There was a new magus in Sounis to carry the news to the king. He didn’t think his tenure in the position would be lasting, and he sorely hoped to leave the post with his neck intact.

“He was working for Eddis, then,” the king said.

The new magus hesitated for a moment, weighing his dedication to truth against his desire not to irritate the already testy king. He was a scholar dragged into this new position by the king’s command. He was not a courtier. Against his better judgment, he chose truth.

“I believe not, Your Majesty,” he said reluctantly.

“Not working for Eddis? Then what the hell is he doing there? Vacationing?”

“I believe he is not there entirely of his own volition, Your Majesty.”

“What’s that mean?” the king asked impatiently.

“The apprentice that reported meeting an Attolian outside the magus’s rooms, I think he was mistaken.”

“That’s obvious enough or my magus would be in Attolia, wouldn’t he?” the king snapped.

The new magus pressed on. “He was deliberately misled, Your Majesty. I think it was an Eddisian who intended to be taken as an Attolian and that he gave that apprentice gold to betray my predecessor for the purpose of misdirection.”

“If you can’t say that more clearly, I can find someone else who can,” the king warned.

The new magus struggled on. “The apprentice assumed that the Attolians had used the magus for their purposes and finished with him, that they wanted the magus betrayed and eliminated. On the contrary, I think my predecessor was quite innocent. The Thief of Eddis himself gave the apprentice the gold and did so because only if my predecessor was afraid for his life could he be induced to flee to Eddis.”

“Eugenides? In the megaron?” Sounis had been angry enough when his magus’s apprentice had come to tell him that the magus allowed Attolian spies to wander through his hallways. That Eugenides had been in the palace was chilling. “What the hell was he doing, then?” the king snarled.

“Well, stealing your magus, sir.”

The king sat blinking in his chair. Then he jumped to his feet, shouting for an officer of his guard.

CHAPTER TEN

THE MORNING AFTER HE AND the queen returned from their journey across Eddis to collect the magus, Eugenides rose early, his body aching. He rode poorly with one hand, though no worse than he had ridden with two. The queen had been content to go at a walk. People had come out on the streets of the city and down from their farms to stand by the road and watch them pass. They hadn’t cheered their queen. They weren’t a cheering population, but they’d smiled, and waved, pleased as much by the sight of Eugenides as of Eddis. Eugenides had wished for the ground to open and swallow him. Thinking of the stares, he shuddered. When his bare feet touched the cold floor, he shuddered again. The mornings were brisk in the mountains. He muttered curses under his breath as he rummaged with his hand through the neatly folded shirts in his wardrobe. His father’s valet tidied things whenever Eugenides turned his back, and in the days he’d been away in Sounis a number of his rattier belongings had disappeared entirely.

“Oh, how inconspicuous I will be when next I am in Attolia,” he said out loud, “dressed in Eddisian formalwear with gold frogs on the front.” He cursed again when he couldn’t find his sword without moving every last thing off the shelf across the bottom of the wardrobe. He left what he’d moved in a pile on the floor. It made the room seem more like his own.

“I should just go back to sleep,” he grumbled, but he dragged out the sword and the sheath as well as the belt and tossed them onto his unmade bed, leaving oil stains on the covers. Someone had made sure the sword wouldn’t rust while he wasn’t using it. He opened the curtains to his room and complained—to himself; there wasn’t anyone else to listen—that it was still dark outside, but he couldn’t ignore the sunshine glowing on the peaks of the mountains across the valley. Only when he sat at his desk and reached for the hook and the metal and leather cup that fitted over the stump of his right wrist was he quiet. He sat for a moment, holding it in his hand before he put it back, and looked for the cotton sleeve he put over his arm before the prosthetic.

He found the sleeve, but couldn’t find the small clasp that clipped the fabric to itself and kept the sleeve fitting snugly. He remembered that he’d dropped it undressing the night before and hadn’t heard it hit the floor. It was lost therefore in the pattern of the wool carpet in front of the fire and would probably take half an hour to find. Sighing, he pulled open a drawer in the desk and ran his fingers through the clutter inside until he found a substitute. He pinned on the sleeve and carefully smoothed the wrinkles from it before he gritted his teeth and pushed his arm into the leather interior of the base of the hook. It was a tight fit, in order to give him some ability to catch and pull things. If he wore it too long, the skin of his arm was white and bloodless when the hook came off, and though he’d grown calluses where it pinched, he often had blisters.

More bothersome were the phantom pains he still had in a hand that was no longer there. He woke sometimes in the night to an ache in his right palm where he’d injured it trying to escape Attolia. The injury had never had a chance to heal. Eugenides expected the pain of it would plague him until he was dead. He didn’t like to think about the missing hand, but he sometimes caught himself reaching with his left hand to rub his right when it felt sore.

Grumbling again, he pushed his stocking feet into boots that he’d had made when he found his old boots had gotten too small over the previous winter, hung his sword belt and sword over his shoulder, and took himself down to the armorer’s courtyard, where trainees and soldiers alike were stretching their muscles and checking their weapons before beginning their exercises. The armorer’s forge was open on two sides to the courtyard, and Eugenides went there to drop his sword on a bench.

The armorer nodded. “You’ll need a new one,” he said. “Balance won’t be right in that.” The courtyard had fallen silent.

“Do you have a practice sword I could use?” Eugenides asked, his back to the silence.

The armorer nodded and pulled one down from the racks on the wall.

As Eugenides took the sword, someone stepped into the shed behind him, and he turned to see his father.

Eugenides nodded a greeting. His father waved him out onto the training ground. As they walked together, Eugenides noticed his father’s stare.

“Do you think she’ll not notice?” his father finally asked.

“Notice what?” said Eugenides innocently.

“Her missing fibula pin with the rubies and gold beads pinning up your sleeve.”

“Garnets and gold beads.”

“The man said they were rubies.”

“They say there’s no hope for liars and fools in this world.”

“And where does that leave you?” his father asked pointedly.

Eugenides laughed. “In possession of the queen’s garnet fibula pin, and serve her right. I told her not to wear it with that orange scarf from Ebla. Is it always so quiet down here?” he asked.

Busy noises filled the open court, and the grim smile of the minister of war passed almost too quickly to be seen.