The Queen of Attolia (12 page)

“You seem to be burdened with my company more often than you deserve,” Eugenides was saying.

“They’re afraid you might snap at anyone else,” Agape answered with a serious expression.

Eugenides looked startled. “No one could snap at you,” he said.

“Yes,” said Agape, still very serious. “I’m much too sweet.”

Eugenides laughed outright, and Agape’s grave expression gave way to a smile. She was the youngest of four sisters and the loveliest as well. The others had allowed a certain shrewishness of character to distort their good looks, but Agape was a great favorite at the court for her kindness and her wit.

“Are you in a dreadful mood?” she asked, laying a hand over Eugenides’s. “Your father warned me that you might be.”

Eugenides glanced at his father, who was staring down at his plate and didn’t look up, though he had certainly heard.

“Yes,” said Eugenides, turning back to Agape, “a dreadful mood. You should swap seats with your sister Hegite. She and I deserve each other this evening.”

“You are unkind to poor Hegite.”

“I would be if she were sitting next to me.”

Agape smiled. “I suppose it is lucky she is not, then,” she said.

“I think luck has nothing to do with it,” Eugenides answered, glancing at his queen, “but with a dinner companion as lovely as you, I won’t complain. Are you singing at the festival?”

They talked then about the upcoming festival, which would end with the rites of Hephestia and an entire day and night of singing by the temple chorus and by selected soloists. Agape had sung the year before and said she would sing again, spending the next few weeks in seclusion in the temple grounds while she practiced.

Midway through dinner Eugenides lifted his wine cup and looked down into it.

“Something is the matter with this cup,” he said.

“What is it?” Agape asked.

“I can’t get anybody to fill it.” He had several times caught the eye of a wine bearer only to have the boy glance away, pretending not to have seen him. “Excuse me,” he said to Agape as he turned and leaned across his father. It was an awkward reach as he had to use his left hand. He accomplished it gracefully and removed his father’s wine cup, leaving his own in its place.

“There,” he said, “I’m sure you can get it filled.” He challenged his father with a look, and the older man nodded.

“I’m sure I can,” he said, and signaled to a wine bearer. The boy came with the ewer and poured out the wine. Eugenides drained the cup he’d taken from his father and held it up. The boy hesitated and looked to
the minister of war.

“Demos,” Eugenides said, “stop looking at my father, and fill my wine cup.” The minister of war turned to look across the room. Demos filled the cup. Eugenides drained it. “Now fill it again,” he said, and the boy did as he was told while the minister of war sat stiffly, turned away.

“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.

“You’re requesting my permission to run away and hide?” she asked.

Eugenides winced, but he then nodded. He stood before her dressed in his most formal tunic with his hair newly clipped and his chin carefully shaven. “Yes,” he admitted. “I am requesting your permission
to run away and hide.”

“Eugenides, we can’t afford to have you disappear in a fit of despair just now.”

“Do I look sunk in despair?” he asked, holding his arms out from his sides.

“I assume you’re hiding it to maintain pretenses.”

“It’s worse than despair I am hiding,” he said, sounding suddenly very bleak.

“Is there something worse?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.” He shifted his weight and looked around the empty room. He turned away from her and appeared to take a great interest in the interlocking gold squares painted around the walls near the ceiling. “I’m terrified,” he admitted.

Eddis thought he was joking and laughed. He glanced at her and away again, and she stopped.

He crossed his arms over his chest and, still facing away from her, spoke to the wall. “Those men in the hall last night…”

“They were joking.”

“I know they were joking. I’m not laughing,” he snapped, and caught himself. His head dropped forward, and he addressed himself again to the wall. “The only thing I want to do right now is bolt the door to my room and hide under the covers. I’d do it, too, but then I might fall asleep, and I can’t risk that. So much,” he said bitterly, “for the hero of Eddis.”

He brushed his hair off his face, then tucked his hand
back under his arm. “I remember when they brought me up the mountain. Parts of the trip. I remember thinking that nothing else, nothing worse, would happen, because I was home. Then I heard Galen telling you that if it was glower in my eyes, I’d be blind.” He was shaking his head. Eddis had to make an effort to stop shaking hers. “And I stand around listening to people
laugh
at the idea that I might end up deaf and dumb as well.”

He started to pace. “Her following stroke is as good as her attack,” he said. “I’m too frightened to leave my room, much less to be of any use to my queen.”

“You’re not in your room now.”

“No, I’m doing my best not to look like a mountain hare frozen in one spot by terror, but I don’t know how long I can keep it up, and that’s why we didn’t have this discussion at your morning session with half the court looking on.”

He stopped pacing abruptly and turned his back on his queen in order to sit on the dais at her feet. He pulled his knees up and hunched over them. “Bleh,” he said, disgusted with himself.

Looking down at him, Eddis could see that his tunic had grown too small and pulled across his shoulders. She remembered his many comments on her ill-fitting clothing, and she made a note to tell him at a more appropriate moment to get a new overshirt made. He had the money. All the proceeds from the ten hijacked Attolian caravans she had given over to him.

“Eugenides,” she said, picking her words carefully, “you’re letting yourself be upset by talk. Empty threats. She wouldn’t do any of those things.”

“You wouldn’t think so, but she cut out the tongue of that traitor Maleveras and left him in a cage in the courtyard for a week before she had him executed.”

“She’d been queen for less than a year. He’d talked half of her barons into deserting her, while pretending to be an ally, and his sedition nearly dethroned her. By the time she discovered his treachery, she had very little real power and not many options. If she hadn’t done something to deter other warmongers, she would have lost the throne.”

“And that baron who was robbing the treasury. She cut off his hand, too, didn’t she?”

“She had him executed. I would have done the same if I’d found one of my tax collectors funding a revolt out of my own treasury. She had his hand cut off posthumously to display for effect. I don’t
think
I would have done that, but I’ve never been in that situation.”

Eugenides turned to stare at her over his shoulder. “You are defending her,” he pointed out.

The queen of Eddis hissed in displeasure. “I don’t want to. She’s vicious, she’s barbaric, and I think by this time edging toward insane, but I’m forcing myself to be honest. She has not indulged in atrocities for personal pleasure,” she said firmly. “Or for personal revenge. She has used them as deterrents to defend her throne.”