“Brave words, Relius.”

“No one here is brave. Just stupid. Did you come to hear me beg? I will. I have. You know the words.” The tears rose in his eyes, and his voice weakened. “Please don’t hurt me anymore. Please. Please, no more.”

The king turned his face away.

“I don’t know,” Relius whispered, “if I was ever brave. But if I’d known that you would come back, I would have killed you then.”

“If you had only known that I would end up here and you there? What a surprise it must be after all your years of service to the queen.”

“No surprise that I am here. Only that you are here as well. Do you think I didn’t know, from the very beginning, that this was where I must end?”

“Would you have served her if you did?” the king asked.

“Gladly,” snarled the secretary, and had to pant for breath, having disturbed the equilibrium of his body’s pain and his tolerance of it.

The king leaned forward then, and Relius cried out, but the king only slid his hand under Relius’s head to lift it while he used the hook to pull the cloak forward. He laid Relius’s head back down on the makeshift pillow.

Philologos came back with a skin jug in his hand.

Sotis took it from him, and, following the king’s indications, he bent to tip it into Relius’s mouth. The secretary swallowed once. Before he could swallow again, the king said confidently, “You must hate her now.”

Relius’s eyes rolled. He looked at the king and deliberately spat out the precious water. He struggled to lift his head, so that he could look the king in the eye. “If I were here for fifty years,” he said, gasping, “and she released me, I would crawl, if that was all I could do, to her feet to serve her.”

The king shook his head in amusement and disbelief. “That is impossible. After what she has done to you?”

“It is what I taught her to do.”

“So you would serve her still?”

“Yes.”

His amusement and his disbelief wiped away, the king leaned closer.

“So would I.” He spoke so quietly that Costis had to strain to hear the words. It was too much for Relius to take in. He only stared.

“What do you want from me?” he whispered. The tears rolled from the corners of his eyes. “You are here for your revenge. I cannot stop you. So take it. Whatever you want you can take. No one can stop you.”

“I want you to believe me.”

“No.” His breathing was ragged as he fought to suppress sobs that would rack his already aching body. His face twisted in pain.

The king was at the edge of the seat, leaning close to Relius’s ear. Costis couldn’t hear what he said next, but he heard Relius cry out. “What difference does it make what I believe when I will be dead soon, like Teleus?”

The king sat back, making a face at the pain in his side. “Then there is something you haven’t heard. She pardoned Teleus.”

“Liar,” Relius cried. “Liar.”

“Well, yes, I am,” the king agreed, turning his head to listen to the sound of footsteps approaching in the passage. “However, this is one truth I can prove. Unless I miss my guess, and I doubt that I could, the angry footsteps currently stamping toward us belong to the captain himself.”

The king was correct. It was the captain and a squad of guards. He came through the door and stopped just behind the king’s chair.

He didn’t speak. He reached around the king’s shoulder to offer him a folded paper.

“Let me guess,” said the king. “My queen has transferred Enkelis and reinstated you, and your first task is to get me back to bed?”

He opened the paper with one hand, spreading it across his knee, and read the message it contained.

He smiled down at it.

“I will spare you, Teleus, the difficulty of attempting to conduct me bodily back to bed. You can finish what I have begun here, instead.”

Teleus flinched in horror and disgust. He looked across the cell to Relius, and the shock on his face faded into grief. Relius looked back without hope. Teleus was alive because the king had interceded on his behalf, and he knew where his duty lay. “I am at your service, Your Majesty,” Teleus said, sickened.

Eugenides got out of his chair in order to turn around fully, so that he could see Teleus’s face. “You misunderstand me, Captain. I am pardoning him.”

Teleus, who had faced his failures and his death and the death of his friend and accepted his own salvation at the hand of a man he despised, ran out of the strength to accept any more. He contradicted the king. “Her Majesty has condemned him.”

Eugenides, wounded and tired and surrounded by the walls and the stench of the prison where he had lost his hand, responded, not mocking but snarling, “Am I king?”

The way a crack in the face of a dam widens with accelerating speed, letting more and more water surge through, Teleus’s voice rose with every word until he was shouting loud enough to be heard across a parade ground, the deep profundo painful in the small cell. “Do you think that matters?” he bellowed. “Do you really imagine it is your orders taken here?”

What else he shouted was lost, its meaning obliterated as the king shouted back, equally impassioned and incomprehensible, their words ricocheting against the walls and clashing into meaningless noise that made Costis long to cover his ears. If Teleus swelled with rage, the king burned with it. No matter that Teleus was nearly a head taller than the king, if Teleus meant to overwhelm him with his physical presence, he failed. Like a feral cat against a barnyard dog, the king stood his ground, and the two shouted until Teleus caught sight of the Secretary of the Archives. Relius had turned his head away, trying hopelessly to shut out the sound. Abruptly Teleus fell silent, letting the king’s last words ring uncontested.

“I CAN DO ANYTHING I WANT!”

The prison keeper chose an inopportune moment to look around the doorway into the cell. He and the king locked gazes, and the king’s eyes narrowed while the prison keeper’s widened. Then the angry flush in the king’s cheeks faded away. He let the queen’s message drop from his hand, his face as white as the paper it was written on. He reached for the chair, and his hook banged awkwardly over the top of it. He was swaying as he turned to catch his balance with his remaining hand. Philologos was nearest and raised his hands to help, but backed away. They waited. The king held the chair, stared into invisible space, and slowly his color came back. He started to speak twice, and stopped. He experimented with a small breath, then took a deeper one, and finally spoke without turning his head.

“I don’t care whose orders you think you are following, Captain, but you will see that Relius is moved to the palace infirmary and some physician, other than the butcher down here, treats him. Get Petrus. I will take your squad with me. You may keep mine. Send Costis to his bed before he falls over.”

He waited to see if Teleus was going to argue.

It was Relius who spoke from where he lay, his voice thready but defiant.

“You cannot buy my loyalty.”

The king made a noise too harsh to be a laugh. He stepped around the chair, and holding his side with his left arm, he leaned close to the secretary. “You said no one down here was brave.” He lifted his hook near Relius’s face. Relius closed his eyes tightly, and the king ruefully withdrew it. Painfully he crouched down until his knees were on the filthy floor and one elbow was supporting him on the bench. He lifted his hand away from his side, lifted it to Relius’s face, brushed the sticking hair off his forehead, and said, speaking very gently, so that a man exhausted and in pain could understand, “You are pardoned, Relius, because I want you to be. Not because I want your loyalty.” He waited while the words sank in. “You can retire to a farm in the Gede Valley and keep goats, and be loyal to whomever you want. I don’t care.