Still diffident, he disagreed with his queen. “The Thieves of Eddis have always been set apart, Your Majesty. He has had very little company in his life, and he isn’t used to it. But there are other words for privacy and independence. They are isolation and loneliness. Drive him out. Whether he wants to or not, he belongs in the open. The world needs to see what a king he is.”

“Whatever the cost to him?”

“No man can choose to serve only himself when he has something to offer to his state. No one can put his own wishes above the needs of so many.”

“Take care,” the queen said softly. “Take care, my dear friend.”

Relius lay very still.

“I am an exceedingly effective scythe,” the queen said.

Relius smiled wanly back. “And I offer you justification out of my own mouth. There is no house waiting for me in some obscure village in the Gede Valley, is there?”

“Not in the Gede Valley, no. There is one in the Modrea, two floors and an open court, as well as an atrium, a study downstairs. There’s a little land at the back, for goats.”

Relius waited.

“Or you could stay with me. I need you still. Attolia needs you still.”

The tears rose in Relius’s silent eyes. He closed them and thought in the darkness about a house in the Gede Valley or the Modrea with a study downstairs and a small fountain, no doubt, and the sound of goats, and peace.

“I am what you have made of me,” the queen said softly.

Relius smiled through his own tears. “And you may mow me down a hundred times, My Queen, with my best wishes. But I am a failure and a wreck. I cannot see how I could be of any use to you.”

“You are not a failure, and for my sake, I hope you are not a wreck. As to what use you may be, shall we wait and see?” she asked.

When Relius agreed, sadly relinquishing in his thoughts the quiet farm in the Modrea Valley, Attolia asked if he had changed his opinion on whether the king should be driven to a task he hated, now that he himself had been manipulated by the queen.

“I only hope you can be as effective with the king,” Relius said.

Attolia admitted the challenge. “The whole Mede Empire was easier to redirect,” she said. “Ornon was right to say that he could not be driven. I don’t know why he continues to try.”

“I think he is providing a foil for you, My Queen, and waiting for you to make your move.”

“I made it already,” said Attolia. “On my wedding night. You have heard no doubt the events of our wedding night?”

Relius looked away. “He said that you . . . cried,” he said softly.

“But not that he cried as well,” said the queen, amused at the memory. “We were very lachrymose.”

“Is that what he told Dite in the garden?” Relius asked, fitting puzzle piece to puzzle piece.

“I think so. I haven’t asked either of them outright. Would you like to hear more romance of the evening? He told me that the Guard should be reduced by half, and I threw an ink jar at his head.”

“Is that when he cried?”

“He ducked,” said Attolia dryly.

Grown more confident of the queen’s humor, Relius said, “I had not pictured you for a fishwife.”

“Lo, the transforming power of love.”

“The Guard,” Relius said thoughtfully.

“Your own pet worry,” said Attolia.

“Will you reduce it?”

“You know why I have not. Because I cannot, not with the Mede raising its armies and my barons still divisive. The Guard is the loyal heart of my forces.”

“And your barons will go on being divisive so long as Eugenides is a figurehead.”

Attolia waited.

“And Eugenides is resisting being king. And?” prompted Relius.

Attolia raised her hands in a mockery of helplessness. “I agreed to reduce the Guard.”

Relius waited.

“With the condition that he needs to ask Teleus and have Teleus agree.”

Relius laughed outright. He was sufficiently healed that no pain forced him to stop.

The queen said, with a ladylike chuckle, “I believe you handled me just the same once. When you told me I could install an okloi general just as soon as I had the approval of the council of barons.”

“And I was right,” said Relius. “Once you had shown you could sway that council, you could install anyone you wished.”

“Am I not right?”

“Entirely right. Teleus won’t bow to superior force. He won’t bow to reason either, and damn his pigheadedness, he won’t bow for his own salvation, but he’ll bow to a king. If Teleus thinks Eugenides is a king, it will only be because he is one. It is a brilliant strategy, My Queen.”

“It is good to hear you say so,” said Attolia quietly, looking at her hands, resting still in her lap. “I have missed your advice.”

The queen gathered her skirts, preparing to rise. Hesitantly, Relius lifted his hand to stop her. “My Queen,” he said, “when you said that you had trusted me all these years . . . ?”

The smile she so often hid in her voice came to her face then. It was a smile Relius had been privileged to see before. He knew he shared that privilege with few others. It pleased him deeply to know that one of those others was the king. “Yes, Relius,” said the queen, smiling. “I have trusted you, and no, that does not mean that I have not had you watched and that I do not have spies that watch my spies, and spies even that watch those.”

“Good,” said Relius, relieved.

The queen shook her head and warned him, “That is over now, my friend. You have been elevated to a new rank, where you are trusted unconditionally. Don’t look so uncomfortable. I have learned that there is a flaw in your philosophy. If we truly trust no one, we cannot survive.” She bent to kiss his cheek, then gathered her skirts and was gone. Relius was left behind in the quiet room, considering a new philosophy.

The events of the state rolled on. The queen showed every sign of affection for her king, and it was accepted as a necessary artifice. The courtiers walked warily of Eugenides; though he was no more than a tool for the queen, he was obviously a dangerous one. The Guard clung to a sense of offense on behalf of their captain. The great states of the Continent politely disbelieved any rumors of war from the Mede Empire, and the King of Sounis slowly recaptured control of his country, though there was still no word of Sophos, the missing heir. Sejanus was tried for conspiring to commit regicide, giving evidence that the assassins had been sent by Sounis. The queen, supposedly at the direction of the king, ordered that he be spared the ultimate penalty for his crimes, and he was sent to be incarcerated in the hinterland. The last of the assassins died in the queen’s prison after revealing that his services had been provided to the King of Sounis by Nahuseresh, the former Ambassador to Attolia from the Mede Empire.

The attendants stood listening to the muffled sounds of destruction. That they could hear anything at all was indicative of the violence of the proceedings on the far side of the heavy wooden door. At each crash they winced. Glad to be in the king’s guardroom, not in his bedchamber with him, Ion met Sotis’s glance and rolled his eyes.