Attolia agreed. “He will do something outrageous if he is pushed too far,” she said, and added, “I know you know that, too.”

“Well, I will not beg for Cleon again,” Eddis said as she handed the towel back to Chloe. “He will apologize on his knees tomorrow, and if Gen cannot stomach him, maybe I will pitch him into the Sacred Mountain myself.”

When a messenger on a lathered horse comes to the city, he draws the eye of every person in the road. They see his direction. As he turns up the streets toward the palace, Rumor, who is born in a moment, is full-grown the next. She begins to move through the town, trailing ever more elaborate finery behind her.

Costis would have reached the palace sooner if he had come by way of the headland above the city. It would have been harder on the mare, though, and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to force her up the steeper path. Still, he urged her to her best pace, her hooves rattling on the stones. When he reached the lower gates of the palace, he was already dismounting as she shuddered to a halt.

The guard on duty recognized him and waved him in.

“Take good—” he started to say over his shoulder.

“We will,” said a stable hand, leading the mare away.

As Costis continued on foot, Rumor outpaced him. A girl in the herb garden cutting rosemary heard the stable hand talking as he brought in the exhausted horse. She stepped to the kitchens, eager to be the first to tell her friends—and the errand boys who overheard her—that something out of the ordinary was happening. In the hallways, people saw a stranger, dirty and tired, out of place in the palace, or they saw the guard who had brought the slave Kamet out from the heart of the empire. They followed to see what more they could learn, or they dropped whatever errand they were on and began another—spreading the news of Costis’s return.

Relius slipped into the reception room where the high king was sitting with Attolia on one side of him and Sounis and Eddis on the other, listening to Cleon’s reluctant apology. The king’s absence of interest in the proceeding was apparent and vast. It was he who was the first to notice Relius, and when Orutus, the new secretary of the archives, came in next, very red in the face, the king sat up straight. Heads turned.

Behind Orutus was General Piloxides and, behind him, Casartus, admiral of the navy. By the time the door opened to let Attolia’s minister of war, Pegistus, in, there were people gathering in the hallway, peering through the doors until they closed again, and Cleon, interrupted in midspeech, was swiveling his head in bewilderment. Relius politely but relentlessly shuffled him out of the way. Orutus stood back, glowering as Relius bowed and said, “Costis brings news.”

Ghasnuvidas, emperor of the Mede, had lost his ships. With no means to transport his men across the Middle Sea, he’d marched them around it instead. With much of his navy destroyed in the straits of Hemsha, he’d sent his entire army north from Kodester into Zaboar. The oligarch of Zaboar had not only allowed them entry, he had closed his harbors, trapping rumormongers inside the city walls. When the Mede forces were shuttled across the Shallow Sea in flotillas of small boats, they landed up and down the coast of Kimmer, and Kimmer too had been silent.

Unopposed, the various companies had moved separately, not uniting until they reached the empty backlands of Roa. Only when commissioners were sent ahead to arrange for markets to be set up along their route did word begin to spread of their advance.

The army passed small villages and then larger ones, marching toward roads wide enough to let them move more quickly. They bought up carts and horses, as many as they were offered, and paid in coin for them. Farmers who brought their produce to the temporary markets told their friends and neighbors that the rumors were true, there was money to be made. The army of Ghasnuvidas wasn’t looting its way through Roa any more than it had through Kimmer. Its passage had been arranged in advance.

Like any prophet warning of calamity, Costis, travel worn and exhausted, was met with disbelief.

“Did you see the army with your own eyes?” Piloxides demanded.

“No,” Costis admitted. “When Kamet heard rumors, I rode east until I saw the farmers’ supply wagons, then I turned and rode here as quickly as I could.”

“Then this is just rumor,” Piloxides growled.

“And we’ve heard nothing from Kimmer or Roa,” said Pegistus.

Orutus said, “If an army had crossed at Sukir, our trade houses would have sent word.”

The door opened and closed behind him, as Eddis’s minister of war and Sounis’s magus arrived. It had taken Relius’s messengers longer to find them.

Puzzled, the magus looked to his king. “Ghasnuvidas sends his army overland,” said Sounis.

“Zaboar,” said the magus heavily, and Relius nodded.

“They couldn’t have crossed from Zaboar,” said Orutus. “There are no troop ships there to move them—”

“The Shallow Sea is full of ships to move them.”

“There’s been plague! No one would march an army into a city with plague! We’ve heard of it for months.”

“Heard from whom?” asked Attolia.

The master of spies dropped his eyes. He admitted, “Our sources may be unreliable.”

“My traders?” Attolia bristled at the possibility of betrayal.

“No, Your Majesty. The trade houses have sent no reports at all.” Grudgingly, Orutus turned to Relius. “Have you heard?”

Relius shook his head. “Not I. I run no spies for my queen.”

“Then all we have is this rumor,” said Casartus, getting back to the point.

“It is no rumor,” Costis said firmly.

“How can you be sure?” asked Eddis’s minister of war, not dismissing Costis’s report, only checking his reasoning.

Exhausted, Costis explained again. “The Mede commissioners are buying up every cow, every pig, every goat, every sack of grain for their commissaries, and they are paying with coin, not promises. If there’s not a huge army, then I don’t know what they are feeding in Roa.”

“Then why didn’t you go on until you’d seen it yourself?” Casartus wailed in frustration.

Costis flicked a glance at Relius. “We were not sure a message would get through if I did not bring it.”

Attolia looked to Relius as well.

“My messenger is late,” he said.

“You said you ran no spies,” the new secretary of the archives said bitterly.

Relius delicately shrugged. “A messenger is not a spy, secretary.”

“You and Kamet were in the capital city?” Orutus turned on Costis.

“No,” said Costis, “we were—” He swallowed the words he had been about to say. “Nearer the coast,” he finished more cautiously. Orutus was livid.

“Based on the provisions, then, just how big do you think this army is?” the magus asked, steering the conversation away from Costis’s reticence.

“Kamet said to expect seventy thousand.” Costis knew no one would believe him, and Casartus wasn’t the only one who threw up his hands.

“Seventy thousand?” said the magus, stunned.

“That is ridiculous!” said Casartus. “All of this—is ridiculous.”