The Queen of Attolia Read online

  “A pleasure to see you—always, Your Majesty,” he said, but he turned his head slowly away and closed his eyes as if the light from the torches around her was too strong.

  “Teleus,” said Attolia to the captain of her personal guard, “see that our guest is locked up very carefully.” She turned her horse and rode back to her gate and through the city to her palace. In her private chambers her attendants waited to undress her and comb out her long hair. When they were done, she dismissed them and sat for a moment before the hearth. It was summertime, and the fireplace was empty. Behind her, she heard a woman’s voice.

  “You have caught him.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the queen without turning her head. “I have caught him.”

  “Be cautious,” said the other. “Do not offend the gods.”

  Left by the guardsmen in a cell at the end of a hallway at the bottom of a narrow stair below the palace, surrounded by stone walls, the Thief dropped as gently as he could to all fours and immediately lifted a hand in disgust. The floor was wet. He turned his head to look across the cell. The dim light coming through a barred window in the door behind him reflected off the stone floor with little variation in its pattern. The floor was wet all over.

  Turning his head had been a mistake. He crawled to a corner and retched until what was left of his dinner was gone. Then he crawled to the opposite corner of the cell and lay down on the damp stones. He prayed to the God of Thieves. There was no answer, and he slept.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DAYS PASSED BEFORE NEWS OF the arrest reached the valleys high in the Hephestial Mountains. A man from a wineshop raced the other talebearers and reached the palace of the queen of Eddis just as her court had gathered in the ceremonial hall for dinner. The queen stood talking with several of her ministers. Behind her was the elaborate ceremonial throne. In front of her the dishes were gold, and by her plate was the gold, figured cup the kings and queens of Eddis had drunk from for centuries.

  As the queen took her place at the table and the members of the royal family, followed by the barons in residence at the palace and various ambassadors, did the same, one of Eddis’s guardsmen crossed the hall to stand behind her chair. The court watched while he bent to speak to her quietly. The queen listened without moving, except to glance down the long table at her uncle, who was also her minister of war. The queen spoke to the guardsman and dismissed him, then turned back to the table.

  “If my ministers will join me, I’m sure we will return shortly. Do please enjoy your dinner,” she announced calmly. Then she stood and crossed the room with a decisive step that didn’t match her finery. She moved toward a narrow doorway that led to a smaller throne room, the original megaron of her ancestors’ stronghold. Her ministers collected around her, following as she led down the three shallow steps through the doorway and across the painted floor to the dais. The original throne room of Eddis was smaller, the original throne simpler than the ceremonial throne in the dining hall. Carved from stone and softened by embroidered cushions, the old throne was quite plain. Being a plain person, Eddis preferred it to the gilded glory of the new throne. She ruled her country from the smaller throne room, and saved the glories of the Greater Hall for banquets.

  Pulling impatiently at her long skirts, she seated herself. “Eugenides has been arrested in Attolia,” she said to her ministers. “A tradesman has come with the news from the capital city. I asked the guard to bring him here.” She didn’t look at her minister of war as she spoke. Her counselors exchanged worried glances but waited patiently without speaking.

  Eddis’s guard, as they escorted the Attolian in, watched him carefully in case he was less harmless than he appeared, but he only stood before the throne, nervously twisting the collar of his shirt. It was bad news that he’d brought, and he knew it. Having come so far to deliver it, hoping to be well paid, he was afraid of his reception.

  “What do you know about the arrest of my Thief?” the queen asked, and the tradesman cleared his throat a few times before he spoke.

  “They found him in the palace and drove him out through the town. He was outside the city walls before they caught him.”

  “They arrested him outside the city? Was he injured?”

  “They used dogs, Your Majesty.”

  “I see,” said the queen, and the tradesman shuffled his feet nervously. “And how do you know it was my Thief?”

  “The members of the guard said so in the wineshop. We all saw him arrested, at least I and my wife did, but it was the middle of the night, and we didn’t know who it might be, but the guards were talking the next day in the shop. They said it was the Thief of Eddis that the queen had caught and that…” The tradesman tapered off into embarrassed throat-clearing noises.

  “Go on,” said the queen, quietly, struggling to appear nonthreatening when she wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled.

  “They said she’s going to make him pay for taunting her, leaving things in the palace so she knows he’s been there.”

  The queen’s eyes closed and opened slowly. It was Eugenides she wanted to shake until his teeth rattled.

  She said, “You’ve come a long way in a short time.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  “Hoping no doubt to be paid for it.”

  The tradesman was silent. He’d ridden his horse to exhaustion and climbed a narrow mountain trail on foot, hurrying every step in order to be the first one to reach Eddis with the news.

  “Give him a double weight in silver,” the queen directed the lieutenant of her guard. “And feed him before he goes home. Give a silver griffin to anyone else who brings the news today,” she added, “and I want to speak to anyone who brings fresh news.”

  When the tradesman was gone, she sat staring into space and frowning. Her ministers waited while she thought.

  “I was wrong to send him,” she said at last. The admission was as much concession as she could make to the horror she felt at her mistake. Eugenides had hinted that the risks would be greater if he returned to Attolia so soon after his last visit. She hadn’t listened. She needed the information only he could get, and the Thief had so easily outwitted his opponents in the past, Eddis had assumed he would do so again. She had sent him, and he hadn’t hesitated to go. She turned to her minister of war. It was his son who would die for her error in judgment.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “She won’t take a ransom.”

  With a small shake of his head, Eugenides’s father concurred.

  Eddis continued. “He’s too valuable to us and could be much too dangerous to her if she let him go. She won’t be inclined to do anything in a hurry, and if he’s been taunting her, and she’s lost face in front of her court…whatever she eventually decides to do is going to be unpleasant. We will have to see,” she said. “We will have to see what we can do.”

  Eugenides lay in his cell. When the pain in his head woke him, he opened his eyes briefly, then slept again. He should have tried to stay awake, but he hardly cared. Sometimes, in his deepest sleep, he thought he heard someone calling his name, and he struggled back to consciousness to find himself alone in the dark. He woke when food and water were pushed through a slot in the bottom of the door and sometimes crawled across the floor to drink the stale water. Other times the effort required was too great, and he left it.

  Slowly the stones in the floor stopped heaving under him, and the blinding pain abated, leaving him with a headache marginally less fierce. More food and water were delivered from time to time. Finally the door of his cell was unlocked and opened. He felt sick again as he was hoisted to his feet but didn’t know if it was from his headache or from fear. He leaned on the guards and tried to collect his ragged thoughts as they led him up from the cells to the queen’s palace.

  Surrounded by the splendor of her court, the queen of Attolia had listened to the veiled insults of the party of Eddisians sent from the mountain country to negotiate the Thief’s release. Eddis had sent her best, and they had
argued skillfully. Attolia had listened, appearing impassive and growing angrier and angrier. She’d sent no official notification to Eddis that Attolia held her Thief. She had only waited, deliberating on his fate, expecting Eddis to make some effort to retrieve him, not expecting the mission that arrived on her doorstep to toss threats in her face the way a man might bait a dog.

  She had ascended her throne after the assassination of her father, and her country had never been fully at peace in her reign. Her army was well paid and therefore loyal, but her treasury was nearly empty. She awaited a good harvest to fill it again, and the ambassador from Eddis threatened that harvest. First, of course, he’d offered a ransom that he’d known she wouldn’t accept. Then he’d politely insulted her several times over, and finally he’d told her that the gates of the Hamiathes Reservoir were closed and would remain so until the Thief of Eddis was returned home. The waters of the Hamiathes Reservoir flowed into the Aracthus River and from there into the irrigation channels that watered some of the most fertile land in her country. Without the water the crops would wither in the summer heat.

  She’d sent for the Thief. Eugenides, when he was brought before her, blinked owlishly, like a nocturnal animal dragged out of its den into the daylight. The black-and-yellow-and-green bruise across his forehead showed through his hair. The split in the skin just above his eyebrows had scabbed over, but the dried blood was still on his face, and the black marks under his eyes were darker than the bruise above. The mud on his torn clothes was still damp.

  “Your queen’s ambassador has offered to ransom you, Thief, but I declined.”

  Eugenides was hardly surprised.

  “You would only come sneaking back through my palaces, leaving notes beside my breakfast dishes. I told your queen’s ambassador I wouldn’t take a ransom of any size for you, and do you know what he said?”

  Eugenides couldn’t guess.

  “He told me the water of the Aracthus won’t flow until your queen has you back again. She’s closed the gate from the reservoir in the mountains, and all my crops above the Seperchia will burn in the fields until you are sent home. What do you think of that?”

  Eugenides thought it was a very good plan, but that it wasn’t going to work.

  The queen had lost face to Eugenides, and her court knew it. Moreover, she could hardly settle for a ransom she’d already refused. She had to consider that Eugenides, though he’d caused her no harm beyond stealing something she hadn’t known she possessed, could become the measurable danger to her that he was to Sounis. Attolia ran her index finger lightly back and forth across her lower lip while she thought.

  Attolia had seen the text of a message Eddis sent to Sounis the year before suggesting that no lock on window or door in his palace would save him if she had to send her Thief to call on him again. All Sounis’s machinations to undermine the rule of Eddis had ceased.

  Attolia suspected that more than a third of her own barons had accepted Sounis’s money at one time or another to finance their revolts. She wished that she had such a tool as Eugenides to use against him, but only Eddis had the tradition of a Queen’s Thief. Bitterly, Attolia admitted to herself that if there were an Attolian Thief, he’d be more threat to her than aid.

  She knew that the walls of her own palace were as porous to Eugenides as the megaron of Sounis, and she didn’t think that if she let him go, she could catch him a second time. There was no question of letting him go. She had heard that he had an aversion to killing people, but, like Sounis, she was reluctant to assume that a childish reluctance for bloodshed would prevent him from following the orders of his queen. He had already proven himself to be extremely loyal.

  She stepped down from the dais to stand before Eugenides. He didn’t look much worried about his possible fate. He seemed more interested in the pattern inlaid in gold on the marble tiles at his feet. She waited, and he slowly lifted his head. He wasn’t unconcerned about his fate. He was frightened of dying and more frightened of what might come to him before he died, but the pain in his head made it hard for him to think what he might say to save himself.

  He looked at her and tilted his head very slightly in wonder. He had forgotten, as he always forgot, how beautiful she was. Her hair was held away from her face by the ruby and gold headband that crossed her forehead just above her dark brows. Her skin was flawless and so fair as to be translucent. She dressed as always in imitation of Hephestia, but it was far easier to imagine the impersonal cruelty of the Great Goddess than to see cruelty in the face of the queen of Attolia. Looking at her, Eugenides smiled.

  Attolia saw his smile, without any hint of self-effacement or flattery or opportunism, a smile wholly unlike that of any member of her court, and she hit him across the face with her open hand. His head rocked on his shoulders. He made no sound but dropped to his knees, fighting nausea.

  “Your Majesty,” said the Eddisian ambassador harshly, and the queen swung around to face him.

  “Do not offend the gods,” he warned her.

  Attolia turned back to Eugenides and his guards. “Hang him,” she said. “Take him out now and hang him. Send his body back to Eddis, and we’ll see if the Aracthus flows.” She stalked back to her throne and spoke from there to the Eddisians. “Remember that your gods are not mine. Nor will they be,” she said.

  She sat on the throne and watched as Eugenides was lifted to his feet by the guards. He had his hands cupped over his face, covered by his dark hair.

  Beside her the ambassador from the Mede Empire shifted his weight and caught her attention.

  “I don’t know what Eddis thought she could accomplish,” Attolia said. “She can hardly hold back a river forever.”

  “Long enough,” suggested the Mede, “to insure her Thief a relatively easy death?”

  Attolia turned to look at him, then back thoughtfully at Eugenides.

  “This queen of Eddis is very clever,” the Mede said softly, bending closer. “She knows how some of your other prisoners have died. You will let her Thief go so quickly?”

  “Stop,” she said, and the guards did as they were told. Eugenides hung from their arms. He was carefully placing his feet and straightening himself while the queen considered.

  Whatever her neighboring monarchs thought, she very rarely made hasty decisions, and she didn’t engage in violence gratuitously. If she executed traitors by hanging them off a city’s walls upside down until they were dead, it was because she couldn’t afford the luxury of beheading them in private, as Sounis did. Everything she did had to be calculated for its effect, and she had meant to think carefully before she chose a suitable punishment for Eugenides, something that would provide an example for unruly members of her aristocracy as well as satisfy her deep and abiding hatred of the queen of Eddis and her Thief. She resented being stampeded into a decision by Eddis and knew that the Mede was right; her anger had been exactly the object of the Eddisian ambassador’s insults. He had indeed argued skillfully.

  Attolia didn’t particularly care for the new ambassador from Medea. His oily style of compliments and indirection didn’t suit her, but that was the required form in the court he came from, and he was certainly insightful and in this case quite accurate.

  The waters of the Aracthus would eventually overfill its reservoir and flood Eddis’s capital city if the dam remained closed. For Attolia, the death of the Thief was worth the loss of a season’s harvest, but his death was the least Attolia could accomplish and the best that Eddis could hope for. There was no reason to satisfy Eddis’s hopes, and she had every desire to confound them.

  “Bring him here,” she said, and the guards obediently brought Eugenides back to the base of the throne. Attolia leaned forward in her chair to look at him. He swallowed convulsively but met her eyes without flinching even as she cupped her hand under his chin.

  “That was hasty of me,” she said. She continued to stare into Eugenides’s face but spoke to the guards. “Take him back to his cell and let him wait. I believ
e,” she said slowly, “I will think a little more before I decide what’s best to do with you.”

  Eugenides looked at her without expression. He turned his head to go on looking at her over his shoulder as he was led away. She wondered if he guessed what punishment she had in mind. Let the Eddisian babble about offending the gods, Attolia thought, sitting back in her throne. They were not her gods, and she would not worship them.

  “A pity about the ransom,” she said.

  “Not a significant sum, surely?” the Mede beside her replied.

  “Not to your emperor, perhaps,” said Attolia. “Here on this coast of the middle sea, where we are less wealthy, I could put a sum like that to good use.”

  “Then take it please, as a gift from my emperor,” said the Mede, as Attolia had hoped he would.

  “You jest?” she asked the Mede.

  “Not at all,” he answered. “Nothing would please my master the emperor more than to be of assistance to so lovely a ruler as yourself.” He made an elaborate bow, and Attolia smiled, very pleased.

  CHAPTER THREE

  EUGENIDES STOOD IN HIS CELL with his shoulders against the damp wall. Resting the back of his head against the stones made the front hurt worse, so he dropped his head toward his chest. He didn’t want to go back to sleep. He imagined his grandfather waiting for him at the gates of the afterworld, and he didn’t want to have to tell him that he’d spent the last few hours allotted to him napping. The old man would not be impressed by false nonchalance.

  All the tools of his trade were still tucked into their pockets in his clothes, but none of them was of any use. No part of the locking mechanism on the door was accessible. Eugenides had checked.

  Pulling himself away from the wall, he staggered along it. His balance was off, and he kept his right hand on the wall to steady himself, feeling the cool stones with his fingertips. There was a gouge in the heel of the hand. The pain from that wound distracted him from the worse one in his head, and from the innumerable tears where the dogs had caught him with their teeth.