The Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  “Not me,” I said. Everyone else at the table looked at me in surprise, as if they had forgotten I could talk.

  “Who asked you?” Ambiades sneered.

  “He did, fuzz-lip.” I pointed with my spoon to Sophos while Ambiades’s hand leapt to his face.

  He jerked it back down and asked, “What would scum from a gutter know about being a soldier?”

  “I wouldn’t know, not being scum from a gutter. But my father is a soldier, and it’s a bloody, thankless, useless job for people who are too stupid and too ugly to do anything else.” Even if my father and I have come to appreciate each other a little more, I still don’t think much of his chosen profession, but I probably shouldn’t have mentioned it then. My capacity for tact sometimes surprises even myself.

  There was a perfect silence at the table while all of us looked over at Pol to see what he would make of this insult to his intelligence as well as his manners. He remained impassive, but the magus told me that in the future I could ignore conversation that was not directed toward me and I should keep my mouth closed unless specifically addressed. I remembered that I had been brought along as a useful sort of tool and not a human being at all.

  I ate my breakfast in silence. When the magus stood up and said, “We’d better get the horses ready,” I continued to stare at my empty oatmeal bowl until he cuffed me on the back of the head.

  “What?” I said. “Were you specifically addressing me? I thought I was supposed to ignore those—”

  “I have a riding crop packed in my saddlebags,” he said. “Would you like me to use it on you?” He was bending over me, and his voice was low. I am not sure that anyone else heard, but I understood him plainly. I threw one leg over the bench and stood up.

  “Lead on,” I said.

  Several extra packages were added to our baggage before we rode away from the inn. While Ambiades, Sophos, and I watched, Pol and the magus carefully arranged and rearranged the loads so that the horses would not be unevenly weighted. I wondered about Pol. He wasn’t a common foot soldier. Sophos and even Ambiades treated him with too much deference. The magus clearly liked and respected him, relying on him to enforce orders addressed to me. He’d probably be the one to use the riding crop if push came to shove.

  As we left the town, it became clear why the magus hadn’t brought a cart. There was no road for it to travel on beyond this small nameless town, or nothing that a civilized person, used to the streets of a city, would call a road. The wagon track we’d been following since Evisa had been carefully maintained, its central grassy strip and its verges kept cropped by the goats of each small village we passed through. That route divided, turning east to head along the foothills, or west to intersect the main road that led to the pass through the Hephestial Mountains. We headed straight on the track that showed fewer signs of travel.

  We passed a few more farms, and then the way narrowed even further to a skinny, overgrown path with high grass and scrubby oaks growing on either side, sometimes so close that pricking leaves caught at the fabric in my trousers.

  The path climbed steeply in places. The horses worked hard. In single file they heaved themselves uphill with a constant clatter of small stones. I gripped the horse underneath as firmly as I could with my knees and worried about slipping off the back end of the saddle at every rise in the trail. I held on with both hands as well, but my arms were in no better shape than my legs, and by midmorning they shook with the strain.

  “Hey, why don’t we stop for lunch?”

  The magus looked at me in disgust, but when we reached the next open space, he directed his horse onto the grass, and mine obediently followed. I tried to convince it to move into the shade before I climbed down, but it stopped next to the magus’s horse and wouldn’t go on.

  “Why doesn’t this damned horse go where I want it to?” I asked, exasperated.

  “Stop jerking on the reins like that. It won’t move,” the magus told me.

  “So I’ve found,” I said as I slid down. “It must like your horse more than I like you.”

  Sophos heard me and laughed. “It’s a packhorse,” he explained. “It’s trained to stop next to its leader.”

  “Really?” I looked at the horse beside me in surprise. “Are they that smart?”

  “Smarter than you,” said Ambiades, coming up beside us.

  “I never heard of a horse that could steal a king’s seal,” I pointed out with a smirk of my own.

  “That’s what I meant,” said Ambiades.

  “Why don’t you eat hot coals?” I walked over to where Pol was taking food out of the bag. I noticed Sophos staring after me.

  “What?” I snapped at him, and he looked away.

  Ambiades put the words in his mouth. “He wants to know if you really are stupid enough to bet a man that you could steal the king’s seal and then show it as proof the next day in a wineshop.”

  It had been a professional risk, but there was no point in saying so. I turned my back on them both.

  We had more bread and olives and cheese for lunch. When I wanted more, the magus said no. “I can’t be sure that we will have more provisions until we get through the mountains.”

  I looked at the packages still tied to the horses. “You didn’t bring enough.”

  “We should pick up a little more tonight. You won’t starve.”

  “No, that’s true,” I said. “You can always give me some of Ambiades’s food.”

  The magus gave me an ugly look. “You’ll get your share and nothing else. No one’s going hungry so that you can eat.”

  “I don’t see why not,” I said as I lay down in the grass for a nap. It had dried in the summer sun to crackling stalks that poked me in the arms and neck. “I’m a lot more important than anyone else here,” I told the blue sky above me.

  No one replied, and after a few minutes I fell asleep.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WE STOPPED AGAIN EARLY IN the evening. Earlier than the magus wanted. He grumbled but agreed to look for a campsite after watching me nearly slide over the back end of my horse at one steep spot in the trail. As soon as he chose a place to stop, I dismounted and collapsed in the prickly grass. I lay there while the magus directed the unpacking of the horses and listened as Ambiades carefully and condescendingly instructed Sophos in the construction of a cooking fire. I turned my head to watch.

  “Haven’t you ever stayed out overnight hunting?” Ambiades asked, looking at kindling tightly stacked in a poor imitation of a campfire.

  Sophos cast an embarrassed look at Pol. “Not alone,” he said.

  “Well, Your Highness,” Ambiades teased, “if you stack all the wood one piece directly on top of another, it won’t burn. The fire suffocates. Imagine how you would feel if you had all that wood stacked on top of you. Watch.” He dismantled the pile and built a pointed hut of sticks with the skill of much practice. “Make a house and the fire lives in it; make a gravepile and the fire dies. Understand?”

  “Yes,” said Sophos humbly, and stepped aside to allow Pol space to cook. I didn’t move until the food was ready and Ambiades came to nudge me with his boot. “Magus says get up and eat something, O scum of the gutter.”

  “I heard him,” I said as I rolled over and pulled myself to my feet. “Tell me,” I said over my shoulder, “O source of all knowledge, have you figured out the difference between a fig tree and an olive?”

  He reddened, and I went to eat my dinner satisfied.

  After dinner, which was skimpy, the magus pointed to a bedroll and said it was mine. The sun was still high in the sky. It wouldn’t reach the horizon for several hours, but I rearranged the blanket and lay down. There was a heavy cloak to cover me while I slept. I ran my hand across the finely woven wool. It was dark blue on the outside, like the magus’s, and was lined with a creamy gold color like a barley field before harvesting. There was no embroidery, but it was carefully made. I would need it as the heat of the day faded. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the m
agus watching me finger the wool, like a tailor assessing its value—or like scum from the gutter touching something he knows he shouldn’t. I turned my back on him and let him think what he wanted.

  The other four continued to sit around the fire. The magus had left plant classification behind and was quizzing his apprentices on history when I fell asleep.

  The next morning before noon we reached a small farmhouse that was sitting in near ruin at the end of the trail. Its whitewash had faded, and its plaster had dropped off in chunks, revealing the lumpy stone walls underneath. A man came to the doorway as we arrived in its weed-grown yard.

  “I expected you last night,” he said to the magus.

  The magus glanced at me. “We moved more slowly than I expected,” he said. “Did you get the provisions?”

  “Everything,” said the man. “There’s fodder in the shed for the horses, enough for two weeks, and if you don’t come back this way, then I’ll take them back down to the city.”

  “Good enough,” said the magus. He opened one of the saddlebags and raised himself on his toes to look inside. He pulled out the leg iron I’d slept in at the inns and then sent Ambiades and Sophos off with the horses. Pol and I followed him into the house, through the empty main room to a back room that had windows on three walls and held several narrow beds.

  “It’s too late to start up the mountain today,” the magus said to Pol as we went in. “We’ll stay here and start tomorrow morning. You,” he said to me, “should be able to rest to your heart’s content.” He had me sit on one of the beds and knelt to lock the cuff around my ankle. He tested with two fingers to make sure that it wasn’t too tight.

  “I forgot to get any padding,” he said. “You’ll have to live without it until the boys bring in the saddlebags.” He looped the chain through the bed frame and pulled on the cuff to make sure that it wouldn’t slip off my heel. Then he and Pol went away. I shifted the cuff into a comfortable place and wondered if the dent formed in my ankle would be permanent.

  The room was cool, none of its windows faced south, and by the time the magus returned to wrap my ankle in one of Pol’s shirts, I was asleep. I spent the day dozing. Sometimes I sat up to look out the window above my bed at the sunlight falling bright and hot outside. Once I saw Pol teaching Ambiades and Sophos to fence with wooden swords, but it could have been a dream; the next time I sat up they were gone.

  After dinner I lay and listened to the voices in the other room. The sky grew dark, and the stars came out. I was asleep again before the moon rose and didn’t stir until Sophos told me that breakfast was waiting. There was an overfull bowl of cooked oats and another bowl of yogurt as well as bread and cheese and olives and several oranges, the small, lumpy kind that are hard to peel but juicy and sweet.

  “Enjoy it,” said the magus, seeing that I was. “You won’t eat so well again for a while.”

  I ate what I could and didn’t complain about anything. When the magus asked me if I could please not chew with my mouth open, as I had been doing assiduously since our first meal together, I obliged him with a visible effort. Pol worked on my wrists, pulling the stained bandages off, cleaning the blisters, and rubbing more salve into them. I didn’t try to wiggle away, and I produced only enough curses to let him know that I could have made more noise but was refraining. The sores were already much better, and I concurred when he decided to leave them exposed to the air for the day, although I could see that it didn’t matter if I concurred or not.

  It was lucky that I hadn’t gotten sick in prison. If I had, it would have taken more than three days of food and fresh air to make me feel so well. While the magus directed the filling of backpacks that everyone but me would carry, I stretched my muscles, bending down to touch my toes, leaning over backward onto my hands, checking to see how much of my strength had returned after a day of rest, and wondering how much longer I had before the magus needed me fit to work. Then I sat on the stone threshold of the house and waited while the others shouldered their burdens.

  In front of me the mountains began in earnest. They lifted above their foothills with a rush, their stony slopes dotted with tenacious bushes that had found a hold in loose shale. Sticking out like the bones in ankles and knees were solid outcroppings of limestone and marble. Anyone could see that the rubble piled on top of the steep slopes made the mountains nearly unscalable, the perfect defense for Eddis, the country hidden in the valleys near their summits. There were gorges carved by water, and somewhere there were quarries, but I wasn’t sure where to look for them cut into the mountainside, because I wasn’t positive where I was myself—somewhere inland of the Seperchia was all I knew for certain.

  The magus called me away from my stone threshold and led the way up the hill beside the house to a narrow crevice sliced in the side of the mountain. The trail that had been no wider than a horse the day before was no wider than a man and barely visible. We walked along an old streambed, probably dry for most of the year. When swollen with winter rains, the stream had carved its way through the shale and slate and with more difficulty but just as inevitably through the marble and granite. Where the water flowed the olives had taken root. The mountain walls rose on either side of us, sometimes in solid stone walls several hundred feet high. The red shank and green shank grew in scrubby clumps that left dry scratches on our skin as we brushed by.

  When the track occasionally ended in a small cliff that would be a waterfall for the stream in the rainy season, the magus looked for footholds on either side of the streambed and always found them. We ran into no impassable obstacles although we climbed over fallen tree trunks and sometimes scrambled uphill on fingers and toes. I was happy to have my soft-soled boots.

  We stopped for lunch before I’d exhausted myself, but I was glad to rest. It was clear that the magus meant to lead us up the streambed until at some point we left Sounis and entered the mountain country, Eddis. Maybe we already had. I hesitated to ask, but I was delighted when Ambiades did.

  “Where are we?”

  “Eddis, since that last climb.”

  “Why?”

  My eyebrows lifted. So the magus hadn’t told his apprentices where we were going. I wondered if he’d told Pol.

  The magus turned to Sophos to ask, “What did you learn about Eddis from your tutor?”

  So Sophos recited what he knew while we ate our lunch. Eddis was ruled by a queen and a court of eleven ministers, including a prime minister. Its main exports were lumber and silver from mines. It imported most of its grain, olives, and wine. The country was narrow and ran along the top of the mountain ranges to the south and southeast of Sounis.

  It sounded like a paragraph from a book describing “All Our Neighbors” or something equally simpleminded.

  When Sophos was done, the magus turned to his senior apprentice. “Tell me what you think are the most significant facts about Eddis.” And Ambiades performed admirably. It made me think he had some aptitude for his training, though I’d gotten the feeling that he thought his apprenticeship was somehow beneath him. Maybe it rankled that Sophos was the son of a duke and he wasn’t.

  “Eddis controls the only easily traversable pass through the mountains between Sounis and Attolia, the two wealthiest trading countries in this part of the world. It has the only remaining timber industry on this coast. All of our forests have been logged. They don’t have many other natural resources in the mountains and they get most of their wealth as a result of other peoples’ trade. Eddis taxes the caravans that go through the mountains and sells her lumber to Attolia and Sounis for merchant ships. Because she depends on trade, she has always been neutral and tried to keep the peace between Attolia and Sounis. After we drove out the invaders, we would have invaded Attolia, but the Eddisians wouldn’t let us.”

  “Very good,” said the magus. He turned to Sophos and asked him if he knew about that incident.

  “When they took apart the bridge across the Seperchia?” Sophos guessed.

  “Yes,” s
aid the magus. “It runs through a gorge, and without crossing the gorge, an army can’t get down the far side of the pass into Attolia.”

  “They were cowards, and they knew they were safe in their mountains,” said Ambiades. He spoke confidently an opinion held by most Sounisians.

  “Why should they have let Sounis through if war would hurt trade?” I asked, forgetting that I risked rebuke by intruding on the conversation of my betters.

  Even Sophos knew the answer. “Because the Attolians had lied. Eddis let the Attolians bring an army through the pass when the invaders first came because it was supposed to fight on our side, but instead the army helped the invaders overrun us at the siege of Solonis.”

  “So after all that time Sounis was out for revenge?” Several hundred years seemed like a long time to nurse a grudge.

  “Most people find it galling to lose their freedom, Gen,” the magus said dryly. The remark passed over Sophos’s head, but Ambiades laughed.

  I said, “Yeah, but Eddis didn’t get overrun, did it? The invaders never conquered them?”

  “No,” said the magus. “The invaders eventually overran Attolia as well as Sounis, but the rule of Eddis has never changed hands at the instigation of an outside force.” That was the end of the conversation and of lunch. We went back to our ascent.

  Twilight came mercifully early in the deep ravine of the streambed. Our party slowed down once we could no longer see to place our feet reliably. Pol helped me along, and I had to take a hand from Ambiades as well. Finally we came to a wider area of the trail and a flat space that had served many travelers as a camping spot. Someone had built a stone fireplace against the wall of the ravine, and the granite above it was blackened by many fires.

  After dinner, when our bedrolls were spread out on the ground behind us, we sat around the fire, and Ambiades asked again why we were in Eddis. The magus answered with another question, which Ambiades answered patiently, obviously used to this response to his inquiries.