Perivos Akuanis looked bitterly at the huge encampment as he walked swiftly between the rows of soldiers. We have nearly had two breakthroughs along the northern wall since the last sunrise. Neither of them would have happened if these men hadn’t been held back—a thousand out of the seven or eight thousand trained soldiers in the entire city, all they had to counter the autarch’s quarter of a million. The Council of the Twenty-Seven Families had surrendered the throne to Ludis so that a strong man would stand against the Autarch of Xis, whatever the loss of their own power, but it was beginning to look as though they would have neither.

If the outside looked like a fortress, the inside of the treasury looked more like the great temple of the Three Brothers: half a dozen black-robed, long-bearded Trigonate priests surrounded the transplanted Jade Chair like roosting crows, and like crows they seemed more interested in hopping and squawking than doing anything useful. Count Perivos, who had never liked or trusted Ludis, had lately come to loathe Hierosol’s lord protector with a fierce, hot anger unlike any he had ever felt. He hated Ludis even more than he hated the Autarch of Xis, because Sulepis was only a name, but he had to stare into Ludis Drakava’s square, heavy-browed face every single day and swallow bile.

The lord protector stood, flapping his arms at the priests as though they truly were crows. “Get out, you screeching old women! And tell your hierarch that if he wants to talk to me he can come himself, but I will use the temples as I see fit. We are at war!”

The Trigonate minions seemed unwilling to depart even after so clear an order, but none of them was above the rank of deacon. Grumbling and pulling at their whiskers, they migrated toward the door. Scowling, Ludis dropped back onto the throne. He caught sight of Count Perivos. “I suppose I should count my blessings the Trigonarch was kidnapped by the Syannese all those years ago,” Ludis growled, “or I’d have him whining at me, too.” He narrowed his eyes. “And what kind of stinking news do you bring, Akuanis?”

“I think you know about what brings me, although it was fresh to me only a half-hour gone. What is this I hear about Olin Eddon?”

Ludis put on the innocent look of a child—particularly bizarre on a brawny, bearded man covered with scars. “What do you hear?”

“Please, Lord Protector, do not treat me as a fool. Are you telling me that nothing unusual has happened to King Olin? That he has not been hustled out of his cell? I am told he is being traded to the autarch for…something. I do not know what.”

“No, you don’t know. And I won’t tell you.” The lord protector crossed his heavy arms on his chest and glowered.

There was something wrong with the way Ludis was behaving. Drakava was a surprisingly complex man, but Akuanis had never seen him show the least remorse for anything he’d done, let alone act like this—childishly petulant, as though expecting to be scolded and punished. This from the man who had declared an innocent priest (who also happened to have the only legitimate claim to the Hierosoline throne) a warlock and had him dragged from his temple and pulled apart by horses? Why should Ludis Drakava have become squeamish now?