The king’s ploy was a success. Petrus came every day and massaged my leg and my hand, measured the flex of my joints, and made me do stretching exercises and sit with my leg on bladders filled with hot water. “I have no illusions that we could give you a good leg, but I think we can help the one you have carry you a little more comfortably,” he said. In pursuit of that goal, he slathered me with poultices and concocted tonics he tried to make me drink.

“There’s something wrong with him,” said Dionis, watching from the doorway.

“How finely observed, Dionis. You are astute.”

“I mean more than the things that are usually wrong with him. Maybe he’s dying.”

I wished I were dying.

“You aren’t dying,” Petrus said sternly. He put his hands on either side of my head and turned my face toward him and away from the wall. He’d guessed it was no physical ailment that kept me in my bed. “You are not going to die,” he said.

I knew better.

It was a month, more or less, before Erondites struck. I knew my time was up even before the double doors into the king’s waiting room crashed open.

“Erondites!” The king shouted loud enough for me to hear him all the way back in my closet if I’d been there, which I wasn’t, because Petrus had made me get out of bed that morning and sit in the waiting room. I was already out of sight, though, as I had heard the attendants shouting as they followed the king up the hallway. “Your Majesty, Your Majesty, please!” they’d called, and I’d leapt for cover.

The supply wagons carrying grain to Perma had been ambushed and burned.

It was a calculated attack on the stability of Attolia’s rule. Her people were sick of her high taxes, tired of relinquishing their crops for her stockpiles. Twice they’d seen the Medes driven from the shores of the Little Peninsula, and they wanted to believe there was no longer any need to prepare for war. Once Cenna’s play had dragged it into the open, their resentment had only grown. The farmers had grudged every seed of the grain that had burned in those wagons. To force more grain from them to replace what had been lost would require harsh measures. To leave the granaries empty would suggest that Attolia’s demands had been unreasonable all along. Either way, the population would be enflamed. If they rioted and were put down, it would undermine Attolia’s popularity still further.

Philologos, and behind him Sotis and Xikos, had appeared in the doorway. Everyone in the waiting room had jumped to their feet. Lamion and Ion, and Hilarion, hearing the noise, had rushed from their sleeping quarters. The king, to all appearances unhinged, was shouting at the chair behind which I cowered.

“You knew the route for those wagons, and you told the baron your grandfather!”

“Your Majesty, no!” Philo protested, all the other attendants chorusing in support: I was an idiot, I could not talk, I was too stupid to read or write, my tutor had said so. The king ignored them all, reaching around the chair to drag me out.

“Erondites has destroyed the supplies for Perma, and you told him how to do it,” he said.

I shook my head, not denying that I’d done as he said, desperately trying to deny my own culpability. I hadn’t wanted to help my grandfather. I hadn’t wanted to betray the king. Tearing myself free from his hand at my collar, I dropped into a crouch, all my old habits coming back.

“Get your hands off your ears,” said the king, slapping them away from my head. “Men are dead because of you.”

I hadn’t meant for that to happen. I hadn’t known it would. He hauled me back up.

Hilarion, all decorum thrown aside, seized the king by the arm. “Your Majesty, you’ll hurt him.” The king shouldered him back and this time caught me around the neck as I tried to get away, choking me in the crook of his arm.

Seeing the knife blade of his hook in front of my face, I whimpered.

“Your Majesty, please,” begged Hilarion.

“You wrote to Erondites,” said the king, his voice flat with rage.

I tried to shake my head.

“Shall I cut out that lying tongue so you never use it again?” the king asked me, and I felt the cold blade hit my teeth, tasted metal or blood.

“Your Majesty!” Hilarion shouted.

The king paused at last. The attendants were staring at him in horror.

He released me and I fell to the floor.

“Send him back to his grandfather,” he said bitterly. “He is an Erondites after all.”

In the face of Xikos’s satisfied face, Hilarion’s shock, Philologos’s distress, the king scowled. I didn’t even care that my grandfather was going to have his way at last. I only cared that the king hated me. I reached for him and he kicked me away. Philologos took my arm then and pulled me to my feet.

Hilarion took my other arm. As I struggled, they began to drag me toward the sleeping quarters.

“I want him gone,” the king said flatly.

Shuffling their feet unhappily, Hilarion and Philo turned me toward the door to the passage.

I was twisting my head to look beseechingly over my shoulder when there was a burst of light so bright it bleached every color in the room to black. The king was caught, eyes wide and mouth open, staring over my shoulder. I faced around, saw the terrifying silhouette of a figure, an impenetrable darkness limned by light, between me and the doors, and I wrenched myself free. My fear greater than all the efforts of Hilarion and Philo to hold me, I threw myself at the king, buried my face in his chest, felt the trembling in him that mirrored my own. Neither of us moved.

Eyes closed, I saw the light slowly fade from the room. When the red inside my eyelids had faded, the king spoke, his voice creaking like an unoiled pulley.

“You betrayed me to Erondites.”

I nodded, admitting my guilt.

“Did you write to him?”

I shook my head, rubbing my face into his shirt.

“You can speak?”

He could cut out my stupid tongue if he would only let me stay.

“Pheris, look at me,” the king said, his anger still simmering. “Can you speak?”

I couldn’t lie to him again. Pulling my face away from him, I touched my fingers to my lips as if to catch the words and pull them out. I didn’t expect him to understand.

“You can speak to Juridius,” he said wearily. “And Juridius was here for the festival of Moira.”

Blinking away tears, I nodded again.

Melisande had taught both of us the silent language she had shared with her deaf brother. She and I could communicate, but it was only Juridius who truly understood me. He was my heart’s companion, and I’d shared everything with him, until the day he turned against me and joined the others at the villa as they drove me away. I’d gone to Melisande and cried and cried in her lap, thinking nothing could be worse—until Emtis had come.

“He can talk?” Xikos was the first to understand.

“With his hands,” confirmed the king. “Well enough to inform Erondites where those wagons would be and when.”

Before my eyes, the shock in the faces of Hilarion, Sotis, Xikander, even Philologos, turned to anger. Ion, Dionis, all of the attendants who’d spoken so freely in front of me, were realizing the depths of my deceit. Xikos pushed past Philologos and reached around Hilarion to drag me away from the king—to my death, I was sure. Whether it would be Xikos who would kill me or my grandfather was the only question.