The Queen of Attolia Read online

  “If you had more time, Galen wouldn’t let you in anyway.”

  “True.” The queen agreed. “And he listens to make sure I don’t upset you. I’ll bet his ear is flat against the door even as we speak,” she whispered, and got a rare smile in response.

  She leaned back in her chair and pulled the thin gold circlet from her head in order to run her fingers through her short hair. “I’m going to pull it all out before I’m thirty,” she said. “I swear there’s someone asking me one thing or another from the moment I wake up until the time I close my eyes at night. When Xanthe wakes me in the morning, she asks me if I’d like my breakfast. I wish she’d just put it in front of me. It would be one less decision to make.”

  He didn’t ask what decisions kept her preoccupied. She didn’t tell him. “I’ll see you in a few days, if I can.” She leaned over the bed to kiss him on the forehead. “Eat something,” she said, and left.

  In Attolia the queen listened carefully to a report sent by her ambassador in Eddis.

  “The fever didn’t kill him,” she observed.

  “It seems not, Your Majesty.”

  “Very well,” she said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE EARLY FALL IN THE mountains had already come when Eugenides decided he’d looked long enough at his ceiling and dragged himself out of bed to look out the window. There was frost on the ground in the front courtyard. An army messenger was riding in on a mountain pony shaggy with its winter coat. Eugenides turned away and went to sit in the chair by the fire that was waiting for him. He was wrapped in a warm robe and had slippers on his feet. The stump of his arm was bound in a clean white bandage. The bandage was unnecessary; the wound was healed, but Eugenides didn’t want to look at it, and keeping it bandaged seemed the easiest solution.

  His left hand, taking over the tasks of his right, seemed clumsy and uncoordinated, though Eugenides’s grandfather had always insisted that both hands be trained to serve interchangeably. Eugenides supposed they worked equally well with the thieves’ tools, and buttons were no difficulty, but buckling a belt was tedious, and his grandfather had never insisted he practice sweeping his hair out of his face and hooking it behind his right ear with his left hand. An oversight on his grandfather’s part, now revealed. Eugenides looked into the flames for a while, then ran his fingers through his hair, which had grown enough to fall down over his eyes, and looked around the room. There was a bookcase to the left of the fireplace and his desk to the right. Pushed to the back of the desk was an awkward pile of papers. In the center of the pile, he supposed, was the scroll he’d been recopying before he’d gone to Attolia. If it was there, it was hidden by the bowls and bandages and phials of different concoctions left by Galen and his assistants. The desk chair was missing. It had been moved to the library when they’d brought in an armchair to sit between the foot of his bed and the fireplace.

  He stood up to poke at the papers at the back of the desk, but the medical detritus took up too much space for there to be any room for sorting. At some point ink had spilled across the text he’d been copying, obscuring the left half of a long paragraph. Eugenides sighed. He would probably remember most of the words, but they would still need to be checked carefully against another reliable copy. He rolled the scroll up and tossed it back into the pile of papers, then sighed again. There were few reliable copies of Thales’s original thoughts on the basic elements of the universe. That’s why his scroll was valuable and why he had been copying it. If it was left at the back of the desk much longer, it was likely to be completely ruined. It should have been returned to its case and reshelved in the library.

  He made himself go look for the case and found most of his books, scrolls, and other materials shifted into piles on one of the library tables. He searched through the piles until he found the case labeled with Thales’s name and the title of the work. He slid the scroll into it and slid the case back into its slot on the library’s shelves. Then he went back to his chair by the fire. He was dozing there when Galen came by. He had a small amphora of lethium, and he carefully refilled the phial on Eugenides’s desk.

  “The library’s a mess,” Eugenides said.

  “I had noticed that,” said Galen. “I went looking for the Aldmenedian drawings of the human body last week, and I couldn’t find them.”

  “So why hasn’t anyone cleaned it up?”

  “It’s your library.”

  “It isn’t. It’s the queen’s library. I just live here.”

  “Whoever’s library it is, I would say you’re the only one who’s going to set it to rights.” He started to leave.

  “Galen,” Eugenides said.

  “Yes?”

  “Get your trash off my desk. I want to use it.”

  Galen snorted. “I’ll see if I can find someone who’s not too busy.”

  Despite Galen’s unsympathetic words, one of his assistants showed up in the afternoon to collect the medicines, bowls, and the unused bandages. Eugenides looked at the remaining clutter but didn’t move to sort it. He turned away and stared into the fire for the rest of the afternoon. The desk sat untouched.

  In the morning he picked up the pen nibs that had been spilled. He dropped them one by one into their case, where they landed with tiny ticking sounds. When the case was full, he stirred them with one finger before he fitted the lid into place and went back to sitting in front of the fire.

  Every morning, when the sunlight forced its way around the edges of the window curtains, trimming them in light, he dragged himself out of bed and went to the desk to clear something away before he sat down in the armchair. He wasn’t used to being awake in the morning. He was used to being awake late in the night, when the rest of the palace was sleeping. He sat in front of the fire until early afternoon, then went back to bed until evening. Galen came to check on him every few days. Eddis and his father alternated in their weekly visits. Except for the servants who delivered trays of food, he was alone. He stayed in the quiet of his study, and no one bothered him.

  When the desk was clear of all but a small phial of lethium, a few drops of which he took every night in order to sleep, he moved on to the library. One day that, too, was tidy, and he had to think of a new reason to get out of bed in the morning. Finally he got up to collect a few scraps of paper and one of his pens and sat down to see what writing with his left hand was going to be like.

  He had to open the ink bottle with his teeth. The paper slid on the desk and needed to be held in place. If he used his stump, the bandages didn’t give him any purchase unless he pressed down quite firmly. The stump was tender, and it hurt. If he used his forearm, he not only covered up most of the paper he was trying to write on, he covered the top part of it—meaning that as he wrote, he would smear what he’d written. Sighing, he got back up and went into the library and over to the chest that held maps in wide, flat drawers. There was a deeper drawer at the top to hold map weights, but it was almost empty. Only two mismatched weights were left. There was a third he almost overlooked at the back. Eugenides put them in the pocket of his robe and carried them to his desk. They held the paper in place. He dipped the pen into the ink and began trying to write.

  He practiced his writing a little every day and was working on it one afternoon when someone crossed the library to knock on the frame of his open door. He looked up to find his father’s secretary standing with another man just behind him.

  “Yes?” said Eugenides.

  “I’ve brought a tailor,” said the secretary. “Your father mentioned that you might need your dinner clothes refitted or a new set altogether before you can come down for dinner.”

  “Am I coming down for dinner?” Eugenides asked. He hadn’t thought about it. Now that it had been brought to mind, he longed for a permanent excuse to miss the formal dinners with the queen and her court.

  The secretary looked at him without speaking. The tailor waited patiently.

  “I guess I’ll have to, eventually,” said Eugenides, a
nd rinsed his pen. “I don’t know why the old suit won’t fit, though.”

  The tailor helped him dress, doing up the buttons on the undershirt when Eugenides fumbled with them. Dressed, Eugenides bunched in his hand the extra fabric of what had been a fitted overshirt.

  “I’m thinner,” he said, surprised.

  “Probably because you don’t eat,” muttered the tailor through the pins in his mouth, and looked up in time to catch a warning glance from the minister of war’s secretary. He looked back down at the cloth he was pinning, but he didn’t forget the rumors he’d heard. Having seen the queen’s Thief with his own eyes, he thought that they were probably true: that the Thief sent his food back to the palace kitchen without touching it, that he kept to his room, seeing no one, that he’d probably die soon, and the whole city grieving as if he were already gone and that vicious bitch of Attolia to blame. The tailor shrugged and paid close attention to his work.

  “The undershirt will have to be recut,” he said. “I might need a few days to get it done.”

  “Take your time,” said Eugenides.

  The gibbous moon, slightly more than half full, shone from a clear sky on the queen’s palace in Attolia. In the summertime, when the palace windows were open, she could lie in the darkness of her bedchamber and listen to the wheels of the heavy carts rumbling in the streets as farmers dragged their produce into the city for the morning market. It was winter. The windows were closed, and when she woke and looked into the darkness around her, the room was silent. She flicked the covers off with an angry sigh and stood up. From the doorway to an anteroom, an attendant appeared. She collected a robe and gracefully slid it over the outstretched arms, settling it on her mistress’s shoulders.

  “Does Your Majesty require something?” she asked.

  “Solitude,” said the queen of Attolia. “Leave me.” The attendant dutifully left her post and went to stand in the hallway outside the queen’s chambers. The queen moved to a window and pulled aside the heavy curtains to look at the moon while passing a sleepless night, one of many.

  When Eugenides paused in the entranceway to the lesser throne room, those closest to him halted their conversations, puzzled to see a stranger in the doorway, then shocked when they recognized him. He looked older, and unfamiliar after his absence. He’d had the barber clip his hair short again, and his right arm was hidden in a sling. As the court looked him over, silence spread away from the bottom of the stair into the throne room like a wave through a small pond, and he stood immobilized by the stares.

  “Eugenides,” said the queen.

  He turned to find her in the crowd. She held out a hand, and he stepped down the stairs and across the throne room to take it and bow over it.

  “My Queen,” he said.

  “My Thief,” she answered.

  He lifted his head. She squeezed his hand, and he forbore to argue with her.

  “Dinner, I think,” said the queen, and the court moved into the Ceremonial Hall, where dinner would be served at the queen’s pleasure and a little earlier than the kitchen had planned. Cursing under his breath, the chef rose to the occasion.

  Eugenides sat between a baroness and a duchess, the queen’s younger sister. The loudest sounds in the room were the footsteps of servers bringing the food. People tended to look in sequence at Eugenides, then at the queen, and then at the plates in front of them. Someone coughed or cleared his throat. Someone at the far end of the table mentioned the harvest, which had been good, and the duchess to his right picked up the thread of the conversation. She chatted about the weather, which was cold. It was winter, so that wasn’t surprising. When the food came, Eugenides ate the vegetables. He left the meat, because he couldn’t cut it, and ate a small piece of bread without spreading cheese on it, because he couldn’t do that either.

  Wine was served with dinner, and when he finished his first serving, his cup was refilled. It was a ceramic cup with a tall, narrow stem and a flared top. Eugenides admired the design painted around the inner rim as he drank from it. Centaurs chased each other in a circle, their bows drawn and arrows notched. Two hands, Eugenides thought to himself, and put the cup down empty.

  When dinner was over and the queen stood, Eugenides stood with the rest of the court. Three fingers splayed unobtrusively on the table, with the knuckles turning white, kept him from swaying. He stayed at his place while his dinner partners excused themselves and drifted off. His father came to slide a hand under Eugenides’s good arm, and Eugenides thankfully shifted his balance to lean against him.

  “Did they not water the wine tonight?” he asked.

  “Same mix as usual, I think. Two parts water.” That was only civilized.

  When the room was empty, his father helped Eugenides away from the table and then upstairs to his room.

  “I won’t need the lethium tonight anyway,” Eugenides said as they reached the door. “Wine’s a pleasant substitute.” He felt his father stiffen. “I was joking,” he said, not sure that he had been.

  The second dinner was much the same. Eugenides’s food arrived in front of him cut into bite-sized pieces, and every diner had a small bowl of olive oil to dip the bread into instead of cheese. Except that he had to reach across his plate to get the bread into the olive oil, everything went well. The conversation was the same. The harvest and the weather. The rest of the table spoke in hushed tones, difficult to overhear. Eugenides drank less and stared at his plate, unwilling to watch the queen carefully not watching him.

  The third night he didn’t appear. His place sat empty at the table. When dinner was over and his father went upstairs to look for him, Eugenides was waiting, dressed in his formal clothes, sitting on his bed. He was leaning against the headboard and had his boots up on the spread. The fabric for his sling lay in a limp bundle across his lap. He looked up at his father, his face bleak.

  “I couldn’t face it again,” he said.

  He dropped his gaze to the toes of his boots. “I already know the harvest was good, and the weather’s still cold. I could try again in the spring.”

  “Tomorrow,” said his father, and left.

  Eugenides tilted over until his face was buried in a pillow.

  When he fell asleep, he dreamed the queen of Attolia was dancing in her garden in a green dress with white flowers embroidered around the collar. It started to snow, dogs hunted him through the darkness, and the sword, red in the firelight, was above him, and falling. The queen stopped dancing to watch. He woke with his throat raw from screaming, still in his clothes, lying on top of the bedcovers.

  He stumbled into the library and sat there in front of the empty fireplace. The room was cold. If it had been a month before, one of Galen’s assistants would have been sleeping in the library, ready with the lethium when Eugenides opened his eyes, and Eugenides would have been unconscious again before the visions of his nightmares had had time to clear from behind his eyelids.

  He sat in the cold library for several hours without stirring the coals of the banked fire. Only at dawn did he move back into the warmer room, where he stretched out on the bed, still dressed, and slept again.

  “And the Thief?”

  “The Thief, Your Majesty?”

  Attolia drummed her fingers on the armrest of her chair. She was in a small receiving room to interview the man who collected information for her from various sources. His official title was Secretary of the Archives.

  “The Thief, Relius. Is he recovering?”

  “Our ambassador in Eddis can provide only limited information these days, but he says Eugenides seems to be recovering slowly. He attends the court dinners about once a week. He seems very little interested in the political situation. It is not discussed on the nights he attends dinner. He doesn’t otherwise leave his rooms.”

  “Does he see the queen?”

  “Not often. She is very busy, of course.”

  “Does he see anyone else?”

  “I understand that his father visits from time to time,
but he does not invite other company. They say he suffers from nightmares,” he added.

  “I’m sure he does.” The queen snorted delicately.

  Relius was looking pointedly over her shoulder. Attolia turned to see the ambassador from Medea, who’d entered the room behind her without being announced.

  “Nahuseresh,” she said, twisting in her chair to hold out both of her hands, which he took and bowed over. He was a remarkably attractive man, she thought, or he would be were it not for his beard, which he dyed crimson and divided in the middle and greased into two neatly oiled points. He might, if he remained in Attolia, give up the Medean style of dressing his beard, but he’d been at her court for some time and showed no signs of acclimating. “I didn’t realize that you’d joined us,” she said.

  “I have committed a great transgression by sneaking in behind you,” said the Mede. “I beg Your Majesty will condescend to forgive me.” He bowed again and kissed her hands.

  “Of course.” The queen smiled. “But give me back my fingers. It is awkward to sit like this.”

  The Mede laughed and relinquished her hands.

  “You seem very interested in the welfare of this Eddisian, Your Majesty,” said the ambassador. “Surely he’s no threat. What can he do with one hand?”

  “I met his grandfather once, many years ago. He told me a thief’s greatest asset, like a queen’s, was his mind.”

  “He sounds overly familiar,” said Nahuseresh with disapproval.