That, too, might have been his fault. He had warned Eugenides that he would have to keep his temper under control and his tongue between his teeth. He knew how much Eugenides would hate playing this role, and he’d looked forward to seeing Eugenides’s cockiness stifled and his sharp tongue checked.

Ornon hadn’t meant for the king to be seen swallowing one insult after another as if he had no spine at all. As a ten-year-old boy, the Thief of Eddis could stop a grown man in his tracks with a single look. Where had that look gone? It worried Ornon that Eugenides’s role as Thief might have been an essential aspect of his confidence and strength of character. Perhaps both were gone, now that he had left Eddis for good. If so, it boded poorly for the country of Attolia.

The Attolians only thought that they wanted a weak king. A weak king meant uncertainty. If the king didn’t wield the power in the country, all kinds of other people would fight to wield it for him. They would fight to gain power and fight to keep it. Some of the fighting would be public, with rebellions and civil wars; more of the fighting would be secret, with poisonings and political murders. Unless the queen continued to hold power, it would be an ugly future for her nation.

Ornon looked at the queen. Perhaps she would continue to rule as sovereign. No one would have anticipated her power when she had first taken the throne. She might still hold the throne alone, but Ornon thought she had reached the end of her resources. She had held her fractious barons and forced them to bow to her authority, but the Mede Empire wanted this little country and the countries of Eddis and Sounis as well. Attolia couldn’t keep her barons in check and fight off the Mede Empire at the same time. She had driven the Mede off once, embarrassing their ambassador. That embarrassment would weaken the ambassador, Nahuseresh, but it was only a matter of time before he and his brother, the next emperor, returned to attack this coast of the Middle Sea. No one who had any foresight doubted that the Mede would eventually return.

When they did, the state of Attolia would have to be united in opposing them. The queen could command her barons, but not unite them. There was too much bloody history between her and too many of her barons. For the same reason, no one of the barons could have become king. They needed a neutral person to take the throne. Eugenides.

Ornon shook his head. Not all plans work out. This one may have been a failure. Eugenides had stopped trying to respond to the Attolian insults. He allowed himself to be heckled and badgered from place to place. He hated being in the public eye, and Ornon knew it. He’d expected a great deal of pleasure in watching Eugenides, with whom he shared a long and complicated history. What Ornon hadn’t expected was this feeling of floating downstream with no one at the tiller in a boat headed for a waterfall.

He looked at the king. Eugenides was wearing the same coat to dinner as he had the night before. More worrisome, he’d smacked a guard in the head during sparring that morning. The Attolians assumed it was an accident, but Ornon knew better. Something had made Eugenides lose his temper, and that was the greatest danger of a weak king. Weak kings who lost their tempers were notoriously destructive. Eugenides had matured lately, but he’d been a hothead for many more years before that.

There was a lull in conversation, and in the quiet, someone from a side table addressed the king. “Your Majesty,” he asked innocently, “is it true that your cousins once held you down in a water cache?”

Ornon, in the act of putting down his wine cup, paused.

“Is it also true that they wouldn’t let you out until you agreed to repeat insults about your own family?”

The man speaking was across the hall from Ornon, but his voice carried. He was one of the younger men, with his hair long and curled, his clothes fashionable. He was one of Dite’s set, Ornon thought. Dite and his younger brother Sejanus both seemed to be particular banes of the king’s existence. Eugenides bridled any time Dite was near. Given that the two Erondites brothers hated each other, one would think that the king would get along with at least one of them, but he didn’t.

Eugenides, who had been pushing his food around on his plate, finally raised his eyes and Ornon’s wine cup hit the table with a crack and a splash.

Hastily righting the cup, Ornon cursed himself for even thinking about Eugenides’s past, as if his thoughts had stirred Eugenides’s more malevolent aspect to the surface. In this mood Eugenides was unlikely to yield to any hints or warnings delivered the length of the table by Ornon. He wouldn’t even look at Ornon. Short of throwing a dinner roll at him, there was no way to get his attention.

The dandified Attolian who had spoken, a patron, but not a baron by any means, glanced at the queen to see if she approved, but she was looking the other way. The king shrugged his shoulders slightly and said, “I could send you to ask them.”

The man laughed. His laughter was edged with contempt. “It would be a long trip, Your Majesty. I would so much rather hear the answer from you.”

“Oh, the trip would be quicker than you think,” said the king, pleasantly. “Most of my male cousins are dead.”

The silence that had begun at the head table had spread to the edges of the hall. The Attolian’s smile grew uncertain.

The king didn’t smile back. Those who understood shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

The late war between Eddis and Attolia had cost Eddis dearly. She had suffered and lost on a greater scale than the larger, richer nation of Attolia, but at the end of the war, the Thief of Eddis had become the king of Attolia. And whether Eugenides of Eddis could send an Attolian courtier to his death to carry a question to his cousins in hell was a question that courtier was suddenly not interested in exploring. He wished, with intensity that surprised him, that he hadn’t listened when Dite had suggested this little joke. The young man looked again to his queen, this time for rescue; she was still looking the other way.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty, if I offended,” he murmured to the tablecloth.

The king said nothing. He met Ornon’s worried look from across the tables and returned it with a widening smile that Ornon knew well. Eugenides was angry and pleased to be so. Leisurely, he reached for his wineglass and drained the little wine that was in it.

Unable to think where else to look, Ornon looked to the queen. His entreaty must have been plain because she smiled with a hint of amusement, and turned to Eugenides. As he contemplated his empty cup, she lifted hers.

“Take mine,” she said.

People sitting nearby recoiled. Eugenides choked on the wine still in his mouth. There was no one in the room unaware that Attolia had used poison hidden in her own wineglass to rid herself of the first husband she had been forced to marry.

Eugenides continued to cough, his shoulders shaking. He threw his head back, gasping, and finally seized the breath he needed to laugh outright. Helplessly holding his sides, he looked at the queen. She only looked back without expression, and he laughed harder. The Attolians, one and all, watched with increasing dislike.

“No fear of that, my dear one,” he said, his voice slightly strained, “and look, no need.” He gestured toward his wine cup, which the wine boy had refilled, lunging forward with the amphora so hastily that the wine had splashed onto the cloth below. “I see my cup is full as well.”

Conversations slowly resumed. The court lost its troubled expressions. The strange moment had passed. Once again, the Attolians had seen that the king was nothing more than a clown. Ornon was staring at his plate, relieved and angry at the same time, wishing that the Attolians could know how close they had come to disaster, and grateful that they didn’t. He looked across the tables at the young man whose insult had roused the danger. That one, he thought, looking at the courtier’s white face, had looked Eugenides in the eye. He knew how near disaster he had been. Ornon turned to look at the queen only to find her looking back at him, the hint of a satisfied smile still on her face. She’d proved her strength, and Ornon bowed his head in respect.