I fell as he let me go and scuttled away, afraid to leave a foot to be caught by the weight that was swinging on hinges toward me. From the floor, I looked up at a circle of faces. They were asking if the queen was dead, had the king stabbed her, had she stabbed him?

“He can’t speak,” Hilarion reminded everyone as he pulled me to my feet.

“He can nod!” shouted someone at the back of the crowd. The hallway was filling up, as everyone within earshot had come to gawk. “Can’t you ask the little monster to nod?”

“Pheris,” Hilarion said, hands on his knees beside me. “Did the king . . . hurt . . . the queen?”

I shook my head.

“Do you think he—” He was searching my face as he spoke, and he stopped himself before the question was complete. Straightening up, he said very loudly, “This is futile. He is an idiot and can’t tell us anything.”

He’d seen how frightened I was, my fear a reflection of the realization reverberating through me. I was no ambassador with diplomatic protection. No one was going to intervene to save me. When the king learned who had betrayed him—and my grandfather who was Erondites would be sure he knew—I would not be sent home, I would have not even a day to spend again with Melisande. My earnest, self-loathing shame at my own actions had been nothing but a means to hide the truth from myself. It was not Erondites who was going to kill me. It was the king.

Too afraid of the possible answer, Hilarion dropped his question. He did not want to know if the king had murdered the queen, or if she was going to murder him. He didn’t want to be the one who had to decide what to do next. When Phresine, with several of the queen’s other attendants, circumnavigated the council room and arrived to speak to him, his relief was palpable. She was old enough to be his mother, and Hilarion bent head and body to listen to her.

Phresine told him she had sent one of the queen’s attendants to each of the royal apartments and divided the rest between the two entries to the council room, to wait on whoever emerged. Grateful for her example, Hilarion did the same. After that, he dismissed everyone he had the authority to send away and persuaded most of the rest to go by asking them if they were sure they wanted to be the first person the king or queen saw when the doors finally opened. The crowd retreated to await developments out of sight. Hilarion sent Xikos and Sotis to fetch furniture from the nearby rooms, and we all sat down.

Hours passed. The dinner hour was over, the skies dark, the moon shining, and nothing had been heard from the king or the queen. Finally, after conferring again with Phresine, Hilarion directed the guards to open the doors. At first little could be seen in the council room; the soft light of the moon coming in through the windows made impenetrable shadows elsewhere. Someone yawned from the far side of the room, where two couches had been pushed together and cushions piled high.

“What is the time, Hilarion?” the king asked sleepily.

“Nearly midnight, Your Majesty.”

“Is there a problem,” asked the queen, also waking, “that you disturb us?”

Hilarion had no answer ready. It was Chloe who piped up. “You said to bring you the map of the new course for the aqueduct . . . when you’d finished with the Pent ambassador.”

From the shadows, the queen laughed. “Tomorrow will be soon enough,” she said.

Softly the doors were closed. In the morning, the king was in his bed and the queen in hers when their attendants went to wake them.

Chapter Six

The Pent ambassador was still demanding an apology as he was hustled onto a ship and dispatched home. His attachés, left behind, continued to insist on one. Between the outrageous behavior of the Pent and that of the king, the court was divided. Ion and Hilarion, usually in fast agreement, were opposed on this issue. Ion, who was meticulous about protocol, defended the king and delighted in every joke at the Pent’s expense. Hilarion disapproved. He felt the king’s misbehavior overshadowed that of the ambassador and had allowed Quedue to avoid the condemnation he deserved. Verimius said the king had embarrassed the Attolians. Xikos despised the king, but despised the Pent even more, and voiced to Xikander a savage wish that the king had succeeded in killing the ambassador. “If only we could have been rid of them both,” he grumbled.

There were rumors about a meeting of the Greater Patronoi, the heads of the great families, or even an assembly of all the barons, to censure the king. On their own, the Greater Patronoi could overrule certain royal decrees, and the assembly of barons, when unified, was powerful enough to dictate to the throne. Attolia, for all her strength, had always been careful to maintain allies in both assemblies.

“They can’t unite themselves long enough to agree on what wine to have with dinner,” said the king. “It will be forgotten in a day.”

Indeed, when Susa made it clear he would not support a motion against the king, the murmuring died down. The Brael ambassador, who was again the extraordinary ambassador for the Pents, brought the subject up in court with obvious reluctance. “In these tempestuous times, Your Majesty, I would like to hear from you that we are safe here in your home, that our diplomatic immunity is inviolable.”

The king pretended to take offense. He assured the Braeling in a high-handed manner that he wasn’t going to start firing at ambassadors the way Sounis had, lingering for so long over the circumstances under which he might be tempted to do so that he rendered his own assurances absurd. People covered their mouths to hide their laughter. The Braeling shook his head but accepted the king’s words at face value, and the matter was considered closed.

I was trying to savor what I was sure were my last days, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Everything tasted sour, like fear and regret. I stayed in my little closet as much as I could, and at night I huddled in my blankets in such awful apprehension—certain that at any moment Juridius would reveal my treason—that I began to wish the waiting was over and I could die.

“Something has frightened him,” said the king.

“You frightened him,” said the queen.

“I wasn’t angry at him.”

“You were angry enough to burn the whole world down and him with it.”

The king sent Petrus to check on me—as much to distract the palace physician from his own health, I think, as out of concern for mine.

“Pheris, you have to eat,” Petrus told me.

He had looked in my ears and down my throat, pinched the skin on my arm and examined my fingernails. He’d sent for soup and oranges and almond cookies, and I’d turned my face away from them all. He held my bent fingers in both his hands and tried gently to straighten them. He looked at me speculatively.

“Do they hurt?”

I shrugged. They did, sometimes. My leg and my back hurt more, and they hurt more often. Sometimes the little jumps and shivers in the muscles made me want to scream, but they were usually at their worst at night, and if I lay still reciting my prayers to Ula as Melisande had taught me, they would abate for a time. Petrus made me get up to walk back and forth in front of him.

“The limp is not always so severe,” said Petrus thoughtfully. I’d been curled up in my bed all day and could hardly move. “If it can be at times worse,” he said, “then conversely, we may be able to make it sometimes better.”