The royal quarters were somewhere on the far side of the atrium, and there was no way across except to sprout wings and fly.
The attendants smiled.
The king stared angrily at the railing in front of him.
“Perhaps not the most direct route,” he said. The attendants continued to smile as he led them back to the hallways and back past the men still standing with their scrolls and tablets. They bowed again as the king passed. He went down the stairs again, just one flight, turned left and left again to circumnavigate the atrium, and then turned right to reach a passage on the far side. They were again in familiar territory, and even Costis knew which way to turn to reach the king’s rooms.
Even after the detour, they were early and unexpected. The guards in the hall pulled themselves to attention, and the one knocked on the doorway to alert those within of the king’s arrival. The king walked through the doorway and turned on his heel to face his attendants.
“Out,” he said.
“Your Majesty?”
“Out,” said the king. “All of you.” He waved the guards toward the door as well.
“Your Majesty cannot mean—”
“His Majesty does mean…and His Majesty has had enough for now, and you may go. Have a holiday. Get a cup of coffee. Chat with your sweethearts. Out.”
“We could never leave you unattended,” Sejanus said in a voice smooth and provoking.
“Your Majesty, it wouldn’t be right,” protested the squad leader, the only one genuinely concerned. He knew his duty, and it did not involve deliberately leaving the king unguarded. Teleus would have his head.
“You can guard me from the hall. The door is the only one into the apartment. You can attend me,” he said to his attendants, “from the hall.”
“Your Majesty, that is unacceptable,” Sejanus said. “We simply cannot leave you all alone.”
The king looked as if he was going to throw the words back in Sejanus’s face. Then his vindictive eye fell on Costis.
“Costis can stay,” he said.
“I think not, Your Majesty.” Sejanus smiled the words, all condescension, but the king stopped him.
“Am I king,” he said flatly, “or shall I call my wife for corroboration?”
He would never admit to the queen that he couldn’t control his own attendants, but none of them, not even Sejanus, could risk calling his bluff.
“Bit in his teeth,” someone muttered as they filtered through the door to the hallway. Lamion was the last one out. He looked back and at the king’s glare hastily pulled the door closed behind him.
Eugenides turned to Costis. “No one walks through that door, Costis. No one comes through any of the doors into this guardroom, is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Good. Come in here first.”
He walked into the bedroom, and Costis followed to the door.
“Move that chair, please. I want it in front of the window.” It was an armchair, awkward but not heavy. Costis hesitantly lifted it and moved it as the king desired.
“Facing the window or away, Your Majesty?”
“Facing.”
The king sat. Costis stood. The king held out his hand, without looking at Costis, and said, “Take that off for me.” He meant the ring on his finger. It was a heavy seal ring, of solid gold with the seal carved into the face of a ruby.
Costis carefully pulled on the ring, but it was a close fit. He had to hold the wrist with one hand and work the ring off the finger by pulling hard.
“I’m sorry, Your Majesty,” he said as he tugged.
“Don’t apologize,” said the king. “I can’t imagine that removing seal rings is in your professional training. Unless they give the Guard special training in looting corpses?”
Costis didn’t think it funny. “They do not, Your Majesty.” He pulled hard and the ring came off.
“Leave it on the desk,” said the king, and looked away.
Costis remembered that Teleus worried what damage this young man would do as he started to feel his power. Angry, he stalked to the desk and dropped the ring on its leather top with a thump. The king ignored him. Costis continued out of the room. The king hadn’t said to close the door, so he didn’t. Let him ask, he thought, but the king didn’t. Costis picked a spot where he could stand without a view of the king sitting in front of the window. He stood stiffly at attention, and he waited.
So far as Costis could tell by listening for sounds of shifting weight in the chair, the king didn’t move. Minutes ticked past. There was no sound from the bedroom. The king had probably decided to take a nap.
“Costis,” he said at last. “Come move the chair back. Then I suppose you had better let the lapdogs back in.”
In spite of himself, Costis was amused at the image of the king’s elegant courtier attendants as a pack of poorly trained house dogs.
Later, in his own quarters, as he was getting ready for bed, Costis wondered who put the king’s seal ring back on and if the attendants wondered how he got it off. He looked at his own left hand, where he wore a small copper ring with a seal on it of Miras, the soldier’s patron god of light and arrows. As a trainee, Costis had joined the Miras cult with his friends. They each wore the copper ring, though it turned their fingers green.
Tentatively he pushed at the ring with his thumb, trying to remove it without using his right hand. He hooked it on the edge of the tabletop to no effect. Finally he put his finger in his mouth and worked it off with his teeth. He spat the ring into his palm and dropped it onto the table, where it sat reflecting the candlelight. Costis shuddered as if someone had walked over his grave. He put the ring back on his finger and went to bed, trying to think of other things.
CHAPTER FIVE
IN a small audience room, Relius delivered his report to the queen. In the past, they had been alone for these meetings. Now, the new king attended as well. While Relius talked, Eugenides sat with one booted ankle over his knee and watched a gold coin flip across the backs of his fingers.
It was a distraction, but the queen did not take her attention off Relius. He was being as elliptical as possible, trying to inform her, without alerting the king, of the intrigues within her court. Eugenides’s failure to exercise his authority meant that others were maneuvering to exercise it for him. Several different parties hoped to woo the king to their side, to make him speak for their interests.
Briefly, the queen looked at Eugenides and back at the Secretary of the Archives. It had not escaped her notice that both these men, exquisitely tailored, had chosen clothes for this occasion that complemented her own. This was not as prescient as it seemed. Her wardrobe was fairly uniform, in spite of her new husband’s suggestions that she expand it. It amused her that their sartorial choices clashed so completely with each other. Eugenides’s loosely cut coat in the Mede style, more like a robe, was red silk shading to orange. Relius dressed in the Continental style, his tunic, a deep wine color, tailored close to his body and matching the short velvet cloak he affected even in summer.
His clothes were an expression of his power. He alone of the queen’s advisors had been with her the length of her reign. He had been the illegitimate son of a steward in a baron’s villa, and she had seen, the first time they met, that he could teach her what she needed most, the manipulation of men and power. He had been her teacher, and she had rewarded him with wealth and influence.
Eugenides had grown bored with moving the coin across his fingers. He began tossing it into the air and catching it. He was distracting Relius, an accident, or more likely a calculated effort to unsettle the secretary. As the coin rose higher and higher into the air, Attolia drew her foot back slightly and kicked the king in the ankle. He jumped and turned to her in outrage. The coin dropped behind him, and he plucked it out of the air without looking.
He glanced at Relius and back at her. He’d missed nothing, she was certain. Eugenides held out the coin; it was a gold stater with her head on one sid
e and the lilies of Attolia on the other.
“Lilies, I rule, heads, you do,” he said, and threw the coin into the air.
“Lilies, you rule, heads, you throw again,” said Attolia.
The coin dropped. Eugenides looked at it and then showed it to her. “No need,” he said. The coin sat in his palm, obverse, showing the lilies of Attolia. He flipped it again and again and again. Each time it landed showing the lilies. He threw the coin and this time caught it in his closed fist. Without looking at it, he slapped it onto the embroidered sleeve of his coat and took his hand away. It was lilies again.
“I think we are finished here,” Attolia said. “Was there anything more, Relius?”
“No, Your Majesty.”
With affected disinterest, the king shrugged his shoulders and palmed the coin from his sleeve. “Thank you, Relius, for your report. As always, I am grateful for your thorough presentation of the information.” He inclined his head, and Relius bowed himself out.
The king rarely missed an opportunity to insult the Captain of the Guard, but to the Secretary of the Archives he was unfailingly polite. It made Relius feel ill. For now the king was a puppet of the Eddisians, but that would change. Within the year, some power in Attolia would pull his strings, and Relius was determined that the power would be the queen’s. Like Teleus, he would stay with his queen no matter the cost.
He wanted to dismiss the coin toss as sleight of hand. Any circus performer could control the drop of a coin, but he’d been puzzled. The queen had been undismayed; she had seemed almost vindicated in her manner. It had been the king who had been more disturbed with each toss of the coin. He’d looked almost sick, Relius thought, by the time he put the coin away.
Relius loitered in the arcade outside the audience room until the king left with his attendants. Walking away along the arcade that lay perpendicular to the one where Relius lurked, the king pulled the coin from his pocket. He looked at the gold stater in sudden disgust and pitched it hard between the columns of the arcade into the shrubbery that filled the courtyard garden. Perplexed, Relius returned to his work.
When the palace was quiet, and it seemed only the royal guards could still be awake: “Baron Artadorus.”
It was a whisper on a breath of air so shallow it wouldn’t have stirred a cobweb, but it combined with the touch of a blade on his neck and woke the baron instantly.
The night-light was out. He could make out nothing but a dark shape leaning over him, close enough to put lips near his ear to whisper into it. Whoever it was wasn’t standing by the bed, but sitting on it. This intruder was in the royal palace, in the baron’s private apartments, in his bedchamber, sitting on his bed, and had arrived there waking no one, not even the other person in the bed.
The blade was sharp, never mind how a man without a hand could hold a knife.
“Your Majesty?” the baron whispered.
“I have had a most interesting discussion with a man named Pilades. Do you know him?”
“No, Your Majesty.” The steel was warming to the temperature of his skin. He could feel the edge biting.
“He works in the Ministry of Agriculture.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“He’s been telling me all about the grain that grows in different parts of the country.”
“Ah,” the baron said weakly.
“Ah, indeed. How long, Baron?” the king whispered, still leaning close enough that the baron could have taken him in his arms, had he been a lover instead of a murderer. “How long have you been misreporting the kind of grain that you grow? How much have you avoided paying in taxes?”
The baron closed his eyes. “This was the first time, Your Majesty.”
“Are you sure?” The knife-edge bit deeper.
“I swear it.”
“I remind you that there are records that can be checked.”
“I swear it, Your Majesty, this was the first time.” His eyeballs strained to the corners of his eyes, striving to see the king’s face. “You will tell Her Majesty?”
The king’s laugh was silent, no more than a puff of warm air against the baron’s cheek.
“I am here in the night, holding a knife-edge at your throat, and you worry that the queen will learn about your error? Worry about me, Artadorus.”
It was blackmail then, thought the baron. “What do you want, Your Majesty?”
The king laughed again, without a sound. “For you to pay your taxes, for a start,” he breathed.
He lifted the knife-edge away and rose noiselessly from the bed. He crossed the room as silently, but when he’d gone through the door, he closed it behind him with a snap. In the bed beside the baron there was a sleepy murmur, not his wife, thank the gods, his wife would have been awakened by the whispered conversation.
His bedfellow stirred beside the baron and sat up. “Did you hear something?”
“You dreamed it,” said the baron. “Go back to sleep.”
For a long time, he lay in his bed thinking. Clearly he had been a fool. A fool not to realize that the king might be inept and inexperienced and still be dangerous. A greater fool to take Baron Erondites’s suggestion that the queen might be distracted by her new marriage. Erondites, never a friend of the queen’s, had seen that prudence had kept Artadorus loyal all these years, and greed might lead him astray. It was he who had set this trap by suggesting a means of avoiding the queen’s taxes, and sprung it by informing the king of the tax scheme the baron was attempting. The baron dismissed the reference to Pilades and the Ministry of Agriculture. This king would never have discovered the business on his own. It was Erondites who had betrayed him, building his influence with the king and preparing to blackmail this baron into working with the king and against the queen. There was only one thing to do. The night was warm, but the baron lay under his bedcovers, chilled through.
At breakfast the queen spoke to the king.
“Baron Artadorus sent me a message asking to see me before breakfast. He has asked to be excused from court.”
“Has he?” The king feigned lack of interest.
“He said he had business to oversee at his home.”
“Oh?”
“Something to do with his accounts.”
“Hmm.”
She warned him with a look.
“Did he fall on his sword?” the king asked.
“Not physically.”
“Ah,” said the king.
She crossed her arms and refused to speak to him again.
“The baron met with the queen this morning. He has been excused from court.” Sejanus, meeting his father briefly in an out-of-the-way courtyard, relayed the news.
“Has he?” said his father, mildly surprised but not distressed. “No doubt he is heading home to edit his accounts. It doesn’t matter. The error has been recorded, and correcting it won’t erase the crime.”
“And if he confessed to the queen already?”
“If he had confessed to the queen, we would all know. Surely you remember what happened to the last person who attempted to defraud the royal treasury?”
There were no more snakes in the king’s bed and no more sand in his food. The Captain of the Guard and the Secretary of the Archives had taken steps to insure that. Palace misbehavior became more subtle. The food that arrived for the king’s lunch, which he ate alone, except for the oppressive company of his attendants, was always unsuited for consumption by a one-handed man. As the king made every effort to conceal his handicap, the attendants made every effort to emphasize it. If the king wanted his bread sliced, he had to ask. If he stubbornly declined to ask, then Sejanus, or Hilarion, would make a show of distress that they had forgotten to slice it for him. Twice more the king locked himself in his rooms. Both times he allowed Costis and only Costis to stay with him.
The attendants, as careless as they appeared, spent their time exiled in the outer corridor, sweating at the thought that the queen might pass by. She surely knew that the king ousted his attenda
nts from his presence, but she seemed willing to turn a blind eye, so long as she was not faced with the pack of them kicking their heels in the passage.
“Her Majesty must appear to support the king,” Sejanus reminded his peers. “Otherwise, I am sure she wouldn’t care how much we irritated the king.”
On a rare evening when Costis was neither on duty nor asleep, he talked with Aris in his quarters.
“Until I die, I think,” Costis said. Aris had asked how long Costis thought he would serve as lieutenant. “Probably of boredom.” Lying in a pose of intense apathy, with his feet on his pillow and his head hanging a little over the edge of the short cot, he stared at the ceiling. His expression of distaste was the one he had to be careful to keep off his face when on duty.
“So you think the promotion is permanent?”
Costis reconsidered. “No. He can’t really mean to leave me as a lieutenant. It’s all pretend and mockery, not a real promotion. I suppose he will get tired of this eventually and I will be demoted back to squad leader. Or line soldier.”
“Or dismissed from the Guard.”
Costis rolled his eyes to look at his friend. Aris had said aloud what Costis had been trying not to think.
Costis shrugged, not an easy thing to do when partly upside down. “If he’s going to do that, I wish he’d do it and get it over with instead of leaving me halfway to nothing, waiting and waiting for the fatal blow. Maybe he’s waiting until boredom kills me…or I kill ex-Lieutenant Sejanus.”
“What? Kill our brave and clever and beautiful Sejanus?”
“With my bare hands,” said Costis. “If he points out one more tarnished buckle or loose thread on my uniform to the king, I am going to pop his eyeballs out with my thumbs, and I don’t care how beautiful he is or how clever.”
Aris chuckled. “Careful…remember, he’s an idol to us all.” Sejanus was wealthy and influential, and generous with his spending money. As lieutenant, he had had the admiration and envy of most of the Guard.