At last Teleus put down his quill. “You were a year younger than the age limit when I accepted you. I made an exception for you, do you know why?”

“No, sir.”

“Another year on your uncle’s farm might have ruined you, and I didn’t want your skills to be wasted. They have been, though, haven’t they? You threw them away.”

“I am very sorry, sir.”

“I’d like to think a desire for justice temporarily evicted common sense, but it’s hard to justify attacking someone so incapable of defending himself, however contemptible he may be and,” he added, “however much your comrades might congratulate you for it.”

Costis opened his mouth, but found no words to speak, and anyway, Teleus held up a hand.

“Your gear has been shifted to one of the lieutenant’s quarters. The boy will show you which one.”

“Sir, I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand, Lieutenant?”

“How can I be a lieutenant, sir?”

“Because you have been promoted by the king’s whim, far beyond your merits. If the king succeeds in eliminating me, you might be the next Captain of the Guard. It’s a joke, Costis. You are a joke. If you don’t want the king’s joke to be a success, then do your duty, and do it well. No doubt there are other men he will attempt to destroy. We don’t have to make it easy for him. Here is your schedule.” He pushed a paper across the desk. “You will have all the regular duty of a lieutenant as well as dancing attendance on the king. I am damned if I am going to have a lieutenant that doesn’t actually serve as one. Dismissed.”

Out on the steps, Costis stopped to look at the schedule. He stared at the sheet in consternation. The king hadn’t needed to hang him; he would be dead of exhaustion within the month. He almost turned back to Teleus, but there was no point. His feet carried him slowly down the stairs to the barracks boy who was waiting to show him to his new quarters.

CHAPTER FOUR

IN the morning, Costis got a better idea of what the captain had meant when he had said that the king’s sense of humor was playing itself out. Costis thought it was not humor so much as sheer vindictiveness.

The training session with the swords was as tedious as the day before. With long, painful pauses, they practiced the early exercises over and over. Afterward, Costis hurried to clean himself in the baths and then went to present himself in the king’s guardroom. He had the day’s passwords and arrived without delay.

The king had bathed but was not yet dressed.

The door between the bedchamber and the guardroom was open, and Costis could hear every part of the process of dressing the king, and see most of it. From the conversation, he attached the names he already knew to some of the men waiting on the king. Hilarion, the heavyset attendant, was the second son of a coastal baron. He brought the king the wrong trousers and was sent back to the wardrobe. Dionis, who was the nephew of another baron, brought him the wrong shirt. He was also sent back to the wardrobe, somewhere through a doorway on the opposite side of the guardroom from the king’s bedchamber. Nothing seemed to suit the king, and the attendants passed back and forth across the guardroom with rejected items. At first Costis blamed the king’s vanity, but slowly he realized that this was all a dance enacted by the attendants and directed by Sejanus. The guards on duty watched in amusement. Sejanus winked as he passed Costis with an ink-stained sash.

The king had chosen a Mede style of dress with a long, open coat over his shirt and tunic. The longer belled sleeves of the coat should have concealed the cuff and hook he had in place of his missing hand, but the coat the attendants brought had been miscut by the tailor. The sleeves were too short. Not only the hook but the entire cuff stuck gracelessly out of the sleeve. The king sent it back.

Sejanus, smoothly conciliatory to the king’s face, pushed his arms backward into the sleeves of the coat as he was leaving and stared in silent consternation at his arms, sticking out of the shortened sleeves all the way to the elbow. He waggled the fingers on his left hand and then turned in horror to his right hand, where his fingers were bent in the shape of a hook. Snatching at the sleeve with his left hand, he pulled his right hand in until it was hidden, then tucked it under his left arm, hiding it further, and looked around in mock chagrin. Someone in the guardroom, staring in over Costis’s shoulder, choked on a laugh, and the three attendants standing in front of the king, in his view, were suffused and rigid.

There seemed to be little that the king could do to control his attendants. He might dismiss them from his service, but Costis guessed that dismissing them would only reveal his inability to control them. So Eugenides sat, with his jaws locked, and ignored Sejanus.

Presently, when he’d been given clothes and been obsequiously helped to dress, the king called Costis. He looked him over closely, as he had the day before.

“Are you a typical example of the Guard, Costis? I am a little surprised. After all, you aren’t really soldiers, and given that you serve a mostly decorative function, I would have expected you to be more . . . decorative.”

Most of the attendants had the kindness to look uncomfortable, knowing that Costis was paying for their transgressions. Hilarion glared at the king, safely out of his line of sight. Sejanus only looked amused. He raised his eyebrows and smiled as if he expected Costis to share the joke.

In this way, Costis fully realized his new function. He had been elevated from obscurity so that there would be some victim in the pecking order lower than the king.

If the king hoped to make Costis, and through him the Guard, look foolish, he had chosen the wrong target. That day, and every day, the soldiers of the Guard treated him as a lieutenant, and not as a joke. With the king, he served as the butt of the king’s humor, but the men of the Guard, some veterans twice his age, saluted Costis with pointed rigor and deferentially called him sir. Even Teleus made no distinction between how he treated Costis and how he dealt with his other lieutenants. The attention made Costis uncomfortable at first. He felt like a fraud, but the show of respect was no sham. The Guard wanted him to be a lieutenant, not an imitation of one, and their confidence in him supplied the strength he needed to suffer the king’s company with dignity.

He had support from another source as well, an anonymous one. He thought it was Sejanus, but had no proof that it was the king’s most successful tormentor that sent a package from time to time with notes on the king’s lessons. The first one arrived the second day of Costis’s new duty. Costis sat in his lieutenant quarters and examined what he’d found waiting for him on the bed. It was a flat package in a cloth wrapper tied with string. A folded note had been slipped under the string.

“To assist in your lessons,” it said, “from one who wishes you well in your contest.” That, Costis thought, defined his role in no uncertain terms. Whether he wished it or not, he was an opponent of the king.

Costis opened the cloth wrapping and found a collection of vellum sheets, neatly folded, covered in writing. He carried the paper to the window and read over someone’s detailed notes on the structure of the Mede language. The handwriting was square but uneven, as if the hand that held the quill had been shaking. If it was Sejanus, he had probably been laughing as he wrote. Several pages were covered back and front with vocabulary lists. Costis glanced through the lists, looking for the words the king had quizzed him with the day before. The infinitive of hit and the words for traitor and idiot had been added to the bottom of the list.