She located the lieutenant who’d brought us and demanded an explanation of him. Unable to hear her over the babbling of so many people, he shrugged apologetically.
She raised one hand and quirked an eyebrow at the crowd. The room fell quiet. The soldiers around the magus, Sophos, and me stepped hastily aside. Once the queen saw us, she dropped her hand.
“Oh,” she said in irritation and perfect understanding. “It’s you, Eugenides.”
I looked down at my dust-covered feet. I was tired, and I felt as light as a cloud that might blow away across the sky at any moment. I didn’t even have the strength to feel chagrin at embarrassing my queen and staunchest defender once again by providing a spectacle for the entire court of Eddis. I’d never been so happy to hear my own name.
The magus, I noted, was not surprised by the greeting. I was a little annoyed because I had wanted to see his jaw drop. I had to satisfy myself with Sophos’s surprise—he was gaping in a heartwarming way—and hope that the magus didn’t know all my secrets.
“Down the steps,” I whispered in Sophos’s ear, as I nudged him forward. While he helped me, the people on either side moved even farther away, not sure whether the queen’s irritation might spill over to them. They needn’t have worried. I had disappeared months before without her approval, but she and a few of her ministers must have guessed why, and if she was angry at me, it was only because she’d been worrying.
With my good hand I reached under the braid at the base of my neck to free the thong that was tied there. It was the shorter of the two that Pol had given me on the banks of the Aracthus. One-handed, I couldn’t easily get the knot undone, and several strands of my own dark hair came with the thong when I pulled it free.
I glanced back briefly at the magus and was delighted to see his mouth open in astonishment.
“Gen,” he said under his breath, “you viper.”
Above the queen’s extended palm I held Hamiathes’s Gift. It had hung hidden by my hair since I’d braided it there after the first fighting in the Sea of Olives. As soon as I’d seen the riders attacking, I’d moved my horse, never far away from the magus’s, until I could cut the thong around his neck with the penknife I’d stolen the first or second day out of prison. He’d been too distracted to notice and had assumed later, as I’d known he would, that the thong had been sliced by a sword stroke and that the Gift had dropped into the stream.
It swung from its leather loop for a moment, such a little boring river stone, but no one in the room doubted its authenticity. The precisely cut runes of Hephestia’s mark swung first toward me and then away. The sapphire hidden in the stone caught the light, and the carved letters seemed to hover, bright blue, in the air.
I had a speech to make. I’d worked it up on the way down the mountain to Sounis and practiced it over and over in the king’s prison, but I couldn’t remember any of it, and besides, I was too tired. That I carried Hamiathes’s Gift to my queen was all that had kept me going from the Attolian stronghold to the top of the mountains. The moment I released the stone, darkness rushed in, and I leaned toward the floor without saying anything.
I slept for a long time untroubled by visions of the gods, and when I woke, I was in my own bed. I brushed my hand back and forth across the soft sheets. They were as fine as anything sold in Sounis because all of Sounis’s best linens were woven in Eddis. At my feet the footboard was carved with a scene of fir trees against the skyline of the sacred mountains, and when I turned my head, I could see the sacred mountains themselves through the windows. They rose up in all directions, safely hemming me in.
I remembered the story that said Hephestia had made the valleys in the mountains for her chosen people, and I wondered if it was true. Having seen the gods, I continued to doubt all of the stories I had heard about them. If the gods were incarnations of the mountains and rivers around us, or whether they drew their power from those sources, I couldn’t say. They had power greater than any mortal, and if that power was enough to change the face of the earth, I didn’t want to know. I only hoped that they would hear my prayers from a distance, accept my offerings, and not trouble my dreams again. Hamiathes’s Gift was more burden than blessing, and I was glad to be free of it.
I lay and admired the view for a while before I realized that there were people talking quietly in the library, which was separated by an open doorway from the room that was both my bedroom and study. I turned my head to listen better. The magus was talking with the queen. I heard him address someone as Minister and thought that probably meant minister of war.
“We deliberately made the king’s message to you as vague as possible, so Gen may have hoped to find the stone in our possession. When he couldn’t find it or any reference to it in my papers, I believe he decided to make a reputation for himself, not just as a thief but as a Sounisian one. He mentioned an Eddisian mother in the forged court records to explain his dark coloring and any trace of an accent that he couldn’t hide, and then he bragged about his ability to perform some outstanding feat that would have to come to my attention. He could only have hoped that it would occur to me that I needed a proficient but anonymous thief whose absence from the city wouldn’t be noticed. He couldn’t have known that the man he bragged to in the wineshop was in fact my spy.”
I hadn’t known, and I’d almost laughed out loud when the magus mentioned it outside the temple. The gods must have arranged it.
“I don’t know how he would have gotten out of the prison on his own,” said the magus. “It seems a foolhardy plan to have relied on my intervention.”
I am a master of foolhardy plans, I thought. I have so much practice I consider them professional risks. Sooner or later they would have needed the cell and the chains for someone more important, the minister of the exchequer, for instance, and I would have been moved to another cell. Sooner or later I would have had my chance to escape, if I hadn’t died of disease first.
“He couldn’t have found the whereabouts of the stone from the papers in my study,” the magus went on. “I was careful to destroy any records. But he could have followed us and stolen the Gift once it was located.”
The minister of war snorted. “Not if he had to follow you on a horse,” he said.
The queen laughed, and I flushed in the privacy of my bedroom. I do hate horses. That was the first sign that I wasn’t going to be the soldier my father hoped for.
The magus might have heard me thinking. “He does have other skills to be proud of,” he said. For instance, I thought, stealing Hamiathes’s Gift not once but twice. Who else in history had done that? But the magus referred to the fight with the Queen’s Guard at the base of the mountain. That wasn’t a skill I appreciated much. If I’d been as inept with a sword as I was in a saddle, my father might not have driven me so hard to be a soldier and to let the title of King’s Thief lapse forever. It had been meaningless for so many generations, and he’d felt strongly that it should disappear for good.
The magus described the fighting with the guard in detail and made me look very good indeed.
The minister of war snorted. The magus didn’t recognize this as high praise, and he said stiffly, “I’ve been told that his father wanted him to be a soldier. I’d be happy to inform his father that he has a son to be proud of.”