The King of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  He had slept badly, waking off and on through the night haunted by the voice he’d heard on the parapet. In the morning light, the whole episode seemed part of one muddled nightmare. Costis preferred it that way.

  At last the king came. He came late, with his face still creased from sleep, when the training ground was filling and guards had settled into pairs and begun sparring throughout the courtyard, except in the empty space where Costis waited by himself. The first thing the king did was walk to one of the fountains along the wall and stick his face into it. He shook his hair off his face, flicking drops of water sparking into the air. Then he crossed the open square to Costis, leaving his attendants behind.

  “Shall we start with the first exercises?” He was looking down at the button on his cuff. It was undone, and he was awkwardly holding his sword and trying to button the cuff at the same time.

  “I don’t think so,” said Costis, and when the king looked up, Costis swung at his head.

  Costis wasn’t close, and the king jumped back. The sword passed harmlessly in front of his nose.

  “Costis, what do you think you are doing?”

  “Sparring, Your Majesty.”

  “Most people cross swords before they spar and they say something introductory like ‘Begin!’ before they swing.”

  “We can cross swords if you will put yours up, Your Majesty.”

  “But I don’t want to spar.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” Costis said, and swung again.

  The king jumped back again. He still hadn’t gotten his button through its buttonhole.

  “Dammit, Costis, have you lost your mind?”

  “No, Your Majesty.”

  “I am not going to spar with you.”

  “Then I am a dead man, Your Majesty.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your attendants will have me arrested if this doesn’t start to look like a sparring match soon. They are headed this way.”

  The king glanced briefly around. The guards on either side had stopped sparring and were standing to watch.

  “I’ll hang, Your Majesty,” said Costis, cheerfully. “Assuming I’m not tortured.”

  “And you are thinking I wouldn’t want that to happen?”

  “I know you don’t.”

  “Only because I have another job for you to do.”

  Costis smiled.

  The king scowled. “This is extortion.”

  Costis lifted his sword up. The king didn’t want him to die, and not because of an errand that needed doing. The king had dismissed him in order to protect him from the reprisals of the powerful. The king wasn’t going to let him hang. Last night’s bizarre episode was forgotten. Only the memory that he hadn’t been betrayed by the king mattered. Costis felt wonderful.

  A moment later the sword he’d been holding clattered to the ground. Costis looked from the sword to his stinging fingers and back to the sword.

  “There,” the king said nastily. “We’re done. I’m going back to bed.” The attendants had paused. More people were staring.

  “I don’t think so, Your Majesty.” Costis picked up the sword and raised it again.

  There were a few exchanges this time before the king’s sword slid over the top of Costis’s guard and the flat side of it smacked him on the cheek.

  “You drop your point in third,” said Eugenides.

  Costis flushed, remembering the king’s comment at their first practice together. He had sparred for weeks with the best swordsman he’d ever encountered in his life and was no better for it because he’d dismissed the king’s advice.

  “Done now?” the king asked.

  “No, Your Majesty.”

  The king sighed. He backed a few steps. Watching Costis warily, he popped his sword between his teeth, and giving up on the buttonhole, he rolled up his sleeve before he spat the sword back into his hand.

  “Ready,” he said.

  They began.

  “Has it occurred to you, Costis,” the king said conversationally between thrusts, “that the only reason I am alive now is that those three assassins took me for a prancing lightweight?”

  It hadn’t occurred to Costis. “You will have the Guard to defend you now,” he said.

  “I was supposed to have the Guard to defend me then. I am not reassured.”

  “You will,” Costis insisted.

  “Oh?” said the king. “You think they will see I do know how to use a sword and lo, they will come to heel? I don’t think so, Costis.”

  It wasn’t as simple as that, Costis knew. There had been suitors before for the queen’s hand, suitors who were capable with a sword, and the Guard wouldn’t have followed them across the street into a wineshop. Nonetheless, Costis was certain that the Guard, if they knew him, would follow the king. He just didn’t have the words to explain why, and was too hard-pressed to stop and think of them.

  The king attacked; Costis defended. The king hit him hard on the thigh. Hopping backward, Costis disengaged, but the king kept coming and hit him twice more, once on the same thigh and once on the elbow. Costis retreated faster. The king watched, his eyes narrowed.

  “Frankly, Costis, if they all fight like you, I am still not reassured.”

  This time, Costis’s sword rose into the air in an arc before hitting the ground with a rattle. He went to pick it up.

  “Too late to stop now, Costis,” the king said, and attacked again.

  Costis snatched up his sword and retreated. The men sparring around him moved to make room and then circled around, all pretense of minding their own business gone.

  “So, Costis,” said the king, as Costis watched him warily, “you asked for this. Why?”

  “You compromised my honor.”

  “I compromised your honor? Which one of us hit the other in the face?”

  “They think I lied on your instructions. That Teleus and I killed the assassins in the garden and let you take the credit.”

  “Oh, that,” said the king with a shrug. “That isn’t your honor, Costis. That’s the public perception of your honor. It has nothing to do with anything important, except perhaps for manipulating fools who mistake honor for its bright, shiny trappings. You can always change the perceptions of fools.”

  The wooden swords thwacked against each other, and Costis was driven back again. The circle of onlookers broke and re-formed again around them. Even after the weeks of practice, it was disconcerting to fight against someone left-handed. The king’s sword came from the wrong direction, and it came too fast for Costis to be sure he could parry it, so he retreated. The circle of men widened to give him room, but the men were starting to jeer.

  “Come on, Costis,” someone shouted. “You’re going the wrong direction.”

  That was easy for him to say, Costis thought. His arm and his thigh didn’t ache, and his face didn’t burn as if a hot iron had been laid on it.

  Other watchers remembered that Costis, even in disgrace, was their man. There were a few cheers on his side, and his heart rose. Costis took a breath and tried to steady himself. When the king moved toward him, Costis held his ground. The king attacked in first, exactly as they had practiced for so many tedious hours. Costis parried, his arm moving automatically. The king attacked again, still in first. Costis parried. Costis remembered their first lesson when he had thought he would have to take his beating and make the king look good in the process. Instead, the king was making him look good. Eugenides continued to attack in first, harder and faster, and each time Costis parried. His arm knew its business better than his head did. He didn’t need to think, only to react—in mounting terror as the king’s blows came faster and faster. Should he change to another attack, Costis was not going to be able to defend himself. The king’s wooden sword was going to break his arm, or his ribs, or his head, but just as Costis thought he would surely break down, the king slowed and backed off. The guard watched in silent appreciation.

  “Ready?” asked the king. Costis nodded. This was the
part where he wouldn’t look good. It was a farce. Costis didn’t stand a chance of defending himself, though he tried. The king moved too fast; he attacked in ways that were entirely a surprise to Costis, who had a soldier’s command of a sword, not a duelist’s.

  The guards around him shouted advice, but it was hopeless.

  The king slipped through Costis’s guard; he slipped under it, catching him on the thigh or the knee, or over it, knocking him on the head, hard enough to sting, but not hard enough to finish him. And with every hit, the king shouted directions in a harsh voice Costis had never heard. “Don’t lower your guard!” Whack. “Don’t swing so wide!” Whack. “Don’t leave yourself open!” Whack. “Don’t…lower…the…point…in…third!” With each stroke, Costis was more rattled. His defense fell apart. The king disarmed him, and then disarmed him again. Costis stood amazed.

  “H-How did you do that?”

  “No!” shouted the king. “You don’t stand there like a buffoon. Get your sword!” he roared, and raced at Costis. In a panic, Costis dove for his sword and missed. The king’s sword fell on his exposed and undefended posterior. Yelping, Costis scrambled for the sword and managed to twist and block the next blow as it fell and the next as he crawled away from the king. The guards roared with laughter. Costis got to his feet and raised his sword, but he was laughing as well, and the sword shook in his hands. He backed as the king advanced. Giving up even a show of self-defense, he waggled the sword in front of him, until he bumped into a wall and realized he’d been backed into a corner of the courtyard.

  The king stood in front of him, arms crossed, sword hanging from his hand. “Are we done?”

  Costis looked at the men standing behind the king, smiling and relaxed.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” said Costis.

  “Good,” said the king. “I want my breakfast. I want a bath.” In a weak voice he added, “I drank too much last night, and I have a headache.”

  He tucked his wooden sword under his right arm and extended his hand to Costis, pulling him out of the corner.

  Costis moved carefully, moaning. With the excitement of the sparring over, he was realizing that some of the blows hadn’t been light.

  “Serves you right,” said the king. “You haven’t even apologized.”

  “I’m very s-sorry, Your Majesty,” Costis said immediately.

  “For what exactly?” the king prompted.

  “Anything,” said Costis. “Everything. Being born.”

  The king chuckled.

  “Will you serve me and my god?”

  “I will, Your Majesty.”

  “Then come out,” said the king, helping him, “knowing that you’ll never die of a fall unless the god himself drops you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “YOUR Majesty,” said a humorless voice, and the king turned away from Costis. The cheerful atmosphere faded. The guards shuffled their feet.

  “Teleus,” said the king. His smile gone, he looked at the captain with a waiting expression.

  “If a man can expiate his debts in bruises, Your Majesty, there are others who would clear their accounts.”

  “I think not, Teleus,” said the king, and started to step around him. Teleus moved to block him.

  “You won’t get out from under your debt so easily, Teleus,” said the king, “and you have little to gain by trying.”

  “And little to offer Your Majesty,” Teleus agreed. “Except a challenge.”

  He flicked a glance at Costis, and the implication was obvious.

  The king shook his head, still not rising to the bait. “If I were to beat you, Teleus, your Guard would only think that you had let me. There’s little point in that.”

  “What, then, if I beat you, Your Majesty?”

  “The day hasn’t come, Teleus, that I would let you beat me.”

  “I think you wouldn’t have to, my lord.”

  The king warned him, “Teleus, I can have your head off.”

  “Of course you can, Your Majesty.” He ducked his head in submission, and the king had started away when Teleus added under his breath, “With a word.”

  The king stopped and his head went up. “I can do it with a sword, too, Teleus.”

  Teleus stepped back and into a guard position.

  “Very well,” said the king, and he raised his own sword. “But I won’t have you accused of not trying your hardest. I know that it is worth my while. How shall we make it worth yours? Shall we make a bet, Teleus? I beat you, and the queen reduces the Guard by half. You win, and she doesn’t.”

  The guards standing around them looked at each other in horror.

  Teleus thrust his chin forward. “I know that you have badgered her to weaken the Guard,” said Teleus. “I will die before I let you do it.”

  “You don’t have to die, Teleus. Just beat me.”

  Feeling that all his good work had been undone, Costis could do nothing but leave them to it. He turned and was walking toward a bench along the wall where he could sit and nurse his bruises when he heard the wooden swords clack and the king yell. He whirled in time to see the king still in the air, both feet off the ground, the sky suddenly blue, the morning mist gone, the sunshine glowing in the sky and on the stones and on the king, and everything frozen for a moment like the carved frieze in a temple, as the flat side of the king’s extended sword smashed against Teleus’s undefended neck.

  Teleus went down like bricks falling. He dropped his sword on the way and clutched at his neck with both hands, digging his face into the ground, struggling to hold the pain and trying to breathe. Half-controlled impulses made his legs twitch, and he shuddered.

  The king looked him over and said impassively to the nearest barracks boy, “Ice.”

  The boy ran, and the soldiers parted to let him through. The king went to Teleus, first squatting down, and then sitting beside him.

  “You didn’t know I could do that, did you?” he asked, conversationally.

  “I did not, Your Majesty,” Teleus gasped.

  “My grandfather killed a man that way once, using the edge of the wooden sword.”

  “I hadn’t realized the Thieves of Eddis were so warlike.”

  “They aren’t, mostly. But like all men, Teleus, I have two grandfathers.” Teleus rolled his eyes to look up at him, and the king said, “One of mine was Eddis.”

  “Ah,” said Teleus.

  “Ah, indeed,” said the king. “Here is the ice.” He took a canvas bag from the barracks boy and felt the lumps of ice through it. Then he laid the bag on the hard ground and used the metal cuff at the end of his arm to crush the ice into smaller pieces and then lifted the bag onto Teleus’s neck.

  “Does that feel better?” he asked.

  “Not really,” said Teleus.

  “Well, Costis will hold it for you. I see I have business with Aristogiton.”

  He got to his feet and walked away. Costis stayed with Teleus, holding the ice on his neck until he took it himself and got to his feet. Teleus looked around. Costis did as well. The king was in the center of the courtyard circling warily around one of the men in Aris’s squad.

  Costis asked, “Where’s Aris?”

  One of the guards turned to look at them in surprise. “He already whacked Aris on the head. Let him off lightly,” he added, looking significantly at the captain holding the ice to his neck. “Now he’s working on Meron.”

  Costis protested, “He can’t fight all of them.”

  Aris arrived beside them, and Costis turned on him. “What were you thinking?”

  Aris shrugged. Obviously hoping that the captain would take no notice, Aris said quietly, “Nobody minded seeing you knocked down. It was good fun. But they started to get angry again when he knocked down the captain. I thought if he did to me what he did to you, they’d relax again. But he didn’t. He just knocked my sword out of my hand after about three exchanges and tapped me on the cheek.”

  If Aristogiton had hoped the captain wasn’t listening, h
is hopes were dashed. Teleus turned around. “And then?” he said harshly.

  “Then he waved Meron out. I swear I didn’t mean for him to take on the whole squad, sir.”

  Costis said in a worried voice, “I think he hurt himself, fighting the captain. That jump must have taken everything he had.”

  “I think he did, too. He’ll have to stop after Meron. What is it, Aris?”

  “It’s Laecdomon, sir. I haven’t told you, sir, and I didn’t know who else to tell, but it was Laecdomon who wanted us to go help pen the dogs. He suggested it. And when we were arrested, he wasn’t with us in the cell, sir. He said he was kept in a different cell, but I never saw him until after the queen pardoned us.”

  “I see,” said Teleus grimly. “Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe he isn’t here this morning,” said Costis hopefully.

  “No,” said Aris, “I saw him earlier.”

  “And you think he’ll come out to challenge the king?”

  “I think he’s Erondites’s man, Captain. He’s not landed, and his family is from the baron’s demesne. Everyone knows how the baron feels.”

  “You can kill a man with a wooden sword,” Costis said, echoing the king’s words.

  “If you don’t care what happens to you afterward,” said Teleus. “Would Laecdomon care?”

  “I don’t know,” said Aris. “The baron would reward his family.”

  “The king can’t beat a fresh opponent,” Costis warned, “and he won’t know that it isn’t just sparring for Laecdomon.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Teleus. “As much as I would like to see it, I am not going to stand here and watch him get knocked down dead by a zealot with a wooden club. Find Laecdomon and get him out of here.”

  Aris and Costis moved away through the crowd. The king finished his opponent. Meron rubbed his chest where the point of the king’s sword had struck and smiled. The king looked through the crowd for the next man in the squad. Searching the crowd himself, Teleus was too late to signal the man to hang back. Teleus, from behind the king’s back, waved to get his attention and then mouthed silent instructions.