“I am Sounis,” his friend answered, and offered a hand to help him up.

Arms around each other, the kings of Sounis and Attolia walked back toward the palace. The magus, following some distance behind, watched with pleasure and the happy anticipation of carrying the news to Eddis.

“That was a compliment, you know,” said Eugenides.

“What was?”

“What Procivitus said. He wouldn’t have suggested you go back to basics if he didn’t think you were worth training.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“I know you didn’t, you idiot. There’s no time for the basics, really, but if you’d like, he’d be happy to train with you while you’re here.”

Sounis hesitated. “I think it might kill me.”

Attolis laughed. “I’ll tell him that you will wait for him in the morning.”

When they’d gone a little farther, Attolis slipped out from under Sounis’s arm. “It might be beneficial to sow a little ambiguity. Really, there is very little hope that I will be able to play this trick on Melheret twice, but will you go on from here alone?”

They parted ways, and the magus and Sounis, led by Attolis’s attendant Hilarion, made their way back to their rooms.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“SOPHOS, you sleep with a knife under your pillow? I’m hurt.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sounis, blinking, afraid that he had made contact with his wild swing.

“I was joking. Wake up the rest of the way, would you?”

“Gen, it’s the middle of the night.”

“I know,” said the king of Attolia.

Sounis tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. He was sitting up in his bed. The sky was still entirely dark, and he couldn’t have been asleep for long. He suspected that he had just dropped off. The bare knife was still in his hand, he realized, and he rooted under his pillow for the sheath.

“Don’t you trust my palace security?”

“Yes, of course,” Sounis said, trying to think of some other reason besides mistrust to sleep with a knife. He heard Eugenides laugh.

“My queen and I sleep with a matched set under our pillows, as well as handguns in pockets on the bedposts. Don’t be embarrassed.”

“Gen, what are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?” Sounis asked.

“Going out of my mind,” said Eugenides promptly. “At least I am on the verge of going out of my mind.” Sounis could just make him out in the darkness as he dropped into the chair across the room. “If I don’t get away from the pernicious attentions of my attendants, the rivalry between my palace physician and Eddis’s, and the need to refrain from pushing certain members of my court down stairs, I am going to be a very bad king indeed. Come out with me, Sophos.”

“The magus,” said Sounis, thinking that his minister probably wouldn’t approve.

“He won’t even know you’re gone, I promise.”

Sounis followed Gen through Attolia’s palace as he had once followed him through the much grimmer stronghold of her fortress on the Seperchia River. This time they were not escaping prisoners, but Sounis had to remind himself of that because there was more than a hint of escaping in the proceedings.

Gen avoided every posted guard. He arrived at intersections of hallways just as they moved away, slipping behind them with no more than a few feet to spare. He led the way down servants’ passages and narrow staircases that were hidden behind knobless doors that matched the paneling so flawlessly that even knowing they were there, Sounis wasn’t sure if he could find them again. He was hopelessly lost.

They reached a small courtyard just inside the outer wall of the palace, with a gate and an inevitable guard, and Sounis balked at last. The guard stood in the very center of the archway, facing out. There was a low doorway opening to his right that would lead to a guardroom holding at least one more man, but Eugenides blithely set out across the open ground. Sounis set his heels and stopped. Eugenides could not possibly make his way past the guard unseen. It was ludicrous even to think of it. Sounis held his breath, knowing that at any moment the guard would catch a glimpse from the corner of his eye, or that god-sent nudge would come that causes a man to turn when someone is sneaking up behind him.

The guard would turn, Sounis thought. At any moment. And he did.

“Your Majesty.”

“Aris,” said the king of Attolia, and flipped a coin into the air. It dropped into the guard’s open palm and disappeared into his purse. The guard resumed his position, and the king passed by.

After digging through his own purse, Sounis put a coin more clumsily into the same hand and followed Attolis out of the palace.

“You bastard,” said Sounis wearily. “I don’t know why I don’t stab you here in this alley so I can be the annux over Sounis and Attolia.” They were twisting through the narrowest of passages, with Eugenides still in the lead, turning on what seemed to be a whim from one walkway to the next.

“Well, the stabbing would be unkind,” said Eugenides, “but you can have the annux part with my goodwill.”

“Not Attolia’s.”

“True,” said the king. “Better not stab me.”

“Gen,” Sounis said, and halted. Attolis, who had already lightly descended a crooked stair, turned back at the bottom and looked up at him.

“Yes?”

Sounis didn’t know what to say.

“She cut off my hand?” Gen asked.

It was exactly what Sounis was thinking, but he said, “Did you know? When she imprisoned us after you stole Hamiathes’s Gift. Did you love her then?”

Eugenides laughed and seemed so at ease that Sounis found himself laughing with him. “No,” said Gen. “I wrote down exactly what I thought for my cousin who is Eddis. I meant to send it to the magus and he might have passed it on to you, but for some reason I never did.” He looked around as if the reason for this lapse might be found in the graffiti on the nearby wall. “It may be lost by now. At any rate, the answer is no, I did not know.”

“When then?” asked Sounis, coming slowly down the stairs. He remembered meeting Eddis and the first time she had smiled. “Or do you not know?”

“I know exactly. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen’s Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn’t funny anymore.” He rubbed his chest, as if at a remembered pain. “I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite.”

Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy. “You exiled him?” He had heard of the destruction of the house of Erondites.

“Happily, not before we resolved our differences,” said Eugenides. He added more seriously, “I would have exiled him even if we hadn’t.”