In Attolia, I had been in front of a mirror at last, and I had understood what made Oreus back in Hanaktos ask me if my expression was a happy one or not. The smile rumpled the scar tissue under my skin, and dragged my face askew, giving me the leer of a man who’d never had a moment of self-doubt, who’d never regretted a life lost. I’d worried that I wouldn’t have the nerve to carry this off, but in the moment, it was easy. Seeing Akretenesh recoil, I laughed out loud.

I’d fired on Hanaktos with my left hand. I had known exactly where he was, and I’d had all morning to prepare my shot. My aim was more reliable with my right, and Akretenesh was much closer than Hanaktos had been.

I had wanted to find a better way than shooting an unarmed man. I had wanted my barons to choose me as king because they believed in me and because they believed in my ideals as I did. But that wasn’t the choice I had before me, and I had already decided that I would make them follow me any way I could. I would not stand by and let them be lost to the Mede or to Melenze or to an endless civil war where they would never be free of bloodshed until the whole country was stripped to the bare bones. If I couldn’t be Eddis, I would be Attolia. If they needed to see my uncle in me, then I would show him to them. And I would take Attolia’s advice, because if I identified my enemy and destroyed him, Sounis would be safe.

My enemy wasn’t Comeneus, though I was fairly certain he didn’t know it. His brother did. As one baron after another had voted for a regent, Comeneus had watched me, but his brother had looked to Hanaktos, and Hanaktos had looked to the Mede.

Staring at me over the barrel of my gun, Akretenesh said, “Did you not just days ago lecture me about the sacred truce?”

With my finger still through the trigger guard of the spent pistol, I lifted my left palm upward to the sky to see if lightning struck me down.

When none did, I smiled again. “We will have to assume that the gods are on my side.”

“I am an ambassador,” Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. “You cannot shoot.”

“I don’t mean to,” I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. “Indeed, you are the only man I won’t shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safety.” I raised my voice a trifle, though it wasn’t really necessary. “We will have another vote, Xorcheus.”

They elected me Sounis. It was unanimous.

When the voting was done, I told Akretenesh to collect his men and get out of my country. “You can get back on a boat at Tas-Elisa,” I said.

He smiled his superior smile, his composure much restored during the slow process of casting votes. “How will you make me?”

“I don’t have to,” I said. “Your emperor isn’t prepared for war with the Continent, or he would be attacking already. You are trying to sneak a foothold here in Sounis to steal my country by sleight of hand. The Continental Powers dither, but they won’t stand for an unprovoked assault, and your emperor is not yet ready for one. The Continent would come to my aid before he was ready for war and spoil all his plans.”

“You think so? You bank on that?” Akretenesh asked. He’d been backing away and almost reached the double doors that led under the stage.

“I do.”

“Well,” said the ambassador, “we will see, then, won’t we?” He threw open the doors, revealing soldiers armed with crossbows.

He turned back to me, shouting, “Ki—”

I shot him, too.

Had he been aware, Akretenesh would have been disappointed to see his assassins spitted with quarrels fired from behind me, before they themselves could get off a single shot. It seemed there was no end of people breaking sacred truces at Elisa that day.

I whirled around, but the arbalests must have been hidden in the bushes on the slopes above the amphitheater. I saw no one.

Someone shouted from the terraced seats, “Long live the Lion of Sounis,” and the amphitheater roared with approval. There was a great deal of backslapping and shouting, as if it were just what my barons had planned on all along.

I wasn’t cheering. I was considering the ambassador. Dead ambassadors are a very bad business, and I approached his body with some trepidation.

Thank the gods, though I do aim better with my right than my left, the new gun threw to one side. I’d never practiced with it, and I’d only winged Akretenesh. His eyes were already open. I leaned down to look at him closely. I didn’t think I’d even hit the bone in his upper arm, but there was no way to be sure. There was a crowd forming around me, my father and his men and other barons drawing close.

“The magus?” I asked urgently.

“Is here, as you wished,” said my father, and I sighed in relief.

“Get Akretenesh to his rooms and fetch a doctor for him,” I told my father.

I turned to give orders to clear out the bodies, but Akretenesh’s thready voice called me back.

“Your Majesty,” he said.

“Yes?” I answered, ever polite.

Akretenesh looked remarkably smug for someone being carried away with a bullet hole in him. “I rather thought that I could persuade your barons to accept a replacement more to my liking. How unfortunate that won’t work, just yet. What will you do about my men, who will no doubt be marching up the port road very soon?”

“I knew you would hear that I was coming to Brimedius. I knew you would attack me on the way, and I arranged to have the Attolians and Eddisians scatter and appear to retreat,” I said, rather smug myself. “They made their way here, in small groups, to hide in the hills long before anyone was watching for them. My magus went to explain this to my father and came down with him from the Melenze pass.”

I’d stayed in Brimedius, hoping to give them time to take cover in the hills. Then I had hurried through the meetings in Elisa as fast as I decently could. There is only so long an army can stay hidden and only so long it can live on nuts and dried meat and still fight when it is called upon. It is not a ruse that would have worked anywhere but in the sacred precinct where the woods are uninhabited.

“The magus, with the Attolians and the Eddisians, is above the road from Tas-Elisa. They will turn back your thousand soldiers easily.”

“Aaah,” said Akretenesh, part enlightenment and part pain, “but there aren’t a thousand. They are closer to ten thousand in number.”

My polite expression froze solid. “Ten thousand?”

“Yes, they came in by ship in the last few days.”

No wonder the bastard looked so smug. I’d just assaulted an inviolate ambassador and started a war with a piddling company of bow and pikemen against his army of ten thousand justifiably enraged Medes.

“Why—” Akretenesh gasped a little and started again. “Why don’t you join me in my rooms a little later, and we will discuss this unfortunate turn of affairs?”

Malicious son of a bitch, I thought, over my dead body am I discussing anything with you.

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll come right up whenever you’re ready.”

“Ten thousand!” I shouted at the walls, back in the room with the wooden shutters, now open, so that anyone could hear me, on the porch or probably across the compound. “That arrogant bastard landed ten thousand men at Tas-Elisa. In my port! Mine!” When I was a child and playmates snatched my toys out of my hands, I tended to smile weakly and give in. Years later I was acting the way I should have as a child. Probably not the most mature behavior for a king, but I was still cursing as I swung around to find a delegation of barons in the doorway behind me. My father, Baron Comeneus, and Baron Xorcheus among them.