Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Attolia didn’t give him one, only waited in perfect serenity as he reflected over the day’s events.

  “My queen,” he said at last, “you crafted those oaths very carefully, didn’t you?”

  Indeed, Attolia had defined the terms of her loyalty, as well as those of Eddis and Sounis, with precision.

  “I swore my obedience to you and to your future children, not to your wife,” Eddis confirmed.

  “And I the same,” said the king of Sounis, sounding very serious, when he’d been so boyish a moment before.

  “You are the linchpin of this treaty, Gen,” said Eddis. “You cannot be risked in battle.”

  The king’s face suddenly lost all its color. He was so pale the scar on his face stood out darker than the skin around it. Eddis crossed her arms and even Sounis braced himself. Attolia narrowed her eyes, as if daring the king to do his worst, but he just drew a long, shaking breath and exhaled it as slowly.

  “We will talk about this later,” he said. “For now, I shall retire to my room and read . . .” He paused to swallow. “About poor Omarak . . . for my edification.”

  He didn’t make it to his room. He had stopped because he needed to rest and then, taken by surprise, he’d lost his carefully maintained equilibrium. After no more than a few steps he stopped again, his guards circling back like flocking birds, their dress capes swinging. When the king pointed to a door nearby, no one knew why. They all stared. It was just a door to one of many small reception rooms off this hallway. Then the king was stumbling toward it, and his guards were leaping ahead of him to get it open and check the room before he entered.

  Two startled men who probably expected their conversation to be undisturbed were summarily ejected as the rest of the royal entourage surged in after the king. Swept along like a small rock in a flood, I went with them. I heard the queen say quite bitterly, “You fool,” and heard the king breathily concede. I could see nothing but the backside of the man ahead of me. I did not see her turn and stalk away from him, only heard the people around me catch their breath. In the shocked silence, there was a soft patter of objects hitting the floor as she lifted a bowl from a side table and ruthlessly emptied it.

  “My king.” Evidently, she offered it to him just in time.

  “Unkingly,” he said when he was done being sick, still bent over, his hand on his thigh. The queen pulled the bowl away and passed it to her attendant, who received it without any change in expression and immediately passed it on.

  Without any warning, the king’s knees buckled. The queen tried to catch him, but he slid through her arms, too heavy to hold. Unwilling to let him go, she dropped as well, velvet and silk robes billowing all around as they sank to the ground together.

  “Poison,” someone whispered, and I heard the dreadful word repeating through the room.

  “But he hasn’t eaten anything!” a horrified Philologos protested.

  “He ate no breakfast,” Hilarion confirmed. “He didn’t touch his dinner last night.”

  “He hasn’t drunk anything today, either,” said Sotis.

  “Nothing?” said the queen.

  “Nothing,” they assured her.

  “Nothing?”

  Assurances died on their lips.

  The king wasn’t poisoned; he was ill and none of them had noticed. She lifted a shaking hand to his forehead to feel the heat burning through his skin. I’m surprised his attendants had the courage to stay still in the face of her rage. I was moving already.

  “He was sick in the night,” confessed Verimius. He must have seen the evidence.

  “Your Majesty, I am sorry. I assumed it was just the nightm—” Hilarion said, before he checked his runaway tongue.

  The queen bent down over the king. “Why didn’t you say something?” she asked.

  The king, eyes still closed, waved his hand at the scene all around him. “I can’t imagine,” he said.

  “We cannot lose you,” said the queen fiercely.

  “So, so, so,” whispered the king, deeply weary. “I just heard.”

  In the doorway, a large man in the green sash of a healer was forcing his way through the crowd.

  “Galen,” said the king with a sigh. “Can you tell him I died?”

  “He is my patient,” Petrus insisted, following along in the other healer’s wake.

  Galen ignored him. “Has anyone else been taken ill?” he asked, and every head swung as they sought and could not find me because I had long since squeezed myself underneath one of the couches along the wall. Only the king, almost flat on the floor, could have seen me, and I prayed to Agalia that he would not. He opened his eyes and deliberately winked at me before closing them again.

  Galen asked, “Has Erondites’s grandson been near the king?”

  “No,” they said.

  Yes.

  “Has he touched him?”

  “No!” they said.

  Yes.

  More afraid of the queen’s growing impatience than jealous of each other, Petrus and Galen finally agreed that the king had not been poisoned, that he had a stomach ailment and should be carried back to his room to be bled and then dosed with lemon and salt.

  “The king shall return to his chamber,” Eugenides allowed in a thin voice. “On his feet, and he will not be bled. And he will have hot lemon and no salt.”

  Galen and Petrus reluctantly accepted the amendments, their acquiescence only provisional, as they helped the king to his feet so that his return to his apartments under his own power might mitigate the rumors already flying around the palace that he had fallen down dead.

  When the room was empty, I struggled out from my hiding place, the exit from under the low couch far more difficult than the entrance had been. I limped around the room, stretching my sore body and collecting the oranges scattered on the floor. Then I pushed the couch a little away from the wall and settled in behind it. My hands shook, making it difficult to peel the fruit, and I wondered if it was going to hurt very much to die. I knew Melisande would be grieved, but not surprised, at the news that I was dead. Would my grandfather be blamed for introducing a diseased grandson into the king’s household? I hoped so.

  I laid out the sections of an orange on the floor as I freed them. There were eleven, a frustrating number. Oranges mostly have ten. I peeled another, hoping not to get another eleven, and got a nine, which was a pleasant surprise. The curved sections of an orange make a good spiral, and with twenty sections, I could make three complete rotations with no section left over. Once I’d laid out the pattern, I ate every part of it, savoring each bite as if it were my last.

  When I had eaten all the oranges and no one had come for me, I moved to sit on the couch instead of behind it. The room was meant for private meetings and was not large. One side table held a vase full of flowers. The other had held the fruit I’d just eaten. There was a mosaic on the floor with the storm god in the center medallion, surrounded by his children. Alyta, goddess of the gentle rain, had a gold garland. Her sisters and brothers, less welcome in their attention, had silver ones.

  In addition to the doorway the king had stumbled through, there were windows and a doorway to the courtyard outside. I went to look at it. There was nothing interesting to see, only empty pavement and the rectangular reservoir in the center to collect water. The reservoir was empty, probably cracked, as it had recently rained.

  When the latch on the door behind me lifted, there was no time to get back to my couch to hide. I slid around the doorpost into the courtyard, where there was not even a flowerpot to conceal me. On hands and knees, I scuttled across the pavement and dropped into the empty reservoir, rolling myself up against the side and hoping that anyone checking the courtyard from the doorway might overlook me.

  I heard someone say, “Sir, the juice is still wet. He can’t be far.”

  “He isn’t,” said Teleus, captain of the guard.

  I opened my eyes to see him staring down at me.

  With his hand wrapped arou
nd my upper arm, Teleus marched me through the waiting room and directly to the bedside where the king lay propped up on pillows, sweaty and pale. Medander saw me first and lunged forward, fist raised.

  “Stop,” whispered the king.

  “He is pest-ridden, Your Majesty. He needs to be got rid of.”

  “Petrus said he had an infection in his throat. Galen and Petrus agree my disease is in my stomach. It’s the only thing they agree on. It could not be Pheris who made me ill. He’s never even been close.”

  He lied. I knew by then who had come with the lemon water in the night, even if he sounded very different by day.

  “Go get your bedding and bring it here,” he said to me, and over the protests from the attendants, I did as I was told.

  They were still arguing when I returned with my rolled-up blankets. The king pointed to a corner, and I retreated there to make a nest and climb into it. None of the attendants disagreed with Medander’s recommendation. They wanted me gone, but the king wouldn’t listen.

  “He is Erondites’s grandson and heir,” said the king, “and I have conceived a great desire to see him live to adulthood. Now all of you go away.”

  “I will stay with the king,” said Petrus officiously. Galen opened his mouth, and I could tell he meant to say that he would stay with the king. Petrus had been kind to me and I hoped the king would choose him, but he refused them both. “All of you go,” he said. “Don’t make me say it again.”

  “May I stay, Your Majesty?” asked Ion, sounding deferential. I noticed the contemptuous glance Xikos and Xikander sent his way when the king said yes.

  Ion sat in a chair as the room fell quiet. “Would you like me to read something, Your Majesty? Or I could get my instrument.”

  The king shook his head. “Send for some food.”

  “Of course.” Ion leapt back up. “Some broth, Petrus said, or some fruit.”

  “Some lamb in plum sauce,” said the king. “They were making it for tonight.”

  “Your Majesty, no.”

  “Lamb,” he whispered. “Plum sauce,” almost mouthing the words.

  When the food came, he appeared to have changed his mind. Waving away the platter Ion carried, he said, “Give it to the little Erondites.”

  I sat in my nest of blankets and ate everything, even the meat, which had been cut up into very small pieces and was easy enough to chew. By the time I was done, the king was asleep and my own eyes were closing. I pushed the tray away and fell asleep, not waking until there was a quiet knock at the door in the morning.

  “Your Majesty,” said Hilarion, stepping into the room, “your cousin who is Eddis wishes to speak to you.” Eddis was already in the doorway behind him, coming in whether she was welcome or not. Ion, who’d spent the night in the chair, rose to his feet, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. Eddis smiled at him, and he ducked his head and withdrew to the door before he remembered me.

  “The little m—Erondites, shall I take him out?”

  Eddis looked at me very seriously. When she smiled, I found myself smiling back.

  “I think we can rely on his discretion,” said Eddis, and Ion bowed and left.

  When the door closed behind him, the king said to Eddis, “You are leaving?”

  “Sounis and I will return to Eddis as quickly as we can, to reduce my worries about someone dying in the near future.”

  “I doubt very much that I am going to die.”

  “You aren’t the one I’m worried about.”

  “That bad?”

  “Cleon has called for a trial.”

  “Oh, Cleon,” said Gen. “Stupid as ever.”

  “He insists you cannot be allowed to rule over me without the approval of the Great Goddess.” Eddis dropped into the seat Ion had vacated and slouched down with her legs crossed at the ankle, much as the king habitually did.

  “Does he expect me to rise from my deathbed to fight with him?” the king asked.

  “I thought you said you weren’t dying.”

  “I’ve reconsidered.”

  “He says that the illness is a sign that you do not have Hephestia’s favor.”

  The king growled and I hunched deeper into the corner, pulling my blankets around me.

  “Alternatively,” said Eddis, “he says you are malingering. You don’t dare to stand trial.”

  “I am not, Eddis,” said the king flatly.

  “Nonetheless.”

  “No. Not nonetheless. You are Eddis. Go smack him.”

  Eddis shook her head. “Smacking people will not persuade them. I must go home and explain myself and see if they will ever forgive me for what I’ve done.”

  “Nonsense,” said the king. “Eddis would not forsake you if you’d sold them all for cannon fodder. It’s me they hate. Is your Mede ambassador going to remain with you?”

  “I suppose he is,” said Eddis, not sounding very happy about it.

  “I wish he and Melheret would both go,” grumbled the king.

  “So does Sophos. Melheret is, this very minute, lecturing him again about shooting his ambassador.”

  “I hope Sophos is being equally rude in return.”

  “No, and you know that Sophos is truly sorry to have shot that idiot Akretenesh. He is still worried the gods will take him to task.” After a pause, she said abruptly, “You are sick, aren’t you, Gen?”

  I could not see the king lying among his covers, but I heard him sigh. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “People do get sick, you know.”

  “But I thought you were getting better.”

  “I do not know why I am a magnet for every contagion. I think—”

  Eddis leaned forward.

  He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I think the life of kings is not the rosy experience the epics make it out to be.”

  Eddis’s tense shoulders dropped in exasperation. “Idiot,” she said fondly, and went away.

  Hilarion, Lamion, Xikos, and Medander returned to wash the king and change his shirt. Galen came to examine him and found Petrus already in the waiting room ready to rush to the king’s bedside.

  The king sent both of them away.

  Next, the Mede ambassador arrived, having finished lecturing the king of Sounis. He insisted that there must be recompense for the assault on Sounis’s ambassador and that it would damage trade with the empire if there was not some immediate remedy.

  “I so admire your diplomatic skills, Melheret,” said the king. “Ten thousand Mede soldiers landed in Sounis and you are pretending to be outraged because Sophos winged his ambassador. I have an idea. I won’t say anything about the invasion of a country under my protection and you won’t ever raise the issue of that idiot Sophos shot again. And you can stop making idle threats, because I know you are going to agree.”

  “And how do you know that, Your Majesty?” said Melheret down his nose in his best affectation of curious condescension.

  “Because you don’t like your ‘brother ambassador’ and you’re secretly delighted Akretenesh got what was coming to him.”

  Melheret opened his mouth and then closed it again.

  “Let us not behave like children, Melheret. You and your ambassador in Eddis will remain because it suits the empire to have you here spying on us. The emperor browbeat us into the exchange of ambassadors, not the other way around. While you may keep up this pretense in public—that we are civilized nations at peace with one another—we both know that your emperor means to crush the Little Peninsula under his sandal as he advances on the Continent.”

  There was a long pause before the ambassador responded.

  “I am sure that if the king of Attolia were to refrain from behaving like a child, it would be appreciated by all,” he said.

  The king seemed genuinely amused. “You really should have given me the statue.”

  “The king is tired,” said Melheret, standing to end the interview, though that should have been the king’s prerogative.

  When he was g
one, the king put his arm across his face and mumbled into his sleeve, “The king is tired of the whole Mede empire. That’s what the king is tired of.”

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, the king informed his attendants that he would be getting up, and in spite of the protests I could already see were formulaic and half-hearted, a very abbreviated form of his morning rituals followed.

  “Pheris,” he called when he was dressed, and the attendants, reminded of my existence, swiveled their heads, wondering where I’d got to. The king knew, waving me out from my hiding place me as I hesitantly peered around the corner of his desk.

  “You are coming with me,” he said. “I don’t want anyone pitching you out a window while I’m not looking.”

  In the afternoon, the king went to lie down, not in his own apartments, but in the queen’s. Attolia had moved into these rooms when she’d seized the throne. Eugenides, once he was king, might have displaced her, or might have taken the apartments directly adjacent, which had traditionally belonged to the queen. He had done neither, choosing instead to inhabit a smaller apartment, usually occupied by minor or more distant relatives of the king. It had previously belonged to Attolia’s older brother and had been empty since his death.

  The queen’s apartments had a guard room to pass through before one reached the spacious waiting room set aside for visitors. There were separate sleeping spaces for each of the attendants, and closets and antechambers, audience and dressing rooms. There were two rooms for the attendants to wait in. The queen’s women had precedence in her apartments, so they gathered in the room nearer the royal bedchamber, decorated with scenes of war and statecraft. The king’s attendants kicked their heels in rooms farther away, paneled with images of pastoral beauty and domestic tranquility.

  “Medander,” said Hilarion, with a look at me and then a firm shake of his head. Medander settled back into his chair, whatever he’d been planning in regard to me reconsidered. I held very still until the other attendants turned their attention to the card game that Ion and Sotis were playing. Sotis was arguing that Ion had broken some trivial rule, and when no one was looking in my direction, I slipped off my chair and sank down behind it.