Having decided to speak to the king, Costis had to wait for an opportunity. He didn’t dare speak out at sword practice in the morning. There were too many people nearby to overhear him. He meant to wait until the king next dismissed his attendants. He began to be afraid that the king had retreated to his rooms alone for the last time, especially as he had demonstrated his willingness to lock his attendants out of his room when he wanted his privacy. Moreover, in the process of winning over Erondites the Younger he seemed to have found a new means of arranging a little peace for himself. Between appointments, he sometimes walked in the garden. On days when the king might have the time free in his schedule, the gardens were emptied. The king could order the guards into position at various points and walk between them alone.

Every day Costis debated with himself whether he should speak to the king at their morning training, but in an agony of indecision he held off. As he told Aris, it was no place for a private exchange. He could suggest to the king that he needed to speak to him alone, but he already knew, from his last attempt to address him during training, that the king wouldn’t cooperate. It was more likely he would turn the moment into a scene from a farce and draw the attention of everyone within hearing, perhaps alerting Sejanus in the process. Costis waited.

Ornon also waited, and worried. Relius had fallen. The Office of the Archives was in disarray. The king hardly spoke to his barons. He spent more and more time distancing himself from the court. He rarely addressed the queen in public, though Ornon was told Eugenides still claimed a proprietary kiss at breakfast.

“Your Majesty.” Sejanus had to repeat himself before the king finally called his thoughts back to the matter at hand.

“What?”

“I’m very sorry, Your Majesty, but the blue sash appears to have ink stains on it as well.”

“Never mind,” said the king. “Just bring me—”

Bring him what? Costis thought. If the king broke down and said, “Bring a sash, any sash,” the attendants would bring him one that didn’t match the style or color of his coat. If he came up with a particular sash, they would claim again that it was stained with ink, or that it had been sent to be cleaned. This could continue all morning, and the king was late, with all his attendants standing around in poses of mock subservience, and Sejanus visibly smug.

“Bring me all the sashes that aren’t stained, dirty, or otherwise abused,” said the king wearily. “And I will pick one.”

It was a solution. The king seemed tired, not triumphant. The attendants excused themselves, calculating how much more time could be wasted fetching and delivering the sashes from the wardrobe, the least likely first, until almost every single sash the king owned was draped across the bed and hanging from the furniture around the room.

Finally the king was dressed and ready to leave. He and his entourage were on their way to the temple of Hephestia. There had been no morning training and would be no breakfast with the queen. This was a signal occasion when the king visited the new temple, still under construction on the acropolis above the palace. By all accounts, the last time Eugenides had addressed the Great Goddess, she’d answered by smashing windows all over the palace. The storm that day had probably been a coincidence, Costis thought, but it made a man think twice, and he hoped today’s visit provoked no such response.

They left the palace through the gate near the stables and the kennels and proceeded up the Sacred Way on foot. The new temple to Hephestia was being constructed on what remained of the foundations of the old Megaron. The king and queen had been married here at a temporary altar. Since then, new courses had been laid to make the walls of a naos, provisionally roofed in canes. The rest of the foundation was open, as all that remained of the earlier building were the basal stones, in some places still covered by mosaics in tessellated patterns. Resting on these were haphazard piles of stonework that would be used to enlarge the foundation before the pillars, lying in pieces nearby, were stepped. The king wove his way between the stonework piles, heading toward the door to the naos and a priestess who waited for him there.

“This is the end of your journey, Your Majesty.”

“I am seeking an answer from the Great Goddess and have come to speak with her Oracle.”

“She knows your question, and your answer.”

“I have not yet delivered it.” The king held up a folded paper in his hand.

“She knows it,” the priestess repeated.

The king tried to push past. “Then she can tell me the answer.”

The priestess held out an arm that stopped him in his tracks. “She will not.”

“Then I will ask the Great Goddess myself.”

“You may not.”

“You think to come between me and the Great Goddess?”

“No one of us can be separated from the Goddess,” said the priestess, but she still held up her arm. Costis wondered if the two would come to blows, and if they did, what was he supposed to do? Help the king violate a temple? Watch while the king was chucked off the temple foundation by the priestesses?

Luckily for him, a commanding voice came from the interior of the naos. The Oracle herself stepped from the darkness into the doorway. Hugely fat, she was wrapped in a peplos of livid green that seemed to glow with its own light against the dark interior behind her. Her meaty fingers twitched the paper out of the king’s hand. She opened it, and without reading it, without even looking at it, she tore it in half. Still cold, she handed one half back to the king.

Eugenides looked down at the paper in his hand. The men behind him craned to see it. There was nothing left but the signature of the king, written left-handed in square letters, ATTOLIS, at the bottom of the page.

“Your answer,” said the priestess.

The king crumpled the paper in his fist and threw it on the ground. Without a word, he stalked from the doorway, across the open foundation of the temple, and leapt across a construction ditch to firm ground without looking back. His guard and his attendants hastily followed. Exchanging looks, rolling their eyes, and with shrugs, they had to break into a trot to catch up. It was clear that the Oracle could upset the king more in one morning than even Sejanus could in several months’ time. Eugenides never slowed and he never looked back all the way down the Sacred Way to the palace and from the gates of the palace to his apartment, where he arrived in such a fury that the guards stationed there actually jumped to attention.

In his guardroom, he turned at last to face his attendants and snarled at them, “Get out.”

Still surprised and puzzled by the scene at the temple, the attendants withdrew without argument. The king pointed at Costis and at the door to the passageway, then walked into the bedroom. Costis quietly closed the door to the passage, and followed the king to move the chair near the window. The king threw himself into the chair, and Costis backed out of the room.

In the guardroom, he stood by the door to the outside passage and waffled. It would take more nerve than he anticipated to take the step forward into the doorway and draw the king’s attention. The door was open. Costis had left it open the first time and the king hadn’t objected, so he assumed it should remain open. It would take three steps to reach it and clear his conscience.

He didn’t move. He reviewed his argument with Aristogiton, but still arrived at the same conclusion. If he wanted to redeem himself, he needed to admit to the king what he had done. Then he reviewed just how much he wanted his self-respect. Too much, he finally decided, and stepped toward the doorway.