I noticed it immediately—there was no one lingering in the street. My view was limited by the armsmen all around me, but the few people I could see moved quickly and kept their heads down. I looked more carefully. The palace guards were watchful, but not of me. Their eyes were on the streets, the people, the alleys we passed. Their hands were on their swords. The hairs on the back of my neck lifted.

The Attolian, blinded by his anger, was oblivious until we had passed through the open space of a market and were making our way up a street of wineshops, all of them shuttered. It was probably where he’d once upon a time been separated from his pay as a country bumpkin, and it should have been crowded at this time of day. It also wasn’t on any direct path between the waterfront and the palace. We were taking an exceptionally circuitous route.

“Where is everyone?” the Attolian asked.

“Silence,” said the leader of our cohort.

“The queen,” someone said under his breath.

The queen had gone on a rampage against her citizens? The queen had poisoned her second husband the way she had poisoned the first? Only two words spoken, but those two words said it wasn’t either of those things. The words conveyed a world of grief, and the Attolians loved their savage queen.

The Attolian looked stricken. “Dead?” he asked.

“Silence!” said the cohort leader again.

“Shut up, Haemus,” snarled the Attolian back. “Is she dead?” he demanded of the men around him.

Several guards shook their heads, not outright disobeying their commander.

“Miscarried,” the man beside me whispered.

“A son, I heard,” said another.

So we learned of the heir just as he slipped away. His sex might have been only a rumor, a reflection of the longed-for security an heir would have brought to the country, but talk of it meant the pregnancy had been far along. The queen was old for a first child, and late miscarriages were often deadly. The Attolians might lose her yet. No wonder the city was as silent as a held breath. How long would the Eddisian king rule without his queen? Not long, I guessed. If I weren’t already doomed, I would have been planning to leave the city by morning. Civil war was coming and on its heels, no doubt, the Medes.

We continued up the streets in the silence the squad leader had called for—I wondered if he had been a friend of the Attolian—and reached the walls around the palace without crossing through the open plaza at its front. We entered the grounds by way of a side gate to a small courtyard. A door led to stairs down to the bowels of the palace—and the prison cells underneath it. At the bottom of the stairs the Attolian was led away without a backward look, while I was taken through a room filled with all the horrors I had fled in Ianna-Ir and out the other side to a warren of stinking, dimly lit hallways and a lightless cell. There was no door to the cell, only a barred gate, and far away one sad lamp to cast the flickering shadows of the passing guards onto the wall near me. I could also hear the Attolian shouting somewhere. He sounded angry but unafraid. I was not surprised.

Unfortunately, he was also getting closer.

I sat against the front wall of the cell, away from the barred door, hoping to be out of sight. The Attolian had stopped shouting, but I was certain I heard his stamping feet among the others making their way toward me. I heard keys jingle as a nearby cell was unlocked and then locked again and the guards awkwardly shuffled away. I sat quietly, breathing through my open mouth.

“I know you are in there, Kamet.”

I twisted to peer out at him. He was sitting across the passageway, leaning, as I was now, on the bars of his cell.

“Costis,” I said, using his name for the first time since he had told it to me, on board the riverboat at the start of our journey. “Costis, I’m sorry.”

He crossed his arms and continued to look furious. “No one has spoken of your master. The king will not leave the queen’s side, and my captain says he must keep you safe until the king sends for you.” He seemed as angry at the captain as he was at me.

“And you?” I asked.

“And me,” he spat. I think the argument I had overheard had been over the role of the Attolian—whether he would guard me from outside a cell or be guarded himself.

“The other guards at the waterfront. They were decoys?”

“Yes. I should have realized, but I was too busy feeling like an idiot.”

Which suddenly made me furious.

“Well,” I said, realizing that the strange feeling rising in my chest was anger, “you are an idiot.”

“What?”

I didn’t back down. He was securely locked in the cell opposite, after all, and I’d already lost his goodwill. I had nothing left to lose. “You knew what I thought of Attolia. You heard me after that Namreen tried to take my head off. Did you not wonder why I met you at the docks? Did you ever think? Did you never ask yourself why I would want to come to your stinking backward country and spend the rest of my life scrabbling for a living on a vomit-stained street corner writing love letters for drunks and bills for tailors?”

He recoiled as if bitten by a rabbit. Then he snarled back at me, “What makes you think my king would have turned you out on a street corner?”

“Costis”—I flung out a hand at the distance the two of us had come—“he sent you halfway across the world to steal me out of spite. He doesn’t care what happens to me.”

He refused to concede, but it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to refute the pettiness of Eugenides. Costis could only mutter into his chest, “That’s not true.” He had so much faith in his silly king.

“If you had let me disappear in Sukir, you would have been a traitor.”

Costis had uncrossed his arms without thinking, and now he sullenly crossed them again. “If your master is dead, then it wouldn’t matter to the king where you went. I keep telling you, you idiot, but you won’t listen.”

Oh, I listened. I knew all I needed of the king of the Attolians. He was so incompetent he couldn’t stop his servants from dumping sand in his food. He was so careless of the lives of his servants that he exiled Costis when he couldn’t protect him. So careless of my life that he thought I would come like a dog to his hand when he sent for me. Like Nahuseresh, he cared only about what he wanted, and to hell with anyone else. I knew what men with power were like, even if Costis didn’t.

“One of us is an idiot,” I said. “I don’t think it’s me.” I’d had no choice but to stake everything on a chance to escape my fate, and I’d lost. Scribing on a street corner would be a paradise compared with what I saw in my future.

We waited for a very long time. It was hard to tell how long in the darkness and the unbroken silence. The prison’s guards brought us food. I slept a little, with my knees up and my head on my arms. Finally, the palace guards came again and unlocked our doors. They tried a joke or two at our expense, but the black look Costis gave them restored the silence as we walked the dark passageways and up the narrow stairs to the palace. We passed open windows in the corridors, and the sky above was a deep blue, like lapis. It had felt like years in the palace’s prison cells, but perhaps this was just the dawn of the day after we had been taken on the war galleys. I didn’t know if I would see the sky again, and I tried to capture its color in my mind’s eye. I did not believe that the news of Nahuseresh’s death had not reached Attolia. His guards might not have heard, but the king surely knew.