What I learned of the Mede army: they were infantry. No horse. They were in ten companies of a thousand with a general and his lieutenants. I didn’t recognize all the names, but one of them had a name very similar to my ambassador’s and might well have been a relative. I could count on him to be personally, as well as professionally, unhappy with me.

Though he was trying to bluster his way through the moment, Baron Statidoros was frightened, and he had good reason. He didn’t have anything I needed, and we both knew it. His patronid was not located somewhere strategic. He didn’t control many men, and he didn’t have a fortune I could “borrow” to help secure my throne.

He was a loyalist, he insisted. If only he’d known that I was alive, that I was returning, etc. His protests might have been convincing if he hadn’t made it clear earlier in the week that he was Comeneus’s man. I didn’t believe for a minute that he’d thought I was dead.

Baron Xorcheus had sent poor Statidoros as a sacrifice. Both Statidoros and I knew that as well. His job was to give me just enough information to strike at a few of the lower members of Hanaktos’s conspiracy but not to betray its leaders. He would take responsibility for the transgressions of others and be condemned for it. Whether he was a volunteer who had a reward coming or a victim caught between me and a threat of death from his own side if he failed, I didn’t know, and I didn’t really care. As this became more clear to him, he became more frightened and unfortunately less coherent.

I had a fast-expiring period of grace, while my erstwhile ambassador was having lead shot dug out of his shoulder. My barons would be growing more anxious, and more stupid, with each passing moment, and a message was no doubt already on its way to the port, Tas-Elisa. The magus would stop any traveler on the road, and the woods would be watched as well, but the hills that had hidden my army for weeks would conceal, just as reliably, any number of Mede emissaries. The message would go like water running downhill to the general in charge of ten thousand Medes: The king of Sounis had fired on his ambassador and seized the reins of government.

I knew whom I couldn’t trust, but outside of my father and a few others, I didn’t know whom I could. I had to start trusting some people, and I had to choose which. I had to decide what to do about the army that was on its way, and I didn’t have the information I needed and didn’t know how I could get it. Basrus could do me only so much good. He could tell me whom he’d seen work with Hanaktos, but not which of them might still be useful to me now.

And then my worst nightmare arrived, weeping and wailing in the doorway. Berrone. I had no idea where she had come from. And her mother was with her, gods defend me. I hadn’t known that either of them was in Elisa, and I was going to kill Nomenus, I thought, kill him.

Berrone was content to stand in the doorway with her hair a wild mess and her face streaming tears, but her mother, bowed over obsequiously behind her, must have given her a pretty savage poke, because Berrone suddenly flung herself at my feet, crying, “Oh, my father, my dear father, how could you murder him and betray me, who rescued you from, from, from—”

From your father, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I looked down at her, and my conscience hit me from behind. The words weren’t hers, but the tears were, and they were real tears. Whatever Hanaktos had been to me, he’d been her father, and I’d killed him.

“Berrone,” I said helplessly.

“What will become of us now, Great King?” said her mother. “What will become of my poor daughter, betrayed by—”

I didn’t even hear the rest, and my sympathy snuffed out like a candle dropped in a well.

“Get out, all of you,” I said to the rest of the room. “Berrone, get up. You can sit on the couch.”

Baron Statidoros, looking as if a god had descended from the ceiling to rescue him, scuttled through the door without another word. Everyone else bowed and exited as well, except for Berrone’s mother, who was busy trying to accuse me of indecent intentions.

“My daughter,” she was saying, “a chaste beauty, whom you have violently stripped of her father’s protection—”

I stepped around Berrone, who was still on the floor, and advanced toward her mother, and I think my intentions were perfectly clear because she backed up hastily.

“Great King!” she cheeped. “Mercy! Mercy on a poor widow and her only daughter,” she cried as she backed through the doorway.

I returned to Berrone and lifted her up, guiding her by the arm to a nearby couch, where I sat beside her.

“Berrone, I am sorry,” I said.

“Everyone’s been so angry at me,” she sobbed. “They’ve yelled at me and been so mean. They sent Sylvie away. And now Mother says that it’s my fault that my father is dead and you have to marry me. Will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Please?” Berrone asked pathetically. “Mother says you have to or she’ll never stop being angry at me, and we’ll live on the street and I won’t have any pretty dresses and all my kittens will be drowned. Please?” She wept.

I almost wept myself.

“Berrone, it isn’t your fault that your father is dead. That’s his fault, and my fault, but not yours.”

“It is my fault,” said Berrone, sniffing. “My mother said everything is my fault. She found out that I paid for you in the market and that you were at the megaron all the time they were looking for you, and then they found out I let you go, and my f-f-father said I spoiled all their plans, because he was supposed to be the one to rescue you. I don’t see why it mattered if I rescued you instead, even if I didn’t know it was you, and I didn’t, you know,” she said earnestly. “I had no idea that was you. But Mother was angry and said I wouldn’t be able to marry you after all and be queen like they’d promised.”

“Like they had what?” I raised my voice without meaning to.

Berrone wailed.

I patted her on the back, as a number of things became clear. Of course Hanaktos wanted me to marry his daughter. What a perfect plan. First encourage a revolt against my uncle, then abduct me, and then rescue me, and then foist his conveniently beautiful daughter into my arms because, surely, any grateful young man would be eager to marry the bird-witted Berrone. What a nightmare. I could now guess at the source of recent tensions between Akretenesh and Hanaktos. The Mede would have been happier to bring Eddis under the imperial thumb as well, but Hanaktos had wanted his daughter on the throne.

It was a subtle and beautiful plan. If I had been even moderately cooperative, they needn’t even have forced a regent on me. I wouldn’t have lived a year after my heir was born. A sudden illness or a hunting accident, and Hanaktos would have had the long regency he dreamed of and a grandchild to inherit the throne. The Mede would have had a dependable ally, because he would have known the truth and could have threatened Hanaktos with it at will. Comeneus had also escaped an early death, I thought, and his brother was going to be disappointed.

“Mother says that now that you have killed my father, you will have to marry me after all. Will you?”

“Gods, no, Berrone.”

“Oh.”

I sighed. “It will be all right, Berrone. I promise. I’ll make sure you have pretty dresses, and we’ll get Sylvie back.”