My father nodded and looked around the room. “At any rate,” he said, “I can see that all goes well here.” To me he said, “You need have no worries. You will be king one way or another.” Then he patted me on the knee and stood up, saying that he had to see to his men.

That evening I stood at the window looking at the amphitheater in the moonlight. Nomenus was tidying the room behind me and laying out my nightclothes. The night was cool. The armies waiting for their barons’ return, on the inland side of the hills, would be baking in the heat, but Elisa, high in the hills, caught the sea breeze. I listened to the creak of the night insects and watched the leaves flutter against the white marble of the amphitheater that seemed to glow in the reflected light, and I wondered what my father thought of me.

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.