Eugenides shrugged one shoulder. “I sometimes find them useful,” he said into his wine cup.

“Well,” said Sounis, “perhaps I will, too. Thank you.”

“Be blessed in your endeavors,” said Eugenides, using the universal Eddisian phrase for please and thank you and you’re welcome.

“And you,” said Sounis, aping his formality.

When the king of Sounis was gone, Eugenides’s attendants, waiting in the guardroom, heard the wine cup smash.

Philologos stood, saying wearily, “I’ll clean it up,” and went to fetch a cloth.

It was a gloomy Sounis that made his way from the private apartments of the king of Attolia to his own suite. He followed his borrowed attendant, paying little attention to his surroundings, until Ion suddenly slowed and Sounis nearly ran into the back of him. In an apparent coincidence, no doubt meticulously prearranged by the Mede ambassador, Melheret and his retinue were just climbing the stairs as Sounis arrived at the head of them. It would be impolite not to draw back and leave the landing free for those ascending.

“Your Majesty,” said the ambassador, pausing to bow where he stood with one foot on a higher step and his hands bunching the fabric of his flowing trousers, lifting them as a woman lifts the hem of a dress. If it was an oddly delicate greeting, it was also blatantly self-assured. The Mede ambassador had no concerns about being taken at a disadvantage and made that much clear.

“Ambassador Melheret.” Sounis returned the address, bowing politely back.

Melheret continued up the remaining steps to the landing, brushed the wrinkles from his clothes, and bowed again. He was as tall as Sounis, but more slender, with gray in his beard and in the hair at his temples. His narrow face was weathered by time in the sun, and he had probably been a soldier before he became an ambassador. He gave the appearance of good health and radiated a confidence that Sounis envied.

“A god-sent opportunity that we meet, Your Majesty,” Melheret said. “I was just returning to my rooms, in anticipation of a bottle of remchik, which my secretary informs me has arrived. Perhaps you would care to join me?”

Sounis looked to Ion, who bowed to indicate his willingness to wait for as long as the king of Sounis desired. Sounis cursed inwardly, certain this meeting had been arranged for a moment when he was without the magus to act as a mediator. There was no polite way to refuse.

The Mede’s apartments were as luxurious as Sounis’s, but the Mede seemed to have been unimpressed by them. In the reception room, where Sounis waited for his host to reappear, cloth tapestries hung from hooks that had been hammered into the plaster walls with no care taken for the decorations already painted there, and Sounis wondered if it was an attempt to obscure spy holes. If so, he doubted it would be successful.

The Attolian furniture was pushed into the corners, and several replacement pieces of Medean design, small enough to have been shipped with the ambassador, had been put in their place. Mede statuettes of gods or goddesses or, Sounis supposed, fertility figures were scattered around the room, clashing with the rest of the Attolian background. The combined effect made Sounis wince.

The Mede ambassador returned carrying a ceramic bottle and two beautiful wine cups. They were glass, a deep blue in color, decorated on the outsides with bas-relief dancers carved in white. Sounis, taking his cup, admired it, running a finger across the raised figures.

“They are lovely, are they not?” said the Mede. “They come from a workshop in our capital. The artist has made a glass service for the emperor himself.”

Holding the cup up to the light from a nearby lamp, Sounis could see that the glass had two layers, white on the outside and blue on the inside. The effect was achieved by carving away the white layer, leaving only the images of white dancers on the blue background. He had never seen anything like it.

“Our artisans have worked for centuries to perfect their art,” said Melheret, as if no Sounisian artisans had ever done the same. “Some believe art is the greatest product of an enduring civilization.”

Following a wave of the Mede’s hand, Sounis chose a seat and sat in it gingerly. It was low to the ground, and the slanted seat tipped him against the curving back, making him wish he had pulled one of the more traditional chairs away from the wall. It wouldn’t be easy to get up in a hurry—say, if armed men leaped from behind the wall hangings.

“You need not fear being attacked, Your Majesty.”

Sounis suppressed a flinch before realizing that the Mede was not reading his thoughts about the furniture.

“Our nation is one of peace and great prosperity. We are not so poor of resources that we steal from our neighbors. Try the remchik?” Melheret had filled his glass.

Sounis took a drink, as he had seen the Mede do, tossing the contents of the glass cup into his mouth all at once. The liquid Melheret had poured was clear, so he knew it wasn’t wine, but he was still taken aback by the powerful alcohol. It went up his nose and seared his throat all the way down to the pit of his stomach. He tried to hold his breath but only succeeded in turning a cough into a whistle. When he inhaled, his breath burned as much as the alcohol had.

“Do you like it?” asked the Mede.

“It’s . . . delicious,” Sounis said politely. His eyes were watering.

“Have another.”

“How, then, do you explain your affiliations with my rebel barons?” Sounis thought of mentioning the attempt on his life as he had fled Sounis, but he assumed that the Mede would only deny any responsibility. If Melheret asked if he had seen Akretenesh with a match in his hand, Sounis would have to say no.

“We have no ‘affiliations,’ as you say,” said Melheret. “Our overtures to your barons, and to your father, have been no more than an honest attempt to establish communication with a new government, and what can be expected of any wise nation. Did we not send an ambassador to your father, thinking that he spoke for your uncle who was Sounis? No one would deny your right to return to your throne. And we, my brother ambassador Akretenesh and I, would be honored to act as neutral mediators. You do not need Attolia’s help to accomplish this.”

“And Attolia? Does she need to fear attack?”

“Again, no,” said the Mede, pouring once more.

Sounis was beginning to like the burning feeling in his middle, and after the second drink, he’d sensed a flavor in his mouth like mint and like fennel at the same time, something cool that contrasted with the heat. Still, he didn’t think it wise to have another taste, and he ignored the contents of the cup.

The Mede sat again and looked into Sounis’s eyes. “I will be frank with you. We are not well disposed toward Attolia. There are conventions among nations, relationships built on mutual good faith. She abused those relationships, lying about her intentions, inviting us to land our troops to aid in her defense, and then turning on them. More than that, she has cast us as aggressors, lying to you and to others in order to destroy our nation’s peaceful relations here on this small peninsula.”

The flavor that came after the burning flavor of the remchik wasn’t mint, Sounis decided on reflection, and realized that he’d absentmindedly sipped from his cup while Melheret was talking.

“Drink,” said the Mede. “Remchik is not for sipping, we say in my home. Its flavor comes in the swallow.” The older man spoke with an almost fatherly authority.