Gasping, I tugged on his shoulder and tried to catch enough breath to reassure him. The men around us slowed, but I waved them forward and staggered on. It wasn’t shouting, it was cheering, I was almost certain. We came around the last curve in the road, and we saw them: rank after rank of men in the blue and gold of Attolia waiting for us, banging their weapons and yelling.

“Attolis,” I gasped to my father. “He sent more men.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

EARLIER in the day, the magus had slowed the Medes on the coast road as they tried to fight their way from the port to Elisa, so that nearly a third of their column was still in the Elisa Valley and not yet on the road down to Oneia when the armies of my loyalist barons came over the hills from the hinterlands. The loyalists had been traveling all night by torchlight and went directly to battle without a rest.

Down in Oneia, the head of the Mede army was crushed with the help of the fresh Attolian troops. The Attolians had arrived only the day before and during the previous night, transferring in small boatloads to the tiny beach below Oneia. If the weather had not been calm, they couldn’t have done it and would have been sitting offshore as we died.

As it happened, the Medes were forced by the pressure of men coming down behind them along the roadway and out into the open to face a coordinated attack where their greater numbers never benefited them. It was madness for their general to commit all his forces on such a road, and I can only think that he fatally underestimated me. Perhaps he, too, had been listening to the Mede ambassador in Attolia.

When the Medes finally organized their retreat, we followed them up toward Elisa. I’d sent men around to reach our ambush site from behind to cover the hillside with their fire, so that the Medes could not treat us as we had treated them.

I learned afterward that in the Elisa Valley the Medes had tried to break away and drive for the capital road, only to find that pass blocked by Hanaktos’s army. Hanaktia is a woman of iron and had taken me at my word when I said that there would be a remedy for all transgressions. She had left the safety of Elisa and ridden herself to her late husband’s soldiers to rally them to fight against the Medes.

I am afraid that the side effect of all this will be a burnishing of our reputation for two-faced deal making. It is unflattering, but the Medes will think twice before making any bargains with future rebels if they believe we are all unreliable allies.

Unable to clear a path of retreat toward the capital, the Medes were forced to fight their way back across the valley and down the road to the port at Tas-Elisa. They were harried at every step and arrived in complete darkness. Thanks to the magus’s work with the townspeople, before the Medes even arrived, the soldiers found themselves locked out of the walled town.

The Mede ships in the harbor had cannons to provide covering fire. Under that and the small-arms fire from the town walls, the few thousand Medes who were left scrambled into shoreboats and were hauled to their ships. My army settled into the tents that had been provided for the Medes, ate their provisions, and enjoyed their wine, while the townspeople sensibly stayed inside their closed walls and refused to let anyone in, including me. Being turned away was a surprise, but I was too relieved by the entire course of the day to care. I rode up to Elisa in the dark, with the sounds of victory slowly fading into the song of nightbirds and insects, and fell into my own kingly bed at dawn.

The bodies were gathered over the next few days, stripped, and then burned. The weapons were collected in a makeshift armory in Tas-Elisa. I meant to restore the truce at Elisa as quickly as possible, so I stored no weapons there. I will pay a whopping fine to the treasury to assuage the outrage of the priests. Though I have escaped any lightning strikes of the gods, I regret bringing war to the place of festivals, and Elisa must have its truce if Sounis is to elect any kings in the future.

We acquired twelve cannons as well, which was an unlooked-for windfall. Evidently the Medes had off-loaded them from their ships to be used at some point in the future. We found them the morning after the battle as the proctors attempted to bring some order to the chaos that was several thousand soldiers sleeping off a drunk. Akretenesh told me I must return the cannons, and I laughed in his face.

Akretenesh was not a happy man. I did try to take a conciliatory approach, but he would have none of it, and my politeness was long at an end when he told me he wanted to take the cannons with him. I packed him into a litter and had him carried down to the port, where with great relief I saw him laid in a boat and pushed off to the Mede transport ship. He made some unpleasant threats, but I doubt he will have an opportunity to carry them out. He will face his emperor over the loss of an army when he reaches home. I do not expect to see him again and am glad of it.

There were more meetings, confirming my impression that talking is the most important thing a king does. I had promised Hanaktia that her children would not lose Hanaktos if she fulfilled her bargain with me. I kept my word but settled one-third of the holdings on Berrone as a dowry and made my mother’s brother her guardian. That it didn’t please her mother was no concern of mine. My uncle will take care of Berrone’s best interests. I don’t trust her mother or brothers to do so.

I went to see Nomenus the day I left. There were six cells in an outbuilding. The building was high in the middle with low eaves, and the doorways of the cells faced each other across a central breezeway. Frankly, it was more pig house than prison. The door to Nomenus’s cell was little higher than my waist and made of woven metal strips. Nomenus lay curled against it. He was asleep, which was not astonishing. He had no blanket, and I assumed it was too cold in the stone building to sleep at night.

As I squatted beside the webwork of iron, he stirred and sat up. “You are triumphant,” he said. “I heard from the guards.”

“I am,” I said.

“I’m glad,” he said grudgingly, tucking his fingers under his arms. “Not wholly glad, you understand…but glad.”

I peered past him into the darkness.

He said, “It is not so cramped farther back. I sit here because it is warmer.”

I had come to see him because I thought that out of sight and out of mind might be a dangerous attitude to take. I wanted to have a very clear idea in my head of where I had put him.

“Unlock this,” I said to the guard with me.

Nomenus backed away from the door once it was open, and I got on my knees and crawled inside. The prison cell did open out; its roof was higher than in the cramped passageway by the door, and the floor in the rest of the cell had been dug out, so it was lower and Nomenus could stand upright. I sat in the tunnel that was the entryway and dangled my legs over the lip into the cell. The dirt having been dug away, what was left was a collection of boulders and the lumpy bedrock. There was no flat space outside of the entryway where I sat.

I waved to Nomenus, and he settled uncomfortably on a rock. He had a huge bruise on his forehead that did not please me. He touched it gingerly and said, “It was no unkindness by your guards,” as if reading my mind. “I first came here in the dark, if you remember.”

“I see.” I couldn’t think of what else I wanted to say. I watched him watching me. Finally I asked, “What are you thinking?”

He swallowed. “Useless excuses that I am trying to keep unsaid.”