It did feel as if lifetimes had passed since Costis had knocked the king down in the training yard. That was some other soldier, a simpleminded one with no idea how complicated life could become.

“Really,” said the king, “I’ve gotten a lot of thinking done tonight. In spite of my entourage.”

“Is that what the wine is for? To help you think?”

“Oh, the wine. The wine, Costis, is to help hide the truth. It doesn’t work. It never has, but I try it every once in a while just in case something in the nature of wine might have changed.”

“The truth, Your Majesty?”

The king cocked his head at him. “I’m not going to tell you, Costis, you idiot. I’m trying to bury it, remember? Hide it from myself, hide it from the gods. Because not wanting the prize the gods have arranged for you—that just might offend the hell right out of them. If you are going to reject the gods’ rewards, Costis, you have to go very carefully.” He shook his finger in admonishment. “You can’t let them know that you hate being surrounded every minute of every day by people who think you should be acting like a king, and that you cannot possibly stand one more day listening to prating idiots tell you how lucky you are while a man you hate is laughing his guts out on the far side of the Black Straits, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about that because you are trapped in the only disaster you’ve ever gotten yourself into that you absolutely cannot get out of.” He turned and walked back along the parapet. He didn’t falter, but landed on the next crenellation in a stiff-legged jolt.

He said over his shoulder, “Do you know, it’s the first time I’ve ever been caught in something I can’t get out of?” His laughter was bitter. “Because I don’t want out of it, Costis. I’m terrified that if they know how much I hate it, they might take it away.” He stopped then, as if realizing what he’d just said, all that he’d admitted out loud. “Oh, my god,” he said, “the wine isn’t working, is it?”

He swung his body around and turned again toward Costis, but his momentum continued to carry him away. He took several teetering steps backward. Then his eyes widened, and Costis could see their whites in the dim light. Instead of recovering, he recoiled farther. One foot stepped out over the abyss. The king reached with his hand and caught at nothing and, though it was impossible, still hung there, suspended, over the open air.

“My god,” the king whispered, not in prayer.

And Costis heard, as clearly as he’d heard the king speaking, another voice. It said, “Go to bed.”

Then the king was falling toward Costis, and Costis was tossing the wineskin aside in order to catch him. As his feet hit the walkway, the king’s knees buckled, and Costis held him, his own knees weak. He couldn’t tell which of them was shaking more. The king sucked at the air, drawing each breath and holding it. Costis remembered the doctor putting in his stitches, but these were more the hissing breaths of a man who has just cut himself or foolishly reached for a hot iron handle and burned his fingers. When the king finally straightened, Costis didn’t let him go and the king didn’t pull away. He stood, head down, with his hand on Costis’s shoulder, until the shaking finally subsided. He laughed a little then and shook his head.

He pushed Costis away and stumbled off in the direction of his waiting attendants.

Trying to believe that he hadn’t seen what he’d seen or heard what he’d heard, Costis followed, telling himself that it wasn’t true that he and the king and even the stone under their feet were nothing but tissue, transparently thin, and that for a moment, the only real thing in the universe had been there on the parapet with the king.

“I am beginning to sense a certain amount of fraud in the reports of poets, Costis,” said the king, over his shoulder. His voice was almost steady. “Maybe someone lied to the poets. Maybe it’s just me. Do you know what the gods said to Ibykon on the night before his battle at Menara?” the king asked. “At least, what they said according to Archilochus?”

“Something about courage,” Costis said automatically, busy with his own thoughts, busy trying not to think them. Gods belonged in temples and distant mountaintops, or floating on clouds. His every feeling revolted at the idea of hearing one speak.

The king quoted:

Rise and slay. Throw your chest against your enemy.

Stand like an arrow when the enemy’s spear thuds at your feet.

“And for Roma . . . ,” the king quoted again.

To you alone, Eldest,

the Fates have given unassailable rule.

Time alters all things,

except this one thing.

For you alone,

the wind that bellows the sails of rule

makes no shift.

“That was Melinno.”

“I know that,” said Costis. “My tutor once made me memorize the entire lyric.”

“No ‘Glory shall be your reward’ for me. Oh, no, for me, it is, ‘Stop whining’ and ‘Go to bed.’” He snorted. “I should know better. Never call on them, Costis, if you don’t really want them to appear.”

They had reached the knot of attendants and Aristogiton anxiously waiting for them.

“I believe I will go to bed now,” the king very stiffly informed his attendants, as if daring them to comment, which they didn’t. He started down the stairs, his hand still on Costis’s shoulder, pushing him along slightly and leaning on him for balance. He seemed suddenly very tired, but he moved without hesitation from the wider main hall through this wing of the palace into the narrower passages on the way back to the royal apartments. His attendants and his guard trailed behind.

They reached a staircase around a light well. The king turned up the stairs. One attendant raised a hand in a moment’s silent protest, but dropped it again. They followed up the stairs to a passage that looked somehow familiar to Costis, though he didn’t fully recognize it until they reached a tiny office and passed through it to a balcony looking out on a larger atrium. They had been here before.

“Dammit,” the king said, looking out over the atrium.

The attendants shuffled their feet. They weren’t gloating. They didn’t even want to remember that they had ever gloated in the past.

“Well, this time I am not walking around,” the king said in disgust. “You can go the long way.” He assumed an expression of long suffering. “Obedient to my god, I am going directly to bed.” He sat down on the railing and swung both legs over at once, dropping down onto the rafter below before the attendants could stop him. To Costis, who’d reached for him too late, he said, “Worried?”

“Your Majesty, you just—” Costis stopped.

“Just what?” the king prompted wickedly.

Nothing would induce Costis to say out loud that the king had almost fallen from the palace wall and that Costis had seen him manifestly saved by the God of Thieves.

The king smiled. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Your Majesty, you are drunk,” Costis pleaded.

“I am. What’s your excuse?” For hearing gods and seeing impossibilities.

The king relented. “Safety is an illusion, Costis. A Thief might fall at any time, and eventually the day must come when the god will let him. Whether I am on a rafter three stories up or on a staircase three steps up, I am in my god’s hands. He will keep me safe, or he will not, here or on the stairs.”