Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Unlike the queen, the king twitched his feet in boredom or irritation and I moved past him warily, in spite of what Sotis had said about avoiding a scene. I’d been dragged out from under tables before. I did notice that the cuffs of the king’s trousers matched the embroidery on the queen’s dress. A pair of thrushes perched side by side on an embroidered branch, just visible above his boots.

  Beyond the king was the queen of Eddis. Her dress was less interesting, plain fabric and no embroidery. Beside her, also in plain clothes, was another man, not the king of Sounis, as he was sitting on the far side of Attolia. Hearing the man speak and Eddis answering, I recognized the rolling sounds in their words.

  “Cleon has called for a trial,” said the rumbling voice.

  “He’s not the king of Eddis,” said the queen, her voice sharp, though still quiet enough that no one but me, crouched by her feet, was likely to hear.

  I stayed to listen, but nothing more interesting was said.

  The dinner went on for what seemed like hours. The music was dull. There were speeches and no dancing afterward and worse, no storyteller. I grew more and more uncomfortable on the cold stone floor, until at last there was a scraping of benches and chairs as those seated at the high table stood to leave. By that time my hip and leg had grown so stiff, I had to press the flesh of my thigh, willing the knee to straighten. Painfully, I flattened myself to see from under the cloth. As the kings and queens moved to the door, drawing eyes away from the table, I crawled out and got to my feet with the help of a chair. Seeing platters still filled with food, I snatched half a game bird. Keeping it close to my leg, hoping no grease would drip on my fine new clothes, I limped awkwardly toward the other attendants, waving my arm for balance.

  Hilarion drew back Xikander, who must have just been on his way to fetch me. I reached the door in time to follow the last of the attendants through it, gritting my teeth until the stiffness in my leg eased.

  Back in my closet, I sat on my pallet, gnawing the meat off the game bird and turning over in my mind what I’d seen of the king and his potentially even more terrifying wife. When I’d licked the bones clean, I threw them out the ventilation window into the airshaft.

  Chapter Three

  In the morning, before the sun was in the sky, Xikander woke me and told me to dress. Reaching for my clothes, I saw by the light of the lamp outside my door the damage from the previous night’s meal. The juices of the game bird had indeed dribbled down the leg of my trousers. There was no help for it, as I had no way to clean them off, not even a washbasin and water, so I scrambled into them as quickly as I could.

  In the king’s waiting room, all the attendants were gathered, as well as people I would come to recognize as important members of the Attolian court. This was an historic occasion. Everyone present had a role, held clothing or jewel boxes or a tiny amphora. Even I was given an earring to keep in my good hand. Philologos pushed me into place in line beside him, and Ion checked that all was in order. When he saw the stains on my trousers, he briefly closed his eyes. Recognizing that there was nothing to be done, he nodded at Hilarion, who rapped on the door of the bedchamber. When there was no response, he opened the door and stepped through.

  Filing in after Hilarion, we found the king lying on his back in his bed surrounded by the cloth of gold drapery, as perfect as any honeybee in a hive, with his arm over his face. He refused to get up.

  “Your Majesty.” Hilarion was close to begging. “Everyone is waiting.”

  “Tell them I died.”

  “Your Majesty?”

  “Died, Hilarion. In the night. Peacefully.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because then you could all go away and leave me alone.”

  Holding a vest in his hands and trying hard not to crumple the velvet, Hilarion looked at the other attendants for support. Lamion slowly lifted his shoulders all the way to his ears. Philologos hesitantly cleared his throat.

  He said, “Your Majesty, if you were dead, we couldn’t just leave you alone.”

  There was silence from the bed.

  “The body would have to be washed,” said Ion, with an air of the most delicate pragmatism. “And we’d have to dress it for a funeral. An elaborate funeral.”

  “We’d have to call the doctor,” Hilarion warned.

  “Doctors,” corrected Ion.

  With a mumbled curse, the king levered himself slowly up. “That was a cheap shot, Ion,” he said bitterly, as everyone else in the room sighed with relief.

  The king’s hook had a series of straps that ran over his shoulders and was the first thing he was helped to put on. He stood to have his pants pulled up, sat again while his attendants placed his feet in boots, lifted his arms while an undershirt was slipped over his head. It was clear that he did not relish the attention. He already looked tired.

  Sotis and Ion did his hair, clipping it and combing it and adding a little oil, then carefully dusting it with powdered gold.

  “Robe,” said Ion sharply, and Lamion went to fetch it.

  Sighing, the king got back to his feet.

  They slipped jewels on his fingers and chains around his neck. Ion plucked the single red ruby out of my hand, rubbed it on his coat, and hung it in the king’s ear. Then Lamion brought in the robe, sky-blue velvet embroidered with gold thread and trimmed in spotted ermine, with the lilies of Attolia on the back in a deeper blue and white. I watched in awe as it was draped around the king’s shoulders. He saw me staring and smiled for the first time.

  “You’ve impressed the imbecile, Your Majesty.” Medander said it as if it were a joke, but there was an edge I didn’t miss. It was not just me that Medander was mocking.

  “I am so glad someone is pleased,” murmured the king.

  Hilarion looked daggers at Medander, but he shrugged them off.

  It was going to be a very long day.

  We first went to the queen’s apartments, which were lavish in direct contrast to the king’s. Arriving in her reception room, the king blamed the attendants for his lateness. They seemed neither resentful nor amused at this lie, just unsettled, eyeing him as if he might erupt like the Sacred Mountain or, worse, return to his bed. Sagging as he settled into his chair, he might have been thinking of just that.

  “Sounis’s barons have urged him to repudiate his promise to you,” said Attolia.

  “He won’t,” said Eugenides, closing his eyes. “Eddis’s barons have been putting the idea in their heads.”

  “Your cousin looked as if he meant to kill you last night at dinner.”

  “Cephus has always hated me.”

  “That wasn’t the cousin I meant.”

  “They have all remembered how much they hate me. I was a hero very briefly when I was stealing your throne and am back to being a villain now that I am stealing Eddis’s.”

  “You are stealing nothing. Eddis is their sovereign, and it is Eddis who has chosen this course!”

  “You are expecting a sensitivity to nuance, my queen, that you will not find in Eddisians.”

  Attolia subsided. “They are demanding a rewording of Eddis’s oath. They want something less stringent. ‘Advise’ rather than ‘rule.’”

  “I’m sure they do. But that’s not the oath Eddis agreed to take, and it’s not the one she will swear today.” The gold powder from his hair had smeared across the back of the chair. One of the attendants, the old woman Phresine, rolled her eyes at the mess, but the king didn’t see.

  “Sounis has had to browbeat his barons into supporting him,” he was saying wearily. “Eddis has far more authority. She doesn’t waste her time the way we do keeping your horrible council of barons appeased.”

  “No ruler’s power is ever absolute,” the queen warned.

  “If the Eddisians want to dethrone Helen, they know it will be over my father’s dead body. Over the dead bodies of my brothers. Possibly over the dead bodies of my sisters—and believe me, no one wants to cross them. If my father says his n
iece is queen, then she is queen, and if Helen says she will be loyal, she will be loyal. If the Eddisians hate it, they’ll be too preoccupied being angry at me to gloat over your barons or Sounis’s once I am high king.”

  “Is that why you continue to be so provoking?”

  He opened his eyes to slits. “I have no idea what you mean, my queen,” he said.

  Attolia raised an eyebrow, too much a queen to say anything else.

  The king’s procession began at the front of the palace, winding around it to the gates where the Sacred Way left the city and climbed to the temple heights above it, and what I remember most clearly now was the unforgiving, uneven paving stones. All my attention was concentrated on picking my way across them in fear of what might happen if I moved too slowly.

  I had never seen a public ceremony. Melisande and I had performed hearth rites together, but since I was not welcome when the family gathered, I had very little knowledge of more formal rituals. I’d visited the small shrines in the valley around our villa but had not been in a real temple since my naming ceremony.

  I wouldn’t be in one that day, either. After recovering from the climb, I peered through the crowd of people around me, first in curiosity and then in disappointment. The new temple of the goddess Hephestia was nothing but an open foundation, a windswept plaza surrounded by ramshackle workshops made of sticks and clay. There was a single small building, no bigger than the shed I’d shared with Melisande: Hephestia’s Treasury. Now its walls are faced with white marble and its dome leafed with gold. It is enclosed within the temple and sits just behind the great statue of Hephestia. Work on that statue had not even begun, and the treasury was an unassuming little building of undressed stone.

  I was no more impressed by the ceremony, which was just a lot of talking. One voice did stand out, with a resonance that made my heart thrum in my chest, but when cautious maneuvering brought the speaker into view, the Oracle, high priestess of Hephestia, turned out to be a stout, middle-aged woman with her hair in tight braids like my mother’s, no more extraordinary to look at than her temple.

  In the old days, a young bull would have been sacrificed and then roasted to be eaten that evening. By the time I realized the high priestess was only going to tap the bull with her thyrsus before it was led away to join the temple’s herd, I’d lost interest in the whole process. My back and leg ached. I longed to sit down but didn’t dare.

  The procession down the Sacred Way moved more slowly than it had going up, luckily for me. The king stopped at each altar we passed to leave an offering for old and new gods alike. Twice he prostrated himself to pray. At a very minor goddess’s altar, to everyone’s confusion, he closed his eyes and lay still for some time before he got up and continued. When we’d passed through the town gates, the king stopped even more often, humbly bowing his head while coins and flower petals and sweets were thrown for the children. Shaking with exhaustion, sick from the noise and the shouting, I was relieved to reach the palace. I didn’t realize the day had only just begun. In the ceremonial courtyard, the king climbed up onto a high platform, where he sat on a figured gold chair to accept as every single person of any importance at all offered him loyalty and gifts in honor of the occasion.

  Attolia went first, standing proudly before her people as she promised to be ruled by the will of the gods and the high king. After her oath, she climbed the steps to sit in a no less ornate silver chair on his left. Eddis’s oath was just as the king had said it would be, and then she climbed to sit on his right. Sounis followed, placing his hand on the king’s foot and looking up to him with an easy smile before swearing his loyalty and obedience—his informality an exception to the crushing etiquette of the hours that followed.

  One by one, the Attolian barons approached the king, swore their loyalty, and then offered their gifts, either directly to the king or to one of the attendants standing below the dais. When my grandfather who was Erondites stepped forward, I shrank back behind Ion and didn’t see him offer up the ornate hunting bow he’d brought, though I heard the king thank him and saw my grandfather’s smirk as he withdrew. Next, a baron carefully placed a golden pomegranate into the king’s outstretched palm. The king passed it to Ion without a second glance and the baron hesitantly cleared his throat.

  “It opens, Your Majesty,” he said.

  “Does it?” said the king, sounding bored. Perhaps he thought this was another gift useful only to a man with two hands.

  “If I may?” the baron asked, reaching up to retrieve it. Holding the pomegranate in just one hand, he released the hidden catch, and the upper half of the gold fruit lifted. The king leaned forward, and then, as if regretting his show of interest, slowly sat back again.

  Hastily, the baron explained, “It can be filled with powder, and the powder then shaken from the openings in the calyx of the fruit, Your Majesty. Or it can hold scent and serve as a pomander, as Your Majesty prefers.”

  Solid gold, it was a valuable offering to the king; the baron was probably trying very hard to recover from some past offense. I often saw the pomegranate in use over the years, but I do not remember whose gift it was—there were so many trying to improve their relations with the king at that time.

  I was surprised to see one baron step forward to make his vow with his daughter beside him. She gave the king a very winning smile as she delivered her family’s gift, and I looked to the queen to see her reaction. Her face remained unreadable.

  “Heiro,” said the king. “These are your earrings.”

  “I noticed that you admired them, Your Majesty.”

  “No one has ever given me earrings,” said the king, sounding delighted. In the past, he’d stolen them, but those earrings, and whatever the Thief of Eddis stole, could only be used in the service of his god or surrendered on his altar. Heiro’s earrings, he would be able to keep. “I will treasure these,” he said, and seemed genuinely pleased, rewarding her with a smile as winning as her own. A hundred men who’d offered him far more expensive gifts ground their teeth in frustration, and Heiro’s father sighed with visible relief.

  That was the king’s last smile. After that, he appeared to be almost as miserable as I was, and I was thoroughly miserable. Unable to stand for another minute, I first crouched, and then sat, ignoring Lamion, who hissed at me, and Hilarion, who surreptitiously poked me with his foot. In my head, I could hear Melisande begging me to get up, and all I could do was assure her that at least I was out of sight behind the other attendants. I’d heard Sotis the night before—no one wanted a scene. When the last baron passed by, I looked up in relief, only to see that a line still stretched around the courtyard and that the mayors of various towns as well as the heads of the larger guilds must have their turns. I dropped my gaze back to the striations in the paving stones underneath me and tried to pass the time imagining they were waves with ships sailing on cool marble seas.

  Foreign heads of state had sent their own gifts to mark the investiture of the high king. Lengths of linen and dyed wool from the Braelings, a silver dish in the shape of a fish from the Pents, and a beautifully decorated sword from the Gants—another item that was unlikely to be useful, as it would not be weighted for a left-handed man. I think this was a matter overlooked by the Gants and not a deliberate offense.

  The Mede ambassador, Melheret, gave the king a scroll. “I was so hoping for a statue,” the king commented ungraciously as he received it. Most of those who heard him looked uncomfortable. The ambassador smiled condescendingly and said, “This is a story of my people, Your Majesty, the Epic of Omarak, who overreached and was struck down for it. I thought you might find it instructive.”

  “Ambassador, I will certainly give it the attention it deserves,” the king promised.

  Finally the ceremony was over. The king rose with a display of stately dignity and descended from the dais. As he left the courtyard and moved toward the royal wing of the palace, protocol winnowed away one by one those who followed him. We had not yet left the pu
blic areas, and there were still bystanders as well as his guards and attendants when he paused in a hallway to complain to Attolia about her gift.

  “You gave me a horse,” he said, his voice breathy and aggrieved. Indeed she had, a splendid white warhorse whose hooves had drummed against the paving stones as it was paraded through the ceremonial court. “Eddis gave me scrolls from her library,” said the king. “Sophos gave me a book of poems.” Presents he evidently preferred.

  If offended, Attolia sounded neither angry nor sympathetic. “With a scroll and a book, you will look like a scholar,” she said. “On that horse, you will look like a king.”

  “I might have to be a king. I don’t have to look like one.”

  “You said you meant to be a figurehead,” Attolia reminded him. “‘A king in appearance only,’ you said.”

  Stymied, the king changed ground. “I don’t need a warhorse, because I fight on foot.”

  Attolia didn’t respond.

  “Gen,” said the queen of Eddis, uncomfortable in the expanding silence.

  “I picked out the horse,” stuck in Sounis hastily, and the king turned to him, swaying a little, as if with surprise.

  “You, Sophos? I thought you were my friend.”

  “I am,” the king of Sounis assured him. “He has all the fighting spirit of an apricot. His trainers had given up and sold him for farm work.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Like riding a slowly moving sofa.” Sounis swore, “On my honor.”

  For a moment, it seemed we might proceed, but the king didn’t move and the guards aborted their steps, half taken. The king repeated himself. “I fight on foot,” he said, this time probing deliberately for a response.