The Queen of Attolia (6 page)

I
N THE MORNING
E
UGENIDES SLEPT
late. When he woke, his room was full of light, and the magus of Sounis sat in the chair at the foot of his bed.

“What are you doing here?” Eugenides asked, not pleased.

“I didn’t think I’d get a chance to visit again soon, so I came up. You know I like Eddis.”

“The country or the queen?”

“I prefer my country,” the magus admitted.

“And my queen,” said Eugenides. “Well, you can’t have her.”

The magus smiled. He had done his best to maneuver the unwilling queen of Eddis into a political marriage with his king and failed, largely because of Eugenides. In spite of the difference in their ages and their goals, they had a great respect for each other.

The magus was privy to the reports of his king’s ambassador in Eddis and had read them carefully
throughout the fall and winter, his personal desires in conflict with his political ones. His king had been delighted at the outcome in Attolia. The magus had grieved, but he’d gone on with the plans he’d thought in the best interest of his country. He was cautious, though, and he’d come to see Eugenides for himself before he encouraged his king toward open conflict with Eddis.

“What’s keeping you busy in Sounis that you think you won’t be back soon to ogle my queen?” Eugenides asked.

The magus had been prepared for apathy but not for ignorance.

“Sounis will declare war on Eddis by summer,” he said.

Eugenides stared.

“Maybe you also don’t know that your country has been at war with Attolia since the fall?”

“That’s not possible,” said Eugenides flatly. “Why would we go to war with Attolia?”

The magus pointed one finger at Eugenides’s right arm.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Eugenides snapped, and got out of bed. He pulled his robe from his wardrobe and threw it around his shoulders. “If this is your idea of a joke, I will kill you,” he snarled.

“You were returned to Eddis with the understanding that the waters of the Aracthus would be restored. Did
you know that?” the magus asked calmly.

Eugenides sighed and dragged his desk chair around to sit facing the magus. “Yes,” he said, and waited for the magus to continue.

“Your queen agreed to open the sluice gates on the reservoir above the Aracthus. She simultaneously ordered confiscated the property of the next ten Attolian caravans through the pass. Attolia protested. Eddis described them as reparations. Attolia called it an act of war and demanded the contents of the caravans be returned. Eddis suggested arbitration by the Court of the Ten Nations, but Attolia refused. She sent an ultimatum that Eddis return the caravans or consider herself at war.”

Eugenides waited.

The magus sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Your queen’s entire two-word answer: ‘War, then.’ She ordered the Attolian ambassador and his retinue confined to their rooms and opened the main gates of the Hamiathes Reservoir. The floodwaters of the Aracthus swept through the unprepared Attolian irrigation system and destroyed most of it. Eddis sent a raiding party out from the base of the mountain to move through the farmland on the far side of the Seperchia. More than twenty-five percent of Attolia’s crops were burned in the field. Eddis lost the raiding party.” The magus looked at him closely. “This is news to you?”

“Go on.”

The magus did. “By the time Sounis heard of the attack, and before Attolia could enter the market and drive the prices up, Eddis had bought most of the local grain surplus. Checking the records, I found that she’d bought most of it even before the ultimatum from Attolia. Did you really not know?” he asked again, finding it hard to believe.

Eugenides stood up again to pace, shaking his head. The magus was reminded of a bear, chained in a pit, albeit a small bear.

“Eddis’s council voted unanimously for war,” the magus said. “The minister of war abstained.”

“Why?” Eugenides wailed, wondering about the actions of the council, not those of his father.

“I think they like you,” the magus said.

“They never did before,” he said bitterly.

The magus said, “I think if you took the time to look, you might see that over the space of a year you turned into the greatest folk hero Eddis has ever known.”

Eugenides dropped into his chair and covered his face with his hand. The magus saw that he’d raised both arms at first, then tucked the arm with the hand missing back into his lap.

“I don’t want to know this,” Eugenides said.

“I did hear,” the magus went on, “that you were rarely out of your rooms this winter. Did you have your head
buried under your covers?” He stood and walked to Eugenides’s desk in order to flip through its contents.

Eugenides sighed, tilting his head back in the chair, keeping his eyes closed. “You could go away now,” he said.

“You’re studying biological classification?” the magus said, holding up a book. “And human anatomy, I see, and Euclid’s
Geometry,
or are you just recopying the text?” He looked at the scraps of paper covered in Eugenides’s labored handwriting. There were more in a pile on the floor next to the desk. He picked up the pile and shuffled through it. “You’ll have to pardon me,” the magus said. “But with your country at war, I can’t see how any of it really matters.”

Standing up, Eugenides pulled the papers out of the magus’s hands. “It matters, because I can’t do anything, anymore, for this country, and it matters,” he yelled as he threw the papers back to his desk, “because I only have one hand and it isn’t even the right one!” Turning, he picked an inkpot off the desk and threw it to shatter on the door of his wardrobe, spraying black ink across the pale wood and onto the wall. Black drops like rain stained the sheets of his bed.

In the silent aftermath of his fury, they heard the queen behind them.

“Magus,” she said from the doorway. “I’d heard that you had come.”

Eugenides swung to look at her. “You started a war in my name without telling me?” he asked.

“You will have to excuse me,” said the queen to the magus as if she hadn’t heard. “I overslept, or I would have greeted you earlier.”

“Are we at war with Attolia?” Eugenides demanded.

“Yes,” said his queen.

“And Sounis?” asked Eugenides.

“Nearly,” said Eddis.

“How could you come once a week to talk about the weather and not mention a war?”

Eddis sighed. “Will you sit down and stop shouting?” she asked.

“I’ll stop shouting. I won’t sit down. I might need to throw more inkpots. Did Galen stop you from telling me?”

“At first,” the queen admitted. “But after that you didn’t want to know, Eugenides. You’re not blind, you had to see the things happening around you, but you never asked.”

He thought about what he’d heard and seen without being curious: the military messengers on their horses riding in and out of the front courtyard, familiar faces disappearing from the court dinners. All the maps were missing, along with the map weights, from the library. His queen had been too busy to visit more than once a week, and he’d never wondered why.

“Who—” He choked on the word and started again. “Who was in the raiding party?”

“Stepsis.” Eugenides winced, and she went on.
“Chlorus, Sosias”—all cousins of Eugenides and the queen—“the commander Creon and his soldiers.”

“Well”—he stumbled over the words—“this explains all those nights without conversation at dinner. What else have I missed that I should have been told but didn’t want to hear?” he asked.

“Not too much. Hostilities between us and Attolia were suspended for the winter. It was an early one, remember. Everyone’s told you about
that.
Magus?” said the queen politely. “Would you excuse us?”

The magus bowed his head and left without a word. When he was gone, the queen sat herself in the armchair he’d lately occupied. She rubbed her face and said, “I’m hungry. I left Xanthe standing in the middle of my room this morning with the breakfast tray, and I didn’t eat anything last night at dinner. I was worrying about you,” she said reproachfully, “sitting in an unheated temple, sulking.”

“I thought I was whining.”

“Sulking, whining, keening piteously.”

“I have not,” Eugenides insisted angrily.

“No,” she admitted, “you haven’t. But you’ve been in a wallow of self-absorption and despair all winter, and no one could blame you. We could only wait and hope you’d recover. Then you tell me that you want to leave Eddis and go to a university on the Peninsula. I need you here, Eugenides.”

“What possible use could you have for a one-handed
former Queen’s Thief?”

“You’re not a former queen’s Thief; you’re
my
Thief. So far I’m still queen.”

“You know what I meant.”

“It’s a lifelong title. You’d be Queen’s Thief if you were bedridden, and you know it.”

“All right, what do you want a useless one-handed Thief for?”

“I want you not to be useless.”

“I can’t steal things without two hands,” Eugenides said bitterly. “That’s why she cut one off.”

The queen of Attolia was only ever “she.” The name Attolia rarely passed his lips, as if Eugenides couldn’t bear the taste of the word in his mouth.

“There are a lot of things that a person with two hands couldn’t steal,” Eddis said.

“So?”

“Surely if it’s impossible to steal them with two hands, it’s no more impossible to steal them with one. Steal peace, Eugenides. Steal me some time.”

She sat back in the chair. “Sounis has pushed Attolia to the brink of a chaotic civil war. No one could claim that she’s been anything but brilliant, holding her throne for this long. Her people support her, but her barons hate her, ostensibly because she rules in her own right and has refused to take one of them for a king. What they really hate is the success she has had at centralizing the power of her throne and preventing them
from running their estates as their own private kingdoms. But she has reached the end of her resources. She invited the Mede to a treaty. You know that’s why I sent you to Attolia. If she takes help from the Mede, if they land on this coast, they will eat us alive: Attolia, Sounis, and Eddis. I sent you because I needed to know how close her contacts with the Mede had become, because Sounis
will not
stop his attempts to unseat Attolia.”

“Go to war with Sounis.”

“I can’t. Sounis is too strong. Eddis and Attolia together might beat him, but Attolia won’t have anything to do with Eddis. She hates me too much, and she’s too much concerned trying to keep a grip on her own country.

“She came to my coronation, you know,” Eddis explained. “She took me aside and gave me a lot of advice on how to hold on to the throne: raise taxes so that I’d have the money to put down insurrection, increase the size of my army, and purge my council regularly. Trust no one, and execute any threats, no matter how insignificant, immediately.”

Eugenides stared, and the queen shrugged. “She’d only been on her throne a few years. If Eddis had been anything like Attolia, it would have been good advice. She’s hated me for not taking her advice and for having a country where I didn’t need to. And she’s hated me because I have you, Eugenides, to keep Sounis and his corruption out of my court.”

She stood and stuffed her hands in the pockets of her trousers and paced the room, pausing to rise on tiptoe to look out the window. Eugenides wondered when she’d started wearing trousers again. Thinking about it, he couldn’t recall seeing her in a dress except at the formal dinners.

“You’d never threatened her directly, but you were a threat to Sounis,” said Eddis. “If Sounis had someone else to harass, he’d have less time to devote to Attolia. He’s been barking up our tree from the moment she cut your hand off.” She turned back to Eugenides.

“Sounis could be entangled for years trying to secure power for himself here in Eddis. He’d find us easy to bite off but not easy to swallow.” She smiled thinly. “Attolia could have had the same result by killing you, but she wanted something that would hurt you and me more.” She looked at him. “You know all this,” she said.

“Most of it,” Eugenides admitted. “I didn’t know why Attolia hated you.”

“Get dressed,” said his queen, “while I order breakfast, and I’ll tell you some more.”

“Without you to deter Sounis, he was ready to begin a campaign to weaken Eddis. I think my court is too loyal to be bought with his money, but his real power is trade. We depend on imports. Sooner or later he was going to stop those. And if Attolia was trading with the Mede, we wouldn’t get any supplies from her.”

“I know this,” said Eugenides.

“Of course. What you don’t know was that I’d been thinking for some time about deposing the queen of Attolia.”

Eugenides blinked.

“It is a measure of complete desperation to unseat a neighboring monarch, and there isn’t a successor that’s much more palatable, but Attolia has been growing more and more unstable as she tries to counter Sounis, and with the Mede hanging over us like vultures, instability is more dangerous than anything else,” said Eddis, pacing the library. “Then she cut off your hand, and I stopped caring if she ended hanging from her own palace walls. Every single person in Eddis agreed with me. Your father and I thought that if Sounis had an opportunity to install a puppet government in Attolia, and if it could be done too quickly for the Mede to interfere, Sounis would leave Eddis alone.”

The queen shrugged and admitted, “In that sense, we are no better than Attolia. To save Eddis, I’d throw her country to that dog Sounis without hesitation.”

“And?”

“The magus, of all people, stopped us in our tracks. He told Sounis that Attolia would treat with the Mede if Eddis and Sounis both attacked her. He may be right, but I believe she’s treating with the Mede anyway. I hoped that if they had to deal with an internal war and an external one, the country would close ranks against
the Mede and against the queen as well. They would accept a puppet king from Sounis, at least for a few years, and we would be rid of her. The Mede emperor cannot interfere without an invitation from the acting government of the country without breaking his treaty with the Greater Powers of the Continent. The Greater Powers don’t want the Mede on this coast any more than we do, and they are also ready to interfere at the first excuse, but the
last
thing we need is to have the conflict fought out on our ground.”