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passing murderers, and they could tell. I asked myself whom I would fight for, with the people I loved most
already dead.
    “I’d save Berrone,” I muttered, thinking that
she’d been kind to me, that she held my debt, even if she was
too stupid to know it.
    “Oh,” said Luca, taking my words in an unintended
fashion. “I’d save Berrone, too,” and they all
laughed. The conversation continued on in a different direction,
and I fell silent.
     
    I thought of the servants in the villa at Letnos. Free and
slave, they had turned on me. They could have chosen to fight, and
they hadn’t, probably because they judged it a losing battle,
and I couldn’t blame them for that. They had seen me in
desultory practice with a sword or reading poetry. They’d
seen me whimpering after my tutor switched my hands. It was no
wonder they thought they would be asking for their own deaths by
following me. So they had made their choices and died of it
anyway.
    I don’t know if we would have won the fight in the villa
if they had stood with me. I know that it was my fault that they
didn’t try. My entire life I had been no better than
Hyacinth, who chose to betray me and then stood wringing his hands
at the consequences. All my life I had been aggrieved to be the
prince of Sounis, wailing, “Why me? Why me?” and
looking for some way to deny my responsibilities.
    Of course the servants had chosen not to follow me; I’d
failed them already by refusing to be a man they could believe in.
I was, in that sense, as responsible for their deaths as I was for
my mother’s and sisters’. I was sorry that I
hadn’t done better for them and glad that I would not fail
anyone else.

CHAPTER SIX
    I N one of my dreams, my tutor told me a story, and I
would like to tell it to you. I don’t know why I was dreaming
of it, but it has come to my mind often in recent days. It is the
story of Morpos’s choice.
T here once was a young man named Morpos who lived in
a small village at the edge of a great forest and was known to all
his neighbors as a fine pipe player. The nearby forest was filled
with bandits, and hidden in the middle of it was a temple belonging
to Atrape, goddess of wise decisions. The temple was guarded by a
wolf, and stories told of an opisthodomos filled with treasures.
Any one of those treasures—a bag of gold, a necklace of
rubies, an enchanted shield or sword—the goddess would give
to any who got past the wolf at the door.
    Few people took up the offer. Not only was there the wolf to
consider, but also the bandits who would catch those who survived a
visit to the temple and strip them of anything of value. And those
who didn’t have gifts of value were stripped of their lives.
One wise supplicant had survived to ask the goddess for the gift of
prophecy and been given it, only to be captured immediately
thereafter. He shouted, “I am going to die, I am going to
die,” and he did.
    Another man asked for a magical sword. He left the temple and
became king of the bandits for a time, until he was stabbed in his
sleep. The sword rusted away soon after.
    One night, as he was sleeping, the young man in our story
dreamed of the wolf. In his dream, the wolf revealed that he had
once been a king who had offended the gods and been transformed
into a beast. He had been sent to guard the temple but was
forbidden to attack anyone who came in peace. All that was
necessary to enter the temple was to bow to the wolf and offer your
throat.
    The young man had no desire to go to the temple and gave little
thought to his dream. His own wish was to travel far from the
forest, to see the world and play his pipes. In the night the wolf
came to him again. And again. Finally, late one winter afternoon,
the young man was walking at the edge of the forest when rain began
to fall. He moved under the trees for shelter but continued to get
wet. He moved deeper into the woods, and the rain came down more
and more heavily. Ahead he saw a small hut made from