Costis looked up from the floor. All traces of the king’s tears were gone, so perfectly erased that Costis almost doubted that he had seen them at all.

“Uh—”

“You interrupted me so that you could say uh?”

Costis blurted out the words. “I told the queen that you sat here and looked out the window.”

The king continued to watch whatever held his attention outside. “She is your queen. You could hardly decline to answer her questions.”

“I also told the Baron Susa.”

The king turned away from the view. He was expressionless. Costis stammered an apology and an explanation. Helplessly he fumbled for the coin he had carried everywhere since that day and held it out to the king. “I don’t want it,” he said. “I didn’t do it for money, I didn’t mean to do it at all.”

The king turned back to the window.

Costis stood, his hand still out, the silver coin lying in his palm, waiting for the penal colony.

Finally the king spoke, very quietly. “I apologize, Costis. I’ve put you in an impossible situation. Why don’t you let my entourage back in, and you may go.”

“Go, Your Majesty? The guard doesn’t change until the end of the hour.”

Eugenides shook his head. “You may go now,” he said.

“What should I do with the coin?”

“Dedicate it. I am sure some god or priest will appreciate its value.”

Costis backed out of the door again. Numb, he admitted the king’s attendants and the guards.

“I’ve been dismissed,” he said to the squad leader. The squad leader nodded, and Costis stepped into the passage.

“What, Lieutenant? Are you going?” the guard there asked cheerfully.

“I’ve been dismissed.”

“An early day. Congratulations,” the guard said. Costis headed down the dim passage.

It wasn’t just an early day. The king was done with him. His stay in limbo was over. He told himself he should be happy, and he wondered why he didn’t feel more relieved. Maybe he was shaken by the king’s tears, but he didn’t want to think about those. He had cleared his conscience and hadn’t been sent to a penal colony; the future should look brighter. He wondered what the king found so interesting to look at out the window.

Descending a narrow staircase on his way back to his barracks, he was presented with the answer. As Costis turned on a landing and began to descend the next flight, he was directly across from a window in the outside wall of the palace. The window opened in the same direction as the king’s, and there, summer-bright and framed by the darkness of the stairwell, was the same view. Costis passed it, and then went back up the stairs to look again. There were only the roofs of the lower part of the palace and the town and the city walls. Beyond those were the hills on the far side of the Tustis Valley and the faded blue sky above them. It wasn’t what the king saw that was important, it was what he couldn’t see when he sat at the window with his face turned toward Eddis.

Costis’s heart twisted sympathetically. He sternly reprimanded that weak and traitorous organ, but he couldn’t help remembering that his own homesickness had sucked the life out of every day when he had first left the farm. His initial summer in the barracks had been the worst. He’d never been more than a few miles from home in his life, and as much as he despised his cousins, he would have given a month’s pay to see one of their familiar faces. The sick feeling had gradually faded as he had made a place for himself in the Guard, but Costis remembered it too well not to recognize it in the king’s face when he had seen him looking so hopelessly out the window. What must it be like to know that you couldn’t ever go home? To leave behind the mountains, where Costis had heard it never got really hot even in the summer, to live on the coast, where the snow rarely came? Small wonder if the king had passed up other, more gracious apartments to have one that had a bedchamber with a window facing toward Eddis.

So what? Costis started down the stairs again. Why should he care, really, if the king was homesick? Eugenides had brought it on himself. He should have stayed in Eddis. No one wanted him in Attolia, not the queen, certainly, not the Guard, not his attendants…

“Dammit!” Costis stopped again. He’d forgotten to tell the king about Sejanus.

There was no point in going back. Cursing more quietly, he continued down the stairs.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHEN Costis got back to his room, he found Aristogiton wearing a smile as wide as his face.

“I’ve been dismissed,” Costis said bluntly, not in the mood for humor, just as Aristogiton announced, “I’ve been promoted.”

Both said, “What?”

“I’ve been dismissed,” Costis said again.

“You told him about Susa, then, not just the queen?”

“Yes.”

“And he threw you out in a rage.”

“No. He apologized to me and said very politely that I could go.”

“Apologized?”

“Nicely.”

“The bastard.”

Costis nodded his head in agreement. “I hate him.”

“You didn’t manage it, then, the grain of self-respect?”

“No,” said Costis. “Not a remnant the size of a grain of wheat, not the size of a grain of sand. If he had been enraged, if he’d sent me to some hell in Thracia…”

“You’d feel like you deserved it and you’d take it like a man. You do know, don’t you, that if you’d sold out to Susa on purpose, you could be a completely honorless but happy villain gloating over your silver?”

“I left it on the Miras altar on the way here.”

Aris groaned.

“I’m sorry. I am spoiling your good news. You’ve been promoted?”

“I and my entire squad,” said Aristogiton, “have been elevated to the Third. I begin my new duties tomorrow.”

“The Third? You’ll be in the palace?”

“I’m assigned to the king.” Aris smiled at Costis’s disbelief. “I was looking forward to watching him humiliate you.”

“But that’s impossible. You can’t be eligible for that kind of promotion.”

“Thank you so much for your judgment of my reputation.”

Costis smiled. “I apologize unreservedly. I am a swine. Obviously you belong in the Third, should be a centurion of the Third, a lieutenant no less.”

“Well,” Aris admitted, “I am pretty sure we all owe it to Legarus the Awesomely Beautiful.”

“Ah,” said Costis, enlightened. “Promoted for his pretty face?”

“And he’s wellborn, and he’s too stupid to be promoted on his own, but if I’m promoted, and with me goes my squad…”

“Then Legarus serves honorably in the Third, and has a ready access to the palace—and probably someone in the palace.”

Aris said, “Yes, I think that’s it, but I have no sticky notions of honor, and you won’t hear me complaining because I have undeservedly been made squad leader in the Third. On the contrary, I intend to celebrate.” He lifted the amphora he held in his hand. “While I am celebrating, you can drown your sorrows,” he told Costis.