“You are pardoned. Do you understand?”

Relius’s head nodded a fraction. Eugenides brushed his hand across the secretary’s forehead one more time. His words were still gentle, but he smiled as he said, “Don’t let Petrus put in too many stitches. They hurt like hell.”

He got to his feet slowly, but he didn’t make a sound. His attendants twitched, but didn’t offer to assist. The king stepped across the cell toward the door, his left leg moving slower than the right, making his steps uneven, his left arm pressed against his side. As he passed Teleus, he didn’t look at him.

“Her Majesty charged me with your safe return to bed,” Teleus said stiffly.

“I am going directly there. When you have seen Relius to a comfortable bed, you may tell Her Majesty so.”

When the king was gone, the prison keeper returned, creeping back. Teleus sent for something to carry Relius on. “Carry him where?” the keeper asked. He’d heard every word from where he’d stood in the hallway. He didn’t need to ask.

“Never mind,” said Teleus curtly. He crossed to Relius’s side. “Are your ribs broken?” he asked.

“Nothing but the hand, I think,” Relius whispered.

Teleus leaned over to lift the secretary’s head. His strong fingers cradled his friend gently while he pulled the cloak away. He used the cloak as a wrapping. “Get that damned chain off,” he said, and the keeper hurried to the task. When it was done, Teleus lifted his friend himself. Holding him in his arms, he carried him out of the cell. The guard trailed behind him.

“You can’t carry him all the way to the infirmary,” the prison keeper called.

“He can hand him to me,” said a guard as he was leaving.

“And me,” said another as he went through the door, leaving the keeper alone in the cell.

“Your Majesty,” Hilarion wailed, sounding more like Philologos.

“I lied.” The king interrupted without lifting his head and without pausing as he continued painfully up the stairs.

With no choice, the attendants followed. They had been left behind at the landing when they had stepped off the stairs, mistakenly heading in the direction of the royal apartments.

The top of the staircase let out onto the walks around the roof of the palace, near the Comemnus tower. All of the towers around the palace were named. The Comemnus was taller than the rest of the roof by only a single story. It had been added to the palace by the current queen’s grandfather in a day of flamboyant architecture and was made of two colors of stone, speckled like a lattice and faced with decorative brickwork. The king paused as if admiring it, then went up the decorative brickwork as if it were a staircase and disappeared over the edge of the roof.

Consternated, the attendants stared at one another. After silent prodding Philologos called, “Your Majesty?” but there was no answer.

Hilarion put his hands to the brickwork and cautiously began to climb, not sure how he would continue when his path took him over the edge of the wall and out above empty space. He didn’t find out. He’d gone no more than a few careful steps when the king’s voice came over the edge of the tower roof.

“I will have you granched,” he said quietly.

Not wanting to end his life hanging impaled on stakes, Hilarion stepped hastily back down.

It was more than an hour before the king came down, and Relius had long been in his bed in the infirmary before his attendants and guard returned the king to the royal apartments.

Weaving with fatigue, dismissed by Teleus when they were halfway to the infirmary, Costis returned to his room, freed himself of belt and breastplate, and fell, otherwise fully dressed, onto the bed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE long summer’s day was ending. The sky was still bright, but the sun was gone. The last of the swallows were flicking across the open spaces between the buildings and the first bats could be seen flicking with them when Dite left the walled city of Attolia and made his way through the open streets to the docks where a ship was awaiting him. If he’d imagined going off alone, with just his bag on his shoulder and some of the king’s money in his pocket, there were obvious complications to this plan. He needed to take his music and his instruments and had had to hire one of the palace boys to carry them. When the boy saw the number of cases, he doubled his price and went out to fetch a handcart. Dite’s friends had helped him pack all afternoon, insuring that it took much longer than necessary and that he had to put in a number of useless but appreciated last-minute gifts. His friends walked with him as he followed the handcart.

They were very merry, all of them. The house of Erondites might be tumbling to destruction, but they saw cause for celebration. Dite was going to the court of Ferria to be music master. Ferria—where they were translating the great works from the ancient world and reading them aloud in the plazas, where the artists were changing the world of painting overnight, where the wealthy patrons of the city demonstrated their status by keeping able-bodied men to do nothing all day and most of the night but make music.

They followed him onto the ship and helped him stow his possessions in his tiny cabin. Then they stood about on the deck admiring the sky, the ship, the crew, the bay. Dite pulled at one young man’s sleeve and drew him aside. He handed him two letters and a heavy purse.

“Will you deliver these for me, Kos? I couldn’t do it myself. The purse and the letter with it are for my mother.”

“God of wealth, Dite, where did you get this much? It isn’t the king’s silver, is it?”

Dite admitted that it was. “I kept some of it,” he said, “but I wanted my mother to have the rest. She might need it.”

“If your father decides he needs a younger wife. I understand. What’s the other letter?”

“That’s for Sejanus. If the king allows it, will you deliver it? I tried to visit him, and they wouldn’t let me. No one is to speak to him.”

Kos agreed. The captain of the ship finally came to put off anyone who didn’t intend to sail for the Peninsula. The ship set out toward Thegmis, and the dark came down.

Inside the walled city, in the walled palace—under it, where it stank and there was no air except what came in, as if by mistake, through tiny openings into the rare light well—the dark hardly mattered. The only light all day had come from burning lamps outside the cell. Sejanus sat with his back against the rough stones of the wall. He was fortunate. He was privileged. He had a mattress on his stone bed; he had a window, no bigger than his face and barred, that connected to an air shaft, like a chimney, that went to the surface. He wasn’t chained. From time to time he walked over and pulled himself up on the bars so that he could put his face close and suck a breath of air not soggy with the smells of the prison.

When the prison keeper brought him food, he asked, he begged, for news of his brother, but the man wouldn’t speak. He left the food and went away.

The Baron Erondites, in his villa surrounded by quiet fields and the occasional sound of the animals in the stable and barn, ate his dinner with absentminded pleasure, unaware of the messenger riding toward him on a fast horse. The night grew older, the dark cooled and blanketed the noises of the farm and the city alike. The Baron Erondites went to his bed, satisfied with his day. In the city, the palace grew quiet. Sejanus slept at last, as did Dite, rocked by the waves of the wine-dark sea.