“You’re requesting my permission to run away and hide?” she asked.

Eugenides winced, but he then nodded. He stood before her dressed in his most formal tunic with his hair newly clipped and his chin carefully shaven. “Yes,” he admitted. “I am requesting your permission to run away and hide.”

“Eugenides, we can’t afford to have you disappear in a fit of despair just now.”

“Do I look sunk in despair?” he asked, holding his arms out from his sides.

“I assume you’re hiding it to maintain pretenses.”

“It’s worse than despair I am hiding,” he said, sounding suddenly very bleak.

“Is there something worse?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.” He shifted his weight and looked around the empty room. He turned away from her and appeared to take a great interest in the interlocking gold squares painted around the walls near the ceiling. “I’m terrified,” he admitted.

Eddis thought he was joking and laughed. He glanced at her and away again, and she stopped.

He crossed his arms over his chest and, still facing away from her, spoke to the wall. “Those men in the hall last night . . .”

“They were joking.”

“I know they were joking. I’m not laughing,” he snapped, and caught himself. His head dropped forward, and he addressed himself again to the wall. “The only thing I want to do right now is bolt the door to my room and hide under the covers. I’d do it, too, but then I might fall asleep, and I can’t risk that. So much,” he said bitterly, “for the hero of Eddis.”

He brushed his hair off his face, then tucked his hand back under his arm. “I remember when they brought me up the mountain. Parts of the trip. I remember thinking that nothing else, nothing worse, would happen, because I was home. Then I heard Galen telling you that if it was glower in my eyes, I’d be blind.” He was shaking his head. Eddis had to make an effort to stop shaking hers. “And I stand around listening to people laugh at the idea that I might end up deaf and dumb as well.”

He started to pace. “Her following stroke is as good as her attack,” he said. “I’m too frightened to leave my room, much less to be of any use to my queen.”

“You’re not in your room now.”

“No, I’m doing my best not to look like a mountain hare frozen in one spot by terror, but I don’t know how long I can keep it up, and that’s why we didn’t have this discussion at your morning session with half the court looking on.”

He stopped pacing abruptly and turned his back on his queen in order to sit on the dais at her feet. He pulled his knees up and hunched over them. “Bleh,” he said, disgusted with himself.

Looking down at him, Eddis could see that his tunic had grown too small and pulled across his shoulders. She remembered his many comments on her ill-fitting clothing, and she made a note to tell him at a more appropriate moment to get a new overshirt made. He had the money. All the proceeds from the ten hijacked Attolian caravans she had given over to him.

“Eugenides,” she said, picking her words carefully, “you’re letting yourself be upset by talk. Empty threats. She wouldn’t do any of those things.”

“You wouldn’t think so, but she cut out the tongue of that traitor Maleveras and left him in a cage in the courtyard for a week before she had him executed.”

“She’d been queen for less than a year. He’d talked half of her barons into deserting her, while pretending to be an ally, and his sedition nearly dethroned her. By the time she discovered his treachery, she had very little real power and not many options. If she hadn’t done something to deter other warmongers, she would have lost the throne.”

“And that baron who was robbing the treasury. She cut off his hand, too, didn’t she?”

“She had him executed. I would have done the same if I’d found one of my tax collectors funding a revolt out of my own treasury. She had his hand cut off posthumously to display for effect. I don’t think I would have done that, but I’ve never been in that situation.”

Eugenides turned to stare at her over his shoulder. “You are defending her,” he pointed out.

The queen of Eddis hissed in displeasure. “I don’t want to. She’s vicious, she’s barbaric, and I think by this time edging toward insane, but I’m forcing myself to be honest. She has not indulged in atrocities for personal pleasure,” she said firmly. “Or for personal revenge. She has used them as deterrents to defend her throne.”

She picked her words carefully before she went on. “It’s not the way I would like to think I would defend my throne, but in prosecuting this war against her I find myself . . . not commendable. I wouldn’t have started a war to avenge you, Gen, or even to rescue you. Still, I wonder, what opportunity for diplomacy did I miss, and did I overlook it because I was angry on your behalf?”

Eugenides had lain on his back on the lowest step to the throne, with his legs crossed at the ankle and his arms still folded across his chest. The cuff and hook he wore were inlaid with gold to match the gold piping on his collar and the embroidery on the sleeves of his overshirt. It was like him, if he had to have a thing, to have the fanciest of its kind. Eddis thought he looked like a well-dressed funerary ornament. Eugenides turned his head to look at her and lay without speaking for the space of three or four breaths.

“If she doesn’t indulge in torture for personal pleasure, why didn’t she do the sensible thing and hang me?” he asked quietly. It was an unanswerable question. He followed it with another. “If she catches me again, what better deterrent than me could she wish to have at her disposal?”

Eddis hesitated. In the past Attolia had shown that she would stop at nothing to defend her throne. How much of a threat had Eugenides been to Attolia? Not much, Eddis thought, but who measures? She considered carefully before she spoke. “If she ever had you again, she’d kill you immediately. She was a fool to do otherwise, but, Eugenides”—she leaned over to meet his gaze directly—“she won’t have you.”

Eugenides covered his face with his arm. “I tell myself that, and I think I believe it, until I go to sleep. I tell myself that she isn’t—that she wouldn’t do those things. But I am afraid that she would,” he whispered. “And then I wish she’d hanged me. I wish in my god’s name that she’d hanged me, and I hate that Mede.” He laughed, and Eddis winced.

“So,” he said, his voice under control again, “may I have your permission to disappear until I look less like a frightened rabbit? Because I don’t think I can keep up appearances here.”

“How long?” Eddis asked.

“A few days, maybe ten.”

“Ten?”

“Maybe.”

“Take as much time as you need,” Eddis said heavily. “I’ll say I’ve sent you out to the coastal provinces.”

That was better than he’d hoped, but Eugenides didn’t say so. He pulled himself upright and stood to bow to his queen. Then he went away.

He was gone ten days and returned early in the morning of the eleventh. Eddis saw him at the back of the throne room during her morning sessions. He looked tired but relaxed. He watched while she dealt with the business at hand: who should get relief money, the care of the orphans and widows of soldiers, what was to be done with burned-out farms. Attolia and Sounis seemed content for the moment to war against each other, but Eddis had to have her tiny amounts of arable land planted carefully or her people wouldn’t have the food to withstand another winter without trade. Sounis’s troops were still blockaded on Thegmis. He was offering a peace negotiation. Attolia was still rejecting it.