“Yes, curse it,” Grus said, more or less truthfully. “I never stopped loving you. It was just… she was there, and we were working together, and…” He shrugged. “One of those things.”
Perhaps luckily, a bodyguard chose that moment to announce, “King Lanius is safe, Your Majesty. A thrall did come after him, but he got away when he flung a moncat in the son of a whore’s face.”
“Did he?” Grus said, blinking. “Well, good for him. That’s quick thinking.” Another guard came in to report that only two thralls were missing, while the rest seemed as passive and animal-like as ever. Grus nodded. “Glad to hear it.” But he also had other things on his mind. He turned back to Estrilda. “Will you listen to me, please?”
“It’s hard to listen to what you say when I know what you did,” she answered. “But I just saw you save me, and so…” She gnawed at the inside of her lower lip. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“You know I’m not perfect,” Grus said. “But I do try. Could you… try to think I’m… not quite so bad?” He’d wanted to come out with something ringing. That wasn’t it. He had to hope it would do.
Estrilda wasn’t looking at him. She was still eyeing the pool and trail of blood the thrall had left behind. Slowly—very slowly—she nodded. “I’ll try.”
Together, Lanius and Grus eyed the door to the palace chamber that had held the thralls—that still did hold all but two of them. The door was now closed, the bar on the outside back in place. The thralls in there couldn’t get outside. Of course, the two murderous thralls who had been in there shouldn’t have been able to get outside, either. They shouldn’t have been able to, but they had.
Lanius eyed the guards who’d stood in front of the door when the thralls escaped. The guards looked back, a sort of wooden embarrassment on their faces. “But couldn’t you hear the bar was coming out of the bracket?” Lanius asked them.
In identical rhythms, they shook their heads. “No, Your Majesty,” one of them said.
“Everything looked fine to us,” the other added.
“You didn’t notice the two thralls sneaking past you?” Grus demanded.
The royal bodyguards shook their heads. “No, Your Majesty,” one said.
“We didn’t see anything funny,” the other agreed.
“I believe them,” Lanius said.
“So do I, worse luck,” Grus said. Now he shook his head, in the manner of a man disgusted with himself. “This whole sorry mess is my fault.”
“Your fault?” Lanius said in surprise. “How?”
“I should have had a wizard keeping guard on the thralls all the time,” Grus answered. “I should have, but I didn’t. After Alca… left the capital, I just let that go. I didn’t have a wizard I particularly trusted—I still don’t—and the thralls seemed harmless, so I thought a couple of ordinary soldiers and a door barred on the outside would keep them out of mischief. I turned out to be wrong.”
“Underestimating the Banished One doesn’t pay.” Lanius snapped his fingers.
“What is it?” Grus asked.
“Later.” Lanius nodded toward the guards, as though to say, Not in front of them. Their wooden expressions never changed. After a moment, he realized terror lay beneath that woodenness. They had to wonder if they would lose their heads for almost letting the two Kings of Avornis be murdered. Lanius nodded toward them again. “It’s not their fault. They were ensorcelled.”
He waited to see if Grus would hold a grudge. Grus didn’t usually, but he didn’t usually have a narrow escape from assassination, either. Lanius knew a certain amount of relief when Grus said, “Yes, I know that. The Banished One has a cursed long reach, and we can’t always hope to outguess him.” The guards showed their relief, mute but very obvious. Grus went on, “Sometimes I wonder if we can ever hope to outguess him.”
“So do I,” Lanius said, as fervently as though he were praying in a temple. He wished the comparison weren’t so apt.
A messenger hurried up the corridor, calling, “Your Majesty! Your Majesty!”
“Yes?” Lanius and Grus spoke together.
Lanius wondered why he bothered. The messenger, inevitably, wanted to talk to Grus. “Your Majesty, the treasury minister reminds you that you were supposed to meet with him more than an hour ago.”
The treasury minister wouldn’t let a little thing like an assassination attempt interrupt his schedule. “Tell Petrosus—” Grus began, but then caught himself. “Tell Petrosus I’ll be with him soon. The quicker we get back to normal, the better.” He nodded to Lanius. “Isn’t that right, Your Majesty?”
“Well, yes, but—”
Grus didn’t let him finish. “Glad you agree. I’ll see you in a bit. Meanwhile, I’d better go find out what’s in Petrosus’ beady little mind. So if you’ll excuse me…” He started after the messenger.
“But there was something I needed to tell you,” Lanius said. “Something important.”
“I’m sure it will keep,” Grus said over his shoulder, by which he couldn’t mean anything but, I’m sure that, whatever you have to tell me, it can’t possibly be important.
Before Lanius could shout at Grus and tell him what a blockhead he was, the other king was around the corner and gone. Lanius muttered under his breath. Then he cursed out loud, which did him no more good than the other had. He almost followed Grus. What point, though? Grus wouldn’t listen to him now. The palace servants would. He set them to rounding up the moncats that had gotten out of their room after the thrall opened the door.
Later that day, Sosia said, “King Olor be praised you’re all right. You and Father both, I mean.”
Even her relief was enough to stab at Lanius, almost as though it were the knife the thrall had tried to use against him. “King Olor be praised indeed,” he said, and wondered when he’d been so sarcastic before. He couldn’t think of a time.
He was glad Sosia didn’t notice. She said, “Father’s had a lot happen to him lately.”
“So he has.” But Lanius couldn’t help adding, “He did some of it to himself, you know.”
Sosia didn’t argue. “Of course he did. But not today, not unless you’re going to blame him for bringing those thralls north so he could study them.”
Grus had already blamed himself for that. But Lanius said, “I’ll never blame anybody for trying to learn things. I do wish he’d listened to me when I tried to tell him that—”
But Sosia suddenly wasn’t listening to him anymore, either. Crex came in crying and limping on a scraped knee. That had to be washed off—which produced more wails and tears—and he had to be cuddled by both Sosia and Lanius. By the time Crex decided he might possibly be all right after all, the servants were bringing in supper. Lanius drank more wine with the food than he usually did. He went to bed not long after supper and slept like a log—except that logs don’t usually wake up the next morning with a headache.
Grus reached for the carafe. “Here,” he said to Estrilda. “Let me pour you some more wine.”
She pushed her goblet across the table toward him. “Thanks,” she said. “Tonight I can use it.”
He filled the goblet for her, and poured more for himself, too. As they both sipped, he said, “I should think so.” He’d seen a lot of fighting. Nobody had ever tried to kill Estrilda before, even if she’d been an afterthought to the thrall.
She set down the goblet. “Did I say thank you?” she asked.
“You have now.” Grus shrugged. “You didn’t need to.”
“I think I did. I… may have been harder on you lately than I should have been.”