The queen had begun another slow step backward up the stair behind her when the king caught her by the wrist and pulled her forward. He pulled Costis as well. Costis was sufficiently taller than the king that bringing his shoulder down to provide support put him off-balance. He had to shift his footing with care, and shift it again as the king let go of Attolia’s wrist in order to catch the robe at the elbow and pull her closer.

The king lifted a hand to her cheek and kissed her. It was not a kiss between strangers, not even a kiss between a bride and a groom. It was a kiss between a man and his wife, and when it was over, the king closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the hollow of the queen’s shoulder, like a man seeking respite, like a man reaching home at the end of the day. “I didn’t have the gardens searched,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Costis realized his mouth was open, and shut it. He couldn’t step away without pulling the king’s arm off his shoulder, but he could look in some other direction, so he did that. He looked at the court, filled with people who were slower than he to realize that their mouths were hanging open. So many stunned faces all in rows. Costis could have laughed, but was still too shaken himself.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” said Attolia softly.

“You didn’t startle me,” said Eugenides. “You scared the hell out of me.”

Attolia’s lips pressed together. “You needn’t admit it out loud,” she reproved him.

“Hard to deny it,” Eugenides answered. Costis could hear him smile.

“Are you badly hurt?”

“Hideously,” said the king, without sounding injured at all. “I am disemboweled. My insides may in an instant become my outsides as I stand here before you, and no one will even notice.” He reached up again to touch her face, trying to wipe away the bloody fingerprints he had left, but only making them worse. “My beautiful queen. Your entire court is staring at you, and I can’t blame them.”

They were, too. The queen turned to look. Her glance swept through the crowd like a reaping sickle through grain. Mouths slammed shut on every side. There was a scuffling sound as the people in the back shifted, trying to screen themselves from view. The queen looked back at the king, who was broadly grinning.

“Where are your attendants?” she said. She looked at Costis for the first time, and at the other soldiers with sudden scrutiny. “Where are your guards?”

“With Teleus,” Eugenides answered quickly. “Costis and these others were conveniently near to hand. I left the others to clean up.”

“I see. Still, you should not be standing here.” She signaled to a guard. “Lift him.”

“I think I will walk,” said the king.

“Maybe a stretcher?” the queen suggested innocently. “You can lie down.”

“Like Oneis carried off the field? I think not,” said Eugenides. His arm pressed against the back of Costis’s neck, and they started up the stairs.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THEY laid the king down on his bed. The crowd had thinned as they crossed the inner palace, and as they reached the final set of stairs, he’d let his guards carry him. He’d accused them of laziness for not offering sooner. When Costis looked at him in reproach, he’d said, “Stop giving me the evil eye, Costis, I am mortally wounded. I deserve some consideration.”

The room was filled with people talking. Those who knew the details of the assassination attempt were sharing their information. The guards were sorting themselves out under the direction of the lieutenant who had been in the guardroom. The queen was near the door speaking to her attendant, who was wiping the king’s bloody fingerprints from the queen’s cheek. The last few hangers-on, those who had talked their way past guards at various doorways along the route, were in the guardroom, hoping to be admitted by the guards posted there. One by one, the silence by the bed drew their attention.

Even the king was quiet. Exhausted, relieved, he lay boneless and silent. The skin was dragged thin across his cheekbones. His sweaty hair stuck to his face, and his eyes were closed. His hand, clutching the fabric of his tunic, had relaxed and slipped down to his side, revealing what the careful bunching of the cloth had concealed.

The tunic had been split by a knife stroke from one side to the other. As the edges of the fabric separated, those by the bed realized how much blood had been soaking, unseen, into the waist of the king’s trousers. The wound wasn’t a simple nick in the king’s side. It began near the navel and slid all the way across his belly. If the wall of the gut had been opened, the king would be dead of infection within days.

He should have said something, why hadn’t he? Costis wondered. In fact, the king had. He had complained at every step all the way across the palace, and they’d ignored it. If he’d been stoic and denied the pain, the entire palace would have been in a panic already, and Eddisian soldiers on the move. He’d meant to deceive them, and he’d succeeded. It made Costis wonder for the first time just how much the stoic man really wants to hide when he unsuccessfully pretends not to be in pain.

The king must have noticed the silence. He opened his eyes. Everyone else was looking at his abdomen; Costis watched his face. Seeing him look anxiously around the room until his eyes fixed on someone by the door, Costis knew that he hadn’t been trying to deceive the palace, or calm the Eddisians. He hardly cared if the palace was in a panic. There was only one person he’d been hiding the extent of the injury from, the queen.

Costis saw him pull himself together as she approached the bed. Of all impossible things, he tried to look smug. “See,” he said, still playing his role, “I told you I was at death’s door,” but he wasn’t fooling them anymore, not Costis and not the queen. The queen’s eyes were slits, and her hands were clenched in fists. She wasn’t frightened; she was angry. He could hardly, at this point, reassure her by telling her the wound wasn’t serious. Costis almost saw him wince. The king opened his mouth to speak.

“It isn’t very deep,” the Eddisian Ambassador said from the other side of the bed. He was leaning over the wound, looking critical and mildly disappointed. Eugenides didn’t miss a beat.

His head whipped around. “It is . . . too . . . deep!” he insisted, outraged.

The attendants looked shocked and then amused.

“Your Majesty,” Ornon said in supercilious tones, “I’ve seen you get deeper scratches with a cloak pin.”

“Damned clumsy with a cloak pin,” one of the attendants muttered.

“I wasn’t using it on myself,” the king snapped. He turned back to the ambassador. “I was enjoying that little moment of horrified attention, Ornon.”

“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” Ornon replied. “But I think you’ve been closer to death than this.”

The king looked up at the queen, who, relieved by Ornon’s opinion as she would not have been by the king’s, still looked down at him in displeasure. “I doubt it,” she said. “I could disembowel you myself.”

“I did say I was so—” The king broke off to shriek in rage and pain, and everyone but the queen jumped. “What in the name of all gods is that?” the king shouted.