“Died, Hilarion. In the night. Peacefully.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because then you could all go away and leave me alone.”
Holding a vest in his hands and trying hard not to crumple the velvet, Hilarion looked at the other attendants for support. Lamion slowly lifted his shoulders all the way to his ears. Philologos hesitantly cleared his throat.
He said, “Your Majesty, if you were dead, we couldn’t just leave you alone.”
There was silence from the bed.
“The body would have to be washed,” said Ion, with an air of the most delicate pragmatism. “And we’d have to dress it for a funeral. An elaborate funeral.”
“We’d have to call the doctor,” Hilarion warned.
“Doctors,” corrected Ion.
With a mumbled curse, the king levered himself slowly up. “That was a cheap shot, Ion,” he said bitterly, as everyone else in the room sighed with relief.
The king’s hook had a series of straps that ran over his shoulders and was the first thing he was helped to put on. He stood to have his pants pulled up, sat again while his attendants placed his feet in boots, lifted his arms while an undershirt was slipped over his head. It was clear that he did not relish the attention. He already looked tired.
Sotis and Ion did his hair, clipping it and combing it and adding a little oil, then carefully dusting it with powdered gold.
“Robe,” said Ion sharply, and Lamion went to fetch it.
Sighing, the king got back to his feet.
They slipped jewels on his fingers and chains around his neck. Ion plucked the single red ruby out of my hand, rubbed it on his coat, and hung it in the king’s ear. Then Lamion brought in the robe, sky-blue velvet embroidered with gold thread and trimmed in spotted ermine, with the lilies of Attolia on the back in a deeper blue and white. I watched in awe as it was draped around the king’s shoulders. He saw me staring and smiled for the first time.
“You’ve impressed the imbecile, Your Majesty.” Medander said it as if it were a joke, but there was an edge I didn’t miss. It was not just me that Medander was mocking.
“I am so glad someone is pleased,” murmured the king.
Hilarion looked daggers at Medander, but he shrugged them off.
It was going to be a very long day.
We first went to the queen’s apartments, which were lavish in direct contrast to the king’s. Arriving in her reception room, the king blamed the attendants for his lateness. They seemed neither resentful nor amused at this lie, just unsettled, eyeing him as if he might erupt like the Sacred Mountain or, worse, return to his bed. Sagging as he settled into his chair, he might have been thinking of just that.
“Sounis’s barons have urged him to repudiate his promise to you,” said Attolia.
“He won’t,” said Eugenides, closing his eyes. “Eddis’s barons have been putting the idea in their heads.”
“Your cousin looked as if he meant to kill you last night at dinner.”
“Cephus has always hated me.”
“That wasn’t the cousin I meant.”
“They have all remembered how much they hate me. I was a hero very briefly when I was stealing your throne and am back to being a villain now that I am stealing Eddis’s.”
“You are stealing nothing. Eddis is their sovereign, and it is Eddis who has chosen this course!”
“You are expecting a sensitivity to nuance, my queen, that you will not find in Eddisians.”
Attolia subsided. “They are demanding a rewording of Eddis’s oath. They want something less stringent. ‘Advise’ rather than ‘rule.’”
“I’m sure they do. But that’s not the oath Eddis agreed to take, and it’s not the one she will swear today.” The gold powder from his hair had smeared across the back of the chair. One of the attendants, the old woman Phresine, rolled her eyes at the mess, but the king didn’t see.
“Sounis has had to browbeat his barons into supporting him,” he was saying wearily. “Eddis has far more authority. She doesn’t waste her time the way we do keeping your horrible council of barons appeased.”
“No ruler’s power is ever absolute,” the queen warned.
“If the Eddisians want to dethrone Helen, they know it will be over my father’s dead body. Over the dead bodies of my brothers. Possibly over the dead bodies of my sisters—and believe me, no one wants to cross them. If my father says his niece is queen, then she is queen, and if Helen says she will be loyal, she will be loyal. If the Eddisians hate it, they’ll be too preoccupied being angry at me to gloat over your barons or Sounis’s once I am high king.”
“Is that why you continue to be so provoking?”
He opened his eyes to slits. “I have no idea what you mean, my queen,” he said.
Attolia raised an eyebrow, too much a queen to say anything else.
The king’s procession began at the front of the palace, winding around it to the gates where the Sacred Way left the city and climbed to the temple heights above it, and what I remember most clearly now was the unforgiving, uneven paving stones. All my attention was concentrated on picking my way across them in fear of what might happen if I moved too slowly.
I had never seen a public ceremony. Melisande and I had performed hearth rites together, but since I was not welcome when the family gathered, I had very little knowledge of more formal rituals. I’d visited the small shrines in the valley around our villa but had not been in a real temple since my naming ceremony.
I wouldn’t be in one that day, either. After recovering from the climb, I peered through the crowd of people around me, first in curiosity and then in disappointment. The new temple of the goddess Hephestia was nothing but an open foundation, a windswept plaza surrounded by ramshackle workshops made of sticks and clay. There was a single small building, no bigger than the shed I’d shared with Melisande: Hephestia’s Treasury. Now its walls are faced with white marble and its dome leafed with gold. It is enclosed within the temple and sits just behind the great statue of Hephestia. Work on that statue had not even begun, and the treasury was an unassuming little building of undressed stone.
I was no more impressed by the ceremony, which was just a lot of talking. One voice did stand out, with a resonance that made my heart thrum in my chest, but when cautious maneuvering brought the speaker into view, the Oracle, high priestess of Hephestia, turned out to be a stout, middle-aged woman with her hair in tight braids like my mother’s, no more extraordinary to look at than her temple.
In the old days, a young bull would have been sacrificed and then roasted to be eaten that evening. By the time I realized the high priestess was only going to tap the bull with her thyrsus before it was led away to join the temple’s herd, I’d lost interest in the whole process. My back and leg ached. I longed to sit down but didn’t dare.
The procession down the Sacred Way moved more slowly than it had going up, luckily for me. The king stopped at each altar we passed to leave an offering for old and new gods alike. Twice he prostrated himself to pray. At a very minor goddess’s altar, to everyone’s confusion, he closed his eyes and lay still for some time before he got up and continued. When we’d passed through the town gates, the king stopped even more often, humbly bowing his head while coins and flower petals and sweets were thrown for the children. Shaking with exhaustion, sick from the noise and the shouting, I was relieved to reach the palace. I didn’t realize the day had only just begun. In the ceremonial courtyard, the king climbed up onto a high platform, where he sat on a figured gold chair to accept as every single person of any importance at all offered him loyalty and gifts in honor of the occasion.