When the weather finally turned cold, Attolia called in her raiders. Sounis, having lost the battle for the Irkes, withdrew his army, and Eddis drew her breath at last. Exhausted soldiers returned to their families to rest. In the iron mines the work went on, unremittingly, as they pressed for the ore to make Her Majesty’s cannon to supplement those few that were mounted above what remained of the Irkes. The rains fell on the ashes of the pines and washed them away. The water cut furrows into the gentle slopes until the walls of the furrows collapsed and ditches grew in their places and the gradual rises were carved into painful hillocks and ravines that would slow any army that fought its way uphill. The streams below ran red with the dirt as if filled with blood.
In Eddis’s capital the palace filled again with lords and barons and Eddis’s officers in their embroidered tunics. Bright candles lit the ceremonial hall during formal dinners as Eddis attempted a show of peacetime rituals.
One day in the winter a doctor from one of the military hospitals came to see Eugenides. In the late afternoon of the same day a page brought a message to Eddis, and she excused herself from a meeting with the master of her foundry and climbed the stairs to the roof of the palace. There were wide walks along the walls where the court strolled on fine days. Eugenides sat on a parapet. Eddis approached but stopped about five feet from him. She didn’t want to startle him. His feet dangled in space four stories off the ground.
He turned his head slightly, enough to see her in the corner of his eye. “Do you still have people following me?” he asked. “Am I not allowed to sit on the roof on a nice day?”
“It isn’t a nice day,” Eddis answered shortly. It was in fact bitterly cold. Flurries of snow blew in the wind. “You’ve been here more than an hour, and you are making the guards nervous.” She settled on the low stones beside him.
“You heard what happened?” Eugenides asked.
“I heard one of the doctors from the War Hospital asked you to visit the wards and you went with him.”
“He took me to visit the amputees.”
“Oh.”
“Because the cannon blow men apart and because the doctors sew the open edges closed—”
“Eugenides—”
“—because of course we wouldn’t want soldiers to die just because they are missing such nonessentials as arms or legs.”
He was looking out over the valley. Across from them was Hephestia’s Sacred Mountain, rising above all others with the Hamiathes Reservoir on one shoulder. “That damned doctor asked me to visit the wounded. Then he trotted me out in front of all those broken-apart men as if to say, ‘See, here is the Thief of Eddis; losing a hand hasn’t bothered him.’ As if I were a sacred relic to restore them and they could then jump out of their beds and lead happy lives forever after.”
“Eugenides—”
“Well, I patted every one of them on the shoulder like some sort of priest, and then I went outside and threw up.” He leaned forward a little to look down between his toes to the hillside far below him. Eddis, sitting with her feet inside the wall, refrained from plucking at his sleeve to pull him back. Telling the Thief to mind his balance was like telling a master swordsman not to cut himself.
“That doctor,” Eugenides muttered. “Why didn’t he say, ‘See, here is the failed Thief of Eddis and the cause of all your misery’?”
“Gen,” Eddis said firmly, “this war is not your fault.”
“Whose is it, then? I fell into Attolia’s trap.”
“I sent you there.”
“I fell and you sent me. She set the trap and sprang it because Sounis hounded her, and Sounis hounded her with the support of the magus, who fears the Mede, and the Mede emperor, I suppose, is under his own pressures. So whom finally do we blame for this war? The gods?”
He looked up into the cloud-filled sky. Eddis laid a warning hand on his arm.
“Oh, I’ll watch my tongue,” said Eugenides. “I have learned how, and I don’t want the clouds to part and Moira to arrive on a band of sunlight to tell me to shut up, but I wish I knew if we’re at war and people are dying because the gods choose to have it so. Is this the will of the Great Goddess, that Eddis be destroyed?”
Eddis shook her head. “We are Hephestia’s people still. I believe that. Beyond that I don’t know. Nothing I’ve ever learned from a priest makes me think I know just what the gods are or what they can accomplish, but, Gen, I know my decisions are my own responsibility. If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make up my mind for me.” She remembered the properties of the stone of Hamiathes and said, “We can’t ask the gods to explain themselves, and I, for one, don’t want to.”
Eugenides looked thoughtful, remembering his own experience with Hamiathes’s Gift, and nodded his agreement.
They had both been quiet for a while before Eddis spoke again. Her words surprised Gen. “You aren’t the boy hero anymore,” she said.
“Was I ever?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.
She smiled, wondering again where he had picked up that particular facial expression. “Oh, certainly you were the golden boy,” she said. “You kept the entire population amused. And since you brought Sounis to his knees, you’ve been the darling of the court as well.”
“The magus said something along those lines. All that glory, and I missed it,” Eugenides said mournfully.
Eddis laughed and leaned closer to put one arm around his shoulder.
Eugenides thought it over. “Not the darling of our dear cousins,” he pointed out.
“Even them,” said Eddis. “They were as angry as anyone else when…you came home.” She stumbled, close to the sensitive subject of his missing hand. He referred to it occasionally, sometimes lightly. He’d joked that it couldn’t possibly affect his riding for the worse, but he still flinched visibly sometimes when it was mentioned by anyone else, and she knew he hated to talk about it.
Sitting together in the cold, they both thought of the cousins who had died since the war began. Stepsis, Chlorus, Sosias in the raiding party at the very beginning. Timos had died stopping Attolia’s advance up the main pass the previous spring. Two others, Cleon and Hermander, had been wounded in those battles and had died of infection over the summer. Others had died after the Irkes Forest burned. Eddis remembered them in the first few days after Eugenides had been brought home to the palace. No one had been more eager than they to avenge their Thief.
“I think they felt it was their prerogative to hold you facedown in a water butt and no one else should dare touch you. Therespides is going to admire you, albeit grudgingly, for the rest of his life.”
“I thought you said that was all over. I missed it.”
“I only said that you weren’t a boy hero. You’ve grown now. People will expect even more of you—that you can steal a magus and bring Sounis to his knees again and do it with one hand.”
“One hand, maybe, but a hand full of your best soldiers. How much credit can I take for that?”
“All of it,” said Eddis. “It wouldn’t have happened but for you. You deserve all the credit—or the blame, some might say—otherwise Attolia wouldn’t be so frightened of you.”
Eugenides looked over at her, surprised.
“Oh, yes, she’s afraid. She’ll take Sounis in the spring or by summer. We’ll offer peace again, and she’ll take it if she can, because she’s afraid of what you might do once Sounis is no longer occupying our attention.”
Eugenides continued to look nonplussed, and Eddis nodded her head. “I wish she would give up this war now, but I can see that her barons would eat her alive. Still, she is not so foolish that she would continue a war once she had some victory to appease them. And after Sounis’s defeat at Irkes Forest, she knows that our soldiers are as good as their reputation.” She said quietly then, “Gen, you are a sacred relic to the men in that hospital.”
“Are you telling me in your gentle way to stop whining?”
“Yes.”
“I think heroes generally do, but those men believe in you.”
“I did wait until I was outside before I threw up.”
In the spring the rains came. The trees bloomed in the lowlands. The snows melted in Eddis, and the floodwaters kept every access to the mountain country closed. The people of Eddis prayed for the rain to never stop even as they trudged through mud to their knees and longed for fresh greens. Attolia and Sounis worked their fields before turning back to their war making. Eddis watched to see if they would attack each other or move again against the mountains.
The rains continued. Sounis bypassed any attempt to retake the islands he had lost to Attolia and instead moved in a surprise attack on Thegmis, almost in the harbor of Attolia’s capital city. The queen was not in her capital. Communications failed, her generals blundered, and Thegmis fell.
Sounis controlled the island, but he’d lost his last large ship in the attack and had no means to resupply his troops or to withdraw them. Attolia blockaded the island with her own navy and waited. Sounis offered to make peace, but Attolia, with the upper hand, rejected his offers. In the mountains Eddis and her minister of war hoped that Sounis was being stupid without the advice of his magus, but they worried.
“He’s not this much of a fool,” said Eddis.
“Have you talked to the magus?” her minister of war asked.
“I did. He is not much help, and that may be deliberate, but he says he doesn’t know what Sounis is planning.”
“We shall wait then and see,” said the minister.
In the evenings, before dinner was served, the court gathered in the old throne room. Four officers who had already drained several cups of watered wine joked about the threats of the queen of Attolia, lately reported by Eddisian spies. In a sudden silence, their words carried over the crowd. “…send him into the afterlife blind, deaf, and with his tongue cut out as well…”
Eyes turned to Eugenides, standing across the room in a group with several of his uncles. Everyone knew that Attolia had been speaking about him. Eugenides turned to the crowd and ducked his head. “I was so looking forward to my next visit,” he said with mock chagrin, and, chuckling, people returned to their conversations. Eddis, from where she stood near the hearth, watched the Thief carefully, but he turned back to his uncles with an impenetrably bland expression. The queen gestured to her steward and directed him in a low voice to reorder the seating at dinner.
Later, from the head of the table, Eddis watched Eugenides take his place with his father to one side of him and Agape, the youngest daughter of the baron Phoros, on the other. The queen was too far away to hear what he said as he sat down, but Agape answered, and they seemed to get on well. Eddis sent up a small prayer under her breath and turned to speak with her own seatmates.
“You seem to be burdened with my company more often than you deserve,” Eugenides was saying.
“They’re afraid you might snap at anyone else,” Agape answered with a serious expression.
Eugenides looked startled. “No one could snap at you,” he said.
“Yes,” said Agape, still very serious. “I’m much too sweet.”
Eugenides laughed outright, and Agape’s grave expression gave way to a smile. She was the youngest of four sisters and the loveliest as well. The others had allowed a certain shrewishness of character to distort their good looks, but Agape was a great favorite at the court for her kindness and her wit.
“Are you in a dreadful mood?” she asked, laying a hand over Eugenides’s. “Your father warned me that you might be.”
Eugenides glanced at his father, who was staring down at his plate and didn’t look up, though he had certainly heard.
“Yes,” said Eugenides, turning back to Agape, “a dreadful mood. You should swap seats with your sister Hegite. She and I deserve each other this evening.”
“You are unkind to poor Hegite.”
“I would be if she were sitting next to me.”
Agape smiled. “I suppose it is lucky she is not, then,” she said.
“I think luck has nothing to do with it,” Eugenides answered, glancing at his queen, “but with a dinner companion as lovely as you, I won’t complain. Are you singing at the festival?”
They talked then about the upcoming festival, which would end with the rites of Hephestia and an entire day and night of singing by the temple chorus and by selected soloists. Agape had sung the year before and said she would sing again, spending the next few weeks in seclusion in the temple grounds while she practiced.
Midway through dinner Eugenides lifted his wine cup and looked down into it.
“Something is the matter with this cup,” he said.
“What is it?” Agape asked.
“I can’t get anybody to fill it.” He had several times caught the eye of a wine bearer only to have the boy glance away, pretending not to have seen him. “Excuse me,” he said to Agape as he turned and leaned across his father. It was an awkward reach as he had to use his left hand. He accomplished it gracefully and removed his father’s wine cup, leaving his own in its place.
“There,” he said, “I’m sure you can get it filled.” He challenged his father with a look, and the older man nodded.
“I’m sure I can,” he said, and signaled to a wine bearer. The boy came with the ewer and poured out the wine. Eugenides drained the cup he’d taken from his father and held it up. The boy hesitated and looked to the minister of war.
“Demos,” Eugenides said, “stop looking at my father, and fill my wine cup.” The minister of war turned to look across the room. Demos filled the cup. Eugenides drained it. “Now fill it again,” he said, and the boy did as he was told while the minister of war sat stiffly, turned away.
“Good lad,” said Eugenides. “Now keep an eye on that cup because I don’t want it empty again this evening, understood?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said as he backed away.
“You are in a dreadful mood,” Agape said.
“I am,” said Eugenides. “And telling me I can’t have wine with my dinner will only make it worse.”
“Being drunk is much better,” Agape agreed.
Eugenides looked at her sharply. “Agape, I think you are trespassing.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not going to stop?”
“No.” She smiled, and Eugenides, in spite of his foul mood, smiled back. Capitulating for the moment, he didn’t touch the wine cup again. After dinner he excused himself politely and disappeared. When his father looked for him, he hadn’t joined any of the small groups around the ceremonial hall for after-dinner conversation. Nor had anyone seen him go upstairs to his room.
With a jug of unwatered wine, he stepped across a courtyard of rain-washed pavement to the guard barracks. The wine, he knew, would ensure his welcome and few questions. Hours later he returned to the central palace and the library. He stopped unsteadily in the doorway when he saw the magus inside, bent over the papers on the table they’d agreed would be his for the duration of his stay in Eddis.
“I stayed up late just to be sure you were gone,” Eugenides said, yawning.
“Unlike your father, I am certainly not waiting up for you,” said the magus dryly. “I have work I prefer to do uninterrupted.”
“Was my father here?”
“Until half an hour ago. It was like having a basilisk in the room.”
Eugenides laughed as he crossed the library to his room. “I’m glad I missed him,” he said.
The magus, taking note of his unsteadiness, agreed. “I’m glad you missed him, too.”
“And will your muse keep you working all night?” Eugenides asked.
“It might,” the magus answered.
“Not if you can only work uninterrupted,” the Thief said cryptically as he closed his door.
The magus had meant to work just a few moments more, but after the interruption he fell back into
his thoughts and was still in the library when Eugenides’s hoarse screams began. He put down his pen and listened.
He was a soldier as well as a scholar, and he was not unfamiliar with the sound of men screaming. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and his fingers. Then, reluctantly, he stood and walked to the door of Eugenides’s room and banged on it. He banged hard and for a long time before the screaming subsided. There was silence, then, until finally the bolt was thrown and Eugenides opened the door to look out. The side of his face was creased with sleep and his hair was damp with sweat.
“Just bad dreams,” he said quietly.
“Come sit by the fire?” the magus asked.
Eugenides staggered out into the light and sat in a chair and groaned. “Oh, my head,” he said.
“That will be more effective than a lecture from your father,” said the magus, amused.
Eugenides disagreed. “You’ve never heard my father lecture.”
“Do you want to talk about them?” the magus asked, sitting in a chair nearby.
“The lectures? Not really. He never says much, but it’s always to the point.”
“The screaming nightmares.”
“Oh,” said the Thief. “No. I don’t want to talk about them.”
“The weather, then?”
“No, thank you. Not the harvest either,” said Eugenides. “Tell me why the king of Sounis wants to marry the queen of Eddis.” He’d asked the magus the same question before.
“The political importance of the marriage is obvious,” the magus answered.
Eugenides shook his head but did it carefully in consideration of the pain left when the numbness caused by too much wine had faded. “I don’t mean the political advantages. He wants more than that.”
“Eddis is brilliant, Gen. She’s very young, almost as young as yourself, and she is already a successful leader and a gifted ruler. Her legal reforms have changed Eddis more in seven years than anyone would have thought possible when she took the throne. And on a personal level she is quite…magnetic.”
The Queen of Attolia Page 13
