Return of the Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  The king dropped his chin to his chest and seemed lost in thought, as a breeze blew through the quiet tent, kicking up the colorful silk streamers hanging from corner poles, making the ends of them dance and sending a shiver down the backs of our necks. “Pheris,” he said when he lifted his head. “You freed Sejanus and you helped him to escape.” Instead of enraged, he appeared only exhausted.

  I thought he would ask me why I had betrayed him, and I was ready.

  “Shall I pardon him, then?”

  That was a question I was unprepared to answer. I stood blinking, utterly at a loss, as Sejanus and the king waited for my answer. I thought back over all I knew of him, and over all I knew of myself, too.

  I don’t know.

  “We never know, Pheris,” said the king. “Decide anyway. For me.”

  That made it easier. For him, the answer was obvious. Yes.

  “Will he betray me again?”

  The hair rose at the back of my neck.

  Never.

  Eddis’s eyes narrowed. Sounis tilted his head as if listening for a sound in the silent tent. Attolia looked away, as if uninterested.

  The king announced, “The Erondites’s patrimony will be divided. One part to you, Pheris, one to Dite, and one to you, Sejanus. None of you will inherit from the others, all will return to the crown if you have no heirs.”

  Sejanus was staring as if he doubted his ears.

  The king looked at him with dislike. Then he stood and left the low dais without another word, stalking off to the tent he shared with the queen and pulling the fabric over the doorway with finality. The queen instructed the guards to unchain Sejanus, and they hesitantly complied. Everything felt off-kilter and uncertain.

  “Pheris?” said the queen.

  Sejanus had come to kneel at my feet.

  “You are the head of his house,” said the queen gently.

  I had no idea what to do.

  “Perhaps Sejanus should join your kinsmen. The guards can escort him to their tents.”

  I nodded, my head bobbing like a fisher bird’s, and the guards led Sejanus away. When he was gone, the queen said to me, “Where the king gives his heart, he gives it completely.”

  The king slept all afternoon. When he woke and saw me sitting nearby, he said, “I trusted you.” I thought it was an accusation at first, and then I understood. He sent me to fetch Eddis, and when she came to his tent, he asked her point-blank how to make Attolia return to the palace.

  “Eugenides,” she said, thoroughly exasperated. “You never ask for anything. My garnet earrings. The rubies from the Attolian Crown.”

  “They weren’t from—” He started to argue, but Eddis scowled so fiercely, he subsided.

  “Ask her,” said Eddis.

  After she left, the king washed his face and combed his hair, put on his parade suit, now repaired to its former glory, and went to meet Attolia as she was leaving the council tent. He approached and took her hand. She frowned warily, but declined to draw it back. The king dropped to his knees, and then she did try to pull back, but it was too late; he wouldn’t let go.

  “My queen,” he said with every appearance of humility. “No man, not even a king, should think he can command his wife, so I have come to ask you, please, will you return to the capital?”

  The men filtering out the door of the council tent saw the tableau and hesitated. Unwilling to intrude, they stepped aside, but they didn’t go on about their business. They waited to see what would happen. Those passing the council tent paused. Anyone within sight of it began to draw near, and seeing them moving, people farther away did the same.

  As the crowd grew, Attolia searched it for Eddis and found her smiling serenely next to Sounis.

  “I see that we all have our hands on each other’s hearts,” Attolia said acidly.

  “You have defeated the enemy,” said the king. “Pick your generals. I will go with them to drive the last of the Medes from our shores, and you can go safely home. I am not ordering, I am merely asking.”

  Attolia tried to pull him up.

  “You were merely asking,” she pointed out.

  “And will go on asking, from right here, in the mud, until you agree.”

  The crowd of onlookers was growing.

  “You do not know a wagon from a wheelbarrow,” Attolia said.

  “That is so,” agreed the king earnestly. “I will let your generals guide me, I swear.”

  “You make more promises than the moon,” said Attolia.

  “A man may do many strange things and not feel he has broken a promise if he keeps his faith with the one to whom he made it.” Very briefly, he glanced at me.

  Attolia, looking away, appeared to be listening to something only she could hear. “So, so, so,” she said at last. “It is time for me to turn to woman’s work. I will go, my king.”

  “Thank you,” the king said in relief, climbing back to his feet and trying to wipe the mud off his knees. “Take Eddis with you.”

  Eddis made a small choking sound, and Attolia’s eyebrows rose in speculation.

  The king said, “Forgive me. I misspoke. What I meant to say was, would you please take Eddis with you?”

  “Helen?” Sounis asked uncertainly.

  “He’s slow,” the king said in a stage whisper to Attolia. “He does eventually catch on.”

  “Yes,” Eddis said, her cheeks reddening. She stepped out from the crowd to join Attolia. “Yes,” she said as they stood arm in arm. “We will both go, not that you were asking,” she said to the king.

  Nudges were followed by smiles, and as the news was passed back through the ranks of those gathering to hear it, there were cheers. Once they’d quieted a little, the king said, “Take Sounis, too.”

  “What?” Sounis was not sure he’d heard properly.

  “Yes,” said the king. “All three of you. Go confer with your barons, your patronoi lesser and greater, your okloi, your townspeople and their mayors.” He spoke to Eddis and Sounis and Attolia, but he addressed everyone around him, his joking demeanor gone. “The Medes will return, and if not the Medes, others who want to control the Lesser Peninsula, this land of Hephestia’s making. The treaty between Sounis and Eddis and Attolia cannot be fixed in one person, in one life as ephemeral as the rain in summer. There must be a charter of one law for everyone, with one council drawn from all three countries so that in future they may select a new high king, as they do in Sounis. We need an unbreakable union, and only you three can make it.”

  To Attolia, he added hesitantly, “The right to be high king cannot be passed to our child.”

  The queen nodded. “To be king or queen of Attolia is enough,” she said.

  To Eddis, the king said, “There will be land grants in Sounis and Attolia to the veterans of this war.” She nodded as well, knowing that the offer of good land would empty her mountain country. To the king of Sounis, he said, “Take the magus. He was born for this,” and they all laughed.

  The king did not say, did not need to say, that he must be absent. He would remain in the north as long as necessary for them to forge an agreement, though it meant he could not be with his queen.

  That was how, with his knees covered in mud, Eugenides united the three countries into one.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Even in Stinos’s protected harbor, the Etisian winds blowing across the decks of the Ruby, the Diamond, and the Sapphire made the rigging hum. The tops of all the waves were white, and the few clouds in the sky scudded past like runaway sheep. With the wind behind them, the Ruby and the Diamond would carry Eddis and Attolia and Sounis back to the city of Attolia in days, not weeks.

  The king had accompanied the travelers out to the ships. As he said his farewells, Eddis drew him close. With the wind blowing her words away, only he heard them.

  “Gen,” she said. “Be careful.”

  “Of course,” he promised.

  “I dreamed of the eruption again last night,” she told him, and he sobered
.

  Eddis nodded. She too had thought that the gods would be pleased by the unification of the three countries. “Do not offend the gods,” she warned him, though neither of them could guess what that might mean.

  Once the ships had left the harbor, we set out to drive the Medes north along the Attolian coast toward Roa, fighting their rear guard in skirmishes, hunting through the woods for deserters who meant to hide and turn bandit rather than go back to the empire. It was an ugly business, and Sejanus died before we reached the border. It was a gut wound that quickly turned septic. I wished for the royal physicians, either of them, but the healers in the hospital tent assured me that there was nothing even Galen or Petrus could have done.

  I sat next to Sejanus, washing him in lavender water as the fever set in, promising him I would write to his mother, that I would write to his brother Dite, that I would forgive my own brother, Juridius. As his thoughts wandered back in time, he told me about his brother Pheris, about the games he would devise pitting his agile mind against his brothers’ and sister’s agile bodies.

  “Your mother wasn’t always so ruthless,” he said. “It was Pheris’s death that hollowed out Marina’s heart. We have weak hearts, the Erondites.”

  No, not you. It was your stupid head that got you into trouble.

  He smiled, but as the fever burned, he grew more anxious, worrying over the past. He plucked at the blanket with his hands and turned his head fretfully. I struggled to soothe him; there was little I could do. As I replaced his pillow for the hundredth time, the king came to the doorway of the hospital tent. He hooked a foot through a campstool and slid it near to Sejanus’s cot. Staying there some time, he spoke quietly with Sejanus.

  My uncle asked about Dite and learned for the first time that his older brother was the music master in the court of Ferria.

  “He is free to come home whenever he chooses. He might not, though,” the king warned gently. “He’s very happy there.”

  “He is?” Sejanus asked, his voice thready.

  He hadn’t known. His only contact with the world had been messages smuggled in by his father, and his father had never mentioned his other living son, hadn’t cared what had become of him.

  The king said, “Juridius is with him. When he is ready, he too may come home.” They talked about the Erondites estate and what part of it Sejanus would choose to be in my hands. Before he left, the king bent over my uncle, brushed his hair gently aside, and kissed him on the forehead. Sejanus, much eased, died a few hours later.

  When the ashes of his pyre had cooled, I climbed onto my pony to catch up with the king. On the road I passed companies of soldiers marching back toward Attolia. The Medes’ inclination to fight dropped with each mile they retreated, and more and more of our soldiers were being released to return home. I stayed the nights in whatever camp I found convenient. I was easily recognized and welcomed, a marvel to me then, and even now. At some point, as the king already had, I crossed the border into Roa.

  Harrying the Medes, the king had not hesitated to enter Roa uninvited. He was not at all surprised, though, when he reached the small harbor town of Nedus, to find a party waiting for him, sent by the king of Roa. In the strictest terms, the spokesman warned Eugenides off from further trespassing lest he risk creating ill will.

  “Me create ill will?” said our king.

  “Indeed,” said the spokesman, a weedy man, with his long hair blowing in his face, making it difficult to take him seriously. “I remind you that there are treaties between Roa and Attolia!”

  “There were treaties between Roa and Attolia when your king allowed the Mede army to march past him without a peep.”

  “It is not for you to say how the Mede will be treated on land that does not belong to the Attolians.”

  “That is certainly true,” the king conceded.

  “Then we shall tell our king that you are turning back,” the spokesman said.

  “You can tell His Majesty whatever you like,” said our king cheerfully. Then he rode past them into the town.

  The Sapphire had recently reached the harbor after beating its way north against the wind. Her captain was waiting at the gangplank to welcome the king on board.

  “Their Majesties?” the king asked him, cutting short the ceremonial greetings.

  “All have safely reached the city,” the captain assured him. “Her Majesty who is Eddis has decided to remain in Attolia at the request of the royal physicians.” When he saw the concern in the king’s face, he added, “The physicians would like to attend both of Their Majesties.”

  “Getting along like a house on fire, are they?”

  “Evidently,” said the captain.

  The king did not appear any less worried, but they moved on to discuss unloading the supplies on the ship and how best to bring the wounded on board before it sailed south again. When they had finished their arrangements, the king rode back to his army. He was unsurprised to find the Roans still milling in confusion outside the town. They felt their message had not landed as it ought to have.

  They tried to deliver it again, but the king waved them away, saying. “I will pursue the Medes until they are no longer a threat. Offer them your support or don’t, as you like. I think you will find you have welcomed poor guests into your home. As for broken treaties, tell your king to think very carefully before he raises that issue with me.”

  When the Sapphire had departed, the king left a garrison to secure the harbor, and we carried on along the coast of Roa.

  Late one night as I was longing for the cot that was set up and waiting for me in the tent I shared with Ion, the king and Ion and I were listening to Pegistus and Trokides argue over the council table. These were the two generals that Attolia and Eddis had tasked with the campaign to rout the Medes, under the nominal supervision of the high king. Eddis had lost her senior general, Xenophon, as well as her minister of war in the battle for the Leonyla. Sounis had wanted his magus with him for the negotiations in the capital and had sent his father to the capital of Sounis to supervise matters there. While there were other candidates, Trokides was a reliable soldier and Pegistus a careful planner. If neither of them was a cunning strategist, chasing the Medes had not called for great military innovation.

  Unfortunately, without cooler heads to mediate between them, they fought over everything. While they were both full of self-importance, they were not stupid—their disagreements, though fiery, usually ended in some grumbling accord, and the king did not intervene in them. He did occasionally lay his head down on the table and feign sleep or threaten them with dire forms of execution, which they ignored.

  That night, we had camped on a bluff above a narrow but fast-moving river. Trokides felt we should knock together rafts and cross the river as quickly as possible. Pegistus had sent scouts to look for a ford, and he wanted to wait until they returned. The king, with his head resting on the back of his seat and a wine cup in his hand, was glancing from Trokides to Pegistus and back again with diminishing patience when a guard stepped into the doorway. Trokides and Pegistus glared equally at the interruption, but the king’s expression was more hopeful.

  “They’re at the pickets, Your Majesty,” said the guard with a broad smile. “Both of them.”

  It was Costis and Kamet. They were brought to the council tent a little later and greeted with embraces and kisses. I smiled shyly at Kamet, hardly recognizing the tidy scribe with the worldly air I’d seen in Attolia’s palace. His hair had grown shaggy and he was dressed in what appeared to be a remanufactured blanket.

  Costis had made it safely back to the temple complex to find Kamet waiting. By the time Nahuseresh’s men had arrived on the hunt through small towns up and down the coast of Roa, Costis and Kamet had made their way into the hills to shelter in an abandoned shepherd’s hut. Costis had found and prepared it during the months he was pretending to be a naturalist and keeping an eye on the Ellid Sea for signs of the Mede ships. Carefully scouting from their hiding place, Cost
is had seen the retreat of the Medes and had been watching and waiting, hoping the Attolians would be on their heels.

  “You smell like sheep,” the king said to Kamet.

  “Your Majesty, it’s been awful,” Kamet responded. “I had to sleep on the floor. It’s not the sheep I smell of.”

  “Costis,” the king said reprovingly.

  “He is alive,” Costis said. It made me smile again to hear him sound so much like his captain, Teleus.

  Trokides and Pegistus were eager to get back to their argument and happy to draw Costis and Kamet into it. They had been working from the limited information brought in by scouts, and local knowledge was what they needed.

  “There are fords upstream,” said Kamet. “The bluffs on either side of the Lusimina just get higher and the river narrower. The only other ford is downstream, at least two days away.”

  “Then we must cross here,” said Trokides triumphantly.

  “They are in the woods on the opposite bank. They are going to shoot anyone trying to cross in a boat,” insisted Pegistus.

  I’d been trying to remember where I’d heard the name of the river.

  “What is it, Pheris?”

  The river. The name.

  “Lusimina?” the king asked, checking with Kamet to see if he’d heard correctly.

  Slowly the memory I needed floated to the surface of my mind.

  After the ambush, when we returned to our camp, the watchmen asked who you were.

  The king blinked, as if he had trouble recalling that night.

  Remember what you said. By the will of the Great Goddess, king of Attolia, king over Sounis and Eddis . . . king over all the land from . . . the mountains . . .

  I didn’t have a sign for Macheddic, or Melenzetti for that matter. Seeing my frustration, the king reached for the charcoal stick they’d been using to mark the map and handed it to me. He tapped a bare spot on the vellum. Slowly at first, and then with increasing confidence, I wrote out the words “king from the Macheddic Mountains to the sea, king from the Melenzetti Pass to the River Lusimina.”

  “Did I say that?” the king asked.