“Well,” my tutor murmured, “at least he stayed.”

I woke to the morning call to rise.

In subsequent dreams, we talked about the nature of man and my uncle’s nature in particular. We did not always see eye to eye. I sometimes disagreed with her but often talked myself around to her position.

She was amused by my interest in the system of natural categorization that the magus had taught me. I explained the importance of understanding how things are connected.

She only smiled at my earnestness and said, “Everything is connected, Bunny, to everything else. If a man tries to transcribe each connection, thread by thread, he will only make a copy of the world and be no closer to understanding it.”

It is a new idea, this categorizing of the world, and I suppose it seems silly to some. They think a fig tree is a fig tree, and what more do they need to know? Ambiades, who was the magus’s apprentice far longer than I ever was, never could see the point in it. The magus thought it important, though, and so did I.

I had missed the magus sorely in the time since we had been separated. Terve was a kindhearted old drunk, and my mother and the girls were always willing to listen to me natter, but I’d had no one who was interested in the things I wondered about. Hyacinth used to cover his ears. It was no wonder I defended the magus’s work to the tutor I had replaced him with in my dreams.

News of the outside world came to us, even in the baron’s outbuildings. Gossip flowed down from the megaron as freely as water, so it wasn’t just my own dreams that I had to think about. By late summer we heard that my uncle had retaken most of the hinterland. When he reached Mephia, we heard about the massacre. There was debate, of course, in the barracks, about the rights of the king and the punishment for rebelling. Mephia could have turned on her baron and surrendered to my uncle, but I am not sure any fewer Mephians would have died.

I alone heard the irony as loyal retainers of Baron Hanaktos argued that the king’s rule is inviolable and that it was only right that the people of a rebel baron must suffer the consequences of his disloyalty. They didn’t seem to consider that the fate of the Mephians could be their own.

There was less news about the islands, or rather, conflicting news. We heard that all the navy had been sunk by Attolia or that none of the navy had been sunk, that various islands had held off attacks or that they had been sacked and burned. We heard that Eddis had swept down from the area of the Irkes Forest and was building fortifications at the base of the foothills. Better that Sounis not be able to retake that property and never threaten Eddis there again, I thought.

As the winter rains set in, the news changed. The king controlled the countryside, and the rebels were walled up in their megarons, but inside with them were the harvests they had brought from their fields. The countryside was nearly bare, and the king needed to feed his army. He chose to withdraw toward his allies farther inland and north to resupply. As the king was driven back, the conversations around me changed: a king who loses turns out not to have been a king at all, but only a usurper, a misruler it is right to overthrow. There was talk of the Eumen conspiracy and the deaths of my uncle’s brothers.

The men in the barracks spoke very freely. I had never in my life heard anyone but the magus speak so frankly about the Eumen conspiracy. Talk had always been in whispers and half-finished allusions, as if people feared their words might be reported to the king and they, too, might end up condemned and executed. What I knew I had overheard in bits and snatches until I was apprenticed to the magus, who dismissed with contempt any fear of the king’s anger. He told me that my uncle’s older brothers were killed and that my uncle took the throne, arrested the conspirators, and in the space of a single day executed them all, leaving no one alive to accuse him of being involved.

No one cared what my workmates talked about among themselves, and they blithely argued my uncle’s guilt with an openness impossible in Sounis’s capital. Most believed my uncle guilty. I had never had any doubts, nor that my father was involved as well—in exchange for a promise that his son would eventually inherit the throne. My father, a royal bastard who never had any ambitions for himself, wanted his son to be king.

It was only when I proved to be a disappointment that my father agreed that my uncle should marry and get an heir of his own. Sounis’s choice was obvious, and I don’t think it ever occurred to him that he might be declined. When the messenger returned from Eddis with a definite “no” for an answer, my uncle was mad with rage. I don’t know if it was thwarted greed or pride, but I know that the magus played on both to get my uncle’s financing for his expedition to steal Hamiathes’s Gift. He was determined that the two countries would be united, and insisted that Sounis could use the gift to force an alliance and a marriage upon Eddis. We know how that turned out.

Our jobs changed for the winter season. We worked on indoor tasks more often, repairing tools, patching clothes, fetching in loads of wood for the household. Helius spent hours carefully carving spoons. There were many days we were out in the cold rain, shaping the land and directing the flow of the water as it drained off. There were dams to be repaired, and ditches dug. We came in cold and wet and huddled around braziers set in a row down the middle of the room. The eaves of the building were open at either end, and the smoke rose to the ceiling and blew out downwind. It was warmer inside than out, but never warm enough. The baron provided blankets, which we wrapped around ourselves. Some of the men pushed their pallets together and slept under shared coverings, but I was not so close to any of the men to feel comfortable joining them. There was jockeying to be closest to the braziers. Ochto allowed no one to force anyone else out. Still, there was a pecking order, and I was near the top, for my man-killer reputation or maybe for the high value my workmates placed on my poetry repertoire.

I was hungry all the time, I longed for a hot bath, and still, I wouldn’t have changed my situation for the world. I loved the evenings and the storytelling, even the idle talk among the men. Better the honest and companionable chatter than all the patronoi of my uncle’s court.

As a slave I thought I had a better understanding of why those in the villa had turned on me but found I was not entirely correct. Some of the slaves around me would have been happy to fight for their baron. Others weren’t so sure. Their willingness to fight was dependent on the certainty of winning, and they wouldn’t take on a losing battle for their lord.

“I’m his slave, not his liegeman,” said Pundis. “He bought me at market when I couldn’t pay my gambling debts. He can sell me just the same. My body is for sale, not my loyalty. I owe him nothing.”

“But you belong to your baron,” I said. “Surely that means there is something more between the two of you. If you were crippled tomorrow in an accident in his fields, would your baron throw you out in the street to starve? I think not. Not unless he wants to be shamed in front of the patronoi.”

I knew that there was at least one blind slave in the kitchens and any number of older slaves around the household who didn’t do enough work to justify their keep, but they were kept nonetheless. Hanaktos may have rebelled against his king, but he was a man who honored his obligations to his people.

“Of course there are good masters and bad ones,” I said. “There are some that would chuck their slaves out to starve at the end of their lives, and I say, don’t fight for them. But even as a slave you are part of your baron’s household. It is his responsibility to support you.” I lifted a fold of the warm wool blanket I was wrapped in, provided by the baron we worked for. “And yours to support him,” I said.