CHAPTER FIVE

IN a small audience room, Relius delivered his report to the queen. In the past, they had been alone for these meetings. Now, the new king attended as well. While Relius talked, Eugenides sat with one booted ankle over his knee and watched a gold coin flip across the backs of his fingers.

It was a distraction, but the queen did not take her attention off Relius. He was being as elliptical as possible, trying to inform her, without alerting the king, of the intrigues within her court. Eugenides’s failure to exercise his authority meant that others were maneuvering to exercise it for him. Several different parties hoped to woo the king to their side, to make him speak for their interests.

Briefly, the queen looked at Eugenides and back at the Secretary of the Archives. It had not escaped her notice that both these men, exquisitely tailored, had chosen clothes for this occasion that complemented her own. This was not as prescient as it seemed. Her wardrobe was fairly uniform, in spite of her new husband’s suggestions that she expand it. It amused her that their sartorial choices clashed so completely with each other. Eugenides’s loosely cut coat in the Mede style, more like a robe, was red silk shading to orange. Relius dressed in the Continental style, his tunic, a deep wine color, tailored close to his body and matching the short velvet cloak he affected even in summer.

His clothes were an expression of his power. He alone of the queen’s advisors had been with her the length of her reign. He had been the illegitimate son of a steward in a baron’s villa, and she had seen, the first time they met, that he could teach her what she needed most, the manipulation of men and power. He had been her teacher, and she had rewarded him with wealth and influence.

Eugenides had grown bored with moving the coin across his fingers. He began tossing it into the air and catching it. He was distracting Relius, an accident, or more likely a calculated effort to unsettle the secretary. As the coin rose higher and higher into the air, Attolia drew her foot back slightly and kicked the king in the ankle. He jumped and turned to her in outrage. The coin dropped behind him, and he plucked it out of the air without looking.

He glanced at Relius and back at her. He’d missed nothing, she was certain. Eugenides held out the coin; it was a gold stater with her head on one side and the lilies of Attolia on the other.

“Lilies, I rule, heads, you do,” he said, and threw the coin into the air.

“Lilies, you rule, heads, you throw again,” said Attolia.

The coin dropped. Eugenides looked at it and then showed it to her. “No need,” he said. The coin sat in his palm, obverse, showing the lilies of Attolia. He flipped it again and again and again. Each time it landed showing the lilies. He threw the coin and this time caught it in his closed fist. Without looking at it, he slapped it onto the embroidered sleeve of his coat and took his hand away. It was lilies again.

“I think we are finished here,” Attolia said. “Was there anything more, Relius?”

“No, Your Majesty.”

With affected disinterest, the king shrugged his shoulders and palmed the coin from his sleeve. “Thank you, Relius, for your report. As always, I am grateful for your thorough presentation of the information.” He inclined his head, and Relius bowed himself out.

The king rarely missed an opportunity to insult the Captain of the Guard, but to the Secretary of the Archives he was unfailingly polite. It made Relius feel ill. For now the king was a puppet of the Eddisians, but that would change. Within the year, some power in Attolia would pull his strings, and Relius was determined that the power would be the queen’s. Like Teleus, he would stay with his queen no matter the cost.

He wanted to dismiss the coin toss as sleight of hand. Any circus performer could control the drop of a coin, but he’d been puzzled. The queen had been undismayed; she had seemed almost vindicated in her manner. It had been the king who had been more disturbed with each toss of the coin. He’d looked almost sick, Relius thought, by the time he put the coin away.

Relius loitered in the arcade outside the audience room until the king left with his attendants. Walking away along the arcade that lay perpendicular to the one where Relius lurked, the king pulled the coin from his pocket. He looked at the gold stater in sudden disgust and pitched it hard between the columns of the arcade into the shrubbery that filled the courtyard garden. Perplexed, Relius returned to his work.

When the palace was quiet, and it seemed only the royal guards could still be awake: “Baron Artadorus.”

It was a whisper on a breath of air so shallow it wouldn’t have stirred a cobweb, but it combined with the touch of a blade on his neck and woke the baron instantly.

The night-light was out. He could make out nothing but a dark shape leaning over him, close enough to put lips near his ear to whisper into it. Whoever it was wasn’t standing by the bed, but sitting on it. This intruder was in the royal palace, in the baron’s private apartments, in his bedchamber, sitting on his bed, and had arrived there waking no one, not even the other person in the bed.

The blade was sharp, never mind how a man without a hand could hold a knife.

“Your Majesty?” the baron whispered.

“I have had a most interesting discussion with a man named Pilades. Do you know him?”

“No, Your Majesty.” The steel was warming to the temperature of his skin. He could feel the edge biting.

“He works in the Ministry of Agriculture.”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“He’s been telling me all about the grain that grows in different parts of the country.”

“Ah,” the baron said weakly.

“Ah, indeed. How long, Baron?” the king whispered, still leaning close enough that the baron could have taken him in his arms, had he been a lover instead of a murderer. “How long have you been misreporting the kind of grain that you grow? How much have you avoided paying in taxes?”

The baron closed his eyes. “This was the first time, Your Majesty.”

“Are you sure?” The knife-edge bit deeper.

“I swear it.”

“I remind you that there are records that can be checked.”

“I swear it, Your Majesty, this was the first time.” His eyeballs strained to the corners of his eyes, striving to see the king’s face. “You will tell Her Majesty?”

The king’s laugh was silent, no more than a puff of warm air against the baron’s cheek.

“I am here in the night, holding a knife-edge at your throat, and you worry that the queen will learn about your error? Worry about me, Artadorus.”

It was blackmail then, thought the baron. “What do you want, Your Majesty?”

The king laughed again, without a sound. “For you to pay your taxes, for a start,” he breathed.

He lifted the knife-edge away and rose noiselessly from the bed. He crossed the room as silently, but when he’d gone through the door, he closed it behind him with a snap. In the bed beside the baron there was a sleepy murmur, not his wife, thank the gods, his wife would have been awakened by the whispered conversation.

His bedfellow stirred beside the baron and sat up. “Did you hear something?”

“You dreamed it,” said the baron. “Go back to sleep.”

For a long time, he lay in his bed thinking. Clearly he had been a fool. A fool not to realize that the king might be inept and inexperienced and still be dangerous. A greater fool to take Baron Erondites’s suggestion that the queen might be distracted by her new marriage. Erondites, never a friend of the queen’s, had seen that prudence had kept Artadorus loyal all these years, and greed might lead him astray. It was he who had set this trap by suggesting a means of avoiding the queen’s taxes, and sprung it by informing the king of the tax scheme the baron was attempting. The baron dismissed the reference to Pilades and the Ministry of Agriculture. This king would never have discovered the business on his own. It was Erondites who had betrayed him, building his influence with the king and preparing to blackmail this baron into working with the king and against the queen. There was only one thing to do. The night was warm, but the baron lay under his bedcovers, chilled through.