Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Pheris,” he said, and my stomach turned over. I regretted more than just my lunch.

  “I lost my temper,” said the king. “I frightened you and I am sorry for that. You might otherwise have come to me when Juridius threatened you.”

  I shook my head. The blame was not his.

  “Pheris, look at me. I told the baron your grandfather that he must choose an heir young enough to be raised here in the palace because I badly need an Erondites that I can trust. I assumed it was you.”

  My lip quivered and I bit it—accidentally too hard—and slapped my hand to my mouth. He laughed at me, smiling very briefly before he became serious again.

  “I didn’t ask you, no one has asked you, if you wanted to be Erondites. I’m sorry for that, too. I am asking you now, shall we make a covenant, you and I, that I will trust you and you will trust me?” He waited, giving me time to think.

  I nodded, put my forefinger to my heart and to my lip, and opened my hand to him. He seemed to understand.

  He said, “You have my word as well.”

  Kamet and I crossed paths often, as both of us were exploring the palace anew. He was a thin, dark young man, though of course I did not see him as young at the time. Indoors, we passed without interacting. In the gardens, where he often walked, I spied on him from the shrubbery. I sensed in him a fellow feeling, of an ever-present vulnerability temporarily lifted.

  To my tutor’s chagrin, my lessons had begun again. He liked me no more than he had before, nor did I like him. Kamet was sometimes moving through the library around us, examining its contents as my tutor sullenly went through the motions of teaching me and I entertained myself by confounding him. I laughed when Kamet pulled a scroll from the shelf and got a face full of dust. His expression was such a mixture of disgust and outrage it was impossible not to. My tutor hushed me.

  After the lesson had ended and my poor tutor had left, Kamet approached very politely to ask if he could borrow my chalk and slate. I slid both across the table and watched with interest as he drew a cat and a bird with a few expert strokes. He added neat letters in a row underneath them. Then he pointed to the bird and looked at me expectantly. “Which letter?” he asked. When I pointed to the one that made the sound peh instead of bah, he raised his eyebrows.

  I pointed to peh again, hoping he would give up. Much safer to enjoy my private jokes . . . privately.

  Kamet’s hands were slim, carefully kept, the only marks on them those of ink and a callus from a pen. Very gently, he tapped one finger on the slate. “Am I like your tutor, that you lie to me?” He sounded so disappointed that I apologetically took back my chalk and made two more letters, barely legible. My spelling was as bad as my handwriting, but he studied the marks, his head cocked to one side, and conceded.

  “Indeed,” he said, “it is a pigeon.” Then he wrote out the word with the correct spelling for me.

  At my next lesson, when I pulled my stool out from under the table, I found what I thought at first was just a rude picture of myself; I had found similar things before, with hex marks drawn across them, although not recently. When I picked it up, I was surprised to see that it was an entire scroll, folded into a codex. The first picture was indeed of me, but not meant to be unkind, only to be easily identified. Inside was a wealth of words with pictures beside them. Cat and dog and pigeon, but so many more as well, an entire vocabulary at my fingertips. Until then I’d been guessing at how letters might be assembled into words. Because my tutor was still trying to get me to identify individual letters, he’d never shown me any texts I might read. I went back to study my image, guessing that the marks underneath it spelled out my name. When my tutor came to the lesson, I hastily stuffed the codex into my vest, my secret and Kamet’s.

  Kamet did not speak to me again, but he nodded politely when he saw me, and I nodded back.

  It was some weeks after Kamet had left Attolia that I arrived for my lesson in the library to find my tutor absent. Someone else was waiting there for me. Lightly built and very handsome, with distinguished gray patches at his temples, he wore a fine tunic with the frogs at his collar embroidered in gold thread.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

  I nodded, my heart in my mouth. He was Relius, the former secretary of the archives and disgraced master of the queen’s spies.

  He said, “The king has asked me to oversee your education.”

  Chapter Eight

  I already knew a great deal about Relius, all of it unsettling. Accused of treason, he’d been arrested, tortured by the king, pardoned by the queen, and somehow, if rumors were true, become the confidant of both. He had no official position in the palace.

  “Sit,” he said, waving at a stool.

  I didn’t want to stare at his hands, mottled with purple scars, missing several fingers. I looked at his face instead to find him watching me, eyebrows raised. Hastily, I sat. I tried to play the same tricks I had used on my tutor, but Relius would have none of it. Where Kamet had been gentle and mildly reproving, Relius was frankly intimidating.

  “You don’t seem to have any of the intelligence Kamet described,” he said. “No, don’t hunch like a turtle, just answer the question. The letter that represents the sound at the beginning of the word ‘king’ is what? Point.”

  Melisande’s warnings thundered in my ears. Staring at Relius’s mutilated hands, I couldn’t have pointed to the correct letter if my life depended on it.

  “Hmm.” Relius expressed his displeasure with a delicate grunt. Then he stood, pushing the stool away from the heavy table with a scraping sound that made me flinch. “Follow me,” he said, and walked out of the library. I trailed after him across the palace to the cramped but light-filled room that was part office, part study, and anteroom to his private apartment. His own collection of scrolls and books filled a shelf, and a number of beautiful maps covered the walls. I later learned that he was a cartographer and had drawn them himself. These had been his rooms all the years he had served the queen as her secretary of the archives. Baron Orutus, the new secretary, had rooms that were larger and better located, but he still resented that he’d never been offered Relius’s office and that Relius still resided there. Relius might have had no official position, but his unofficial position was unassailable: he was a royal favorite.

  Closing the door, he said, “Now it is just the two of us. Sit,” he said, and pointed to the stool sitting next to the worktable.

  I stared at his hand despite myself. He demonstrated that his misshapen fingers could still snap sharply, and I hastily moved to the stool. It was as high as my waist. Relius watched and did not offer to help as I struggled onto it. He pushed papers around on the table until he found one that was mostly blank. He dipped a pen into an inkpot and wrote out a series of numbers.

  “You recognize these?” he asked, and I shook my head. I knew my letters, but the only “numbers” I’d ever learned were hatch and strike marks. Relius poured out a pile of small black pellets, the playing pieces for a game. He asked me to count out four of them, then ten, then fifty. He watched while I made five groups of ten each in order to make the counting easier, but said nothing. He walked around the study for a while, staring at the ceiling as if he were reading some messages written there.

  “How old are you?” he asked. Obediently, I counted out the little black stones.

  “Ah,” he said. “You seem much younger.”

  I shrugged my shoulder and he snorted. “Yes, I can see that’s no accident.”

  He went to stare out the window for so long he might have forgotten me. The rungs on the chair were set for people taller than I was, and my feet didn’t reach them. Finally he turned around. “You may go. I will speak to the king later. Come here next time, not to the library.”

  Getting down from the stool was more difficult than getting up. Relius watched with no comment. When I was back on my feet, he waved me to the door and returned to looking out the window as I limped away.

  A
week passed, and the time for my next lesson arrived. When I rose to leave the king’s waiting room, Xikander said, “I heard your tutor gave up on you and is back in the tax office. Are you still going to go to the library to pretend to learn?” I lifted my chin and stalked away, but his snicker followed me down the passageway.

  As it happened, Relius wasn’t in his study when I arrived. I knocked on the open door, and when he didn’t answer, instead of waiting politely in the hall, I slipped inside. I went to look into a bedroom at an unmade bed, more books and papers, and a bowl of shriveled grapes. Another door led to a windowless storeroom lined with shelves.

  Having determined that Relius was nowhere in the apartment, I turned to an examination of everything I could see in his study. Maps, miscellaneous papers on the table, a rack of writing tools, and a set of brass compasses, highly intriguing devices I’d never seen before. On his shelves were sheets of music, two flutes, and numerous books. I was just reaching to touch one of the flutes when Relius cleared his throat behind me. I snatched my hand back and swung around, almost tripping over my own feet.

  “Another time, we will look at those. Not today. You should return to the king’s apartments.”

  I felt his eyes boring into the middle of my back as I went.

  “Oh, did you get tired of pretending?” Xikander asked when I returned. There was a table in the waiting room that always held a plate of nuts and pastries. There was an amphora of wine as well, with partly filled cups scattered around it. I lifted a wine cup, looked at Xikander contemplatively, and when he tensed, put it back down. Hearing Sotis laughing behind me, I headed off to my closet, and that is why I wasn’t with the king when the news came: the allied fleet of the Greater Powers of the Continent had “unexpectedly” met the Mede navy in the narrow straits near Hemsha. In an event described by the Pent commander of the fleet in a dispatch to his government as a “regrettable accident,” the allies had sunk most of the Mede ships. The emperor of the Mede blamed the king of Attolia and was withdrawing his ambassador.

  Officially, the allies had sailed into the narrow straits seeking nothing more than a source of fresh water to resupply their ships, and had come across the Medes at their mooring. Seeing the allies bearing down on them, unsure if they were under attack, the Medes had run out their guns. Some unknown sailor among the Medes had fired without orders. An allied ship, finding herself fired upon, had answered, and once that had happened, there had been no hope of stopping the confrontation. The Mede ships, all sails down, unable to maneuver, had been destroyed almost to the last one.

  That night, the Mede ambassador elected to dine in his rooms.

  All over the city, people were celebrating, raising their glasses in toasts to the proxy victory. They knew now that Costis’s adventure with Kamet had never been about anything as petty as revenge, and there would be no more talk of “two goats and an olive tree don’t make an estate.”

  Melheret took his formal leave from the Attolian court three days later and may well have spent that entire time preparing his exit speech. It was a work of art. The king, listening to it, leaned forward, elbows on his knees, wholly attentive to the Mede’s every word, taking note of the mannered and precise language, the formal words of goodwill layered over with equally stylized insults, the genial good humor that did not hide his contempt. His compliments were conveyed in tones of condescending reproach at the way he, and by extension, his nation, had been treated.

  Our king, when it was his turn to respond, sounded far more sincere. “It has been an honor to have the ambassador at our court, and my queen and I are deeply sorry that some untoward misunderstanding has cost us his company. If the emperor of the Mede feels aggrieved, surely it is unjust that we must pay the price with the loss of our ambassador’s fellowship, the recent disturbing news from Hemsha having nothing to do with our Little Peninsula, and the excellent relationship between ourselves and the empire falling victim to the regrettable actions of others. In proof of that, we would like to offer you a token of our goodwill as you depart.”

  Melheret had prepared for this customary exchange and signaled his servant to bring forward his own gift, a bottle of scent, tiny but exquisite. “It has a most delicate aroma,” he told the king. “Delightful, but of course, very short-lived.” He bowed.

  The king thanked him by saying, “We receive it in exactly the spirit of goodwill with which it is offered, Ambassador, and in exchange—” He turned to Ion, who handed him a flat oval case no bigger than the palm of his hand. As soon as he saw it, the ambassador patted his coat pocket, surprised to find it empty. “Your Majesty,” he said sharply, his anger cutting finally through all of his stiff diplomatic posturing, “that is a private possession of mine.”

  “The miniature of your wife. I know. You always keep it with you, and I apologize for borrowing it without asking, but I wanted to be sure our present to you would suit.”

  Melheret all but snatched the case from the king’s hand and opened it as if checking to be sure it had not been damaged in any way before he slid it back into his pocket. The king waved Ion forward with a case of a similar size, but a little fatter. When Melheret opened it, he blinked.

  “Earrings for your wife,” said the king. “To match the necklace in her portrait.”

  “She will be so pleased to have you home,” said the queen, her voice quite kind, but the implication clear. His wife was not the only one to be pleased about the end of the Mede’s tenure in Attolia. “Safe travels, Ambassador.”

  Melheret swallowed. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”

  He seemed almost dazed as he withdrew.

  There were sporadic celebrations for days and then, as if the city had taken a deep breath and let all its worries go, people went back to their ordinary lives for the first time in years without the imminent threat of war. Attolia refused to release the grain from the storehouses, but she did order that work restart on the aqueduct—work that put money in people’s pockets and eased for many the high price of bread.

  I continued my studies with my new tutor. Relius had informed me that I could expect to meet him for an hour or so each day, beginning at dawn. Most mornings, I easily slipped past whichever attendants were sleeping in the king’s waiting room. The guards, never asleep, opened the doors without a sound to let me through. On the mornings the king took his sword and sparred with the guard, I had no lesson so that I could be there when he dressed. Otherwise, he started his days quite late, and my absence from my little closet drew no attention.

  Relius was not a gentle teacher, but he was a thorough one. I got used to the condescending noise he made in the back of his nose as he quizzed me on the words I knew and added more to the codex Kamet had given me. He taught me to write with a pen as well as with chalk, and one day he taught me numbers—not the marks I already knew, but Sidosian numerals. I was still quite wary of him at that time, but when he wrote the numbers out, first one through nine and then ten, I actually knocked his hand away from them, making his pen spatter ink across the scrap of paper, interrupting his explanation of the value of the null symbol. I had seen it. One and null make ten. A symbol that represented nothing increased every number it sat beside by a factor of ten. Two nulls side by side increased a number a hundredfold. Hatch and strike marks grew unwieldy with larger numbers, and it would be impossible to learn a different symbol for every amount, but with a null, one could write any number, an infinity of numbers, even.

  “Pheris?” said Relius, displeased.

  I ignored him. I was all but unaware of my hands squeezing, as if with my crooked fingers I was grasping at this new idea. With the numbers ordered in columns, one could see new relationships between them without laying out a pattern first.

  Exasperated, Relius picked up the pen again and wrote out the symbols for addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, using simple equations to make their meaning clear. Then he left me alone.

  By the time I turned my head, wincing from the shooting pains
in my neck and all over my body, I found he’d retired to his armchair and that Teleus, the captain of the guard, had joined him. They were sharing a bowl of olives and watching me. Teleus put down a wine cup and rose to give me a hand as I got down from the stool.

  “You’re already late for the king’s dressing,” Relius told me as I rocked back and forth. “Go visit the stable master, and be sure you return to the royal apartments by way of the gardens.”

  Still dazed, I did as he said. The stable master, pleased to see me, introduced me to the pony he’d found for me to ride. A beautiful little mare, mostly a light gray, with darker spots sprinkled on her haunches. If anyone in the king’s apartments wondered where I’d been, they were answered by the strong smell of horse when I returned.

  Relius did not understand my fascination with patterns and numbers, but he waited patiently during my next lesson as I arranged stones and counted them and worked out the use of the symbols he’d shown me. Square patterns were easy to represent with his equations, but I could not find one to fit my triangles.

  “I will send a letter to a colleague for further instruction,” he promised, “if you will deign to return to the rest of today’s lesson.”

  Relius was not always so patient, and I was not always so cooperative. I had a burning desire to learn to read, but much less devotion to my handwriting, content with any mark that vaguely resembled the shape I was trying to form.

  “Those numbers,” said Relius, “could have been written by pigeons tracking through the ink.”

  I shrugged. I knew what they were meant to be.

  He shook his head. “This is your voice,” he said, tapping the page.

  I was the only one interested in my numbers and I already knew what they were.

  “Take that idiotic look off your face, or I will beat you with a stick,” Relius snapped, and I flinched.

  He handed me the pen. “Try again,” he said. My best efforts were still bird tracks and spills and drips. In hindsight, I was no more patient than my tutor, and as my frustration grew, my hand obeyed me less until, ultimately, I knocked the inkpot over.