After what felt like a very long time, the king managed to get to his knees and then, using his wooden sword as a crutch, made it to his feet. The sword trailed on the ground behind him as he crossed the court one wobbling step at a time. His face was all blood and dirt caked together, and he could hardly see. The Eddisians lightly touched his shoulder and aimed him toward the minister of war.
I don’t know what I expected, but it was not that the king would sink onto the bench and his father would enfold him in his arms, that the king would lay his head on his father’s shoulder with a sigh and his father would rub his back as if he were a tiny baby.
The surly Eddisians around us all smiled like fond parents. I thought Teleus, who’d come into the ground with half the royal guard behind him, was going to tear someone’s head off. No one spoke, not even Teleus. He just stared, veins showing in his forehead.
“Ready?” the minister asked the king.
“Not yet,” he said, his voice muffled by his father’s shoulder. “I’m trying to get through this asinine business without being sick.”
Everyone looked at Aulus, and at me, and then back at the king.
At last the minister stood and lifted the king easily in his arms. He carried him back up to the palace, the Eddisians and the Attolians following, with Teleus and his guard coming behind. He met the queen on the stairs up to the higher terraces. She said nothing as he passed carrying her all-but-unconscious husband, but the look she gave the Eddisian minister of war would have melted brass, let alone lead.
In the king’s antechamber, the attendants pressed forward, suddenly aggressive, like dogs on their own ground. The minister of war continued to ignore them, carrying the king all the way to his bed, where he finally laid him down.
“Your wife,” he said to the king.
“Terrifying, isn’t she?” the king said with his eyes closed.
The minister grunted.
“You should have left it to Ornon,” the king murmured.
“You should have quit sooner,” his father grumbled.
With obvious effort, the king rolled his head toward his father and blinked through one swollen eye. “Tell Thalas that,” he suggested.
“How will you fight like this?” his father asked.
“I’m not allowed to fight,” the king said, sounding very smug for a man with lips almost too swollen to move.
The minister grunted again. “Be sure to tell me how Thalas’s approval feels when you climb on that fancy horse.”
There was a silence.
“O Great Goddess, aid me,” the king whispered. “I forgot about the horse.”
“You’re a damn fool,” said his father, indulgently.
When the Eddisian queen arrived an hour or two later, Hilarion stepped over as if to block the doorway. She only smiled in amusement and went around him. “Excuse us, Hilarion,” she said, dismissing him.
Hilarion tried to drag me out with him as he left, but I dug in my heels. He glanced at the king lying on the bed, recovering from the ministrations of Galen and Petrus, and threw me a murderous look, but released me. In his defense, he was not a weak-willed man, merely out of his depth.
Eddis sat on the side of the bed, and the king opened his eyes.
“Attolia is fit to be tied,” she said, “or I’d leave you to your rest. She has accused us of distracting her guard from their duty.”
“I did that,” said the king. “I told Teleus to escort Sophos and everyone else I could think of out to the Thegmis to tour the fortifications there. He had to take half the guard.”
“I assured her of that,” said Eddis dryly. “Somehow she is unconvinced by my word alone.” Looking down, she interlaced her fingers and unwove them again, twisting them together and pulling them apart. Abruptly, she said, “You were the one paying Therespides.”
The king weighed the likely success of a lie and said, “I sent the money through Relius.”
Eddis lifted her hands to cover her face. The king and I both averted our eyes, neither of us able to offer her the privacy she deserved.
When she lowered her hands, she had regained her composure, mostly. Her voice was only slightly ragged. “Have you considered, Gen, even once, that you might achieve your goals with the minimum damage to yourself and without the maximum amount of distress to those around you?” She said, “You were afraid too many of them might prefer a king, even you, to a queen who was Eddis.”
“My father could stop any rebellion, but not the gradual diminishment of your authority. They’d start by those calling you Eddia and then Sounia, and if the Medes didn’t come they would ‘forget’ you ever were Eddis. Cleon’s agitating rallied them to support you as their sovereign.”
“So I could rule Eddis as Irene rules Attolia and Sophos rules Sounis. But we knew the Medes would come, Gen,” she said angrily. “And after you had stoked their resentment and their superstitions, the only way to bring the Eddisians around was a trial, and you told no one. You sent your guard away while it happened.”
“It was better than having an Attolian-against-Eddisian riot in that courtyard,” said the king, sounding just as fed up. “The magus had enough trouble stopping Teleus from starting an all-out war once the trial was over.”
“You didn’t warn the magus, either.”
“He did fine.”
“And you did not warn your queen.”
“She would have led the riot.”
Eddis conceded that this was probably true. She looked over his bandages and the lumps of cloth-wrapped ice packed against his bruises. “Galen?” she guessed.
“He has emptied the ice cellar. He says there is nothing that can’t be fixed with enough ice.”
Eddis was reluctantly amused. “What happens now between your father and your queen?”
“Well, he already hates her because she cut off my hand. Now the feeling is mutual.”
“So, so, you intend to separate them for the entirety of your reign?”
The king shifted uncomfortably, looking for a softer spot on his mattress, before he confessed. “I’ve arranged for them to both be in the garden at the same time, entirely alone. We’ll see which one leaves alive.”
“You are joking.”
“Only about one of them leaving alive. They might kill each other.”
“Gen . . .”
“Helen, you know how it will go. They will agree, like people always do, that it’s all my fault.” He shifted painfully again. Not finding a better spot, he gave up with a sigh. “They are adults. They know what is at stake. They will sit next to each other on a bench without speaking until the palace bells ring the hour, and when they get up the whole matter will be finished. They will embark on a long relationship of mutual respect and admiration and lecturing me.”
Eddis considered.
“I am right. I am always right. It’s a curse,” said the king.
Eddis nodded. This time she didn’t lift her hands to cover her fractured composure, and she didn’t wipe away her tears. The king reached for her, rolling painfully up on his side to take her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “If there was another way than this, I couldn’t find it.”
She brushed off the apology. “I’ve always known I was the last Eddis,” she said.