A Conspiracy of Kings

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Please,” he added.

  Eddis stared at him for a long time, knowing that forgiving someone because you have to is not forgiving him at all.

  “Come with me,” she said at last. She led him through Attolia’s palace to a double set of carved doors. At her signal, the guards pulled them open, and she passed through. Inside the room, she turned and waited. Sounis stood paralyzed on the threshold.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE 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 physici
an 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.

  About the Author

  MEGAN WHALEN TURNER is the author of the Newbery Honor Book The Thief and its companions, The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia. She lives with her family in Ohio.

  home.att.net/~mwturner

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Jacket art © 2010 by Vince Natale

  Jacket design by Chris Stengel and Chad W. Beckerman

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  A CONSPIRACY OF KINGS. Copyright © 2010 by Megan Whalen Turner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Turner, Megan Whalen.

  A conspiracy of kings / by Megan Whalen Turner.

  p. cm.

  “Greenwillow Books.”

  Summary: Kidnapped and sold into slavery, Sophos, an unwilling prince, tries to save his country from being destroyed by rebellion and exploited by the conniving Mede empire.

  ISBN 978-0-06-187093-4 (trade bdg.)

  ISBN 978-0-06-187094-1 (lib. bdg.)

  [1. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. 2. Princes—Fiction. 3. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.T85565Co 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2009023052

&n
bsp; EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-198669-7

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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