The magus and I had some very uncomfortable moments when we were arrested by the guard. Our only hope was to convince one of them to send a message to the king, but the squad leader gave us no opportunity to speak. When the magus tried, a guardsman had him pinned by the throat before he could get more than a word out. So intimidating was he that we kept silent all the way to the palace and down into the cells. Only when there was a closed door between us and the very angry guards did the magus shout that Attolis would want to know we were in his prison. I was already imagining myself chained to an oar.

We spent our time while we were waiting discussing just what we could say that might warrant the attention of the king. We agreed that telling the prison guards flat out that I was the king of Sounis probably wouldn’t work. The magus thought he could say that he had information valuable to Relius, whom he knew by name, and that might get us an interview with him. Not that an interview with Attolia’s master of spies would be wholly without risk, but face to face the magus thought he could convince the man of our identities.

Then Gen appeared at the door, and we didn’t need to convince anyone of anything after all. Instead we followed the guards he left us to a set of rooms that were a welcome change from our infested inn of the previous week.

“Ridiculous to think what indignities I would suffer in silence, if I knew that I was to be rewarded with an oversize bucket of hot water,” the magus said as he settled into the bath the servants had filled for him. He leaned against the higher side, leaving his arms and legs dangling over the lower edges and looking something like a pale spider, but more like an overturned terrapin. I’d already had my bath, at his insistence, and was getting into clean clothes with the help of a dresser and trying to eat the food that had been brought at the same time. The careful attention of the manservant was rather amusing to me after all the time I’d spent in the same set of pants and loose shirt.

The clothes were rather startling in their finery. “Do you think Gen picked them?” I asked, posing in my new overcoat. The decorative fabric panels hastily tacked to the front and back made an already handsome piece of clothing into an ostentatious one.

The magus eyed me from the bath.

“I would believe it. All that embroidery suits you.”

“Makes me look less like riffraff, you mean?”

“Yes,” he agreed with mocking gravity. “That’s it exactly.”

A barber came to trim us and shave us, taking off the last of my darker hair and leaving it tidy, if short. When he was done, Hilarion arrived and introduced himself as one of the king’s attendants.

He asked if we would be able to join the king and queen for an audience. I should have paid more attention, but I was still eating what I could from a plate of fruit and trying not to drip anything on my coat. I didn’t realize until we had followed Hilarion through the narrow corridors to the main staircase that we were heading toward the megaron of the palace, the largest of the throne rooms. When we reached the doorway, we could hear the quiet rustling of the crowd beyond, and when I looked past Hilarion, I could see only a narrow aisle open in the center of the room. I had forgotten the arrival of the ambassadors from the Continent.

Standing just inside the doorway, no more than a few feet away from me, was a party of Medes, distinctive in their brightly colored and more loosely cut clothing. I was surprised that Attolia, who had so recently and insultingly sent home a Mede army, would be entertaining an ambassador from the empire.

I was suddenly glad that our clothes were meant for ceremony. Even so, if I could have, I would have signaled Hilarion and waited until a less public moment to talk with Attolia and the new Attolis, but it was too late. We were swept into the room, announced, lauded, eyeballed by the crowd, and moved to the foot of the raised dais almost without our own volition.

Attolia was just as I remembered from our briefest of meetings, when the magus and I had been apprehended after attempting to steal Hamiathes’s Gift. She looked as regal and every bit as intimidating as she had before. She greeted me, while Eugenides reclined on his throne, his elbow on the arm of his chair and his thumb tucked under his cheekbone to prop up his head. With his fingers cupped against his forehead he eyed me from under the arch they made, as a man does when he is looking at something very far away.

The magus and I had talked for many long hours about this marriage of Eugenides and the queen of Attolia. The magus insisted it was Eugenides’s choice and his desire as well, but it was impossible to know whose influence would prevail and if Gen would grow more like his wife, or his wife more like her king.

Down in the prison cells, he had seemed everything that I remembered. So much so that I hadn’t even noticed the hook in place of his hand. In the throne room, the differences were hard to miss. I’d been told that he wore a false hand on formal occasions, but it seemed that his habits had changed. His right arm lay across the arm of the throne, and at the end was a pointed hook.

The last time I had seen Gen he had been whole, if slightly damaged, after our escape from captivity in Attolia. I hadn’t realized the strength of my habit of picturing him in my thoughts as he had been when we first met: skinny and prison pale, incongruous in the clean clothes the magus provided. I did remember just enough of his taste in clothing from the weeks I had stayed in Eddis that I was not completely taken aback by his grandeur. Gods know, he does play up with his beaded jacket and his lace trim. I almost laughed aloud when I saw that the design of his boots remained unchanged, though even they had gold dusted in their tooled leather patterns.

It wasn’t a moment for laughter. Not with Attolia coolly admitting her surprise at the unforeseen arrival of a foreign ruler, especially one with whom she was currently at war.

At war with my uncle, I said, and not, I hoped, with me.

Attolia nodded. I will tell you honestly, I wish it had been you I addressed. I would have felt better just to have seen you in the crowd, but I didn’t. I had the sense that Attolia might not feel any more bound by the rules of hospitality than Baron Hanaktos, and her expression gave me no clue to her thoughts. I feared that I could find myself on my way back to the underground cell at any moment.

Attolia asked what brought me to her court. Poor prince or not, I hadn’t sat through a thousand boring ceremonies without learning something about diplomatic language. I dug through my memories for the right formulaic phrases, and then with as much dignity as I could muster, I explained that I had just escaped from my own country, a country in the greatest peril, lost either to the Mede or to Melenze or both. I pointed out that none of these outcomes would profit the state of Attolia. I had come to my friends to ask for the men and the gold to win my country back.

Attolia watched me with close consideration as I spoke. When I finished, there was a moment of polite silence. As she opened her mouth to speak, Gen, who had been silent throughout, sat up and laid his hand across hers. I could hear the Attolians sucking in their breaths. Attolia slipped her hand away, but she sat back in her chair and nodded a deferral to her king.

Then, as you well know, Eugenides looked me in the eye as if I were a complete stranger and said, “The simplest way to end a war is to admit you have lost it.”

The silence after that was not polite.

Little could convince me more that I was fit to be king than that moment when I acted like one and didn’t tell Attolis something very rude that he could do with his own throne and mumbled instead a few more ritualized phrases about momentous decisions, and the time they take, and then walked myself and the magus out of the room before I had a real fit of apoplexy in front of the assembled courts and ambassadors of Eddis, Attolia, and the Continent with a few condescending Mede visitors looking on.