“It’s the dog watch of the night,” the king said softly.

Relius gasped and opened his eyes to see the king sitting in the low chair near the foot of the bed. As he watched, the king stood, and hooked the chair with his foot to slide it closer to Relius’s head and sat again.

His statement seemed at first irrelevant, but it wasn’t. The dog watch of the night was a bad time for those haunted by nightmares. The king had to know that for himself.

Relius lifted his head briefly. The king turned to follow his gaze to the silent group of attendants near the door. He turned back to look down at Relius with a bitter smile that was gone almost as soon as it appeared and was replaced by an expression of surprising calm. He sat quietly by the bed as Relius, through sheer willpower, steadied his breathing and relaxed his body. The darkness around them became slowly less threatening.

“Why save me, Your Majesty?” Relius asked softly.

“You think it was a mistake?”

Relius opened his mouth and shut it again.

“You want to say yes and no at the same time,” the king guessed.

“I am having trouble separating my own self-interest from that of my queen,” Relius admitted, sounding a little pedantic and apologetic about it.

“You sound like Sounis’s magus. He had a similar problem once.”

“The risk that you take is too great,” Relius said, “and you gain nothing by pardoning me.”

“The greatest risk was to the queen, and the risk lay in your death, not your pardon.”

Relius puzzled over this, and the king gave in to exasperation.

“You don’t know what I mean. She is so strong, and you assume that strength has no end, no breaking point. You and Teleus are among the few she still trusts enough to love, and you say yes, she should have you tortured and killed. What were you thinking?”

“If she pardons people because she loves them, someday someone that she loves will betray her and all of Attolia with her. A queen must make sacrifices for the common good,” Relius said.

“And if what she sacrifices is her heart? Giving it up a piece at a time until there is nothing left? What do you have then, Relius, but a heartless ruler? And what becomes of the common good then?”

“The queen could never be heartless.”

“No,” said the king. “She would die herself, Relius, or lose her mind first and then her heart. Could you not see it happening? Or is your faith in her strength really so blind? Everyone has a breaking point. Yet you never stop demanding more of her.”

Relius was quiet while he thought. “And yours? I thought we found your breaking point.”

Eugenides winced, but he responded with a self-deprecating noise. “Ornon says, Ornon-who-always-has-something-to-say says, the Thieves of Eddis don’t have breaking points. We have flash points instead, like gunpowder. That’s what makes us dangerous.”

“You don’t like Ornon,” said Relius.

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Because you don’t like to speak the truth?”

Eugenides made a wry face. “Ornon and I have a great deal of hard-won respect for each other,” said the king.

“Won how?”

“Well, he almost managed to avert a war. I’ve heard he did a splendid job of working the queen up to killing me on the spot when she caught me. If it hadn’t been for the Mede Ambassador’s timely and provoking interruption, I would have been safely dead, and there wouldn’t have been a great deal of blood shed.”

“You’ve heard?” Relius asked.

“I wasn’t there for Ornon’s part.”

He’d been puking on the wet floor of a cell of the queen’s prison. Not far from where Relius himself had been.

“Ornon’s respect for you?” Relius asked, taking the conversation back to a less perilous topic.

The king only smiled. “Even ex-Thieves don’t spill their secrets, Relius.”

He left a little later. Relius lay alone with his thoughts. What kind of man, he wondered, referred to himself as “safely dead”?

The king, passing through the guardroom and back to the queen’s bedroom, asked, “Where’s Costis?”

“He was released at the end of the afternoon watch.”

“By whom? I didn’t give him leave to go.”

“The queen sent him to the guardroom, Your Majesty.”

“Then why isn’t he here?”

“The captain dismissed him at the end of the afternoon watch.”

“I want him.”

“The captain?”

“No, you idiot—” He broke off as the queen appeared in a doorway opposite. “You’re awake,” he said.

“Phresine is not,” pointed out the queen.

“Oh?”

“You gave her lethium.”

“She gave it to me first.”

The queen looked at him, eyes narrowed, and said nothing. He waved at his attendants. “I dragged them like a ball and chain all the way across the palace and back.”

“If sterner measures are called for, we can find a larger ball and chain.” The queen turned and disappeared into the apartment.

“Oh, dear,” Eugenides muttered as he followed, without sending for Costis after all. The queen’s sterner measures, dispensed by the Eddisian Ambassador, arrived before dawn.

Costis wasn’t in uniform, he wasn’t even particularly clean, when he learned the next morning that he had been sent for. He had checked the duty schedule the evening before when he was hunting for Aristogiton and couldn’t find him. Aris had been on duty. Costis was assigned no duties for the foreseeable future, and he had enjoyed a quiet morning pottering around in his own room, giving his sword and breastplate and the assorted shiny bits of his uniform a thorough cleaning. He had polishing grease on his nose and his fingers were black when someone slid back the leather curtain across his doorway without knocking on the door frame first.

When Costis lifted his head from the sword he was cleaning, prepared to be angry at the intrusion, he found no lowly barracks boy in the doorway. It was Ion, one of the king’s elegant and carefully turned-out attendants.

Ion, looking far from elegant, stared at him in horror. “Get dressed. Get clean. You are supposed to be in the queen’s guardroom.”

“When?” asked Costis, getting to his feet.

“Now,” said the attendant, “hours ago. You were supposed to be there when the king asked for you just now. He said he wanted you last night, but we didn’t think he meant it.”

“And now he’s angry?”

“Now the queen is angry.”

Moving fast, Costis tipped water from a pitcher into a bowl and began to scrub his face.

The queen was waiting in the antechamber to the bedroom. As before, she had Ornon with her. They were both waiting. She stood as Costis entered. No, Costis thought, she didn’t stand. She rose—like a thundercloud towering in the summer sky. He could try to explain that he hadn’t known he was supposed to remain on duty, and that he’d been dismissed by the captain himself. He could also rush back to the guardroom, snatch his sword out of the rack, and throw himself down on it. Likely with the same results.