A Conspiracy of Kings (12 page)

The magus stirred in my arms and whispered brokenly, “I am
fine. My tent, take me to my tent.”

My father returned with the physician, both looking concerned. I
helped lift the magus and carry him to his tent. We laid him on a
bed there, and I stood wringing my hands while the physician
listened to his heart and tried to get him to speak. I told my
father that he should prepare for Hanaktos’s attack. My
father wanted to disagree, but he looked to the magus, lying nearly
insensible on the bed, and acquiesced. I told him that if Hanaktos
did not attack, we should move north anyway, as soon as possible.
He clamped his jaw and, when I didn’t back down, bowed
without speaking and left. The magus’s hand lifted, and he
reached for me.

I went to him and bent to hear him as he whispered again.
“Speak to you,” he said hoarsely.
“Private.”

“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and chased away
the physician and his assistants, who seemed to have nothing useful
to do anyway.

When we were alone, I bent over the magus again. He opened his
eyes and sat up so quickly I nearly knocked heads with him.

“You fraud!” I said.

He held up his hands for silence. “Indeed,” he said
quietly, “I could think of no other way out of the tent. Your
Majesty, we must get you out of the camp immediately.”

“We will be prepared for Hanaktos’s attack,” I
assured him.

“There is more, I am afraid. I fear that you will be
conveniently dead in the attack, and I can think of no way to
prevent this except to flee.” He watched my face closely as
he said, “Akretenesh has too many supporters here.”

He was warning me that I was going to be assassinated by my
father’s men.

I thought he couldn’t be serious. Things couldn’t be
that bad, but he was already up from his bed, stuffing clothes into
a set of saddlebags.

“Why is the Mede ambassador in the camp at all?” I
asked.

“Your father. He cannot stand the idea that Melenze wants
Haptia back and thinks that the Medes are a better ally. I am
sorry. My every effort to change his mind has entrenched him
deeper. I should have stayed in the mountains of Eddis.”

I shook my head. No one could have convinced my father to cede
land back to the Melenzi. “Akretenesh only suggested a regent
in order to set you and my father against each other.”

“Indeed. It was a fine distraction from the immediacy of
Hanaktos’s attack. We must get you safely away.”

“But they need me as a pawn,” I said. “Why
would they want me dead?”

The magus snatched a few things from a writing desk. I’d
forgotten his lopsided smile. “A
pawn
,” he emphasized. “You are not
one. They cannot afford to have you independent of their control,
with your father’s army at your back.”

“I saw your signals,” I protested.

The magus shook his head. “Akretenesh saw as
well.”

“Ah,” I said, “er.”

“Indeed. Not only have we convinced him that you are more
cunning than they realized, but we’ve also made it clear that
if you were a puppet, it would be me pulling your strings. A
mistake all around, and my fault. I apologize, My King.”

I shuddered at the address as if someone were walking over my
future gravesite. “What about my father?” I asked.

“I believe that he will go north as he was told.
Especially after Hanaktos attacks. We can decide on a safe place to
rejoin him later,” the magus said.

“No,” I said. “My father will take the army
north on his own. You and I go to Attolia.”

The magus didn’t hesitate, didn’t even look at me.
“As you wish” was all he said as he went back to
packing, leaving me to wonder if I was the only one who felt the
world spinning.

I had never meant to go to Melenze. I had known from the moment
I’d learned of my uncle’s death that I would go to
Attolia. Eugenides was the king of Attolia and my friend. If his
wife was the wolf at my throat, surely I could still trust him. I
wanted the army in the north, not to make an alliance with Melenze
but to prevent more deaths while I secured peace.

The magus, when the bags were packed, cautiously approached the
side of the tent. Standing on the fabric to pull it tight, he
lifted his knife to carefully slit the canvas. He paused, and in
the distance I heard shouting as Hanaktos’s men attacked our
pickets. The magus paid no attention. He had run his fingers across
the fabric of the tent and was sniffing them. He looked up at me,
startled, and seized me by the shirtfront. Dispensing with
subtlety, he slashed open the side of the tent and dragged me
through it as the walls caught fire. Soaked from the outside in
lamp oil, they were engulfed in flame in an instant. Stumbling in
the dark, we staggered away from the heat and kept going, trying to
distance ourselves from whoever had struck the light. Whoever it
was must have made haste to get away as well. No one pursued us.
It’s possible that no one even saw us, as men raced toward
the tent, shouting.

In the confusion of attack, and fire, and darkness, we slipped
away. The magus was right that we would have burned in the tent,
and who could have said it was anything but a tragic accident with
a lamp?

By daylight we were not so far away that we could be sure we had
outdistanced pursuit. We crawled into a screen of spindly bushes,
sheltered from view from above by large rocks, where I changed into
the clothes the magus had brought. They were his but fit me well.
We quietly waited out the day. I broke the silence only to ask
about my mother and sisters.

“We received a written message from them,” said the
magus.

“My mother neither reads nor writes,” I said,
immediately suspicious of a hoax and frightened that my relief had
been unfounded.

“It was from Ina,” the magus reassured me.
“She provided information only she could know.”

“You are certain?”

The magus’s quiet laugh relieved my anxiety. “She
mentioned that your tutor, Malatesta, had survived the attack on
the villa by jumping into the latrine pit.”

“That’s Ina,” I said. “Thank the
gods.”

“She crept into the steward’s room when you
didn’t return. She heard the order to fire the villa and
convinced your mother to move out of the icehouse. They hid
themselves in a playhouse she and Eurydice had made in the bushes
nearby and remained there until the smoke from the fire drew the
neighbors. Unfortunately, they accepted the hospitality of a
neighbor, we don’t know which one, who turned them over to
your rebellious barons.”

I knew which one, and told the magus about Hyacinth.

“Ah,” said the magus. “She made an allusion to
flowers that I didn’t understand. She also revealed that they
were in Brimedius. I do not think the rebels meant to inform us,
but the information was coded in the text.”

I snickered. Ina indeed.

When darkness fell, we continued, still cautious, though we both
thought that Hanaktos’s men would expect us to be heading
north toward Melenze and would look for us there. We traveled at
night for the next few days but eventually reached roads that were
sufficiently well trafficked that we could walk unremarked by
anyone. We made it to Selik and paid a ridiculous amount for
horses. I was worried that we might not have enough money left for
food, but that night the magus reassured me. I had just gone
through an entire loaf of bread and half a chicken, which we had
purchased already cooked in a food stall near the horse-trading
market. I’d suggested eating it before we left the market.
I’d also suggested eating it on the road. I was not so
comfortable with my new authority that I could say, “We eat
the chicken now!” but the magus had seen that I was
considering it. Shaking his head, he had said, “Your Majesty,
with your very kind permission, we will find a place to sleep for
the night off the road, and we will eat the chicken
then.”

Once we were at the campsite, and the chicken was gone, I had
asked about money. “My purse is full enough,” said the
magus, “to keep you supplied with roast chickens.”

“So, so, so,” I said. “We know who the power
behind the throne is,” and the magus laughed.

“You eat more than Gen did after prison,” he
said.

“I have more sympathy with him all the time. Are you going
to finish that drumstick?” I asked.

“I am. Stop staring at it.”

We had to sell the horses in the tiny town just past Evisa and
didn’t get a good price for them, but where we were going
they would be of no use. The magus and I both thought it was unwise
to use the main pass, and we went back to the one we had used years
ago when we went adventuring after Hamiathes’s Gift. Both of
us were thinking of that trip, when we had ridden out of Sounis
with the conquest of Eddis in mind. So much had changed since
then.

We approached the pass cautiously but found no one guarding it.
Either the rebels didn’t know of it, or they were still
searching for us on the roads to Melenze. We spent the night in the
empty farmhouse that had once belonged to the magus’s family,
and in the morning we began the climb.

It was only a little less daunting than it had been on the first
trip. Our way was cut through solid stone by the trickle of a
stream at the bottom of a gorge, and there were many places where
we climbed straight up with only shallow handholds carved into the
rock for aid. I was stronger than I had been, and the handholds
seemed closer together than they had been before, but still, it was
hard going, and I was tired out by the end of the first day.

In the evening, at a tiny cookfire, looking at the climb that
waited for us in the morning, the magus said thoughtfully,
“That lying little monster complained about everything: the
food, the horses, the blankets, the company. He even found fault
with the stories I told by the fire, but I cannot recall that he
ever once complained about the climbing.”

“So many things are obvious in retrospect, aren’t
they?” I said.

The magus looked at me seriously, and then he smiled.
“Indeed,” he said.

We crossed through Eddis without pausing. The magus said that a
royal visit had been planned with Attolia and that the megaron at
Eddis would be empty. I knew it was Attolia I needed to make peace
with. Eddis had mercenaries who might help me win back my state.
Attolia had the gold.

Everything, it seemed, depended on gold. The magus and I had
fallen easily back into our old habits. He lectured constantly, and
I asked questions to my heart’s delight. Where he had once
been my master and I his apprentice, I had become king and he my
sole advisor. Where we had once focused on natural history and
philosophy, we now concentrated on administration, taxation, and
the prosecution of war.

He had begun his lessons by quoting the duke of Melfi: “To
make war you need three things: one, money; two, money; and three,
money.” He went on to tell me the things I should have known
already, that I would have known if I had been a more promising
heir to the throne and not exclusively interested in poetry.

A bronze cannon costs ten solids to the ton. Eddis’s iron
cannons cost less but are too heavy to move. Even a bronze cannon,
at six thousand pounds, takes twelve horses or fifty men to shift.
The horses cost a subit a head and have to eat. The men expect
wages, and they also eat. The horses have harnesses and iron shoes
that need to be replaced at three octari apiece, while the men must
have weapons and uniforms, and all of them paid for out of the
treasury. I learned that my uncle who was Sounis had run through
his ready gold and was in debt to the number of twenty-five
thousand solids to moneylenders on the Peninsula. He had promised
the Hephestia Diamond as security. He had already sold the Soli
Diamond and a number of lesser stones from the treasury to purchase
the ships to replace those that Eugenides had blown up. He had then
tried to squeeze still more money out of his barons, and that, the
magus thought, had been the sun that ripened the rebellion. The
patronoi were sick of paying the costs of the king’s
wars.

When Eugenides married the queen of Attolia and made peace
between Eddis and Attolia, the Mede ambassador had offered my uncle
a treaty of protection from his now far more dangerous neighbors.
Sounis had taken Mede money and hired men to assassinate Eugenides,
but he had stopped short of accepting an alliance, refusing to cede
any power to the Mede. He still insisted that he could defeat both
his enemies, but his barons no longer agreed. They wanted the
security of the alliance with the Mede, and my father wanted it as
well. Though my father and uncle had argued, his loyalty was
unfailing. Not so the barons’, evidently.

By the time we reached Attolia, I understood better the wonders
that had been achieved in Eddis with so small a treasury, and I was
even more impressed with Attolia for squeezing so much gold out of
the Mede emperor when he thought he was buying her sovereignty.
Attolia still had that gold, and if she let me use it, the magus
warned me, it would be a loan, not a gift, and there would be costs
attached. The magus was very clear about the dangers of my
decision, but he never questioned it.

“Have you and my father discussed something like
this?”

“Never,” said the magus. “It isn’t a
decision either of us could make. Only you, My King.”

The magus, unless we could be overheard, addressed me formally.
As if being addressed as King was something else I needed to be
prepared for before I reached Attolia.

“W
HERE is it?” the burly man shouted,
with his hand still in my left boot, as he searched it for some
valuable that hadn’t fallen out when he’d turned it
upside down.

“Where’s what?” asked the magus, mightily
confused. The robbers had already stolen away our purses, and
neither the magus nor I had any guess what more they could
want.