By this time the fighting had spilled through the doors of the great room and down the steps into the entryway of the megaron. I hurried to catch up, dodging between knives and delivering a blow or two when I could, but mostly just grabbing my opponents and tossing them into each other in order to get past.

Outside of those at the dinner, no one seemed to have known of the baron’s inhospitable plans. The guards in the forecourt certainly didn’t know whom to fire upon. In all the confusion, there was no organized attempt to stop us. My father and I were side by side as we raced down the steps toward the waiting horses. I snatched a set of reins from a startled stable hand and scrambled into a saddle. The gates of the court were still standing open. I turned my horse toward them as the baron himself appeared on the porch above me. Our eyes met, and in the flickering light he knew exactly who I was. He launched himself from the top of the stairs and nearly knocked me from the saddle. Dropping to the ground as the horse reared, he ruthlessly used the long knife he carried to stab the animal in the belly. The horse screamed, tottered on its back legs, and slammed to the ground. I rolled away, struggled to my feet, and raced for the gates, Hanaktos not far behind me. The gates were too far away, and there was no sanctuary behind them anyway, so I turned to face the enraged baron as he raised his knife in a brief moment of triumph.

My father rode him down. His horse’s shoulder sent the baron flying, and my father’s hand was in mine before I was aware of reaching for him, and then he was pulling me up behind him. Arrows and crossbow bolts clattered on the stones around us as we raced for the gates, and then we were safe in the darkness beyond.

Trusting the horses to keep to the road, we rushed downhill. At the bottom of the hill, the road divided, one part going on into the town and the other circling outside it. We stopped there, to listen for pursuit and gather our bearings. The darkness that had hidden us from enemy fire was treacherous to us as well. The horse was staggering under our weight, and my father leaned forward to thump its shoulder in appreciation. The other riders stopped beside us, their horses stamping and jostling. Several men bent to catch up the reins of riderless animals, their owners lost to the quarrels and arrows shot from the megaron or perhaps lost in the megaron before my father’s men reached the courtyard. By ear as much as by eye, I counted. Only ten of the fifteen men my father had brought were with us.

“Conyx is dead,” said a voice in the dark.

“Troyus as well.”

No one had seen the others fall. If they were wounded, they would be cared for. If they were wealthy, they might eventually be ransomed or bargained for in other ways if events went against Hanaktos. If events went for Hanaktos, they might someday be in the very barracks I had left, working for Ochto, building stone walls in my place.

Unexpectedly my father swiveled in the saddle, bringing one arm over my head and seizing me in a bear hug. His arms locked around me, and mine around him, although on my part it might have been less affection and more a result of being dragged off-balance and in great danger of falling off the horse. The beleaguered animal sidestepped uncomfortably. I tightened my hold on my father a little further, swung my leg free, and, as he reluctantly released me, dropped to the ground. My father caught me by the hand as I slipped down and held it while he looked into my face, making out what he could in the darkness.

“I will kill the man who did this,” he swore. “With my own hands I will kill him.”

I laughed. My father might kill Baron Hanaktos, but I had no doubts that the cunning slaver was long gone.

CHAPTER NINE

WE rode into the middle of the armed camp just before dawn. On foot, feeling my way through familiar fields and groves of trees, I had led my father’s men in a game of cat and mouse across Hanaktos’s land. Unable to find us on the main road, our pursuers soon retreated to the megaron. When we’d covered enough distance to hide the sound of our hoof-beats, I had mounted one of the spare horses, and we had ridden inland, first picking our way slowly in the dark and then moving faster when the moon rose.

As we dismounted, I found myself seized by my father’s men. Grateful for their escape, they nearly squeezed the life out of me and thumped me on the back until I staggered. My father tore me free and pulled me toward the open doorway of a well-lit tent. In silhouette, I saw a man I would recognize in any light and threw myself at him in delight, shouting, “Magus, you are returned!”

“I returned?” he said. “It is you who are—”

When he stopped, I knew the light from the tent had fallen on my face.

“Dear gods all above and around us,” the magus said, staring at me. Measuring myself against him, I realized we now saw eye to eye. I had not seen him since I was exiled to Letnos, and he’d been forbidden to write to me. All I had heard of him had been rumors, first that he was an Attolian traitor, then that he was an Eddisian one, which I had dismissed as ridiculous. I had never doubted him, and suspected from the beginning that Eugenides might have had a hand in his disappearance. I hadn’t realized how much I had counted on the magus to solve all of Sounis’s problems until I realized we stood shoulder to shoulder and he was not in fact larger than life.

He grabbed me and held me tight. I had to pull myself away before I began to blubber like a baby. Fortunately he deferred to my dignity and let me go. He turned to my father. “Thank the heavens you have rescued him.”

“Backward to the facts, as usual,” my father said as he swept the magus and me into the tent ahead of him. “He has rescued us and brought us safely out of Hanaktos’s trap.”

“It was a trap.”

My father said testily, “I told you that we had little choice but to try. Hanaktos holds the bargaining power. Melenze is Ferria’s dog, and their fee for aiding us will be the Melenze–Sounis pass, which they are filling as we speak.”

From which I gathered that Melenze was assembling its army on our northern border and offering to come to save us from Attolia. No doubt they wanted the port of Haptia back as well, to be the final link in their trade route from the center of the Continent to the Middle Sea.

“And what cost doing business with Hanaktos?” snapped the magus. “Even if he hadn’t spitted you? Our entire country the lapdog of the Medes?”

“Always yapping about the Medes. What have they to do with Hanaktos?” responded my father. “I have said already, the Medes are too far away to rule over us with any attention. Let them have their tribute, and they will leave us to ourselves.”

“I have told you, the Medes will wipe us out of existence!” insisted the magus. “As they have every other nation with which they have ‘allied.’”

Clearly Father and the magus had had no rapprochement in my absence.

“Hanaktos held my wife and my daughters and my son,” my father said. “Tell me, then, how shall I not deal with him?”

“H-he didn’t have me,” I stuttered. “I was under his nose, but he didn’t know it.” My mind raced. Perhaps help had arrived after Basrus carried me off. Perhaps the fire had been put out before it was too late. “My mother and sisters are not dead?”

“They are hostage,” said my father heavily, “held by rebels who have some connection with Hanaktos, who claimed that he wants no more part in this rebellion, only the settling of it. He offered a mediation and restoration of Sounis.”