Eddis was in the reception room. She sent her attendants back to the anteroom. The magus excused himself, pulling the door closed behind him, and Eddis and Sounis were alone.

Sounis approached her where she sat on a low seat and took her hand before he dropped to one knee to offer his apologies. “I misspoke. I am sorry. I swear I did not know that he meant to do this, or I would not have engaged you in a promise to be immediately broken.”

“It need not be broken,” said Eddis. He held himself as if he were in pain, and she cursed herself for hurting him, but she had not considered that the ceremony would slip from its careful scripting.

Sounis shook his head as if trying to clear it. “I cannot argue with his interpretation of my oath, though I would not have sworn it had I seen this outcome. You think he will change his mind?”

Eddis shook her head then and said gently, “No. I mean something else, Sophos. I was not unaware of Gen’s requirement when I accepted your proposal.”

He stared at her for a moment before jumping to his feet. “No!” he said, staring down at her. “You cannot yield your sovereignty of Eddis to marry me. You cannot believe that I would allow that?”

“Sophos…”

“It would be monstrous!”

“You do not understand,” she warned him.

“I understand enough!” he answered. “I understand that he will make himself a great king over Sounis, Attolia, and Eddis. I understand that I cannot allow it. How can you not see that?”

Eddis stood very slowly and took a deep breath. “I do see,” she said. As he watched helplessly, she pulled her skirt free from where it had caught on the upholstery, and she crossed to the door. She tapped its latch and someone on the far side opened it. It closed behind her without a sound.

Sounis stood at the window, looking across the city toward the port, and as he watched the shadows of clouds move across the water in the distance, he felt a chill on the back of his neck. It was self-doubt, the black beetle that had pursued him all his life, pinching at him, poisoning his every success, whispering in his ear about his flaws and his failures and his unworthiness. He hadn’t felt it in months, but the pinprick of its claws was instantly familiar. They informed him with their tiny tattoo that he had almost certainly done something immensely, irrevocably, and unforgivably stupid.

He turned away from the view and lunged across the room to throw open the door to the anteroom.

“The queen of Eddis,” he said as he headed for the outer door of the apartment, past the startled magus. “Which way, which way back to her rooms?”

The royal guard stared at him.

“Which way?” Sounis shouted.

The guard pointed. Sounis rushed through the outer door of the apartment and disappeared down the hall.

The Attolian palace, like any building hundreds of years old, put rabbit warrens to shame with its corridors and intersections. At the first of these, Sounis stopped and listened. He heard footsteps and headed indecently fast in the direction that they came from, praying he wouldn’t run, unreflecting, into the Mede ambassador to Attolia and his retinue. At each corner he had to stop and listen again, but he was gaining quickly. He almost lost them when he passed a stairwell but then remembered that once earlier he had climbed stairs between his apartment and Eddis’s. At the top of the stairs, he saw, down a hallway, female figures rounding a corner and hurried after them.

With his quarry almost in sight, he might have slowed and composed himself, but he didn’t spare it a thought. He rounded the corner and nearly spitted himself on the business end of an Eddisian pike. Throwing up his arms, he stopped on the tips of his toes with the point of the weapon an inch or two from his chest. He thought of the breastplate that he’d been made to wear for weeks. He lowered himself very slowly and kept his hands out from his sides. Behind him he could hear his own guard stamping up the corridor to catch up to him.

The queen of Eddis was surrounded by her attendants, all of them armed, which was enough to take anyone aback, never mind her Eddisian guards arrayed in front and behind, watching for attack from either direction.

Eddis said quietly, “No need for alarm,” and the weapons disappeared like morning fog. Eddis turned and moved off, followed by her attendants and her guard, leaving Sounis behind. Gingerly, he followed, stepping between two of her guards and catching up. Eddis’s attendants grudgingly made room so that he could walk beside her. He tipped his head forward, to watch her profile.

“I have a gift,” he said, speaking quickly, not sure how much time he had. “I always used to think it was a curse, but now I am not sure, because maybe it’s like the goats from the god, and one just has to know what name to call it.” He had to take short steps, but quick ones, to match her pace. “My gift is that I always know when I’ve made an ass of myself.”

Eddis’s eyes glanced briefly in his direction and away again. She did not slow. As she turned a corner, Sounis thought it was marvelous that she knew so surely where she was going.

“Whenever I went to my uncle’s megaron, whenever I met with my tutor, tripped over something that wasn’t there, said something inane, I knew it. I used to watch other people making idiots of themselves, and they never seemed to know it, but I always have. All my life I’ve wished that if I was going to be an ass, I could just be an oblivious one.” Eddis still hadn’t looked at him again. “I was stupid. I’m sorry. It was wrong of me to think that I could allow or disallow anything you choose to do. You are Eddis.”

She slowed finally and turned to give him a smile. He experienced a brief moment of relief before he realized that it was artificial. She walked on.

Sounis stood as everyone else brushed past him and watched her move farther and farther away. Long years of experience told him to turn and go back to his own apartments, but more recent events kept his feet rooted to the floor.

“We all make mistakes,” he said loudly. Eddis surged on without looking back, but he knew he had caught her ear. “You sent him to Attolia, didn’t you?” He called after her, deliberately cruel. “He told you it was dangerous, and you sent him anyway. Was it worth it?”

Eddis walked even faster, furious. Sounis pushed past her guards, who flinched but didn’t stop him, and seized her by the arm. She swung around so sharply he stepped back, but he didn’t let go. “I do not care,” he said, “how much of an ass I am right now. Because every night that I dreamed in Hanaktos, I dreamed of you. Every night. When I dreamed about my library, you were there, reading a book, looking from the windows, never speaking, but always there. And I knew that everything was just the way it should be, do you understand?” He said, “I’m sorry. I should have had more faith in you. I understand why you are angry with me: because I disappointed you, and also we don’t all throw things when we are angry, I understand that now, too. But we all make mistakes, Helen,” he said again, “all of us. And I think, I really think you will regret it if this one time you could forgive me, and you don’t.

“Please,” he added.

Eddis stared at him for a long time, knowing that forgiving someone because you have to is not forgiving him at all.

“Come with me,” she said at last. She led him through Attolia’s palace to a double set of carved doors. At her signal, the guards pulled them open, and she passed through. Inside the room, she turned and waited. Sounis stood paralyzed on the threshold.