Coalition of Lions by Elizabeth Wein Page A

understand the stricture of his childhood. I asked, “Why were you sent there, Priamos?”
    “It is traditional,” he said mildly. “The emperor’s male relatives are always closely guarded, so we may not overthrow him. My brother Mikael, eldest son of the queen of queens, will never be set free. A good many think Caleb a madman to have been so generous toward the rest of his sister’s sons.”
    “They say the same of my mother,” Telemakos agreed with sympathy, pushing aside the books so he might sit cross-legged on the floor next to Priamos. “The queen of queens is always telling me how lucky I am not to be sequestered myself. She says it happens, sometimes, to noble children whose fathers disappear.”
    What a strange world you live in, I thought.
    Telemakos began picking up books also, opening them and making little grunts of distaste or dismissal as he discovered the contents of each.
    “If I were imprisoned in this palace, I would stay always in the Golden Court,” I said. “It’s so light there, and I love the sound of the fountains.”
    “Pah!” Priamos made a gesture of disgust. “I hate the Golden Court. All those chained monkeys. They make me sick.”
    “I like the monkeys,” Telemakos said.
    “It is the chains I object to.”
    Priamos glared down at his disordered books. I knelt to stack them for him.
    “How long will your detention last?” I asked. “We were going to hunt together.”
    “We may yet. We could not go now in any case, while the rains persist.”
    “Rain makes the princess homesick,” Telemakos said. “Is it really like this in Britain, all the year long? I should hate it. I like to be outside.”
    “So do your monkeys.”
    We both gazed down at Telemakos’s shining head, bent in concentration over Priamos’s books. It was as though I held this child tethered by an invisible lead, a chain even lighter and stronger than the gold that bound the monkeys. He did not know he wore it, but I held him captive and condemned as if the links were real.
    Telemakos seemed to pay no notice to either of us. Priamos rubbed one of his narrow hands around the opposite wrist and looked up.
    “How have you entertained yourself since your arrival in Aksum, Princess?” he asked me.
    “Constantine and I meet every day. We’ve got half a dozen meetings scheduled over the next week; we are supposed to work out a plan for my return to Britain.”
    Sifting through documents in his office, Constantine and I tried to piece together what we still owed Aksum in borrowed revenue or goods not paid for. Behind Constantine’s records in his files were other documents, written in Ethiopic or Greek, but signed or annotated in Latin in Medraut’s firm, spare hand. Medraut had rarely put his name to anything, I came to realize; he signed himself anonymously “Ambassador of Britain” or “Envoy of Artos.” His record keeping was complicated and meticulous, but Constantine had made a faithful attempt to equal it. I would never grow to like Constantine, yet I was beginning to see why Caleb thought he would make a decent viceroy, and even why my father had placed him in line for the British kingship.
    Wazeb was always there as well, listening without watching us, his head tilted to one side as Halen whispered brief translations at his ear. Once, when Constantine and I had become embroiled in yet another bitter argument, Constantine had turned to Wazeb and said apologetically, “We dishonor you, debating so in your company.”
    “Not at all,” Wazeb had answered lightly. “It is very interesting.”
    It made my neck go tense, thinking about it.
    “Constantine has wealth my father did not have,” I said to Priamos. “I have allegiances his father does not have. And I know where my father’s soldiers are stationed, and their numbers and strengths, and which parts of Mercia had an abundant harvest last year and so on—but I dislike Constantine so much I don’t want to tell him anything. We scarcely