Eddis confirmed the worst of them. “My brothers made you cry.”

Sounis tilted his head back and closed his eyes. “Are you certain that you want to be my wife?”

“Absolutely,” said Eddis, quietly. “Eternally certain.”

Holding her tight, Sounis looked around the library. “Does Gen know?” he wondered aloud, and he felt Eddis pull away slightly. He looked into her face. “What does he dream?” he asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“They aren’t dreams to him, Sophos,” said Eddis, feeling his arms tighten again around her at the implication. “I believe that the veil for him is always thin, and that he walks through the world gingerly.”

“Can he answer my questions, then?”

Eddis was amused by his persistence, but shook her head. “In my experience, the more you know of the gods, the more you know what you cannot understand.”

“There is a great deal I don’t know,” he said, seriously. “And not just about the gods.”

Looking into his unsmiling face, Eddis knew it was as close as he would ever come to an accusation. He had been saved by the men Eugenides sent, though he did not yet know the ferocity with which the king of Attolia had stripped those men from other posts, the capital he had expended, the secrets that had been revealed in order to send help to Sounis. But Sophos had to know that she and Eugenides had let him ride away with an Attolian army at his back, believing he needed it. With more faith in himself, and his father’s army, he could have retaken his throne without Attolia’s aid. He might not have followed that bloodier and more costly path, but Eddis and Attolis hadn’t offered him the choice.

“Yes,” Eddis admitted, praying that he would not ask for an apology she could not give.

“But you will tell me everything now?”

“Now and forever,” Eddis promised.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

THE king of Attolia reclined in a chair in a loggia high up in the palace. His feet were braced on a footstool, and he had a robe around his shoulders. The sun was setting somewhere out of sight, but its light still filled the corner of the stone porch where he sat. His eyes were closed, and he didn’t open them before he spoke.

“Have you convinced him?” he asked.

“Gen,” said Sounis.

Eugenides started violently and knocked the wine cup on the arm of his chair. He made a halfhearted effort to catch it but only added a spin that flung the wine farther. The cup broke on the ceramic tiles.

“Gods damn it,” he said.

“You can say that?” Sounis asked, approaching the back of his chair.

Attolis considered the younger king of Sounis over his shoulder. “There has been no objection so far. I take care not to link anyone specific to the word damn, though.”

Sounis said, “I broke the truce at Elisa.”

“Pay your fine,” said Eugenides dismissively, “and assume they are on your side. That’s what I do.” He resettled the robe around his shoulders.

“Eddis said that, too.” Sounis looked at the robe. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Attolis responded, a little shortly. “I am drinking my wine hot, with foul herbs in it, as a favor to my palace physician, who wants to show the queen of Eddis’s physician just who’s in charge here. Sit.” He waved his hand at a nearby chair. Sounis pulled it over and placed it just out of the sunlight, which was too bright to suit him.

“So that wasn’t an accident?” He looked at the mess an attendant was hastily wiping up.

“The initial reaction was,” Eugenides said evasively. He could have saved the wine if he’d wanted to. “You surprised me.”

“I thought nothing surprised you.”

“And I thought you were the queen of Eddis.” He looked malevolently over his shoulder at his attendants waiting by the door to the porch.

Sounis defended them. “She was here.” After she had been announced, but before Hilarion could introduce Sounis, Eddis had raised her hand to silence the attendant and wordlessly withdrawn. Sounis wondered if she thought Gen might have refused to see him if he’d been announced on his own. If he would have retreated again to remote formality.

“Being a mere mortal,” said Eugenides, “I am surprised as often as any man. Has she convinced you?”

“Yes.” Sounis had spent most of the day in the library with Eddis. They had been interrupted only once, when Xanthe knocked to admit a group of servants with food and drink.

“Why didn’t you tell me to take Attolia’s advice from the beginning?”

“I thought you should figure it out. What you learn for yourself, you will know forever,” said Eugenides.

“Pol used to say that,” said Sounis, surprised.

“I learned it from him. I just wish to my god that I had his patience for the process,” said Eugenides, looking with dislike at the new cup of wine his attendants brought him, but taking it all the same.

Thinking of the guardsman he had admired, who had died during their pursuit of Hamiathes’s Gift, Sounis looked out over the stone balustrade of the loggia at the buildings of Attolia below him. There were no clouds visible, and the sky was filled with the liquid light of late afternoon that poured down over the city. He could see people in the streets beyond the outer wall of the palace, standing talking to each other or walking from the wider avenues into the narrow alleys out of his sight. A man with a horse was trying to coax it to pull a wagon over a shallow step in the roadway. If Sounis leaned forward, the sun hit him in the eyes, but he could still make out the bend in the roadway where he had perched on a marker with a peashooter to capture the king of Attolia’s attention. He found that he didn’t want to talk about the gods.

“Won’t Eddis’s people resent her decision?” he asked.

“They won’t be angry at you,” Eugenides told him. “They will be angry at me. They love Eddis too much to desert her, and she has in many ways prepared them for this.”

Sounis lifted his feet onto the footstool. “How angry will they be with you?” he asked.

“Very,” said Eugenides. “I’m trying not to think about it,” he added as he shifted his feet to make room for Sounis’s. “I am glad you got the message about the troops at Oneia.”

When Sophos didn’t respond, Gen put his cup down and straightened.

“I sent that information in every manner I could think of, including by pigeon. If you didn’t get it, why did you take your army down a narrow road to a dead end?”

Sounis shrugged. “There was no point in running for the capital. The Medes would have followed and laid siege. You might have eventually lifted it, but you couldn’t have saved me from being the king who ran away. I would never have been Sounis, just your puppet on the throne.”

“What if I hadn’t sent reinforcements to Oneia?”

“But you did.”

“You should credit Irene,” said Eugenides. “I had the men and the transport, but she told me where to deliver them.”

“Where did you get the boats?” Sounis asked.

“Stripped them off the Neutral Islanders, with the permission of their headmen.”