I looked up to see if I was laying it on too thick, but Berrone was watching with fascinated horror. Her servant woman, however, was skeptical. She was eyeing me from the doorway.

“He attacked her, mistress. What could I do but defend her? And so”—I hung my head—“you see me now, a man-killer, despised and despairing.”

“What can I do?” Berrone asked breathlessly.

Success, I thought. “I have seen, just today, a man coming to dinner with your father. He was a friend of my father’s. He will vouch for me, and I know he will help me recover the money that was stolen. My sister and I can be free again. I can pay a blood debt to the owner of the man I killed.”

“He doesn’t deserve it,” cried Berrone. “The beast.”

“I do not care,” I cried. “I will pay anything to free my sister. Mistress, can you help me?”

The steward summoned by Berrone stared at the mess of broken crockery on the carpeted floor.

Berrone hadn’t understood the first time I explained my plan, so I had explained it again more slowly. Hiding behind the curtain to her bedroom, I could only hope she would remember her part.

“Who was it?” the steward asked.

“I don’t know which one, but you’ll know him when you see him. He has wine down his shirt.”

“He spilled some on his shirt, you say? I understand now, mistress, and I will deal with him.” The steward went off to chase down the houseboy, whose story of being assaulted by a scarred slave would be dismissed as a lie concocted to explain the absence of his shirt with its incriminating stain.

“What now?” asked Berrone, turning to me as I stepped out from behind the curtain.

I looked at her, sitting on an upholstered stool with her knees together and her ankles apart like a little girl, her hands clutching her skirts, and my conscience was suddenly painfully wrung. I was returning a bitter payment for her kindnesses, even if they were stupid kindnesses.

“Are—are you sure you want to do this?” I stammered.

“Oh, yes,” said Berrone.

Over Berrone’s head, I saw her maid, and from her expression, I knew that she hadn’t been fooled by my theatrics. Pinned by her gaze, I froze.

She stood, arms crossed and unmoving. At last even Berrone realized that some decision still hung in the balance, and she swung around on her stool and clutched her maid around the waist.

“Oh, Sylvie, don’t be a spoilsport. Don’t, please?” And I still waited, because there was no point in lying to Sylvie. The maid looked at Berrone, and her face softened. She nodded.

Freed from my momentary paralysis, I stifled my remorse and began to explain the next step. A new shirt to go under my houseboy overshirt. Then I would go down to dinner. The houseboy would be in his dormitory, probably nursing his bruises, and not nearby, ready to denounce me. I would wait on the men as they dined and seize my chance to speak to “my father’s friend.”

The maid fetched a clean shirt for me, and under cover of helping me with it, she said, “You are no slave; that much of your story is true.”

“I will get her in terrible trouble if anyone finds out she helped me,” I confessed.

“Hush, there is no trouble I cannot bring her out of, and if I tell her to keep silent, she will. It will be her secret and keep her warm for weeks.” She looked me in the eye. “You will remember what you owe her.”

I promised I would.

Suddenly the door was opened, and on the threshold was an angry young man I recognized after a moment of blank incomprehension as Berrone’s brother. I dropped to my knees and hastily started picking up the pieces of the shattered amphora still on the floor.

“Berrone!” he shouted. “You’ve gotten Timos in trouble, and now he can’t dress me for dinner.”

“I’m sorry,” said Berrone. She was flustered and looked to me. If her brother noticed, we all were doomed, but he was too interested in his own problem.

“That doesn’t help me, does it? My long knife needs to be polished and honed and its sheath oiled.” He looked sly and pleased with himself. “We are to wear them to dinner.”

I swallowed, my mouth dry. I had meant to be reunited with my father. I had meant to whisper in his ear and then slip away to the stables to meet him when he left. My father was the baron’s guest, and though I knew that Hanaktos was a traitor, it had not occurred to me that he could fail to honor the most basic law of hospitality. Still, if Berrone’s brothers had been told to wear their knives to dinner, I had to believe that my father might not leave the dining hall alive.

“I—I can hone and oil it for you, master,” I heard myself say.

“Can you? Have you done it before?”

“Yes, master.”

“Come along, then,” he said. He strode away without another word to his sister, and I rose to follow him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I had expected the men to be in a private dining room on couches, my father alone with the baron and his murderous sons, but the household was eating at the long tables in the great room. My father was there, with the men who had accompanied him. Most of them I recognized; the rest I knew by their uniforms. They were scattered in ones and twos down the length of the tables, with the baron’s men on either side. None were at the head table, not even my father, an insult so stunning I was surprised he had tolerated it. He was flanked by two beefy guardsmen and looked smaller than I had ever seen him.

The head table held only Baron Hanaktos and male members of his household. His eldest son sat beside him, but the other sons were at the lower tables. The baron’s insult would work against him. As a mere houseboy I couldn’t have approached the head table, but I could easily make my way to my father.

With an amphora under my arm, I moved from man to man along the table, pouring out the wine. My father saw me drawing nearer, and each time I came to his eye, he looked away with no sign of recognition. I admired his self-control until I bent close and said, just loud enough to be heard over the roar in the room, “Baron Hanaktos means to kill you tonight.”

My father jumped as if I’d stuck him with a white-hot awl. He had watched me filling wine cups all the way down the length of the table without any idea who I was, and only by my voice did he know me. He was swinging around to look up into my face.

“Hold still,” I hissed in his ear, and he froze, either because of what I’d said or because he had succeeded in turning enough to see me over his shoulder.

“The household is wearing knives,” I said. “I will tell each of your men to be ready to fight when I drop my amphora.”

I wasn’t sure he was listening. His face was growing darker and darker. I’d seen him in a rage often enough to know that the next words out of his mouth were going to be easily audible over the roar of the room. Hastily I tipped the wine cup onto the table, hoping that anyone looking just then might have thought the spill preceded my father’s anger instead of following it.

“Sorry! Sorry!” I said loudly, and leaned in close enough as I wiped up the spill to snarl, “Hold your tongue!” under my breath.

That was something I’d never imagined doing, even in my freest flights of fancy, and my father was stunned silent. He sat motionless while I first used the cloth I had over my arm to wipe up the spill, then refilled the wine cup and pushed it into his hand. He took it mechanically, still staring at me.