“I was afraid. I couldn’t just sit here being afraid and doing nothing about it.”

“So you did this? Damn you, Eugenides. What would I have done if she’d caught you?”

“I was in the woods watching people go in and out of the megaron. I wasn’t anywhere near her.”

“That’s as close as you went? The woods?”

Eugenides hesitated. “I went into the town once.”

Eddis stared at him and waited.

“And I scouted the outer walls of the megaron.”

“What would I have done,” Eddis repeated in a low voice, more anguished than her shouting, “what would I have done if she’d caught you and cut you to pieces and sent the pieces back to me?”

“Buried them,” said Eugenides.

Eddis sat back against her throne and crossed her arms. She looked at Eugenides a long time while he waited patiently.

“Now you want to go back,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Eugenides, this is like seeing a child burn himself on a pot and then say he’d like to try climbing into the fire next.”

“I’m not a child,” the Thief said.

“We can send someone else,” Eddis said, ignoring him while she considered alternatives.

“There isn’t anyone else,” Eugenides said firmly, interrupting her thoughts. “And I want to do this.”

“I won’t believe that. If this is truly what you want, I should have you locked up until you come to your senses. There has to be someone else.”

“No,” said Eugenides.

“Yes,” said his queen.

“Who?” Eugenides asked.

“Gen,” Eddis was forced into admitting, “it would be worse than losing you to have you do this and become like her.”

He came and sat on the footstool by her chair. “I am your Thief. As you pointed out once before, I am a member of your royal family. There is no one else to send. And, My Queen, I do want this.” He looked up at her. “I can’t tell you why. She may be a fiend from hell to make me feel this way, but even if I have to hate myself for the rest of my life, this is what I want.” He shook his head, perhaps in self-contempt, and shrugged. “I dream about her at night.”

Eddis looked down at him and said dryly, “We have heard you screaming.”

He laughed, a sharp sound like wood splintering, then said, “I can’t do this except at your direction.” He leaned back against her legs and turned his head to look up at her. “My Queen,” he said softly, “you can’t tell me I am a grown-up hero and still keep me tied to you like a little boy. Let me go.”

“Oh, Gen. When I said Eddis expected more of you, I didn’t mean this.”

She sat and looked at her hands for a long time.

“All right,” she said at last. “Go and steal the queen of Attolia.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

IT TOOK TIME TO PREPARE for Eugenides’s plan. The spring rains fell. Eddis grew green with the luminescence of new growth against a pearl gray sky. Independent traders slipped into the tiny harbors of the Eddis coast, and their small shipments were carried up the cliffs to the coastal province. In the capital the women and the men too old for fighting sewed the quilted tunics that were the uniform of the soldiers. The soldiers trained, Eugenides’s cousin Crodes, who served as the queen’s messenger, spent hours every day practicing his pronunciation, and Eugenides, for his part, took riding lessons, griping bitterly all the while.

One night in her megaron at Ephrata, the queen of Attolia retired late to her rooms. She had pored for hours over the papers on her writing desk, and she had written page after page to add to them, sealing her messages with wax and the imprint of the ring on her finger, one of the many seals she used. The royal messengers would be busy in the morning, each of them with a leather bag to carry marked with the royal insignia. Some would ride across Attolia, and some would board the small, fast ships that waited in Ephrata’s harbor.

She was tired. She sat, almost too weary to keep her head lifted as Phresine gently combed the tangles out of her hair and twisted it into the single braid the queen wore when she slept. As Phresine combed out the long hair, she teased the queen about the shadows under her eyes.

“You will wear yourself to the bone. Your beauty will be gone, and your suitors will lose interest.”

“It’s a mask, Phresine. The suitors haven’t any interest in me.”

“Well, your mask will be gone soon if you don’t take better care.”

“Only to be replaced with another.”

“And that one?”

“Power. What men like best for themselves and least in their women.”

“Then you must marry before your beauty is gone, mustn’t you?” Phresine stepped carefully on dangerous ground. It didn’t pay to grow too familiar with Her Majesty. Phresine had never seen the queen lose her temper, but her censure was not to be taken lightly. She was unfailingly polite to her women, and kind in a formal way. Perhaps because she never allowed anyone too close, any sign of trust or confidence from her was highly prized by her attendants. Still, she ruled her court and her country with an inflexible hand. Pausing in her work, Phresine considered that for all she knew, the queen was as ruthless as she seemed, and Phresine valued her position too much to risk it by letting her tongue wag.

“Phresine,” the queen said without turning her head to look at her attendant, “I can read your mind.”

Phresine moved her hands, stilled during her thoughts, back to their tasks. “Then you know there’s no harm in old Phresine,” she said.

When Phresine was gone, the room was quiet except for the ceaseless sound of waves that came through the open window. The narrow slice of moon inched across the sky until it shone onto her carpet, and Attolia was still awake. She got out of bed, lifting her robe from where it was draped by the bedside. A year earlier an attendant would have been hovering, ready to serve a restless queen, but the queen had long since ordered them out of her chambers at night. She could get her own water if she was thirsty. She wanted to be alone.

She pushed her arms into the wide sleeves of the robe and wrapped it around herself, then dragged a chair to sit in the moonlight by the window. “Damn him,” she cursed under her breath, “damn him, damn him, damn him,” as if her curses could weigh down the Thief of Eddis like stones piled one on top of another until he was overcome.

She sighed and tried to organize her thoughts. If she was going to be awake, there were still problems of strategy to address. The Mede ambassador was persistent in his attentions. A close relative of the emperor and a brother of the emperor’s heir, he was not an unlikely suitor. It was no doubt why he had been chosen as ambassador. She wished he wouldn’t grease his beard so dramatically. The scent of the oil he used was overwhelming.

Her thoughts circled back to the scent of the hair oil she’d used as a child. She’d broken the last amphora of it and then never used it again. That same day her older brother had died falling from his horse, and the familiar earth had seemed to shift under her feet. Suddenly her world had changed, and she was a different person with new rooms in the palace, a new view from her windows, the comforting presence of her nurse replaced by the aloof faces of unfamiliar attendants. Not just a princess of the royal house to be married agreeably in a few years, she was the princess whose husband would be the next king of Attolia. Her dead mother’s jewelry was collected from her father’s concubines and brought to her. The combs in her hair were more ornamental, the earrings in her ears heavier, and her hair oils more expensively scented.