The Queen of Attolia Page 8

  Eugenides ignored him.

  “I have to go. I can hardly stay longer. My king isn’t going to declare war until Attolia has the pass under her control. The narrow ascent will make the attack costly for her, but Eddis has only a small army to hold the pass. She has no real defenses outside the natural terrain. When her army is gone, my king will attack from Sounis. If Eddis surrendered…it would be better. You can see that, can’t you, Gen?”

  Eugenides didn’t look at him and didn’t speak, not even to point out to the magus that only very close friends were entitled to call him by the shortened form of his name.

  “Gen, sitting in here isn’t going to help anything. You can talk sense to Eddis. Maybe you aren’t a Thief anymore, but you could still do something.”

  Eugenides lifted his head, but only to look into the middle distance beyond the walls of the library. The magus sighed and stood up. He patted Eugenides once on the shoulder and left without seeing how the Thief’s eyes narrowed, watching him go.

  He returned to his king in Sounis and told him he thought the Thief was no longer a danger to anyone, except perhaps himself. The best course of action was to join Attolia and seize Eddis. Sounis was delighted.

  He was in his private dining room, reclining on a couch as he picked at a late meal. As the magus talked, servants moved in and out carrying trays with tempting delicacies, most of which the king ate. The trays were offered to the magus, and he selected enough to avoid offense.

  “And when Eddis has surrendered, you think we will be able to hold all of it?” the king asked.

  “Attolia’s army will be wasted trying to secure the pass. You should be able to take it from her fairly easily. By then she will be deeply enmeshed with the Mede, trying to hold some power in her own country. Neither of them will have time to squabble over Eddis. If you secure Eddis quickly, you will be strong enough to outface the Mede when he tries to expand beyond Attolia.”

  “But our chances to take Attolia will be gone.”

  “For the present, yes.”

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘the present’?” the king asked.

  “Perhaps the next hundred years,” the magus answered, and the king snorted in irritation.

  “I thought you might mean that. Let’s keep our predictions to my lifetime, shall we?”

  “There’s little chance the Medes would lose their grip on Attolia within your lifetime, Your Majesty,” the magus said stiffly. “Remember that Eddis will not be assimilated immediately. It will take at least a year to reorganize the various ministries under Sounisian control.”

  The king flashed his magus a dark look. “Let us hope my lifetime is not so brief,” he said.

  “Of course not, Your Majesty,” the magus murmured. “The reorganization of the government will be only one of many steps. Eddis has a superb fighting force. You will want to integrate it into your own forces without diminishing its worth.”

  “Eddis should have married me,” Sounis said abruptly. “Do you think she still might?”

  “It would be in our interests, Sire.”

  “Ours, but not hers?”

  “Eddis has been independent for a long time, Your Majesty. They will not give up easily.”

  “They will give up in the end, though,” said Sounis confidently, picking over the tray beside him for the pastry of his choice.

  “Oh, yes,” the magus agreed, as confident. “They are a small country with few resources outside their mines and their trees. Sounis will have them in the end.” When the king dismissed him, he returned to his study to make careful notes for the history he was writing of the war the Sounisians had fought centuries before while struggling to stay free of the powerful invaders from the Peninsula. He hoped to use the knowledge he acquired in the exercise to aid him in a more successful defense against the Mede.

  “What of the Thief?” the queen of Attolia asked. Her ambassador and his staff were still confined to their rooms in Eddis’s palace, but there were those willing to pass information to Attolia. Their reports were unreliable, but they were all her secretary had to answer his queen’s persistent questions.

  “No one has seen the Thief,” the secretary of the archives told her. “He no longer comes down to dinner.”

  “Reassuring news,” the queen said.

  “Surely he is in no way a threat, Your Majesty?” Relius asked, puzzled by her continued interest in the crippled Thief of Eddis.

  “I don’t think he is a threat, Relius, but he bears watching. To be certain that he was no threat, I should have had both his hands cut off and probably his feet, too.” She thought for a moment about the words of the Thief’s grandfather and corrected herself. “To be entirely certain, I should have hanged him, but the traditional punishment seems to have been effective so far. Do watch him. If there’s any sign that he has come out of his internal exile, I want to know about it.”

  Relius’s spies continued to report that the Thief had retreated to his rooms and admitted no one, not even his father. His queen never attempted a visit. She never spoke of him, and evidently no one else at court dared to. Those who needed the books or scrolls from the library made their selections and carried them away to read elsewhere. There were not many scholars in Eddis.

  Galen alone forced himself on Eugenides. He had a key to the door connecting Eugenides’s retreat to the library, and Eugenides could hardly barricade himself in. Galen, however, was not one of Relius’s informants. Relius knew that he left increasing amounts of lethium for the Thief, and that was all. Not even the servants, leaving food in the library and returning to collect empty trays, saw Eugenides.

  He remained in his rooms as the winter eased and the spring came.

  Snow gradually turned to rain in the mountains, and twisting ropes of solid ice melted into eager streams of bone-chilling water that hurried down the mountain slopes toward their elder sister, the Seperchia River. In the pass that the Seperchia cut between the Hephestial Mountains and the coastal range, the streams were forced into narrow ditches and crossed the roadway there in stone-sided culverts. A temporary dam of branches in one culvert caused the water to back and deepen. When a stone shifted in its bed, the swirling water ate at the ground behind it. No one reset the stone, no one prevented the damage from spreading. The ground collapsed; stone and bank were washed away, with more stones following, knocked loose and dragged along by the flood.

  Elsewhere Eddis’s royal engineers diverted the water more deliberately, eroding years of careful work that had gone into maintaining the road that ran from Attolia’s capital, through Eddis, to the capital city of Sounis, carrying most of the trade between the three countries. In some places whole sections of the road disappeared in heaving muddy landslides, and the engineers, torn between satisfaction and anguish, reported to the queen that no army would reach the heights of the pass quickly.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SPRING CAME EARLIER ON THE coast than it did in the mountains, and Sounis’s summer was already near when the king’s magus woke one morning in the last hour before dawn with his ears ringing to find his room awash in moonlight. There was a sound like thunder still lingering in the air, and he left his bed to look out the window.

  “There isn’t much to see from here,” said a voice behind him. “You need a view of the harbor.”

  The magus turned to look for the Thief of Eddis and saw a shadow standing in a corner out of the moonlight.

  “Eugenides,” he said. He had recognized the voice.

  “Yes.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Not much yet,” answered the Thief from the darkness. “I remain fairly limited in my physical activities.” He held up his right arm, and the magus started before realizing that the hand he saw had to be a wooden one, concealed by a glove.

  Another booming explosion filled the air, and the magus turned back to the window but could see only a glare reflecting on the whitewashed walls of the buildings below.

  “I had to send so
meone else to light the fuses,” Eugenides said behind him.

  “Fuses?” asked the magus, with a sick feeling.

  “In the powder magazines of your warships,” Eugenides explained.

  “Powder magazines?”

  “You sound like the chorus in a play,” said Eugenides.

  “And the play is a tragedy, I suppose?”

  “A farce,” Eugenides suggested, and the magus winced.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “How many of your ships are burning? Four,” said Eugenides. “Five if the Eleutheria catches when the Hesperides burns. She probably will.”

  “The Principia?” The Principia was the largest ship in the navy. She carried more guns than two of the smaller ships put together.

  “Oh, yes,” said Eugenides, “she’s definitely gone.”

  The magus looked out again at the flickering reflections from the fires as his king’s navy burned in the harbor.

  “The sailors are all ashore for the Navy Festival,” he said.

  “Celebrating their naval superiority and control over most of the islands in the middle sea,” agreed Eugenides. “Sounis outdid himself this year with the free wine.”

  “Surely there was a guard on the ships, though,” protested the magus.

  “We put on our pretty Sounisian uniforms and paddled out there in a shore boat and told them they were relieved from duty by order of the king. Or rather, my loyal assistants did. I’m not much use in a rowboat these days.”

  The magus dropped his head into his hands. “We have no navy,” he said. It was an exaggeration, but painfully close to the truth. His Majesty’s best warships had collected in the harbor at Sounis for the yearly festival. Attolia had still not reached the top of the pass, Eddis’s soldiers fought bitterly, and Sounis had wanted to fortify his citizens for the war ahead.

  “You said I should do something.” Eugenides smiled in the dark, twisting the knife of his revenge a little deeper into the magus.

  “I did?”

  “As you were leaving, after your extremely edifying visit in the spring. You said, ‘You could still do something.’ Your exact words.”

  “I meant talk your queen into surrendering, not destroy our navy in its own harbor!” the magus shouted.

  The shadowy form of Eugenides held one finger to its lips. “Shh,” he said.

  “And my king?” the magus asked more quietly. “What have you done to my king?”

  “He’s as safe in his bed as he thinks he is. Although he’s probably out of bed by now. We don’t have much time.”

  “Time for what?” the magus asked.

  “I didn’t come to Sounis to blow up His Majesty’s warships. I told you someone else had to do that.”

  “What did you come for if not to murder my king?”

  “I came to steal his magus.”

  “You can’t,” said the magus in question.

  “I can steal anything,” Eugenides corrected him. “Even with one hand.” He took a step forward into the moonlight and waggled his fingers. The smile on his face made the magus feel worse, not better. “You shouldn’t let the king choose your apprentices. Your most recent student, as we speak, is betraying your plans for the price of a good cloak. I would have given him more if he’d had the sense to ask for it.”

  “My plans?” said the magus, beginning to wonder if he was still asleep. The scene in the moonlit bedchamber had all the discontinuity of a dream.

  “Your plans to blow up the king’s navy.”

  “Aaah,” said the magus, catching on, “I’m working for Eddis?”

  “Oh, gods, no. You’re working for Attolia. You have been all along. Poor Ambiades found out, and that’s why you got rid of him. Pol, too.”

  “Not even Sounis would believe that,” the magus protested.

  “He will for long enough,” said Eugenides. “Think of it as stealing not you but the king’s faith in you.”

  “And what happens to me without the king’s faith?”

  “If you’re smart, you leave Sounis,” said Eugenides. “Quickly.”

  He waited while the magus thought. They both knew that Sounis was afraid of his advisor’s power, that he chose poor apprentices for the magus to keep that power from growing, and that the king’s heir had been sent to a teacher on the island Letnos to keep him far from the magus’s influence.

  They left the megaron through one of its smaller courtyards. The magus had a shoulder bag with three manuscripts inside, his silver comb, his razor, and his telescope, which he’d carried down to his room earlier in the evening after stargazing from the megaron’s roof. Eugenides wouldn’t let him go to his study and wouldn’t let him carry any clothes.

  “My history of the Invasion,” he had protested. “It’s in my study.”

  “You want people to think that you’re going down to the harbor, not running for your life,” Eugenides had told him. “Hurry, and you’ll live to rewrite it.”

  Dressed as an apprentice, he walked behind the magus, keeping his wooden hand close to his side, and none of the guards looked twice at either of them. Once in the narrow streets outside the megaron, Eugenides led the way, hurrying through the old city and then down through the new city by back streets. He detoured into a quiet cul-de-sac where he’d left a bag hidden behind a stairway. Inside were two faded gray overshirts. He handed one to the magus and pulled the other over his head.

  Crowds got thicker as they approached the harbor. Only the most dedicated revelers had been in the streets when the explosions began, but sailors sleeping on the floors of wineshops had dragged themselves out and were making their way, with the rest of the curious populace, down to the docks. Caught in the unexpected pedestrian traffic were the large wagons that moved through the city in the darkest hours of the night. They were forbidden to block the traffic during daylight hours. Dawn was approaching, and their drivers cursed as the horses moved a step at a time toward the market gate out of the city. The huge animals were normally placid, but the shouting, milling crowds unsettled them, and they jerked in their harnesses and their neighing rose above the sounds of people in the streets.

  Pulling the magus by the material of his cloak, Eugenides worked his way along the line of wagons. He had almost reached the market gate itself when he found the wagon he was looking for and swung himself up onto the back of it. He seemed to the magus to move as easily with one hand as he had with two. He turned to help the magus as one of the men already sitting on the wagon bed spoke.

  “That was a near thing,” the man said as the wagon cleared the last of the congestion and picked up speed, rumbling through the torchlit tunnel under the city’s wall. “I see you collected your prize.”

  “I did indeed,” said Eugenides.

  The wagon was only a few miles outside the city when it left the main road and bumped down narrower tracks to a farmhouse and a stable. Waiting by the stable were saddled horses, one for each of the occupants of the cart, excepting the magus and Eugenides.

  Eugenides stood, with the magus beside him, as the horses were mounted. Each of the riders nodded once to him as they rode away.

  Then the riders were gone. Only Eugenides and the magus were left, and the man quietly unharnessing the cart horses. The farmhouse beside them was dark, the yard was quiet. The sky was pink and blue with the dawn, and the air was still. One of the horses sighed and stamped one huge hoof in the dust. The Thief disappeared into the stable through the open double doors and reappeared a few moments later, having removed the false hand and replaced it with a hook. He was stooped over the crosstree of a sleek messenger’s chariot that he handled easily, even with one hand. He saw the magus staring and smiled.

  “You see how well planned this adventure is,” he said. “I arrange not only a cart but a chariot as well. Timos will drive us.”

  Timos led the cart horses into the stable and reappeared with a matched pair of racing horses. They were beautiful animals, graceful and excited in the morning air. Eugenid
es stepped back to give them plenty of room while Timos backed them to the chariot and began to fix their traces. When Timos was done and had climbed into the chariot, Eugenides stepped up as well and waved for the magus to join him.

  The messenger’s chariot was light and well balanced. The magus, stepping onto the woven leather flooring, felt it give under his feet. He braced himself, as he saw Eugenides was doing, and held on very tightly as the horses jumped forward and the chariot whirled around the corner of the farmhouse and back down the rutted tracks to the main road. Once on the main road, Timos let the horses choose their pace, and fields, farmhouses, olive groves, whole villages passed in a jostled blur. The horses never slowed until the sun was high overhead and Timos pulled them up at an inn. New horses were hitched into place while the three travelers stood by the chariot waiting. These, too, moved like the wind until Timos again pulled up at another inn.

  There’d been no chance to ask questions when the horses were changed, and talking was out of the question in the jolting chariot.

  “We’ll eat and then go,” Eugenides said, indicating a table under a tree by the inn. The magus moved agreeably, but very slowly, toward the shade.

  “Tired?” Eugenides asked.

  “Old,” the magus answered. “Too old to be dragged out of my home by the machinations of someone I thought was a friend.”

  Eugenides stopped to look over his shoulder. “Who told Sounis that now was the time to take Eddis? Who told him to ally first with Attolia to conquer us? He’d be stomping around in Attolia’s grain fields right now if it weren’t for you, and you know it.”

  “True,” the magus admitted mournfully.

  “It would serve you right if I dragged you off to Eddis and locked you into a cell for the next fifty years.”

  The magus settled onto a bench and rested his head in his hands. “Whether I spend the rest of my life in comfort in Eddis or in jail won’t be historically significant.”