We acquired twelve cannons as well, which was an unlooked-for windfall. Evidently the Medes had off-loaded them from their ships to be used at some point in the future. We found them the morning after the battle as the proctors attempted to bring some order to the chaos that was several thousand soldiers sleeping off a drunk. Akretenesh told me I must return the cannons, and I laughed in his face.

Akretenesh was not a happy man. I did try to take a conciliatory approach, but he would have none of it, and my politeness was long at an end when he told me he wanted to take the cannons with him. I packed him into a litter and had him carried down to the port, where with great relief I saw him laid in a boat and pushed off to the Mede transport ship. He made some unpleasant threats, but I doubt he will have an opportunity to carry them out. He will face his emperor over the loss of an army when he reaches home. I do not expect to see him again and am glad of it.

There were more meetings, confirming my impression that talking is the most important thing a king does. I had promised Hanaktia that her children would not lose Hanaktos if she fulfilled her bargain with me. I kept my word but settled one-third of the holdings on Berrone as a dowry and made my mother’s brother her guardian. That it didn’t please her mother was no concern of mine. My uncle will take care of Berrone’s best interests. I don’t trust her mother or brothers to do so.

I went to see Nomenus the day I left. There were six cells in an outbuilding. The building was high in the middle with low eaves, and the doorways of the cells faced each other across a central breezeway. Frankly, it was more pig house than prison. The door to Nomenus’s cell was little higher than my waist and made of woven metal strips. Nomenus lay curled against it. He was asleep, which was not astonishing. He had no blanket, and I assumed it was too cold in the stone building to sleep at night.

As I squatted beside the webwork of iron, he stirred and sat up. “You are triumphant,” he said. “I heard from the guards.”

“I am,” I said.

“I’m glad,” he said grudgingly, tucking his fingers under his arms. “Not wholly glad, you understand . . . but glad.”

I peered past him into the darkness.

He said, “It is not so cramped farther back. I sit here because it is warmer.”

I had come to see him because I thought that out of sight and out of mind might be a dangerous attitude to take. I wanted to have a very clear idea in my head of where I had put him.

“Unlock this,” I said to the guard with me.

Nomenus backed away from the door once it was open, and I got on my knees and crawled inside. The prison cell did open out; its roof was higher than in the cramped passageway by the door, and the floor in the rest of the cell had been dug out, so it was lower and Nomenus could stand upright. I sat in the tunnel that was the entryway and dangled my legs over the lip into the cell. The dirt having been dug away, what was left was a collection of boulders and the lumpy bedrock. There was no flat space outside of the entryway where I sat.

I waved to Nomenus, and he settled uncomfortably on a rock. He had a huge bruise on his forehead that did not please me. He touched it gingerly and said, “It was no unkindness by your guards,” as if reading my mind. “I first came here in the dark, if you remember.”

“I see.” I couldn’t think of what else I wanted to say. I watched him watching me. Finally I asked, “What are you thinking?”

He swallowed. “Useless excuses that I am trying to keep unsaid.”

I waited.

After a moment he tossed up his hands, and to my intense discomfort, he started to cry. “You are king,” he said, his voice breaking. “What I did doesn’t matter very much now, does it? And what else could I do but be loyal to my lord? Is it my business whom my lord is loyal to?”

“Do you believe that?”

“No.” He pushed himself farther back and drew his legs up to be wrapped in the curl of his arms. He rubbed his face against his arms. “I wanted to be on the winning side, and I thought I was.”

He was either a flawed but fundamentally decent man or a very convincing actor, or possibly, he was both.

“Please,” he said, with obvious reluctance. “I hadn’t meant to ask, but, is it . . . forever?” His tears had made streaks through the dirt on his face.

I said, “No. It isn’t forever, but it’s going to be some time.”

He nodded.

“When I have other things dealt with, I will deal with you,” I promised him.

Later, as I climbed onto my horse’s back and rode for the capital, his last words were still in my ears. His cell had already been locked behind me, and he hadn’t been talking to me. He was praying to the gods, I think, when he whispered, “Don’t forget me. Please, don’t forget me.”

I stayed only two days in the capital. I was welcomed by a cheering citizenry, who threw flowers at my head. It was disconcerting to think I could have put almost any young man in my retinue on a white horse and they would have thrown flowers at him instead. It was not me they cared about, only what I meant to them: a cessation of hostilities, a chance for prosperity, food on the table.

I left the city of Sounis almost immediately because I had backed Brimedius into a corner, and he had admitted both that he had held my mother and sisters and that they had subsequently disappeared. He admitted that he had no idea where they were. Clearly, he expected to be held responsible for their deaths. I did not relieve him of his fears, and wouldn’t until I had seen my mother and sisters with my own eyes.

I was anxious to get to Eddis. In this, my father was my greatest ally, putting his foot down when the magus suggested I should travel with all my Eddisians and Attolians at a snail’s pace. I took a guard and a change of clothes and left the rest to travel at the speed of armies and gastropods. We changed horses frequently and arrived in Eddis almost as quickly as any royal messenger. I didn’t question for a minute that it was my desire for haste that moved us, not until we arrived in the great court of the Eddisian palace.

My father dropped from his horse almost before the animal had stopped moving and strode, oblivious, through six layers of a ceremonial reception, to take my mother in his arms. I stared, remembering his words after we’d escaped Hanaktos. As I watched him lift her off the ground, watched her wrap her arms around him and lay her head on his shoulder, it was apparent that I had misunderstood what he meant when he said that only I was “important.”

Our parents’ behavior seemed to be no surprise to either Ina or Eurydice, who left them to each other and ran toward me. To my relief, the Eddisians in the court didn’t seem to mind the disruption of the ceremony they’d planned, and I was able to seize Ina and Eurydice in my own arms and all of us could babble our questions and answers at one another while the Eddisians looked tolerantly on. The majordomo efficiently dispatched my guard to quarters and swept us all inside to rooms where we could be private and I could ask about the one person I had looked for but not seen, the queen of Eddis.

Ina told me, “She has taken her court to Attolia and waits to see you there.”

“Her Majesty has kindly given us this time together,” said my mother, “knowing that we have much to catch up on.”

Indeed, we did. Settling on the couches, we shared our adventures. Ina and Eurydice told me how Ina had led them out of Brimedius, while my mother sat between me and my father, looking comfortably at each of us in turn and speaking very little. She did not appear particularly brave or daring, hardly even strong-minded. She seemed as quiet as ever, but I didn’t doubt that she had done just as Eurydice said and run a sharpened stick down the throat of one of Brimedius’s hounds. Even with the evidence of their happy outcome, I am left with nightmares at the dangers they faced and know I have many debts to repay to people and to gods for their safe arrival in Eddis.