“He was writing this,” said the Captain of the Guard, shaking a collection of papers in his hand. “He tried to take poison when he saw us in the doorway, Your Majesty.”

“Is the paper a confession?”

“Yes.”

They walked Relius across the room, and he dropped to his knees before the throne. He stared forward like a man who sees nothing clearly except his own death, for whom the sounds of the world are nothing but a muffled din.

Blank of expression, he raised his eyes to the queen. “May I explain?”

The queen looked down at him and said nothing. His lips moved as if he was speaking, but there were no words. He closed his eyes briefly, and he struggled for a breath to begin. “When I told you that I did not know who betrayed us . . . I lied,” he admitted. “I had already realized that it can only be my fault. I visited a woman in the town. You know of her, you knew when she left me. I thought she was tired of me, but I should have understood when she disappeared that I let her see too much, that she was a spy for the Mede.” He held his head in his hands. “My Queen—”

Teleus hit him in the back of the head, so hard that he sprawled forward onto the marble steps of the thrones’ dais.

“She is Your Majesty, to you!” the Captain of the Guard snarled.

“Teleus.” The queen reined him in with a word, but his face, unlike the queen’s, showed all his rage and his sense of betrayal.

“The poison?” she asked Relius. He had pulled himself back to his knees.

“I was afraid,” he said.

“Understandably so,” said Attolia. “But does an innocent man keep poison at hand?”

“My—Your Majesty,” Relius corrected himself. “I failed you,” he said. “I failed you, but I swear I never meant to betray you. I was writing all this, so that you would know. I did not mean to hide it from you. You must believe me,” he insisted.

“Must I, Relius?”

If all he had taught her was true, there was only one answer to her question.

His lips formed the word, but he couldn’t force it out. He shook his head.

“No,” agreed the queen, speaking softly. “Take him away.”

When he was gone, no one in the court moved, afraid to be the first to draw her eye.

“You will observe?” the king said.

“I must,” said the queen.

“I can’t,” the king admitted.

“Of course not,” said Attolia. She turned to the chamberlain, whose role it was to issue people in and out of the royal presence, and said, “We are through here.” It signaled the end of the court session for the day. Any further business would be postponed. The chamberlain bowed and began to clear the room. When the king stood, all stopped where they were and bowed respectfully as his guard gathered and escorted him away. Costis glanced back once to see the queen still sitting alone on her throne as the room emptied.

No, Costis thought. The king would not observe Relius’s interrogation. It would mean a return to the rooms underground where Eugenides had been imprisoned, where he had lost his right hand. If he looked sick—and he was so pale he was almost green—Costis thought it was not at the idea of Relius’s suffering, but rather at memories of his own.

They returned to the king’s rooms. He stopped in the guardroom.

“What is the time?” he asked, rubbing his face with his hand like a man distracted. He didn’t even look pleased with his success in eliminating Relius.

“Just coming to the half hour, Your Majesty.”

“Very well.” As he walked into his room, he reached for the door, blocking his attendants with his arm. “Knock in an hour,” he said. “Don’t bother me before then.”

He closed the door in their faces.

“Well,” said Sejanus, “I suppose not even you are necessary, then, Costis, when the king retires to gloat. I wonder why he doesn’t do this when he wants to crawl into his hole and lick his wounds. It would save us standing in the hallway.”

Costis thought it was probably because the king didn’t want to move the chair for himself, and he probably wanted to be sure the attendants wouldn’t wander into the room in spite of his orders to leave him alone.

He jumped when he heard the bolt shoot in the door. He hadn’t been aware that there was a bolt. Sejanus laughed at his surprise.

“He does that every night,” he said. “I think our little king doesn’t trust us. We have to knock like okloi at the temple in the morning and wait until he opens it for us.”

Attolia returned to her apartment and sent her attendants away. She sat at the window. There was a deliberate click of a door closing, but no other sound.

She thought of Relius. In the first year of her reign, when she was a young queen with nothing to guide her but her wits and civil war on her hands, her guards had found Relius spying on her and dragged him out from under a wagon. Who was his master? they had asked, and he’d answered, No one. Entirely for himself, he had wanted a glimpse of the queen. Standing in his muddy clothes, the illegitimate son of a household steward, Relius had offered to serve her. He offered her everything she needed to know of her enemies. He had taught her the craft of manipulation and intrigue, teaching her to use men as tools, and as weapons, and to survive in a world where trust had no place. Never trust anyone, had been his first and most important lesson.

“Not even you?” she had laughed, back then when she had still laughed sometimes.

“Not even me,” he had answered her seriously.

Only through pain can you be sure of the truth, he had taught her, and she must have truth at any cost. Her nation depended on it.

She had to know the truth.

The silence around her was a gift, and she took refuge in it. For this brief time she did not need to move or speak, did not need to tease apart the truth from the lies of Relius’s betrayal, did not need to justify her action or her inaction. Her king found no such refuge in stillness. He preferred to pace. She had seen it often enough already, back and forth as silent as a cat in a cage. But he could be still as well, as skillful in stifling movement as in moving, as silent as sunlight on stone. He knew that the stillness was as near as she could come to peace, and he offered it to her.

When Phresine knocked to say that it was time to dress for dinner, she waited for the click of the latch and then she called her attendants in.

When the hour was up, it was time for the king to dress for a state dinner, and Costis was dismissed. He marched back through the palace with the squad of guards also relieved from their duty. They had left the palace proper and were on the terrace, moving toward the stairs that led down toward the Guard’s compound, when they crossed the path of Baron Susa.

Costis knew him by sight, as he was baron over the land where Costis’s family farm was. He nodded at the baron politely and was surprised when the baron called him by name. Costis stopped. So did the squad.

“Perhaps you could send your men on,” suggested Susa. “I only want a moment of your time to chat with a fellow countryman.”

Reluctantly, Costis sent the men back to the barracks.

“So, Costis Ormentiedes,” said the baron, “you have become quite the confidant of our king, have you not?”