A Conspiracy of Kings (13 page)

We both had been asleep. There had been no sign of
Hanaktos’s men, and we’d taken no precautions except to
check that the road behind and ahead of us was empty before we
retreated into the woods to camp each night. We’d been taken
by surprise when we were tossed from our blankets like seed
scattered on the ground and found ourselves on our backs with
daggers at our throats. The robbers had searched our bags, throwing
our spare clothes every which way, checking the seams, and pulling
the bags themselves to pieces as the horses we had purchased only
the day before stood by whickering anxiously at all the fuss. The
magus and I watched bemused.

Their leader had tipped the contents of the magus’s purse
into his hand and thrown the little leather pocket contemptuously
to the ground.

“Whatever it is that you are carrying so carefully, with
an eye on every man you meet. We’ve watched you these last
two days. What are you carrying? Gold? Silver? Where is
it?”

I almost waved a hand and said, “Here. Me.” But I
didn’t. The man was too frustrated, and I was very afraid
that when he found his careful hunt had yielded nothing, he would
spit us both. I looked over at the magus. He looked back, bone dry
of ideas.

“It was gemstones,” I said, “matched garnets
the size of your thumb, but they’re gone already. We handed
them off.”

“Handed them off?”

“At the inn, last night. The, uh, man was there. He was
the merchant we were bringing the gems for.” I racked my
brains to remember some specific man from the roomful we’d
eaten with the night before.

“The man in the booth,” suggested the magus.

“Near the door?” snarled the man.

“Ye–es,” said the magus, as if reluctant,
trying hard not to sound like someone scrambling for a safe lie.
His hand waved in a vague gesture.

The bandit looked thoughtful. “The second booth? Blond,
with rings in his ears?”

“That’s him,” I piped. “He was to take
the garnets on to the baron.”

“What baron?”

Suddenly I couldn’t remember the name of a single Attolian
baron and couldn’t guess, even if I’d been able to come
up with one, who might be a plausible recipient of a matched set of
large garnets. What a time to have my mind go all to pear. Only by
a god’s will did I remember a crossroads we had passed the
day before. “He was taking the road for Pirrhea,” I
said. Gen had stolen us chickens in Pirrhea, which was why the sign
at the crossroads had caught my eye.

Without another word, the robbers left us, taking our spare
clothes and our horses with them and heading through the woods
toward the road, back to the crossroads and Pirrhea. We watched
them without saying anything until they were long gone. Even then
we didn’t speak, only stuffed our feet into our boots, which
they hadn’t taken, and legged it ourselves in the opposite
direction, as fast as we could go. We cut back toward the road to
reach it some ways ahead of where we had been traveling. When we
did, we ran, not sure if someone had followed. We jogged steadily
until we were in sight of the next town. By then the sky was light,
and the sun was near rising. The gates in front of us were open,
and the merchants would soon be doing business.

“Garnets,” said the magus.

“The size of your thumb,” I assured him.

Both of us silently hoped the blond man was on his way anywhere
but on the road to Pirrhea.

W
E were in the city of Attolia three days later,
after catching a ride in the back of a wagon from a farmer
delivering olive oil to the capital. We were starving. The magus
had spent our last lone coin, found stuck in the seam of his purse,
on bread. In the city we tried to bluster our way into an inn but
were turned away on the first two tries when the landlord, spooked
by our lack of traveling bags, asked to see our coin before he
showed us a room. Finally we found a shabbier hostel, where the
magus’s easy confidence carried the day. We got a room and
some food and considered our strategy. The magus was afraid to
approach the palace. There was every chance that the Mede agents
whom we had escaped so far would be lurking, waiting to catch us as
we approached.

“It’s what I would do,” said the magus,
“were I the Mede. They know by now that you are not with your
father.”

“We could send a message,” I said. “If we
promised payment on delivery, we could send it by messenger, but
would any message sent by a common carrier and delivered to the
gates be carried to the king?”

What a quandary!

We tried approaching Baron Susa, but we were turned away, even
from his back door. We thought we might contact a merchant who
would pass our message to a patronoi, who might deliver it to the
palace, but that failed as well. I picked up a job unloading a cart
and earned us enough coins to buy food, but not enough to make a
bribe of any significance, and without a bribe we could not seem to
contact anyone of any importance in the city. The public day in the
royal courts wasn’t to be held for weeks. While there were
people the magus could contact outside the city, that would mean
more traveling. We didn’t have the time.

The magus was growing more concerned each day that Mede spies
would locate us, two Sounisians in the city, behaving oddly. We
were sure to draw attention, and after our experience in the woods,
neither of us was too sure we would see the Mede agents before they
saw us. Equally worrisome, the landlord of the filthy, flea-ridden
inn where we were staying was becoming suspicious.

The magus went out the door first. When it was my turn, I nearly
landed on top of him. He dodged and I rolled, and we ended up
facing each other, sitting on the hard stones of the road with our
legs splayed out in front of us.

“Thank your gods, I don’t call the city
guard,” shouted the landlord, and slammed the courtyard door.
He opened it a minute later to throw the magus’s overshirt
out after us.

Rubbing my bruised elbow ruefully, I asked the magus, “If
he called the guard, do you think we could tell them who we
are?”

The magus shook his head. “Attolia is pressing every
prisoner they arrest onto their ships in order to fortify the
islands she has taken from Sounis. We’re far more likely to
end up on a galley, revealing our true identities to the passing
sharks.”

I got up first and helped the magus to his feet. Sighing, he
picked up his overshirt and threw it over his shoulder. We walked
up the street.

It was later that day, when we were selling off our clothes in
exchange for grubbier ones and the cash to buy food, that we heard
a rumor in the marketplace that the king and queen would be riding
to the harbor to greet arriving ambassadors. We put together the
peashooter and snagged the dried peas out of a market stall. The
magus wanted to spit the pea, but I demonstrated my knack for
accuracy, and he agreed that I should be the one. I did think of
the changes to my face, but I was sure that Eugenides, if he
looked, would know me, and I was more distressed than I can say
when he passed by without any sign of recognition.

The magus and I had some very uncomfortable moments when we were
arrested by the guard. Our only hope was to convince one of them to
send a message to the king, but the squad leader gave us no
opportunity to speak. When the magus tried, a guardsman had him
pinned by the throat before he could get more than a word out. So
intimidating was he that we kept silent all the way to the palace
and down into the cells. Only when there was a closed door between
us and the very angry guards did the magus shout that Attolis would
want to know we were in his prison. I was already imagining myself
chained to an oar.

We spent our time while we were waiting discussing just what we
could say that might warrant the attention of the king. We agreed
that telling the prison guards flat out that I was the king of
Sounis probably wouldn’t work. The magus thought he could say
that he had information valuable to Relius, whom he knew by name,
and that might get us an interview with him. Not that an interview
with Attolia’s master of spies would be wholly without risk,
but face to face the magus thought he could convince the man of our
identities.

Then Gen appeared at the door, and we didn’t need to
convince anyone of anything after all. Instead we followed the
guards he left us to a set of rooms that were a welcome change from
our infested inn of the previous week.

“Ridiculous to think what indignities I would suffer in
silence, if I knew that I was to be rewarded with an oversize
bucket of hot water,” the magus said as he settled into the
bath the servants had filled for him. He leaned against the higher
side, leaving his arms and legs dangling over the lower edges and
looking something like a pale spider, but more like an overturned
terrapin. I’d already had my bath, at his insistence, and was
getting into clean clothes with the help of a dresser and trying to
eat the food that had been brought at the same time. The careful
attention of the manservant was rather amusing to me after all the
time I’d spent in the same set of pants and loose shirt.

The clothes were rather startling in their finery. “Do you
think Gen picked them?” I asked, posing in my new overcoat.
The decorative fabric panels hastily tacked to the front and back
made an already handsome piece of clothing into an ostentatious
one.

The magus eyed me from the bath.

“I would believe it. All that embroidery suits
you.”

“Makes me look less like riffraff, you mean?”

“Yes,” he agreed with mocking gravity.
“That’s it exactly.”

A barber came to trim us and shave us, taking off the last of my
darker hair and leaving it tidy, if short. When he was done,
Hilarion arrived and introduced himself as one of the king’s
attendants.

He asked if we would be able to join the king and queen for an
audience. I should have paid more attention, but I was still eating
what I could from a plate of fruit and trying not to drip anything
on my coat. I didn’t realize until we had followed Hilarion
through the narrow corridors to the main staircase that we were
heading toward the megaron of the palace, the largest of the throne
rooms. When we reached the doorway, we could hear the quiet
rustling of the crowd beyond, and when I looked past Hilarion, I
could see only a narrow aisle open in the center of the room. I had
forgotten the arrival of the ambassadors from the Continent.

Standing just inside the doorway, no more than a few feet away
from me, was a party of Medes, distinctive in their brightly
colored and more loosely cut clothing. I was surprised that
Attolia, who had so recently and insultingly sent home a Mede army,
would be entertaining an ambassador from the empire.

I was suddenly glad that our clothes were meant for ceremony.
Even so, if I could have, I would have signaled Hilarion and waited
until a less public moment to talk with Attolia and the new
Attolis, but it was too late. We were swept into the room,
announced, lauded, eyeballed by the crowd, and moved to the foot of
the raised dais almost without our own volition.

Attolia was just as I remembered from our briefest of meetings,
when the magus and I had been apprehended after attempting to steal
Hamiathes’s Gift. She looked as regal and every bit as
intimidating as she had before. She greeted me, while Eugenides
reclined on his throne, his elbow on the arm of his chair and his
thumb tucked under his cheekbone to prop up his head. With his
fingers cupped against his forehead he eyed me from under the arch
they made, as a man does when he is looking at something very far
away.

The magus and I had talked for many long hours about this
marriage of Eugenides and the queen of Attolia. The magus insisted
it was Eugenides’s choice and his desire as well, but it was
impossible to know whose influence would prevail and if Gen would
grow more like his wife, or his wife more like her king.

Down in the prison cells, he had seemed everything that I
remembered. So much so that I hadn’t even noticed the hook in
place of his hand. In the throne room, the differences were hard to
miss. I’d been told that he wore a false hand on formal
occasions, but it seemed that his habits had changed. His right arm
lay across the arm of the throne, and at the end was a pointed
hook.

The last time I had seen Gen he had been whole, if slightly
damaged, after our escape from captivity in Attolia. I hadn’t
realized the strength of my habit of picturing him in my thoughts
as he had been when we first met: skinny and prison pale,
incongruous in the clean clothes the magus provided. I did remember
just enough of his taste in clothing from the weeks I had stayed in
Eddis that I was not completely taken aback by his grandeur. Gods
know, he does play up with his beaded jacket and his lace trim. I
almost laughed aloud when I saw that the design of his boots
remained unchanged, though even they had gold dusted in their
tooled leather patterns.

It wasn’t a moment for laughter. Not with Attolia coolly
admitting her surprise at the unforeseen arrival of a foreign
ruler, especially one with whom she was currently at war.

At war with my uncle, I said, and not, I hoped, with me.

Attolia nodded. I will tell you honestly, I wish it had been you
I addressed. I would have felt better just to have seen you in the
crowd, but I didn’t. I had the sense that Attolia might not
feel any more bound by the rules of hospitality than Baron
Hanaktos, and her expression gave me no clue to her thoughts. I
feared that I could find myself on my way back to the underground
cell at any moment.

Attolia asked what brought me to her court. Poor prince or not,
I hadn’t sat through a thousand boring ceremonies without
learning something about diplomatic language. I dug through my
memories for the right formulaic phrases, and then with as much
dignity as I could muster, I explained that I had just escaped from
my own country, a country in the greatest peril, lost either to the
Mede or to Melenze or both. I pointed out that none of these
outcomes would profit the state of Attolia. I had come to my
friends to ask for the men and the gold to win my country back.