“Good lad,” said Eugenides. “Now keep an eye on that cup because I don’t want it empty again this evening, understood?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said as he backed away.

“You are in a dreadful mood,” Agape said.

“I am,” said Eugenides. “And telling me I can’t have wine with my dinner will only make it worse.”

“Being drunk is much better,” Agape agreed.

Eugenides looked at her sharply. “Agape, I think you are trespassing.”

“Yes.”

“But you’re not going to stop?”

“No.” She smiled, and Eugenides, in spite of his foul mood, smiled back. Capitulating for the moment, he didn’t touch the wine cup again. After dinner he excused himself politely and disappeared. When his father looked for him, he hadn’t joined any of the small groups around the ceremonial hall for after-dinner conversation. Nor had anyone seen him go upstairs to his room.

With a jug of unwatered wine, he stepped across a courtyard of rain-washed pavement to the guard barracks. The wine, he knew, would ensure his welcome and few questions. Hours later he returned to the central palace and the library. He stopped unsteadily in the doorway when he saw the magus inside, bent over the papers on the table they’d agreed would be his for the duration of his stay in Eddis.

“I stayed up late just to be sure you were gone,” Eugenides said, yawning.

“Unlike your father, I am certainly not waiting up for you,” said the magus dryly. “I have work I prefer to do uninterrupted.”

“Was my father here?”

“Until half an hour ago. It was like having a basilisk in the room.”

Eugenides laughed as he crossed the library to his room. “I’m glad I missed him,” he said.

The magus, taking note of his unsteadiness, agreed. “I’m glad you missed him, too.”

“And will your muse keep you working all night?” Eugenides asked.

“It might,” the magus answered.

“Not if you can only work uninterrupted,” the Thief said cryptically as he closed his door.

The magus had meant to work just a few moments more, but after the interruption he fell back into his thoughts and was still in the library when Eugenides’s hoarse screams began. He put down his pen and listened.

He was a soldier as well as a scholar, and he was not unfamiliar with the sound of men screaming. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and his fingers. Then, reluctantly, he stood and walked to the door of Eugenides’s room and banged on it. He banged hard and for a long time before the screaming subsided. There was silence, then, until finally the bolt was thrown and Eugenides opened the door to look out. The side of his face was creased with sleep and his hair was damp with sweat.

“Just bad dreams,” he said quietly.

“Come sit by the fire?” the magus asked.

Eugenides staggered out into the light and sat in a chair and groaned. “Oh, my head,” he said.

“That will be more effective than a lecture from your father,” said the magus, amused.

Eugenides disagreed. “You’ve never heard my father lecture.”

“Do you want to talk about them?” the magus asked, sitting in a chair nearby.

“The lectures? Not really. He never says much, but it’s always to the point.”

“The screaming nightmares.”

“Oh,” said the Thief. “No. I don’t want to talk about them.”

“The weather, then?”

“No, thank you. Not the harvest either,” said Eugenides. “Tell me why the king of Sounis wants to marry the queen of Eddis.” He’d asked the magus the same question before.

“The political importance of the marriage is obvious,” the magus answered.

Eugenides shook his head but did it carefully in consideration of the pain left when the numbness caused by too much wine had faded. “I don’t mean the political advantages. He wants more than that.”

“Eddis is brilliant, Gen. She’s very young, almost as young as yourself, and she is already a successful leader and a gifted ruler. Her legal reforms have changed Eddis more in seven years than anyone would have thought possible when she took the throne. And on a personal level she is quite . . . magnetic.”

“She’s ugly,” Eugenides objected.

The magus hesitated. “Perhaps not the conventional ideal of physical beauty.”

“She’s short, she’s broad-shouldered, and hawk-faced with a broken nose. I would say no, she is not an ideal.”

“She has a lovely smile,” the magus countered.

“Oh, yes,” Eugenides agreed. “I’ve seen men fall on their knees and beg to walk across hot coals for her after one of those smiles.”

The magus shrugged. “I suppose my king would like one for himself,” he said simply.

Eugenides nodded and stared into the fire. “Agape,” he said.

“Hmm?” asked the magus, puzzled at the abrupt change in topic.

“Agape, the queen’s cousin. She and the queen are much alike.”

“Your cousin, too, isn’t she?”

“Oh, you know how it is, we’re all cousins here,” Eugenides said, still staring at the fire. “The connections are different. Agape is the daughter of the queen’s mother’s sister, and I am related to the queen through my father, who is her father’s brother. Agape’s grandfather was mine’s half brother, I think.” He waved his hand, dismissing genealogies. “We have special priests who keep track of these things and spend months figuring out who can marry whom. Agape’s much more closely related to the queen than to me, and she is very much like her.”

“She is,” the magus agreed.

“Maybe you could get Sounis to marry her?” Eugenides suggested.

“Perhaps.”

“Poor Agape,” Eugenides said wistfully.

“He’s not an entirely irredeemable character,” the magus said, defending his king.

“I’m sure not,” Eugenides said agreeably, “but he’s caused a lot of bloodshed wanting a woman he can’t have.”

“Not a new thing in the history of the world,” the magus said.

“No,” Eugenides responded thoughtfully, “and maybe I should be more sympathetic, but I think I will just go back to bed.”

“Shall I stay?” the magus asked.

“No,” said Eugenides. “I am going to give up on wine as a soporific and take some of Galen’s lethium.” He gave a sketchy good-night wave with his left hand and disappeared into his room.

In the morning he asked for a private audience with the queen and scheduled it with her chamberlain, a highly unusual chain of events. In general, if he wanted to talk to her, he just did, and if he wanted to speak privately, he appeared at her elbow when no one else was near, whenever and wherever that might be. After weeks of silence, barricaded in his library after the magus’s first visit, he’d woken her in the middle of the night in her bedchamber, while her attendants slept on undisturbed nearby, and asked to borrow several men and a chariot in order to destroy Sounis’s navy.

Now Eddis met with him in one of the small interview rooms in a newer part of the palace. It was an official receiving room and had a throne in it raised three steps off the floor. She always felt as if she were perching like a bird rather than sitting like a monarch on this particular throne. She looked down at her Thief.