A Conspiracy of Kings

by Megan Whalen Turner

  I had no chance to speak to him again except in impersonal conversation at dinner. I had no privacy outside my own rooms. Akretenesh accompanied me at all times or handed me off to Brimedius or another obsequious rebel baron. It was Akretenesh who was with me when I saw a familiar figure ahead in a passageway, a figure just in the act of dodging down a flight of stairs.

  “Basrus!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, and to my everlasting surprise, Hanaktos’s slaver stopped in his tracks.

  Not so Akretenesh, who slid hastily to stand between the two of us, one hand not quite touching my chest, as if to stop me from an assault. It was unnecessary. I was unexpectedly pleased to see the familiar, ugly face.

  “Your Majesty has made an error,” Akretenesh said in warning. “This is, ah—” He paused, apparently at a loss for a good lie. “This is the rat catcher,” he said firmly. To my delight, he still couldn’t come up with a name.

  “Bruto,” said Basrus, with a straight face.

  “Yes, that’s it. Your Majesty, Bruto.” Akretenesh, being a Mede, didn’t recognize the name from the nursery rhyme of Bruto and the rats. It didn’t help that Basrus was winking at me over his shoulder.

  “We have a vermin problem, and Bruto has been clearing the compound,” Akretenesh said, perhaps revealing more than he meant. I wondered if the rats were of a human kind and if the quarry was in the compound itself or farther afield.

  “I wish you success in your endeavors on my behalf, Ba–Bruto,” I said. There was little point in contesting the Mede’s story. If anyone standing there in the passage with me knew who Basrus was, he knew that I knew as well, and would understand the irony in my emphasis on “my behalf.”

  “It is an honor to work for Your Majesty.” Basrus bowed. He straightened and looked me in the eye. “If I may say so, I was delighted to hear of the safe arrival of your mother and sisters in Brimedius.” He bowed again.

  “Thank you, Basrus,” I said.

  “Bruto,” he said.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Akretenesh was starting to give both of us the evil eye. He dismissed Basrus sharply, and the slaver turned back to the stairs. I went on to my rooms.

  There were more meetings. Each day I thought with envy of Polystrictes. I would have preferred his goats to my barons. Every one of them seemed to come to me with questions, and I had to lay every concern to rest before I had any hope that they would listen to what I had to say. I wanted to hold my head in my hands and scream.

  Instead I explained over and over that no, we wouldn’t change our oligarchy, we had always had barons elevated above patronoi and patronoi above the okloi. My father himself was one of the four dukes created by my grandfather in imitation of the courts on the Continent. I would hardly disempower him. I only meant that we would have a rule of law for everyone, king, baron, patronoi, and okloi. That I would not constantly set the barons against one another, as my uncle had, and that no man needed to fear that he must be a favorite with the king to be safe from his neighbors.

  But rumor was a hydra that regrew as often as I chopped it down. I came to rely on Nomenus, who would come with my breakfast every morning and tell me what fresh crop of misdirection had grown up in the night. He passed on to me the stories that he heard passing from one servant to the next, and I used the information to brace my arguments with the next baron in the order of precedence. I was sure Akretenesh was feeding the confusion, but there was nothing I could do about it other than try to convince my barons that they could believe in me. I continued to meet with as many as I could every day, in spite of Nomenus’s asking me if I would like to have rest in the afternoons. I was battle hardened after all the meetings in Attolia.

  The night before I was to meet with Baron Comeneus, Nomenus came to my rooms with a late meal. He had an amphora in his hand and another servant to bring in a tray with bread and cheese. He was usually able to manage this on his own, and I looked at the extra man curiously. Hesitantly, Nomenus introduced him as a friend from Tas-Elisa. He emphasized friend significantly. My hopes rising like birds on the wing, I thought at first that the magus had sent him. I asked if he brought news, but he knew nothing of the magus nor of the Eddisians and Attolians. “They say the goat-feet went back to the mountains and the Attolians with them,” he said.

  I sighed, not knowing if this was good news or bad, and even though I had grown to trust Nomenus more than was warranted, I was still too wary to ask more.

  “What of Comeneus?” I said. “Does he really lead these barons?” I still couldn’t imagine Comeneus in charge of anything larger than a hunting party.

  “The other barons all yield to him,” Nomenus said. “They say he will be regent for you.”

  “Does anyone mention Hanaktos? His army is blocking the King’s Road. Does anyone say what he will get out of his part in this?”

  Nomenus and the other man shook their heads. “We’ve heard nothing of him,” the man said. “We only hear of Comeneus.”

  “We will tell you if we learn anything more, My King,” Nomenus said, and I was touched that he addressed me as his King and not just as Your Majesty.

  In the morning I didn’t so much meet with Comeneus as sit to be lectured by him. Relative to Xorcheus, his was a newly created barony, only a few generations old, so he was very near to the last of the barons. I had wondered why he hadn’t ridden in on an earlier baron’s back, but when he came into the room, I understood much better. He wanted me all to himself. What he lacked in precedence, he made up in bluster. He was just as I remembered him, a large man with a thick jaw, a heavy mat of hair, and narrow-set eyes. He looked down his nose at me and declined to bow. He sat without being invited and as much as dared me to comment on it. He looked over my shoulder at Akretenesh and back at me with some satisfaction.

  “Thank you for meeting with me, Baron.”

  “Glad to,” he said gruffly. “No point in beating about the bush. Your uncle commanded people, made ’em hop. That’s what we want in a king, but you can’t do that yet, can you? A yearling needs to grow a little more before he carries any weight. A young hawk needs to be seasoned. You must give an olive tree years before it bears fruit.”

  Muse of poetry, come to his aid, I thought. Could the man produce one more metaphor of husbandry? He seemed to be trying.

  “Green wood,” I suggested, but even he sensed that there was something unfortunate about a metaphor for a king in which you dry out your royalty before you set fire to it.

  “You see my point, Your Majesty.” He went on, poking his finger at me with every point he made, to explain that my harebrained scheme of surrendering to Attolia was the result of my unseasoned youth. Like my uncle, I hadn’t listened to wiser heads. He’d let his temper get the better of him. He’d been mercurial and unreliable. He’d been selfish and hadn’t had the best interests of Sounis at heart, and that was the real problem. That was why the barons had oh-so-reluctantly risen against him.

  I sneaked glances at Akretenesh, trying to see how Hanaktos fitted into his plans, because I could not believe that Comeneus was a partner in his schemes.

  A pawn, perhaps. Akretenesh’s bland expression of approval never altered, and I wished I had his diplomatic skills. It was all I could do to keep myself from grabbing Comeneus’s finger and biting it.

  Finally I interrupted him to say that I was grateful for his instruction, and even if he were not to be my regent, I would certainly consider his advice in the future with the attention it deserved. Before he could say anything else, I added that he had served Sounis as he had thought best, and he would certainly be rewarded for it. He nodded vigorously, like a big ox. He appeared to expect a very substantial reward, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the Mede ambassador.

  After I had listened to Comeneus tell me the mistakes of my uncle, I quit for the day and returned to my rooms. The servants stripped off my sweaty clothes and brought me a cup of iced wine. When the others were gone, I quizzed Nomenus for all he knew.
Was there any more news from Tas-Elisa? Were Hanaktos’s men still on the road to the capital? Were they moving on Elisa? Nomenus said that he’d heard nothing of the kind.

  The day of the meet I dressed in my most elaborate clothes, thinking of Gen. The coat he had had made for me with the ridiculous pockets and the embroidery on top of embroidery on the outside so that I could look like a king and act like one was as stiff as a board. I felt like a box with legs. The night before, I had finally opened the lower compartment of Attolia’s pistol case, dreading what I might discover. Whatever alternative Eugenides had urged me to find, I had not, and I had waited to look until it was too late to change course. When I saw what lay under Attolia’s gun, I put my head down on the table and cried.

  Dressed in my best, I went to the meet. I couldn’t slouch without putting obvious dents in the lines of my elegant coat, so I kept my shoulders well back and bobbed my head at my court like a demented hen. The barons and their supporters had been gathering since dawn.

  Each baron was entitled to bring two men, usually choosing an heir and one other. The amphitheater was full, from the prestigious seats in the first rows all the way up to the benches across the top, where people had to lean to see past the branches of the bushes that grew on the slopes behind them and hung down to block their view.

  I climbed up onto the stage and waited patiently through the long protocol of the ceremony, sitting in one of a row of chairs with Akretenesh and members of my late uncle’s council. The chairs, significantly, were all the same size.

  It was late in the morning, and I was soaked in sweat by the time Baron Xorcheus proposed a regency. I stood up and stepped to the front of the stage. Xorcheus hesitated, unsure of what I was doing, and that gave me time to walk down the stair to the open ground in front of my barons. By the time I reached the center, the murmuring had faded away.

  I can’t really remember what I said. It was idealistic and it was naive. I reminded them that we shared one peninsula with Eddis and Attolia, that we shared a language, and that the gods of our fathers were the same. I said it was stupid to think that we could ever be anything but subjects to the Mede, that my barons needed to see beyond their own self-interests to the interests of all Sounis and to the interests of Eddis and Attolia as well. United, we would all benefit. I said exactly what I had wanted to say all along, because I knew that nothing I said was going to make any difference anyway.

  Xorcheus called for the vote, and one by one my barons answered my idealism. They stood and called out “regency” or “king,” and I waited in the center of the amphitheater for their judgment. A regent for even a short time would cement Akretenesh’s power and make me no more than a puppet king for the rest of my reign. Once he had installed his own allies in every position in court, once he had complete control of the army, I would have lost forever.

  There were a few “kings”, but one after another, the votes for a regent came in. I looked each baron in the eye, and they were defiant, contemptuous, regretful, and in rare cases ashamed of themselves, but they voted for Comeneus and the Mede. That was the meet. When all the deal making was done, you had to cast your vote aloud for everyone to hear.

  When the vote came around to my father, I held my breath. He stood and looked down at me for so long, I thought the sun had stopped in the sky. When he said “king,” he said it so firmly that the people nearby him winced. I swallowed a lump in my throat and looked to the next man.

  I watched Baron Comeneus as the voting drew near him. The barons voted in the same order of precedence in which they had come to meet with me. By the time Comeneus voted it was already clear what the outcome would be, and he called “regent” with radiating self-importance. He never looked anywhere except at me, but at his right hand sat his heir, a much-younger brother. He never looked at me at all.

  When the vote was over, the amphitheater was silent. I heard Akretenesh speak just behind me. He must have come down the steps without my realizing it.

  “Did you think they would make you king?” he said, contemptuously. His voice was quiet, but he’d forgotten, or perhaps never knew about, the acoustics. His every word was audible even to the men in the highest seats and I watched them, as a single organism, recoil.

  “No,” I said, turning. “Not on the first vote.”

  I put my left hand into the open front of my coat to the pockets sewn inside. Narrow and three times as deep as they were wide, they were almost useless; anything you put into them would slip to the bottom and be out of reach, anything except the long-barreled handgun that Attolia had given me. It fit perfectly. I lifted it out of the pocket, directed it almost without looking, fixed my eyes on Akretenesh, and shot Hanaktos dead.

  If Akretenesh’s voice had been audible to the back row, the report of the gun was deafening.

  In the shocked, silent aftermath, I said, “We’ll give them a second chance.”

  With my right hand, I reached to the other pocket. I had known as soon as I lifted the false bottom in the gun case and looked underneath what it meant. I had tried without ceasing to find some alternative to Attolia’s ruthless advice, and I had failed. Gen’s gift reassured me that I had not failed for lack of trying. He had seen no other solution himself.

  I lifted out the matching gun and read its archaic inscription. Realisa onum. Not “The queen made me,” but “I make the king.”

  Looking at Akretenesh’s startled face down the long barrel of the handgun, I smiled until I felt the scar tissue tighten. That one expression, I’d never showed him. My face gave away my humiliation, my rage, my surprise, and my embarrassment, but I had never let him see what I looked like when I smiled: my uncle.

  His diplomatic mask dissolved, and he backed away.

  In Attolia, I had been in front of a mirror at last, and I had understood what made Oreus back in Hanaktos ask me if my expression was a happy one or not. The smile rumpled the scar tissue under my skin, and dragged my face askew, giving me the leer of a man who’d never had a moment of self-doubt, who’d never regretted a life lost. I’d worried that I wouldn’t have the nerve to carry this off, but in the moment, it was easy. Seeing Akretenesh recoil, I laughed out loud.

  I’d fired on Hanaktos with my left hand. I had known exactly where he was, and I’d had all morning to prepare my shot. My aim was more reliable with my right, and Akretenesh was much closer than Hanaktos had been.

  I had wanted to find a better way than shooting an unarmed man. I had wanted my barons to choose me as king because they believed in me and because they believed in my ideals as I did. But that wasn’t the choice I had before me, and I had already decided that I would make them follow me any way I could. I would not stand by and let them be lost to the Mede or to Melenze or to an endless civil war where they would never be free of bloodshed until the whole country was stripped to the bare bones. If I couldn’t be Eddis, I would be Attolia. If they needed to see my uncle in me, then I would show him to them. And I would take Attolia’s advice, because if I identified my enemy and destroyed him, Sounis would be safe.

  My enemy wasn’t Comeneus, though I was fairly certain he didn’t know it. His brother did. As one baron after another had voted for a regent, Comeneus had watched me, but his brother had looked to Hanaktos, and Hanaktos had looked to the Mede.

  Staring at me over the barrel of my gun, Akretenesh said, “Did you not just days ago lecture me about the sacred truce?”

  With my finger still through the trigger guard of the spent pistol, I lifted my left palm upward to the sky to see if lightning struck me down.

  When none did, I smiled again. “We will have to assume that the gods are on my side.”

  “I am an ambassador,” Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. “You cannot shoot.”

  “I don’t mean to,” I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. “Indeed, you are the only man I won’t shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safe
ty.” I raised my voice a trifle, though it wasn’t really necessary. “We will have another vote, Xorcheus.”

  They elected me Sounis. It was unanimous.

  When the voting was done, I told Akretenesh to collect his men and get out of my country. “You can get back on a boat at Tas-Elisa,” I said.

  He smiled his superior smile, his composure much restored during the slow process of casting votes. “How will you make me?”

  “I don’t have to,” I said. “Your emperor isn’t prepared for war with the Continent, or he would be attacking already. You are trying to sneak a foothold here in Sounis to steal my country by sleight of hand. The Continental Powers dither, but they won’t stand for an unprovoked assault, and your emperor is not yet ready for one. The Continent would come to my aid before he was ready for war and spoil all his plans.”

  “You think so? You bank on that?” Akretenesh asked. He’d been backing away and almost reached the double doors that led under the stage.

  “I do.”

  “Well,” said the ambassador, “we will see, then, won’t we?” He threw open the doors, revealing soldiers armed with crossbows.

  He turned back to me, shouting, “Ki—”

  I shot him, too.

  Had he been aware, Akretenesh would have been disappointed to see his assassins spitted with quarrels fired from behind me, before they themselves could get off a single shot. It seemed there was no end of people breaking sacred truces at Elisa that day.

  I whirled around, but the arbalests must have been hidden in the bushes on the slopes above the amphitheater. I saw no one.