“My Queen,” Teleus began.

“Your Majesty,” snarled Attolia. Everyone in the room recoiled, excepting only Teleus.

“No,” he said. “Relius was right and I was wrong. You are My Queen. Even though you cut my head from my shoulders, with my last breath as a noose tightens, to the last beat of my heart if I hang from the walls of the palace, you are My Queen. That I have failed you does not change my love for you or my loyalty.”

“Yet you prefer his mercy to my justice.” She meant the king. She knew where the message had come from.

“No—” Teleus shook his head dumbly, held his hands out in supplication. “I only—” but she cut him off.

“Have it then. Free him.” She snapped out the order to the prison keepers. “Free them all.” Then she rose from the throne and stormed for the door, leaving behind her attendants, her guard, all of them struck motionless by her anger.

The guards at the door hesitated, unsure if the queen meant to leave the room without her entourage.

“Open the door!” she shouted, and they leapt to obey. She swept through the doorway and disappeared down the hall beyond. Her attendants and her guard came to life, and streamed behind. The rattle of chains and the crash as they dropped to the floor was the only sound as the crowd, like water released from a smashed jug, dispersed in every direction, through every door except the one the queen had used, everyone seeking urgent business elsewhere.

Costis, packed in with the crowd, turned and hurried off himself. Not in the battle for Thegmis, or even in the garden with the assassins, had he been so frightened. The queen had passed him, so close he’d felt the stir of air, and he had guessed that if she had turned her head, only a little, and met his eyes, he might have died right there, so potent was her anger.

Without stopping and without speaking to anyone, he went like a badger to its hole. He hurried down the stone hallway of the barracks and slipped through the narrow doorway into his quarters. He threw himself down on the cot, leaning his back against the wall and pulling his feet up like a child afraid of nightmares under the bed. He wrapped his arms around his legs and sat. After a time he yawned. The building around him was quiet. There was an occasional sound of footsteps in the stairwell and in the courtyard outside, but nothing out of the ordinary. No shouting, nor the tramp of feet mustering out to arrest one small, unimportant guardsman. He yawned again. He had been awake all night. He rested his head against the wall and fell asleep sitting up.

Hunger and a stiff neck woke him hours later. He stretched painfully and decided that sooner or later he would have to leave his room or starve. He also had better check the duty schedule. Officially, he was still enjoying his three-day leave to go hunting with Aristogiton, but emergencies might have changed the schedule, and if he hadn’t been arrested already, maybe he wouldn’t be. Maybe his part in the play enacted in the throne room would be overlooked in the moment and forgotten in the future. He could only hope so. He went to the mess hall.

It was almost empty. Tight little groups of men huddled together, talking in voices that carried only as a murmur. Costis sliced himself some bread and cheese and helped himself to a cup full of olives and ladled the day’s stew into a bowl. He piled the bread on the stew, the cheese on the bread, balanced the cup of olives on top of the cheese, and still had a hand free to collect a cup of watered wine. He sat by himself. Almost before he had unstacked his meal, he was surrounded.

“Any news?” the men settling on the benches around him asked.

“I’ve been in my room since dawn,” Costis said.

“So we have news for you,” someone said.

“Maybe,” said Costis. “Teleus and the others were freed. I know that much.”

“Were you there?”

“You weren’t on duty?”

“I was in the crowd.”

“Aeeie, that was a stupid place to be.”

“So,” Costis agreed. “I won’t do that again.”

“You went back to your quarters? You haven’t heard anything else?”

“Like what?” Costis asked warily.

“Like the fight between the king and the queen.”

Costis put his cup down. In whispers they told him the news.

The queen had gone directly from the throne room to the king’s apartments. “I would see My Lord Attolis,” she demanded angrily. Never had she addressed him before by his name as king.

“I am here,” he had answered, stepping into the doorway wearing a nightshirt and robe, rumpled and pale, but resolute. He had been waiting for her. He’d leaned against the doorway for support, while the roomful of perplexed attendants scattered like chaff trapped in a small space with a high wind.

As the queen raged at him, he responded, first calmly, then with his own heat. “Is there no one that you will see punished?” the queen shouted. “Are you so fond of Teleus now that you preserve his life at all costs?”

“I only asked you to reconsider.”

“There is nothing to reconsider!”

“You know why I need him.”

“Not anymore,” the queen declared with finality.

The king ignored the finality. “Now more than ever,” he insisted.

“He has failed—”

“That is not entirely his fault!”

“Then you will unmake my decisions?” Attolia dared him to try.

“You said I could,” Eugenides flatly replied.

Pushed too far, the queen lashed out. The king made no effort to avoid the blow. His head snapped around, and his forehead struck the doorjamb. He staggered and caught himself. By the time he opened his eyes, she was at the door and then she was gone.

Before his attendants were released from their dumbstruck paralysis, he had stepped through the door and swung it closed. It slammed with a report like gunshot, and they heard the tumblers of the lock fall into place.

Sejanus attempted a cutting comment, but it missed its mark in the uneasy confusion, and its edge blunted on a sullen unanticipated sympathy for the king.

“Yesterday, I thought he loved her,” Philologos said plaintively.

“I think he did,” said one of the others.

“And she—”

“And I think,” said Hilarion, cutting short further discussion, “that we are not all needed here, and as all of us have been up through the night, some of us, at least, should go to bed.” He put a hand on Philologos’s shoulder and pushed him toward the door that led through the king’s wardrobes to the cell-like, semiprivate rooms where the attendants slept. “Who knows but that you will get up to find that the world has inverted itself yet again?” He looked around the room at the other attendants as if in warning, but spoke to Philologos. “Remember, the love of kings and queens is beyond the compass of us lesser mortals.”

If anyone noticed, no one commented that he had called the Thief of Eddis a king.

“She didn’t love him,” the guard to Costis’s right said. He sounded relieved. “It was a sham.”

Before Costis could disagree, the man on his left said, “Of course, it was a sham. Would our queen be cow-eyed for the goatfoot that stole her throne? Are you mad?”