We both heard the king say, very slowly, as if trying to remember, “My dream. I was in the dark and Lader came with a prophecy for me.” He spoke slowly, but with growing certainty. “He said to beware the house of Erondites. What an Erondites knows will destroy me, and my greatest danger will come from the tongueless one.”

Chloe, sitting across from me, narrowed her eyes. It dawned on me only then that with my grandfather’s death, I had become Erondites, not just a member of my family, the head of it. Instead of any feeling of triumph at how the tables had turned, I felt sick. I shook my head violently at Chloe. Her expression didn’t change.

“Lader?” I heard the queen ask.

“Lader,” the king confirmed. “Not someone who wishes me well. Pheris,” he said, and I knew that he knew I’d heard every word. Shaking, I rose from the stool and went into the tent. He lay in the rumpled bedclothes, his hair going in all directions as it always did in the morning, his face creased with sleep. He smiled, and it was the smile I knew.

My fears eased, though Attolia’s expression remained speculative.

“You know the story of the potter and the prophet?” the king asked me.

Indeed I did.

“This prophecy—it was not Moira bringing me a message from the Great Goddess. This was a truth delivered by a man who hates me. I will not go breaking all my pots on his say-so. Do you understand? Now find me Teleus, please, and send him here. After that, carry Her Majesty’s message to the camp master.”

I did as I was told, and as I returned to the king I met Teleus, just leaving the royal tent. With a stern expression and a hand on my shoulder, he steered me away from the entrance. I tried to resist. The dire words I’d heard in the king’s tent were like carrion crows. I had felt their truth in my bones and I was frightened. Teleus pushed me firmly toward a fire ring some distance away. These burned patches, with their rustic seating and a barren expanse of trampled ground, were all that remained of the tent city that had been there a few days before.

Taking a seat on an upturned log, Teleus folded his hands. “The Braelings and the other Powers have betrayed us,” he said at last, as if I didn’t know that better than anyone. “The king has just informed me that before he left the capital, Relius shared his travel plans with Fordad.”

Every thought of Lader’s prophecy flew out of my head.

“We have not heard anything from Relius since he left the capital,” Teleus said.

I started to shake my head, but managed to draw it only a little to one side, as if I were trying to move the weight of the world with my chin. Hilarion was dead, Lamion, Sotis, even Xikos, a death I wouldn’t have guessed I would mourn and yet did. I would not accept another. The day Relius had left, Teleus had told him to be careful and Relius had mocked him. It was Teleus who was going to war, Teleus who would be in danger, not Relius.

“We had hoped that he was just unable to get a message through to us.” Teleus was looking down at his hands, trying to get the words out. “He isn’t coming back, Pheris.”

I miss Relius. The queen had said it to the king when Pegistus’s calculations for the march had been so badly off. They’d been afraid already that something had gone wrong.

Grief strikes in strange ways. I would never have expected that I would weep someday for Xikos, or that I would see Xortix’s younger son sobbing his heart out when he learned that the lover he’d betrayed had died, or that, losing Relius, I would think of all the words I’d written with such care in the journals he’d given me, words that he would never read if he was dead—and that my first tears for him would be tears of rage. We sat and cried together, Teleus and I, by the ashes of the dead fire, as the men broke up the few remaining tents in the camp. Then Teleus wiped my face with his sleeve and sent me back to the king.

I was in the royal tent, rolling the bed linens to go into a trunk, when a messenger arrived, bringing word from Sounis that a new prisoner had been taken.

“Is it Nahuseresh?” asked the king hopefully. No other prisoner came to mind that was worth sending a messenger on a hard ride when the king would already be on his way to the main camp very soon.

“It’s Sejanus, Your Majesty.”

The king paused in the act of stuffing one foot into his trousers. He let me help him attach the straps of his hook and cuff, but all the ceremony of dressing and undressing him had long since been surrendered to the demands of war. “I suppose I should have wondered before now what he might be up to,” the king said thoughtfully. “Pheris, leave the packing for someone else and fetch Teleus. I want to go as soon as possible, and I want you with me.”

We rode into the main camp as the sun was dropping toward the horizon. The tents were all aglow in the slanting light, and there was a breeze to blow the stink away. It looked like a scene from a storybook, but the king’s mood was as foul as the sewage in the mud between the brightly colored tents.

The sides of the council tent had been rolled up. The table in the center had been moved away to leave space in front of the four folding chairs draped with cloth and cushioned with furs. The king sat with Attolia on his left and Eddis and Sounis to his right as Sejanus was brought to them in chains.

“I came to warn you,” he protested on his knees.

“No,” said the king. “You escaped your arrest and came to join your father. Finding him dead, you are pretending you came to warn me.”

“I didn’t know he was dead,” insisted Sejanus.

“My condolences,” said the king.

I’m not sure I would have known my uncle if we’d met on the road. Thin and filthy, his long hair in tangles, he looked nothing like the urbane visitor at the Villa Suterpe. He knew me, though. He looked in every direction except mine.

“Tell me, Sejanus,” said the king. “Isolated as you were, how did you discover this plot against me?”

“My father arranged my escape, I admit that. As soon as I was free, though, I came here to warn you.”

“Directly,” the king said in utter disbelief.

“Directly!”

The king appeared to consider, then shook his head again. “No. It doesn’t seem more plausible no matter how many times you repeat it.”

“Your Majesty, please—”

“You know what would make it easier to believe, Sejanus? If you told me the names of the others who conspired with your father.”

“I don’t know who they are,” said my uncle, too quickly.

“You don’t?” asked the king. “Are you sure? You couldn’t point out one or two?” He gestured at the assembled barons, hidden among them those who had conspired with Erondites. My grandfather could not have acted alone. Sejanus might have given away a conspirator with a single glance, but he didn’t. He was studying the dirt in front of him with all his attention.

“You have escaped the custody imposed by your king. The penalty for that is death,” said the king.

“I am not afraid to die, Your Majesty,” Sejanus said proudly.

The king shifted, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees to ask, “What are you afraid of, Sejanus?”

“Your Majesty, even if you torture me, I cannot give you names I do not know.” Brave words.