Eugenides asked, “Do you swim, Your Majesty?”
“No,” she answered shortly.
When Teleus led the soldiers up from the cavern below the megaron, he met the Mede, waiting at the top of the stairs. “Perhaps you would like to tell me what caused this furor, guard?” the Mede asked, and Teleus hesitated, but could see no justification in not reporting the abduction of the queen. The Mede smiled grimly.
“How very clever of the Thief of Eddis. No doubt he is drowning her as we speak,” said the Mede. “Perhaps drowning himself as well, if he means to sail down the coast on a cloudy night with no moon to guide him.” Nahuseresh didn’t seem to mind much the idea of the queen drowning. Teleus watched him, eyes narrowed.
“We have to get a message to the army at the pass,” Teleus said.
“Why?” asked the Mede, raising his eyebrows in surprise. “To start the arrangements for a state funeral?”
“She might not be dead,” Teleus snarled.
“True,” Nahuseresh agreed thoughtfully. “That’s true. I had better leave you to your task. Please excuse me, guard. I have some dinner waiting for me in my rooms, I think.”
“Your Majesty.” Eugenides spoke many hours later. “You’ll want to bend your head, I’m going to jibe.”
Attolia opened her eyes and looked back toward him. The wind had blown the clouds apart, and the moon shone on the water around her and on the high black cliffs not far away.
“The sail will swing across the boat quickly,” Eugenides explained. “You don’t want the boom to hit you.”
Stiffly, Attolia hunched down. Eugenides moved the tiller to one side, and the boat lurched. The sail swept overhead and slammed hard at the end of its lines. The boat tilted and Attolia lunged for the high side, but Eugenides was already sitting on the rail, leaning backward to bring the boat level. The speed of the boat, once it had turned broadside to the wind, seemed twice what it had been before, and Attolia went on clutching the siderail as the boat charged toward sheer cliffs.
She was rigid, her fingers clenched as Eugenides steered between rocks topped with foaming white water and sailed directly toward the cliffs, in which she could see no break or variation. Then, as he adjusted the tiller again, she saw the narrow opening they aimed for. A minute later they were between its walls. The wind lessened, and the water was smooth, only rising and falling in gentle swells. The boat’s momentum carried it forward as Eugenides carefully maneuvered it past hazards that she couldn’t see.
Moving more and more slowly, they drifted into a tiny cove entirely surrounded by the high cliffs. There was no wind, and the water was smooth, reflecting the moon that shone overhead. The harbor was utterly quiet after the noise of the open sea.
Attolia settled herself again in the middle of the forward bench, staring again at the centerboard case.
“Your Majesty.” Eugenides spoke quietly and waited until Attolia raised her eyes to look at him.
His face was still, his expression unreadable. Seeing it, Attolia remembered the day in the audience chamber when she had become queen in fact as well as in name. Her guard captain, Teleus’s predecessor, had eliminated her overbearing suitor, and she’d left her barons to themselves to accept the reality of her rule and gone to her bedchamber—the last time she would go to that room instead of the royal apartments. She’d stood in front of the smooth silver mirror there and studied her face, reaching up to touch her skin, wondering if it could in truth be as hard as it appeared. She’d been frightened and sick in that audience chamber, with no assurance that the captain could or would hold to his promises, but none of her fear, or her revulsion, had shown on her face. She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.
“You have a choice now,” the Thief was saying. “Conscious or unconscious, you can go into the water. I have the boat pole to make certain you don’t come out again.” He nudged the pole lying at his feet. It rattled against the centerboard case, and hearing it, Attolia glanced down. The boat pole was five or six feet long and had two small hooks at the end. The hooks she could easily imagine catching in the folds of her clothes as Eugenides leaned on the pole to force her farther and farther under the surface.
She looked back at Eugenides impassively. She thought he had brought her a long way to drown her, but she knew that in his own field he was meticulous and supposed he wanted to be entirely sure of his results.
He made no move but instead spoke again. “Or you can offer me something I want more than I want to hold your head underwater until the last of your air is gone.”
Attolia had thought her choice was to be conscious or unconscious when she breathed in the black water that would kill her; she couldn’t imagine what Eugenides might want more than that. It was all she would have dreamed of in his place.
“I want to be king of Attolia,” he said.
Attolia blinked. She looked around the tiny harbor and had to clear her throat with a cough before she spoke. “You’ve brought me to a place rather spare of witnesses if you want me to declare you my heir before I die.”
“I wasn’t proposing to become your heir,” said the Thief.
“Then what?” asked Attolia.
“There’s an easier way for a man to become king,” said Eugenides, and waited for her to realize what he proposed.
Attolia stared at him. “You think I would marry you?” she asked in disbelief.
“If you object to marrying a man with one hand, you’ve only yourself to blame.”
“And when did you grow into a man?” asked Attolia, lifting her eyebrow, her voice tinged with sarcasm.
Eugenides didn’t rise to her bait. “It’s your choice, Your Majesty,” he said quietly.
“And if I choose to die here?” she asked.
The only sounds were the slap of ripples against the boat bottom and the susurration of the water against the base of the cliffs around them.
“Then Attolia collapses into civil war and the Medes come,” Eugenides said at last. “They will rule Attolia, and Sounis as well, while Eddis retreats to her mountains.”
“Eddis has no trade without Sounis and Attolia. She is not self-sustaining. If your queen destroys Attolia, she destroys herself.”
“She has the pirates.”
The queen looked again at the harbor around her, understanding perfectly how useful it was to a queen who had no official navy. “How resourceful of her. Of course she has the pirates. Can she control them?”
“Well enough to serve our purposes. Well enough to keep Eddis from starving.”
“You hope.”
Eugenides shrugged. “Eddis will have been a poor country for a long, long time before the Medes lose their grip on this coast, but there will be an Eddis long after Sounis and Attolia are gone. We have our mountains to keep us.”
“And if I choose not to die?”
“Then I will escort you to my queen to begin negotiations for a marriage contract. Together the armies of Eddis and Attolia can keep the Mede off this coast and force Sounis to make peace as well.”
“And you would be king in Attolia?”
“Yes.”
“And I would be queen still.”
“You would rule. I will not interfere, but you will accept Eddisian advisors.”
“Then I watch my country bled dry to pay Eddis tribute, its treasury drained, its taxes raised, its peasants enslaved, and the barons again the true rulers of the country, free to do as they please so long as the king is fed?”
“Do you care,” asked Eugenides, “so long as the queen is fed as well?”
“Yes,” Attolia hissed, and leaned forward with her hands clenched.
Eugenides remained impassive. Attolia could see him in the moonlight but couldn’t guess if he was pleased to have elicited a reaction from her. She sat back on her bench and composed herself.
“Yes, I care. It is my country.”
The Thief thought carefully before he spoke. “If I am king, there will be peace with Eddis but no tribute.”
The queen sniffed in disbelief, then sat hunched over, wrapping her hands in the fabric of her dress to warm them while she thought. She was cold and wet, and sitting across from Eugenides, she felt older than her years. Her bones ached. Eugenides, she was sure, was too young to have bones that ached. No matter what he thought of himself, he was hardly more than a boy. A boy without one hand. She reached up to push the wet hair out of her face, wondering when she had sunk so low that she had begun torturing boys. It was the question she’d asked herself night after night, lying awake in her bed or sitting in a chair by the window, watching the stars slowly move across the sky.
“I listened outside your cell door every night before I sent you back to Eddis,” Attolia said abruptly.
Eugenides sat quietly, waiting for her to go on.
“The first night you cried,” she said. She looked for a reaction but saw none.
She had lingered outside his cell, in the dim light of the lamps, alone because she’d sent away her escort while she listened. Alone, because she had known, even then, that she would turn on any guard who mocked the Thief’s pain. He had cried in breathless, racking sobs that had gone on and on, long after she’d thought he would have exhausted himself. Finally he had slept, but the queen had not. The sound of his tears had kept her from sleep that night and woken her from nightmares since the evening she’d heard them.
“The second night you repeated the same words over and over. I think the fever had set in by then. Do you remember what you said?”
“No.”
She knew every one of them. His voice, broken and stumbling, had filled her dreams until she had wept in her sleep, crying tears for him that she’d never been able to cry for her father or for herself. “Oxe Harbrea Sacrus Vax Dragga…” she began.
Eugenides’s chin lifted as he recognized the opening words. “It’s the invocation of the Great Goddess at her spring festival,” he said calmly, “calling her to the aid of those that need her. The words are archaic.”
“She comes to the aid of those who need her? She didn’t come to yours.”
“You have a decision to make, Your Majesty.” Eugenides reminded her. “And not much time to make it in.”
It was quiet then, while Attolia thought, particularly about the Medean ambassador with his attractive face and his quick smile.
Eugenides waited. “Very well,” the queen said, sitting up straight to look him in the eye. “Be king of Attolia. But never drink from my wine cup while you hope to live.”
“There’s an oar by the boat hook,” Eugenides said, his voice devoid of triumph. “You’ll have to paddle us to the dock.” He steered, reaching across his body to use his hand instead of his hook, while she shifted on her seat in order to dip the paddle into the dark water and move the boat toward the tiny dock that jutted from the rocky beach at the base of the cliffs.
She had no skill with the paddle, and it was half an hour before they reached the dock. Attolia pulled the boat against it, and Eugenides stepped out. He turned and offered her his hand. Once she, too, was standing on the dock, he moved back several steps, closed his eyes, and stretched his arms up over his head to ease the stiffness in his shoulders. Attolia reached to pull from its fabric padding the knife she carried along her ribs, but it was gone. Gone as well were the ceremonial knife from her belt and even the tiny blade hidden in the twists of her hair.
She looked at Eugenides to see his eyes open and his hand holding all three knives, their blades spread in a fan. He tossed them one at a time into the air, catching each by the blade as it came down and tossing it up again, juggling them one-handed, then holding them out, handles first, to the queen. She hesitated, expecting him to pull them back, but he didn’t move.
“Have all three,” he said.
When she’d taken them, he pointed to a spot just below his heart.
“An upward stroke here,” he said, “would be most efficient, but almost anywhere would do the job. You can push me into the water,” he said. “I don’t know if I can swim with one hand or not.”
Attolia waited, sensing a trap. The moon disappeared behind a cloud. Eugenides was only a dark form against the darker water behind him. “Before you make a decision,” he said, “I want you to know that I love you.”
Attolia laughed. Eugenides flushed in the dark.
“I have been surrounded by liars all my life and never heard one lie like you,” said Attolia, smiling.
“It’s the truth.” Eugenides shrugged.
“This is a feeling that’s come upon you suddenly? Since our recent engagement?”
“No,” said the Thief quietly. “When I stole Hamiathes’s Gift, I loved you then. I didn’t understand it. I thought you must be a fiend from hell,” he admitted, cocking his head to one side, “but I already loved you.”
He said, “Before he died, my grandfather used to bring me to your palace so that I could see it for myself. There was a party and dancing one night, and the palace was full of people. I went to the kitchen garden to hide because it should have been empty, but once I was inside, the door opened from the flower gardens, and you came in by yourself. I watched you walking between the rows of cabbages and then dancing under the orange trees. I was above you, in one of the trees.”
Attolia stared. She remembered the night she danced under the orange trees. “And how old were you?” the queen asked. “Six?”
“Older than that,” said Eugenides, smiling at the memory.
“Calf love,” said the queen.
“Calf love doesn’t usually survive amputation, Your Majesty.”
“A good thing I cut off your hand, then, instead of cutting out your heart,” said Attolia cruelly. “You think you still love me?”
“Yes.”
“And you think I’ll believe you?”
Eugenides shrugged. “You can kill me here, Your Majesty, and be done with this. Or you can believe me.” He’d seen her in a pale dress dancing in the moonlight, pretending an entire troupe of dancers danced the harvest circle with her, her arms open to embrace the sisters and friends who existed only in her imagination, and he’d never seen anything so beautiful or so sad. He’d remembered that moment when he’d seen her flush at being called cruel. Afterward, when the magus offered to send him information more current than that in his own library, Eugenides had accepted gladly and read carefully, trying to see whether Attolia could be the monster in human guise she was accused of being, or only a woman who ruled without the support of her barons. In the end he had taken advice his grandfather had given him years before and gone to see for himself.
“I love you,” he said. “You could believe me.”
Attolia looked at him a moment longer, still holding the knife ready. Then she slid it back into its padded sleeve in the front of her dress and stepped forward. She laid one hand on his cheek. He stood as if he were frozen.
“This is what I believe,” she said. “I believe that at the top of the stairs you have friends waiting, and if I climb those stairs without you, I will surely die at the top.”
“There’s the boat,” Eugenides said quietly, not moving under the warmth of her hand.
“You didn’t tie it to the dock, and it has floated away. If I did reach it, could I hope to paddle it past the rocks?”
“No.”
“Then let us climb the stairs together,” said the queen, and she turned away from him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE STEPS LEADING UP FROM the beach were cut into the side of a fissure in the cliffs. From time to time wooden steps stretched across the fissure to carry them to better footing on the opposite side. Eugenides let the queen go first, that she might set the pace and that he might keep an eye on her. The climb warmed her and loosened her muscles, but her feet in their felt slippers were still wet and cold. Each step hit like a blow. She checked the knives in their places frequentl
y. At the first turn, where a wooden bridge crossed to the far side of the narrow canyon, she turned to speak to Eugenides. He was below her, cautiously out of reach.
“You didn’t suborn Efkis,” she said.
“No,” Eugenides answered, “that was a lie. There was no royal messenger. The lieutenant was my cousin Crodes. He has been practicing his Attolian accent for months. The royal messenger pouch we had from your embassy in Eddis.”
“But you moved your men past Efkis’s guard. And your cannon,” she said. “Eleven cannon. How did you get those past?”
“They were wood.”
“Wood?”
“Wood,” said Eugenides. “Fake. We brought them all down the Seperchia on one boat and then threw them over the side at the end and floated them to shore.”
“Bastard,” Attolia said.
“Not that I know,” Eugenides responded, and for a second a smile flickered on his face, the same sly smile of the successful archer that Attolia remembered. The smile disappeared in an instant.
Attolia turned to begin climbing again. She declined to look back at Eugenides. She climbed ferociously, spending her anger on the stairs. Eugenides followed, listening as her breath grew more labored, waiting for her to get tired and slow down. Having set the pace, the queen refused to reduce it. Struggling to breathe without panting, she kept climbing.
“Your Majesty,” Eugenides said.
The queen stopped and swept around to stare down at him.
Eugenides had spoken before he’d thought of anything to say. He only wanted her to stop, hoping that when she began the climb again, she would go more slowly. He looked up at her, tongue-tied by her beauty and her scorn.
“I thought you might like the earrings,” he said lamely.
It was as if he could hear the blood moving through her and could hear her flushing with rage.
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