A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner

own shirt, then handed it
to me and walked away without a word. I shrugged cautiously and
went to lie down for an afternoon rest.
    That night he appeared, to my utter amazement, with an iced
cake. He could only have gotten it from his friend the cook, and
the cook could only have provided it at some significant risk. Yet
Dirnes was still clearly angry with me, and I couldn’t think
why he was asking for favors on my behalf.
    “Dirnes,” I said, “I don’t want your
cake.”
    I did, actually. I wanted it a lot.
    The men in the barracks were watching us.
    “I didn’t ask you to do me any favors!” Dirnes
said, very nearly shouting, not just angry, upset. His distress
touched me when his anger hadn’t, and I suddenly understood
what I had failed to see before: that Dirnes was a slave, like me.
He had nothing, or anyway, very, very little. I had saved him a
beating from the soldier and taken a beating from Ochto that might
have been his. He couldn’t pay me back. An iced cake, a
trivial thing, had no doubt cost him all his credit and more with
the cook, and he was still obliged to me, would be obliged until he
could somehow sacrifice to do a favor in return, with no end for
that obligation in sight. This was a principle of indenture of
which I had been unaware. Slaves don’t do favors for other
slaves.
    “Dirnes, I am sorry,” I said, reaching out to grab
his hand and squeezing it hard. “It was nothing,
really.” I lifted my arm to show him how much more easily it
moved. “By rest day it will be healed. Ochto won’t even
have left marks.”
    Dirnes stared at me as if I’d said I was going to grow a
pair of wings and fly up to visit the gods. I was uncomfortably
aware that everyone else was staring at me, too. Ochto in
particular. Hastily I broke the iced cake in half.
    “Here, share with me,” I said.
     
    My previous life just seemed to slip away. My dreams of the
library grew more rare and less vivid. I was more cautious passing
soldiers. I knew my place. I enjoyed an occasional tidbit from the
kitchen, shared in friendship with Dirnes, and hardly thought about
the dinners at the Sounis megaron that lasted until dawn. My uncle
was losing more ground, but I was less and less interested in the
news of the outside world. Dirnes’s pursuit of the
cook’s goodwill was more important to day-to-day life. Our
progress in terracing the baron’s landscape and digging the
ditches to carry the runoff of the heavy winter rains was what
mattered, not battles that took place miles away. When my
uncle’s army was defeated at Thylos, it hardly seemed to have
anything to do with me.
    As the rains lessened and the days grew warmer again, I was
promoted to wall building and found I had a gift for it. Something
about the careful choosing and positioning of stones, something
about the way something so durable grew out of an accumulation of
small decisions, filled me with satisfaction.
    On a day hotter than usual for so early in the year, we had been
working on the landward side of a low hill, cut off from the sea
breeze. Dirnes had asked for permission to go down to the shore for
a quick swim before returning to the barracks to eat. It
wasn’t unusual for the men to take a quick break in the
middle of the day, and Ochto had agreed, so four of us had hurried
down to the shore. We’d stayed overlong and were hurrying
back, busily undoing all the good of our swim, but unwilling to
risk missing our meal entirely. There were plenty of men ready to
eat whatever was left in the pot if Ochto thought we were away too
long. We were on the road when we heard horsemen behind us and
moved off to avoid the dust they would kick into the air. I looked
up as they passed and saw my father.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    H E was mounted on a bay horse, surrounded by ten or
fifteen of his men. I stood stock-still and watched them go by. My
father never looked anywhere but ahead.
    “Bunny?” Dirnes asked.
    I shook myself. “Nothing,” I said. “A