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Chapter Text

The Queen’s Garden of Attolia was, Hector had to admit, beautiful. The warmer, more humid climate of the southeastern lowlands was able to nurture far more delicate plants than the mountains could: while his niece’s gardens boasted artful arrangements of hardy vines and were dusted with vivid color where small blooms peeked through, here the planters were boisterous with color, full of large flowers and broad leaves that would have dried up and blown away in colder climates and fiercer winds.

There was a message in the fact that this garden was just as lovely and well-tended as any part of the King’s Garden of Attolia. Hector had seen quite a bit of that garden, shadowing his queen as she walked through it with her husband and thoroughly checking over parts of it to ensure that they were safe for the pair to wander alone when they wanted to do so. The King’s Garden was both a display for important guests and the preferred retreat of the queen of Attolia, while the Queen’s Garden, in another reversal of Attolian royal tradition, had been Gen’s retreat ever since the assassination attempt years ago. The two gardens were tended and beautified with equal zeal. Whatever they may have originally thought of him, the servants of the palace now loved their king no less than their queen.

Hector found the cushioned bench that Gen had given him directions to. It had a deep seat and a high back and was long enough to hold three people sitting, or one short person lying down for a nap. After a brief consideration, Hector settled himself carefully onto one end of it. There was no one coming that he would need to rise and greet. The Queen’s Garden, unlike the King’s, was reserved for the sole use of royal family and their explicitly invited guests, which explained why Gen had suggested it as a place where his father could “rest awhile, out of the way, and not be disturbed.” Hector had acquiesced to his son’s unsubtle hint that the sudden tensions between Eddis and Attolia would cool more quickly if Hector got “out of the way.” He recalled the poisonously furious look Attolia had given him on the palace steps. The last time he’d seen a look that was anything like that had been on his own queen’s face, when she’d asked her council of ministers if they would support war with Attolia. He could too easily imagine the exact same war starting anew, in reverse, just as stupid as it had been the first time but infinitely more costly.

She loves him. Hector had known this. The queens of Eddis and Attolia were close enough now to be true friends, and his niece had no doubts that Attolia loved Gen as fiercely as Gen loved her. That, Hector did not quite believe, but he accepted that Attolia loved his son as much as she was capable of loving anything. He knew – he was perhaps the only person outside of the monarchy of the Hephestian Peninsula who knew – that Attolia had chosen marriage freely after Eddis had offered her a different way to secure the peace treaty between their two countries. He’d heard of the Attolian barons’ recent plot to weaken their king, of how Eugenides’s threat to abdicate his throne had been swiftly followed by Attolia’s threat to do the same and to follow her husband wherever he went. He’d even seen Gen and his wife share the kind of silent, tender, infinitely knowing look that people only shared if they were profoundly in love with each other and had been for some time. He’d merely thought that whatever affection Attolia felt could coexist just fine with an absolute lack of concern for Gen’s well-being.

Hector sighed slowly and leaned back into the cushions. He ached all over. His knee hurt nearly as much as the bruise on his chest where Gen had first struck. None of his ribs were broken, but two of them might have been fractured. At least Gen’s ribs wouldn’t be similarly fractured. Hector’s head throbbed. He had to stop getting kicked in the head in Attolian megarons.

The bench stood at the top of a small rise, and from it, Hector could see the edge of a little pond below, where a conveniently placed log formed an attractive resting spot for waterfowl, fixed in place and shaded by the branches above. The alcove his bench was in was similarly shaded, hidden on three sides and from above by a combination of trees and vines. He could see why Gen favored this spot enough that some tender of the garden came and put cushions on the bench whenever the weather was fine.

Footsteps crunched just loudly enough on the gravel path to be heard over the pounding of his head. Hector turned to look in their direction and was surprised – although, considering the location, he should not have been surprised – to see the queen of Attolia appear from around the corner of a hedge.

He tried not to groan as he rose to his feet.

Attolia stilled. Her face transformed into a mask of fury. She was alone, and Hector realized why the queen was wandering the garden alone right now at the same time that, going by the shift in her expression from pure fury to fury heavily tinged with annoyance, the queen realized why her father-in-law was also here.

Attolia made one abortive step backwards. She didn’t continue. It must have sunk in for her almost as quickly as it had for Hector that if this attempt to force a private conversation between Hector and Attolia didn’t work, then Eugenides would simply try again, and again, and again, and again. Hector wondered what lie Gen had fed his terrifying wife to get her to come walk alone in this part of her garden. It must have been good.

Hector inclined his head politely to the queen. “Your Majesty.” He managed to keep his voice neutral, having gotten rather a lot of practice at that since Helen had ordered him to stop glaring at Attolia as though he wanted to pitch her off the Sacred Mountain. He gestured to the bench, offering the queen the opposite end of it.

Attolia gave him a look of intense distaste but accepted. He seated himself once she had. They were both quiet for some time, watching a young bird waddle up the submerged portion of the log in the pond to join its fellows on the log’s dry end, before Attolia breathed sharply and said, “If he dies, the union between our three countries dissolves.”

Hector did not know whether she meant it as a reminder of the wording of the oaths that bound Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia together, or as a threat of war.

He nodded quietly. “He will recover,” he told her, as soon as he could be sure that those would be the words to come out of his mouth, rather than “He’s survived far worse.”

“He had a fever three days ago,” Attolia snapped. “He’s only up because it’s all but impossible to keep him down and because he swore he would stick to diplomatic work for a week.”

Hector snorted. That oath, Gen had technically not violated. The rest, Hector couldn’t disagree with: he remembered having to sit by his son’s bedside for hours at a time in the weeks after Eugenides had brought home the Gift, making sure Gen didn’t break Galen’s prescription of bedrest. The first time his son had come back from Attolia nearly dead.

Attolia’s frown sharpened in response to his snort. “If his fever returns, and he catches a new infection on top of it …”

“He will be kept in bed,” Hector finished. He heard the frustration in his own voice but didn’t know whether, or how, to explain that it wasn’t frustration with Attolia. The trial had been half a step above a farce, if that, and Gen should have quit far sooner. He’d already proven enough to his peers. There had been no good to come of his fighting on. But the Thieves of Eddis stood closer to the gods than most did, and they became stubbornly loath to break sacred oaths at the most inconvenient times. Hector had once read the account that the queen of Eddis had made her cousin write describing his theft of Hamiathes’s Gift, and he’d reminded Gen now and then that if Gen truly meant to hold fast to his oaths to the gods, then he had to stop enacting abysmally stupid plans. Evidently, Gen found that particular oath permissible to break. But not the oath of the trial.

“He will not,” said Attolia. She struggled for a deep breath, then added coolly, “Your queen and I worded her and Sounis’s oaths of loyalty with care. Eugenides is the only thing holding this alliance together, and he knows it, and he has not been resting, nor taking care with his health, and he intends to fight in the battles –”

“He can’t, now,” Hector interrupted to point out.

Attolia stopped. She looked down at the pond below and kept looking at it, her hands clasped neatly and tightly together in her lap, for a minute before she asked, once again cool, “That was your plan?”

Hector grunted. She turned to look at him, and he acquiesced enough to shake his head.

“You did not tell your queen,” she remarked. It was such a Helen way of phrasing the accusation. Hector realized the two queens must have already spoken. That meant that civil war in the Hephestian Peninsula had been averted, at least.

Hector grunted.

“Did you tell Gen?” Attolia asked more quietly, and the question surprised him enough that he turned to face her fully.

Attolia read his face before he could say anything. “No,” the queen interpreted, her voice soft, and he shook his head to confirm.

“He was behind it, then,” Attolia said evenly. Then she dropped her face into her hands and swore. Hector raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t heard that curse before in the mouth of any Attolian, let alone that of their calmly and remotely polite queen. She sounded almost Eddisian.

It took a moment longer for him to realize that Attolia was not talking about the trial itself. By this point, it was already blindingly retrospectively obvious that Eugenides had known the trial was coming. If Gen had not gotten his advance information about the trial from his cousin or from his father, though, then he had not directly gotten it from any Eddisian, which meant he had collected all the information that he needed in order to plan around the trial through covert means, which meant …

Internally, Hector echoed Attolia’s curse.

He should have seen it. He should have seen it long before now. He’d been shadowing his court’s bastard of a Mede ambassador in all the free time he’d had while not bolstering his country’s preparedness for war, waiting to catch that ambassador committing a fault grievous enough to justify ousting him and his poisonous gossip from the court, when that poisonous gossip had not been originating from him at all. He should have noticed. He should have remembered how long Gen had known that Therespides was happy to take gold from Attolia’s former spymaster. He should have guessed that being busy dealing with the Attolian court as its king would not stop Gen from continuing to try and redirect all of the more dangerous tensions of the Eddisian court as well. He knew his son.

The queen of Attolia evidently knew his son better.

Attolia continued to sit like that, head in hands, and Hector studied her. Her dress was bright and elaborately embroidered, though less so than her husband’s clothes tended to be. Her intricately braided hair had gray strands in it, he realized. She was older than his own queen was, though still young, and the gray strands of hair were sparse enough and had been arranged carefully enough that from a greater distance, they either looked like places where her hair caught the light or were invisible entirely.

Maybe it was just Attolia’s personal experience of having ruled her country alone before being joined by a king that had made her jump so quickly from the realization that Gen had known far in advance about the trial to the realization that he’d been deliberately turning the Eddisians against himself and toward their own newly married, newly sworn-to-a-high-king queen. But likely not. There were few people who could play the kinds of games Gen played, even fewer who were still alive, but the queen of Attolia was one of them. Hector remembered her sitting tall on the throne at Ephrata, playing her former Mede ambassador so thoroughly for a fool that she had managed to accept another man’s marriage proposal – not to mention plot a joint military maneuver against the Mede – right in front of that ambassador without his either noticing or suspecting a thing. That moment when the prospect of her and Eugenides being married had gained an entirely new dimension of “terrifying.”

Hector sighed. There were few things that Gen had inherited from his father, but the capacity to fall madly in love with the worst possible choice of spouse had been one of them, and the poisonous, scheming queen of Attolia had drawn him in likely without meaning to at all. And Gen, to Hector’s eternal frustration, had never been one to give up on something just because it caused him pain or threatened to cost him his life.

Hector swallowed his frustration and said, “They will respect him as Annux now.” It was the only consolation he could think of to offer.

“If he lives,” Attolia qualified his statement, lifting her head up and returning her hands to her lap.

The queen of Attolia’s voice and gaze were both so accusing that when Hector again replied, “He will recover,” he didn’t quite manage to stop himself from adding, “fully.”

Attolia did not flinch, in that her body did not move. It instead became still, stone-like, empty of expression. Tense in the way that anyone who had trained for years not to let others read their emotions tensed when they drew on that training. Hector glanced instinctively at her hands, remembering how they often continued to move when the rest of her had stilled. They clutched protectively at her belly. Hector supposed he had let his “I want to pitch you off the Sacred Mountain” expression slip out. Obedient to his own queen, he tried to reign it back in. He’d just about succeeded when the realization struck him as suddenly as lightning: Attolia’s hands had moved to protect her belly.

Oh gods. What a time for the queen of Attolia to be pregnant. Did Gen know? “Does Gen know?”

Attolia raised a laconic eyebrow at him. “What?”

Hector gestured at her stomach.

The queen froze again. Not expressionless this time. She twitched, swallowed, and smoothed out her skirts with both hands. “No.” She managed to answer evenly, despite her expression. “When the march has been organized, and the work of getting three armies organized under one banner is done. I will let him know then.”

Meaning, Hector thought, that she would tell her king once it was too late for him to send her home from the field of battle.

Hector frowned. He was not the father of her husband and the uncle of one of the few friends she confided in for nothing. All of Attolia knew that her first miscarriage had been bad. He knew how bad. Sternly, because he did mean it, however grudgingly, he told her, “Our peninsula cannot afford for you to take risks with your life, either.”

“I didn’t plan this,” she snapped. Her father-in-law raised his eyebrows, and she flushed and looked away.

“In Eddis,” Hector said as gently as he could manage, knowing that the country of Attolia had no tradition of female warriors whose wisdom its queen could draw on, “when a woman away at war realizes that she is with child, she returns home to bear her child safely.” He drew up more words in his mind, about the diseases that pervade warcamps and the dangers to a pregnant woman of having to move camp night after night, but Attolia cut in before he could get them out.

“You expect your queen to return to her mountains and leave her people to face the Medes without her?” She raised one eyebrow as Hector stared at her. “Or have you not noticed how she and Sounis swoon around each other like a pair of drunk pitneens?”

Hector had not, in fact, in all of his warplans, considered that Helen might become pregnant and not do the sensible thing and go home.

Attolia plowed on. “She will not. Being home would not be much safer for her, and far less so for me, if the Medes overcome our armies. And we cannot issue orders from so far away. Which of you has turned back a Mede army before?”

He grunted. Both times the Mede had landed on their shores before, the battle plans that had driven them back had largely come from Attolia. Her clandestine alliance-forming and her army’s perfect, rapid splitting and regrouping maneuver had convinced Nahuseresh to remove his troops from her shores with next to no bloodshed; her coaching of the then-uncrowned king of Sounis and her insistence on landing the Attolian relief troops at Oneia had combined into a battle strategy so effective that it had beaten back a Mede force three times as large as the one they’d expected would land in Sounis. He suspected that she’d had no small part in forming the plot that had demolished the Mede navy, either, even if the lion’s share of its masterminding had been done by Gen. He’d respected her as a military leader long before any of that. It had not been only for his son’s sake that he’d abstained from voting to start a war against her after she’d sent Gen home maimed and all but dead.

But as daunting as the prospect of Attolia’s absence from the strategy tent when they faced a Mede army of seventy thousand was, the fact remained that the three-way alliance that gave the Hephestian Peninsula its only hope of staving off the Mede Empire was fixed in Eugenides, and the thing that bound Eugenides to a duty he wholeheartedly hated was not ambition or a sense of responsibility or any of his sacred oaths to gods who didn’t hesitate to betray him, but the woman Hector was looking at.

He couldn’t contest the fact that Attolia’s staying home would be a dire blow for their side. Instead, he breathed deeply and admitted, “Dying of miscarriage on the field would be the cruelest thing you’ve done to him.”

The queen of Attolia merely raised an eyebrow at that. “I cut off his hand.”

Hector would have expected it to be a relief that she wouldn’t mince words about it, but the ease with which she said it chilled him. He ignored his shiver and nodded, then added, in order to drive his previous point home, “And tortured him nearly to death.”

At this, the queen did look away, so he left the last bit, And sent him back so ill you must have expected him to die anyway, unsaid. The unspoken words still made his blood roar. Like always. He’d considered before – because Helen and likely Gen himself believed it – but had discarded the idea that Attolia had sent the Thief home alive because she hadn’t wanted him to die. Regardless of whether Gen’s infections had been part of her hopes from the beginning or merely a welcome surprise, she’d taken the opportunity they'd provided her to return Gen technically alive but unlikely to stay that way. Eddis had been forced to release the Aracthus for Attolia but to suffer the loss of her Thief anyway. It had been a miracle that Gen had eventually recovered, if never fully.

Attolia’s present worries about what Gen’s injuries from the trial would do to his ability to survive any disease he might catch were hardly an argument in her favor. Her renowned cruelty may have been political calculation rather than the personal indulgence she’d once made it out to be, but it had always been calculated for maximum effect, not for minimum damage. Attolia could have hanged the Thief when she caught him and have accomplished the same effect of redirecting the old Sounis’s expansionist efforts away from Attolia and towards Eddis, but what she’d chosen to do instead had gained her both that and the waters of the Aracthus and had left the young queen of Eddis unwilling to ever send a spy directly into Attolia’s megaron again. If Attolia had truly hoped that Gen would survive, she would at least have waited until he was well enough to travel before sending him home.

The queen of Attolia nodded, still facing the pond, and quietly explained, “It was the belief of some of my advisers that war with Eddis was inevitable by that point.”

Hector clenched his teeth. “We thought you were treating with the Medes,” he grumbled.

“I was not,” said Attolia.

“Gen thought you weren’t.”

The queen paused, whatever further justification she’d been about to offer temporarily forgotten. She closed her mouth and looked at Hector with both eyebrows raised.

He explained, “He was trying to prove that you weren’t.”

Attolia fell silent for some time. The wind blew gently, playing with the leaves around the bench and with the few loose strands of the queen’s hair. When she did speak, her voice was a whisper barely louder than the wind. “He never told me.”

Of course he hadn’t. He loved her. By now, Attolia must have realized, as Hector himself had once realized, that one of the secretive Thieves revealing their abilities to you didn’t mean threat: it meant trust. If it had once taken Hector, a childhood friend of the Thief-in-training and a loyal brother of Eddis, several months to realize the Queen Thief’s terrifying demonstrations to him were flirtation and not inexplicable threat, he could hardly blame Attolia, an as-far-as-she-knew personal enemy of the Thief and a bitter rival of Eddis, for reading the wrong meaning into the notes and gifts Gen left for her in the most frightening of places. Hector did not think anyone else even in the Eddisian court had realized that Gen had fallen for the Attolian queen. He had, but he’d assumed his son’s last encounter with her had cured him of that. He should have known better.

If Attolia did love Gen now, then realizing what the mementos he’d left for her had actually meant must have been painful enough. They hadn’t been personal enemies, whatever she’d thought at the time. Gen wouldn’t have told her that they hadn’t been political enemies, either.

Gen likely wouldn’t thank his father for telling this to her, but at the moment, listening to the queen calmly explain her reasoning for torturing the captured Thief, Hector didn’t care. If he could somehow guilt his daughter-in-law into not marching pregnant to war, all the better. Although if Attolia was enough like Gen to enjoy being married to him, Hector doubted he’d succeed.

The queen looked at him, the crease between her eyebrows just pronounced enough to betray pain. He gestured for her to continue what she’d been saying before. She shook her head to herself and did.

“We knew Eddis was learning to produce her own cannon,” she began. “We did not know how well or how quickly. I’d guessed that what Stenides was up to in the Greater Peninsula was learning how to accelerate Eddis’s cannon production. I should have realized what a temptation trying to get information about your cannon from his brother would be.”

Hector started in surprise. As far as he was aware, all that Gen had known at the time was that Sten was touring different universities on the Greater Peninsula. Kingdoms often took great pains to keep their weapons manufacturing knowledge from leaving their borders, and Sten hadn’t wanted to worry his little brother. Was that how Gen had found out the truth? He felt sick.

It was at least a minute before the pulsing of Hector’s head dimmed enough that he took note of the phrasing Attolia had used. He faced her – she was still not looking at him – and asked, “You didn’t order it?” as mildly as he could. Which was not very mildly.

Attolia glanced at him once, sharply, then turned away again. Hector’s breath caught. It was the same thing Gen did, down to the expression and the timing, when he felt he was about to be accused of something unfairly.

“I am not trying to deny my responsibility,” said the queen. Her voice was hard. She exhaled slowly, and it softened. “But no. The questioning was done against my orders.”

Hector hesitated before asking more. But he doubted he would get another chance to ask, and she seemed surprisingly willing to answer, and he was going to have to entrust grandchildren of his to this woman’s care someday, possibly quite soon. “What were you doing all that time, then?” She had held Gen in her prison nearly two weeks; cutting his hand off would’ve taken only minutes.

Attolia pressed her lips together into a thin, humorless smile. “Avoiding the question of what to do with him.”

Hector raised his eyebrows at the queen’s apparent admission that she hadn’t been making a calculated move at all. But maybe she hadn’t. He glanced again at her belly. He did believe her that the pregnancy hadn’t been calculated, considering the timing. No person planned and calculated everything they did.

Attolia flushed, and Hector realized how his raising his eyebrows and silently noting her pregnancy again must have been interpreted. You seem to have figured out what you want to do with him now.

The queen took a deep breath to equilibrate, then sat up straighter. She cast her father-in-law a look full of dry humor. “Are you planning to fill my country with your soldiers again, to guarantee the safety of your new grandchild?” she asked, not quite smiling. “They were so useful the first time. My apologies for not thanking you for them sooner.”

Hector grunted. The Eddisian soldiers he’d strategically stationed around Attolia as a condition of the peace treaty, in order to ensure Gen’s safety as Attolia’s new king, had not returned to their former posts after having been sent to Sounis for the noble purpose of throwing the encroaching Medes back onto their boats and sending them home. Long before that, though, Attolia and the new Attolis had turned what most would have expected to be a liability into an asset, easily manipulating the Eddisian ambassador at their court into offering the Eddisian soldiers’ labor on construction projects throughout Attolia, shifting Eddisian garrisons to sites where tensions between neighboring Attolian barons were running high as a pointed and effective reminder that any civil violence that broke out could lead to an attack on Attolia as a whole. Hector had not even been sure whether Attolis or Attolia was more responsible for this devious repurposing of his men, but the only people he could safely complain about it to had been Helen and the magus of Sounis, both of whom had found the whole affair riotously funny.

Attolia’s dry humor faded. Even had Hector wanted to, he couldn’t station Eddisian peacekeeping troops around Attolia again unless Gen asked for them and concocted some Annux-ial excuse for them to be there, which Gen would not do. Gen’s queen must know that. She nodded to Hector and then told him quietly, but with fierce conviction, “I will not harm my children.”

She did not seem offended at having to give him that reassurance. And it was reassuring. He met her eyes and nodded.

“Nor let them come to harm,” she went on, then paused. Her lips twisted into a grimace. “To the best of my ability. If they take after their father …”

“They may not,” he told her, understanding that worry. “Only Gen took after his mother. None of my others did. There is only one Thief in each generation. At most.”

She gave him a look that he had no difficulty interpreting as, And one has not given you trouble enough?

Hector grumbled his agreement. He’d done everything that he could think of to turn his youngest son away from the path of a Thief, and he’d failed. He had been waiting in dread ever since Gen had taken his oath to be Thief to hear that the boy had died, too suddenly, too senselessly, too soon. Like his mother had. For all of Hector’s military and political power in Eddis, there was little he could do to keep his youngest son from dying of a fall or from assassination or execution in a foreign court.

Hector did not think he had gotten one deep breath in between the time the ad hoc messenger from Attolia had reported Eugenides’s arrest and the time Galen had told him Gen’s fever had finally passed.

Attolia was still studying him. She nodded slightly to herself, as if satisfied with something, and asked, or rather suggestively remarked, “You do seem certain he’ll recover from what you did to him today.” It was a plural ‘you,’ at least. When Hector did not immediately reply, she added in a profoundly unimpressed tone of voice, “Because of the gods?”

He quashed his frustration at how little time she’d given him to work out a reply – but then, he reminded himself, she must be used to the pace at which words flew out of Gen’s mouth. He shook his head in answer to her second question while he organized his thoughts.

“He’s not wounded as badly as he seems,” Hector explained. “The trial is a test of skill, but the main skill it tests is endurance.” Hector had had to pound it into his own brother’s head, decades ago, that his brother needed to focus on preserving himself instead of on trying to win every match of his own trial, but to Hector’s relief, Gen had not needed the same hint. Gen had moved correctly from the first. Hector’s father hadn’t done the same – but he’d killed a man at his trial, and no one had chosen to argue that he hadn’t passed just because he’d fallen too early. “Gen played it as an endurance test. He didn’t try to win a match when the odds were against him. He made sure he took his hit in a safe place, instead.” Attolia raised an eyebrow at Hector. “I taught him how to do that,” he explained. “None of his bones are broken. None of his bruises are in critical places.”

Hector had taught Gen how to do that, relentlessly, during the two years Gen had abided by his oath never to take a sword by the hilt. They had worked on how to dodge, how to slip out of someone’s grip, and how, when dodging was impossible, to shift to keep a strike from falling on a place where it would be disabling or fatal and make it fall somewhere less damaging instead. Hector had taken Gen at the literal word of his ridiculous oath and had taught him disarming maneuvers that didn’t involve taking an opponent’s sword by its hilt, too. Gen had whined every second. But he’d learned.

“His face is a mess,” Gen’s wife contested.

Hector didn’t think he would reassure her if he said he’d only struck his son in the face once Gen had been moving so slowly that Hector could be sure of hitting exactly where he aimed and not breaking his nose or taking out an eye by mistake. By that point, Hector had been desperate to make his fool son stop fighting any way he could. He reiterated, “Nothing broken.”

The queen’s jaw tightened. “He couldn’t walk.” Her voice was pitched low.

Hector looked at her in surprise. “He could walk,” he told her. He cast around in his memory of this morning. “Your guard captain saw him walk,” he added. “He can confirm.”

“You were carrying him up …” she trailed off, as Hector realized that the queen of Attolia might never before have seen Gen around people who were strong enough to carry him and whom he trusted enough to allow them to carry him even when he could move on his own, and as Attolia realized why Hector would be an exception to Gen’s apparent no-carrying rule.

Hector said, “He figured out how to climb up me before he learned how to walk.” Crawling vertically, his wife had called it.

This, at last, won a smile from the stone-faced queen – one which seemed genuine, even if if didn’t quite reach her eyes.

Feeling oddly encouraged, Hector added, “He liked to stand on my shoulders and be taller than other people.” This won a delicate snort. “He would wriggle out of my hands and balance on my head too, until my brother who was Eddis ordered him to stop, or else he would consider his minister of war’s inevitable broken neck to be a deliberate attack by the Thieves.”

At this, the queen of Attolia’s lips pressed together so firmly that they went white. Hector had seen Gen grin every time he spotted this expression on his wife’s face. He’d thought that it was an expression of annoyance, but looking at her now, near enough to see the shaking of her shoulders, he realized it was how she laughed.

The watch bells rang the hour, and Hector started. He did not think he had been sitting here so long.

Attolia calmed enough that her usual poise returned, and she rose. She sighed heavily and nodded once to her father-in-law. “I will go call off Orutus.”

It took a moment for Hector to place the name as that of the current Secretary of the Archives – spymaster – of Attolia. His eyes widened. Orutus was not nearly as effective in the position as Relius had been, according to Sounis’s magus, though he was, quote, “not quite entirely hopeless.” Hector’s mind spun with an image of the desperate and inexperienced Attolian spymaster rushing to arrest Eddisian nobles in the name of the Annux before the Annux could wake up and stop him.

“Your Majesty,” he called.

Attolia stopped and looked back. Hector started to rise, but she waved him back to his seat. He sank into the cushions again, his knee throbbing. Attolia waited patiently for him to speak but raised her eyebrows in warning of the consequences that might come of her errand being delayed.

Hector didn’t want to delay her. The chances of their having another private conversation with each other anytime soon were slim, though, and he needed to do what he could before this one ended. “If you wait too long to tell Gen, he’ll figure it out for himself.” And be furious when he does, Hector thought.

Attolia grimaced. “We had best endeavor to get marching soon.” He watched her carefully as she spoke and realized for the first time that when speaking, she tended to gesture only with her left hand.

Hector’s heart tumbled, just for a moment. Gen had few enough people to catch him when he fell. He couldn’t afford to lose any of them, least of all the one he had chosen over everything else that mattered to him.

Raising a Thief, Hector had learned better than most parents did how to mitigate the dangers of an activity when it proved impossible to keep someone determined from engaging in it in the first place. “Have you told your attendants?” he asked the queen.

She cocked her head. “You think they wouldn’t have run to their king by now with the news?”

“They like him?” Hector said, surprised. The last time he’d had the chance to closely observe the queen of Attolia’s attendants had been during the marriage negotiations, and at that point they’d hated Gen. Gen had never said anything to suggest that had changed. Hector had gathered from certain comments that one of them had even tried to drug his soup.

“Almost all of them coo over him while he’s sleeping,” Attolia informed him.

Despite himself, Hector smiled. Gen was no better now at realizing how often he stole the hearts of those around him than he’d ever been.

“Is that all?” the queen asked.

“Tell your attendants,” Hector instructed his daughter-in-law. “Tell them you aren’t ready yet to share the news with him, that you want to see how the first months go first.” He doubted her attendants would go against that.

Attolia considered and evidently reached the same conclusion, because she nodded. “Very well.”

That would ensure that at least some people around the queen were making certain she wasn’t overextending herself. Hector nodded. She turned away.

“Your Majesty,” he called her back again.

The queen of Attolia turned once more, with a polite expression. She seemed to be quite good at hiding exasperation. That was a skill one learned quickly, dealing with Eugenides.

Hector bit the inside of his lip. If Attolia believed that her own attendants did not yet know of her pregnancy, it had to be early days. There were things one might do to stop a pregnancy in its early days, none wholly without risk, but many far less risky, when done in a hospital of a royal physician’s choosing, than giving birth or having a late miscarriage in a warcamp. “If now is not the time for you to have a child …”

Attolia took his meaning. She shook her head. “My country needs an heir,” she told him. She hesitated, and then, tenderly, lifting one hand to the middle of her stomach, she added, “And I want this.”

Hector stared. There was little physical resemblance between his late wife and his son’s queen, except of course in that both were beautiful, but the expression on Attolia’s face reminded him of nothing so much as the way his wife had looked when she’d first held their first daughter.

The queen of Attolia as a mother, he thought. Dear gods all above and around us. But she loved Gen fiercely enough. She would love their children as much. And Gen as a father … Hector wondered if he should start teaching all his other grandchildren how to secure their valuables.

The queen appeared to be waiting for him to make a reply. He nodded to her again, then did as much of a bow as he easily could without getting up from the bench. He had done what good he could for now. “Be blessed in your endeavors,” he told her.

Attolia nodded back. “And you.”

Chapter Text

The war council’s last meeting of the night concluded early. The day had been thrilling and terrifying, triumphant and exhausting, and the councilors and ministers and monarchs who’d been awake for all of it had no desire to keep strategizing late into the night. For once, they had no need to: today the combined forces of the Little Peninsula had finally begun to push the Medes back.

The Mede retreat wouldn’t last, the magus was certain, but the exhausted armies needed a victory to celebrate, and no one could argue that all the ground they had gained today wasn’t a victory, even if it proved to be a fleeting one. Many of the people leaving the council tent were headed off to bonfire celebrations, while most of the others were headed early to bed. The magus had just started debating which to do himself when the Eddisian minister of war caught his eye and beckoned him over with a nod.

The minister was standing near the queens. The magus’s own king had already departed, taking his turn to walk among the troops of the three countries, more mingled together tonight than they’d been on nights past. Eugenides had departed even earlier, the Attolian royal physician’s having finally cornered him and insisted on bringing Gen to his own tent to see to the Gen’s face – less because Petrus expected he would need any particular supplies from his tent and more because he thought Galen less likely to encroach on Petrus’s personal tent than on the king and queen of Attolia’s tent, the magus suspected. Months ago, the magus had struck up a conversation with Petrus about Petrus’s expertise on the medicinal properties of local plant species, then about what advice Petrus had with regards to the prospect of setting up a charity hospital in Sounis similar to the one in Attolia, and then, finally, once Petrus had grown relaxed and affable, about why Gen’s occasionally consulting the physician who’d treated him since birth bothered Petrus so much. “I am not going to let My King be subject to the ministrations of a superstitious goatfoot who believes the God of Thieves personally interferes with the bodies of his servants,” Petrus had told him. That Petrus’s king was himself a superstitious goatfoot and that he'd clearly been healed through miraculous means after his Trial as Annux had not yet changed Petrus’s opinion of the Eddisian royal physician.

The queen of Eddis concluded a conversation with her Attolian counterpart as the magus approached. She gave the older queen’s shoulder a squeeze, stood from the folding chair draped decoratively in fabrics of Eddisian black and red and gold that served as a proxy for her throne, and gave the magus a warm smile. Years of acquaintance had yet to lessen the power of that smile. Despite his worries that the Medes would soon start to send out larger forces to overwhelm the Little Peninsula’s armies, he felt his spirit ease.

Attolia’s lips quirked in an attempt at a smile in response to her friend’s shoulder squeeze, but she didn’t look up from the table. Eddis left, and the magus was still waiting for Attolia to notice him so that he could greet her appropriately when Attolia stood, gestured for the Eddisian minister of war to follow her, and exited the council tent, all without a single glance in the magus’s direction – or in any direction besides the doorway.

The magus looked at the minister. Whatever Hector had wanted with him would have to wait. To his surprise, though, Hector nodded for the magus to join him, and they walked in silence together to the Attolian royal tent. Attolia’s attendant Chloe was just leaving as they arrived, likely taking the opportunity that her queen’s request for privacy provided her to go and participate in the festivities around the camp. She gave the magus a brief and strangely appraising look as she passed. He nodded back; she was passing by too quickly for him to greet her and to ask if there was something she needed from him. Hector continued through the doorway, and the magus perforce followed. The minister snapped the tent flaps shut behind them.

Attolia was seated on the cushioned bench next to her writing desk. She raised her eyebrows at Sounis’s magus and then turned her inquiring expression on the minister of war.

Hector grunted. “He has relevant experience,” he explained, and the queen’s expression shifted to understanding. This meeting, whatever it was for, had been prearranged, then.

The magus bowed. “It would be an honor to be of service to you in any way I can, Your Majesty,” he said. When neither the queen nor the minister said anything in response, he added, “May I inquire as to what it is that I have useful experience with?”

Attolia said, “Keeping a king safe on the battlefield,” at the same time as Hector said, rather more succinctly, “Gen.”

Ah. The magus bowed again, less deeply than the first time. “I’m happy to be of assistance.”

By the time he looked up, the queen was rubbing circles into her temples with her thumbs and the minister was pouring wine. The magus suspected the three of them would need it. Attolia gestured for the magus to sit in the chair by her husband’s writing desk. The minister sat on the bed.

Attolia took one sip from the tall porcelain cup Hector offered her and sighed. “I almost find myself wishing today hadn’t been so successful,” she admitted frankly. “We can’t possibly keep him off the field now.”

Hector grumbled his frustrated agreement. The magus raised his eyebrows. Not at the claim that Gen couldn’t be kept off the battlefield anymore – he agreed with that wholeheartedly. Eugenides had charged ahead of the battle line and had chased after his quarry without a single pause to check where any of the soldiers on his side were, right up until his father’s men had ridden him down to flank him. If even a handful of Peninsula soldiers were swayed into thinking in the heat of battle that their high king’s behavior on the field should be emulated, then all of their battle lines would dissolve into chaos. The magus had seen it happen before. The hot-blooded drive to chase down and kill one’s prey was a powerful one, weakened not at all by that prey’s being a human enemy. It took months of training to get soldiers to the point where their instinct to stay in formation would override all of their baser impulses on a battlefield. The previous king of Sounis had not always had enough foresight to recruit new soldiers months before they were needed on the field, and some of the earliest battles the magus could remember fighting in had been lost despite superior numbers because the enemy had held formation while his own side had not. The only way to discourage copycats of Gen’s disastrous tactics had been to play up, as much as they possibly could, the degree to which the high king had the favor of the gods, emphasizing how that favor let him do things on the battlefield that no one else – no one else – could do. And they could hardly cast Eugenides as the emblem of divine aid on the battlefield and then tell their soldiers they weren’t sending him to battle.

He was surprised, though, at the openness and frankness in the words that the queen of Attolia and the Eddisian minister of war were exchanging. In part because Attolia’s royal poise slackened so rarely that the magus, despite often finding her to be the easiest of the Little Peninsula’s monarchs to have a discussion with, had never been able to bring himself to drop formality around her, but mostly because he couldn’t help remembering the months of his otherwise pleasant internment in Eddis during which Hector had suddenly become so terrifyingly dour that you couldn’t be in a room with him without the hair on the back of your neck standing up. About the same time, Gen had transformed back into the exhausting and unstoppable ball of questions, complaints, needling humor, and scheming that the magus remembered from before Gen’s imprisonment in Attolia, and the magus had initially thought that Gen and his father had had another of their apparently legendary fights but had managed to do it privately for once. It was only much later that he’d learned of Gen’s plan to end the war between Eddis and Attolia. The minister of war, who’d refused to ever give one word of support for the proposition to sell his neice’s hand in marriage in order to buy an alliance with Sounis, now had to sell his son’s to buy peace. And to the queen of Attolia. The magus had considered asking Hector one last time before Gen’s party set off for Attolia if the former option weren’t preferable, but in the end he’d just given up and gone out to the barracks to get himself very drunk.

No trace of the tension that had once taken hold of the minister every time the thought of Attolia crossed his mind, let alone when Attolia herself crossed his path, now remained that the magus could see. He tried to think back to when that had changed. Certainly not by the start of the war council meetings between the three countries as they’d prepared their armies’ march to the Leonyla Pass. Not by the time of Gen’s Trial as Annux, either, he thought: the magus had spent most of that day talking various Attolians down from starting war with Eddis either directly, by attacking the Eddisian soldiers in and around the megaron, or indirectly, by demanding that Eddis make a dozen Eddisian princes and her minister of war in particular answer for what they’d done to Attolis to the Attolians’ satisfaction, and he’d spent most of that night listening to the queen of Eddis vent her frustration with all and sundry to her husband. She’d gone on at length about how this all could have been avoided despite Gen’s efforts to get himself beaten senseless at every available opportunity if only her uncle had given her a chance to work something else out with Attolia’s help. Eddis had been so worked up, and Sounis had been so focused on his wife, that neither of them had thought to dismiss her attendants, his attendants, or the magus, and they’d all stood awkwardly around the room trying not to look at each other until Eddis had finally started crying into her husband’s arms and Xanthe had ushered everyone besides the king and queen out into the hall.

The magus sipped his own wine as the minister and Attolia spoke to each other.

“So,” said the queen, indicating Hector with a tilt of her wine cup, “you want the unit that he fights with to be only Eddisian, aside from his attendants, and not a mixed unit.”

“There’s no time to train new soldiers in our formations,” Hector answered her.

Attolia raised one eyebrow. “Were the joint maneuvers the armies practiced on my parade fields before we marched something other than training?”

“Our more complex formations,” Hector clarified.

The magus sucked in his breath. This conversation was too closely echoing the words that the three armies, mustering together for the first time, had hurled at one another like little flaming sticks that could ignite and burn down whole fields of grain. The Eddisian soldiers who’d spent every long winter since childhood training for battle had sneered at their less thoroughly trained counterparts; the Attolian soldiers for whom soldiering was their only vocation had sneered at those who soldiered only part of the time; the Sounisian soldiers who needed a good, broad patronoi education in order to hold military rank had sneered at the okloi and barbarians who claimed to be able to run an army. The magus had spent so many interminable days running back and forth between the leaders of the three armies, convincing them to ignore whatever slight they felt they’d received that day and then to go stamp out any sparks of resentment among their soldiers. He had served alongside most of the Sounisian military command, had befriended much of the Eddisian military command while they were taking turns preventing him from escaping Eddis, and had made quick inroads with the Attolian military command after a few late-night conversations with Relius at which Teleus had also been present had turned into the magus buying Teleus a drink in apology for the time that he, the heir of Sounis, and the Thief of Eddis had escaped Teleus’s custody, which had turned into the magus’s being introduced to most of the Attolian Royal Guard. It had given him just enough of an edge with each group to keep the peace between them even when his own temper had been running high. (Given how certain it was that Gen had known who was informally keeping peace between the armies, the magus really ought to have suspected something, he wearily supposed, when Gen had invited him to attend him on the same day that Sounis and enough nobles from various countries to justify committing half of the Attolian Guard to their collective protection were away on the island of Thegmis.)

Attolia merely nodded, unoffended. “Formations that are effective enough at protecting a king to justify the slight to my and Sounis’s forces?”

The minister nodded bluntly. “Princes of Eddis train and serve as rank-and-file soldiers,” he said. That rule had exceptions – most notably Gen and his brother Stenides, former watchmaker and current minister of the Eddisian armory – but for the most part, in the magus’s observation, it held true. “It’s a tenet of our military’s philosophy. It doesn’t stop when one becomes a king. But kings have always been targeted on the battlefield. The other soldiers adjust around them, to keep them better protected.”

Attolia looked skeptical. The magus butt in, “If I may?” At a nod from the queen, he said, “That tracks with the research I’ve done on the history of Eddis. Almost every Eddis goes into battle on the front lines, but very few of them die on the field.”

“The men around them do,” said Attolia, and the magus realized that she must have read the same histories he had. The royal library of Attolia was the most extensive in the Little Peninsula, and any significant volumes in Eddis’s library that had been absent from Attolia’s had likely been copied for the Attolian library at the request of the homesick Attolis. “For every Eddis, there’s a list two dozen names long of men who died fighting by his side. What makes you think Gen will let you arrange your army for his protection, knowing what it will cost the people who stand nearest him?” This last was directed to Gen’s father. “Do you think he won’t notice and won’t order a different formation that puts him and the other men at equal risk?”

The magus grimaced. Gen would definitely notice. Gen was no soldier, capable as he was with a sword, but he knew Eddis’s army well. With his cousin’s blessing, he had even offered Sophos – Sounis; when was the magus finally going to learn to stop thinking of His Royal Majesty the King of Sounis, the man referred to as Lion in two countries of the Little Peninsula and referred to in the third (often with a snicker) as the Right Hand of the Annux, the prince who’d cowed his entire council of rebellious barons into electing him king with two bullets and one smile, as a gawky little boy? – a squadron of the Eddisian royal guard for his personal protection during his battle to take back his country. The men Gen had offered had watched the younger king’s handful of sparring sessions with the Eddisian master of swords and had, at Gen’s request, determined how best they could cover Sounis’s weak spots in battle. Sounis had been aching for more men, but he’d declined. His friend had been unoffended. They’d both known how it would look if Sounis took to the field for the first several times while under the close and careful protection of Eddisian royal guards.

The minister didn’t have an answer for that.

“Do you imagine you’ve slapped sense into him?” Attolia asked dryly. She didn’t seem especially angry about her father-in-law’s treatment of his son, but the magus held his breath for a moment anyway, knowing her reputation for murderous protectiveness of her husband and knowing too how he would have reacted had his own king’s thickheaded brute of a father dared to strike the king his son.

“Let him oversleep and only reach the battlefield after everyone else is in position and it’s too late for him to make adjustments,” the magus joked, aiming to relieve any tension that he might be failing to perceive.

Hector raised his eyebrows as if seriously considering this suggestion.

Attolia snorted. “That will work precisely once,” she warned. “You need a means of making him actually agree to stay where you position him.”

At that, the magus smiled. “Bribe him with the offer to fight on foot.”

The others smiled in return. Gen, once he was back from the battlefield and his blood had had a chance to cool, had been rightfully ashamed of how stupidly he’d let himself be goaded into behaving, and during the subsequent war council meetings, he’d deferred in all matters to his councilors – up until someone had asked him point-blank what he thought had or hadn’t worked from his strategy today and he’d taken the opportunity to whine about how abysmally his war horse had served him.

“It would make it harder for him to fly ahead of his guards,” Attolia mused. “It would be a natural excuse to surround him with Eddisians, too, who have experience with kings fighting on foot. My armies expect anyone of particular importance to be fighting with the cavalry. Sounis’s as well, I assume?” The magus answered her look with a nod. “Likely the Medes do as well, so it will take them some time to reorder their attacks to focus on Eddisian infantry.”

“They’ll be more hesitant trying to capture instead of kill,” Hector added.

They were all three silent for a moment, reflecting with no real relief on the obvious fact that the Medes would prefer to have the Annux of the Little Peninsula brought to them alive.

“It’s a conscript army,” the magus reminded them. “They lack experience, and what training they have is focused on killing.” There had been very little hostage-taking in this war. It was a war of attrition: attrition of men for the vastly smaller forces of the Little Peninsula, attrition of food and supplies for the vastly larger Mede force. Capturing their enemies alive wasn’t worth it for the Medes unless they captured generals or monarchs.

“So we mark him clearly,” Attolia said practically. “The Mede troops will know they won’t be rewarded for killing our Annux. We position cavalry in a pincer formation around him to dismantle any Mede attempt at capturing his infantry company.”

“The Medes will still try to kill by instinct when they’re pressed,” the magus warned.

Hector grunted. “My men can protect him.”

“You’re sure?” the magus asked. He regretted his phrasing a moment later, but Hector wasn’t one to read insult into questions about his soldiers’ abilities.

Hector nodded. “The formation won’t be obvious to inexperienced soldiers with Mede training,” he informed the magus. “Eddisians train to coordinate our fighting without standing close to each other.”

Attolia nodded agreement. She would know, the magus supposed. He had not seen much actual combat with Eddisians in his lifetime, but she had. She had a sharp eye for tactics, and she would have spotted coordination taking place between soldiers many paces apart. The Medes, trained to hold a line, to focus only on the soldiers to their immediate left and right, would be far less likely to make sense of Eddisian tactics.

“I can sell that to Teleus,” Attolia told them. “Assuming Gen will hold formation on foot.”

“Present it to him as a choice,” the magus suggested. “Either he needs the protection of being on horseback, or he needs the protection of Eddisians guarding him as best they know how on foot. He’ll promise one or the other.” They all knew which one he would choose.

“And forget his promise as quickly as the moon,” Attolia muttered into her wine.

The magus frowned. He caught the eye of the minister, who’d slumped forward with his elbows on his knees. “The princes who challenged him at his trial,” the magus said. “I take it they’re skilled fighters, and none of them are especially close with him?”

Hector snorted and nodded. The magus knew enough about Eddisian custom to know that there was neither a minimum nor a maximum number of young men a prospective king had to spar with at his trial. Those whose rank gave them a right to demand a match simply chose whether or not they wanted one. The men who’d demanded a match from Gen had either known Gen poorly enough that they’d doubted his ability to perform on a battlefield, or they’d distrusted Gen’s motivations for becoming Annux over Eddis, or they’d (understandably, the magus had to admit) just wanted the chance to whack Gen with a wooden sword. Gen’s father had been the only one to fight because he’d wanted the trial to conclude appropriately but with minimal possible damage.

“I take it they all accept that he rules with the gods’ favor now,” the magus went on. Hector nodded. No one was less likely to doubt the goddess’s miracle than the people who knew firsthand how injured Gen had been the day before it. “Have them guard him, then,” said the magus. “Gen won’t be as determined to keep them safe as he would be his brother or his dearer cousins.” He hesitated, then added, “Or you.”

Gen’s father grimaced but nodded. The magus knew the minister had trained his son himself, and likely knew better than anyone else how Gen fought, but Gen would be quick to break formation to come to his father’s rescue if Hector was near enough to him that he might succeed, when he’d be less quick to come to Cleon’s or Therespides’s rescue.

Attolia raised a skeptical eyebrow. “He forgave Relius,” she pointed out. “He forgave me. You think a bad history with them will be enough to stay his hand?”

“You, he already loved,” Hector countered.

Attolia’s second eyebrow joined her first as she studied her father-in-law. The light from the tent’s central lamp sputtered briefly, making all of their shadows jump, and steadied again. “You knew?” she asked.

Hector grunted. The magus turned to look at him as well, equally surprised. The minister smiled dryly. “He went about courtship the way his mother did.”

Ah, thought the magus. So that’s why he supported Gen’s campaign for Attolia. The magus had been surprised at the time by what had seemed to him to be remarkably little last-minute effort to talk Gen out of his latest lunatic plan. Hector hadn’t only wanted an end to the war: he’d realized long since that he wouldn’t be able to keep Gen away from Attolia in the long run, and at least Gen’s going about proposing to her the way that he did gave Hector a say in what provisions the country of Attolia would have to accept as assurances of their new king’s safety.

“She left earrings on your bedside table in the middle of the night?” Attolia asked.

“Usually notes,” Hector answered. “Though she’d swap out my cuff links for gaudier ones on some nights. I caught her at it once by feigning sleep. She was delighted.”

The queen cocked her head. “‘Delighted?’” she inquired.

“She dragged me out to the practice grounds and insisted I help her with a training exercise, as I’d been rude enough to demonstrate that she needed more training.”

“Ah. ‘Delighted.’” Attolia took a sip of her wine. Her eyes sparkled. “What was the training exercise?”

Hector shrugged. “It was about maintaining good orientation in the dark. So she said. She tied her scarf over her eyes and told me to lead her around and try and confuse her sense of direction. Didn’t work the way she wanted it to, so she had me take a turn instead to show me what she meant. She took my hand once the scarf was tied and went sprinting off with me, up and down the stairs of the palace, around so many turns I lost count. She stopped again when we were outside and asked me where we were. I thought we were in the courtyard. She laughed and then started humming a song and dancing to it with me.” Hector paused for a moment, stared down at his hands, and let out a slow sigh. “We were halfway through the dance before I managed to get the scarf off without losing hold of her. We were on a roof walk.”

“Ha!” The magus pressed a hand against his mouth to keep from laughing further. Attolia’s shoulders were shaking. Her lips were pressed so tightly together that they were almost white, but they were upturned into a rare smile.

Attolia opened her mouth, then shook her head and went on silently laughing. “Gen’s threatened to take me dancing on the roof of the megaron,” she managed at last.

“Someday he will,” Hector warned.

The magus shook his head, but the words made him smile nonetheless. That “someday” was a mere dream, but it had been spoken so much like a promise: someday this war will be over; someday our countries will be safe and free; someday we will gather together in peace and the Thief will dance with his beloved on the roof of their palace. The magus could imagine it with perfect clarity. Someday everything will be alright.

“Because he never gives up on a bad idea?” Attolia asked. She leaned back and draped an elbow over the top of her couch.

The minister grunted. “He had the shoes for it made for you years ago.”

“Yes, they were practically an engagement gift,” said Attolia. Her lips quirked again in a way the magus wasn’t certain whether to interpret as a grimace or as a smile. “They’re quite comfortable. I do wish he’d found a way to give them to me at the bottom of that cliff. Do you mean they’re specifically meant for balancing on rooftops? They work just as well for scaling walls.”

The magus stifled a sigh. No wonder Teleus still doesn’t get along with his king, he thought, shaking his head. Bad enough for a guard captain to have to protect a king who kept managing to slip away from his guards; now Gen was teaching Teleus’s queen how to do the same. The magus did wonder, briefly, how Gen had managed to get the right dimensions to have a pair of close-fitting boots made for the queen of Attolia prior to their engagement. It didn’t take long for him to recall Kamet’s account of his flight from Medea, which Relius had shared with him – specifically, Kamet’s memories of the royal sandal polisher he’d met during his previous stay in Attolia. The magus pinched the bridge of his nose. Gods-all, Gen.

Hector shrugged. “He’ll get you on the roof somehow. If you agree, you’ll know when it’s coming. And you can keep him from bringing his dancing knives along.”

“Gods, is that where he learned the Knife Dance? On the roof?” Attolia downed the last of her wine. Hector nodded and stood to refill her cup. The sound that the wine made hitting her cup changed from a low pitch to a high one as the cup filled. She watched it pour, and a worry line formed between her eyebrows. “That’s what all the Mysteries of the Thieves are about, isn’t it,” she said softly. “Making them put their whole lives in their god’s hands.”

Hector mumbled something unintelligible in a tone of agreement. He set the wine jug back on Gen’s writing desk. “Most of the time, his god will catch him,” he told his daughter-in-law. He waited until she met his eyes to add, “The rest of the time, you have to.”

Attolia held his gaze for a moment. Then she nodded. The worry line didn’t disappear. Hector went back to the bed, sitting more heavily on it this time.

“Do you think,” Attolia asked, quiet, her eyes fixed absently on the roof of the tent, “that the gods want Gen to fight in this war?”

Hector grunted his wordless admission that the question had crossed his mind as well and that he lacked an answer.

“I would have thought they would tell him so,” Attolia went on. Her left hand swung in a small arc. “He’s asked them at least twice.”

“Mm?” Hector prompted, raising his eyebrows.

The queen looked suddenly solemn. “The first time, Moira told him that when he dies, he'll die of a fall,” she said. “The second time she seemed to try to spook him away, and the Oracle prophesied, ‘Peris upus s’tatix.’”

The phrase was archaic. “‘Avoid … taking too much for yourself,’” the magus puzzled out, translating the words automatically.

Attolia nodded in his direction. “Gen translated it as ‘Don’t over-indulge,’” she told him. “I’m more inclined to agree with your translation, but that still leaves open the question of what the gods don’t want him to take too much of. His share of danger on the battlefield? Or his freedom to stay back from the battlefield?”

“Their instructions to him are normally clearer,” Hector said. Attolia snorted.

The magus felt a shiver run down his back as it sank in that the minister and the queen weren’t speaking abstractly, nor voicing their personal interpretations of divine omens. Both of them knew – knew, with terrible certainty – that the Hephestian gods talked to Eugenides. The magus had come to accept that the gods were in all probability real and were taking a special interest in the Thief’s life, but that was something different than direct conversation between gods and mortals, and the chasm between “almost certainly true” and “certainly true” had never felt so wide.

Die of a fall. Thieves tended to fall to their deaths, the magus knew. He’d endeavored during his time in Eddis to compile a history of the Thieves, a difficult task due to Eddis’s history being more oral than written and due to a taboo against sharing knowledge about the Thieves. Gen, for all of his secrets and lies, was leagues more forthcoming than his predecessors had evidently been. The magus had known already that Gen’s mother and grandfather had died of falls. After considerable effort, he’d verified that Gen’s maternal great-grandfather had also been Thief and had fallen to his death in a spat of civil chaos in Attolia. He’d discovered that Iktenos the Architect was Gen’s ancestor in the same line and had died of a fall, but he hadn’t been able to confirm that Iktenos had been the Thief of his generation until Sounis had let it slip to him after having been told as much by Eddis. It was harrowing but easy to imagine Gen’s ancestors and Gen himself someday falling to their deaths after misjudging a jump or losing their footing on a steep ridge. Thieves so often jumped roofs and balconies and ran across too-narrow supports, and a person could only have so much luck. It was more chilling to picture the God of Thieves physically holding up his chosen ones all their lives, then taking his hands away with one final push.

“Is he supposed to go half-measure?” Attolia mused aloud. “Not knowing which direction ruin lies in, and so avoiding both? There is no ‘half-measure’ in this war. Having him out there exposed to danger but not fighting would be worse than either not sending him at all or sending him to fight for all he’s worth.”

“We don’t have the option not to send him, now,” said the minister.

“I know.” Attolia sighed heavily. “So tomorrow he fights and we do what we can to make sure he comes back from it.” She turned to the magus. “Do you really believe he’ll stay in formation if it’s the cousins that he’s less fond of who are dying around him?” she asked him. “He still mourns all the ones lost in Eddis’s last war with Attolia.”

The magus did his best to shake off the cold feeling that the thought of the God of Thieves letting Gen fall and break had left in his chest. “He wouldn’t have done what he did today if Nahuseresh had claimed to have caught and tortured a random Attolian spy to death,” he said bluntly. (He sincerely hoped that had been no more than a lie to draw out Eugenides.)

The queen was silent as she weighed this.

“The princes who challenged him at his trial didn’t only harm him,” the magus added. “They were all of them making Eddis’s life substantially harder for months. Years, in many cases.” He didn’t think he needed to say that when Gen held onto grudges, it was against people who’d hurt those he loved as well and not just him.

Attolia nodded slowly. “It will do, then.”

The minister rose to his feet. Attolia cast him an inquiring look. “I’ll make the arrangements,” he told her. “We’ll tell him tomorrow.”

Attolia nodded and stood as well. She moved slowly, sighing as she straightened up. The magus rose automatically when the queen did.

“You should rest,” Hector told her, pointedly.

“I must speak with Teleus.”

“I can let Teleus know of the arrangement,” the magus offered. Teleus wouldn’t be pleased with what he would undoubtedly view as an insult to the Attolian Guard’s ability to protect their king, but the magus thought that he could get Teleus to swallow it without any lingering glares.

The queen inclined her head. “You don’t need to run damage control among your Sounisians?” she asked. “They’re being excluded from Gen’s battlefield guard as well.”

“There’s no need,” the magus informed her.

“I had been hoping that your countrymen might come to feel more loyalty for their Annux,” she murmured.

The magus acknowledged that with a nod. With the Eddisians’ turn towards respect for their high king, the Sounisians had become the more worrisome malcontents. At present, though, the magus was unconcerned. “He’s becoming more popular among them every day,” he told Attolia. “This won’t be a major setback, even among those who would be inclined to view it as a snub.”

“Oh? What’s the cause of his newfound popularity?”

“Perminder,” the magus answered, unsuccessful at keeping pride out of his voice. He had been the one to recommend Perminder of Nilos to his king’s attention when Sounis and Eddis had discussed which Sounisian they might suggest as an attendant for the Annux. Since the intent had been to counterbalance someone likely to spread gossip against Gen, the magus had searched for the Sounisian patronoi most apt to do the opposite, and the decision had clearly been well-made. “He divides his days between Gen and his own countrymen. His peers like what he says about the Annux, and it spreads.”

Attolia briefly raised an eyebrow but then nodded. Perminder had been giving Eugenides loyal service, and Attolia must have seen enough to trust that Perminder wouldn’t say anything to his countrymen that would incite them against the king he served. Perminder was clever about the stories he shared: since Sophos was a wildly popular king, Perminder focused his tales on the friendship between the kings. The Sounisians who cheered their own king for the peace and stability he’d brought to their country and for his extending the spate of pardons for his barons to his other subjects as well, releasing almost every debtor from prison and so giving every town in Sounis back a few sons they had feared were lost for good, were delighted to hear of their young king and their Annux joking and tussling like a pair of schoolboys who’d known each other their whole lives and working together to dismantle threats to the Little Peninsula. Perminder’s stories made it clear that Sounis’s loyalty to the high king was neither perfunctory nor undeserved, and step by step, retelling by retelling, his countrymen were falling into line.

“May I inform Teleus?” the magus pressed.

Attolia was silent for a few seconds. Then she nodded. “Thank you.” She sat back down again, and her shoulders slumped. She did look exhausted, the magus thought. He bowed to her and followed Hector out of the tent.

He waited until they were several steps away from the doorway to quietly ask, “Is she well?”

Hector grunted. They took another few steps. He said, “If she miscarries again …”

The magus nodded. Attolia’s pregnancy was far enough along now that it was starting to show. Not that its increasing visibility had surprised anyone in the warcamp. The weeks-ago fight she’d had with her husband when he’d figured out she was pregnant hadn’t exactly been discreet.

He wondered, because he couldn’t not wonder, whether Gen would fall into despair or rage if his wife’s pregnancy ended badly. The magus had seen Gen soul-crushed before, and he never wanted to see that again. His heart ached from the mere memory of it. He’d also seen Gen in a blind fury, and that was … that was something else, something so different from the countless terrors a man might otherwise encounter in his lifetime that facing it left you instantly, absolutely, certain that you were about to die. That some power beyond the scope of this world was about to reach through and smite you down. After it passed, you might convince yourself that your reaction had just been shock or else attribute it to the resurgence of some half-forgotten memory from, say, the early days of your military career, back when you didn’t yet know how to cope with all the seemingly senseless death. But in the moment itself, you felt nothing but stark terror.

The magus could almost respect Nahuseresh for his decision to turn and flee from Gen on the battlefield, had it been at all possible to respect a man who’d managed to spend years in Attolia’s company without ever once noticing how talented a monarch she was.

“She won’t go home,” Hector grumbled.

The magus nodded again. “We’d be hard-pressed without her.”

Hector shook his head. “We’ll be far worse off if she dies. I’d hoped Helen might be able to change Irene’s mind once she was this far along, but Helen supports her.” He took another few steps, then admitted, “I’d also thought our allies would reach us by now and the pressure would ease.”

The magus grimaced. The Little Peninsula would pay dearly for the aid the Continental Powers were sending, but at least there would still be a Sounis, an Eddis, and an Attolia if their Continental allies reached them before the Little Peninsula’s own forces were overwhelmed. Every day, that looked decreasingly likely.

The magus wondered, in the midst of suppressing that fear anew, at the fact that Hector called Attolia by her first name. He supposed that Hector, being the father of one king and the uncle of another queen and related by marriage to the remaining monarchs of the Peninsula, might find it more unnatural to refer to any of the four by title. These days, the magus mostly felt the opposite way. Except in regard to Eugenides, oddly. It wasn’t that Gen hadn’t grown into his titles as much as the other monarchs had grown into theirs: he had. Maybe it was just that Gen had made such a memorable first impression. Or maybe it was that in these precipice times, when the countries of Little Peninsula might any day now all be wiped out as one, he needed Sophos to be Sounis, and Helen to be Eddis, and Irene to be Attolia, and he needed the Annux of the Little Peninsula to be Gen. The Annux wasn’t who changed enemies into allies and always had one more trick up his sleeve and never stopped going until he’d snatched miraculous victory from the pit of defeat. Gen was. The three countries of the Little Peninsula needed their monarchs, and they needed Gen.

“We’ll do what we can,” said the magus. “Our queens and kings will do the same. We can support them. We can’t stop them.” Much as the magus might want to grab his king by the coat and drag him home to his mother every time he armored up for battle.

The magus had a lot of sympathy for Hector, and even, if he admitted it, for Sounis’s most frustratingly idiotic duke. None of them would ever really get over the urge to stop their rulers from risking their lives when the needs of their countries demanded it, he suspected.

They reached a fork in the trampled path where Hector would have to go one way towards the Eddisian tents and the magus would have to go another. They stopped.

The magus cleared his throat. “Is there anything else you needed from me tonight?” he asked. “I’m not sure what I really contributed to that meeting.”

“What you knew about Gen,” the minister answered.

The magus frowned. Hector loved his children, all six of them, fiercely, and he seemed even more protective of Gen than of the rest, though maybe that was only because none of Gen’s siblings came anywhere near matching him for self-destructiveness. Hector paid careful attention to what his youngest child was doing, and he always had. “I’m not sure what I know about him that you don’t,” the magus admitted.

Hector grunted. “He talks to you.”

“Ah. Yes.” The little mountain country of Eddis took many pains to train its people in the arts of war and fine craftsmanship but few to educate its nobility in intellectual arts. Eddisians were not stupid – though they had managed to accomplish a great deal by convincing their neighbors that they were – but they were not, as a general rule, well-read. Gen had spent years living in a library and had taken full advantage of his surroundings. Finding no one among his peers to discuss the history or philosophy or science he read about with, he’d eagerly turned to the magus for that type of conversation. “Less often than he used to,” the magus added, with a backward glance towards Attolia’s tent. “He’s since found other people to discuss what he reads with.”

Hector followed the direction of his glance and grunted. “They’re a good match,” he said, with more respect than grudgingness in his voice.

And a terrifying one, the magus silently appended. If there had been one advantage to his having been imprisoned in Eddis at the time, it had been that he had not had to be the one to break the news of Eugenides’s and Attolia’s intent to marry to his old king. He couldn’t imagine that had gone well.

The magus sighed, remembering those years. “I should have realized,” he muttered, thinking of the dozens of pages-long letters in Gen’s old handwriting that he still had tucked away in a corner of his study. At Hector’s inquiring look, he clarified, “What Gen felt for her. He was extraordinarily interested in the history of her reign.” There was much about Gen that was more obvious in hindsight. There always was. The magus’s only excuse that time was that he was far more familiar with scholarship than with love, so he’d assumed Gen’s desire to discuss Attolia had been for professional and intellectual reasons.

The man who’d realized much sooner grunted. “You didn’t know my wife.”

“That’s true; I never had the pleasure of meeting her,” said the magus. There was another thing about the Thieves that was more obvious in hindsight: they tended to have as little open interaction with members of foreign courts as possible. Gen had certainly made quite a bit of use of the unfamiliarity of his face to those in Sounis’s or Attolia’s service. “I hadn’t been in my position for many years when she passed.”

“Picture Gen,” Hector told him, “but a little taller, with an entire skirt’s worth of pockets, and with less shame.”

That made the magus laugh outright. “Less shame?” he said, shaking his head. Hector smiled. “Dear gods. Did she blindfold you and drag you up to the roof to dance often?”

“Oh, yes. Whenever she could manage it.” Hector stared up at what stars were visible through the bonfires’ haze. They twinkled back at him. As the magus watched, Hector’s smile shifted slowly from fond to pained. In a soft voice, he said, “I wish I’d never let her dance alone.”

Chapter Text

It was early morning, still an hour before the trumpet’s first call, and the Attolian royal tent was empty save for Irene and her unconscious husband.

Chloe was in her own tent, likely asleep. The king’s few remaining attendants were in theirs. They’d all come in yesterday at different times to check on him. For the most part, they had merely exhausted Irene, not so much by what they said or did as by being there and needing her to be Queen, even as the urge to slump in her seat and put her head in her hands grew stronger by the second. Ion had proven useful, though, in that he’d been able to bring Pheris away to bed at the end of the day. Pheris had stayed by his king’s side through fiery ambush and Mede capture and the wrath of a god and had had no intention of leaving the royal tent until his king woke once more, as far as Irene could tell. The boy couldn’t put off sleep for days on end, though. Ion had had to carry him like a baby to his bed.

The magus of Sounis had come as well to check on Gen after last night’s strategy meeting. He’d watched his sleeping Annux for a minute, had gently squeezed Gen’s shoulder, and had then stepped over to Irene and hugged her. Irene would have startled if she’d had any capacity for shock left. The magus had always been so formal around her in the past. She’d nodded against the fine wool of his cloak, wordless, and he’d released her and had left without saying a word to her, either. There had been no visitors since.

Irene watched the tent walls slowly brighten with sunlight and resisted the urge to get up and adjust Gen’s blankets once again. Even if she told herself otherwise, she knew that what she was really hoping for every time she readjusted this or that thing on his bed was to elicit some response from him, some slight movement towards her in answer to her touch. She hadn’t gotten a response yet, and she wasn’t going to get one this time. He hadn’t shifted at all since his father had lain him down here the morning before – not when the trumpets had blared to signal the armies to advance, not when Petrus and Galen had come to check him over again, not when the rest of the world had gone to sleep and she’d crouched by his side to gently cup his face in her hands and kiss him. His expression remained perfectly blank, and his breathing remained unvaryingly even. Not even during the three days he’d slept after screaming at his gods over their betrayal and receiving their answer had his body seemed this empty.

Eugenides was never this still when he slept. He tossed this way and that, turning over completely every other hour unless he was drugged with lethium. Or unless Irene was holding him. That hadn’t always had the effect of calming him down when he was restless in sleep, but over the months and years, the animal part of his brain had seemed to release the associations it had made with her touch prior to their marriage and to begin associating it with safety instead, and now all she needed to do was hold her husband close and they both slept easier. Sometimes she would fall asleep before her thief of a king concluded his nighttime business and came to bed, and she would wake later in the night to find him curled warmly against her side. Sometimes the royal physician cajoled him into going to sleep early, and she would climb onto her bed as gently as she could after her late meetings with her advisers ended, and he would silently shift to put an arm around her without fully waking.

Irene closed her eyes. She hadn’t slept at all since the ambush. She didn’t want to sleep. Once upon a time, there had been an assassin in the night, one who slipped past her guards and her attendants and into the room where she slept and back out again without anyone’s being the wiser until morning. And then the assassin in the night had transformed into a young man, an ally, a helpmeet, her king, the love of her life. And in time, her own nightmares had ceased. She had asked him only once to not enter a room she was in without letting her know, and he had never startled her since. She had asked him how he snuck about her palace, and he’d grinned in delight and shown her. He was just a man – a talented one, a clever one, a brave one, but just a man nonetheless, not a vessel of divine reckoning or a figure from nightmare. Just the man she loved, making his broken way through life by her side.

And then a vessel of divine reckoning and a figure from nightmare had returned to her from the Medes.

Irene couldn’t bear the thought of going to sleep now and dreaming of the assassin in the night. Of waking afraid for her life and not being able to look over and see I love you in her husband’s eyes. So she stayed awake, exhausted, and silently pleaded with her husband’s god to give him back to her again, to let him go.

“Sir,” said a voice outside the tent. Irene’s drooping eyelids snapped open. It was Aristogiton’s voice. Had Irene not told Teleus to take him and the surviving members of his squad off-duty until their injuries from the ambush had healed? Probably not. There had been a lot of little things she didn’t seem to have the energy to remember to do, these past two days.

No other words followed that first one, but after a few moments her tent flap was hesitantly opened and Aris peered inside without looking at her directly. “Your Majesty?” he asked hesitantly. “May I enter?”

She waved him in. He stepped just close enough that she could hear him when he said very quietly, “The Eddisian minister of war is here. Should I tell him that you’re not dressed to receive visitors?”

Irene blinked. She was dressed to receive visitors, having resisted Chloe’s attempt to get her into a nightgown the previous evening, but she appreciated Aris’s offer and the political sense behind it. Hector was too high-ranking in his own right for her to refuse to see him without an excuse, or else it would be taken as an insult. Most of her guards would have simply announced him and let him in. Some, newer to the King’s Guard and the nuances of the royal court, would have done their best to turn him away without checking with her and without offering any excuse. Few would have considered lying on her behalf unless she had specifically instructed them to. Aris had proven unexpectedly good at this sort of subterfuge; he’d been the first man in the Guard to petition the queen for permission to suggest to the king that he might simply walk out the gate when he chose to leave the palace on his own and that whoever was guarding the gate wouldn’t hurry to report to Teleus if it was clear that the king didn’t want his guard captain to scour the city for him again. That arrangement made sure that Gen at least wasn’t climbing down the palace’s outer walls all the time and that some of the Guard, plus Irene herself when she so desired, were alerted whenever the king was out on the town. It had also proven quite profitable for Aris, she was given to understand.

She considered the guard for a moment. She was in no hurry to replace Teleus, but Aris might make a fine successor to him someday. Gods knew it would be a nice change of pace to have a guard captain who understood how to deal with Gen.

“No,” said Irene eventually, shaking her head. It ached. “Send him in.” Aris had been right that at least in one sense she wasn’t ready for visitors, but all political considerations aside, she didn’t have the moral right to keep a father from his injured son.

Aris bowed and left. He cast a brief look of worry and faint hope towards his king’s bed on the way out. Irene’s heart constricted. Did Aris know by now, she wondered, his true value to his king? Had he realized that he’d kept his position in the First Cohort after his failures not just because of his potential and his king’s mercy but because sometimes, Gen needed whichever guards he had to face the morning after a screaming nightmare – or right after a screaming nightmare, if he was sleeping alone or if Irene didn’t manage to send the “all’s well” signal swiftly enough – to look at him neither with triumph nor with pity but simply with understanding? There was only one squad in the Guard that knew, firsthand, what a stay in her dungeons did to a man’s mind. Their protectiveness of their king had for a long time now been more than just a professional requirement.

Maybe Irene shouldn’t have been surprised that Aris had found a way to be on duty right now, as Gen lay in bed unresponsive.

Heavy footsteps announced Hector’s arrival. The noise felt too loud with all the background sounds of the camp gone. Their armies had gained a fantastic amount of ground the previous day: the Medes hadn’t had time to really reorganize their command structure since the massacre, and the palpable electric vengeance of their enemies’ gods had shaken them to the man. The Hephestian Peninsula’s armies’ camps had moved far forward at the end of the day. The Attolian royal tent had stayed behind, since a royal physician – Irene couldn’t remember which one – had suggested that Gen not be moved. She wondered whether that was because they thought moving him would aggravate his injuries, or because they thought his absent spirit would need his body to stay in roughly the same place in order to find it again. She hadn’t asked.

Hector stepped into the royal tent without ceremony. His eyes went to his son first, but they only stayed there a moment before settling on Irene. She met his gaze dully.

He cleared his throat. “You need to sleep.”

The queen did not dignify that with a response.

Hector frowned. “Irene.”

Irene was already sitting up as tall as she could, but she lifted her chin aristocratically. “Morpheos has declined to visit me lately,” she said, pronouncing the Hephestian god of sleep’s name the way her husband did, with a harshness to the final syllable.

Her father-in-law stared at her sternly for several seconds – long enough that the line across his body between shadow and sunlight inched noticeably upward – before he grunted. “Irene,” he said again, and this time she startled. His voice was more gentle than she’d ever heard it before, and there was a quiet but profound sadness to it. He looked once more at his son, then back. “There’s nothing you could have done to prevent this.”

Irene didn’t answer, because there was something she could have done to prevent this. She could have left with Gen. The Hephestian gods were not as strong outside of the Hephestian Peninsula, she was sure: the gods were tied to the land, to the mountains and rivers and trees, and at any rate the delta at the heart of the Mede Empire seemed to have its own gods walking the Earth, so that must be true in other places as well. Gen had asked her to leave with him. More than asked.

“I can’t leave my country, Eugenides.”

“Why not? It keeps trying to eat you alive.”

“Because if I leave, then Erondites will rule Attolia, and I will not leave my people to that fate.”

“Mm. What if I destroyed Erondites first, then?”

“You are king now. Kings cannot go about assassinating barons they don’t like.”

“I wouldn’t kill him, just remove him.”

“And leave his heir in his place? Dite’s a dear, but he hasn’t the skill to run a barony by himself. If his family remains alive, Dite won’t stay in power long. Someone more ruthless will take his place and will become just as much of a threat to the throne. The Erondites barony commands too much land and too many men.”

“What if I destroy the House of Erondites?”

“You can’t destroy a whole baronial house.”

“I can do anything I want. Give me six months.”

“Six months? How exactly do you propose to destroy a baronial house in six months?”

“I don’t know yet, I have to think.”

“You cannot use your Guard against them. This country is tired of civil strife.”

“I won’t need to, for this. Although, speaking of your Guard and ways it can cause civil strife …”

But ninety-eight days later, he hadn’t asked her to leave with him again. She’d wanted him to be king; he’d resolved to give her everything she wanted. He’d become exactly the king that his gods required. All because of her.

Hector’s frown deepened, and Irene realized she was shaking her head. She commanded her body to stillness.

Quietly, Hector reminded her, “He took his oath to his god before he took his oath to you. He is not solely yours.”

But I don’t want to share. Irene grimaced. She sounded like a child, but she couldn’t deny that was exactly what she was thinking. He’s mine. I don’t care what other oaths he’s sworn, he’s mine, give him back to me! There was a part of her that knew she wasn’t being reasonable, that the gods were the ones who’d given Gen to her in the first place and that when they used him, it was for the survival of the Hephestian Peninsula, and that goal was worth the price of the Annux’s life if that was what it cost. But this part of her was insignificant and tiny compared to her overwhelming desire to go to the temple of Hephestia in Attolia and tear it apart brick by brick. It was only fair: she’d built that temple in exchange for the gods returning Gen to her, so it should be within her rights to tear it down when they took him away. Helen had once told her a myth wherein a woman whose daughter had been stolen had managed to see her again by destroying the temple of the goddess who’d kidnapped her. Though even then, the woman hadn’t been able to bring her daughter home.

Hector met her eyes and nodded with such understanding that her thoughts stopped in their tracks. Oh. A vague image of a woman with Gen’s features falling from a window up to the Eddisian palace’s roof flashed through her mind. Of course Hector understood. How terrible that someone else should ever have felt the same way she felt right now, and what a relief.

Irene shifted to the side as Hector made to sit next to her on the cushioned bench. It was not a particularly long bench, and even at opposite ends of it, they sat close enough together that a sudden gesture would have made them collide. Hector kept his eyes on hers. “But he’s not solely his god’s, either,” he told her, softly. “He has us. As long as we’re here to catch him, he won’t fall. We’re here. He’ll come back to us.”

Irene stared off at nothing and swallowed against the lump in her throat. “Helen said as much,” she told him, in case Helen hadn’t already related to Hector the conversation they’d had the night Eugenides had come back from the Mede camp. “Though she admitted she’d never seen him that far gone.” And even though Helen hadn’t said it outright, it had been clear to Irene, reflecting anew on practically everything she knew about Gen’s prior life in Eddis, that Helen had gone to considerable lengths to try and ensure Gen never did get subsumed by his god to such a degree.

“He wasn’t completely gone,” Hector offered.

Irene’s eyes winced closed. “That’s worse. He would never –” He would never have wanted this. Not Gen, not the first Thief in centuries to so thoroughly reject the “assassin” aspect of his calling that he’d looped all the way back around to the older means of Eddisian kingmaking: finding and stealing Hamiathes’s Gift. Not the king who’d killed in battle and in self-defense but had never yet used assassination nor even execution as a political tool. Had he known? Had he looked around, betrayed and in pain and alone among enemies but for one mute, limping child, and knowingly given in to the God of Thieves? Or had he had no intention of doing that, maybe even had a different plan altogether, but been forced to the systematic slaughter of Mede officers anyway, to becoming everything he hadn’t wanted to be?

It took Irene a short moment to realize she was crying and a longer moment to recognize the fabric she felt against her face as that of Hector’s vest. It seemed that he had hugged her. She could feel his arms around her shoulders, holding her securely, but she wasn’t sure when they’d moved there, or why. She imagined how she looked right now, pressed face-first against the Eddisian minister of war’s chest, her hair unkempt from two days without rebraiding, her skirt wrinkled all over from the places she’d bunched its fabric in her fists, her fingers fidgeting because she needed to pee again like she did every five gods-damned minutes these days. Unqueenly. She was too worn through to care.

Irene sobbed into Hector’s chest like a little girl crying in the arms of her nurse before her nurse had left to start a family of her own and have children she would love rather than merely feeling a duty toward. Hector held her steady. Irene struggled for a deep breath, then whispered the fear she’d been dreading to say aloud but couldn’t leave unspoken any longer. “What if he doesn’t come back?” Her hands found her belly and circled it. She’d just recently started to feel kicking inside her; she hadn’t shown Gen yet, but it made it all so real, made her imagine the warm weight of a child in her arms. A child who needed parents to be there and protect them and love them and teach them everything they needed to know. To be the opposite of Irene’s parents, basically. She raised her voice and heard it crack as she said, “I can’t do this alone.”

“He’ll come back,” Hector told her.

She shook her head again. “There was a patient in my charity hospital once, whose head had been badly injured. She looked like she was sleeping – breathing steadily, not moving besides that – but nothing could wake her, and in a few days, she died.”

“His head isn’t injured,” Hector calmly pointed out.

Irene turned her face just enough to blink in Gen’s direction. He lay still, his head just as whole and uninjured as it had been the last hundred times she’d looked at him.

She heard the shfff of skin against her dress’s fabric a moment before she felt the gentle pressure of circles being rubbed into her back. Her breathing steadied, but her tears didn’t stop. Gods. She was about to become a mother; why did she feel so much like a little child?

“It’s sleep,” Hector continued quietly. “He’s only sleeping. It’s a power of the gods, to send people into very deep sleep, and it’s always restorative. He will wake, and he will not be happy if he sees that you haven’t been resting.” Irene sniffed but didn’t reply. “Galen will come again this morning,” he added. “Ask him how well Gen’s injuries have healed.”

Irene frowned thoughtfully. She hadn’t checked for that. Gen had been healed overnight after his Trial, not instantly, and Medes and a close-range explosion had done rather more damage to him than his father’s careful sparring strikes had. Was it only taking longer for him to recover this time?

She swallowed. “And if he comes back,” she asked, “and he’s like his grandfather?”

A growl formed deep in Hector's throat. Irene didn’t need to specify which grandfather. She had only spoken to the old Thief once, and she used to chalk up her discomfort during that conversation to the fact that he had seemed to appear from shadow itself and had studied her with far more intensity than anyone else did at the time, but Gen’s stories, and Helen’s, however neutrally recounted, had left her with the impression that the man had been far too comfortable acting as an agent of divine vengeance. And far too uncomfortable with mercy. And wildly unsuited to child-rearing. She'd gathered that that had been Hector’s impression as well, since the old Thief had apparently needed to repeatedly kidnap Gen out of Hector’s reach in order to complete Gen’s training. (She supposed this must have skewed Gen’s impression of how people typically react to being kidnapped, which explained a lot about his own methods.)

“Gen is not like his grandfather.” Hector’s voice remained even, but Irene could feel him tense.

“And he never could be?”

“No.”

“Is that not what your council of ministers was afraid of?” she breathed. “That he would grow up to be his grandfather, all over again?” In her mind, Eugenides’s voice echoed, “… all that remains will be the Thief, and every sovereign of the Continent who betrayed me will wake choking on their own blood …” It had seemed so impossible to her, that first moment when she’d finally pieced together everything she knew about how Gen left Eddis and went after the Gift, that anyone who’d known Gen could have doubted his loyalty to the queen of Eddis. His loyalty was so deep and so obvious and had fascinated Irene for so long. A queen could not have servants who both loved her and were loyal to her; Relius’s old maxim had seemed to prove itself to Irene over and over during the first years of her reign. But there was Eddis’s Thief, perfectly loving to his queen and perfectly loyal, the two traits that should have repelled each other wound together in him instead. Unmistakably, she would have sworn. Yet fear made it easy to mistake loyalty for its opposite – Irene knew that far too well – and she hadn’t, until two nights ago, known just how terrifying the Thief could be.

Irene felt Hector’s arms stiffen around her. For a moment, she felt irrationally frightened, but only for a moment. Hector breathed deep and loosened his grip. She pulled back enough to see his face, which bore a grim expression. She looked away.

“Thalas was visited by a shade and given a prophecy,” Hector said while Irene wiped her face dry with her underskirt. She paused and looked up. Part of her mind noted the state of Hector’s vest and wondered whether she should wipe it, too, but that would likely make it worse, and at any rate, he would be wearing a breastplate over it for most of the day. The rest of her tired mind tried to place the name “Thalas” and finally landed on “the high priest of Eddis.” Hector continued, “It said that Gen would steal a throne and would rule over Eddis and would see Eddis destroyed during his reign.”

Irene blinked twice. “That … but … Each of those things is true separately, but they’re not …” She shook her pounding head and only then registered that Hector’s eyebrows had shot up in surprise.

Oh dear. Irene scrambled to think of a way to backtrack from confirming the coming destruction of Eddis. Suggest that she was so sleep-deprived that she’d mistaken the meaning of “destroyed?” Hastily add, “Except that last one, of course?” Claim to have been briefly possessed by Moira in a continuation of the outbreak of divine possessions that the Attolian royal family was experiencing?

Finally, Hector said, “Helen told you about the Sacred Mountain?”

Thank the gods, thought Irene, letting out her breath. She shook her head. “Gen did.”

Hector hmpfed. He turned his face towards his son and stared at him for a moment, then said, “I wasn’t sure she’d told him. She didn’t at first.”

“The gods took care of that,” Irene informed him.

Hector’s shoulders sagged. “Mm.”

“When did she tell you?” Irene asked, curious, remembering all too clearly the sound of Gen’s screams echoing out through the shattered windows of the old solarium when he’d seen – more than seen – a vision of the eruption. She shivered, and unexpectedly, Hector wrapped an arm around her again. Irene rubbed her forehead, sighed, and leaned her aching head against his shoulder. A distant part of her wondered if there was any time in her life when she would have been glad to hear of Eddis’s fate. She’d had no love for the mountain country for most of her life, associating it with long, cold nights and with harsh trade taxes and especially with its unfairly free princess turned unfairly well-served queen. Yet the image of its green valleys left black and barren as the dystopia, of its stone buildings melting into a flow of burning rock, of every living creature in its valleys choking to death on smoke, was not one she could imagine ever finding pleasant.

Hector grunted. “The night after Gen announced his plan to marry you,” he answered.

“Ah.” Irene hid a wince. Helen’s god-sent nightmares of the Sacred Mountain’s eruption had begun during a winter break in her war with Attolia. How quickly had Helen realized, once Gen laid out his plan, that the gods were the ones trying to force an alliance that would make Eddisians migrate to land-rich Attolia and out of volcanic danger, that the gods were the ones who’d betrayed her beloved young cousin?

Irene closed her eyes and held her tongue against escaping blasphemous thoughts. She didn’t know how anyone could love gods like that, who would make a perfectly loyal servant give up almost everything he held dear in order to save his homeland, over and over, and then sweep his homeland away in a burning tide anyway. Irene sacrificed to the Hephestian gods out of necessity, never out of gratitude. At times, she wondered if Helen did the same. Irene didn’t think she could have borne the weight of her crown if she’d known since the day she’d become Attolia that she would be the last of that name, that her country would fall and she would see it fall, but somehow, Helen managed it. Did she secretly rage at her gods in spaces so private that no one – perhaps not even her gods – could overhear? Did she seek out offerings that were precious to the gods and destroy them in fury? Helen had started a war against Attolia over what had happened to Gen. She’d been unable, as all mortals were unable, to start a war against the gods.

“Did you see the vision as well?” Irene asked quietly. She felt Hector shake his head. “How long before you first believed it?”

“I believed it.”

Irene raised her eyebrows. Gen had not thought his father to be particularly devout, from what he’d told her. She supposed that might have changed after years of being in Gen’s orbit. “You believed your queen’s vision, but not your high priest’s?”

Hector sighed. “Both.”

“But –” Irene frowned, trying to make sense of that. Hector cared dearly for his children, but he was a general an a prince of his country, and if his country’s continued existence demanded the sacrifice of his children, she was sure he would put Eddis first even in that.

Hector grunted. “It was a shade’s prophecy,” he said. “It was not from Moira. The gods seek the continuation of their people. Shades speak to the living only for the sake of personal matters.”

Slowly, Irene nodded. “You thought the prophecy was twisted somehow, and you trusted Gen.” She stared at the bed, somewhat expecting Gen to stick to his habit of showing up at the most inconvenient times by waking right in the middle of this conversation.

Hector repeated, “Gen is not like his grandfather.”

“No, he’s not.” And he wasn’t. Irene was in the rare position of being able to gather stories about the Thieves, as it wasn’t difficult for her to get Gen to open up when they were alone together, and despite Gen’s occasional protests to the contrary, he greatly enjoyed telling stories. It was common in those stories for the Thieves of Eddis to be brave, clever, patriotic, and self-sacrificing, but it was uncommon for them to be forgiving or kind. It was profoundly uncommon for them to trust anyone who gave them the slightest reason not to.

And it occurred to Irene, in a way it hadn’t before, that Gen hadn’t only been raised and trained by Thieves. Hector had trained him, too. Hector, who would accept the destruction of his country on the word of a prophecy but refuse to stop trusting someone he loved on account of the same. Who would sit and hold the queen of Attolia as she cried as if she were his own baby daughter. Who could stand close enough to the Thieves to know exactly how dangerous they could become and yet never once, in all the convolutions of their relationship, treat Gen as anything other than his son. Gen hadn’t only learned from the Thief side of his family. For all that he was his mother’s son, he was just as much his father’s.

Hector’s eyes stayed on Irene as her breathing evened out. “He’ll be himself when he wakes,” he said.

“Yes,” Irene agreed. She studied her sleeping king, and a hard smile tugged at her lips. “Perhaps slightly more vengeful than before.” She knew that she certainly was. It was a good thing Eugenides had scared Yorn Fordad out of their warcamp before anger had had a chance to break through Irene’s shock and fear: at least some of the Hephestian Peninsula’s monarchs needed to avoid violating diplomatic immunity.

Hector grunted. “You trust him?” he said, piercingly.

I don’t trust his god, thought Irene, but that was not what Hector had asked. Tired as she was, she nearly echoed Helen’s words from years ago automatically: What choice do I have but to trust him? She’d been thinking of that conversation a lot, this past day and night. At the time, she’d thought that Helen had been asking Gen’s prospective bride what other option she had than to trust Gen, but she hadn’t been. She’d been asking a fellow queen. It had never before occurred to Irene that Helen had had to make the same choice herself: to trust the Thief or to try to destroy him. Those were the only options a ruler had, once you knew what the Thief was capable of. Besides ignoring him and hoping he ignored you, that is, but in Irene’s case, they’d quite thoroughly established that there was nothing Irene could do short of murdering Gen that would make him leave her alone.

Irene hadn’t been able to bear the thought of losing Gen. So she’d done the opposite. In retrospect, it struck her as nearly funny: she’d gone directly from trusting no one at all to trusting the biggest liar in the whole Hephestian Peninsula. It had been the most terrifying leap she’d ever taken, and the softest landing.

Hector was still staring at her with a disconcerting intensity. Irene studied his face, then smiled despite herself. Meshed in with all the differences, there she spotted Gen’s chin and ears and forehead; there was that lock of hair above his left eyebrow that insisted on sticking straight forward; there was the way one side of Gen’s mouth dipped slightly further down than the other when he frowned.

Gen was not only the Thief. He never had been. And he never would be.

“Yes,” Irene answered firmly. “Always.”

Hector nodded.

His expression softened, and he squeezed her shoulder once before saying, “He trusts you as well. More than anyone.”

I know, she thought, and was surprised to find that that was true. Her hands stilled as she contemplated this knowledge.

More gently, Hector finished, “He can’t do this alone, either.”

Irene’s neck and shoulders slumped.

“So,” said Hector. “You must sleep.”

“Fine, fine,” Irene conceded, waving a hand. It was strangely natural to copy the way Gen spoke when talking with Gen’s father.

Hector nodded again and began to stand up. He paused when he was halfway to his feet.

“What is it?” Irene asked.

The corners of Hector’s mouth twitched. “You may have to see your treasurer before you sleep,” he told her. When she raised an eyebrow, he explained, “My men caught a pair of elephant handlers yesterday.”

Irene lifted her chin and smiled openly for the first time in days. “Excellent.”

“You offered quite a generous reward,” he commented.

“He really wants those elephants.”

Hector chuckled, and Irene blinked in surprise. She’d never heard him do that before. The accomplishment left a proud warmth in her chest.

“I can write my camp treasurer to pay out the rewards, if you can tell me how many of your soldiers were involved,” she said, reaching for her lap desk since her writing desk was too cluttered with reports and maps, “and whether they’ve helped capture the elephants as well.”

Hector shook his head. “Not yet. Ornon spoke to the handlers and told me they said that the elephants are likely to stick together, which should make them easier to find.”

“So long as we get to them first.” She frowned, trying to stabilize the lap desk. Her belly protruded so far now that the desk hung halfway off her knees.

Hector grunted and walked to a corner of the royal tent that was used for storage. He moved several small chests aside; Irene recognized one containing carefully packed amphoras of hair oil and another containing Gen’s false hand, brought along despite the fact that he hadn’t worn it in over a year. She remembered when he used to swap the hook for the false hand before every court dinner, but these days he chose the hook for even the most formal ceremonies. She’d overheard the magus comment to Gen at one point that he was glad to see Gen’s inner battle between function and vanity for once resolve in favor of function.

Hector finally pulled a spare table leg from the corner, along with nails and a handsaw and hammer – Irene was briefly surprised that all of those things were in her tent, but she imagined it might be difficult to requisition spare parts and workman’s tools in the middle of a warcamp should there be a sudden royal need for them – and carried them to the center of the tent. She offered up her lap desk. He cut the spare table leg to size and attached it to the far end of her desk while she watched in fascination. He handed back the desk, and she wrote out the letter for the treasurer easily and sealed it with her ring.

“Aristogiton,” she called, standing up. The guard appeared at the tent door quickly, and she passed the letter to him. “See this finds its way to the camp treasury, please.”

“Your Majesty.” He bowed and left.

Irene watched Aris step away and realized just as he accosted another guard and began explaining Her Majesty’s wishes that she’d forgotten to tell him to send for Chloe. She sighed, shook her head, closed the tent flap, and reached behind herself, feeling for the buttons and ties at the back of her dress.

Hector forestalled her with a hand on her shoulder. Irene looked back and met his eyes, then nodded. He set to work unfastening her harder-to-reach buttons. He was quicker and a bit less gentle than Gen was when doing the same, but then, she supposed, Gen tended to have things other than efficiency on his mind when he helped her undress.

Hector stepped back when her dress hung loosely enough that she could remove it without effort, and she turned to face him. He nodded to her. “Sleep well,” he said, starting for the doorway.

“Hector.” He stopped and looked back at the sound of her voice, and they held each other’s eyes for a few moments before she whispered, “Thank you.”

He nodded again. And then he took both her shoulders in his hands, pulled her close, and planted a kiss on her forehead. He was gone before she could think of how to respond.

The tent flaps shivered gently in the breeze. Irene stepped over and tied them shut.

Not long after she got her nightgown on, just as she was fishing the last of her hairpins out of her hair and braiding it for sleep, Aris announced Petrus's and Galen's arrival. Irene let them in. They insisted on examining her first and were soon jointly advising her to drink more water and for gods’ sakes (Galen’s wording) sleep.

Galen satisfied himself regarding the condition of Irene's health and moved on while Petrus was still busy with her. Petrus exclaimed when he felt her baby kicking. “Wait,” he said slowly, placing his hand on the opposite side of her belly, “are there … two?”

Irene’s heart leapt at the prospect.

“I wouldn’t judge that from the motion,” cautioned Galen. “Children in the Thief line don’t tend to stay still.”

“Neither do the adults,” Irene grumbled.

Galen snorted. He was doing something with Gen’s knee. “Petrus,” he called, and the Attolian royal physician stood and joined him by the bed. Galen raised his eyebrows expectantly while Petrus examined the same knee.

“His knee cap was fractured,” Petrus insisted in a strangled voice.

“And now?”

Petrus sighed, and Irene felt her breaths come in more deeply. Hector was right.

“Well?” Galen insisted as Petrus turned away from the bed.

“I already admitted that you were right.” Petrus adjusted his spectacles.

Galen chuckled and punched Petrus in the shoulder hard enough to dislodge his spectacles anew. Petrus leaned away, clearly affronted. Irene would find a way to take Petrus aside later and explain that this was an Eddisian gesture of affection.

The two physicians left at the same time, heading off to oversee the day’s work in the medic tents for their respective armies, and Irene sat down on the bed once again. She considered Gen for a minute before nodding to herself and slipping between the sheets to his left. If she had been possessed by a god and then, later, woke from the ordeal while Gen was still sleeping, she knew she want to find him asleep right by her side.

Irene interwove her fingers with Gen’s. He didn’t react. He will, she reminded herself. Be patient. He will. She pulled his hand up to her face to kiss the back of his knuckles, then closed her eyes and fell asleep still holding it.

Chapter Text

“Your Majesty.” Phresine smiled as Helen entered the first waiting room into the queen of Attolia’s chambers.

Helen immediately found herself smiling back. Phresine’s smile was so warm and welcoming and … grandmotherly, was probably the right word. Helen had never met any of her own grandparents, the plague’s having hit the Eddisian royalty harder than it had hit most of the population, since travel for the sake of diplomacy had still been necessary even when most other types of travel in and out of Eddis had been banned. The surviving Eddisian nobles from that generation were, unfortunately, mostly of the opinion that a woman should not be Eddis, nor that a Thief who was also a prince should exist, much less become Annux over Eddis. It was a rare and welcome event to be looked on with such unbegrudging, indulgent fondness by someone of Phresine’s generation.

“Is Her Majesty taking visitors?” Helen asked.

“Certain ones,” Phresine said, opening the door to the next room and gesturing Helen and her attendants inside.

The smell of baby hit Helen even before the final door to Irene’s bedchamber was opened. She knew that the Attolian royal nursery was prepared, but the prince and princess of Attolia evidently had yet to be moved there. She’d seen the newborns already, having been admitted to Irene’s bedside to hold her hand while she went through labor, but she wondered what they would look like now, after a day to acclimate to life. Based on the murmurs she could hear from the waiting room behind her, her attendants were asking Irene’s attendants similar questions. Xanthe in particular seemed eager to know how the twins were faring. And how they were behaving. It seemed a little early to Helen to be worrying about the twins getting up to mischief, but then, they were Gen’s children.

The conversation in the attendants’ waiting room went from quiet to inaudible as the door to Irene’s bedchamber closed behind Helen. Only one attendant, Luria, sat in the bedchamber itself, watching over the two cradles to the right of the great golden bed. She nodded at Helen but said nothing in greeting. Helen couldn’t fault her silence. Gods only knew how rare it was for both of the babies to be sleeping at once. Helen’s eyes traveled to the bed itself, where her fellow queen leaned against the headboard, dressed in a loose nightgown and propped up by an array of pillows.

Irene looked exhausted. Small wonder. Yesterday, after giving birth to two babies and then nursing them to sleep, she’d insisted over the stern protests of the royal physicians on getting dressed and on holding a small formal audience (albeit while lying down), during which she had told the magus and her fellow monarchs in no uncertain terms that the the drafting of the Charter of the Three States was to be completed that day. They'd been very close to working out the last few details of the treaty anyway, and they'd resolved the remaining points of contention swiftly, for the most part simply accepting whatever compromise the magus suggested. There was a court dinner that night celebrating both the birth of Attolia’s heirs and the completed draft of the Charter. Irene had made a brief appearance at the dinner before finally retiring.

The magus probably thought Irene had been so insistent on finishing the Charter that day because she’d wanted to give her new heirs the political gift of having their birthday forever be associated with the treaty of coequal unity between the countries of the Hephestian Peninsula. Others probably thought the queen of Attolia had wanted to give her people a dramatic demonstration that her children’s birth had left her perfectly healthy and in good condition to rule, to waylay any lingering fears from her prior miscarriage. Helen, privately, thought it was something more simple: that holding two live, squirming babies that bore as many of Gen’s features as they did Irene’s, and seeing Gen’s eyes look up at her from the face of an infant, had made Irene want to bring her husband home as fast as he could possibly come.

Irene met Helen’s stare and gave a small smile, which was probably all that she had the energy for. She held out one of her hands. Helen walked over to her and took it.

“No new crises, I assume?” Irene whispered.

“None,” Helen assured her. “Most of the city must still be sleeping off a hangover.”

Irene’s mouth twitched in appreciation of the joke. Upon reflection, maybe another reason for her pushing for the Charter’s completion had been that the combined celebrations of the drafting of the Charter and the births of the twins entailed nearly a week straight of festivities, and there would be no court business until it was over. Perhaps Irene meant to spend the first few days of the lull with her children by her side and then move them to the nursery and employ a nursemaid so that she could actually sleep.

“Have you eaten?” Helen asked, eyeing the mostly untouched platter of fruits and sliced bread and cheeses on the bedside table.

“Some,” Irene answered. She sighed. “I thought the nausea would go away once they were out in the world.”

Helen squeezed her hand sympathetically. “Selene’s warned me that doesn’t go away until a week or two after birth.”

Irene closed her eyes and muttered something about how her children and her husband and her country were all very, very lucky that she loved them enough to be willing to put up with this, which Helen pretended not to hear.

Helen occupied her own eyes by looking over at the cradles again. From this angle, she could easily peer into them and see the blue-and-gold swaddled infants inside, pudgy and wrinkled and precious beyond words. Two of them. The fingers of Helen’s free hand made an involuntary grabbing motion. I want one, she thought, and she silently reminded herself that she would have a baby soon enough, a baby that was hers, hers and Sophos’s, and that baby would be lovely and loved and perfect in every way, especially if the sweet little hulking giant of an infant would hurry up and be born already. Helen was so very ready to meet them and hold them and to stop feeling more like a human-shaped balloon with each passing day.

The bedding in the cradles was unruffled except for where the babies lay in the middle. Helen glanced back at Irene’s bed and saw dimples to either side of her. The twins had only recently been moved to their cradles, then. “Are you expecting other visitors?” Helen asked.

Irene shook her head. “My attendants have somehow contrived to turn everyone away,” she said. “You’re the only person Phresine’s let through so far, besides the physicians.”

That was for the refused visitors’ benefit as much as for Irene’s, Helen suspected. Anyone who thought they had a right to an audience with Irene today was likely an Attolian baron pissed off that his standing in the Hephestian Peninsula would no longer be technically higher than that of a Sounisian baron or an Eddisian baron under the new Charter, and at the moment, the Attolians’ king was not here to calm down their queen whenever anyone especially angered her. Or vice versa, Helen supposed, but it would be a very stupid Attolian patronoi who went to Gen with complaints about the Charter when the news of it reached the banks of the Lusimina and expected Gen to react to their concerns about the fact that the Annux could now be replaced by someone else, someone not even necessarily Attolian, with anything other than an expression of fervent hope that that particular provision of the Charter be carried out posthaste.

… Come to think, Helen and the magus should probably start working on a lecture for Gen on why the Annux who’d led his people to victory against the Mede’s being dethroned in the near future would be politically terrible for the Hephestian Peninsula, as the various powers of the Continent evaluated whether or not their militaries should leave the Hephestian Peninsula alone, before Gen could conceive of some horrible plot to get himself removed as Annux.

“Would you like more company of a non-baronial variety?” Helen asked. Irene opened her eyes but didn’t answer. “Many of my attendants are gifted masseuses,” she tempted. There had been several nights lately when a massage had done wonders at helping Helen fall asleep. Prudish as they were, Helen wasn’t sure if Attolians expected their queen’s attendants to have the same expertise that hers did.

Irene raised an eyebrow. “Oh, did Gen learn by watching them? He’s never said,” she asked, and Helen, considering that possibility, sent up another prayer of gratitude that her own marriage had come after her megaron’s resident nighttime spy had permanently relocated to Attolia. Not that Gen had ever been much of a voyeur, but there were only so many Eddisian bedrooms a person could sneak through without glimpsing private affairs, especially in the dead of winter.

Helen cleared her throat. “Shall we see if we can find out through a comparison of technique?” she suggested.

“Hm.” Irene drummed a finger against her lips. Luria looked on in curiosity. “Petrus already spent a great deal of time massaging my stomach yesterday and today.”

“Just your stomach?” Helen pressed, and Irene nodded. “Well, if you’d like –”

She was interrupted by a yowl from one of the cradles. Although she’d been speaking softly, the sound of her voice appeared to have woken the princess, who continued wailing as Luria lifted her up.

Irene held out her arms, and the howling baby was delivered into them while Helen stammered an apology.

“It’s not your fault,” Irene assured her. “This one fusses about every little thing. Petrus and Galen both checked her over for infirmity, but it seems this is just her preferred way of communicating.”

“So, so, so,” Helen murmured. “No mistaking her paternity.”

Irene smiled. Her daughter, latching on to nurse, stopped whining and quieted down. “No, indeed.”

Next to the bed, Luria was lifting the prince out of his own cradle. Helen looked and saw that his eyes – wide and dark and so very much like Gen’s – were also open, his sister’s cries having woken him. He wasn’t wriggling around or otherwise indicating a desire to be nursed, though, and he seemed to Helen to be more tired than hungry. Luria rocked him for a minute, then caught Helen’s eager stare, smiled, and came around the bed to place the prince of Attolia in Helen’s arms.

The baby blinked up at Helen. She grinned back. His face screwed up, and he sneezed. “Shh, shh,” she whispered, rocking him gently.

Irene nodded to her. “Is that one also hungry?”

“I don’t think so,” Helen answered, turning to show Irene how her son was curling up against the center of Helen’s chest rather than seeking a breast.

“He just wants to sleep right now, then,” Irene said in an exhausted tone of voice that indicated that he wasn’t the only one.

Helen scooted closer and looked down at the princess. The twins did look much alike, but even with only a few tufts of hair apiece, the princess’s hair was visibly curlier than her brother’s. “Do you know what her name will be?” Helen asked Irene.

The queen of Attolia shook her head. “Not yet. Gen and I discussed possibilities last time, but … I don’t know if we’ll want to reuse any of those.”

Helen nodded understanding. Irene’s miscarriage had happened late enough that Petrus had been able to tell that it would have resulted in a daughter had Irene carried to term. Fortunately, there was no hurry to decide the name of this new daughter; the naming ceremony wouldn’t happen for weeks yet.

Irene nodded at the baby in Helen’s arms, then quietly, looking suddenly shy, said, “For him, I … was thinking ‘Hector.’”

Helen blinked. “Not your own father’s name?” She had thought Attolian tradition was firm regarding the names of sons who were destined to inherit.

Irene’s lips twitched. “My father was not a popular king,” she said.

“So, your people would consider it a good omen for your heir to be named after Gen’s father instead?” asked Helen.

Irene shrugged. “Some will undoubtedly object, but it’s common enough in Attolian custom to name a firstborn son after either grandfather, especially when he’s born into a different family than that of the grandfather he’s named for. Children are meant to be a reminder of the ties that bind us together.”

She looked oddly hesitant to Helen, like a child seeking permission or approval, and it struck Helen that that might be exactly what she was doing. Helen smiled in reassurance. “Having your son carry my uncle’s name would be an honor to my family,” she said.

“To mine as well,” said Irene, smiling back. “He was a great leader on the battlefield, and a great man. And he died fighting to save Attolia at least as much as to save Eddis.” Irene’s voice quietened as she spoke. Helen looked closer and saw that despite her smile, there were tears in her eyes.

Helen’s own eyes welled up as if in response. Gods. She’d thought she’d already cried all that she possibly could these past few weeks, as the final reports of the war’s casualties were completed and lain out before her. Eddis had lost on a greater scale than had Sounis or Attolia. Helen had anticipated that – it came of having a much greater proportion of one’s population be soldiers – but to see it all tallied up like that had been … a lot. Her favorite uncle; her senior general; four of her other ministers; her best royal messenger; her second-favorite male cousin, and so many other cousins besides that she’d lost count altogether; so many soldiers who should have been too old or too young to be fighting at all, who would have been home with their families instead of on the battlefield had this war not demanded of all three countries every last resource they could muster, had it been anything other than a fight for sheer survival. Helen had thought she was used to loss. In many ways, she was, but not on this scale.

But here were fresh tears all over again. Perhaps it was just that when things were going well, the shock of loss, even of already-mourned loss, hit harder, and this past week really had gone well. The Charter was drafted! The most recent news from Roa was that the remaining Mede soldiers were deserting in such numbers that the king of Roa was having to use his own forces to get rid of them now and that Roa had formally ceded the stretch of land between the Pinosh and the Lusimina to Attolia! Irene had given birth to two healthy heirs and was recovering well! Helen, despite how tired and bloated she felt all the time, had been assured by the royal physicians of all three countries that her own pregnancy was progressing well, too! (For whatever the Sounisian royal physician’s opinion was worth. Sophos had inherited his royal physician from his uncle, who had been the kind of man to prefer good news to accurate news and to regularly remove from his court those who gave him the latter. The magus had survived the old Sounis’s court in large part by virtue of being very good at emphasizing the bright side of any situation, and even then he’d barely survived. Sophos’s royal physician was just a sycophant.)

Even Helen’s dreams of the Sacred Mountain’s eruption had turned peaceful some weeks ago and had recently ceased altogether. Whatever it was that the gods had been cautioning against, it had apparently come and passed with no grievous mistakes made on the part of the Hephestian Peninsula. Helen wondered if Gen would be able to tell her what it had been when he returned. Or Pheris. Helen was half-convinced – maybe more than half – that the new Erondites was a chosen of Moira: his memory and his perceptiveness had that same slight more-than-human edge that Gen’s balance and night vision did, and she’d witnessed him be both confident and accurate in his interpretation of at least one prophecy. She wondered if Pheris might someday share the journals that she’d seen him writing in with her. The magus had told her that he could see the boy becoming a historian. Hopefully, Eugenides’s tutelage had not spilled over into teaching Pheris to use the same tricks of narration Gen used.

Helen’s nights had been pleasant in other ways, too, with the ever-diminishing challenges of the Medes and of securing a lasting peace in the Hephestian Peninsula giving her and Sophos enough breathing room to recall that for all that it felt as if lifetimes had passed since their wedding, it had in reality been not quite two years. They still had their whole lives left to enjoy each other’s company, and remembering this seemed to have given them the giddy energy of newlyweds all over again. She and Sophos had had the chance to rise late that morning and had thoroughly taken advantage of it. Helen looked down again at the Attolian prince in her arms. Oh, gods, she felt so ready to have one of her and Sophos’s own.

Luria offered Helen a handkerchief, and she accepted it and wiped her eyes before any of her tears spilled onto the baby’s face. Prince Hector. “It will mean the world to Gen,” whispered Helen.

Irene smiled through her own tears. “The resemblance is strong, don’t you think?”

Helen studied the stern expression on the prince’s little face and laughed. “Uncanny,” she agreed. “I can feel the disapproving stare even with his eyes closed.”

“I’m sure it’s directed at his sister, not at you,” said Irene, adjusting her grip on the princess in question in order to give her right arm a break. The princess stopped nursing and loudly protested this change. Irene calmly guided her daughter to return to nursing. Helen soothed baby Hector. “She stole my hair tie this morning,” Irene told her.

“Oh, dear.” Helen tried to keep her grin from showing.

“Oh?” asked Irene, wiping her face and giving Helen an inquiring look. “Is there some story in this?”

Helen shrugged and gave in. “I don’t remember this myself,” she said, “but the story goes that the first time Gen’s mother burped him, he filched a pin out of her hair, and they couldn’t get him to let go of it until she took him to the altar of Eugenides and he set it down there.”

Irene raised one eyebrow. “Is that how they knew he would become a Thief?”

“No, his grandfather declared that he would be a Thief the day he was born.” Helen almost went on to explain the traditional wintertime Eddisian means of confirming that an infant was chosen of the God of Thieves but, upon consideration, decided against it. Irene looked like she could tell that Helen had something else to say, though, so Helen said, “I doubt Gen was deliberately dedicating the hairpin. Though maybe he dropped it while trying to grab a shinier one from the altar.”

Irene smiled. “He still enjoys swiping hairpins.”

“Oh, yes,” Helen agreed. “There’s never been a time when he didn’t. None of his aunts would hold him after the first few stolen hairpins. Whenever his mother was busy, his father had to keep hold of him, because once he started crawling it wasn’t safe to leave him to his own devices, either.” She had a memory of a time that she and her older brothers had been caught trying to eavesdrop on a meeting of the council of ministers because Hector had unexpectedly needed to slip out early with his baby son when Gen wouldn’t quiet down. He’d spotted his nephews and niece fleeing around a corner and had called them to attention. Helen had managed to get out of the talking-to and any other punishment that might have followed by volunteering to take Gen with her and go back to Xanthe. By the time Xanthe had found Helen and Gen playing together in Helen’s room, every last one of Helen’s silver hairpins had disappeared, never to be seen again, and her curls were in fantastic disarray. It had been an important step towards Helen’s getting Xanthe to cut her hair short the way she’d wanted it.

Irene smiled painfully. She looked away for a few moments, her daughter nursing peacefully, and then looked back and asked, “Did I tell you – or did Gen tell you – after the Naupent …?”

“Hm?” Helen prompted.

“They were lying next to each other when I found them,” Irene said. She blinked, and another tear spilled over her eyelid.

“Oh,” said Helen. She looked out the window, up at the sky. “They were very good as a fighting pair.”

“No. That’s not it. Hector made sure not to fight too near Gen, to encourage Gen to stay in formation.” Irene paused, and Helen nodded, then nodded again, realizing that when Gen had told Helen that he’d seen his father fall, he must have meant he’d seen it from far enough away that there’d been no way he could’ve gotten to Hector’s side in time to help. Otherwise, he would have tried to go to his father no matter what danger he put himself in by doing so. “Gen found him at the end of the day.”

“Oh,” said Helen. “Oh …” The survivors from the Battle of Naupent had described to her how quickly, after the Medes had retreated, every soldier left at the pass had fallen suddenly and profoundly asleep. They’d not even had time to send a messenger to the queens to report the battle’s outcome. Gen must have remembered where he’d last seen Hector and beelined straight to that spot as soon as the fighting stopped, if that was where he’d woken up.

The lack of word from the pass had left those in the warcamp fearing the worst – the second-worst; the Medes had clearly failed to break through – but Helen would forever be grateful for that god-sent sleep. More than three-quarters of those who’d fought in the Battle of Naupent had died, yet every last one of the survivors was alive still. Not a single one succumbed to slow blood loss or disease once the battle itself was won. A small miracle, but their gods were gods of small miracles, able to temporarily change the appearance of a ruined temple but not rebuild it, able to heal a deep cut but not restore a lost limb, able to rain lighting down on one traitor but not on a whole army, able to foretell a volcanic eruption and maybe even delay it but not prevent it. They did their best to save their people with what powers they had, and Helen strove to be grateful for what they did do rather than dwelling on all they failed to save. The memory she held onto most firmly from the morning after the Battle of Naupent was that of Irene’s scouting party returning to the warcamp. Dozens of Eddisians that Helen had feared dead had appeared in tow, and right at the front had been Gen, Gen, alive and awake and even briefly smiling when his eyes found her in the crowd. Sophos had easily outstripped Helen in their rush towards the returning party. He’d helped Gen down from a horse with that same engulfing hug that he often used to help Helen dismount after he hadn’t seen her for a while, and then the two had simply held each other, opening their arms to admit Helen and Irene too when they approached. Before all the tears of mourning, she’d cried tears of joy, and that, more than anything, was what she wanted to remember.

Irene nodded. “I’ve seen him cry many times before,” she started. She broke off into a sobbing hiccup, then took a deep breath to prevent another one and continued, “But only twice like that, like he couldn’t stop and didn’t care that he couldn’t.” She smiled humorlessly. “I would’ve let him seek out and destroy every last traitor in Attolia if it hadn’t been for your worry and for Pheris’s peculiar brand of loyalty.”

That last startled one quick laugh out of Helen. “That’s a good way of describing Pheris.”

“It’s clear enough where he learned that from.”

“Yes.” Helen met Irene’s pained look of fondness with her own. Gen had spent so much of his life doing everything he possibly could to save Eddis, usually without Helen’s permission, several times while outright lying to her about what he was up to. Helen had spent her whole reign trying to keep various members of her court from strangling Eugenides and half of it wanting to strangle him herself. There was a special kind of joy in watching Gen now have to deal with his own young, secretive, self-destructively loyal ball of chaos.

Irene wiped her face and looked down at her daughter again. For a time, Irene simply stared at the baby as if she were the most astonishingly beautiful thing Irene had ever seen. “Gods-all,” she whispered, “I pray I end up with a fraction of Hector’s patience.”

Helen shook her head, still gently rocking the baby Hector in her arms. “It wasn’t patience,” she told Irene. “Gen’s father was frustrated with him nearly all the time. He just refused to ever stop loving Gen no matter what Gen did.” Irene looked up, and buried somewhere beneath her more neutral expression, Helen thought she saw glimmers of fear and self-doubt. “That’s all it takes,” Helen reassured her. Irene still looked faintly afraid. Helen added gently, “You’ve survived years of being married to Gen; you already have quite a bit of practice.”

Irene gave her a small smile.

Helen cradled the prince of Attolia more closely to her chest and leaned to give her friend a peck on the forehead. “You’re going to be an amazing mother, Irene.” She looked down at the two babies and added, “You already are.”

Irene smiled more easily. Carefully, she leaned to rest her head on Helen’s shoulder. Helen scooted towards the headboard to make it easier for them to maintain that position.

“I didn’t take my daughter to the alter of Eugenides to dedicate the stolen hair tie,” Irene murmured, and Helen could hear that the worry in her voice was affected.

Helen snorted. Irene smiled. “More power to you, if you were able to get it back out of her hands without divine assistance.”

“All it took was untying it and slipping it sideways out of her fist.”

“Ah. Sometimes we mortals manage to find our own brilliant solutions, it seems.”

“Mm.”

Helen felt nuzzling against her chest and looked down. “Oh,” she said. “I think he’s hungry now.”

“I figured that would happen sooner rather than later.” Irene sat up straighter, Luria rearranged some pillows to better support her, and Helen helped her position the prince to nurse on her other side.

They sat in tired, contented silence together for a few minutes. An opening in the clouds made the sun shine more brightly through the windows, glimmering off the golden bedspread, and the distant sound of trumpets summoned the changing of the guard. Slowly, Irene’s smile faded into an expression of faint worry again. “Luria,” she said after a while, “fetch me some cold water with oranges in it.”

Luria stood, bowed, and left. She might have passed on Irene’s request to another attendant at the door and remained in the room with them, but it seemed she understood what her queen actually wanted. She stepped out, quietly closing the door behind her.

Helen turned to Irene. “What is it?”

Irene continued to stare down at her children. “What you said about never stopping loving them,” she said quietly. “I don’t know …” She didn’t continue.

Helen frowned. “You’re worried that you can’t?”

Irene shrugged with false nonchalance. “I’ve rid myself of feeling to the point where I couldn’t even recognize love, much less return it, before.”

Helen squeezed Irene’s shoulder. “Not for a long time now,” she pointed out.

“A whole childhood is a much longer time than that,” said Irene.

It took Helen a moment to understand that Irene meant the twins’ childhoods. If a person could change so much in just a handful of years, how much might she change in a decade and more, and would it always be change for the better?

Irene turned her head to meet Helen’s eyes, her eyebrows creased in worry. Despite herself, Helen smiled.

“What is it?” said Irene.

“It’s just that I am remembering a very similar conversation I had with your husband,” Helen told her.

Irene raised one eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Not exactly the same,” Helen admitted. “The similarity was in his worrying what he could become, given certain pressures, and whether the advice he was hearing from others was merely what he wanted to hear.”

“Yes,” Irene said softly.

Helen nodded. She laid her other hand on her friend’s other shoulder so that she could squeeze both at once. “Irene, if you aren’t yet able to trust yourself, you’ll have to trust us.” Helen waited until Irene nodded. “You’ll have to believe we have reason for it, when we put faith in you.”

Irene exhaled slowly. She still looked a little … lost, for lack of a better word, though less worried than she’d been a minute ago. It struck Helen for the first time then that before she, Irene, and Sophos had left the Leonyla and set sail for the capital of Attolia, Irene hadn’t gone a single day without seeing her husband in their entire married life. Helen and Sophos had so often spent weeks apart, ruling their respective courts, that it had completely escaped Helen’s mind that separation wasn’t something the Attolian royal couple was used to at all.

With a sigh of her own, Helen offered, “The first time after we married that Sophos left for Sounis … I had to stay in Eddis, you remember; my whole court was in uproar about Gen becoming Annux … About the second week after he left, I began to feel strangely disconnected from it all. Like being married to Sophos was just something that was happening to me and nothing more than that.” Hesitantly, Irene nodded. “It faded not long after we were reunited,” Helen assured her.

Irene looked down at the twins. The prince was nursing hungrily, but the princess was slowing down now and drowsing. After a moment, Irene asked Helen, “Have you … felt the same way about being pregnant, at all?”

“Mm.” Helen chewed her lip, considering her words. “Not personally, no. But I’ve had Sophos by my side the whole time, and you’ve seen how contagious his enthusiasm is.” Sophos’s nonstop offers to fetch Helen any food that she might be craving or to rub her feet or to simply carry her in his arms from meeting to meeting so that she wouldn’t have to walk would almost be annoying, were they not also irrepressibly adorable. Helen smiled in reminiscence and shook her head. “I know that that’s not at all an uncommon experience, though. If three or four of your attendants have children, at least one of them has probably gone through something similar.” She would have offered to call in her own attendants, many of whom were mothers, but if there was one thing that the queen of Attolia’s attendants almost certainly did better than any Eddisian noblewoman did, it was refraining from gossip.

“I don’t feel that way now,” Irene told her.

Helen heard the implicit refusal to talk with any attendants about it and shrugged. “Alright.”

Irene grimaced. “But it could come back.”

“It could,” Helen agreed. “Though if you’ve felt that way at all over the past few weeks, I must say I’ve noticed a distinct lack of you being driven to murderous rampages during that time.”

Irene snorted.

More seriously, Helen added, “If it’s worrying you, though, I hope you’ll at least speak with Gen about it.”

“Of course.”

The certainty in that “of course” made Helen smile, at least until Irene frowned and muttered, “At least he has a good role model to follow when it comes to parenting.”

Helen leaned back against the headboard and sighed again. “Irene, my uncle was a great man. I miss him terribly, and I hate that I have to somehow face the rest of my reign now without him at my back,” she said. She felt tears rising again and swallowed firmly. “But he wasn’t flawless. Hell, a not-insignificant driving force of the constant antagonism between Gen and the other boys his age, back when they were growing up, was that every one of them looked up to Hector, and Hector did not keep his disapproval of Gen’s choices private to his own family. And he was dreadful at communicating anything besides orders. I don’t enjoy speaking ill of him, but you have to know he was only a mortal like me or like you,” said Helen. “Not perfect. Not anywhere close.”

“He listened,” said Irene. “He tried.”

“Yes,” Helen agreed, wiping her face with the handkerchief Luria had given her.

“Even when he didn’t want to. Even when he really didn’t want to. And he never once let himself stop.”

Helen cast her a wry smile. “It runs in that branch of my family,” she said.

Irene turned her head. Slowly, she smiled back. “It does.”

In the silence that followed, Irene sank deeper into her supporting pillows, closing her eyes. Helen studied her. “Have I tired you out?” she asked softly.

“No, no,” said Irene, then yawned unconvincingly. “I’m alright to keep talking.”

Helen raised her eyebrows. “Shall I call our physicians in for a second opinion on that?”

“Don’t you dare.” Irene shifted, and Helen instinctively moved out of elbowing range despite both of Irene’s arms being occupied. “Although at least they’re getting along now.”

Helen coughed. There were upsides to having gossipy attendants. “I heard they were seen making out in one of those little reception rooms near the atrium,” she said.

“What, really?” Irene asked. Helen grinned in response. Irene leaned her head back against a pillow. “Mm. Well, good for Petrus.”

“I’m not sure just how much stock I would put in that rumor,” Helen cautioned. “They might have just been spotted with their heads close together as they conspired against my husband’s physician.”

Irene snorted delicately. “Sophos needs to replace that man with someone competent,” she muttered.

Helen could only nod in agreement. “Right before I came here to see you, Sophos and I set the magus to finding someone well-suited for the task of setting up a charity hospital in Sounis,” she told Irene. “Sophos intends to follow your clever example and offer them the position of royal physician as well, to help popularize the new medical techniques they develop.”

Irene looked pleased. Then she raised an eyebrow. “I thought the first new thing Sophos wanted to build in Sounis now was a university?”

“The idea is that the hospital will become the centerpoint of the eventual university,” Helen explained. “A modern research-focused university, like the one in Sidusia that the Medes keep hailing as the pinnacle of education.”

“Ambitious,” said Irene. “And expensive. He is aware that his people will be expecting tax relief now that the war is over? He’s still a very new king. Even with the military successes under his belt, he needs to retain his public’s goodwill.”

Helen stared at her fellow queen cradling and nursing two infants while sternly doling out sound, practical political advice, and she smiled.

Irene raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“You are an excellent mother and an excellent queen,” said Helen.

“Traditionally, becoming a mother is a significant part of a queen’s job,” said Irene, but she smiled at the compliment nonetheless.

“I am sure Sophos will be by to ask you for advice before we depart.”

Irene’s smile faded just slightly. “Gods,” she whispered. “I hadn’t even been thinking about … I suppose there’s not much reason for you to stay in Attolia, now that the Charter’s drafted.”

Helen reached out and squeezed Irene’s shoulder again. “Of course there is.” Irene met her eyes and seemed to take her meaning. Her expression softened. “And anyway,” said Helen, “I don’t feel like hiking up a mountain at the moment. My people and Sophos’s can wait for long enough to welcome home their new heir alongside their sovereigns.”

“You’re leaving after you’ve given birth, then?” Irene asked.

“Sometime after that,” said Helen, shrugging. “Though I’m sure we’ll be back to visit once everything’s settled down a little more. And you could come visit us at last, if you’d like. You’ve still not seen my library, have you?”

“Your infamous library,” Irene agreed. She shook her head, though not in refusal. “I’d never be able to drag Gen home.”

“Of course you would,” Helen said, then winked. “I’m not going to let Gen bring his elephants with him to Eddis.”

“Ah, yes.” Irene smiled, still, rightfully, smug about the elephants. “I hope your heir won’t end up jealous of their cousins’ pets. I doubt Gen will be giving away any of them.”

Irene was all too aware of the damage that growing up jealous of a different royal family could do, Helen knew. “All the more reason for us to visit often and see them ourselves, then,” she said smoothly.

Irene's smile grew. “Mm.”

The princess of Attolia stopped nursing, fast asleep in her mother’s arm. Helen helped Irene reposition her nightgown and, after a wordless negotiation, took Irene’s daughter into her own arms so that Irene could focus on her son. Helen somehow managed not to wake the princess up.

Love of the Goddess, but Gen’s daughter looked so much like him with her eyes closed. Helen had not, for a very long time, really been able to recollect what Gen had looked like back when he was a baby, but apparently some part of her brain still remembered. How odd and how fitting, that Helen’s own child would be the younger cousin to Gen's children.

“There’ll be a dedication ceremony for the Sounisian charity hospital, once it’s ready to open,” Helen said quietly. “It would be lovely for you all to come to it.”

“Indeed,” said Irene, tearing her gaze away from her son. “And I expect the new aqueduct for this city to be finished next year, and I intend to hold a public celebration when the first water flows through it. You and Sounis would be welcome.” Helen smiled. Irene blinked, then shook her head in awe. “Gods,” she whispered. “We’ll have so much time to build, now.”

Helen’s smile turned painful for a moment as she recalled that Eddis was the one country that they couldn’t build in. Irene appeared to realize this a moment later and opened her mouth, but Helen shook her head before Irene could apologize.

“We have a future now,” said Helen. “It won’t be perfect, but we have one. And we will make it better than the past.” She smiled again.

Irene smiled back. “Yes,” she said. Her voice was quiet but firm. She turned her eyes back to her baby son. “Yes. We will.”