A Conspiracy of Kings

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “And what cost doing business with Hanaktos?” snapped the magus. “Even if he hadn’t spitted you? Our entire country the lapdog of the Medes?”

  “Always yapping about the Medes. What have they to do with Hanaktos?” responded my father. “I have said already, the Medes are too far away to rule over us with any attention. Let them have their tribute, and they will leave us to ourselves.”

  “I have told you, the Medes will wipe us out of existence!” insisted the magus. “As they have every other nation with which they have ‘allied.’”

  Clearly Father and the magus had had no rapprochement in my absence.

  “Hanaktos held my wife and my daughters and my son,” my father said. “Tell me, then, how shall I not deal with him?”

  “H-he didn’t have me,” I stuttered. “I was under his nose, but he didn’t know it.” My mind raced. Perhaps help had arrived after Basrus carried me off. Perhaps the fire had been put out before it was too late. “My mother and sisters are not dead?”

  “They are hostage,” said my father heavily, “held by rebels who have some connection with Hanaktos, who claimed that he wants no more part in this rebellion, only the settling of it. He offered a mediation and restoration of Sounis.”

  “He is in league with the Medes,” said the magus.

  “You have no proof,” my father countered while I was still reeling at the idea that Eurydice and Ina and my mother were somewhere living and not dead in the destruction of the villa on Letnos. It was a moment before I paid more attention to the exchange of fire between my father and the magus. They were deep into what was obviously a familiar rut.

  “Surely this is my uncle’s decision,” I pointed out. Their argument cut off more sharply than I anticipated.

  My father said, “Your uncle is dead.”

  The magus said, “You are Sounis.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I should have stayed in Hanaktos and built walls. “More than a month ago,” the magus said when I asked him how long it had been since the death of my uncle. “Sounis had a fever before a day of hard riding and died that night.”

  The magus and my father had told no one except a few officers. To the men in the army they had said the king was elsewhere, raising more forces.

  “Your Majesty”—the magus addressed me, and I flinched—“we are near to being overwhelmed by Eddis and Attolia. They only wait for us to be at our weakest. We have lost the navy and most of the islands. Eddis has fortified the ground at the base of the Irkes pass. The Mede emperor and the prince of Melenze are also waiting. There is a chance that if Melenze knew your uncle who was Sounis had died, they would not wait to make an alliance with us; they would attack.”

  “Attolia and Melenze will tear us apart between them,” said my father, and got a glare for it from the magus.

  “We need to make an alliance with Melenze before the news gets out,” said the magus while I stared at him like a pilchard.

  “We need to make an alliance with the Medes before war breaks out between Melenze and Attolia with us in the middle,” my father said more forcefully.

  “The Medes,” the magus countered, trying to keep his temper, “started this rebellion, direct this rebellion, and nearly saw you dead tonight!” He pinched his nose and drew a deep breath. He said to my father, “Hanaktos will be on your heels.”

  “Hanaktos, thanks to my son, doesn’t know where we are.” He told the magus of our trip through the dark.

  “Thanks to His Majesty,” the magus said, and my father seemed startled at the correction but not displeased. On the contrary, he suddenly looked much like Ina when she has all her embroidery threads arranged to her satisfaction. He looked so pleased that I checked over my shoulder to see if there might be someone else behind me who had drawn his attention.

  “Your Majesty,” said the magus deferentially, trying to restart the conversation. “I am sorry to put you in this position, but I believe Hanaktos might still attack.”

  “He has no idea where we are!” my father argued.

  “The Mede will have told him!” said the magus.

  “The Mede again!” my father said, throwing up his hands.

  “The Mede what?” said a voice behind me. “What will I have told whom?”

  I spun around to see a man standing in the open doorway of the tent. Only the lack of reaction from my father and the magus stopped me from jumping at his throat. He was clearly a Mede.

  “Aah,” he said in theatrical delight. “The rumors running around the camp are true: Your lost lamb has been found.”

  Then he looked at the magus and said pointedly, “Won’t you please present me to your king?,” confirming that he’d been listening outside the tent and had heard everything that had been said within. Which is a reason you should not discuss important business in a tent or at least should keep your voices down if you do, as my father and the magus emphatically had not. The Mede was pleased at the magus’s discomfort, and his saturnine smile showed it.

  The magus stiffly said, “Your Majesty, permit me to present the ambassador Akretenesh from His most Excellent and Sovereign Majesty Ghaznuvidas, emperor of the Mede.”

  Good thing that I hadn’t strangled him, I thought.

  “I am most honored, Your Majesty,” said Akretenesh, with a deep bow.

  “You are welcome, Your Excellency,” I said, tilting my head, probably a little too far. “I am of course gratified, though very surprised, to receive you in such”—I couldn’t think of a diplomatic word and settled for—“unusual circumstances.”

  “Allow me to say, and to speak for my master when I do, how pleased we are to be introduced to you in any circumstances. We are delighted that you are found safe and returned to your anxious parent.”

  He turned to my father then. “And your wife and daughters are as well, I trust?”

  “No,” said my father. “It was a trap.” He told him of Hanaktos’s treachery.

  The Mede was horrified, stopping just short of saying that it was the sort of thing one could expect from barbarians like us. He asked how my father intended to free my mother and sisters, and my father had no answer except, “They do not matter. Only Sounis is important.”

  I glared at him, but he would not meet my eye.

  “Indeed,” the Mede murmured, forfeiting any tolerance I might have had for him. He turned to me and said earnestly, “Your Majesty, you can count on our support. We have the ships to patrol your coast and to retake your islands from Attolia. We have the armies to aid you here on land. With our help, you can be secure on your throne.”

  I said, “Our thanks, Excellency. I believe we would benefit more from your gold…as Attolia did.”

  Akretenesh’s expression didn’t change, but it was a hit. We both knew that the Mede emperor had provided gold to Attolia, thinking he was buying control over her country from a foolish queen. If he had been successful, Akretenesh wouldn’t have been in a tent in the dark with me, offering his emperor’s support. Instead, Attolia would be a subject state, invading us with those very same Mede armies at her back.

  “Permit me to say that your youth is refreshing, Your Majesty, but perhaps it should be tempered by experience. Will you have a regent?”

  “Nonsense,” said my father.

  “Surely he is not confirmed king? Not yet elected by your barons?”

  It’s true that the kings in Sounis are confirmed in a meeting of all the barons, but I was the appointed heir. My father explained that in such cases, the Barons’ Meet was a formality.

  He extolled my many virtues in the fight at Hanaktos and the escape afterward. A year earlier I would have been gratified. Contrariwise, all I felt was resentment at being talked of as if I were a tent pole. Behind my father, the magus was signaling. He hadn’t liked my comment about the Attolian gold, and he didn’t want me pricking the ambassador.

  “He is a fine king already!” my father said in conclusion.

  Eyeing the magus, I demurred. “His Excellenc
y may be right, Father,” I said. The magus nodded, and my father stared at me.

  “Perhaps the right regent,” hinted the magus.

  My father opened his mouth to call me a fool and froze. As the magus had pointed out earlier, I was his king. His ambitions had elevated me beyond his dictatorial control. He turned on the magus instead. “This is your doing,” he snarled. “You have corrupted him with your incessant nattering. Next he will say that we go to Melenze.”

  “I do,” I said. “I do say we should go to Melenze. You will take the army north immediately.”

  That was the bitter end of my brief moment in the sunshine of my father’s affection. It was also the beginning of a shouting match between the magus and my father that could be heard on the other side of the camp, never mind the other side of the tent walls.

  My father accused the magus of manipulating me and of being a power-hungry monster. The magus called my father beef witted and lamented the combination of his dim wits and his short temper. All this in front of the Mede ambassador. My father has always been prone to temper, and the magus acid-tongued, but they were like schoolboys. I hardly knew the magus. I feared I had made a terrible mistake following his lead, and Akretenesh didn’t help, spreading oil on the waters only to set fire to it.

  I didn’t know what to do. I stood there indecisive, until suddenly the magus fell silent and seemed to be staring intently at the ground. So strange was his behavior that even my father paused in his diatribe. The magus looked up, and his face was almost purple. He took a single explosive breath, the color drained out of his face, and he fell at my feet.

  “Magus!” I squealed, and dropped to my knees beside him. I shouted at my father to call the camp physician and cradled the magus’s head. His color was better, but he was insensible. I ignored the Mede ambassador’s hastily excusing himself and listened for a heartbeat. I sighed in relief when I heard it and then waited impatiently for the physician.

  The magus stirred in my arms and whispered brokenly, “I am fine. My tent, take me to my tent.”

  My father returned with the physician, both looking concerned. I helped lift the magus and carry him to his tent. We laid him on a bed there, and I stood wringing my hands while the physician listened to his heart and tried to get him to speak. I told my father that he should prepare for Hanaktos’s attack. My father wanted to disagree, but he looked to the magus, lying nearly insensible on the bed, and acquiesced. I told him that if Hanaktos did not attack, we should move north anyway, as soon as possible. He clamped his jaw and, when I didn’t back down, bowed without speaking and left. The magus’s hand lifted, and he reached for me.

  I went to him and bent to hear him as he whispered again. “Speak to you,” he said hoarsely. “Private.”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes,” and chased away the physician and his assistants, who seemed to have nothing useful to do anyway.

  When we were alone, I bent over the magus again. He opened his eyes and sat up so quickly I nearly knocked heads with him.

  “You fraud!” I said.

  He held up his hands for silence. “Indeed,” he said quietly, “I could think of no other way out of the tent. Your Majesty, we must get you out of the camp immediately.”

  “We will be prepared for Hanaktos’s attack,” I assured him.

  “There is more, I am afraid. I fear that you will be conveniently dead in the attack, and I can think of no way to prevent this except to flee.” He watched my face closely as he said, “Akretenesh has too many supporters here.”

  He was warning me that I was going to be assassinated by my father’s men.

  I thought he couldn’t be serious. Things couldn’t be that bad, but he was already up from his bed, stuffing clothes into a set of saddlebags.

  “Why is the Mede ambassador in the camp at all?” I asked.

  “Your father. He cannot stand the idea that Melenze wants Haptia back and thinks that the Medes are a better ally. I am sorry. My every effort to change his mind has entrenched him deeper. I should have stayed in the mountains of Eddis.”

  I shook my head. No one could have convinced my father to cede land back to the Melenzi. “Akretenesh only suggested a regent in order to set you and my father against each other.”

  “Indeed. It was a fine distraction from the immediacy of Hanaktos’s attack. We must get you safely away.”

  “But they need me as a pawn,” I said. “Why would they want me dead?”

  The magus snatched a few things from a writing desk. I’d forgotten his lopsided smile. “A pawn,” he emphasized. “You are not one. They cannot afford to have you independent of their control, with your father’s army at your back.”

  “I saw your signals,” I protested.

  The magus shook his head. “Akretenesh saw as well.”

  “Ah,” I said, “er.”

  “Indeed. Not only have we convinced him that you are more cunning than they realized, but we’ve also made it clear that if you were a puppet, it would be me pulling your strings. A mistake all around, and my fault. I apologize, My King.”

  I shuddered at the address as if someone were walking over my future gravesite. “What about my father?” I asked.

  “I believe that he will go north as he was told. Especially after Hanaktos attacks. We can decide on a safe place to rejoin him later,” the magus said.

  “No,” I said. “My father will take the army north on his own. You and I go to Attolia.”

  The magus didn’t hesitate, didn’t even look at me. “As you wish” was all he said as he went back to packing, leaving me to wonder if I was the only one who felt the world spinning.

  I had never meant to go to Melenze. I had known from the moment I’d learned of my uncle’s death that I would go to Attolia. Eugenides was the king of Attolia and my friend. If his wife was the wolf at my throat, surely I could still trust him. I wanted the army in the north, not to make an alliance with Melenze but to prevent more deaths while I secured peace.

  The magus, when the bags were packed, cautiously approached the side of the tent. Standing on the fabric to pull it tight, he lifted his knife to carefully slit the canvas. He paused, and in the distance I heard shouting as Hanaktos’s men attacked our pickets. The magus paid no attention. He had run his fingers across the fabric of the tent and was sniffing them. He looked up at me, startled, and seized me by the shirtfront. Dispensing with subtlety, he slashed open the side of the tent and dragged me through it as the walls caught fire. Soaked from the outside in lamp oil, they were engulfed in flame in an instant. Stumbling in the dark, we staggered away from the heat and kept going, trying to distance ourselves from whoever had struck the light. Whoever it was must have made haste to get away as well. No one pursued us. It’s possible that no one even saw us, as men raced toward the tent, shouting.

  In the confusion of attack, and fire, and darkness, we slipped away. The magus was right that we would have burned in the tent, and who could have said it was anything but a tragic accident with a lamp?

  By daylight we were not so far away that we could be sure we had outdistanced pursuit. We crawled into a screen of spindly bushes, sheltered from view from above by large rocks, where I changed into the clothes the magus had brought. They were his but fit me well. We quietly waited out the day. I broke the silence only to ask about my mother and sisters.

  “We received a written message from them,” said the magus.

  “My mother neither reads nor writes,” I said, immediately suspicious of a hoax and frightened that my relief had been unfounded.

  “It was from Ina,” the magus reassured me. “She provided information only she could know.”

  “You are certain?”

  The magus’s quiet laugh relieved my anxiety. “She mentioned that your tutor, Malatesta, had survived the attack on the villa by jumping into the latrine pit.”

  “That’s Ina,” I said. “Thank the gods.”

  “She crept into the steward’s room when you didn’t return. She hear
d the order to fire the villa and convinced your mother to move out of the icehouse. They hid themselves in a playhouse she and Eurydice had made in the bushes nearby and remained there until the smoke from the fire drew the neighbors. Unfortunately, they accepted the hospitality of a neighbor, we don’t know which one, who turned them over to your rebellious barons.”

  I knew which one, and told the magus about Hyacinth.

  “Ah,” said the magus. “She made an allusion to flowers that I didn’t understand. She also revealed that they were in Brimedius. I do not think the rebels meant to inform us, but the information was coded in the text.”

  I snickered. Ina indeed.

  When darkness fell, we continued, still cautious, though we both thought that Hanaktos’s men would expect us to be heading north toward Melenze and would look for us there. We traveled at night for the next few days but eventually reached roads that were sufficiently well trafficked that we could walk unremarked by anyone. We made it to Selik and paid a ridiculous amount for horses. I was worried that we might not have enough money left for food, but that night the magus reassured me. I had just gone through an entire loaf of bread and half a chicken, which we had purchased already cooked in a food stall near the horse-trading market. I’d suggested eating it before we left the market. I’d also suggested eating it on the road. I was not so comfortable with my new authority that I could say, “We eat the chicken now!” but the magus had seen that I was considering it. Shaking his head, he had said, “Your Majesty, with your very kind permission, we will find a place to sleep for the night off the road, and we will eat the chicken then.”

  Once we were at the campsite, and the chicken was gone, I had asked about money. “My purse is full enough,” said the magus, “to keep you supplied with roast chickens.”

  “So, so, so,” I said. “We know who the power behind the throne is,” and the magus laughed.