“Is here, as you wished,” said my father, and I sighed in relief.

“Get Akretenesh to his rooms and fetch a doctor for him,” I told my father.

I turned to give orders to clear out the bodies, but Akretenesh’s thready voice called me back.

“Your Majesty,” he said.

“Yes?” I answered, ever polite.

Akretenesh looked remarkably smug for someone being carried away with a bullet hole in him. “I rather thought that I could persuade your barons to accept a replacement more to my liking. How unfortunate that won’t work, just yet. What will you do about my men, who will no doubt be marching up the port road very soon?”

“I knew you would hear that I was coming to Brimedius. I knew you would attack me on the way, and I arranged to have the Attolians and Eddisians scatter and appear to retreat,” I said, rather smug myself. “They made their way here, in small groups, to hide in the hills long before anyone was watching for them. My magus went to explain this to my father and came down with him from the Melenze pass.”

I’d stayed in Brimedius, hoping to give them time to take cover in the hills. Then I had hurried through the meetings in Elisa as fast as I decently could. There is only so long an army can stay hidden and only so long it can live on nuts and dried meat and still fight when it is called upon. It is not a ruse that would have worked anywhere but in the sacred precinct where the woods are uninhabited.

“The magus, with the Attolians and the Eddisians, is above the road from Tas-Elisa. They will turn back your thousand soldiers easily.”

“Aaah,” said Akretenesh, part enlightenment and part pain, “but there aren’t a thousand. They are closer to ten thousand in number.”

My polite expression froze solid. “Ten thousand?”

“Yes, they came in by ship in the last few days.”

No wonder the bastard looked so smug. I’d just assaulted an inviolate ambassador and started a war with a piddling company of bow and pikemen against his army of ten thousand justifiably enraged Medes.

“Why—” Akretenesh gasped a little and started again. “Why don’t you join me in my rooms a little later, and we will discuss this unfortunate turn of affairs?”

Malicious son of a bitch, I thought, over my dead body am I discussing anything with you.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll come right up whenever you’re ready.”

“Ten thousand!” I shouted at the walls, back in the room with the wooden shutters, now open, so that anyone could hear me, on the porch or probably across the compound. “That arrogant bastard landed ten thousand men at Tas-Elisa. In my port! Mine!” When I was a child and playmates snatched my toys out of my hands, I tended to smile weakly and give in. Years later I was acting the way I should have as a child. Probably not the most mature behavior for a king, but I was still cursing as I swung around to find a delegation of barons in the doorway behind me. My father, Baron Comeneus, and Baron Xorcheus among them.

They thought it was how a king behaved.

I ran my fingers through my hair and tried to pursue a more reasonable line of thought, but more reasonable thoughts made me angry again. Armies of ten thousand men don’t just spring from the ground at the tip of a wine cup. It takes time to move them from wherever they came from and time to unload them from ships. There’s space to consider, and logistics. The land around the port had to be wall-to-wall men. Someone had to have made a plan to feed them, and supplies had to have been coming in for weeks. Some of them, no doubt, had been hidden within the preparations for the meet by Hanaktos, but he hadn’t done it on his own. There were more people sitting in the meet, and some of them maybe in the room with me, who had known that the Mede was bringing an army. And many, many more of them must have known once Tas-Elisa filled to the brim with soldiers.

Not me. I didn’t have a clue.

Which means that my careful collection of “information” from Nomenus over the previous week had been a farce.

“Who knows anything about the ten thousand men at the port?” No one volunteered any information. There was a flicker of apprehension in Baron Xorcheus, but that wasn’t enough. I knew he’d called for a regent, and I knew he was overanxious. I didn’t know for certain why.

I remembered Polystrictes and his goats. I wasn’t sure if I had a wolf or a dog, but I knew how to tell the difference. A dog does what you tell it to.

“Basrus!” I shouted, and the barons and their men looked at me confused.

“I want Hanaktos’s slaver. Find him and bring him.”

I waved the rest of the people away and paced the room until the slaver appeared at the door looking like a man who isn’t sure if he’s under arrest.

“Majesty, I—”

“Later. Who knows about the army at Tas-Elisa?”

Basrus’s eyeballs rolled to one side, and before he said a word, Baron Xorcheus decided all hope of concealment was lost.

“Hanaktos warned me to have all my people well away from the port three days past. He said what the eyes don’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over. That’s all I know myself. Baron Statidoros knows more.”

I looked at Basrus, and he disappeared.

Baron Comeneus was staring at Xorcheus in outrage, reinforcing my conviction in the amphitheater. He hadn’t known about the army. It was Hanaktos who had been in charge.

Comeneus turned to me. I thought he was going to call for Xorcheus’s head, but I was wrong. “Your Majesty, that man,” he said, pointing out the door after Basrus, “is an okloi! You cannot mean to send him to compel a baron!”

As if it mattered, here at what might well be the swirling drain of Sounis’s history, whether or not Basrus was a landowner and entitled to a vote on legal issues.

“You cannot mean to suggest that you would consider his word—”

“Shut up,” I told him, and he stared at me openmouthed. I stared back; not the boy he’d condescended to, not my uncle’s inept heir, I, the king of Sounis. “I may or may not survive as king, but if I am a puppet of the Medes, at least I will know it. Go ask your brother what he knows of Hanaktos’s plans, and then come back and tell me what he said.”

I waved my hand to dismiss them all; I needed to be alone to think. They didn’t move. “Get out!” I shouted, and that had more effect.

Only my father stood his ground. He cleared his throat. “The truce is broken. You need guards.”

He was right. Weapons were going to come out from any of a hundred secret hiding places, and it would shortly be every baron for himself.

I could trust my father and only a few others completely. I told my father, “Our men will be our guards here. You will arrange it?” He nodded. “Tell whoever you can that I am not wiping any slates clean. I will hold people responsible for their actions, now and in the future, but there will be, for every transgression, a remedy in the next few days. Tell the council that. Make sure they know that the future of the patronoi depends on their service to me.”

Then I sent him away to arrange for more guards and to quell my barons’ destructive tendency toward shortsightedness and panic.

I paced until Basrus delivered Baron Statidoros, who spilled every bean as fast he could spit words out of his mouth.