They thought it was how a king behaved.

I ran my fingers through my hair and tried to pursue a more reasonable line of thought, but more reasonable thoughts made me angry again. Armies of ten thousand men don’t just spring from the ground at the tip of a wine cup. It takes time to move them from wherever they came from and time to unload them from ships. There’s space to consider, and logistics. The land around the port had to be wall-to-wall men. Someone had to have made a plan to feed them, and supplies had to have been coming in for weeks. Some of them, no doubt, had been hidden within the preparations for the meet by Hanaktos, but he hadn’t done it on his own. There were more people sitting in the meet, and some of them maybe in the room with me, who had known that the Mede was bringing an army. And many, many more of them must have known once Tas-Elisa filled to the brim with soldiers.

Not me. I didn’t have a clue.

Which means that my careful collection of “information” from Nomenus over the previous week had been a farce.

“Who knows anything about the ten thousand men at the port?” No one volunteered any information. There was a flicker of apprehension in Baron Xorcheus, but that wasn’t enough. I knew he’d called for a regent, and I knew he was overanxious. I didn’t know for certain why.

I remembered Polystrictes and his goats. I wasn’t sure if I had a wolf or a dog, but I knew how to tell the difference. A dog does what you tell it to.

“Basrus!” I shouted, and the barons and their men looked at me confused.

“I want Hanaktos’s slaver. Find him and bring him.”

I waved the rest of the people away and paced the room until the slaver appeared at the door looking like a man who isn’t sure if he’s under arrest.

“Majesty, I—”

“Later. Who knows about the army at Tas-Elisa?”

Basrus’s eyeballs rolled to one side, and before he said a word, Baron Xorcheus decided all hope of concealment was lost.

“Hanaktos warned me to have all my people well away from the port three days past. He said what the eyes don’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over. That’s all I know myself. Baron Statidoros knows more.”

I looked at Basrus, and he disappeared.

Baron Comeneus was staring at Xorcheus in outrage, reinforcing my conviction in the amphitheater. He hadn’t known about the army. It was Hanaktos who had been in charge.

Comeneus turned to me. I thought he was going to call for Xorcheus’s head, but I was wrong. “Your Majesty, that man,” he said, pointing out the door after Basrus, “is an okloi! You cannot mean to send him to compel a baron!”

As if it mattered, here at what might well be the swirling drain of Sounis’s history, whether or not Basrus was a landowner and entitled to a vote on legal issues.

“You cannot mean to suggest that you would consider his word—”

“Shut up,” I told him, and he stared at me openmouthed. I stared back; not the boy he’d condescended to, not my uncle’s inept heir, I, the king of Sounis. “I may or may not survive as king, but if I am a puppet of the Medes, at least I will know it. Go ask your brother what he knows of Hanaktos’s plans, and then come back and tell me what he said.”

I waved my hand to dismiss them all; I needed to be alone to think. They didn’t move. “Get out!” I shouted, and that had more effect.

Only my father stood his ground. He cleared his throat. “The truce is broken. You need guards.”

He was right. Weapons were going to come out from any of a hundred secret hiding places, and it would shortly be every baron for himself.

I could trust my father and only a few others completely. I told my father, “Our men will be our guards here. You will arrange it?” He nodded. “Tell whoever you can that I am not wiping any slates clean. I will hold people responsible for their actions, now and in the future, but there will be, for every transgression, a remedy in the next few days. Tell the council that. Make sure they know that the future of the patronoi depends on their service to me.”

Then I sent him away to arrange for more guards and to quell my barons’ destructive tendency toward shortsightedness and panic.

I paced until Basrus delivered Baron Statidoros, who spilled every bean as fast he could spit words out of his mouth.

What I learned of the Mede army: they were infantry. No horse. They were in ten companies of a thousand with a general and his lieutenants. I didn’t recognize all the names, but one of them had a name very similar to my ambassador’s and might well have been a relative. I could count on him to be personally, as well as professionally, unhappy with me.

Though he was trying to bluster his way through the moment, Baron Statidoros was frightened, and he had good reason. He didn’t have anything I needed, and we both knew it. His patronid was not located somewhere strategic. He didn’t control many men, and he didn’t have a fortune I could “borrow” to help secure my throne.

He was a loyalist, he insisted. If only he’d known that I was alive, that I was returning, etc. His protests might have been convincing if he hadn’t made it clear earlier in the week that he was Comeneus’s man. I didn’t believe for a minute that he’d thought I was dead.

Baron Xorcheus had sent poor Statidoros as a sacrifice. Both Statidoros and I knew that as well. His job was to give me just enough information to strike at a few of the lower members of Hanaktos’s conspiracy but not to betray its leaders. He would take responsibility for the transgressions of others and be condemned for it. Whether he was a volunteer who had a reward coming or a victim caught between me and a threat of death from his own side if he failed, I didn’t know, and I didn’t really care. As this became more clear to him, he became more frightened and unfortunately less coherent.

I had a fast-expiring period of grace, while my erstwhile ambassador was having lead shot dug out of his shoulder. My barons would be growing more anxious, and more stupid, with each passing moment, and a message was no doubt already on its way to the port, Tas-Elisa. The magus would stop any traveler on the road, and the woods would be watched as well, but the hills that had hidden my army for weeks would conceal, just as reliably, any number of Mede emissaries. The message would go like water running downhill to the general in charge of ten thousand Medes: The king of Sounis had fired on his ambassador and seized the reins of government.

I knew whom I couldn’t trust, but outside of my father and a few others, I didn’t know whom I could. I had to start trusting some people, and I had to choose which. I had to decide what to do about the army that was on its way, and I didn’t have the information I needed and didn’t know how I could get it. Basrus could do me only so much good. He could tell me whom he’d seen work with Hanaktos, but not which of them might still be useful to me now.

And then my worst nightmare arrived, weeping and wailing in the doorway. Berrone. I had no idea where she had come from. And her mother was with her, gods defend me. I hadn’t known that either of them was in Elisa, and I was going to kill Nomenus, I thought, kill him.

Berrone was content to stand in the doorway with her hair a wild mess and her face streaming tears, but her mother, bowed over obsequiously behind her, must have given her a pretty savage poke, because Berrone suddenly flung herself at my feet, crying, “Oh, my father, my dear father, how could you murder him and betray me, who rescued you from, from, from—”