A Conspiracy of Kings (2 page)

Of course the magus had long since left Sounis, stolen away in
the night by the Thief of Eddis, though my uncle didn’t know
who was responsible at first. I’d heard rumors, which I
didn’t believe for a minute, that the magus was an Attolian
spy who’d fled the city when he was about to be discovered. I
was not surprised at all to learn subsequently that it had been
Eugenides at work. By the time Malatesta came, I was positive the
magus was busily tramping around the mountains of Eddis, collecting
botanical specimens and enjoying his “captivity” as a
prisoner of the queen of Eddis. I am quite sure he was not
suffering any distress because I had a new tutor.

I hated Malatesta. He could barely manage the multiplication of
greater numbers, and he didn’t know any prime over thirteen.
He’d never read the
Eponymiad
, but he
tried to pretend he had. I doubt very much he’d ever set foot
in a seminar at the University in Ferria. He’d studied no
medicine and no natural history. The only thing he’d read was
poetry. That should have made us friends, but I hated his taste in
poetry, too. Where he admired the sweet and the overwrought, I
liked the
Eponymiad
.

My mother knew how I felt, of course. She and my sisters
sympathized with me, but there was little they could do. My mother
would never act against my father’s judgment, no matter how
poorly she thought of Malatesta. If my father had stayed at the
villa longer than a day, she might have changed his opinion,
drawing him into alignment with her own as invisibly as a magnet
works on a lodestone, but my father had been gone within a day of
installing my new tutor.

I knew that it made my mother sad to see my distress, so I hid
it as well as I could. I also knew that with the slightest
encouragement, Ina and Eurydice would have filled Malatesta’s
bed with bees. They are delicate girls, so small in stature, and
fine-boned like my mother, that I can still lift both of them with
one hand. You could be forgiven for thinking them the incarnation
of every ladylike grace, but my father has had frequent cause to
swear that they got the spine so notably absent in me. A bed full
of bees wasn’t going to get rid of Malatesta; only my father
could do that. The bees would only make him more spiteful, so I
tried not to encourage the girls.

The one person I did complain to, and at length, was Hyacinth,
my single friend on the island of Letnos. He lived in a villa
nearby and came down to visit almost every day, arriving as my
mother and sisters were rising from their afternoon rest, his
visits therefore coinciding with their afternoon meal. On the rare
occasions that he was late, Eurydice always saved him a cake.

He was my only companion of my own age, and I should have been
more grateful to have him, but it was hard to be grateful for
Hyacinth. His father was a patron with a property of only medium
size, holding few of the king’s responsibilities, and
Hyacinth was gratified to consider himself a friend of the heir to
Sounis. He was always smiling and always eager to please.
Everything I said he agreed with, which was trying, and his flute
playing would make the deaf wince, but I think the real problem
with Hyacinth was that he reminded me of myself. He read poetry. He
flinched at loud noises. In addition to having no musical skills,
he had no martial skills. He avoided any situation that might
require a physical effort on his part. Seeing him, I found it no
wonder that my father despised me.

Yet I was his companion, and he mine, and when Malatesta beat
me, I went to him for sympathy. Oh, yes, I was taller than
Malatesta by inches, and long since old enough to be considered a
man, but my tutor was still switching me across the palms of my
hands and leaving painful blisters there. And I was still sniffing
back tears of rage and humiliation like a big baby. Especially so,
when I was switched for insisting that
burn
did
not rhyme with
horn
or that I couldn’t
produce any factors for 31 or 43. Malatesta used to say things that
even he knew were wrong and then watch me in contempt when I let
them pass, too cowed to contradict him.

While I was failing to manage my own petty problems, my uncle
who was Sounis was dealing with greater ones. After the sabotage of
his fleet in its own harbor, he’d jumped into war with
Attolia without hesitation. The magus would have counseled him
otherwise, but the magus, as you know, was whisked away before he
could counsel anything. Then Sounis discovered it was Eddis who was
responsible for both the destruction of his ships and the
disappearance of his valuable advisor, and he started a new war
without any more forethought. He was confident, I think, of success
over both Eddis and Attolia right up until the world heard that the
Thief of Eddis had stolen the queen of Attolia and meant to marry
her.

When the stars aligned in that very unexpected way, my uncle was
at a loss. Together, Attolia and Eddis were far more powerful than
they were alone. He was overmatched, and everyone knew it. There
were more rumors each day. The maids picked up news from who knows
where and retold it to Ina and Eurydice, who carried it to Mother
and me. My mother scolded them for listening to gossip, but she
never insisted they stop.

One morning at breakfast Ina said, “Our uncle has agreed
to marry the cousin of the queen of Eddis.”

“Your uncle who is Sounis?” my mother said, gently
reminding Ina of the honorific.

“Indeed,” said Ina, not touching on the unspoken
truth that only one of our uncles, the king of Sounis, survived.
“They say her name is Agape.”

I should have been glad that it might mean peace among our three
countries, but my pleasure was more selfish. My uncle had given up
his pursuit of Eddis. He would marry someone else and might soon
produce an heir. My mother warned me not to put faith in rumors,
but I was quite filled with hope.

I wrote to my father, as politely as I knew how, to say that my
sword work was improved and that I was sick of poetry (sick of
Malatesta’s, at least). With a marriage to the queen’s
cousin Agape planned, there would soon be a much more appropriate
heir to replace me, and could I please come back to the mainland? I
prayed to the household gods to save me from one more day on
Letnos. Within a day of sending the letter, like an idiot in an old
wives’ tale, I got what I asked for.

I was crossing the courtyard of the villa, and it was as if one
of Terve’s lessons had come to life. He may as well have been
there, shouting, “You are suddenly attacked by fifteen men;
what are you going to do?” Only they weren’t a product
of Terve’s imagination; they were real men, cutting down the
guards at the front gate and streaming into the courtyard of the
villa.

Terve’s first question: “Where’s your
weapon?” My sword of course was in my room, upstairs at the
back of the main house and as useless to me as if it had been on
the moon. The men were spreading out across the courtyard toward
all entrances to the house, and by the time I got to my rooms to
fetch my sword it would be too late to do anything with it.
Terve’s sword, I was almost certain, was still in my study
under the couch where my father had thrown it in disgust when
he’d seen its condition. Malatesta had taken control of my
study and my books, allowing me in only for his insipid lessons; he
didn’t know that the sword was there, and I doubted that the
servants would have moved it. None of the armed men racing across
the courtyard was headed for the study, which was just opposite
from where I stood, its door open to the courtyard.

My feet were moving in that direction before my head had
finished reaching a decision. The study had a door and a window. I
jumped through the open window because it was faster and fell to
the stone floor on my stomach, scrabbling in the dust under the
couch until my hand closed on a stiff leather strap. I dragged the
sword free of its sheath with difficulty and turned, still on my
knees, as a man filled the doorway. Coming from light into the
dark, he was looking ahead of him, not down toward me. My lunge, as
I came to my feet, took him in the chest as I drove the sword
upward with the strength of my legs. Even rusted, the sword slid
through him, and I found, for the first time, how easy it is to
kill a man.

Astonished, I pulled the sword free and immediately plunged it
into the man behind him, who had as little warning as his fellow. I
hit bone that time, but the man’s momentum drove him onto the
point. It was harder to draw the sword out, but I pulled mightily,
desperate to get it free.

Terve’s second question: “What are you going to do
with the weapon?” I knew what I meant to do: defend my mother
and my sisters.

The villa on Letnos is typical, with the courtyard formed on
three sides by buildings of a single story—my study was on
one side, close to the house. My father’s study was on the
opposite. In between, facing into the courtyard, were the
dormitories, the stables, and the kitchen, as well as the office of
the steward and the officer of the guard.

The fourth side of the courtyard was the main house, with a
porch on the uppermost story for the women’s rooms. There was
a stair in the wall that led to the roofs of the lower buildings,
and a drain tile, I knew, that offered a handhold for a climb from
the lower roofs to the porch. I’d taken that route before
when my father was looking for me and I was avoiding him. If I
hurried, I thought I might beat the men who were already in the
villa, who would be making their way up the stairs inside the
house. I ran across the courtyard, now empty, and climbed the steps
to the roof, all according to a plan I had once laid out in
response to one of Terve’s seemingly useless exercises.

Why would anyone attack an unimportant villa, I had asked at the
time, and if it was important enough to be attacked, why
wouldn’t it be defended? Just pretend, he’d said.

I climbed up and over the railing around the porch, trampling
the privacy screen in the process and getting my foot stuck through
it for a moment—not a part of the plan. As I rushed through
the door into my mother’s rooms, the maids were screaming. I
had to shout over the noise they were making, but whether she
understood me or not, Ina had the sense to push shut the large
wooden door at the entrance to the rooms. Someone in the hallway
outside pressed the latch, and the door started to swing open, but
I ran full tilt into it and slammed it closed again. There was a
shout of pain from the other side, and a thump as a body struck the
door. Ina grasped the latch to keep it from moving. While her small
hand secured it, the metal tongue of the latch secured the door.
The door shook in its frame, but it was solid, and we had as much
time as the latch would give us.

Eurydice and my mother were in the room, as well as two maids. I
rushed to the door that connected my mother’s room to
dressing spaces and the bedchambers. There were separate doors into
the bedchambers from the corridor, and I feared to see the
attackers coming through them, but the dressing room was empty. I
dodged through the doorway to grab a grooming set from the tray
there, then shut that door and jammed its latch with the handle of
a brush. I turned back to Ina. As she lifted her hand, I quickly
jammed that latch as well. Everything, everything, as planned with
Terve on an idle afternoon months before.

Eurydice was crouched on the floor. She’d found the wedge
used to hold the door when they wanted it open and was forcing it
into place to help keep the door closed. Once it was secure, I
looked around. The attackers could not come at us from the porch.
Only my mother’s reception room opened onto the balcony, an
old-fashioned way to make sure that no daughter of the house
escaped for an unlicensed glimpse of the men in the courtyard
below.

My mother had hushed the maids, and in the relative quiet she
said, “We heard the fighting from the porch. Darling, are
they bandits?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. They were organized
and all outfitted alike, and no bandits would attack a villa on
Letnos. There was nothing to be stolen, and where would they go
afterward? They couldn’t get off Letnos without passing the
king’s ships that patrolled around it, and the patrol ships
would stop anything larger than a rowboat.

The latch wasn’t going to hold long. “I want you to
hide,” I told my mother, and hustled her and my sisters and
the maids out onto the balcony. When I explained what I wanted, the
maids balked. My mother rolled her eyes at them and calmly stepped
over the railing. She waited while I climbed down to the roof
below, and then she let herself drop into my arms. Eurydice
positively threw herself over the railing, laughing when I caught
her. Ina pointed sternly, and the maids lowered themselves
gingerly, one of them wailing softly, even after I set her on her
feet.

When all the women were safely down, I turned to find Eurydice
standing at the edge of the roof.

“Back away,” I said, “in case they send
someone out of the house.” We could still hear the hammering
on my mother’s door.

Eurydice had seen the bodies on the ground, and her laughter was
gone. “All the guards,” she said.

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” I said,
picking up my sword from the roof. “Bend low, so no one can
see you from the courtyard.” As if herding ducks, I waved
them with my hand to the outside edge of the flat roof, away from
the main house, toward the spot where the peaked roof above the
kitchens began.

When they’d dug an icehouse a few years earlier,
they’d put a door to it on the outside of the house wall, to
make it easier to bring the ice in. The mound over the entranceway
was just a few feet below the level of the roof. It was no
difficulty to jump down and slither to the ground.