The magus didn’t hesitate, didn’t even look at me. “As you wish” was all he said as he went back to packing, leaving me to wonder if I was the only one who felt the world spinning.

I had never meant to go to Melenze. I had known from the moment I’d learned of my uncle’s death that I would go to Attolia. Eugenides was the king of Attolia and my friend. If his wife was the wolf at my throat, surely I could still trust him. I wanted the army in the north, not to make an alliance with Melenze but to prevent more deaths while I secured peace.

The magus, when the bags were packed, cautiously approached the side of the tent. Standing on the fabric to pull it tight, he lifted his knife to carefully slit the canvas. He paused, and in the distance I heard shouting as Hanaktos’s men attacked our pickets. The magus paid no attention. He had run his fingers across the fabric of the tent and was sniffing them. He looked up at me, startled, and seized me by the shirtfront. Dispensing with subtlety, he slashed open the side of the tent and dragged me through it as the walls caught fire. Soaked from the outside in lamp oil, they were engulfed in flame in an instant. Stumbling in the dark, we staggered away from the heat and kept going, trying to distance ourselves from whoever had struck the light. Whoever it was must have made haste to get away as well. No one pursued us. It’s possible that no one even saw us, as men raced toward the tent, shouting.

In the confusion of attack, and fire, and darkness, we slipped away. The magus was right that we would have burned in the tent, and who could have said it was anything but a tragic accident with a lamp?

By daylight we were not so far away that we could be sure we had outdistanced pursuit. We crawled into a screen of spindly bushes, sheltered from view from above by large rocks, where I changed into the clothes the magus had brought. They were his but fit me well. We quietly waited out the day. I broke the silence only to ask about my mother and sisters.

“We received a written message from them,” said the magus.

“My mother neither reads nor writes,” I said, immediately suspicious of a hoax and frightened that my relief had been unfounded.

“It was from Ina,” the magus reassured me. “She provided information only she could know.”

“You are certain?”

The magus’s quiet laugh relieved my anxiety. “She mentioned that your tutor, Malatesta, had survived the attack on the villa by jumping into the latrine pit.”

“That’s Ina,” I said. “Thank the gods.”

“She crept into the steward’s room when you didn’t return. She heard the order to fire the villa and convinced your mother to move out of the icehouse. They hid themselves in a playhouse she and Eurydice had made in the bushes nearby and remained there until the smoke from the fire drew the neighbors. Unfortunately, they accepted the hospitality of a neighbor, we don’t know which one, who turned them over to your rebellious barons.”

I knew which one, and told the magus about Hyacinth.

“Ah,” said the magus. “She made an allusion to flowers that I didn’t understand. She also revealed that they were in Brimedius. I do not think the rebels meant to inform us, but the information was coded in the text.”

I snickered. Ina indeed.

When darkness fell, we continued, still cautious, though we both thought that Hanaktos’s men would expect us to be heading north toward Melenze and would look for us there. We traveled at night for the next few days but eventually reached roads that were sufficiently well trafficked that we could walk unremarked by anyone. We made it to Selik and paid a ridiculous amount for horses. I was worried that we might not have enough money left for food, but that night the magus reassured me. I had just gone through an entire loaf of bread and half a chicken, which we had purchased already cooked in a food stall near the horse-trading market. I’d suggested eating it before we left the market. I’d also suggested eating it on the road. I was not so comfortable with my new authority that I could say, “We eat the chicken now!” but the magus had seen that I was considering it. Shaking his head, he had said, “Your Majesty, with your very kind permission, we will find a place to sleep for the night off the road, and we will eat the chicken then.”

Once we were at the campsite, and the chicken was gone, I had asked about money. “My purse is full enough,” said the magus, “to keep you supplied with roast chickens.”

“So, so, so,” I said. “We know who the power behind the throne is,” and the magus laughed.

“You eat more than Gen did after prison,” he said.

“I have more sympathy with him all the time. Are you going to finish that drumstick?” I asked.

“I am. Stop staring at it.”

We had to sell the horses in the tiny town just past Evisa and didn’t get a good price for them, but where we were going they would be of no use. The magus and I both thought it was unwise to use the main pass, and we went back to the one we had used years ago when we went adventuring after Hamiathes’s Gift. Both of us were thinking of that trip, when we had ridden out of Sounis with the conquest of Eddis in mind. So much had changed since then.

We approached the pass cautiously but found no one guarding it. Either the rebels didn’t know of it, or they were still searching for us on the roads to Melenze. We spent the night in the empty farmhouse that had once belonged to the magus’s family, and in the morning we began the climb.

It was only a little less daunting than it had been on the first trip. Our way was cut through solid stone by the trickle of a stream at the bottom of a gorge, and there were many places where we climbed straight up with only shallow handholds carved into the rock for aid. I was stronger than I had been, and the handholds seemed closer together than they had been before, but still, it was hard going, and I was tired out by the end of the first day.

In the evening, at a tiny cookfire, looking at the climb that waited for us in the morning, the magus said thoughtfully, “That lying little monster complained about everything: the food, the horses, the blankets, the company. He even found fault with the stories I told by the fire, but I cannot recall that he ever once complained about the climbing.”

“So many things are obvious in retrospect, aren’t they?” I said.

The magus looked at me seriously, and then he smiled. “Indeed,” he said.

We crossed through Eddis without pausing. The magus said that a royal visit had been planned with Attolia and that the megaron at Eddis would be empty. I knew it was Attolia I needed to make peace with. Eddis had mercenaries who might help me win back my state. Attolia had the gold.

Everything, it seemed, depended on gold. The magus and I had fallen easily back into our old habits. He lectured constantly, and I asked questions to my heart’s delight. Where he had once been my master and I his apprentice, I had become king and he my sole advisor. Where we had once focused on natural history and philosophy, we now concentrated on administration, taxation, and the prosecution of war.

He had begun his lessons by quoting the duke of Melfi: “To make war you need three things: one, money; two, money; and three, money.” He went on to tell me the things I should have known already, that I would have known if I had been a more promising heir to the throne and not exclusively interested in poetry.