A Conspiracy of Kings Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyelids. Someone was sponging me off
with a cloth, wiping down my neck and along my shoulders. My
shoulders hurt, too, or rather my back, but it was a stinging pain,
not the disabling pain in my head that made it hard to link my
thoughts into any sensible order.
    “Lie still, lion, while we get this dye off,” said a
voice over my head. “We’re almost done with you.
We’ll have you at rest in a moment.” As good as his
word, he soon left off wiping and lifted me to my feet and helped
me walk. We descended the ridge. I still couldn’t see, but I
could feel the ground dropping out from below my feet. The bright
haze visible through my eyelids faded as we passed into the shade,
and my feet tangled in blankets. He held a cup to my swollen lips
and I drank, tasting lethium and wine.
    “Down,” he said, and I sagged to my knees and then
to my side and lay there with my insensible thoughts linking up
randomly and breaking apart again until I fell asleep and it was
dreams, not thoughts, floating through my empty head.
     
    I woke the next morning to a headache, a vast and tiresome pain
that seemed outside my head as much as in it, a headache and a very
sore and swollen face. I had a vague memory of Hyacinth whispering
more tearful apologies into my ear, but he was gone when I opened
my eyes as much as the swelling would allow and peered around me.
Hyacinth might have been a dream. I lay under a striped cloth,
which dropped to the ground on one side like a tent. When I sat up,
the skin tightened across my back like lines of fire. I
couldn’t seem to twist my head far enough to see over a
shoulder, but on my upper arm I could see the red line of a lash. I
blinked hazily, and for a moment wondered what I could have done to
so infuriate Malatesta. My tongue caught painfully on something
sharp; one of my teeth was loose, connected only by a narrow bridge
of flesh.
    The slaver squatted beside me. “You’ll be wondering,
my lion, just what we are up to. You were right that we cannot
easily get you off the island, but we mean to try. Your own mother,
I’m sorry, may she journey safely, but even she
wouldn’t know you.”
    I lifted my hand away from its explorations of my face and up to
the top of my head to find my hair all cut away and ragged.
    “It’s darker now,” Basrus said. “No one
will pick you out among my slaves. No one here but myself and my
lieutenant, Gorgias, knows who you are. As far as the rest of my
men and the other slaves know, you are a very troublesome slave who
has killed another slave in a fight and you are on your way to the
galleys.”
    “And if I shout to one and all that I am the heir to
Sounis?” I asked as clearly as I could, past my swollen
lip.
    “That’s the question, then, isn’t it?”
He held up a gag with leather straps.
    It’s not so terrible as it sounds. They loaded me into the
back of the cart, where I lay for the first day, grieving for my
mother and my sisters and cataloging my mistakes, unfairly blaming
Terve for not warning me that the villa might be burned, hating
Hyacinth, and the slaver, and all his men, and, most of all, with
excoriating rage, myself.
    We were stopped by the island’s guard, and each time they
looked through the slaver’s receipts it was clear that all
was in order. Basrus even pointed me out as his most recent
purchase, and not one of the guard looked twice at a troublemaker
sold off for fighting. The first time it happened, I shook my head
as fiercely as the pain would allow, only to have the guards assume
I was protesting a bad reputation. After that I gave it up as
useless.
     
    As I was bounced and jolted toward the town of Letnos, my uncle
was lured out of the city of Sounis by news of fighting between two
of the coastal barons. The two, Comeneus and his neighbor, had
squabbled often enough that it was no wonder that the king rode out
immediately with a century from the garrison at Sounis. He was to
have been killed on the road just outside the