The Queen of Attolia (4 page)

“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.

Eugenides 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 with 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.

“If you had more time, Galen wouldn’t let you in anyway.”

“True.” The queen agreed. “And he listens to make sure I don’t upset you. I’ll bet his ear is flat against the door even as we speak,” she whispered, and got a rare smile in response.

She leaned back in her chair and pulled the thin gold circlet from her head in order to run her fingers through her short hair. “I’m going to pull it all out before I’m thirty,” she said. “I swear there’s someone asking me one thing or another from the moment I wake up until the time I close my eyes at night. When Xanthe wakes me in the morning, she asks me if I’d like my breakfast. I wish she’d just put it in front of me. It would be one less decision to make.”

He didn’t ask what decisions kept her preoccupied. She didn’t tell him. “I’ll see you in a few days, if I can.” She leaned over the bed to kiss him on the forehead. “Eat something,” she said, and left.

In Attolia the queen listened carefully to a report sent by her ambassador in Eddis.

“The fever didn’t kill him,” she observed.

“It seems not, Your Majesty.”

“Very well,” she said.

T
HE EARLY FALL IN THE
mountains had already come when Eugenides decided he’d looked long enough at his ceiling and dragged himself out of bed to look out the window. There was frost on the ground in the front courtyard. An army messenger was riding in on a mountain pony shaggy with its winter coat. Eugenides turned away and went to sit in the chair by the fire that was waiting for him. He was wrapped in a warm robe and had slippers on his feet. The stump of his arm was bound in a clean white bandage. The bandage was unnecessary; the wound was healed, but Eugenides didn’t want to look at it, and keeping it bandaged seemed the easiest solution.

His left hand, taking over the tasks of his right, seemed clumsy and uncoordinated, though Eugenides’s grandfather had always insisted that both hands be trained to serve interchangeably. Eugenides supposed they worked equally well with the thieves’ tools, and
buttons were no difficulty, but buckling a belt was tedious, and his grandfather had never insisted he practice sweeping his hair out of his face and hooking it behind his right ear with his left hand. An oversight on his grandfather’s part, now revealed. Eugenides looked into the flames for a while, then ran his fingers through his hair, which had grown enough to fall down over his eyes, and looked around the room. There was a bookcase to the left of the fireplace and his desk to the right. Pushed to the back of the desk was an awkward pile of papers. In the center of the pile, he supposed, was the scroll he’d been recopying before he’d gone to Attolia. If it was there, it was hidden by the bowls and bandages and phials of different concoctions left by Galen and his assistants. The desk chair was missing. It had been moved to the library when they’d brought in an armchair to sit between the foot of his bed and the fireplace.

He stood up to poke at the papers at the back of the desk, but the medical detritus took up too much space for there to be any room for sorting. At some point ink had spilled across the text he’d been copying, obscuring the left half of a long paragraph. Eugenides sighed. He would probably remember most of the words, but they would still need to be checked carefully against another reliable copy. He rolled the scroll up and tossed it back into the pile of papers, then sighed again. There were few reliable copies of Thales’s original
thoughts on the basic elements of the universe. That’s why his scroll was valuable and why he had been copying it. If it was left at the back of the desk much longer, it was likely to be completely ruined. It should have been returned to its case and reshelved in the library.

He made himself go look for the case and found most of his books, scrolls, and other materials shifted into piles on one of the library tables. He searched through the piles until he found the case labeled with Thales’s name and the title of the work. He slid the scroll into it and slid the case back into its slot on the library’s shelves. Then he went back to his chair by the fire. He was dozing there when Galen came by. He had a small amphora of lethium, and he carefully refilled the phial on Eugenides’s desk.

“The library’s a mess,” Eugenides said.

“I had noticed that,” said Galen. “I went looking for the Aldmenedian drawings of the human body last week, and I couldn’t find them.”

“So why hasn’t anyone cleaned it up?”

“It’s your library.”

“It isn’t. It’s the queen’s library. I just live here.”

“Whoever’s library it is, I would say you’re the only one who’s going to set it to rights.” He started to leave.

“Galen,” Eugenides said.

“Yes?”

“Get your trash off my desk. I want to use it.”

Galen snorted. “I’ll see if I can find someone who’s not too busy.”

Despite Galen’s unsympathetic words, one of his assistants showed up in the afternoon to collect the medicines, bowls, and the unused bandages. Eugenides looked at the remaining clutter but didn’t move to sort it. He turned away and stared into the fire for the rest of the afternoon. The desk sat untouched.

In the morning he picked up the pen nibs that had been spilled. He dropped them one by one into their case, where they landed with tiny ticking sounds. When the case was full, he stirred them with one finger before he fitted the lid into place and went back to sitting in front of the fire.

Every morning, when the sunlight forced its way around the edges of the window curtains, trimming them in light, he dragged himself out of bed and went to the desk to clear something away before he sat down in the armchair. He wasn’t used to being awake in the morning. He was used to being awake late in the night, when the rest of the palace was sleeping. He sat in front of the fire until early afternoon, then went back to bed until evening. Galen came to check on him every few days. Eddis and his father alternated in their weekly visits. Except for the servants who delivered trays of food, he was alone. He stayed in the quiet of his study, and no one bothered him.

When the desk was clear of all but a small phial of lethium, a few drops of which he took every night in order to sleep, he moved on to the library. One day that, too, was tidy, and he had to think of a new reason to get out of bed in the morning. Finally he got up to collect a few scraps of paper and one of his pens and sat down to see what writing with his left hand was going to be like.

He had to open the ink bottle with his teeth. The paper slid on the desk and needed to be held in place. If he used his stump, the bandages didn’t give him any purchase unless he pressed down quite firmly. The stump was tender, and it hurt. If he used his forearm, he not only covered up most of the paper he was trying to write on, he covered the top part of it—meaning that as he wrote, he would smear what he’d written. Sighing, he got back up and went into the library and over to the chest that held maps in wide, flat drawers. There was a deeper drawer at the top to hold map weights, but it was almost empty. Only two mismatched weights were left. There was a third he almost overlooked at the back. Eugenides put them in the pocket of his robe and carried them to his desk. They held the paper in place. He dipped the pen into the ink and began trying to write.

He practiced his writing a little every day and was working on it one afternoon when someone crossed the
library to knock on the frame of his open door. He looked up to find his father’s secretary standing with another man just behind him.

“Yes?” said Eugenides.

“I’ve brought a tailor,” said the secretary. “Your father mentioned that you might need your dinner clothes refitted or a new set altogether before you can come down for dinner.”

“Am I coming down for dinner?” Eugenides asked. He hadn’t thought about it. Now that it had been brought to mind, he longed for a permanent excuse to miss the formal dinners with the queen and her court.

The secretary looked at him without speaking. The tailor waited patiently.

“I guess I’ll have to, eventually,” said Eugenides, and rinsed his pen. “I don’t know why the old suit won’t fit, though.”

The tailor helped him dress, doing up the buttons on the undershirt when Eugenides fumbled with them. Dressed, Eugenides bunched in his hand the extra fabric of what had been a fitted overshirt.

“I’m thinner,” he said, surprised.

“Probably because you don’t eat,” muttered the tailor through the pins in his mouth, and looked up in time to catch a warning glance from the minister of war’s secretary. He looked back down at the cloth he was pinning, but he didn’t forget the rumors he’d heard. Having seen the queen’s Thief with his own eyes, he
thought that they were probably true: that the Thief sent his food back to the palace kitchen without touching it, that he kept to his room, seeing no one, that he’d probably die soon, and the whole city grieving as if he were already gone and that vicious bitch of Attolia to blame. The tailor shrugged and paid close attention to his work.

“The undershirt will have to be recut,” he said. “I might need a few days to get it done.”

“Take your time,” said Eugenides.

The gibbous moon, slightly more than half full, shone from a clear sky on the queen’s palace in Attolia. In the summertime, when the palace windows were open, she could lie in the darkness of her bedchamber and listen to the wheels of the heavy carts rumbling in the streets as farmers dragged their produce into the city for the morning market. It was winter. The windows were closed, and when she woke and looked into the darkness around her, the room was silent. She flicked the covers off with an angry sigh and stood up. From the doorway to an anteroom, an attendant appeared. She collected a robe and gracefully slid it over the outstretched arms, settling it on her mistress’s shoulders.

“Does Your Majesty require something?” she asked.

“Solitude,” said the queen of Attolia. “Leave me.” The attendant dutifully left her post and went to stand in the hallway outside the queen’s chambers. The queen
moved to a window and pulled aside the heavy curtains to look at the moon while passing a sleepless night, one of many.

When Eugenides paused in the entranceway to the lesser throne room, those closest to him halted their conversations, puzzled to see a stranger in the doorway, then shocked when they recognized him. He looked older, and unfamiliar after his absence. He’d had the barber clip his hair short again, and his right arm was hidden in a sling. As the court looked him over, silence spread away from the bottom of the stair into the throne room like a wave through a small pond, and he stood immobilized by the stares.

“Eugenides,” said the queen.

He turned to find her in the crowd. She held out a hand, and he stepped down the stairs and across the throne room to take it and bow over it.

“My Queen,” he said.

“My Thief,” she answered.

He lifted his head. She squeezed his hand, and he forbore to argue with her.

“Dinner, I think,” said the queen, and the court moved into the Ceremonial Hall, where dinner would be served at the queen’s pleasure and a little earlier than the kitchen had planned. Cursing under his breath, the chef rose to the occasion.

Eugenides sat between a baroness and a duchess, the
queen’s younger sister. The loudest sounds in the room were the footsteps of servers bringing the food. People tended to look in sequence at Eugenides, then at the queen, and then at the plates in front of them. Someone coughed or cleared his throat. Someone at the far end of the table mentioned the harvest, which had been good, and the duchess to his right picked up the thread of the conversation. She chatted about the weather, which was cold. It was winter, so that wasn’t surprising. When the food came, Eugenides ate the vegetables. He left the meat, because he couldn’t cut it, and ate a small piece of bread without spreading cheese on it, because he couldn’t do that either.

Wine was served with dinner, and when he finished his first serving, his cup was refilled. It was a ceramic cup with a tall, narrow stem and a flared top. Eugenides admired the design painted around the inner rim as he drank from it. Centaurs chased each other in a circle, their bows drawn and arrows notched. Two hands, Eugenides thought to himself, and put the cup down empty.

When dinner was over and the queen stood, Eugenides stood with the rest of the court. Three fingers splayed unobtrusively on the table, with the knuckles turning white, kept him from swaying. He stayed at his place while his dinner partners excused themselves and drifted off. His father came to slide a hand under Eugenides’s good arm, and Eugenides thankfully shifted
his balance to lean against him.

“Did they not water the wine tonight?” he asked.

“Same mix as usual, I think. Two parts water.” That was only civilized.

When the room was empty, his father helped Eugenides away from the table and then upstairs to his room.

“I won’t need the lethium tonight anyway,” Eugenides said as they reached the door. “Wine’s a pleasant substitute.” He felt his father stiffen. “I was joking,” he said, not sure that he had been.

The second dinner was much the same. Eugenides’s food arrived in front of him cut into bite-sized pieces, and every diner had a small bowl of olive oil to dip the bread into instead of cheese. Except that he had to reach across his plate to get the bread into the olive oil, everything went well. The conversation was the same. The harvest and the weather. The rest of the table spoke in hushed tones, difficult to overhear. Eugenides drank less and stared at his plate, unwilling to watch the queen carefully not watching him.

The third night he didn’t appear. His place sat empty at the table. When dinner was over and his father went upstairs to look for him, Eugenides was waiting, dressed in his formal clothes, sitting on his bed. He was leaning against the headboard and had his boots up on the spread. The fabric for his sling lay in a limp bundle
across his lap. He looked up at his father, his face bleak.

“I couldn’t face it again,” he said.

He dropped his gaze to the toes of his boots. “I already know the harvest was good, and the weather’s still cold. I could try again in the spring.”

“Tomorrow,” said his father, and left.

Eugenides tilted over until his face was buried in a pillow.

When he fell asleep, he dreamed the queen of Attolia was dancing in her garden in a green dress with white flowers embroidered around the collar. It started to snow, dogs hunted him through the darkness, and the sword, red in the firelight, was above him, and falling. The queen stopped dancing to watch. He woke with his throat raw from screaming, still in his clothes, lying on top of the bedcovers.

He stumbled into the library and sat there in front of the empty fireplace. The room was cold. If it had been a month before, one of Galen’s assistants would have been sleeping in the library, ready with the lethium when Eugenides opened his eyes, and Eugenides would have been unconscious again before the visions of his nightmares had had time to clear from behind his eyelids.

He sat in the cold library for several hours without stirring the coals of the banked fire. Only at dawn did he move back into the warmer room, where he stretched out on the bed, still dressed, and slept again.