I waited.

After a moment he tossed up his hands, and to my intense discomfort, he started to cry. “You are king,” he said, his voice breaking. “What I did doesn’t matter very much now, does it? And what else could I do but be loyal to my lord? Is it my business whom my lord is loyal to?”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.” He pushed himself farther back and drew his legs up to be wrapped in the curl of his arms. He rubbed his face against his arms. “I wanted to be on the winning side, and I thought I was.”

He was either a flawed but fundamentally decent man or a very convincing actor, or possibly, he was both.

“Please,” he said, with obvious reluctance. “I hadn’t meant to ask, but, is it…forever?” His tears had made streaks through the dirt on his face.

I said, “No. It isn’t forever, but it’s going to be some time.”

He nodded.

“When I have other things dealt with, I will deal with you,” I promised him.

Later, as I climbed onto my horse’s back and rode for the capital, his last words were still in my ears. His cell had already been locked behind me, and he hadn’t been talking to me. He was praying to the gods, I think, when he whispered, “Don’t forget me. Please, don’t forget me.”

I stayed only two days in the capital. I was welcomed by a cheering citizenry, who threw flowers at my head. It was disconcerting to think I could have put almost any young man in my retinue on a white horse and they would have thrown flowers at him instead. It was not me they cared about, only what I meant to them: a cessation of hostilities, a chance for prosperity, food on the table.

I left the city of Sounis almost immediately because I had backed Brimedius into a corner, and he had admitted both that he had held my mother and sisters and that they had subsequently disappeared. He admitted that he had no idea where they were. Clearly, he expected to be held responsible for their deaths. I did not relieve him of his fears, and wouldn’t until I had seen my mother and sisters with my own eyes.

I was anxious to get to Eddis. In this, my father was my greatest ally, putting his foot down when the magus suggested I should travel with all my Eddisians and Attolians at a snail’s pace. I took a guard and a change of clothes and left the rest to travel at the speed of armies and gastropods. We changed horses frequently and arrived in Eddis almost as quickly as any royal messenger. I didn’t question for a minute that it was my desire for haste that moved us, not until we arrived in the great court of the Eddisian palace.

My father dropped from his horse almost before the animal had stopped moving and strode, oblivious, through six layers of a ceremonial reception, to take my mother in his arms. I stared, remembering his words after we’d escaped Hanaktos. As I watched him lift her off the ground, watched her wrap her arms around him and lay her head on his shoulder, it was apparent that I had misunderstood what he meant when he said that only I was “important.”

Our parents’ behavior seemed to be no surprise to either Ina or Eurydice, who left them to each other and ran toward me. To my relief, the Eddisians in the court didn’t seem to mind the disruption of the ceremony they’d planned, and I was able to seize Ina and Eurydice in my own arms and all of us could babble our questions and answers at one another while the Eddisians looked tolerantly on. The majordomo efficiently dispatched my guard to quarters and swept us all inside to rooms where we could be private and I could ask about the one person I had looked for but not seen, the queen of Eddis.

Ina told me, “She has taken her court to Attolia and waits to see you there.”

“Her Majesty has kindly given us this time together,” said my mother, “knowing that we have much to catch up on.”

Indeed, we did. Settling on the couches, we shared our adventures. Ina and Eurydice told me how Ina had led them out of Brimedius, while my mother sat between me and my father, looking comfortably at each of us in turn and speaking very little. She did not appear particularly brave or daring, hardly even strong-minded. She seemed as quiet as ever, but I didn’t doubt that she had done just as Eurydice said and run a sharpened stick down the throat of one of Brimedius’s hounds. Even with the evidence of their happy outcome, I am left with nightmares at the dangers they faced and know I have many debts to repay to people and to gods for their safe arrival in Eddis.

It was the next day that my mother sought a word in private, looking for me in the small chamber attached to the palace library where Gen used to have his bedroom. Pausing at the threshold, she framed a question. “I thought you would be in a hurry to be on your way to Attolia?”

“I am in a hurry,” I said. “But that’s no reason you should be made uncomfortable. It will be much more pleasant for you if we go back to the main pass and await the soldiers returning to Attolia and then travel with them.”

“It will be slower, though, won’t it?” she asked, as she settled lightly on the arm of a chair opposite me.

I looked studiously at the book in my hand.

My mother waited.

I finally gave up and closed the book. “I broke the truce at Elisa and I shot an unarmed man. I shot the ambassador. I cost the lives of her soldiers and Attolia’s as well as my own, and my hands are covered in blood. What if Eddis thinks there was a better way? What if she is glad she has not already agreed to marry me, and what if she wants nothing to do with me now?”

My mother said very reasonably, “You can’t hide from someone in her own palace. If you don’t go to Attolia, she will come here.”

I hunched my shoulders and went back to looking at my book.

My mother stood, saying peacefully, “I will tell your father that you will go tomorrow by way of the Old Aracthus Road. The rest of us will travel with your borrowed military.”

She looked back before she pulled the door closed. “Your questions—you know I am not the one to answer them.”

She was as right as ever, and so I have come to the queen of Eddis, to ask her for answers.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

SOUNIS folded his hands and waited. He had arrived at the palace late the night before and had risen early in the morning, expecting to find no one but the two honorary royal guardsmen and his own personal guard in his anteroom. Instead he found Ion, the attendant of the king of Attolia, waiting by a bench against the wall.

“You’re still here, then?” asked Sounis, in surprise and pleasure.

“Yes, Your Majesty. My king thought that you might wish to dress with particular care this morning. There will be an official reception in a few hours.” Ion was smiling. They both knew that Attolis hadn’t been referring just to the ceremony planned for the day.

Sounis looked down at the clothes he’d put on. He hadn’t given them a thought, but Eugenides was probably right. He opened the door wider and turned back toward his bedchamber.

Ion had brought scissors, and after he shaved him, he trimmed Sounis’s hair and added a light coating of oil. He opened a small jar and took a pinch of gold powder and shook it to cling to the oil.

“Ion,” said Sounis, dismayed.

“It’s for luck,” said Ion. He packed his case and went to Sounis’s wardrobe.