Tas-Elisa is a small town with a reasonable harbor and several far more serviceable roads out to the hinterlands. It was half a day’s ride from there up to Elisa. As good as his word, Akretenesh billeted his men outside the town. He would have his men ready to hand if the truce was broken, and he also neatly blocked anyone else who might intend to bring an army through that way.

There was only one other route sufficiently wide enough to move an army quickly into Elisa.

“And the King’s Road?” I asked.

“Baron Hanaktos will leave his men there,” said Akretenesh.

We arrived at Elisa as the sun set. The great theater sits in a natural curve of the hills, and the best view of it from a distance is on the coast road. No one knows when Elisa’s slopes were first terraced and lined with marble seats, but the temple keeps lists of the plays performed here during the spring and fall festivals, and they go back hundreds of years, all the way back to when the plays were performed in the archaic language on the open orchestral ground in front of the seats.

There is a stage now, built over rooms for storage space and costume changes, but the actors still come down to the open space in front of the seats. Each play has some special speech set there to take advantage of the miracle of Elisa’s design. Standing in the right place, an actor can speak his lines in a whisper and be heard all the way to the back rows of seats.

If I had my say, all the plays would be performed in the old way, and there would be no stage. The building across the open side of the amphitheater spoils the view across the valley and over the lower hills between Elisa and the sea. I admit, though, that I am as delighted as anyone else when an actor in the role of a god is lowered onto the stage and even more so when he disappears through a trapdoor and then emerges from the doorway below to continue his lines. Those sorts of effects cannot happen with only the open ground to perform on.

Scattered at the base of the amphitheater in no particular order are the rest of the buildings: dormitories, villas, temples, and a stadium all hidden among the trees. Below them is the town. During festivals, the overflow of the crowds lived in tents, but there would not be so many for the barons’ council. I was certainly not headed for a tent. We rode directly to the king’s compound, where we were met by the steward and servants who were waiting to pay their respects.

I was sick with trepidation—and this at the necessity of meeting the servants, never mind my barons. But these weren’t the lackeys at Brimedius; they were people who knew me as the heir of Sounis. I had come here every year for as long as I could remember to see the plays. I could measure my chance of success in their reaction when I arrived. When I climbed down from my horse, I wasn’t sure my knees would hold me. I would rather be beaten again at Hanaktos’s whipping post than relive that introduction.

The steward was very polite. He welcomed me in exactly the words I had heard him use to my uncle, while I listened for the contempt I was afraid I would hear in his voice. When he was finished, he and all the servants bowed together. Then he introduced the senior members of the staff. I knew many of them and said gracious things and tried to memorize the names I did not know. I was looking to see some sign that they despised me, and not seeing it, I was convincing myself that I was blind. I was honestly grateful when Akretenesh suggested that I was fatigued and might wish to have a bath while my rooms were readied.

I escaped to the baths with just Nomenus, who had come with us from Brimedius to attend me. I’d washed in my rooms in Brimedius and hadn’t had a real bath since I’d left Attolia. I hid in the steam room until I was too light-headed to care anymore what the Elisians were going to make of me. After the plunge, Nomenus was waiting with a robe.

“Your Majesty,” he said as he wrapped me in it, “I believe you are most welcome here.”

I twisted to look him in the face, but he dropped his eyes.

“I did not mean to offend Your Majesty.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said, grateful for the reassurance.

When I reached my rooms, everything was carefully arranged, all my finery in the wardrobes and my luggage cases cleared away. Sitting on a table by the window was the box from Attolia. I ran my hand across the bowed top, and then flipped open the latch and lifted the lid, to see if the gun was still inside. It lay untouched within its velvet-covered bolster. One gun, against Akretenesh and all my rebellious barons. Akretenesh knew how insignificant it was. How insignificant I was. I wondered if my sisters had been in Brimedius after all, watching me from a window as I rode away. I wondered where the magus was. There had been no sign of him, and I had had no word from my father.

I thanked the three or four servants in the rooms with me for their work. They smiled, maybe not just in politeness, and I sent them on their way. I sent Nomenus away as well and sat on a stool in front of the table, staring at the gun for a long time.

In the morning I met with the first of my barons. It was their right to speak to me before the vote, and they wouldn’t give it up. There was a protocol—Xorcheus first, as his was the oldest created barony, and then, after him, all the other barons in the order of their creations. A baron could choose to bring another baron, lower in seniority, with him. The more senior barons usually make some money selling off the privilege, but Xorcheus came alone. I think he would have skipped the entire process if he could have. He had a small property of almost no significance, and I got the impression that he wished we all would just go away and leave him to it.

He grunted a greeting when he was ushered into the room and didn’t know whether he would bow or not. I imagined asking for a full obeisance face down on the floor, and just the vision I produced in my own head helped me relax a little in my chair and wave him to sit before he made a decision we both would have to live with.

We were in a long, narrow room on the ground floor. I had asked to have the chairs moved as far away as possible from the shuttered window, but I had no way of knowing who was out on the terrace, listening for any word he might catch. Akretenesh had chosen the room. It had murals painted in panels between the timbers that supported the upper floors. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, four beautiful women carrying baskets of fruit or flowers, or, in the case of Winter, bundles of spindling branches. All of them with their backs to me, which I didn’t take for a particularly encouraging omen.

Akretenesh, as “mediator,” was with us. He would be in every meeting as I tried to convince my barons not just to elect me king but to make me king without a regent. He didn’t say anything. He knew that the rebels weren’t likely to cooperate. The whole object of their rebellion had been to seize the king’s authority for themselves. That they had started an all-out civil war by accident didn’t mean that they would give up their prizes.

The loyalists wouldn’t be much more easily convinced. My barons knew where I had been, that I had been abducted and had hidden in Hanaktos’s fields, and that I had gone to Attolia to negotiate a surrender. The Medes looked better and better to them all the time.

So I talked myself hoarse. First to Xorcheus and then to the rest of my barons, one at a time or in small groups. I went over, again and again, my arrangements with Attolia, the loss of the islands but the end of the war. I had practiced my arguments on the magus as we rode from Attolia and polished them in the tent at night. I had gone over them again while I was a prisoner in Brimedius. I was determined to convince the barons to end their revolt without bloodshed. So I explained the advantages of peace and trade. I swore up and down that the Attolians would have no hand in our governance, only a promise of our loyalty and our support if they were ever attacked.