Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Get out.” Thoroughly fed up, Relius dismissed me, and I went.

  Unwilling to return to the king’s waiting room, blinking away tears, I walked to the gardens instead. Working my way into the secret space I had hollowed out inside a hedge, I crouched for a while, feeling unfairly treated. Only when it was time to help dress the king did I go back to the palace. It would have been unthinkable to exercise this kind of freedom earlier, but now I did it without a thought, slipping away for hours to watch the ants and their anthills, the bees in the kitchen garden coming and going from the stacks of clay pipes that housed their hives. If there were still a few unpleasant people who might wish me ill, I only needed to avoid them, and that was not hard.

  Relius was conciliatory the next day. He apologized for his temper. “I will make an effort to do better,” he said, “and will expect the same from you. Are we agreed? Yes? Good. Because I don’t have a stick to hit you with, and I can’t be bothered to find one.”

  He was joking, I was almost certain.

  “Start with the numbers,” he said. “You like those.”

  After that, I began to produce slightly more legible figures and letters. But I had a long, weary way to go, and I was still unconvinced it was worth the effort.

  From Relius, I learned the history of Attolia, from the arrival of the Invaders to the rise of the oligarchy, and the way the great baronial families had worked together to weaken the monarchy and divide power among themselves. Relius explained how the barons’ agreement had been broken when one of them had engaged his heir to marry the princess Irene; how the other families had been angry, but outmaneuvered; and how they’d been outmaneuvered again when the queen poisoned her first bridegroom and took the throne for herself. He did not go into details on his own contributions.

  He did show me my own family’s part. “This chart shows the queen’s family, and here, the Erondites. It’s a distant connection, but many of those with closer connections were killed during the civil strife that came about after she took power.”

  Attolia had survived that strife by ruthlessly eliminating contenders for her throne, sparing Erondites only because he was a useful ally at the time. Until Attolia married, the baron had been content with his tenuous connection to the throne, one son in the queen’s guard and another who wooed her at court. Only when Attolia chose a husband had Erondites begun to plot in earnest against the queen and against the new king.

  Relius taught me about the world outside the Little Peninsula, making me memorize the names of rulers and the significant people in their courts. Sliding his bent fingers across the map he had pulled down from the wall, he showed me the Continent. “The Braelings have become so wealthy, they have made a new trade empire. The Epidi are afraid their islands will be overrun, and the Gants are fighting again with each other. If Meleo of Gant succeeds in his claim to the Southern Gant lands, he will have a nation to rival both the Braelings and the Pents. If he allies with just one of them, the Brael-Pent alliance will come apart like wet paper, and none of them can afford to be embroiled with the Mede over the little Hephestian Peninsula when that happens. All this, the Mede emperor uses to his advantage.”

  Relius had few maps of the Mede empire and fewer books. He was frustrated by his limited understanding of any of the languages of the empire, and much of what he knew he’d only recently learned from Kamet.

  For my part, any amount of painstaking work memorizing the names and histories of people I’d never meet was worth it to learn that the area of any triangle was always one-half the number of units in its base multiplied by the number of units in its height. Relius handed me the proof written out on a piece of paper and laughed at what I am sure was a rapt expression on my face.

  “Don’t get spit on it,” he said.

  I glared at the very suggestion, realizing too late what I was revealing.

  “Yes,” said Relius. “I have noted the . . . shall we say, ‘elective’ nature of certain behaviors.”

  One day, after he had again reiterated that my writing was my voice and I had again rolled my eyes, though I did it with my head down, he reached around behind him and pulled a slim book from the shelf—just sheets of foolscap sewn together with no wooden covers, more a pamphlet than a book.

  “This was written five hundred years ago.” He held it open in front of me.

  The Invitation

  I will send the boy to the market

  to the monger at the end of the row

  for sweet shrimp and three fish, the freshest,

  I will say, with their eyes still clear,

  tell him to go

  to the wine shop, bring an amphora

  of Cleoboulos’s best

  buy herbs of every kind

  the most sweetly scented

  while I idle through the day

  awaiting you.

  I reached out to touch the text in wonder, amazed that paper could last so long. The ink was dark and the pages still smooth and even, though a little yellowed.

  Relius rolled his eyes, much harder than I ever rolled mine. “They were copied for me by a friend. The poet is long dead, but his words are still with us, because he wrote them down.” He tapped the sheet of scrap paper in front of me, covered with my wriggling attempts at letters. “And it does no good to write something that only you can read!”

  I looked at the poem again. Copied by a friend.

  “Yes,” said Relius, well aware of what I was thinking. “Someone loves me very much, even with all my faults, and don’t give me that look. You’ll be in love yourself someday.”

  I was quite certain I would not. By then, I knew why the guard Legarus stared with such anger and misery at Baron Xortix’s younger son and how Relius had been arrested for treason when his lover had turned out to be a spy for the Mede emperor. One would have thought Relius would be done with love and lovers, but I’d seen a veritable parade of them. None of his affairs lasted long, and I’d already witnessed several spats when he showed someone the door. If this friend had loved Relius for years, he or she was quite the anomaly.

  Relius tapped the page in front of me. “Keep practicing,” he instructed.

  Yawning, I arrived one morning to find him nowhere in the office or in the rest of the apartment. This was not unusual, as he often spent his nights elsewhere. What was unusual was the intricately folded parchment on his worktable. I shouldn’t have touched it, but I did, curious to see how it opened. Only when I had it mostly unfolded did it occur to me that Relius might not be pleased. I hesitated and then threw caution to the winds. When it was open, I hunched over the message inside, parsing its meaning little by little until I reached the end and sighed with relief at Kamet’s instructions on how to make the folds crisp again with a straightedge.

  I knew the one Kamet meant and used it to carefully refold the parchment. Then I slipped down from the stool to stretch my leg and turned to find Relius sitting in his armchair by the little stove where he heated water for his coffee.

  “You become too absorbed in your work,” he said. “You are used to people ignoring you, but you cannot ever assume that they are. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “As you are interested in Kamet’s message, I suggest you write back to him. Can you make the same folds with a fresh piece of parchment? Good. Tell him I am traveling. He knows where. Tell him that if the message arrives unopened, he should be safe. Add anything else you like, but be sure you put that in.”

  What if I get the folds wrong?

  “You’ll do fine. Worry more about your handwriting. Take it to Teleus in his office by noon tomorrow. He will send it on its way. You will need this,” he said, handing me a key, which I took and looked at, perplexed.

  “I will be gone a week or two. You may continue to come here to my study at our usual time. Keep at the History of Savoro. I’ll ask you how far you’ve gotten when I get back.” Then he said, “The king will be wanting you by now,” and waved me out the door without any
other farewell.

  I did not see him again for more than a month, and his plans for me were already astray by the next morning. When I went to the study, I was surprised and dismayed to find Baron Orutus, the new secretary of the archives, going through Relius’s papers. I backed out of the doorway before he caught me watching. When I returned later, I found a new hasp screwed to the door and securely locked. I had no way to write a message and nothing to write it on.

  I went first to the library in search of writing material. Though there was paper and parchment in plenty, there was nothing I could use. I tried to find a map of the empire, curious about Kamet’s journey to Attolia, but when I went to a map case, I was chased away by one of the scholars, who knew I had no business there.

  Frustrated and angry, I retreated almost as far as the garden before I remembered that Relius had been very clear that the message had to go to Teleus before noon. I knew there were pens and paper in the king’s writing desk, but I could not fetch them without someone seeing me, and I knew better than to draw attention.

  My erstwhile tutor had returned to the offices of the queen’s indentured, a whole wing of the palace dedicated to the bureaucracy of the state, business, taxes, record keeping, all of it on paper. I hurried there to make a pest of myself, wandering through the offices until I found my old tutor, who tried to ignore me as I stood stubbornly looking over his shoulder. He was writing out a letter describing the crown’s commitment of funds for the repair of a royal road somewhere in the west. I knew that once he was truly annoyed, he would throw down his pen in frustration and run his hands through his hair. When he did, I picked up the pen, and his inkpot as well.

  “Oh, no,” he protested. “No, no, no.” But I was already walking away.

  “Oh, let him go,” I heard someone say. “It’s worth an inkpot to get rid of him.” I felt a smile spread across my face that disappeared when I remembered parchment. I turned back.

  “Take it, take it,” one of the indentured said, offering a sheaf of papers, which I let him slide under my arm. “What?” he said. “What else?” I looked from him to his desk and back. “Parchment?” he asked, astonished. “Do you know what it costs?” But he gave me a sheet of that too, as he pushed me, fairly gently, on my way.

  Pleased with myself, I took the supplies out to the garden, where I could work without anyone looking over my shoulder. Hiding in the shrubbery, the paper in the dirt, I practiced a message to Kamet, complaining that I was locked out of Relius’s office while he was away and telling him that if the message arrived with its intricate folds intact, he was safe. I copied it onto parchment, folded it as carefully as I could, and took it to Teleus’s office. He accepted it without comment, and he too waved me on my way.

  With no clear idea how far away Kamet was, I expected a reply every day. I returned again and again to check Relius’s door, but it remained locked. One morning I slipped into the library before dawn to sit in the dark, waiting for enough light to see the maps. I spread them out over the tables as I looked for one that showed the Mede empire. The sun cleared the horizon, and I was able to make out the fine print before a librarian arrived to chase me out.

  In the end, Relius was back before a package arrived from Kamet. One of the palace errand boys delivered it. He made a face at me, and I stuck out my tongue at him. Relius let these gestures of mutual respect pass without comment. A year earlier, the boy would have made a sign to stave off bad luck, and I would have made one as if to curse him. When Relius had gotten the package open, he handed me a squashed flower of tightly folded vellum. Unfolded, it turned out to be Kamet’s map.

  I’d seen the maps in the library. I’d watched Relius carefully adding information to a map of his own.

  “But this one is yours,” said Relius.

  To keep? I wondered.

  Relius nodded and tapped the key hidden under my shirt. “Out it in the garden,” he suggested. So, he knew about the box I’d found while he was gone. I had hollowed out a space at the back of a hedge to call my own. In it I’d built a little shelter out of stones—stolen from the edges of the gravel paths—to keep my new pens and paper dry. One day, the shelter was gone, the stones all restored to their borders, and a brass-bound wooden box sat in its place. It had a lock and a key on a string long enough to wear around my neck.

  No one but the king could have provided the box, but the king was rarely alone for more than a few moments a day and never, to my knowledge, alone with Relius. Relius was watching me in amusement.

  I’d overheard many secrets in my short life, but this was the first time anyone had chosen to share a confidence with me. Being trusted was a heady feeling.

  “Before you put the map away, I’d like to compare it to mine,” said Relius, very seriously. “With your permission, of course.”

  He smoothed it as flat as possible on his worktable, and the two of us studied both maps, pointing out differences as we saw them. Twice, Relius dipped his pen in ink and made a notation on his own map.

  The next day, there was another surprise. The magus of Sounis had sent a packet of information to Relius, and included in it was a folded piece of parchment for me. Opening it, I found an entire page of writing I recognized from the proof Relius had shown me of the formula to determine the area of a triangle. It was a hastily copied excerpt from another scroll, and at the top was my favorite pattern, the bee spiral: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. It was the order of the cells in the honeycomb, and it was the pattern in the triangles I made that turned so perfectly into a spiral and then back. The scroll said the pattern was in the seeds in a pine cone and the curve of a snail shell as well. It said they all shared the same numerical form. I stared beseechingly at Relius. He expected me to read the History of Savoro.

  He shook his head, raising his eyes to the gods. “By all means, spend the morning reading about patterns you can make with orange slices. Why would I think the history of a family that’s held power on the Greater Peninsula for five hundred years would be more important?”

  I had a better understanding of his humor by this time and knew he was pleased—that he’d asked the magus for the information and was happy with the results. He had another cause to be happy—the magus’s handwriting was in some places unreadable. Later, I brought the parchment back to Relius to ask him to decipher several words. He laughed at me. “You see the importance of handwriting now.”

  He made me recopy the entire excerpt, and I still have it.

  With the destruction of the Mede fleet, some tensions in Attolia had eased. The appointment of Drusis, Motis, and Polemus gave all the attendants a chance to begin anew with the king. If Xikos and Xikander and Sotis weren’t supporters, their dislike faded to resignation, and emotions, running hot for so long in the Attolian court, began to settle.

  In Eddis, in contrast, sentiment was only growing against the high king. The Eddisians had not liked their queen’s hasty marriage. Though they approved of Sounis, they disagreed with her decision to give up her sovereignty. Even in Sounis’s own country, there were rumblings that the Medes were no longer a threat and that the need for a union of the three countries on the Little Peninsula was over.

  My grandfather who was Erondites came to court. He looked me over with disgust and was much astonished when I glared back. He tossed off a laugh as he paraded past. Relius warned me that Erondites hadn’t given up any more than the Mede had.

  The Book of Pheris

  Volume II

  Chapter One

  Costis was near enough to the capital that his name and his seal ring had been sufficient to convince the innkeeper to offer his best mount. It was lucky, because most of his emergency funds were spent. He’d ridden the horse hard, and he could feel her beginning to weaken. The sun on the horizon had spilled all but the last of its golden light, and the cloudless sky above had deepened to the hue of a silver bowl tipped upside down over the world. There was no reason to push her further. He dismounted and walked awhile to give th
e mare a rest. He wouldn’t reach another inn before it was fully dark, so he decided to look for a farm where he could stable her for the night and get a little rest himself. Just the thought of sleep made his eyes smart.

  As he walked, night fell. In the moonlight, he remounted and urged the mare on, looking for a glimmer of light on either side of the road that might offer him welcome. All was quiet in the countryside. The only sounds were those of the insects singing and the frogs peeping, the occasional high-pitched whistle of a bat circling over the open fields. In the city he traveled toward, there were long hours still to pass before noises faded, before the streets emptied and the last drunk staggered home, before long-winded arguments and murmured adorations finally dissolved into sleep. When the sun rose over the city, it would be at peace and its people would rise with high expectations of the day, setting aside the usual worries, looking forward to the plays. It was the Festival of Moira. It was a happy time.

  The queen paused in the doorway.

  “Is that Melheret’s statue of Prokip?”

  The king was working at his desk, using his hook to slide around the pages of the reports he was going through. The scattershot of little holes in state documents was the surest sign that he’d read them.

  “No, it’s mine,” the king said, not looking up.

  “And was it previously owned by the former Mede ambassador?”

  “Who really owns anything?”

  “Is that the statuette that the former Mede ambassador mistakenly thought he owned, and is he aware that it is here on your desk?”

  “I had a cast of his statue made.”

  The queen waited.

  “This is not the cast,” the king admitted, finally turning to face her.

  “And how many of the ambassadors know that you’ve robbed the Mede of his treasure?” She did not seem amused.