“How finely observed, Dionis. You are astute.”
“I mean more than the things that are usually wrong with him. Maybe he’s dying.”
I wished I were dying.
“You aren’t dying,” Petrus said sternly. He put his hands on either side of my head and turned my face toward him and away from the wall. He’d guessed it was no physical ailment that kept me in my bed. “You are not going to die,” he said.
I knew better.
It was a month, more or less, before Erondites struck. I knew my time was up even before the double doors into the king’s waiting room crashed open.
“Erondites!” The king shouted loud enough for me to hear him all the way back in my closet if I’d been there, which I wasn’t, because Petrus had made me get out of bed that morning and sit in the waiting room. I was already out of sight, though, as I had heard the attendants shouting as they followed the king up the hallway. “Your Majesty, Your Majesty, please!” they’d called, and I’d leapt for cover.
The supply wagons carrying grain to Perma had been ambushed and burned.
It was a calculated attack on the stability of Attolia’s rule. Her people were sick of her high taxes, tired of relinquishing their crops for her stockpiles. Twice they’d seen the Medes driven from the shores of the Little Peninsula, and they wanted to believe there was no longer any need to prepare for war. Once Cenna’s play had dragged it into the open, their resentment had only grown. The farmers had grudged every seed of the grain that had burned in those wagons. To force more grain from them to replace what had been lost would require harsh measures. To leave the granaries empty would suggest that Attolia’s demands had been unreasonable all along. Either way, the population would be enflamed. If they rioted and were put down, it would undermine Attolia’s popularity still further.
Philologos, and behind him Sotis and Xikos, had appeared in the doorway. Everyone in the waiting room had jumped to their feet. Lamion and Ion, and Hilarion, hearing the noise, had rushed from their sleeping quarters. The king, to all appearances unhinged, was shouting at the chair behind which I cowered.
“You knew the route for those wagons, and you told the baron your grandfather!”
“Your Majesty, no!” Philo protested, all the other attendants chorusing in support: I was an idiot, I could not talk, I was too stupid to read or write, my tutor had said so. The king ignored them all, reaching around the chair to drag me out.
“Erondites has destroyed the supplies for Perma, and you told him how to do it,” he said.
I shook my head, not denying that I’d done as he said, desperately trying to deny my own culpability. I hadn’t wanted to help my grandfather. I hadn’t wanted to betray the king. Tearing myself free from his hand at my collar, I dropped into a crouch, all my old habits coming back.
“Get your hands off your ears,” said the king, slapping them away from my head. “Men are dead because of you.”
I hadn’t meant for that to happen. I hadn’t known it would. He hauled me back up.
Hilarion, all decorum thrown aside, seized the king by the arm. “Your Majesty, you’ll hurt him.” The king shouldered him back and this time caught me around the neck as I tried to get away, choking me in the crook of his arm.
Seeing the knife blade of his hook in front of my face, I whimpered.
“Your Majesty, please,” begged Hilarion.
“You wrote to Erondites,” said the king, his voice flat with rage.
I tried to shake my head.
“Shall I cut out that lying tongue so you never use it again?” the king asked me, and I felt the cold blade hit my teeth, tasted metal or blood.
“Your Majesty!” Hilarion shouted.
The king paused at last. The attendants were staring at him in horror.
He released me and I fell to the floor.
“Send him back to his grandfather,” he said bitterly. “He is an Erondites after all.”
In the face of Xikos’s satisfied face, Hilarion’s shock, Philologos’s distress, the king scowled. I didn’t even care that my grandfather was going to have his way at last. I only cared that the king hated me. I reached for him and he kicked me away. Philologos took my arm then and pulled me to my feet.
Hilarion took my other arm. As I struggled, they began to drag me toward the sleeping quarters.
“I want him gone,” the king said flatly.
Shuffling their feet unhappily, Hilarion and Philo turned me toward the door to the passage.
I was twisting my head to look beseechingly over my shoulder when there was a burst of light so bright it bleached every color in the room to black. The king was caught, eyes wide and mouth open, staring over my shoulder. I faced around, saw the terrifying silhouette of a figure, an impenetrable darkness limned by light, between me and the doors, and I wrenched myself free. My fear greater than all the efforts of Hilarion and Philo to hold me, I threw myself at the king, buried my face in his chest, felt the trembling in him that mirrored my own. Neither of us moved.
Eyes closed, I saw the light slowly fade from the room. When the red inside my eyelids had faded, the king spoke, his voice creaking like an unoiled pulley.
“You betrayed me to Erondites.”
I nodded, admitting my guilt.
“Did you write to him?”
I shook my head, rubbing my face into his shirt.
“You can speak?”
He could cut out my stupid tongue if he would only let me stay.
“Pheris, look at me,” the king said, his anger still simmering. “Can you speak?”
I couldn’t lie to him again. Pulling my face away from him, I touched my fingers to my lips as if to catch the words and pull them out. I didn’t expect him to understand.
“You can speak to Juridius,” he said wearily. “And Juridius was here for the festival of Moira.”
Blinking away tears, I nodded again.
Melisande had taught both of us the silent language she had shared with her deaf brother. She and I could communicate, but it was only Juridius who truly understood me. He was my heart’s companion, and I’d shared everything with him, until the day he turned against me and joined the others at the villa as they drove me away. I’d gone to Melisande and cried and cried in her lap, thinking nothing could be worse—until Emtis had come.
“He can talk?” Xikos was the first to understand.
“With his hands,” confirmed the king. “Well enough to inform Erondites where those wagons would be and when.”
Before my eyes, the shock in the faces of Hilarion, Sotis, Xikander, even Philologos, turned to anger. Ion, Dionis, all of the attendants who’d spoken so freely in front of me, were realizing the depths of my deceit. Xikos pushed past Philologos and reached around Hilarion to drag me away from the king—to my death, I was sure. Whether it would be Xikos who would kill me or my grandfather was the only question.
“Stop,” said the king, and Xikos paused in disbelief. None of the attendants seemed to have been aware of the great presence in the room. What they made of our reactions, I don’t know.
“Your Majesty,” said Ion sternly. “You cannot mean to keep a traitor among us.”
“Your tune has changed.”
“I was mistaken, Your Majesty. Send him away.”
“So his grandfather can kill him?”
“It is no more than he deserves,” claimed Dionis.
“Tell Erondites to find another heir,” suggested Philologos, and Hilarion agreed.
“No one in the barons’ council will object,” he said.
“He is a traitor,” said Xikos, which was ironic coming from a man who, if not a traitor, was certainly no friend of the king.
I think it was Xikos’s words that sealed the decision in the king’s mind. “Keep him,” he said, adding to me, “Out of my sight would be better, Pheris, but I realize how that would turn out.”
It would turn out a murder, I thought. I didn’t dare meet anyone’s eye. All of them were thinking o
f their secrets and how many of them I knew. Even Hilarion and Ion. Even Philologos was embarrassed to think of the things I’d overheard.
Into the angry silence, it was Ion who spoke. “Pheris will sit in the waiting room with us, Your Majesty. Very quietly, I am sure. And at night, he will sleep with me.”
I flicked a glance up at him. He looked at me with such dislike that I quickly looked down again, but he was promising the king to keep me unharmed, and I was grateful.
“Come,” said Ion, when the king said nothing. A hand on my shoulder, he guided me to a corner, where I sat on a bench against the wall. My feet dangled. The king went into his bedchamber alone and closed the door. It grew increasingly uncomfortable, but I sat, as Ion had promised, very quietly.
Others in the room were not so silent.
“The king should kill him,” said Xikos.
“The king isn’t interested in doing favors for Erondites,” Verimius said.
“All of them should be killed,” said Medander.
I thought of my mother and my brother and sisters back at the villa. I considered my uncle Sejanus, still under arrest. He’d manipulated the other attendants into behavior they were now ashamed of. He worked with the men who’d tried to assassinate the king. It was a wonder to me that he hadn’t been executed long since. I thought of my brother Juridius, also a traitor. I thought of Emtis and what I had done and could not deny that the Erondites were a corrupt family.
“If the king wants him, he stays,” said Ion. “We all know why you want him gone, Medander. Stop being a cheat and you won’t have to worry about what secrets the little monster knows.”
The king did not leave his rooms that evening. Food was sent up from the kitchens. The attendants drank and played cards in the evening, and then Ion told me to collect my bedding and bring it to his room. Ion’s room was no larger than my closet, but it had a window that looked out on the world, not onto an airshaft. It had little in it besides a bed, a table, and a chair, and seemed spacious without racks of clothes. On the table was an altar housing a row of tiny gods. I wondered which they were, but Ion flicked my ear painfully and pointed to the corner by the door.
“Sleep there,” he said.
Cowed, I went to make a nest of my blankets and lie down.
The king might have bowed to the will of the gods and allowed me to remain in the palace. He had not forgiven me. I trailed after Ion, going only where he chose to go, not daring to sneak away, even to my little closet, much less out of the apartments, for fear someone would pitch me down the stairs and expect the king to be happy to hear of my death. There were no more unsupervised hours in the garden. People were careful what they said when I was near, looking significantly in my direction, putting their heads close together to speak in low voices.
The king accused Erondites of being behind the burning of the grain wagons, but my grandfather roundly denied all knowledge of the ambush. He pointed out that he had not invited Juridius to the plays, and asked why the king was not accusing my grandfather who was Susa of treason. My brother, when questioned, refused to implicate either Susa or Erondites. He claimed that a stranger in the street had asked him for the information and paid him to get it. It was an obvious lie fed to him by my grandfather or perhaps my mother. He was too young to be pressed for the truth, and they both knew it. In the end, the king had to admit that there was no proof to tie Erondites to the crime, and he was forced to withdraw his accusation.
Erondites had successfully defied the king, but it was not without cost. The king exiled Juridius. Though he was just a child, he was summoned to the capital under guard and put on a ship under the direction of the captain to be taken to the Greater Peninsula. My mother’s brief reconciliation with her father was over, and the inheritance of the house of Erondites was again in doubt.
Wrapped in my blankets, listening to Ion’s even breathing as he slept, I imagined the soldiers arriving at the Villa Suterpe. Had Marina fought them when they came for her beloved son, as Melisande had fought for me? Had Juridius had any warning? Had he had time to say goodbye? Did he even know, when he was taken aboard the ship, that he was going to Ferria, where my uncle Dite would take him in?
I sensed, but didn’t fully understand, the rising tensions around me. With the end of the war with Eddis and Sounis and her marriage to Eugenides, Attolia had been, for the first time in her rule, a popular queen. Now her popularity, and the king’s, was leaching away. I knew that there were protests in the city as food prices rose. Because I sat through the meetings with Ion, I could have told you how much the improvement to the fort at Thegmis cost, but not what the spending of that money meant to people already sick of being taxed to pay for armies and weapons and fortifications. I was focused on my own woes because I was a child and because no one had ever encouraged me to do otherwise.
Diplomatic ties were straining, and not just with the Mede ambassador, who continued to pretend the emperor had no plans to invade. None of the ambassadors from the Continent would admit what everyone knew to be true, not even Fordad, at least not publicly. He was welcome in private audiences with the king and queen, where he frankly discussed the danger, but the official Brael position was that there was no cause for concern. Everyone who wasn’t a fool knew the Medes were coming, and still there were those making jokes about Cenna’s play and blaming the king for the queen’s preparations. It was Attolia who knew how to plan for a war.
There was talk of new attendants and the retirement of the current ones. With a few exceptions, the queen changed her attendants fairly often. Officially, it was meant to spread the honor of the appointment to different families. Unofficially, it prevented any one of the attendants from becoming too influential. Phresine and Imenia, her senior attendants, were both very careful never to use their closeness to the queen to their advantage. Iolanthe and Ileia were honored for their service and sent home with expensive gifts. They were replaced with two younger women, Caeta and Silla, who both became famous later, but for reasons unrelated to this account.
When I heard the king might change attendants, I prayed that he would not turn me out. I had no home to go to; my grandfather and my mother both wanted me dead. I hoped the king might send Xikos away, and I wasn’t the only one, but it was Medander who was excused, along with Verimius. I heard the queen press the king again about making his cousin Cleon an attendant, but nothing came of it. Instead, three new attendants, Polemus, Motis, and Drusis, squeezed into the space Verimius and Medander had left.
Motis and Drusis were brothers, the younger sons of a cousin of my grandfather who was Susa. They were therefore relatives of mine, though they didn’t care to recognize the connection.
“Ugh,” said Drusis when he first saw me. He raised a hand.
“None of that,” Ion snapped at him.
“Excuse me?” asked Drusis, as if he’d misheard, as if to ask what right Ion had to tell Drusis whom he could or could not hit.
“Lay a hand on him and I’ll cut it off,” said Ion grimly, a threat with great weight in the Attolian court.
Drusis shrugged and backed away with a single poisonous look for us both.
I didn’t understand. Ion despised me as much as the other attendants did, and he did not defend me because of the king’s favor, because that was long gone. Ion tried to live by principles that no one had ever taught me. Do not lie, do not take what is not yours, do not hurt the weak. Like Philologos, he was ashamed of letting himself be cajoled by my uncle Sejanus into tormenting the king and because of that behaved better toward me than I deserved.
Chapter Seven
Ion was attending the king, and therefore I was with the king as well as he practiced his horsemanship on a course laid out near the Fields of War. We had arrived at the open ground along the river, too boggy for building and so left open for fairs and other gatherings, in a collection of carriages and riders. The royal stable master had brought the king’s warhorse on a lead.
The way the king grumbled, any
observer might have assumed the queen had shamed him into the exercise. But it was the king who was determined to improve his skill, while the queen was enjoying a rare chance to sit with nothing but needlework to occupy her under an awning that had been raised to block the sun.
Though he still refused to submit to the argument that his life was too important to risk in battle, he had grudgingly accepted that royalty did not fight on foot. Despite stories to the contrary, he was not a bad rider, but he had yet to become practiced at riding with one hand. Both he and the horse had to adjust if he was going to hold a sword and fight from horseback, and the stable master, trying to train both at the same time, had no easy task.
The beautiful warhorse Sounis had chosen for the king was as indolent as he was handsome. Yorn Fordad had suggested naming him Fryst, after the Brael god of winter, and Fryst appeared determined not to live up to the fierceness of his name. Built like a marble temple on legs, he was as placid as the king was excitable and preferred going around obstacles instead of over them—or, better yet, not going at all. Given any opportunity to stand still, he did.
“Faster, Your Majesty,” called the stable master. “Faster!”
Too late.
Fryst balked at the fence the king wanted him to jump. When he stopped dead, the king sailed over the fence into the dirt on the other side of it.
The queen looked up briefly before returning to her embroidery.
Lying on the ground, the king shouted, “I think I’ve broken something—”
“Nothing important, I’m sure,” she called back.
“My pride!”
She laughed. He got very nimbly back to his feet to glare over the fence.
When he leapt back onto Fryst, the king drove him in a circle to try the jump again. This time, when the horse balked, the king flew even higher into the air. Fryst’s head went down and the king went up, rotating in midair to land upright, flourishing his arms like an acrobat jumping a bull. The queen clapped, the king bowed, and Fryst flicked his ears, looking interested for the first time that day.
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