Unfortunately, without cooler heads to mediate between them, they fought over everything. While they were both full of self-importance, they were not stupid—their disagreements, though fiery, usually ended in some grumbling accord, and the king did not intervene in them. He did occasionally lay his head down on the table and feign sleep or threaten them with dire forms of execution, which they ignored.

That night, we had camped on a bluff above a narrow but fast-moving river. Trokides felt we should knock together rafts and cross the river as quickly as possible. Pegistus had sent scouts to look for a ford, and he wanted to wait until they returned. The king, with his head resting on the back of his seat and a wine cup in his hand, was glancing from Trokides to Pegistus and back again with diminishing patience when a guard stepped into the doorway. Trokides and Pegistus glared equally at the interruption, but the king’s expression was more hopeful.

“They’re at the pickets, Your Majesty,” said the guard with a broad smile. “Both of them.”

It was Costis and Kamet. They were brought to the council tent a little later and greeted with embraces and kisses. I smiled shyly at Kamet, hardly recognizing the tidy scribe with the worldly air I’d seen in Attolia’s palace. His hair had grown shaggy and he was dressed in what appeared to be a remanufactured blanket.

Costis had made it safely back to the temple complex to find Kamet waiting. By the time Nahuseresh’s men had arrived on the hunt through small towns up and down the coast of Roa, Costis and Kamet had made their way into the hills to shelter in an abandoned shepherd’s hut. Costis had found and prepared it during the months he was pretending to be a naturalist and keeping an eye on the Ellid Sea for signs of the Mede ships. Carefully scouting from their hiding place, Costis had seen the retreat of the Medes and had been watching and waiting, hoping the Attolians would be on their heels.

“You smell like sheep,” the king said to Kamet.

“Your Majesty, it’s been awful,” Kamet responded. “I had to sleep on the floor. It’s not the sheep I smell of.”

“Costis,” the king said reprovingly.

“He is alive,” Costis said. It made me smile again to hear him sound so much like his captain, Teleus.

Trokides and Pegistus were eager to get back to their argument and happy to draw Costis and Kamet into it. They had been working from the limited information brought in by scouts, and local knowledge was what they needed.

“There are fords upstream,” said Kamet. “The bluffs on either side of the Lusimina just get higher and the river narrower. The only other ford is downstream, at least two days away.”

“Then we must cross here,” said Trokides triumphantly.

“They are in the woods on the opposite bank. They are going to shoot anyone trying to cross in a boat,” insisted Pegistus.

I’d been trying to remember where I’d heard the name of the river.

“What is it, Pheris?”

The river. The name.

“Lusimina?” the king asked, checking with Kamet to see if he’d heard correctly.

Slowly the memory I needed floated to the surface of my mind.

After the ambush, when we returned to our camp, the watchmen asked who you were.

The king blinked, as if he had trouble recalling that night.

Remember what you said. By the will of the Great Goddess, king of Attolia, king over Sounis and Eddis . . . king over all the land from . . . the mountains . . .

I didn’t have a sign for Macheddic, or Melenzetti for that matter. Seeing my frustration, the king reached for the charcoal stick they’d been using to mark the map and handed it to me. He tapped a bare spot on the vellum. Slowly at first, and then with increasing confidence, I wrote out the words “king from the Macheddic Mountains to the sea, king from the Melenzetti Pass to the River Lusimina.”

“Did I say that?” the king asked.

Yes.

I was Erondites. I knew what would destroy the king and would not let Lader triumph from beyond the grave. Do not overreach.

“Your Majesty?” Pegistus prompted impatiently.

“We will not cross the river,” the king said slowly, but with certainty.

Trokides was outraged. “On the word of a child?” he said.

“Your Majesty?” Pegistus protested. “If the Medes turn and come this way again, Roa will not stop them.”

“No,” said the king. “We will build a fort here and garrison it.”

“On Roa’s land?” Pegistus was horrified.

“No, not on Roa’s land,” said the king. It had been in his mind all along to make the king of Roa pay for his treachery. Eugenides moved his hand across the map. “This is Attolia now.”

“And if the king of Roa objects?” Trokides asked, quite reasonably.

The king shrugged. “He can send his complaints to the courts of the Greater Powers of the Continent or to his new friend Ghasnuvidas, emperor of the Mede, and see who comes to his aid. This land is Attolia, and we will march no farther.”

Far away in the capital city of Attolia, Eddis woke in the dark. She’d been dreaming, as she had so many times before, of a dark night and the crisp mountain air of Eddis, the sky full of stars shining so bright on the Sacred Mountain that the snow on its slopes glowed even though there was no moon. She’d dreamed she was on the roof walks of her palace, looking over her city, and the quiet night was shattered by a crack and then a roar as the mountaintop exploded into a ball of fire and gouts of flame shot into the air, only to be hidden by an ever-expanding cloud of smoke. She had run through the palace, desperate to reach the streets to warn the people. The snow on the slopes was melting, some of it turning to steam but the rest into a burning river of mud and lava that would roll down the slopes to sweep over her city and fill the mountain valley.

“Helen?” murmured her husband beside her. Circling her with his arm, he pulled her close, shifting her bulk with an ease she envied. “Nightmare?” he asked.

“I ran through the streets and they were empty, Sophos. The windows, the doors, they were boarded over and everyone was gone. The Sacred Mountain was erupting and there was no one there.”

The terrible tension was fading, and she was already falling back asleep to dream again. She wasn’t in her palace or in Eddis. This time, she was looking over the rooftops of some other city, seeing them fill with people who’d felt the ground shaking under their feet, heard the rumbling of the distant explosion, and come out to watch the eruption taking place far away.

Chapter Fourteen

Over the next few weeks, the Peninsula’s soldiers put down their weapons and began felling trees to make room for a sturdy fort. They dug trenches and laid the courses for stone walls while the king exchanged letters and messengers with the king of Roa. There was posturing and threats. Roa sent a new spokesman, shifty-eyed and provoking. We did not know it then, but Roa had bribed the remaining Mede officers to make a stand on the far side of the Lusimina. The Medes were indeed lying in wait, as Pegistus had feared. However, our king would not be baited into crossing the river, and every day more of the enemy’s soldiers disappeared on their way home. As the deserters had nothing but their weapons and the clothes on their backs, they soon turned to looting the countryside as they went.