A Conspiracy of Kings (28 page)

I am afraid that the side effect of all this will be a
burnishing of our reputation for two-faced deal making. It is
unflattering, but the Medes will think twice before making any
bargains with future rebels if they believe we are all unreliable
allies.

Unable to clear a path of retreat toward the capital, the Medes
were forced to fight their way back across the valley and down the
road to the port at Tas-Elisa. They were harried at every step and
arrived in complete darkness. Thanks to the magus’s work with
the townspeople, before the Medes even arrived, the soldiers found
themselves locked out of the walled town.

The Mede ships in the harbor had cannons to provide covering
fire. Under that and the small-arms fire from the town walls, the
few thousand Medes who were left scrambled into shoreboats and were
hauled to their ships. My army settled into the tents that had been
provided for the Medes, ate their provisions, and enjoyed their
wine, while the townspeople sensibly stayed inside their closed
walls and refused to let anyone in, including me. Being turned away
was a surprise, but I was too relieved by the entire course of the
day to care. I rode up to Elisa in the dark, with the sounds of
victory slowly fading into the song of nightbirds and insects, and
fell into my own kingly bed at dawn.

The bodies were gathered over the next few days, stripped, and
then burned. The weapons were collected in a makeshift armory in
Tas-Elisa. I meant to restore the truce at Elisa as quickly as
possible, so I stored no weapons there. I will pay a whopping fine
to the treasury to assuage the outrage of the priests. Though I
have escaped any lightning strikes of the gods, I regret bringing
war to the place of festivals, and Elisa must have its truce if
Sounis is to elect any kings in the future.

We acquired twelve cannons as well, which was an unlooked-for
windfall. Evidently the Medes had off-loaded them from their ships
to be used at some point in the future. We found them the morning
after the battle as the proctors attempted to bring some order to
the chaos that was several thousand soldiers sleeping off a drunk.
Akretenesh told me I must return the cannons, and I laughed in his
face.

Akretenesh was not a happy man. I did try to take a conciliatory
approach, but he would have none of it, and my politeness was long
at an end when he told me he wanted to take the cannons with him. I
packed him into a litter and had him carried down to the port,
where with great relief I saw him laid in a boat and pushed off to
the Mede transport ship. He made some unpleasant threats, but I
doubt he will have an opportunity to carry them out. He will face
his emperor over the loss of an army when he reaches home. I do not
expect to see him again and am glad of it.

There were more meetings, confirming my impression that talking
is the most important thing a king does. I had promised Hanaktia
that her children would not lose Hanaktos if she fulfilled her
bargain with me. I kept my word but settled one-third of the
holdings on Berrone as a dowry and made my mother’s brother
her guardian. That it didn’t please her mother was no concern
of mine. My uncle will take care of Berrone’s best interests.
I don’t trust her mother or brothers to do so.

I went to see Nomenus the day I left. There were six cells in an
outbuilding. The building was high in the middle with low eaves,
and the doorways of the cells faced each other across a central
breezeway. Frankly, it was more pig house than prison. The door to
Nomenus’s cell was little higher than my waist and made of
woven metal strips. Nomenus lay curled against it. He was asleep,
which was not astonishing. He had no blanket, and I assumed it was
too cold in the stone building to sleep at night.

As I squatted beside the webwork of iron, he stirred and sat up.
“You are triumphant,” he said. “I heard from the
guards.”

“I am,” I said.

“I’m glad,” he said grudgingly, tucking his
fingers under his arms. “Not wholly glad, you
understand…but glad.”

I peered past him into the darkness.

He said, “It is not so cramped farther back. I sit here
because it is warmer.”

I had come to see him because I thought that out of sight and
out of mind might be a dangerous attitude to take. I wanted to have
a very clear idea in my head of where I had put him.

“Unlock this,” I said to the guard with me.

Nomenus backed away from the door once it was open, and I got on
my knees and crawled inside. The prison cell did open out; its roof
was higher than in the cramped passageway by the door, and the
floor in the rest of the cell had been dug out, so it was lower and
Nomenus could stand upright. I sat in the tunnel that was the
entryway and dangled my legs over the lip into the cell. The dirt
having been dug away, what was left was a collection of boulders
and the lumpy bedrock. There was no flat space outside of the
entryway where I sat.

I waved to Nomenus, and he settled uncomfortably on a rock. He
had a huge bruise on his forehead that did not please me. He
touched it gingerly and said, “It was no unkindness by your
guards,” as if reading my mind. “I first came here in
the dark, if you remember.”

“I see.” I couldn’t think of what else I
wanted to say. I watched him watching me. Finally I asked,
“What are you thinking?”

He swallowed. “Useless excuses that I am trying to keep
unsaid.”

I waited.

After a moment he tossed up his hands, and to my intense
discomfort, he started to cry. “You are king,” he said,
his voice breaking. “What I did doesn’t matter very
much now, does it? And what else could I do but be loyal to my
lord? Is it my business whom my lord is loyal to?”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.” He pushed himself farther back and drew his
legs up to be wrapped in the curl of his arms. He rubbed his face
against his arms. “I wanted to be on the winning side, and I
thought I was.”

He was either a flawed but fundamentally decent man or a very
convincing actor, or possibly, he was both.

“Please,” he said, with obvious reluctance. “I
hadn’t meant to ask, but, is it…forever?” His
tears had made streaks through the dirt on his face.

I said, “No. It isn’t forever, but it’s going
to be some time.”

He nodded.

“When I have other things dealt with, I will deal with
you,” I promised him.

Later, as I climbed onto my horse’s back and rode for the
capital, his last words were still in my ears. His cell had already
been locked behind me, and he hadn’t been talking to me. He
was praying to the gods, I think, when he whispered,
“Don’t forget me. Please, don’t forget
me.”

I stayed only two days in the capital. I was welcomed by a
cheering citizenry, who threw flowers at my head. It was
disconcerting to think I could have put almost any young man in my
retinue on a white horse and they would have thrown flowers at him
instead. It was not me they cared about, only what I meant to them:
a cessation of hostilities, a chance for prosperity, food on the
table.

I left the city of Sounis almost immediately because I had
backed Brimedius into a corner, and he had admitted both that he
had held my mother and sisters and that they had subsequently
disappeared. He admitted that he had no idea where they were.
Clearly, he expected to be held responsible for their deaths. I did
not relieve him of his fears, and wouldn’t until I had seen
my mother and sisters with my own eyes.

I was anxious to get to Eddis. In this, my father was my
greatest ally, putting his foot down when the magus suggested I
should travel with all my Eddisians and Attolians at a
snail’s pace. I took a guard and a change of clothes and left
the rest to travel at the speed of armies and gastropods. We
changed horses frequently and arrived in Eddis almost as quickly as
any royal messenger. I didn’t question for a minute that it
was my desire for haste that moved us, not until we arrived in the
great court of the Eddisian palace.

My father dropped from his horse almost before the animal had
stopped moving and strode, oblivious, through six layers of a
ceremonial reception, to take my mother in his arms. I stared,
remembering his words after we’d escaped Hanaktos. As I
watched him lift her off the ground, watched her wrap her arms
around him and lay her head on his shoulder, it was apparent that I
had misunderstood what he meant when he said that only I was
“important.”

Our parents’ behavior seemed to be no surprise to either
Ina or Eurydice, who left them to each other and ran toward me. To
my relief, the Eddisians in the court didn’t seem to mind the
disruption of the ceremony they’d planned, and I was able to
seize Ina and Eurydice in my own arms and all of us could babble
our questions and answers at one another while the Eddisians looked
tolerantly on. The majordomo efficiently dispatched my guard to
quarters and swept us all inside to rooms where we could be private
and I could ask about the one person I had looked for but not seen,
the queen of Eddis.

Ina told me, “She has taken her court to Attolia and waits
to see you there.”

“Her Majesty has kindly given us this time
together,” said my mother, “knowing that we have much
to catch up on.”

Indeed, we did. Settling on the couches, we shared our
adventures. Ina and Eurydice told me how Ina had led them out of
Brimedius, while my mother sat between me and my father, looking
comfortably at each of us in turn and speaking very little. She did
not appear particularly brave or daring, hardly even strong-minded.
She seemed as quiet as ever, but I didn’t doubt that she had
done just as Eurydice said and run a sharpened stick down the
throat of one of Brimedius’s hounds. Even with the evidence
of their happy outcome, I am left with nightmares at the dangers
they faced and know I have many debts to repay to people and to
gods for their safe arrival in Eddis.

It was the next day that my mother sought a word in private,
looking for me in the small chamber attached to the palace library
where Gen used to have his bedroom. Pausing at the threshold, she
framed a question. “I thought you would be in a hurry to be
on your way to Attolia?”

“I am in a hurry,” I said. “But that’s
no reason you should be made uncomfortable. It will be much more
pleasant for you if we go back to the main pass and await the
soldiers returning to Attolia and then travel with them.”

“It will be slower, though, won’t it?” she
asked, as she settled lightly on the arm of a chair opposite
me.

I looked studiously at the book in my hand.

My mother waited.

I finally gave up and closed the book. “I broke the truce
at Elisa and I shot an unarmed man. I shot the ambassador. I cost
the lives of her soldiers and Attolia’s as well as my own,
and my hands are
covered
in blood. What if
Eddis thinks there was a better way? What if she is glad she has
not already agreed to marry me, and what if she wants nothing to do
with me now?”

My mother said very reasonably, “You can’t hide from
someone in her own palace. If you don’t go to Attolia, she
will come here.”

I hunched my shoulders and went back to looking at my book.

My mother stood, saying peacefully, “I will tell your
father that you will go tomorrow by way of the Old Aracthus Road.
The rest of us will travel with your borrowed military.”

She looked back before she pulled the door closed. “Your
questions—you know I am not the one to answer
them.”

She was as right as ever, and so I have come to the queen of
Eddis, to ask her for answers.

S
OUNIS folded his hands and waited. He had arrived at
the palace late the night before and had risen early in the
morning, expecting to find no one but the two honorary royal
guardsmen and his own personal guard in his anteroom. Instead he
found Ion, the attendant of the king of Attolia, waiting by a bench
against the wall.

“You’re still here, then?” asked Sounis, in
surprise and pleasure.

“Yes, Your Majesty. My king thought that you might wish to
dress with particular care this morning. There will be an official
reception in a few hours.” Ion was smiling. They both knew
that Attolis hadn’t been referring just to the ceremony
planned for the day.

Sounis looked down at the clothes he’d put on. He
hadn’t given them a thought, but Eugenides was probably
right. He opened the door wider and turned back toward his
bedchamber.

Ion had brought scissors, and after he shaved him, he trimmed
Sounis’s hair and added a light coating of oil. He opened a
small jar and took a pinch of gold powder and shook it to cling to
the oil.

“Ion,” said Sounis, dismayed.

“It’s for luck,” said Ion. He packed his case
and went to Sounis’s wardrobe.

“My clothes are still in cases in my reception room,
except for what I am wearing.”

But Ion was already pulling a suit from tissue paper. “His
Majesty—”

“I hazard to guess,” said Sounis. “The tailors
still had my measurements?”

“Indeed,” said Ion, and helped him out of his
clothes and into a linen shirt so fine that it was easy to see the
shape of his arms right through it. It was covered by a sleeveless
tunic in dark blue.

“Boots, too?” said Sounis.

“He likes to think of everything.”

“Yes, yes, he does.”

“An opal earring, Your Majesty? Or would you prefer
onyx?”

When Sounis was finally presentable to Attolian standards, Ion
opened the door to the reception room and bowed. Xanthe, the oldest
of Eddis’s attendants, was standing just outside. She turned
away and said to someone not in view, “Your Majesty, the king
of Sounis.”

Eddis was waiting for him on a carved seat by the window. She
stood. Her dress was of linen as fine as his own. It had an
overdress decorated in knotted cord and a waist of satin covered in
tiny beads in the same pattern as the knots.