“I cannot stay, I am between audiences,” said Eugenides, king of Attolia. “All the embassies from the Continent seem to have arrived at the same time. With Eddis here as well, we are scheduled every moment.” He looked at their shabby clothes in puzzlement.

“We were traveling anonymously for safety—” explained the magus.

“But surely—”

“—and then we were robbed on the road.”

“Ah,” said the king, “the danger in being anonymous. Your novel approach made me think secrecy must be important, so I told my captain nothing but that you were to be conveyed quickly and quietly. I just learned that he had seen you shooting peas in my face, and I am relieved not to find the two of you hanging by your thumbs.”

“Your Majesty,” someone called from beyond the door, “we must go.”

“Yes,” said the king before turning back to the magus. “They will take you up to a room where you can get clean, and perhaps have a view.” He looked around the tiny stone-walled room. “I will give credit to Teleus on safety, at least.”

The young man at the back of the cell snorted at that. The king stepped around the magus to hug him fiercely. He then released him but didn’t step away. Looking up, he examined the scarring on his lip that lifted it into a slight sneer, and the broken nose. “My god, you’ve been in the wars. Once you are clean and have had some rest, I will want to hear all about where you have been and why.” He pulled the younger man’s head down and kissed him solidly on his forehead, saying seriously, “Gods-all, I am glad to see you safe, Sophos.”

The young man smiled back. “Sounis,” he said, just as someone called from the door.

The king looked away and then back, as if uncertain that he had heard correctly. “What?”

“I am Sounis,” said the young man. “My uncle is dead.”

All the king’s happiness was wiped away. “You’re joking?” he suggested.

Bewildered, the younger king shook his head. “No, I am Sounis.” He meant to make a remark about keeping a visiting king locked in a cellar, but his own happiness faltered.

“Your Majesty, please,” the man in the passage called again. The king of Attolia looked to the door, and then at the magus, and then at the magus’s former apprentice, the new king of Sounis.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and clearly meant it. He grasped the younger man briefly by the sleeve, said “I am sorry” again, and was gone, leaving the magus of Sounis and his king standing alone, with the open door of their cell before them.

Sounis turned to the magus. “He cannot think that I cared about my uncle?”

“I think he was delighted to see you safe,” said the magus, “and grieved that the next time you meet, it must be as king and king and not as friends.”

“I hope that I will always be his friend,” said Sounis.

“I know that he hopes so as well,” the magus assured him. “But now, let us follow our escort to a bath, if you please, and some food. You will need your strength, I think, to answer many questions about where you have been and what has become of you, since they saw you last.”

CHAPTER ONE

MY father sacked another tutor. I see that doesn’t surprise you at all. Terve was my eighth. The magus had been my seventh. My father and my uncle who was Sounis had sent me to Letnos with Terve to separate me from the magus after the ground-shaking set-to the three of them had had after my private correspondence was discovered. Terve was an old army veteran. He was to teach me riding and sword and military history and the hell with anything else. I didn’t really mind. I liked Terve, and he didn’t get in the way of my real studies. What he mainly did was drink and tell war stories. In the mornings he oversaw my sword training from a stump in the training yard with a wineskin in his lap, tending to be overgenerous in his praise, unlike all my previous tutors, shouting things like, “A natural! A natural!” in between swallows of wine.

I did some riding on my own, though not with any real discipline, and in the afternoon I studied as I pleased. By that time Terve was well into his second amphora and would lie on a couch in the study. He might suddenly shout, “You’re being attacked by six men with swords!” or something similar, and I would have to come up with a plan for my defense. He would pick apart my answers and then drift off into another war story until, eventually, he fell asleep. He was there, snoring quietly, when my father arrived to check on my progress.

Terve was immediately replaced. A soldier from my father’s guard was assigned to teach me sword work, and a hateful, condescending bully named Sigis Malatesta was my new tutor—from the Peninsula, as you can tell by the name, supposedly educated at the University in Ferria. He had accompanied my father to Letnos, so my father must have had some idea of replacing Terve even before he found him on the couch, though perhaps not with so much shouting.

I have no idea what my father saw in Malatesta. In the normal run of things, he doesn’t give a bent pin for learning, but he’d met Malatesta at the court of Sounis, and I suspect that he thought hiring Malatesta would be a poke in the eye for the magus, whom he has never liked. Years ago he sent me to be the magus’s apprentice with the explicit hope that the magus’s razor tongue would be the end of my intellectual pretensions. When that didn’t work out as he intended, it only made him dislike the magus more.

Of course the magus had long since left Sounis, stolen away in the night by the Thief of Eddis, though my uncle didn’t know who was responsible at first. I’d heard rumors, which I didn’t believe for a minute, that the magus was an Attolian spy who’d fled the city when he was about to be discovered. I was not surprised at all to learn subsequently that it had been Eugenides at work. By the time Malatesta came, I was positive the magus was busily tramping around the mountains of Eddis, collecting botanical specimens and enjoying his “captivity” as a prisoner of the queen of Eddis. I am quite sure he was not suffering any distress because I had a new tutor.

I hated Malatesta. He could barely manage the multiplication of greater numbers, and he didn’t know any prime over thirteen. He’d never read the Eponymiad, but he tried to pretend he had. I doubt very much he’d ever set foot in a seminar at the University in Ferria. He’d studied no medicine and no natural history. The only thing he’d read was poetry. That should have made us friends, but I hated his taste in poetry, too. Where he admired the sweet and the overwrought, I liked the Eponymiad.

My mother knew how I felt, of course. She and my sisters sympathized with me, but there was little they could do. My mother would never act against my father’s judgment, no matter how poorly she thought of Malatesta. If my father had stayed at the villa longer than a day, she might have changed his opinion, drawing him into alignment with her own as invisibly as a magnet works on a lodestone, but my father had been gone within a day of installing my new tutor.

I knew that it made my mother sad to see my distress, so I hid it as well as I could. I also knew that with the slightest encouragement, Ina and Eurydice would have filled Malatesta’s bed with bees. They are delicate girls, so small in stature, and fine-boned like my mother, that I can still lift both of them with one hand. You could be forgiven for thinking them the incarnation of every ladylike grace, but my father has had frequent cause to swear that they got the spine so notably absent in me. A bed full of bees wasn’t going to get rid of Malatesta; only my father could do that. The bees would only make him more spiteful, so I tried not to encourage the girls.