A Conspiracy of Kings Read online

  Megan Whalen Turner

  A Conspiracy of Kings

  THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED

  TO DIANA WYNNE JONES. THANK YOU

  FOR THE STORIES AND FOR THE LEG UP.

  Contents

  Prologue

  THE king of Attolia was passing through his city, on…

  Chapter One

  MY father sacked another tutor. I see that doesn’t surprise…

  Chapter Two

  I lay on the dirt, my hands tied behind me,…

  Chapter Three

  I woke slowly with everything hurting so much I didn’t…

  Chapter Four

  I hoped. I hoped all that afternoon and through dinner,…

  Chapter Five

  HOURS later I was locked in a pantry under the…

  Chapter Six

  IN one of my dreams, my tutor told me a…

  Chapter Seven

  HE was mounted on a bay horse, surrounded by ten…

  Chapter Eight

  I had expected the men to be in a private…

  Chapter Nine

  WE rode into the middle of the armed camp just…

  Chapter Ten

  I should have stayed in Hanaktos and built walls. “More…

  Chapter Eleven

  “WHERE is it?” the burly man shouted, with his hand…

  Chapter Twelve

  WE were in the city of Attolia three days later,…

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE Queen of Eddis protested. “I did not laugh,” she…

  Chapter Fourteen

  AS Eddis left, she gathered in her wake most of…

  Chapter Fifteen

  “SOPHOS, you sleep with a knife under your pillow? I’m…

  Chapter Sixteen

  THE long summer twilight was in the sky outside, but…

  Chapter Seventeen

  WE left Attolia with horses underneath us and all the…

  Chapter Eighteen

  AKRETENESH dined with me every day, chatted about this and…

  Chapter Nineteen

  IN Sounis only the barons hold the power to confirm…

  Chapter Twenty

  EARLIER in the day, the magus had slowed the Medes…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  SOUNIS folded his hands and waited. He had arrived at…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE room was Attolia’s library.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  THE king of Attolia reclined in a chair in a…

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  THE king of Attolia was passing through his city, on his way to the port to greet ambassadors newly arrived from distant parts of the world. The king was a newcomer and a foreigner, king only by virtue of a political marriage to the queen of Attolia and still unfamiliar to most Attolians. They massed along the Sacred Way to see him for themselves, as well as to cheer their queen, who rode beside him in the open coach. One member of the crowd, a young man with a broken nose, a lip twisted by scar tissue, and dirty clothes that combined to suggest a person of violent and criminal habits, had a particular need to get close. He was in the company of an older man, unscarred, but no less shabby, who boosted him up the side of a stone street marker that labeled the intersection of the Sacred Way and one of the larger cross streets.

  “Lift your right foot up another few inches. There’s a chip out of the corner. Yes, that’s it. Are you secure? Can you see?”

  “Yes, I am set, and I can see. Stop nagging,” said the younger man. With one foot on a narrow ledge and the other pressed against the chipped indentation, he was high enough to wrap his left hand around the narrow top of the marker. From this vantage point, he could see easily over the heads of the people gathered in the streets, and with a good grip for one hand, he had the other free. They had chosen the marker the day before because it offered a view up a long straight stretch of the Sacred Way and he would have plenty of time to aim.

  The crowds were growing thicker. The talk was loud, some of it the usual complaints about the cost of cooking oil and good wine, and the behavior of the young these days; some of it about the new king. One and all disparaged his Eddisian background, but a few grudging supporters mentioned his rumored love for their queen in his favor. Such romantic stories were dismissed as foolish by the more outspoken, but a few expressions softened. Latecomers eyed the position on the street marker, but the older man defended the approach to it with the unwitting assistance of a portly woman and her gaggle of small children. They blocked the access of those who might have thought they could share the high ground or force the occupier of it to relinquish his spot. The only danger came from one or two of the small children who tried to climb up. The younger man stepped on a few fingers and apologized perfunctorily. The woman gave him a dirty look but pulled her children down. As the commotion uphill signaled the approach of the royal procession, the children’s father appeared, pushing his way through the crowd, wiping his hands on his dirty smock as he came. He swept up two of the smallest of the children to his shoulders, and they all watched for the arrival of the carriage bearing the king and queen.

  The young man, with his free hand, dipped into his pocket and then lifted his hand to his mouth. He lowered his hand again but this time took a thin tube from the other man standing below.

  The king was visible now, sitting upright in the carriage beside the queen. The carriage drew closer. The young man clinging to the street marker took his aim, waited for the right moment, and with a concentrated puff of air, fired the shot.

  The pea hit the king on the cheek. He didn’t react, and the small pellet dropped out of sight into his lap. He tilted his head to murmur something to his wife, the queen. His assailant waved and shouted the king’s name, just like everyone else in the crowd, and when the king looked up, his eyes passed over his attacker without pause.

  The royal carriage rolled by. The young man dropped from the stele.

  “Did you hit him?” the older man asked.

  “Yes,” said the younger.

  “Did he see you?”

  “If he did, he didn’t recognize me.”

  His companion looked grim. “We’d better go,” he said just as a woman’s voice said more loudly, “He did what?”

  Both of them turned a little too quickly to see the mother of the brood of children with her hand on the littlest one’s shoulder, the boy clutching her skirts. “Who did what now?” asked the father wearily. But the woman wasn’t angry with her son.

  “He says that one—up there on the stele—he shot something at the king and hit him in the face,” she said. Her words drew unwelcome attention from those within hearing. Other heads turned toward them.

  “I did not—” The young man tried to deny the accusation, but the woman was having none of his protest, and his denial was abbreviated by a stinging smack from the older man, who then seized him by the upper arm and shook him so hard his teeth rattled.

  “I cannot believe you!” the man shouted. “And what your mother will say, I don’t know.” He swore with venom and then apologized to the brood mother. “My nephew,” he explained, “he breaks his poor mother’s heart.” The mother nodded warily, only partly satisfied.

  “I never—” said the younger man sullenly, only to be shaken again.

  “You’ll shut your mouth and come home with me,” snarled his companion.

  The youth allowed himself to be dragged off, followed by the approving nods of the witnesses, and complaining bitterly to his “uncle” that he’d done nothing at all wrong. The two men turned down the first cross street they reached and out of sigh
t of the crowd began to walk faster, the older man still pulling the younger along by the arm.

  “You know, I don’t think you’re allowed to treat me like this,” the younger pointed out woefully. The older man laughed.

  “Gods protect us,” he said, “we can only hope the little monster isn’t telling them right now that I handed you the peashooter.”

  They both glanced back. A small crowd of shadowy figures, black against the sunlit street, appeared around the corner behind them, the silhouettes of their skirts and smocks easy to identify.

  “He told them,” said the younger man.

  “Faster,” said the elder, and the two broke into a run. Pursued by shouts, they raced down the street and around another corner, and skidded to an abrupt halt, face to face with a squad of the Royal Guard.

  “Back! Back!” the older man shouted, revealing, in his alarm, a Sounisian accent previously concealed. But their retreat was already cut off by the people behind them. Through that crowd came another squad of soldiers. Murmuring grew at the sight of the Guard, the two men’s transgression exaggerated with each retelling. “It was a poison dart they shot at the king!” they heard a voice shout from the crowd.

  There was a narrow space between two apartment houses, but it was only an alcove to a door. The older man pushed the younger in and turned to face the soldiers. The accent of Sounis now clear in his voice, he warned them, “Your king doesn’t want us dead.”

  Hours later they sat locked in a dark cell under the palace. At last they heard a door somewhere open with a bang and a light set of footsteps approaching, followed by several more sets of footsteps, all heavier, but moving as fast. The younger man jumped to his feet, but the older, who stepped between him and the door, was first to see the face of the king of Attolia when it opened.

  “We are uninjured,” the magus of Sounis quickly reassured him.

  “Thank the gods,” said the king. “I thought to find you black and blue.”

  “Indeed, we thought the same,” said the magus. He exchanged a look with his companion that made them both laugh, and he welcomed the king into his arms for a mutually crushing embrace.

  “I cannot stay, I am between audiences,” said Eugenides, king of Attolia. “All the embassies from the Continent seem to have arrived at the same time. With Eddis here as well, we are scheduled every moment.” He looked at their shabby clothes in puzzlement.

  “We were traveling anonymously for safety—” explained the magus.

  “But surely—”

  “—and then we were robbed on the road.”

  “Ah,” said the king, “the danger in being anonymous. Your novel approach made me think secrecy must be important, so I told my captain nothing but that you were to be conveyed quickly and quietly. I just learned that he had seen you shooting peas in my face, and I am relieved not to find the two of you hanging by your thumbs.”

  “Your Majesty,” someone called from beyond the door, “we must go.”

  “Yes,” said the king before turning back to the magus. “They will take you up to a room where you can get clean, and perhaps have a view.” He looked around the tiny stone-walled room. “I will give credit to Teleus on safety, at least.”

  The young man at the back of the cell snorted at that. The king stepped around the magus to hug him fiercely. He then released him but didn’t step away. Looking up, he examined the scarring on his lip that lifted it into a slight sneer, and the broken nose. “My god, you’ve been in the wars. Once you are clean and have had some rest, I will want to hear all about where you have been and why.” He pulled the younger man’s head down and kissed him solidly on his forehead, saying seriously, “Gods-all, I am glad to see you safe, Sophos.”

  The young man smiled back. “Sounis,” he said, just as someone called from the door.

  The king looked away and then back, as if uncertain that he had heard correctly. “What?”

  “I am Sounis,” said the young man. “My uncle is dead.”

  All the king’s happiness was wiped away. “You’re joking?” he suggested.

  Bewildered, the younger king shook his head. “No, I am Sounis.” He meant to make a remark about keeping a visiting king locked in a cellar, but his own happiness faltered.

  “Your Majesty, please,” the man in the passage called again. The king of Attolia looked to the door, and then at the magus, and then at the magus’s former apprentice, the new king of Sounis.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and clearly meant it. He grasped the younger man briefly by the sleeve, said “I am sorry” again, and was gone, leaving the magus of Sounis and his king standing alone, with the open door of their cell before them.

  Sounis turned to the magus. “He cannot think that I cared about my uncle?”

  “I think he was delighted to see you safe,” said the magus, “and grieved that the next time you meet, it must be as king and king and not as friends.”

  “I hope that I will always be his friend,” said Sounis.

  “I know that he hopes so as well,” the magus assured him. “But now, let us follow our escort to a bath, if you please, and some food. You will need your strength, I think, to answer many questions about where you have been and what has become of you, since they saw you last.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  MY father sacked another tutor. I see that doesn’t surprise you at all. Terve was my eighth. The magus had been my seventh. My father and my uncle who was Sounis had sent me to Letnos with Terve to separate me from the magus after the ground-shaking set-to the three of them had had after my private correspondence was discovered. Terve was an old army veteran. He was to teach me riding and sword and military history and the hell with anything else. I didn’t really mind. I liked Terve, and he didn’t get in the way of my real studies. What he mainly did was drink and tell war stories. In the mornings he oversaw my sword training from a stump in the training yard with a wineskin in his lap, tending to be overgenerous in his praise, unlike all my previous tutors, shouting things like, “A natural! A natural!” in between swallows of wine.

  I did some riding on my own, though not with any real discipline, and in the afternoon I studied as I pleased. By that time Terve was well into his second amphora and would lie on a couch in the study. He might suddenly shout, “You’re being attacked by six men with swords!” or something similar, and I would have to come up with a plan for my defense. He would pick apart my answers and then drift off into another war story until, eventually, he fell asleep. He was there, snoring quietly, when my father arrived to check on my progress.

  Terve was immediately replaced. A soldier from my father’s guard was assigned to teach me sword work, and a hateful, condescending bully named Sigis Malatesta was my new tutor—from the Peninsula, as you can tell by the name, supposedly educated at the University in Ferria. He had accompanied my father to Letnos, so my father must have had some idea of replacing Terve even before he found him on the couch, though perhaps not with so much shouting.

  I have no idea what my father saw in Malatesta. In the normal run of things, he doesn’t give a bent pin for learning, but he’d met Malatesta at the court of Sounis, and I suspect that he thought hiring Malatesta would be a poke in the eye for the magus, whom he has never liked. Years ago he sent me to be the magus’s apprentice with the explicit hope that the magus’s razor tongue would be the end of my intellectual pretensions. When that didn’t work out as he intended, it only made him dislike the magus more.

  Of course the magus had long since left Sounis, stolen away in the night by the Thief of Eddis, though my uncle didn’t know who was responsible at first. I’d heard rumors, which I didn’t believe for a minute, that the magus was an Attolian spy who’d fled the city when he was about to be discovered. I was not surprised at all to learn subsequently that it had been Eugenides at work. By the time Malatesta came, I was positive the magus was busily tramping around the mountains of Eddis, collecting botanical specimens and enjoying his “captivity” as a prisone
r of the queen of Eddis. I am quite sure he was not suffering any distress because I had a new tutor.

  I hated Malatesta. He could barely manage the multiplication of greater numbers, and he didn’t know any prime over thirteen. He’d never read the Eponymiad, but he tried to pretend he had. I doubt very much he’d ever set foot in a seminar at the University in Ferria. He’d studied no medicine and no natural history. The only thing he’d read was poetry. That should have made us friends, but I hated his taste in poetry, too. Where he admired the sweet and the overwrought, I liked the Eponymiad.

  My mother knew how I felt, of course. She and my sisters sympathized with me, but there was little they could do. My mother would never act against my father’s judgment, no matter how poorly she thought of Malatesta. If my father had stayed at the villa longer than a day, she might have changed his opinion, drawing him into alignment with her own as invisibly as a magnet works on a lodestone, but my father had been gone within a day of installing my new tutor.

  I knew that it made my mother sad to see my distress, so I hid it as well as I could. I also knew that with the slightest encouragement, Ina and Eurydice would have filled Malatesta’s bed with bees. They are delicate girls, so small in stature, and fine-boned like my mother, that I can still lift both of them with one hand. You could be forgiven for thinking them the incarnation of every ladylike grace, but my father has had frequent cause to swear that they got the spine so notably absent in me. A bed full of bees wasn’t going to get rid of Malatesta; only my father could do that. The bees would only make him more spiteful, so I tried not to encourage the girls.

  The one person I did complain to, and at length, was Hyacinth, my single friend on the island of Letnos. He lived in a villa nearby and came down to visit almost every day, arriving as my mother and sisters were rising from their afternoon rest, his visits therefore coinciding with their afternoon meal. On the rare occasions that he was late, Eurydice always saved him a cake.