The King of Attolia (9 page)

“Hello, Dite,” said the king. Costis was behind him, and could only hear the smile in Eugenides’s voice, not see it in his face. Costis winced. The king had found someone else lower in the pecking order than Costis himself. He had needed only to ask Relius, the Secretary of the Archives and the queen’s master of spies, who wrote “The King’s Wedding Night.” Relius would have known who was responsible for publicly insulting the king.

“I thought we should talk,” said Eugenides.

Costis exchanged glances with the guard beside him, then looked away.

“About what, Your Majesty?” Dite was going to try to brazen it out. Costis wished he wouldn’t. It was only going to make a scene that promised to be very, very ugly take even longer. Dite was a fool. He might have been immune, as the heir to a powerful baron, but
everyone knew he wouldn’t get any protection from his father. And if his own father wouldn’t bring a complaint to the throne about the treatment of his son, no one else could.

“Why, about that very amusing song you wrote.” Before Dite could deny it, the king turned to Teleus. “You have guards at the rest of the entrances. You’ve cleared it?”

Teleus nodded, and the king turned back.

“We can have a private talk, Dite.”

“I still don’t know what about, Your Majesty.”

“Well. The errors in your representation, for a beginning. There were a few, you know. I’m sure you’ll want to present a factual account once you hear the details.” The king paused, to be sure he had Dite’s full attention. He did. He had the undivided attention of every man around him. “She cried.”

Dite recoiled. “Your Majesty, I don’t—”

“Want to hear this? Why not, Dite? Don’t you want to put it into your song? The queen wept on her wedding night. Surely you can find rhymes for that? Walk with me, and I can tell you more.”

“Your Majesty, please,” Dite said, shaking. “I’d rather not hear more. If you would excuse me.” The whole court knew he was in love with the queen. The whole country knew it. He took a step backward, but Teleus stood directly behind him and blocked any escape.

The king slid an arm that ended in a shiny silver hook to the middle of Dite’s back and gently but firmly forced him through the archway. “Walk with me, Dite,” he insisted.

Costis was left with the rest of the guardsmen, breathing unevenly through teeth that were clenched so hard they hurt.

“Bastard,” someone behind him hissed.

“He should worry about being assassinated,” said another man.

“Steady,” said Teleus.

“Captain…,” the guard protested.

“Shut up,” Teleus snarled.

No one spoke after that.

Dite and the king walked for half an hour in the garden. When they returned, Dite looked subdued, but surprisingly calm.

Once through the archway, he turned and dropped to his knees in front of Eugenides, who said amiably, “Get up, Dite.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“Have lunch with me tomorrow?”

Dite looked up from a surreptitious check of the dirt smudges on the knees of his fine trousers, and smiled. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I’d be honored.”

The king smiled. Dite smiled. They parted. Dite went off alone and the king, followed by his stunned guardsmen, walked back to the terrace where the
breakfast dishes had been cleared away. The queen was gone. The wind blew across the empty stone pavement.

By the day’s end, the entire palace knew of Dite’s defection to the king’s support. Costis reviewed the evidence of his own eyes over and over in his head and still couldn’t believe it. He was thinking of it as he prepared for bed. He was about to blow out the light on his desk when he heard footsteps approaching. He looked up from the flame to see Aris leaning on his door frame.

“Have you heard the latest?” Aris asked.

“I was there,” said Costis. “I saw Dite myself.”

Aris corrected himself. “Not the latest, I suppose. The almost latest. Have you heard what went on last night at dinner?”

Costis shook his head. Aris related his information, picked up at the mess. “If being high-handed is your idea of how a king behaves, I think he has worked it out. You might not think he can act like a king, but he thinks he can.”

It didn’t get exactly the response that Aris had expected.

“He told me that story, Aris. The night I thought they were going to hang me. He said his cousins were worse than mine, that they used to hold him face down in the water until he was willing to insult his own family. He said”—Costis paused to think through what he
was saying—“he said he wouldn’t mention such a thing to anyone but me. I suppose he thought I was going to be dead the next day.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“No, of course not,” said Costis. “He only told me because he thought I wouldn’t live long enough to tell anyone else. I couldn’t repeat it.”

Aris was looking amused. “You think I am ridiculous, don’t you?” Costis asked.

“I do,” Aris admitted. “But, as a low-minded and practical sort of fellow, I’m glad someone has ideals and sticks to them.”

“If the king didn’t tell that story to anyone but me, he’ll think I have been passing it around. Why didn’t he say something about it this morning when we sparred?”

“Would he?” Aris asked.

“I don’t know,” Costis admitted. “But he’s not going to go on believing that I’m some kind of loose-mouthed gossiper.”

“Loose-mouthed gossip seller,” suggested Aris, and at Costis’s puzzled expression, he looked amused again and rolled his eyes.

“Do you know how much that humiliating tidbit about the king was worth?” Aris asked. “However it
did
get to Dite’s friend, you can be sure someone was very well paid on the way.”

Costis was horrified.

“Does he think that I sold that story to someone?”

Aris shrugged.

Costis swore, cursing the king in every particular.

He was still angry the next morning. He was determined to say something to the king at the first opportunity, and that was to be during their morning training together. The king didn’t look as if he were holding a dire insult against Costis. But then, Costis thought, the king never looked the way he was supposed to. He just stood there, patiently waiting for Costis to put up his sword for the same pathetic basic exercises. Costis didn’t move. He stood very proudly, with his shoulders square, and rushed into what he had to say.

“Your Majesty, if you believe I sold that story about your cousins—”

The king interrupted before he was finished. “I would never accuse you of such a thing.”

“—well, you are mistaken, I assure you,” Costis insisted. Only after he’d spoken did the king’s words sink in.

The king laughed. Costis held on tight to his temper. The men around him were turning to stare.

Stiffly Costis said, “You may think poorly of me, and I think poorly of myself, but I did not spread that story.”

“Too slow to find a buyer? Better luck next time.”

Costis lifted his chin a little higher. “I would never stoop to revealing information I knew was private.”

“Not even if you don’t like the person whose privacy you are protecting?”

“Especially not then,” said Costis, and hoped his disdain showed.

“I see.” The king only looked more amused. “First position, this morning? I’ll try not to hit you in the face again. It will be harder if you keep sticking your chin out like that.”

Costis left the training ground defiantly satisfied. He may have sounded like an ass, in fact, he knew he had, but he’d shown the king he had some pride left. He was very pleased with himself, at least until he was summoned by the queen.

Costis was hurrying, as usual, from the king’s apartments at midday. He had to move sharply to get something to eat in the Guards’ mess and then be back in time for his duty in the afternoon. It would have been easier to carry bread and cheese in his belt, but that was a uniform violation. He could have skipped the meal, but his stomach had shown an embarrassing tendency to rumble in the quiet of the afternoon court sessions.

One of the queen’s attendants, Imenia, approached him in the passage, and he stepped aside to allow her to pass, but she stopped.

“The queen wishes to speak to you, Lieutenant,” she said.

Costis gaped. “Me?”

The attendant responded with a stare.

Costis stammered an apology. “Forgive me, where shall I go?”

Imenia condescended to nod and turned away, expecting him to follow, which he did. He knew the names of the attendants, and had been slowly putting those names to the faces he saw at the afternoon courts and at the dinners. Imenia was not the first of the queen’s attendants, but she was among the most senior.

Feeling light-headed, only partly because he’d had no food at all that day, he followed to the door of the queen’s apartments. Imenia nodded at the guards in the hallway there. They neither challenged nor even looked at Costis. They seemed somehow more impressive than the men who guarded the king. Beyond the doorway, the guardroom of the queen glowed with light from the windows near the ceiling. The room was far larger than the king’s guardroom, paneled entirely in wood inlaid with mosaic pictures. Costis stared.

He’d thought the king’s apartments were the height of opulence, until he saw this room, not even an audience chamber, merely the guardroom. The noise of his boots, crossing the carpetless floor, reminded him that he hadn’t come to admire the walls. He handed his sword to the guard waiting to take it and made haste after Imenia, who hadn’t slowed.

She passed through one of the open doors on the far side of the guardroom and down a passage, then turned into a narrower passage that was lit indirectly by light
from the windows in the rooms opening off it. She stopped at a doorway and waved Costis in. The queen waited for him in the small audience room. Her chair was the only furniture.

The queen looked him over impassively and spoke to the point. “What is the king doing when he retires to his room without his attendants?”

Costis wished the queen had asked him her question the day before, when he hadn’t just told the king he wouldn’t stoop to distribute gossip. He could almost hear what Aris called his ideals crashing to the ground like a pile of sticks. This wasn’t gossiping; this was his queen asking him a direct question, or alternatively, asking him to betray the privacy of the king, who was his sovereign, or alternatively, a goat-footed throne-stealing interloper. Costis thanked the gods he could keep his conscience clear and answer, “I don’t know, Your Majesty.”

“Don’t know, Lieutenant, or won’t tell?”

“I don’t know, Your Majesty. I am sorry.”

The queen looked thoughtful. “Nothing?”

Costis swallowed.

“Do you mean to say that as far as you are aware, he spends the entire time sitting and looking out the window and nothing else?”

“That’s correct, Your Majesty,” Costis said, relieved that it was the truth.

“You may go.”

Costis stepped backward through the door and retraced his steps to the guardroom. The attendant who had brought him was nowhere to be seen. Costis held up his head but he couldn’t shake the sensation of creeping away from the majesty of the queen. That, he told himself, was what a sovereign should be.

One morning in the Guards’ bath, the valet was buckling on Costis’s greaves when he spoke. “I have a friend,” he said quietly, “who heard something the other day.”

Costis, warned by the tone of his voice, kept his own low. “What did he hear?”

“Two men talking. You know how it is in the plunges, people think they are going on too quietly to be heard, but suddenly every word they say seems to be going directly into your ear.”

“Yes,” said Costis. Everyone knew that the curved roofs of the baths sometimes caused strange echoes to carry unexpected distances. “I’ve had that happen to me. But usually it’s a vet talking about the girls he’s left behind.”

“These two weren’t talking about girls.”

“Go on,” said Costis.

“Well, I will,” said the valet, “because it’s been worrying me and I’d like to pass it on and then forget it. The one asked the other if things were going well, and the other said yes, just as planned, he thought he
would be successful in a few more weeks. He said he thought the first man would be very pleased with the results. Those were his words, ‘very pleased with the results.’”

“So?” said Costis. “They could be talking about anything, managing a farm, training a horse.”

“I don’t think so,” said the valet. He finished with the greaves and stood, face to face with Costis. “It was the Baron Erondites and Sejanus.”

Of course, it would be Sejanus, Costis thought. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “that Baron Erondites served in the Guard under the old king, and as Sejanus was still a guard until he became the king’s attendant, they both have privileges to use the Guards’ baths…if they didn’t want anyone else in the court to see them talking.”

“Exactly,” said the valet. “And now I am going to forget I ever heard anything.” He stepped back. Thinking hard, Costis left for the palace.

Dite had been cut off in every way from his family, though the baron had stopped short of disinheriting him. People thought he still held out hope that Dite might come to his senses. In contrast, the baron was publicly fond of Sejanus, providing him with an allowance and keeping his town house open for Sejanus’s use. It was Sejanus who made it clear that he was a loyal member of the Guard, and kept his distance from his father. People might have thought that
his loyalty was more to the Guard itself, and to his career in it, than personally to the queen, but having your greatest loyalty be to your own career wasn’t a crime, really, or there would be more people in the queen’s prisons. Sejanus certainly shared his father’s opinion of his brother, Dite, and Dite returned the favor. They made it abundantly clear whenever they chanced to meet. Sejanus called Dite a fop and a coward. Dite sneered at Sejanus and referred to him as a sweaty uncultured pig, but he had been forced to watch in helpless rage one evening as Sejanus cruelly cut through his lyre strings one by one, while their friends looked on in amusement or discomfort, depending on where their sympathies lay. Because Sejanus would be heir if Dite were disinherited, his animosity was not surprising and didn’t suggest any disloyalty to Attolia.