“Our prince wishes to know why a man would decline an invitation to eat with him. So we have come looking for the farmer who won the amphora at the city today to ask him why he left so hastily. Are you that farmer?” He was looking pointedly at the amphora in Gerosthenes’s hand.
This was a difficulty indeed. Standing in the deep twilight by the road, Klimun racked his brains for a story to tell. Perhaps there was a shrewish wife who wanted him home. Perhaps she didn’t know he’d left and he must make it back to his farm before she was undeceived. At all cost, he must think of a reason not to go back to the prince. He didn’t notice that since they had paused to look for the old woman’s coins, the evening had grown not darker, but brighter. The moon had come up, it had cleared the horizon behind him, but Klimun didn’t see it, and he never thought of the bargain he had made with the goddess of the moon.
“Phresine,” said Eugenides, looking uncomfortable. “I should have stipulated a story with a happy ending. I don’t like this one. Tell me a different one.”
Phresine ignored him. The king set his jaw, but he listened.
Now, Gerosthenes, standing with the amphora in his arms, was facing the horizon where the moon had crept into the sky. He remembered Klimun’s promise, but what could he do? Klimun had gathered himself to speak. His mouth was open, and the words were on their way from heart to tongue. Gerosthenes could hardly shout, “My prince, don’t lie.” Horrified, he knew there was nothing he could say.
“Phresine…” The king looked genuinely unhappy. Costis didn’t believe for a moment there had ever been a real Klimun, or a real Gerosthenes. He looked at Phresine for some understanding of the king’s distress, but Phresine was looking into space and seemed unaware of the king’s unhappiness.
“So,” she said, “Gerosthenes hit Klimun over the head with the amphora.”
“Ha,” the king snorted in relief. Phresine affected not to notice this any more than his earlier distress. She continued.
Well, this was a surprise to more people than Klimun. It was the Prince Atos himself who nudged his horse forward from the back of the group of horsemen and asked why Klimun’s friend had wasted an amphora of their best wine on Klimun’s head.
Klimun was wondering that himself. He looked at Gerosthenes, who looked at the moon. Klimun followed his gaze and turned to see the moon over his shoulder.
“I see that you are enlightened,” said the young prince. “Do please enlighten us as well.”
Seeing no other choice before him, Klimun did so. “My friend has most earnestly recommended that I remember a vow I have taken never to lie by moonlight, and to tell you truthfully that I am Klimun, Basileus of Kathodicia, that I came here in secret to see the new prince of this city and judge him by his behavior among his people.”
“And what was your judgment?” the young prince asked.
“You are proud, but fair, and I do not think you are a warmonger.”
“I’m flattered,” said the prince.
“You may be flattered, but I am no flatterer,” said Klimun, “at least not by moonlight.”
“Then I think you are what my father said I should value above all others, a man I can trust, and we should be allies,” said the prince.
“Then I would be both flattered and honored,” said Klimun, “but I am not sure that I am worthy of your trust.” Humbly he turned to the old woman, still standing nearby, and said, “Goddess, I have broken my promise to you. If not for the action of my friend, I would have lied. I believe your olives and my city are forfeit,” he said sadly.
“You told no lie,” said the goddess, for goddess she was, as both Gerosthenes and Klimun had realized.
“But I would have lied.”
“Your friend prevented you.”
“Yes.” Klimun agreed, but saw only that he had been tried and found wanting.
“If you were not the man you promised to be, all these years, he would not have been your friend, here in your moment of need. I do not think the moonlight has uncovered anything it should not have seen,” she said gravely, and then she was gone, leaving Klimun very relieved and a group of horsemen awaiting an explanation.
“Thank you, Phresine,” said the king, humbly.
“Thank me by eating some more soup and sleeping for a while.”
“Will there be poppy juice in it?”
Phresine shook her head.
“Good. My wife and I agreed that only my wine was to be poisoned.”
Phresine went to fetch him more soup.
By the time the king had eaten a little, he admitted he was tired and slept again. Costis was grateful. In the late afternoon, the queen came to sit with the king and sent Costis to the guardroom. Teleus arrived with the change of the guard and told Costis he could go.
The air was heavy as Costis crossed the large open courtyard behind the public rooms of the palace. Costis stifled a yawn, surprised at how tired he could feel after doing nothing all day. From the courtyard, he cut through the breezeway that connected the front part of the palace to the complicated collection of buildings that made up the residential portion of the palace for the court. There was a passage at the east end that bypassed the public rooms and led to a terrace. From the terrace, one could go by steep staircases down to the barracks and the training grounds of the Royal Guard.
Sleepy and hot, he stepped around the broken pieces of several roof tiles that must have fallen from somewhere high above the terrace. There was a crash like a crockery jar exploding behind him, and he jumped forward out of the way of the next batch of tiles that slid down. He looked back at the mess on the terrace, thought longingly of an afternoon nap, and went instead to report the fall to the palace secretary in charge of roofs.
Thoroughly awake after that, and hungry, he headed for the mess hall. The guard who had sat at his left earlier in the day was sitting at a table alone, and he waved for Costis to join him. Costis, after pouring himself a glass of wine, did so.
Domisidon, sitting nearby, looked up, saw Costis, and said, “The king’s lapdog arrives.”
The guard beside Costis laughed, then stopped. “I’m sorry, Costis, it isn’t your fault. What happens to you now, do you know?”
Costis thought. “I have no idea. I was pretty much done being a fake lieutenant. I thought they might farm me out to a border fort—maybe when Prokep came down from the north. I guess that might still happen.”
“But you’ve saved the king’s life?”
“Not really,” said Costis. “He mostly did that himself.”
“Of course. I forgot.”
They thumped him on the shoulder and elbowed him good-naturedly. But there was something behind the good nature, not condescension, commiseration perhaps. He didn’t want to ask outright what they meant by their pity. He was afraid he knew the answer, and he didn’t like it. Costis excused himself and went to look for Aristogiton.
In the night, Relius woke, gripped by sudden terror. The infirmary around him was dark, the high ceilings lost beyond the glimmer of the night candle by his bed, the heavy air around him silent. Under the light pressure of the sheet and thin blanket, he was rigid with fear, and he had to close his eyes to fight the impulse to thrash his way free of the covers, of the bed, and of the infirmary. There was no escape, no hope of escape. It was an emotion beyond rational thought, and not until the king spoke did Relius realize he was not alone.
“It’s the dog watch of the night,” the king said softly.
Relius gasped and opened his eyes to see the king sitting in the low chair near the foot of the bed. As he watched, the king stood, and hooked the chair with his foot to slide it closer to Relius’s head and sat again.
His statement seemed at first irrelevant, but it wasn’t. The dog watch of the night was a bad time for those haunted by nightmares. The king had to know that for himself.
Relius lifted his head briefly. The king turned to follow his gaze to the silent group of attendants near the door. He turned back to look down at R
elius with a bitter smile that was gone almost as soon as it appeared and was replaced by an expression of surprising calm. He sat quietly by the bed as Relius, through sheer willpower, steadied his breathing and relaxed his body. The darkness around them became slowly less threatening.
“Why save me, Your Majesty?” Relius asked softly.
“You think it was a mistake?”
Relius opened his mouth and shut it again.
“You want to say yes and no at the same time,” the king guessed.
“I am having trouble separating my own self-interest from that of my queen,” Relius admitted, sounding a little pedantic and apologetic about it.
“You sound like Sounis’s magus. He had a similar problem once.”
“The risk that you take is too great,” Relius said, “and you gain nothing by pardoning me.”
“The greatest risk was to the queen, and the risk lay in your death, not your pardon.”
Relius puzzled over this, and the king gave in to exasperation.
“You don’t know what I mean. She is so strong, and you assume that strength has no end, no breaking point. You and Teleus are among the few she still trusts enough to love, and you say yes, she should have you tortured and killed. What were you thinking?”
“If she pardons people because she loves them, someday someone that she loves will betray her and all of Attolia with her. A queen must make sacrifices for the common good,” Relius said.
“And if what she sacrifices is her heart? Giving it up a piece at a time until there is nothing left? What do you have then, Relius, but a heartless ruler? And what becomes of the common good then?”
“The queen could never be heartless.”
“No,” said the king. “She would die herself, Relius, or lose her mind first and then her heart. Could you not see it happening? Or is your faith in her strength really so blind? Everyone has a breaking point. Yet you never stop demanding more of her.”
Relius was quiet while he thought. “And yours? I thought we found your breaking point.”
Eugenides winced, but he responded with a self-deprecating noise. “Ornon says, Ornon-who-always-has-something-to-say says, the Thieves of Eddis don’t have breaking points. We have flash points instead, like gunpowder. That’s what makes us dangerous.”
“You don’t like Ornon,” said Relius.
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“Because you don’t like to speak the truth?”
Eugenides made a wry face. “Ornon and I have a great deal of hard-won respect for each other,” said the king.
“Won how?”
“Well, he almost managed to avert a war. I’ve heard he did a splendid job of working the queen up to killing me on the spot when she caught me. If it hadn’t been for the Mede Ambassador’s timely and provoking interruption, I would have been safely dead, and there wouldn’t have been a great deal of blood shed.”
“You’ve heard?” Relius asked.
“I wasn’t there for Ornon’s part.”
He’d been puking on the wet floor of a cell of the queen’s prison. Not far from where Relius himself had been.
“Ornon’s respect for you?” Relius asked, taking the conversation back to a less perilous topic.
The king only smiled. “Even ex-Thieves don’t spill their secrets, Relius.”
He left a little later. Relius lay alone with his thoughts. What kind of man, he wondered, referred to himself as “safely dead”?
The king, passing through the guardroom and back to the queen’s bedroom, asked, “Where’s Costis?”
“He was released at the end of the afternoon watch.”
“By whom? I didn’t give him leave to go.”
“The queen sent him to the guardroom, Your Majesty.”
“Then why isn’t he here?”
“The captain dismissed him at the end of the afternoon watch.”
“I want him.”
“The captain?”
“No, you idiot—” He broke off as the queen appeared in a doorway opposite. “You’re awake,” he said.
“Phresine is not,” pointed out the queen.
“Oh?”
“You gave her lethium.”
“She gave it to me first.”
The queen looked at him, eyes narrowed, and said nothing. He waved at his attendants. “I dragged them like a ball and chain all the way across the palace and back.”
“If sterner measures are called for, we can find a larger ball and chain.” The queen turned and disappeared into the apartment.
“Oh, dear,” Eugenides muttered as he followed, without sending for Costis after all. The queen’s sterner measures, dispensed by the Eddisian Ambassador, arrived before dawn.
Costis wasn’t in uniform, he wasn’t even particularly clean, when he learned the next morning that he had been sent for. He had checked the duty schedule the evening before when he was hunting for Aristogiton and couldn’t find him. Aris had been on duty. Costis was assigned no duties for the foreseeable future, and he had enjoyed a quiet morning pottering around in his own room, giving his sword and breastplate and the assorted shiny bits of his uniform a thorough cleaning. He had polishing grease on his nose and his fingers were black when someone slid back the leather curtain across his doorway without knocking on the door frame first.
When Costis lifted his head from the sword he was cleaning, prepared to be angry at the intrusion, he found no lowly barracks boy in the doorway. It was Ion, one of the king’s elegant and carefully turned-out attendants.
Ion, looking far from elegant, stared at him in horror. “Get dressed. Get clean. You are supposed to be in the queen’s guardroom.”
“When?” asked Costis, getting to his feet.
“Now,” said the attendant, “hours ago. You were supposed to be there when the king asked for you just now. He said he wanted you last night, but we didn’t think he meant it.”
“And now he’s angry?”
“Now the queen is angry.”
Moving fast, Costis tipped water from a pitcher into a bowl and began to scrub his face.
The queen was waiting in the antechamber to the bedroom. As before, she had Ornon with her. They were both waiting. She stood as Costis entered. No, Costis thought, she didn’t stand. She rose—like a thundercloud towering in the summer sky. He could try to explain that he hadn’t known he was supposed to remain on duty, and that he’d been dismissed by the captain himself. He could also rush back to the guardroom, snatch his sword out of the rack, and throw himself down on it. Likely with the same results.
“You will not leave the apartment without royal permission,” commanded the queen. “You will eat and sleep here. You will remain in the king’s presence until he dismisses you, and you will endeavor in every way to ingratiate yourself sufficiently that he does not dismiss you.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Ornon”—her eyes flicked to the Eddisian Ambassador briefly—“believes the experience will be instructive. Try to learn something.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” The queen watched him for a moment. She offered this opening, if there was anything else Costis wanted to say. But Costis was silent. Seeing himself in her eyes, he remembered what he hadn’t thought of in days, not since the assassination—that he was a lieutenant in name only, and what had brought him to this place at this time in the royal apartment was his failure, failure to keep his temper, failure to keep his oath. Failure to do his duty. He had nothing to say.
The queen left, followed by Ornon. Shaking, Costis went to the door of the bedchamber to find the king.
Two men in Eddisian uniform sat in chairs by the window. They had pulled a small table over and were casting dice on the inlaid wooden top. Costis eyed them suspiciously as the king repeated what the queen had just told Costis in the anteroom. The king sat in bed, surrounded by papers and vellum sheets spread in haphazard patterns. There was an open leather mail pouch incongruously rough on the soft embroidered cloth of the spread.
<
br /> “I have more company than I need,” said the king. “You can go to the guardroom.”
Costis cleared his throat uncomfortably. “The queen said I should stay.”
“And no doubt, you are therefore afraid to go. I would be, too. Stay, then, and I shall introduce you to Aulus and Boagus, my dear relatives, who have joined me to while away my convalescence.”
Costis couldn’t help wondering if these were the cousins that had held him down in the rainwater cache. “Watch out for Aulus,” the king warned acidly. “Like the bull he resembles, he has been known to crush people with a single misstep.”
Aulus eyed the king for a moment without comment, then rose from his chair. Aulus, Costis realized, was huge. He hadn’t appeared so large when he was sitting, but standing up, he seemed to almost fill the room. He loomed over the king as he bent to collect the papers and reports on the bed.
The king pinned a paper to the spread with his hook. “I am reading that!” he insisted. Aulus took no notice. He merely pulled the paper until it tore free. He put the shredded piece onto the stack he had built and shoveled the entire stack into the messenger pouch. Then he looked at the king and lifted a single admonishing finger as thick as the haft on a hand ax.
“I told you. One more nasty comment and it would be time for a nap.” His accent was thick enough to cut with a knife, and it seemed to add a syllable to every word.
“You cannot keep me in bed!”
“Of course I can,” said Aulus calmly. “A damn sight easier than I can get you to do anything else. I’ll lie down on top of the covers on this side. Boagus can lie on the other. You’ll be trapped like a kitten in a sack, and before you can work out a suitable revenge, Boagus and I will be safely posted to a distant and very invisible location, far beyond the reach of his royal petulance the King of Attolia.” He nodded significantly. “Ornon promised.”
The king stared dumbfounded, then attempted to reason. “I have important—”
“Gen,” Aulus interrupted. “You’ve been reading since the sun came up. You’re ragged, and you need a rest.”