The Mede ambassador had tried to engage the ambassadors of the Epidi Islands and Kimmer on the subject. Diplomatically, the Epidian claimed not to have seen it. The ambassador of Kimmer said the same, going on at some length about his health and the inadvisability of spending all day in the heat. It might have been diplomacy or truth. “Large crowds inevitably breed disease,” he told Melheret. “I never see plays.”

“Pity,” said the Mede. “It was most amusing.” Turning to Quedue, he finally got the response he had been fishing for.

“Quite riotously funny!” the Pent shouted, loud enough to draw everyone’s attention. He quoted the silliest bits of the play while looking straight at the king as Melheret smiled and the king smiled, the smiles more and more ferocious, and only the Pent failing to notice.

There was no way to deny Cenna the Golden Pen. She had given a voice to all those who resented the high taxes and the requisitions levied to support the war effort, who thought the Medes, twice driven off the Little Peninsula, were no longer a threat. To deny her play the prize might enflame them further.

When she came forward to take the pen, Cenna turned out to be a surprisingly small woman with a head full of curly hair and a cheerful smile. She didn’t look like a troublemaker.

“I have exiled people for less than a play like that, Cenna,” said the king sourly.

“But it was funny, Gen, wasn’t it?”

“Time will tell,” said the king. And indeed, it is a play still performed in the capital every year or two, to the delight of its audiences.

“Moira’s priestesses will be more careful how they select the judges for their contest in the future,” said Attolia, sitting at her dressing table. She had sent away Phresine, who usually undid the pins from her hair, and made no move to remove them herself. Her hands remained folded in her lap.

“We have more important things to worry us,” Eugenides pointed out. “The Namreen are still on the hunt. Costis may still be alive.”

Attolia nodded absently.

“Irene?” Eugenides prompted.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “Sophos asked my advice about a prisoner he is holding.”

“Ion Nomenus,” Eugenides guessed. “Is he still in that pig shed?”

“He was moved down to a cell in Hanaktos.”

“I suppose Sophos wants to release him.”

“Of course he does,” snapped Attolia. “Sophos would let a viper nest in his shoe if it said pleassssssse.”

Eugenides laughed, but she was too angry to join him. She said, “Nomenus betrayed him. Sophos should have killed him on the spot and he didn’t have the stomach for it.”

“He didn’t,” Eugenides agreed.

“He let a traitor play on his weakness, and the result of his mercy is that he is asked for even more mercy.” She finally began to work at the pins in her complicated braids, pulling them too hard, catching a few hairs with each pin and pulling anyway. “Nomenus has petitioned to be pardoned.”

“Many of Sophos’s barons did worse and suffered not at all.” Eugenides crossed the room to stand behind her.

Meeting his gaze in the mirror, Attolia glared. “We are kings and queens, not all-powerful gods. We cannot reward the good men and punish the bad ones just as we would prefer. He should leave Nomenus to rot and I told him so,” she said, daring her king to disapprove.

Eugenides wisely let a moment pass, and when he spoke it was not to argue over the just deserts of a traitor. “You’re angry at Sophos for asking you to make that decision so he wouldn’t have to.”

“I do what I must because I am queen of Attolia. I am not here to cut Sophos’s food for him.” She yanked on a pin.

He stilled her hand with his own. Startled, she regretted her choice of metaphor, but he lifted her hand away gently and began to free the pins himself.

“Give our friend more credit than that,” he asked of her. “He came to you because you have greater experience. You gave him your counsel. The decision is his, and Sophos of all people would never try to evade that responsibility.”

As the pins painlessly slipped free, Attolia said, more sympathetically, “I told him he should save a better man. Nomenus is a liar who will only lie to him again.”

She was eyeing him once more in her mirror.

“Whereas I am filled with truth as a hive is with honey,” he said, his voice sticky-sweet.

“Oh, what a lie that was,” she said, her expression finally softening.

By this time, I was ranging farther from the king’s side. If people still saw me and warded off ill luck with a flick of their fingers, they did no more than that, and I was careful never to venture where the king’s favor might not protect me. The day after Cenna’s play, as I returned from another pointless visit to my tutor, I was surprised to see Juridius. I thought he might be an apparition until he threw an arm over my shoulder.

“Hello, brother. My grandfather who is Susa invited me to the festival.” So he, too, had seen the plays. I wondered what he had made of them, but he had not sought me out to talk about Moira’s competition. I should have guessed it by the way he said “my grandfather who is Susa,” as if Susa was not my grandfather as well.

We stood for some time, arm in arm, in a brotherly fashion, while people passed by, and he told me the news of home, none of it what I wanted to hear. Having talked quite loudly about the family and our mother’s prestigious visitors, and her reconciliation with her father, he said more quietly, “My grandfather who is Erondites misses having an informant among the king’s attendants, Pheris.”

I tried to pull away and he tightened his grip.

My mother’s charming brother Sejanus had used his position as attendant to torment the king and further an assassination attempt. My uncle’s crimes were the very reason I’d been sent to the palace as a pretend heir.

“Erondites wants to know when they will move grain to the stockpiles at Perma,” Juridius whispered in my ear. “I told him I could find out from you.”

I yanked my head back to look him in the eye, thinking it a cruel joke, not believing my brother would betray me so, and to my grandfather, of all people. Juridius made a pretense of reassuring me. “Melisande is an old woman, scared of shadows,” he said. “You have nothing to fear from Erondites.”

Having revealed that I was no fool, he still thought he could treat me like one. I tapped a finger to his temple. He was empty-headed if he thought I didn’t know that my grandfather wanted me dead.

Slapping my hand away, his smiles all gone, Juridius said, “You are his heir, Pheris, heir to the house of Erondites. You must do what is best for the family.”

I shook my head. My treacherous brother shook his, mocking me.

“Tell me, Pheris,” he said, “do your new friends know that you are not the idiot you pretend to be? Does the king?” He tightened his arms further, making it hard for me to breathe.

Melisande knew how dangerous it was to be me. It was her hope that people might take pity on a poor witless boy, where they would fear and despise a clever one. She had taught me to play the fool and led my family to believe I was one. In Attolia’s palace, they’d taken my idiocy for granted. If they found out that I had understood all the secrets I’d overheard, that I knew the significance of the things I had seen, they would murder me.