Passing Sejanus’s pen, I mooned theatrically over a honey cake I had slipped from the royal table, and his guards, as I thought they would, lunged at me as if to snatch it away. I might be instantly recognizable, might have the king’s favor, but I was still a small person with a treat, and I made a tempting victim. Perhaps they were only teasing, but I cowered as if afraid and offered them the wineskin I was also carrying instead. They took it, thanking me for the “gift,” and I hurried off.

I circled back to see them sharing the wine and waited out of sight until they had fallen asleep with Petrus’s lethium inside them. With a blanket over my shoulder and a large melon under my arm, I went to untie the knots that closed the pen.

“What are you doing?” Sejanus hissed at me.

As I pulled the sagging gate open, I put a crooked finger to my lips. The guards were not deeply asleep and silence was crucial.

“Pheris, I must stay here or they will catch us both,” Sejanus whispered.

I waited.

“Did Alestis send you?”

I nodded.

“Can he get us both free?” Hope gave his voice a desperate edge.

I nodded again. Lying is just letting people believe what they want to be true.

When I’d found Alestis, with the other Erondites soldiers, he’d seen me watching, and his look of contempt had been all I had needed to know that Sejanus had been mistaken in his friendship.

Carrying my blanket into the muddy pen, I arranged Sejanus’s blanket over it, putting the melon underneath to give the semblance of a head under the cloth. Then I handed Sejanus Sotis’s clothes. Ion’s would have been a better fit, but Ion would have noticed them missing. Dressed in fine clothes, with his messy hair tied back, Sejanus was able to stroll past the picket lines like a man avoiding the stinking latrines, headed out into the woods to do his business.

I’d gone ahead, as if doing the same, and waited to lead him to where I’d tied my pony. I looked in the wrong thicket at first—they are all the same in the dark—lending too much verisimilitude to my show of idiocy for Sejanus. For a moment, I thought Snap had pulled free and we were doomed.

“Where is Alestis?” he asked me, repeating the question several times. Finally, blinking, I produced a rolled paper and handed it to him. He unrolled it in the dark and shrugged helplessly. “I have no light. Did the stupid bastard think I can read this in the dark?”

I handed him a waxed folder of matches. He squatted down beside me to take them. “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing for his angry words. “I am sorry and I did not mean to frighten you.” He patted me gently. “Thank you for the matches.”

When he’d read the instructions, which I had written out in a scrawl no better than Alestis’s might be, we mounted the pony. Sejanus’s long legs hung past the stirrups and Snap grunted with the effort of carrying us both. Sejanus patted her, too.

We headed toward the ridge to the north and west side of the camp, splashing through shallow streams and weaving between the spindly trees. As the ground rose, the forest thickened and it was harder to stay on course. Sejanus climbed down to lead the pony while searching for a trace of a path to follow. Finally he found one that took us to the edge of the valley. It continued with the rocky cliffs on one side and the woods on the other, until we reached the stone marker we were seeking. I looped Snap’s reins around the stele loosely so she could pull herself free, but I hoped she wouldn’t do so too soon. Then we began to climb.

I’d grown much stronger in the time I’d been an attendant. I had been with the king for the three days he slept and I was quite rested. Even so, I had to move very slowly on the steep slope or risk a bone-breaking fall. I could feel Sejanus’s impatience, yet he didn’t rush me and he held my hand in the steeper parts, to be sure I didn’t lose my balance. When I checked again and again to see how high we had climbed, he encouraged me.

“Don’t look, you’ll be all right.”

When we reached a place where the trail flattened out on a narrow ledge, I hesitated, trying to screw up my courage. He saw it and he urged me to take a rest.

“We just have to be over the ridge by daylight,” he said. “They cannot waste time chasing us if they don’t know which way we’ve gone.”

Cursing my weakness, I sat down beside him. Saving the king from himself was a harder business than I’d expected.

When Sejanus began to talk, I think it was to himself as much as to me. “I had a brother like you once. His name was Pheris too.” Seeing me startle, he said, “No, not you, another Pheris, my brother Pheris. He was older than me, older than Dite. They gave him my father’s, and his father’s name, before they knew he was . . . that he was like you.”

So I’d had an uncle I had never heard of as well as Dite, whom I’d completely forgotten about.

“Our father wanted to get rid of the baby. When they are born like that they are usually id—” He looked sideways at me and bit the word back. “Everyone thought the baby would die, but our nurse loved him and she kept him alive. She was always bringing him out and showing everyone how clever he was—because he was clever, but it didn’t matter. She got my father to play chess with him once, and when Pheris won, my father threw the board at him. We all knew who lost that game, but Melisande never learned.”

She had, I thought.

Sejanus got back to his feet. Instead of rambling to the sky, he bent to speak directly to me. “I’m going to take you to my mother. The king will seize all the Erondites land, but she has a small unwedded estate he can’t touch. She loved my brother. She will be happy to see you, and if Melisande still lives, she will send for her, too.” He took my hand, reassuring me. “No one is going to hurt you. The king will not have you for a fool to mock in his court.” In the dim light, he searched my face for comprehension and I nodded, reassuring him in turn.

Instead of seizing the opportunity I had right in front of me, I trailed after him like the idiot he thought I was, keeping one eye on the path and one on the ground below us, as he told me about his mother and incidentally about himself, and how he had ended up at the villa where he’d been a prisoner. “I was comfortable; no one was unkind,” he said. “It took me a long time to realize that nothing I did would ever matter again. I’d been someone important and I’d thrown that away. For something so stupid, too. Here, take my hand, it’s slippery.”

He was helping me at every turn, though he was more tired than I was, and we soon had to rest again.

“My father wanted a puppet; I wanted Eugenides dead. Once he was gone, I was sure the queen would marry Dite. Dite loved her so much.” Bone weary, he struggled back to his feet and, spreading his legs to brace himself, he offered me a hand. “I had a lot of time to think in that villa,” he said. “I had been wrong about everything—Dite, the queen, the king. I hated my father and I ended up just like him.”

He must have guessed what I would have asked, if I could have. Why had he let my grandfather help him escape?

He laughed at himself. “I wanted to be someone who mattered again,” he admitted. “I’d never had the courage to stand up to my father the way Marina and Dite did. When the Medes offered me money to kill the king, I thought it was a stroke of luck—Dite would marry the queen and I would be out from under my father forever.”