The king had moved back to his rooms a week earlier. Where he slept was anyone’s guess. The attendants knew that they put him to bed in his bedchamber, and that when they knocked at the door in the morning, he was there to unlock it. Now they knew that this was the entirety of what they knew.

In an interview that morning with the new Secretary of the Archives, the Baron Hippias, Eugenides had learned that the assassins from Sounis had been sent by Nahuseresh. Afterward, the king had excused himself graciously from the queen and returned to his rooms for what was supposed to be a change of clothes before lunch with a foreign ambassador.

But he hadn’t changed his clothes. Instead he had silently waved his attendants out of the bedchamber and closed the door behind them with a benevolent smile, and then, as far as they could tell from the noise, he’d broken every breakable thing in the room.

The noises stopped some time before they heard the door unlock. The king depressed the latch and let it swing open behind him as he turned back toward the center of the room. The attendants paced hesitantly into the destruction. There were broken bits of the side chairs scattered across the carpet. The hangings above the king’s bed were ribboned tatters.

“The person who describes this to the queen will be flayed.” The king spoke quietly. The attendants moved from nervous to fearful.

“Your Majesty,” said Ion. The king didn’t seem to be listening. Ion licked his lips and tried again. “Your Majesty,” he whispered. The king turned and looked at him impassively. “I-I am sure . . . I assure you . . . no one here will speak of it.”

The king passed his hand across his face. “That will have to do,” he said. “I will change in the wardrobe. Cleon and Ion can attend me. The rest of you—” He looked around at the wreckage. “Clean up what you can.”

“Sacred altars,” Lamion whispered when he was gone. “Does he think there will be anyone in the palace who doesn’t hear about this?”

Philologos passed the velvet ribbons of the bed hangings through his hand. The bedpost nearby was marked as if hammered over and over with a pickax. The wood was splintered and gouged. The holes were surprisingly deep.

“They won’t know details. They won’t hear any from us.”

“They won’t need to,” said Hilarion.

Philologos poked his fingers into the holes.

The attendants began collecting the remains of the chairs. They looked helplessly at the wall, splattered with overlapping explosions of different colored ink. The unbreakable inkwells lay on the carpet. Fine ceramic pieces of the more fragile inkwells crunched underfoot. One inkwell, lying on its side, was carved diorite. It had left a dent in the plastered wall. Below the king’s scriptorium was an array of writing utensils swept from its surface. Pens and nibs, papers and the weights he used to hold them while he wrote, were all scattered in mute testimony to frustration and rage.

Silently the attendants contrasted the evidence before their eyes to the calm behavior of the king as he had returned from the audience with Hippias.

“Our little king doesn’t like people trying to assassinate him.”

“He isn’t angry because someone tried to kill him,” Philologos said sharply.

“How do you know that, Philo, dear?”

But Philologos had had enough of being condescended to. “Because, Lamion, I am not as dumb as you think I am, even if you are.”

By the time Lamion had parsed this to be sure there was in fact an insult at the end of it, Hilarion had laid a restraining hand on his arm.

“So, tell us, Philologos, your insight.”

“He isn’t angry because Nahuseresh tried to have him killed,” Philologos told them. “He is angry because he can’t go kill Nahuseresh in return.”

“Because he is king,” agreed Hilarion.

“Not because he’s king,” Philologos said, disgusted by their dull wits. “Because he has only one hand,” he said, voicing the king’s bitterness as his own.

The attendants looked around them at the mess, at the fabric sliced again and again until it hung in threads, and the bedpost marked by gouges. They looked back at Philologos with new respect.

“That’s what he doesn’t want the queen to know about.”

No one disagreed. They turned their attention to cleaning what they could and arranging for the wall to be repaired, and discussed, very carefully, how they might suggest to the rest of the court that the king’s tantrum was caused by his dislike of Nahuseresh, and nothing else.

Costis panted as he hurried up the stone steps past the last flickering lamp and onto the dark walk that ran around the roof of the palace. Aris was waiting for him at the top. Behind them rose the dark bulk of the inner palace. In front of them was the city with a few lights burning on its dark streets and farther out the harbor, with the dim lights on ships glowing against the deeper black of the sea. Costis shivered. The night air was cool, and he’d raised a sweat hurrying across the palace after the messenger Aristogiton had sent to knock on his door frame and wake him in the early hours of the dog watch of the night.

“What is it?” he asked, not happy to have been dragged out without an explanation. “Your messenger wouldn’t—”

“Shh,” said Aris, and pointed out toward the outer wall. His eyes not yet accustomed to the dark after coming up from the lighted courtyard below, Costis saw only a dim silhouette against the sky.

“That’s not—” Costis whispered.

“The king. Yes, it is,” said Aris.

“He’s on top of the crenellations.” Costis had patrolled this wall many times and knew those crenellations. They rose from the parapet, about two feet high and each about three feet long, narrowing to a ridge along the top. As he watched, the king moved to the end of one crenellation and then hopped across the intervening space to the next.

Costis opened his mouth to say, “Why doesn’t someone tell him to get down?” when he realized why Aris had summoned him from his warm bed. “No,” he said firmly, “not me.”

“Costis, please.”

“Where are his cursed attendants?” Costis hissed.

“Behind you,” said Ion.

Costis whirled to see a handful of them standing in the dark. They had been no friend of Costis’s when he was with the king. They’d made it clear that their waiting room was no place for common soldiers, and now they wanted him to tell the king to get down off the wall before he fell and broke every bone in his body.

“Go to hell,” said Costis. He turned back to the stairs.

“Costis, please,” begged Aris.

“It isn’t my business,” said Costis. “Besides, he probably does this sort of thing all the time at home.”

“Maybe he does, but not with a wineskin in his hand,” said Ion, flatly. Staring, Costis could see the wineskin swinging as the king jumped to the next crenellation.

“It’s not my business,” Costis insisted, as flatly.

“It’s my business,” said Aris, catching him by the arm. “I’m on watch. If he falls, Costis, I’ll hang for it. Please.”

Costis said nothing.

“We’ll all hang for it,” said Hilarion. “I know why you don’t want to get involved. You certainly owe us no favors, but I swear on my honor, Costis, name your price and we’ll pay it, if you can get him off that wall.”