Slowly the stones in the floor stopped heaving under him, and the blinding pain abated, leaving him with a headache marginally less fierce. More food and water were delivered from time to time. Finally the door of his cell was unlocked and opened. He felt sick again as he was hoisted to his feet but didn’t know if it was from his headache or from fear. He leaned on the guards and tried to collect his ragged thoughts as they led him up from the cells to the queen’s palace.
Surrounded by the splendor of her court, the queen of Attolia had listened to the veiled insults of the party of Eddisians sent from the mountain country to negotiate the Thief’s release. Eddis had sent her best, and they had argued skillfully. Attolia had listened, appearing impassive and growing angrier and angrier. She’d sent no official notification to Eddis that Attolia held her Thief. She had only waited, deliberating on his fate, expecting Eddis to make some effort to retrieve him, not expecting the mission that arrived on her doorstep to toss threats in her face the way a man might bait a dog.
She had ascended her throne after the assassination of her father, and her country had never been fully at peace in her reign. Her army was well paid and therefore loyal, but her treasury was nearly empty. She awaited a good harvest to fill it again, and the ambassador from Eddis threatened that harvest. First, of course, he’d offered a ransom that he’d known she wouldn’t accept. Then he’d politely insulted her several times over, and finally he’d told her that the gates of the Hamiathes Reservoir were closed and would remain so until the Thief of Eddis was returned home. The waters of the Hamiathes Reservoir flowed into the Aracthus River and from there into the irrigation channels that watered some of the most fertile land in her country. Without the water the crops would wither in the summer heat.
She’d sent for the Thief. Eugenides, when he was brought before her, blinked owlishly, like a nocturnal animal dragged out of its den into the daylight. The black-and-yellow-and-green bruise across his forehead showed through his hair. The split in the skin just above his eyebrows had scabbed over, but the dried blood was still on his face, and the black marks under his eyes were darker than the bruise above. The mud on his torn clothes was still damp.
“Your queen’s ambassador has offered to ransom you, Thief, but I declined.”
Eugenides was hardly surprised.
“You would only come sneaking back through my palaces, leaving notes beside my breakfast dishes. I told your queen’s ambassador I wouldn’t take a ransom of any size for you, and do you know what he said?”
Eugenides couldn’t guess.
“He told me the water of the Aracthus won’t flow until your queen has you back again. She’s closed the gate from the reservoir in the mountains, and all my crops above the Seperchia will burn in the fields until you are sent home. What do you think of that?”
Eugenides thought it was a very good plan, but that it wasn’t going to work.
The queen had lost face to Eugenides, and her court knew it. Moreover, she could hardly settle for a ransom she’d already refused. She had to consider that Eugenides, though he’d caused her no harm beyond stealing something she hadn’t known she possessed, could become the measurable danger to her that he was to Sounis. Attolia ran her index finger lightly back and forth across her lower lip while she thought.
Attolia had seen the text of a message Eddis sent to Sounis the year before suggesting that no lock on window or door in his palace would save him if she had to send her Thief to call on him again. All Sounis’s machinations to undermine the rule of Eddis had ceased.
Attolia suspected that more than a third of her own barons had accepted Sounis’s money at one time or another to finance their revolts. She wished that she had such a tool as Eugenides to use against him, but only Eddis had the tradition of a Queen’s Thief. Bitterly, Attolia admitted to herself that if there were an Attolian Thief, he’d be more threat to her than aid.
She knew that the walls of her own palace were as porous to Eugenides as the megaron of Sounis, and she didn’t think that if she let him go, she could catch him a second time. There was no question of letting him go. She had heard that he had an aversion to killing people, but, like Sounis, she was reluctant to assume that a childish reluctance for bloodshed would prevent him from following the orders of his queen. He had already proven himself to be extremely loyal.
She stepped down from the dais to stand before Eugenides. He didn’t look much worried about his possible fate. He seemed more interested in the pattern inlaid in gold on the marble tiles at his feet. She waited, and he slowly lifted his head. He wasn’t unconcerned about his fate. He was frightened of dying and more frightened of what might come to him before he died, but the pain in his head made it hard for him to think what he might say to save himself.
He looked at her and tilted his head very slightly in wonder. He had forgotten, as he always forgot, how beautiful she was. Her hair was held away from her face by the ruby and gold headband that crossed her forehead just above her dark brows. Her skin was flawless and so fair as to be translucent. She dressed as always in imitation of Hephestia, but it was far easier to imagine the impersonal cruelty of the Great Goddess than to see cruelty in the face of the queen of Attolia. Looking at her, Eugenides smiled.
Attolia saw his smile, without any hint of self-effacement or flattery or opportunism, a smile wholly unlike that of any member of her court, and she hit him across the face with her open hand. His head rocked on his shoulders. He made no sound but dropped to his knees, fighting nausea.
“Your Majesty,” said the Eddisian ambassador harshly, and the queen swung around to face him.
“Do not offend the gods,” he warned her.
Attolia turned back to Eugenides and his guards. “Hang him,” she said. “Take him out now and hang him. Send his body back to Eddis, and we’ll see if the Aracthus flows.” She stalked back to her throne and spoke from there to the Eddisians. “Remember that your gods are not mine. Nor will they be,” she said.
She sat on the throne and watched as Eugenides was lifted to his feet by the guards. He had his hands cupped over his face, covered by his dark hair.
Beside her the ambassador from the Mede Empire shifted his weight and caught her attention.
“I don’t know what Eddis thought she could accomplish,” Attolia said. “She can hardly hold back a river forever.”
“Long enough,” suggested the Mede, “to insure her Thief a relatively easy death?”
Attolia turned to look at him, then back thoughtfully at Eugenides.
“This queen of Eddis is very clever,” the Mede said softly, bending closer. “She knows how some of your other prisoners have died. You will let her Thief go so quickly?”
“Stop,” she said, and the guards did as they were told. Eugenides hung from their arms. He was carefully placing his feet and straightening himself while the queen considered.
Whatever her neighboring monarchs thought, she very rarely made hasty decisions, and she didn’t engage in violence gratuitously. If she executed traitors by hanging them off a city’s walls upside down until they were dead, it was because she couldn’t afford the luxury of beheading them in private, as Sounis did. Everything she did had to be calculated for its effect, and she had meant to think carefully before she chose a suitable punishment for Eugenides, something that would provide an example for unruly members of her aristocracy as well as satisfy her deep and abiding hatred of the queen of Eddis and her Thief. She resented being stampeded into a decision by Eddis and knew that the Mede was right; her anger had been exactly the object of the Eddisian ambassador’s insults. He had indeed argued skillfully.