Unable to move an army into Eddis, Attolia sent small raiding parties up the side of the mountain under cover of darkness to attack farms in the isolated mountain valleys. Many of the farms were deserted, the men fighting in Eddis’s army, the families moved to the safety of the capital city, leaving the farms to be burned out by Attolia’s raiders.

The overabundance of sheep that had crowded the capital the winter before was gone, many of them moved back to the pastures of the coastal provinces, but many more of them slaughtered to feed the population. Offerings burned in every temple as the people prayed for the rains to come to wash their enemies off the mountains and the snows to lock them out for the winter.

When the weather finally turned cold, Attolia called in her raiders. Sounis, having lost the battle for the Irkes, withdrew his army, and Eddis drew her breath at last. Exhausted soldiers returned to their families to rest. In the iron mines the work went on, unremittingly, as they pressed for the ore to make Her Majesty’s cannon to supplement those few that were mounted above what remained of the Irkes. The rains fell on the ashes of the pines and washed them away. The water cut furrows into the gentle slopes until the walls of the furrows collapsed and ditches grew in their places and the gradual rises were carved into painful hillocks and ravines that would slow any army that fought its way uphill. The streams below ran red with the dirt as if filled with blood.

In Eddis’s capital the palace filled again with lords and barons and Eddis’s officers in their embroidered tunics. Bright candles lit the ceremonial hall during formal dinners as Eddis attempted a show of peacetime rituals.

One day in the winter a doctor from one of the military hospitals came to see Eugenides. In the late afternoon of the same day a page brought a message to Eddis, and she excused herself from a meeting with the master of her foundry and climbed the stairs to the roof of the palace. There were wide walks along the walls where the court strolled on fine days. Eugenides sat on a parapet. Eddis approached but stopped about five feet from him. She didn’t want to startle him. His feet dangled in space four stories off the ground.

He turned his head slightly, enough to see her in the corner of his eye. “Do you still have people following me?” he asked. “Am I not allowed to sit on the roof on a nice day?”

“It isn’t a nice day,” Eddis answered shortly. It was in fact bitterly cold. Flurries of snow blew in the wind. “You’ve been here more than an hour, and you are making the guards nervous.” She settled on the low stones beside him.

“You heard what happened?” Eugenides asked.

“I heard one of the doctors from the War Hospital asked you to visit the wards and you went with him.”

“He took me to visit the amputees.”

“Oh.”

“Because the cannon blow men apart and because the doctors sew the open edges closed—”

“Eugenides—”

“—because of course we wouldn’t want soldiers to die just because they are missing such nonessentials as arms or legs.”

He was looking out over the valley. Across from them was Hephestia’s Sacred Mountain, rising above all others with the Hamiathes Reservoir on one shoulder. “That damned doctor asked me to visit the wounded. Then he trotted me out in front of all those broken-apart men as if to say, ‘See, here is the Thief of Eddis; losing a hand hasn’t bothered him.’ As if I were a sacred relic to restore them and they could then jump out of their beds and lead happy lives forever after.”

“Eugenides—”

“Well, I patted every one of them on the shoulder like some sort of priest, and then I went outside and threw up.” He leaned forward a little to look down between his toes to the hillside far below him. Eddis, sitting with her feet inside the wall, refrained from plucking at his sleeve to pull him back. Telling the Thief to mind his balance was like telling a master swordsman not to cut himself.

“That doctor,” Eugenides muttered. “Why didn’t he say, ‘See, here is the failed Thief of Eddis and the cause of all your misery’?”

“Gen,” Eddis said firmly, “this war is not your fault.”

“Whose is it, then? I fell into Attolia’s trap.”

“I sent you there.”

“I fell and you sent me. She set the trap and sprang it because Sounis hounded her, and Sounis hounded her with the support of the magus, who fears the Mede, and the Mede emperor, I suppose, is under his own pressures. So whom finally do we blame for this war? The gods?”

He looked up into the cloud-filled sky. Eddis laid a warning hand on his arm.

“Oh, I’ll watch my tongue,” said Eugenides. “I have learned how, and I don’t want the clouds to part and Moira to arrive on a band of sunlight to tell me to shut up, but I wish I knew if we’re at war and people are dying because the gods choose to have it so. Is this the will of the Great Goddess, that Eddis be destroyed?”

Eddis shook her head. “We are Hephestia’s people still. I believe that. Beyond that I don’t know. Nothing I’ve ever learned from a priest makes me think I know just what the gods are or what they can accomplish, but, Gen, I know my decisions are my own responsibility. If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make up my mind for me.” She remembered the properties of the stone of Hamiathes and said, “We can’t ask the gods to explain themselves, and I, for one, don’t want to.”

Eugenides looked thoughtful, remembering his own experience with Hamiathes’s Gift, and nodded his agreement.

They had both been quiet for a while before Eddis spoke again. Her words surprised Gen. “You aren’t the boy hero anymore,” she said.

“Was I ever?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.

She smiled, wondering again where he had picked up that particular facial expression. “Oh, certainly you were the golden boy,” she said. “You kept the entire population amused. And since you brought Sounis to his knees, you’ve been the darling of the court as well.”

“The magus said something along those lines. All that glory, and I missed it,” Eugenides said mournfully.

Eddis laughed and leaned closer to put one arm around his shoulder.

Eugenides thought it over. “Not the darling of our dear cousins,” he pointed out.

“Even them,” said Eddis. “They were as angry as anyone else when . . . you came home.” She stumbled, close to the sensitive subject of his missing hand. He referred to it occasionally, sometimes lightly. He’d joked that it couldn’t possibly affect his riding for the worse, but he still flinched visibly sometimes when it was mentioned by anyone else, and she knew he hated to talk about it.

Sitting together in the cold, they both thought of the cousins who had died since the war began. Stepsis, Chlorus, Sosias in the raiding party at the very beginning. Timos had died stopping Attolia’s advance up the main pass the previous spring. Two others, Cleon and Hermander, had been wounded in those battles and had died of infection over the summer. Others had died after the Irkes Forest burned. Eddis remembered them in the first few days after Eugenides had been brought home to the palace. No one had been more eager than they to avenge their Thief.

“I think they felt it was their prerogative to hold you facedown in a water butt and no one else should dare touch you. Therespides is going to admire you, albeit grudgingly, for the rest of his life.”