Gen thanked him, standing stiffly as Melheret left the practice field. Then he threw his practice sword on the ground so hard it bounced. Cursing, he picked it up, and after obviously considering hacking at the pavement with it, he pitched it across the open court. As he seemed still unsatisfied, Sounis offered his own practice sword, curious to see what would happen. It was a borrowed one, and he minded not at all when it went sailing between two of the Attolian guardsmen standing nearby.

Gen turned to the man standing on his other side, but that man, Sounis knew, was Eddis’s minister of war and Gen’s father. Not inclined to indulge tantrums, the minister stood unhelpfully with his arms crossed and his practice sword held tight in the fist tucked under the crook of his elbow.

Eugenides tipped his head back to look at the sky. He said, “That was more difficult than I anticipated.”

Teleus, the captain of the Royal Guard, returned with both Eugenides’s and Sounis’s swords. He presented the one punctiliously to his king as if it were an edged weapon, holding it out on his fingers, bowing over it. “If Your Majesty would like to retire to the dining hall?”

Gen wiped his hand down his arm as if wiping something invisible away, and took the practice sword from him, deliberately grabbing it across its edgeless blade and tucking it under his handless arm. “Yes, thank you, Teleus. Breakfast. Join me?” he said to Sounis over his shoulder.

Sounis took his blunt sword more politely from Teleus, then looked at the magus, who shrugged. They followed Attolis through the courtyard archway and into the narrow alleys between guard barracks to a dining hall. Inside the hall they passed by the long tables but did not stop, continuing down a dark hallway beside the kitchens to an empty storeroom that should have been equally dark but was lit by lamps hanging from metal pegs hammered into cracks in the stone walls.

Bewildered, Sounis stood and watched as the Eddisians paired up and began to spar. He listened as they analyzed every aspect of the Mede’s style and began to piece together the best means to defeat him. Thanks to Eugenides’s careful efforts to draw out the Mede, they had seen all they needed.

Sounis turned to the magus. “Did you know?”

“That he was relentless?” The magus finished his question. “Yes. That he had this in mind, no. I did not realize that he disliked the ambassador so much.”

“Melheret has a reputation as one of the best swordsmen in the Mede court,” a soldier informed them, having overheard. “They say he trained the former ambassador, Nahuseresh.”

“Ah,” said the magus, understanding at once. “I see that he means to be prepared if he meets him again.”

“Surely that’s unlikely,” said Sounis.

“I don’t think unlikely means to him what it does to the rest of us,” said the magus.

The Attolians were smiling openly by this time. Whatever they thought of their king, they enjoyed a good joke at a newcomer’s expense, whereas the Eddisians seemed no less intent than they had been on the training field, though they did joke with one another as they sparred.

“No, his foot was farther back,” said a voice nearby.

“Higher in the backswing,” said another man.

“Why would you put your elbow out like that?”

“Airing your arm hair?”

“Boagus could take out whole swaths of Medes that way,” said someone across the room, and everyone laughed.

“Pray gods then that the Medes don’t have anyone that smells as bad as me,” said the smiling man who must have been Boagus.

Sounis, watching, was crushed by a sudden longing for Pol, who would have been at home with these men.

“Do you spar, Your Majesty?”

Still unused to being so addressed, Sounis jumped.

“Oh, yes, thank you,” he said to the small, wiry man who had invited him to match swords.

“Will you practice against the Mede?” the man asked, as he settled into a fighting stance.

Sounis demurred. “No, thank you,” he said. “I am not expert enough, I am afraid, to learn from it.”

“Very well,” said the man. He was a head shorter than Sounis, and Sounis thought himself prepared for attack until the man’s sword suddenly caught him just above the elbow. He fell back in surprise and smiled politely, acknowledging the hit, but the other man didn’t smile back. Sounis resisted the impulse to look to the magus for rescue and raised his sword again.

The wiry little man was a monster in human guise, Sounis decided, sent by the gods to humiliate him. It was only luck that the other men in the room were focused on Eugenides and his partners or they would have been snickering behind their hands. Sounis was covered with sweat and deep in confusion by the time Eugenides finally called a halt. He’d been praying for the king of Attolia to wind up his exercise and was cursing him for his selfish delay. When Eugenides called, “Enough!,” Sounis lowered his sword immediately and caught a stinging smack on his upper arm. The little man was giving him such a look that instead of being angry at the late hit, Sounis found himself apologizing for dropping his weapon too soon.

“Hmph,” said the Eddisian, and walked away.

Sounis slunk out of the room, avoiding a sympathetic glance from the magus. Passing the food in the dining hall, he snagged a roll and hurried on to catch up with Eugenides, wondering, even as he did so, why he bothered.

Sounis drew closer once they both were outside, but slowed when he saw his sparring partner was closing in on Eugenides as well. The man said something to the king that made him turn in Sounis’s direction. Sounis knew he would only look silly if he backed away and forced himself to continue his approach, arriving in time to hear the small Eddisian say, “That one should go back to the basics,” before he stalked away like a particularly officious little rooster.

Flushed, and knowing it, Sounis fell into step with the king of Attolia and glared at the ground. “You might have mentioned this charade you had planned beforehand,” he said stiffly, his irritation overcoming his reserve.

“Couldn’t,” Gen said coolly. “I needed you on the edge, looking slightly sick.”

Sounis knew that his mind sometimes worked like a pig stuck in mud, but at other times conclusions seemed to strike like lightning, one bolt after another. He realized that Eugenides was growing more remote, not less, and almost in the same instant that he would never see any sign of his old friend if all he did was wait patiently for it. If the king of Attolia was more than just his ally, there was one sure way to find out. He stuffed the bread into his mouth and dropped his practice sword. He slid one foot around Eugenides’s ankle, and using both hands, as well as his greater mass, he sent him flying.

It was immensely satisfying. Eugenides crashed into his attendants, who went stumbling in turn, a mass of windmilling arms and falling bodies as they tried to catch the king, who was making no effort to save himself. He’d dropped his own practice sword and had his arms tucked in where his hook would do no accidental damage. He slipped through their clutching hands like a fish.

Sounis stood very still, his hands well away from his body, surrounded, as he’d anticipated, by weapons that were very real and all pointed toward him. Eugenides levered himself up on his elbows, appearing stunned. After a moment he lay back down again and began to laugh. He was uncooperative as his crouching attendants tried to lift him. They managed to pull him to a seated position, but he waved them away. With a nod, he dismissed the swords back to their sheaths. “Just what makes you think you can get away with that?” he asked the young man standing over him with a butter-won’t-melt-in-my-mouth expression incongruous on his scarred face.