I stifled a snort of my own in the silence that followed. The magus must have still been tired. He must have once known, but forgotten, that the minister of war had married the daughter of the previous King’s Thief. He was talking to my father. The magus might have remembered this, might have recognized me from the first time he’d seen me in Sounis, but we had never been introduced. When he’d come with Sounis’s marriage proposals, I had been sulking in my rooms.

While the magus, realizing his error, was trying to word an apology, my father came to look in at me. “I thought I heard you laughing up your sleeve,” he said.

One arm was too tightly wrapped in bandages to move, but I held up the other to demonstrate that there was nothing up the sleeve of my nightshirt but my elbow.

“I’ll come by later.” Before he disappeared from the doorway, he nodded once, and that, I knew, would be his only sign of approval for all my hard work. He was not a man of many words.

After years spent trying to dissuade me from wasting my time acquiring valueless skills, he had come to my study one night to tell me why the queen of Eddis would consider a marriage proposal from Sounis and why her council, himself included, urged her to accept. He’d left a stack of double-heavy coins on the table and gone away.

A moment later the magus appeared in the doorway, closely followed by Sophos. “I’m glad to see you looking better,” he said.

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.

He smiled. “I’ve decided not to give you the satisfaction of gnashing my teeth.” I laughed, while he looked around the room for a chair to sit in.

“That one is most comfortable.” I lifted my hand out from under the sheets to point.

He sat down and put his feet up on a stack of books. We both remembered an earlier interview.

“I’ll probably have to burn it,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve had days to get clean.”

“Days?” I said. Sophos was still hovering. “Push the books off the window seat,” I told him, “and sit there. Has it really been days?”

“It has.”

“What have I missed?”

“Not much,” said the magus. “An emissary from the queen of Attolia, a few from Sounis—well, four from Sounis.”

“Four?”

The magus shrugged one shoulder in an elegant gesture of boredom.

“Tell me,” I said, “or I’ll get up and strangle you with one hand. What did the messages say?”

“Oh, I believe that Attolia sends best wishes that the Queen’s Thief is well and hopes that she will have a chance to entertain him for a longer period sometime in the future.”

I grimaced at the thought.

“She knew who you were?”

“She must have strongly suspected. We’d only met very briefly, but she knows my reputation better than you did.”

“She’ll be plotting an elaborate revenge,” said the magus.

“And you?”

“Am I planning an elaborate revenge? No, I haven’t been able to think of anything adequate.”

I laughed again. “I meant, did you suspect?”

The magus sighed. “No, not at all, at least not until you were able to make a bridge suddenly appear across the Seperchia. Then I started to think it wasn’t an accident that I lost my way in the dark in the town. And I wondered if maybe the guards at the stone bridge recognized you. They seemed to have taken your appearance very much in stride. I wasn’t certain until the captain welcomed me to Eddis—as if you belonged there and had brought Sophos and me as guests. That other bridge, did you know it would be there?”

“I go down every year after the floods have dropped and lodge a tree trunk there. My grandfather and I used to do it when he was alive. He liked to have a way to get into Attolia without being seen coming from Eddis.”

“Pol knew,” said Sophos from the window.

“Yes.” The magus agreed. “When we watched you fighting with Sophos’s sword, he whispered to me that you were Eddisian trained. I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me until later.”

Pol had known before then, I was sure. He’d known from the moment I’d carelessly thanked him in my own words for the ossil berries. If he hadn’t been pressed by the Attolians, and if he hadn’t been so sure that the Gift had dropped in the stream, he wouldn’t have let me out of his reach without searching me first.

The fact that he hadn’t told the magus what he knew made me think that he expected me to slip away once we were in the mountains and that he would have let me go. His orders were to keep Sophos safe and to bring back the Gift. Bringing back the Queen’s Thief of Eddis hadn’t been mentioned, I’m sure, and Pol must not have seen any reason to overreach his orders. I think he had liked me as much as I’d liked him.

“Ambiades might have guessed,” I said. He and I had exchanged our information involuntarily beside the dystopia. I had realized that Ambiades was working for someone besides the magus, and he had realized that it would take one fraud to recognize another.

The magus shook his head. “Ambiades was clever. It’s too bad he was a fool, too: always wanting more money, and more power . . . more respect. He would have made a fine magus if he could have stopped being the grandson of a duke.”

For a moment we sat quietly thinking our own thoughts about ambition. I thought about Pol, who had seemed to be quite free of it, and I hoped he’d gotten some satisfaction pushing Ambiades over the edge of that cliff. All in all, I wished I could have done it myself.

Finally the magus said, “To think that I once beat the Queen’s Thief with a horse crop.”

I smiled and had to tell him that beating the Queen’s Thief wasn’t a rare honor.

“Oh? Is everyone on the mountain as skilled as you are with a sword?”

“Ah, but I don’t use a sword.” I explained that I hadn’t held a sword in the two years since I’d torn up my enrollment papers in the Eddisian Guard. During an argument with my father I’d sworn, in front of an embarrassing number of people, not to take a sword by the hilt unless my life was in danger.

“Ah,” said the magus, as if many things had grown more clear. I wondered whom he’d been talking to.

“You’re tired,” he said after a moment, and he was right. “We’ll go.”

“Wait,” I said. “You haven’t told me what Sounis said in his messages.”

The magus shook his head. “You’ll have to ask your queen that,” he said. I followed his gaze to where the queen had been standing for I didn’t know how long.

She was wearing a green shot silk dress that squeezed her under the arms and made her look like a peahen dressed up in her smaller husband’s clothes. My brother Temenus had broken her nose with a practice sword when they were eleven, and the resulting bump had given her a comfortably settled plainness that was more attractive than all Attolia’s beauty, but she didn’t know that and often felt that she let her people down by not being more pretty. In her five-year reign she’d won the loyalty and love of her subjects. They thought she was beautiful, I told her, and they would be just as happy to see her in a sack as in the elaborate costumes her dressers liked to bully her into.