I shook my head, shook off his kindness, his concern, his familiarity. He waited.

His familiarity. I squinted at him—much like a blind caggi, I’m sure.

Then I leapt to my feet. Eyes wide open and staring, I surged toward the throne—the guards clutching at me just a moment too late, and the king waving them back. I kept going until I could see his face, see every detail—the quirk of his eyebrow, the twist at the corner of his mouth, the mark on his cheek, where he’d said the Attolian guards had once shot him when he was running away, leaving the scar I remembered so well. I was almost on top of him before I stopped, but he did not recoil, only sat leaning forward so that I could get a good look at the queen of Attolia’s errand boy and sandal polisher.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Do they know?” I asked, gesturing toward all the courtiers behind me.

“Some,” he said seriously. He threw his eyes over the crowd and then looked back at me. “More will know now.”

He smiled.

I remembered him as a boy, small for his age. I found him taller, broader in the shoulder, much older than the intervening years would explain, with a hook where his hand had been—wholly changed, in fact, but for the scar on his face and that smile. Or perhaps, I thought, he has not changed. Perhaps it is just the world that has changed. Perhaps he was only by accident at the edge of this court and had slowly and inevitably drawn all of it into orbit around him.

“Why?” I asked. “Why bring me here?”

“Spite,” said Eugenides frankly. He leaned back and crossed his arms. “I have a great deal of ill will for your former master. And because you are my friend,” he added, glancing up from his boots. “That should have been the first reason, but I will be honest now—it was not.”

Was it the act of a friend to steal my future? To engage Laela in my betrayal? “Kings don’t move mountains as a favor to a friend,” I said aloud.

The king equivocated. “While in my experience, they do, I grant you—it’s not what successful kings are known for. Sometimes a little bit of spite motivates what more kindness cannot.”

The disobedient servant I’d found endearing and the king who’d stolen my future—I struggled to put the two people together in my head. Costis’s stories of a weak and silly king and the confident and cunning manipulator before me—like misaligned papers, I could not shape them into a tidy stack. Like a bad ledger, it wouldn’t tally.

“I’m sorry,” said the king. “I know you wanted your chance at the emperor’s side, even if it meant your death would come with his.”

“We all die,” I snapped.

“We do.” He was suddenly so grieved. I remembered his queen and his heir and wanted to bite my tongue. He said, “I’ve taken something from you that I had no right to take. As Laela did. I hope you will forgive us both.”

He waited, but I was still busy tidying my mismatched impressions, adding his grief to the layering of them in my head. I looked around the room, evaluating the likelihood that this was actually a dream—I was asleep still in the cells under Attolia’s palace. It was a wonder the entire room wasn’t laughing, as I was the butt of the joke now. I looked for Costis but couldn’t pick him out at that distance.

The wine merchant—the memory came to me, now that I knew the truth. I turned back to the king. “You sent the wine merchant?”

He seemed confused. “I did not send a wine merchant,” he said—for whatever that was worth.

“He led me to the docks. He was in Sherguz as well.”

“You would not have gone to the docks on your own?” the king asked. I shook my head.

“A coincidence, then,” said Eugenides.

I shook my head again. I’d been quite sure there was something odd about the merchant, and I’d begun to doubt coincidences.

“I’ve upended your life for spite, Kamet. Will you let me make it up to you?”

He was the king of the Attolians. What was there to say but yes?

“As a token of my good faith,” he said, offering me a coin. I knew, before I took it from his hand, that it would be the very one I’d given him when I thought I was helping him make his way home to a fishing village on the coast. No doubt the whole court would hear the story—and how it ended with this small coin returned to me. All the Attolians would think that he had repaid me for my kindness—because the Attolians were fools. I wondered if he had a brother, if his brother was a scholar, if anything he’d ever said had been true.

“I’ll get you a new copy of Enoclitus’s scroll,” said the king. “Someone with better handwriting can copy it for you this time. We will rebuild your library here in Attolia.”

Then he waved forward an attendant with instructions to take me to my rooms as an honored guest. I was not headed for that street corner yet. I suppose that made Costis right and me wrong, but there was no chance for me to tell him so. Poor Costis. Now that he’d found himself played by his king as well as by me, he probably wanted to see neither of us ever again. Still in a daze, I was led away, leaving the king to continue his audience with others who waited for his attention.

I was walking up one of the wide marble staircases, still in the ceremonial part of the palace, trying to adjust to the idea of being an honored guest with attendants—who were attending me—when I saw the Mede ambassador. Melheret arrived at the top of the stairs and began to descend while I paused, one foot up and one down, and when Melheret bowed, I bowed back, a lopsided, wobbling attempt at courtesy.

“Kamet, what a surprise,” he said. He’d stopped on a higher stair and looked down at me benevolently. “We thought you dead in a rockslide.”

“No, sir,” I said. I knew Melheret. He had been my master’s commanding officer once. He was a mid-level army man who’d grown too old for battle and had been given the position as ambassador to the Attolians because no one else wanted it. After his appointment, he’d come to Nahuseresh’s country estate to ask for advice. For Melheret, it had been a heaven-sent opportunity to advance his career—he need only avoid complete catastrophe and he could return to a much better position at court than he had previously held. He’d had every reason to expect some guidance from Nahuseresh, but my master had looked down his nose at him and been snotty. I think I had probably been snotty as well.

“We almost had you at Sherguz,” Melheret said, conversationally. “You must have been on one of the boats that burned before they could be searched. The Namreen checked the inns afterward, of course, but they were looking for a Setran traveling alone. We didn’t know about the Attolian then.”

I swallowed, remembering the inn. I’d only gotten the Attolian out of the courtyard because the wine merchant from the capital had come into it. We could have been sitting right there in plain sight when the Namreen had come hunting. I hoped the wine merchant, wherever he was, would be blessed by the gods with a booming business, with health and wealth and an old age surrounded by his grandchildren.

Melheret smiled. “You’ve come from an audience with the king, but before that from the prisons. Not how an honored guest is usually received.”