Kushiel's Chosen

fought at the Battle of Three Princes; he and dead Prince Rolande, and Benedicte de la Courcel. In my dream, I remembered his upright bearing, his handsome, aging gentleman-farmer's features, white teeth smiling and the smell of apples in the air, heavy and cloying.
    I woke gagging, breathed in the night air of La Serenissima, dank and foetid with canal water, and went back to sleep.
    In the morning I found waiting a summons to sing for the Doge.

THIRTY-EIGHT
    The Doge's private quarters were as hot and cloistered as the Room of the Shield in which he held his formal audiences. Braziers burned in every room, and the windows were hung with dense velvet drapery that kept out sunlight and air.
    For all that, Cesare Stregazza huddled in his robes of state, a woolen wrap edged in gold fringe thrown over his shoulders. Servants in Stregazzan livery came and went, bringing sweets, mulled wine with spices, the small lap-harp I requested, charcoal for the braziers, fresh candles, a pitcher of water drawn cool from the well, and their faces gleamed with sweat in the stifling quarters. Indeed, they made little effort to hide their discomfort and banged objects around with ill grace. A D'Angeline would have died of shame, to provide such poor service to a sovereign.
    I did my best to conceal my embarrassment, and played sweetly on the harp, singing a couple of familiar country lays. It is not a great gift of mine, but my voice holds true and no one leaves the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers without learning to sing and play with some measure of skill. The Doge listened, his hands clasped together beneath his woolen wrap, and the hooded old eyes in that quivering face watched his ill-mannered servants with a dark, ironic gleam.
    Me, he praised, and requested that I continue. I sang a haunting Alban air that I had learned from Drustan mab Necthana's sisters, alternating weaving threads of soprano and contralto as best I could. Truly, it called for a man's tenor in the mix, but I reckoned no one in La Serenissima would notice. Emboldened, I followed it with a humorous D'Angeline tune usually sung in rounds during a game of kottabos, about a wager between a courtesan and three suitors. The Doge laughed aloud as I sang the different roles, and I marked how his trembling diminished as he relaxed. Even the servants ceased their rude blundering about to listen, smiling at the sense of it though they did not know the words, and when they resumed their chores, it was with a greater measure of care.
    When I had done, I paused for a sip of water.
    Cesare Stregazza leaned back, watching my face. "Leave us, please," he said to the servants. When they had gone, he turned back to me. "Sing me the song that lulled the Master of the Straits, little Contessa."
    I glanced up, briefly surprised. The Doge knew more of me than I had known. I bowed my head in acquiescence, took up the harp once more, and sang. It is a hearth-song of the Skaldi, a song such as their women sing, and I learned it among them, during that long, cold winter I spent as a slave in Gunter's steading. There are Skaldic war-songs the world has heard, of battle and glory and blood and iron. This was a gentler, homelier tune, about the sorrow of the women waiting by the hearth-side and the death of a young warrior-husband, of mourning come too soon and children unborn while the snow falls unending and the wolf howls outside the door.
    I had not sung it since the day we first crossed the Straits, although I had written down the words for Thelesis de Mornay. I laid the harp aside when I finished.
    "Brava," Cesare Stregazza said softly. "Well done, my lady." He lifted his cup of mulled wine and sipped it, and his hand scarce trembled at all. "Five songs, sung in three tongues; three lands you have travelled, and Caerdicca Unitas a fourth. Ysandre de la Courcel had scarce warmed her precarious throne when she chose you to send to Alba, and Marco's spies would have it that she's cast you out for girlish spite?"
    "My lord Doge," I said deferentially. "Her majesty did not... cast me out. 'Tis a small misunderstanding, no more."
    His wrinkled lips curved in a wry smile. "Oh, aye, is it? My son is a canny man, but he's never sat a throne of state. You are the best kind of weapon there is, Phèdre nó Delaunay; the kind that appears but a charming adornment. No sitting monarch with a measure of sense would leave you lying about for some enemy's hand to pick up, no, and it is my impression