A Conspiracy of Kings (26 page)

“The magus?” I asked urgently.

“Is here, as you wished,” said my father, and I
sighed in relief.

“Get Akretenesh to his rooms and fetch a doctor for
him,” I told my father.

I turned to give orders to clear out the bodies, but
Akretenesh’s thready voice called me back.

“Your Majesty,” he said.

“Yes?” I answered, ever polite.

Akretenesh looked remarkably smug for someone being carried away
with a bullet hole in him. “I rather thought that I could
persuade your barons to accept a replacement more to my liking. How
unfortunate that won’t work, just yet. What will you do about
my men, who will no doubt be marching up the port road very
soon?”

“I knew you would hear that I was coming to Brimedius. I
knew you would attack me on the way, and I arranged to have the
Attolians and Eddisians scatter and appear to retreat,” I
said, rather smug myself. “They made their way here, in small
groups, to hide in the hills long before anyone was watching for
them. My magus went to explain this to my father and came down with
him from the Melenze pass.”

I’d stayed in Brimedius, hoping to give them time to take
cover in the hills. Then I had hurried through the meetings in
Elisa as fast as I decently could. There is only so long an army
can stay hidden and only so long it can live on nuts and dried meat
and still fight when it is called upon. It is not a ruse that would
have worked anywhere but in the sacred precinct where the woods are
uninhabited.

“The magus, with the Attolians and the Eddisians, is above
the road from Tas-Elisa. They will turn back your thousand soldiers
easily.”

“Aaah,” said Akretenesh, part enlightenment and part
pain, “but there aren’t a thousand. They are closer to
ten thousand in number.”

My polite expression froze solid. “Ten
thousand?”

“Yes, they came in by ship in the last few
days.”

No wonder the bastard looked so smug. I’d just assaulted
an inviolate ambassador and started a war with a piddling company
of bow and pikemen against his army of ten thousand justifiably
enraged Medes.

“Why—” Akretenesh gasped a little and started
again. “Why don’t you join me in my rooms a little
later, and we will discuss this unfortunate turn of
affairs?”

Malicious son of a bitch, I thought, over my dead body am I
discussing anything with you.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll come right up
whenever you’re ready.”

“Ten thousand!” I shouted at the walls, back in the
room with the wooden shutters, now open, so that anyone could hear
me, on the porch or probably across the compound. “That
arrogant
bastard landed
ten thousand
men
at Tas-Elisa. In my port! Mine!” When I was a
child and playmates snatched my toys out of my hands, I tended to
smile weakly and give in. Years later I was acting the way I should
have as a child. Probably not the most mature behavior for a king,
but I was still cursing as I swung around to find a delegation of
barons in the doorway behind me. My father, Baron Comeneus, and
Baron Xorcheus among them.

They
thought it was how a king behaved.

I ran my fingers through my hair and tried to pursue a more
reasonable line of thought, but more reasonable thoughts made me
angry again. Armies of ten thousand men don’t just spring
from the ground at the tip of a wine cup. It takes time to move
them from wherever they came from and time to unload them from
ships. There’s space to consider, and logistics. The land
around the port had to be wall-to-wall men. Someone had to have
made a plan to feed them, and supplies had to have been coming in
for weeks. Some of them, no doubt, had been hidden within the
preparations for the meet by Hanaktos, but he hadn’t done it
on his own. There were more people sitting in the meet, and some of
them maybe in the room with me, who had known that the Mede was
bringing an army. And many, many more of them must have known once
Tas-Elisa filled to the brim with soldiers.

Not me. I didn’t have a clue.

Which means that my careful collection of
“information” from Nomenus over the previous week had
been a farce.

“Who knows anything about the ten thousand men at the
port?” No one volunteered any information. There was a
flicker of apprehension in Baron Xorcheus, but that wasn’t
enough. I knew he’d called for a regent, and I knew he was
overanxious. I didn’t know for certain why.

I remembered Polystrictes and his goats. I wasn’t sure if
I had a wolf or a dog, but I knew how to tell the difference. A dog
does what you tell it to.

“Basrus!” I shouted, and the barons and their men
looked at me confused.

“I want Hanaktos’s slaver. Find him and bring
him.”

I waved the rest of the people away and paced the room until the
slaver appeared at the door looking like a man who isn’t sure
if he’s under arrest.

“Majesty, I—”

“Later. Who knows about the army at Tas-Elisa?”

Basrus’s eyeballs rolled to one side, and before he said a
word, Baron Xorcheus decided all hope of concealment was lost.

“Hanaktos warned me to have all my people well away from
the port three days past. He said what the eyes don’t see the
heart doesn’t grieve over. That’s all I know myself.
Baron Statidoros knows more.”

I looked at Basrus, and he disappeared.

Baron Comeneus was staring at Xorcheus in outrage, reinforcing
my conviction in the amphitheater. He
hadn’t
known about the army. It was
Hanaktos who had been in charge.

Comeneus turned to me. I thought he was going to call for
Xorcheus’s head, but I was wrong. “Your Majesty, that
man,” he said, pointing out the door after Basrus, “is
an okloi! You cannot mean to send him to compel a baron!”

As if it mattered, here at what might well be the swirling drain
of Sounis’s history, whether or not Basrus was a landowner
and entitled to a vote on legal issues.

“You cannot mean to suggest that you would consider his
word—”

“Shut up,” I told him, and he stared at me
openmouthed. I stared back; not the boy he’d condescended to,
not my uncle’s inept heir, I, the king of Sounis. “I
may or may not survive as king, but if I am a puppet of the Medes,
at least I will know it. Go ask your brother what he knows of
Hanaktos’s plans, and then come back and tell me what he
said.”

I waved my hand to dismiss them all; I needed to be alone to
think. They didn’t move.
“Get
out!”
I shouted, and that had more effect.

Only my father stood his ground. He cleared his throat.
“The truce is broken. You need guards.”

He was right. Weapons were going to come out from any of a
hundred secret hiding places, and it would shortly be every baron
for himself.

I could trust my father and only a few others completely. I told
my father, “Our men will be our guards here. You will arrange
it?” He nodded. “Tell whoever you can that I am not
wiping any slates clean. I will hold people responsible for their
actions, now and in the future, but there will be, for every
transgression, a remedy in the next few days. Tell the council
that. Make sure they know that the future of the patronoi depends
on their service to me.”

Then I sent him away to arrange for more guards and to quell my
barons’ destructive tendency toward shortsightedness and
panic.

I paced until Basrus delivered Baron Statidoros, who spilled
every bean as fast he could spit words out of his mouth.

What I learned of the Mede army: they were infantry. No horse.
They were in ten companies of a thousand with a general and his
lieutenants. I didn’t recognize all the names, but one of
them had a name very similar to my ambassador’s and might
well have been a relative. I could count on him to be personally,
as well as professionally, unhappy with me.

Though he was trying to bluster his way through the moment,
Baron Statidoros was frightened, and he had good reason. He
didn’t have anything I needed, and we both knew it. His
patronid was not located somewhere strategic. He didn’t
control many men, and he didn’t have a fortune I could
“borrow” to help secure my throne.

He was a loyalist, he insisted. If only he’d known that I
was alive, that I was returning, etc. His protests might have been
convincing if he hadn’t made it clear earlier in the week
that he was Comeneus’s man. I didn’t believe for a
minute that he’d thought I was dead.

Baron Xorcheus had sent poor Statidoros as a sacrifice. Both
Statidoros and I knew that as well. His job was to give me just
enough information to strike at a few of the lower members of
Hanaktos’s conspiracy but not to betray its leaders. He would
take responsibility for the transgressions of others and be
condemned for it. Whether he was a volunteer who had a reward
coming or a victim caught between me and a threat of death from his
own side if he failed, I didn’t know, and I didn’t
really care. As this became more clear to him, he became more
frightened and unfortunately less coherent.

I had a fast-expiring period of grace, while my erstwhile
ambassador was having lead shot dug out of his shoulder. My barons
would be growing more anxious, and more stupid, with each passing
moment, and a message was no doubt already on its way to the port,
Tas-Elisa. The magus would stop any traveler on the road, and the
woods would be watched as well, but the hills that had hidden my
army for weeks would conceal, just as reliably, any number of Mede
emissaries. The message would go like water running downhill to the
general in charge of ten thousand Medes: The king of Sounis had
fired on his ambassador and seized the reins of government.

I knew whom I couldn’t trust, but outside of my father and
a few others, I didn’t know whom I could. I had to start
trusting some people, and I had to choose which. I had to decide
what to do about the army that was on its way, and I didn’t
have the information I needed and didn’t know how I could get
it. Basrus could do me only so much good. He could tell me whom
he’d seen work with Hanaktos, but not which of them might
still be useful to me now.

And then my worst nightmare arrived, weeping and wailing in the
doorway. Berrone. I had no idea where she had come from. And her
mother was with her, gods defend me. I hadn’t known that
either of them was in Elisa, and I was going to kill Nomenus, I
thought, kill him.

Berrone was content to stand in the doorway with her hair a wild
mess and her face streaming tears, but her mother, bowed over
obsequiously behind her, must have given her a pretty savage poke,
because Berrone suddenly flung herself at my feet, crying,
“Oh, my father, my dear father, how could you murder him and
betray me, who rescued you from, from, from—”

From your father, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I
looked down at her, and my conscience hit me from behind. The words
weren’t hers, but the tears were, and they were real tears.
Whatever Hanaktos had been to me, he’d been her father, and
I’d killed him.

“Berrone,” I said helplessly.

“What will become of us now, Great King?” said her
mother. “What will become of my poor daughter, betrayed
by—”

I didn’t even hear the rest, and my sympathy snuffed out
like a candle dropped in a well.

“Get out, all of you,” I said to the rest of the
room. “Berrone, get up. You can sit on the couch.”

Baron Statidoros, looking as if a god had descended from the
ceiling to rescue him, scuttled through the door without another
word. Everyone else bowed and exited as well, except for
Berrone’s mother, who was busy trying to accuse me of
indecent intentions.

“My daughter,” she was saying, “a chaste
beauty, whom you have violently stripped of her father’s
protection—”

I stepped around Berrone, who was still on the floor, and
advanced toward her mother, and I think my intentions were
perfectly clear because she backed up hastily.

“Great King!” she cheeped. “Mercy! Mercy on a
poor widow and her only daughter,” she cried as she backed
through the doorway.

I returned to Berrone and lifted her up, guiding her by the arm
to a nearby couch, where I sat beside her.

“Berrone, I am sorry,” I said.

“Everyone’s been so angry at me,” she sobbed.
“They’ve yelled at me and been so mean. They sent
Sylvie away. And now Mother says that it’s my fault that my
father is dead and you have to marry me. Will you?”

“Will I
what
?”

“Please?” Berrone asked pathetically. “Mother
says you have to or she’ll never stop being angry at me, and
we’ll live on the street and I won’t have any pretty
dresses and all my kittens will be drowned. Please?” She
wept.

I almost wept myself.

“Berrone, it isn’t your fault that your father is
dead. That’s his fault, and my fault, but not
yours.”

“It is my fault,” said Berrone, sniffing. “My
mother said everything is my fault. She found out that I paid for
you in the market and that you were at the megaron all the time
they were looking for you, and then they found out I let you go,
and my f-f-father said I spoiled all their plans, because he was
supposed to be the one to rescue you. I don’t see why it
mattered if I rescued you instead, even if I didn’t know it
was you, and I didn’t, you know,” she said earnestly.
“I had no idea that was you. But Mother was angry and said I
wouldn’t be able to marry you after all and be queen like
they’d promised.”

“Like they had what?” I raised my voice without
meaning to.

Berrone wailed.

I patted her on the back, as a number of things became clear. Of
course Hanaktos wanted me to marry his daughter. What a perfect
plan. First encourage a revolt against my uncle, then abduct me,
and then rescue me, and then foist his conveniently beautiful
daughter into my arms because, surely, any grateful young man would
be eager to marry the bird-witted Berrone. What a nightmare. I
could now guess at the source of recent tensions between Akretenesh
and Hanaktos. The Mede would have been happier to bring Eddis under
the imperial thumb as well, but Hanaktos had wanted his daughter on
the throne.