Exasperated, Relius picked up the pen again and wrote out the symbols for addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, using simple equations to make their meaning clear. Then he left me alone.

By the time I turned my head, wincing from the shooting pains in my neck and all over my body, I found he’d retired to his armchair and that Teleus, the captain of the guard, had joined him. They were sharing a bowl of olives and watching me. Teleus put down a wine cup and rose to give me a hand as I got down from the stool.

“You’re already late for the king’s dressing,” Relius told me as I rocked back and forth. “Go visit the stable master, and be sure you return to the royal apartments by way of the gardens.”

Still dazed, I did as he said. The stable master, pleased to see me, introduced me to the pony he’d found for me to ride. A beautiful little mare, mostly a light gray, with darker spots sprinkled on her haunches. If anyone in the king’s apartments wondered where I’d been, they were answered by the strong smell of horse when I returned.

Relius did not understand my fascination with patterns and numbers, but he waited patiently during my next lesson as I arranged stones and counted them and worked out the use of the symbols he’d shown me. Square patterns were easy to represent with his equations, but I could not find one to fit my triangles.

“I will send a letter to a colleague for further instruction,” he promised, “if you will deign to return to the rest of today’s lesson.”

Relius was not always so patient, and I was not always so cooperative. I had a burning desire to learn to read, but much less devotion to my handwriting, content with any mark that vaguely resembled the shape I was trying to form.

“Those numbers,” said Relius, “could have been written by pigeons tracking through the ink.”

I shrugged. I knew what they were meant to be.

He shook his head. “This is your voice,” he said, tapping the page.

I was the only one interested in my numbers and I already knew what they were.

“Take that idiotic look off your face, or I will beat you with a stick,” Relius snapped, and I flinched.

He handed me the pen. “Try again,” he said. My best efforts were still bird tracks and spills and drips. In hindsight, I was no more patient than my tutor, and as my frustration grew, my hand obeyed me less until, ultimately, I knocked the inkpot over.

“Get out.” Thoroughly fed up, Relius dismissed me, and I went.

Unwilling to return to the king’s waiting room, blinking away tears, I walked to the gardens instead. Working my way into the secret space I had hollowed out inside a hedge, I crouched for a while, feeling unfairly treated. Only when it was time to help dress the king did I go back to the palace. It would have been unthinkable to exercise this kind of freedom earlier, but now I did it without a thought, slipping away for hours to watch the ants and their anthills, the bees in the kitchen garden coming and going from the stacks of clay pipes that housed their hives. If there were still a few unpleasant people who might wish me ill, I only needed to avoid them, and that was not hard.

Relius was conciliatory the next day. He apologized for his temper. “I will make an effort to do better,” he said, “and will expect the same from you. Are we agreed? Yes? Good. Because I don’t have a stick to hit you with, and I can’t be bothered to find one.”

He was joking, I was almost certain.

“Start with the numbers,” he said. “You like those.”

After that, I began to produce slightly more legible figures and letters. But I had a long, weary way to go, and I was still unconvinced it was worth the effort.

From Relius, I learned the history of Attolia, from the arrival of the Invaders to the rise of the oligarchy, and the way the great baronial families had worked together to weaken the monarchy and divide power among themselves. Relius explained how the barons’ agreement had been broken when one of them had engaged his heir to marry the princess Irene; how the other families had been angry, but outmaneuvered; and how they’d been outmaneuvered again when the queen poisoned her first bridegroom and took the throne for herself. He did not go into details on his own contributions.

He did show me my own family’s part. “This chart shows the queen’s family, and here, the Erondites. It’s a distant connection, but many of those with closer connections were killed during the civil strife that came about after she took power.”

Attolia had survived that strife by ruthlessly eliminating contenders for her throne, sparing Erondites only because he was a useful ally at the time. Until Attolia married, the baron had been content with his tenuous connection to the throne, one son in the queen’s guard and another who wooed her at court. Only when Attolia chose a husband had Erondites begun to plot in earnest against the queen and against the new king.

Relius taught me about the world outside the Little Peninsula, making me memorize the names of rulers and the significant people in their courts. Sliding his bent fingers across the map he had pulled down from the wall, he showed me the Continent. “The Braelings have become so wealthy, they have made a new trade empire. The Epidi are afraid their islands will be overrun, and the Gants are fighting again with each other. If Meleo of Gant succeeds in his claim to the Southern Gant lands, he will have a nation to rival both the Braelings and the Pents. If he allies with just one of them, the Brael-Pent alliance will come apart like wet paper, and none of them can afford to be embroiled with the Mede over the little Hephestian Peninsula when that happens. All this, the Mede emperor uses to his advantage.”

Relius had few maps of the Mede empire and fewer books. He was frustrated by his limited understanding of any of the languages of the empire, and much of what he knew he’d only recently learned from Kamet.

For my part, any amount of painstaking work memorizing the names and histories of people I’d never meet was worth it to learn that the area of any triangle was always one-half the number of units in its base multiplied by the number of units in its height. Relius handed me the proof written out on a piece of paper and laughed at what I am sure was a rapt expression on my face.

“Don’t get spit on it,” he said.

I glared at the very suggestion, realizing too late what I was revealing.

“Yes,” said Relius. “I have noted the . . . shall we say, ‘elective’ nature of certain behaviors.”

One day, after he had again reiterated that my writing was my voice and I had again rolled my eyes, though I did it with my head down, he reached around behind him and pulled a slim book from the shelf—just sheets of foolscap sewn together with no wooden covers, more a pamphlet than a book.

“This was written five hundred years ago.” He held it open in front of me.

The Invitation

I will send the boy to the market

to the monger at the end of the row

for sweet shrimp and three fish, the freshest,

I will say, with their eyes still clear,

tell him to go

to the wine shop, bring an amphora

of Cleoboulos’s best

buy herbs of every kind

the most sweetly scented

while I idle through the day

awaiting you.

I reached out to touch the text in wonder, amazed that paper could last so long. The ink was dark and the pages still smooth and even, though a little yellowed.