“You eat more than Gen did after prison,” he said.
“I have more sympathy with him all the time. Are you going to finish that drumstick?” I asked.
“I am. Stop staring at it.”
We had to sell the horses in the tiny town just past Evisa and didn’t get a good price for them, but where we were going they would be of no use. The magus and I both thought it was unwise to use the main pass, and we went back to the one we had used years ago when we went adventuring after Hamiathes’s Gift. Both of us were thinking of that trip, when we had ridden out of Sounis with the conquest of Eddis in mind. So much had changed since then.
We approached the pass cautiously but found no one guarding it. Either the rebels didn’t know of it, or they were still searching for us on the roads to Melenze. We spent the night in the empty farmhouse that had once belonged to the magus’s family, and in the morning we began the climb.
It was only a little less daunting than it had been on the first trip. Our way was cut through solid stone by the trickle of a stream at the bottom of a gorge, and there were many places where we climbed straight up with only shallow handholds carved into the rock for aid. I was stronger than I had been, and the handholds seemed closer together than they had been before, but still, it was hard going, and I was tired out by the end of the first day.
In the evening, at a tiny cookfire, looking at the climb that waited for us in the morning, the magus said thoughtfully, “That lying little monster complained about everything: the food, the horses, the blankets, the company. He even found fault with the stories I told by the fire, but I cannot recall that he ever once complained about the climbing.”
“So many things are obvious in retrospect, aren’t they?” I said.
The magus looked at me seriously, and then he smiled. “Indeed,” he said.
We crossed through Eddis without pausing. The magus said that a royal visit had been planned with Attolia and that the megaron at Eddis would be empty. I knew it was Attolia I needed to make peace with. Eddis had mercenaries who might help me win back my state. Attolia had the gold.
Everything, it seemed, depended on gold. The magus and I had fallen easily back into our old habits. He lectured constantly, and I asked questions to my heart’s delight. Where he had once been my master and I his apprentice, I had become king and he my sole advisor. Where we had once focused on natural history and philosophy, we now concentrated on administration, taxation, and the prosecution of war.
He had begun his lessons by quoting the duke of Melfi: “To make war you need three things: one, money; two, money; and three, money.” He went on to tell me the things I should have known already, that I would have known if I had been a more promising heir to the throne and not exclusively interested in poetry.
A bronze cannon costs ten solids to the ton. Eddis’s iron cannons cost less but are too heavy to move. Even a bronze cannon, at six thousand pounds, takes twelve horses or fifty men to shift. The horses cost a subit a head and have to eat. The men expect wages, and they also eat. The horses have harnesses and iron shoes that need to be replaced at three octari apiece, while the men must have weapons and uniforms, and all of them paid for out of the treasury. I learned that my uncle who was Sounis had run through his ready gold and was in debt to the number of twenty-five thousand solids to moneylenders on the Peninsula. He had promised the Hephestia Diamond as security. He had already sold the Soli Diamond and a number of lesser stones from the treasury to purchase the ships to replace those that Eugenides had blown up. He had then tried to squeeze still more money out of his barons, and that, the magus thought, had been the sun that ripened the rebellion. The patronoi were sick of paying the costs of the king’s wars.
When Eugenides married the queen of Attolia and made peace between Eddis and Attolia, the Mede ambassador had offered my uncle a treaty of protection from his now far more dangerous neighbors. Sounis had taken Mede money and hired men to assassinate Eugenides, but he had stopped short of accepting an alliance, refusing to cede any power to the Mede. He still insisted that he could defeat both his enemies, but his barons no longer agreed. They wanted the security of the alliance with the Mede, and my father wanted it as well. Though my father and uncle had argued, his loyalty was unfailing. Not so the barons’, evidently.
By the time we reached Attolia, I understood better the wonders that had been achieved in Eddis with so small a treasury, and I was even more impressed with Attolia for squeezing so much gold out of the Mede emperor when he thought he was buying her sovereignty. Attolia still had that gold, and if she let me use it, the magus warned me, it would be a loan, not a gift, and there would be costs attached. The magus was very clear about the dangers of my decision, but he never questioned it.
“Have you and my father discussed something like this?”
“Never,” said the magus. “It isn’t a decision either of us could make. Only you, My King.”
The magus, unless we could be overheard, addressed me formally. As if being addressed as King was something else I needed to be prepared for before I reached Attolia.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“WHERE is it?” the burly man shouted, with his hand still in my left boot, as he searched it for some valuable that hadn’t fallen out when he’d turned it upside down.
“Where’s what?” asked the magus, mightily confused. The robbers had already stolen away our purses, and neither the magus nor I had any guess what more they could want.
We both had been asleep. There had been no sign of Hanaktos’s men, and we’d taken no precautions except to check that the road behind and ahead of us was empty before we retreated into the woods to camp each night. We’d been taken by surprise when we were tossed from our blankets like seed scattered on the ground and found ourselves on our backs with daggers at our throats. The robbers had searched our bags, throwing our spare clothes every which way, checking the seams, and pulling the bags themselves to pieces as the horses we had purchased only the day before stood by whickering anxiously at all the fuss. The magus and I watched bemused.
Their leader had tipped the contents of the magus’s purse into his hand and thrown the little leather pocket contemptuously to the ground.
“Whatever it is that you are carrying so carefully, with an eye on every man you meet. We’ve watched you these last two days. What are you carrying? Gold? Silver? Where is it?”
I almost waved a hand and said, “Here. Me.” But I didn’t. The man was too frustrated, and I was very afraid that when he found his careful hunt had yielded nothing, he would spit us both. I looked over at the magus. He looked back, bone dry of ideas.
“It was gemstones,” I said, “matched garnets the size of your thumb, but they’re gone already. We handed them off.”
“Handed them off?”
“At the inn, last night. The, uh, man was there. He was the merchant we were bringing the gems for.” I racked my brains to remember some specific man from the roomful we’d eaten with the night before.
“The man in the booth,” suggested the magus.
“Near the door?” snarled the man.
“Ye–es,” said the magus, as if reluctant, trying hard not to sound like someone scrambling for a safe lie. His hand waved in a vague gesture.
The bandit looked thoughtful. “The second booth? Blond, with rings in his ears?”
“That’s him,” I piped. “He was to take the garnets on to the baron.”
“What baron?”
Suddenly I couldn’t remember the name of a single Attolian baron and couldn’t guess, even if I’d been able to come up with one, who might be a plausible recipient of a matched set of large garnets. What a time to have my mind go all to pear. Only by a god’s will did I remember a crossroads we had passed the day before. “He was taking the road for Pirrhea,” I said. Gen had stolen us chickens in Pirrhea, which was why the sign at the crossroads had caught my eye.
Without another word, the robbers left us, taking our spare clothes and our
horses with them and heading through the woods toward the road, back to the crossroads and Pirrhea. We watched them without saying anything until they were long gone. Even then we didn’t speak, only stuffed our feet into our boots, which they hadn’t taken, and legged it ourselves in the opposite direction, as fast as we could go. We cut back toward the road to reach it some ways ahead of where we had been traveling. When we did, we ran, not sure if someone had followed. We jogged steadily until we were in sight of the next town. By then the sky was light, and the sun was near rising. The gates in front of us were open, and the merchants would soon be doing business.
“Garnets,” said the magus.
“The size of your thumb,” I assured him.
Both of us silently hoped the blond man was on his way anywhere but on the road to Pirrhea.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WE were in the city of Attolia three days later, after catching a ride in the back of a wagon from a farmer delivering olive oil to the capital. We were starving. The magus had spent our last lone coin, found stuck in the seam of his purse, on bread. In the city we tried to bluster our way into an inn but were turned away on the first two tries when the landlord, spooked by our lack of traveling bags, asked to see our coin before he showed us a room. Finally we found a shabbier hostel, where the magus’s easy confidence carried the day. We got a room and some food and considered our strategy. The magus was afraid to approach the palace. There was every chance that the Mede agents whom we had escaped so far would be lurking, waiting to catch us as we approached.
“It’s what I would do,” said the magus, “were I the Mede. They know by now that you are not with your father.”
“We could send a message,” I said. “If we promised payment on delivery, we could send it by messenger, but would any message sent by a common carrier and delivered to the gates be carried to the king?”
What a quandary!
We tried approaching Baron Susa, but we were turned away, even from his back door. We thought we might contact a merchant who would pass our message to a patronoi, who might deliver it to the palace, but that failed as well. I picked up a job unloading a cart and earned us enough coins to buy food, but not enough to make a bribe of any significance, and without a bribe we could not seem to contact anyone of any importance in the city. The public day in the royal courts wasn’t to be held for weeks. While there were people the magus could contact outside the city, that would mean more traveling. We didn’t have the time.
The magus was growing more concerned each day that Mede spies would locate us, two Sounisians in the city, behaving oddly. We were sure to draw attention, and after our experience in the woods, neither of us was too sure we would see the Mede agents before they saw us. Equally worrisome, the landlord of the filthy, flea-ridden inn where we were staying was becoming suspicious.
The magus went out the door first. When it was my turn, I nearly landed on top of him. He dodged and I rolled, and we ended up facing each other, sitting on the hard stones of the road with our legs splayed out in front of us.
“Thank your gods, I don’t call the city guard,” shouted the landlord, and slammed the courtyard door. He opened it a minute later to throw the magus’s overshirt out after us.
Rubbing my bruised elbow ruefully, I asked the magus, “If he called the guard, do you think we could tell them who we are?”
The magus shook his head. “Attolia is pressing every prisoner they arrest onto their ships in order to fortify the islands she has taken from Sounis. We’re far more likely to end up on a galley, revealing our true identities to the passing sharks.”
I got up first and helped the magus to his feet. Sighing, he picked up his overshirt and threw it over his shoulder. We walked up the street.
It was later that day, when we were selling off our clothes in exchange for grubbier ones and the cash to buy food, that we heard a rumor in the marketplace that the king and queen would be riding to the harbor to greet arriving ambassadors. We put together the peashooter and snagged the dried peas out of a market stall. The magus wanted to spit the pea, but I demonstrated my knack for accuracy, and he agreed that I should be the one. I did think of the changes to my face, but I was sure that Eugenides, if he looked, would know me, and I was more distressed than I can say when he passed by without any sign of recognition.
The magus and I had some very uncomfortable moments when we were arrested by the guard. Our only hope was to convince one of them to send a message to the king, but the squad leader gave us no opportunity to speak. When the magus tried, a guardsman had him pinned by the throat before he could get more than a word out. So intimidating was he that we kept silent all the way to the palace and down into the cells. Only when there was a closed door between us and the very angry guards did the magus shout that Attolis would want to know we were in his prison. I was already imagining myself chained to an oar.
We spent our time while we were waiting discussing just what we could say that might warrant the attention of the king. We agreed that telling the prison guards flat out that I was the king of Sounis probably wouldn’t work. The magus thought he could say that he had information valuable to Relius, whom he knew by name, and that might get us an interview with him. Not that an interview with Attolia’s master of spies would be wholly without risk, but face to face the magus thought he could convince the man of our identities.
Then Gen appeared at the door, and we didn’t need to convince anyone of anything after all. Instead we followed the guards he left us to a set of rooms that were a welcome change from our infested inn of the previous week.
“Ridiculous to think what indignities I would suffer in silence, if I knew that I was to be rewarded with an oversize bucket of hot water,” the magus said as he settled into the bath the servants had filled for him. He leaned against the higher side, leaving his arms and legs dangling over the lower edges and looking something like a pale spider, but more like an overturned terrapin. I’d already had my bath, at his insistence, and was getting into clean clothes with the help of a dresser and trying to eat the food that had been brought at the same time. The careful attention of the manservant was rather amusing to me after all the time I’d spent in the same set of pants and loose shirt.
The clothes were rather startling in their finery. “Do you think Gen picked them?” I asked, posing in my new overcoat. The decorative fabric panels hastily tacked to the front and back made an already handsome piece of clothing into an ostentatious one.
The magus eyed me from the bath.
“I would believe it. All that embroidery suits you.”
“Makes me look less like riffraff, you mean?”
“Yes,” he agreed with mocking gravity. “That’s it exactly.”
A barber came to trim us and shave us, taking off the last of my darker hair and leaving it tidy, if short. When he was done, Hilarion arrived and introduced himself as one of the king’s attendants.
He asked if we would be able to join the king and queen for an audience. I should have paid more attention, but I was still eating what I could from a plate of fruit and trying not to drip anything on my coat. I didn’t realize until we had followed Hilarion through the narrow corridors to the main staircase that we were heading toward the megaron of the palace, the largest of the throne rooms. When we reached the doorway, we could hear the quiet rustling of the crowd beyond, and when I looked past Hilarion, I could see only a narrow aisle open in the center of the room. I had forgotten the arrival of the ambassadors from the Continent.
Standing just inside the doorway, no more than a few feet away from me, was a party of Medes, distinctive in their brightly colored and more loosely cut clothing. I was surprised that Attolia, who had so recently and insultingly sent home a Mede army, would be entertaining an ambassador from the empire.
I was suddenly glad that our clothes were meant for ceremony. Even so, if I could have, I would have signaled Hilarion and waited until a less public moment to talk with Attolia and the new Attolis,
but it was too late. We were swept into the room, announced, lauded, eyeballed by the crowd, and moved to the foot of the raised dais almost without our own volition.
Attolia was just as I remembered from our briefest of meetings, when the magus and I had been apprehended after attempting to steal Hamiathes’s Gift. She looked as regal and every bit as intimidating as she had before. She greeted me, while Eugenides reclined on his throne, his elbow on the arm of his chair and his thumb tucked under his cheekbone to prop up his head. With his fingers cupped against his forehead he eyed me from under the arch they made, as a man does when he is looking at something very far away.
The magus and I had talked for many long hours about this marriage of Eugenides and the queen of Attolia. The magus insisted it was Eugenides’s choice and his desire as well, but it was impossible to know whose influence would prevail and if Gen would grow more like his wife, or his wife more like her king.
Down in the prison cells, he had seemed everything that I remembered. So much so that I hadn’t even noticed the hook in place of his hand. In the throne room, the differences were hard to miss. I’d been told that he wore a false hand on formal occasions, but it seemed that his habits had changed. His right arm lay across the arm of the throne, and at the end was a pointed hook.
The last time I had seen Gen he had been whole, if slightly damaged, after our escape from captivity in Attolia. I hadn’t realized the strength of my habit of picturing him in my thoughts as he had been when we first met: skinny and prison pale, incongruous in the clean clothes the magus provided. I did remember just enough of his taste in clothing from the weeks I had stayed in Eddis that I was not completely taken aback by his grandeur. Gods know, he does play up with his beaded jacket and his lace trim. I almost laughed aloud when I saw that the design of his boots remained unchanged, though even they had gold dusted in their tooled leather patterns.
A Conspiracy of Kings Page 10
