Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  I made a face. Sitting on the stone floor had left me cold and stiff. I did not want to listen to the Pent, who might drone on until dinnertime.

  Complaints had been made to the queen and to the king about Quedue, about bills he’d run up with the palace tradesmen, the unwanted attention he paid to the women of the court, his insults to minor patronoi and his rudeness to the servants. The kitchens hated him, as he complained about the food and demanded dishes be made to order at all hours. No one, not even his fellow ambassadors, liked him, but there was little that could be done. He was the ambassador of one of the most important countries on the Continent. Only the Braelings were more powerful.

  Quedue’s request for an audience was out of the ordinary, and almost any other ambassador would have been turned away. Fordad, the Brael ambassador, would have been welcome, but Fordad would never have asked. He was meticulous in adhering to the rules of protocol—unlike the Pent, who’d made it clear he felt those rules were for lesser men from less powerful countries.

  The queen allowed the ambassador to be admitted, so I shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position, and watched balefully as the Pent minced into the room tick-tacking on his high-heeled shoes. Lamion said he wore them in order to seem taller than the king.

  “My dear Irene,” said Quedue, waving at the attendants and the guards. “This is hardly private.” The queen had not given him permission to use her name, nor to sit, which he did. “I had hoped to meet you without your shepherdesses, who guard so assiduously their one precious sheep.”

  “Do queens have privacy where you come from, ambassador? We do not have it here, I assure you.” Attolia rose and moved away from him. The council room had been a dining room once, back when guests reclined as they ate. That had not been the style at court for years, but the couches from those days still lined the walls and the queen stopped next to one. Chloe leapt forward to plump the pillows and Attolia settled onto her left side, her elbow on a curving rest and her hand under her chin, her expression remote. Chloe adjusted Attolia’s dress, smoothing the fabric and tucking it around her legs before stepping back, the picture of deference.

  Quedue immediately left his chair and crossed the room as well. Attolia had deliberately left no room for him on the couch, so he dropped and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the queen. Phresine’s eyes widened. The queen’s expression remained unchanged.

  “You can depend upon me,” the Pent said. I didn’t know what he meant.

  Attolia also seemed puzzled. “For what, ambassador? Is there a new matter we need to discuss?”

  “Yes,” said Quedue in a low voice. “A vitally important matter. We have a saying in my country, that a beautiful woman deserves love.”

  Phresine’s expression was almost worth the ache in my hip.

  “Ugly women do not?” asked the queen, as if genuinely curious.

  This was not what the Pent had expected, and after a brief hesitation, he ignored her. “My king has often said it is wrong for a beautiful woman to enter a marriage of convenience.” He lingered over the words, and the queen appeared to consider them carefully.

  “But he married your queen to preserve peace on the border with Gant, did he not? Surely he would not imply that she is not . . . ?”

  The Pent said hastily, “Oh, my king never ceases to praise the beauty of his queen.”

  “Really?” said Attolia. “I thought he called her a cow. From a land of cows.”

  The conversation, which Quedue had obviously practiced in advance, was going further and further astray. “Is cow . . . not a compliment here in Attolia?”

  Someone snorted, but Attolia only said very seriously, “Cow-eyed is, ambassador. It has something to do with the eyelashes and the demurely lowered gaze.”

  “Well then, let me call you cow-eyed, dear queen, for your lashes are lovely and no one can rival you for low—I mean, no one can rival your demure nature.” He took the queen by the hand, trying to regain the initiative. “I think what my king meant was that true love should not be constrained, and a certain flexibility is important in a political marriage.” He was stroking his thumb across her knuckles.

  Her reply was cold. “On the contrary, Ambassador. Your king may not expect his wife to be faithful. He may call his queen a cow, and I wish her joy of him. In Attolia, the most important thing in a marriage is—”

  She was pulling hard enough that he was probably hurting her hand. She stopped and stared him down. Reluctantly, he released her.

  “—respect,” she finished.

  “Nonsense,” said the Pent. He paused to glare at the attendants all around them before he leaned in to whisper, “You are hemmed about with his spies, but I can silence them. I know what you would say, if you felt free to speak.”

  Phresine stepped forward to end this fiasco. Too late. The ambassador had raised himself up on his knees, seized the queen’s face in both hands, and pressed his lips against hers.

  The king, assuming the meeting with the engineers was dragging on, had, like the Pent, waived formalities. Descending the flight of stairs from the royal apartments, he’d walked down the hallway trailing his attendants behind him, to arrive in the open doorway precisely as a whole roomful of people stood by watching the queen of Attolia in the Pent ambassador’s arms.

  No one paints moments like these on walls.

  Seeing him pale, I understood why even Eddis had braced herself after the oath-taking ceremony when the king was told he could not fight in his own battles. That had been illness. This was rage.

  The ambassador, sensing his dangerous exposure, swiveled his head. Seeing the king, he waffled over how alarmed he should be. Attolia pushed him away. She pointed to the second set of doors on the far side of the room.

  “Run,” she said.

  After another moment of hesitation, the ambassador jumped to his feet but failed to take her advice, only circling to the far side of the council table before he paused to look back. The king hadn’t moved, except to lift his hand to his heart, like a man slowly realizing the fatal nature of a wound. He even looked down, as if expecting to see a blade protruding from his chest.

  When he lifted his head and fixed his eyes on the Pent and the ambassador saw the knife that appeared in the king’s hand, he began to flee in earnest, his hard-soled shoes rattling as he raced away. The king went after him, leapt to the top of the table in a single jump, and landed at a run on the other side. The ambassador was going so fast as he left the room that he bounced off the opposite wall of the passage outside.

  The queen shouted at the guards to shut the doors. The king, without time to countermand the order, swerved to one side, reversed the knife in his hand, and hurled it through the diminishing space between them. There was a ring of metal on stone outside and a wail from the ambassador, then a slam that reverberated through the room and probably the entire palace. Slowing to a stop, the king stood with his shoulders hanging.

  Then he spun in a slow circle, looking at the guards, his attendants, the queen’s attendants. Frozen in place, they might have been devotional statues at an altar.

  “Get out,” he ordered.

  No one protested, but no one moved, either.

  “OUT!” he shouted. The guards who’d just closed the doors began furiously pulling them open again. Floor to ceiling and solid bronze, they weighed as much as ten men and it was no easy task.

  Once they were open, the queen’s attendants began to file out. Phresine hesitated. Attolia waved her hand, ever so slightly, and Phresine went too. At the other doorway, Hilarion stood aside to let Xikander pass him. Then he, too, hesitated. The guards behind him were moving more cautiously than the men who’d probably saved the Pent ambassador’s life, and the doors behind him were not yet closed.

  “Out, Hilarion,” said the king, his voice lower but no less intense.

  Hilarion bowed and stepped back, disappearing from sight, leaving the king, the queen, and me, behind the lemon tree, too frightened to
breathe.

  The king swung to face the queen, looked down again at his hand held to his chest.

  “It hurts,” he said. His voice breaking.

  “Serves you right,” said the queen, every word as cold as ice.

  “Serves me right?” said the king. Incredulous as well as angry, he said, “Serves me right?”

  “You dare,” said Attolia, rising to her feet like a thundercloud. “You dare impugn me.”

  “He was kissing you!”

  “He was insulting me!”

  “You told them to shut the doors!” the king shouted.

  They stood facing each other.

  “Why? Why?” wailed the king, until Attolia gritted her teeth and gave the answer that should have been obvious.

  “If I cannot kill the Pent ambassador, then neither will you.”

  The fire in the king flickered. His eyes fell away from her face. There was another long silence until, in a milder voice, he inquired, “Can we not kill him?”

  “Do not pretend with me when you know the answer.” The queen sat, recovering her poise. “Though he will be on the next ship headed west, if I have to send him home in a rowboat.”

  The king sighed heavily. He continued to look all around the room, as if for a previously unseen exit, and then said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

  The queen nodded. She held out her hand, and he crossed the space between them and fell to his knees. He put his head down on her lap.

  Voice muffled, he said, “It still hurts,” as if the pain should have lessened now that the cause of it was gone.

  She stroked his hair. “Serves you right,” she said again, but gently.

  I exhaled in relief. The king lifted his head. My mouth went dry as he fixed his eyes on the potted lemon I was hiding behind.

  The king pushed back on his heels. He’d reached me in the space of a few heartbeats and had me out by the collar and stumbling toward the door in a few more. The metal cuff on his hook made a sharp tap, no more, on the solid bronze doors. After a long moment of hesitation, one began to swing open. The king stopped it with his foot, shoved me through the narrow opening, then used his weight to close it again.

  I fell as he let me go and scuttled away, afraid to leave a foot to be caught by the weight that was swinging on hinges toward me. From the floor, I looked up at a circle of faces. They were asking if the queen was dead, had the king stabbed her, had she stabbed him?

  “He can’t speak,” Hilarion reminded everyone as he pulled me to my feet.

  “He can nod!” shouted someone at the back of the crowd. The hallway was filling up, as everyone within earshot had come to gawk. “Can’t you ask the little monster to nod?”

  “Pheris,” Hilarion said, hands on his knees beside me. “Did the king . . . hurt . . . the queen?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you think he—” He was searching my face as he spoke, and he stopped himself before the question was complete. Straightening up, he said very loudly, “This is futile. He is an idiot and can’t tell us anything.”

  He’d seen how frightened I was, my fear a reflection of the realization reverberating through me. I was no ambassador with diplomatic protection. No one was going to intervene to save me. When the king learned who had betrayed him—and my grandfather who was Erondites would be sure he knew—I would not be sent home, I would have not even a day to spend again with Melisande. My earnest, self-loathing shame at my own actions had been nothing but a means to hide the truth from myself. It was not Erondites who was going to kill me. It was the king.

  Too afraid of the possible answer, Hilarion dropped his question. He did not want to know if the king had murdered the queen, or if she was going to murder him. He didn’t want to be the one who had to decide what to do next. When Phresine, with several of the queen’s other attendants, circumnavigated the council room and arrived to speak to him, his relief was palpable. She was old enough to be his mother, and Hilarion bent head and body to listen to her.

  Phresine told him she had sent one of the queen’s attendants to each of the royal apartments and divided the rest between the two entries to the council room, to wait on whoever emerged. Grateful for her example, Hilarion did the same. After that, he dismissed everyone he had the authority to send away and persuaded most of the rest to go by asking them if they were sure they wanted to be the first person the king or queen saw when the doors finally opened. The crowd retreated to await developments out of sight. Hilarion sent Xikos and Sotis to fetch furniture from the nearby rooms, and we all sat down.

  Hours passed. The dinner hour was over, the skies dark, the moon shining, and nothing had been heard from the king or the queen. Finally, after conferring again with Phresine, Hilarion directed the guards to open the doors. At first little could be seen in the council room; the soft light of the moon coming in through the windows made impenetrable shadows elsewhere. Someone yawned from the far side of the room, where two couches had been pushed together and cushions piled high.

  “What is the time, Hilarion?” the king asked sleepily.

  “Nearly midnight, Your Majesty.”

  “Is there a problem,” asked the queen, also waking, “that you disturb us?”

  Hilarion had no answer ready. It was Chloe who piped up. “You said to bring you the map of the new course for the aqueduct . . . when you’d finished with the Pent ambassador.”

  From the shadows, the queen laughed. “Tomorrow will be soon enough,” she said.

  Softly the doors were closed. In the morning, the king was in his bed and the queen in hers when their attendants went to wake them.

  Chapter Six

  The Pent ambassador was still demanding an apology as he was hustled onto a ship and dispatched home. His attachés, left behind, continued to insist on one. Between the outrageous behavior of the Pent and that of the king, the court was divided. Ion and Hilarion, usually in fast agreement, were opposed on this issue. Ion, who was meticulous about protocol, defended the king and delighted in every joke at the Pent’s expense. Hilarion disapproved. He felt the king’s misbehavior overshadowed that of the ambassador and had allowed Quedue to avoid the condemnation he deserved. Verimius said the king had embarrassed the Attolians. Xikos despised the king, but despised the Pent even more, and voiced to Xikander a savage wish that the king had succeeded in killing the ambassador. “If only we could have been rid of them both,” he grumbled.

  There were rumors about a meeting of the Greater Patronoi, the heads of the great families, or even an assembly of all the barons, to censure the king. On their own, the Greater Patronoi could overrule certain royal decrees, and the assembly of barons, when unified, was powerful enough to dictate to the throne. Attolia, for all her strength, had always been careful to maintain allies in both assemblies.

  “They can’t unite themselves long enough to agree on what wine to have with dinner,” said the king. “It will be forgotten in a day.”

  Indeed, when Susa made it clear he would not support a motion against the king, the murmuring died down. The Brael ambassador, who was again the extraordinary ambassador for the Pents, brought the subject up in court with obvious reluctance. “In these tempestuous times, Your Majesty, I would like to hear from you that we are safe here in your home, that our diplomatic immunity is inviolable.”

  The king pretended to take offense. He assured the Braeling in a high-handed manner that he wasn’t going to start firing at ambassadors the way Sounis had, lingering for so long over the circumstances under which he might be tempted to do so that he rendered his own assurances absurd. People covered their mouths to hide their laughter. The Braeling shook his head but accepted the king’s words at face value, and the matter was considered closed.

  I was trying to savor what I was sure were my last days, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Everything tasted sour, like fear and regret. I stayed in my little closet as much as I could, and at night I huddled in my blankets in such awful apprehension—cert
ain that at any moment Juridius would reveal my treason—that I began to wish the waiting was over and I could die.

  “Something has frightened him,” said the king.

  “You frightened him,” said the queen.

  “I wasn’t angry at him.”

  “You were angry enough to burn the whole world down and him with it.”

  The king sent Petrus to check on me—as much to distract the palace physician from his own health, I think, as out of concern for mine.

  “Pheris, you have to eat,” Petrus told me.

  He had looked in my ears and down my throat, pinched the skin on my arm and examined my fingernails. He’d sent for soup and oranges and almond cookies, and I’d turned my face away from them all. He held my bent fingers in both his hands and tried gently to straighten them. He looked at me speculatively.

  “Do they hurt?”

  I shrugged. They did, sometimes. My leg and my back hurt more, and they hurt more often. Sometimes the little jumps and shivers in the muscles made me want to scream, but they were usually at their worst at night, and if I lay still reciting my prayers to Ula as Melisande had taught me, they would abate for a time. Petrus made me get up to walk back and forth in front of him.

  “The limp is not always so severe,” said Petrus thoughtfully. I’d been curled up in my bed all day and could hardly move. “If it can be at times worse,” he said, “then conversely, we may be able to make it sometimes better.”

  The king’s ploy was a success. Petrus came every day and massaged my leg and my hand, measured the flex of my joints, and made me do stretching exercises and sit with my leg on bladders filled with hot water. “I have no illusions that we could give you a good leg, but I think we can help the one you have carry you a little more comfortably,” he said. In pursuit of that goal, he slathered me with poultices and concocted tonics he tried to make me drink.

  “There’s something wrong with him,” said Dionis, watching from the doorway.