It wasn’t a moment for laughter. Not with Attolia coolly admitting her surprise at the unforeseen arrival of a foreign ruler, especially one with whom she was currently at war.

At war with my uncle, I said, and not, I hoped, with me.

Attolia nodded. I will tell you honestly, I wish it had been you I addressed. I would have felt better just to have seen you in the crowd, but I didn’t. I had the sense that Attolia might not feel any more bound by the rules of hospitality than Baron Hanaktos, and her expression gave me no clue to her thoughts. I feared that I could find myself on my way back to the underground cell at any moment.

Attolia asked what brought me to her court. Poor prince or not, I hadn’t sat through a thousand boring ceremonies without learning something about diplomatic language. I dug through my memories for the right formulaic phrases, and then with as much dignity as I could muster, I explained that I had just escaped from my own country, a country in the greatest peril, lost either to the Mede or to Melenze or both. I pointed out that none of these outcomes would profit the state of Attolia. I had come to my friends to ask for the men and the gold to win my country back.

Attolia watched me with close consideration as I spoke. When I finished, there was a moment of polite silence. As she opened her mouth to speak, Gen, who had been silent throughout, sat up and laid his hand across hers. I could hear the Attolians sucking in their breaths. Attolia slipped her hand away, but she sat back in her chair and nodded a deferral to her king.

Then, as you well know, Eugenides looked me in the eye as if I were a complete stranger and said, “The simplest way to end a war is to admit you have lost it.”

The silence after that was not polite.

Little could convince me more that I was fit to be king than that moment when I acted like one and didn’t tell Attolis something very rude that he could do with his own throne and mumbled instead a few more ritualized phrases about momentous decisions, and the time they take, and then walked myself and the magus out of the room before I had a real fit of apoplexy in front of the assembled courts and ambassadors of Eddis, Attolia, and the Continent with a few condescending Mede visitors looking on.

I came upstairs to these rooms, where I told the magus and the guards to wait in the anteroom, as I did not want his company or anyone else’s. That seems to have meant very little, though, because no sooner did I close the door than it opened again. You came in. You took one look at me. And you laughed.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE Queen of Eddis protested. “I did not laugh,” she said.

“You did,” Sounis said. “You are laughing still. And why didn’t those guards turn you away?”

Eddis studied him. His face was much changed by Basrus’s fists. He was also taller and heavier than when they had last met. His shoulders had grown broad from his working in Hanaktos’s fields, and she could easily imagine him dropping a man with a single blow. She did not think he realized how fierce his appearance had become; though his smile had changed, his easy blushes remained. She did not know how to put into words the relief it was to see him safe, and so the feelings escaped as another laugh. Still smiling, she defended the Attolians. “They are guards,” she said. “They could not deny a queen.”

Sounis returned her smile and conceded. “No, and neither can I. You asked to hear the story of events that brought me here, and I have given it to you, as I am sure anyone would give you anything you asked. I am only sorry that all my face can offer you is amusement,” he added.

Eddis reached to touch her own crooked nose. “If I laughed,” she said, “it is only at the idea that we make a matched pair now, you and I.” She asked him, more seriously, “Your uncle who was Sounis learned of our letters. That was the cause of your exile to Letnos?”

“An unfinished letter was stolen from my desk and delivered to him,” explained Sounis. “He had my rooms searched and intercepted your next letter. He and my father and the magus spent the evening in a shouting match, and I was sent away the next morning.”

“So you did not receive the letter? You have not read it?”

“No.”

“You made a proposal in your previous letter. Perhaps it was only hypothetical?”

“It was not.”

Eddis gently chided, “All that time in the fields of Hanaktos, you thought of many things and many people, but never, it seems, of the queen of Eddis.”

The color rose in Sounis’s cheeks, but he did not look away. He had thought of her every day. “When I was working in the fields, I knew how unfounded my hopes were,” he said. “I was a poor excuse for an heir of Sounis when I made the proposal and then became even less than that.”

“How less?” asked Eddis.

Sounis looked down at her hand, lying in his, and covered it for a moment. Still holding it lightly, he stood and stepped back until her hand slipped away from his grasp. Then he crossed to the far side of the room. Without looking back, he said, “That look on Gen’s face. Does he think I am a fool? That I came to Attolia instead of Melenze because I was naive? Did he think I was asking him to give me soldiers and gold to fight a war as a personal favor? I came here on my knees to offer him Sounis, and he looks at me as if I were my uncle and grabs it out of my hands.”

Eddis asked, “The magus did not talk about this on the road?”

Sounis shook his head. “He tried to warn me, and I refused to listen.” He shook his head again, this time in bewilderment. “Eugenides offered his life once to save me. Why should I doubt that he is my friend?”

“He is the king of Attolia,” said Eddis.

“And no particle of your Thief remains?”

Eddis searched for words. “He swore an oath to be Thief on his grandfather’s death. But the oath is a mystery of the Thieves, and no one alive but Eugenides knows what it requires.”

“So now I must deliver my country into the hands of enemies? The magus no doubt thinks I am a fool.”

“I cannot believe that,” said Eddis. “Nor will I believe you could have a better friend than Eugenides.”

“I should throw something, perhaps,” said Sounis, “but I do not think it would relieve my feelings.”

“I have not found it to do so,” said Eddis.

“Gen evidently does.”

“Gen is Gen,” said Eddis.

“Gen is a bastard,” said the king of Sounis.

Eddis looked sad, and Sounis was sorry he had spoken so harshly. He returned to sit by her side.

He said, “Sounis is lost. I know what comes of the Mede occupation. In a generation, or perhaps two, Sounis and Attolia and Eddis will be gone. Only Medes will serve in the government, only Medes will hold public office, only Medes will own land or hold wealth. They will knock down the old temples and control the guilds and the trades, and the Sounisians will be left okloi, or worse, beggars in their own cities.

“I could sell half my country to Melenze to get its protection, but that would only delay the Medes, not turn them back. Also, there’s little hope that Melenze would be satisfied with half of Sounis. They would eat up the rest of it in the next few years, and I would be in no position to stop them. I am in a war with Attolia I cannot win, with a civil war at home that I have fled.