The captain shook his head.

“You transferred him? Are you worried about my taste in revenge?”

“Should I be?” Teleus asked bluntly.

“Not for that,” said the king. “On the other hand, if you give me another morning like this one, I’ll have you all packed up in chains and sold on the Peninsula as gladiators.”

There was more laughter. “No more mornings like this one, Your Majesty,” Teleus promised. “I admit that I find them painful myself.”

“I’m glad to hear it. If I’d known that all I needed to do was hit you very hard with a stick, I would have done it months ago.”

Teleus responded thoughtfully. “I would like to think there was more to this morning than getting hit in the neck with a practice sword.” He looked gravely at the king. “It isn’t an easy thing to give your loyalty to someone you don’t know, especially when that person chooses to reveal nothing of himself.”

He met Eugenides’s eye, and this time it was the king who looked away.

He looked back to say, “For what was done, and not well done, I apologize, Teleus.”

“No matter, Your Majesty. You are revealed at last.”

The king looked down at his nakedness and back at the captain. “Was that a joke?” he asked.

“It does happen, on occasion. Do you know what you will do with Laecdomon?”

“Let him go,” said the king.

“Some might think you are too merciful,” Teleus said.

“But you don’t.”

Teleus shook his head. “He will go to Erondites and the baron will kill him.”

The king agreed. “Erondites can’t risk a connection between himself and a known traitor, and he will be afraid of whatever tales Laecdomon could tell. When Laecdomon is found dead in a ditch, everyone will see how Erondites rewards those who serve him.”

“And if he doesn’t suffer the ultimate penalty at Erondites’s hand?” Teleus asked.

“Then I am still satisfied to let him go. If he disgraced himself, it was because I offered him the opportunity; if you tease a dog, it bites.”

“Men are not dogs.” Teleus leaned to give Costis a severe look. “A man should control himself.”

“Easy for you to say, Captain.”

“Not so easy, Your Majesty,” Teleus assured him, “but I never hit you in the face.”

“That’s true enough,” Eugenides agreed, without a glimmer of a smile. “But, then, I never meant you to.”

He waited. When Teleus’s eyes widened, Eugenides confirmed what the captain had guessed.

“I wasn’t baiting you,” said the king. “I was baiting Costis.”

Costis sat back, dumbfounded. The loss of temper that had changed his life, the appointment to lieutenant. They hadn’t been accident or caprice. “You made the notes on the Mede language,” Costis accused the king, realizing that the small letters, though neatly formed, had shown the telltale shake of a man writing with his left hand.

“You sent them to me.”

“I did,” the king admitted.

“Why?”

“Your accent was terrible,” said the king, in Mede, his accent perfect. “It’s much better now.”

“Why?” Costis asked again, demanding more. Teleus crossed his arms, silently seconding the request.

“Sometimes, if you want to change a man’s mind, you change the mind of the man next to him first.” Eugenides waved toward Costis, but he was talking to Teleus. “Archimedes said that if you gave him a lever long enough, he could move the world. I needed to move the Guard. I needed to move you.”

“You changed Costis’s opinion in order to change mine? And why does my opinion matter so much?” Teleus asked. “You could have replaced me.”

The king shrugged. “I want the Queen to reduce the Guard, and she said she will when I have asked you and you have agreed. So. May I reduce the Guard?”

“It is your decision. You are king.”

“That is the question, Teleus. Am I king? Don’t tell me that I have been anointed by priest and priestess or that this baron or that one has whispered meaningless sacred oaths at my ankles. Tell me, am I king?”

Teleus didn’t pretend not to understand. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Then I may reduce the Guard?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Thank you.” The king started to stand.

“Although you didn’t win that match.”

The king settled back down onto the bench. He eyed Teleus balefully.

“You never give up, do you? What is that supposed to mean?”

“It was your wager, Your Majesty,” Teleus pointed out. “If Laecdomon won the match, you wouldn’t reduce the Guard.”

“In Eddis, a match runs until the first blow is struck.”

“In Attolia, also.”

“Well, I struck the first blow.”

Teleus crossed his arms. “The object of the match is to practice swordplay, Your Majesty, not party tricks. A move that cannot be done with a sword is inadmissible.”

“You are splitting hairs. You must have been talking to Relius, or was it Ornon?”

Teleus was obdurate. “You could not take a real sword out of a man’s grip, not with your bare hand.”

“Oh, Teleus,” the king said, shaking his head sorrowfully. “So bullheaded and so wrong.” Reaching across to Teleus, he held out his hand in a fist and opened it slowly like a flower. “I practice it with a wooden sword. I can do it with a real one, too.”

Teleus lifted a blunt finger to gently trace the thin line of newly healed skin on the king’s palm. “The assassin’s sword. I don’t know what to say, My King.”

Eugenides shrugged. “Say I don’t need to watch my own back anymore.”

Teleus nodded. “I will be at your back, My King, until the last breath leaves my body.”

“Very well, then,” said Eugenides, and stood up as Teleus said thoughtfully, “I see, now, why Ornon was so confident of your success.”

Eugenides climbed cautiously down from the upper bench. “Ornon was probably hoping I’d have my head bashed in, but I don’t want your support under false pretenses, Teleus. Ornon wasn’t thinking of circus tricks. He knew that if Laecdomon had ever become a real threat, I would have disemboweled him. Did you forget?” He raised his lamed arm, and looking at the truncated limb, they remembered the deadly nature of the replacement for his missing hand.

“You make people forget, with your long sleeves, pretending to be ashamed of it,” said Teleus.

“Yes. But the truth is always right in front of you to see.”

“So the Guard will be halved,” Teleus said heavily.

The king sighed in resignation. Standing before Teleus, he said, “Teleus, the Guard made the queen. The Guard can unmake her. You can guarantee their loyalty now, but can you guarantee it twenty years from now? Forty years from now? You know you can’t, yet you would entrust that Guard ten years, fifteen years, thirty years from now, with the power of kingmakers. Sooner or later the Guard’s loyalty will be bought and sold like other men’s, and the crown will go to the highest bidder. That is the course of history, Teleus. It is unchangeable. Keeping a private guard this large is like using a wolf to guard the farm. It may keep off the other wolves, but sooner or later it will eat you. I won’t leave that legacy for my heirs.”