The Queen of Attolia (11 page)

Her attendants all agreed with her assessment of the Mede’s physical appearance. She listened to their chatter in the mornings and the evenings as they dressed her and arranged her hair. Attolia permitted them their gossip so long as they were discreet. She enjoyed their chatter, though she never took any part.

“They say the Mede has ordered a new tunic woven with gold in the thread and precious stones sewn in around the collar.”

“They say he has several sets of emeralds and his valet sews them onto whichever clothes he chooses in the morning.”

“He should buy some other stones,” Phresine said. She was the oldest of the queen’s attendants and sat by the window with a needle pinched in her lips while she arranged the hem she was darning in one of the queen’s dresses. She took the needle out. “Something that goes better with rubies,” she said, glancing over at her queen, whose rubies were being carefully braided into her hair.

It was a daring attendant who risked a sly gibe at her mistress, but there could be no doubt that Attolia smiled on the Mede, that she permitted him to hold her hands at greetings a trifle longer than was proper, that he called her “dear queen” and sometimes just “my dear.”

“Something that goes better with his beard,” said one of the younger women with a titter. Her rash words provoked an uncomfortable silence. The attendants looked to their queen.

“Chloe,” said Attolia.

“Your Majesty?”

“Go fetch something for me.”

“What would you like, Your Majesty?”

“I don’t know. Go find out.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Chloe whispered, and hurried away.

The talk turned to safer topics after her departure.

T
HE COUNTRY OF
E
DDIS PRAYED
, and as if in answer, the Etesian winds came late. Sounis used what remained of his navy to ferry his army out to the islands to defend those that he could. Attolia attacked relentlessly and secured one island after another. The Mede whispered advice in her ear, and she listened carefully. She had always been a careful listener, and it was easy for the Mede to see evidence of his advice carried out. He was an astute general, and Attolia appreciated that.

“Does she know about the ships?” Kamet asked him.

“I doubt it,” said the Mede. “What intelligence she has she directs toward her barons, trying to keep them on their leashes. She has very little vision outside her tiny country, and doesn’t seem much interested in the affairs of the wider world. I begin to think she owes her throne to the very barons she suspects of treason. I don’t know who else keeps her in power.”

“You will ask her about an embassy on Cymorene?
We will need that as a staging ground.”

“I have asked her already. She is wary and has put me off, but I will win her over in time. It will be no trouble to convince her that the embassy will be small and harmless, existing only to supply the occasional messenger ship between our benevolent empire and hers.”

“We still need cause to land here on the mainland.”

“We’ll have it,” said the ambassador. “There is no need to hurry, and once we are fixed here, we will be unmovable.”

When the Etesians finally came, Sounis withdrew his troops from the islands, leaving them to defend themselves in the unlikely event that Attolia would risk her own navy by attacking during the season of windstorms. He collected his navy in his safest harbors and turned his attention toward his land-based enemy, Eddis. Attolia did the same.

The mountains defended Eddis better than any army could have, but there were gaps in their protection. The Irkes Forest was a stretch of pines that covered one of the gradual rises into the mountains. “When Sounis had tried to move an army through the forest, Eddis had threatened to burn the trees around them. Sounis had withdrawn. With the sea war temporarily stalled, Sounis returned to the Irkes and burned it himself and then advanced through the ashes.

The mountains were more uniform on the Attolian border. The newly forged cannon at the pass prevented Attolia’s army from attacking there. The only other access for an army was the canyon where the Aracthus River had once cut its way down the mountainside to join the Seperchia. When the Hamiathes Reservoir had been constructed, the river had been diverted to a new course and joined the Seperchia farther downstream. The former riverbed and the road that ran along it were defended by a heavily fortified gate at the bottom of the mountains, and that gate was further defended by the chasm of the Seperchia River between it and Attolia.

Unable to move an army into Eddis, Attolia sent small raiding parties up the side of the mountain under cover of darkness to attack farms in the isolated mountain valleys. Many of the farms were deserted, the men fighting in Eddis’s army, the families moved to the safety of the capital city, leaving the farms to be burned out by Attolia’s raiders.

The overabundance of sheep that had crowded the capital the winter before was gone, many of them moved back to the pastures of the coastal provinces, but many more of them slaughtered to feed the population. Offerings burned in every temple as the people prayed for the rains to come to wash their enemies off the mountains and the snows to lock them out for the winter.

When the weather finally turned cold, Attolia called
in her raiders. Sounis, having lost the battle for the Irkes, withdrew his army, and Eddis drew her breath at last. Exhausted soldiers returned to their families to rest. In the iron mines the work went on, unremittingly, as they pressed for the ore to make Her Majesty’s cannon to supplement those few that were mounted above what remained of the Irkes. The rains fell on the ashes of the pines and washed them away. The water cut furrows into the gentle slopes until the walls of the furrows collapsed and ditches grew in their places and the gradual rises were carved into painful hillocks and ravines that would slow any army that fought its way uphill. The streams below ran red with the dirt as if filled with blood.

In Eddis’s capital the palace filled again with lords and barons and Eddis’s officers in their embroidered tunics. Bright candles lit the ceremonial hall during formal dinners as Eddis attempted a show of peacetime rituals.

One day in the winter a doctor from one of the military hospitals came to see Eugenides. In the late afternoon of the same day a page brought a message to Eddis, and she excused herself from a meeting with the master of her foundry and climbed the stairs to the roof of the palace. There were wide walks along the walls where the court strolled on fine days. Eugenides sat on a parapet. Eddis approached but stopped about five feet from him. She didn’t want to startle him. His feet dan
gled in space four stories off the ground.

He turned his head slightly, enough to see her in the corner of his eye. “Do you still have people following me?” he asked. “Am I not allowed to sit on the roof on a nice day?”

“It isn’t a nice day,” Eddis answered shortly. It was in fact bitterly cold. Flurries of snow blew in the wind. “You’ve been here more than an hour, and you are making the guards nervous.” She settled on the low stones beside him.

“You heard what happened?” Eugenides asked.

“I heard one of the doctors from the War Hospital asked you to visit the wards and you went with him.”

“He took me to visit the amputees.”

“Oh.”

“Because the cannon blow men apart and because the doctors sew the open edges closed—”

“Eugenides—”

“—because of course we wouldn’t want soldiers to die just because they are missing such nonessentials as arms or legs.”

He was looking out over the valley. Across from them was Hephestia’s Sacred Mountain, rising above all others with the Hamiathes Reservoir on one shoulder. “That damned doctor asked me to visit the wounded. Then he trotted me out in front of all those broken-apart men as if to say, ‘See, here is the Thief of Eddis; losing a hand hasn’t bothered him.’ As if I were a sacred
relic to restore them and they could then jump out of their beds and lead happy lives forever after.”

“Eugenides—”

“Well, I patted every one of them on the shoulder like some sort of priest, and then I went outside and threw up.” He leaned forward a little to look down between his toes to the hillside far below him. Eddis, sitting with her feet inside the wall, refrained from plucking at his sleeve to pull him back. Telling the Thief to mind his balance was like telling a master swordsman not to cut himself.

“That doctor,” Eugenides muttered. “Why didn’t he say, ‘See, here is the failed Thief of Eddis and the cause of all your misery’?”

“Gen,” Eddis said firmly, “this war is not your fault.”

“Whose is it, then? I fell into Attolia’s trap.”

“I sent you there.”

“I fell and you sent me. She set the trap and sprang it because Sounis hounded her, and Sounis hounded her with the support of the magus, who fears the Mede, and the Mede emperor, I suppose, is under his own pressures. So whom finally
do
we blame for this war? The gods?”

He looked up into the cloud-filled sky. Eddis laid a warning hand on his arm.

“Oh, I’ll watch my tongue,” said Eugenides. “I have learned how, and I don’t want the clouds to part and Moira to arrive on a band of sunlight to tell me to shut up, but I wish I knew if we’re at war and people are
dying because the gods choose to have it so. Is this the will of the Great Goddess, that Eddis be destroyed?”

Eddis shook her head. “We are Hephestia’s people still. I believe that. Beyond that I don’t know. Nothing I’ve ever learned from a priest makes me think I know just what the gods are or what they can accomplish, but, Gen, I know my decisions are my own responsibility. If I am the pawn of the gods, it is because they know me so well, not because they make up my mind for me.” She remembered the properties of the stone of Hamiathes and said, “We can’t ask the gods to explain themselves, and I, for one, don’t want to.”

Eugenides looked thoughtful, remembering his own experience with Hamiathes’s Gift, and nodded his agreement.

They had both been quiet for a while before Eddis spoke again. Her words surprised Gen. “You aren’t the boy hero anymore,” she said.

“Was I ever?” he asked, raising one eyebrow.

She smiled, wondering again where he had picked up that particular facial expression. “Oh, certainly you were the golden boy,” she said. “You kept the entire population amused. And since you brought Sounis to his knees, you’ve been the darling of the court as well.”

“The magus said something along those lines. All that glory, and I missed it,” Eugenides said mournfully.

Eddis laughed and leaned closer to put one arm around his shoulder.

Eugenides thought it over. “Not the darling of our dear cousins,” he pointed out.

“Even them,” said Eddis. “They were as angry as anyone else when…you came home.” She stumbled, close to the sensitive subject of his missing hand. He referred to it occasionally, sometimes lightly. He’d joked that it couldn’t possibly affect his riding for the worse, but he still flinched visibly sometimes when it was mentioned by anyone else, and she knew he hated to talk about it.

Sitting together in the cold, they both thought of the cousins who had died since the war began. Stepsis, Chlorus, Sosias in the raiding party at the very beginning. Timos had died stopping Attolia’s advance up the main pass the previous spring. Two others, Cleon and Hermander, had been wounded in those battles and had died of infection over the summer. Others had died after the Irkes Forest burned. Eddis remembered them in the first few days after Eugenides had been brought home to the palace. No one had been more eager than they to avenge their Thief.

“I think they felt it was their prerogative to hold you facedown in a water butt and no one else should dare touch you. Therespides is going to admire you, albeit grudgingly, for the rest of his life.”

“I thought you said that was all over. I missed it.”

“I only said that you weren’t a boy hero. You’ve grown now. People will expect even more of you—that you can steal a magus and bring Sounis to his knees
again and do it with one hand.”

“One hand, maybe, but a hand full of your best soldiers. How much credit can I take for that?”

“All of it,” said Eddis. “It wouldn’t have happened but for you. You deserve all the credit—or the blame, some might say—otherwise Attolia wouldn’t be so frightened of you.”

Eugenides looked over at her, surprised.

“Oh, yes, she’s afraid. She’ll take Sounis in the spring or by summer. We’ll offer peace again, and she’ll take it if she can, because she’s afraid of what you might do once Sounis is no longer occupying our attention.”

Eugenides continued to look nonplussed, and Eddis nodded her head. “I wish she would give up this war now, but I can see that her barons would eat her alive. Still, she is not so foolish that she would continue a war once she had some victory to appease them. And after Sounis’s defeat at Irkes Forest, she knows that our soldiers are as good as their reputation.” She said quietly then, “Gen, you are a sacred relic to the men in that hospital.”

“Are you telling me in your gentle way to stop whining?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t feel like a hero. I feel like an idiot.”

“I think heroes generally do, but those men believe in you.”

“I did wait until I was outside before I threw up.”

In the spring the rains came. The trees bloomed in the lowlands. The snows melted in Eddis, and the floodwaters kept every access to the mountain country closed. The people of Eddis prayed for the rain to never stop even as they trudged through mud to their knees and longed for fresh greens. Attolia and Sounis worked their fields before turning back to their war making. Eddis watched to see if they would attack each other or move again against the mountains.

The rains continued. Sounis bypassed any attempt to retake the islands he had lost to Attolia and instead moved in a surprise attack on Thegmis, almost in the harbor of Attolia’s capital city. The queen was not in her capital. Communications failed, her generals blundered, and Thegmis fell.

Sounis controlled the island, but he’d lost his last large ship in the attack and had no means to resupply his troops or to withdraw them. Attolia blockaded the island with her own navy and waited. Sounis offered to make peace, but Attolia, with the upper hand, rejected his offers. In the mountains Eddis and her minister of war hoped that Sounis was being stupid without the advice of his magus, but they worried.

“He’s not this much of a fool,” said Eddis.

“Have you talked to the magus?” her minister of war asked.

“I did. He is not much help, and that may be deliber
ate, but he says he doesn’t know what Sounis is planning.”

“We shall wait then and see,” said the minister.

In the evenings, before dinner was served, the court gathered in the old throne room. Four officers who had already drained several cups of watered wine joked about the threats of the queen of Attolia, lately reported by Eddisian spies. In a sudden silence, their words carried over the crowd. “…send him into the afterlife blind, deaf, and with his tongue cut out as well…”

Eyes turned to Eugenides, standing across the room in a group with several of his uncles. Everyone knew that Attolia had been speaking about him. Eugenides turned to the crowd and ducked his head. “I was so looking forward to my next visit,” he said with mock chagrin, and, chuckling, people returned to their conversations. Eddis, from where she stood near the hearth, watched the Thief carefully, but he turned back to his uncles with an impenetrably bland expression. The queen gestured to her steward and directed him in a low voice to reorder the seating at dinner.

Later, from the head of the table, Eddis watched Eugenides take his place with his father to one side of him and Agape, the youngest daughter of the baron Phoros, on the other. The queen was too far away to hear what he said as he sat down, but Agape answered, and they seemed to get on well. Eddis sent up a small prayer under her breath and turned to speak
with her own seatmates.