“Little countries get eaten up by larger ones,” I said with a shrug. “It is the nature of the world. They will be better off once they are integrated into the empire.”

I used some of my funds to purchase a bracelet for Laela to thank her for her good turn for me, because people like Laela and me cannot leave debts outstanding.

After my bruises faded, I resumed my other business for my master. Not everything could be arranged from my office, and anyway, I liked to exercise my privilege to go in and out of the palace at my own discretion. My master’s previous secretary, who had trained me as a child, had warned me that I must not spend every day looking into ledgers by the light of a smoking lamp or my eyesight would suffer. My eyesight is poor, but probably would have been worse had I not taken his advice to go out of doors as often as possible.

In fact, if my eyesight had been better, the whole course of this narrative might have been different. I would have seen the Attolian waiting ahead of me in an empty hallway of the palace in time to dodge into one of the side passages used by the menial slaves and servants. Instead, I approached, unaware that he was an Attolian until it was too late to change direction without drawing his attention. Thinking that we had met by chance, I kept my eyes down and moved a little faster.

He was a very large Attolian, by size and dress a soldier. When I saw him casting glances up and down the passage to see who was nearby, my stomach sank. My master had tried to usurp the Attolian throne. His failure had endeared him neither to his wife nor to the emperor. He may have been a laughingstock in the emperor’s palace, but I doubted that anyone in Attolia was laughing.

“Kamet,” said the Attolian with a firm nod of greeting. This was growing worse and worse. I didn’t think anyone in Attolia knew my name, and if this soldier did, he probably also knew that I was the one who had set fire to our rooms to create the distraction that would allow my master to escape the fortress at Ephrata. Our meeting in this hallway was not an accident.

The soldier stooped to bring his lips close enough to my ear to say very quietly, “My king blames your master for the loss of his hand.”

That, too, was an issue—and a perfectly reasonable sentiment on the part of the Attolian king. The Thief of Eddis had been arrested in Attolia’s capital city, and my master told me he had deliberately stoked the queen of Attolia’s rage, hoping to prompt war between the two countries. Attolia had exercised an old-fashioned option for dealing with thieves, and my master had been quite pleased. Only now, that same Eddisian thief was the king of Attolia—the queen had married him to save her throne, choosing him over my master. Oh, my poor face, I thought, and oh, my poor ribs—they’d just recently stopped hurting every time I tried to stand up or bend over to tighten my sandal. I could only assume the Attolian meant to exact a petty revenge on my person. It wasn’t my fault that my master was an enemy of his king, but I doubted that mattered.

At least the Attolian was still talking. The longer he talked, the better my chances that someone might come along. Thank the eternal gods he was a chatty Attolian, or so I thought at the time.

“My king wants your master to suffer the loss of his right hand,” the Attolian was saying, and I admit I was distracted as he grabbed my wrist and it took me a minute to realize that he was speaking metaphorically. He meant me—I was my master’s right hand. It dawned on me that I might be facing something far, far worse than a casual beating in one of the back passages of the emperor’s palace. I tried to pry his fingers apart as I looked desperately up and down the corridor for help. There was no one, not even a blurry sign of movement in the distance that would indicate a witness was coming.

Surely the Attolians understood it was uncivil for a guest to beat to death someone else’s property in a deserted hallway of his host’s palace? Maybe not. They weren’t very civilized, and it would be a significant revenge, petty, but intensely disruptive. I was an expensive slave and my master relied on me—his entire estate was going to fall into chaos until he found a replacement secretary—but when all was said and done, I was still just a slave. Maybe the Attolians would pay some small percentage of my worth to my master as an apology and in so doing add a little more insult to injury. Given my master’s uncertain position at the emperor’s court, they might get away with it. The Attolian king obviously had a deep well of spite and I would have appreciated his low cunning more if I hadn’t thought the Attolian was about to wring my neck.

“Meet me at the Rethru docks after sunset,” he said.

That sentence made so little sense that I stopped picking at his fingers to stare up at his face. I was close enough, as he had me by the wrist, to see him quite clearly. He was a typical Attolian: sandy-brown hair, a broad face, light-colored eyes. Altogether he had a simple, straightforward look to him, and he seemed perfectly serious. He put his hands to my shoulders and stared back down at me, as if he thought I was stupid or didn’t understand his heavily accented Mede. He could have just spoken in Attolian, but instead, he used very simple sentences. “I will help you escape your master. Come to the Rethru docks. Be there after sunset. And I will take you to Attolia. You will be free in Attolia. Do you understand?”

It was like being lectured by an earnest, oversized child.

I realized my mouth was open and shut it. I nodded. “Rethru docks,” I repeated after him.

“After dark. Can you be there?”

I nodded again. Certainly I could get to the Rethru docks after dark. The Attolian nodded back, then checked the corridor again and hurried away.

I watched him go, my knees weak with relief. I staggered to the nearest alcove and slipped behind the large urn standing in the center of it. I wrapped my arms around myself and had a long, if quiet, laugh. My ribs hurt, but it was worth it. It had been a difficult few weeks, and it was good to laugh again.

I could be free in Attolia. If only I could have shared the joke with my master, but he wouldn’t have seen the humor just then. Another time, I would have told him and he and I would have laughed until we fell down. I could be free in Attolia—a place more backward than anywhere I have ever known, with its stinking sewers and its smoking furnaces and its preening idiot aristocrats. Gods support me, they were still memorizing all their poetry because none of them knew how to read. The only beautiful thing in the whole country was the queen, and she had sold herself into a marriage with the Eddisian Thief, the very one whose hand she had cut off. There was a match made in hell.

As a slave in the emperor’s palace I had authority over all of my master’s other slaves and most of his free men. I had my own money in my master’s cashbox. I had a library of my own, a collection of texts in my alcove that I carefully packed into their own case whenever my master moved households. I not only could read and write, I could read and write in most of the significant languages of the empire. My master had paid good money for it to be so. Someday he meant to make a gift of me to his brother, and then, as the next emperor’s personal slave, I would be one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in all the empire. I wouldn’t have taken the Attolians’ offer even if I’d believed it was sincere—and I didn’t. They meant to slice my throat and toss me in a sewer, I was sure.

When my amusement passed, leaving my ribs aching, I shook my head at the self-aggrandizement of the Attolians, and headed back to my master’s apartments. There is freedom in this life and there is power, and I was ambitious for the latter. I looked forward to the day I would be in my master’s confidence again—I would tell him about the Attolian, and he and I would laugh together. In the meantime, I thought, I would be anywhere that evening but out on the Rethru docks.