From your father, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I looked down at her, and my conscience hit me from behind. The words weren’t hers, but the tears were, and they were real tears. Whatever Hanaktos had been to me, he’d been her father, and I’d killed him.

“Berrone,” I said helplessly.

“What will become of us now, Great King?” said her mother. “What will become of my poor daughter, betrayed by—”

I didn’t even hear the rest, and my sympathy snuffed out like a candle dropped in a well.

“Get out, all of you,” I said to the rest of the room. “Berrone, get up. You can sit on the couch.”

Baron Statidoros, looking as if a god had descended from the ceiling to rescue him, scuttled through the door without another word. Everyone else bowed and exited as well, except for Berrone’s mother, who was busy trying to accuse me of indecent intentions.

“My daughter,” she was saying, “a chaste beauty, whom you have violently stripped of her father’s protection—”

I stepped around Berrone, who was still on the floor, and advanced toward her mother, and I think my intentions were perfectly clear because she backed up hastily.

“Great King!” she cheeped. “Mercy! Mercy on a poor widow and her only daughter,” she cried as she backed through the doorway.

I returned to Berrone and lifted her up, guiding her by the arm to a nearby couch, where I sat beside her.

“Berrone, I am sorry,” I said.

“Everyone’s been so angry at me,” she sobbed. “They’ve yelled at me and been so mean. They sent Sylvie away. And now Mother says that it’s my fault that my father is dead and you have to marry me. Will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Please?” Berrone asked pathetically. “Mother says you have to or she’ll never stop being angry at me, and we’ll live on the street and I won’t have any pretty dresses and all my kittens will be drowned. Please?” She wept.

I almost wept myself.

“Berrone, it isn’t your fault that your father is dead. That’s his fault, and my fault, but not yours.”

“It is my fault,” said Berrone, sniffing. “My mother said everything is my fault. She found out that I paid for you in the market and that you were at the megaron all the time they were looking for you, and then they found out I let you go, and my f-f-father said I spoiled all their plans, because he was supposed to be the one to rescue you. I don’t see why it mattered if I rescued you instead, even if I didn’t know it was you, and I didn’t, you know,” she said earnestly. “I had no idea that was you. But Mother was angry and said I wouldn’t be able to marry you after all and be queen like they’d promised.”

“Like they had what?” I raised my voice without meaning to.

Berrone wailed.

I patted her on the back, as a number of things became clear. Of course Hanaktos wanted me to marry his daughter. What a perfect plan. First encourage a revolt against my uncle, then abduct me, and then rescue me, and then foist his conveniently beautiful daughter into my arms because, surely, any grateful young man would be eager to marry the bird-witted Berrone. What a nightmare. I could now guess at the source of recent tensions between Akretenesh and Hanaktos. The Mede would have been happier to bring Eddis under the imperial thumb as well, but Hanaktos had wanted his daughter on the throne.

It was a subtle and beautiful plan. If I had been even moderately cooperative, they needn’t even have forced a regent on me. I wouldn’t have lived a year after my heir was born. A sudden illness or a hunting accident, and Hanaktos would have had the long regency he dreamed of and a grandchild to inherit the throne. The Mede would have had a dependable ally, because he would have known the truth and could have threatened Hanaktos with it at will. Comeneus had also escaped an early death, I thought, and his brother was going to be disappointed.

“Mother says that now that you have killed my father, you will have to marry me after all. Will you?”

“Gods, no, Berrone.”

“Oh.”

I sighed. “It will be all right, Berrone. I promise. I’ll make sure you have pretty dresses, and we’ll get Sylvie back.”

“No,” said Berrone firmly.

I was puzzled. “No?”

“That’s what men say to girls they don’t want to marry, and I know because Sylvie told me—” She was getting upset again.

“Men will tell you that they’ll find Sylvie?” I asked quickly, and she was distracted.

“Noo,” she said slowly. “Sylvie said they’ll promise me pretty dresses.”

“Well, I won’t promise you pretty dresses. But I will get you Sylvie back. Tell me again, who said you were going to be queen?”

“My mother, she—” I stopped her before she repeated the entire scene again.

“That’s all I needed to know, Berrone. Thank you.”

I handed Berrone out the door at the same time that I waved to Hanaktos’s widow.

“A word, Lady Hanaktia.”

I summoned my victims to the largest room and had them wait for me. One by one, I called them away, but these weren’t the strained and circuitous interviews I’d sat through before. As each baron entered the room, he saw Basrus sitting to one side of me and Hanaktia on the other, as terrifying as any sphinx from a fireside story. By the time I received word that Akretenesh wanted to see me, I was well on my way to knowing what to do with my barons, and they were well on their way toward full cooperation.

All in all, it was not a profitable discussion with the Mede ambassador. He refused to tell me anything that I didn’t already know about his plans. I suggested that he might like to be sent down to the port by litter to see his own doctors, because I wanted him out of the way. He declined. He told me he would prefer to wait until his army came to him.

“It might not,” I said.

“We’ll see, won’t we?” he answered.

“In the morning we will run for Oneia,” I said to my private council, hastily selected.

They had wanted me—my father most strenuously—to take what horse we had and to try to cross through Hanaktos’s army on the capital road. If they could get me safely away, either by convincing Hanaktos’s cousin, who commanded the men, to let me pass, or by fighting our way through, I could ride for the city of Sounis to try to hold it against the Medes. Unfortunately, I would leave most of my barons behind to change sides yet again. Those who didn’t change sides would bear the brunt of the Medes’ revenge, as would the Attolians and the Eddisians I would be abandoning. I refused.

I waited for someone to say the obvious. We didn’t have enough men to stand against ten thousand Medes. We’d be cut to pieces when we reached the dead end that was Oneia. No one said a word.

“The magus, with his remaining men, will slow the Medes. They won’t reach Elisa until noontime, and we will have time to arrange the men on the Oneia Road. Then, when we reach Oneia and turn to fight on the open ground, most of the Medes will still be stuck on the roadway. If we fight well, they will still be there when our armies make it across the hills behind Elisa and come down on them from the rear.”