“But our chances to take Attolia will be gone.”

“For the present, yes.”

“What exactly do you mean by ‘the present’?” the king asked.

“Perhaps the next hundred years,” the magus answered, and the king snorted in irritation.

“I thought you might mean that. Let’s keep our predictions to my lifetime, shall we?”

“There’s little chance the Medes would lose their grip on Attolia within your lifetime, Your Majesty,” the magus said stiffly. “Remember that Eddis will not be assimilated immediately. It will take at least a year to reorganize the various ministries under Sounisian control.”

The king flashed his magus a dark look. “Let us hope my lifetime is not so brief,” he said.

“Of course not, Your Majesty,” the magus murmured. “The reorganization of the government will be only one of many steps. Eddis has a superb fighting force. You will want to integrate it into your own forces without diminishing its worth.”

“Eddis should have married me,” Sounis said abruptly. “Do you think she still might?”

“It would be in our interests, Sire.”

“Ours, but not hers?”

“Eddis has been independent for a long time, Your Majesty. They will not give up easily.”

“They will give up in the end, though,” said Sounis confidently, picking over the tray beside him for the pastry of his choice.

“Oh, yes,” the magus agreed, as confident. “They are a small country with few resources outside their mines and their trees. Sounis will have them in the end.” When the king dismissed him, he returned to his study to make careful notes for the history he was writing of the war the Sounisians had fought centuries before while struggling to stay free of the powerful invaders from the Peninsula. He hoped to use the knowledge he acquired in the exercise to aid him in a more successful defense against the Mede.

“What of the Thief?” the queen of Attolia asked. Her ambassador and his staff were still confined to their rooms in Eddis’s palace, but there were those willing to pass information to Attolia. Their reports were unreliable, but they were all her secretary had to answer his queen’s persistent questions.

“No one has seen the Thief,” the secretary of the archives told her. “He no longer comes down to dinner.”

“Reassuring news,” the queen said.

“Surely he is in no way a threat, Your Majesty?” Relius asked, puzzled by her continued interest in the crippled Thief of Eddis.

“I don’t think he is a threat, Relius, but he bears watching. To be certain that he was no threat, I should have had both his hands cut off and probably his feet, too.” She thought for a moment about the words of the Thief’s grandfather and corrected herself. “To be entirely certain, I should have hanged him, but the traditional punishment seems to have been effective so far. Do watch him. If there’s any sign that he has come out of his internal exile, I want to know about it.”

Relius’s spies continued to report that the Thief had retreated to his rooms and admitted no one, not even his father. His queen never attempted a visit. She never spoke of him, and evidently no one else at court dared to. Those who needed the books or scrolls from the library made their selections and carried them away to read elsewhere. There were not many scholars in Eddis.

Galen alone forced himself on Eugenides. He had a key to the door connecting Eugenides’s retreat to the library, and Eugenides could hardly barricade himself in. Galen, however, was not one of Relius’s informants. Relius knew that he left increasing amounts of lethium for the Thief, and that was all. Not even the servants, leaving food in the library and returning to collect empty trays, saw Eugenides.

He remained in his rooms as the winter eased and the spring came.

Snow gradually turned to rain in the mountains, and twisting ropes of solid ice melted into eager streams of bone-chilling water that hurried down the mountain slopes toward their elder sister, the Seperchia River. In the pass that the Seperchia cut between the Hephestial Mountains and the coastal range, the streams were forced into narrow ditches and crossed the roadway there in stone-sided culverts. A temporary dam of branches in one culvert caused the water to back and deepen. When a stone shifted in its bed, the swirling water ate at the ground behind it. No one reset the stone, no one prevented the damage from spreading. The ground collapsed; stone and bank were washed away, with more stones following, knocked loose and dragged along by the flood.

Elsewhere Eddis’s royal engineers diverted the water more deliberately, eroding years of careful work that had gone into maintaining the road that ran from Attolia’s capital, through Eddis, to the capital city of Sounis, carrying most of the trade between the three countries. In some places whole sections of the road disappeared in heaving muddy landslides, and the engineers, torn between satisfaction and anguish, reported to the queen that no army would reach the heights of the pass quickly.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SPRING CAME EARLIER ON THE coast than it did in the mountains, and Sounis’s summer was already near when the king’s magus woke one morning in the last hour before dawn with his ears ringing to find his room awash in moonlight. There was a sound like thunder still lingering in the air, and he left his bed to look out the window.

“There isn’t much to see from here,” said a voice behind him. “You need a view of the harbor.”

The magus turned to look for the Thief of Eddis and saw a shadow standing in a corner out of the moonlight.

“Eugenides,” he said. He had recognized the voice.

“Yes.”

“What have you done?”

“Not much yet,” answered the Thief from the darkness. “I remain fairly limited in my physical activities.” He held up his right arm, and the magus started before realizing that the hand he saw had to be a wooden one, concealed by a glove.

Another booming explosion filled the air, and the magus turned back to the window but could see only a glare reflecting on the whitewashed walls of the buildings below.

“I had to send someone else to light the fuses,” Eugenides said behind him.

“Fuses?” asked the magus, with a sick feeling.

“In the powder magazines of your warships,” Eugenides explained.

“Powder magazines?”

“You sound like the chorus in a play,” said Eugenides.

“And the play is a tragedy, I suppose?”

“A farce,” Eugenides suggested, and the magus winced.

“How many?” he asked.

“How many of your ships are burning? Four,” said Eugenides. “Five if the Eleutheria catches when the Hesperides burns. She probably will.”

“The Principia?” The Principia was the largest ship in the navy. She carried more guns than two of the smaller ships put together.

“Oh, yes,” said Eugenides, “she’s definitely gone.”

The magus looked out again at the flickering reflections from the fires as his king’s navy burned in the harbor.

“The sailors are all ashore for the Navy Festival,” he said.

“Celebrating their naval superiority and control over most of the islands in the middle sea,” agreed Eugenides. “Sounis outdid himself this year with the free wine.”