In the palace infirmary, the moon shone through the arched windows. The lamp beside the only occupied bed burned with a tiny flame, and the dark gathered in the corners of the room and the recesses of the high ceilings. Relius was awake. He had heard the door on the far side of the infirmary open and close again, and he watched as the king crossed the large room toward him. His steps made no more sound than the moonlight falling through the windows, nor did the stool scrape against the floor as he settled onto it and hooked his ankle around one of its three legs. He might have been a dream, and Relius was not sure he was not.

Relius cleared his throat and whispered, “I had heard that you moved through the palace at night unattended.”

“In the past, perhaps,” the king admitted. “But not tonight.” Lifting his head, with effort, from the pillow, Relius could make out figures in the gloom on the far side of the room.

“My punishment,” said the king, “for walking in the gardens when I knew they hadn’t been searched. I have promised to keep them with me.”

Relius said nothing.

“I’ll keep the promise until I know I can get away with breaking it,” said the king. “It may be some time. She was”—he searched for a word, looked as if he might be dismissing enraged, livid, furious, and said—“not pleased.”

Relius still said nothing. He was waiting.

The king knew. “It occurred to you some time ago that this would be a fine revenge.” He lifted an arm to wave at the empty room around them. “One night here on clean sheets in the warmth of the brazier with a lamp beside you to chase the horrors away and then, in the morning, back to the cold and dark of one of those little rooms under the palace.”

It was as if the king pulled the thoughts out of Relius’s head on a string.

Relius had to try twice to get words out. “Is that what this is?” he whispered. He shifted his head on the pillow, searching for an answer in the king’s expression.

“No.”

Relius still stared without blinking. “Oh, gods,” he said, and closed his eyes. He seemed to shrink beneath the bedcover.

The king agreed with what Relius left unsaid. “It is exactly what I would tell you, whether it was true or not. There is nothing I can say to keep you from lying here all night anticipating the worst. Even if you are not hauled away in the morning, you will only worry that the prison guard will be here in the afternoon, or the late watches of the next night or the next, and maybe, after enough nights have passed, you might begin to think you were safe all along. But there are hours and days and weeks of suffering between now and that point, aren’t there?” His voice was quiet.

“Should I beg again for your mercy?” Relius asked, looking away.

“You should believe me,” said the king more forcefully. “But you won’t. Would you believe the queen? Shall I bring her here to tell you it isn’t all a cruel trick?”

Relius twisted to face the king in astonishment and in horror.

“No!” The protest was surprisingly robust.

“Why not?”

“I failed her.”

“You won’t even ask?”

“I will never—” speaking so forcibly he was reminded of his pain and his vulnerability. He broke off.

“I thought so,” said the king. “I left her to sleep and brought you this instead. She wrote it out earlier.”

Eugenides lifted a roll of paper in his hand. He offered it to Relius. “You hold the bottom,” he said. He laid the roll across Relius’s chest. One of Relius’s hands was wrapped in bandages, but he used the other to pinch the edge of the scrolled paper as the king lifted. Once it was open, the king squeezed the scroll at the top, keeping it open while he folded it and laid it on the edge of the bed. He pushed the cuff on his other arm along the fold to make a gentle crease.

He held it up again, so that Relius could see the words as he read them aloud. “I, Attolia Irene, here pardon my Secretary of the Archives, Relius, for his crimes and his failures, because of his many services to me and for the love I bear him.”

Relius swallowed. Eugenides released the paper and straightened out the fold. It rolled back up.

“For the love she bears you, Relius.”

“It’s paper,” said Relius, blinking back tears. “Put it over the bedside lamp and it will be ash.”

Eugenides shook his head, but Relius’s eyes were closed again, and he didn’t see. “Relius,” Eugenides commanded, and the Secretary of the Archives opened his eyes. “It’s her word. If I drop it into a brazier, the paper will burn, but her word is not so easily consumed. She wouldn’t lie to you.”

Relius shook his head. “You are the king,” he said.

It was his last possible denial. The king countered, “If she thought that I, as king, intended to overrule the pardon, she would never have written this. It would be a lie, and she wouldn’t lie to you,” he repeated.

“No,” Relius said shakily, “she . . . wouldn’t.” His breath of relief ended with a gasp.

“I am sorry I couldn’t come sooner, Relius. I did not mean to leave you alone here so long.”

The king sat beside the secretary, neither of them speaking, until Relius was asleep. When the king got up, he stood a moment, hunched over, before he straightened with an almost inaudible sigh.

In the morning, Costis skipped sword training, had a leisurely bath in the bathhouse, and went directly to breakfast in the mess hall. He picked a place by himself, but he was not alone for long. A group of other guards instantly rose and settled around him like a flock of birds. Their haste made Costis uncomfortable, but there was no way to leave without giving offense.

They wanted news and Costis was their most likely source.

“We heard that the king has had Lieutenant Sejanus arrested on some trumped-up charges.” To them, he was still the loyal lieutenant.

“They weren’t trumped up,” Costis said, before he recalled that the charges were exactly that.

“He confessed,” Costis said, but the guards had seen him waver. They looked at him so skeptically that Costis added firmly, “Sejanus attempted to kill the king.”

“Don’t we wish he’d succeeded,” said Domisidon, a leader in the Third Century.

Costis winced. He would have agreed wholeheartedly just a few days before. Or perhaps not. He had raced to the king in the gardens before he knew that Eugenides was more than he appeared and before he knew that the queen loved him. What had shifted his opinion of the king? It might have been Costis’s suspicions of Sejanus, but he thought it was more likely the king’s tears, and the realization that the king, no matter how obnoxious, suffered just like any other man, from teasing without mercy, from isolation, from homesickness.

Exis was down the table, watching Costis with lifted eyebrows. Costis shrugged. “I think it is worth remembering that Sejanus is a true son of Baron Erondites.”

The guards understood that. Whatever their thoughts about the king, they knew the danger that Erondites posed for their queen. “At least now we know why the queen has been pretending her affection for the king. She’s made him her puppet,” Exis said dryly.

“He’s no one’s puppet,” Costis warned, but they laughed.