The Queen of Attolia (13 page)

She picked her words carefully before she went on.
“It’s not the way I would like to think I would defend my throne, but in prosecuting this war against her I find myself…not commendable. I wouldn’t have started a war to avenge you, Gen, or even to rescue you. Still, I wonder, what opportunity for diplomacy did I miss, and did I overlook it because I was angry on your behalf?”

Eugenides had lain on his back on the lowest step to the throne, with his legs crossed at the ankle and his arms still folded across his chest. The cuff and hook he wore were inlaid with gold to match the gold piping on his collar and the embroidery on the sleeves of his overshirt. It was like him, if he had to have a thing, to have the fanciest of its kind. Eddis thought he looked like a well-dressed funerary ornament. Eugenides turned his head to look at her and lay without speaking for the space of three or four breaths.

“If she doesn’t indulge in torture for personal pleasure, why didn’t she do the sensible thing and hang me?” he asked quietly. It was an unanswerable question. He followed it with another. “If she catches me again, what better deterrent than me could she wish to have at her disposal?”

Eddis hesitated. In the past Attolia had shown that she would stop at nothing to defend her throne. How much of a threat had Eugenides been to Attolia? Not much, Eddis thought, but who measures? She considered carefully before she spoke. “If she ever had you again, she’d kill you immediately. She was a fool to do
otherwise, but, Eugenides”—she leaned over to meet his gaze directly—“she won’t have you.”

Eugenides covered his face with his arm. “I tell myself that, and I think I believe it, until I go to sleep. I tell myself that she isn’t—that she wouldn’t do those things. But I am afraid that she would,” he whispered. “And then I wish she’d hanged me. I wish in my god’s name that she’d hanged me, and I
hate
that Mede.” He laughed, and Eddis winced.

“So,” he said, his voice under control again, “may I have your permission to disappear until I look less like a frightened rabbit? Because I don’t think I can keep up appearances here.”

“How long?” Eddis asked.

“A few days, maybe ten.”

“Ten?”

“Maybe.”

“Take as much time as you need,” Eddis said heavily. “I’ll say I’ve sent you out to the coastal provinces.”

That was better than he’d hoped, but Eugenides didn’t say so. He pulled himself upright and stood to bow to his queen. Then he went away.

He was gone ten days and returned early in the morning of the eleventh. Eddis saw him at the back of the throne room during her morning sessions. He looked tired but relaxed. He watched while she dealt with the business at hand: who should get relief money, the care of the orphans and widows of soldiers, what
was to be done with burned-out farms. Attolia and Sounis seemed content for the moment to war against each other, but Eddis had to have her tiny amounts of arable land planted carefully or her people wouldn’t have the food to withstand another winter without trade. Sounis’s troops were still blockaded on Thegmis. He was offering a peace negotiation. Attolia was still rejecting it.

The following week brought the news that Sounis had negotiated the purchase of ships from an anonymous continental power willing to support his war with Attolia. The ships were scheduled to be delivered in time to break the blockade of Thegmis and to support a land invasion before the arrival of the summer windstorms. With one stroke Sounis had doubled the size of his navy and Attolia had lost her opportunity to make peace.

“He knew he had the ships coming when he attacked Thegmis,” said Eddis.

“Almost certainly.”

The minister of war spoke to Eddis’s council. “Attolia is fighting not only Sounis but her barons as well. She can’t command in person the land battle and direct the navy at the same time, and her new-model generals can’t run a war if her barons are going to work against Attolia’s interests. The defeat at Thegmis was entirely due to the interference of the baron Stadicos with
Attolia’s orders. Sounis is already organizing to take back the islands that he’s lost. He’ll begin as soon as the new ships for his navy are delivered. If he controls the islands, Attolia will be hard pressed to stop a land invasion.”

“She’s an astute strategist. Are you sure that Sounis will retake the islands, even with superior firepower?” someone asked.

The minister of war shrugged. “Who’s to say? Sounis is not a subtle thinker, but he’s not a fool either. Lately we had hoped that Attolia would take Sounis and be content once he was no longer a threat to her throne, whereas Sounis’s goal has been to expand his hegemony. If he controls Attolia, he may still pursue war with Eddis, attacking us on two fronts. The only relief we could hope for would be the time it would take him to solidify his control over his new territory.

“However, the Mede presence off the coast is the real danger, and it has intensified. It’s doubtful that Sounis could in the near term execute so crushing a victory that he could capture the queen. If the queen flees to the Mede, they will make every effort to restore her to her throne as their puppet. They will have the excuse they need to land in force on this coast, and they will likely overrun Sounis and then Eddis as well. Even if they refrain from a direct attack, our situation will only worsen without an outlet for regular trade. So for us, the very worst possible outcome would be Attolia’s going to the Mede for help.”

The queen asked for comment, and talk went on all morning as every detail of the war was reexamined.

“Your Majesty,” said her Thief at last. He’d never spoken before at a council meeting, and those at the table turned to look at him in surprise.

“Our goal has been to dethrone Attolia without inviting in the Mede. If the instability of her rule were eliminated and Attolia had a government more stable but inimical to the Mede, it could mean an alliance between Eddis and Attolia that would drive back Sounis.”

“Yes,” Eddis agreed.

“I think,” Eugenides said quietly, “that I could eliminate the instability of the Attolian queen.”

“Go on,” said Eddis, and her council listened as Eugenides talked.

“Attolia isn’t in the capital. She is at Ephrata on the coast. There’s no real castle there. It’s a fortified megaron in the old style, which means it’s not as easy for me to move through as her palace is, for example, or the megaron in Sounis’s capital. However, Ephrata is not well defended. Sounis doesn’t yet have a navy to attack her by sea, and she has the lower ridges of the coastal hills as well as the Seperchia between her and the base of the pass from Eddis. Our army would have to break the blockade at the bottom of the pass and cross the river and those hills to reach her. She’s not much worried about an assault, and she keeps only a minimal garrison of her private guard at Ephrata.”

The council looked at him expectantly, holding their collective breath.

“If I could get into Ephrata, I could remove the queen.”

In the past he wouldn’t have needed help, and it would have been a matter for him and the queen to discuss alone. Now he spoke to her entire council and its individual members looked not at him but at their hands, or cast quick glances at one another, all of them remembering a younger Eugenides who’d sworn he’d never be a soldier and wanted nothing to do with the business of killing people.

“We would need a force large enough to seize Ephrata,” Eugenides said.

“How could we seize Ephrata?” one of the men at the table asked. “You just said she has her entire army camped between us and the Seperchia.”

Eugenides explained. As the intricacy of his plan unfolded, it became indisputably clear where he had been for the ten days he’d been away. The queen watched him with her eyes narrowed as he talked about taking a small force down to Attolia and bypassing her army camped at the Seperchia.

“She has border patrols along the base of the mountains.” One of the generals welcome at Eddis’s council meetings spoke up. “How would you get any significant group of soldiers past those without alerting her?”

“She doesn’t patrol the dystopia.”

“For obvious reasons.” The dystopia was the black, rocky ground left behind by the eruptions of the Sacred Mountain. The ground was fertile but too rough to cultivate and too dry. Its only regular water source was the unnavigable Aracthus River, which flowed down from the shoulder of the Sacred Mountain and directly across the dystopia to the fields between it and the banks of the much larger Seperchia River.

“How do you propose to get to the dystopia without being seen and then get across it?” the general asked.

Eugenides looked at his father.

“The Aracthus?” his father asked.

Eugenides nodded without speaking.

“What’s the garrison at Ephrata?” the minister of war asked.

“Fifty men,” Eugenides answered, and waited.

After a pause for thought his father nodded. “It could be done,” he said at last.

Eugenides turned back to the general. “You see,” he argued, “by taking a smaller force, we can avoid the Attolian army. We can seize the megaron without meaning to hold it because once the queen is gone, the megaron is irrelevant.”

“And you’re sure she’s there?”

“I am.”

“And that she would be there when we attacked?”

“That could be determined.”

Before anyone else could speak, the queen cleared
her throat. All eyes except Eugenides’s turned to her. He looked at the floor.

“If you would please excuse us,” the queen said very quietly, “I will speak to my Thief.”

Unsure at the cause of her anger, her council hastily collected its papers and disappeared. Eddis looked across the empty table.

“Fifty men,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You counted?”

“As best I could.”

Eddis waved her hand at the empty seats around the table. “They think I sent you. They think you went to Attolia on my orders. I gave you permission to run away and hide, not to go creeping around Attolia’s megaron so that she can catch you again. Are you out of your
mind
?” she shouted, standing up, scattering the papers piled in front of her, knocking a pen so that it dripped ink in fuzzy black dots onto the tabletop.

“I was afraid. I couldn’t just sit here being afraid and doing nothing about it.”

“So you did this? Damn you, Eugenides. What would I have done if she’d caught you?”

“I was in the woods watching people go in and out of the megaron. I wasn’t anywhere near her.”

“That’s as close as you went? The woods?”

Eugenides hesitated. “I went into the town once.”

Eddis stared at him and waited.

“And I scouted the outer walls of the megaron.”

“What would I have done,” Eddis repeated in a low voice, more anguished than her shouting, “what would I have done if she’d caught you and cut you to pieces and sent the pieces back to me?”

“Buried them,” said Eugenides.

Eddis sat back against her throne and crossed her arms. She looked at Eugenides a long time while he waited patiently.

“Now you want to go back,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Eugenides, this is like seeing a child burn himself on a pot and then say he’d like to try climbing into the fire next.”

“I’m not a child,” the Thief said.

“We can send someone else,” Eddis said, ignoring him while she considered alternatives.

“There isn’t anyone else,” Eugenides said firmly, interrupting her thoughts. “And I want to do this.”

“I won’t believe that. If this is truly what you want, I should have you locked up until you come to your senses. There has to be someone else.”

“No,” said Eugenides.

“Yes,” said his queen.

“Who?” Eugenides asked.

“Gen,” Eddis was forced into admitting, “it would be worse than losing you to have you do this and become like her.”

He came and sat on the footstool by her chair. “I am your Thief. As you pointed out once before, I am a member of your royal family. There is no one else to send. And, My Queen, I do want this.” He looked up at her. “I can’t tell you why. She may be a fiend from hell to make me feel this way, but even if I have to hate myself for the rest of my life, this is what I want.” He shook his head, perhaps in self-contempt, and shrugged. “I dream about her at night.”

Eddis looked down at him and said dryly, “We have heard you screaming.”

He laughed, a sharp sound like wood splintering, then said, “I can’t do this except at your direction.” He leaned back against her legs and turned his head to look up at her. “My Queen,” he said softly, “you can’t tell me I am a grown-up hero and still keep me tied to you like a little boy. Let me go.”

“Oh, Gen. When I said Eddis expected more of you, I didn’t mean this.”

She sat and looked at her hands for a long time.

“All right,” she said at last. “Go and steal the queen of Attolia.”

I
T TOOK TIME TO PREPARE
for Eugenides’s plan. The spring rains fell. Eddis grew green with the luminescence of new growth against a pearl gray sky. Independent traders slipped into the tiny harbors of the Eddis coast, and their small shipments were carried up the cliffs to the coastal province. In the capital the women and the men too old for fighting sewed the quilted tunics that were the uniform of the soldiers. The soldiers trained, Eugenides’s cousin Crodes, who served as the queen’s messenger, spent hours every day practicing his pronunciation, and Eugenides, for his part, took riding lessons, griping bitterly all the while.

One night in her megaron at Ephrata, the queen of Attolia retired late to her rooms. She had pored for hours over the papers on her writing desk, and she had written page after page to add to them, sealing her messages with wax and the imprint of the ring on her finger,
one of the many seals she used. The royal messengers would be busy in the morning, each of them with a leather bag to carry marked with the royal insignia. Some would ride across Attolia, and some would board the small, fast ships that waited in Ephrata’s harbor.

She was tired. She sat, almost too weary to keep her head lifted as Phresine gently combed the tangles out of her hair and twisted it into the single braid the queen wore when she slept. As Phresine combed out the long hair, she teased the queen about the shadows under her eyes.

“You will wear yourself to the bone. Your beauty will be gone, and your suitors will lose interest.”

“It’s a mask, Phresine. The suitors haven’t any interest in me.”

“Well, your mask will be gone soon if you don’t take better care.”

“Only to be replaced with another.”

“And that one?”

“Power. What men like best for themselves and least in their women.”

“Then you must marry before your beauty is gone, mustn’t you?” Phresine stepped carefully on dangerous ground. It didn’t pay to grow too familiar with Her Majesty. Phresine had never seen the queen lose her temper, but her censure was not to be taken lightly. She was unfailingly polite to her women, and kind in a formal way. Perhaps because she never allowed anyone too
close, any sign of trust or confidence from her was highly prized by her attendants. Still, she ruled her court and her country with an inflexible hand. Pausing in her work, Phresine considered that for all she knew, the queen was as ruthless as she seemed, and Phresine valued her position too much to risk it by letting her tongue wag.

“Phresine,” the queen said without turning her head to look at her attendant, “I can read your mind.”

Phresine moved her hands, stilled during her thoughts, back to their tasks. “Then you know there’s no harm in old Phresine,” she said.

When Phresine was gone, the room was quiet except for the ceaseless sound of waves that came through the open window. The narrow slice of moon inched across the sky until it shone onto her carpet, and Attolia was still awake. She got out of bed, lifting her robe from where it was draped by the bedside. A year earlier an attendant would have been hovering, ready to serve a restless queen, but the queen had long since ordered them out of her chambers at night. She could get her own water if she was thirsty. She wanted to be alone.

She pushed her arms into the wide sleeves of the robe and wrapped it around herself, then dragged a chair to sit in the moonlight by the window. “Damn him,” she cursed under her breath, “damn him, damn him, damn him,” as if her curses could weigh down the
Thief of Eddis like stones piled one on top of another until he was overcome.

She sighed and tried to organize her thoughts. If she was going to be awake, there were still problems of strategy to address. The Mede ambassador was persistent in his attentions. A close relative of the emperor and a brother of the emperor’s heir, he was not an unlikely suitor. It was no doubt why he had been chosen as ambassador. She wished he wouldn’t grease his beard so dramatically. The scent of the oil he used was overwhelming.

Her thoughts circled back to the scent of the hair oil she’d used as a child. She’d broken the last amphora of it and then never used it again. That same day her older brother had died falling from his horse, and the familiar earth had seemed to shift under her feet. Suddenly her world had changed, and she was a different person with new rooms in the palace, a new view from her windows, the comforting presence of her nurse replaced by the aloof faces of unfamiliar attendants. Not just a princess of the royal house to be married agreeably in a few years, she was the princess whose husband would be the next king of Attolia. Her dead mother’s jewelry was collected from her father’s concubines and brought to her. The combs in her hair were more ornamental, the earrings in her ears heavier, and her hair oils more expensively scented.

Within the month her father had chosen her husband, selling her to the son of his most powerful baron
in exchange for a peaceful end to his reign. Sitting in her chair in the moonlight, Attolia thought back over the year of her engagement, which she had spent, as custom demanded, with the family of her future husband. Surrounded by strangers, completely isolated from any ally, she’d listened as her fiancé and his father talked over their plans to destroy the king and to wring whatever power and riches they could from her throne, sucking her country dry to feed their appetites.

Sitting in her corner, quietly spinning thread on her spindle or embroidering the collars on her fiancé’s shirts, she’d listened to him as he struggled to follow his father’s convoluted plans, gloating at every opportunity for treason and character assassination. It was her fiancé who gave her the name shadow princess. As quiet and as dull as a shadow he called her, and it was true. Caught in an abrupt adolescence, she was too tall and ungraceful. Her face was long, and as she schooled it carefully to keep it free of expression, she looked plain and not bright. Beside her in the corner the other ladies cast down their eyes demurely and flaunted for her benefit the gold earrings and bracelets her fiancé left with them after his visits. A shadow princess he’d called her, and someday, he’d said, a shadow queen.

Attolia had had few trinkets of her own, but as she sat quietly moving her needle through the embroidery, she had thought very carefully about the royal jewelry that would someday be at her disposal. She listened to
her future father-in-law’s plans and made plans of her own. She collected leaves, one by one, from the coleus bushes in the garden. They grew in hedges along the walks around the villa. She tied the leaves into a knot in one of her sashes and hung the sash in her wardrobe. Six weeks before she was supposed to return to the castle to prepare for her wedding, the news came that her father was dead. Her fiancé stopped in her rooms with a face so full of mock solemnity it was an insult and told her that her father had been poisoned by some unknown assassin. The princess felt her own face had turned to a stone mask. She fled to her bedroom and waited there for the tears to come, but none did. Finally she had decided that none were called for. Hadn’t he gotten what he bargained for? Hadn’t he reached the end of his reign without war?

She returned to the capital, where she was watched by her fiancé’s spies, but not closely. She was the shadow princess, dull and quiet. She waited with every appearance of passivity as a funeral was arranged for her father and a wedding for herself. Then, at the wedding feast, while the lords and ladies of her court looked on, Attolia poisoned her bridegroom.

He’d had a porcine habit of eating her food when he’d finished his own. When his wine cup was empty, he would reach without comment for hers, having noted if she’d sampled it first. She sat through her wedding feast with her lips stinging from the poison of the
powdered coleus leaf that had touched them as she pretended to drink, then watched as he took her wine, as casually as he had taken her country, and choked on it and died.

The lords of Attolia had turned on one another then, searching for the assassin, and the queen had retired to her rooms and waited while the barons wrangled over who would be the next king. Late that night she was finally summoned to meet the man who’d managed through threats and promises to gain the allies to proclaim himself king. Her hands clenched still when she remembered the disdain of the servingwoman sent to fetch her. The barons had looked Attolia over, she remembered, the way she had seen men looking at slave girls, and one man had laughed when she had crossed the room to sit on the throne. That same man had ordered her to be ready to marry him in the morning. She’d nodded stiffly, her face impassive, and the captain of her guard had raised his crossbow and shot the claimant for her hand through the heart.

The response had its calculated effect. In the stunned silence that followed, she divided the property of the dead baron among his competitors and informed them that the next king of Attolia would be her choice, not theirs. She then retired to allow them time to absorb the new reality of her rule: the guards around them, the hostages she held, and the army she controlled.

They hadn’t called her the shadow queen then. The royal jewelry was the only resource she’d had, that and the knowledge she’d gained listening to the father of her fiancé as he’d tried to hammer into the head of his dull son the complicated intrigue necessary to seize the throne.

She had judged the men and women around her and doled her treasure out carefully. The golden bees—earrings the color of honey that were older than the monarchy—and brooches and fibula pins, ruby earrings and gold necklets and bracelets had all been dropped one by one into carefully chosen hands. Over the previous year she’d learned all she needed to know about her father’s most powerful barons, and while they squabbled about who might be the next king, she’d made herself queen.

She had kept her bargains with the officers in her army, promoting them outside their feudal hierarchy, making a new-model army that answered to her and not to the divisive barons. She’d used her new army to destroy her erstwhile father-in-law and again taken the property of her opponents to placate her barons and enrich her supporters.

The stone mask over her feelings grew heavier and heavier as she was forced to more and more extreme measures to hold her throne. Surrounded by people who hated or feared her, she trusted no one and told herself that she didn’t need to. Once, just after she’d
seized her throne, she’d summoned an old nurse back to be an attendant, and the woman had refused to come to the palace. Enraged, Attolia had ridden out to the village where the woman lived, intending to see her arrested for refusing her queen’s faith in her.

The nurse, who’d been young when she’d served Attolia, had grown to middle age. She’d married and had children. She stood in the court of her farmhouse, looking up to her queen, and asked, “Where are my children? Where is my husband, Your Majesty?”

Attolia had not registered their absence, had not cared until the woman pointed it out.

The nurse stepped closer to the queen and explained. “Two men came to the house saying they would keep my children safe while I served the queen. Did you send them?”

Mute, Attolia had shaken her head.

“I did not think you had. For now, my husband has the children and hides with them, but will any of them be safe if I serve you? And can you trust me if you cannot keep them from harm?”

She had reached up to lay a hand on Attolia’s knee, a gesture of supplication, and comfort as well, and Attolia had shaken her head.

“Your Majesty, you are searching for your nurse, to trust with your life, but she’s gone. There is no one you can trust here.” Attolia had turned her horse and ridden away.

That year she’d had a gold headband made, set with rubies, to wear in her hair in place of the royal jewelry. It was a copy of the headband worn by the famous statue of the goddess Hephestia in the main temple in Eddis. Hephestia had ruled the old gods as Attolia intended to rule her barons, alone.

She had replaced the golden bees and the rest of the royal gems, buying them back from the people she’d bribed with them, sometimes buying replacements for pieces that couldn’t be recovered, but she continued to wear the headband every day to remind her subjects of her authority. At night it lay in a velvet-lined case near her bed.

One morning, she’d found it moved slightly from its resting spot and beside it a pair of matching ruby earrings. She’d thought at first that it was some flattery delivered with the connivance of one of her attendants, perhaps from the newly arrived ambassador of Medea, or one of her court currying favor, but before she could interrogate the women of her chamber, a nagging suspicion grew that it was not a gift of flattery, but the Thief of Eddis laughing at her again. She never wore the rubies. They were kept in their own velvet case beside the one that held the headband.

In the moonlight she sighed again and climbed stiffly out of her chair and went to look at them. She opened the case and flicked them across the velvet lining with the nail of her forefinger, resisting touching
them as if they might be hot. She snapped the case closed, laid her robe over a chair, and went back to bed and finally to sleep.

“She’s retaken Thegmis.” Nahuseresh sat in his office, tapping the edge of a folded message against his knee.

Kamet stopped in the doorway. “Will you have the excuse you need to land?” he asked.

Nahuseresh picked a letter from the emperor off the secretary’s desk. The emperor wanted news of progress and would not be pleased to hear that Thegmis was once again safe in Attolia’s hands. The ambassador didn’t answer his secretary’s question but spoke his thoughts aloud.

“I haven’t seen enough of her generals. She is clever enough to hide them from me, sending this one away as she speaks to that one, never leaving an opportunity for me to study them. If I knew which one planned the retaking of Thegmis, I could kill him and cripple her. She’d offer us anything then, desperate for help.”

“And if you can’t identify the generals that she depends on, and you can’t cut off her military support, what then?” Kamet asked. “The emperor will not start a war with the Continental Powers. They are bound by treaty to defend this coast if you attack it.”