Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Compensation!” interrupted the king. “Do you mean to tell me that if we seize those ships, the Pents expect me to pay for them?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Fordad said, and named a staggering sum. The Pents were well aware of the Attolians’ desperation and her empty coffers. They had sent three exquisite ships, newly constructed, with unmarked decks and creamy white sails. They meant to have their apology.

  The king appeared stunned. “So, I beg the Pents’ forgiveness or I come up with a king’s ransom? Those are my choices, Fordad?”

  “Those are your choices, Your Majesty,” Fordad said regretfully. “The Pents are our allies, and the Brael will stand by our treaty with them. If you seize the property of the Pents without paying compensation, you will lose the support of my government.”

  “Very well,” said the king, with a small sigh.

  “You will apologize?” said Fordad, relieved.

  “Oh, no,” said the king. “I’m seizing the boats. We’ll pay the compensation.”

  Fordad didn’t think he was serious. He was trying to appear amused right up until Lamion came forward with a small carved box and opened it for the ambassador’s inspection. “Foest deost Fryst!” the Brael swore, shocked into his native language.

  Three matching cabochon rubies nestled in the folds of gold velvet, each the size of his thumb, each the red of fresh blood.

  Attolia, better at concealing her feelings, sounded only mildly curious as she leaned toward the king to ask, “Are those the rubies from the Attolian crown?”

  “They are,” said the king proudly.

  “Did you spend the night picking them out?”

  “I did not, though one of my ancestors did—many, many years ago. The ones in the crown are glass. They’ve been glass for so long that I didn’t think you’d mind if we spent the real ones.” He smiled at her.

  “And that?” Attolia pointed as Xikos stepped forward with another small case.

  “That is the diamond and sapphire collection colloquially known as the Attolian Skies.”

  “Which was lost during the Amanix uprising.”

  “Which was stolen by my great-great-grandfather during the Amanix uprising, yes.”

  Attolia, while continuing to stare at the king, addressed the Braeling. “I believe we have met your price, ambassador.”

  Fordad, his eyebrows almost at his hairline, bowed deeply, allowed that if the jewels were authenticated, the ships were theirs—and then, wary of the tension between the king and queen, he hastily excused himself and his staff with him. As he marched back to his office in the wing he shared with the remaining ambassadors, he chewed his mustache, thinking of the letters he needed to write to his government and to the Pents.

  His junior ambassador asked under his breath, “Is it going to be a problem that we have just sold the Pents’ ships to the Attolians?”

  “I had my instructions,” said Fordad.

  “But no one knew he had the Attolian Skies.”

  “They can’t blame me for that.”

  “Maybe the Pents will be happy with the gems,” the junior ambassador suggested, trying to look on the bright side. “They are magnificent, and Attolia wasn’t pleased to see her baubles spent on boats.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” snapped Fordad. “She’s not concerned about what she’ll wear to the next court function.”

  “Then what was she so angry about?” the less-experienced diplomat wondered.

  “I’m not sure,” said Fordad, worried. “But I wouldn’t change places with the king of Attolia right now if you offered me the Attolian Skies.”

  The queen canceled the rest of their appointments. She and the king returned to her apartments in silence. The king’s attendants bowed themselves to a halt in their waiting room with poorly hidden relief, and the queen’s attendants continued on only a little farther before they too were grateful to excuse themselves. From several rooms away and through closed doors, we could hear the crashing noise once the queen and the king reached the queen’s bedchamber.

  “Oh,” murmured Phresine, closer and able to identify the sound. “I think that was the Ailmené coffeepot.”

  Luria sighed. The queen always gave her attendants gifts from her personal possessions on special occasions, and Luria had been hoping to receive that pot when she married.

  “I said I was sorry,” Eugenides protested.

  “Your apologies are boring,” shouted Attolia.

  “Oh, I know,” Eugenides conceded.

  “The rubies. The Attolian Skies,” said Attolia. “You took them from the treasury of your god.” It was not a question.

  “Yes,” Eugenides admitted.

  “You robbed your god.”

  He equivocated.

  “You robbed your god,” she repeated.

  “It’s not—” He stopped, reconsidering the wisdom of what he’d been about to say. “My god allows these liberties at times.”

  “What times?” she asked.

  He winced. One could never know for certain what might provoke the anger of a god.

  “And if the Thief is mistaken when he takes liberties with the god’s treasury? Then what?” She didn’t wait for an answer she could guess. “You took this decision upon yourself.” It was a strong, if quietly voiced, objection.

  “I had to,” he said helplessly, and she knew why. To protect her from the god’s anger if he’d guessed wrong.

  The attendants in the distant anteroom flinched as one.

  “The dressing table,” whispered Chloe in awe, and the others hushed her.

  The jewels were authenticated. The Pent ships were handed over to the Attolians, who renamed them the The Queen’s Ruby, The Royal Sapphire, and The Attolian Diamond, and began to ready them for cannon. Sounis and Eddis brought their small force down from the mountains, their arrival doing little to inhibit the ever-growing tensions. The Attolians, looking down their noses at the civilian soldiers of Sounis, resented being condescended to in the same way by the Eddisians. The Eddisians, most of them seasoned mercenaries, made it clear they were unimpressed by the martial skills of Sounisians and Attolians alike. The integration of the forces called for a delicate hand.

  The combined military leadership of the Little Peninsula met for the first time in the large council chamber. Eugenides, the high king, sat at one end of the table, with Sounis on his right. Attolia, at the opposite end, sat with Eddis at hers. The senior advisors filled the chairs around the large table, and their staffs and junior officers stood behind them. Though Orutus would have fought tooth and nail to keep Relius himself out of the room, he made no effort to exclude me. As an attendant who couldn’t stand for the entire meeting, I was permitted a small stool just behind the king. I sat with my notebook on my knees. I didn’t need to lurk behind the potted lemon tree, though I might have wished myself there. It was a long and difficult meeting, with arguments over every point as men tried to assert their authority or fend off any plan of action that might diminish it. The only one who made not the least effort to impress was the annux, sitting with his usual boneless inattention. He knew as much as any Eddisian about battles and strategy, but it wasn’t his area of expertise, and he saw no need to pretend it was.

  Eddis had brought her minister of war and her best military advisors to Attolia. Sounis had as well. One of them was his magus, a man never gentle in his arguments, and another his father, a seasoned general, who nonetheless bridled like a proud parent at any sign of disrespect for the young king. On strategic matters, Sounis turned to his magus instead of his father, and did so while deftly managing what was clearly a prickly relationship between the two men. Again and again, Sounis’s voice was a calming one in the council, soothing not only his father’s ruffled feathers, but those of many others.

  Where Sounis’s father positively beamed with approval at his son, Eddis’s minister of war glowered. The high king, slumped in his seat, catching his father’s glare, slumped further.

  Attolia had c
hosen Pegistus as her minister of war. He was younger than Eddis’s minister and, unlike him, not a general of the army. His gift was for logistics, crucially important to any successful campaign, but often underappreciated. Pegistus sometimes struggled for the respect he thought he deserved, and it made him pretentious. The meeting had already gone on several hours when he was explaining in excruciating detail the network of supply caches that he’d put in place, pointing out their locations on his maps.

  “None on the route our armies are marching,” Eddis’s minister of war pointed out. Coming from the older man, what was only an observation seemed a criticism. Eddis gave her uncle a reproving look, as if to remind him that they were all there to get along.

  “We will have the material to Stinos by the time the Eddisians reach there,” Pegistus promised.

  “Why are the caches so small?” asked Trokides, one of Sounis’s senior generals and very high-handed. He’d criticized everyone and everything throughout the meeting, and his tone put Pegistus’s back up.

  “We cannot store what we don’t have,” Pegistus said sharply, which inevitably led to a round of protests as the Attolian barons detailed their contributions and the sacrifices they’d made. I thought of the wagons that had burned at Perma and wished I was under the table instead of sitting in plain sight.

  Eddis’s minister of war didn’t need to raise his voice to cut through the bickering. “What’s your advance-to-return distribution?” he asked, and a grim silence fell.

  “Ten to one,” said Pegistus in the quiet. He cleared his throat, glancing at Attolia before he went on. “We have chosen to put the bulk of our supplies into the advance caches to be sure our men are at fighting strength,” he said. “However, on our return there may well be some crops and we could—of course, we will,” he insisted, “purchase any additional food we need.”

  Everyone understood.

  Pegistus didn’t expect to buy food from the local farms. He’d put most of the supplies into the advance caches because he’d calculated that even if the Medes were repelled, in the very best possible outcome, only one in ten of the men who marched north could be expected to return. Attolia took advantage of this moment when no one was arguing to end the meeting.

  She stood up, and everyone else followed suit. Unfortunately, as they did so, Casartus asked one last question.

  “Your Majesty, what of the cannon from the mountain foundry?”

  “Stenides is still waiting on the iron to cast the last of them,” said Eddis.

  A junior naval officer on her left, a younger son of an insignificant baron, having seen her mildness and mistaken it for meekness, said condescendingly, “The Pent ships are of little use without cannon.”

  Boagus immediately kicked him so hard in the back of the leg that the man dropped to his knees.

  As the naval officer looked up at the queen, much astonished, Eddis said, in the same pleasant voice she’d used all day, “Now you don’t have to talk down to me.”

  The whole room played statues as he looked from Eddis to his own queen, still seated at the end of the table.

  Eddisian, Attolian, and Sounisian alike remained frozen, bent over their papers or halfway out of their chairs, unwilling to so much as shift their weight until they saw what would happen next. Was Attolia, in her own palace, to demur as her men were abused? Was Eddis to be insulted by a minor naval officer? Only Sounis and the high king appeared unconcerned. One was yawning, hand over his mouth; the other was trying to brush the wrinkles out of his silk coat as Eddis and Attolia smiled at each other like wolves recognizing members of their own pack. Attolia waved her hand, a hostess offering up her junior naval officer as a canapé.

  Eddis graciously offered him a hand to rise, and the young man, who’d had plenty of time to see his life as well as his career pass before his eyes, bowed and apologized to her, to his queen, to the whole room. He even apologized to Boagus.

  “That was not helpful,” Eddis said later to Boagus as they passed through the antechamber to the apartments she and Sounis shared in Attolia’s palace, where her attendants and his were waiting to dress them for dinner.

  “Didn’t hurt.” Boagus corrected himself: “Didn’t hurt anyone but that preening boatman.”

  “We are striving here for cooperation, you useless, uncivilized lout.”

  “Who’s uncivilized?” Boagus said, mocking outrage.

  “You are. You are an embarrassment to your country and your queen. Get out.”

  Boagus laughed. “I will await Your Majesty’s pleasure—”

  “In the hall!”

  “In the hall.” He bowed and left.

  Sounis had already passed through the antechamber and was pulling off his boots, having successfully waved off his attendants. He agreed with Boagus. “That idiot’s sheer terror did more to unify the council than anything else in that meeting. They’ll follow either of you to the ends of the Earth now.”

  “They won’t follow Gen, though,” said Eddis, frustrated either with the greater situation or the fact that her attendant, Selene, was pulling her hair as she removed its pins. She tried to pull one out herself, and the older woman impatiently brushed her hand away. “Helen? What is it?” Sounis asked.

  “Cleon,” she said with a sigh. “I should have shot him. I should have shot Therespides too, while I had the chance. He’s not only called for a trial again, he’s telling people that if we follow an untried king into battle, we will lose.” Eddis stood and began to pace, rubbing her arms as if chilled and eluding Selene, who followed her back and forth, still trying to remove her earrings and unbind her hair. “And that has put the fear of the gods into them. Crodes, of all people, has asked if orders will come through me for fear that we’ll be cursed if they accidentally take any direction from Gen.”

  Sounis considered the chaos of a battlefield. “That would be . . . unwieldy.”

  “It would be catastrophic.”

  “But they’re following you. And you’re following him . . . surely?”

  “This isn’t a problem good sense can solve,” Eddis told him. “A good thumping would, but it would have to be by one of Gen’s brothers. Unfortunately, I sent Temenus to march with Xenophon, and Stenides is overseeing the foundry.”

  Sounis put his arms around his wife, halting her, giving Selene her opportunity. The attendant started to work in earnest on the queen’s hairpins. “I’m sure Gen has a plan,” Sounis said as he held Eddis in place.

  “If that doesn’t frighten you, it should,” said Eddis, glowering.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning the king appeared to be deep in thought as he sat with his feet hooked around a stool and his head tipped forward to let Ion clip his hair. His attendants were no longer willing to let him go even to the practice field without a nicer pair of pants, an embroidered shirt, an earring in his ear. They would have powdered his hair with gold every day if he had let them. The magus watched with amusement, having come to the bedchamber to see the king prepared for the day.

  Ion stepped back to study his work. “I still say it would be handsome if you let it grow long, Your Majesty.”

  Ion’s careless remark caught the king’s wayward attention. His head came up. He snapped, “Teach me how to braid it with one hand, Ion, and I will grow it to my knees.”

  Ion flushed and apologized.

  Waving the apology and his attendants away, the king stood to leave. As he went, the magus, immune to protocol, walked along beside him. Once they were in the passageway, he said, “Still wishing for your lost hand back, Gen?”

  The king, having taken Ion’s comment so badly, was unoffended by the magus’s disapproval. He shrugged. “I miss it. I’m sure everyone has something about themselves they’d like to change—to dance better, sing better, be stronger or taller.”

  Xikos snickered. The king’s occasional touchiness about his height was well-known.

  The king must have heard, because he said, “In Xikos’s case, be smarter th
an a burnt stick.” Everyone else snickered. As he started down the stairs, the king continued, saying, “But if I hadn’t lost the hand, I’d be another person entirely by now. Wishing for the hand back would be like wishing the man I already am to be replaced by some stranger. It would be wishing my own self out of existence, and who would want that?”

  “Nicely reasoned,” said the magus critically. “Now tell me why you’re still snapping at your attendants.” He halted, midstep. “Oh, Gen,” he said ruthlessly. “It’s vanity.”

  The king had also stopped. He hung his head. The magus laughed and laughed.

  “How unfair to blame poor Ion,” he pointed out.

  To everyone’s amazement, the king conceded. He said to Ion, standing above him, “Ion, I’m sorry. I was an ass and I apologize.”

  Startling both the magus and the king, Ion practically leapt down the stairs. He put his arms out to blockade the way.

  “Your Majesty, are you ill?” he demanded.

  The king stared.

  “You have been quiet this morning, and now you are being amenable.”

  “And I am never quiet or amenable unless at death’s door?” said the king. “Thank you for that indictment of my character, Ion. No, I am not ill.”

  Ion looked doubtful.

  “By my god, I swear I am as healthy as a horse,” said the king, holding up his hand. He was smiling. Ion still didn’t move.

  “It’s going to be a difficult day, Ion,” the king said more seriously. “That’s all.”

  Ion was suspicious but had to let him pass.

  The training court where the king practiced in the mornings was empty of Attolians when we arrived. There were only Eddisians waiting for the king.

  “You asked earlier who would wish you out of existence . . . ,” the magus mused.

  “Trust me, magus,” muttered the king. “They wouldn’t like a two-handed Eugenides any better.”

  Hilarion was looking around in alarm. Teleus was not there, nor were any of the men the king usually sparred with. “Your Majesty? Where is the guard? What is going on?”