I couldn’t bear to look the Attolian in the face. I couldn’t risk him reading my thoughts, so I told him the motion of the waves out on the Middle Sea made me sick, and I stayed in the cabin. He, of course, came to sit with me, and I had to lie still and pretend I was asleep.

“Kamet, wake up,” said the Attolian one morning, and showed me the pennant he’d asked the ship’s sailmaker to sew. A black line made an oval around four oddly formed letters. “It’s supposed to be Hamiathes’s Gift,” he said. “When we reach the Thegmis Channel, we will fly it from the mast. No one but the king and I know what it means, but when they see it at the fort on the mainland, they’ve been told to send a man on a fast horse to the capital. The king will know we are coming.”

I didn’t know what Hamiathes’s Gift was, and I didn’t care, either. “How long until we see Thegmis?” I asked.

“Only a day or two now,” he assured me. Then he asked if I wanted something to eat, and when I said no, he finally left.

I didn’t want anything to eat. I wanted to die. I would have thrown myself overboard into the sea if I’d thought it would have kept the Attolian from ever knowing that I had betrayed him and I prayed to Prokip, god of justice, that punishment for my deceit would fall on my shoulders, not his. At night I lay awake thinking about what the Attolian king might do. Throw me in a prison cell or kill me or send me back to the empire. Maybe he would sell me off to one of his barons in need of a record keeper. I had once had ambitions to run the empire—and the best I could hope for was that I might end my life in the wilderness counting sheep.

When the island of Thegmis lay ahead of us, I climbed up on the deck to see the pennant raised.

“My god, Kamet, you look terrible,” the Attolian said. “Go back and lie down.”

So I looked out the porthole in my cabin, and I thought of our upcoming reception in Attolia as we passed under the cliffs of Thegmis, no more than a stone’s throw from shore. I wished for the hundred thousandth time that I could swim. I could read and write in five languages. I could multiply and divide in my head, track a hennat out of place through an entire year’s expense records, and turn a feather into a perfect pen with two cuts of my knife, but I could not swim.

We neared the capital as the sun was setting, and I returned to the deck to face the future. Everything was shining in the sun’s dying rays—the headlands, the temples, the ordinary buildings of what I knew for a fact was a rather dingy city. The marble palace of Attolia, as we rounded the headland, glowed like another sun itself, but as we drew nearer, the shadow of Thegmis, lurking offshore, crept up from the sea to swallow first the port, then the city, then the palace. By the time we passed the lighthouse at the end of the mole, only the temples on the heights were still in the sun, and heading toward us at top speed were two of Attolia’s war galleys.

The Attolian was puzzled. “We were supposed to get into the city without anyone knowing we’d arrived. Why would they send out war galleys?”

Before my hands could cover my treacherous mouth, the words fell out. “Because my master is dead—there’s no need for secrecy now.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Attolian dismissed this with a shake of his head. Then he took his eyes off the approaching galleys and looked at me instead while the words sank in.

“He was poisoned the day you offered me my freedom,” I said to the deck under my feet.

Where another man might have shouted, or cursed, or questioned, the Attolian just stood silent. In Ianna-Ir, I had picked him for an idiot, but by this time I knew better. He was thinking everything through before he responded—the persistence of the Namreen, my fear that he would see the wanted poster in Koadester, the empire’s well-known policy on the treatment of slaves of a murdered master. Every single thing that he had noticed, he was reevaluating.

“I wondered why you said Nahuseresh ‘had’ a sense of decorum. Did you poison him?”

Well, that was a question I hadn’t anticipated. “No, it was his brother, probably at the emperor’s direction.”

“You would have left the Anet’s Dream, but you couldn’t swim.” He hadn’t been asleep when I went exploring on the riverboat.

“Yes.”

“And you still meant to disappear in Sukir.”

“Yes.”

He nodded slowly. “I thought we were Immakuk and Ennikar, but we were just Senabid and his master, weren’t we?” His words were more full of contempt for himself than for me. “Is that why you didn’t want to tell me those jokes? You were afraid I’d see myself in them?”

“No,” I protested.

“No,” he agreed. “I wouldn’t have. I’m that stupid.”

Just then a bump shook the ship, the war galley wasting no time on a gentle interception. The captain shouted in outrage. The sailors looked over at us, suddenly uncertain. The soldiers came up over the railings, so many to collect just the two of us, their numbers proportional to the rage of a confounded king.

As I looked away, the Attolian leaned over me, planting one large finger against my chest. “If you had told me,” he said quietly, equal parts betrayal and rage in his voice, “if you had told me in Sukir, I would have let you go.”

Almost as if he’d heard this declaration of treason, a soldier as big as the Attolian, but older, with gray in his hair and a fancy badge on his breast, stepped up to the Attolian. It was Teleus, captain of Attolia’s palace guard, and he said very loudly, “I hereby arrest you both in the name of the king.”

This time the Attolian did shout. “What?”

“Think, you idiot,” said his captain.

Two men grabbed me then and dragged me away. I tried to insist that it was not the Attolian at fault, but no one listened. I doubt the Attolian even heard over his own shouting. In moments I was tossed over the side of the ship into the war galley and the galley was pulling away. Someone tugged me to a bench where I sat down so hard I nearly fell over backward. The galley’s high sides hid everything from view but the temples on the hillside above Attolia’s palace. I sat watching it grow closer, wavering, as I blinked again and again.

The galleys stroked to the shore, cutting through the waves like a stylus across wet clay. We arrived at the dock, and I wiped my cheeks with my sleeves. The guards were gentler getting me off the boat than they had been putting me on—there was one at either hand to swing me across the gap between the ship and the quay to where even more guards waited, dressed in their breastplates and greaves, their helmets with the rounded tabs in front to protect the nose. They were impersonal and anonymous and stood intimidatingly close. I looked for the Attolian—I was still thinking of him as the Attolian, even surrounded by other Attolians—and located him at last arguing with the captain of the palace guard, poking him in the chest as he’d poked me—which was out of character and seemed like an excessively bad idea. The captain’s only response was a series of curt orders that set the guards around him in motion. They hastily formed into groups, and each set off from the waterfront in a different direction. The captain led one group away while the Attolian was escorted to my side. He’d been saying something as he came, but when he saw me, he fell silent and looked pointedly away. Then we marched, surrounded by guards, through an eerily quiet city.