“I see,” said the Mede.

“I think that will be all for now, Relius,” Attolia said, and dismissed her secretary with a flick of her fingers. When he reached the door, she called him back. “There is one other thing.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” He knew what it was.

“You’ll take care of it?”

“Immediately, Your Majesty.”

The master of Her Majesty’s spies bowed carefully before slipping out the door to put his not inconsiderable energies into discovering how the Medean ambassador came to interrupt the queen and to do so without being announced.

Nahuseresh excused himself not long after and returned to the rooms allotted to him and his ambassadorial party. His own secretary waited for him there.

“The messenger from the Three Cities brought a message to you from the emperor,” the secretary warned him. “It is with your papers.”

Nahuseresh found it there, folded and sealed. However, the seal was broken. Nahuseresh examined the folding carefully in order to open the papers without tearing them. Each of the folds was crisp and complete. It had not been opened and refolded. He glanced over at his secretary, who smiled.

“I didn’t recognize the pattern,” the secretary admitted, “so I left it.”

“I’ll teach it to you someday soon, Kamet,” Nahuseresh promised while glancing over the message. “The emperor catalogs the gold we have given the barbarian queen and asks if we have struck a bargain together and received a receipt for our purchases.”

“He is early in pressing for success, isn’t he?” the secretary asked.

“He doesn’t press as much as he urges us to make haste,” Nahuseresh corrected him, eyes still on the paper he held.

“Haste hasn’t made his empire,” Kamet pointed out.

“It is unlike him,” Nahuseresh agreed. “But no doubt he has his reasons.” He refolded the message and dropped it onto his desk. “Try working out the folds yourself. Let me know if you need help. We will send a message to the emperor this evening saying we hope the queen will remain preoccupied with her Eddisian Thief while we work. You have spoken with the servants in Baron Erondites’s household?”

“I’ve spoken with them. Not ingratiated myself. They’re a little reserved yet, not sure where I fit in their hierarchy.”

“I see.”

“They don’t have many slaves here,” Kamet observed.

Nahuseresh shook his head. “No. They have a relatively small population and not a great deal of wealth.”

“I could run away and make myself a free man,” joked Kamet.

“Oh, I’d find you.” Nahuseresh smiled. The slave’s almond-shaped eyes and red-brown complexion would set him apart from the residents of Attolia. “What do you think of Baron Erondites so far?”

“He’s a likely one, very sleek. Thinks well of himself. What do you think of the Attolian queen?”

“She’s quite beautiful,” Nahuseresh said.

“Yes?” prompted Kamet.

“And she has the most appealing of feminine virtues, especially in a queen. She’s easily led,” said Nahuseresh, smiling.

“She’s held the throne for some time,” the secretary said cautiously.

“She secured her throne with brilliant tactics early on that were no doubt those of an advisor, probably the Baron Oronus, or Erondites’s father. Whichever of them it was, they are both dead now. She has been shrewd or perhaps lucky in advisors so far. She has to choose another if she hopes to work her way out of her present difficulties.”

“The one with the most gold?” Kamet asked.

“One hopes so,” said Nahuseresh.

When Attolia was dressed for bed and her hair was carefully combed and braided, she sent away her attendants and wandered slowly through her chambers. She ran her hand across the covers of the bed, turned back invitingly, but didn’t get in. She gathered her robes around herself and sat in a chair by the window, looking out at the night sky. After a while she relaxed enough to drum her fingers on the arm of the chair.

“I should have hanged him,” she said out loud.

She said nothing else, and the room was silent as the moon sailed slowly over the roofs of the palace and eventually dropped its light through the window to the carpet by her feet. Exhausted, she finally went to bed and slept without dreaming.

CHAPTER SIX

AS THE WINTER PASSED, HE forced himself to get up in the morning, even if it was only to sit in the chair at the foot of his bed to watch the fire in the fireplace. Some days he practiced his handwriting. In the night, when the palace was quiet, he woke and lay in bed for hours, staring at the shadows the fire cast on his ceiling. It was a thief’s time, the middle of the night. Old habits died hard, and he couldn’t sleep. He counted himself lucky if he didn’t wake screaming and was glad that when he did have nightmares, there was no other apartment near the library where people might hear him.

In the late winter he was still working on his handwriting and studying the books and scrolls from the library. He was reading a text on a system for categorizing plants and animals when someone knocked at his door. He looked up to find a man standing in his doorway. Beside him, as if he’d just put it down, was a square leather box with a handle on top.

“Can I help you?” Eugenides asked, puzzled.

“They sent me up to show you some things,” the man said awkwardly.

Eugenides had no trouble fitting a number of people into the category “they.” “What things?” he asked.

The man pushed his box a little closer to where Eugenides sat. He unlatched and lifted the top to display the contents. Held in place by leather straps was an assortment of prosthetics: false hands and hooks. The hands were carved from wood, some of them fists, some partly open. The hooks were set in shiny brass or silver cups, inlaid or plain.

“Get out,” said Eugenides.

“Young sir,” the man protested.

“Get out!”

“When you’ve looked.” The man stood his ground.

Eugenides got up from his chair and, after the briefest of looks into the box, fled. He strode across the library and slammed its door behind him.

Eugenides went down the hallway past several startled servants and was running up stairs two at a time before he realized that he didn’t want to go to the roof. On a fine day in late winter it would be peopled with ladies walking the lookouts, tired of being shut in by the cold. He racked his brains to think of a refuge, but the library was his refuge, and he’d been driven out. After a moment he turned and went back down the stairs and along the hall to another flight of steps, hurrying past people without speaking, thankful that he was dressed in clothes and not in his robe, as he often was in the morning, until he remembered that he was dressed only because his father’s valet had stopped in that morning to prod him, no doubt in anticipation of his visitor. The thought made him savage, and the valet was lucky to be far away.

He left the palace by way of a tiny courtyard that had a door in its stone wall that let him out onto a grass-covered slope.

There was a paved path of white stones that led uphill from the gate to intersect the wider pavement of the Sacred Way. The Sacred Way swept back and forth across the hillside working up to the great temple of Hephestia, which overlooked the palace.