"So do I," Krispos said. Then her lips silenced him.

Krispos woke, yawned, stretched, and rolled over onto his back. Dara was sitting up in bed beside him. By the look of her, she'd been awake for some time. Krispos sat up, too. He glanced at where sunbeams hit the far wall. "Phos!" he exclaimed. "What hour is it, anyway?"

"Somewhere in the fourth, I'd say—more than halfway to noon," Dara told him. The Videssians gave twelve hours to the day and another twelve to the night, reckoning them from sunrise and sunset respectively. Dara gave him a quizzical look. "What do you suppose you were doing last night that left you so tired?"

"I can't imagine," Krispos said, only partly in irony. He'd grown up a peasant, after all, and what labor was more exhausting than farming? Yet he'd risen with the sun every day. On the other hand, he'd gone to bed with the sun, too, and he'd been up considerably later than that the night before.

Yawning again, he got up, ambled over to the bureau to put on some drawers, then opened a tall wardrobe, picked out a robe, and pulled it on over his head. Dara watched him bemusedly. He was reaching for a pair of red boots when she asked, "Have you forgotten you have a vestiarios to help you with such things?"

He paused. "As a matter of fact, I did," he said sheepishly. "That was foolish of me, wasn't it? But it's also foolish for Barsymes to help me just because I'm Avtokrator. I didn't need his help before." As if to defy custom, he tugged on his own boots.

"It's also foolish not to let Barsymes do his job, which is to serve you," Dara said. "If you don't allow him to perform his proper function, then he has none. Is that what you want?"

"No," Krispos admitted. But having done entirely without service most of his life, and having given it first as groom in Iakovitzes' and Petronas' stables, then as Anthimos' vestiarios, he still felt odd about receiving it.