I escaped to the baths with just Nomenus, who had come with us from Brimedius to attend me. I’d washed in my rooms in Brimedius and hadn’t had a real bath since I’d left Attolia. I hid in the steam room until I was too light-headed to care anymore what the Elisians were going to make of me. After the plunge, Nomenus was waiting with a robe.

“Your Majesty,” he said as he wrapped me in it, “I believe you are most welcome here.”

I twisted to look him in the face, but he dropped his eyes.

“I did not mean to offend Your Majesty.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said, grateful for the reassurance.

When I reached my rooms, everything was carefully arranged, all my finery in the wardrobes and my luggage cases cleared away. Sitting on a table by the window was the box from Attolia. I ran my hand across the bowed top, and then flipped open the latch and lifted the lid, to see if the gun was still inside. It lay untouched within its velvet-covered bolster. One gun, against Akretenesh and all my rebellious barons. Akretenesh knew how insignificant it was. How insignificant I was. I wondered if my sisters had been in Brimedius after all, watching me from a window as I rode away. I wondered where the magus was. There had been no sign of him, and I had had no word from my father.

I thanked the three or four servants in the rooms with me for their work. They smiled, maybe not just in politeness, and I sent them on their way. I sent Nomenus away as well and sat on a stool in front of the table, staring at the gun for a long time.

In the morning I met with the first of my barons. It was their right to speak to me before the vote, and they wouldn’t give it up. There was a protocol—Xorcheus first, as his was the oldest created barony, and then, after him, all the other barons in the order of their creations. A baron could choose to bring another baron, lower in seniority, with him. The more senior barons usually make some money selling off the privilege, but Xorcheus came alone. I think he would have skipped the entire process if he could have. He had a small property of almost no significance, and I got the impression that he wished we all would just go away and leave him to it.

He grunted a greeting when he was ushered into the room and didn’t know whether he would bow or not. I imagined asking for a full obeisance face down on the floor, and just the vision I produced in my own head helped me relax a little in my chair and wave him to sit before he made a decision we both would have to live with.

We were in a long, narrow room on the ground floor. I had asked to have the chairs moved as far away as possible from the shuttered window, but I had no way of knowing who was out on the terrace, listening for any word he might catch. Akretenesh had chosen the room. It had murals painted in panels between the timbers that supported the upper floors. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, four beautiful women carrying baskets of fruit or flowers, or, in the case of Winter, bundles of spindling branches. All of them with their backs to me, which I didn’t take for a particularly encouraging omen.

Akretenesh, as “mediator,” was with us. He would be in every meeting as I tried to convince my barons not just to elect me king but to make me king without a regent. He didn’t say anything. He knew that the rebels weren’t likely to cooperate. The whole object of their rebellion had been to seize the king’s authority for themselves. That they had started an all-out civil war by accident didn’t mean that they would give up their prizes.

The loyalists wouldn’t be much more easily convinced. My barons knew where I had been, that I had been abducted and had hidden in Hanaktos’s fields, and that I had gone to Attolia to negotiate a surrender. The Medes looked better and better to them all the time.

So I talked myself hoarse. First to Xorcheus and then to the rest of my barons, one at a time or in small groups. I went over, again and again, my arrangements with Attolia, the loss of the islands but the end of the war. I had practiced my arguments on the magus as we rode from Attolia and polished them in the tent at night. I had gone over them again while I was a prisoner in Brimedius. I was determined to convince the barons to end their revolt without bloodshed. So I explained the advantages of peace and trade. I swore up and down that the Attolians would have no hand in our governance, only a promise of our loyalty and our support if they were ever attacked.

And my conversations all seemed to go awry. Was it true that I would swear an oath of allegiance to Attolia? I said no, that I would swear to Attolis, but that made little difference to them. They didn’t like the Thief of Eddis any better as an overlord. There was nothing impossible in what I was saying. My arguments were good, but my barons would have to trust me, and they wouldn’t. They looked from me to the Mede and back again. Then they said polite things and excused themselves.

Akretenesh watched, amused.

There was no point in trying to tell the barons the things that the magus had taught me, the way the Medes had dealt with their “allies” in the past. They weren’t interested in history lessons. I knew that my uncle who was Sounis had set his barons against one another in order to keep them weak. I knew that he had used his army to threaten anyone who dared disagree with him. They hadn’t liked him, they had lived their lives wondering when he would turn on them, but that was what they expected a king to be. I wasn’t nearly intimidating enough.

I told them how things work in Eddis and tried to show them that there is a rule of law that is better than backbiting and self-interest as a means to run a state. My idealistic words made Xorcheus uncomfortable. They made the rest of the barons contemptuous.

At the end of one day, when I had worked my way through almost half the barons and was tripping over my tongue, so tired was I of talking, Nomenus came to the door of the audience room.

“I thought that was the last for now, Nomenus,” I said.

“It’s your father, Your Majesty. He has arrived from the north, and he asks an audience.”

I stood up and went to greet my father at the door. He wrapped me in a hug as fierce as the one he’d given me as I slid from the back of his horse outside Hanaktos’s megaron. I swallowed. So much depended on him. I had left him under attack by Hanaktos and gone to surrender to Attolia, and I had no idea what he thought of me.

“Won’t you come sit down?” I said, and we crossed the room together.

“Ambassador,” my father said, and reached out to take Akretenesh’s hand. “Won’t you join us?” So the three of us settled into chairs facing one another.

“This business of surrendering to Attolia. I am not at ease,” my father said.

I shrugged. “You have heard all the arguments already from the magus.”

My father nodded and rolled his eyes. “That man bent my ear mercilessly. He never stopped for an instant.” He looked at Akretenesh. “Your empire has a history of absorbing its allies the way a tide overcomes a tide pool.”

Akretenesh smiled comfortably, and I felt like a child again, watching from the corners while the adults talked. I couldn’t tell from my father’s brief comment when he had last seen the magus. I could only hope that the magus had made his way safely to meet my father after the battle near Brimedius. I didn’t dare ask.

Akretenesh was speaking. “I know how things can change their appearance when seen from a distance. Our allies have become part of our empire by their own choice because it was to their advantage. But Sounis does not lie on our borders, the way they did, and cannot be integrated so easily into our system of provinces. Your case is quite different, I assure you.”