A Conspiracy of Kings (30 page)

T
HE room was Attolia’s library.

“You have not seen it before,” said Eddis.

“No,” whispered Sounis.

“I did not think you had, or you would have recognized it.
Gen made sure no meetings were held here.”

It was a long room lined with books. High windows let in light
all day, but none that would reach to damage the delicate contents
of the shelves. The glass-paneled doors on the opposite side of the
room faced north, not toward a view of snowcapped mountains but
toward a perfectly ordinary view of the city of Attolia. The
ceiling above was coffered and white; the cases along the walls
were carved with familiar figures. Sounis recognized a lion and
then a rabbit. He looked for the fox and found it. He moved to
touch its pointed ears with a hesitant finger.

“Who made this place?” he said in a choked
voice.

Eddis hesitated. “The architect was Iktenos, Gen’s
great-great-grandfather and the Thief of Eddis, though that is not
well known in Attolia, even now.”

“He dreamed of my library.”

“It would seem so.”

Slowly, Sounis turned away from the carving of the fox. He
reached for a tabletop and ran his hands over it, clutching the
edge until his knuckles turned white.

He wanted to know that it was solid. Eddis knew that all the
world would seem to him insubstantial, as if it might tear away and
reveal something else infinitely larger and more terrifying.

“I broke the truce at Elisa,” he said,
wild-eyed.

“Pay your fine,” she said reassuringly. “Had
you offended them you would know by now.”

“My tutor?”

“Moira, I think. She is nearest to mortals.”

“They are real?”

Eddis said nothing.

“Do they appear only in dreams? Or do they have physical
properties? Can you touch them? Can they—” He looked
up. “Can they bring bolts of lightning?”

Eddis shrugged.

“Tell me!” cried Sounis.

“Answer your own questions!” Eddis shouted back, and
he blinked.

“You don’t know?”

Eddis shook her head.

Sounis sat.

“Write it down,” Eddis said. “It will grow
less clear. First, it will begin to seem that it really was just a
dream and a mere coincidence that this library is so familiar. Then
it will be a memory you have of a dream you can’t quite
remember, and then even that will be gone.”

Sounis considered the authority in her voice. “What have
you dreamed?” he asked.

“I dreamed of you,” Eddis said, her eyes bright.
“In the library, talking to your tutor.” She wrapped
her arms around herself and turned away as he rose from his chair.
“And I dream of the Sacred Mountain exploding and see people
clutch their throats and fall to the ground and fire fall out of
the air and everything begin to burn. A river of fire washes down
the slopes of the mountain, and the reservoir explodes in a huge
cloud of steam, but the fire doesn’t stop until it has
devoured the city of Eddis entirely.”

Horrified, Sounis didn’t know what to do, or say. Then he
remembered his father in the forecourt of Eddis’s megaron in
the mountains, and he put a hand on Eddis’s shoulder. He did
not take her in his arms so much as he offered them to her, and
when she moved into this embrace, he held her tightly.

“I need to empty the city of Eddis,” she said,
laying her head on his chest. “I need to give every man and
woman and child a reason to think that life would be better for
them away from the mountain, down in the lowlands, out on the
islands. Anywhere but Eddis.”

“You need to marry me,” he said.

“Yes,” said Eddis.

“And I am a pig, like my uncle.”

Eddis laughed. Her head fit just under his chin, and Sounis
could feel the chuckle in his chest. “No, you are not, or I
would not love you as I do.”

“I loved you the first time I saw you.”

Eddis laughed again. “You were four,” she said,
without lifting her head.

Startled, Sounis said, “I was?”

“My father who was Eddis paid a visit to the court of
Sounis. My brothers and I accompanied him.”

“I don’t remember,” said Sounis.
“Unless, perhaps, I do,” he added, wincing, as hazy
recollections grew clearer.

Eddis confirmed the worst of them. “My brothers made you
cry.”

Sounis tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “Are you
certain that you want to be my wife?”

“Absolutely,” said Eddis, quietly. “Eternally
certain.”

Holding her tight, Sounis looked around the library. “Does
Gen know?” he wondered aloud, and he felt Eddis pull away
slightly. He looked into her face. “What does he
dream?” he asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“They aren’t dreams to him, Sophos,” said
Eddis, feeling his arms tighten again around her at the
implication. “I believe that the veil for him is always thin,
and that he walks through the world gingerly.”

“Can
he
answer my questions,
then?”

Eddis was amused by his persistence, but shook her head.
“In my experience, the more you know of the gods, the more
you know what you cannot understand.”

“There is a great deal I don’t know,” he said,
seriously. “And not just about the gods.”

Looking into his unsmiling face, Eddis knew it was as close as
he would ever come to an accusation. He had been saved by the men
Eugenides sent, though he did not yet know the ferocity with which
the king of Attolia had stripped those men from other posts, the
capital he had expended, the secrets that had been revealed in
order to send help to Sounis. But Sophos had to know that she and
Eugenides had let him ride away with an Attolian army at his back,
believing he needed it. With more faith in himself, and his
father’s army, he could have retaken his throne without
Attolia’s aid. He might not have followed that bloodier and
more costly path, but Eddis and Attolis hadn’t offered him
the choice.

“Yes,” Eddis admitted, praying that he would not ask
for an apology she could not give.

“But you will tell me everything now?”

“Now and forever,” Eddis promised.

T
HE king of Attolia reclined in a chair in a loggia
high up in the palace. His feet were braced on a footstool, and he
had a robe around his shoulders. The sun was setting somewhere out
of sight, but its light still filled the corner of the stone porch
where he sat. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t open them
before he spoke.

“Have you convinced him?” he asked.

“Gen,” said Sounis.

Eugenides started violently and knocked the wine cup on the arm
of his chair. He made a halfhearted effort to catch it but only
added a spin that flung the wine farther. The cup broke on the
ceramic tiles.

“Gods damn it,” he said.

“You can say that?” Sounis asked, approaching the
back of his chair.

Attolis considered the younger king of Sounis over his shoulder.
“There has been no objection so far. I take care not to link
anyone specific to the word
damn
,
though.”

Sounis said, “I broke the truce at Elisa.”

“Pay your fine,” said Eugenides dismissively,
“and assume they are on your side. That’s what I
do.” He resettled the robe around his shoulders.

“Eddis said that, too.” Sounis looked at the robe.
“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Attolis responded, a little
shortly. “I am drinking my wine hot, with foul herbs in it,
as a favor to my palace physician, who wants to show the queen of
Eddis’s physician just who’s in charge here.
Sit.” He waved his hand at a nearby chair. Sounis pulled it
over and placed it just out of the sunlight, which was too bright
to suit him.

“So that wasn’t an accident?” He looked at the
mess an attendant was hastily wiping up.

“The initial reaction was,” Eugenides said
evasively. He could have saved the wine if he’d wanted to.
“You surprised me.”

“I thought nothing surprised you.”

“And I thought you were the queen of Eddis.” He
looked malevolently over his shoulder at his attendants waiting by
the door to the porch.

Sounis defended them. “She was here.” After she had
been announced, but before Hilarion could introduce Sounis, Eddis
had raised her hand to silence the attendant and wordlessly
withdrawn. Sounis wondered if she thought Gen might have refused to
see him if he’d been announced on his own. If he would have
retreated again to remote formality.

“Being a mere mortal,” said Eugenides, “I am
surprised as often as any man.
Has
she
convinced you?”

“Yes.” Sounis had spent most of the day in the
library with Eddis. They had been interrupted only once, when
Xanthe knocked to admit a group of servants with food and
drink.

“Why didn’t you tell me to take Attolia’s
advice from the beginning?”

“I thought you should figure it out. What you learn for
yourself, you will know forever,” said Eugenides.

“Pol used to say that,” said Sounis, surprised.

“I learned it from him. I just wish to my god that I had
his patience for the process,” said Eugenides, looking with
dislike at the new cup of wine his attendants brought him, but
taking it all the same.

Thinking of the guardsman he had admired, who had died during
their pursuit of Hamiathes’s Gift, Sounis looked out over the
stone balustrade of the loggia at the buildings of Attolia below
him. There were no clouds visible, and the sky was filled with the
liquid light of late afternoon that poured down over the city. He
could see people in the streets beyond the outer wall of the
palace, standing talking to each other or walking from the wider
avenues into the narrow alleys out of his sight. A man with a horse
was trying to coax it to pull a wagon over a shallow step in the
roadway. If Sounis leaned forward, the sun hit him in the eyes, but
he could still make out the bend in the roadway where he had
perched on a marker with a peashooter to capture the king of
Attolia’s attention. He found that he didn’t want to
talk about the gods.

“Won’t Eddis’s people resent her
decision?” he asked.

“They won’t be angry at you,” Eugenides told
him. “They will be angry at me. They love Eddis too much to
desert her, and she has in many ways prepared them for
this.”

Sounis lifted his feet onto the footstool. “How angry will
they be with you?” he asked.

“Very,” said Eugenides. “I’m trying not
to think about it,” he added as he shifted his feet to make
room for Sounis’s. “I am glad you got the message about
the troops at Oneia.”

When Sophos didn’t respond, Gen put his cup down and
straightened.

“I sent that information in every manner I could think of,
including by pigeon. If you didn’t get it, why did you take
your army down a narrow road to a dead end?”

Sounis shrugged. “There was no point in running for the
capital. The Medes would have followed and laid siege. You might
have eventually lifted it, but you couldn’t have saved me
from being the king who ran away. I would never have been Sounis,
just your puppet on the throne.”

“What if I hadn’t sent reinforcements to
Oneia?”

“But you did.”

“You should credit Irene,” said Eugenides. “I
had the men and the transport, but she told me where to deliver
them.”

“Where did you get the boats?” Sounis asked.

“Stripped them off the Neutral Islanders, with the
permission of their headmen.”

Sounis stared. “Were you behind the negotiations on Lerna
and Hannipus?” he asked.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,”
answered Eugenides with a straight face.

Sounis glanced at the attendants and let the subject drop.
“We would have died without the additional men,” he
admitted matter-of-factly. “But we would have taken the
entire Mede army with us. Poets would have written about us, and
songs would have been sung about us—”

“For all the good that would have done your dead
bodies,” Eugenides cynically interrupted.

“Well, I wasn’t looking forward to it,” said
Sounis caustically. “But over our dead bodies the Medes would
never have been accepted by the people of Sounis. Much more likely
that they would have allied with Attolia.” He looked at
Eugenides, who was still eyeing him in surprise. “I
didn’t
expect
to die,” he said.
“I knew you would send help.”

“Why?”

It was Sounis’s turn to be surprised. He said, “You
told me you needed me to be Sounis. I am. I needed my king to send
me help. You did. There had to be reinforcements at Oneia, so they
were there.” To him it was obvious.

Eugenides swallowed. “I see.”

They both returned to looking out over the city. Sounis’s
thoughts turned to Eddis. He had given up his sovereignty to
Attolis for reasons anyone could understand. He wasn’t sure
that anyone would ever know how Eugenides had become king over
Eddis. If he couldn’t bring himself to speak of the gods
aloud to Eugenides, who would he ever tell? Who else would ever
know of Eddis’s dreams of fire and death from the Sacred
Mountain?

“She would have married your uncle,” Eugenides said,
as if sensing his thoughts and turning them in a new direction.

“I am glad she will not,” said Sounis.

“Me, too.” Eugenides smiled.

“The Medes will find us united against them,” said
Sounis.

“I should hope so,” said Eugenides. “You shot
the ambassador.”

“You gave me the gun.”

They both laughed.