Eugenides sighed and dragged his desk chair around to sit facing the magus. “Yes,” he said, and waited for the magus to continue.

“Your queen agreed to open the sluice gates on the reservoir above the Aracthus. She simultaneously ordered confiscated the property of the next ten Attolian caravans through the pass. Attolia protested. Eddis described them as reparations. Attolia called it an act of war and demanded the contents of the caravans be returned. Eddis suggested arbitration by the Court of the Ten Nations, but Attolia refused. She sent an ultimatum that Eddis return the caravans or consider herself at war.”

Eugenides waited.

The magus sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Your queen’s entire two-word answer: ‘War, then.’ She ordered the Attolian ambassador and his retinue confined to their rooms and opened the main gates of the Hamiathes Reservoir. The floodwaters of the Aracthus swept through the unprepared Attolian irrigation system and destroyed most of it. Eddis sent a raiding party out from the base of the mountain to move through the farmland on the far side of the Seperchia. More than twenty-five percent of Attolia’s crops were burned in the field. Eddis lost the raiding party.” The magus looked at him closely. “This is news to you?”

“Go on.”

The magus did. “By the time Sounis heard of the attack, and before Attolia could enter the market and drive the prices up, Eddis had bought most of the local grain surplus. Checking the records, I found that she’d bought most of it even before the ultimatum from Attolia. Did you really not know?” he asked again, finding it hard to believe.

Eugenides stood up again to pace, shaking his head. The magus was reminded of a bear, chained in a pit, albeit a small bear.

“Eddis’s council voted unanimously for war,” the magus said. “The minister of war abstained.”

“Why?” Eugenides wailed, wondering about the actions of the council, not those of his father.

“I think they like you,” the magus said.

“They never did before,” he said bitterly.

The magus said, “I think if you took the time to look, you might see that over the space of a year you turned into the greatest folk hero Eddis has ever known.”

Eugenides dropped into his chair and covered his face with his hand. The magus saw that he’d raised both arms at first, then tucked the arm with the hand missing back into his lap.

“I don’t want to know this,” Eugenides said.

“I did hear,” the magus went on, “that you were rarely out of your rooms this winter. Did you have your head buried under your covers?” He stood and walked to Eugenides’s desk in order to flip through its contents.

Eugenides sighed, tilting his head back in the chair, keeping his eyes closed. “You could go away now,” he said.

“You’re studying biological classification?” the magus said, holding up a book. “And human anatomy, I see, and Euclid’s Geometry, or are you just recopying the text?” He looked at the scraps of paper covered in Eugenides’s labored handwriting. There were more in a pile on the floor next to the desk. He picked up the pile and shuffled through it. “You’ll have to pardon me,” the magus said. “But with your country at war, I can’t see how any of it really matters.”

Standing up, Eugenides pulled the papers out of the magus’s hands. “It matters, because I can’t do anything, anymore, for this country, and it matters,” he yelled as he threw the papers back to his desk, “because I only have one hand and it isn’t even the right one!” Turning, he picked an inkpot off the desk and threw it to shatter on the door of his wardrobe, spraying black ink across the pale wood and onto the wall. Black drops like rain stained the sheets of his bed.

In the silent aftermath of his fury, they heard the queen behind them.

“Magus,” she said from the doorway. “I’d heard that you had come.”

Eugenides swung to look at her. “You started a war in my name without telling me?” he asked.

“You will have to excuse me,” said the queen to the magus as if she hadn’t heard. “I overslept, or I would have greeted you earlier.”

“Are we at war with Attolia?” Eugenides demanded.

“Yes,” said his queen.

“And Sounis?” asked Eugenides.

“Nearly,” said Eddis.

“How could you come once a week to talk about the weather and not mention a war?”

Eddis sighed. “Will you sit down and stop shouting?” she asked.

“I’ll stop shouting. I won’t sit down. I might need to throw more inkpots. Did Galen stop you from telling me?”

“At first,” the queen admitted. “But after that you didn’t want to know, Eugenides. You’re not blind, you had to see the things happening around you, but you never asked.”

He thought about what he’d heard and seen without being curious: the military messengers on their horses riding in and out of the front courtyard, familiar faces disappearing from the court dinners. All the maps were missing, along with the map weights, from the library. His queen had been too busy to visit more than once a week, and he’d never wondered why.

“Who—” He choked on the word and started again. “Who was in the raiding party?”

“Stepsis.” Eugenides winced, and she went on. “Chlorus, Sosias”—all cousins of Eugenides and the queen—“the commander Creon and his soldiers.”

“Well”—he stumbled over the words—“this explains all those nights without conversation at dinner. What else have I missed that I should have been told but didn’t want to hear?” he asked.

“Not too much. Hostilities between us and Attolia were suspended for the winter. It was an early one, remember. Everyone’s told you about that. Magus?” said the queen politely. “Would you excuse us?”

The magus bowed his head and left without a word. When he was gone, the queen sat herself in the armchair he’d lately occupied. She rubbed her face and said, “I’m hungry. I left Xanthe standing in the middle of my room this morning with the breakfast tray, and I didn’t eat anything last night at dinner. I was worrying about you,” she said reproachfully, “sitting in an unheated temple, sulking.”

“I thought I was whining.”

“Sulking, whining, keening piteously.”

“I have not,” Eugenides insisted angrily.

“No,” she admitted, “you haven’t. But you’ve been in a wallow of self-absorption and despair all winter, and no one could blame you. We could only wait and hope you’d recover. Then you tell me that you want to leave Eddis and go to a university on the Peninsula. I need you here, Eugenides.”

“What possible use could you have for a one-handed former Queen’s Thief?”

“You’re not a former queen’s Thief; you’re my Thief. So far I’m still queen.”

“You know what I meant.”

“It’s a lifelong title. You’d be Queen’s Thief if you were bedridden, and you know it.”

“All right, what do you want a useless one-handed Thief for?”

“I want you not to be useless.”