Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  He sensed my reluctance. “Pheris, if the king learns who conspired against him, if he destroys their houses, he will never be able to trust anyone again. He will be another Attolia, starting a new rebellion with each one he puts down, and my father will have his way even from beyond the grave. I can stop that. You don’t believe me? No, you are making that face because you have no idea what I’m talking about. I am just nattering away, trying to convince myself. Maybe I am running away because I’m afraid. I don’t know. I am afraid, that’s the truth.”

  I slipped my hand free. Resting it on his arm, I watched his face closely in the moonlight, thinking about lies and how we want to believe them. I wanted to believe that he cared about the barons, his country, his countrymen.

  His laugh was bleak.

  “Poor imbecile. It’s all right. Everything will be all right. Let’s get moving.”

  We had nearly reached the spine of the ridge and I had run out of time. I began to back away.

  “Pheris?” He looked down at me. There was just enough light that I could see his shoulders sag with exhaustion. “I’m sorry I called you an imbecile. Please don’t be angry.”

  Maybe I was the one who was just afraid—afraid of dying, afraid of making another mistake as I had with Emtis. I don’t know.

  I’m not going with you.

  “What do you mean?” he said, stunned. “You have to—you have to come with me.”

  As I had guessed, Juridius and I were not the first babies that Melisande had taught our secret, silent language.

  I dug into the purse at my waist and pulled out his ring. I tossed it to him, high in the air so that it would be easy to catch. He still nearly missed it, leaving it until it was almost too late to put out his hands. He cupped the ring to his chest, continuing to stare down at me.

  You can sell it to someone and get what you need with the coin.

  He took a single step toward me and I was already turning to run down the trail, knowing I would fall.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he called, holding out his hands, stepping deliberately back. “I will not chase you, I promise. But Pheris, you must come with me.”

  What happened to your brother?

  He looked at me so sadly and said nothing.

  Your father killed him.

  It took him a long time to speak. “The morning after my grandfather died, when Melisande went to wake him, Pheris was dead.”

  I understood. It’s hard to call your father a murderer, easier to say he was a traitor to his country than to say that he had suffocated his own son in his bed. I’d known all my life that my mother, but for spite, might have done the same to me. It is only now, as a grown man, that I can write it out in so many words.

  “Come with me, Pheris. Alestis has arranged—”

  Alestis arranged nothing.

  “What?”

  My pony. My directions.

  “I don’t understand,” Sejanus said. “Marina told me you were not like our brother.”

  She doesn’t know me.

  Melisande had seen how cleverness failed to protect my uncle and had changed her tactics. Knowing my mother would otherwise have paraded me like a trophy prisoner in front of her father, knowing that when he lost patience with it, my life would be over, Melisande had insisted I play the fool.

  “Pheris, come with me,” begged Sejanus. “We will fetch Melisande to my mother’s villa. She can have a ripe old age with us and you will be safe.”

  Safe? Because I don’t matter?

  “You cannot go back to the king.”

  I will serve him.

  “You are Erondites. He will kill you.”

  I shook my head, not believing it. The men who took my wine would blame themselves for falling asleep. They would be punished, I knew, but I was stupid with my own cleverness and I told myself they’d brought it on themselves.

  “You will lie to your king?” my uncle asked.

  As you lied to him. We are liars, all the Erondites.

  Sejanus thought back over the trail we had climbed, the narrow places, the ledges and the steep drops. He was realizing how close to death he had been, how close both of us had been.

  I play chess, too.

  He nodded, remembering his clever brother. “He would have sacrificed a pawn to eliminate a knight. Pheris, my mother loved him. She would take you in and be glad,” he said. “Someday, we could approach the king . . .”

  I shook my head and he gave up.

  “Can you get back down on your own?” he asked, worried for me.

  I nodded. I didn’t know anything of the kind, but I let him believe what he wanted to believe.

  “Then thank you, and thank you for this.” He held up the ring.

  Gods’ blessings on your road.

  “And on yours,” said Sejanus. “Will you write to your grandmother?”

  I will.

  “Pheris.” I had already started down, but I paused to look over my shoulder. “My brother was the best of the Erondites. He would be honored that you share his name.”

  Sejanus climbed on and I began the dangerous descent, hoping my pony was still waiting for me.

  I got back to the camp just as the sun was rising. The descent had turned out to be safer than the climb, though hard on my clothes, as I slithered down most of it on my side. Snap had not pulled herself free, and I rode her close enough to camp to be sure she would find the picket lines again on her own. I slipped her bridle off and hung it over her withers, hoping the groom who found her in the morning would be puzzled, but not alarmed, by the empty saddle. I pushed her in the direction of the other horses and made my own way back, coming to the sentry and waiting to be recognized.

  “Did you fall in your own hole?” he asked sarcastically, and I looked away. “Do you need a hand?” he asked more kindly, and I shook my head as if embarrassed. My bad leg ached fiercely and I limped at a snail’s pace past Sejanus’s pen and looked through the fencing. The wet blanket was still huddled in the center. The guards had been changed and no one was any the wiser. With the very last of my strength, I made it back to the attendants’ tent and crawled into my cot.

  Chapter Eleven

  The camp was in an uproar when I woke. Groggy, I fumbled my way back into my clothes, my body so stiff that I fell twice and finally sat on the ground to put my feet into the legs of my trousers. Only when I had them on did I realize how filthy they were. It was no wonder the sentry had asked if I was all right. I had to undress and find another pair in my trunk. I left off my tunic, which was almost as dirty, and went in my shirt to the council tent. When I reached the tent, it was already full, and when I tried to slip in among the other attendants, Ion eyed me with a wrinkled brow and then stepped between me and the king.

  The pickets had been alerted, the camp had been searched, but there was no sign of my uncle or his means of escape. The king was enraged, not the cold fury we’d seen before, but the heat of a temper burning out of control. He shouted at Teleus and at Baron Anacritus, who had charge of the camp. Neither could shout back, but Teleus was sorely tempted. Anacritus was afraid. The king promised death to anyone who had aided my uncle. Too late, I was afraid for the men I’d tricked into drinking lethium-laced wine.

  No one was certain which guards to blame or I would have lived with the guilt for their deaths on my conscience. Before the king could condemn them all, as he might have done at that moment, word arrived that Nahuseresh had rallied his army. The Medes were marshaling to attack, and the king was ready to fly to pieces with frustration.

  Over the three days that he had slept, Attolia and Eddis had driven the Peninsular armies relentlessly. They had succeeded in pushing the enemy all the way to the pass. Part of the Mede forces were already in the narrow gorge of the Pinosh River and hemmed in, as we were, by the steep sides of the Leonyla Valley. Their superior numbers were no longer the advantage they had been. To force the Medes to retreat any farther, though, would be to push a stopper into an already full bot
tle. The task would only grow more difficult as the battle lines narrowed and our men grew more exhausted.

  “I want Sejanus,” the king insisted.

  “Gen,” said Sounis, very sharply for him.

  War is never just about men killing with swords and guns. Time is a weapon, and so is hunger. The Medes had abandoned most of their baggage train when they were routed after the death of Bu-seneth. If the Peninsular armies held their ground—only a few days, perhaps just one day more—the Medes would have to withdraw or starve. No one could be spared to hunt Sejanus. All of the Little Peninsula’s resources needed to be committed to battle.

  Grinding his teeth, the king gave in.

  “Afterward, then,” he said to Attolia.

  “Afterward,” she agreed. They both knew that Sejanus, with days to make good on his escape, would be impossible to find.

  The queens issued their orders. Much had changed since the first contentious council meetings of the combined armies, and there was little need for discussion or even elaboration of their instructions. Sounis and one company of reserves would swing to one side of the valley; the king would take the other. All the rest of their forces would be committed to pushing the Medes back into the Leonyla Pass.

  Neither Sounis nor the king would be risked in battle unless the main forces failed. If the Medes broke out, the two companies of reserves would fall on them in a pincer movement, their only hope to delay the enemy and give the queens time to escape. Teleus and a small company selected from the royal guard would see them safely to the mountains of Eddis.

  Propelled by my words to my uncle the night before, in a desire to have a life that mattered, I followed the king out of the tent. Ion tried to pull me back. Pushing him away, I caught the king’s eye.

  “Stop it, Ion,” said the king. “He is not the Erondites I’m worried about. What is it, Pheris?” His eyebrows shot up. He said, “No.”

  Stubbornly, I stood my ground.

  “You will stay with the queens.”

  I had grown stronger over the previous year, strong enough to ride hard after the king and return with him from the Mede camp, strong enough to climb the steep sides of the Leonyla Valley and only be stiff and sore the next day. But the fundamentals had not changed. I could not ride hard, day after day, without rest. If our forces were defeated, as the queens fled, they would have to slow their pace or leave me behind. I would never make it to the mountains of Eddis.

  “Get him his pony,” said the king.

  While everyone else was making their preparations, I was hastily cleaning as much of the dirt off my tunic as I could. I had no breastplate to strap on, no sword to wear. As we assembled around him, the king gave me a long knife, kneeling to buckle it around my waist himself.

  “In a lifetime of stupid things, this may be the stupidest thing I have ever done,” he said to me. “But if I am told to watch Erondites, by the gods, I will. You stay close, do you understand?” He knew he could not keep me safe, and he was afraid for me. He looked me in the eye and said, “To hell with Lader if he thinks I will not trust you.”

  We rode into position, and I did stay close to the king. Ion was on one side of him and I on the other.

  We could see across the valley to Sounis and his reserves, mostly Sounisians. His father was with him as well as his magus. On our side, except for the attendants, the soldiers were Eddisians. Eddis’s minister of war was there, and many of the men were the king’s close cousins.

  We milled in place, some standing in their stirrups to get a better view of the battlefield through the thin trees downhill from us. The Medes were slow to enter the fight, the sounds of battle dim in the distance. The morning sun had burned off the mist that had come through the Leonyla the night before, and the sky overhead was cloudless. The grass was green, fed by the many streamlets of the Pinosh. A brown-and-white spotwing butterfly bobbled from the tiny yellow flowers of the chipweed to the larger blossoms of the trumpet grass.

  There was a whistle in the air, like a hawk screeching over and over again, and someone must have finally turned to look for it.

  It wasn’t a hawk. To my horror, Ion pointed at a figure waving from high up on the ridge.

  “Does anyone have a glass?” asked the king. I didn’t need one. My back was bent, but my eyes were excellent.

  “I think it’s Sejanus,” said Motis.

  “Crossbow!” Ion shouted, and he leapt at the king, sweeping him off his horse. They both fell heavily to the ground while the rest of us, paralyzed, watched the slow arc of a crossbow quarrel against the sky. It landed some distance away. Cursing, the king shoved Ion away and got to his feet, holding his ribs.

  “Damnation, Ion. Even if he’d hit me, which is next to impossible at that distance, the bolt would bounce off a linen shirt, never mind a breastplate. Someone go catch my horse.” Unlike poor Fryst, the horse had not dropped back to a walk and was some distance away.

  Several men had pistols and raised them to fire at Sejanus.

  “Don’t waste the shot,” said the minister of war. “What does he think he’s doing?”

  Sejanus appeared to be waving the crossbow over his head and then pointing at us emphatically. I turned my pony toward where I’d seen the quarrel fall.

  “Pheris?” I heard the king behind me.

  I struggled to hold my reins and communicate at the same time.

  “Find what?” asked the king.

  Quarrel. Impatiently I made a long arc with my hand.

  “The shot from the crossbow,” the king said. “Find it.” Men jumped down from their horses to look through the grass. Sejanus waited above us.

  The bolt was almost completely buried in the ground, only the message wrapped around it visible. Motis brought it to the king, who passed it to his father to untie and unroll. The minister pulled the paper free, creased it so that it would stay flat, and handed it back.

  My heart leapt into my throat. It was my note, my words scrawled on the scrap of paper torn from my journals. The king glanced briefly at what I’d written, then flipped the page over to read the words added clumsily in charcoal on the back.

  “Mede. Naupent,” the king read out loud.

  As one, we all turned to look up at Sejanus. He was waving his arms over his head, crossed at the wrist and then wide open, the universal signal of distress, of warning.

  “Naupent?” asked the king’s father.

  “It’s a tiny pass,” the king answered thoughtfully. “Just a footpath, but it’s way over the hills from the coast.”

  “Is there a watch on it?”

  “I don’t know, I assume so.” Attolia, who would have known, was too far away to ask.

  “How would the Medes know about it?” Ion asked.

  “Erondites,” said the king. We all looked up at Sejanus.

  “And this is Erondites’s son,” said his father. “Do you trust him?”

  “No,” said the king. He was still staring at the note and then up at Sejanus. If the king took his men to the pass, there would be only Sounis and his company to slow the Medes if the Peninsular army was overwhelmed. He shook his head. He squinted at the minister of war. “Should I?” he asked.

  The minister of war considered. He’d heard the sounds of the fighting. He had seen enough of it through the trees to say, “For an army with no supplies and overwhelming numbers, they aren’t pressing their advantage. They mustered late in the day, which might have been disorganization or might not. They might be waiting.”

  The king was quiet, still thinking. “‘Naupent’ means tongueless. The pass is so high the mist from the sea doesn’t come through it.” He was staring at me. I was still frozen by the sight of my words written on the paper in his hand. “It was never about you,” said the king, as if a weight had been lifted. With my treacherous uncle on the hillside above, I was less certain. I prayed to the Great Goddess that the king was right. “Send a message to the council tent,” the king ordered Ion. “We’ll go to the pass.”

/>   “Not you,” said the minister of war.

  The king looked around at the open field. “Were you going to leave me here alone? Or do you mean to leave my guard and go by yourself?”

  The minister frowned.

  “Do you know where the pass lies?” the king asked. “Do any of you?” They did not.

  “I will ride with you,” said the king to his father. Before the minister could protest, he added reasonably, “I can go to ground when we get close.”

  There was no way to take horses up to the Naupent except to ride first out of the narrow part of the valley. Sounis and his reserves, Attolia and Eddis in front of the council tent, seeing the men wheeling on their horses and racing away, must have been dumbfounded. The king’s messenger, once he reached the council tent, was sent on to Sounis with the news and with orders to divide the reserves and send half to take up the king’s place.

  We rode hard until we came to a path that climbed into the hills above the Pinosh, Snap doing her best to keep up. In time, I was clinging to her back as she trotted along the very ridge that Sejanus and I had climbed toward the night before. Sejanus was waiting there for us.

  “The Medes are marching up to the Naupent. They mean to attack from the rear and capture the queens.”

  The king jerked his head toward the back of our little troop, and Sejanus went looking for someone to lift him onto a horse. No one would meet his eyes. Their horses stamped and threw up their heads.

  It was Ion who finally held out a hand to Sejanus, and then we were on our way again, pushing our horses as fast as they could go up the hillsides and along their ridges until we reached the next hillside to climb. Snap’s short legs were no longer a disadvantage, and she was a nimble climber. I, however, was having more and more trouble staying in the saddle as she swayed and lurched. I was exhausted before the ride began and was beginning to shake. At a wide spot in the trail, one of the soldiers pulled up beside me and held out his hands. I unbuckled the straps across my thighs and leaned toward him. He pulled me off my pony and settled me on his lap, which was no doubt safer but even more terrifying, as my legs dangled over every abyss we passed and my life hung on a man’s forearm. I didn’t even know his name and I do not believe he survived the battle at Naupent, as I did not see him again.