A Conspiracy of Kings (18 page)

Bewildered, Sounis stood and watched as the Eddisians paired up
and began to spar. He listened as they analyzed every aspect of the
Mede’s style and began to piece together the best means to
defeat him. Thanks to Eugenides’s careful efforts to draw out
the Mede, they had seen all they needed.

Sounis turned to the magus. “Did you know?”

“That he was relentless?” The magus finished his
question. “Yes. That he had this in mind, no. I did not
realize that he disliked the ambassador so much.”

“Melheret has a reputation as one of the best swordsmen in
the Mede court,” a soldier informed them, having overheard.
“They say he trained the former ambassador,
Nahuseresh.”

“Ah,” said the magus, understanding at once.
“I see that he means to be prepared if he meets him
again.”

“Surely that’s unlikely,” said Sounis.

“I don’t think
unlikely
means to
him what it does to the rest of us,” said the magus.

The Attolians were smiling openly by this time. Whatever they
thought of their king, they enjoyed a good joke at a
newcomer’s expense, whereas the Eddisians seemed no less
intent than they had been on the training field, though they did
joke with one another as they sparred.

“No, his foot was farther back,” said a voice
nearby.

“Higher in the backswing,” said another man.

“Why would you put your elbow out like that?”

“Airing your arm hair?”

“Boagus could take out whole swaths of Medes that
way,” said someone across the room, and everyone laughed.

“Pray gods then that the Medes don’t have anyone
that smells as bad as me,” said the smiling man who must have
been Boagus.

Sounis, watching, was crushed by a sudden longing for Pol, who
would have been at home with these men.

“Do you spar, Your Majesty?”

Still unused to being so addressed, Sounis jumped.

“Oh, yes, thank you,” he said to the small, wiry man
who had invited him to match swords.

“Will you practice against the Mede?” the man asked,
as he settled into a fighting stance.

Sounis demurred. “No, thank you,” he said. “I
am not expert enough, I am afraid, to learn from it.”

“Very well,” said the man. He was a head shorter
than Sounis, and Sounis thought himself prepared for attack until
the man’s sword suddenly caught him just above the elbow. He
fell back in surprise and smiled politely, acknowledging the hit,
but the other man didn’t smile back. Sounis resisted the
impulse to look to the magus for rescue and raised his sword
again.

The wiry little man was a monster in human guise, Sounis
decided, sent by the gods to humiliate him. It was only luck that
the other men in the room were focused on Eugenides and his
partners or they would have been snickering behind their hands.
Sounis was covered with sweat and deep in confusion by the time
Eugenides finally called a halt. He’d been praying for the
king of Attolia to wind up his exercise and was cursing him for his
selfish delay. When Eugenides called, “Enough!,” Sounis
lowered his sword immediately and caught a stinging smack on his
upper arm. The little man was giving him such a look that instead
of being angry at the late hit, Sounis found himself apologizing
for dropping his weapon too soon.

“Hmph,” said the Eddisian, and walked away.

Sounis slunk out of the room, avoiding a sympathetic glance from
the magus. Passing the food in the dining hall, he snagged a roll
and hurried on to catch up with Eugenides, wondering, even as he
did so, why he bothered.

Sounis drew closer once they both were outside, but slowed when
he saw his sparring partner was closing in on Eugenides as well.
The man said something to the king that made him turn in
Sounis’s direction. Sounis knew he would only look silly if
he backed away and forced himself to continue his approach,
arriving in time to hear the small Eddisian say, “That one
should go back to the basics,” before he stalked away like a
particularly officious little rooster.

Flushed, and knowing it, Sounis fell into step with the king of
Attolia and glared at the ground. “You might have mentioned
this charade you had planned beforehand,” he said stiffly,
his irritation overcoming his reserve.

“Couldn’t,” Gen said coolly. “I needed
you on the edge, looking slightly sick.”

Sounis knew that his mind sometimes worked like a pig stuck in
mud, but at other times conclusions seemed to strike like
lightning, one bolt after another. He realized that Eugenides was
growing more remote, not less, and almost in the same instant that
he would never see any sign of his old friend if all he did was
wait patiently for it. If the king of Attolia was more than just
his ally, there was one sure way to find out. He stuffed the bread
into his mouth and dropped his practice sword. He slid one foot
around Eugenides’s ankle, and using both hands, as well as
his greater mass, he sent him flying.

It was immensely satisfying. Eugenides crashed into his
attendants, who went stumbling in turn, a mass of windmilling arms
and falling bodies as they tried to catch the king, who was making
no effort to save himself. He’d dropped his own practice
sword and had his arms tucked in where his hook would do no
accidental damage. He slipped through their clutching hands like a
fish.

Sounis stood very still, his hands well away from his body,
surrounded, as he’d anticipated, by weapons that were very
real and all pointed toward him. Eugenides levered himself up on
his elbows, appearing stunned. After a moment he lay back down
again and began to laugh. He was uncooperative as his crouching
attendants tried to lift him. They managed to pull him to a seated
position, but he waved them away. With a nod, he dismissed the
swords back to their sheaths. “Just what makes you think you
can get away with that?” he asked the young man standing over
him with a butter-won’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression
incongruous on his scarred face.

“I am Sounis,” his friend answered, and offered a
hand to help him up.

Arms around each other, the kings of Sounis and Attolia walked
back toward the palace. The magus, following some distance behind,
watched with pleasure and the happy anticipation of carrying the
news to Eddis.

“That was a compliment, you know,” said
Eugenides.

“What was?”

“What Procivitus said. He wouldn’t have suggested
you go back to basics if he didn’t think you were worth
training.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“I know you didn’t, you idiot. There’s no time
for the basics, really, but if you’d like, he’d be
happy to train with you while you’re here.”

Sounis hesitated. “I think it might kill me.”

Attolis laughed. “I’ll tell him that you will wait
for him in the morning.”

When they’d gone a little farther, Attolis slipped out
from under Sounis’s arm. “It might be beneficial to sow
a little ambiguity. Really, there is very little hope that I will
be able to play this trick on Melheret twice, but will you go on
from here alone?”

They parted ways, and the magus and Sounis, led by
Attolis’s attendant Hilarion, made their way back to their
rooms.

“S
OPHOS, you sleep with a knife under your
pillow? I’m hurt.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sounis, blinking, afraid
that he had made contact with his wild swing.

“I was joking. Wake up the rest of the way, would
you?”

“Gen, it’s the middle of the night.”

“I know,” said the king of Attolia.

Sounis tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. He was sitting up
in his bed. The sky was still entirely dark, and he couldn’t
have been asleep for long. He suspected that he had just dropped
off. The bare knife was still in his hand, he realized, and he
rooted under his pillow for the sheath.

“Don’t you trust my palace security?”

“Yes, of course,” Sounis said, trying to think of
some other reason besides mistrust to sleep with a knife. He heard
Eugenides laugh.

“My queen and I sleep with a matched set under our
pillows, as well as handguns in pockets on the bedposts.
Don’t be embarrassed.”

“Gen, what are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of
the night?” Sounis asked.

“Going out of my mind,” said Eugenides promptly.
“At least I am on the verge of going out of my mind.”
Sounis could just make him out in the darkness as he dropped into
the chair across the room. “If I don’t get away from
the pernicious attentions of my attendants, the rivalry between my
palace physician and Eddis’s, and the need to refrain from
pushing certain members of my court down stairs, I am going to be a
very bad king indeed. Come out with me, Sophos.”

“The magus,” said Sounis, thinking that his minister
probably wouldn’t approve.

“He won’t even know you’re gone, I
promise.”

Sounis followed Gen through Attolia’s palace as he had
once followed him through the much grimmer stronghold of her
fortress on the Seperchia River. This time they were not escaping
prisoners, but Sounis had to remind himself of that because there
was more than a hint of escaping in the proceedings.

Gen avoided every posted guard. He arrived at intersections of
hallways just as they moved away, slipping behind them with no more
than a few feet to spare. He led the way down servants’
passages and narrow staircases that were hidden behind knobless
doors that matched the paneling so flawlessly that even knowing
they were there, Sounis wasn’t sure if he could find them
again. He was hopelessly lost.

They reached a small courtyard just inside the outer wall of the
palace, with a gate and an inevitable guard, and Sounis balked at
last. The guard stood in the very center of the archway, facing
out. There was a low doorway opening to his right that would lead
to a guardroom holding at least one more man, but Eugenides
blithely set out across the open ground. Sounis set his heels and
stopped. Eugenides could not possibly make his way past the guard
unseen. It was ludicrous even to think of it. Sounis held his
breath, knowing that at any moment the guard would catch a glimpse
from the corner of his eye, or that god-sent nudge would come that
causes a man to turn when someone is sneaking up behind him.

The guard would turn, Sounis thought. At any moment. And he
did.

“Your Majesty.”

“Aris,” said the king of Attolia, and flipped a coin
into the air. It dropped into the guard’s open palm and
disappeared into his purse. The guard resumed his position, and the
king passed by.

After digging through his own purse, Sounis put a coin more
clumsily into the same hand and followed Attolis out of the
palace.

“You bastard,” said Sounis wearily. “I
don’t know why I don’t stab you here in this alley so I
can be the annux over Sounis and Attolia.” They were twisting
through the narrowest of passages, with Eugenides still in the
lead, turning on what seemed to be a whim from one walkway to the
next.

“Well, the stabbing would be unkind,” said
Eugenides, “but you can have the annux part with my
goodwill.”

“Not Attolia’s.”

“True,” said the king. “Better not stab
me.”

“Gen,” Sounis said, and halted. Attolis, who had
already lightly descended a crooked stair, turned back at the
bottom and looked up at him.

“Yes?”

Sounis didn’t know what to say.

“She cut off my hand?” Gen asked.

It was exactly what Sounis was thinking, but he said, “Did
you know? When she imprisoned us after you stole Hamiathes’s
Gift. Did you love her then?”

Eugenides laughed and seemed so at ease that Sounis found
himself laughing with him. “No,” said Gen. “I
wrote down exactly what I thought for my cousin who is Eddis. I
meant to send it to the magus and he might have passed it on to
you, but for some reason I never did.” He looked around as if
the reason for this lapse might be found in the graffiti on the
nearby wall. “It may be lost by now. At any rate, the answer
is no, I did not know.”

“When then?” asked Sounis, coming slowly down the
stairs. He remembered meeting Eddis and the first time she had
smiled. “Or do you not know?”

“I know exactly. I was hiding in a takima bush in the
Queen’s Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites
tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage
and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was
laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches
around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and
to my complete surprise,
it wasn’t funny
anymore
.” He rubbed his chest, as if at a
remembered pain. “I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I
very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor
Dite.”

Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he
had already made into an enemy. “You exiled him?” He
had heard of the destruction of the house of Erondites.

“Happily, not before we resolved our differences,”
said Eugenides. He added more seriously, “I would have exiled
him even if we hadn’t.”

“I understand,” said Sounis, and he did.
“Where are we going?”

“To a nice tavern where they have no idea who I am, so
pull that cloak a little tighter over your fine clothes. I
don’t want them asking awkward questions. I just want a
chance to have a moment without my dear companions or, gods forbid,
any physicians.”

“They seemed a little unfriendly with each other,”
said Sounis.

The king of Attolia sighed. “They purport to be worried
about my health.”

They had left the narrow alleys and were walking along the
broader Sacred Way, and Eugenides kept his voice low. Sounis
suspected that everyone in the palace worried about
Eugenides’s health.