After one moment of gripped immobility, the queen bent to kiss the king lightly on one closed eyelid, then on the other. She said, “I love your eyes.” She kissed him on either cheek, near the small lobe of his ear. “I love your ears, and I love”—she paused as she kissed him gently on the lips—“every single one of your ridiculous lies.”

The king opened his eyes and smiled at the queen in a companionship that was as unassailable as it was, to Costis, unfathomable. Deeply embarrassed to be witness to this private moment, he glanced at the door, thinking of escape, but the way was blocked by two of the queen’s attendants, present but as immobile as doorposts, both looking carefully at the ground. He wished the floor could open and swallow him, the floorboards split apart and he and the upholstered chair and the small three-legged table all be sucked down out of sight. Assuming, of course, that it could happen without a sound, and without drawing the attention of the king or queen.

“Costis is here, and Iolanthe and Ileia,” the queen reminded the king.

“Costis,” said the king vaguely. “Younger version of Teleus? No sense of humor?”

“The same,” said the queen, a trace of amusement in her voice.

The king lay still, but his color was slowly coming back to his face, and his breathing eased. He opened his eyes and looked up at the queen still bending over him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You were right,” she said.

“I was?” The king sounded bewildered.

“The apologies do get boring.”

Eugenides chuckled. He closed his eyes again and turned his head from side to side on the pillow, relaxing overworked nerves. Looking more like himself, he said, “You are treasure beyond any price.”

He sounded more like himself, too, and Costis realized that what he had taken for the roughness of sleep was the king’s accent. While half asleep, he had spoken with an Eddisian accent, which was only to be expected, but Costis had never heard it before, nor had anyone he knew. Awake, the king sounded like an Attolian. It made Costis wonder what else the king could hide so well that no one even thought to look for it.

“If you are feeling more yourself, there is a problem best addressed immediately,” said the queen.

“In my nightshirt?” The king wriggled, as ever, out of straightforward obedience.

“Your attendants. I have spoken to them. You will speak to them as well.”

“Ah. They have seen me in my nightshirt.” He looked down at his sleeve, embroidered with white flowers. “Not in your nightshirt, though.”

He was fully awake and himself again.

He said, “Don’t you think we should know first what message Iolanthe is holding on the tip of her tongue?”

Iolanthe, who had been waiting patiently with her message, said when the queen turned to her, “Your Majesty’s physician is here.”

“Someone else who has seen me in a nightshirt,” muttered the king.

Petrus, when he came to the door, was followed by two guardsmen, and looked as if he might have been propelled by them rather than his own motive force. He reinforced this impression by dropping to his knees as the guardsmen stepped back. The queen waved a dismissal, and they continued backward through the door before she turned to the doctor.

“Your Majesty, p-please—” he stuttered before she cut him off.

“Clearly you found something in the lethium. What was it?”

“Q-Quinalums,” he said. “The king’s lethium has been tainted with powdered quinalums.” He twisted his long fingers together nervously. “I am sure Your Majesty knows that they are used in the temples t-to open the minds of the oracles to receive the gods’ messages. Misused, they can cause death. Even the smallest amounts in the untrained result in—”

“Screaming nightmares?” suggested the king.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The queen looked at the physician appraisingly. If the king could make a throne seem like a stool fit for a printer’s apprentice, the queen could make a rumpled bedspread into a throne.

With an effort that Costis recognized as heroic, coming from such a timid man, Petrus pulled himself together. “Your M-Majesty,” the physician said more calmly, “I cannot prove my innocence. The only defense I can offer is that I am not a brave man and not a stupid one. It was not I who altered the king’s medication. Please believe that there is nothing on this earth that would have induced me to do so.”

“I am not sure that is a risk I am prepared to take,” said Attolia.

The man was sweating. “The hospital,” he said, “the experiments and—and your patients depend on me. Please, Your Majesty . . .”

The queen lifted her chin abruptly. “Very well,” she said.

The physician breathed a sigh of relief. He tried to recover a little of his lost dignity. “The taste of the quinalums was obscured by the lethium. Another physician might not have realized that quinalum was present.”

“Though the screaming nightmares might have given him a hint?” the king asked dryly.

“Yes, Your Majesty. Perhaps I should examine Your Majesty?”

A dark look from the king and a nod from the queen dismissed him.

When he was gone, the queen pulled at the covers, straightening them around the king.

“You trust him?” she asked.

Costis wondered what signal he had missed between the two of them.

“I know something you don’t,” the king told her.

“Who put the quinalums in the lethium?”

“That, too.”

“You will see your attendants. They have run unchecked long enough.”

“I’m very tired,” he said pathetically.

“Now.” She rose and left.

Filing through the door, the king’s attendants stood in a group between the bed and the windows. Costis didn’t envy them the conversation they had evidently had with the queen. He was still standing by the chair near the head of the queen’s bed and would have chosen to be almost anywhere else in the world, but neither the king nor the queen had dismissed him. Excepting the queen’s hint to the king, and his comment about Costis’s deficient sense of humor, neither of them had seemed to take note of him at all.

“I can’t doubt that the queen has made her displeasure at your performance very clear,” the king began.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“And she has left your punishment to me?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Well, pick up your heads and stop looking like criminals. If Her Majesty has excoriated you, then I think you have been punished enough already.”

Costis suppressed a wince. He might have pitied the attendants after their talk with the queen, but he hadn’t forgiven them, and he didn’t think the king should either. Eugenides might know how to deal with their queen, perhaps better than anyone could have guessed, but the king mishandled his attendants. One and all they lifted their heads and looked up with varying degrees of relief. Sejanus’s smirk was already back.

Only Philologos was unwilling to be let off so easily.

“Your Majesty,” he said sternly. “We have behaved shamefully. You should not overlook it.”