“Pay your fine,” said Eugenides dismissively, “and assume they are on your side. That’s what I do.” He resettled the robe around his shoulders.

“Eddis said that, too.” Sounis looked at the robe. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” Attolis responded, a little shortly. “I am drinking my wine hot, with foul herbs in it, as a favor to my palace physician, who wants to show the queen of Eddis’s physician just who’s in charge here. Sit.” He waved his hand at a nearby chair. Sounis pulled it over and placed it just out of the sunlight, which was too bright to suit him.

“So that wasn’t an accident?” He looked at the mess an attendant was hastily wiping up.

“The initial reaction was,” Eugenides said evasively. He could have saved the wine if he’d wanted to. “You surprised me.”

“I thought nothing surprised you.”

“And I thought you were the queen of Eddis.” He looked malevolently over his shoulder at his attendants waiting by the door to the porch.

Sounis defended them. “She was here.” After she had been announced, but before Hilarion could introduce Sounis, Eddis had raised her hand to silence the attendant and wordlessly withdrawn. Sounis wondered if she thought Gen might have refused to see him if he’d been announced on his own. If he would have retreated again to remote formality.

“Being a mere mortal,” said Eugenides, “I am surprised as often as any man. Has she convinced you?”

“Yes.” Sounis had spent most of the day in the library with Eddis. They had been interrupted only once, when Xanthe knocked to admit a group of servants with food and drink.

“Why didn’t you tell me to take Attolia’s advice from the beginning?”

“I thought you should figure it out. What you learn for yourself, you will know forever,” said Eugenides.

“Pol used to say that,” said Sounis, surprised.

“I learned it from him. I just wish to my god that I had his patience for the process,” said Eugenides, looking with dislike at the new cup of wine his attendants brought him, but taking it all the same.

Thinking of the guardsman he had admired, who had died during their pursuit of Hamiathes’s Gift, Sounis looked out over the stone balustrade of the loggia at the buildings of Attolia below him. There were no clouds visible, and the sky was filled with the liquid light of late afternoon that poured down over the city. He could see people in the streets beyond the outer wall of the palace, standing talking to each other or walking from the wider avenues into the narrow alleys out of his sight. A man with a horse was trying to coax it to pull a wagon over a shallow step in the roadway. If Sounis leaned forward, the sun hit him in the eyes, but he could still make out the bend in the roadway where he had perched on a marker with a peashooter to capture the king of Attolia’s attention. He found that he didn’t want to talk about the gods.

“Won’t Eddis’s people resent her decision?” he asked.

“They won’t be angry at you,” Eugenides told him. “They will be angry at me. They love Eddis too much to desert her, and she has in many ways prepared them for this.”

Sounis lifted his feet onto the footstool. “How angry will they be with you?” he asked.

“Very,” said Eugenides. “I’m trying not to think about it,” he added as he shifted his feet to make room for Sounis’s. “I am glad you got the message about the troops at Oneia.”

When Sophos didn’t respond, Gen put his cup down and straightened.

“I sent that information in every manner I could think of, including by pigeon. If you didn’t get it, why did you take your army down a narrow road to a dead end?”

Sounis shrugged. “There was no point in running for the capital. The Medes would have followed and laid siege. You might have eventually lifted it, but you couldn’t have saved me from being the king who ran away. I would never have been Sounis, just your puppet on the throne.”

“What if I hadn’t sent reinforcements to Oneia?”

“But you did.”

“You should credit Irene,” said Eugenides. “I had the men and the transport, but she told me where to deliver them.”

“Where did you get the boats?” Sounis asked.

“Stripped them off the Neutral Islanders, with the permission of their headmen.”

Sounis stared. “Were you behind the negotiations on Lerna and Hannipus?” he asked.

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” answered Eugenides with a straight face.

Sounis glanced at the attendants and let the subject drop. “We would have died without the additional men,” he admitted matter-of-factly. “But we would have taken the entire Mede army with us. Poets would have written about us, and songs would have been sung about us—”

“For all the good that would have done your dead bodies,” Eugenides cynically interrupted.

“Well, I wasn’t looking forward to it,” said Sounis caustically. “But over our dead bodies the Medes would never have been accepted by the people of Sounis. Much more likely that they would have allied with Attolia.” He looked at Eugenides, who was still eyeing him in surprise. “I didn’t expect to die,” he said. “I knew you would send help.”

“Why?”

It was Sounis’s turn to be surprised. He said, “You told me you needed me to be Sounis. I am. I needed my king to send me help. You did. There had to be reinforcements at Oneia, so they were there.” To him it was obvious.

Eugenides swallowed. “I see.”

They both returned to looking out over the city. Sounis’s thoughts turned to Eddis. He had given up his sovereignty to Attolis for reasons anyone could understand. He wasn’t sure that anyone would ever know how Eugenides had become king over Eddis. If he couldn’t bring himself to speak of the gods aloud to Eugenides, who would he ever tell? Who else would ever know of Eddis’s dreams of fire and death from the Sacred Mountain?

“She would have married your uncle,” Eugenides said, as if sensing his thoughts and turning them in a new direction.

“I am glad she will not,” said Sounis.

“Me, too.” Eugenides smiled.

“The Medes will find us united against them,” said Sounis.

“I should hope so,” said Eugenides. “You shot the ambassador.”

“You gave me the gun.”

They both laughed.