Dite and the king walked for half an hour in the garden. When they returned, Dite looked subdued, but surprisingly calm.

Once through the archway, he turned and dropped to his knees in front of Eugenides, who said amiably, “Get up, Dite.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty.”

“Have lunch with me tomorrow?”

Dite looked up from a surreptitious check of the dirt smudges on the knees of his fine trousers, and smiled. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I’d be honored.”

The king smiled. Dite smiled. They parted. Dite went off alone and the king, followed by his stunned guardsmen, walked back to the terrace where the breakfast dishes had been cleared away. The queen was gone. The wind blew across the empty stone pavement.

By the day’s end, the entire palace knew of Dite’s defection to the king’s support. Costis reviewed the evidence of his own eyes over and over in his head and still couldn’t believe it. He was thinking of it as he prepared for bed. He was about to blow out the light on his desk when he heard footsteps approaching. He looked up from the flame to see Aris leaning on his door frame.

“Have you heard the latest?” Aris asked.

“I was there,” said Costis. “I saw Dite myself.”

Aris corrected himself. “Not the latest, I suppose. The almost latest. Have you heard what went on last night at dinner?”

Costis shook his head. Aris related his information, picked up at the mess. “If being high-handed is your idea of how a king behaves, I think he has worked it out. You might not think he can act like a king, but he thinks he can.”

It didn’t get exactly the response that Aris had expected.

“He told me that story, Aris. The night I thought they were going to hang me. He said his cousins were worse than mine, that they used to hold him face down in the water until he was willing to insult his own family. He said”—Costis paused to think through what he was saying—“he said he wouldn’t mention such a thing to anyone but me. I suppose he thought I was going to be dead the next day.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“No, of course not,” said Costis. “He only told me because he thought I wouldn’t live long enough to tell anyone else. I couldn’t repeat it.”

Aris was looking amused. “You think I am ridiculous, don’t you?” Costis asked.

“I do,” Aris admitted. “But, as a low-minded and practical sort of fellow, I’m glad someone has ideals and sticks to them.”

“If the king didn’t tell that story to anyone but me, he’ll think I have been passing it around. Why didn’t he say something about it this morning when we sparred?”

“Would he?” Aris asked.

“I don’t know,” Costis admitted. “But he’s not going to go on believing that I’m some kind of loose-mouthed gossiper.”

“Loose-mouthed gossip seller,” suggested Aris, and at Costis’s puzzled expression, he looked amused again and rolled his eyes.

“Do you know how much that humiliating tidbit about the king was worth?” Aris asked. “However it did get to Dite’s friend, you can be sure someone was very well paid on the way.”

Costis was horrified.

“Does he think that I sold that story to someone?”

Aris shrugged.

Costis swore, cursing the king in every particular.

He was still angry the next morning. He was determined to say something to the king at the first opportunity, and that was to be during their morning training together. The king didn’t look as if he were holding a dire insult against Costis. But then, Costis thought, the king never looked the way he was supposed to. He just stood there, patiently waiting for Costis to put up his sword for the same pathetic basic exercises. Costis didn’t move. He stood very proudly, with his shoulders square, and rushed into what he had to say.

“Your Majesty, if you believe I sold that story about your cousins—”

The king interrupted before he was finished. “I would never accuse you of such a thing.”

“—well, you are mistaken, I assure you,” Costis insisted. Only after he’d spoken did the king’s words sink in.

The king laughed. Costis held on tight to his temper. The men around him were turning to stare.

Stiffly Costis said, “You may think poorly of me, and I think poorly of myself, but I did not spread that story.”

“Too slow to find a buyer? Better luck next time.”

Costis lifted his chin a little higher. “I would never stoop to revealing information I knew was private.”

“Not even if you don’t like the person whose privacy you are protecting?”

“Especially not then,” said Costis, and hoped his disdain showed.

“I see.” The king only looked more amused. “First position, this morning? I’ll try not to hit you in the face again. It will be harder if you keep sticking your chin out like that.”

Costis left the training ground defiantly satisfied. He may have sounded like an ass, in fact, he knew he had, but he’d shown the king he had some pride left. He was very pleased with himself, at least until he was summoned by the queen.

Costis was hurrying, as usual, from the king’s apartments at midday. He had to move sharply to get something to eat in the Guards’ mess and then be back in time for his duty in the afternoon. It would have been easier to carry bread and cheese in his belt, but that was a uniform violation. He could have skipped the meal, but his stomach had shown an embarrassing tendency to rumble in the quiet of the afternoon court sessions.

One of the queen’s attendants, Imenia, approached him in the passage, and he stepped aside to allow her to pass, but she stopped.

“The queen wishes to speak to you, Lieutenant,” she said.

Costis gaped. “Me?”

The attendant responded with a stare.

Costis stammered an apology. “Forgive me, where shall I go?”

Imenia condescended to nod and turned away, expecting him to follow, which he did. He knew the names of the attendants, and had been slowly putting those names to the faces he saw at the afternoon courts and at the dinners. Imenia was not the first of the queen’s attendants, but she was among the most senior.

Feeling light-headed, only partly because he’d had no food at all that day, he followed her to the door of the queen’s apartments. Imenia nodded at the guards in the hallway there. They neither challenged nor even looked at Costis. They seemed somehow more impressive than the men who guarded the king. Beyond the doorway, the guardroom of the queen glowed with light from the windows near the ceiling. The room was far larger than the king’s guardroom, paneled entirely in wood inlaid with mosaic pictures. Costis stared.

He’d thought the king’s apartments were the height of opulence, until he saw this room, not even an audience chamber, merely the guardroom. The noise of his boots, crossing the carpetless floor, reminded him that he hadn’t come to admire the walls. He handed his sword to the guard waiting to take it and made haste after Imenia, who hadn’t slowed.

She passed through one of the open doors on the far side of the guardroom and down a passage, then turned into a narrower passage that was lit indirectly by light from the windows in the rooms opening off it. She stopped at a doorway and waved Costis in. The queen waited for him in the small audience room. Her chair was the only furniture.