The King of Attolia (23 page)

“If she pardons people because she loves them, someday someone that she loves will betray her and all of Attolia with her. A queen must make sacrifices for the common good,” Relius said.

“And if what she sacrifices is her heart? Giving it up a piece at a time until there is nothing left? What do you have then, Relius, but a heartless ruler? And what becomes of the common good then?”

“The queen could never be heartless.”

“No,” said the king. “She would die herself, Relius, or lose her mind first and then her heart. Could you not see it happening? Or is your faith in her strength really so blind? Everyone has a breaking point. Yet you never stop demanding more of her.”

Relius was quiet while he thought. “And yours? I thought we found your breaking point.”

Eugenides winced, but he responded with a self-deprecating noise. “Ornon says, Ornon-who-always-has-something-to-say says, the Thieves of Eddis don’t have breaking points. We have flash points instead, like gunpowder. That’s what makes us dangerous.”

“You don’t like Ornon,” said Relius.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Because you don’t like to speak the truth?”

Eugenides made a wry face. “Ornon and I have a great deal of hard-won respect for each other,” said the king.

“Won how?”

“Well, he almost managed to avert a war. I’ve heard he did a splendid job of working the queen up to killing me on the spot when she caught me. If it hadn’t been for the Mede Ambassador’s timely and provoking interruption, I would have been safely dead, and there wouldn’t have been a great deal of blood shed.”

“You’ve heard?” Relius asked.

“I wasn’t there for Ornon’s part.”

He’d been puking on the wet floor of a cell of the queen’s prison. Not far from where Relius himself had been.

“Ornon’s respect for you?” Relius asked, taking the conversation back to a less perilous topic.

The king only smiled. “Even ex-Thieves don’t spill their secrets, Relius.”

He left a little later. Relius lay alone with his thoughts. What kind of man, he wondered, referred to himself as “safely dead”?

The king, passing through the guardroom and back to the queen’s bedroom, asked, “Where’s Costis?”

“He was released at the end of the afternoon watch.”

“By whom? I didn’t give him leave to go.”

“The queen sent him to the guardroom, Your Majesty.”

“Then why isn’t he here?”

“The captain dismissed him at the end of the afternoon watch.”

“I want him.”

“The captain?”

“No, you idiot—” He broke off as the queen appeared in a doorway opposite. “You’re awake,” he said.

“Phresine is not,” pointed out the queen.

“Oh?”

“You gave her lethium.”

“She gave it to me first.”

The queen looked at him, eyes narrowed, and said nothing. He waved at his attendants. “I dragged them like a ball and chain all the way across the palace and back.”

“If sterner measures are called for, we can find a larger ball and chain.” The queen turned and disappeared into the apartment.

“Oh, dear,” Eugenides muttered as he followed, without sending for Costis after all. The queen’s sterner measures, dispensed by the Eddisian Ambassador, arrived before dawn.

Costis wasn’t in uniform, he wasn’t even particularly clean, when he learned the next morning that he had been sent for. He had checked the duty schedule the evening before when he was hunting for Aristogiton
and couldn’t find him. Aris had been on duty. Costis was assigned no duties for the foreseeable future, and he had enjoyed a quiet morning pottering around in his own room, giving his sword and breastplate and the assorted shiny bits of his uniform a thorough cleaning. He had polishing grease on his nose and his fingers were black when someone slid back the leather curtain across his doorway without knocking on the door frame first.

When Costis lifted his head from the sword he was cleaning, prepared to be angry at the intrusion, he found no lowly barracks boy in the doorway. It was Ion, one of the king’s elegant and carefully turned-out attendants.

Ion, looking far from elegant, stared at him in horror. “Get dressed. Get clean. You are supposed to be in the queen’s guardroom.”

“When?” asked Costis, getting to his feet.

“Now,” said the attendant, “hours ago. You were supposed to be there when the king asked for you just now. He said he wanted you last night, but we didn’t think he meant it.”

“And now he’s angry?”

“Now the queen is angry.”

Moving fast, Costis tipped water from a pitcher into a bowl and began to scrub his face.

The queen was waiting in the antechamber to the bedroom. As before, she had Ornon with her. They
were both waiting. She stood as Costis entered. No, Costis thought, she didn’t stand. She rose—like a thundercloud towering in the summer sky. He could try to explain that he hadn’t known he was supposed to remain on duty, and that he’d been dismissed by the captain himself. He could also rush back to the guardroom, snatch his sword out of the rack, and throw himself down on it. Likely with the same results.

“You will not leave the apartment without royal permission,” commanded the queen. “You will eat and sleep here. You will remain in the king’s presence until he dismisses you, and you will endeavor in every way to ingratiate yourself sufficiently that he does not dismiss you.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Ornon”—her eyes flicked to the Eddisian Ambassador briefly—“believes the experience will be instructive. Try to learn something.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The queen watched him for a moment. She offered this opening, if there was anything else Costis wanted to say. But Costis was silent. Seeing himself in her eyes, he remembered what he hadn’t thought of in days, not since the assassination—that he was a lieutenant in name only, and what had brought him to this place at this time in the royal apartment was his failure, failure to keep his temper, failure to keep his oath. Failure to do his duty. He had nothing to say.

The queen left, followed by Ornon. Shaking, Costis went to the door of the bedchamber to find the king.

Two men in Eddisian uniform sat in chairs by the window. They had pulled a small table over and were casting dice on the inlaid wooden top. Costis eyed them suspiciously as the king repeated what the queen had just told Costis in the anteroom. The king sat in bed, surrounded by papers and vellum sheets spread in haphazard patterns. There was an open leather mail pouch incongruously rough on the soft embroidered cloth of the spread.

“I have more company than I need,” said the king. “You can go to the guardroom.”

Costis cleared his throat uncomfortably. “The queen said I should stay.”

“And no doubt, you are therefore afraid to go. I would be, too. Stay, then, and I shall introduce you to Aulus and Boagus, my dear relatives, who have joined me to while away my convalescence.”

Costis couldn’t help wondering if these were the cousins that had held him down in the rainwater cache. “Watch out for Aulus,” the king warned acidly. “Like the bull he resembles, he has been known to crush people with a single misstep.”

Aulus eyed the king for a moment without comment, then rose from his chair. Aulus, Costis realized, was huge. He hadn’t appeared so large when he was sitting, but
standing up, he seemed to almost fill the room. He loomed over the king as he bent to collect the papers and reports on the bed.

The king pinned a paper to the spread with his hook. “I am reading that!” he insisted. Aulus took no notice. He merely pulled the paper until it tore free. He put the shredded piece onto the stack he had built and shoveled the entire stack into the messenger pouch. Then he looked at the king and lifted a single admonishing finger as thick as the haft on a hand ax.

“I told you. One more nasty comment and it would be time for a nap.” His accent was thick enough to cut with a knife, and it seemed to add a syllable to every word.

“You cannot keep me in bed!”

“Of course I can,” said Aulus calmly. “A damn sight easier than I can get you to do anything else. I’ll lie down on top of the covers on this side. Boagus can lie on the other. You’ll be trapped like a kitten in a sack, and before you can work out a suitable revenge, Boagus and I will be safely posted to a distant and very invisible location, far beyond the reach of his royal petulance the King of Attolia.” He nodded significantly. “Ornon promised.”

The king stared dumbfounded, then attempted to reason. “I have important—”

“Gen,” Aulus interrupted. “You’ve been reading since the sun came up. You’re ragged, and you need a rest.”

Eugenides glanced at Costis. Costis straightened,
prepared to defend his king to the death against this huge Eddisian nanny.

Aulus sighed wearily. “Gen. Go to sleep.”

The king grudgingly slipped down under the covers. To Costis’s awed delight, the enormous Eddisian actually straightened the covers and tucked them in.

Aulus went back to the window, but didn’t begin the dice game again. He whistled a quiet tune Costis didn’t recognize, filled with long, soothing notes. Before the second repetition of the tune, the king was asleep.

Boagus got up to check on him, hanging over him for a long time and watching him carefully. Finally he nodded at Aulus and stepped back to his chair. He and Aulus made themselves comfortable, both putting their boots up on the small wooden table, negotiating wordlessly how four feet might be simultaneously squeezed onto it. Then they closed their eyes like professional soldiers who know better than to miss a chance for rest, and appeared to fall asleep themselves.

When Costis moved, just shifting his weight from one foot to the other, not only one but both of the Eddisians opened an eye to look him over. Costis didn’t move again. The king slept until the watch trumpets blew their noon fanfare. When he’d eaten, Aulus let him have his reports back.

In the afternoon, apropos of nothing, Aulus said, “I heard you were scared white by your jailer yesterday.”

Gen did not look up from what he was reading. “That would be Ornon talking again,” he said.

“Yes,” said Aulus, smiling.

“No,” said the king, looking up at last. “I was not scared white by one of my jailers.”

He looked down—pretended to go back to what he was reading, but didn’t. Instead he fiddled with the nubs of the embroidery on the bedcover. Boagus opened his mouth, but at a signal from Aulus, he shut it again. They waited. Aulus appeared to be willing to wait forever.

“I nearly had them killed, every single one of them, garroted, gutted, and dead.”

Costis remembered the sick look on the king’s face and the sudden long silence in the cell.

“Your captain, too?” Aulus asked.

“Oh, certainly. He would have been first in line.” He pushed his hand through his hair. “I told him I can do anything I want,” he admitted.

“Ahh,” said Aulus, “I suppose he thought that was the King of Attolia talking?”

“I suppose he did.”

Boagus shook his head. “You really can do anything you want, now.” Eugenides’s glare made him throw up his hands in the air and add hastily, “Not that you couldn’t always.”

Aulus chuckled. “If I had a gold coin for every time I heard you say that you could do anything you wanted, I’d
be rich,” he said, “as rich as—” He searched for an appropriate comparison.

“As Ornon before he lost all his sheep,” Boagus finished for him. The two soldiers laughed, and even the king smiled. Reinforcing Costis’s suspicion that Eugenides had been responsible for Ornon’s lost sheep, Boagus asked, “Do you still baa like a lamb when he walks into the room?”

Eugenides shook his head. “Ornon took me aside first thing after the coronation ceremony and explained that it would be beneath my dignity.”

Aulus and Boagus stared. Eugenides’s expression was bland.

“He said that?” Aulus asked.

“He did,” the king confirmed.

“What did you say?” Boagus asked suspiciously.

“I promised to bark like a sheepdog instead.”

The Eddisians chuckled again.

“You don’t, though?” Aulus had to ask.

The king eyed him with disgust. “Give me some credit,” he said, and when Aulus was visibly relieved, added, “Not when anybody else can hear me.”

The Eddisians roared.

The king laughed more quietly, holding his hand against his side. Even Costis smiled. He quickly straightened the smile. It wasn’t his place to laugh with the king, but he was pleased all the same.

A figure appeared suddenly in the doorway. Costis’s
hand went to his empty sword belt. Aulus and Boagus crouched forward in their seats and then relaxed. The figure was Ornon. Squelched laughter leaked out like the flames of a poorly snuffed candle.

“Ambassador Ornon,” said Eugenides in a slightly choked voice. “How good of you to drop by.”

“I believe you have been having a joke at my expense, Your Majesty,” Ornon said, crossing the room to sit in a chair by the fire screen.

“We wouldn’t dream of it, Ambassador.”

“I am so relieved. I might have to suggest a celebration to mark your return to health. A day of special audiences, perhaps.” As the king’s expression changed he added, “A royal parade?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Well, I do think it would be a fine way to reassure the populace, but not if Your Majesty disliked it.”

“Thank you. I dislike it very much. My apologies if we have offended you.”

“Not at all.” Ornon’s dry smile registered points scored on either side, then faded. “If you are done laughing, send your keepers away. I am afraid I have news.”

“Bad news?”

Ornon shrugged. “Good for our hopes of peace and a unified triumvirate to stand against the Mede. Bad news,” he said gently, “for the heir of Sounis.”

Laughter gone, the king said, “They have his body, then?”

“No. Not yet. But we have reports that Sounis is retaking the countryside. If the rebels had him alive as a hostage, they would have said so by now.”

“I see.”

Ornon signaled the Eddisians. “Perhaps you would excuse us?”

The king waved Costis out of the room as well.