“He was in love,” the king explained.
“With whom?” Attolia asked.
The king laughed. “You.”
She said nothing, but her cheeks grew pink as she sat in a chair near the bed. “That is a joke?” she asked at last.
The entire court knew that Erondites’s older son was in love with the queen. The entire country knew it. Costis suspected it was common knowledge as far as Sounis.
“That is ridiculous,” she said.
The king agreed. “Like falling in love with a landslide. Only you could fail to notice.”
She shook her head in disbelief and started to speak. But before she did, she looked from face to face at the other people in the room and observed the truth reflected there. Her cheeks grew pinker. She turned back to the king.
He said, “Sejanus and his brother pretended to dislike each other. It kept Sejanus in his father’s good graces, and Dite above suspicion and therefore able to be close to you, at least until I stepped in to claim you. Sejanus was jealous of me on his brother’s behalf. He hoped that if I were dead, you might come to accept Dite’s love for you.”
“The difficulty with Dite that you two have settled,” she said thoughtfully, disbelieving the conclusion she had reached. “You were jealous…of Dite?”
The king, the master of the fates of men, before their eyes was reduced to a man, very young himself, and in love. Picking again at the coverlet, he answered, with his eyes cast down, “Wildly.”
The queen’s lips thinned, and her eyes narrowed, but even her control was not equal to the task, and she had to lift her hand to cover her smile and then duck her head. Her shoulders shook slightly as she laughed.
“I shall throw something at you,” the king warned loftily. “You are embarrassing me in front of my attendants.”
The queen lifted her head, but kept her hand in place a moment more. When she lowered it, she was almost serene. “As if you cared,” said the queen. With an observing eye, she added, “You’re tired.”
“Yes,” he admitted, and this was clearly the truth.
There was more color in his face than could be accounted for with a blush. She lifted a hand to lay on his forehead, but he leaned out of reach.
“Go away,” he said.
“As your wishes are clear, I will,” she murmured, and rose. “You will send them away and sleep now?”
“Yes.”
She bent to kiss him and was gone.
As if you cared.
If the attendants had felt chagrined, horrified, or foolish before, they were now feeling very, very small.
“One of you go get me some clothes,” said the king.
“A nightshirt and your robe, Your Majesty, right away.”
“I said clothes.” The king sighed and rubbed his face. He did look tired. “The new blue silk from the tailor’s. Pick something to go with it.” There was a subtle warning in the words.
“Yes, Your Majesty.” One attendant bobbed his head and started for the door.
The king turned to Costis. “Go get a squad ready to escort me.”
Philologos protested naively, “You said you were going to rest.”
The king only flicked a glance in his direction. “I lied.”
After Costis had informed the squad on duty in the queen’s guardroom, he waited, watching the attendant hurry past with the king’s clothes. Another headed out carrying a message. A short time later the king himself appeared, trailing worried attendants.
Hilarion stepped faster, passing the king. Once ahead of him, and between the king and the door, he stopped and turned around to ask bluntly, “Where are we going, Your Majesty?”
The king tilted his head and looked up at him through narrowed eyes. Hilarion swallowed, but the king chose to give him an answer. “So far today I have pardoned people I would have preferred to exile, exiled the only member of this court that I like, and imprisoned for life a man I would have preferred to execute. I am going to the palace prison to indulge myself. I think I deserve it. You may stay here.”
“No!” A little too loud. “I mean, please, no, Your Majesty. We should be with you.” Or the queen would have their heads, thought Costis.
“I will have my guards with me. They are sufficient.”
“Your Majesty.” It was Philologos. “We are your attendants, aren’t we?” His expression was equal amounts pleading and resignation.
The king rolled his eyes, but gave in. “Three of you may come.”
He left it to them to choose. Hilarion and Sotis, now that Sejanus was gone, were the two obvious choices. Costis was a little surprised when Philologos also stepped forward and even more surprised when the other attendants backed down. The three followed the king out the door.
Costis hesitated, then followed them. He’d been told by the queen to stay with the king until dismissed and he hadn’t been dismissed.
They reached the grand staircase that led down four levels to the ground. The king glared at the steps in front of him.
“If we may assist you, Your Majesty?” Hilarion offered.
“You may not.”
Putting his hand on the marble railing, he went down. He moved slowly, without any obvious sign of difficulty, but Costis noted that the king was sweating by the time he reached the ground floor.
They crossed the palace and circumnavigated the kitchens to reach a stairwell that led down to the palace prison. The prison was entirely underground and lay beneath the courts between the palace and the stables and hound pens. The hound pens probably smelled better, Costis thought. He hated it down here.
At the bottom of the stairwell the guard sat on a three-legged stool. He didn’t rise until he saw the king, and then did so with barely concealed reluctance. With insulting leisure, he led the way into the prison. The chief of the prison guards, in their guardroom, bowed to the king, looked at the hook at the end of the king’s arm, and hid his smile. It seems he knew which prisoner the king was seeking.
“This way, Your…Majesty.”
By stepping forward as the prison keeper opened the cell door, Costis blocked the king until two of his own guards had gone in, and he had stepped in himself, but the prisoner was no danger. He was chained to the stone bench on which he lay, and the chains, like the guards, were a superfluous security. The cell stank of cess and vomit, and the prisoner hadn’t moved when the door opened, not even to turn his head. The growth of his beard covered his chin, and the bruises obscured the rest of his face. His arms lay across his chest, one hand swollen and black. The fingers were like grotesque sausages, and Costis looked away. There was a cloak bundled behind him. Perhaps it had been used as a blanket at one time, but the prisoner lay now without it. Recognizing the fabric, Costis was stunned.
He looked more carefully at the man lying on the bench. Even knowing who he was, Costis saw no sign of the assured Secretary of the Archives in the battered and bruised face, but bunched behind him was undeniably what remained of Relius’s elegant cloak.
Costis stepped aside to let the king enter and took his place by the doorway.
“A chair,” said the king. He considered the prisoner and then turned to Philologos. “And some water. Get it from the kitchen.”
Philologos hurried out the door.
The chair was brought, and the prison guard set it beside the king with a flourish.
“If there is anything else you desire, Your—”
“I desire”—the king interrupted in a level voice—“never again to see your living face.”
The smug condescension of the prison keeper wavered as he backed out the door. The attendants exchanged knowing glances. Eugenides sat in the chair that had been brought and leaned back carefully. “So, Relius,” he said finally, “are you ready to discuss the resources of your queen?”
It was a curious question, like an echo without a source. As if Relius had once asked the king the same question and the king was casting it back to him. Costis felt a chill travel down his spin
e.
A sound came from the figure lying so still in his chains. “I thought you would come somewhat sooner for your revenge,” Relius whispered.
“I’ve been indisposed.”
“I heard. One does hear things, even down here.”
“I remember.” The king looked around the cell as if reacquainting himself. “It was a room very much like this. I don’t remember a bunk, but maybe I just didn’t see it. Does she know that you came back to question me after she left?”
Costis swallowed, feeling more uneasy with each passing moment. Relius had questioned the king. When he had been a prisoner of Attolia, Relius had pressed him for information about the Queen of Eddis.
I am going to the palace prison to indulge myself. I think I deserve it.
Costis exchanged a glance with the rest of the guards in the cell. They were veterans. They’d seen this sort of thing before. They didn’t want to be here either.
Relius shook his head almost imperceptibly. “She didn’t want to know then.”
“And you weren’t foolish enough to tell her later?”
“No. Though she will have guessed.”
“Did I tell you anything?” the king asked conversationally.
Costis shuddered from head to toe.
“No,” Relius said. “You begged in demotic. You babbled in archaic. I would have pressed you harder, but I was afraid you would die. She didn’t want you dead.” The Secretary of the Archives finally turned his head to look at the king. “I wish I’d killed you.”
“Brave words, Relius.”
“No one here is brave. Just stupid. Did you come to hear me beg? I will. I have. You know the words.” The tears rose in his eyes, and his voice weakened. “Please don’t hurt me anymore. Please. Please, no more.”
The king turned his face away.
“I don’t know,” Relius whispered, “if I was ever brave. But if I’d known that you would come back, I would have killed you then.”
“If you had only known that I would end up here and you there? What a surprise it must be after all your years of service to the queen.”
“No surprise that I am here. Only that you are here as well. Do you think I didn’t know, from the very beginning, that this was where I must end?”
“Would you have served her if you did?” the king asked.
“Gladly,” snarled the secretary, and had to pant for breath, having disturbed the equilibrium of his body’s pain and his tolerance of it.
The king leaned forward then, and Relius cried out, but the king only slid his hand under Relius’s head to lift it while he used the hook to pull the cloak forward. He laid Relius’s head back down on the makeshift pillow.
Philologos came back with a skin jug in his hand.
Sotis took it from him, and, following the king’s indications, he bent to tip it into Relius’s mouth. The secretary swallowed once. Before he could swallow again, the king said confidently, “You must hate her now.”
Relius’s eyes rolled. He looked at the king and deliberately spat out the precious water. He struggled to lift his head, so that he could look the king in the eye. “If I were here for fifty years,” he said, gasping, “and she released me, I would crawl, if that was all I could do, to her feet to serve her.”
The king shook his head in amusement and disbelief. “That is impossible. After what she has done to you?”
“It is what I taught her to do.”
“So you would serve her still?”
“Yes.”
His amusement and his disbelief wiped away, the king leaned closer.
“So would I.” He spoke so quietly that Costis had to strain to hear the words. It was too much for Relius to take in. He only stared.
“What do you want from me?” he whispered. The tears rolled from the corners of his eyes. “You are here for your revenge. I cannot stop you. So take it. Whatever you want you can take. No one can stop you.”
“I want you to believe me.”
“No.” His breathing was ragged as he fought to suppress sobs that would rack his already aching body. His face twisted in pain.
The king was at the edge of the seat, leaning close to Relius’s ear. Costis couldn’t hear what he said next, but he heard Relius cry out. “What difference does it make what I believe when I will be dead soon, like Teleus?”
The king sat back, making a face at the pain in his side. “Then there is something you haven’t heard. She pardoned Teleus.”
“Liar,” Relius cried. “Liar.”
“Well, yes, I am,” the king agreed, turning his head to listen to the sound of footsteps approaching in the passage. “However, this is one truth I can prove. Unless I miss my guess, and I doubt that I could, the angry footsteps currently stamping toward us belong to the captain himself.”
The king was correct. It was the captain and a squad of guards. He came through the door and stopped just behind the king’s chair.
He didn’t speak. He reached around the king’s shoulder to offer him a folded paper.
“Let me guess,” said the king. “My queen has transferred Enkelis and reinstated you, and your first task is to get me back to bed?”
He opened the paper with one hand, spreading it across his knee, and read the message it contained.
He smiled down at it.
“I will spare you, Teleus, the difficulty of attempting to conduct me bodily back to bed. You can finish what I have begun here, instead.”
Teleus flinched in horror and disgust. He looked across the cell to Relius, and the shock on his face faded into grief. Relius looked back without hope. Teleus was alive because the king had interceded on his behalf, and he knew where his duty lay. “I am at your service, Your Majesty,” Teleus said, sickened.
Eugenides got out of his chair in order to turn around fully, so that he could see Teleus’s face. “You misunderstand me, Captain. I am pardoning him.”
Teleus, who had faced his failures and his death and the death of his friend and accepted his own salvation at the hand of a man he despised, ran out of the strength to accept any more. He contradicted the king. “Her Majesty has condemned him.”
Eugenides, wounded and tired and surrounded by the walls and the stench of the prison where he had lost his hand, responded, not mocking but snarling, “Am I king?”
The way a crack in the face of a dam widens with accelerating speed, letting more and more water surge through, Teleus’s voice rose with every word until he was shouting loud enough to be heard across a parade ground, the deep profundo painful in the small cell. “Do you think that matters?” he bellowed. “Do you really imagine it is your orders taken here?”
What else he shouted was lost, its meaning obliterated as the king shouted back, equally impassioned and incomprehensible, their words ricocheting against the walls and clashing into meaningless noise that made Costis long to cover his ears. If Teleus swelled with rage, the king burned with it. No matter that Teleus was nearly a head taller than the king, if Teleus meant to overwhelm him with his physical presence, he failed. Like a feral cat against a barnyard dog, the king stood his ground, and the two shouted until Teleus caught sight of the Secretary of the Archives. Relius had turned his head away, trying hopelessly to shut out the sound. Abruptly Teleus fell silent, letting the king’s last words ring uncontested.
“I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT!”
The prison keeper chose an inopportune moment to look around the doorway into the cell. He and the king locked gazes, and the king’s eyes narrowed while the prison keeper’s widened. Then the angry flush in the king’s cheeks faded away. He let the queen’s message drop from his hand, his face as white as the paper it was written on. He reached for the chair, and his hook banged awkwardly over the top of it. He was swaying as he turned to catch his balance with his remaining hand. Philologos was nearest and raised his hands to help, but backed away. They waited. The king held the chair, stared into invisible space, and slowly his color came back. He started to speak twice, an
d stopped. He experimented with a small breath, then took a deeper one, and finally spoke without turning his head.
“I don’t care whose orders you think you are following, Captain, but you will see that Relius is moved to the palace infirmary and some physician, other than the butcher down here, treats him. Get Petrus. I will take your squad with me. You may keep mine. Send Costis to his bed before he falls over.”
He waited to see if Teleus was going to argue.
It was Relius who spoke from where he lay, his voice thready but defiant.
“You cannot buy my loyalty.”
The king made a noise too harsh to be a laugh. He stepped around the chair, and holding his side with his left arm, he leaned close to the secretary. “You said no one down here was brave.” He lifted his hook near Relius’s face. Relius closed his eyes tightly, and the king ruefully withdrew it. Painfully he crouched down until his knees were on the filthy floor and one elbow was supporting him on the bench. He lifted his hand away from his side, lifted it to Relius’s face, brushed the sticking hair off his forehead, and said, speaking very gently, so that a man exhausted and in pain could understand, “You are pardoned, Relius, because I want you to be. Not because I want your loyalty.” He waited while the words sank in. “You can retire to a farm in the Gede Valley and keep goats, and be loyal to whomever you want. I don’t care.
“You are pardoned. Do you understand?”
Relius’s head nodded a fraction. Eugenides brushed his hand across the secretary’s forehead one more time. His words were still gentle, but he smiled as he said, “Don’t let Petrus put in too many stitches. They hurt like hell.”
He got to his feet slowly, but he didn’t make a sound. His attendants twitched, but didn’t offer to assist. The king stepped across the cell toward the door, his left leg moving slower than the right, making his steps uneven, his left arm pressed against his side. As he passed Teleus, he didn’t look at him.
“Her Majesty charged me with your safe return to bed,” Teleus said stiffly.
“I am going directly there. When you have seen Relius to a comfortable bed, you may tell Her Majesty so.”