Attolis engaged him with a wave and turned away. Sounis followed, the magus behind him, like obedient ducklings to the passageway outside the apartments. As he moved up beside Eugenides, Sounis said, “Chilly this morning.”

“Is it?” asked the king, and Sounis dropped the attempt at conversation.

The men walked in silence to the practice field, where they found a crowd of Attolians and Eddisians idly waiting. The captain of the Royal Guard crossed the open court to meet them. He was a prickly man, and Sounis sensed a nonspecific disapproval, for Eugenides, the training, the morning, the sun in the sky, Sounis wasn’t sure what. Gen nodded at him and, by the simple expedient of pointing at one man after another, arranged partners for warm-ups and sparring.

The Mede made them wait. When Melheret arrived, he warmed up on his own, and when he was willing, he wandered across the open field to where Gen was practicing with a member of his guard. Wearing only his trousers and thin tunic, he appeared fit and comfortable with his sword.

When the king of Attolia and the Mede began to spar, both proceeded cautiously. Then the Mede started to press, and Eugenides responded, just barely keeping up. The Mede grew more confident and pressed harder. Suddenly Gen surged in with a rapid set of strokes that appeared momentarily overwhelming, but he was rebuffed. He fell back, and the sparring went on. Each time Gen escalated, the Mede was just that much better, that much faster, and Gen was again on the defensive.

Sounis stood beside the magus on the edge of the watching crowd and tried not to wince. Melheret was making only a minimal effort to keep a diplomatic face on the exchange, and it was clear that Gen was both angry and embarrassed.

This was not the easygoing, sarcastic friend he remembered, nor the emotionally distant king. This was a Gen oddly impotent in anger, and it was uncomfortable to watch him trying and failing to outlast the Mede. Sounis looked away. The Eddisians around him were watching with impassive intensity; the Attolians, with amused glances.

Midway through the match, Eugenides began using his hook to deflect thrusts from his opponent.

“Do you mind?” he asked.

“Not at all,” said the Mede, but held out a hand and accepted a blunted dagger from someone in the crowd as his own second weapon. Gen continued to be overmatched.

Finally, when it was clear that Eugenides was never going to do the gracious thing and admit defeat, Melheret stepped back. “Your Majesty, I must beg you to excuse me,” he said. “I am afraid other duties call.” He bowed with mocking deference.

Gen thanked him, standing stiffly as Melheret left the practice field. Then he threw his practice sword on the ground so hard it bounced. Cursing, he picked it up, and after obviously considering hacking at the pavement with it, he pitched it across the open court. As he seemed still unsatisfied, Sounis offered his own practice sword, curious to see what would happen. It was a borrowed one, and he minded not at all when it went sailing between two of the Attolian guardsmen standing nearby.

Gen turned to the man standing on his other side, but that man, Sounis knew, was Eddis’s minister of war and Gen’s father. Not inclined to indulge tantrums, the minister stood unhelpfully with his arms crossed and his practice sword held tight in the fist tucked under the crook of his elbow.

Eugenides tipped his head back to look at the sky. He said, “That was more difficult than I anticipated.”

Teleus, the captain of the Royal Guard, returned with both Eugenides’s and Sounis’s swords. He presented the one punctiliously to his king as if it were an edged weapon, holding it out on his fingers, bowing over it. “If Your Majesty would like to retire to the dining hall?”

Gen wiped his hand down his arm as if wiping something invisible away, and took the practice sword from him, deliberately grabbing it across its edgeless blade and tucking it under his handless arm. “Yes, thank you, Teleus. Breakfast. Join me?” he said to Sounis over his shoulder.

Sounis took his blunt sword more politely from Teleus, then looked at the magus, who shrugged. They followed Attolis through the courtyard archway and into the narrow alleys between guard barracks to a dining hall. Inside the hall they passed by the long tables but did not stop, continuing down a dark hallway beside the kitchens to an empty storeroom that should have been equally dark but was lit by lamps hanging from metal pegs hammered into cracks in the stone walls.

Bewildered, Sounis stood and watched as the Eddisians paired up and began to spar. He listened as they analyzed every aspect of the Mede’s style and began to piece together the best means to defeat him. Thanks to Eugenides’s careful efforts to draw out the Mede, they had seen all they needed.

Sounis turned to the magus. “Did you know?”

“That he was relentless?” The magus finished his question. “Yes. That he had this in mind, no. I did not realize that he disliked the ambassador so much.”

“Melheret has a reputation as one of the best swordsmen in the Mede court,” a soldier informed them, having overheard. “They say he trained the former ambassador, Nahuseresh.”

“Ah,” said the magus, understanding at once. “I see that he means to be prepared if he meets him again.”

“Surely that’s unlikely,” said Sounis.

“I don’t think unlikely means to him what it does to the rest of us,” said the magus.

The Attolians were smiling openly by this time. Whatever they thought of their king, they enjoyed a good joke at a newcomer’s expense, whereas the Eddisians seemed no less intent than they had been on the training field, though they did joke with one another as they sparred.

“No, his foot was farther back,” said a voice nearby.

“Higher in the backswing,” said another man.

“Why would you put your elbow out like that?”

“Airing your arm hair?”

“Boagus could take out whole swaths of Medes that way,” said someone across the room, and everyone laughed.

“Pray gods then that the Medes don’t have anyone that smells as bad as me,” said the smiling man who must have been Boagus.

Sounis, watching, was crushed by a sudden longing for Pol, who would have been at home with these men.

“Do you spar, Your Majesty?”

Still unused to being so addressed, Sounis jumped.

“Oh, yes, thank you,” he said to the small, wiry man who had invited him to match swords.

“Will you practice against the Mede?” the man asked, as he settled into a fighting stance.

Sounis demurred. “No, thank you,” he said. “I am not expert enough, I am afraid, to learn from it.”

“Very well,” said the man. He was a head shorter than Sounis, and Sounis thought himself prepared for attack until the man’s sword suddenly caught him just above the elbow. He fell back in surprise and smiled politely, acknowledging the hit, but the other man didn’t smile back. Sounis resisted the impulse to look to the magus for rescue and raised his sword again.

The wiry little man was a monster in human guise, Sounis decided, sent by the gods to humiliate him. It was only luck that the other men in the room were focused on Eugenides and his partners or they would have been snickering behind their hands. Sounis was covered with sweat and deep in confusion by the time Eugenides finally called a halt. He’d been praying for the king of Attolia to wind up his exercise and was cursing him for his selfish delay. When Eugenides called, “Enough!,” Sounis lowered his sword immediately and caught a stinging smack on his upper arm. The little man was giving him such a look that instead of being angry at the late hit, Sounis found himself apologizing for dropping his weapon too soon.