Sounis straightened up, and when the attendant turned away, he made a face at the magus. Gen was welcome to his attendants. “They looked familiar, didn’t you think? Just like—”

“Yes,” the magus replied.

The attendant’s ears were all but standing out from his head as he strained to hear what the king’s rooms looked like, but Sounis left the rest of his sentence unsaid. The magus had also seen the resemblance in the plain walls and plain paneling, and in the king’s desk with its careful arrangement of papers and pens, to the library of the queen of Eddis, where Eugenides had lived as her Thief.

When they were back in Sounis’s own bedchamber and the attendant was gone, Sounis spoke more freely.

“I thought he would be more like the Gen I know once we were in private.”

“You were never in private,” said the magus.

“Still,” said Sounis.

“My King,” said the magus hesitantly, and Sounis waved him to speak. “I believe we must go forward with the understanding that Attolis’s responsibility as king will outweigh his affections as a man. But that does not mean that I doubt his friendship. Or that I believe his friendship is unimportant. On the contrary, no treaty, no matter how cleverly worded, will hold without it.”

Sounis threw up his hands. “Tell him that,” he said.

In the ways of accommodation between nations, many viewpoints were exchanged in the process of moving from an agreement in principle to one locked in words. Sounis had no supporting barons with him, and so he and the magus wore themselves hoarse in one meeting after another. They talked long into the night, so that Sounis could make informed decisions and the magus could carry Sounis’s words back to more meetings the next day. Sounis was ferried from appointment to appointment by one or another of the king of Attolia’s companions. They took it in turn to be available at all times, waiting in his anteroom with a brace of honorary guards, ready to lead him up and down the endless corridors of Attolia’s palace.

In his meetings, Sounis was careful to keep to words he had discussed in advance with the magus, well aware that each one was a link in a chain that would bind him and his country to Attolia. He was determined that his agreements would engender no unforeseen consequences and that the ties between Attolia and Sounis would not be all at the expense of Sounis.

In the evenings, after a day of meetings, he sometimes walked in the queen’s garden, with the king and queen of Attolia and a crowd of others or, more rarely, with the queen of Eddis. She had not yet returned to her own home and had announced that she would remain until negotiations were complete.

The queen’s garden lay behind the palace. Large and walled for privacy, it was a miniature world of alleys and outdoor rooms. There were fountains and reflecting pools with benches beside them and expansive lawns around them, and there were smaller benches discreetly tucked into alcoves between high hedges.

Attolia remained as intimidating as ever, cool and beautiful, with never a word that was unkind or one that was kind, either. She was a wellspring of information that had, as far as Sounis ever found, no end. She spoke freely about the organization of her army, and her creation of a separate branch of it specifically for her artillery. She offered ready information on how she moved her cannons, how she supplied her ships, and how she circumvented the destructive traditions of the patronoi by making the best use of her okloi, offering promotions and land grants for twenty-year veterans and receiving in return their uncorrupted loyalty. It was information too important not to have, and Sounis steeled himself to continue asking questions as often as she would answer.

Eugenides remained as distant as his queen. His mask of formality seemed unassailable, and Sounis continued to search without success for some sign of his friend in the king’s remote expression.

For many reasons, Sounis preferred his quieter walks with Eddis. These were more lightly companioned, with her ladies and one of the king’s attendants following some distance behind. At first the discussions were much the same as those with Attolia. Eddis was a welcome anchor in his unsure navigation of the political seas, and he turned to her for advice to supplement the magus’s. On occasion the magus walked with them, though as the days passed, he excused himself more often than not, leaving Sounis and Eddis alone in each other’s company.

It seemed to Sounis that if he was not in a meeting discussing an interest rate or a trade of goods or if he was not walking in the garden, he was reluctantly standing in the light of a window while being fitted for clothes. He wouldn’t have minded the never-ending measurements if he could have eaten during the process, but the tailors insisted that raising his arms would spoil their work. If the measurements were irksome, the clothes themselves, when they began to arrive, appeared disturbingly expensive.

After the third suit of the day, he called for the magus. Leaning down from where he was posed on a felted wooden block, he said quietly into the magus’s ear, “Do I need this much lace? And how are we paying for it?”

The tailors paused in their work as if under a magician’s spell, their pins poised, their lips pursed. The king’s attendant on duty that day was Ion, standing patiently in a corner. He cleared his throat politely and said, “His Majesty’s wardrobe is a gift from My King.”

Sighing, the tailors returned to their work. “Attolis is very generous,” they murmured.

“Indeed,” said Sounis, thinking that the attention to frippery was the only sign of the old Eugenides he had seen. When the tailors were finished and had stripped away the carefully marked patches of fabric, he stretched and stepped down from the wooden stand.

“Your Majesty?” said the tailor apologetically.

Sounis had been heading back to the clothes that had been borrowed for him to wear until the tailoring was done. “You said that suit was the last?”

The tailor bowed. “We still have the uniforms to fit.”

Sounis sighed as he stepped back up, suspecting that the king of Attolia was torturing him.

“Would I be wrong,” Sounis asked one evening as he walked with Eddis, “to think that I talk to you, you talk to Gen, and Gen talks to Attolia, who talks to the magus, who talks to me?”

Eddis laughed. “Not always. Sometimes, as in this case, someone approaches my Eddisian ambassador Ornon, here in Attolia, and he talks to me, I talk to you, you talk to Attolia, Attolia talks to Gen, and he talks to me.”

“I see you appear in that progression twice.”

“Oh, more than that, because after Gen talks to me, the process reverses. He goes back to Attolia, who talks to you, who go to the magus, who repeats the information to me, who gives it to Ornon, who takes it to whoever started this particular political ball rolling in the first place.” She ended breathless, but smiling.

They had been discussing the Neutral Islands, the scattered island states that were spread off the shores of Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia. Most of the islands in the archipelago changed hands intermittently between Sounis and Attolia, but some had established their independence from either power and maintained it by keeping a scrupulous neutrality.

With the exception of a few lying very near Sounis’s shore, all islands but the Neutral ones were in Attolia’s hands. When Sounis’s barons had risen in rebellion against him, the navy of Sounis had disappeared into division and disarray. The nucleus of Sounis’s navy was owned by the crown, but all the other ships were owned and outfitted by individual barons, who called them back to their home ports, isolating them from one another and from any central command, making them easy pickings for Attolia’s fleet and pirates. What was left of Sounis’s navy was trapped in the harbor of the capital city. Unable to break Attolia’s blockades, Sounis’s islands had surrendered one by one.