The Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  When I peeped into the stable, I found the ostler asleep in his chair at one end. Good luck for me. Not only was he asleep, but I guessed by the empty bottle on his left that he was drunk as well. I collected five leading straps from a peg over his head and slipped down the row of stalls, looking into each one at a sleeping horse. I picked five that I thought were mares and woke them with a whisper. I clipped the straps to their halters, and then I opened all the stall doors, carefully so that there was no squeak, starting with the one farthest from the ostler. The horses lifted themselves to their feet. Puzzled at being disturbed at such an odd hour, they made small noises of inquiry, none loud enough to wake the ostler.

  When all the stall doors were open, I went back to my chosen five and led the first one out. As I led her past the stall of my next choice, I leaned in to twitch the strap hanging from that mare’s halter. She obediently followed her stablemate out of the stall and down the row. The other horses came out in the same way. Soon all five were in a line, and the horses left in their stalls were leaning out of their stalls, wondering what they were missing.

  I was at the door of the stable, looking out at the stone-flagged courtyard where the horses’ hooves were going to sound like the crack of doom. I looked back at the sleeping ostler. He would sleep through the noise only if he were very drunk indeed, and there was no way to know how much had been in the bottle when he started. There was an obvious solution, but I was a thief, not yet a murderer.

  I sent a hasty prayer to the god of thieves that the horses would keep quiet and that the ostler was blind drunk; then I shuffled around until I had all five leading ropes in my hands and drew the horses out.

  The silence was so profound that I turned back to make sure that the horses were following. It hadn’t occurred to me that the gods that I’d seen silent and unmoving in their temple might still be taking an interest in me. I almost bumped into the mare directly behind me. She threw up her head in surprise but didn’t make a noise. I stepped backward, and she followed. The iron shoes on her hooves struck the flagstones soundlessly. The other horses came as well. Afraid that I’d been struck deaf, I backed out of the courtyard. Behind my horses came the others from the stable. They slipped through the gates of the inn and disappeared like ghosts down different streets. When the ostler woke, he would have to search the entire town before he would know that five of his charges were missing.

  At the town gate I found Pol standing over the body of a guard.

  “Did you kill him?” My lips formed the words without speaking.

  Pol shook his head. Like the ostler, the guard was asleep. Pol took four of the horses, two leading straps in each hand, and left me just one to lead up the grass beside the road, between two houses and then out across the fields. We reached the cover of some trees and found the other three waiting.

  “Was there any trouble?” the magus asked, and the spell of silence burst with a pop.

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, “no trouble.” Except that I’d discovered that I was eager to divest myself of the gods’ attention as quickly as possible.

  Sophos took the leading strap from my hands and led my horse away to be saddled.

  Pol asked me, “Are you all right?”

  I nodded my head.

  He took me by the elbow and felt my body shaking. “Are you sure?”

  I nodded again. How could I explain that this was a perfectly normal reaction for someone who has had a careless prayer answered by the gods? The silence of the horses had been immeasurably more unnerving than the gods in their temple. Maybe because the stables had been part of my world and the temple had not. I don’t know. For the first time in a long while, Pol had to help me onto my horse.

  We were only an hour away from Kahlia when a cold, damp breeze blew down my neck and I pulled up my horse to listen to the sound of the temple gong beating in the night.

  “What’s that?” Ambiades asked when the others had also stopped.

  Probably Aracthus, still doing his part, I thought. “The ostler woke up,” I said, and dug my heels into the horse underneath me.

  By morning we had nearly covered the ground back to the mountain trail. The horses were exhausted, and our pursuers were so close that twice we’d seen them over our shoulders at straight places in the road. The ostler must have called out the town garrison without counting his horses first. We lost sight of the soldiers when we turned into the olive groves, but they remained close behind. As we twisted in the dark under the trees, we moved a little quicker than our pursuers, only because we knew where we were going and they did not.

  The mountain rose so steeply out of the Sea of Olives that it appeared without warning as we came out of the trees. Suddenly in front of us sunshine was falling on the piled rubble at the base of the cliff. The magus pulled up his horse and dismounted.

  “Not many people know about the trail. If we can get up the cliffside before they see us, they might not know where we’ve gone.”

  “Doesn’t Eddis begin here? Won’t we be on neutral ground?” Sophos asked.

  “Only if there’re enough Eddisians to insist on it,” said the magus, and slapped his horse with the riding crop, sending it down the alley between trees and mountains, followed by the other horses. “Get moving,” he said to the rest of us.

  “Not me,” I said, intending to find a safe hiding place to wait until the hunt flowed past. It was past time for me to be going my own way. Once they were free of pursuit, the magus and Pol might turn their attention to ensuring my return to Sounis and prison, and I wasn’t going back to prison, or to Sounis for that matter.

  The magus was astonished. Then he was angry. “What do you mean, not you?”

  “I’m not going back to prison or the silver mines or some other hole in the ground. I’ll take my chances in Attolia.”

  “You think I would take you back to the prison?” the magus asked.

  “You think I would trust you?” I answered, unfairly. He hadn’t given me any reason not to trust him, but everyone remembered my comments in the mountains about the probability of a knife in the back.

  “The Attolians will kill you just the same,” he said, “more painfully probably.”

  “They’ll be too busy chasing you.”

  The magus glanced over at Pol.

  “You don’t have time to waste forcing me,” I pointed out.

  He threw up his hands. “Fine!” he bellowed. “Go die on the swords of the Attolians. Be drawn, be quartered, be hung, I don’t care. Spend the rest of your life in one of their dungeons. What possible difference would it make to me?”

  I sighed. I hadn’t intended to offend him. “Leave me a sword,” I said without thinking, “and I’ll do my best to slow them down.” I could have bitten off my own tongue, but the magus didn’t take me up on my offer. He snorted in disbelief and turned away.

  The others followed, but Sophos turned back after a few hesitant steps. He awkwardly pulled his sword free from its scabbard and offered it hilt first in my direction. “It’s not any use to me,” he explained truthfully.

  It was a beginner’s sword, lighter than a regular one but better than nothing. I took it by the blunt part of the blade just below the hilt and raised it to him before he turned to hurry after the magus, who had looked back once to snort in contempt before disappearing between the boulders.

  I chose a nearby boulder and climbed up the side of it. Once I reached the top, I was above the eye level of any passing horseman, and it was as good a hiding place as any. Any pursuers would ride by without being aware of me, unless of course I jumped down on them, waving a sword.

  I couldn’t imagine what had possessed me to suggest such a thing to the magus. I’d sworn to the gods from the king’s prison that I wasn’t going to embroil myself in any more stupid plans. Of course I hadn’t actually believed in the gods at the time, but why should I care what happened to the magus and his apprentices? I spent ten minutes sweating in the sun, reviewing all the reasons I di
dn’t like the magus and everything he stood for, and trying to ignore a grisly image of all of them being beheaded.

  There was a jingle of bits, and several hundred yards away the Attolians appeared one by one from the cover of the trees. They paused to look at the hoofprints leading toward the main pass, then ignored them, riding directly toward the magus’s secret trail. They weren’t the garrison from Kahlia; like the soldiers we’d met earlier, they were dressed in the colors of the Queen’s Guard.

  I told myself one more time as they passed beneath me that the only reasonable thing to do was to wait until they passed, so I could sneak down the far side of the boulder and disappear into the trees. Then I jumped onto the shoulders of the second rider from the front. The other horses were moving too quickly to stop, and as I hit the ground on top of the Attolian, I saw a hoof land on the turf several inches from the end of my nose. The Attolian struggled up on top of me, just in time to be hit by a following hoof. The horse came down as I scrambled away on all fours, dragging Sophos’s sword. I’d managed not to stick the Attolian, his horse, or myself. I got to my feet and ran.

  Once I was among the olives I could move faster than the men still on horses, and I was well ahead of those who’d been thrown. I was heading for a patch of dry oaks I’d seen from the clifftop ten days earlier. The oaks grew low to the ground, and I counted on their tightly packed leaves to hide me. Without dogs, the pursuers had little chance of dragging me out and I could stay undercover until nightfall, then disappear in the dark.

  The solid mass of oak trees was visible between the trunks of the olives, and I was slowing down, trying to pick the best place to dive into the cover of their leaves, when a second party of horsemen appeared and cut off my escape. Unable to outdistance them for long, I swung back toward the mountain, hoping to get among the rocks, where I couldn’t be ridden down. If I could climb the cliff face, and if they didn’t have crossbows or, gods forbid it, guns to shoot me with, I might get away or at least surrender without being killed first. I pounded across the hard-packed dirt under the olives, and some small part of me that should have been thinking something more sensible noticed that my strength had returned since I’d left the king’s prison.

  I made it to open ground, but my pursuers caught up with me just before I reached the rocks. A horse moved in front of me, and I had to turn to avoid it. There were horses everywhere, and shouting. Everyone seemed to be shouting.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I HEARD THE TUMBLERS CLICKING as the guards unlocked my cell door before opening it to wave the magus in. Without turning my head, I could see him silhouetted in the doorway with Sophos beside him. Once the door was closed and locked behind him, the cell was dark. I lay quietly and hoped that he hadn’t seen me.

  “Magus?” Sophos whispered.

  “Yes, I saw,” the magus answered, and my hopes sank. I heard him taking small, careful steps across the floor. When he got close to me, he squatted down and reached out with his hands. One of them brushed my leg and then my sleeve and followed it down my arm until he touched my hand very quickly, to see if I was warm and alive or cold and dead.

  “He’s alive,” he told Sophos as he put his hand back over mine and squeezed it. It was meant to be comforting.

  “Gen, can you hear me?” he whispered softly.

  “Go away.”

  In the dark he found my face and pushed the hair that had been lying across it out of the way. He was very gentle. “Gen, I owe you an apology. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t answer. Only a short time before, I had floated to the surface of the pain that had swallowed me up. I didn’t care much about his apology.

  Sophos kneeled down beside me in the dark. “How did you get here?” he whispered, as if the guard were lurking outside to hear the prisoners’ conversation.

  “They had a cart.”

  The magus snorted. His fingers left my face, and I felt them lightly touching the front of my shirt where it was stiff with dried blood. “Don’t,” I said. My voice was wispy and thin. I tried to pull myself together and started again. “Just leave me alone. I’m fine. Go away.”

  “Gen, I think the bleeding has stopped. I’ve still got my cloak. I’m going to see if I can wrap you in it.”

  “No,” I said, “no, no, no.” I didn’t dare shake my head, but I desperately didn’t want the magus to try to wrap me in his cloak. I didn’t want his cloak. I didn’t want him to put his hand beneath my head and lift it to slide Sophos’s fancy folded cloak underneath, which is what he did first. When he didn’t notice the bump under my hair at the base of my skull, I gave up protesting. The pain washed back over me, and I sank into it. The last thing I heard was the magus arguing with a guard about clean water and bandages.

  When I woke again, there was a gloomy light coming through the cell’s barred window, and I could see Sophos hovering. My shirt had been opened, and I was wrapped in white bandages. The magus must have won his argument.

  Sophos saw me looking cross-eyed down at my chest and said, “He told the guard that you could always be killed later, but if you were dead, you couldn’t be questioned by anyone but the gods.”

  That was comforting. “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  He came to sit cross-legged beside me. I was lying on his cloak and wrapped in the magus’s. “They came an hour ago and took the magus away,” he said. “Pol and Ambiades are dead. The queen’s soldiers were waiting for us at the top of the cliff. Ambiades had told them about the trail.”

  He waited, and when I couldn’t think of anything to say, he told me, “We saw everything from the top of the cliff.”

  Hence the magus’s apology.

  The captain of the Queen’s Guard and his men had been waiting on the mountainside. No doubt they had had more men stationed at the entrance to the Seperchia Pass, but the captain had gambled on the magus’s leaving Attolia the way he had come in. When Pol and the magus boosted Sophos over the lip, he’d seen their boots, but he’d been dragged onto the clifftop before he could shout a warning. There had been nothing the magus and Pol could do but follow with Ambiades. When the captain of the guard had asked where I was, the magus, still angry at me, had said, “Saving his own skin.” Stretched flat on top of the boulder, I was easy to see from above.

  “He’s planning an ambush,” said one of the soldiers, and raised a crossbow.

  “The queen wanted them all alive,” the captain reminded him.

  “Then don’t bother to shoot him,” the magus said bitterly. “He’ll hide there until you climb down to arrest him.”

  “He’s armed,” said the captain, and he cupped his hands to his mouth to shout a warning to his men but lowered them when the magus fluttered one hand in dismissal. “The only thing he can do with a sword is steal it or sell it.”

  So they stood and watched me turn an orderly hunt into a knot of fallen horses and wounded men. The captain swung toward the magus, who was clearly stunned, and then changed his mind about what he was going to say. “Not what you expected?” he asked in wry tones.

  The magus shook his head, watching me as I ran for cover.

  “My men will cut him off,” the captain assured him as I disappeared under the olives.

  “He’s done for,” said Ambiades when I was chased back into the open by the horsemen. “Good riddance,” he added as they bore down on me.

  “Shut up, Ambiades,” the magus said.

  “They’ll have to dismount to get him,” said the captain.

  “They won’t have any trouble,” the magus had said sadly, not knowing how strongly my father had desired me to become a soldier and not a thief.

  “I’ve never seen someone win against that many men,” said Sophos, sitting on the cold stone floor beside me.

  “You still haven’t,” I pointed out. “Tell me about Ambiades.” I didn’t want to talk about the fight at the base of the mountains. Something unpleasant had happened. I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. I didn’t want to.

&
nbsp; But Sophos wouldn’t be distracted. “No, I suppose not. But you wounded two of them, and I think you killed the last one.”

  My eyes closed. That was what I hadn’t wanted to think about. I hadn’t intended to kill anyone, but I’d panicked when I’d seen swords on every side.

  “We saw you run back into the open,” Sophos went on mercilessly. “Why didn’t they ride you down?”

  “Too many rocks,” I whispered. I was tired. “And they were riding farm horses. They only step on people by accident.”

  Only four of the soldiers had dismounted at first. I’d chopped one of them on the forearm, then disarmed another and gotten my sword tangled in his hilt. I wouldn’t have been able to free a longer sword, but I managed to pull Sophos’s clear in time to stop a thrust from someone on my left. Training that I thought I’d forgotten turned the block into a lunge, and I’d sunk the sword into my opponent, certainly killing him. It had felt no different from stabbing a practice dummy. I was so horrified that as he fell away from me, I’d let the sword slip out of my hand. I hadn’t wanted to be a soldier. I’d become a thief instead, to avoid the killing. See where that had gotten me.

  A light push from behind had forced me forward a half step. When I looked down, my shirt was lifted away from my chest like a tent, with a half inch of sword poking through a tear in the cloth. The point must have entered somewhere around the middle of my back but had slanted to come out near my armpit. I remembered very clearly that there was only a smear of blood on the steel.

  “We thought you were dead,” Sophos told me.

  So had I. My knees had folded. Things were muddled and awful for a long time, and when I opened my eyes again, I was lying on my back and the sky over me was perfectly blue. The blue was all I could see. I must have been on a cart, but its sides were out of my sight. There was no sign of olive trees or the mountains. If it hadn’t been for the jolting as the cartwheels turned, I could have been lying on a cloud. People still seemed to be shouting, but they were very far away. They were important people, shouting about me. I heard the king of Sounis and the queen of Eddis and other voices I couldn’t identify. I thought that they might be gods. I wanted to tell them not to fuss. I wanted to explain that I would be dead soon, and there would be nothing left to fuss over, but the cart must have hit a particularly severe bump. The blue sky above me turned to red and then to black.