“They wanted power,” said Eugenides with a shrug. “I gave it to them.”
“You didn’t give it to them, you threw it in their faces. You opened a contest for the throne that would have left them all fighting each other like weasels in a hole.”
“I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” he admitted.
“I thought of any number of other—much more sensible—things to do,” said Attolia.
“And?”
“Threw caution to the winds,” she told him, and kissed him on the lips.
“Atté, Atté,” a little later he murmured in her ear, the battle cry of the Attolians.
“You have created a monster,” Erondites said, leaning forward in his chair to reach for the bottle of wine on the table. He poured himself a cup full to brimming. “There is no one now to rein him in. We know how that has gone in the past.”
“We’ll just have to hope this time it will be different,” said Susa.
“Why would it be different? When the power of the throne increases, we see our own rights and privileges trampled.”
“It’s not just our privileges that are about to be trampled, Pheris,” said Susa.
“What does it benefit us to be subdued by our king instead of by the Medes?”
“We might think of others besides ourselves. Occasionally.”
Erondites snorted. “You might be satisfied,” he said. “Don’t expect me to be.”
He left the court the next day, ostensibly to muster the men he would send to support the king’s army. He would not travel with the army, only send his men under the command of one of his least favorite nephews.
Costis left as well. Orutus had initially refused to let him return to Roa and had even gone so far as to order Costis confined to his barracks. He should have known better. Instead of returning to his quarters, Costis had gone directly to the king, where he had accused Orutus of abandoning Kamet to die. Orutus, following on Costis’s heels into the audience room, had in turn appealed to the queen.
“If Costis is followed back to Roa, what then?”
To his surprise, Relius had supported him. “The risk is too great that both will be killed, Your Majesty.”
The king would have spoken, but the queen laid a hand on his arm. “Kamet has served his purpose,” she said and even Orutus winced at her pragmatism. Costis blinked as he stared straight ahead and the muscles in his jaw jumped. But the queen wasn’t finished. “To risk Costis as well as Kamet is poor tactics, I agree. However, we must consider that if we order him to remain with the guard, his heart is unlikely to be in his work.” She looked at him, standing so upright before them. “And how embarrassing for us all if he were to take a lesson from a poor role model and abandon his responsibilities altogether.”
We all looked at the king, who looked at his toes.
The queen said to Costis, “I cannot in good conscience risk the men to ensure your safety. If you go alone, you may lead to Kamet the very thing you fear. Do you wish to take that chance?”
“I do,” said Costis.
“Then go,” said the queen. “And be blessed in your endeavors.”
The next day, Relius too departed. I arrived in the doorway to his apartments just as he and Teleus were saying their farewells. Relius laughed at my expression, and Teleus turned to frown at me.
“He does not approve of adult goings-on,” said Relius.
“I think it’s your goings-on he does not approve of,” said Teleus.
He was correct.
“That’s two of you, then,” said Relius airily. He didn’t like being criticized, and I think Teleus had been lecturing. Teleus was a great believer in lectures.
Sternly, he said to Relius, “You be careful.”
“I am not the one going to war,” Relius pointed out.
“No,” said Teleus, “you are the one poking your nose into other people’s business.”
Relius rolled his eyes at the rebuke, but when Teleus continued to browbeat him, he gave that quick lift of his chin that was as much of a concession as Teleus was likely to get. Evidently it was enough, for Teleus kissed him again and left.
“You,” said Relius to me, “keep your opinions to yourself. Someday you will be in love, and all your mocking of poor Philologos will come back to haunt you.”
I had been his student for too long, and I just rolled my eyes as he had rolled his at Teleus.
He laughed and waved at the table. “Come see what I have for you.”
It was a set of four leather-covered notebooks, plain but perfectly made.
“I want to know what you see while I am gone and what you think it means. I know, I know, your handwriting is still terrible. Make notes. Then go back and write more neatly when you can. Write enough that you will remember later what happened, and I will ask you questions when I return.”
What if people see me writing?
“Erondites has played his hand and lost again. He cannot even crow about the return of Susa’s land, as the rents are going to Marina. Erondites will not see a single copper coin while Juridius is in exile. Once the army is on the march, people will have more important things on their minds than what you are scribbling in a book.”
Those were my first journals and the beginning of my histories of the life of the great king.
Chapter Three
The day was bright and the sun’s warmth appreciated. The riders making their way in a narrow stream up the pass from Sounis into Eddis were already high in the mountains, and whenever they moved into the shade, it sent a chill down their necks that made them shiver as if whole armies were marching over their graves.
The king of Sounis rode with his magus near the front of his forces. There’d been some disagreement about his safety there. But once before, when the woman he meant to marry had waited for him in Eddis, he’d won an argument about whether he should ride more slowly and allow half his army to march ahead of him. Now the woman was his queen, and he was even less inclined to make her wait while he inched up the winding route above the Seperchia River. The magus had to tell him quite sternly not to advance ahead of all his men.
“We are at war,” the magus reminded him.
Sophos looked at the cliff on their right and the steep drop to the river on their left. “Where do you imagine the party of Mede assassins is going to leap from, Magus?”
The magus frowned and savaged him, as only the magus could, for his self-indulgence. “If the Medes are in Eddis and have murdered the queen”—he saw the king flinch and went inexorably on—“no warning would have had time to reach us. If she is lying this moment in her throne room . . . with her throat cut . . . in a pool of blood . . . we would not know it until the Mede assassins rode down the trail toward us to—”
“—be spitted by a small army of Sounisians,” interrupted Sophos, angry at what he knew was a reprimand he deserved.
“—to spit the idiot king who keeps riding ahead of his men in the van,” said the magus.
Sophos glowered, but he reined in his horse.
“Why must armies move so slowly?” he complained.
“You know why,” said the magus, more gently.
Eddis and her party waited by the bridge across the narrow chasm of the Seperchia River. The lower part of the bridge was stone, three levels of arches that reached all the way down to the water below. The uppermost level of the bridge was made of wood. The mountain wind blowing all around, never from the same direction for very long, made every loose thing flap and jingle, tossed the horses’ manes, and narrowed everyone’s eyes to slits. They appeared a grim company until the Sounisians arrived and Eddis kicked her sturdy mountain pony into motion. Sounis’s advance guard politely drew aside to let their king ahead of them to greet his queen. Their horses’ hooves thudding on the boards, the king and queen met in the middle of the bridge. Sophos dismounted first and stepped to catch Helen as she swung from the saddle. She hung an arm around his neck and kissed him as she dropped. He had to bend to
keep his lips on hers until she reached the ground. Arm in arm, they led their horses toward Eddis’s company.
The men from Sounis were a day behind schedule, and Sophos apologized. “Everything took longer than expected. We started late and I could not march the men in the dark.”
“The pass always slows people down,” Helen reassured him. “Irene and I have taken it into account.”
The bulk of Eddis’s army had marched from the Aracthus Pass. Only Eddis’s minister of war and her personal guard and her hardier attendants were with her. Sounis greeted those he knew by name and the rest introduced themselves, comfortable addressing him as “Your Majesty.” If it still made him feel awkward to have hardened warriors bow their heads to him, he didn’t let it show.
Armies, even small ones, move slowly enough that Helen and Sophos could walk together, talking quietly and bringing each other up-to-date. Their horses followed behind them, occasionally nuzzling the backs of their heads or pulling sharply on the reins to snatch at whatever they thought might be edible and within reach.
“How many trips does your father think it will take to move your men to Attolia?” Helen asked.
“Too many,” said Sophos. “He doesn’t think he can get them there before they need to march north.” Thinking of the men who had so graciously accepted him as their king, he asked if tensions had eased in Helen’s court. She shook her head.
“Gen and Attolia both asked why I didn’t take Cleon out and shoot him. I think Gen was joking.”
“Not Attolia,” hazarded Sophos. He’d recognized Cleon among Eddis’s men.
“I wasn’t sure what trouble Cleon might get into, so I am keeping him with me. I wanted him well away from Therespides, as I’m sure it’s Therespides encouraging him, and frankly . . .” She hesitated.
“Oh, do be frank,” said Sounis, earning the smile that still made his heart seize.
Away from listening ears, with the wind blowing their words to pieces, she did not worry about being overheard. “Frankly, Cleon is too stupid to have stuck to this business so long. Frankly, it is Therespides I would like to shoot, and frankly, it would not solve the problem. There are just too many who think a Thief should not be high king over Eddis.” She waved a hand at the men walking ahead of them, the honor guard behind, and lifted it in a gesture of defeat. “I cannot shoot them all.”
“They were happy to have him be king of Attolia.”
“He’d brought me the Gift. He’d ended the war. Most important of all, he’d be in Attolia,” she emphasized.
Sounis kicked a rock down the road and had to pause to reassure his horse, who’d shied at the sound. When he caught up to Eddis, he asked hesitantly, “Gen does know the details of the marriage proposal, doesn’t he?”
“That your uncle threatened to give Hamiathes’s Gift to Gen, making him king, if I didn’t accept Sounis’s offer? Gen didn’t know at the time—he must by now.” Eddis glanced back at the magus riding and chatting with Gen’s father a little ways behind them. Sounis did too. They both knew the mastermind of his uncle’s plan.
“Gen would just have passed it on to you.”
“The council would not believe it.”
“They underestimated his loyalty.”
“So did the magus. A rare error on his part, but—”
“Catastrophic,” finished Eddis just as Sounis said, “Fortuitous,” and both blushed.
“Gen has always supported you,” Sounis pointed out. “And me.”
Eddis hesitated. Sophos recognized her reservations and dismissed them. “Yes, I might have won over my barons in Sounis without him, but it was Gen who gave me the courage to end a civil war with almost no bloodshed, and because of him, we entered our treaty on an equal footing with Attolia. Can Cleon truly not understand that?”
Eddis shrugged. “Cleon has never been what you would call astute. The people listening to Cleon, they think Gen has always been much too close to the throne for anyone’s comfort. You cannot imagine the outrage when his father, the son of the king, married the daughter of the Thief. And if it’s old news that my mother preferred my uncle but married my father to become queen, Cleon has raked it all back up again—all of the rumors about my mother’s infidelity and Gen’s mother’s revenge. Seducing other people’s lovers is a wintertime sport in Eddis. My father who was Eddis and Gen’s father paid a fortune to the temple priests that year to ensure their sons’ naming ceremonies were uncontested.” She did not say, did not need to say, that years later those same people saw her brothers dying one by one of fever and did not think a woman could rule Eddis. “His grandfather insisted on naming Gen for his god, and people who’d thought the Thieves of Eddis were just a remnant of ancient history suddenly assumed the worst.”
“Gen brought you the Gift. He made you queen,” insisted Sounis.
“And I destroyed it,” said Eddis. “Which made me what?”
“Queen,” said Sounis firmly.
Eddis smiled at him again, but it was a sadder smile. “Even those who were grateful to Gen were worried by his popularity. When he lost his hand, they hoped the Thief in him was gone for good, and when it wasn’t, sending him somewhere else to be king seemed like an excellent idea.”
“Until he became high king.”
“Until that,” said Eddis. “They had already assumed you and I would marry. They thought that Eddis and Sounis together would be a counter to Attolia. They did not expect him to be annux.”
Sophos kicked another rock, a smaller one, and this time the horse only flapped his ears in annoyance.
“You insisted we marry immediately, giving them no time to object. Do you regret that?”
“Never.”
“I mean politically,” he said. “Spare me my blushes.”
“Never,” she repeated, watching the worry lines on his forehead ease before adding, “I love your blushes too much.”
Watching the two of them, Eddis’s minister of war said something to the magus that made him laugh. Neither Eddis nor Sounis noticed.
In Attolia, no one was laughing. As ships disgorged Sounis’s soldiers, the tent city on the Fields of War grew larger and larger. Even in the face of the Mede invasion, Attolians were unsettled by the arrival of the army of a country with which they had so recently been at war. They looked with suspicion at the Sounisian soldiers. Efforts to integrate the two armies were mixed, as Sounisian barons were uncomfortable taking orders from okloi in Attolia’s standing army and the career military men of Attolia called the barons “Sometime Soldiers.”
“My queen.” Casartus was actually wringing his hands. “If we take the ships from Cimorene to blockade Roa, we risk losing Cimorene, and if the Mede take Cimorene, we will never drive them off.” He was a good strategist and probably right. “The allied navy dawdles under the Pents’ direction, and at the current rate we will not have all the forces from Sounis here to begin the march north. We must have more ships.”
“Can the Neutral Islands provide us with no ships?” Attolia asked.
“We have asked, Your Majesty. They hold their ships close, worried for their own defense.”
“And if Eddis were to ask?” she inquired with a trace of bitterness.
Casartus said, “I—we—do not think it will make a difference in this case, Your Majesty.”
When Sounis had faced an unexpected invasion of Mede soldiers and was in desperate straits, Eugenides had had the men to send to his aid, but not the means. He’d needed a flotilla of shallow-draft vessels and he’d summoned Ornon, ambassador of Eddis, to ask the Neutral Islands to supply them.
“Since when do the Neutral Islands answer to Eddis?” Attolia had asked, sharing a grim look with her admiralty, all of whom were also taken by surprise.
“They do not,” said Ornon. “We can ask, as a favor.”
“A favor you assume they will grant is not neutrality,” said Attolia.
Delicately, the king had explained that because Eddis was too poor to support her populati
on, in every generation some had to leave to search for better fortune elsewhere. “Not all of them can be mercenaries,” said the king.
“Helen sent her people to corrupt the Neutral Islands?”
“It was her grandfather who first encouraged Eddisians to settle on specific islands with the idea that those islands, over time, might incline in Eddis’s favor.”
“I see,” the queen had said, indeed seeing several events in her history more clearly. The wars between Sounis, Eddis, and Attolia were over, hopefully forever, but it was still a sore point.
“Very well. Let us go to the Braelings again for advice,” said Attolia.
The Braelings, however, had little to offer. When Fordad was summoned to an audience in the megaron with the king and queen, he brought his secretary and his junior ambassador. The Brael ambassador, who might have spoken more informally in other circumstances, was very precise in his speech.
“Your Majesties have our support,” he assured the Attolians. “What ships we are free to commit will carry our troops and the Gants’ troops, but those ships are in Manse, only loading now. We expect them to arrive in time to convey their men to Stinos before the summer windstorms arrive. They will not reach Attolia in time to move Sounis’s forces, though they could continue to Roa after Stinos.”
“Allowing the Medes to leisurely unload a mountain of supplies and be long gone by the time the Braels arrive,” Casartus muttered.
Everyone was so carefully trying to avoid looking at the king that he had to clear his throat to get Fordad’s attention. He said, “There are three large Pent ships in the harbor now, that brought grain and other supplies we have purchased. The Pents are happy enough to make money from our war.”
“Indeed, Your Majesty. The Pents want you to know they have much to offer as allies if you are willing to apologize for the treatment of their ambassador, and as their special envoy, I have been empowered to accept that apology.” Knowing the king all too well, Fordad warned, “My government would withdraw all support if you were to deprive the Pents, in any way, of their ships, or the use of their ships, without compensation—”
Return of the Thief Page 16