Finally the king was dressed and ready to leave. He and his entourage were on their way to the temple of Hephestia. There had been no morning training and would be no breakfast with the queen. This was a signal occasion when the king visited the new temple, still under construction on the acropolis above the palace. By all accounts, the last time Eugenides had addressed the Great Goddess, she’d answered by smashing windows all over the palace. The storm that day had probably been a coincidence, Costis thought, but it made a man think twice, and he hoped today’s visit provoked no such response.
They left the palace through the gate near the stables and the kennels and proceeded up the Sacred Way on foot. The new temple to Hephestia was being constructed on what remained of the foundations of the old Megaron. The king and queen had been married here at a temporary altar. Since then, new courses had been laid to make the walls of a naos, provisionally roofed in canes. The rest of the foundation was open, as all that remained of the earlier building were the basal stones, in some places still covered by mosiacs in tessellated patterns. Resting on these were haphazard piles of stonework that would be used to enlarge the foundation before the pillars, lying in pieces nearby, were stepped. The king wove his way between the stonework piles, heading toward the door to the naos and a priestess who waited for him there.
“This is the end of your journey, Your Majesty.”
“I am seeking an answer from the Great Goddess and have come to speak with her Oracle.”
“She knows your question, and your answer.”
“I have not yet delivered it.” The king held up a folded paper in his hand.
“She knows it,” the priestess repeated.
The king tried to push past. “Then she can tell me the answer.”
The priestess held out an arm that stopped him in his tracks. “She will not.”
“Then I will ask the Great Goddess myself.”
“You may not.”
“You think to come between me and the Great Goddess?”
“No one of us can be separated from the Goddess,” said the priestess, but she still held up her arm. Costis wondered if the two would come to blows, and if they did, what was he supposed to do? Help the king violate a temple? Watch while the king was chucked off the temple foundation by the priestesses?
Luckily for him, a commanding voice came from the interior of the naos. The Oracle herself stepped from the darkness into the doorway. Hugely fat, she was wrapped in a peplos of livid green that seemed to glow with its own light against the dark interior behind her. Her meaty fingers twitched the paper out of the king’s hand. She opened it, and without reading it, without even looking at it, she tore it in half. Still cold, she handed one half back to the king.
Eugenides looked down at the paper in his hand. The men behind him craned to see it. There was nothing left but the signature of the king, written left-handed in square letters, ATTOLIS, at the bottom of the page.
“Your answer,” said the priestess.
The king crumpled the paper in his fist and threw it on the ground. Without a word, he stalked from the doorway, across the open foundation of the temple, and leapt across a construction ditch to firm ground without looking back. His guard and his attendants hastily followed. Exchanging looks, rolling their eyes, and with shrugs, they had to break into a trot to catch up. It was clear that the Oracle could upset the king more in one morning than even Sejanus could in several months’ time. Eugenides never slowed and he never looked back all the way down the Sacred Way to the palace and from the gates of the palace to his apartment, where he arrived in such a fury that the guards stationed there actually jumped to attention.
In his guardroom, he turned at last to face his attendants and snarled at them, “Get out.”
Still surprised and puzzled by the scene at the temple, the attendants withdrew without argument. The king pointed at Costis and at the door to the passageway, then walked into the bedroom. Costis quietly closed the door to the passage, and followed the king to move the chair near the window. The king threw himself into the chair, and Costis backed out of the room.
In the guardroom, he stood by the door to the outside passage and waffled. It would take more nerve than he anticipated to take the step forward into the doorway and draw the king’s attention. The door was open. Costis had left it open the first time and the king hadn’t objected, so he assumed it should remain open. It would take three steps to reach it and clear his conscience.
He didn’t move. He reviewed his argument with Aristogiton, but still arrived at the same conclusion. If he wanted to redeem himself, he needed to admit to the king what he had done. Then he reviewed just how much he wanted his self-respect. Too much, he finally decided, and stepped toward the doorway.
The king sat with his feet on the chair and his knees drawn up to his chest, looking over them and out the window. So motionless was he, and so silent the progress of his tears, that it was the space of a breath before Costis realized the king was crying. When he did, he stepped hastily back out of sight.
“What is it, Costis?” The king’s voice was quiet. He must have caught the movement from the corner of his eye.
Reluctantly, Costis stepped forward. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty.”
“All will be well, I am sure. Is there something you wanted to say?”
Costis looked up from the floor. All traces of the king’s tears were gone, so perfectly erased that Costis almost doubted that he had seen them at all.
“Uh—”
“You interrupted me so that you could say uh?”
Costis blurted out the words. “I told the queen that you sat here and looked out the window.”
The king continued to watch whatever held his attention outside. “She is your queen. You could hardly decline to answer her questions.”
“I also told the Baron Susa.”
The king turned away from the view. He was expressionless. Costis stammered an apology and an explanation. Helplessly he fumbled for the coin he had carried everywhere since that day and held it out to the king. “I don’t want it,” he said. “I didn’t do it for money, I didn’t mean to do it at all.”
The king turned back to the window.
Costis stood, his hand still out, the silver coin lying in his palm, waiting for the penal colony.
Finally the king spoke, very quietly. “I apologize, Costis. I’ve put you in an impossible situation. Why don’t you let my entourage back in, and you may go.”
“Go, Your Majesty? The guard doesn’t change until the end of the hour.”
Eugenides shook his head. “You may go now,” he said.
“What should I do with the coin?”
“Dedicate it. I am sure some god or priest will appreciate its value.”
Costis backed out of the door again. Numb, he admitted the king’s attendants and the guards.
“I’ve been dismissed,” he said to the squad leader. The squad leader nodded, and Costis stepped into the passage.
“What, Lieutenant? Are you going?” the guard there asked cheerfully.
“I’ve been dismissed.”
“An early day. Congratulations,” the guard said. Costis headed down the dim passage.
It wasn’t just an early day. The king was done with him. His stay in limbo was over. He told himself he should be happy, and he wondered why he didn’t feel more relieved. Maybe he was shaken by the king’s tears, but he didn’t want to think about those. He had cleared his conscience and hadn’t been sent to a penal colony; the future should look brighter. He wondered what the king found so interesting to look at out the window.
Descending a narrow staircase on his way back to his barracks, he was presented with the answer. As Costis turned on a landing and began to descend the next flight, he was directly across from a window in the outside wall of the palace. The window opened in the same direction as the king’s, and there, summer-bright and framed by the darkness of the stairwell, was the same view. Costis passed it, and then wen
t back up the stairs to look again. There were only the roofs of the lower part of the palace and the town and the city walls. Beyond those were the hills on the far side of the Tustis Valley and the faded blue sky above them. It wasn’t what the king saw that was important, it was what he couldn’t see when he sat at the window with his face turned toward Eddis.
Costis’s heart twisted sympathetically. He sternly reprimanded that weak and traitorous organ, but he couldn’t help remembering that his own homesickness had sucked the life out of every day when he had first left the farm. His initial summer in the barracks had been the worst. He’d never been more than a few miles from home in his life, and as much as he despised his cousins, he would have given a month’s pay to see one of their familiar faces. The sick feeling had gradually faded as he had made a place for himself in the Guard, but Costis remembered it too well not to recognize it in the king’s face when he had seen him looking so hopelessly out the window. What must it be like to know that you couldn’t ever go home? To leave behind the mountains, where Costis had heard it never got really hot even in the summer, to live on the coast, where the snow rarely came? Small wonder if the king had passed up other, more gracious apartments to have one that had a bedchamber with a window facing toward Eddis.
So what? Costis started down the stairs again. Why should he care, really, if the king was homesick? Eugenides had brought it on himself. He should have stayed in Eddis. No one wanted him in Attolia, not the queen, certainly, not the Guard, not his attendants…
“Dammit!” Costis stopped again. He’d forgotten to tell the king about Sejanus.
There was no point in going back. Cursing more quietly, he continued down the stairs.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHEN Costis got back to his room, he found Aristogiton wearing a smile as wide as his face.
“I’ve been dismissed,” Costis said bluntly, not in the mood for humor, just as Aristogiton announced, “I’ve been promoted.”
Both said, “What?”
“I’ve been dismissed,” Costis said again.
“You told him about Susa, then, not just the queen?”
“Yes.”
“And he threw you out in a rage.”
“No. He apologized to me and said very politely that I could go.”
“Apologized?”
“Nicely.”
“The bastard.”
Costis nodded his head in agreement. “I hate him.”
“You didn’t manage it, then, the grain of self-respect?”
“No,” said Costis. “Not a remnant the size of a grain of wheat, not the size of a grain of sand. If he had been enraged, if he’d sent me to some hell in Thracia…”
“You’d feel like you deserved it and you’d take it like a man. You do know, don’t you, that if you’d sold out to Susa on purpose, you could be a completely honorless but happy villain gloating over your silver?”
“I left it on the Miras altar on the way here.”
Aris groaned.
“I’m sorry. I am spoiling your good news. You’ve been promoted?”
“I and my entire squad,” said Aristogiton, “have been elevated to the Third. I begin my new duties tomorrow.”
“The Third? You’ll be in the palace?”
“I’m assigned to the king.” Aris smiled at Costis’s disbelief. “I was looking forward to watching him humiliate you.”
“But that’s impossible. You can’t be eligible for that kind of promotion.”
“Thank you so much for your judgment of my reputation.”
Costis smiled. “I apologize unreservedly. I am a swine. Obviously you belong in the Third, should be a centurion of the Third, a lieutenant no less.”
“Well,” Aris admitted, “I am pretty sure we all owe it to Legarus the Awesomely Beautiful.”
“Ah,” said Costis, enlightened. “Promoted for his pretty face?”
“And he’s wellborn, and he’s too stupid to be promoted on his own, but if I’m promoted, and with me goes my squad…”
“Then Legarus serves honorably in the Third, and has a ready access to the palace—and probably someone in the palace.”
Aris said, “Yes, I think that’s it, but I have no sticky notions of honor, and you won’t hear me complaining because I have undeservedly been made squad leader in the Third. On the contrary, I intend to celebrate.” He lifted the amphora he held in his hand. “While I am celebrating, you can drown your sorrows,” he told Costis.
“I would be delighted,” said his friend.
Much later, he asked Aris a question that had been preying on his mind. “Do you think the Thief wanted to be king?”
“Of course,” said Aris.
Costis, taking this as a straight answer, was unprepared when Aris added, “Who wouldn’t want to be married to the woman who cut off his right hand?”
Costis looked up, startled.
“Everyone talks as if it’s a brilliant revenge,” said Aris, “but I’d rather cut my own throat than marry her, and she hasn’t chopped any pieces off me.”
“I thought—”
“I was her loyal guard? I am. I would march into the mouth of hell for her. I will never forget that I would be bending over a tannin vat now and for the rest of my life if not for her. I might have been a soldier under her father and have marched myself into the ground and died choking on my own blood in the dirt and never have been even a squad leader—not me, not the son of a leather merchant. Look at me now, with a squad in the Third. Miras guide us, I worship her. But I am not blind, Costis. I feel about her the same way every member of the Guard feels. She is ruthless.”
He leaned forward, pointing a finger in Costis’s face. “And it is a good thing she is, because she wouldn’t be queen if she weren’t. She is brilliant and beautiful and terrifying. It’s a fine way to feel about your queen, not your wife,” he added.
Costis blinked.
“There isn’t one womanly bone in her body, and you cannot believe any man in his right mind would want to marry her. If the Thief had wanted to be her husband, he would have forced the issue of heirs. He hasn’t, has he? If you ask me,” Aris continued, “it was Eddis’s plan all along. I hear men dismiss her as just a woman, and I think we of all people should know better. If she weren’t every bit as brilliant and as ruthless as Attolia, there would be a king in Eddis. I will bet any price you name that the Thief was as loyal to his queen as we are to ours.” Aris shrugged. “So Eddis sent him to be King of Attolia. Poor bastard. I’ll stick to marching into the mouth of hell, myself.” He looked at Costis and shrugged again. “Just my opinion. I’ll go back to my wine.”
Costis, looking down into his own wine cup, shook away thoughts of the king.
“Not your business anymore,” said Aris.
“Not my business,” Costis agreed.
The queen was agitated, but no sign of it showed as she stood at the table sorting the papers that lay on it. “There was no need to ask Teleus who was in command in the border forts in the northeast. You already know.”
“I do?”
“You were provoking him.”
“Why would I do that?”
“And you asked me to recall Prokep from his fort ten days ago so that you could meet him.”
“Did I?”
The queen shook her head. It had been an awkward meeting between herself and the king and Teleus, with Teleus as stiff as a poker and Eugenides draped in his chair like a cat. The king had asked Teleus who was in charge of the forts on the border with Magyar and when the general in charge of the region would next be in the capital to deliver a report on his charge. Teleus had answered every question with barely veiled contempt, but had agreed to keep Costis on light duties until the king had made up his mind about a suitable transfer.
The queen began packing papers into a diplomatic pouch. “I wish you and Teleus got along better.”
“I wish Teleus weren’t an idiot.”
If the queen heard him, she gave no sign, only f
inishing with the pouch and then setting it aside.
In the mountain country of Eddis, the days were shorter than in coastal Attolia. The lamps in the palace had been lit and the late summer evening was almost over when the Queen of Eddis summoned Sounis’s magus, who was officially her prisoner. The magus had just returned the day before from an unsupervised exploration of the hinterland, where he had been collecting differing versions of various folktales from people in isolated communities. Queen and magus shared a fondness and a respect for Eugenides, the former Thief of Eddis. Once the magus was seated and had a cup of wine near to hand, the queen handed him the most private report from her ambassador to Attolia, Ornon, and waited patiently while he read through it.
“I see,” said the magus. “I did wonder why your ambassador’s assistant was returned so precipitously. I assumed it was Gen who gave him that black eye. It must have been beautiful when it was fresh.”
“No, that was Ornon,” Eddis informed him dryly. “As you see, the assistant took it upon himself to try to force Gen’s hand.”
“I can see that he failed,” said the magus, turning the paper to read the sentences that crossed the page. “But I am not sure I understand the significance of the bridge.”
“Cletus and Anacritus are both allies of the queen’s. They pay ruinous fees to a third baron, Minos, for use of the only bridge across that gorge for miles. Anacritus needs it to get to his pasturage, Cletus’s people must use the bridge if they are going to get any of their produce to market. Neither can afford the labor to build a bridge himself. Attolia has wanted to build one for years, but hasn’t been able to do so without showing blatant favoritism that would enrage Minos, technically also a supporter of hers.”
“Now you are building a bridge for her?”
“Ornon had no choice,” Eddis said with a hint of irony, “but to graciously offer the labor of the Eddisian garrison.”
The magus nodded. “So the Baron Minos has no grounds for complaint and the Barons Anacritus and Cletus, who found the garrison of Eddisians a burden—”
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