Return of the Thief Read online

  Map

  Dedication

  To Sounis

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Dedication

  Exordium

  The Book of Pheris, Volume I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  The Book of Pheris, Volume II

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Interregnum

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alyta’s Missing Earring

  Some Persons of Significance: A List of Characters in The Queen’s Thief Novels

  About the Author

  Books by Megan Whalen Turner

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Exordium

  Unlike others who claim to be well-informed, I am an eyewitness to the events I describe, and I write this history so that future scholars will not have to rely, as do so many staring into the past in my day, on secondhand memories passed down over the years, their details worn away by time and retelling. I will include in my account what I did not see and hear myself only if I learned of the events as they occurred and from those who were present. If my readers trust me, then they may trust my sources. If I cannot record exactly what words were spoken at every moment, I can say with confidence what those words might have been, and in some cases what they must have been, as I saw what resulted from them being spoken, and can we not derive the words when we know the consequences of their utterance?

  I am only a man and I know, and my readers must also know, that there will be errors in my account. I call on Moira to guide my pen in this endeavor and accept the sovereignty of no other. No matter how many times I have come to my study to find words have been inked over or mocking comments added to my manuscript, I have simply recopied those passages. Where the comments have been enlightening, I have incorporated the information into my work and where other uninvited readers have left their questions, I have sought to answer them. No man’s reticence can obscure Moira’s history, nor should it obscure mine. As I hope to make my chronicle of the high king live and breathe, I will dispense with the language of scholarship and to you who read this account, I say that on my honor it is as true and faithful a narrative as it is in my means to provide.

  The Book of Pheris

  Volume I

  Chapter One

  Though I was born to the house of Susa, I am Erondites. My mother, the only daughter of the Baron Erondites, was disowned when she married herself to a younger son of the Susa family. My father was an uncomplicated, easygoing man, and I have never known what drew the two of them together, as my mother was ambitious enough for two, and far more conniving. Resenting her restriction to family life on a Susa country estate, she entertained a steady stream of visitors from the capital who brought her all the news of the court, of the queen, and of her father’s many machinations. She was far more his child than either of her surviving brothers, and she hated him for casting her out.

  When it became clear that I had been born with the infirmity that ran in my family, she declined the conventional response, and not because of any maternal feelings. Knowing it would anger her father, she arranged for a wet nurse and recorded my birth in the capital. She held my naming ceremony in the great temple, with free wine and food for all who attended, and only after that turned me over to the nurse of her own childhood, never to show any interest in me again.

  I grew up in an outbuilding on the grounds of the Villa Suterpe, my nurse, Melisande, keeping me alive through my infancy and continuing to care for me as I grew older. She was nurse to my brother, Juridius, as well, though once he was old enough, he was moved to the main house. I never was, and if Melisande had had her way, I would have stayed forever in the two small rooms of our little home, as I was blamed every time the milk soured or someone fell ill. “Out of sight, out of mind, little one,” she cautioned me.

  Despite the dangers, and her warnings, I was drawn to the main house like a moth to flame. Attention for an ugly child such as I was never positive, but I had my repertoire of seemingly accidental defenses. To my nurse’s distress, I enjoyed tipping plates of food or wine into my tormentors’ laps or wiping the spit from my mouth on their sleeves and watching with an assumed air of bewilderment as their audience laughed at them instead of me. I came to understand something my nurse never did: the less people want to see you, the easier it becomes to be invisible in plain sight.

  My story begins in late summer. The days were still hot, but the grain was ripe, and the end of the year was on the horizon. It was late in the afternoon, the dry air like powder on the skin, and I was behind the stables watching a swarm of bees settle into a hollow tree. They had abandoned the clay pipes stacked for them in the kitchen garden, and the beekeeper had not yet tracked them down. Fascinated by an orderliness I glimpsed in their movements, I sometimes watched the bees for hours, though the longer I was still, the more painful it was when I tried to move again.

  Just as my father returning from the hunt would linger at the threshold, handing off his horse, his weapons, his prizes to this servant or that servant before taking the wine from his cupbearer, so would a bee pause at the entrance to the hive to bow and spin in circles, to greet the doorkeeper bees and be greeted in turn. If the hunt had been successful, my father would pour out a libation in thanks; if a bee returned with pockets stuffed full of pollen, the doorkeeper bees escorted the successful hunter inside while other bees flew off, retracing her flight. All had a role to play.

  The blue had washed out of the sky except where the sun was just settling on the hills to the west, and a house cat had joined me to begin his evening hunt in the litter under the trees. The birds overhead were making a racket as they found their roosts for the night, and I didn’t hear my nurse at first. Her voice was just loud enough to carry into the bushes, where she knew I liked to hide.

  “Quickly, come quickly, boy,” she called, though she knew how difficult it is for me to get to my feet when I’ve been still for a long time.

  The cat was crouched for a pounce. I had no desire to interrupt his pursuit of dinner, but Melisande called again, so I worked myself up from the ground—carefully enough that the hunter, focused on its mouse, took no notice of my going. The slope behind the stables was steep and I had to move in small steps, placing my bad leg with strict attention to avoid tumbling downhill. My nurse, once she caught sight of me through the brush, urged me with anxious waves of her hand to hurry. Obedient to her, if to no other, I did try, but she was bobbing her head in distress by the time I reached her. She had a bag, which she pushed into my good hand.

  “You take this,” she said. “You go to the shrine of Agalia, you know the one I mean, where the roof has come down. You stay there until I come for you, do you understand?”

  I nodded but waited for more, watching her face. “Erondites is here,” she said, and I froze as still as the mouse behind me hiding in deadly peril from the cat. Erondites. My grandfather who hated me. She had no time to say more, and I wondered later: if I hadn’t sought an explanation, if I’d gone as soon as I’d been told, slipping away into the bushes, would I have made it to the old shrine in the hills—a h
alf day’s walk away for anyone else, an entire day for me or my old nurse? And if I had made it there, what might have been different then?

  One of the housemen rounded the corner of the stable, moving fast, followed by another. Melisande said to me, “Go, go,” but of course I could not. The first houseman snatched the bag and threw it on the ground, then picked me up, grabbing me around the chest and swinging me. I cried out in pain and Melisande sank her hands into my shirt, twisting the fabric as if, feeble as she was, she could pull me out of the houseman’s arms.

  “No,” she said, her voice breaking, “no, he cannot have my little Pheris.”

  As I watched in horror, the houseman struck her with his fist, knocking her to the ground. I bit him hard on the ball of his shoulder, making him shout and then swear, but he did not drop me as I expected. He only changed his grip, easily shifting my weight and sending fire through my leg again. He locked an arm around my neck.

  “Your time is up, little monster,” he said as he tightened his hold.

  I’d never been treated so by a servant. Certainly by my family members, but the servants only spat when they saw me, or made a hex sign. Any physical harm they did was indirect: something placed for me to trip over, something unpleasant left on the paths for me to find. If they’d laid a hand on me, Melisande would have had them chopped and boiled and fed to the pigs. But Melisande was still on the ground, sobbing into her hands as my vision grew dark and the blood roared in my ears.

  The next thing I knew, I was falling. My head hit the stone floor of the living room at the center of the main house, and I sprawled bonelessly until the darkness began to clear. When I could, I rolled into a crouch so that if I was kicked, as I sometimes was, I had a chance of taking the blow on my good leg. I’d spent a long winter in bed after my father had kicked the bad one.

  My mother reclined on a couch, apparently at ease, the beads woven into the thin braids near her face hanging quite still. I’d often longed to set those braids in motion, to hear the clink of the brightly colored glass beads, but knew that any attempt to draw near to her would end with a slap. The man beside her was bald and running to fat the way powerfully built men often do as they age. He clutched a wine cup in his fist and stared at me in disgust—my grandfather, who’d never spoken to my mother since her marriage, who was much reviled in the villa, who’d wanted me dead since the day I was born. I knew what he saw.

  Not taking my eyes off him, I tipped my head to one side to let the drool from my mouth spin in a thin line to the floor. Erondites curled his lip and looked away. My mother, fiddling with the beads she wouldn’t let me touch, snorted in amusement.

  “Meet your heir, Father,” she said. “Juridius tells me I should have named him Pheris Monstrous instead of Mostrus.”

  “You shouldn’t have named him at all. You should have had him got rid of.” It was no longer considered civilized to leave babies like me out on a hillside for a fox to take, though it still happened. More often, they were quietly drowned by a midwife, or left unfed, uncared for, until they faded away.

  “And where would you be now if I had?” my mother asked.

  Erondites didn’t like that.

  “He does not speak?”

  “No,” said my mother.

  “Play chess?” he asked acidly.

  “Melisande knows better. She keeps him out of sight.”

  To my surprise, he laughed in what seemed genuine amusement. “He’ll do very well.”

  “Be sure you remember our bargain,” my mother warned.

  Erondites shrugged. “You have my word. When your firstborn has served his purpose, Juridius will be my heir.”

  My brother was younger than I by less than a year, taller and healthy and a credit to his house.

  “Juridius will suit you, Father. He knows what he owes his family.”

  “Better than you,” said Erondites.

  “I know what a woman owes her family. Have I not provided my husband with sons?” Her smile was ugly.

  “But now you are restored, daughter, to the family of Erondites.”

  “Juridius is my family, and my loyalty will be to him and my other children. If you mean to use my little monster and then reinstate Sejanus as your heir when you have secured his freedom, beware. Sejanus is no match for me.”

  “Rest easy,” said her father while looking at me with both ownership and contempt. “From this, we will proceed to rebuild the House of Erondites.”

  Chapter Two

  In a small audience room made smaller by the granite pillars holding up its high ceiling, with walls paneled in red agate veined in black, the king of Attolia waited. The candles in every sconce couldn’t lighten the room—or the king’s temper. He was awaiting the arrival of the new heir to the estate of Erondites, as stipulated, a child young enough to be raised in the palace away from the malignant tendencies of his family. The baron had proposed his oldest grandchild, the king had approved, and the boy had been delivered, but Hilarion, who’d met his coach in the stable yard, had sent a warning that all was not as expected.

  The doors to the audience room opened with a crash, and everyone recoiled except the king. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, heels hooked on the rung of his massive chair, as the attendants dragged me in, the expressions on their faces warning everyone of the smell before it hit.

  “His ‘coach’ was a wagon with a box in the back,” Hilarion announced, coming in behind us. “Locked from the outside.”

  They’d put me into the box with a bucket and a bottle of water. The bucket upended at every bump, and the jug of water, still half full, had cracked on the second day.

  “Is this Erondites’s grandson Juridius?” asked the king, as if he doubted it.

  “No,” said Hilarion grimly. “Juridius is the second child of the baron’s daughter, Marina. This is her first.”

  “Ah,” said the king.

  “His birth was recorded in the temple,” Hilarion admitted defensively. “There’s been no sign of him since. Everyone assumed he’d died.” He didn’t need to say why.

  But being invisible is not the same as being dead, and it was obvious that a grave mistake had been made. Feet shuffled and heads bowed as those who might be held responsible ducked the king’s gaze. The men holding my arms released me and I sank into my crouch, wrapping my arms around my knees, staring malevolently at the king as he stared back. As angry as I was helpless, I squeezed the spit from my mouth, drooling onto the floor in front of me, but unlike my grandfather, the king didn’t look away. Eventually I did.

  Knowing that every eye was on me, and there was no escape but the one in my head, I dipped my finger into the small puddle in front of me and made a triangle of three carefully placed wet spots. There was a communal exhalation of disgust, and the weight of stares lightened. I added a third row to my triangle with three spots, then another with five.

  “Why didn’t they expose him?” I heard someone ask.

  “Put him back in his box,” someone else advised the king.

  “Return him to Erondites.”

  And Erondites, having had his joke, would kill me and make Juridius his heir. Helpless to alter my fate, I concentrated on the ever-widening triangle. The first wet spot was drying out, so I worked up a little more spit. Eyeing the king, I let it run out of my mouth.

  “Your Majesty, get rid of him!” I heard someone protest, but the king watched me seriously as I dipped a finger into my self-made ink and re-created my first point.

  “No,” he said, coming to a decision. “Get him clean. Find him a bed in my apartments. He will fit in very well with my attendants.”

  I lifted my head, thinking I had misheard. If I was surprised, the attendants were horrified—obviously, unmistakably horrified—yet not one of them dared protest. That was the first I knew of the king.

  They took me through the palace, past the stares of strangers, to a large room filled with scattered furnishings that I later learned was both guard room and waiting roo
m of the king’s apartments. They stripped off my clothes and left me to stand shivering and naked as servants brought in a circular tub and pitchers of water to pour into it. My silent angry tears had become shaking breathless sobs by the time it was full, and Hilarion sighed heavily as he crouched in front of me and pointed to the tub.

  I shook my head. My leg hurt too much to take my weight. I was considering whether I might steady myself with one hand on the edge of the tub when Hilarion ran out of patience and shoved me in. The attendants jumped back, all cursing together as water splashed everywhere. I dragged myself upright, gasping in pain.

  “He hoots like a drunken owl,” said the narrow-faced one with long fair hair, the one I later learned was Xikander. Scooping the water with my good hand, I flung it in his direction.

  He raised a hand and called me a cursed monster. He didn’t want to get close enough to hit me, though.

  One of the servants came forward, with toweling to soak up the water. “You wash him,” said Hilarion, but the servant made a sign to avert the evil eye and backed away.

  “Gods damn it,” snapped Hilarion, and I snatched up the soap left by the tub, hastily dragging it across my body, preferring to wash myself than to risk being drowned. By accident or on purpose.

  By the time I’d soaped and scrubbed myself, Hilarion had realized that I couldn’t get out of the tub on my own. He lifted me with one hand while one of the other attendants rinsed away the soap, soaking Hilarion in the process.

  “Take him to the bed,” he directed, shaking off some of the water.

  They wrapped me in sheeting, and one of them carried me down narrow hallways to drop me on a mattress laid out on the floor. I struggled free of the constricting fabric, only to find myself surrounded by headless people. Hearing the thin, whistling sound of my terror, the man standing nearby laughed. I do not remember now who it was, nor do I want to. I do remember Philologos, though, for his kindness.

  “He’s frightened,” Philo said from the doorway.