A Conspiracy of Kings

by Megan Whalen Turner

  It wasn’t a moment for laughter. Not with Attolia coolly admitting her surprise at the unforeseen arrival of a foreign ruler, especially one with whom she was currently at war.

  At war with my uncle, I said, and not, I hoped, with me.

  Attolia nodded. I will tell you honestly, I wish it had been you I addressed. I would have felt better just to have seen you in the crowd, but I didn’t. I had the sense that Attolia might not feel any more bound by the rules of hospitality than Baron Hanaktos, and her expression gave me no clue to her thoughts. I feared that I could find myself on my way back to the underground cell at any moment.

  Attolia asked what brought me to her court. Poor prince or not, I hadn’t sat through a thousand boring ceremonies without learning something about diplomatic language. I dug through my memories for the right formulaic phrases, and then with as much dignity as I could muster, I explained that I had just escaped from my own country, a country in the greatest peril, lost either to the Mede or to Melenze or both. I pointed out that none of these outcomes would profit the state of Attolia. I had come to my friends to ask for the men and the gold to win my country back.

  Attolia watched me with close consideration as I spoke. When I finished, there was a moment of polite silence. As she opened her mouth to speak, Gen, who had been silent throughout, sat up and laid his hand across hers. I could hear the Attolians sucking in their breaths. Attolia slipped her hand away, but she sat back in her chair and nodded a deferral to her king.

  Then, as you well know, Eugenides looked me in the eye as if I were a complete stranger and said, “The simplest way to end a war is to admit you have lost it.”

  The silence after that was not polite.

  Little could convince me more that I was fit to be king than that moment when I acted like one and didn’t tell Attolis something very rude that he could do with his own throne and mumbled instead a few more ritualized phrases about momentous decisions, and the time they take, and then walked myself and the magus out of the room before I had a real fit of apoplexy in front of the assembled courts and ambassadors of Eddis, Attolia, and the Continent with a few condescending Mede visitors looking on.

  I came upstairs to these rooms, where I told the magus and the guards to wait in the anteroom, as I did not want his company or anyone else’s. That seems to have meant very little, though, because no sooner did I close the door than it opened again. You came in. You took one look at me. And you laughed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE Queen of Eddis protested. “I did not laugh,” she said.

  “You did,” Sounis said. “You are laughing still. And why didn’t those guards turn you away?”

  Eddis studied him. His face was much changed by Basrus’s fists. He was also taller and heavier than when they had last met. His shoulders had grown broad from his working in Hanaktos’s fields, and she could easily imagine him dropping a man with a single blow. She did not think he realized how fierce his appearance had become; though his smile had changed, his easy blushes remained. She did not know how to put into words the relief it was to see him safe, and so the feelings escaped as another laugh. Still smiling, she defended the Attolians. “They are guards,” she said. “They could not deny a queen.”

  Sounis returned her smile and conceded. “No, and neither can I. You asked to hear the story of events that brought me here, and I have given it to you, as I am sure anyone would give you anything you asked. I am only sorry that all my face can offer you is amusement,” he added.

  Eddis reached to touch her own crooked nose. “If I laughed,” she said, “it is only at the idea that we make a matched pair now, you and I.” She asked him, more seriously, “Your uncle who was Sounis learned of our letters. That was the cause of your exile to Letnos?”

  “An unfinished letter was stolen from my desk and delivered to him,” explained Sounis. “He had my rooms searched and intercepted your next letter. He and my father and the magus spent the evening in a shouting match, and I was sent away the next morning.”

  “So you did not receive the letter? You have not read it?”

  “No.”

  “You made a proposal in your previous letter. Perhaps it was only hypothetical?”

  “It was not.”

  Eddis gently chided, “All that time in the fields of Hanaktos, you thought of many things and many people, but never, it seems, of the queen of Eddis.”

  The color rose in Sounis’s cheeks, but he did not look away. He had thought of her every day. “When I was working in the fields, I knew how unfounded my hopes were,” he said. “I was a poor excuse for an heir of Sounis when I made the proposal and then became even less than that.”

  “How less?” asked Eddis.

  Sounis looked down at her hand, lying in his, and covered it for a moment. Still holding it lightly, he stood and stepped back until her hand slipped away from his grasp. Then he crossed to the far side of the room. Without looking back, he said, “That look on Gen’s face. Does he think I am a fool? That I came to Attolia instead of Melenze because I was naive? Did he think I was asking him to give me soldiers and gold to fight a war as a personal favor? I came here on my knees to offer him Sounis, and he looks at me as if I were my uncle and grabs it out of my hands.”

  Eddis asked, “The magus did not talk about this on the road?”

  Sounis shook his head. “He tried to warn me, and I refused to listen.” He shook his head again, this time in bewilderment. “Eugenides offered his life once to save me. Why should I doubt that he is my friend?”

  “He is the king of Attolia,” said Eddis.

  “And no particle of your Thief remains?”

  Eddis searched for words. “He swore an oath to be Thief on his grandfather’s death. But the oath is a mystery of the Thieves, and no one alive but Eugenides knows what it requires.”

  “So now I must deliver my country into the hands of enemies? The magus no doubt thinks I am a fool.”

  “I cannot believe that,” said Eddis. “Nor will I believe you could have a better friend than Eugenides.”

  “I should throw something, perhaps,” said Sounis, “but I do not think it would relieve my feelings.”

  “I have not found it to do so,” said Eddis.

  “Gen evidently does.”

  “Gen is Gen,” said Eddis.

  “Gen is a bastard,” said the king of Sounis.

  Eddis looked sad, and Sounis was sorry he had spoken so harshly. He returned to sit by her side.

  He said, “Sounis is lost. I know what comes of the Mede occupation. In a generation, or perhaps two, Sounis and Attolia and Eddis will be gone. Only Medes will serve in the government, only Medes will hold public office, only Medes will own land or hold wealth. They will knock down the old temples and control the guilds and the trades, and the Sounisians will be left okloi, or worse, beggars in their own cities.

  “I could sell half my country to Melenze to get its protection, but that would only delay the Medes, not turn them back. Also, there’s little hope that Melenze would be satisfied with half of Sounis. They would eat up the rest of it in the next few years, and I would be in no position to stop them. I am in a war with Attolia I cannot win, with a civil war at home that I have fled.

  “But Sounis is not the only country at risk. This war drains Attolia’s resources and endangers her as well. I thought…I thought that Gen would be satisfied with an oath of loyalty to him and a negotiated surrender on my part. Sounis would give up the islands we had lost, and in exchange, I would still be king. Sounis would be free, only allied as a tributary of Attolia, much as Melenze is allied with Ferria. And instead I find that Attolis demands a complete surrender, to depose me from my throne and disenfranchise my patronoi.”

  “He did not say that,” said Eddis.

  “You were there? You heard him?” Sounis asked. “He said I should admit my defeat. You heard his voice and saw his face. What else could he mean?”

  “Would you give up being Sounis?” Eddi
s asked, too casually. “Would you allow your country to become just another part of Attolia?”

  Sounis’s eyes narrowed. “No,” he said. He stood, and his restless energy carried him across the room again. “I will go to Melenze. And hope to delay the Medes long enough to find some other solution to their imperial expansion. Of course, that assumes the king and queen of Attolia intend to honor the laws of hospitality and allow me to travel safely to the border.”

  Eddis nodded. Sounis dropped into a chair on the far side of the room and stared at Eddis. “He sent you.”

  Eddis’s slow, broad smile appeared. Sounis crossed his arms and bolstered himself against it.

  “Why?”

  “Because he wants no more than you thought to give him: your allegiance and the islands he already controls.”

  “That is not what he indicated in the throne room.”

  “He needed you to know that he meant to take Sounis whether you offered it or not. He would have taken it from your uncle.”

  “I can see that,” said Sounis. “Did he think I didn’t know it? The king of Attolia is a bastard, but an honest one? I came here to offer him my allegiance. I came because I trusted him. So why does he make me think I should not?”

  Eddis sighed. “Maybe, Sophos, because he is an idiot.” She shook her head. “He sent me to ask if you will negotiate a surrender. I cannot speak for him otherwise, but Sophos, I know he is your friend.”

  “So he sends you to ask me to forgive him?”

  Eddis was silent. Eugenides did not expect to be forgiven.

  Sounis sat down and lay back in his chair. He put his arm across his forehead and snapped, “Oh, of course, I will forgive him. What choice do I have?” His own words seemed to give him pause, and after a moment’s thought, he sighed heavily. “I will forgive him,” he said more calmly, “because I have heard him scream when someone pulled a sword out of him that could have just as easily gone into me. And because I believe I know him, all evidence to the contrary, and that if he is Attolis, he is also my friend Gen. But he could have trusted me to begin with, instead of acting like an idiot and treating me like one.”

  “No one would argue,” said Eddis, revealing some of her own exasperation with the king of Attolia.

  “I’m not a fool,” said Sounis.

  “No.”

  “I cannot win a war with Attolia and at the same time put down a rebellion.”

  “I do not see how.”

  “Sounis could not yield to Attolia, but I believe I can yield to Eugenides as the king of Attolia and still be Sounis and still hold my country. We can unite against a far greater danger.”

  “Yes.”

  “I do not actually need you to tell me that.”

  Biting back her smile, Eddis shook her head. “No.”

  Sounis smiled, too, though it was a sorrowful smile. He stood. “I suppose I should tell the magus.”

  Eddis stood as well. As he passed on his way to the door, she stopped him with one hand on his sleeve.

  “How less?” she asked him, serious again.

  It was obvious to Sounis. “A slave in the fields of Hanaktos, and now, not much better. I am a king with no country. Would you have that?”

  Eddis seemed to consider. “Yes.”

  Regret and pleasure were in equal measure when Sounis said reluctantly, “I am not sure that is wise. I would have to question my own feelings, because I do not think I love you so wildly that I would drag you into such a poor match.”

  “It might have been preferable,” Eddis admitted drily, “if you had thrown off your chains of bondage solely for love of me. It would certainly have been more flattering.” Standing so near to him, she was looking up into his face and watching it closely. “I am willing to accept, however, that we are real people, not characters in a play. We do not, all of us, need to be throwing inkwells. If we are comfortable with one another, is that not sufficient?”

  “Were I a king in more than just name, it would be all, all I dreamed of,” said Sounis, and it was Eddis who blushed.

  “You wish to wait, then, until you are confirmed as Sounis?”

  “If…”

  “When,” said Eddis firmly.

  “Yes,” said Sounis, “then.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AS Eddis left, she gathered in her wake most of the crowd that Sounis found squeezed into the anteroom outside his door when he opened it. People flowed out of the room like a tide, leaving only two of the Attolian guard, and the magus, standing alone, as unaware of the empty room as he had been of the full one.

  He looked old, Sounis thought, and it seemed a shame that such a man couldn’t have a better king to serve. “I’m sorry,” Sounis said. “You tried to warn me that he is the king of Attolia now, and I should have listened.”

  To his surprise, the magus walked forward and dropped to his knees.

  “Don’t,” said Sounis, but the magus took each of the king’s hands and kissed them before holding them to his eyes. Embarrassed, Sounis pulled the magus to his feet, but the magus was unperturbed. He smiled as he stood, and looking Sounis in the face, he said simply, “My King, I am at your disposal.”

  The conversation between Sounis and his future overlord was carefully arranged and far from private. Sounis was conveyed through the palace by an amorphous crowd that expanded and shrank as he progressed; guards, escorts, majordomos, and hangers-on surrounded him as he went up stairs and along corridors until he arrived at the private apartment of the king of Attolia and was announced. His first thought, upon entering, was that his own guest apartment in the palace was the more luxurious. His walls were covered in patterned cloth and trimmed with molded plasterwork. The king’s walls were plain plaster above and plain paneling below, with benches on three sides to provide seating. Though the cushions were worked with embroidered figures, the chamber’s appearance was reminiscent of nothing so much as a patronoi’s waiting room for okloi petitioners.

  The door to the next room was open, and Sounis was surprised to see that it was the bedchamber. He had thought that any room of measurable importance necessarily had an antechamber, and often more than one. In the megaron of Sounis, his uncle had lived in a room behind a room behind a room, each one lined with silk wall coverings or fine murals and far removed from the people he governed. Sounis thought Gen, cheek by jowl with his guardroom, must be rather more closely entwined in the lives of those around him. On reflection, he suspected Gen was more closely entwined than any of the polished young men standing around the guardroom suspected.

  The men in uniform were obviously the king’s guards. The others were like Hilarion, Sounis assumed, more of the king’s companions. They were attractive in the way only the very well heeled can be. Trained in all the arts of riding, shooting, fighting, dancing, and clever court dialogue, their kind had intimidated him for years, and Sophos, now Sounis, quailed at the idea of surrounding himself with such companions. He wondered how Gen got along with them.

  Eugenides waited for him in the bedchamber, sitting on an upholstered bench. He indicated the seat beside him. Sounis stood for a moment looking down at him before taking the seat. He was looking for some sign of the friend he had traveled with through Eddis and across Attolia in pursuit of a mythical relic and saw none. The king of Attolia’s expression showed no sense of irony or humor, just a blank courtesy. Sounis sat beside him and looked straight ahead.

  Everyone else in the room, including the magus, remained standing. Neither the queen of Eddis nor the queen of Attolia attended.

  The king of Attolia nodded agreeably but made no personal comment. He asked if Sounis would give his oath of loyalty.

  “If Attolis can make it worth the sacrifice,” Sounis answered.

  “And if not?” Attolis inquired politely.

  Sounis crossed his legs, as if at ease, and offered his intention to go to Melenze and use their resources to fight Attolia and to delay the encroaching Medes. “Better to be king of some part of Sounis than
of none of it.”

  “The oath of loyalty would pertain to all of Sounis, not part,” Attolis said.

  “You would have my loyalty, but no right to interfere in the internal management of my state.”

  “That is acceptable,” said Attolis.

  “Then we are in agreement,” said Sounis.

  After a dry and formal parting, Sounis was led back to his own rooms, the magus beside him. Sounis was thinking over his decision. A hallway, filled with various members of the court, was no place to discuss such private thoughts. “The king’s rooms are very plain,” he observed instead.

  Attolis’s attendant, walking just ahead, turned to speak over his shoulder. “They are not the royal apartments. His Majesty chose these rooms in preference and has arranged for the queen to remain in the royal apartments, as it suits them both.” He managed to convey that they had rooms every bit as nice as any in Sounis and also that it wasn’t anyone’s business but theirs where their king slept.

  Sounis straightened up, and when the attendant turned away, he made a face at the magus. Gen was welcome to his attendants. “They looked familiar, didn’t you think? Just like—”

  “Yes,” the magus replied.

  The attendant’s ears were all but standing out from his head as he strained to hear what the king’s rooms looked like, but Sounis left the rest of his sentence unsaid. The magus had also seen the resemblance in the plain walls and plain paneling, and in the king’s desk with its careful arrangement of papers and pens, to the library of the queen of Eddis, where Eugenides had lived as her Thief.

  When they were back in Sounis’s own bedchamber and the attendant was gone, Sounis spoke more freely.

  “I thought he would be more like the Gen I know once we were in private.”

  “You were never in private,” said the magus.

  “Still,” said Sounis.

  “My King,” said the magus hesitantly, and Sounis waved him to speak. “I believe we must go forward with the understanding that Attolis’s responsibility as king will outweigh his affections as a man. But that does not mean that I doubt his friendship. Or that I believe his friendship is unimportant. On the contrary, no treaty, no matter how cleverly worded, will hold without it.”