“We will talk about this later,” he said. “For now, I shall retire to my room and read . . .” He paused to swallow. “About poor Omarak . . . for my edification.”

He didn’t make it to his room. He had stopped because he needed to rest and then, taken by surprise, he’d lost his carefully maintained equilibrium. After no more than a few steps he stopped again, his guards circling back like flocking birds, their dress capes swinging. When the king pointed to a door nearby, no one knew why. They all stared. It was just a door to one of many small reception rooms off this hallway. Then the king was stumbling toward it, and his guards were leaping ahead of him to get it open and check the room before he entered.

Two startled men who probably expected their conversation to be undisturbed were summarily ejected as the rest of the royal entourage surged in after the king. Swept along like a small rock in a flood, I went with them. I heard the queen say quite bitterly, “You fool,” and heard the king breathily concede. I could see nothing but the backside of the man ahead of me. I did not see her turn and stalk away from him, only heard the people around me catch their breath. In the shocked silence, there was a soft patter of objects hitting the floor as she lifted a bowl from a side table and ruthlessly emptied it.

“My king.” Evidently, she offered it to him just in time.

“Unkingly,” he said when he was done being sick, still bent over, his hand on his thigh. The queen pulled the bowl away and passed it to her attendant, who received it without any change in expression and immediately passed it on.

Without any warning, the king’s knees buckled. The queen tried to catch him, but he slid through her arms, too heavy to hold. Unwilling to let him go, she dropped as well, velvet and silk robes billowing all around as they sank to the ground together.

“Poison,” someone whispered, and I heard the dreadful word repeating through the room.

“But he hasn’t eaten anything!” a horrified Philologos protested.

“He ate no breakfast,” Hilarion confirmed. “He didn’t touch his dinner last night.”

“He hasn’t drunk anything today, either,” said Sotis.

“Nothing?” said the queen.

“Nothing,” they assured her.

“Nothing?”

Assurances died on their lips.

The king wasn’t poisoned; he was ill and none of them had noticed. She lifted a shaking hand to his forehead to feel the heat burning through his skin. I’m surprised his attendants had the courage to stay still in the face of her rage. I was moving already.

“He was sick in the night,” confessed Verimius. He must have seen the evidence.

“Your Majesty, I am sorry. I assumed it was just the nightm—” Hilarion said, before he checked his runaway tongue.

The queen bent down over the king. “Why didn’t you say something?” she asked.

The king, eyes still closed, waved his hand at the scene all around him. “I can’t imagine,” he said.

“We cannot lose you,” said the queen fiercely.

“So, so, so,” whispered the king, deeply weary. “I just heard.”

In the doorway, a large man in the green sash of a healer was forcing his way through the crowd.

“Galen,” said the king with a sigh. “Can you tell him I died?”

“He is my patient,” Petrus insisted, following along in the other healer’s wake.

Galen ignored him. “Has anyone else been taken ill?” he asked, and every head swung as they sought and could not find me because I had long since squeezed myself underneath one of the couches along the wall. Only the king, almost flat on the floor, could have seen me, and I prayed to Agalia that he would not. He opened his eyes and deliberately winked at me before closing them again.

Galen asked, “Has Erondites’s grandson been near the king?”

“No,” they said.

Yes.

“Has he touched him?”

“No!” they said.

Yes.

More afraid of the queen’s growing impatience than jealous of each other, Petrus and Galen finally agreed that the king had not been poisoned, that he had a stomach ailment and should be carried back to his room to be bled and then dosed with lemon and salt.

“The king shall return to his chamber,” Eugenides allowed in a thin voice. “On his feet, and he will not be bled. And he will have hot lemon and no salt.”

Galen and Petrus reluctantly accepted the amendments, their acquiescence only provisional, as they helped the king to his feet so that his return to his apartments under his own power might mitigate the rumors already flying around the palace that he had fallen down dead.

When the room was empty, I struggled out from my hiding place, the exit from under the low couch far more difficult than the entrance had been. I limped around the room, stretching my sore body and collecting the oranges scattered on the floor. Then I pushed the couch a little away from the wall and settled in behind it. My hands shook, making it difficult to peel the fruit, and I wondered if it was going to hurt very much to die. I knew Melisande would be grieved, but not surprised, at the news that I was dead. Would my grandfather be blamed for introducing a diseased grandson into the king’s household? I hoped so.

I laid out the sections of an orange on the floor as I freed them. There were eleven, a frustrating number. Oranges mostly have ten. I peeled another, hoping not to get another eleven, and got a nine, which was a pleasant surprise. The curved sections of an orange make a good spiral, and with twenty sections, I could make three complete rotations with no section left over. Once I’d laid out the pattern, I ate every part of it, savoring each bite as if it were my last.

When I had eaten all the oranges and no one had come for me, I moved to sit on the couch instead of behind it. The room was meant for private meetings and was not large. One side table held a vase full of flowers. The other had held the fruit I’d just eaten. There was a mosaic on the floor with the storm god in the center medallion, surrounded by his children. Alyta, goddess of the gentle rain, had a gold garland. Her sisters and brothers, less welcome in their attention, had silver ones.

In addition to the doorway the king had stumbled through, there were windows and a doorway to the courtyard outside. I went to look at it. There was nothing interesting to see, only empty pavement and the rectangular reservoir in the center to collect water. The reservoir was empty, probably cracked, as it had recently rained.

When the latch on the door behind me lifted, there was no time to get back to my couch to hide. I slid around the doorpost into the courtyard, where there was not even a flowerpot to conceal me. On hands and knees, I scuttled across the pavement and dropped into the empty reservoir, rolling myself up against the side and hoping that anyone checking the courtyard from the doorway might overlook me.

I heard someone say, “Sir, the juice is still wet. He can’t be far.”

“He isn’t,” said Teleus, captain of the guard.

I opened my eyes to see him staring down at me.

With his hand wrapped around my upper arm, Teleus marched me through the waiting room and directly to the bedside where the king lay propped up on pillows, sweaty and pale. Medander saw me first and lunged forward, fist raised.

“Stop,” whispered the king.