The Queen of Attolia (16 page)

“You wish to surrender?” the man shouted.

“In the morning,” Teleus answered.

“Fair enough. Will you leave your dead until then?”

The royal messenger was lying in the road as the darkness gathered.

“We’ll bring him in tonight with your permission,” Teleus said.

“I’ll tell my general,” the soldier said, and waved one hand up at Teleus before turning back to the forest.

“Let me go, sir,” said a voice at Teleus’s elbow. He turned and recognized the lieutenant who had come in with the messenger’s bag. “He was a friend,” the soldier said. “I’ll go get him.”

“Very well,” said Teleus.

A little later the guard was standing beside one of the pillars that supported the wide porch of the megaron and saw the lieutenant on horseback waiting while the gate from the courtyard was opened. He was accompanied by four others, the rest of the messenger’s guard but one. Annoyed, he remarked to no one in particular that it didn’t take five men to collect a body. He started down the steps from the porch, but the gate opened, and the riders disappeared through it. He waited in the courtyard, meaning to speak to the lieutenant when he returned. When he heard the shouting on the wall, he rushed up the stairs to the lookout above the gate. Staring into the twilight, he saw no one on the road. The horsemen and the body of the messenger were gone.

“The messenger?” he asked.

“Jumped up the moment they got near,” the guard said. “No more dead than I am. One of the riders took him up behind, and they rode into the woods.”

Teleus stared. Five men. The messenger’s guard minus one. “Follow me,” he commanded the nearby guard, and ran back down the rampart stairs even faster than he had climbed them.

A
TTOLIA TURNED TO LOOK AT
him, where he kneeled watching her face. He’d grown, she realized. Boys did often grow in one last leap just as they became men, but her spies either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t thought to tell her. He was not quite her height, but with his hair cropped short under his helmet, she hadn’t looked twice at him when she had seen him with the other muddy soldiers in the courtyard earlier. He’d had a false hand then, instead of a hook. She supposed he’d covered it with riding gloves. The greatest change in him was not his height, nor the length of his hair, but the expression on his face. He looked at her as impassively as she knew she looked at him. She could feel the immobile mask of her own face. She thought that if she searched for the guardsman Teleus had sent to escort her, she would find him nearby, not unconscious, not bound and gagged, but dead.

“You’ve changed,” said Attolia.

“So I have been told. Into the boat, Your Majesty,”
said Eugenides with a nod of his head. He still squatted there next to the boat, within easy striking distance. The black water was near to hand to receive her body.

Attolia remembered his face as it had looked the first time she examined it closely, when he’d been in her castle on the Seperchia, bleeding from a sword wound. He’d smiled at her—the satisfied smile of an archer whose shot had gone home—when he’d told her that she was more beautiful than Eddis but less kind. Attolia didn’t think he would smile at her again, not even to gloat. She hesitated another moment and then stepped into the boat. It rocked under her, and she sat down quickly, facing backward, on a wooden bench that stretched from side to side close to the mast. She pulled her cloak tighter to ward off the chill.

“Where there’s life, there’s hope, Your Majesty?” Eugenides asked, his voice expressionless. Attolia didn’t answer. She fixed her gaze on the centerboard case in front of her, while the Thief used the knife-edge along the inside of the hook to slice through the line that bound the sail of the boat. The boom dropped beside her, the sail flapped free. Eugenides untied the boat and, holding its bowline, walked it toward the end of the dock. Distantly they heard shouting. Eugenides picked up speed, beginning to trot. The boat moved quickly through the water, and as it passed the end of the dock, Eugenides stepped in at the stern. The boat rocked again. Attolia clutched the front edge of her
seat. Men spilled through the doorway behind them, but the boat was already out from under the overhang of the megaron’s foundation and into the wind. It heeled abruptly as the sail filled, and Attolia shifted her weight. Eugenides dropped into the seat at the stern and laid his hook over the boat’s tiller to steer. He adjusted the sail with his hand and the boat picked up more speed, leaving the cavern behind. By the time Attolia’s soldiers reached the end of the dock, the boat was out of reach, its occupants invisible in the darkness.

The water in the harbor was choppy, and the little boat seemed to jump from wave to wave. Attolia felt the spray hitting her back and was thankful that the closely woven wool of the cloak repelled most of the water. She huddled inside it.

They left the harbor and sailed out into the dark sea. When Eugenides turned the boat to follow the coast toward Eddis, the wind was behind them and he was a dark mass in the stern. Over his shoulder Attolia watched the lights of the megaron fade until they disappeared entirely behind the rocks of a headland. They sailed on, the water slowly soaking through the back of Attolia’s cloak as it splashed over the bow behind her.

Eugenides asked, “Do you swim, Your Majesty?”

“No,” she answered shortly.

When Teleus led the soldiers up from the cavern below the megaron, he met the Mede, waiting at the top of the stairs.
“Perhaps you would like to tell me what caused this furor, guard?” the Mede asked, and Teleus hesitated, but could see no justification in not reporting the abduction of the queen. The Mede smiled grimly.

“How very clever of the Thief of Eddis. No doubt he is drowning her as we speak,” said the Mede. “Perhaps drowning himself as well, if he means to sail down the coast on a cloudy night with no moon to guide him.” Nahuseresh didn’t seem to mind much the idea of the queen drowning. Teleus watched him, eyes narrowed.

“We have to get a message to the army at the pass,” Teleus said.

“Why?” asked the Mede, raising his eyebrows in surprise. “To start the arrangements for a state funeral?”

“She might not be dead,” Teleus snarled.

“True,” Nahuseresh agreed thoughtfully. “That’s true. I had better leave you to your task. Please excuse me, guard. I have some dinner waiting for me in my rooms, I think.”

“Your Majesty.” Eugenides spoke many hours later. “You’ll want to bend your head, I’m going to jibe.”

Attolia opened her eyes and looked back toward him. The wind had blown the clouds apart, and the moon shone on the water around her and on the high black cliffs not far away.

“The sail will swing across the boat quickly,”
Eugenides explained. “You don’t want the boom to hit you.”

Stiffly, Attolia hunched down. Eugenides moved the tiller to one side, and the boat lurched. The sail swept overhead and slammed hard at the end of its lines. The boat tilted and Attolia lunged for the high side, but Eugenides was already sitting on the rail, leaning backward to bring the boat level. The speed of the boat, once it had turned broadside to the wind, seemed twice what it had been before, and Attolia went on clutching the siderail as the boat charged toward sheer cliffs.

She was rigid, her fingers clenched as Eugenides steered between rocks topped with foaming white water and sailed directly toward the cliffs, in which she could see no break or variation. Then, as he adjusted the tiller again, she saw the narrow opening they aimed for. A minute later they were between its walls. The wind lessened, and the water was smooth, only rising and falling in gentle swells. The boat’s momentum carried it forward as Eugenides carefully maneuvered it past hazards that she couldn’t see.

Moving more and more slowly, they drifted into a tiny cove entirely surrounded by the high cliffs. There was no wind, and the water was smooth, reflecting the moon that shone overhead. The harbor was utterly quiet after the noise of the open sea.

Attolia settled herself again in the middle of the forward bench, staring again at the centerboard case.

“Your Majesty.” Eugenides spoke quietly and waited until Attolia raised her eyes to look at him.

His face was still, his expression unreadable. Seeing it, Attolia remembered the day in the audience chamber when she had become queen in fact as well as in name. Her guard captain, Teleus’s predecessor, had eliminated her overbearing suitor, and she’d left her barons to themselves to accept the reality of her rule and gone to her bedchamber—the last time she would go to that room instead of the royal apartments. She’d stood in front of the smooth silver mirror there and studied her face, reaching up to touch her skin, wondering if it could in truth be as hard as it appeared. She’d been frightened and sick in that audience chamber, with no assurance that the captain could or would hold to his promises, but none of her fear, or her revulsion, had shown on her face. She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it. She wondered if Eugenides was glad of his.

“You have a choice now,” the Thief was saying. “Conscious or unconscious, you can go into the water. I have the boat pole to make certain you don’t come out again.” He nudged the pole lying at his feet. It rattled against the centerboard case, and hearing it, Attolia glanced down. The boat pole was five or six feet long and had two small hooks at the end. The hooks she
could easily imagine catching in the folds of her clothes as Eugenides leaned on the pole to force her farther and farther under the surface.

She looked back at Eugenides impassively. She thought he had brought her a long way to drown her, but she knew that in his own field he was meticulous and supposed he wanted to be entirely sure of his results.

He made no move but instead spoke again. “Or you can offer me something I want more than I want to hold your head underwater until the last of your air is gone.”

Attolia had thought her choice was to be conscious or unconscious when she breathed in the black water that would kill her; she couldn’t imagine what Eugenides might want more than that. It was all she would have dreamed of in his place.

“I want to be king of Attolia,” he said.

Attolia blinked. She looked around the tiny harbor and had to clear her throat with a cough before she spoke. “You’ve brought me to a place rather spare of witnesses if you want me to declare you my heir before I die.”

“I wasn’t proposing to become your heir,” said the Thief.

“Then what?” asked Attolia.

“There’s an easier way for a man to become king,” said Eugenides, and waited for her to realize what he proposed.

Attolia stared at him. “You think I would marry you?” she asked in disbelief.

“If you object to marrying a man with one hand, you’ve only yourself to blame.”

“And when did you grow into a man?” asked Attolia, lifting her eyebrow, her voice tinged with sarcasm.

Eugenides didn’t rise to her bait. “It’s your choice, Your Majesty,” he said quietly.

“And if I choose to die here?” she asked.

The only sounds were the slap of ripples against the boat bottom and the susurration of the water against the base of the cliffs around them.

“Then Attolia collapses into civil war and the Medes come,” Eugenides said at last. “They will rule Attolia, and Sounis as well, while Eddis retreats to her mountains.”

“Eddis has no trade without Sounis and Attolia. She is not self-sustaining. If your queen destroys Attolia, she destroys herself.”

“She has the pirates.”

The queen looked again at the harbor around her, understanding perfectly how useful it was to a queen who had no official navy. “How resourceful of her. Of course she has the pirates. Can she control them?”

“Well enough to serve our purposes. Well enough to keep Eddis from starving.”

“You hope.”

Eugenides shrugged. “Eddis will have been a poor
country for a long, long time before the Medes lose their grip on this coast, but there will be an Eddis long after Sounis and Attolia are gone. We have our mountains to keep us.”

“And if I choose not to die?”

“Then I will escort you to my queen to begin negotiations for a marriage contract. Together the armies of Eddis and Attolia can keep the Mede off this coast and force Sounis to make peace as well.”

“And you would be king in Attolia?”

“Yes.”

“And I would be queen still.”

“You would rule. I will not interfere, but you will accept Eddisian advisors.”

“Then I watch my country bled dry to pay Eddis tribute, its treasury drained, its taxes raised, its peasants enslaved, and the barons again the true rulers of the country, free to do as they please so long as the king is fed?”

“Do you care,” asked Eugenides, “so long as the queen is fed as well?”

“Yes,” Attolia hissed, and leaned forward with her hands clenched.

Eugenides remained impassive. Attolia could see him in the moonlight but couldn’t guess if he was pleased to have elicited a reaction from her. She sat back on her bench and composed herself.

“Yes, I care. It is my country.”

The Thief thought carefully before he spoke. “If I
am king, there will be peace with Eddis but no tribute.”

The queen sniffed in disbelief, then sat hunched over, wrapping her hands in the fabric of her dress to warm them while she thought. She was cold and wet, and sitting across from Eugenides, she felt older than her years. Her bones ached. Eugenides, she was sure, was too young to have bones that ached. No matter what he thought of himself, he was hardly more than a boy. A boy without one hand. She reached up to push the wet hair out of her face, wondering when she had sunk so low that she had begun torturing boys. It was the question she’d asked herself night after night, lying awake in her bed or sitting in a chair by the window, watching the stars slowly move across the sky.

“I listened outside your cell door every night before I sent you back to Eddis,” Attolia said abruptly.

Eugenides sat quietly, waiting for her to go on.

“The first night you cried,” she said. She looked for a reaction but saw none.

She had lingered outside his cell, in the dim light of the lamps, alone because she’d sent away her escort while she listened. Alone, because she had known, even then, that she would turn on any guard who mocked the Thief’s pain. He had cried in breathless, racking sobs that had gone on and on, long after she’d thought he would have exhausted himself. Finally he had slept, but the queen had not. The sound of his tears had kept her from sleep that night and woken her from night
mares since the evening she’d heard them.

“The second night you repeated the same words over and over. I think the fever had set in by then. Do you remember what you said?”

“No.”

She knew every one of them. His voice, broken and stumbling, had filled her dreams until she had wept in her sleep, crying tears for him that she’d never been able to cry for her father or for herself. “Oxe Harbrea Sacrus Vax Dragga…” she began.

Eugenides’s chin lifted as he recognized the opening words. “It’s the invocation of the Great Goddess at her spring festival,” he said calmly, “calling her to the aid of those that need her. The words are archaic.”

“She comes to the aid of those who need her? She didn’t come to yours.”

“You have a decision to make, Your Majesty.” Eugenides reminded her. “And not much time to make it in.”

It was quiet then, while Attolia thought, particularly about the Medean ambassador with his attractive face and his quick smile.

Eugenides waited. “Very well,” the queen said, sitting up straight to look him in the eye. “Be king of Attolia. But never drink from my wine cup while you hope to live.”

“There’s an oar by the boat hook,” Eugenides said, his voice devoid of triumph. “You’ll have to paddle us
to the dock.” He steered, reaching across his body to use his hand instead of his hook, while she shifted on her seat in order to dip the paddle into the dark water and move the boat toward the tiny dock that jutted from the rocky beach at the base of the cliffs.