The Queen of Attolia

by Megan Whalen Turner

  Eugenides stood up again to pace, shaking his head. The magus was reminded of a bear, chained in a pit, albeit a small bear.

  “Eddis’s council voted unanimously for war,” the magus said. “The minister of war abstained.”

  “Why?” Eugenides wailed, wondering about the actions of the council, not those of his father.

  “I think they like you,” the magus said.

  “They never did before,” he said bitterly.

  The magus said, “I think if you took the time to look, you might see that over the space of a year you turned into the greatest folk hero Eddis has ever known.”

  Eugenides dropped into his chair and covered his face with his hand. The magus saw that he’d raised both arms at first, then tucked the arm with the hand missing back into his lap.

  “I don’t want to know this,” Eugenides said.

  “I did hear,” the magus went on, “that you were rarely out of your rooms this winter. Did you have your head buried under your covers?” He stood and walked to Eugenides’s desk in order to flip through its contents.

  Eugenides sighed, tilting his head back in the chair, keeping his eyes closed. “You could go away now,” he said.

  “You’re studying biological classification?” the magus said, holding up a book. “And human anatomy, I see, and Euclid’s Geometry, or are you just recopying the text?” He looked at the scraps of paper covered in Eugenides’s labored handwriting. There were more in a pile on the floor next to the desk. He picked up the pile and shuffled through it. “You’ll have to pardon me,” the magus said. “But with your country at war, I can’t see how any of it really matters.”

  Standing up, Eugenides pulled the papers out of the magus’s hands. “It matters, because I can’t do anything, anymore, for this country, and it matters,” he yelled as he threw the papers back to his desk, “because I only have one hand and it isn’t even the right one!” Turning, he picked an inkpot off the desk and threw it to shatter on the door of his wardrobe, spraying black ink across the pale wood and onto the wall. Black drops like rain stained the sheets of his bed.

  In the silent aftermath of his fury, they heard the queen behind them.

  “Magus,” she said from the doorway. “I’d heard that you had come.”

  Eugenides swung to look at her. “You started a war in my name without telling me?” he asked.

  “You will have to excuse me,” said the queen to the magus as if she hadn’t heard. “I overslept, or I would have greeted you earlier.”

  “Are we at war with Attolia?” Eugenides demanded.

  “Yes,” said his queen.

  “And Sounis?” asked Eugenides.

  “Nearly,” said Eddis.

  “How could you come once a week to talk about the weather and not mention a war?”

  Eddis sighed. “Will you sit down and stop shouting?” she asked.

  “I’ll stop shouting. I won’t sit down. I might need to throw more inkpots. Did Galen stop you from telling me?”

  “At first,” the queen admitted. “But after that you didn’t want to know, Eugenides. You’re not blind, you had to see the things happening around you, but you never asked.”

  He thought about what he’d heard and seen without being curious: the military messengers on their horses riding in and out of the front courtyard, familiar faces disappearing from the court dinners. All the maps were missing, along with the map weights, from the library. His queen had been too busy to visit more than once a week, and he’d never wondered why.

  “Who—” He choked on the word and started again. “Who was in the raiding party?”

  “Stepsis.” Eugenides winced, and she went on. “Chlorus, Sosias”—all cousins of Eugenides and the queen—“the commander Creon and his soldiers.”

  “Well”—he stumbled over the words—“this explains all those nights without conversation at dinner. What else have I missed that I should have been told but didn’t want to hear?” he asked.

  “Not too much. Hostilities between us and Attolia were suspended for the winter. It was an early one, remember. Everyone’s told you about that. Magus?” said the queen politely. “Would you excuse us?”

  The magus bowed his head and left without a word. When he was gone, the queen sat herself in the armchair he’d lately occupied. She rubbed her face and said, “I’m hungry. I left Xanthe standing in the middle of my room this morning with the breakfast tray, and I didn’t eat anything last night at dinner. I was worrying about you,” she said reproachfully, “sitting in an unheated temple, sulking.”

  “I thought I was whining.”

  “Sulking, whining, keening piteously.”

  “I have not,” Eugenides insisted angrily.

  “No,” she admitted, “you haven’t. But you’ve been in a wallow of self-absorption and despair all winter, and no one could blame you. We could only wait and hope you’d recover. Then you tell me that you want to leave Eddis and go to a university on the Peninsula. I need you here, Eugenides.”

  “What possible use could you have for a one-handed former Queen’s Thief?”

  “You’re not a former queen’s Thief; you’re my Thief. So far I’m still queen.”

  “You know what I meant.”

  “It’s a lifelong title. You’d be Queen’s Thief if you were bedridden, and you know it.”

  “All right, what do you want a useless one-handed Thief for?”

  “I want you not to be useless.”

  “I can’t steal things without two hands,” Eugenides said bitterly. “That’s why she cut one off.”

  The queen of Attolia was only ever “she.” The name Attolia rarely passed his lips, as if Eugenides couldn’t bear the taste of the word in his mouth.

  “There are a lot of things that a person with two hands couldn’t steal,” Eddis said.

  “So?”

  “Surely if it’s impossible to steal them with two hands, it’s no more impossible to steal them with one. Steal peace, Eugenides. Steal me some time.”

  She sat back in the chair. “Sounis has pushed Attolia to the brink of a chaotic civil war. No one could claim that she’s been anything but brilliant, holding her throne for this long. Her people support her, but her barons hate her, ostensibly because she rules in her own right and has refused to take one of them for a king. What they really hate is the success she has had at centralizing the power of her throne and preventing them from running their estates as their own private kingdoms. But she has reached the end of her resources. She invited the Mede to a treaty. You know that’s why I sent you to Attolia. If she takes help from the Mede, if they land on this coast, they will eat us alive: Attolia, Sounis, and Eddis. I sent you because I needed to know how close her contacts with the Mede had become, because Sounis will not stop his attempts to unseat Attolia.”

  “Go to war with Sounis.”

  “I can’t. Sounis is too strong. Eddis and Attolia together might beat him, but Attolia won’t have anything to do with Eddis. She hates me too much, and she’s too much concerned trying to keep a grip on her own country.

  “She came to my coronation, you know,” Eddis explained. “She took me aside and gave me a lot of advice on how to hold on to the throne: raise taxes so that I’d have the money to put down insurrection, increase the size of my army, and purge my council regularly. Trust no one, and execute any threats, no matter how insignificant, immediately.”

  Eugenides stared, and the queen shrugged. “She’d only been on her throne a few years. If Eddis had been anything like Attolia, it would have been good advice. She’s hated me for not taking her advice and for having a country where I didn’t need to. And she’s hated me because I have you, Eugenides, to keep Sounis and his corruption out of my court.”

  She stood and stuffed her hands in the pockets of her trousers and paced the room, pausing to rise on tiptoe to look out the window. Eugenides wondered when she’d started wearing trousers again. Thinking about it, he couldn’t recall seeing her in a dre
ss except at the formal dinners.

  “You’d never threatened her directly, but you were a threat to Sounis,” said Eddis. “If Sounis had someone else to harass, he’d have less time to devote to Attolia. He’s been barking up our tree from the moment she cut your hand off.” She turned back to Eugenides.

  “Sounis could be entangled for years trying to secure power for himself here in Eddis. He’d find us easy to bite off but not easy to swallow.” She smiled thinly. “Attolia could have had the same result by killing you, but she wanted something that would hurt you and me more.” She looked at him. “You know all this,” she said.

  “Most of it,” Eugenides admitted. “I didn’t know why Attolia hated you.”

  “Get dressed,” said his queen, “while I order breakfast, and I’ll tell you some more.”

  “Without you to deter Sounis, he was ready to begin a campaign to weaken Eddis. I think my court is too loyal to be bought with his money, but his real power is trade. We depend on imports. Sooner or later he was going to stop those. And if Attolia was trading with the Mede, we wouldn’t get any supplies from her.”

  “I know this,” said Eugenides.

  “Of course. What you don’t know was that I’d been thinking for some time about deposing the queen of Attolia.”

  Eugenides blinked.

  “It is a measure of complete desperation to unseat a neighboring monarch, and there isn’t a successor that’s much more palatable, but Attolia has been growing more and more unstable as she tries to counter Sounis, and with the Mede hanging over us like vultures, instability is more dangerous than anything else,” said Eddis, pacing the library. “Then she cut off your hand, and I stopped caring if she ended hanging from her own palace walls. Every single person in Eddis agreed with me. Your father and I thought that if Sounis had an opportunity to install a puppet government in Attolia, and if it could be done too quickly for the Mede to interfere, Sounis would leave Eddis alone.”

  The queen shrugged and admitted, “In that sense, we are no better than Attolia. To save Eddis, I’d throw her country to that dog Sounis without hesitation.”

  “And?”

  “The magus, of all people, stopped us in our tracks. He told Sounis that Attolia would treat with the Mede if Eddis and Sounis both attacked her. He may be right, but I believe she’s treating with the Mede anyway. I hoped that if they had to deal with an internal war and an external one, the country would close ranks against the Mede and against the queen as well. They would accept a puppet king from Sounis, at least for a few years, and we would be rid of her. The Mede emperor cannot interfere without an invitation from the acting government of the country without breaking his treaty with the Greater Powers of the Continent. The Greater Powers don’t want the Mede on this coast any more than we do, and they are also ready to interfere at the first excuse, but the last thing we need is to have the conflict fought out on our ground.”

  “So what’s happening now?”

  “Sounis wants Eddis and Attolia both. I offered him a chance to help me, but he’s choosing instead to join Attolia, although he hasn’t committed himself yet. She’s going to try to bring an army up the pass when the weather breaks. It will be slow, and most of the losses will be hers; there’s no room for her to maneuver. Should she get to the main fortifications, Sounis will bring his army up the other side of the pass. He wants to know that the defenses on his side of the Seperchia won’t be reinforced before he attacks. We’ve evacuated the people from the coastal mountains and moved the livestock over the bridge to this part of the country. We’re up to our eyeballs in sheep right now. If we don’t start slaughtering them soon, they’ll have grazed out the pastures. The silver mines have been packed with explosives that can be detonated if we’re going to lose them.

  “Trade has been suspended through the pass. I did that,” said Eddis. “I thought that I might as well do it before one of the lowlanders did. Goods are being moved by ship through the coastal islands. There has been an unsurprising increase in piracy,” she said dryly.

  “Can we stop the Attolian army?” Eugenides asked.

  “No,” said Eddis bleakly. She ran one hand through her hair. “Not without throwing our entire army down the pass. We’d stop her, but we’d be defenseless on every other front, and that’s what Sounis is waiting for.”

  “When do you expect the army?”

  “Attolia’s army is loyal and competent, but she has to supply it somehow, and that’s slowing her down. That and a long winter. The snows still have the main pass closed, and after the thaw the tributaries down to the Seperchia will keep the roads impassable. We usually spend weeks or more on springtime repairs before the pass is opened. Obviously we won’t be doing repairs this year.”

  “When?”

  “The middle of our spring, if we’re lucky.”

  “And what are your plans?”

  Eddis looked grim. “To abandon the country west of the Seperchia: the coastal mountains and the silver mines. We can hold the entrance to these interior valleys. We have enough grain to get us through next winter.”

  “And then?”

  “We hope that Sounis and Attolia bring each other enough grief to reduce their interest in Eddis. Please gods, they can’t maintain an alliance long, and one of them may be willing to break off and ally with us before we starve.”

  “And if they remain allied with each other?”

  “Then we surrender, Eugenides, and I am the queen that gets deposed. Attolia would probably take the coastal mountains and silver mines. Sounis would have the Hephestial Valley and the iron mines, unless he tries to grab the whole. At any rate, you could be a former queen’s Thief yet. Now I have to go speak to Xenophon. He’s been waiting for me.”

  “Yes,” said Eugenides. “Go talk to Xenophon, by all means.” He went back into his bedroom and shut the door.

  That night, after a day of staring into the flames of his fire, Eugenides left his room and wandered the deserted hallways of the palace. He was thinking. Absentmindedly he passed familiar things: a panel that opened into a passage behind the queen’s chambers, a storeroom with a tiny window from which he could reach the equally tiny window of his cousin Phrinidias’s dressing room, a useful hiding place behind a twisting staircase.

  The palace slept at this time of the night, and he’d always felt these hours belonged to him alone, so he was surprised, when he turned into a passageway that led to a staircase up to the roof, to find a guard at the end of it. He forced himself to continue down the passageway. There was no reason to turn back just because he’d been seen. He reached the doorway to the staircase, and the guard shifted his weight in order to stand squarely in the middle of it.

  “I’m going to the roof,” Eugenides explained, puzzled.

  “No, sir,” said the guard.

  “What do you mean, ‘no, sir’?” said Eugenides. “Why not?”

  “I have my orders, sir.”

  “What, that no one is allowed on the roof?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir, no one is allowed on the roof, or no, those aren’t your orders?”

  “No, those aren’t my orders, sir.”

  “Well, then, what are your orders, and stop calling me sir.” No one had ever called him sir before he’d stolen Hamiathes’s Gift, but since then it had been cropping up quite often. He didn’t like it.

  “My orders are not to allow you onto the roof, sir.”

  The Thief stared, dumbfounded.

  “Eugenides.”

  He turned. The queen stood at the end of the passageway, flanked by two more soldiers and a third man.

  “What do you mean, I’m not allowed on the roof?” said Eugenides, outraged.

  The queen walked toward him. The third man, Eugenides saw, was one of Galen’s assistants. He glanced from the assistant back to his queen.

  “You have someone watching my door,” he accused her.

  She looked uncomfortable. Eugenides turned to the guard beside him
and cursed. He turned back to the queen, still cursing. The soldiers on either side of her looked shocked.

  “You think I’m going to throw myself off the roof?” he asked.

  She did. The people in his family tended to die in falls. His mother, even his grandfather. When the palsy in his hands had grown so severe that he could no longer feed himself, he’d been unable to climb to the roof, and he’d tumbled over the railing at the top of one of the back staircases. It hadn’t been a hard fall, but enough to kill an old man.

  “You started a war without mentioning it,” Eugenides snarled. “You have my rooms watched, and I’m not allowed on the roof. What do I find out next?” He pushed past her and the soldiers. He walked backward away from her. “Tell me you’ve enrolled me as an apprentice bookkeeper. You bought a lovely house for me in the suburbs. You have a marriage arranged with a nice girl who doesn’t mind cripples!” he shouted. He had reached the corner and disappeared from sight still shouting. He was making enough noise to wake every sleeper in that wing of the palace, and he didn’t care. “I can’t wait to hear!” He spaced his last words out and finally was finished. There was no sound, not even that of his receding footsteps.

  The queen sighed and dismissed the soldiers who’d accompanied her.

  “Shall I go back to watching his door, Your Majesty?” Galen’s assistant asked.

  “Yes,” she answered heavily. “Watch him as carefully as you can.”

  Returning to her room, she sighed again. The accusation about the arranged marriage had been a home shot. It was a good thing Eugenides hadn’t realized it yet.

  In the morning the magus knocked at the library door and entered without waiting for an invitation. Eugenides, still in the clothes he’d worn the day before, looked up once from the fireplace and then ignored him.

  “My king sent me, you understand,” the magus said, sitting in the armchair opposite the Thief. “Our ambassador has reported that you were no longer a threat, but Sounis is wary when you are involved. He wanted me to gather a second opinion.”