Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “I didn’t know he was dead,” insisted Sejanus.

  “My condolences,” said the king.

  I’m not sure I would have known my uncle if we’d met on the road. Thin and filthy, his long hair in tangles, he looked nothing like the urbane visitor at the Villa Suterpe. He knew me, though. He looked in every direction except mine.

  “Tell me, Sejanus,” said the king. “Isolated as you were, how did you discover this plot against me?”

  “My father arranged my escape, I admit that. As soon as I was free, though, I came here to warn you.”

  “Directly,” the king said in utter disbelief.

  “Directly!”

  The king appeared to consider, then shook his head again. “No. It doesn’t seem more plausible no matter how many times you repeat it.”

  “Your Majesty, please—”

  “You know what would make it easier to believe, Sejanus? If you told me the names of the others who conspired with your father.”

  “I don’t know who they are,” said my uncle, too quickly.

  “You don’t?” asked the king. “Are you sure? You couldn’t point out one or two?” He gestured at the assembled barons, hidden among them those who had conspired with Erondites. My grandfather could not have acted alone. Sejanus might have given away a conspirator with a single glance, but he didn’t. He was studying the dirt in front of him with all his attention.

  “You have escaped the custody imposed by your king. The penalty for that is death,” said the king.

  “I am not afraid to die, Your Majesty,” Sejanus said proudly.

  The king shifted, sitting forward with his elbows on his knees to ask, “What are you afraid of, Sejanus?”

  “Your Majesty, even if you torture me, I cannot give you names I do not know.” Brave words.

  Remembering the brazier in Bu-seneth’s tent and the rack of hot irons, the sound and the smell of them, I felt my gorge rise. There was a sense of momentum, as if the king was somehow hurtling forward like a runaway cart as he said, “You do know them and you will give them to me.”

  None of the people in that tent would have protested if the king had ordered Sejanus carved into pieces. None of those standing in ranks around the tent, either. All of them would have said it was because he was their king and they were his loyal subjects. The truth is, they were frightened. Even Susa. They’d all seen the king when he returned from the Mede camp, and not one of them would cross him. Some of those standing in the tent were already making plans to flee.

  I knew it was wrong—that the king who had so recently suffered at the Medes’ hands would use those tools on another man, and my secret, most monstrous self whispered, “Better him than me. Better that Erondites than this one.”

  “Secure him for the night,” said the king. “We will deal with him in the morning.”

  The guard put Sejanus in a goat pen. The gate of the pen was tied closed with rawhide, its security not so much in its fencing as in the men posted to keep an eye on the prisoner at all times. With its sides made of staves lashed loosely together, everyone could see his humiliation. As a light rain fell, soaking Sejanus and the blanket they had given him, people came to stare. No one jeered, though; no one said anything at all, unsettled and unsure why.

  Eddis went to speak to the king, and Ion, on the king’s orders, had to turn her away. She went to Attolia with her concerns, and Attolia told her about Lader’s warning.

  “Lader was always poisonous,” said Eddis.

  “His words are still prophecy. The gods themselves say that what Sejanus knows will destroy the king,” said Attolia. “He must give up the names of those who have committed treason. It is an ugly business. I see your concerns, but the law is clear.”

  Eddis said, “Sejanus used every weaseling trick he knew to torment Gen. Even if Gen had his own reasons for allowing it, he came to hate Sejanus and those wounds still bleed. I am afraid emotion clouds his reason.”

  “Then it is good that he has the law to guide him.”

  Eddis frowned. “The law may not be enough.”

  “Pheris,” Sejanus called to me in a carrying whisper. I had walked past the pen three times already, making excuse after excuse to pass that way. I was trying to see the man I remembered in the abject prisoner huddled under a damp blanket. I knew he was an enemy of my king. I also knew that when I had been the monster in the Villa Suterpe, he had been kind to me.

  “Pheris,” he begged. “Please. Come closer.”

  Reluctantly I approached and crouched by the pen.

  He held his hand out between the stakes. “This is my last ring,” he said. “Take it.”

  I wasn’t stupid enough to go so near.

  “Take it.” He shook it in his hand. “I have promised it to a man who will lead you to safety. Can you understand me?” He narrowed his eyes, searching my face for some sign of comprehension. “Alestis was a stable boy on our estate when your mother and I were your age. Alestis, can you remember that name? We were friends and he will take you to your grandmother. You will give him my ring as payment. Do you understand?”

  He tossed the ring. I didn’t catch it and it dropped into the grass by my feet.

  “Hey,” said the guard, noticing us, and Sejanus pulled back his hand. “Move along there,” said the guard.

  “Take the ring,” whispered Sejanus. “Take it and give it to Alestis.”

  I scooped it up and left without looking at him again. I admit that I was intrigued that Sejanus had given to me the last thing he had of any value, but the idea of him helping me seemed as implausible as the claims he’d made to the king. I took the ring back to the tent I shared with the other attendants. The space inside had at the outset been quite crowded, with a cot and a trunk for each of us. The trunks were still there, but half the cots were gone. I pulled out of my trunk the box I’d brought from my hiding place in the palace garden what felt like eons ago, where I kept my pens and ink bottles and small pieces of paper, my counters, my collection of odds and ends.

  I laid out all my small treasures on my cot, adding the ring to my various patterns and finding none that pleased me. I moved the pieces, the rocks and the feathers, the buttons and coins, the gold cufflink I’d slipped from the sleeve of Xikos’s coat. He’d assumed he’d lost it. He didn’t take good care of his things and with one gone, he’d had to pay for a new set. He was so angry and never guessed it was me. The memory had been a little spot of glee before, but now it ached like a bruise.

  The ring didn’t fit, the cufflink was a bruise, my regrets were a road my thoughts traveled down until they came inevitably to Emtis. Emtis was the reason I feared that I was, as my family called me, a monster. He’d hurt me and I’d thought I was justified in hurting him. Perhaps I would have been if I’d acted from fear alone. Instead, I’d taken revenge and only afterward asked what my hate had made of me.

  I thought of the king, haunted by Lader. I thought of how much he hated Sejanus and I thought about the prophecy. Sejanus had mocked and humiliated the king. So had many others, but it was Sejanus who had come so close to killing him. The king had seen him directing the assassins in the garden without recognizing the danger. He’d survived that attack by inches. Fear and hatred twine together. Looking at the stones and the delicate feather of a wren, Xikos’s cufflink and Sejanus’s ring, I saw a pattern. I saw the relationship between all the pieces, hate, fear, revenge, remorse. I saw it as if it were one of the magus’s equations and I could calculate the outcome. Whatever it was that Sejanus knew, learning it would destroy the king.

  I picked up the ring—one single piece removed from the pattern, and all of it was altered. I packed up my treasures and put Sejanus’s ring back in my pocket. On a page pulled from my journals, using penmanship that would have made Relius proud, I wrote out a message requesting a horse and signed it with Baron Orutus’s name. No one would question it if the secretary of the archives sent for a horse, and no one would doubt that it was the secretary’s order whe
n it was delivered by the king’s most easily identifiable attendant.

  This masterstroke of deception turned out to be entirely unnecessary. After hunting through the camp for the man Alestis and seeing in an instant I would get no help from him, I went to the spot on the horse lines where the royal horses were picketed, to find the stable master expecting me.

  “Shall I have her saddled?”

  He took my blank stare for concern.

  “She has a few more pepper spots, and I’ve put cream on them. Otherwise she’s as sound as a drum.”

  Snap. In the chaos after the powder exploded in the Mede camp, she too had made her escape. She’d been found the next day wandering the Attolian picket lines, looking for her friends. The master sent a groom to fetch her, and once I had petted her all over and kissed her clever nose, he helped me to mount, assuming that I was taking her for a ride to celebrate.

  As the camp settled for the night and Ion and Medander waited on the king, I wandered among the tents. Back in the capital, when the armies had been mustering, the soldiers had been out at all hours drinking in the taverns or swaggering through the streets. In the camp, the men who had fought through one day and knew they might have to do so the next were more inclined to get a good night’s sleep. Those who stayed at the fires, sharing their wine and talking together, kept their voices low.

  Passing Sejanus’s pen, I mooned theatrically over a honey cake I had slipped from the royal table, and his guards, as I thought they would, lunged at me as if to snatch it away. I might be instantly recognizable, might have the king’s favor, but I was still a small person with a treat, and I made a tempting victim. Perhaps they were only teasing, but I cowered as if afraid and offered them the wineskin I was also carrying instead. They took it, thanking me for the “gift,” and I hurried off.

  I circled back to see them sharing the wine and waited out of sight until they had fallen asleep with Petrus’s lethium inside them. With a blanket over my shoulder and a large melon under my arm, I went to untie the knots that closed the pen.

  “What are you doing?” Sejanus hissed at me.

  As I pulled the sagging gate open, I put a crooked finger to my lips. The guards were not deeply asleep and silence was crucial.

  “Pheris, I must stay here or they will catch us both,” Sejanus whispered.

  I waited.

  “Did Alestis send you?”

  I nodded.

  “Can he get us both free?” Hope gave his voice a desperate edge.

  I nodded again. Lying is just letting people believe what they want to be true.

  When I’d found Alestis, with the other Erondites soldiers, he’d seen me watching, and his look of contempt had been all I had needed to know that Sejanus had been mistaken in his friendship.

  Carrying my blanket into the muddy pen, I arranged Sejanus’s blanket over it, putting the melon underneath to give the semblance of a head under the cloth. Then I handed Sejanus Sotis’s clothes. Ion’s would have been a better fit, but Ion would have noticed them missing. Dressed in fine clothes, with his messy hair tied back, Sejanus was able to stroll past the picket lines like a man avoiding the stinking latrines, headed out into the woods to do his business.

  I’d gone ahead, as if doing the same, and waited to lead him to where I’d tied my pony. I looked in the wrong thicket at first—they are all the same in the dark—lending too much verisimilitude to my show of idiocy for Sejanus. For a moment, I thought Snap had pulled free and we were doomed.

  “Where is Alestis?” he asked me, repeating the question several times. Finally, blinking, I produced a rolled paper and handed it to him. He unrolled it in the dark and shrugged helplessly. “I have no light. Did the stupid bastard think I can read this in the dark?”

  I handed him a waxed folder of matches. He squatted down beside me to take them. “I’m sorry,” he said, apologizing for his angry words. “I am sorry and I did not mean to frighten you.” He patted me gently. “Thank you for the matches.”

  When he’d read the instructions, which I had written out in a scrawl no better than Alestis’s might be, we mounted the pony. Sejanus’s long legs hung past the stirrups and Snap grunted with the effort of carrying us both. Sejanus patted her, too.

  We headed toward the ridge to the north and west side of the camp, splashing through shallow streams and weaving between the spindly trees. As the ground rose, the forest thickened and it was harder to stay on course. Sejanus climbed down to lead the pony while searching for a trace of a path to follow. Finally he found one that took us to the edge of the valley. It continued with the rocky cliffs on one side and the woods on the other, until we reached the stone marker we were seeking. I looped Snap’s reins around the stele loosely so she could pull herself free, but I hoped she wouldn’t do so too soon. Then we began to climb.

  I’d grown much stronger in the time I’d been an attendant. I had been with the king for the three days he slept and I was quite rested. Even so, I had to move very slowly on the steep slope or risk a bone-breaking fall. I could feel Sejanus’s impatience, yet he didn’t rush me and he held my hand in the steeper parts, to be sure I didn’t lose my balance. When I checked again and again to see how high we had climbed, he encouraged me.

  “Don’t look, you’ll be all right.”

  When we reached a place where the trail flattened out on a narrow ledge, I hesitated, trying to screw up my courage. He saw it and he urged me to take a rest.

  “We just have to be over the ridge by daylight,” he said. “They cannot waste time chasing us if they don’t know which way we’ve gone.”

  Cursing my weakness, I sat down beside him. Saving the king from himself was a harder business than I’d expected.

  When Sejanus began to talk, I think it was to himself as much as to me. “I had a brother like you once. His name was Pheris too.” Seeing me startle, he said, “No, not you, another Pheris, my brother Pheris. He was older than me, older than Dite. They gave him my father’s, and his father’s name, before they knew he was . . . that he was like you.”

  So I’d had an uncle I had never heard of as well as Dite, whom I’d completely forgotten about.

  “Our father wanted to get rid of the baby. When they are born like that they are usually id—” He looked sideways at me and bit the word back. “Everyone thought the baby would die, but our nurse loved him and she kept him alive. She was always bringing him out and showing everyone how clever he was—because he was clever, but it didn’t matter. She got my father to play chess with him once, and when Pheris won, my father threw the board at him. We all knew who lost that game, but Melisande never learned.”

  She had, I thought.

  Sejanus got back to his feet. Instead of rambling to the sky, he bent to speak directly to me. “I’m going to take you to my mother. The king will seize all the Erondites land, but she has a small unwedded estate he can’t touch. She loved my brother. She will be happy to see you, and if Melisande still lives, she will send for her, too.” He took my hand, reassuring me. “No one is going to hurt you. The king will not have you for a fool to mock in his court.” In the dim light, he searched my face for comprehension and I nodded, reassuring him in turn.

  Instead of seizing the opportunity I had right in front of me, I trailed after him like the idiot he thought I was, keeping one eye on the path and one on the ground below us, as he told me about his mother and incidentally about himself, and how he had ended up at the villa where he’d been a prisoner. “I was comfortable; no one was unkind,” he said. “It took me a long time to realize that nothing I did would ever matter again. I’d been someone important and I’d thrown that away. For something so stupid, too. Here, take my hand, it’s slippery.”

  He was helping me at every turn, though he was more tired than I was, and we soon had to rest again.

  “My father wanted a puppet; I wanted Eugenides dead. Once he was gone, I was sure the queen would marry Dite. Dite loved her so much.” Bone weary, he struggled back to his fee
t and, spreading his legs to brace himself, he offered me a hand. “I had a lot of time to think in that villa,” he said. “I had been wrong about everything—Dite, the queen, the king. I hated my father and I ended up just like him.”

  He must have guessed what I would have asked, if I could have. Why had he let my grandfather help him escape?

  He laughed at himself. “I wanted to be someone who mattered again,” he admitted. “I’d never had the courage to stand up to my father the way Marina and Dite did. When the Medes offered me money to kill the king, I thought it was a stroke of luck—Dite would marry the queen and I would be out from under my father forever.”

  We were so high that on any steep spot on the trail I could have taken us both to our deaths, and Sejanus continued to hold my hand. I was still listening to him, and we’d nearly reached the end of our climb.

  “He didn’t ask me if I wanted to escape; he just arranged it. I hated him so much. I meant to go straight to the king. Reveal all my father’s plans. I thought I might redeem myself.”

  But he hadn’t told the king his father’s plans.

  “My father was dead and his conspiracy with him. All those men who were trapped in his web were free. Most of them didn’t know he was treating with the Medes; some have done nothing more than give Erondites gold when he demanded it. All of them, if they aren’t executed, will see their estates confiscated, their families ruined.”

  He was making excuses for them and for himself. “No one could stand up to my father. That’s why Marina ran off. Only Dite ever defied him to his face—Dite the poet, Dite who played the flute and cried when he shot his first dove. My father despised Dite. The king thought he was striking such a blow against Erondites, but I’m sure he was delighted when his disobedient son was exiled, and the whole court would have known it. That’s why no one dared to cross him—he always got his way in the end.”

  He tugged on my hand. I’d slowed, waiting to see what he said next. Did he realize that what he said about his father was what the other attendants said about Sejanus? That he always got his way?