The King of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  It was a long night.

  The king’s attendants played dice or cards, or lay on the benches and slept. Costis and his guards stood at their posts. Costis wished the king’s attendants could go away, as the queen’s attendants had gone, but he supposed they should be available should the king call for them, as unlikely as that might be. Finally most of the attendants slept.

  The guard changed for the dog watch of the night. Costis sent his men back to their quarters but stayed at his post. Only his authority could keep the attendants out of the guardroom. There was no sign of the new captain, Enkelis, although he must have heard about the confrontation between the guard and the attendants. There was no sign of any of the other lieutenants, though they must also have heard. No doubt, they thought it was safest to leave the matter in Costis’s hands and avoid any responsibility for the outcome, Costis thought dryly.

  There was a gray light visible in the atrium at the end of the hallway when Phresine returned. Standing in front of Costis, with her back to the others in the hallway, Phresine held out a gold seal ring, set with a carved ruby.

  “Come with me, please, Lieutenant,” she said.

  Costis shook his head, surprised. He couldn’t leave the king’s door.

  She looked up at him gravely and lifted the ring a little higher. It was the seal ring of the Queen of Attolia. Holding it, Phresine spoke with the voice of the queen. To disobey her was to disobey a direct order from the queen.

  Costis looked over his shoulder at the closed door behind him. Then back at the queen’s attendant. She offered him no further explanation. He knew, even if he had told no one, that his orders to guard the king, day and night, had come through Enkelis, from the queen herself. He looked again at the crowd in the passage, trying and failing to imagine what might justify leaving the king and queen unguarded.

  “My men?” he asked the attendant.

  “Leave them here, if you wish. They are not needed.”

  “Very well.” The king would be adequately guarded without him. He instructed the squad leader on duty to admit no one to the king’s apartments until the king or the queen summoned them. Then he followed the queen’s attendant.

  In the queen’s opulent guardroom, he left his sword and the gun he had appropriated from another guard. No one proceeded further into the royal apartments armed. He followed his guide through a passage and various interconnected rooms to a small chamber, an anteroom by its furnishings, with a couch and a desk and a closed door. Knocking gently, Phresine pressed the latch and opened the door. She was a small woman, and Costis could easily see over her shoulder into the room. On a gilded chair, waiting for him, was the queen.

  Costis blinked.

  He walked forward automatically, but his mind was rooms away. Three steps into the queen’s bedroom, he could take in the whole room, paneled in wood, carpeted in gold, with chests and a desk and various chairs and a bed, raised on a dais, with a cloth-of-gold spread. It had no bedposts, no canopy, and no curtains to hide the sleeping occupant.

  Costis knew, even before he saw the dark hair on the pillow, who it was. If he hadn’t been so tired, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Eugenides had long since proven that he could move through the palace of Attolia as he pleased. Clearly, both he and the queen could travel to the queen’s room in private if they chose.

  “He took a few drops of lethium several hours ago, so I don’t think there is a particular need to be quiet,” said the queen. Costis turned toward her and hastily pulled himself to attention. Nothing could stop the flush of red creeping to his hairline.

  She was amused.

  “I want you to stay here until he wakes.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “You may sit.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  Costis didn’t move.

  “Tell an attendant when he wakes.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  When she was gone, and the door had closed behind her, Costis drew a shaking breath and glanced around the room. Moving cautiously, he approached the bed. The king’s face was turned away. Costis bent to look at it closely, aware that he was taking a liberty very few must have. Eugenides looked very different in his sleep, younger and—Costis searched for a word—gentler. Costis had never thought the king’s expression strained until he saw that strain, by the action of a few drops of poppy juice, relieved.

  Thoughtful, he stepped back from the raised bed. There was a low upholstered chair nearby. Costis settled hesitantly onto it. The buckles of his breastplate dug into his side, reassuring him that this was not all a dream.

  The morning light was dim. The skies were still gray. Costis yawned. As if in answer to a prayer, Phresine arrived at the doorway with a tray in her hands. He snapped his mouth shut and stood, feeling guilty for sitting down.

  She smiled to put him at his ease. “I thought you might like breakfast,” she said.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Costis whispered. “I’m not sure I should.”

  “Of course you should,” she said. Her voice was low, but she didn’t whisper. “You aren’t here on guard duty. He has men in the guardroom to keep him safe. You’re here in case he is…unwell when he wakes.” She put the tray down on a small table beside Costis’s chair, and crossed to the bed to lay her hand on the king’s forehead. He didn’t stir. She slid her hand around his face to cup his cheek and bent to kiss him on the brow, like a mother kissing her child.

  Costis stared.

  Phresine smiled. “The liberties an old woman can take,” she said. “Even with a king.” She slipped through the door, leaving Costis alone again.

  The queen’s bedchamber was as golden as a honeycomb and as peaceful as a tomb. Though Costis was occasionally aware of the quiet bustle of coming and going in the rest of the apartment, the silence in the bedchamber was soporific. He stood and paced across the carpet to keep himself awake, and looked with interest, but not too close an interest, at the queen’s writing desk with its tidy rows of inkwells and pens, and at the row of carved beads on a shelf and the assortment of tiny amphoras on a tabletop. Then he sat back down to watch the king sleep.

  Once Eugenides’s head turned on the pillow and he opened his eyes. He looked around the room, puzzled but unconcerned. His gaze settled on Costis. Costis leaned forward in his chair and said, “Go back to sleep.”

  Eugenides obediently closed his eyes.

  Costis smiled. Behind him someone chuckled and he started. It was Ileia, one of the younger of the queen’s attendants, with her dark hair escaping from its silver net and curling against her neck. She was leaning against the door frame with her arms crossed. “I didn’t think he ever did as he was told,” she said, smiling.

  “I only told him what he was going to do anyway,” said Costis.

  “That would be the trick,” Ileia agreed.

  Later, when Eugenides stirred again, Costis was relieved to think the king might finally be waking. Costis was stupid with fatigue. The day had passed with creeping slowness, and his eyes were desperate to close. Even when he held them open, they seemed unwilling to focus, and it took time to realize that the king wasn’t waking, he was having another nightmare.

  Costis dropped forward onto his knees beside the bed.

  “Your Majesty?”

  The king flinched as if flame-bitten, but he didn’t wake.

  Suddenly he was completely rigid. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing anything in front of him. He struggled for a deep breath, and Costis, to forestall the scream he knew was coming, grabbed the king hard by the arm and shook him.

  A heartbeat later the king was on the far side of the bed, eyes wide and a six-inch knife like a sudden miracle in his left hand. Costis kept his hands out in front of him, easily seen, and held very still and spoke very calmly.

  “You were having a nightmare, Your Majesty.”

  “Costis,” said the king, as if he was struggling to recognize him.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”


  “Squad leader.”

  “You made me a lieutenant, Your Majesty,” he said carefully.

  The king focused. “Yes, I did.”

  He lowered the point of the knife. It was shaking, but the color was coming back into his face.

  “Irene,” he said softly.

  Costis turned to see the queen in the doorway. When he looked back at the king, the returning color had drained away again.

  The queen stepped around the end of the bed and came up beside the king to put her arms around him.

  The king leaned against her and said apologetically, “I am going to be sick.”

  “Put that down, then,” said the queen, lifting the knife from his unresisting fingers and tossing it onto the bedcovers. With one arm around him still, she reached with the other for a basin set on a table beside the bed. She held it for him and stroked the king’s forehead as he threw up.

  “My god, how humiliating is that,” said the king as he lay back on the pillow.

  “Survivably so,” said the queen.

  “Easy for you to say,” said the king. “You weren’t throwing up.”

  “Tell me what I should say, then,” the queen asked.

  The king sighed. Forgetting Costis standing nearby, forgetting possibly that anyone or anything else in the world existed, the king said shakily, “Tell me you won’t cut out my lying tongue, tell me you won’t blind me, you won’t drive red-hot wires into my ears.”

  After one moment of gripped immobility, the queen bent to kiss the king lightly on one closed eyelid, then on the other. She said, “I love your eyes.” She kissed him on either cheek, near the small lobe of his ear. “I love your ears, and I love”—she paused as she kissed him gently on the lips—“every single one of your ridiculous lies.”

  The king opened his eyes and smiled at the queen in a companionship that was as unassailable as it was, to Costis, unfathomable. Deeply embarrassed to be witness to this private moment, he glanced at the door, thinking of escape, but the way was blocked by two of the queen’s attendants, present but as immobile as doorposts, both looking carefully at the ground. He wished the floor could open and swallow him, the floorboards split apart and he and the upholstered chair and the small three-legged table all be sucked down out of sight. Assuming, of course, that it could happen without a sound, and without drawing the attention of the king or queen.

  “Costis is here, and Iolanthe and Ileia,” the queen reminded the king.

  “Costis,” said the king vaguely. “Younger version of Teleus? No sense of humor?”

  “The same,” said the queen, a trace of amusement in her voice.

  The king lay still, but his color was slowly coming back to his face, and his breathing eased. He opened his eyes and looked up at the queen still bending over him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You were right,” she said.

  “I was?” The king sounded bewildered.

  “The apologies do get boring.”

  Eugenides chuckled. He closed his eyes again and turned his head from side to side on the pillow, relaxing overworked nerves. Looking more like himself, he said, “You are treasure beyond any price.”

  He sounded more like himself, too, and Costis realized that what he had taken for the roughness of sleep was the king’s accent. While half asleep, he had spoken with an Eddisian accent, which was only to be expected, but Costis had never heard it before, nor had anyone he knew. Awake, the king sounded like an Attolian. It made Costis wonder what else the king could hide so well that no one even thought to look for it.

  “If you are feeling more yourself, there is a problem best addressed immediately,” said the queen.

  “In my nightshirt?” The king wriggled, as ever, out of straightforward obedience.

  “Your attendants. I have spoken to them. You will speak to them as well.”

  “Ah. They have seen me in my nightshirt.” He looked down at his sleeve, embroidered with white flowers. “Not in your nightshirt, though.”

  He was fully awake and himself again.

  He said, “Don’t you think we should know first what message Iolanthe is holding on the tip of her tongue?”

  Iolanthe, who had been waiting patiently with her message, said when the queen turned to her, “Your Majesty’s physician is here.”

  “Someone else who has seen me in a nightshirt,” muttered the king.

  Petrus, when he came to the door, was followed by two guardsmen, and looked as if he might have been propelled by them rather than his own motive force. He reinforced this impression by dropping to his knees as the guardsmen stepped back. The queen waved a dismissal, and they continued backward through the door before she turned to the doctor.

  “Your Majesty, p-please—” he stuttered before she cut him off.

  “Clearly you found something in the lethium. What was it?”

  “Q-Quinalums,” he said. “The king’s lethium has been tainted with powdered quinalums.” He twisted his long fingers together nervously. “I am sure Your Majesty knows that they are used in the temples t-to open the minds of the oracles to receive the gods’ messages. Misused, they can cause death. Even the smallest amounts in the untrained result in—”

  “Screaming nightmares?” suggested the king.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  The queen looked at the physician appraisingly. If the king could make a throne seem like a stool fit for a printer’s apprentice, the queen could make a rumpled bedspread into a throne.

  With an effort that Costis recognized as heroic, coming from such a timid man, Petrus pulled himself together. “Your M-Majesty,” the physician said more calmly, “I cannot prove my innocence. The only defense I can offer is that I am not a brave man and not a stupid one. It was not I who altered the king’s medication. Please believe that there is nothing on this earth that would have induced me to do so.”

  “I am not sure that is a risk I am prepared to take,” said Attolia.

  The man was sweating. “The hospital,” he said, “the experiments and—and your patients depend on me. Please, Your Majesty…”

  The queen lifted her chin abruptly. “Very well,” she said.

  The physician breathed a sigh of relief. He tried to recover a little of his lost dignity. “The taste of the quinalums was obscured by the lethium. Another physician might not have realized that quinalum was present.”

  “Though the screaming nightmares might have given him a hint?” the king asked dryly.

  “Yes, Your Majesty. Perhaps I should examine Your Majesty?”

  A dark look from the king and a nod from the queen dismissed him.

  When he was gone, the queen pulled at the covers, straightening them around the king.

  “You trust him?” she asked.

  Costis wondered what signal he had missed between the two of them.

  “I know something you don’t,” the king told her.

  “Who put the quinalums in the lethium?”

  “That, too.”

  “You will see your attendants. They have run unchecked long enough.”

  “I’m very tired,” he said pathetically.

  “Now.” She rose and left.

  Filing through the door, the king’s attendants stood in a group between the bed and the windows. Costis didn’t envy them the conversation they had evidently had with the queen. He was still standing by the chair near the head of the queen’s bed and would have chosen to be almost anywhere else in the world, but neither the king nor the queen had dismissed him. Excepting the queen’s hint to the king, and his comment about Costis’s deficient sense of humor, neither of them had seemed to take note of him at all.

  “I can’t doubt that the queen has made her displeasure at your performance very clear,” the king began.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “And she has left your punishment to me?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Well, pick up your heads and stop looking like criminals
. If Her Majesty has excoriated you, then I think you have been punished enough already.”

  Costis suppressed a wince. He might have pitied the attendants after their talk with the queen, but he hadn’t forgiven them, and he didn’t think the king should either. Eugenides might know how to deal with their queen, perhaps better than anyone could have guessed, but the king mishandled his attendants. One and all they lifted their heads and looked up with varying degrees of relief. Sejanus’s smirk was already back.

  Only Philologos was unwilling to be let off so easily.

  “Your Majesty,” he said sternly. “We have behaved shamefully. You should not overlook it.”

  “I shouldn’t?” The king was amused.

  “No.” Philologos was not.

  “You tell me,” said the king. “What should I do?”

  Philologos didn’t smile back. “We should be dismissed, if not banished outright.”

  His fellow attendants looked at him as if he was out of his mind.

  “That’s a little fierce, isn’t it?” said the king. “To deprive your father of his heir and his only son because of schoolboy tricks?”

  Maybe Philologos hadn’t thought this through, but he didn’t waver. Exiled, he might still inherit his father’s land and property, but would hardly be able to administer them from outside the country. His father, in the interests of his property and dependents, would likely be forced to disinherit the young man and choose another heir, a cousin, probably, if the man had only one son, or a daughter if she could be safely married to a man who would hold and defend the family’s land.

  “For schoolboy tricks?” the king repeated.

  Philologos licked his lips. “The snake was not just—”

  “Philologos,” Hilarion interrupted. “Before you betray a man’s misdeeds, you might check to see if he has the same sense of nobility as yourself. However, as you have done so”—he turned to the king—“perhaps you can exile those of us responsible for the most grievous offenses against you, Your Majesty, and send Philologos back to his father.”

  The king appeared taken aback. “I am surprised, Hilarion, to see your nobility can rise to the occasion, but I hadn’t intended to exile any of you. Not even for the snake. I think it is all in the past now. We can leave it there.”