The magus was growing more concerned each day that Mede spies would locate us, two Sounisians in the city, behaving oddly. We were sure to draw attention, and after our experience in the woods, neither of us was too sure we would see the Mede agents before they saw us. Equally worrisome, the landlord of the filthy, flea-ridden inn where we were staying was becoming suspicious.

The magus went out the door first. When it was my turn, I nearly landed on top of him. He dodged and I rolled, and we ended up facing each other, sitting on the hard stones of the road with our legs splayed out in front of us.

“Thank your gods, I don’t call the city guard,” shouted the landlord, and slammed the courtyard door. He opened it a minute later to throw the magus’s overshirt out after us.

Rubbing my bruised elbow ruefully, I asked the magus, “If he called the guard, do you think we could tell them who we are?”

The magus shook his head. “Attolia is pressing every prisoner they arrest onto their ships in order to fortify the islands she has taken from Sounis. We’re far more likely to end up on a galley, revealing our true identities to the passing sharks.”

I got up first and helped the magus to his feet. Sighing, he picked up his overshirt and threw it over his shoulder. We walked up the street.

It was later that day, when we were selling off our clothes in exchange for grubbier ones and the cash to buy food, that we heard a rumor in the marketplace that the king and queen would be riding to the harbor to greet arriving ambassadors. We put together the peashooter and snagged the dried peas out of a market stall. The magus wanted to spit the pea, but I demonstrated my knack for accuracy, and he agreed that I should be the one. I did think of the changes to my face, but I was sure that Eugenides, if he looked, would know me, and I was more distressed than I can say when he passed by without any sign of recognition.

The magus and I had some very uncomfortable moments when we were arrested by the guard. Our only hope was to convince one of them to send a message to the king, but the squad leader gave us no opportunity to speak. When the magus tried, a guardsman had him pinned by the throat before he could get more than a word out. So intimidating was he that we kept silent all the way to the palace and down into the cells. Only when there was a closed door between us and the very angry guards did the magus shout that Attolis would want to know we were in his prison. I was already imagining myself chained to an oar.

We spent our time while we were waiting discussing just what we could say that might warrant the attention of the king. We agreed that telling the prison guards flat out that I was the king of Sounis probably wouldn’t work. The magus thought he could say that he had information valuable to Relius, whom he knew by name, and that might get us an interview with him. Not that an interview with Attolia’s master of spies would be wholly without risk, but face to face the magus thought he could convince the man of our identities.

Then Gen appeared at the door, and we didn’t need to convince anyone of anything after all. Instead we followed the guards he left us to a set of rooms that were a welcome change from our infested inn of the previous week.

“Ridiculous to think what indignities I would suffer in silence, if I knew that I was to be rewarded with an oversize bucket of hot water,” the magus said as he settled into the bath the servants had filled for him. He leaned against the higher side, leaving his arms and legs dangling over the lower edges and looking something like a pale spider, but more like an overturned terrapin. I’d already had my bath, at his insistence, and was getting into clean clothes with the help of a dresser and trying to eat the food that had been brought at the same time. The careful attention of the manservant was rather amusing to me after all the time I’d spent in the same set of pants and loose shirt.

The clothes were rather startling in their finery. “Do you think Gen picked them?” I asked, posing in my new overcoat. The decorative fabric panels hastily tacked to the front and back made an already handsome piece of clothing into an ostentatious one.

The magus eyed me from the bath.

“I would believe it. All that embroidery suits you.”

“Makes me look less like riffraff, you mean?”

“Yes,” he agreed with mocking gravity. “That’s it exactly.”

A barber came to trim us and shave us, taking off the last of my darker hair and leaving it tidy, if short. When he was done, Hilarion arrived and introduced himself as one of the king’s attendants.

He asked if we would be able to join the king and queen for an audience. I should have paid more attention, but I was still eating what I could from a plate of fruit and trying not to drip anything on my coat. I didn’t realize until we had followed Hilarion through the narrow corridors to the main staircase that we were heading toward the megaron of the palace, the largest of the throne rooms. When we reached the doorway, we could hear the quiet rustling of the crowd beyond, and when I looked past Hilarion, I could see only a narrow aisle open in the center of the room. I had forgotten the arrival of the ambassadors from the Continent.

Standing just inside the doorway, no more than a few feet away from me, was a party of Medes, distinctive in their brightly colored and more loosely cut clothing. I was surprised that Attolia, who had so recently and insultingly sent home a Mede army, would be entertaining an ambassador from the empire.

I was suddenly glad that our clothes were meant for ceremony. Even so, if I could have, I would have signaled Hilarion and waited until a less public moment to talk with Attolia and the new Attolis, but it was too late. We were swept into the room, announced, lauded, eyeballed by the crowd, and moved to the foot of the raised dais almost without our own volition.

Attolia was just as I remembered from our briefest of meetings, when the magus and I had been apprehended after attempting to steal Hamiathes’s Gift. She looked as regal and every bit as intimidating as she had before. She greeted me, while Eugenides reclined on his throne, his elbow on the arm of his chair and his thumb tucked under his cheekbone to prop up his head. With his fingers cupped against his forehead he eyed me from under the arch they made, as a man does when he is looking at something very far away.

The magus and I had talked for many long hours about this marriage of Eugenides and the queen of Attolia. The magus insisted it was Eugenides’s choice and his desire as well, but it was impossible to know whose influence would prevail and if Gen would grow more like his wife, or his wife more like her king.

Down in the prison cells, he had seemed everything that I remembered. So much so that I hadn’t even noticed the hook in place of his hand. In the throne room, the differences were hard to miss. I’d been told that he wore a false hand on formal occasions, but it seemed that his habits had changed. His right arm lay across the arm of the throne, and at the end was a pointed hook.

The last time I had seen Gen he had been whole, if slightly damaged, after our escape from captivity in Attolia. I hadn’t realized the strength of my habit of picturing him in my thoughts as he had been when we first met: skinny and prison pale, incongruous in the clean clothes the magus provided. I did remember just enough of his taste in clothing from the weeks I had stayed in Eddis that I was not completely taken aback by his grandeur. Gods know, he does play up with his beaded jacket and his lace trim. I almost laughed aloud when I saw that the design of his boots remained unchanged, though even they had gold dusted in their tooled leather patterns.