The King of Attolia (15 page)

“Y
OUR
Majesty,” Costis whispered.

Eugenides opened his eyes and turned his head on the pillow. Costis was on his knees by the bed. The room was dark. The only light came in the open door of the bedchamber past the guards standing there at attention. They’d let Costis go through unchallenged, as though they hadn’t seen him. They knew why he was here.

The king blinked.

“Your Majesty, I am sorry to wake you, but I think only you can help.”

“What time is it?” the king asked, hoarsely.

“It’s the dog watch, an hour until dawn.”

“Early, then,” the king murmured, “not late.”

“Your Majesty, she’s going to have them all executed.”

“All who?” His eyes were bright with fever.

“The captain, my friend Aris, and his entire squad. She had them arrested yesterday afternoon after she left
here and said they will be executed in the morning.”

“In an hour?”

“Your Majesty, she has promoted the senior lieutenant to the captain’s position, but the men are saying they won’t serve under him.” He rushed on, “If you can stop her, Your Majesty, please, can you? Aris didn’t know the danger, I swear to you. He thought the garden was safe.”

“Why didn’t you come sooner?”

“You were asleep. They gave you lethium.”

With effort, the king dragged his hand free of the sheets. “I remember,” he said. “I didn’t want it. It always makes me feel like I’ve been dead.” He rubbed his face. “Has she sent for them?”

“Not yet,” said Costis.

“Ah.”

“Your Majesty, please.”

“Costis, I can’t publicly reverse her orders.”

“But she would listen to you,” Costis pleaded.

“Privately, she might. If there were time. But she’s angry, Costis. I knew she would be.”

Costis dropped his head. He had seen so many impossible things in a day, he had hoped for one more.

“Wait,” said the king. “Just wait.” He twisted his head. “Is there water? Lethium leaves you dry as a bone.”

Costis poured him a cupful, and then refilled it twice when the king emptied it. Eugenides had hauled
himself, wincing, to a more upright position to drink. He sighed heavily and stared into the invisible distances. He asked at last, “Do you know any archaic?”

Costis almost flew down the stairs and through the turning passages of the palace. He relied on the early hour to keep his way clear. He cut through the kitchens, escorted on his way by the grumbling and complaints of the kitchen folk already awake and at their work, to reach the stairs that led down to the queen’s prison, only to be brought up short by the deliberate shuffling of the prison keeper. Costis forced himself to match the man’s strides. There was no point getting ahead of him. The prison keeper had the keys, and like all the prison keepers, he was jealous of his power here in Her Majesty’s dungeon. He would make no haste for a queen’s guardsman.

Costis waited while the keeper jingled through the keys and slowly unlocked the cell. Then, his patience exhausted, he wrenched open the iron-barred door. He saw Aris first, sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up and his arms locked around them. Excess chain lay in tangled loops around his feet. He raised his head to look at Costis, then dropped it again and reached out a hand to touch the man lying beside him gently on the shoulder. “It’s time, Legarus,” he said softly.

Legarus was crying. The rest were dry-eyed, but Legarus was crying. No wonder, Costis thought. It was
Legarus who had been the ostensible cause of their sudden promotion, an arrangement by some lover in the palace, everyone had assumed. But the promotion hadn’t been arranged for Legarus’s benefit. Nepotism had only been a disguise. Someone had wanted on duty that day a squad of neophytes, who, in their inexperience, could more easily be distracted from their duty. His lover had used Legarus and left him to die.

Costis turned to Teleus, who was getting to his feet. “There is no hope, Costis,” Teleus said flatly, seeing the look in his eye.

“There is,” Costis insisted.

“No,” Teleus stubbornly refused. “I should never have agreed to promote Aristogiton’s squad. I would not have done it for the queen’s bodyguard, and I shouldn’t have done it for the king’s.”

“The squad you promoted? They also die?”

“They also failed.”

Costis wanted to seize him by the shoulders and shake him. “And the Guard? She has promoted Enkilis, you know. The men won’t follow him.”

“They have pledged their swords to the queen.”

“They aren’t just swords. They are men. They follow you.” Without you, their discipline will fail, maybe their loyalty. They are the keystone of the army. You are the keystone of the Guard. The queen cannot afford to lose you.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” Teleus asked.

“You have to stop her.”

“She knows it, too, Costis,” Teleus said sadly. “Even if I could stop her, who am I to do so? It is her decision.”

“What if she is making a mistake?”

“Who am I to question the queen’s judgment?”

“She is human like us all, Captain.” Costis remembered how she had felt in his arms the afternoon before. “She must make mistakes sometimes.”

“Oh, yes,” said Teleus bitterly. “Rarely, but we are all living with the fruits of her greatest error. Still, we cannot remake her decisions. She is the queen.”

“Then ask her to reconsider. Just that. Ask her to take the time to be sure it is the right decision.”

“How?” asked Teleus.

The throne room was bright with lights in every sconce. The chandeliers were great wheels of light suspended in the air. The crowd was thick, though the day had not yet begun. No one would miss a chance to see the Captain of the Guard sent to his execution. It was relatively easy for Costis to slip in and stand anonymously near the door. The king had warned him to deliver his message to Teleus and then go directly to his rooms to wait there for the storm to pass, but Costis couldn’t go yet. He wasn’t sure what Teleus had decided to do. Too soon, the prison keeper had swung the door open and the rest of the jailers had assembled to escort
the prisoners to the queen. There had been no more time to convince Teleus. Quickly, Costis had repeated the phrase in archaic and translated it into the demotic. He had no idea if Teleus knew any archaic or if he would be able to remember an unfamiliar sequence of sounds at a moment like this. Costis had no idea why this phrase, the invocation of Hephestia used in the spring festival in Eddis, might remind the queen of past mistakes. He only knew that the king had promised that it would. All Costis could do was follow the prisoners and their keepers and then step away as the prisoners were led into the throne room. He would wait until he knew if his friend was going to die. If Aris was sentenced to die, Costis wouldn’t leave him.

On her throne, Attolia held every eye. The empty throne beside her, which she had occupied only a few short months before, might have been invisible, might never have existed, for all of its significance to the people in her presence.

She looked down at the men before her. Only Teleus could speak for them. He looked from left to right like a man hesitating before he chooses his way. Then he raised his face to the queen. “
Oxe Harbrea Sacrus Vax Dragga Onus Savonus Sophos At Ere
.”

The room darkened as a sudden morning draft swept through the open windows near the ceiling and blew through the chandeliers, guttering their flames. In
the flickering light, the queen seemed to swell with rage, seemed to burn with it like a flame, simultaneously motionless and ceaselessly moving. The fabric of her robe wrinkled across her knees very slightly as the hands holding it clenched into fists. Costis drew a breath, sucking at air that seemed too solid to inhale.

“What?” said the queen, daring him to repeat it.

“We invoke the Great Goddess in our hour of need for her wisdom and her mercy,” Teleus said in the demotic.

“
Ere
translates as love, a rather ruthless love, not mercy, Teleus. The Great Goddess of Eddis is not known for her mercy.”

“My Queen,” Teleus began.

“Your Majesty,” snarled Attolia. Everyone in the room recoiled, excepting only Teleus.

“No,” he said. “Relius was right and I was wrong. You are My Queen. Even though you cut my head from my shoulders, with my last breath as a noose tightens, to the last beat of my heart if I hang from the walls of the palace, you are My Queen. That I have failed you does not change my love for you or my loyalty.”

“Yet you prefer his mercy to my justice.” She meant the king. She knew where the message had come from.

“No—” Teleus shook his head dumbly, held his hands out in supplication. “I only—” but she cut him off.

“Have it then. Free him.” She snapped out the order
to the prison keepers. “Free them all.” Then she rose from the throne and stormed for the door, leaving behind her attendants, her guard, all of them struck motionless by her anger.

The guards at the door hesitated, unsure if the queen meant to leave the room without her entourage.

“Open the door!” she shouted, and they leapt to obey. She swept through the doorway and disappeared down the hall beyond. Her attendants and her guard came to life, and streamed behind. The rattle of chains and the crash as they dropped to the floor was the only sound as the crowd, like water released from a smashed jug, dispersed in every direction, through every door except the one the queen had used, everyone seeking urgent business elsewhere.

Costis, packed in with the crowd, turned and hurried off himself. Not in the battle for Thegmis, or even in the garden with the assassins, had he been so frightened. The queen had passed him, so close he’d felt the stir of air, and he had guessed that if she had turned her head, only a little, and met his eyes, he might have died right there, so potent was her anger.

Without stopping and without speaking to anyone, he went like a badger to its hole. He hurried down the stone hallway of the barracks and slipped through the narrow doorway into his quarters. He threw himself down on the cot, leaning his back against the wall and pulling his feet up like a child afraid of nightmares
under the bed. He wrapped his arms around his legs and sat. After a time he yawned. The building around him was quiet. There was an occasional sound of footsteps in the stairwell and in the courtyard outside, but nothing out of the ordinary. No shouting, nor the tramp of feet mustering out to arrest one small, unimportant guardsman. He yawned again. He had been awake all night. He rested his head against the wall and fell asleep sitting up.

Hunger and a stiff neck woke him hours later. He stretched painfully and decided that sooner or later he would have to leave his room or starve. He also had better check the duty schedule. Officially, he was still enjoying his three-day leave to go hunting with Aristogiton, but emergencies might have changed the schedule, and if he hadn’t been arrested already, maybe he wouldn’t be. Maybe his part in the play enacted in the throne room would be overlooked in the moment and forgotten in the future. He could only hope so. He went to the mess hall.

It was almost empty. Tight little groups of men huddled together, talking in voices that carried only as a murmur. Costis sliced himself some bread and cheese and helped himself to a cup full of olives and ladled the day’s stew into a bowl. He piled the bread on the stew, the cheese on the bread, balanced the cup of olives on top of the cheese, and still had a hand free to collect a
cup of watered wine. He sat by himself. Almost before he had unstacked his meal, he was surrounded.

“Any news?” the men settling on the benches around him asked.

“I’ve been in my room since dawn,” Costis said.

“So we have news for you,” someone said.

“Maybe,” said Costis. “Teleus and the others were freed. I know that much.”

“Were you there?”

“You weren’t on duty?”

“I was in the crowd.”

“Aeeie, that was a stupid place to be.”

“So,” Costis agreed. “I won’t do that again.”

“You went back to your quarters? You haven’t heard anything else?”

“Like what?” Costis asked warily.

“Like the fight between the king and the queen.”

Costis put his cup down. In whispers they told him the news.

The queen had gone directly from the throne room to the king’s apartments. “I would see My Lord Attolis,” she demanded angrily. Never had she addressed him before by his name as king.

“I am here,” he had answered, stepping into the doorway wearing a nightshirt and robe, rumpled and pale, but resolute. He had been waiting for her. He’d leaned against the doorway for support, while the
roomful of perplexed attendants scattered like chaff trapped in a small space with a high wind.

As the queen raged at him, he responded, first calmly, then with his own heat. “Is there no one that you will see punished?” the queen shouted. “Are you so fond of Teleus now that you preserve his life at all costs?”

“I only asked you to reconsider.”

“There is nothing to reconsider!”

“You know why I need him.”

“Not anymore,” the queen declared with finality.

The king ignored the finality. “Now more than ever,” he insisted.

“He has failed—”

“That is not entirely his fault!”

“Then you will unmake my decisions?” Attolia dared him to try.

“You said I could,” Eugenides flatly replied.

Pushed too far, the queen lashed out. The king made no effort to avoid the blow. His head snapped around, and his forehead struck the doorjamb. He staggered and caught himself. By the time he opened his eyes, she was at the door and then she was gone.

Before his attendants were released from their dumbstruck paralysis, he had stepped through the door and swung it closed. It slammed with a report like gunshot, and they heard the tumblers of the lock fall into place.

Sejanus attempted a cutting comment, but it missed
its mark in the uneasy confusion, and its edge blunted on a sullen unanticipated sympathy for the king.

“Yesterday, I thought he loved her,” Philologos said plaintively.