A Conspiracy of Kings

Quotes

1. "Ten thousand!" I shouted at the walls, back in the room with the wooden shutters, now open so that anyone could hear me, on the porch or probably across the compound. "That arrogant bastard landed ten thousand men at Tas-Elisa. In my port! Mine!" When I was a child and playmates snatched my toys out of my hands, I tended to smile weakly and give in. Years later I was acting the way I should have as a child. Probably not the most mature behavior for a king, but I was still cursing as I swung around to find a delegation of barons in the doorway behind me. My father, Baron Comeneus, and the Baron Xorcheus among them.

   They thought it was how a king behaved.

2. 

   Eschewing ceremony, Eugenides said, "You shot their ambassador?"

   "You gave me the gun," protested Sounis.

   "I didn't mean for you to shoot an ambassador with it!" Eugenides told him.

   "Oh, how our carefully laid plans go astray," murmured the magus.

   "You shut up!" said Gen, laughing.

3. 

   "In my experience, the more you know of the gods, the more you know what you cannot understand."

4. 

   "I'd suggested eating it before we left the market. I'd also suggested eating it on the road. I was not so comfortable with my new authority that I could say, "We eat the chicken now!" but the magus had seen that I was considering it."

5. 

   "Sophos, you sleep with a knife under your pillow? I'm hurt."

   "I'm sorry," said Sounis, blinking, afraid that he had made contact with his wild swing.

   "I was joking. Wake up the rest of the way, would you?"

   "Gen, it's the middle of the night."

   "I know," said the king of Attolia.

6. 

   Then, as you well know, Eugenides looked me in the eye as if I were a complete stranger and said, "The simplest way to end a war is to admit you have lost it."

   The silence after that was not polite.

7. 

   "You bastard," said Sounis wearily. "I don't know why I don't stab you here in this alley so I can be the annux over Sounis and Attolia." They were twisting through the narrowest of passages, with Eugenides still in the lead, turning on what seemed to be a whim from one walkway to the next.

   "Well, the stabbing would be unkind," said Eugenides, "but you can have the annux part with my goodwill."

   "Not Attolia's."

   "True," said the king. "Better not stab me."

8. 

   The magus and I had talked for many long hours about this marriage of Eugenides and the queen of Attolia. The magus insisted it was Eugenides's choice and his desire as well, but it was impossible to know whose influence would prevail and if Gen would grow more like his wife, or his wife like her king.

9. 

   "Don't you trust my palace security?"

   "Yes, of course," Sounis said, trying to think of some other reason besides mistrust to sleep with a knife. He heard Eugenides laugh.

   "My queen and I sleep with a matched set under our pillows, as well as handguns in pockets on the bedposts. Don't be embarrassed."

   "Gen, what are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?" Sounis asked.

   "Going out of my mind," said Eugenides promptly. "At least I am on the verge of going out of my mind."

10. 

    Eddis nodded. "Gen leaves the reins in Attolia's hands. Which is not what either I or Attolia recommended, but wisely he ignored us both."

    "Wisely?"

    Smiling, Eddis said, "He hasn't the temperament. He gets angry. She only ever gets angry at him."

    Sounis, having seen the Thief of Eddis lose his temper, could see her point.

11. 

    "I know exactly when. I was hiding in a takima bush in the Queen's Garden, watching the older son of the Baron Erondites tell Attolia that he loved her. He was trying to propose a marriage and she thought he was talking about a poem he was writing. I was laughing like a very quiet fiend, trying not to make the branches around me shake, and then, between one heartbeat and the next, and to my complete surprise, it wasn't funny anymore." He rubbed his chest, as if a remembered pain. "I wanted to kill him. Once she was gone, I very nearly jumped out of the bush onto his head. Poor Dite."

    Poor Eugenides, thought Sounis, to fall in love with a woman he had already made into an enemy.

12. 

    Staring at me over the barrel of my gun, Akretenesh said, "Did you not just days ago lecture me about the sacred truce?"

    With my finger still through the trigger guard of the spent pistol, I lifted my left palm upward to the sky to see if lightning struck me down.

    When none did, I smiled again. "We will have to assume the gods are on my side."

    "I am an ambassador," Akretenesh warned me, anger bringing his confidence back. "You cannot shoot."

    "I don't mean to," I reassured him, still smiling. I adopted his soothing tones. "Indeed, you are the only man I won't shoot. But if I aimed at anyone else, it might give others a dangerously mistaken sense of their own safety." I raised my voice a trifle, thought it wasn't really necessary. "We will have another vote, Xorcheus."

    They elected me Sounis. It was unanimous.

13. 

    "I seem to remember once sharing my oatmeal with you," Sounis remarked.

    "I seem to remember stealing your oatmeal," said the former Thief of Eddis, "but it didn't have sand in it."

    "Sand?" said Sounis, taken aback.

    "Sand, and if my queen notices, she will have someone flayed."

14. 

    Everything, it seemed, depended on gold. The magus and I had fallen easily back into our old habits. He lectured constantly, and I asked questions to my heart's delight. Where he had once been my master and I his apprentice, I had become king and he my sole advisor. Where we had once focused on natural history and philosophy, we now concentrated on administration, taxation, and the prosecution of war.

    He had begun his lessons by quoting the duke of Melfi: "To make war you need three things: one, money; two, money; and three, money." He went on to tell me the things I should have known already, that I would have known if I had been a more promising heir to the throne and not exclusively interested in poetry.

15. 

    "Would I be wrong," Sounis asked one evening as he walked with Eddis, "to think that I talk to you, you talk to Gen, and Gen talks to Attolia, who talks to the magus, who talks to me?"

    Eddis laughed. "Not always. Sometimes, as in this case, someone approaches my Eddisian ambassador Ornon, here in Attolia, and he talks to me, I talk to you, you talk to Attolia, Attolia talks to Gen, and he talks to me."

    "I see you appear in that progression twice."

    "Oh, more than that, because after Gen talks to me, the process reverses. He goes back to Attolia, who talks to you, who go to the magus, who repeats the information to me, who gives it to Ornon, who takes it back to whoever started this particular political ball rolling in the first place."

16. 

    "You eat more than Gen did after prison", he said.

    "I have more sympathy with him all the time. Are you going to finish that drumstick?" I asked.

    "I am. Stop staring at it."

17. 

    "Do you warn him not to offend the gods?"

    "There was no need," said Attolis, smiling, "He couldn't offend the gods with a pointed stick."

18. 

    "You have heard the queen's advice. My gift is below. Would you wait to see it until you have decided what you will do with hers?"

19. 

    He was confident, I think, of the success over both Eddis and Attolia right up until the world heard that the Thief of Eddis had stolen the queen of Attolia and meant to marry her.

20. 

    In the shocked aftermath, I said, "We'll give them a second chance."

    With my right hand, I reached to the other pocket. I had known as soon as I lifted the false bottom of the gun case and looked underneath what it meant. I had tried without ceasing to find some alternative to Attolia's ruthless advice, and I had failed. Gen's fit reassured me that I had not failed for lack of trying. He had seen no other solution himself.

    I lifted out the matching gun and read the archaic inscription. Realisa onum. Not "The queen made me," but "I make the king."

21. 

    Inside the case was a dueling pistol, a king's weapon, wheel-locked, chased in gold. Eddis had seen it earlier that day. When Sounis lifted it out and tipped his head over the locking mechanism, she knew he was reading the letters inscribed there: Onea realia. "The queen made me."

22. 

    "I think he was delighted to see you safe," said the magus, "and grieved that the next time you meet, it must be as king and king and not as friends."

23. 

    "When you stop fussing," Gen had said, slipping to his knees beside her couch, "I will sleep with two knives under my pillow."

    Attolia had looked down at him and said sharply, "Don't be ridiculous."

    Only when Eugenides laughed had Sounis realized her implication: If she ever turned against Eugenides, a second knife wouldn't save him.

That’s all the quotes.

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