“You are thinking as I stand between you and the Great Goddess that perhaps you have dedicated your sacrifices all these years in error?” Her voice was amused.

Eugenides said nothing.

“Do not offend one power to attain the favor of another. The Thief is your god, but remember, no god is all-powerful, not even the Great Goddess.”

She was silent then, long enough for Eugenides to wonder if she was gone and if he dared raise his head and if what had happened was all that would happen. Finally she spoke again.

“Little Thief,” she said, “what would you give to have your hand back?”

Eugenides almost lifted his head.

“Oh, no,” said the goddess. “It is beyond my power and that of the Great Goddess as well. What’s done is done, even with the gods. But if the hand could be restored, what would you give? Your eyesight?” The voice paused, and Eugenides remembered begging Galen, the physician, to let him die before he was blind. “Your freedom?” The goddess went on. “Your sanity? Think, Eugenides, before you question the gods. You have much still to lose.”

Softly Eugenides asked, “Why did my gods betray me?”

“Have they?” asked the goddess as softly.

“To Attolia, to the Mede…” Eugenides stuttered.

“Would you have your hand back, Eugenides? And lose Attolia? And see Attolia lost to the Mede?”

Eugenides’s eyes were open. In front of his face the floor was littered with tiny bits of glass that glittered in the candlelight.

“You have your answer, Little Thief.” And she was gone.

Eugenides slept and woke again in the dark. He was on his back, he realized. He was in bed. There was no fire in the hearth, but it was a clear night, and there was enough light to see Eddis sitting in a chair nearby.

He cleared his throat. “The mountain,” he said. “I saw the mountain explode.”

“I know,” said Eddis.

“You’ve seen it?” asked Eugenides.

“In my dreams since midwinter.”

Eugenides moved his head back and forth on the pillow, as if trying to shake the memories away. “Once was awful enough for me. When do you think?”

“Not soon,” said Eddis, leaning toward him to rest a hand on his forehead. “Someday, but perhaps not in our lifetime. Hephestia has warned us, so there will be time to prepare.” She reassured him, and he slept again.

When he next woke, it was day, and the room was filled with light. He turned to see if Eddis was still beside him and found Attolia, patiently waiting for him to open his eyes. She was sitting with her hands folded, staring into the distance, but she must have seen his movement because she shifted to meet his gaze.

“Do you love me?” Eugenides asked without preamble.

“Why do you ask?” she answered, and he grimaced in frustration.

“Because I need to know,” he said.

“I am wearing your earrings,” Attolia offered.

“Being willing to marry me is not the same as loving me.”

“Would you believe me if I said I did love you?” Attolia asked. It seemed a genuine question, and Eugenides thought carefully about his answer.

“I don’t think you’d lie.”

“Does it matter?” Attolia asked.

“If you are truthful?”

“If I love you,” she said.

“Yes. Do you love me?” he asked again.

She didn’t answer. “When we opened the doors to the solarium three days ago—”

“Three days?” Eugenides queried.

“Three days,” Attolia confirmed. “When we opened the doors, we saw that the entire room was scorched black and you were on the floor possibly dead, surrounded by broken glass. Window glass is expensive, you realize that?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” he said meekly.

“You might have been dead, but you weren’t. Not cut to pieces, not burned to a cinder, and when you woke, your queen reported that you didn’t seem to be insane. Are you insane?”

“No more than usual, I think.”

“Insane to think of loving me,” said Attolia, and the emotions that colored her usually emotionless voice were bitterness and self-mockery.

Eugenides reached to take her hand, but she was sitting at his right side and he had to reach across his body. He raised himself on his elbow, but she freed her hand and pushed him gently back into the bed. Then she pulled the covers back to expose the stump of his right arm. His cuff and hook, he saw, were laid on a table across the room. He resisted the temptation to pull the arm back under the covers.

“It is not so sore,” she said.

“No.” Eugenides ran his hand over his arm. The ridges of calluses and the blisters were gone. He was free of the ache in his bones and the pain in his phantom hand. He thought of the goddess who had interceded on his behalf and thought the pain might be gone forever.

Looking at his arm, Attolia said, “I cut off your hand.”

“Yes.”

“I have been living with your grief and your rage and your pain ever since. I don’t think—I don’t think I had felt anything for a long time before that, but those emotions at least were familiar to me. Love I am not familiar with. I didn’t recognize that feeling until I thought I had lost you in Ephrata. And when I thought I was losing you a second time, I realized I would give up anything to keep you—my lip service to other gods, but my pride, too, and my rage at all gods, everything for you. Then I see you here, and see what I have done to you.” Gently she stroked his maimed arm, and he shivered at the warmth of her touch and its intimacy.

“You have spied on me for years?” she asked.

“Yes,” Eugenides admitted.

“Watched me deal with my barons and my servants, loyalists, traitors, and enemies?” She thought of the hardness and the coldness she had cultivated over those years and wondered if they were the mask she wore or if the mask had become her self. If the longing inside her for kindness, for warmth, for compassion, was the last seed of hope for her, she didn’t know how to nurture it or if it could live.

Unable to guess the answer, she asked, “Who am I, that you should love me?”

“You are My Queen,” said Eugenides. She sat perfectly still, looking at him without moving as his words dropped like water into dry earth.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

And she believed him.