
There was no possibility of lying. "Yes, but I don't know what it truly was. I am trying to find out. Bessarion Comnenos was murdered, and Justinian was implicated in helping the man who did it. He is in exile in Judea."
John let out his breath in a sigh. It carried sorrow and infinite weariness. "I'm sorry. If he could have anything to do with that, then he did not find what he was seeking. I sensed that the last time he was here. He was different. It was in his voice. A disillusion."
"Disillusion?" she asked, leaning closer to him. "With the Church... or something else?"
"My dear friend," John said, shaking his head a fraction from side to side. "Justinian was looking for answers to questions of purpose and loneliness. He wanted reasons that made sense to our incomplete grasp. He would have been a better emperor himself than Bessarion Comnenos, and I think he knew that. But the throne would not have made him a better man. I'm not sure if he understood that also."
Emperor! Justinian? He must have misunderstood. "But he loved the Church," she insisted. "He would have fought for it!"
"Oh yes," he agreed. "He hungered to belong to it, to preserve its place, its rituals, its beauty, and above all its identity."
A new idea flared up in her mind. "Enough to die for it?"
"I cannot answer that," John replied. "No man knows what he will die for until the moment comes. Do you know what you would die for, Anastasius?"
She was taken aback. She had no answer.
He smiled. "What do you want of God? And what do you believe He wants of you? I asked Justinian that, and he did not answer me. I think he did not yet know what he believed."
"You said he loved the Church," she said softly. "Why the Orthodox, and not the Roman? They have beauty, too, and faith, and ritual. What did he believe in that he was willing to pay so much to keep it?"
"We love a familiar path," John said simply. "None of us like to be told what to think, what to do, by a stranger imposing his will from another land in another tongue."
"Is that all?"
"It is a great deal," he said with a small, weary smile. "There are not many certainties in life, not much that does not change, wither, deceive, or disappoint at some time or other. The sanctities of the Church are the only things I know of. Are not these things worth living or dying for?"
"Yes," she said immediately. "Did he find that... at least that hope?"
"I don't know," he answered, his voice sad and very lonely. "But I miss him." He looked tired, the strength gone from his voice, the sunken eye sockets more deeply shadowed.
"I am doing what I can to prove he was wrongly accused," she said impulsively. "If I succeed, they will have to pardon him and he will return."
"A cousin of a cousin?" He smiled at her.
"And a friend," she added. "I don't wish to tire you." She rose, frightened now in case she was tempted into betraying herself irreparably.
He lifted his hand in the old blessing. "May God light your path in the darkness, and comfort your aloneness in the cold of the night, Anna Lascaris."
The heat washed up her in a wave like fire, yet it was sweet, in spite of all the fear there should have been. He knew her; he had used her own name. For a long, terrible, wonderful moment, she was herself.
She leaned forward and touched his hand softly, a totally feminine gesture. Then she turned and walked to the door. The instant she was beyond it, she would resume her role.
When she had made the long journey back to Constantinople, saying nothing but the few civil words necessary to Vicenze, she called upon Zoe.
Anna stood in the same room as always, with its great golden cross on the wall and its magnificent view, and faced Zoe with a smile, tasting the moment.
"Were you able to save the good