Costis saw him pull himself together as she approached the bed. Of all impossible things, he tried to look smug. “See,” he said, still playing his role, “I told you I was at death’s door,” but he wasn’t fooling them anymore, not Costis and not the queen. The queen’s eyes were slits, and her hands were clenched in fists. She wasn’t frightened; she was angry. He could hardly, at this point, reassure her by telling her the wound wasn’t serious. Costis almost saw him wince. The king opened his mouth to speak.
“It isn’t very deep,” the Eddisian Ambassador said from the other side of the bed. He was leaning over the wound, looking critical and mildly disappointed. Eugenides didn’t miss a beat.
His head whipped around. “It is…too…deep!” he insisted, outraged.
The attendants looked shocked and then amused.
“Your Majesty,” Ornon said in supercilious tones, “I’ve seen you get deeper scratches with a cloak pin.”
“Damned clumsy with a cloak pin,” one of the attendants muttered.
“I wasn’t using it on myself,” the king snapped. He turned back to the ambassador. “I was enjoying that little moment of horrified attention, Ornon.”
“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” Ornon replied. “But I think you’ve been closer to death than this.”
The king looked up at the queen, who, relieved by Ornon’s opinion as she would not have been by the king’s, still looked down at him in displeasure. “I doubt it,” she said. “I could disembowel you myself.”
“I did say I was so—” The king broke off to shriek in rage and pain, and everyone but the queen jumped. “What in the name of all gods is that?” the king shouted.
The physician, nervously clutching a bloody swab, said, “It’s a mixture of aqua vitae and v-vital herbs.”
“It hurts, you bloodsucking leech. I didn’t leave that torturing bastard Galen in the mountains so that you could take his place.”
“I’m so sorry, but it w-will prevent infection, Your Majesty.”
“It had better if it hurts that much, and you had better warn me before you put any more on.”
“I will, Your Majesty,” the doctor said, carefully wiping the wound with another clean cloth.
“When you’ve finished admiring it, you can put a bandage on it,” the king said impatiently.
The palace doctor, who was a thin, nervous man, stared, concentrating. “I’d like to put stitches in where the cut is deepest. And stitch the muscle first.” He looked up at the queen for approval.
“It doesn’t need stitches,” the king said warily.
“Because it’s not very deep,” someone in the crowd muttered. The king looked around with a black look, but didn’t see the speaker.
“Petrus has been my personal physician for a number of years,” said the queen. “With the crown’s money, he operates a charitable hospital in the city where he has studied a number of new medical techniques. If he believes stitches are suitable, I suggest you let him put them in.”
“Just here,” said the doctor, “at the side where the wound is deeper. Had it been this deep for the entire length, your assassin would certainly have ruptured the peritoneum.”
“The what?”
“The gut.”
“Ahh,” said the king, and then “Aagh!” a moment later. “What is that, an awl?”
“Oh, no, Your Majesty, no, as you can see, it is a very fine needle.”
“It doesn’t feel like a needle—it feels like you’ve spent too much time working on people who don’t pay you and you should—ow! Ow! Ow!”
Costis closed his eyes, appalled. The king couldn’t lie on a deathbed with a sense of dignity. The attendants were all on the verge of breaking into laughter, and the king, far from minding, was enjoying every minute of it.
The queen’s lips thinned.
“I am very sorry,” the physician said helplessly.
“Stop apologizing and hurry.”
“Your Majesty, I…” Petrus looked as if he was about to cry.
Ornon spoke firmly from behind the doctor. “Your Majesty is upsetting his physician.” The ambassador stepped closer to the bed. He and the king locked gazes.
Eugenides looked away. “Oh, very well,” he said, sulkily. “Tell him to get on with it.” He took a breath and let it go in a brief huff of audible petulance.
Ornon encouraged the doctor with a pat on his shoulder and stepped back. The doctor bent over the wound again. The king made a face, but was silent. The doctor looked up momentarily in astonishment but returned to his work, eager to finish before this reprieve passed.
The king lay still and made no sound. As Petrus pulled his first stitches tight, the king took a deeper breath and didn’t let it go. After a long count of ten, he softly released the breath and took another.
There were three people between Costis and the queen. Costis knocked all three of them aside like pegs in a counting game and dropped to his knees in time to catch the queen as she collapsed into his outspread arms.
He’d seen her, white as wax, from the corner of his eye and, seeing her waver, had known she was fainting, but too late to do anything but catch her.
“The queen!” someone shouted in alarm, and the king erupted like a wild animal caught in a snare.
He tried to sit up, and the men around him held him down. He struggled. Someone sensible used both hands to pin the hook, with its knife-edge, to the bed. Someone less sensible tried to consolidate his grip on the king’s other arm and staggered back, holding his face.
“My stitches, my stitches!” the physician yelled.
“Your Majesty, Your Majesty!”
“Damn your stitches!” he snarled. “Let me up.”
With one hand free the king was forcing himself to a sitting position, but more people were pushing him back down, all of them shouting. Someone fell back from the end of the bed, kicked solidly. The doctor cried out again, all his work going to waste.
Costis saw no good to be had by involving himself in the melee. He watched as Ornon stepped forward, seized a man efficiently by the hair, and pulled him sharply backward. The man sat down hard, and Ornon stepped into the space he had left by the king’s bed. He splayed his hand across the king’s face and slammed his head back hard against the pillow. Keeping his hand planted on the king’s face, he leaned over and roared into his ear, “The queen is fine!”
Eugenides was still. The men around the bed froze as well.
“Irene?” the king called.
“She fainted. That’s all,” Ornon said more quietly. “There is a great deal of blood. She is a woman and she was upset. It is not a surprising reaction.”
Costis looked down at the woman in his arms. She had a name. She was Irene. He’d never thought of her having any name except Attolia, but of course she was a person as well as a queen. Lying in his arms, she felt surprisingly human, and female. Costis, suddenly uncomfortable with his burden, was relieved when Hilarion lifted her out of his arms and carried her away to the guardroom. Her attendants followed after, clucking like hens.
Costis got to his feet.
On the bed, Eugenides stirred restlessly. “Upset at the sight of blood?” he said. “Not my wife, Ornon.”
“Your blood,” the ambassador pointed out.
Eugenides glanced at the hook on his arm and conceded the point. “Yes,” he said. He seemed lost in a memory. The room was quiet. As Costis struggled toward a new understanding of the king and the queen, he knew everyone else in the room was doing the same. Except perhaps the physician, who was holding needle and thread in his raised hand, waiting anxiously for instruction.
“Get on with it,” said the king. He hardly seemed to notice when the stitching began. He looked toward the doorway, toward the queen, but spoke to the Eddisian Ambassador. “I think, in future, Ornon, I will stick to upsetting my physician.”
CHAPTER NINE
“YOUR Majesty,” Costis whispered.
Eugenides opened his eyes and turned his head on the pillow. Costis
was on his knees by the bed. The room was dark. The only light came in the open door of the bedchamber past the guards standing there at attention. They’d let Costis go through unchallenged, as though they hadn’t seen him. They knew why he was here.
The king blinked.
“Your Majesty, I am sorry to wake you, but I think only you can help.”
“What time is it?” the king asked, hoarsely.
“It’s the dog watch, an hour until dawn.”
“Early, then,” the king murmured, “not late.”
“Your Majesty, she’s going to have them all executed.”
“All who?” His eyes were bright with fever.
“The captain, my friend Aris, and his entire squad. She had them arrested yesterday afternoon after she left here and said they will be executed in the morning.”
“In an hour?”
“Your Majesty, she has promoted the senior lieutenant to the captain’s position, but the men are saying they won’t serve under him.” He rushed on, “If you can stop her, Your Majesty, please, can you? Aris didn’t know the danger, I swear to you. He thought the garden was safe.”
“Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“You were asleep. They gave you lethium.”
With effort, the king dragged his hand free of the sheets. “I remember,” he said. “I didn’t want it. It always makes me feel like I’ve been dead.” He rubbed his face. “Has she sent for them?”
“Not yet,” said Costis.
“Ah.”
“Your Majesty, please.”
“Costis, I can’t publicly reverse her orders.”
“But she would listen to you,” Costis pleaded.
“Privately, she might. If there were time. But she’s angry, Costis. I knew she would be.”
Costis dropped his head. He had seen so many impossible things in a day, he had hoped for one more.
“Wait,” said the king. “Just wait.” He twisted his head. “Is there water? Lethium leaves you dry as a bone.”
Costis poured him a cupful, and then refilled it twice when the king emptied it. Eugenides had hauled himself, wincing, to a more upright position to drink. He sighed heavily and stared into the invisible distances. He asked at last, “Do you know any archaic?”
Costis almost flew down the stairs and through the turning passages of the palace. He relied on the early hour to keep his way clear. He cut through the kitchens, escorted on his way by the grumbling and complaints of the kitchen folk already awake and at their work, to reach the stairs that led down to the queen’s prison, only to be brought up short by the deliberate shuffling of the prison keeper. Costis forced himself to match the man’s strides. There was no point getting ahead of him. The prison keeper had the keys, and like all the prison keepers, he was jealous of his power here in Her Majesty’s dungeon. He would make no haste for a queen’s guardsman.
Costis waited while the keeper jingled through the keys and slowly unlocked the cell. Then, his patience exhausted, he wrenched open the iron-barred door. He saw Aris first, sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up and his arms locked around them. Excess chain lay in tangled loops around his feet. He raised his head to look at Costis, then dropped it again and reached out a hand to touch the man lying beside him gently on the shoulder. “It’s time, Legarus,” he said softly.
Legarus was crying. The rest were dry-eyed, but Legarus was crying. No wonder, Costis thought. It was Legarus who had been the ostensible cause of their sudden promotion, an arrangement by some lover in the palace, everyone had assumed. But the promotion hadn’t been arranged for Legarus’s benefit. Nepotism had only been a disguise. Someone had wanted on duty that day a squad of neophytes, who, in their inexperience, could more easily be distracted from their duty. His lover had used Legarus and left him to die.
Costis turned to Teleus, who was getting to his feet. “There is no hope, Costis,” Teleus said flatly, seeing the look in his eye.
“There is,” Costis insisted.
“No,” Teleus stubbornly refused. “I should never have agreed to promote Aristogiton’s squad. I would not have done it for the queen’s bodyguard, and I shouldn’t have done it for the king’s.”
“The squad you promoted? They also die?”
“They also failed.”
Costis wanted to seize him by the shoulders and shake him. “And the Guard? She has promoted Enkilis, you know. The men won’t follow him.”
“They have pledged their swords to the queen.”
“They aren’t just swords. They are men. They follow you.” Without you, their discipline will fail, maybe their loyalty. They are the keystone of the army. You are the keystone of the Guard. The queen cannot afford to lose you.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Teleus asked.
“You have to stop her.”
“She knows it, too, Costis,” Teleus said sadly. “Even if I could stop her, who am I to do so? It is her decision.”
“What if she is making a mistake?”
“Who am I to question the queen’s judgment?”
“She is human like us all, Captain.” Costis remembered how she had felt in his arms the afternoon before. “She must make mistakes sometimes.”
“Oh, yes,” said Teleus bitterly. “Rarely, but we are all living with the fruits of her greatest error. Still, we cannot remake her decisions. She is the queen.”
“Then ask her to reconsider. Just that. Ask her to take the time to be sure it is the right decision.”
“How?” asked Teleus.
The throne room was bright with lights in every sconce. The chandeliers were great wheels of light suspended in the air. The crowd was thick, though the day had not yet begun. No one would miss a chance to see the Captain of the Guard sent to his execution. It was relatively easy for Costis to slip in and stand anonymously near the door. The king had warned him to deliver his message to Teleus and then go directly to his rooms to wait there for the storm to pass, but Costis couldn’t go yet. He wasn’t sure what Teleus had decided to do. Too soon, the prison keeper had swung the door open and the rest of the jailers had assembled to escort the prisoners to the queen. There had been no more time to convince Teleus. Quickly, Costis had repeated the phrase in archaic and translated it into the demotic. He had no idea if Teleus knew any archaic or if he would be able to remember an unfamiliar sequence of sounds at a moment like this. Costis had no idea why this phrase, the invocation of Hephestia used in the spring festival in Eddis, might remind the queen of past mistakes. He only knew that the king had promised that it would. All Costis could do was follow the prisoners and their keepers and then step away as the prisoners were led into the throne room. He would wait until he knew if his friend was going to die. If Aris was sentenced to die, Costis wouldn’t leave him.
On her throne, Attolia held every eye. The empty throne beside her, which she had occupied only a few short months before, might have been invisible, might never have existed, for all of its significance to the people in her presence.
She looked down at the men before her. Only Teleus could speak for them. He looked from left to right like a man hesitating before he chooses his way. Then he raised his face to the queen. “Oxe Harbrea Sacrus Vax Dragga Onus Savonus Sophos At Ere.”
The room darkened as a sudden morning draft swept through the open windows near the ceiling and blew through the chandeliers, guttering their flames. In the flickering light, the queen seemed to swell with rage, seemed to burn with it like a flame, simultaneously motionless and ceaselessly moving. The fabric of her robe wrinkled across her knees very slightly as the hands holding it clenched into fists. Costis drew a breath, sucking at air that seemed too solid to inhale.
“What?” said the queen, daring him to repeat it.
“We invoke the Great Goddess in our hour of need for her wisdom and her mercy,” Teleus said in the demotic.
“Ere translates as love, a rather ruthless love, not mercy, Teleus. The Great Goddess of Eddis is not known for her mer
cy.”
“My Queen,” Teleus began.
“Your Majesty,” snarled Attolia. Everyone in the room recoiled, excepting only Teleus.
“No,” he said. “Relius was right and I was wrong. You are My Queen. Even though you cut my head from my shoulders, with my last breath as a noose tightens, to the last beat of my heart if I hang from the walls of the palace, you are My Queen. That I have failed you does not change my love for you or my loyalty.”
“Yet you prefer his mercy to my justice.” She meant the king. She knew where the message had come from.
“No—” Teleus shook his head dumbly, held his hands out in supplication. “I only—” but she cut him off.
“Have it then. Free him.” She snapped out the order to the prison keepers. “Free them all.” Then she rose from the throne and stormed for the door, leaving behind her attendants, her guard, all of them struck motionless by her anger.
The guards at the door hesitated, unsure if the queen meant to leave the room without her entourage.
“Open the door!” she shouted, and they leapt to obey. She swept through the doorway and disappeared down the hall beyond. Her attendants and her guard came to life, and streamed behind. The rattle of chains and the crash as they dropped to the floor was the only sound as the crowd, like water released from a smashed jug, dispersed in every direction, through every door except the one the queen had used, everyone seeking urgent business elsewhere.
Costis, packed in with the crowd, turned and hurried off himself. Not in the battle for Thegmis, or even in the garden with the assassins, had he been so frightened. The queen had passed him, so close he’d felt the stir of air, and he had guessed that if she had turned her head, only a little, and met his eyes, he might have died right there, so potent was her anger.
Without stopping and without speaking to anyone, he went like a badger to its hole. He hurried down the stone hallway of the barracks and slipped through the narrow doorway into his quarters. He threw himself down on the cot, leaning his back against the wall and pulling his feet up like a child afraid of nightmares under the bed. He wrapped his arms around his legs and sat. After a time he yawned. The building around him was quiet. There was an occasional sound of footsteps in the stairwell and in the courtyard outside, but nothing out of the ordinary. No shouting, nor the tramp of feet mustering out to arrest one small, unimportant guardsman. He yawned again. He had been awake all night. He rested his head against the wall and fell asleep sitting up.
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