Fordad, his eyebrows almost at his hairline, bowed deeply, allowed that if the jewels were authenticated, the ships were theirs—and then, wary of the tension between the king and queen, he hastily excused himself and his staff with him. As he marched back to his office in the wing he shared with the remaining ambassadors, he chewed his mustache, thinking of the letters he needed to write to his government and to the Pents.

His junior ambassador asked under his breath, “Is it going to be a problem that we have just sold the Pents’ ships to the Attolians?”

“I had my instructions,” said Fordad.

“But no one knew he had the Attolian Skies.”

“They can’t blame me for that.”

“Maybe the Pents will be happy with the gems,” the junior ambassador suggested, trying to look on the bright side. “They are magnificent, and Attolia wasn’t pleased to see her baubles spent on boats.”

“Don’t be stupid,” snapped Fordad. “She’s not concerned about what she’ll wear to the next court function.”

“Then what was she so angry about?” the less-experienced diplomat wondered.

“I’m not sure,” said Fordad, worried. “But I wouldn’t change places with the king of Attolia right now if you offered me the Attolian Skies.”

The queen canceled the rest of their appointments. She and the king returned to her apartments in silence. The king’s attendants bowed themselves to a halt in their waiting room with poorly hidden relief, and the queen’s attendants continued on only a little farther before they too were grateful to excuse themselves. From several rooms away and through closed doors, we could hear the crashing noise once the queen and the king reached the queen’s bedchamber.

“Oh,” murmured Phresine, closer and able to identify the sound. “I think that was the Ailmené coffeepot.”

Luria sighed. The queen always gave her attendants gifts from her personal possessions on special occasions, and Luria had been hoping to receive that pot when she married.

“I said I was sorry,” Eugenides protested.

“Your apologies are boring,” shouted Attolia.

“Oh, I know,” Eugenides conceded.

“The rubies. The Attolian Skies,” said Attolia. “You took them from the treasury of your god.” It was not a question.

“Yes,” Eugenides admitted.

“You robbed your god.”

He equivocated.

“You robbed your god,” she repeated.

“It’s not—” He stopped, reconsidering the wisdom of what he’d been about to say. “My god allows these liberties at times.”

“What times?” she asked.

He winced. One could never know for certain what might provoke the anger of a god.

“And if the Thief is mistaken when he takes liberties with the god’s treasury? Then what?” She didn’t wait for an answer she could guess. “You took this decision upon yourself.” It was a strong, if quietly voiced, objection.

“I had to,” he said helplessly, and she knew why. To protect her from the god’s anger if he’d guessed wrong.

The attendants in the distant anteroom flinched as one.

“The dressing table,” whispered Chloe in awe, and the others hushed her.

The jewels were authenticated. The Pent ships were handed over to the Attolians, who renamed them the The Queen’s Ruby, The Royal Sapphire, and The Attolian Diamond, and began to ready them for cannon. Sounis and Eddis brought their small force down from the mountains, their arrival doing little to inhibit the ever-growing tensions. The Attolians, looking down their noses at the civilian soldiers of Sounis, resented being condescended to in the same way by the Eddisians. The Eddisians, most of them seasoned mercenaries, made it clear they were unimpressed by the martial skills of Sounisians and Attolians alike. The integration of the forces called for a delicate hand.

The combined military leadership of the Little Peninsula met for the first time in the large council chamber. Eugenides, the high king, sat at one end of the table, with Sounis on his right. Attolia, at the opposite end, sat with Eddis at hers. The senior advisors filled the chairs around the large table, and their staffs and junior officers stood behind them. Though Orutus would have fought tooth and nail to keep Relius himself out of the room, he made no effort to exclude me. As an attendant who couldn’t stand for the entire meeting, I was permitted a small stool just behind the king. I sat with my notebook on my knees. I didn’t need to lurk behind the potted lemon tree, though I might have wished myself there. It was a long and difficult meeting, with arguments over every point as men tried to assert their authority or fend off any plan of action that might diminish it. The only one who made not the least effort to impress was the annux, sitting with his usual boneless inattention. He knew as much as any Eddisian about battles and strategy, but it wasn’t his area of expertise, and he saw no need to pretend it was.

Eddis had brought her minister of war and her best military advisors to Attolia. Sounis had as well. One of them was his magus, a man never gentle in his arguments, and another his father, a seasoned general, who nonetheless bridled like a proud parent at any sign of disrespect for the young king. On strategic matters, Sounis turned to his magus instead of his father, and did so while deftly managing what was clearly a prickly relationship between the two men. Again and again, Sounis’s voice was a calming one in the council, soothing not only his father’s ruffled feathers, but those of many others.

Where Sounis’s father positively beamed with approval at his son, Eddis’s minister of war glowered. The high king, slumped in his seat, catching his father’s glare, slumped further.

Attolia had chosen Pegistus as her minister of war. He was younger than Eddis’s minister and, unlike him, not a general of the army. His gift was for logistics, crucially important to any successful campaign, but often underappreciated. Pegistus sometimes struggled for the respect he thought he deserved, and it made him pretentious. The meeting had already gone on several hours when he was explaining in excruciating detail the network of supply caches that he’d put in place, pointing out their locations on his maps.

“None on the route our armies are marching,” Eddis’s minister of war pointed out. Coming from the older man, what was only an observation seemed a criticism. Eddis gave her uncle a reproving look, as if to remind him that they were all there to get along.

“We will have the material to Stinos by the time the Eddisians reach there,” Pegistus promised.

“Why are the caches so small?” asked Trokides, one of Sounis’s senior generals and very high-handed. He’d criticized everyone and everything throughout the meeting, and his tone put Pegistus’s back up.

“We cannot store what we don’t have,” Pegistus said sharply, which inevitably led to a round of protests as the Attolian barons detailed their contributions and the sacrifices they’d made. I thought of the wagons that had burned at Perma and wished I was under the table instead of sitting in plain sight.

Eddis’s minister of war didn’t need to raise his voice to cut through the bickering. “What’s your advance-to-return distribution?” he asked, and a grim silence fell.

“Ten to one,” said Pegistus in the quiet. He cleared his throat, glancing at Attolia before he went on. “We have chosen to put the bulk of our supplies into the advance caches to be sure our men are at fighting strength,” he said. “However, on our return there may well be some crops and we could—of course, we will,” he insisted, “purchase any additional food we need.”