“You changed Costis’s opinion in order to change mine? And why does my opinion matter so much?” Teleus asked. “You could have replaced me.”
The king shrugged. “I want the Queen to reduce the Guard, and she said she will when I have asked you and you have agreed. So. May I reduce the Guard?”
“It is your decision. You are king.”
“That is the question, Teleus. Am I king? Don’t tell me that I have been anointed by priest and priestess or that this baron or that one has whispered meaningless sacred oaths at my ankles. Tell me, am I king?”
Teleus didn’t pretend not to understand. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Then I may reduce the Guard?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Thank you.” The king started to stand.
“Although you didn’t win that match.”
The king settled back down onto the bench. He eyed Teleus balefully.
“You never give up, do you? What is that supposed to mean?”
“It was your wager, Your Majesty,” Teleus pointed out. “If Laecdomon won the match, you wouldn’t reduce the Guard.”
“In Eddis, a match runs until the first blow is struck.”
“In Attolia, also.”
“Well, I struck the first blow.”
Teleus crossed his arms. “The object of the match is to practice swordplay, Your Majesty, not party tricks. A move that cannot be done with a sword is inadmissible.”
“You are splitting hairs. You must have been talking to Relius, or was it Ornon?”
Teleus was obdurate. “You could not take a real sword out of a man’s grip, not with your bare hand.”
“Oh, Teleus,” the king said, shaking his head sorrowfully. “So bullheaded and so wrong.” Reaching across to Teleus, he held out his hand in a fist and opened it slowly like a flower. “I practice it with a wooden sword. I can do it with a real one, too.”
Teleus lifted a blunt finger to gently trace the thin line of newly healed skin on the king’s palm. “The assassin’s sword. I don’t know what to say, My King.”
Eugenides shrugged. “Say I don’t need to watch my own back anymore.”
Teleus nodded. “I will be at your back, My King, until the last breath leaves my body.”
“Very well, then,” said Eugenides, and stood up as Teleus said thoughtfully, “I see, now, why Ornon was so confident of your success.”
Eugenides climbed cautiously down from the upper bench. “Ornon was probably hoping I’d have my head bashed in, but I don’t want your support under false pretenses, Teleus. Ornon wasn’t thinking of circus tricks. He knew that if Laecdomon had ever become a real threat, I would have disemboweled him. Did you forget?” He raised his lamed arm, and looking at the truncated limb, they remembered the deadly nature of the replacement for his missing hand.
“You make people forget, with your long sleeves, pretending to be ashamed of it,” said Teleus.
“Yes. But the truth is always right in front of you to see.”
“So the Guard will be halved,” Teleus said heavily.
The king sighed in resignation. Standing before Teleus, he said, “Teleus, the Guard made the queen. The Guard can unmake her. You can guarantee their loyalty now, but can you guarantee it twenty years from now? Forty years from now? You know you can’t, yet you would entrust that Guard ten years, fifteen years, thirty years from now, with the power of kingmakers. Sooner or later the Guard’s loyalty will be bought and sold like other men’s, and the crown will go to the highest bidder. That is the course of history, Teleus. It is unchangeable. Keeping a private guard this large is like using a wolf to guard the farm. It may keep off the other wolves, but sooner or later it will eat you. I won’t leave that legacy for my heirs.”
“We keep Her Majesty safe,” Teleus said, pain in his voice. “We have always kept her safe.”
“Guard my back, Teleus, and I will keep her safe.”
Moving more easily, but favoring his left leg, he went through the door, leaving the Guard and returning to his attendants, no doubt waiting outside.
“Will he keep her safe? Phokis could break him in half with one hand.”
“If Phokis could lay a hand on him.”
“Do you doubt him?”
The guards shook their heads.
“Basileus,” someone hidden in the steam whispered. Others echoed the praise. “Basileus.”
Only Teleus shook his head. Costis watched him, not surprised. “The Basileus was a prince of his people, what we call a king now,” Teleus explained. “That one”—he nodded toward the closed door—“will rule more than just Attolia before he is done. He is an Annux, a king of kings.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As ever, the stories about Attolia, Sounis, and Eddis are fiction. There is no history here. This does not mean that representations of people and events from the real world have not crept in, but even those have been subject to fictionalization. There was a poet named Archilochus in the seventh century BC. We still have fragments of his poems, but the verse quoted in the book is not his. There was a playwright named Aristophanes who wrote comedies with titles like The Birds and The Frogs. I don’t know that he ever wrote one entirely about farmers, but if he had, it would have been very funny indeed. The gods I describe aren’t real, either. I made them up. The landscapes that surround the stories are based on the actual landscape of modern Greece and on what I imagine ancient Greece to have looked like. But the setting isn’t Greece, and it isn’t meant to be ancient. With firearms and pocket watches, window glass and printed books, I hope it is more Byzantine than Archaic.
About the Author
MEGAN WHALEN TURNER is the author of Instead of Three Wishes, The Thief, which was awarded a Newbery Honor, and its sequels, The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia. She lives in Ohio.
You can visit her online at http://home.att.net/~mwturner.
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Credits
Cover art © 2006 by Vince Natale
Cover design by Christopher Stengel
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE KING OF ATTOLIA. Copyright © 2006 by Megan Whalen Turner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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