The Queen of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  The library was empty, but the connecting door to Eugenides’s study and bedchamber was open. Eugenides lay on his bed, and Galen, the palace physician, bent over him. He straightened as the queen entered.

  “He’s unconscious?” Eddis asked, standing by the bed.

  “He’s drugged,” said the physician. “We got some lethium drops into him.” He was glad she hadn’t come earlier. Eugenides was feverish and hadn’t recognized anyone when he’d wakened. They’d had to hold him down and force the lethium into his mouth. There’d been no way to measure what had gone in and what he’d spat out again.

  “How is his arm?” the queen asked.

  The physician shook his head and gestured to the filthy bandages. “I haven’t gotten to his arm. I assume it was well cauterized or it would stink more.” The physician pushed the hair off Eugenides’s forehead. “His head isn’t broken, although clearly it might have been. You can see the bruising on his forehead, but if he’d cracked his skull, he’d probably be dead already. I’m more worried about his right eye, which is infected. See the grit on his eyelashes.” The physician pointed it out, sweeping his finger above the lashes, careful not to brush them.

  “If it’s prison glower,” the physician explained, “he’ll lose the sight in that eye, and if the infection spreads, he’ll be blind in both.” He shrugged helplessly.

  Two servants bearing ewers of warm water slipped into the room behind the queen.

  “You can’t treat it?”

  “I’m not an oculist. I’ve sent for one in town, but as far as I know, there isn’t a treatment. There’s a man in Attolia who says he has an ointment that will keep the infection from spreading, but whether he does and whether he’d come here…” He held up his hands.

  “He’ll come if I say he will,” said Eddis.

  “He’s Attolian, Your Majesty.”

  “He’ll still come,” she said.

  The physician looked up. The queen gave him a brief hard smile. She wasn’t joking. She’d have the Attolian abducted and dragged up the mountain if need be.

  “Your Majesty, it may not be glower. The oculist from town should be here soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “An hour or two. Until then, Your Majesty, I do have work to do.”

  Eddis nodded. “I leave you to it then. I want to know what the oculist says.”

  When Eddis was gone, the physician looked down at Eugenides and saw the glint of his eyes through his lashes. He looked closer. “You’ll need more lethium,” he said.

  “I won’t,” Eugenides whispered.

  The physician looked at the bandages that still needed to be changed.

  “You will,” he said, and went to mix several drops of the medicine with water in a tiny horn cup. When he came back, Eugenides’s eyes were open, and he was watching the physician carefully. When he raised the cup, Eugenides turned his head away.

  “No more trouble, please, young man.”

  “Galen,” he whispered, “do you think that if people are crippled in this life, they are crippled in the afterlife as well?”

  The physician lowered the cup. “You would know that better than I,” he said.

  “No,” said Eugenides. “I don’t know.”

  Galen raised the cup again, but Eugenides continued to turn his face away. “Galen, I don’t want to be blind when I die.”

  Galen sat silently with the cup held in his hands and his hands resting in his lap. His assistants slipped away.

  “You aren’t going to die for a long time.”

  “I don’t want to be blind when I die, if I live to be a hundred.”

  “Do you imagine I am going to pour a cup of lethium down your throat and let you go?” Galen asked finally.

  “I’d appreciate it,” Eugenides said.

  “I took an oath to heal people.”

  Eugenides didn’t argue. He only turned to look at the physician, with his eyes underlined by black bruises and bright with fever. The scar on his cheek showed against the yellowed skin around it.

  Galen sighed. “It might not be glower, and there’s no need to talk about breaking oaths yet.” He raised the cup in his hand. “Drink this for now.”

  When Eugenides woke, it was dark and the oculist had come. The room was lit by candles that reflected in the many panes of the glass windows and shone on the two men sitting by the bed. Galen had awakened him with a gentle touch on his arm, but even that gentle touch had worsened a hundred different pains, and the dull ache in his head, and the burning in his eye. Both of his eyes felt as if full of hot sand, and the rest of his body hurt so badly he couldn’t be sure where the pain came from.

  The oculist examined him as gently as possible, holding a lighted candle close to his face, then moving it away again.

  “When did you notice the infection?”

  Eugenides could only shake his head and then regret it. He didn’t know what day it was or how long he’d been in the queen’s prison cell. He tried to think, but his thoughts teetered on the edge of a black pit filled with memories that threatened to drown him.

  “Before she cut off my hand,” he said finally.

  The oculist looked at the physician.

  “Say a week ago,” he said. “Maybe ten days.”

  The oculist lifted his candle again. Eugenides flinched but didn’t complain. “Sticky-eye,” said the oculist finally. “If it were glower, the eye would be more red by now and much more sensitive to the light. Keep it clean; try to get some decent food into him.” He looked down at Eugenides and said firmly, “Hundreds of little children survive this every year with their eyesight intact. You have nothing to worry about on that count.”

  On that count, Eugenides thought, and when Galen offered him another dose of lethium, he drank it and slept.

  In Attolia, the queen sat at dinner. The hall was lit with the finest candles, the food was excellent. The queen ate very little.

  “Your thoughts seem elsewhere tonight, Your Majesty,” said the man seated to her right in the place of honor.

  “Not at all, Nahuseresh,” Attolia assured her Mede ambassador. “Not at all.”

  Eugenides’s fever grew worse. He slipped into the pit of his memories, and Galen repeatedly dosed him with the lethium to give him some rest. No longer recognizing Galen or his assistants, he fought every dose as he’d fought the first. He had to be held down, and Galen, with most of his weight on Eugenides’s chest, tipped the lethium into his mouth as Eugenides screamed. To keep the lethium from spilling out again, Galen covered the boy’s mouth with his hand, and covered his nose as well. Eugenides couldn’t breathe until the lethium was swallowed, and he fought with all his strength, struggling to turn his head away. Galen could feel his body arching underneath him as he tried to throw the weight off his chest. Not until he was exhausted and nearly unconscious would he swallow.

  Eddis sat, white-faced, in the library.

  “He won’t thank you for listening to this,” said her minister of war, sitting down beside her. He, too, had come to the library to check on his son.

  “Have you ever…?”

  “Heard him make a noise like that? No.”

  Eddis couldn’t remember a time herself. His screams sounded as if they were dragged out of him with a hook. “Is he getting worse?”

  Eugenides’s father shook his head. “The same, I think.” He settled into his chair. “If he fights this much when they try to get the lethium into him, I suppose he’s got some strength in him yet.”

  “Is it like this every time?”

  Her minister of war nodded. The queen left her chair abruptly and went to stand in the doorway of the bedchamber.

  “Eugenides!” she snapped.

  Galen looked up, meaning to send her away, but the struggling figure on the bed had frozen. Eugenides opened his eyes, blinking them in bewilderment. The people around the bed relaxed.

  “Stop making an ass of yourself and swallow the lethium,” she told him.

  Eu
genides swallowed and shuddered as the bitter draft went down. Galen took his hand away. “My Queen?” Eugenides whispered, still confused.

  “Go to sleep,” ordered Eddis.

  Eugenides, obedient to his queen and the lethium, closed his eyes.

  “Effective,” said the minister as she returned to sit next to him in the library.

  “We’ll see what Galen says,” the queen said, embarrassed, but she waited instead of returning to her meeting with her minister of trade. To her surprise, the physician, when he appeared, was pleased with the results of her interruption.

  “He recognized you. He hasn’t recognized anyone else. Come back when you can.”

  In the morning Eddis sat by Eugenides’s bedside, waiting for him to wake. She asked Galen about the bruises under his eyes, and he said that the black marks were old blood that had been trapped under the skin. She’d known that much, but she wondered why his nose hadn’t been broken then, if the bruising around his eyes was so dark. Galen explained that the blood was from the blow to his forehead, and it had drained into his eye sockets. He said it might take several weeks to fade. In the meantime the bruises made his face seem even thinner and his skin more pale.

  She sat and watched him sleep, remembering many other times she’d seen him with bruises. He’d often had them after fights with his cousins. They’d teased him because of his name and teased him more as his grandfather’s interest in him grew. Eugenides had a tongue that sometimes moved faster than his thoughts, and he responded with taunts of his own, usually more cutting, sometimes so effective that the cousins’ attentions were diverted to his victim and Eugenides escaped. More often the teasing ended in blows and in bruises.

  When his mother had died, Eugenides hadn’t waited to tell his father his intentions to be the next Thief of Eddis. His father, the loss of his wife still fresh, had been enraged. Eugenides and his father had fought, both of them exercising their grief in anger with each other, in front of the entire court. The cousins, who idolized the minister of war, increased their attacks on Eugenides, and bad feelings grew until Eddis had moved him out of the boys’ dormitory and into the only free room that she could think of, an anteroom to the rarely used palace library.

  He’d cleaned the dust off the shelves and honed rudimentary reading skills into a taste for scholarship not uncommon among the Thieves of Eddis, and when he had fought his periodic, disastrous losing battles with his cousins, he had retreated to the library and his study-bedchamber to nurse his bruises. Eddis had visited him often in times of internal exile. She hadn’t taken his side. It was too obvious to everyone involved that he had brought trouble on himself and was anything but a helpless victim. His cousins had begun to lose cherished objects and find them again on the temple altar dedicated forever to the God of Thieves. Eddis hadn’t supported his cousins either when they had come to her with their complaints. They were her cousins as well, and she’d fought with them herself until her two older brothers had died of fever within the space of a few days and she had become the heir to Eddis. Within a few months she had become queen, and after that no one fought with her except in formal, polite, tedious ways—no one except Eugenides, who continued to abuse her about her taste in clothes and relatives, as if the existence of the cousins were her fault.

  “Exile them all,” he’d suggested.

  “You know I can’t. Someday they’re going to be officers in my army and my ministers of trade and the exchequer.”

  “You can make me an officer instead.”

  “You tore up your enrollment papers during the last fight with your father.”

  “I’ll be your minister—”

  “Of the exchequer? You’d rob me blind.”

  “I would never steal from you,” he’d said hotly.

  “Oh? Where is my tourmaline necklace? Where are my missing earrings?”

  “That necklace was hideous. It was the only way to keep you from wearing it.”

  “My earrings?”

  “What earrings?”

  “Eugenides!” She had laughed. “If Cleon beats you, it’s because you deserve it!”

  She never worried about his complaints. She worried only when he was quiet. Either he was plotting something so outrageous it would bring her entire court to her throne howling for his blood, or he’d been fighting with his father, or on very rare occasions it meant he’d been seriously hurt. One of his cousins had broken several of his ribs once in a beating, and once he’d slipped while making his way across an icy wall and had fallen to the ground with his leg twisted underneath him. It was a hazard of thieves, to fall, often to their deaths, as his mother had done.

  When hurt, he’d been white faced and quiet, staying in his rooms until he started to heal, and then, when he was feeling better, he’d complained constantly. He didn’t, however, tell her who had broken his ribs or how he’d sprained his knee. Numerous eager tattletales told her about Titus, and the other bit of news she dragged out of the palace physician who’d dragged it from Eugenides while working on the leg. Galen was also used to seeing Eugenides’s bruises and listening with no visible sympathy to his complaints.

  Eddis leaned forward to brush the hair away from Eugenides’s damp forehead. Galen had cut off most of the Thief’s long hair, and he looked very different without it. She wouldn’t have guessed that his hair, cut short, would form small curls at his temple and behind his ears. She brushed one of them back into place.

  “My Queen,” he said quietly, opening his eyes.

  “My Thief,” she said sadly.

  “She knew I was in the palace,” he said in a low voice, sounding very tired. “She knew where I was hiding, she knew how I’d get out of the city. She knew everything. I’m sorry.”

  “I shouldn’t have sent you.”

  He shook his head. “No. I made mistakes. I don’t know what they were. I’ve been trying to think. I just don’t know. I failed you, My Queen,” he said, his voice getting weaker. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry,” said Eddis bitterly, and Eugenides’s eyes opened again. “I’ll tell you she will be sorry when she’s the one hanging head down from her palace walls.” She was crumpling the fine fabric of her dress in her fists. She smoothed it out and then stood up to pace.

  “Galen will throw me out if I upset you,” she said, sitting down again.

  “You’re not upsetting me. It’s good to see you storming around. She doesn’t storm,” he said, looking away into empty space. “When she’s angry, she sits, and when she’s sad, she sits. If she was ever happy, she’d just sit, I think.” It was more than he had said for days, and when he was done, he closed his eyes. Eddis thought he was sleeping. She stood and walked to the window. It was set high in the wall. The sill was at her eye level, and the glass panes reached nearly to the ceiling. By standing on her toes, she could look down into the front courtyard. It was empty.

  “She was within her rights,” Eugenides said behind her.

  Eddis spun around. “She was not.”

  “It was a common punishment for thieves.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” snapped Eddis. “They haven’t cut the hand off a thief in Attolia in a hundred years. And anyway, you’re not a common thief. You are my Thief. You’re a member of the royal family. She attacked all of Eddis through you, and you know it.”

  “Eddis had no business in her palace.” Eugenides was whispering. Eddis knew he was tired.

  “Attolia has no business treating with the Medes,” she said, her voice raised.

  Galen opened the door and gave her a warning look.

  “Go away!” she snapped.

  He shook his head but stepped back, leaving the door open.

  “It was the act of a barbarian!” Eddis turned back to Eugenides. His eyes were closed. “And she’s going to be sorry,” she said as she left.

  Out in the library Galen bowed very formally, excusing himself before he stepped past her. After he’d seen Eugenides and dosed him again w
ith narcotics, he found Eddis waiting in the library. She was in one of the armchairs with her knees up and her feet pulled in under her skirts.

  “Both of you in tears now,” he said.

  Eddis sniffed. “I’m angry.”

  “He’s not strong enough for you to be angry.” He looked helpless for a moment.

  “Oh, I know,” said the queen, sighing. “He’s too weak to listen to me yelling, and if he dies, it’s my fault, and it’s already my fault that he’s lost his hand, and I’ve only the gods to thank he isn’t blind as well.” She pulled back her skirt a little way to reveal an underskirt, which she used to wipe her eyes. She sniffed and then stood up.

  Galen watched with amusement. She smiled at him. “Go on with your lecture.”

  “Which is?” Galen asked.

  Eddis held one hand to her chest and orated. “If you choose that, after a lifetime of service to your family, my advice is to be ignored and I am to leave my post, then that is your prerogative, but so long as I am Physician of the Palace, I will insist that my prescriptions for the well-being of my patients will be observed…. Am I getting this right?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I think I can guess the rest as well,” said the queen.

  “Thank you, Your Majesty,” said Galen. “I am grateful not to have to say it myself.”

  So the queen of Eddis visited Eugenides while he slept. The fever passed but left him terribly thin and unable to do much more than sleep most of the day and night. Galen said it might be some time before he regained his strength.

  On the rare occasions when Eugenides was awake, Eddis talked to him about the harvest, which was good, and about the weather, which was good, and not about her meetings with her ministers, the directors of her mines, the master of the royal forge, or the commanders of her small army, nor about the many diplomatic messages arriving from Sounis and Attolia. When he was in less pain, and awake more often, she told him what gossip she could from the court and apologized for coming to see him infrequently.