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Costis was in trouble and it was all the king’s fault.
This was not an unusual circumstance for Costis. Recently his daily life and continued service in the Queen’s Guard had been condensed down to the whims of his king.
Costis could imagine the king’s eyes if he ever accused him of being the fulcrum around which the whole of his existence turned, he could imagine his smile. Smug, but with a hidden melancholy that would truly only ever be revealed in moments of extreme physical distress or inebriation. And even then Costis would never be able to tell if he was seeing the true Eugenides. If he even existed at all.
An occupational hazard, I’m afraid, the king would tell Costis. The utter erosion of one’s personality. It would be a joke, of course, because everything the king said was a joke. Just as everything he said was devastatingly serious.
Costis had picked up the bad habit of this over the last few months--holding conversations with the king inside his own head. Here he could say things to Eugenides he would never dare in the waking world, could take him to account for the hundreds of frustrations he had inflicted on his life. But the king in Costis’s head could never measure up to Eugenides himself, could never possibly fathom the wandering, branching corridors of his machinations. So all of it was--like so many of Costis’s recent struggles--ultimately useless.
For instance, like moments such as these when all the one-sided conversations in the world would not get him out of his situation. And he couldn’t ask the true king, because the true king was not here.
A barracks boy had arrived at Costis’s room with a summons to attend the king in the queen’s chambers. An odd request, odder still that it was delivered so late at night, but Eugenides was wont to request Costis’s presence for anything from fending off assassins to helping him tie the laces on his boots. Perhaps he was in his cups and simply wanted someone to annoy.
But when Costis arrived he found the outer room unoccupied except by a single pair of guardsmen, one of whom nodded Costis through. He took that as assurance that he was expected, but when he entered he found the inner rooms empty. The queen’s solar was vacant. Costis had only ever been here during the day, and only then with the king and his attendants, and it was strange to see the soft, low couches unoccupied by women. The weaving basket sat in a lonely lump beside the table.
Costis was not renowned for his quick wit or his grasp of politics, but enough time spent with the king had given him a keen sense of when he was being played with. Or used. And being summoned to the queen’s chambers in the dead of night with no witnesses, sounded like an excellent opportunity to get his head on a stick, and that stick on the battlements. He would not be surprised if the guards in the front room were a part of it. If he sought out the barracks boy who had delivered the message, he would most likely have conveniently forgotten about the incident. That, or he might not have been a barracks boy at all. Costis was so accustomed to being summoned by the king he had not even bothered to read the message for himself. Lazy. Stupid. He needed to get out of here before things got very, very bad.
But before he could make his escape, his escape was cut off. Which was, of course, most likely what his enemies intended.
From the outer room he heard the queen’s voice. He panicked.
What he should have done was throw himself on her mercy. Go to her to explain himself before she had him tossed into the dungeon with no hope of a trial. What he did instead was to turn tail and run in the opposite direction, his reptile brain harrying him into flight. And because the gods seemed bent on turning Costis’s life into an endless farce, this meant running straight into the queen’s darkened bedchamber.
This was a poor tactical decision, and Costis knew it. He clutched at his belt, instincts convinced that he could muscle his way out of this situation. He wasn’t wearing his sword; no weapons were permitted into the inner keep. The queen’s voice came closer.
He made an aborted motion toward the window, but it was the long, narrow sort designed to let in plenty of light, but not large, desparate guardsman.
Until he met the king, Costis had never much considered his own physical shortcomings. The career he’d taken, the style of fighting he had honed, they were all more than suited to broad shoulders and large hands. But from watching the king he had gained a new appreciation for a slighter build, for quick, deft fingers that could finesse locks and find holds in seemingly smooth stone. He finally understood the poets’ obsession for the lithe bodies they praised.
Not that any poet would dare think of the king that way, not after what had happened to the last man foolish enough to write a bawdy song. Costis might be one of the only people who knew the truth of the Sejanus affair, but that didn’t make him any more likely to cross him.
All of this was to the point that Costis was now lamenting his size as he quickly examined and discarded possible sources of escape. He could not fit through the window or under the bed. The queen’s voice drew closer, until there was nothing but a single closed door between Costis and his monarch. There was no chance of rescue, no possible explanation for his presence here. He sent up a silent prayer to his god, opened the door to the wardrobe, and quite unceremoniously shoved himself inside.
There, amidst a jungle of linen and silk, he listened to the queen open the chamber door and bid her women goodnight. In the dark Costis held his breath, heartbeat throbbing, palms slick with fear. The queen moved around the room, rustling, no doubt removing jewels and--Costis felt unsteady at the very thought--her clothes. It did strike him as odd that she would leave her attendants outside without first being helped out of her gown, but what did Costis know of a woman’s dressing habits, let alone a queen’s? Attolia, after all, enjoyed the use of both of her hands.
Carefully, infinitely carefully, Costis eased his weight forward, taking it off his back leg before it went numb. Honestly, it wouldn’t matter if he was crippled or not when led to the gallows, but it did hurt a great deal in the moment. The wood groaned, and Costis was filled with the need to throttle whatever son of a bitch had sold the queen of Attolia a creaky wardrobe.
The gods must have heeded his pleas, because Attolia coughed just as the wardrobe creaked. The cough became an exasperated exhalation, which became quick steps across the room, her bare feet pattering like raindrops. The wardrobe was open a crack, enough to watch the queen draw the sash back, allowing her husband the king to step in through the open window.
“One day you are going to be shot down by your own guards,” Attolia said.
“Teleus only posts the very simple guards on the east wing.” Eugenides landed on the stones without a sound. “And the very loyal.”
Costis’s throat went tight. His usual post was on the east wing.
“It doesn’t matter how loyal they are if they happen to glance up and see a skinny monster in dirty boots stuck to the wall. Any gods-fearing man would panic.”
The king took both the queen’s hands in his single one. “Such are the risks I am willing to take for my wife and jailer.” His eyes flickered briefly to the wardrobe and a fresh pit of fear opened up inside Costis. But the king walked straight past to the decanted bottle on the table, and Costis breathed again. Silently.
He was exceedingly glad he had not attempted to escape through the window. Even if he had managed to somehow force himself through it, he would then have emerged face to face with the king, who would have just witnessed Costis crawling out of his wife’s bedchamber in the dead of night.
But now he was trapped, because this had all the markings of a rendezvous, and certainly would not be adjourned any time soon. Perhaps not until morning. The king poured wine for the queen and then for himself. She took her cup, and instead of moving to the other chair she sat herself on the arm of the king’s, her leg resting against his side.
Costis should announce himself. He thought that maybe with the king here, he had a slightly higher chance of making it through the night alive.
The king said something to make the queen laugh, and not the typical reserved chuckle she occasionally lavished on a particularly solicitous courtier. A full, round laugh of pure delight. Costis did not know she was capable of a sound like that.
It struck Costis, here, stuffed into a wardrobe and slowly suffocating on his own shallow, panicked breaths, that the man and woman who ruled his country were made of flesh and blood. They were like him. To a certain extent he’d known this about Eugenides, at least. He’d felt his blood on his hands, held him warm and drunk and breathless on the rooftop. But the queen…
Attolia had always been a monolith in his mind, a perfect, shining creature to worship and protect. The was good--that was what a queen should be to her guard. But she was a woman, younger than Costis himself, who everyday bore up under the impossible things asked of her. She was very much in love with her husband, and for the sake of her country could not let that fact be widely known.
Eugenides had called Attolia his “jailer”, and Costis had heard him express such sentiments before. He had no desire to be king--as the thief of Eddis, palace life was in direct opposition to everything he was. He was a tiger trapped in a very small cage, surrounded by spectators who every so often would prod him for sport. It would be a simple thing for Eugenides to leave, just vanish in the night, away from the suffocating life he despised. But he would never leave the queen
Costis felt an acute tug of resistance at the idea of interrupting them, even though watching was sinful, an imposition into the privacy of two people who so rarely had the luxury. In the soft light of the lamp they glowed as if they had been carved from living marble, and Costis didn’t know which one of them was more beautiful. Attolia with her grace, her classical features, her cold grandeur that held the viewer spellbound, or Eugenides with his smooth, sly warmth.
The king brushed his hand over the queen’s cheek, and kissed her.
Costis’s face blazed hot.
The king picked the queen up, false hand supporting her back, nightgown cascading over his arm like a wedding train. He carried her to the bed and out of Costis’s line of sight, but they were still barely a yard away--the queen’s rooms were opulent but not large--so he could still hear them.
Cold horror bloomed up. Costis was about to overhear Eugenides, his king, perform husbandly duties on his wife, the queen. There was not an inch of Costis that was not drenched in fear sweat.
He was not a stranger to the act. Any number of acts, in fact. His first night out with the guard had culminated in an ill-advised trip to a notorious brothel in the city, where a number of men and women had been happy to relieve him of his tension, and of his salary. He was also quite accustomed to pretending he could not hear things when he could; the walls in the barracks were not thick, and many spaces were separated only by thin curtains. But this was not two recruits trysting in a storeroom.
He didn’t want to hear, but of course he could not make any noise to drown out the sounds. So he heard everything. Not that they were unusually loud, but every soft breath, every creak of the bed frame bloomed new pictures across Costis’s vision. His cheeks burned and he begged the gods for fortitude.
“Help,” he mouthed soundlessly, unsure of who he was even praying to.
With a sinking feeling, he realized that there was truly no way out of this. Even if he did manage to remain silent and still throughout the night, in the morning one of the queen’s women would open the wardrobe in search of a fresh gown, and would instead find the stiff corpse of a guard, because by that time his overworked heart would surely have exploded.
Better to get it over with.
Steeling himself, he pushed open the wardrobe door. The light danced shakily over the scene on the bed--Attolia, her skirts rucked up like a tavern girl’s, the king with his shirt unlaced to his naval, sleeves trailing. The difference in his false hand and the healthy tan of his skin was starkly brutal.
They were both looking straight at Costis.
“I know I’m a foreigner,” the king said mildly. “So I might not be aware of the traditions of Attolian courtship. Tell me, my dear, do they involve spending half an hour in an armoire sweating like a pig?”
“Only on feast days.” The queen seemed unphased by the sudden emergence of a member of her guard. “Might I remind you that he is your project?”
“Your majesties--.” Costis’s throat closed up. They both waited, but he did not know what to say. “How--.” He dragged in a hollow breath. “Why--.”
“Tell me, Costis,” the king said affably, as if they were playing each other at cards. “What possessed you to make us wait on your pleasure while you spent quality time with Irene’s gowns? Was the message not clear enough?”
Costis sputtered. “You, you weren’t here, Your Majesty, and I thought--.”
Eugenides’s gaze sharpened. “And you thought someone was playing your for a fool.”
“More than a fool, Your Majesty,” Costis said. A dead man, more like.
Eugenides sighed. “Whatever kills you, Costis, it will not be me. Eventually, death will find you, but I will not be the one tying the noose.”
It was no binding contract. Costis could not use it in a tribunal--but the king told me when he was half out of his clothes that no harm will befall me! It nevertheless struck a deep, ringing cord in him.
Tell me you won’t cut off my other hand, rip out my tongue.
Attolia said, of course I won’t.
Costis had been a soldier for years, but even he could not imagine a life when the greatest show of affection could be the promise of an end to pain.
“You knew I was there all along?”
Attolia smirked, burying the sound of her laugh in the king’s shoulder.
“Then--why?”
Attolia and Eugenides made the same face--amused patience, a teacher enjoying the adorable attempts of a young student. Costis wondered who learned it from whom. Maybe they both developed it independently.
“Costis,” the king said. “You’re a man of the world.”
“I’ve never been out of Attolia, Your Majesty.” He immediately shut his eyes in mortification. “I mean, I’m not sure what--.”
“Costis,” the king said again. “Come here and kiss me.”
A fortnight ago in the training ring, Costis had taken a direct hit from the flat of his opponent’s blade. It had left him laid out on his back, out of breath and stunned. He had been surprised by the attack, no doubt--otherwise it would not have connected. But at the same time he had been unsurprised, because he was sparring, and that was what happened when you sparred--you got hit.
That was what Costis felt now. The blunt force trauma of the king’s words ringing like a bell through his blood. But at the same instant, it came as no shock at all. In the training ring there was the threat of injury, and with Eugenides there was the threat of...something else. An energy, a tension. Costis had the impression, occasionally, that he was being offered a hand in a dance the steps of which were a mystery to him.
He turned to the queen, sure that his own shock would be mirrored in her, but she was watching Costis as well. One of her brows went up. “I believe your king gave you an order, guardsman.”
Costis’s heart leapt up in his throat. He knew Attolian kings took concubines, but not guards, and not in the presence of the queen. But then again Eugenides had never behaved like a king--not in public, and not in private.
Costis had taken one uneasy step to the bed when Eugenides said, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, Costis.” His voice was soft, and he put a quelling hand on Attolia’s arm. They both may have been drunker than the half-empty bottle of wine on the table might suggest.
Costis locked up. That question had not even entered his mind. Did he want to? He was overrun with thoughts of the inappropriateness of it all, the irregularity. But everything these two did was irregular.
Did he want to kiss the king?
He’d never asked himself that. Or the queen either, but that was reasonable. That would be like imagining touching the sun--impossible and self-destructive. Even looking in its direction would cause him harm. But where Attolia was a closed door, Eugenides was a curtain covering an entranceway that occasionally twitched in the breeze, giving him a view of what was inside.
He took another step. Then another. He braced for the inevitable moment when the joke would be revealed, when the king would break into laughter and tell him it had all been a lesson in gullibility. A lesson Costis sorely needed, clearly, because the way Eugenides was looking at him scattered heat over his skin, made him feel keenly aware of his body but also like he was watching it from outside. Watching himself get closer and closer to the queen of Attolia’s bedside.
They shifted to make room for him, Attolia drawing her legs up under her and Eugenides’s posture opened like a flower. He sat in his throne with lazy indifference, artfully posed to look like he had no interest in the proceedings but that, like every other aspect of his public life, was carefully crafted to manipulate a viewer. This was not like that. This was the king opening himself up, offering himself to Costis’s touch.
Costis was not sure how to proceed. All the liaisons he’d had in the past had been with whores or fellow soldiers, neither of which sat there demurely waiting for him to come to them. Often inebriation was involved, on his side at the very least. He was suddenly aware of how clumsy and large his hands were.
“Kiss me,” the king said again, so Costis did, the king’s voice compelling him forward, the instinctual drive to follow orders and put himself at his sovereign’s disposal. He cupped the king’s cheek with rough fingers, momentarily surprised by how delicate the structure of his face felt. He braced himself for the knife in his gut, the lash falling on his back as the gods punished him for such an indiscretion, but all he felt was the king’s soft exhalation of surprised pleasure, as if he’d had doubts that Costis would want to do this. That Costis wanted him.
The king’s mouth parted hot and sudden, all the tension in his body melting away as Costis propped a knee up on the side of the bed, crawling closer. He was balanced precariously, and he had to let go of Eugenides almost at once to grab at the bedpost.
“I forgot about your graceful nature,” the king laughed against Costis’s chin. He maneuvered himself further up the bed, pulling Costis along with him. Costis followed, feeling like he was being brought into foreign territory. With one foot on the ground he could still tell himself he had an escape route, even if that was far from the truth.
The king kissed him again, nudging Costis’s hands until they went back to cupping his face, tracing his thumbs across sharp cheeks.
Well, I am already damned, Costis thought, and kissed him harder. He closed his eyes and focused on the hard pound of his pulse, the way feeling the king under his hands stirred up an odd tension of protectiveness and the need to assert himself, to lay the king down and kiss him breathless and gasping.
“Costis.” The king muttered something else, possibly in a language Costis didn’t know, possibly just nonsense. One could never tell with the king. He made a soft, yielding sound, a little gasp, and Costis realized that he’d wrapped the fingers of one hand into the king’s hair, mussed it into a disaster of curls. He eased up on his grip, but the king grabbed for his wrist, keeping his hand where it was.
“Yes, like that,” the king muttered when Costis dared the slightest little tug. He tugged harder and Eugenides bit down on his bottom lip with a hungry sound that did light, fizzy things to Costis’s insides.
The queen shifted on the end of the bed, reminding Costis that he was kissing a man in the presence of his wife. Nervousness spiked inside him, a trembling anxiety that threatened the spreading warmth. He tried to pull away, until he king made a sound of negation and held him tighter.
“It’s alright,” he said against Costis’s mouth. “It’s alright,” again and again, like he was soothing a spooked horse. “She trusts you.”
And so do I.
Eugenides didn’t say it, but every inch of his body was shouting it, how he pressed up against Costis, the slow, hesitant twitches of his muscles as they slowly untensed. The king did not drop his guard around anyone, and Costis was sure that if the moment called for it he could spring into action, grab for the knife that he doubtless had stashed on him somewhere, regardless of being mostly undressed. But he didn’t. He would never have to. Because Costis was here, and Costis would never hurt him. Either of them. And he knew it. That trust, that confidence, it almost felt better than the slow, hypnotic way the king rocked up into him, the increasingly more frustrated motions of his hips.
“Your Majesty--.”
“Call me Gen.”
Behind them, Attolia made a soft noise. It might have been surprise, it might have been approval. Costis was in no state to discern. “Your Majesty--.”
“I said--.”
“Gen.” He could barely force it past his teeth, years of conditioning silencing it down to a throaty whisper. He cupped the king’s face, tracing the edge of his smile with a thumb. “Gen.”