A Conspiracy of Kings

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Gen turned to the man standing on his other side, but that man, Sounis knew, was Eddis’s minister of war and Gen’s father. Not inclined to indulge tantrums, the minister stood unhelpfully with his arms crossed and his practice sword held tight in the fist tucked under the crook of his elbow.

  Eugenides tipped his head back to look at the sky. He said, “That was more difficult than I anticipated.”

  Teleus, the captain of the Royal Guard, returned with both Eugenides’s and Sounis’s swords. He presented the one punctiliously to his king as if it were an edged weapon, holding it out on his fingers, bowing over it. “If Your Majesty would like to retire to the dining hall?”

  Gen wiped his hand down his arm as if wiping something invisible away, and took the practice sword from him, deliberately grabbing it across its edgeless blade and tucking it under his handless arm. “Yes, thank you, Teleus. Breakfast. Join me?” he said to Sounis over his shoulder.

  Sounis took his blunt sword more politely from Teleus, then looked at the magus, who shrugged. They followed Attolis through the courtyard archway and into the narrow alleys between guard barracks to a dining hall. Inside the hall they passed by the long tables but did not stop, continuing down a dark hallway beside the kitchens to an empty storeroom that should have been equally dark but was lit by lamps hanging from metal pegs hammered into cracks in the stone walls.

  Bewildered, Sounis stood and watched as the Eddisians paired up and began to spar. He listened as they analyzed every aspect of the Mede’s style and began to piece together the best means to defeat him. Thanks to Eugenides’s careful efforts to draw out the Mede, they had seen all they needed.

  Sounis turned to the magus. “Did you know?”

  “That he was relentless?” The magus finished his question. “Yes. That he had this in mind, no. I did not realize that he disliked the ambassador so much.”

  “Melheret has a reputation as one of the best swordsmen in the Mede court,” a soldier informed them, having overheard. “They say he trained the former ambassador, Nahuseresh.”

  “Ah,” said the magus, understanding at once. “I see that he means to be prepared if he meets him again.”

  “Surely that’s unlikely,” said Sounis.

  “I don’t think unlikely means to him what it does to the rest of us,” said the magus.

  The Attolians were smiling openly by this time. Whatever they thought of their king, they enjoyed a good joke at a newcomer’s expense, whereas the Eddisians seemed no less intent than they had been on the training field, though they did joke with one another as they sparred.

  “No, his foot was farther back,” said a voice nearby.

  “Higher in the backswing,” said another man.

  “Why would you put your elbow out like that?”

  “Airing your arm hair?”

  “Boagus could take out whole swaths of Medes that way,” said someone across the room, and everyone laughed.

  “Pray gods then that the Medes don’t have anyone that smells as bad as me,” said the smiling man who must have been Boagus.

  Sounis, watching, was crushed by a sudden longing for Pol, who would have been at home with these men.

  “Do you spar, Your Majesty?”

  Still unused to being so addressed, Sounis jumped.

  “Oh, yes, thank you,” he said to the small, wiry man who had invited him to match swords.

  “Will you practice against the Mede?” the man asked, as he settled into a fighting stance.

  Sounis demurred. “No, thank you,” he said. “I am not expert enough, I am afraid, to learn from it.”

  “Very well,” said the man. He was a head shorter than Sounis, and Sounis thought himself prepared for attack until the man’s sword suddenly caught him just above the elbow. He fell back in surprise and smiled politely, acknowledging the hit, but the other man didn’t smile back. Sounis resisted the impulse to look to the magus for rescue and raised his sword again.

  The wiry little man was a monster in human guise, Sounis decided, sent by the gods to humiliate him. It was only luck that the other men in the room were focused on Eugenides and his partners or they would have been snickering behind their hands. Sounis was covered with sweat and deep in confusion by the time Eugenides finally called a halt. He’d been praying for the king of Attolia to wind up his exercise and was cursing him for his selfish delay. When Eugenides called, “Enough!,” Sounis lowered his sword immediately and caught a stinging smack on his upper arm. The little man was giving him such a look that instead of being angry at the late hit, Sounis found himself apologizing for dropping his weapon too soon.

  “Hmph,” said the Eddisian, and walked away.

  Sounis slunk out of the room, avoiding a sympathetic glance from the magus. Passing the food in the dining hall, he snagged a roll and hurried on to catch up with Eugenides, wondering, even as he did so, why he bothered.

  Sounis drew closer once they both were outside, but slowed when he saw his sparring partner was closing in on Eugenides as well. The man said something to the king that made him turn in Sounis’s direction. Sounis knew he would only look silly if he backed away and forced himself to continue his approach, arriving in time to hear the small Eddisian say, “That one should go back to the basics,” before he stalked away like a particularly officious little rooster.

  Flushed, and knowing it, Sounis fell into step with the king of Attolia and glared at the ground. “You might have mentioned this charade you had planned beforehand,” he said stiffly, his irritation overcoming his reserve.

  “Couldn’t,” Gen said coolly. “I needed you on the edge, looking slightly sick.”

  Sounis knew that his mind sometimes worked like a pig stuck in mud, but at other times conclusions seemed to strike like lightning, one bolt after another. He realized that Eugenides was growing more remote, not less, and almost in the same instant that he would never see any sign of his old friend if all he did was wait patiently for it. If the king of Attolia was more than just his ally, there was one sure way to find out. He stuffed the bread into his mouth and dropped his practice sword. He slid one foot around Eugenides’s ankle, and using both hands, as well as his greater mass, he sent him flying.

  It was immensely satisfying. Eugenides crashed into his attendants, who went stumbling in turn, a mass of windmilling arms and falling bodies as they tried to catch the king, who was making no effort to save himself. He’d dropped his own practice sword and had his arms tucked in where his hook would do no accidental damage. He slipped through their clutching hands like a fish.

  Sounis stood very still, his hands well away from his body, surrounded, as he’d anticipated, by weapons that were very real and all pointed toward him. Eugenides levered himself up on his elbows, appearing stunned. After a moment he lay back down again and began to laugh. He was uncooperative as his crouching attendants tried to lift him. They managed to pull him to a seated position, but he waved them away. With a nod, he dismissed the swords back to their sheaths. “Just what makes you think you can get away with that?” he asked the young man standing over him with a butter-won’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression incongruous on his scarred face.

  “I am Sounis,” his friend answered, and offered a hand to help him up.

  Arms around each other, the kings of Sounis and Attolia walked back toward the palace. The magus, following some distance behind, watched with pleasure and the happy anticipation of carrying the news to Eddis.

  “That was a compliment, you know,” said Eugenides.

  “What was?”

  “What Procivitus said. He wouldn’t have suggested you go back to basics if he didn’t think you were worth training.”

  “I didn’t realize.”

  “I know you didn’t, you idiot. There’s no time for the basics, really, but if you’d like, he’d be happy to train with you while you’re here.”

  Sounis hesitated. “I think it might kill me.”

  Attolis laughed. “I’ll tell him that you will wait
for him in the morning.”

  When they’d gone a little farther, Attolis slipped out from under Sounis’s arm. “It might be beneficial to sow a little ambiguity. Really, there is very little hope that I will be able to play this trick on Melheret twice, but will you go on from here alone?”

  They parted ways, and the magus and Sounis, led by Attolis’s attendant Hilarion, made their way back to their rooms.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “SOPHOS, you sleep with a knife under your pillow? I’m hurt.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Sounis, blinking, afraid that he had made contact with his wild swing.

  “I was joking. Wake up the rest of the way, would you?”

  “Gen, it’s the middle of the night.”

  “I know,” said the king of Attolia.

  Sounis tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes. He was sitting up in his bed. The sky was still entirely dark, and he couldn’t have been asleep for long. He suspected that he had just dropped off. The bare knife was still in his hand, he realized, and he rooted under his pillow for the sheath.

  “Don’t you trust my palace security?”

  “Yes, of course,” Sounis said, trying to think of some other reason besides mistrust to sleep with a knife. He heard Eugenides laugh.

  “My queen and I sleep with a matched set under our pillows, as well as handguns in pockets on the bedposts. Don’t be embarrassed.”

  “Gen, what are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?” Sounis asked.

  “Going out of my mind,” said Eugenides promptly. “At least I am on the verge of going out of my mind.” Sounis could just make him out in the darkness as he dropped into the chair across the room. “If I don’t get away from the pernicious attentions of my attendants, the rivalry between my palace physician and Eddis’s, and the need to refrain from pushing certain members of my court down stairs, I am going to be a very bad king indeed. Come out with me, Sophos.”

  “The magus,” said Sounis, thinking that his minister probably wouldn’t approve.

  “He won’t even know you’re gone, I promise.”

  Sounis followed Gen through Attolia’s palace as he had once followed him through the much grimmer stronghold of her fortress on the Seperchia River. This time they were not escaping prisoners, but Sounis had to remind himself of that because there was more than a hint of escaping in the proceedings.

  Gen avoided every posted guard. He arrived at intersections of hallways just as they moved away, slipping behind them with no more than a few feet to spare. He led the way down servants’ passages and narrow staircases that were hidden behind knobless doors that matched the paneling so flawlessly that even knowing they were there, Sounis wasn’t sure if he could find them again. He was hopelessly lost.

  They reached a small courtyard just inside the outer wall of the palace, with a gate and an inevitable guard, and Sounis balked at last. The guard stood in the very center of the archway, facing out. There was a low doorway opening to his right that would lead to a guardroom holding at least one more man, but Eugenides blithely set out across the open ground. Sounis set his heels and stopped. Eugenides could not possibly make his way past the guard unseen. It was ludicrous even to think of it. Sounis held his breath, knowing that at any moment the guard would catch a glimpse from the corner of his eye, or that god-sent nudge would come that causes a man to turn when someone is sneaking up behind him.

  The guard would turn, Sounis thought. At any moment. And he did.

  “Your Majesty.”

  “Aris,” said the king of Attolia, and flipped a coin into the air. It dropped into the guard’s open palm and disappeared into his purse. The guard resumed his position, and the king passed by.

  After digging through his own purse, Sounis put a coin more clumsily into the same hand and followed Attolis out of the palace.

  “You bastard,” said Sounis wearily. “I don’t know why I don’t stab you here in this alley so I can be the annux over Sounis and Attolia.” They were twisting through the narrowest of passages, with Eugenides still in the lead, turning on what seemed to be a whim from one walkway to the next.

  “Well, the stabbing would be unkind,” said Eugenides, “but you can have the annux part with my goodwill.”

  “Not Attolia’s.”

  “True,” said the king. “Better not stab me.”

  “Gen,” Sounis said, and halted. Attolis, who had already lightly descended a crooked stair, turned back at the bottom and looked up at him.

  “Yes?”

  Sounis didn’t know what to say.

  “She cut off my hand?” Gen asked.

  It was exactly what Sounis was thinking, but he said, “Did you know? When she imprisoned us after you stole Hamiathes’s Gift. Did you love her then?”

  Eugenides laughed and seemed so at ease that Sounis found himself laughing with him. “No,” said Gen. “I wrote down exactly what I thought for my cousin who is Eddis. I meant to send it to the magus and he might have passed it on to you, but for some reason I never did.” He looked around as if the reason for this lapse might be found in the graffiti on the nearby wall. “It may be lost by now. At any rate, the answer is no, I did not know.”

  “When then?” asked Sounis, coming slowly down the stairs. He remembered meeting Eddis and the first time she had smiled. “Or do you not know?”

  “I know exactly. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen’s Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn’t funny anymore.” He rubbed his chest, as if at a remembered pain. “I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite.”

  Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy. “You exiled him?” He had heard of the destruction of the house of Erondites.

  “Happily, not before we resolved our differences,” said Eugenides. He added more seriously, “I would have exiled him even if we hadn’t.”

  “I understand,” said Sounis, and he did. “Where are we going?”

  “To a nice tavern where they have no idea who I am, so pull that cloak a little tighter over your fine clothes. I don’t want them asking awkward questions. I just want a chance to have a moment without my dear companions or, gods forbid, any physicians.”

  “They seemed a little unfriendly with each other,” said Sounis.

  The king of Attolia sighed. “They purport to be worried about my health.”

  They had left the narrow alleys and were walking along the broader Sacred Way, and Eugenides kept his voice low. Sounis suspected that everyone in the palace worried about Eugenides’s health.

  “I am nothing but a bone of contention,” said the patient bitterly.

  Sounis was unsympathetic. “That seems unlike Galen,” he said.

  “Well, you try insinuating that he’s a mountain bumpkin with the medical knowledge of the village butcher and see how he takes it,” said Eugenides. “My oh-so-timid palace physician turns out to be quite ferocious when he thinks someone is trespassing on his medical ground.”

  “That also seems unlike Galen,” said Sounis.

  “My fault entirely,” Eugenides admitted. “I asked to see Galen while he was here with Eddis and touched off a bout of professional jealousy.”

  Sounis snickered.

  “Your time will come, puppy. You just wait,” said Eugenides. He turned again into a narrow side street. “There it is,” he said, “under the lantern.”

  The tavern had a sign of painted grapes just barely illuminated by the dim lamp. Sounis went down stone steps and ducked through a low door underneath the sign. The taproom was no better lit, and he stepped carefully around scattered tables to a booth against a wall where he an
d Eugenides could sit opposite each other and still each have a view of the door.

  By unspoken agreement they paused in their conversation until they were sitting with the high walls of the booth on either side.

  “And your attendants?” Sounis asked.

  “Every one another Ambiades,” said Gen, referring to the traitor who had betrayed them both when they followed the magus in pursuit of Hamiathes’s Gift. “I’d had some hope for Philologos,” Gen admitted, “but Sejanus won that hand neatly.”

  Sounis had been thinking of Ambiades. “He would have been a better man under different circumstances.”

  Gen looked at him. “True enough,” he said. “But does a good man let his circumstances determine his character?”

  Sounis couldn’t argue with that. “Perhaps you can bring out better in them?”

  Eugenides shook his head. “I pulled the carpet out from under them very thoroughly. They will not cross me, but they won’t love me, either. I am not Eddis. People do not hand me their hearts.”

  Sounis wondered. He would have given Eugenides his heart on a toothpick, if asked. He remembered Ion’s obvious wince at being rated somewhat less significant to Gen than his boots.

  The barmaid came to the table, and Gen ordered wine.

  When she was gone, Sounis asked if Attolis paid his way out of his own palace often, but he needled to no effect.

  “Oh, that’s not a bribe to get out the gate. It’s compensation for the rating he’ll get from the captain of my guard. Teleus hates it when I go out, and he’s going to be sullen in the morning, but I’ve given him enough ground. The circus this morning was largely at his insistence. My father and Procivitus would have served my purposes well enough, but Teleus insisted his guard be involved. He does not like them to be ashamed of me.” Eugenides shrugged. “So. Melheret will already know I was making a fool of him, and I won’t be able to trick him again, but Teleus must be appeased.”