Return of the Thief Read online

  “You stay with him, if you want,” said the other attendant, brushing past.

  Philo crouched down to reassure me. “They are just dummies,” he said, “made of stuffing. They hold the king’s coats.” Encouraged, I looked more closely and saw that he was right. The dim figures only appeared to be shifting in the flickering lamplight from the hallway. I had not been cast into an underworld dungeon with headless monsters. I was in a closet.

  “He has a lot of coats,” said Philologos soberly. Then he smiled and I managed to take a breath, in and out, with only a tiny leftover hiccup in the middle. Tentatively, I plucked at the sheeting to make it more like bedclothes and less like a shroud.

  “Lie down,” Philologos suggested.

  I put my head on the pillow. He straightened the sheeting and laid a blanket over me before he left. I curled around the pain in my hip and my leg. Too tired to force my limbs to be still, I lay with the muscles in my leg jumping and cramping until I fell into a restless, twitching sleep.

  “Send him back,” said the queen. “Erondites has had his joke at your expense.”

  Eugenides went on pacing.

  “Then what?” he asked. “I have already agreed that his eldest grandson could be reinstated as his heir. I can send this child back to Suterpe—I can’t force Erondites to send Juridius to the palace in his place.”

  “Keep the boy or send him back, Juridius will be raised by his grandfather,” said the queen. “And when the baron is satisfied that Juridius is loyal only to the Erondites, he will eliminate this pretend heir he has foisted on you.”

  “Unless he thinks I will someday free Sejanus. Then he will cut both of them out of the inheritance.”

  “I do not think Marina would be pleased by that,” said Attolia.

  I woke in the dark with my throat on fire. Even the meager light from the lamp in the hall was gone. I longed for my nurse. Melisande would have known what was wrong: too much banging in that box on wheels, too many days without real rest, too much shouting, too much of everything. She would have stroked my head and fetched me cool water to drink, but I was alone and the palace silent all around me. Weeping into my hands, I eventually fell asleep again, to be surrounded in my dreams by looming headless figures.

  Nudged by a foot, I woke again, this time in the diffuse light from the closet’s small opening to an airshaft. The owner of the foot leaned over me briefly and then backed away, leaving me alone again in my misery. I was often ill, and used to it, but I’d never been without Melisande to comfort me. I was very afraid I would die and was in no way relieved by the appearance of a thin, balding man in the doorway.

  “Has anybody brought him a drink?” the man asked angrily. “Has anyone done anything for him at all?”

  “Well, we didn’t put a pillow over his face,” said someone out in the passage.

  “Get some water,” snapped the man as he bent down beside me. He took away the covers, even as I clutched at them. Having worked for years at the charity hospital, he was used to ungrateful patients. “If you bite, I will put a stick between your teeth,” he warned, but he needn’t have worried. I hardly had the strength to bite by then. He poked me in the stomach and counted my ribs, listened to my breathing, and looked in my ears as well as down my throat. He was very thorough, and when he was done, he tucked the covers back around me.

  “You’ll be fine in a day or two,” he said, with a reassuring gentleness. “I will give you very nasty-tasting medicine to be sure of it,” he added, taking the cup that had been brought to him and mixing into it a vile liquid that was everything he had promised.

  “Miras’s golden balls,” said Dionis behind him. “He can’t even drink.”

  Petrus—because this was indeed the royal physician—sighed. “Not everything that is easy for you is easy for the rest of us. Why don’t you go away, Dionis?”

  “The king wants to know if he’ll live.”

  “It’s a diseased throat. If he throws off the fever, he will be well in a few days.”

  Dionis left, and Petrus leaned over me again with the cup. “I know it tastes bad, and I know it’s hard to swallow,” he said. “But drink it up. You’re better off sleeping through today’s festivities anyway.”

  The next time I woke, it was night again. The dark figure crouched over me seemed an apparition from my fevered dreams.

  “Shh,” said a heavily accented voice. “Sit up now and have a drink.”

  Melisande, I thought. Even far away, she knew what I needed. Imagining her melting honeycombs in the fire, calling on Ula, goddess of the hearth and healing, to aid me, I struggled to sit up, took the cup pushed into my hand, and sipped cool water, scented with lemon, sure that this strange messenger had been sent in answer to my nurse’s prayers.

  “Better than that oily piss Petrus makes you drink,” he said, his words rough and rolling like bobbins. I wondered that Ula’s messengers were so vulgar.

  Heaven-sent or not, the water was delicious, and I drained the cup to the last drop before holding it out for an unseen hand to take away. I lay down, and the same hand rested on my forehead for a moment like a blessing before he was gone.

  Petrus came to check on me every day as my sore throat and fever waxed and waned. With his high forehead and his chin beard, he looked like a satyr missing his horns, but he was far kinder than his appearance suggested. The man with the strange accent came as well, but only in the night. He was not one of Ula’s messengers, as I’d first thought, and might have been a servant or one of the attendants. He never said.

  When Petrus finally reported that I was well enough to be up, Philologos brought loose-fitting underclothes and a robe, and when I was dressed he led me to the king’s waiting room. He instructed me to sit on the bench that ran around its walls and then went to take his part in the morning ritual of dressing the king. Used to the elegance of the Villa Suterpe, I was unimpressed by the king’s apartments. The attendants’ sleeping quarters were a tight warren of narrow passages and curtained doorways, while the guard room and the waiting room were one and the same, separated from the king’s bedchamber by a single door. The waiting room’s furniture was mismatched, its hearth was small, and its paneled walls mostly plain. The only interesting things to look at were the decorative medallions hung where the panels joined. They held meticulously carved hunting scenes of men and dogs and horses. I did not think it an odd choice at the time.

  The door to the king’s bedchamber was arched like the entry to a skep. I was strongly reminded of bees as the attendants went in and out, conferring in low voices as they brought items of clothing or returned them to their closets. Some of the items went by more than once. I saw a gold sash twice and a blue one four times. Eventually the back-and-forth slowed down and the king strolled through the room without stopping, not even pausing to glance in my direction. Those who would attend him that day followed after, the double doors to the passageway closed behind them, and everyone left in the room stared at me.

  “He’s to have clothes for tomorrow,” said Hilarion heavily.

  I had been sent to the palace in time to be an eyesore at the wedding of Sounis and Eddis. Instead I had been ill and slept through it. Having recovered, I was expected to attend the elaborate ceremony during which Attolia and Eddis and Sounis would swear loyalty to Eugenides as the high king over all the rulers of the Little Peninsula. I might have been left in my closet for the day, but the king had decreed otherwise.

  Just then, a tall, elegant man swept into the waiting room, Ion, second only to Hilarion in authority over the attendants. With his dark curls held back in his fist, he was obviously in search of a hair tie. “Lamion, have you stolen my velvet . . . Oh, the little monster is better,” he said in surprise. “Does it speak? Do you speak?” he asked me directly, and I stared back at him.

  Hilarion shook his head. “Erondites’s men say he doesn’t.”

  “So, it’s a quiet monster. We should count our blessings. Gods willing it will not snore like D
ionis.” He bent to stare into my face. “Do you understand me, do you understand what I am saying?” he said, and I looked down.

  “The king wants him outfitted as an attendant,” a stocky man grumbled. That was Dionis.

  “Fetch the tailor, then,” Ion said with a shrug.

  “Why don’t you do it?” But Dionis was speaking to Ion’s disappearing back. He’d seen his velvet hair tie on Lamion and gone to find himself another.

  The tailor must have been in the palace, as he arrived very quickly with a stool he wanted me to stand on. Even he could see that if I do not keep my feet well spread I will fall over, so huffing and puffing with irritation, he put his stool aside and crouched down to take my measurements. While he measured, the attendants watched and talked. Ion returned and I listened carefully, learning their names as I heard them.

  “Hard to believe that a man would send out in public a grandson like that,” said one. Sotis.

  “Seems like he’s the butt of his own joke if that’s the kind of heir he has.” Dionis.

  “He is a step up from Sejanus.” Sotis again, and everyone laughed.

  Sejanus was my uncle, every bit as beautiful as Ion and highly esteemed in the palace, or so I’d previously believed. My mother’s brother, he had always been received at the Villa Suterpe with open arms, as he was an excellent hunting companion to my father and brought delightful tidbits of gossip from the capital. The servants fawned on him, and even I looked forward to his visits. He’d once slipped me a cake without alerting anyone else to my presence underneath a table. That was more kindness than I’d had from any other member of my family.

  “He’s Susa’s grandson, too. Susa can’t be happy to have him paraded about.” That was Xikander.

  “The king is going to send him back, isn’t he?” asked Xikos, Xikander’s brother. There was a communal sort of shrug. Clearly none of them knew what the king would do.

  Snarling in exasperation, the tailor seized me by the arm and shook me violently. I bared my teeth at him, and he smacked me.

  “None of that,” said Hilarion.

  “He won’t stand still!” said the tailor.

  “He’s still enough, get on with it.” Sullenly, the tailor hunched back down. I moved again, easing the weight off my bad leg, daring the tailor to object.

  “Does anyone know what his name is? The king said to find out.”

  “If he’s the firstborn of Susa’s family, he should have been Juridius.”

  “I heard from Xippias that his mother gave him Erondites’s name for spite,” said Dionis.

  “Pheris,” Ion said, and I turned obediently to look at him, knowing it would annoy the tailor again.

  “Are you Pheris?” Ion asked, and I nodded.

  “Pheris Mostrus Erondites?” asked Ion, and I nodded again, hesitantly, unaccustomed to the new house name.

  Sotis laughed. “Pheris Monstrous Erondites.” He thought he was clever.

  “Quiet, Sotis,” said Ion.

  Hilarion was also amused, but it wasn’t me he was laughing at. “That’s what they call his grandfather, you know.”

  “So?” asked Sotis.

  I was equally surprised.

  “So, so, so,” confirmed Ion. “Not to his face, of course.”

  I could understand that.

  “He is Pheris, then,” said Xikos.

  “Unless he nods at everything,” said the sleek, black-haired Medander. He leaned toward me. “Are you horse? Are you dog?” he asked. “Are you filth?”

  “He’s Pheris,” said Hilarion. “Stop teasing him.”

  “What do you think, Pheris?” Medander asked, modulating his tone. He was always reluctant to take orders from Hilarion but wouldn’t defy him directly. “Do you want to go home to Grandfather?” My whole body shuddered at the thought, and they all laughed.

  When the tailor was finished, they gave me some watered wine and honey cakes and sent me back to bed. Out of sight of the attendants and the guards, I explored the labyrinth of the king’s apartments, finding storage and bedchambers and the necessaries. Back in my closet, I sat on my pallet of blankets, sipping from my cup. The sound of my nurse’s wails as they had carried me away from the villa still rang in my ears. Out of sight, out of mind, she’d taught me. That was the way to stay safe. As I considered what I had seen and heard, I saw no chance of staying out of sight and no safety at all in my future. To be honest, I saw no future.

  The results of the tailor’s hard work arrived that evening. Not even my brother Juridius, apple of my mother’s eye, had clothes like the ones Xikos casually tossed at my head.

  “Put those on,” he said, “and then get out of the way. We need to dress the king for dinner.”

  I sorted through the collection in my lap and found a fine white undershirt, plain, stitched at the seams with stitches so small I could hardly see them, a sleeveless velvet vest in Attolian blue embroidered in gold, and a pair of trousers, loose in the leg, with a tight cuff at the bottom. I was relieved to see that they buttoned at the top, which meant I wouldn’t have to ask anyone to tie the strings on my pants. The vest was double-breasted in the Eddisian style. When the frogs were secured, the embroidery across the front resolved into a gryphon on one side facing a lion on the other, with lilies in between. I remember this as the first time I’d seen the unified crest of the Little Peninsula. There were slippers in the same sky blue as the vest. They’d measured me for boots, but those would have to be specially made to accommodate my foot, and that would take more time.

  Once I was dressed, I retreated to a corner, watching Dionis, the gray-haired attendant, stripping coats from the dummies and collecting pants and sashes from the racks that ran along the walls. His hands appeared to be as full when he returned and began to replace the coats on their holders. Ion came to help.

  Dionis looked put out, Ion only amused. As they finished their work and left, I heard muffled voices from the waiting room and then the sound of hurrying feet. I dove under the racked clothes, but not fast enough to evade Sotis. Grabbing me by my good foot, he pulled me out.

  “The king says you dine with us, and when the king commands, we obey. That means little monsters, too.” By the scruff of my neck, Sotis pushed me out of the attendants’ quarters to where the king was waiting. As he looked me over, I had my first chance to study Eugenides closely.

  He was missing a hand.

  I had not seen this before. I was raised by my nurse in an outbuilding—all I knew of this king was that he was an Eddisian who’d married our queen after some sort of trickery. I thought it unlikely he’d been born unnatural, much more likely he’d lost the hand in battle or perhaps in some prosaic way. One of the masons at the villa had had most of his lower arm cut off after his hand was crushed by a falling stone. I’d heard his fingers turned black.

  Philologos must have noticed the direction of my gaze. When the king finished his inspection and turned away, Philologos leaned close to say in a whisper, “The queen cut it off.”

  I think he meant merely to inform me and would have added more explanation, but Xikos added also in a whisper, a spite-filled one, “Don’t annoy the queen.”

  Philologos glared at him and then shook his head at me, as if I should pay Xikos no attention. But all the while, Xikos, eyebrows high, was nodding his head up and down.

  Philologos hissed, “Stop it.”

  “Don’t annoy the king, either,” said Sotis, leaning in.

  “Don’t annoy any of us,” said Hilarion, flipping my ear painfully and pointing to the empty doorway. I hastened through it.

  We proceeded to the megaron, the only space in Attolia’s palace large enough to hold the combined courts of Sounis, Attolia, and Eddis. Attolia joined us on the way, her guards and her attendants mirroring the king’s own. Furtively, I watched her, catching glimpses of her face as she turned to speak to the king. Sotis, I judged an unreliable informant, but Philologos had seemed quite sincere. I could see that the queen, for all her beauty, comman
ded respect. Everyone watched her just as they watched the king, ready to respond in an instant to their least direction.

  The first time I saw Attolia’s megaron, I could not imagine even a temple could be bigger or more astonishing. The rows of marble columns held the ceiling impossibly high. The gold leaf on the beams glittered in the light of candles in chandeliers that were great wheels of iron illuminating the room below. The famous blue-and-gold mosaic floors were almost invisible under the tables and benches needed to seat so many people.

  At the high table, Eddis and Sounis waited to greet the king and queen of Attolia with an exchange of kisses. When they sat, everyone else moved in concert to their own places. Philologos pointed and I went where I was told, scrambling awkwardly over the bench seat as the servants began bringing in trays of food; boys with ewers and amphorae moving from person to person, filling cups and brightly colored glasses.

  At the Villa Suterpe, Melisande and I had eaten on the couches that were our beds at night, from bowls made of plain fired clay. While I was staring at the wealth of sparkling, shining ceramic and glass—running a finger across the raised pattern on my plate—others were casting their glances at me and then at the king. Elbows were dug into rib cages and jokes were made. The king was pointedly speaking with the queen of Eddis to his left, ignoring it all.

  “Gods damn it,” said Hilarion beside me, too late.

  Sometime after that, the king said over his shoulder, “Sotis, where is my little Erondites?”

  Sotis leaned in to speak quietly. “Under the table, Your Majesty. It appears he is not used to sitting for his dinner.”

  I glared at his shoes. I was not allowed to sit at the table with my family. All my familiarity with tables such as these came from slipping under the cloths before the servants came to set them and creeping away when I was sure the diners had gone.

  “Hilarion thought it best not to make a scene,” explained Sotis.

  The king agreed. “People love a dancing bear,” he murmured. “No one wants to be one.”

  Under the head table, with people seated on only one side and a cloth that dropped almost to the floor on the other, I felt safe for the moment. I was hungry, but used to that. While everyone above me dined, I took my time admiring the embroidery on the queen’s dress. As the queen was very still, I could look my fill. Her skirts were covered in a pattern of interlacing branches, each leaf and blossom perfect in every detail. There was even a tiny nest at the hem, with two even smaller golden eggs nestled inside. I wondered who else but me would ever see them.