The King of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Fetch Teleus,” she said, and a messenger hurried from the room.

  You might not think he can act like a king, but he thinks he can.

  They waited like a wax tableau. Costis wondered if others’ thoughts were racing silently in circles, as his were. The queen gave no indication what she was thinking. Not even her gaze shifted until Teleus was standing in front of her. Her husband was sovereign of Attolia, and her country was riddled with Eddis’s soldiers. She ordered the arrest of her secretary.

  “There will be no mistakes made, Teleus,” warned the queen. “It will be done immediately.”

  Once the captain had gone, they returned to the tableau. Time slid slowly past, and no one spoke, no one moved. They waited. The doors opened, but it was the Eddisian Ambassador. He bowed to the throne and moved quietly to a space along the wall. The doors opened again, and this time it was Teleus. He had his guards and, surrounded by them, the Secretary of the Archives. Stunned, the court turned back to the king. The truth was on Teleus’s face and on Relius’s. The Secretary of the Archives was guilty.

  “He was writing this,” said the Captain of the Guard, shaking a collection of papers in his hand. “He tried to take poison when he saw us in the doorway, Your Majesty.”

  “Is the paper a confession?”

  “Yes.”

  They walked Relius across the room, and he dropped to his knees before the throne. He stared forward like a man who sees nothing clearly except his own death, for whom the sounds of the world are nothing but a muffled din.

  Blank of expression, he raised his eyes to the queen. “May I explain?”

  The queen looked down at him and said nothing. His lips moved as if he was speaking, but there were no words. He closed his eyes briefly, and he struggled for a breath to begin. “When I told you that I did not know who betrayed us…I lied,” he admitted. “I had already realized that it can only be my fault. I visited a woman in the town. You know of her, you knew when she left me. I thought she was tired of me, but I should have understood when she disappeared that I let her see too much, that she was a spy for the Mede.” He held his head in his hands. “My Queen—”

  Teleus hit him in the back of the head, so hard that he sprawled forward onto the marble steps of the thrones’ dais.

  “She is Your Majesty, to you!” the Captain of the Guard snarled.

  “Teleus.” The queen reined him in with a word, but his face, unlike the queen’s, showed all his rage and his sense of betrayal.

  “The poison?” she asked Relius. He had pulled himself back to his knees.

  “I was afraid,” he said.

  “Understandably so,” said Attolia. “But does an innocent man keep poison at hand?”

  “My—Your Majesty,” Relius corrected himself. “I failed you,” he said. “I failed you, but I swear I never meant to betray you. I was writing all this, so that you would know. I did not mean to hide it from you. You must believe me,” he insisted.

  “Must I, Relius?”

  If all he had taught her was true, there was only one answer to her question.

  His lips formed the word, but he couldn’t force it out. He shook his head.

  “No,” agreed the queen, speaking softly. “Take him away.”

  When he was gone, no one in the court moved, afraid to be the first to draw her eye.

  “You will observe?” the king said.

  “I must,” said the queen.

  “I can’t,” the king admitted.

  “Of course not,” said Attolia. She turned to the chamberlain, whose role it was to issue people in and out of the royal presence, and said, “We are through here.” It signaled the end of the court session for the day. Any further business would be postponed. The chamberlain bowed and began to clear the room. When the king stood, all stopped where they were and bowed respectfully as his guard gathered and escorted him away. Costis glanced back once to see the queen still sitting alone on her throne as the room emptied.

  No, Costis thought. The king would not observe Relius’s interrogation. It would mean a return to the rooms underground where Eugenides had been imprisoned, where he had lost his right hand. If he looked sick—and he was so pale he was almost green—Costis thought it was not at the idea of Relius’s suffering, but rather at memories of his own.

  They returned to the king’s rooms. He stopped in the guardroom.

  “What is the time?” he asked, rubbing his face with his hand like a man distracted. He didn’t even look pleased with his success in eliminating Relius.

  “Just coming to the half hour, Your Majesty.”

  “Very well.” As he walked into his room, he reached for the door, blocking his attendants with his arm. “Knock in an hour,” he said. “Don’t bother me before then.”

  He closed the door in their faces.

  “Well,” said Sejanus, “I suppose not even you are necessary, then, Costis, when the king retires to gloat. I wonder why he doesn’t do this when he wants to crawl into his hole and lick his wounds. It would save us standing in the hallway.”

  Costis thought it was probably because the king didn’t want to move the chair for himself, and he probably wanted to be sure the attendants wouldn’t wander into the room in spite of his orders to leave him alone.

  He jumped when he heard the bolt shoot in the door. He hadn’t been aware that there was a bolt. Sejanus laughed at his surprise.

  “He does that every night,” he said. “I think our little king doesn’t trust us. We have to knock like okloi at the temple in the morning and wait until he opens it for us.”

  Attolia returned to her apartment and sent her attendants away. She sat at the window. There was a deliberate click of a door closing, but no other sound.

  She thought of Relius. In the first year of her reign, when she was a young queen with nothing to guide her but her wits and civil war on her hands, her guards had found Relius spying on her and dragged him out from under a wagon. Who was his master? they had asked, and he’d answered, No one. Entirely for himself, he had wanted a glimpse of the queen. Standing in his muddy clothes, the illegitimate son of a household steward, Relius had offered to serve her. He offered her everything she needed to know of her enemies. He had taught her the craft of manipulation and intrigue, teaching her to use men as tools, and as weapons, and to survive in a world where trust had no place. Never trust anyone, had been his first and most important lesson.

  “Not even you?” she had laughed, back then when she had still laughed sometimes.

  “Not even me,” he had answered her seriously.

  Only through pain can you be sure of the truth, he had taught her, and she must have truth at any cost. Her nation depended on it.

  She had to know the truth.

  The silence around her was a gift, and she took refuge in it. For this brief time she did not need to move or speak, did not need to tease apart the truth from the lies of Relius’s betrayal, did not need to justify her action or her inaction. Her king found no such refuge in stillness. He preferred to pace. She had seen it often enough already, back and forth as silent as a cat in a cage. But he could be still as well, as skillful in stifling movement as in moving, as silent as sunlight on stone. He knew that the stillness was as near as she could come to peace, and he offered it to her.

  When Phresine knocked to say that it was time to dress for dinner, she waited for the click of the latch and then she called her attendants in.

  When the hour was up, it was time for the king to dress for a state dinner, and Costis was dismissed. He marched back through the palace with the squad of guards also relieved from their duty. They had left the palace proper and were on the terrace, moving toward the stairs that led down toward the Guard’s compound, when they crossed the path of Baron Susa.

  Costis knew him by sight, as he was baron over the land where Costis’s family farm was. He nodded at the baron politely and was surprised when the baron called him by name. Costis stopped. So did the squad.

&n
bsp; “Perhaps you could send your men on,” suggested Susa. “I only want a moment of your time to chat with a fellow countryman.”

  Reluctantly, Costis sent the men back to the barracks.

  “So, Costis Ormentiedes,” said the baron, “you have become quite the confidant of our king, have you not?”

  Costis wished he could call the men back. He was rattled by the fall of Relius. Their presence would have deflected anything Susa wanted to say, but it was too late. Susa was waiting for an answer.

  “No, sir. I wouldn’t say so, sir,” Costis said carefully. Just as Aris had been hesitant to cross Sejanus, Costis would be very careful not to offend Susa. As landowners, Costis’s family was not as vulnerable as Aris’s. Susa couldn’t raise the taxes on the land, or seize any of it, and an Attolian landowner, no matter how small his holding, held the rule of law on his own land, but Susa could still make things uncomfortable for the Ormentiedes.

  “I understand that he has requested you for special service, even allowing you to attend him privately?”

  “The king is—” Costis paused to look down at the ground, hoping that he radiated embarrassment. “The king is exercising his sense of humor, sir.”

  “Ah?” prompted Susa.

  “I’ve been doing nothing but basic exercises on the training ground since I…came to his attention.” Costis was afraid he might be overdoing the shamefaced act, so he lifted his head and pulled himself to something like attention, in the process managing to look even more harassed. “I am on the walls at night regularly, sir, and at the court in the afternoon. The extra watches are…”

  “Capricious?” asked Susa.

  Costis’s expression hardened. “I would never say so, sir.” To call the king capricious was a step too far even for Susa.

  “And the private audience for a dishonored squad leader?”

  “His Majesty chose to dismiss his attendants, and when they protested leaving him entirely alone, he selected me as a replacement. I don’t believe, sir, that that was a compliment to myself but rather a reflection of the king’s relative pleasure with his attendants, sir, which was at the time low.” Were there too many “sirs” in that answer? he wondered.

  “I see,” said Susa. “Nonetheless, you have absorbed a certain amount of information you would be glad to relay, I am sure, Lieutenant.”

  Costis hoped his expression didn’t give away his horror at the proposition. However the Undersecretary of Naval Provisions had gotten his information, more than just the king assumed it came from Costis, probably because of the scene he had made on the training ground. He wanted to turn on his heel and walk away, but he couldn’t. Neither, he knew, could he offer Susa what he wanted.

  “Not much, really, sir,” said Costis. He remembered his audience with the queen. “Nothing beyond that he spends the time alone looking out the window.” He shrugged an apology for the insignificance of his information.

  Susa’s eyebrows went up. He didn’t think it was insignificant. It was apparent Costis had revealed something very important indeed. “Thank you, Squad Leader.” He offered a coin, which Costis took after a moment’s hesitation, not knowing how to refuse it, and then Susa went away.

  Costis walked on through the palace and down to the Guard’s barracks, knowing himself entirely guilty of what the king had not condescended to accuse him of.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE stool hit the wall with a satisfying crash.

  “I was going to sit on that,” Aris pointed out mildly. He was lying on the bed, where he had been waiting for Costis. “Anyway, I planned to sit there once you showed up. What has happened now?”

  “Only that I have done something stupid. STUPID.”

  “You told the king you aren’t a gossipmonger?”

  “No,” said Costis. “I mean, yes, I told the king. That’s not the stupid thing I did.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Another time Costis might have laughed. “I told the king I would not sink so low that I would reveal private information about him.”

  “And?”

  “The queen summoned me at noon to ask what the king did when he was alone in his rooms.”

  “Ah.”

  “How could I not tell the queen anything she asked?”

  “You are still here—and breathing—so I assume you did tell her?”

  “She wanted to know if he did anything besides looking out the window the whole time. I said not that I knew of. I thought I wasn’t telling her anything new and I wasn’t refusing to answer her because I don’t know anything anyway.” He held up his hands, begging Aris to tell him this answer had not been unreasonable.

  “So?” Aris was reserving his judgment. He knew that there was more coming.

  “So Susa just asked me the same thing.”

  “Ah.”

  “Stop saying that!”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “I thought it was meaningless, only now I think it wasn’t. It was important. I just didn’t know it.”

  “But you said the queen already knew.”

  “No,” said Costis, “the queen guessed it. Then she asked me in a way that I would confirm it if it was true.” He rubbed his face with his hands. “I am so sick of people who all seem to be smarter than I am and know more than I do. I want to go back to the farm. These people make my family look easy to get along with.”

  “Well, at least no one knows, this time,” said Aris. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Well, because I have to tell him, don’t I?”

  Aristogiton didn’t agree. He and Costis argued back and forth as he tried to convince his friend not to expose himself to further difficulties. What difference, after all, could it make if the king spent time looking out the window? What of interest could he possibly be looking at?

  Costis didn’t know and couldn’t guess. “But it is important, Aris. You have to see that. And if it’s important to the queen and to Susa, it means that it will be something used against him.”

  “Then tell him that you told the queen. You can’t be blamed for that, and if Susa throws it in his face, the king will think it came from the queen. He’ll never learn otherwise.”

  Costis shook his head. “If Susa is going to attack him, he should know.”

  “Why?” demanded Aris. “You don’t care if he gets poisoned tomorrow.”

  “I don’t care if he gets poisoned as long as it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  Aris looked at him in speculation. “You do care if he gets poisoned,” he said.

  Costis admitted the point with a sigh. “If he choked on a bone and died, I wouldn’t care. But I can’t…I sound like a sanctimonious old philosopher, but I can’t stand by and watch people get murdered, Aris. I never meant to have anything to do with people like this. I wanted to be a soldier.”

  “You wanted to be Captain of the Guard someday,” observed Aris.

  “That was before I realized what it meant.”

  “So what do you want now?”

  “I want to retrieve some grain of self-respect. That’s about the total of my ambition at this point. I’ll tell him about Susa and I’ll tell him about Sejanus while I’m at it, and maybe if I’m blessed by the gods, he’ll have me exiled to a nice penal colony in Thracia.”

  Having decided to speak to the king, Costis had to wait for an opportunity. He didn’t dare speak out at sword practice in the morning. There were too many people nearby to overhear him. He meant to wait until the king next dismissed his attendants. He began to be afraid that the king had retreated to his rooms alone for the last time, especially as he had demonstrated his willingness to lock his attendants out of his room when he wanted his privacy. Moreover, in the process of winning over Erondites the Younger he seemed to have found a new means of arranging a little peace for himself. Between appointments, he sometimes walked in the garden. On days when the king might have the time free in his schedule, the gardens were emptied. The king could order the
guards into position at various points and walk between them alone.

  Every day Costis debated with himself whether he should speak to the king at their morning training, but in an agony of indecision he held off. As he told Aris, it was no place for a private exchange. He could suggest to the king that he needed to speak to him alone, but he already knew, from his last attempt to address him during training, that the king wouldn’t cooperate. It was more likely he would turn the moment into a scene from a farce and draw the attention of everyone within hearing, perhaps alerting Sejanus in the process. Costis waited.

  Ornon also waited, and worried. Relius had fallen. The Office of the Archives was in disarray. The king hardly spoke to his barons. He spent more and more time distancing himself from the court. He rarely addressed the queen in public, though Ornon was told Eugenides still claimed a proprietary kiss at breakfast.

  “Your Majesty.” Sejanus had to repeat himself before the king finally called his thoughts back to the matter at hand.

  “What?”

  “I’m very sorry, Your Majesty, but the blue sash appears to have ink stains on it as well.”

  “Never mind,” said the king. “Just bring me—”

  Bring him what? Costis thought. If the king broke down and said, “Bring a sash, any sash,” the attendants would bring him one that didn’t match the style or color of his coat. If he came up with a particular sash, they would claim again that it was stained with ink, or that it had been sent to be cleaned. This could continue all morning, and the king was late, with all his attendants standing around in poses of mock subservience, and Sejanus visibly smug.

  “Bring me all the sashes that aren’t stained, dirty, or otherwise abused,” said the king wearily. “And I will pick one.”

  It was a solution. The king seemed tired, not triumphant. The attendants excused themselves, calculating how much more time could be wasted fetching and delivering the sashes from the wardrobe, the least likely first, until almost every single sash the king owned was draped across the bed and hanging from the furniture around the room.