The feast was for a visiting delegation from Lycia.
He had known about it three days in advance — his supply role ant he saw the provisioning requests before most people knew an event was happening. He had read the guest list, noted the Lycian king’s representative and the two senior officials accompanying him, and had spent those three days reading what the palace archive held about Troy’s relationship with Lycia.
Not much. The relationship was old and generally positive — Lycia sent fighters to Troy’s aid in conflicts and Troy provided favorable terms on the Dardanelles passage for Lycian ships. It was the kind of alliance that worked because neither side needed much from the other. The Lycian representative was nad Sarpedon — not the king, a senior official, which ant this was a courtesy visit rather than a significant negotiation.
He had read all of it and then read it again, looking for what wasn’t there.
What wasn’t there: any record of the relationship being tested. Any record of a dispute or a repair. The alliance existed as a fact, not as sothing that had been worked for.
*Alliances that have never been tested are alliances you don’t actually know the strength of,* he had noted on his shard. Then crossed it out. Then written it again.
---
He arrived at the feast at the correct ti.
The main hall at formal occasions was different from the main hall at ordinary als — the sa stone, the sa columns, the sa painted walls, but transford by lamplight and arrangent into sothing that felt larger than its dinsions. The lamps were doubled. The tables ran in the formal configuration — Priam at the head, the senior guests on his right, the palace hierarchy filling in according to a protocol that everyone present understood without being told.
He found his place — below the senior officials, above the household servants, the correct position for a third prince with a supply title — and sat.
He put on the expression he had developed for these occasions: present, interested, saying nothing unless spoken to. The face of soone who was paying attention without performing attention.
He spent the first hour watching.
---
The Lycian representative, Sarpedon, was a man in his early fifties who had the specific ease of soone who had been doing this — the formal diplomatic feast, the careful conversation, the performance of relationship — for long enough that he had stopped finding it effortful. He spoke to Priam with the warmth of genuine familiarity. Whatever the relationship between their offices, these two n knew each other.
Priam was — Lysander watched him across the table and thought about the word for what he was seeing.
*Tired.*
Not physically. Sothing more specific. The tiredness of a man who had been king for a very long ti and had developed, over that ti, an extrely accurate sense of which problems were real and which were the performances of problems that people brought to him because they needed an audience. The specific exhaustion of a man who could read a room perfectly and found, more and more, that the room contained mostly performance.
He watched his sons with the sa quality.
Hector he watched with sothing that was close to relief — the relief of seeing sothing solid and dependable in a field of variables. Hector noticed this, Lysander thought, and it was part of why Hector bore the weight he bore without complaint: he understood that his father needed him to be solid, and Hector was constitutionally incapable of refusing what was genuinely needed.
Paris he watched with love and wariness in equal asure. The love was obvious in the way he looked at his son. The wariness was visible only if you knew what to look for — a slight adjustnt in his expression when Paris laughed too loudly, when Paris’s attention moved too visibly toward a pretty serving woman, when Paris said sothing charming that was also slightly too much.
*He knows,* Lysander thought. *Priam knows exactly what Paris is. He loves him completely and accurately.*
---
The politics of the room revealed themselves gradually.
Three senior officials sat together on the left side of the table — n in their sixties, palace administration, the kind of officials who had outlasted multiple generations of junior staff through the specific skill of being indispensable without ever being threatening. They talked to each other in the low continuous murmur of people who were always in the middle of the sa conversation regardless of what setting they were in.
One of them — a man nad Khryses, who managed the eastern administrative records — glanced at Lysander twice in the first hour. Not hostile. Assessing. Lysander noted it and let it go.
The second glance he did not let go.
After the third glance he caught Khryses’s eye deliberately and gave a small nod — the acknowledgnt of soone who had noticed the interest and was open to it. Khryses returned the nod and looked away.
*Later,* Lysander thought. *He will find a mont.*
He was right. During the interval between the second and third courses, when people moved and conversations reshuffled, Khryses found himself near Lysander’s section of the table.
He said: *"The supply oversight is producing results. The steward ntioned the western farm expansion."*
*"The steward did the work,"* Lysander said. *"I provided so of the analysis."*
*"The analysis was apparently useful."*
*"I hope so."*
Khryses looked at him with the specific directness of a man who had been doing palace politics for forty years and had stopped finding indirectness efficient.
He said: *"You read the eastern administrative records."*
Not a question.
*"As part of understanding the supply situation. Yes."*
*"You read them carefully."*
*"I try to read everything carefully."*
*"You will have noticed certain patterns in the eastern route reporting."*
Lysander said: *"I have noticed that the eastern route reports have beco less detailed over the past two years. Less specific about the interdiate markets."*
Khryses looked at him.
*"Yes,"* he said. *"That is what I would expect soone reading carefully to notice."*
A pause.
He said: *"If you want to discuss what that ans, I am in my office every morning before the second hour."*
He moved away before Lysander could respond.
Lysander looked at his cup.
Khryses managed the eastern administrative records. The eastern route reports had beco less detailed. Ampelos’s seal had been on docunts sent east through Phaedron.
He filed it. He did not pull the thread tonight.
---
Hector found him at the end of the feast.
The evening was winding down — the Lycian delegation being seen off with the correct formalities, the hall beginning to empty. Hector ca and sat beside him in the unhurried way he did most things.
He said: *"You spent the evening watching."*
*"Yes."*
*"What did you see."*
*"Priam is tired in a specific way. The three senior officials on the left manage their own interests before the palace’s. Sarpedon genuinely likes Priam — not performance. The Lycian relationship is real but untested."*
Hector looked at him.
*"Untested,"* he said.
*"We have never needed them when it was difficult. We have had the alliance in easy conditions only. We do not know what it is actually worth."*
*"And you think we will need to know."*
*"I think we should know before we need to."*
Hector was quiet for a mont.
He said: *"Khryses spoke to you."*
*"Yes."*
*"He does not speak to people without reason."*
*"I know."*
*"What did he want."*
*"I am not certain yet. Sothing about the eastern records. I am going to find out."*
Hector looked at the empty table.
He said: *"Khryses has been in this palace longer than I have been alive. He knows where everything is and he watches everything."*
*"Yes,"* Lysander said. *"I noticed."*
*"Be careful with him. Not because he is hostile — I do not think he is. Because he is careful himself, and careful people deserve equivalent care."*
*"Understood."*
Hector stood.
He said: *"South ground. Dawn."*
*"Yes,"* Lysander said.
Hector went out.
Lysander sat for another mont in the emptying hall, the lamps burning lower, the painted walls settling back into their ordinary presence.
He had co to watch and he had watched. He had made one connection — Khryses — that might open sothing or might not. He had confird what he had suspected about Priam’s relationship with his sons.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing that changed the plan.
But he understood the room better now.
That was enough.
Seven hundred and two words.
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