“He’s frightened,” Philo said from the doorway.

“You stay with him, if you want,” said the other attendant, brushing past.

Philo crouched down to reassure me. “They are just dummies,” he said, “made of stuffing. They hold the king’s coats.” Encouraged, I looked more closely and saw that he was right. The dim figures only appeared to be shifting in the flickering lamplight from the hallway. I had not been cast into an underworld dungeon with headless monsters. I was in a closet.

“He has a lot of coats,” said Philologos soberly. Then he smiled and I managed to take a breath, in and out, with only a tiny leftover hiccup in the middle. Tentatively, I plucked at the sheeting to make it more like bedclothes and less like a shroud.

“Lie down,” Philologos suggested.

I put my head on the pillow. He straightened the sheeting and laid a blanket over me before he left. I curled around the pain in my hip and my leg. Too tired to force my limbs to be still, I lay with the muscles in my leg jumping and cramping until I fell into a restless, twitching sleep.

“Send him back,” said the queen. “Erondites has had his joke at your expense.”

Eugenides went on pacing.

“Then what?” he asked. “I have already agreed that his eldest grandson could be reinstated as his heir. I can send this child back to Suterpe—I can’t force Erondites to send Juridius to the palace in his place.”

“Keep the boy or send him back, Juridius will be raised by his grandfather,” said the queen. “And when the baron is satisfied that Juridius is loyal only to the Erondites, he will eliminate this pretend heir he has foisted on you.”

“Unless he thinks I will someday free Sejanus. Then he will cut both of them out of the inheritance.”

“I do not think Marina would be pleased by that,” said Attolia.

I woke in the dark with my throat on fire. Even the meager light from the lamp in the hall was gone. I longed for my nurse. Melisande would have known what was wrong: too much banging in that box on wheels, too many days without real rest, too much shouting, too much of everything. She would have stroked my head and fetched me cool water to drink, but I was alone and the palace silent all around me. Weeping into my hands, I eventually fell asleep again, to be surrounded in my dreams by looming headless figures.

Nudged by a foot, I woke again, this time in the diffuse light from the closet’s small opening to an airshaft. The owner of the foot leaned over me briefly and then backed away, leaving me alone again in my misery. I was often ill, and used to it, but I’d never been without Melisande to comfort me. I was very afraid I would die and was in no way relieved by the appearance of a thin, balding man in the doorway.

“Has anybody brought him a drink?” the man asked angrily. “Has anyone done anything for him at all?”

“Well, we didn’t put a pillow over his face,” said someone out in the passage.

“Get some water,” snapped the man as he bent down beside me. He took away the covers, even as I clutched at them. Having worked for years at the charity hospital, he was used to ungrateful patients. “If you bite, I will put a stick between your teeth,” he warned, but he needn’t have worried. I hardly had the strength to bite by then. He poked me in the stomach and counted my ribs, listened to my breathing, and looked in my ears as well as down my throat. He was very thorough, and when he was done, he tucked the covers back around me.

“You’ll be fine in a day or two,” he said, with a reassuring gentleness. “I will give you very nasty-tasting medicine to be sure of it,” he added, taking the cup that had been brought to him and mixing into it a vile liquid that was everything he had promised.

“Miras’s golden balls,” said Dionis behind him. “He can’t even drink.”

Petrus—because this was indeed the royal physician—sighed. “Not everything that is easy for you is easy for the rest of us. Why don’t you go away, Dionis?”

“The king wants to know if he’ll live.”

“It’s a diseased throat. If he throws off the fever, he will be well in a few days.”

Dionis left, and Petrus leaned over me again with the cup. “I know it tastes bad, and I know it’s hard to swallow,” he said. “But drink it up. You’re better off sleeping through today’s festivities anyway.”

The next time I woke, it was night again. The dark figure crouched over me seemed an apparition from my fevered dreams.

“Shh,” said a heavily accented voice. “Sit up now and have a drink.”

Melisande, I thought. Even far away, she knew what I needed. Imagining her melting honeycombs in the fire, calling on Ula, goddess of the hearth and healing, to aid me, I struggled to sit up, took the cup pushed into my hand, and sipped cool water, scented with lemon, sure that this strange messenger had been sent in answer to my nurse’s prayers.

“Better than that oily piss Petrus makes you drink,” he said, his words rough and rolling like bobbins. I wondered that Ula’s messengers were so vulgar.

Heaven-sent or not, the water was delicious, and I drained the cup to the last drop before holding it out for an unseen hand to take away. I lay down, and the same hand rested on my forehead for a moment like a blessing before he was gone.

Petrus came to check on me every day as my sore throat and fever waxed and waned. With his high forehead and his chin beard, he looked like a satyr missing his horns, but he was far kinder than his appearance suggested. The man with the strange accent came as well, but only in the night. He was not one of Ula’s messengers, as I’d first thought, and might have been a servant or one of the attendants. He never said.

When Petrus finally reported that I was well enough to be up, Philologos brought loose-fitting underclothes and a robe, and when I was dressed he led me to the king’s waiting room. He instructed me to sit on the bench that ran around its walls and then went to take his part in the morning ritual of dressing the king. Used to the elegance of the Villa Suterpe, I was unimpressed by the king’s apartments. The attendants’ sleeping quarters were a tight warren of narrow passages and curtained doorways, while the guard room and the waiting room were one and the same, separated from the king’s bedchamber by a single door. The waiting room’s furniture was mismatched, its hearth was small, and its paneled walls mostly plain. The only interesting things to look at were the decorative medallions hung where the panels joined. They held meticulously carved hunting scenes of men and dogs and horses. I did not think it an odd choice at the time.

The door to the king’s bedchamber was arched like the entry to a skep. I was strongly reminded of bees as the attendants went in and out, conferring in low voices as they brought items of clothing or returned them to their closets. Some of the items went by more than once. I saw a gold sash twice and a blue one four times. Eventually the back-and-forth slowed down and the king strolled through the room without stopping, not even pausing to glance in my direction. Those who would attend him that day followed after, the double doors to the passageway closed behind them, and everyone left in the room stared at me.

“He’s to have clothes for tomorrow,” said Hilarion heavily.

I had been sent to the palace in time to be an eyesore at the wedding of Sounis and Eddis. Instead I had been ill and slept through it. Having recovered, I was expected to attend the elaborate ceremony during which Attolia and Eddis and Sounis would swear loyalty to Eugenides as the high king over all the rulers of the Little Peninsula. I might have been left in my closet for the day, but the king had decreed otherwise.