“My apologies,” said the king. One of his attendants pulled out a chair for him and he sat at the table. The attendants bowed and withdrew, leaving the king and queen alone except for their guards.

“That waistband doesn’t go with that coat,” said the queen.

“As you have already noted, I was late.” Eugenides bent his head to look at his waist. His coat was yellow, and so was the waistband, but the shades were not the same. “My attendants have triumphed this morning in their quest to make me look foolish.”

“You are unhappy with your attendants,” the queen said. The flesh between Costis’s shoulders crawled at the implied fate of any man or woman who failed the queen’s expectations.

“Oh, no,” said the king. “There’s no need to boil them in oil. No doubt in time their taste will improve.”

“Perhaps if you did not order your clothes in colors that would suit a canary?”

The king tilted his head to one side and eyed her for a moment as if weighing his response. “You’re right,” he agreed placidly. “I should stick to an Eddisian tunic in black with black embroidery and shiny black boots. I can powder my hair with gray like a Continental, and you can pretend you married my father.”

The queen waved at the guard around them, and the soldiers withdrew, out of hearing distance, but not before they heard the queen tell her king that his father at least had a sense of dignity.

“And he’s never late for breakfast,” observed the king, taking a bite of a pastry.

When breakfast was over, the king stepped around the table and bent to kiss his wife’s cheek. This assertion of ownership, the queen endured like stone. Costis was transfixed. He struggled to imagine her own mother kissing the queen and balked, seeing instead an adult Attolia somehow shrunk to the size of a child. Distracted by the image, he was late to realize that everyone on the terrace was looking at him. The king had motioned him to approach and waited with one eyebrow raised.

When Costis stepped forward, the king looked him carefully up and down. He leaned closer to peer at the buckles on Costis’s breastplate, while Costis counted back in his head the number of days it had been since he’d polished them. The king’s subsequent look of dissatisfaction left Costis certain that somewhere there was a buckle undone or an unburnished spot on his breastplate.

“I understand you are now an unassigned guard?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The king addressed his captain. “Is he going to dangle like a loose thread from your tidy schedule?”

“I am sure I can find a use for him, Your Majesty.”

“I have a place ready made,” said the king. “He can serve me.”

“The units that serve the king are fully made up, Your Majesty, but we could enlarge one unit if you like.”

“No, not in someone else’s squad.”

“You want him detached from the Guard?” Teleus was puzzled.

“I thought as . . . lieutenant.”

Teleus was stunned.

“Yes.” The king nodded his head with sudden decision. “I want him promoted to lieutenant-at-large, and I want him assigned to me. Every day from now until I dismiss him. Morning and afternoon. I will inform him if I want him with me in the evenings. He can begin now.”

“Costis has not been trained as a lieutenant,” Teleus protested politely. “He does not know the protocols for serving within the inner palace.”

“He can learn as he goes.” The king lifted the gun out of Costis’s hand. A lieutenant didn’t carry one. He passed it to Teleus to dispose of, and waved in dismissal.

When Teleus still stood, the king waved again, shooing him off like a trespassing pigeon. The captain bowed, cast a look at Costis full of dire warning, and retired.

“I believe he was instructing you not to disgrace yourself,” said the king, and then turned to his attendants. “Where are we going this morning?” he asked.

The day that followed took on the same nightmarish impossibility of the day before. Bewildered, Costis followed the king and his attendants and guards as they led the way through the convoluted passages of a palace pieced together by at least seven known architects over a span of uncounted years. He observed the king’s tutorial on olive production and taxation. When it was over, the king asked Costis whether he thought it was better to levy a tax per tree or try to estimate olive production year to year.

“I don’t know, Your Majesty,” Costis answered.

“Hmm,” said the king. “I thought you grew up on a farm?”

The tutorial on olive production was followed by a lesson in Mede. As the king wandered around the room, obviously bored and unreluctant to show it, Costis tried to stay alert. The king seemed to know by divine inspiration when his attention wandered.

“Costis. The word for death in Mede, I can’t remember it.”

Costis racked his brain, searching that part of the mind that remembered the last few words it had heard without actually understanding them. “Shuut,” he said at last. Clearly annoyed, the king asked him another question and another until Costis couldn’t produce an answer, and then a few more questions after that. The conjugation of to hit, the word for traitor, the word for idiot.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty. I didn’t hear that part of the lesson,” said Costis. None of those things had been mentioned by His Majesty’s tutors.

“You might pay attention to what’s going on around you, instead of daydreaming. My life does depend on it, you know.”

Costis thought perhaps he’d died and somehow crossed the river into hell without noticing the trip.

At last, one of the attendants stepped forward to say that it was time for the king to return to his apartment to eat. The king’s instructors thanked the king with every appearance of sincerity.

In the hallway, the king dropped back to walk behind his attendants and beside Costis.

“So, Costis,” he said, “have you learned all you need to know of Mede?”

“No, sir,” said Costis, judging that to be the safest answer.

The king yawned, covering his mouth with his hand. “Me neither,” he said.

They had reached a corner. The attendants who had been in front of them had politely slowed until the king was once more even with his retinue. Sejanus murmured a direction.

The king looked around. “I thought it was that way.” He pointed.

“No, Your Majesty,” the attendants patiently chorused.

The entrance to the king’s apartments, like the queen’s, was always guarded. The king nodded at the guards and passed through the door from the corridor. Costis hesitated, unsure if he should wait in the hall or pass through himself. A hand between his shoulder blades impelled him forward. Through the door, he found a guardroom, elegantly paneled in wood, lit by deep windows in the far wall. It was the entrance room to the king’s private chambers, and it held more soldiers and one of Teleus’s lieutenants. Costis himself, he remembered with a shock, was also one of the captain’s lieutenants.

The guards standing around the room at attention must moments before have been occupying the benches that lined the walls. The king waved, a gesture of simultaneous recognition and dismissal, and the guards settled from the rigor of attention to a slightly more relaxed but respectful posture. A guard opened a door to the king’s right, and he passed through, followed by his attendants. Costis knew from palace rumor and from Sejanus that the room beyond must be the king’s bedroom. There was no other anteroom.