Just then, a tall, elegant man swept into the waiting room, Ion, second only to Hilarion in authority over the attendants. With his dark curls held back in his fist, he was obviously in search of a hair tie. “Lamion, have you stolen my velvet . . . Oh, the little monster is better,” he said in surprise. “Does it speak? Do you speak?” he asked me directly, and I stared back at him.

Hilarion shook his head. “Erondites’s men say he doesn’t.”

“So, it’s a quiet monster. We should count our blessings. Gods willing it will not snore like Dionis.” He bent to stare into my face. “Do you understand me, do you understand what I am saying?” he said, and I looked down.

“The king wants him outfitted as an attendant,” a stocky man grumbled. That was Dionis.

“Fetch the tailor, then,” Ion said with a shrug.

“Why don’t you do it?” But Dionis was speaking to Ion’s disappearing back. He’d seen his velvet hair tie on Lamion and gone to find himself another.

The tailor must have been in the palace, as he arrived very quickly with a stool he wanted me to stand on. Even he could see that if I do not keep my feet well spread I will fall over, so huffing and puffing with irritation, he put his stool aside and crouched down to take my measurements. While he measured, the attendants watched and talked. Ion returned and I listened carefully, learning their names as I heard them.

“Hard to believe that a man would send out in public a grandson like that,” said one. Sotis.

“Seems like he’s the butt of his own joke if that’s the kind of heir he has.” Dionis.

“He is a step up from Sejanus.” Sotis again, and everyone laughed.

Sejanus was my uncle, every bit as beautiful as Ion and highly esteemed in the palace, or so I’d previously believed. My mother’s brother, he had always been received at the Villa Suterpe with open arms, as he was an excellent hunting companion to my father and brought delightful tidbits of gossip from the capital. The servants fawned on him, and even I looked forward to his visits. He’d once slipped me a cake without alerting anyone else to my presence underneath a table. That was more kindness than I’d had from any other member of my family.

“He’s Susa’s grandson, too. Susa can’t be happy to have him paraded about.” That was Xikander.

“The king is going to send him back, isn’t he?” asked Xikos, Xikander’s brother. There was a communal sort of shrug. Clearly none of them knew what the king would do.

Snarling in exasperation, the tailor seized me by the arm and shook me violently. I bared my teeth at him, and he smacked me.

“None of that,” said Hilarion.

“He won’t stand still!” said the tailor.

“He’s still enough, get on with it.” Sullenly, the tailor hunched back down. I moved again, easing the weight off my bad leg, daring the tailor to object.

“Does anyone know what his name is? The king said to find out.”

“If he’s the firstborn of Susa’s family, he should have been Juridius.”

“I heard from Xippias that his mother gave him Erondites’s name for spite,” said Dionis.

“Pheris,” Ion said, and I turned obediently to look at him, knowing it would annoy the tailor again.

“Are you Pheris?” Ion asked, and I nodded.

“Pheris Mostrus Erondites?” asked Ion, and I nodded again, hesitantly, unaccustomed to the new house name.

Sotis laughed. “Pheris Monstrous Erondites.” He thought he was clever.

“Quiet, Sotis,” said Ion.

Hilarion was also amused, but it wasn’t me he was laughing at. “That’s what they call his grandfather, you know.”

“So?” asked Sotis.

I was equally surprised.

“So, so, so,” confirmed Ion. “Not to his face, of course.”

I could understand that.

“He is Pheris, then,” said Xikos.

“Unless he nods at everything,” said the sleek, black-haired Medander. He leaned toward me. “Are you horse? Are you dog?” he asked. “Are you filth?”

“He’s Pheris,” said Hilarion. “Stop teasing him.”

“What do you think, Pheris?” Medander asked, modulating his tone. He was always reluctant to take orders from Hilarion but wouldn’t defy him directly. “Do you want to go home to Grandfather?” My whole body shuddered at the thought, and they all laughed.

When the tailor was finished, they gave me some watered wine and honey cakes and sent me back to bed. Out of sight of the attendants and the guards, I explored the labyrinth of the king’s apartments, finding storage and bedchambers and the necessaries. Back in my closet, I sat on my pallet of blankets, sipping from my cup. The sound of my nurse’s wails as they had carried me away from the villa still rang in my ears. Out of sight, out of mind, she’d taught me. That was the way to stay safe. As I considered what I had seen and heard, I saw no chance of staying out of sight and no safety at all in my future. To be honest, I saw no future.

The results of the tailor’s hard work arrived that evening. Not even my brother Juridius, apple of my mother’s eye, had clothes like the ones Xikos casually tossed at my head.

“Put those on,” he said, “and then get out of the way. We need to dress the king for dinner.”

I sorted through the collection in my lap and found a fine white undershirt, plain, stitched at the seams with stitches so small I could hardly see them, a sleeveless velvet vest in Attolian blue embroidered in gold, and a pair of trousers, loose in the leg, with a tight cuff at the bottom. I was relieved to see that they buttoned at the top, which meant I wouldn’t have to ask anyone to tie the strings on my pants. The vest was double-breasted in the Eddisian style. When the frogs were secured, the embroidery across the front resolved into a gryphon on one side facing a lion on the other, with lilies in between. I remember this as the first time I’d seen the unified crest of the Little Peninsula. There were slippers in the same sky blue as the vest. They’d measured me for boots, but those would have to be specially made to accommodate my foot, and that would take more time.

Once I was dressed, I retreated to a corner, watching Dionis, the gray-haired attendant, stripping coats from the dummies and collecting pants and sashes from the racks that ran along the walls. His hands appeared to be as full when he returned and began to replace the coats on their holders. Ion came to help.

Dionis looked put out, Ion only amused. As they finished their work and left, I heard muffled voices from the waiting room and then the sound of hurrying feet. I dove under the racked clothes, but not fast enough to evade Sotis. Grabbing me by my good foot, he pulled me out.

“The king says you dine with us, and when the king commands, we obey. That means little monsters, too.” By the scruff of my neck, Sotis pushed me out of the attendants’ quarters to where the king was waiting. As he looked me over, I had my first chance to study Eugenides closely.

He was missing a hand.

I had not seen this before. I was raised by my nurse in an outbuilding—all I knew of this king was that he was an Eddisian who’d married our queen after some sort of trickery. I thought it unlikely he’d been born unnatural, much more likely he’d lost the hand in battle or perhaps in some prosaic way. One of the masons at the villa had had most of his lower arm cut off after his hand was crushed by a falling stone. I’d heard his fingers turned black.