Read Online A Conspiracy of Kings by Megan Whalen Turner - Free Book Online

make a copy of the
world and be no closer to understanding it.”
    It is a new idea, this categorizing of the world, and I suppose
it seems silly to some. They think a fig tree is a fig tree, and
what more do they need to know? Ambiades, who was the magus’s
apprentice far longer than I ever was, never could see the point in
it. The magus thought it important, though, and so did I.
    I had missed the magus sorely in the time since we had been
separated. Terve was a kindhearted old drunk, and my mother and the
girls were always willing to listen to me natter, but I’d had
no one who was interested in the things I wondered about. Hyacinth
used to cover his ears. It was no wonder I defended the
magus’s work to the tutor I had replaced him with in my
dreams.
     
    News of the outside world came to us, even in the baron’s
outbuildings. Gossip flowed down from the megaron as freely as
water, so it wasn’t just my own dreams that I had to think
about. By late summer we heard that my uncle had retaken most of
the hinterland. When he reached Mephia, we heard about the
massacre. There was debate, of course, in the barracks, about the
rights of the king and the punishment for rebelling. Mephia could
have turned on her baron and surrendered to my uncle, but I am not
sure any fewer Mephians would have died.
    I alone heard the irony as loyal retainers of Baron Hanaktos
argued that the king’s rule is inviolable and that it was
only right that the people of a rebel baron must suffer the
consequences of his disloyalty. They didn’t seem to consider
that the fate of the Mephians could be their own.
    There was less news about the islands, or rather, conflicting
news. We heard that all the navy had been sunk by Attolia or that
none of the navy had been sunk, that various islands had held off
attacks or that they had been sacked and burned. We heard that
Eddis had swept down from the area of the Irkes Forest and was
building fortifications at the base of the foothills. Better that
Sounis not be able to retake that property and never threaten Eddis
there again, I thought.
     
    As the winter rains set in, the news changed. The king
controlled the countryside, and the rebels were walled up in their
megarons, but inside with them were the harvests they had brought
from their fields. The countryside was nearly bare, and the king
needed to feed his army. He chose to withdraw toward his allies
farther inland and north to resupply. As the king was driven back,
the conversations around me changed: a king who loses turns out not
to have been a king at all, but only a usurper, a misruler it is
right to overthrow. There was talk of the Eumen conspiracy and the
deaths of my uncle’s brothers.
    The men in the barracks spoke very freely. I had never in my
life heard anyone but the magus speak so frankly about the Eumen
conspiracy. Talk had always been in whispers and half-finished
allusions, as if people feared their words might be reported to the
king and they, too, might end up condemned and executed. What I
knew I had overheard in bits and snatches until I was apprenticed
to the magus, who dismissed with contempt any fear of the
king’s anger. He told me that my uncle’s older brothers
were killed and that my uncle took the throne, arrested the
conspirators, and in the space of a single day executed them all,
leaving no one alive to accuse him of being involved.
    No one cared what my workmates talked about among themselves,
and they blithely argued my uncle’s guilt with an openness
impossible in Sounis’s capital. Most believed my uncle
guilty. I had never had any doubts, nor that my father was involved
as well—in exchange for a promise that his son would
eventually inherit the throne. My father, a royal bastard who never
had any ambitions for himself, wanted his son to be king.
    It was only when I proved to be a disappointment that my father
agreed that my uncle should marry and get an heir of his own.
Sounis’s choice was obvious, and I