The Thief

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Just then a bullet hit the rock near the magus’s hand. His hand slipped, and he fell forward with his left arm and shoulder in the river. He managed to keep his head up, but even so, the Seperchia nearly dragged him down. Sophos and I both grabbed him by the waistband, Sophos with both hands, I with only one. We pulled with all our strength. The magus kicked his feet, looking for a foothold and, with our help, backed himself out of the water. The riflemen fired again as we all sank behind large rocks, out of their sight. We picked our way between the rocks, up the steep bank of the river. It rose steeply about ten feet, and then the ground dropped away a little. We were safe from any more stray bullets, and we stopped to rest. Only then did I notice the blood dripping down my shirtfront. I touched my fingers gingerly to my cheek.

  “One of the bullets must have knocked loose a shard of rock,” the magus said. “It’s taken a divot out of your face, I’m afraid.”

  “All my beauty gone.” I sighed.

  “It might heal clean,” the magus reassured me, although he could see that I was joking.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, feeling the shape of the hole in the skin with my finger. I was quite certain I’d have a feather-shaped white scar. Getting across the makeshift bridge had been well done, and the god of thieves agreed, although some might not recognize his sign of approval.

  “What if they sent a party up this side of the river as well?” Sophos asked.

  The magus looked at me, and I shrugged with one shoulder. “We can look,” I said. We had left the dystopia behind on the far side of the river. There were rocks along the bank on this side, but the ground quickly flattened out into rolling fields broken by lines of scrub and trees. A road ran between the fields and the river. There were no houses as far as we could see, and no sign of anyone on the road.

  “I think we can hope for the best,” I said. “But those men might ride back downstream, cross the bridge, and come up this side. We should keep moving.”

  “Moving where?” the magus asked.

  I shrugged again and waved my good hand upriver. “That way.” Away from the people who might be pursuing us.

  We slid down the bank to the road and walked up it. The road was a cart track of powdered dirt. My feet were happier, and with fewer jolts my shoulder was happier as well. The reassuring sensation of floating down the road returned. As we walked, the fields on our right disappeared and were replaced with land that had been cleared once but not farmed for a long time. Wild grasses grew, and there were bushes, but we were the tallest thing in the landscape. I felt very exposed.

  I felt much better when the sun dropped behind the hills and night fell, but then the cold came. A half hour after the sun was gone, a chill wind blew down the back of my neck. The magus and Sophos didn’t seem bothered by it. I pushed myself a little faster to warm up and breathed with my mouth open to keep my teeth from chattering. I couldn’t dismiss the crawling sensation in the middle of my back. I was thinking that the Attolian queen wanted at least one of her prisoners back very badly.

  The mountains were ahead of us, and we continued toward them in the dark. On this side of the range they rose very steeply, directly out of the Attolian plain, just as they had risen out of the Sea of Olives. We kept to the road by feel. When my bare feet stepped into the stubble, I knew that we had wandered from the track. Even with the breeze pushing me down the road, we walked very slowly. I was tired. I could still hear the roar of the river in its chasm, and I longed for a drink of clean water. When I began to stumble, the magus took my arm, but he was too tall. Sophos slipped under my good shoulder and supported me. Thoughts of the riders that might be behind kept us moving.

  After a long time the moon rose, and the Seperchia, which had curved away from the road, began to curve back. The ground we were on had been rising, and the river ran beside us through a chasm thirty or forty feet deep. Its far bank was a cliff face that lifted straight up to the shoulders of the mountains. If we hadn’t crossed at the makeshift bridge, the trail we had been following would have dumped us into the water.

  Our road ended in a bridge, and without discussion we started across it. Just before we reached the top of its stone arch, the magus stopped and then turned around. If he’d had ears like a horse, he would have swiveled them forward.

  “What do you hear?” I asked.

  “Hoofbeats.”

  We crossed over the bridge and walked directly into the arms of the soldiers waiting there.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THERE WAS A LEDGE ON the far side of the bridge. At the back of it a squat tower defended a gate that closed off a cleft in the cliff face. The gate was open, and soldiers were scattered around three different fires in front of it, playing dice, sleeping, doing whatever soldiers do when they are off duty. There were only two guards posted at the bridge, and they were sitting on the stone pilings at the end. They didn’t see us until we arrived almost at their feet, and for a moment all they could do was stare. Then they smirked. Then they both jumped down, and one planted his spear beside us, looking suddenly crisp and military while the other guard ran to find his captain. No one said a word while we waited. Around the fires the soldiers didn’t even look up from their dice games.

  When the captain arrived, he didn’t have much more to say than his guards. While he looked us over, I leaned on Sophos, and the magus supported us both.

  The captain shook his head. To the magus he said, “Welcome to Eddis.” Then he turned to his lieutenant, who had come up behind him. “Get horses,” he said succinctly. “And four or five guards to take them. This is not for us to figure out. Get up on the bridge where you belong,” he said to the two guards, and they scrambled to the top of the arched bridge and looked out over the moonlit plain from there. “You three can follow me,” he said to us, crooking a finger in our direction.

  A few soldiers in the camp noticed the movement by the bridge, and heads began to turn. The signs of relaxation disappeared, and the soldiers suddenly became professionals, eager and suspicious. By the time the lieutenant returned with five men and six small horses, the hoofbeats that the magus had heard had been heard by the guards as well and reported to the captain.

  “That will be the Attolian guard,” said the magus. He might have expected to be handed over right then.

  “I’ll deal with them,” the captain said to the lieutenant. “You take care of these.” He waved a disgusted hand in our direction. Then, signaling to more of his guards to attend him, he tramped away.

  Horses were mounted with a lot of jingling and thumping, and a beefy soldier tugged Sophos out from under my arm. Taking him by the elbow and the seat of the pants, he swung him onto a horse. Somebody took my elbow, intending to do the same thing, but as they tugged, I swiveled around and sagged to my knees.

  “Stop! Don’t do that!” shouted Sophos, his voice breaking, as he struggled to get down from the horse. The beefy soldier held him pinned and told him to calm down.

  The man holding my arm looked a little closer at my face and suggested someone get a blanket. The one they fetched was warm from lying next to the fire. They wrapped me in it and then lifted me up gently into the lieutenant’s arms.

  As the horses crossed under the gate, I saw carved griffons overhead, and then I think I fell asleep. I dreamt of rock walls moving past on either side and heard in my sleep the crashing of the ponies’ hooves as they climbed the stone roadway that ran up the cleft in the mountains, cut by the Aracthus before its path had changed.

  When we reached the palace, the main courtyard was lit by lanterns, but most of the windows were dark. It was long past midnight. Everyone climbed off his horse, and two men helped me to the ground. After that there was a lot of hemming and hawing, and no one really knew what to do. Sophos came and tucked himself under my good shoulder. The magus stood beside us. All the others sidled a little farther away as if they were afraid our troubles might be contagious.

  Finally someone opened the double doors that led to the e
ntrance hall, and we trooped in. The clatter of boots on the marble floors announced our arrival to anyone who hadn’t heard the noise in the courtyard. Servants and onlookers appeared at the heads of the two staircases. Lights were still burning in the lesser throne room, and the great knot of us moved in that direction. The people on the stairs were sucked down in our wake, and by the time we’d left the dark entrance hall and crowded into the doorway of the brightly lit throne room, I felt like the center of a circus on the move. All we needed was dancing bears.

  At first all I could see of the room was the walls near the ceiling where mountain swallows were painted swooping and diving, but a series of stairs led into the room, and as the people ahead of me stepped down, I could see where the lower walls were stained dark red and two gold griffons lay, one on either side of the throne. The throne was empty. At the raised hearth in front of it a group of women had been sitting and talking, and two of them had been playing chess. By far the least attractive of the women stood up.

  She had black hair, like Attolia, and her gown was red velvet, but there all similarities between her and the lowland queen ended. The queen of Eddis tended to stand like a soldier. The ruffles on her shoulders made her arms seem long enough to reach to her knees. Her nose had been broken and had reknitted crooked; her hair was cut short like a man’s and curled so much over her simple silver crown that the crown itself was nearly invisible.

  She located the lieutenant who’d brought us and demanded an explanation of him. Unable to hear her over the babbling of so many people, he shrugged apologetically.

  She raised one hand and quirked an eyebrow at the crowd. The room fell quiet. The soldiers around the magus, Sophos, and me stepped hastily aside. Once the queen saw us, she dropped her hand.

  “Oh,” she said in irritation and perfect understanding. “It’s you, Eugenides.”

  I looked down at my dust-covered feet. I was tired, and I felt as light as a cloud that might blow away across the sky at any moment. I didn’t even have the strength to feel chagrin at embarrassing my queen and staunchest defender once again by providing a spectacle for the entire court of Eddis. I’d never been so happy to hear my own name.

  The magus, I noted, was not surprised by the greeting. I was a little annoyed because I had wanted to see his jaw drop. I had to satisfy myself with Sophos’s surprise—he was gaping in a heartwarming way—and hope that the magus didn’t know all my secrets.

  “Down the steps,” I whispered in Sophos’s ear, as I nudged him forward. While he helped me, the people on either side moved even farther away, not sure whether the queen’s irritation might spill over to them. They needn’t have worried. I had disappeared months before without her approval, but she and a few of her ministers must have guessed why, and if she was angry at me, it was only because she’d been worrying.

  With my good hand I reached under the braid at the base of my neck to free the thong that was tied there. It was the shorter of the two that Pol had given me on the banks of the Aracthus. One-handed, I couldn’t easily get the knot undone, and several strands of my own dark hair came with the thong when I pulled it free.

  I glanced back briefly at the magus and was delighted to see his mouth open in astonishment.

  “Gen,” he said under his breath, “you viper.”

  Above the queen’s extended palm I held Hamiathes’s Gift. It had hung hidden by my hair since I’d braided it there after the first fighting in the Sea of Olives. As soon as I’d seen the riders attacking, I’d moved my horse, never far away from the magus’s, until I could cut the thong around his neck with the penknife I’d stolen the first or second day out of prison. He’d been too distracted to notice and had assumed later, as I’d known he would, that the thong had been sliced by a sword stroke and that the Gift had dropped into the stream.

  It swung from its leather loop for a moment, such a little boring river stone, but no one in the room doubted its authenticity. The precisely cut runes of Hephestia’s mark swung first toward me and then away. The sapphire hidden in the stone caught the light, and the carved letters seemed to hover, bright blue, in the air.

  I had a speech to make. I’d worked it up on the way down the mountain to Sounis and practiced it over and over in the king’s prison, but I couldn’t remember any of it, and besides, I was too tired. That I carried Hamiathes’s Gift to my queen was all that had kept me going from the Attolian stronghold to the top of the mountains. The moment I released the stone, darkness rushed in, and I leaned toward the floor without saying anything.

  I slept for a long time untroubled by visions of the gods, and when I woke, I was in my own bed. I brushed my hand back and forth across the soft sheets. They were as fine as anything sold in Sounis because all of Sounis’s best linens were woven in Eddis. At my feet the footboard was carved with a scene of fir trees against the skyline of the sacred mountains, and when I turned my head, I could see the sacred mountains themselves through the windows. They rose up in all directions, safely hemming me in.

  I remembered the story that said Hephestia had made the valleys in the mountains for her chosen people, and I wondered if it was true. Having seen the gods, I continued to doubt all of the stories I had heard about them. If the gods were incarnations of the mountains and rivers around us, or whether they drew their power from those sources, I couldn’t say. They had power greater than any mortal, and if that power was enough to change the face of the earth, I didn’t want to know. I only hoped that they would hear my prayers from a distance, accept my offerings, and not trouble my dreams again. Hamiathes’s Gift was more burden than blessing, and I was glad to be free of it.

  I lay and admired the view for a while before I realized that there were people talking quietly in the library, which was separated by an open doorway from the room that was both my bedroom and study. I turned my head to listen better. The magus was talking with the queen. I heard him address someone as Minister and thought that probably meant minister of war.

  “We deliberately made the king’s message to you as vague as possible, so Gen may have hoped to find the stone in our possession. When he couldn’t find it or any reference to it in my papers, I believe he decided to make a reputation for himself, not just as a thief but as a Sounisian one. He mentioned an Eddisian mother in the forged court records to explain his dark coloring and any trace of an accent that he couldn’t hide, and then he bragged about his ability to perform some outstanding feat that would have to come to my attention. He could only have hoped that it would occur to me that I needed a proficient but anonymous thief whose absence from the city wouldn’t be noticed. He couldn’t have known that the man he bragged to in the wineshop was in fact my spy.”

  I hadn’t known, and I’d almost laughed out loud when the magus mentioned it outside the temple. The gods must have arranged it.

  “I don’t know how he would have gotten out of the prison on his own,” said the magus. “It seems a foolhardy plan to have relied on my intervention.”

  I am a master of foolhardy plans, I thought. I have so much practice I consider them professional risks. Sooner or later they would have needed the cell and the chains for someone more important, the minister of the exchequer, for instance, and I would have been moved to another cell. Sooner or later I would have had my chance to escape, if I hadn’t died of disease first.

  “He couldn’t have found the whereabouts of the stone from the papers in my study,” the magus went on. “I was careful to destroy any records. But he could have followed us and stolen the Gift once it was located.”

  The minister of war snorted. “Not if he had to follow you on a horse,” he said.

  The queen laughed, and I flushed in the privacy of my bedroom. I do hate horses. That was the first sign that I wasn’t going to be the soldier my father hoped for.

  The magus might have heard me thinking. “He does have other skills to be proud of,” he said. For instance, I thought, stealing Hamiathes’s Gift not once but twice. Who else in history had
done that? But the magus referred to the fight with the Queen’s Guard at the base of the mountain. That wasn’t a skill I appreciated much. If I’d been as inept with a sword as I was in a saddle, my father might not have driven me so hard to be a soldier and to let the title of King’s Thief lapse forever. It had been meaningless for so many generations, and he’d felt strongly that it should disappear for good.

  The magus described the fighting with the guard in detail and made me look very good indeed.

  The minister of war snorted. The magus didn’t recognize this as high praise, and he said stiffly, “I’ve been told that his father wanted him to be a soldier. I’d be happy to inform his father that he has a son to be proud of.”

  I stifled a snort of my own in the silence that followed. The magus must have still been tired. He must have once known, but forgotten, that the minister of war had married the daughter of the previous King’s Thief. He was talking to my father. The magus might have remembered this, might have recognized me from the first time he’d seen me in Sounis, but we had never been introduced. When he’d come with Sounis’s marriage proposals, I had been sulking in my rooms.

  While the magus, realizing his error, was trying to word an apology, my father came to look in at me. “I thought I heard you laughing up your sleeve,” he said.

  One arm was too tightly wrapped in bandages to move, but I held up the other to demonstrate that there was nothing up the sleeve of my nightshirt but my elbow.

  “I’ll come by later.” Before he disappeared from the doorway, he nodded once, and that, I knew, would be his only sign of approval for all my hard work. He was not a man of many words.

  After years spent trying to dissuade me from wasting my time acquiring valueless skills, he had come to my study one night to tell me why the queen of Eddis would consider a marriage proposal from Sounis and why her council, himself included, urged her to accept. He’d left a stack of double-heavy coins on the table and gone away.