“The shot from the crossbow,” the king said. “Find it.” Men jumped down from their horses to look through the grass. Sejanus waited above us.

The bolt was almost completely buried in the ground, only the message wrapped around it visible. Motis brought it to the king, who passed it to his father to untie and unroll. The minister pulled the paper free, creased it so that it would stay flat, and handed it back.

My heart leapt into my throat. It was my note, my words scrawled on the scrap of paper torn from my journals. The king glanced briefly at what I’d written, then flipped the page over to read the words added clumsily in charcoal on the back.

“Mede. Naupent,” the king read out loud.

As one, we all turned to look up at Sejanus. He was waving his arms over his head, crossed at the wrist and then wide open, the universal signal of distress, of warning.

“Naupent?” asked the king’s father.

“It’s a tiny pass,” the king answered thoughtfully. “Just a footpath, but it’s way over the hills from the coast.”

“Is there a watch on it?”

“I don’t know, I assume so.” Attolia, who would have known, was too far away to ask.

“How would the Medes know about it?” Ion asked.

“Erondites,” said the king. We all looked up at Sejanus.

“And this is Erondites’s son,” said his father. “Do you trust him?”

“No,” said the king. He was still staring at the note and then up at Sejanus. If the king took his men to the pass, there would be only Sounis and his company to slow the Medes if the Peninsular army was overwhelmed. He shook his head. He squinted at the minister of war. “Should I?” he asked.

The minister of war considered. He’d heard the sounds of the fighting. He had seen enough of it through the trees to say, “For an army with no supplies and overwhelming numbers, they aren’t pressing their advantage. They mustered late in the day, which might have been disorganization or might not. They might be waiting.”

The king was quiet, still thinking. “‘Naupent’ means tongueless. The pass is so high the mist from the sea doesn’t come through it.” He was staring at me. I was still frozen by the sight of my words written on the paper in his hand. “It was never about you,” said the king, as if a weight had been lifted. With my treacherous uncle on the hillside above, I was less certain. I prayed to the Great Goddess that the king was right. “Send a message to the council tent,” the king ordered Ion. “We’ll go to the pass.”

“Not you,” said the minister of war.

The king looked around at the open field. “Were you going to leave me here alone? Or do you mean to leave my guard and go by yourself?”

The minister frowned.

“Do you know where the pass lies?” the king asked. “Do any of you?” They did not.

“I will ride with you,” said the king to his father. Before the minister could protest, he added reasonably, “I can go to ground when we get close.”

There was no way to take horses up to the Naupent except to ride first out of the narrow part of the valley. Sounis and his reserves, Attolia and Eddis in front of the council tent, seeing the men wheeling on their horses and racing away, must have been dumbfounded. The king’s messenger, once he reached the council tent, was sent on to Sounis with the news and with orders to divide the reserves and send half to take up the king’s place.

We rode hard until we came to a path that climbed into the hills above the Pinosh, Snap doing her best to keep up. In time, I was clinging to her back as she trotted along the very ridge that Sejanus and I had climbed toward the night before. Sejanus was waiting there for us.

“The Medes are marching up to the Naupent. They mean to attack from the rear and capture the queens.”

The king jerked his head toward the back of our little troop, and Sejanus went looking for someone to lift him onto a horse. No one would meet his eyes. Their horses stamped and threw up their heads.

It was Ion who finally held out a hand to Sejanus, and then we were on our way again, pushing our horses as fast as they could go up the hillsides and along their ridges until we reached the next hillside to climb. Snap’s short legs were no longer a disadvantage, and she was a nimble climber. I, however, was having more and more trouble staying in the saddle as she swayed and lurched. I was exhausted before the ride began and was beginning to shake. At a wide spot in the trail, one of the soldiers pulled up beside me and held out his hands. I unbuckled the straps across my thighs and leaned toward him. He pulled me off my pony and settled me on his lap, which was no doubt safer but even more terrifying, as my legs dangled over every abyss we passed and my life hung on a man’s forearm. I didn’t even know his name and I do not believe he survived the battle at Naupent, as I did not see him again.

The king stopped his horse beside an outcropping like a rocky shoulder sticking out of the hillside. The trail disappeared around it and then reappeared on a slope some distance away, switchbacking upward to a notch in the knife edge of the mountain above us.

“We are close enough now,” said the king. “You can see the way from here. Pheris and I will wait for reinforcements from the queens.”

The minister of war nodded stern approval. He leaned to embrace his son, then he bowed his head to his high king and led the way forward. Ion hesitated, but the king waved him on. Dionis and Motis followed. My bearer deposited me back on Snap, and the man who had been leading her handed me back the reins. I sat on my pony, feeling weak and cheated as everyone else rode to glory, not really understanding that most of them were riding to their deaths. The last man had passed around a curve in the trail and the sound of horse hooves on rock was fading when I looked at the king, wondering how he could have given up his chance and mine to fight against the Medes.

He said, “This is no time to argue with my father.” Then he pointed over my shoulder to the much fainter track behind me.

We turned our horses and began to climb. The ascent was much steeper at first than the route the minister of war had taken, and the horses had to scramble to get up it. Once they had, we could see that, like the other route, our path climbed all the way to the skyline. We watched as the minister of war reached it and passed through. Then we rode up after him.

Up close, the Naupent was a passage between sheer rock walls, so narrow I could have reached from Snap’s back and touched them on either side. On the other side of it, we discovered the remains of the Attolian guard. Their bodies were scattered among those of the Mede advance party that the minister of war had killed in turn.

The open ground below the Naupent on the seaward side was cupped like a shallow bowl, tilted as if to spill its contents down the hill. There was even a trickle of a stream that pooled just before the lip of it, like a libation waiting to be poured out. Beyond that, the ground dropped too steeply to be seen from where we sat. Farther away, though, we could make out the route down to the Gulf and coming up it, their weapons shining in the sun, the Mede.

The Minister of War had ordered his men into formation on either side of the narrow streamlet. He looked over his shoulder as the king rode down to join them.

“I lied,” said the king.

“I know,” said his father. He pointed to the space he’d left open and the king moved into position.