A Conspiracy of Kings Page 2

  He was my only companion of my own age, and I should have been more grateful to have him, but it was hard to be grateful for Hyacinth. His father was a patron with a property of only medium size, holding few of the king’s responsibilities, and Hyacinth was gratified to consider himself a friend of the heir to Sounis. He was always smiling and always eager to please. Everything I said he agreed with, which was trying, and his flute playing would make the deaf wince, but I think the real problem with Hyacinth was that he reminded me of myself. He read poetry. He flinched at loud noises. In addition to having no musical skills, he had no martial skills. He avoided any situation that might require a physical effort on his part. Seeing him, I found it no wonder that my father despised me.

  Yet I was his companion, and he mine, and when Malatesta beat me, I went to him for sympathy. Oh, yes, I was taller than Malatesta by inches, and long since old enough to be considered a man, but my tutor was still switching me across the palms of my hands and leaving painful blisters there. And I was still sniffing back tears of rage and humiliation like a big baby. Especially so, when I was switched for insisting that burn did not rhyme with horn or that I couldn’t produce any factors for 31 or 43. Malatesta used to say things that even he knew were wrong and then watch me in contempt when I let them pass, too cowed to contradict him.

  While I was failing to manage my own petty problems, my uncle who was Sounis was dealing with greater ones. After the sabotage of his fleet in its own harbor, he’d jumped into war with Attolia without hesitation. The magus would have counseled him otherwise, but the magus, as you know, was whisked away before he could counsel anything. Then Sounis discovered it was Eddis who was responsible for both the destruction of his ships and the disappearance of his valuable advisor, and he started a new war without any more forethought. He was confident, I think, of success over both Eddis and Attolia right up until the world heard that the Thief of Eddis had stolen the queen of Attolia and meant to marry her.

  When the stars aligned in that very unexpected way, my uncle was at a loss. Together, Attolia and Eddis were far more powerful than they were alone. He was overmatched, and everyone knew it. There were more rumors each day. The maids picked up news from who knows where and retold it to Ina and Eurydice, who carried it to Mother and me. My mother scolded them for listening to gossip, but she never insisted they stop.

  One morning at breakfast Ina said, “Our uncle has agreed to marry the cousin of the queen of Eddis.”

  “Your uncle who is Sounis?” my mother said, gently reminding Ina of the honorific.

  “Indeed,” said Ina, not touching on the unspoken truth that only one of our uncles, the king of Sounis, survived. “They say her name is Agape.”

  I should have been glad that it might mean peace among our three countries, but my pleasure was more selfish. My uncle had given up his pursuit of Eddis. He would marry someone else and might soon produce an heir. My mother warned me not to put faith in rumors, but I was quite filled with hope.

  I wrote to my father, as politely as I knew how, to say that my sword work was improved and that I was sick of poetry (sick of Malatesta’s, at least). With a marriage to the queen’s cousin Agape planned, there would soon be a much more appropriate heir to replace me, and could I please come back to the mainland? I prayed to the household gods to save me from one more day on Letnos. Within a day of sending the letter, like an idiot in an old wives’ tale, I got what I asked for.

  I was crossing the courtyard of the villa, and it was as if one of Terve’s lessons had come to life. He may as well have been there, shouting, “You are suddenly attacked by fifteen men; what are you going to do?” Only they weren’t a product of Terve’s imagination; they were real men, cutting down the guards at the front gate and streaming into the courtyard of the villa.

  Terve’s first question: “Where’s your weapon?” My sword of course was in my room, upstairs at the back of the main house and as useless to me as if it had been on the moon. The men were spreading out across the courtyard toward all entrances to the house, and by the time I got to my rooms to fetch my sword it would be too late to do anything with it. Terve’s sword, I was almost certain, was still in my study under the couch where my father had thrown it in disgust when he’d seen its condition. Malatesta had taken control of my study and my books, allowing me in only for his insipid lessons; he didn’t know that the sword was there, and I doubted that the servants would have moved it. None of the armed men racing across the courtyard was headed for the study, which was just opposite from where I stood, its door open to the courtyard.

  My feet were moving in that direction before my head had finished reaching a decision. The study had a door and a window. I jumped through the open window because it was faster and fell to the stone floor on my stomach, scrabbling in the dust under the couch until my hand closed on a stiff leather strap. I dragged the sword free of its sheath with difficulty and turned, still on my knees, as a man filled the doorway. Coming from light into the dark, he was looking ahead of him, not down toward me. My lunge, as I came to my feet, took him in the chest as I drove the sword upward with the strength of my legs. Even rusted, the sword slid through him, and I found, for the first time, how easy it is to kill a man.

  Astonished, I pulled the sword free and immediately plunged it into the man behind him, who had as little warning as his fellow. I hit bone that time, but the man’s momentum drove him onto the point. It was harder to draw the sword out, but I pulled mightily, desperate to get it free.

  Terve’s second question: “What are you going to do with the weapon?” I knew what I meant to do: defend my mother and my sisters.

  The villa on Letnos is typical, with the courtyard formed on three sides by buildings of a single story—my study was on one side, close to the house. My father’s study was on the opposite. In between, facing into the courtyard, were the dormitories, the stables, and the kitchen, as well as the office of the steward and the officer of the guard.

  The fourth side of the courtyard was the main house, with a porch on the uppermost story for the women’s rooms. There was a stair in the wall that led to the roofs of the lower buildings, and a drain tile, I knew, that offered a handhold for a climb from the lower roofs to the porch. I’d taken that route before when my father was looking for me and I was avoiding him. If I hurried, I thought I might beat the men who were already in the villa, who would be making their way up the stairs inside the house. I ran across the courtyard, now empty, and climbed the steps to the roof, all according to a plan I had once laid out in response to one of Terve’s seemingly useless exercises.

  Why would anyone attack an unimportant villa, I had asked at the time, and if it was important enough to be attacked, why wouldn’t it be defended? Just pretend, he’d said.

  I climbed up and over the railing around the porch, trampling the privacy screen in the process and getting my foot stuck through it for a moment—not a part of the plan. As I rushed through the door into my mother’s rooms, the maids were screaming. I had to shout over the noise they were making, but whether she understood me or not, Ina had the sense to push shut the large wooden door at the entrance to the rooms. Someone in the hallway outside pressed the latch, and the door started to swing open, but I ran full tilt into it and slammed it closed again. There was a shout of pain from the other side, and a thump as a body struck the door. Ina grasped the latch to keep it from moving. While her small hand secured it, the metal tongue of the latch secured the door. The door shook in its frame, but it was solid, and we had as much time as the latch would give us.

  Eurydice and my mother were in the room, as well as two maids. I rushed to the door that connected my mother’s room to dressing spaces and the bedchambers. There were separate doors into the bedchambers from the corridor, and I feared to see the attackers coming through them, but the dressing room was empty. I dodged through the doorway to grab a grooming set from the tray there, then shut that door and jammed its latch with the handle of a brush.
I turned back to Ina. As she lifted her hand, I quickly jammed that latch as well. Everything, everything, as planned with Terve on an idle afternoon months before.

  Eurydice was crouched on the floor. She’d found the wedge used to hold the door when they wanted it open and was forcing it into place to help keep the door closed. Once it was secure, I looked around. The attackers could not come at us from the porch. Only my mother’s reception room opened onto the balcony, an old-fashioned way to make sure that no daughter of the house escaped for an unlicensed glimpse of the men in the courtyard below.

  My mother had hushed the maids, and in the relative quiet she said, “We heard the fighting from the porch. Darling, are they bandits?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. They were organized and all outfitted alike, and no bandits would attack a villa on Letnos. There was nothing to be stolen, and where would they go afterward? They couldn’t get off Letnos without passing the king’s ships that patrolled around it, and the patrol ships would stop anything larger than a rowboat.

  The latch wasn’t going to hold long. “I want you to hide,” I told my mother, and hustled her and my sisters and the maids out onto the balcony. When I explained what I wanted, the maids balked. My mother rolled her eyes at them and calmly stepped over the railing. She waited while I climbed down to the roof below, and then she let herself drop into my arms. Eurydice positively threw herself over the railing, laughing when I caught her. Ina pointed sternly, and the maids lowered themselves gingerly, one of them wailing softly, even after I set her on her feet.

  When all the women were safely down, I turned to find Eurydice standing at the edge of the roof.

  “Back away,” I said, “in case they send someone out of the house.” We could still hear the hammering on my mother’s door.

  Eurydice had seen the bodies on the ground, and her laughter was gone. “All the guards,” she said.

  “There’s nothing we can do for them,” I said, picking up my sword from the roof. “Bend low, so no one can see you from the courtyard.” As if herding ducks, I waved them with my hand to the outside edge of the flat roof, away from the main house, toward the spot where the peaked roof above the kitchens began.

  When they’d dug an icehouse a few years earlier, they’d put a door to it on the outside of the house wall, to make it easier to bring the ice in. The mound over the entranceway was just a few feet below the level of the roof. It was no difficulty to jump down and slither to the ground.

  “We can go up through the olive grove to the road,” said my mother.

  “No.” I shook my head again. “There might be more lookouts in the trees,” I said. It was Terve’s observation from the year before. “It will be better to hide in the icehouse until they are gone.” That was my solution. The entranceway beside us might have been bolted from the inside, but it wasn’t, because the house wasn’t defended even from thievery. There’d never been a need.

  Once inside, we barred the door behind us and went down the stairs and across the straw that covered the ice. We were underneath the steward’s office. Another set of stairs led up to a door that had a lock to keep servants out of the valuable ice. It was also unlocked. The key would be hanging in the steward’s room beside the kitchen.

  I told my mother, my sisters, and the maids to wait in the icehouse. I found the key and locked them in, then slid the key under the door to my mother. They were hidden, and they were safe. I went to rally the servants, and my ideal plan, painstakingly worked out with Terve, came to an immediate, ruinous end.

  The kitchen, too, had its own doors to the outside, to provide easy access to the kitchen gardens and the fruit trees. The room was full of servants. Everyone who had avoided the mysterious attackers had gathered there. I looked for Malatesta and, when I didn’t see him, jumped to the worst conclusion.

  There were no guards. Eurydice had been correct about the bodies she had seen. I could hear raised voices from the porch at the top of the house, and I knew that the latch on my mother’s door had given way.

  I shouted over the babble in the kitchen, “We must rally here and fight our way into the main house,” and the babble was replaced by dead silence.

  They looked at me like sheep. Or rather, like goats—just that look a goat gives you when it has decided not to cooperate and knows you can’t make it. Suddenly, I was me again, just me, the weakling who cried when his tutor whipped his fingers with a switch.

  “We have to rally here and fight,” I said again, and my voice cracked. Some of the servants slipped out the door toward the orchards. “Won’t you fight? I’ve killed two already,” I said to those who were left. Their eyes dropped. More of them sidled out the door. From the house there was no more crashing, but more shouting. They’d found my mother’s room empty. They were fanning out again to search.

  “He’s here!” The cook rushed to the door to the courtyard, shouting up toward my mother’s balcony. I lunged after him in horror. Someone grabbed at my arm, and I disengaged him with my blade. Even rusted, it bit deep. I swung it again, and those around me fell back, but the cook was still shouting to the intruders that their prize was waiting for them like a complete idiot, in the kitchen, surrounded by the people he’d thought would help him. I tried to back myself toward the door to the outside, but it was much too late to think strategically. A wall suddenly appeared on my left, rushing toward me. I turned, uncomprehending, and raised my sword, but it did little good against what turned out to be a table turned on end. By the time I understood what was happening, I was falling backward. No one, not even Pol, had ever taught me how to fight off a table.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I lay on the dirt, my hands tied behind me, my feet tied, and a bag over my head. The bag was coarsely woven and I could see a little through it. The day was bright. Men were moving around. If I hadn’t had something that smelled like a dishrag in my mouth, I would have cursed them. Impulses of rage swept over me, and I kicked with both feet and struggled against the ropes, but I never hit anything, and the ropes were unrelentingly tight.

  The servants had disarmed me neatly by squashing me flat with the table and then standing on my sword blade until someone could pry my fingers off the handle. “Sorry,” they whispered, “sorry,” through the gaps in the tabletop. I screamed at them every curse I’d ever practiced when I was alone, trying to imitate the Thief of Eddis, but I doubt I sounded anything but hysterical. When the men who had attacked the villa came in, the servants melted back against the walls. Someone pulled the table off me, and a few minutes later I was tied top and bottom, but still shouting, which is when I received the wet dishcloth in my mouth, followed by the bag over my head.

  With my own voice muffled, I could hear the men around me clearly. They hadn’t found my mother and my sisters.

  “All right,” said a voice obviously in charge, “kill all the servants and fire the building.”

  They’d carried me away, screaming into the cloth stuffing my mouth, and tied me, stomach down, onto the back of a donkey that had gone at an agonizing trot for long enough that I’d lost track of time, thinking of my mother and my sisters and the maids patiently waiting for me in the cool dark of the ice cellar, unaware of their danger until the burning villa above crashed in upon them. We reached an unknown stopping point, where I was lifted down and left on the ground while people carried on with some business nearby.

  “He’s still kicking,” someone commented above me. “I am surprised. I thought he was more like our Hyacinth here.”

  I froze and heard someone, Hyacinth, I had no doubt, gasp in horror. It was certainly his voice I heard next. “You were not to tell him!”

  I thought of Malatesta, whom I had accused in my head of being a traitor to my family. He was probably dead at the villa, while Hyacinth had never even crossed my mind.

  Several people above laughed. The first voice I had heard, and the one who ordered the firing of the villa, said, “There, that has stopped him kicking.” The voice was clos
er, as if he were bending over me, and I sat up as quickly as I could, hoping that the hard part of my head might connect with his face, but either I missed, or he jumped back in time. I hit nothing and had to drop back to the ground, my stomach aching.

  The men around me laughed again. “Get that thing off his head,” their leader said.

  Once the hood was off and the gag out of my mouth, I could see that I was near the shore, on a level spot on a hillside, looking over the water. Behind me, the hill rose higher. Below me, it steepened and dropped to the ring road that circled the island. In the distance, down the coast, I could see the curve of the headland that hid the city of Letnos.

  There were more people around me than I had expected, and they seemed to be making no effort at concealment. I glanced quickly at each of them, still expecting Malatesta, but there was no sign of him. I should have looked for their leader, but I was caught staring at Hyacinth, who was nearby wringing his hands. “You helped them?”

  “Not by much,” said the heavyset man on my left. His was the voice I had heard giving orders. “He described the villa for us and told us where the family was most likely to be at that time of the day.”

  “He wasn’t supposed to know,” Hyacinth cheeped pathetically. Turning to me, he said, “I didn’t want you to know. You didn’t have to.”

  “I see,” I said calmly. “Can I get up?”

  The stocky man lifted me to my feet easily. He turned out to be somewhat shorter than I was, once I was standing. His skin was dark and rough from long days spent in the open. He was about my father’s age and showed signs of a similar life of violence. He crouched to cut through the ropes around my ankles, then lifted the rope to the bonds on my wrists and hesitated. “There are too many of us to fight, young prince.”