“Stop,” said the king, and Xikos paused in disbelief. None of the attendants seemed to have been aware of the great presence in the room. What they made of our reactions, I don’t know.

“Your Majesty,” said Ion sternly. “You cannot mean to keep a traitor among us.”

“Your tune has changed.”

“I was mistaken, Your Majesty. Send him away.”

“So his grandfather can kill him?”

“It is no more than he deserves,” claimed Dionis.

“Tell Erondites to find another heir,” suggested Philologos, and Hilarion agreed.

“No one in the barons’ council will object,” he said.

“He is a traitor,” said Xikos, which was ironic coming from a man who, if not a traitor, was certainly no friend of the king.

I think it was Xikos’s words that sealed the decision in the king’s mind. “Keep him,” he said, adding to me, “Out of my sight would be better, Pheris, but I realize how that would turn out.”

It would turn out a murder, I thought. I didn’t dare meet anyone’s eye. All of them were thinking of their secrets and how many of them I knew. Even Hilarion and Ion. Even Philologos was embarrassed to think of the things I’d overheard.

Into the angry silence, it was Ion who spoke. “Pheris will sit in the waiting room with us, Your Majesty. Very quietly, I am sure. And at night, he will sleep with me.”

I flicked a glance up at him. He looked at me with such dislike that I quickly looked down again, but he was promising the king to keep me unharmed, and I was grateful.

“Come,” said Ion, when the king said nothing. A hand on my shoulder, he guided me to a corner, where I sat on a bench against the wall. My feet dangled. The king went into his bedchamber alone and closed the door. It grew increasingly uncomfortable, but I sat, as Ion had promised, very quietly.

Others in the room were not so silent.

“The king should kill him,” said Xikos.

“The king isn’t interested in doing favors for Erondites,” Verimius said.

“All of them should be killed,” said Medander.

I thought of my mother and my brother and sisters back at the villa. I considered my uncle Sejanus, still under arrest. He’d manipulated the other attendants into behavior they were now ashamed of. He worked with the men who’d tried to assassinate the king. It was a wonder to me that he hadn’t been executed long since. I thought of my brother Juridius, also a traitor. I thought of Emtis and what I had done and could not deny that the Erondites were a corrupt family.

“If the king wants him, he stays,” said Ion. “We all know why you want him gone, Medander. Stop being a cheat and you won’t have to worry about what secrets the little monster knows.”

The king did not leave his rooms that evening. Food was sent up from the kitchens. The attendants drank and played cards in the evening, and then Ion told me to collect my bedding and bring it to his room. Ion’s room was no larger than my closet, but it had a window that looked out on the world, not onto an airshaft. It had little in it besides a bed, a table, and a chair, and seemed spacious without racks of clothes. On the table was an altar housing a row of tiny gods. I wondered which they were, but Ion flicked my ear painfully and pointed to the corner by the door.

“Sleep there,” he said.

Cowed, I went to make a nest of my blankets and lie down.

The king might have bowed to the will of the gods and allowed me to remain in the palace. He had not forgiven me. I trailed after Ion, going only where he chose to go, not daring to sneak away, even to my little closet, much less out of the apartments, for fear someone would pitch me down the stairs and expect the king to be happy to hear of my death. There were no more unsupervised hours in the garden. People were careful what they said when I was near, looking significantly in my direction, putting their heads close together to speak in low voices.

The king accused Erondites of being behind the burning of the grain wagons, but my grandfather roundly denied all knowledge of the ambush. He pointed out that he had not invited Juridius to the plays, and asked why the king was not accusing my grandfather who was Susa of treason. My brother, when questioned, refused to implicate either Susa or Erondites. He claimed that a stranger in the street had asked him for the information and paid him to get it. It was an obvious lie fed to him by my grandfather or perhaps my mother. He was too young to be pressed for the truth, and they both knew it. In the end, the king had to admit that there was no proof to tie Erondites to the crime, and he was forced to withdraw his accusation.

Erondites had successfully defied the king, but it was not without cost. The king exiled Juridius. Though he was just a child, he was summoned to the capital under guard and put on a ship under the direction of the captain to be taken to the Greater Peninsula. My mother’s brief reconciliation with her father was over, and the inheritance of the house of Erondites was again in doubt.

Wrapped in my blankets, listening to Ion’s even breathing as he slept, I imagined the soldiers arriving at the Villa Suterpe. Had Marina fought them when they came for her beloved son, as Melisande had fought for me? Had Juridius had any warning? Had he had time to say goodbye? Did he even know, when he was taken aboard the ship, that he was going to Ferria, where my uncle Dite would take him in?

I sensed, but didn’t fully understand, the rising tensions around me. With the end of the war with Eddis and Sounis and her marriage to Eugenides, Attolia had been, for the first time in her rule, a popular queen. Now her popularity, and the king’s, was leaching away. I knew that there were protests in the city as food prices rose. Because I sat through the meetings with Ion, I could have told you how much the improvement to the fort at Thegmis cost, but not what the spending of that money meant to people already sick of being taxed to pay for armies and weapons and fortifications. I was focused on my own woes because I was a child and because no one had ever encouraged me to do otherwise.

Diplomatic ties were straining, and not just with the Mede ambassador, who continued to pretend the emperor had no plans to invade. None of the ambassadors from the Continent would admit what everyone knew to be true, not even Fordad, at least not publicly. He was welcome in private audiences with the king and queen, where he frankly discussed the danger, but the official Brael position was that there was no cause for concern. Everyone who wasn’t a fool knew the Medes were coming, and still there were those making jokes about Cenna’s play and blaming the king for the queen’s preparations. It was Attolia who knew how to plan for a war.

There was talk of new attendants and the retirement of the current ones. With a few exceptions, the queen changed her attendants fairly often. Officially, it was meant to spread the honor of the appointment to different families. Unofficially, it prevented any one of the attendants from becoming too influential. Phresine and Imenia, her senior attendants, were both very careful never to use their closeness to the queen to their advantage. Iolanthe and Ileia were honored for their service and sent home with expensive gifts. They were replaced with two younger women, Caeta and Silla, who both became famous later, but for reasons unrelated to this account.

When I heard the king might change attendants, I prayed that he would not turn me out. I had no home to go to; my grandfather and my mother both wanted me dead. I hoped the king might send Xikos away, and I wasn’t the only one, but it was Medander who was excused, along with Verimius. I heard the queen press the king again about making his cousin Cleon an attendant, but nothing came of it. Instead, three new attendants, Polemus, Motis, and Drusis, squeezed into the space Verimius and Medander had left.