Remembering the brazier in Bu-seneth’s tent and the rack of hot irons, the sound and the smell of them, I felt my gorge rise. There was a sense of momentum, as if the king was somehow hurtling forward like a runaway cart as he said, “You do know them and you will give them to me.”

None of the people in that tent would have protested if the king had ordered Sejanus carved into pieces. None of those standing in ranks around the tent, either. All of them would have said it was because he was their king and they were his loyal subjects. The truth is, they were frightened. Even Susa. They’d all seen the king when he returned from the Mede camp, and not one of them would cross him. Some of those standing in the tent were already making plans to flee.

I knew it was wrong—that the king who had so recently suffered at the Medes’ hands would use those tools on another man, and my secret, most monstrous self whispered, “Better him than me. Better that Erondites than this one.”

“Secure him for the night,” said the king. “We will deal with him in the morning.”

The guard put Sejanus in a goat pen. The gate of the pen was tied closed with rawhide, its security not so much in its fencing as in the men posted to keep an eye on the prisoner at all times. With its sides made of staves lashed loosely together, everyone could see his humiliation. As a light rain fell, soaking Sejanus and the blanket they had given him, people came to stare. No one jeered, though; no one said anything at all, unsettled and unsure why.

Eddis went to speak to the king, and Ion, on the king’s orders, had to turn her away. She went to Attolia with her concerns, and Attolia told her about Lader’s warning.

“Lader was always poisonous,” said Eddis.

“His words are still prophecy. The gods themselves say that what Sejanus knows will destroy the king,” said Attolia. “He must give up the names of those who have committed treason. It is an ugly business. I see your concerns, but the law is clear.”

Eddis said, “Sejanus used every weaseling trick he knew to torment Gen. Even if Gen had his own reasons for allowing it, he came to hate Sejanus and those wounds still bleed. I am afraid emotion clouds his reason.”

“Then it is good that he has the law to guide him.”

Eddis frowned. “The law may not be enough.”

“Pheris,” Sejanus called to me in a carrying whisper. I had walked past the pen three times already, making excuse after excuse to pass that way. I was trying to see the man I remembered in the abject prisoner huddled under a damp blanket. I knew he was an enemy of my king. I also knew that when I had been the monster in the Villa Suterpe, he had been kind to me.

“Pheris,” he begged. “Please. Come closer.”

Reluctantly I approached and crouched by the pen.

He held his hand out between the stakes. “This is my last ring,” he said. “Take it.”

I wasn’t stupid enough to go so near.

“Take it.” He shook it in his hand. “I have promised it to a man who will lead you to safety. Can you understand me?” He narrowed his eyes, searching my face for some sign of comprehension. “Alestis was a stable boy on our estate when your mother and I were your age. Alestis, can you remember that name? We were friends and he will take you to your grandmother. You will give him my ring as payment. Do you understand?”

He tossed the ring. I didn’t catch it and it dropped into the grass by my feet.

“Hey,” said the guard, noticing us, and Sejanus pulled back his hand. “Move along there,” said the guard.

“Take the ring,” whispered Sejanus. “Take it and give it to Alestis.”

I scooped it up and left without looking at him again. I admit that I was intrigued that Sejanus had given to me the last thing he had of any value, but the idea of him helping me seemed as implausible as the claims he’d made to the king. I took the ring back to the tent I shared with the other attendants. The space inside had at the outset been quite crowded, with a cot and a trunk for each of us. The trunks were still there, but half the cots were gone. I pulled out of my trunk the box I’d brought from my hiding place in the palace garden what felt like eons ago, where I kept my pens and ink bottles and small pieces of paper, my counters, my collection of odds and ends.

I laid out all my small treasures on my cot, adding the ring to my various patterns and finding none that pleased me. I moved the pieces, the rocks and the feathers, the buttons and coins, the gold cufflink I’d slipped from the sleeve of Xikos’s coat. He’d assumed he’d lost it. He didn’t take good care of his things and with one gone, he’d had to pay for a new set. He was so angry and never guessed it was me. The memory had been a little spot of glee before, but now it ached like a bruise.

The ring didn’t fit, the cufflink was a bruise, my regrets were a road my thoughts traveled down until they came inevitably to Emtis. Emtis was the reason I feared that I was, as my family called me, a monster. He’d hurt me and I’d thought I was justified in hurting him. Perhaps I would have been if I’d acted from fear alone. Instead, I’d taken revenge and only afterward asked what my hate had made of me.

I thought of the king, haunted by Lader. I thought of how much he hated Sejanus and I thought about the prophecy. Sejanus had mocked and humiliated the king. So had many others, but it was Sejanus who had come so close to killing him. The king had seen him directing the assassins in the garden without recognizing the danger. He’d survived that attack by inches. Fear and hatred twine together. Looking at the stones and the delicate feather of a wren, Xikos’s cufflink and Sejanus’s ring, I saw a pattern. I saw the relationship between all the pieces, hate, fear, revenge, remorse. I saw it as if it were one of the magus’s equations and I could calculate the outcome. Whatever it was that Sejanus knew, learning it would destroy the king.

I picked up the ring—one single piece removed from the pattern, and all of it was altered. I packed up my treasures and put Sejanus’s ring back in my pocket. On a page pulled from my journals, using penmanship that would have made Relius proud, I wrote out a message requesting a horse and signed it with Baron Orutus’s name. No one would question it if the secretary of the archives sent for a horse, and no one would doubt that it was the secretary’s order when it was delivered by the king’s most easily identifiable attendant.

This masterstroke of deception turned out to be entirely unnecessary. After hunting through the camp for the man Alestis and seeing in an instant I would get no help from him, I went to the spot on the horse lines where the royal horses were picketed, to find the stable master expecting me.

“Shall I have her saddled?”

He took my blank stare for concern.

“She has a few more pepper spots, and I’ve put cream on them. Otherwise she’s as sound as a drum.”

Snap. In the chaos after the powder exploded in the Mede camp, she too had made her escape. She’d been found the next day wandering the Attolian picket lines, looking for her friends. The master sent a groom to fetch her, and once I had petted her all over and kissed her clever nose, he helped me to mount, assuming that I was taking her for a ride to celebrate.

As the camp settled for the night and Ion and Medander waited on the king, I wandered among the tents. Back in the capital, when the armies had been mustering, the soldiers had been out at all hours drinking in the taverns or swaggering through the streets. In the camp, the men who had fought through one day and knew they might have to do so the next were more inclined to get a good night’s sleep. Those who stayed at the fires, sharing their wine and talking together, kept their voices low.